The Gospel According to Larry (10 page)

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Authors: Janet Tashjian

BOOK: The Gospel According to Larry
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I tried to focus on the irony of the situation. For months, my sermons ranted against consuming the lives of celebrities. But after betagold yanked me into the public eye, suddenly every movement of mine made for evening news or tabloid feature.
Flip-Off Phillips called me from her car phone and offered to counsel me and make sure I was okay. I was touched by her concern until she asked me for an autographed photo of the two of us for her wall.
It's not like I was any more welcome at home.
From the second betagold announced my secret identity, Peter went from disbelief to skepticism to outright fury.
“My own stepson—manipulating the minds of millions!”
“Like father, like son.”
Thankfully, he let the comment slide. “With information you took from me!”
What could I tell him—that I was curious, that the information looked interesting? That it was the only part of this whole mess I
did
regret?
He suddenly seemed like a balloon deflating before my eyes. “I've lost four of my biggest clients. All because of those ads. People think I'm a traitor!”
“I never wanted to get you in trouble,” I said. “I just thought people deserved to see the information.”
His usually calm demeanor exploded. “Who are you protecting? Even the Communists are consumers now!”
I might as well have been tied to the back of the chair with the bulb over the kitchen table spotlighting me, interrogation style. Peter's Marine training came back to him, big time. He'd never been captured and sent to a P.O.W. camp, but he was making up for it now.
I
was making up for it.
Each time I tried to explain that I was only voicing my opinion—which I was constitutionally allowed to do, by the way—he lost it a bit more.
“You're accepting that invitation to
60 Minutes
and you're telling Mike Wallace you were wrong.”
“That buying junk is our moral imperative,” I added.
“That's right.” He banged his fist on the table so hard, the salt and pepper shakers flew across the room like missiles. He eyed me carefully. “Are you mocking me?”
“No, sir.”
“Laugh all you want,” he said. “I've been taking care of you for three years; your real father never took care of you for a day.” He kept going, on a roll. “He was a real philosopher too. Bumming for quarters on the streets of Cleveland before he drank himself to death.”
Never, in all the years I've known him, had Peter been intentionally cruel. But the bent smile on his face gave his perverse pleasure away. When I got up to leave, he pounded the table again. “If you're going to live in this house, you need to retract those sermons and stop all this nonsense.”
I took a deep breath. “I can't do that.”
“Why? Because you like being famous? Reveling in all this attention?”
I told him I hated the attention, that I had gone to great lengths
not
to be in the spotlight. “I can't help it if we live in a culture that worships people just for being famous.”
He shook his head, trying to compose himself. “We might have to move,” he said. “Depending on what happens with the rest of my clients.”
I couldn't imagine where we could move to and regain our privacy. Fiji? Peru?
“Look,” Peter continued. “I appreciate that you're working to make the world a better place. But believe it or not, I am too.” He held the edges of the counter for support. “No offense, Josh, but this idealism thing is a phase, like so many others you've been through. Remember the skydiving? The giant Polaroid camera you were obsessed with?”
I told him they were different.
“You say that every time,” Peter said. “You don't have enough life experience. You don't know how the real world works yet.”
“Adults always say that to keep kids quiet,” I said. “You don't have any answers; you're all just muddling through, like the rest of us.”
“Unlike you who has all the answers. Right, Mr. Big-Shot Guru?” He grabbed his keys and headed out the door.
I had let myself savor my contributions, but here I was face-to-face with something I had destroyed.
I was suddenly filled with the memory of Peter promising my mother on her deathbed that he would take care of me. And lo and behold, he was living up to his promise. Maybe I should use the
60 Minutes
opportunity to deny Larry's work and bail out Peter.
But I knew I couldn't. Peter's beliefs were an integral part of his life. So were mine. A stalemate—fathers and sons had them all the time. Maybe Peter and I weren't so different from other families after all.
51
I closed the blinds just as the photographers snapped my picture. I imagined the resulting photographs in tomorrow's newspaper—a seventeen-year-old boy, his body divided by stripes of light, a perpetual prisoner.
Ahhh, Beth. Beth. Beth.
A few weeks ago at Larryfest, we held hands and chanted about peace and love. Now—post-betagold—she wouldn't even answer the phone. As my best friend, she'd been besieged by the press, with some of the tabloids offering her up to two hundred thousand dollars for an exclusive. She could have paid her entire college tuition with money to spare, but, thankfully, she turned them down.
52
Needless to say, Beth did not take kindly to finding out my secret identity along with the
rest of the world. The shocked expression on her face as betagold outed me haunts me to this day.
For weeks afterward, my calls and e-mails were not returned. Each time I went to her back door—followed by dozens of paparazzi—her father slammed it closed and told me she wasn't home. I was immediately let go at the hardware store, even though my celebrity had increased sales by over 200 percent.
I waited until a Sunday afternoon when I knew Beth would be doing inventory. As usual, a drum of chlorine propped open the back door to let in the summer air. I stood near the paintbrushes and coughed, so I wouldn't sneak up on her. When she saw me, she smiled.
She tossed me a clipboard and slid a box of washers across the floor. I counted them out as we spoke.
“You could've told me,” she said.
I told her I almost did, several times, in fact.
“All this attention would drive the normal person crazy, but you …” her voice trailed off. “You must be miserable.”
“I never would have done it if I'd known. Never in a million years.”
My fingers grew dirtier and more metallic
as I counted; the familiar smell was comforting. Beth wanted to know everything—how I came up with the idea, how I'd kept the site private. “I never once suspected it, even with the Lorax,” she said. “But in hindsight, this whole thing is so you.” She shook her head. “The Wizard.”
She then gave me grief for writing the sermon about phonies. “You posted that one after I bagged you for Todd,” she said. “There I was thinking Larry was some kind of genius mind reader, when all along he was the guy next door.”
“Hey, Larry had to live next door to
somebody
,” I said. “He just lucked out with you.”
She smiled, a pre-betagold moment. “It's hard to be friends right now,” she said. “I've got to get some perspective on this.”
I told her to take whatever time she needed. I had so much more to say, but instead of saying it, I just fidgeted with the new jar openers on the bottom shelf.
“You better go,” she said. “My father's coming back in a few minutes. He hasn't been too happy about all of this.”
I handed her the washers, all 137 of them.
“So, we'll talk, right?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Soon. Maybe.”
I nodded and snuck out the door.
I made sure no one saw me leave, then rode my bike toward the woods. Over the past few weeks, my visits had grown more frequent and extended. If this frenzy didn't die down soon, I'd be setting up camp there permanently.
At this rate, maybe that wasn't such a bad thing.
Believe it or not, it took less than two months for the book deals to kick in. Some enterprising youth downloaded all my sermons and published them in hardcover as
The Larry Bible.
Two unauthorized biographies hit the shelves, one entitled
Josh/Larry—Flip a Coin;
the other,
Messiah in My Homeroom
written by a girl I went to junior high with but never spoke to once. Several acquaintances from my childhood set up their own Web sites. My babysitter from Ohio, where Mom and I lived till I was four, had a popular site called From Pampers to Prophet—Josh Swensen, the Early Years.
53
One of my biggest disappointments was having to shut down the Web site. Even with the
latest broadband technology, the site couldn't handle the 255 million hits it now received per day. Worse than that, hardly anyone wanted to discuss issues anymore; the questions posted on the message boards went from “How can we live more meaningful lives?” to “Does anyone know where I can get an XL Larry T-shirt?”
Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein—all the companies I slammed in my sermons—approached me to endorse their products.
“Does the irony escape you?” I asked the woman who claimed she was from Coca-Cola. “I trash you people for soaking us with advertising and now you want me to represent your product? What kind of philosopher would I be?”
The word
philosopher
almost sent the woman into advertising nirvana. She jumped across the room. “That's it! A heavily rotated commercial—lots of MTV play, lots of fast cuts, girls in short skirts—you're walking down this inner-city street, philosophizing, that's great—hip-hop music blasting in the background—trashing Coke while you're drinking one! It's perfect!”
I pondered the obvious. “Won't people think it's strange that I'm guzzling down a product from a company whose marketing campaign I've detested all along?”
“Is that what you're worried about?” She smiled at me as if I were a two-year-old. “People don't THINK!”
I held open the kitchen door and asked her to leave.
“Ten million dollars.” She smiled like the Cheshire cat. “Plus, your stepfather's agency gets the biz.”
These advertising people really knew what buttons to push. When Peter found out about her proposal, he played it low key but couldn't help mentioning that the Coca-Cola account was worth more than a billion dollars a year.
I told him I understood, but I still couldn't do it.
I slept under the Larsons' porch so I wouldn't have to deal with Peter again. I felt like a guppy hiding under a piece of coral in an aquarium full of piranhas.
It was only a matter of time before I was swallowed whole.
The next time I saw Beth was out behind the cemetery.
54
She'd e-mailed me to meet her there to avoid the press. I had to leave my house at six in the morning in a long blond wig and fringed jacket not to attract attention.
I thanked the universe for a few moments alone with her.
55
“I just wanted to say goodbye,” she said.
When I asked her where she was going, she told me she was spending the rest of the summer at her aunt's.
“Aunt Marge, down the beach?”
“No. Aunt Jo in Seattle.”
“What?” Please, don't do this to me. Please.
“This whole year's been crazy. I need to just be alone for a while.” She smiled. “I sound like you.”
“But then you'll be at Brown. I can see you there, right?”
She pulled some dead ivy off my mother's grave. “Look, friendship is based on honesty. And let's face it, you were living a giant lie.”
I cajoled, I begged, I offered a thousand excuses. She stood firm.
56
“You know me. Hypocrites drive me insane. And the world's gone completely nuts over this. Betagold sells you out, and what does she get? A million-dollar book deal and a prime-time special. To say nothing of that stupid toothbrush
she's charging people to see.
57
You'd think it was the Ark of the freaking Covenant.”
“No one wants to talk about Larry's message anymore,” I complained. “About how we're wasting natural resources, exploiting workers …”
“You don't have to summarize Larry's philosophy for me,” Beth snapped. “I know it as well as anyone.”
“Of course you do.”
“Let's face it, Josh. Half of those rants were mine. The World Bank screwing Third World countries? I wrote a paper on that for Mr. Bartlett's class. I'm glad you got the word out to others, but let's not pretend you're some kind of expert here.”
She did that quotation-mark thing around the word
expert.
I felt my face redden and looked down, only to get fixated on her tattoo peeking out from the hem of her jeans. Our relationship had deteriorated so much in the past month, I would never dare to reach over and touch it anymore. Instead I asked her what happened with Todd.
She sighed. “It was stupid to think we could
be a couple,” she said. “We had nothing in common at all.”
“
We
had something in common,” I said. “
We
should've been the couple.”
“Yeah, well too late now, isn't it?”
I looked into her eyes, confused.
“You're not saying you thought about it too, are you?”
Her lack of response sent me to my feet.
“Don't do this to me! After all I've been through, don't pull this on me now!” I shouted. “Are you saying you
wanted
us to be together? All this time?”
She concentrated on a patch of moss near the tombstone. “Just since ninth grade.”
I stomped through the graveyard repeating the word
NO
over and over. “This is not happening, this can't possibly be happening …”
My feelings ricocheted between fury and hope, if that's possible. Maybe we could still salvage something from all this wasted time.
But my dream scenario barely kicked into first gear before Beth interrupted it.
“We should just end it,” she said. “Besides, I need to get out of here. I was turning into too much of a conformist, following Larry's every word. I'll be better off on my own program, contributing on a more personal level.”
She ran her hand along the top of the tombstone. “Bye, Mrs. Swensen.” She turned to me. “Bye, Josh.”
And, just like that, the girl I had loved forever walked out of my life.
“You can't go!” I shouted. “We never even tried!”
“Goodbye, Larry.”
“I'm not Larry; I'm Josh. It's me! Goddamn it, stop!”
But she didn't.
Could I possibly be a bigger wimp? Not able to cough up enough of my real feelings until it was too late. Betagold was right. I was the worst kind of philosopher—a coward, a man (hardly) of ideas not rooted in anything real, anything from the heart. A voice inside me screamed not to let her go. But I did.
I slumped against my mother's tombstone, my future residence for all eternity. “Mom?”
She didn't answer. The only noise I heard was the distant roar of a small plane overhead. It towed a colorful banner that read LARRY DRINKS MOUNTAIN DEW.
58
I rolled over into the dirt, covered my eyes and ears like a baby. I'd lost Beth and destroyed Peter, my privacy, and my vocation, all in one fell swoop. Not much going on for Josh in the plus column these days.
I stared at the brown earth until I felt human again.
Which took me until the next morning.

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