Boys in Gilded Cages (11 page)

“
Can I hide with
you?”

Daryl and Marcia lay side-by-side on the
bed. Daryl reached over and wiped the wet spot off of her
cheek.

“
I can’t have sex with
you,” Marcia said.

“
I know that,” Daryl said,
almost defensive. “Why are you upset?”

“
I don’t know,” Marcia
said, drained and defeated.

“
You probably thought I was
someone else.”

“
What?” Marcia
asked.

“
You had a fantasy of me in
your head, but really, I’m just a lowlife crack head to you now.
You like me with a bad attitude, but the baggage was out of sight.
Until now.” Daryl looked over at Marcia. “Right?”

Marcia waited a long time to answer. “I’m
scared of you.”

Daryl sighed. “Yeah, well. You probably
should be.”

“
Yeah. I guess
so.”

Daryl raised up. “I do like you, Marcia. I
like you a lot.”

“
But?”

“
But…” Daryl said, “I don’t
think you can handle me right now. I’d rather you just keep the
fantasy. That version of me is much better. Both for me, and for
you.”

Marcia rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t even
make any sense.”

“
It would if you really
knew the truth,” Daryl said. “And trust me, you don’t want
that.”

They eventually fell asleep, while the chaos
of the party happened outside. Marcia woke up to sobs. They were
Daryl’s sobs.

Without saying a word, she wrapped her arms
around Daryl, stroked his hair, and held him until he fell back
asleep.



FASHIONABLY
LATE




His topcoat just wasn’t
heavy enough. This was evident from the increased chatter of his
jaw. His molars clanged, seeming to echo throughout his mouth and
down his throat with the drainage from his sinuses, which, as his
father warned before the move, is commonly increased in this
climate. The door shut behind him. This, for some reason, triggered
an involuntary contemplative moment, not really a flashback or a
hypothetical scene complete with heightened reality, but more like
an ominous rumble in the gut, regarding the upcoming events of this
dreaded evening--A welcoming party in his honor.

This miserable party was his mother’s doing,
of course--An opportunity to showcase her teenage son’s angelic
face to a bunch of people who are surely better acquainted with the
faces of road kill. “This is my son, Jaime,” she’d say to homely
people in hand-knitted sweaters. “He’s in from Nashville.” She
would say this with saccharine voice inflection, as the neighbors
nod with honest fascination. She’d take for granted that these
poor, dumb people would look upon them both as if Nashville was a
beacon of world culture, which meant that his mother gave birth to
exotic offspring in an exotic land. And they’d be impressed,
because people from Wyoming are exactly that stupid. He suspected
that’s why she decided to live here in the first place, to live
around people whom she could easily impress. This brief flash of
dread triggered, as it always does, an unconscious, queer facial
expression that always perplexes and unsettles strangers in the
mall--a reaction he recognized, but didn’t understand.

He was experienced with this reflexive
expression enough to know what the muscles in his face felt like
when it happened. It only layered onto the rest of the awkward shit
his body did, showing no reverence to etiquette or aesthetics, and
in turn made more awkward bodily and facial shit happen, which led
people to believe he was crazy or diseased. It subsided here
quicker than normal, as there wasn’t anyone around. He forced one
foot in front, moving his legs into an odd amble.

And so he slumped up the dirt road from the
guest house, toward his mother’s house. He could see the house from
the cedar porch he was now a few steps from, and he silently prayed
the route would get deterred, perhaps by a snowstorm or
elevation-sickness.

He took comfort in, of all things, the
landscape. Just like the Paramount logo marking the end of the
coming attractions, he settled into the image. He admired the
metropolitan atmosphere: Streets of busy, furiously indifferent
drones, and daydreamed about it as he stared at the silhouette of
the Rocky Mountains. While there were no skyscrapers in Nashville,
and no cabs to hail except for on the curbs of the airport and
Greyhound station, there was still a sense of hustle in the city
that to him, was soothing, ambient noise. There is a level of
comfort in being surrounded by anonymous people who also considered
him to be anonymous.

Still, icy, nature felt exactly the same as
a busy street. It was just as comfortable. His agoraphobia had
nothing to do with people, as was explained to him a couple years
back by one in a long line of family counselors. No, his
agoraphobia had everything to do with the hyper-sensitivity he had
towards his own human inadequacies. Rationally, he understood that
all people have their own shortcomings, but for reasons unknown to
him, he was the only person who deserved to have them exposed in
front of the world. Maybe if he knew what exactly made him flawed,
he could overcome them. He couldn’t detect the scars in his
mannerisms or his face or whatever, nor did he understand the
complexity of himself. He expected no one else to, including
doctors or Scientology auditors or his parents. “One day,” his
mother once snarled when he announced he was not showing up to his
Junior prom, “You’re going to be old and lonely, just like all old
people. Only, you’ll have no reflective thoughts to keep you
company.”

He kept his head down while she spoke, which
seemed to only agitate her more. “What do you have against being
young and happy?” He had nothing against it, he wanted to say. He
just found that the fight was too hard to bother. He was already
defeated, for some reason. Being defeated, he agreed to show up to
his senior prom at Esther B. Williams high.

Being in Hawthorn, the high school gymnasium
was in the middle of town, and its main focal point—all lit up,
almost like Ground Zero or some type of indoctrination center.
Fields, a church, some houses, dirt, and a cultish environment
stand guard all around, a place where the Gods were mechanized
beasts called tractors, that Jamie had only heard of in that Robert
Redford movie and a country song fetishizing it on the radio one
time on the way in to town. The gym was barren on the inside and
sparsely populated, with a bored DJ playing that tractor-sex
country song over and over again. Zombie-fied cheerleaders that
were plainly good-looking, in a rural kind of way, held pep rallies
there. Teachers pace the floors, always stoic and silent, and
behave like government agents. It was in weird-ass Hawthorn where
Jaime’s affliction was fostered and matured.

After thirty minutes of Prom festivities,
Jamie’s mother, who was there to chaperone, was asked to leave for
showing up drunk, and for being inappropriate with Jerry Winkler,
the only twenty-two year old that ever existed at Jaime’s high
school. Jaime considered this not only a betrayal of motherly
duty--for Jerry Winkler was one of the few people with whom Jaime
had a casual friendship, which presented a gross conflict of
interest--but it was also the exact worst case scenario Jaime had
feared before agreeing to go.

Jaime’s mother had no interest in enriching
her son’s

life or experience. It became apparent that
if Jaime sought the party once and a while, he’d see his mother
more often, but as the fun-loving lush

that Jerry Winkler liked to take in the back
seat of his Jeep.

After that, none of the other moms would
talk to Jaime’s mom. Dad ordered her into rehab, for what, who
knows. When she refused, it was only a matter of time, and Dad took
Jaime to Nashville with him.

It was at most forty degrees outside during
the warmest part of the day, a chill belied by the intense Wyoming
sun, and by the beads of sweat forming under his shaggy, heavy
bangs. He was neither prepared for, nor was he happy about, his
recent move from Nashville, also a place with detestable weather.
But he had a faint determination to pour himself into the mold of
this new lifestyle, as there was no third option, and no sense in a
smart boy like Jaime to have to use the last resort.

The steepness of the route was unfortunately
underestimated. It looked like flat land in the view from the guest
house, but for some reason, the muscles in his thighs started to
throb, along with his temples--unusual for a jogger. He also
noticed that his mother’s house was no longer in view, which was a
little alarming. He checked his cell phone for the time, and
calculated that he had twenty minutes until he

was officially late for the party. However,
his mother often encouraged being slightly late to parties. “Ten
minutes late, you’re fashionable. Twenty minutes, you’re not
allowed to eat,” she’d said on more than one occasion. Jaime was
always sure to be on-time.

It was starting to get dark, and his mother
had already called four times, none of the calls Jaime had
answered. Walking uphill for what seemed like forever had made him
sweaty and not presentable. He eventually just parked under a tree
a few feet away from the trail and smoked a cigarette, which then
became two, and then three. His meditation was interrupted by the
nasally voice of an older woman.

“
Those are bad for ya’,
you know,” The voice offered.

“
Really? I hadn’t heard,”
Jaime replied, hoping his sarcasm was enough to ward this person
away from him. His eyes met with a harsh blue light, intrusively
scanning his face and his person.

“
You lost? You look lost,”
The woman observed. From what Jaime could see, she was wearing a
police uniform. “You a cop?” He asked.

“
Not quite. Security
guard,” she said, pointing behind her. “For that house over there.”
Jaime concluded that she must have been unnecessarily hired for his
mother’s party as a frumpy prop.

“
Oh. I live over there,”
Jaime said, and pointed in a nonspecific direction.

Ms. Security Guard burrowed her brows. “Well
what are you doing sitting out here? There’s mountain lions, you
know.” He, in fact, did not know that.

“
I’ll be okay. I’ve got a
mean look.” After a second of silence, he assumed the joke fell
flat. “Just wanted to be outside for a minute.”

“
Well, don’t freeze to
death,” She said, walking away. “’Night.”

“’
Night.”

About thirty minutes after the party was
scheduled to begin, Jaime was still sitting underneath the tree. He
knew his mother would be incensed. She had little patience for the
unsociable, and couldn’t understand for the life of her how anyone
could be pathologically scared of a party. His father was more
sympathetic to his condition, but eventually it became obvious to
Jaime that it wasn’t sympathy his father felt for him, it was
toleration--toleration only sustainable because Jaime was the
definition of a quote unquote latchkey kid. Eventually though,
Jaime became too much for him to handle, even from a remote
location. The condition had not only taken over Jaime’s life, it
had taken over his as well. Jaime honestly wasn’t aware of this
until his father broke the news, over dinner, that Jaime would be
moving over a thousand miles away.

“
I work over fifty hours a
week, Son. Your mother works none,” He explained. “If nothing else,
she’ll be present. We at least owe you

that.”

“
I don’t get a say?” Jaime
countered.

“
It’s for your health,
Jaime.” He said, keeping his eyes on the floor.

“
And for mine. You can’t
go on running the streets while I’m at work. You need someone who’s
going to be home.”

During this conversation, it came to Jaime’s
attention for the first time, that he had no clue what his father
even did for a living. He knew he made lots of money, and that
probably meant a high-stress job. He knew he lived in a
decent-sized house in a crime-free neighborhood, and he knew his
father had an indistinct disinterest in everything, since Jaime
could remember.

Jaime was far too perceptive to actually
believe that he wasn’t wanted, or that he was the cause of his
parents’ divorce. Instead, he had always undertaken the old adage
that ‘life is a bitch, and then you die,’ and cut away all of the
psychological malarkey. He tried his hardest to not care if his
parents wanted him. They were in their own little world, out of
touch with humanity, preferring instead status and imitating sitcom
families’ behavior. It was their goal to ensure Jaime’s idea of
life was just as limited. It was apparently their responsibility to
split him apart so that he had no bearings, ever. But Jaime was
just along for the ride; an outside observer who could find the
humor in his family while enjoying the material perks. He liked to
think he stepped outside the bubble, and walked right into a world
with no romanticism, no psychobabble. Not so jaded that he shunned
the world completely like the goth classmates he taunted with his
few friends, but jaded enough to express his rage effectively
without becoming a victim of the stupid world. Apparently, no
matter what he said or did, he was a part of it all whether or not
he was willing to be.

He considered calling his mother to get
directions, or just to tell her he wasn’t coming. Instead, he sat.
He became extremely tired, nearing sleep. His phone rang and rang,
but he didn’t bother to check if it was his mother, and it didn’t
occur to him to just turn off the phone. He just sat and smoked
cigarettes, leaving the butts around the tree. Finally, he checked
his phone for the time: 11:30p.m. “Shit,” he said aloud. “Watch
your language,” he heard a familiar voice demand. “Why are you
sitting out here?”