Lawnboy (16 page)

And what about my brother’s role in all this?

A silence took over the van. I loaded a tape into the stereo, and Laura Nyro’s “Timer” made its first fumblings toward coherence.

“Frankly, I’m over him, if you want to know the truth,” I said after the song had finished. “I don’t even think about him all that much anymore.”

“Well, you still seem pretty upset.”

“Well, you seem to have pretty bad instincts. Everything’s fine, okay? I’m not the least bit upset.”

We kept driving. Something clattered and buzzed inside my head. He seemed to be one of those people who respected you more once you flexed your grip and stood up for yourself. It didn’t make it any easier, though. Was I already fucking things up for myself? We passed a two-story green dinosaur outside a mechanic’s garage, which prompted me to glance over at him. I expected to see that arrogance again taking hold of his face, but there was something more complicated there, a look that told me that he knew it too—an emptiness, the loss of something nameless yet profound. I thought about my earlier assertion that it was unreasonable to have sex with every single person whom I thought was attractive. And then I reconsidered it. His arms were chiseled and bronze. His head was shaved. His eyes shimmered with an irradiated, wilting light. And then I changed my mind again.

It turned out that Ursula, mistaking Hector for Peter, had many months ago called the King Cole desk in a minor fit to inform him that a neighbor, a Mrs. Diane Petrancouri of Avenida Bayamo, had spotted me standing naked with William in the window. Too immersed in the story not to reveal his true identity, Hector listened to my mother’s words with a keen interest, her fear that the neighbors were talking, her realization only minutes before that I was actually involved in a “full-fledged imbroglio.” She was beside herself with frenzy and grief. It wasn’t until a full three minutes had passed that she’d realized she wasn’t talking to my brother, but to someone with a Cuban accent, whereupon she promptly hung up the phone.

“God, she was a trip,” he said.

My face burned hot with shame. Still, I was compelled to know more. “Is that all?”

“Well, it was too much to take in all at once, though she said something about—yeah, this was my favorite”—he began mimicking my mother with disturbing accuracy—“This kid was accepted to
Princeton
for Christ’s sake.”

He started shaking his head. “And I thought
my
mother was a lunatic.”

“Oh God.” My stomach was a nervous pit. I laughed hysterically, exaggeratedly, somewhere between dread and relief.

As if to make up for his earlier misstep, Hector started telling me about himself, an activity with which he seemed well acquainted. Apparently before he’d moved back to Florida—he’d grown up off Hialeah’s Red Road, within earshot of the racetrack—he’d lived in the East Village for ten years, where he’d waited tables at various restaurants, sold clear plastic clubwear at Patricia Field’s, and tended bar at the Tunnel. He’d immersed himself in as many crowds as he could. He knew—“only casually,” he insisted—the Lady Bunny, Misstress Formika, Sherry Vine, Tabboo!, and Girlina—the fiercest drag queens in New York. He faithfully attended Monday-night ACT UP meetings, participating in the Labor Day march on Kennebunkport when George Bush was still president. He appeared in several films—“bit parts”—among them
Paris Is Burning,
a Super 8 short for a Jack Pierson installation, and a homo horror movie called
Boys on a Meathook.
He had a boyfriend of six years, a Welsh guy named Simon. He spent four summers in Provincetown where he danced nights at the Crown and Anchor and was a go-go boy (nickname: Lanolin) in Ryan Landry’s House of Superstars. He was photographed by Nan Goldin for the
Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
He lived in the same railroad flat for ten years, until one day, after waking up to frozen pipes the fourth time that month, he decided he’d finally had enough and packed up a suitcase and moved back to Florida, whereupon he immediately took a job at Disney World, of all places, selling mementos of Mickey Mouse and Dumbo to children from the Midwest.

It was terribly interesting to me, probably more so than it should have been. Something became clear. It seemed to me that young suburban homos had one of two options: either you could do what Hector and Todd had done, move to the city and turn your back on your past, giving yourself a new name, or you could stay where you were, attempting to hide yourself, becoming nothing but paltry, constricted, cowardly, and dull. It worried me that I was veering closer and closer to the latter category.

“How come you didn’t stay?” I asked finally.

“Tedious, tedious. Homo High School,” he said, shrugging it off. “A big old charm school. After a while it’s time to pick up your certificate.”

“But didn’t you have fun?”

“Of course, I had fun. But,” he sighed, “it’s like this: I was thirty-two years old. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was tired of seeing all my friends die.”

“Your friends died?” I said dumbly.

“This was New York, honey. I’d buried four of my closest friends in four months. Five guys I’d been a buddy for: Leo, Rex, Israel, Duncan, Thomas. Only months before Simon died.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He shrugged again. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s like, I didn’t give a damn anymore. I’d been to so many memorial services that they didn’t mean anything anymore.”

His fingers tightened slightly on the wheel.

“And it just seemed like everyone I knew was positive. I’d hear about someone else getting sick, riding out the first symptoms, and it didn’t touch me. It didn’t make me sad. I’d perfected this reaction, this absence of reaction, as if this whole mess were perfectly par for the course, the way it’s supposed to be.”

“So what about your friends?”

He fiddled with the sun visor, then flipped it up again. “That was terrible, it was the worst. You know, it’s bad enough watching an old person die, but”—he started shaking his head—“these were my lovers and friends. I didn’t want to remember them lying on the floor with shit staining their pants.”

I eased down into my seat, holding my arms over my chest.

“It wasn’t good for me after a while. It was too easy to be detached and hard about things, and I hated that about myself. It killed all my enthusiasm, though I didn’t know it at the time. I needed to get the fuck away.”

“So you went to Florida.”

“So I went to Florida,” he said. “Some decision. Go south in hopes that all your troubles’ll melt away.”

“And you met my brother.”

“And I met your brother.” He turned to me with a weary, troubled grin. He blinked as if flummoxed. “Do I sound like an asshole? Does any of this babble make sense to you?”

“No,” I said, then, “yes,” though I couldn’t be completely sure of either answer. I looked at the parkway ahead. Above it, the sun loomed heavy and white, boring a hole through the clouds.

***

The van skated down Cape Coral’s Diplomat Parkway, a four-lane highway bisecting a lunar landscape, a
tabula rasa
of sorts, on which kids in convertibles threw cans, pulled down their pants, and hurled the occasional racial epithet. I imagined this place from the air, a vast, chilling land mass the size of Phoenix or Detroit, with its 100,000 lots, all of which had been initially sold, like the failed Boca Palms, through high-pressure vacation packages 30 years before. It was slowly but surely cocooning itself into a kind of hell. I thought of news reports I’d watched in the last week, footage of throats slashed in West Palm, home invasions on friendly streets, race riots, huge chimneys jetting flame, layoffs at Digital Equipment, clouds of chlorine gas wafting over a Little League game. I thought of these stories, and of myself in them, and what kind of part we’d all played in their creation.

The bank stood in an especially desolate socket, bordering a lily-choked canal with clots of scrub on the banks. The earth was the color of pulverized soap. It shouldn’t have surprised me that my brother chose to do his banking here, a good forty miles from the King Cole, all for the sake of saving a few bucks. It was just like Sid, whose savings multiplied in a series of dubious Dallas banks, all of which paid back the highest dividends, yet offered minimal protection from risk.

“Look around,” Hector said, parking the van. “Isn’t it thrilling?”

“You’re serious?”

“Of course, I’m serious. It’s so awful it’s beautiful. It’s like that scene in
The Snake Pit
where that woman’s singing “Going Home” and before you know it, the whole mental hospital’s joining in with her, and it’s awful, corny, and moving all at once.”

I nodded. I understood what he was getting at. I thought of Wolfie Cohen’s Rascal House, Piccadilly cafeterias, all notions of a similar point of view, but they were all about wreckage, fading emblems of a sweeter era. This place seemed like something darker.

“Watch these kids,” he said, pointing to the Circle K next door. They circled about ominously on their little bikes, like fevered mosquitoes. “I bet they’re going to call me a fag. Just watch.”

“Careful,” I said.

He was already heading toward the bank. He deliberately flounced up the sidewalk, in full view of the teenagers, in boots, tiny shorts, and a Hooters Boca Raton T-shirt. He might have been Todd Bemus, the tougher, more streamlined version, the city boy, the one I’d never known. Sure enough, behind his back, I heard talk of pussies and fags, uttered just loud enough for me to hear.

It occurred to me that I was no longer annoyed with him.

“So what happened?” he said when he returned to the van. “Anything happen? Did they call me a fag?”

I shrugged. “More or less,” I said. “Yes. I guess they did.”

“Great,” he said, not the least bit ruffled. A satisfied smile spread across his face. “Just what I told you.
Yo, pencildicks,
” he shouted to the astonished kids. “Greetings to Cape Coral.” Then he threw the van into gear and we were off.

***

Twilight was falling on the neighborhoods outside Naples. One by one the amber streetlights trembled on, saturating the houses with an orange phosphorescent haze. By the time we pulled into the King Cole driveway, the sky was nearly dark, the color of burnished ebony. Beside the chickee hut a young woman struck a match, then began lighting the torches beneath the baobobs. There was something so lonely and comforting about her attentions, her complete immersion in the task, that I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She stepped backwards, holding her arms over her chest. For some reason, I felt oddly magnanimous. I loved the world.

“What’s she doing here?” Hector said, not moving from behind the wheel.

“Who?” I said.

A disapproving noise came forth from his mouth. He nodded in the direction of the woman.

“Is she a guest?”

“Don’t tell me she brought the kid here too. Tacky,” he said, shaking his head. “Tacky. That’s about as tacky as you can get.”

I opened the van door and stood on the parking lot. I heard a single child splashing around in the pool. “Hey, Mom,” he cried, “I’m making up swimming strokes. This one’s the turbo. Look at me, you’re not looking!”

“If she’s not a guest,” I said, “she shouldn’t be here. I don’t have any qualms about telling her to leave.”

“Oh right,” he mumbled.

“Who is she, then?”

He looked at me as if I were a lower form of life. “Peter’s girlfriend,” he said, frowning.

“Peter’s girlfriend? Since when does Peter have a girlfriend?”

“He hasn’t told you about Holly?”

I looked over at the woman standing by the pool. The fact was Peter hadn’t told me anything. I hadn’t known about his drinking: only recently had I figured out that he faithfully attended AA meetings two times a week. I hadn’t known other things: how he put the money together to buy this place, or how he’d spent the many long years away from our family. But that was Peter, a wily, mysterious sort, always negotiating behind our backs, resisting at all costs any movement toward overt explanation.

“So she’s a jerk?”

“No,” he said, “Not really. She’s actually a very nice, decent woman. I mean—I mean I could even imagine being friends with her in a different context.”

“Then why are you so upset?”

He shook his head.

“Did she do something to Peter?”

He didn’t answer. I stared at his face, that wry, exhausted gaze. My stomach pressed against the plate of my ribs. I needed some food. And then I got it: this was jealousy. Peter wasn’t only involved with Holly. He was also fucking Hector.

***

There was so much to talk about. I wanted, once and for all, to tell him about my time together with William, so he’d hear it from my side, not processed through Ursula or Hector. I wanted to tell him that whatever he did was fine with me, that he didn’t have to worry about feeling self-conscious or judged or anything but comfortable. I wanted to tell him that I cared about him deeply, that I couldn’t have been more grateful that he’d invited me to live with him, giving me the opportunity to offer my help during this chaotic time. It seemed that our situation couldn’t have been more ideal, for who could understand each other better than two brothers, after all? I knew exactly how he felt. What better person to talk with? I imagined that we’d grow closer in the coming time, that I’d start living the kind of life I’d always longed for, a life without dissembling, or second-guessing myself.

Still, there was Holly. Was he primarily involved with her, with Hector as the occasional diversion, or was it the other way around, with Holly there for appearance’s sake? Did he even know what he wanted? I thought about the time when, during one of his brief surprise visits home, I’d declared, without warning, at the dinner table, that I’d liked another boy in my class. “I can’t believe you’d do that to Mom and Dad,” he’d said with disgust, not three hours after my admission. “Anything to get attention. Anything to aim the lens back on yourself.” Why hadn’t he, as older brother, stepped in, telling them, “He isn’t the only one”?

Step up, step right this way. Secrets, secrets: welcome to Sarshik’s House of Secrets.