Seeing Off the Johns (21 page)

2002
2002

Chon rubbed his arms against a cool breeze that blew on downtown Austin in late August. He thumbed a cigarette from the pack he had in the breast pocket of his shirt. Kamel Reds. He'd drunkenly picked a box of them off a shelf behind a bar a year ago and kept buying them when he woke up hung-over the next morning and found he liked how they tasted.

Cigarettes were something he picked up in Austin. Going to bars and parties, he smoked with people around him over conversations soul-baring and full of shit. But cigarettes weren't Chon. Much of the way he was living then wasn't either. Chon didn't know who he was or who he wanted to be, but he knew that much.

He stood alone on line on Lavaca outside of Antone's, a bar that started as a blues joint but now housed alternative and hip-hop bands too. It was Jimmie Vaughn on a Thursday, Blue October that Friday, and Talib Kweli on Saturday. Antone's was an old Austin establishment, a microcosm of the whole city—a rocking metaphor for how the whole place seemed to run. His friends hadn't wanted to wait in line with him or to pay the concert cover charge, so they said they'd meet up with him over on Sixth.

Chon flashed his fake I.D. at a bouncer who seemed more interested in the fashion choices of the young ladies waiting to get in than whether or not a kid one month away from drinking legally was actually named Lester Maxwell, DOB 12/16/1980. Chon
wasn't in the mood for drinking, but it cut three dollars off his cover. The big room was already packed. The air was thick with sweat and smoke and the products people used to make themselves seem more beautiful than they were. Chon staked out a spot for himself in front of stage right.

A while after the opening band finished their set, as the members of the band wrapped cords the lengths of their forearms around their elbows and in their palms and carried amplifiers and encased guitars from the stage, a security guy gave Chon a harsh nudge with his shoulder and told him to make way. He was escorting the main act's girlfriend—a woman who looked much smaller than you imagine her to be when you see her in the movies—up to the VIP section in a loft above the crowd. There was something about that exchange that made Chon happy. He was miles and miles away from Greenton, and just one very big degree of separation away from America's sweetheart. It made Chon wish someone were there to tell this to.

The next time Henry came to town, Chon thought, they would go to Antone's. They would listen to whoever was playing, have a few beers. And they would try to fill somehow the gaps that months apart and different lifestyles had put between them.

Next to Chon, a couple of people were pointing at a lanky, ridiculous-looking man in a tight black T-shirt and leather pants. There he stood, a few people in front of Chon, the daytime Hollywood actor and nighttime aspiring blues singer whose band would be headlining the next night's show at Antone's to about a quarter of the place's capacity. Chon noticed, but didn't say anything. The thing in a situation like this was to not say anything. The people next to Chon did not seem to know this.

“Hey, look,” one of the guys said loud enough to be heard on stage. “It's [insert movie star/blues singer's more famous older brother's name].”

The low lights and smoke-filled air couldn't hide the shades of red the actor's face
turned. He was done slumming it with the commoners on the floor. He walked over to the VIP door and headed upstairs where people knew how to blow smoke for a man in leather pants. Chon laughed.

The crowd moved up a spot into the sinkhole forming, person by person, in the space the actor had vacated. The music hadn't started so things weren't packed yet. Chon looked around at all the cool people wearing their fashion like their lives depended on it, and all the hip people their unfashion like nothing had ever depended on anything. Chon didn't count himself one of them, but this was mainly because he felt he would never be cool. He would never be hip. He would never be Austin.

He wanted to believe that in the three years he had been gone from Greenton, he had shed more of the place than his melodic country-Spanglish drawl—he was still bringing words cadentially upward to sarcastic-sounding blue notes, making his statements sound like questions, but now he wasn't doing it after every sentence.

But his ties to home were ones that almost couldn't be identified and, as such, were harder to break than changing the way he spoke. No one he met could even point to Greenton on a map, much less look at him, listen to him, get to know him and say that that was where he came from, that Greenton had made Chon Gonzales.

But the place
had
made Chon. It was hard enough living alone at twenty in a city of strangers, but to have no one to share his frame of reference—as he had with almost everyone in Greenton—was lonelier than the efficiency apartment he called home on the far east end of Stassney. He'd made friends at work, some at school. He even knew a guy from Benavides he figured he might have met at some high school function or other. Chon probably never would have crossed paths with the guy in Austin except Chon was wearing a Greenton High School shirt in class one day and the guy sparked up a conversation for no other reason than that they were both from such similar places and both likely feeling the same brand of loneliness.

Chon never thought he would have to face the city alone. And, really, he didn't have to. He could always call Araceli. He knew she would drop whatever she was doing and listen, just like he would, to someone who knew the same street names and nicknames and tall tales and histories she did. He knew she would help him because she loved him.

Now Chon understood that it had been foolish to ever think that there could be a forever between the two of them, even if they did leave home together. They had to meet new people, encounter new cultures, experience the world. Chon had never seen an Asian person in the flesh, never met anyone from a different continent other than the South Americans who had begun making their way across the border looking for food and water when they got into town on their way to Chicago or Michigan or anywhere else they had family getting started on the dream. It was almost sure to be too much for them.

Here it was, the final proof that what he was trying to outrun wasn't Greenton or what it had made of him, but an embarrassing adolescence he had just barely escaped: he was in a crowded bar in the middle of downtown Austin, and all he could think about was Araceli Monsevais. It wasn't thankless, unwarranted pining anymore. They shared a history together, all of history. Everyone reminisces fondly and regretfully about their lost loves. Chon knew there was no shame in his thoughts. But it was the act of longing, the awakening of those avenues in his brain or of those muscles in his soul, that took him back to a time that filled him with such shame that no amount of new friends or growing up could make that shame sting any less. Chon never caught wise to the fact that he wasn't the only person who had times and past lives to look back on in horror. But that was always his failing, thinking he was the only one.

Now, with the room near full and getting crazy—his mind swimming in the thoughts that being alone in a city full of people always brought—Chon wanted a beer. He
abandoned his spot in the crowd to get to the bar. It was no real loss. Skinny as he still was, he could elbow and sidestep his way back up to a prime piece of floor when the show started.

Chon ordered. The bartender gave him the first longneck she could reach in the trough in front of her. Chon had no objection to the brand she'd pulled. As he turned to walk away, someone tapped him on the shoulder. Before he could look to see who it was, Araceli grabbed the scruff of hair behind his right ear like she always did when she walked into the kitchen of his apartment after class and he was at the stove, cooking their dinner.

This happened more than Chon would have thought it would. He'd be walking on campus or around downtown or on the trail at Lake Austin, thinking of home and of Araceli and of better times when he'd had her, and she would pop up, just like that. It wasn't as unlikely an occurrence as he thought it to be. Austin is a very small city. It's easy to spot someone in a crowd when they're the only person in the world you're ever looking for.

He turned around, smiling. She pulled him in for a tight, quick, excited hug, then kissed him on the cheek. It was a small, tender kiss. Chon wished he had turned his face the fifteen degrees it would take for their lips to meet, but that would have complicated the serendipitous turn that brought her to Antone's.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Supporting our boy. Major label record release party, Bob's gone big time.”

“Can you believe it—our CD, in Best Buys and Wal-Marts all over the country?” She flicked at the bottle in Chon's hand. “Your birthday come early this year?”

“Door was cheaper for 21 and up,” Chon said.

“Yeah, and you just paid the difference with that beer.” Her tone was playful, that
great Monsevais humor that Chon had come to hate in Araceli because it could so easily be turned passive-aggressive and actively cruel. But she was there, smiling at Chon, with the red and blue and white lights from the truss above the stage making more cruel the fact that she hadn't gone there with him.

“You look really great tonight,” Chon said.

“Don't change the subject.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. What were we talking about?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Anything but how great I look.”

Chon nodded and looked away. For as much as it stung to be there with her but not with her, Chon was reminded of the reason they hadn't worked.

“Alright,” Chon said. She looked at him with a sort of desperation on her face, like he was about to walk away from her and out of the bar. He remembered that look and hated himself for ever hurting her. “I look great tonight.”

Araceli laughed. “You do.”

“Wow, really believable,” Chon said.

She put her hand on his collarbone. “You really do.”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the call came on the speakers, “Bob Schneider and Lonelyland.”

The band took the stage. The Mexican-looking guy behind the drum set clicked a four count and away they went. The bass player—tall, near albino—played an electric upright and danced around his three square feet of stage. Behind him, a three-piece horn section played swells and fills to the music. In front of where Chon had been standing before he left to get a drink, an older man sat on stage with a cello between his legs. Bob Schneider took the stage carrying an electric guitar with dice in place of the volume and tone knobs. He thanked the audience for coming out and started playing.

“Let's get closer,” Araceli shouted. She grabbed Chon's hand and pulled him into the crowd that separated them from the stage.

Whereas he would have had to advance his way to the stage forcefully, Araceli did it gracefully—making eye contact with the people she was cutting off and making eyes at the space that wasn't really in front of them. They all moved, even the women, and Chon remembered what it was like walking into a place with Araceli.

They ended up near the front of the crowd in the center of the audience.

It wasn't Austin that had come between Chon and Araceli. It wasn't moving into a world so shiny and dirty and well-lit.

There were two things that did Chon and Araceli in. One was that she was too beautiful for Chon to let out into a world where he had everyone pegged as schemers and thieves—out to take from him what he had been working all these last years to get. It was that and the fact that Chon couldn't sack up the confidence to trick himself into believing that he deserved Araceli or—he would realize years later—happiness either. Defining himself by his pursuit of something he didn't believe he was worthy of for so long had taken its toll on Chon. He shuddered to think of what his life would have been like if he hadn't gotten Araceli. But if he hadn't gotten her, he believed he probably would have lived through her moving out of town to join the boyfriend who would hypothetically not have died. Chon thought he might even have moved to Austin on his own to live the life of a satisfied, well-adjusted man one month shy of his 21st birthday, as though such people really existed. Realistically, though, he knew he most likely would still be manning the register at the Pachanga if it weren't for her.

He didn't trust the men she saw and encountered and almost surely flirted with on campus when she was going to school and he was working. Then, when he started
school a semester after she did, he didn't trust the men who were in classes with her when he wasn't. Then he didn't trust the women she had begun hanging out with in the honor sorority she'd joined. He held on tight, too tight, to what he really believed was being stolen from him. He felt undermined by the world around him. It was all out to get her. It was all a valid option for Araceli and a threat to Chon's whole world.

When they moved to Austin, Chon got a small apartment in West Campus to be close to Araceli. She didn't spend more than a handful of nights in her dorm that first semester. Initially, each of them felt they were the picture of domestic bliss, like they were something more than two children playing house. But Araceli made friends and joined groups and went to parties without Chon, who often had to work night shifts at a gas station where he'd gotten a job. He knew it wasn't fair to expect her to stay home and wait for her boyfriend to come back stinking of busted beer bottles and stale coffee. But he had in his head the certitude, the unshakeable certitude, that she would one day be stolen from him, that he would be left alone in a cold and isolating city by the only person he knew there.

That made him get angry when she came home late. There were shouting matches that he felt didn't end well. They made her cry. She started going back to her dorm room after nights of partying. Then he flung accusations at her. One night it was all too much.