Boys in Gilded Cages (20 page)

The Socialite stood there, gaunt, blonde,
with a pouty scowl, wearing sunglasses that were way too big and
probably way too expensive.

“
You look like shit,” she
said.

“
Please, come in,” he
said, grinning. “Can I offer you a cigarette?” She accepted it. The
hotel, which belonged to a chain owned by her family, had a strict
no-smoking policy. “How did you get in without being
recognized?”

“
I’m in Memphis, you
hick,” she snapped. “Can I ask what the fuck you’re doing
here?”

“
You can,” Brandon said
calmly. “What might you be doing here?”

“
I’m saving your ass, is
what I’m doing.”

“
Okay.” Brandon laid back
and grabbed his crotch suggestively. “You know what to
do.”

The Socialite laughed. “Take a shower, get
your shit, we’re leaving.”

“
I’m not
leaving.”

“
Yes, you are.”

“
No, I’m not.”

This went on for about ten minutes, with The
Socialite and Brandon Bennett the Man arguing, each speaking in a
different language, The Socialite getting lost in translation. She
reasoned that not only was he fucking up his career, she was being
fucked over by him. If they broke up, what would become of him? A
child star following the beaten path, a fucking loser. She was his
way back up and she came all the way to bum fuck Memphis, after
all, are you kidding me, Brandon? My body is rejecting this place
as we speak. This in itself is a sacrifice.

Brandon the Actor coaxed The Socialite into
giving up her cocaine by leading her to believe he would be leaving
with her. He stuck the baggie down the front of his jeans, and
stalled for a little while.

Then he threw her out.

He got out his laptop and started typing
what started out as a joke. Celebrity suicides are no joke, as they
make Hollywood journalists and hangers-on a lot of money and pretty
much mold their careers from clay.

The first ever mass e-mailed suicide
note.

So he looked at his cell phone for the first
time in two days, to find Lou’s e-mail address. He found it and a
few others’ and then crushed the cell phone under his hiking
boot.

By the time the suicide note was read by the
first set of eyes, Brandon Bennett had already left the hotel and
re-gifted his Porsche to a nearby ditch. He was not inside on
impact.

He took the Amtrak to the closest small town
with a depot, picked up a penny saver paper, and used half of his
remaining cash to buy a used white Bronco off some guy’s lawn.
Brandon Bennett the Man headed to Southwest Missouri.

He stopped at the Wal-Mart just outside
Hawthorn to pick up some essentials: A quart of orange juice, a
bottle of cherry cough syrup, condoms, a toothbrush. The checkout
girl was eyeing him in a strange way, presumably because of the
condoms. It was not a sexual glare or especially intruding, but it
occurred to Brandon that he should address it.

“
How ya’ doin’,“ he said,
nodding.

“
You don’t remember me,”
the checkout girl said flatly. Brandon frantically went through
many subconscious filing cabinets. “It’s okay, it’s been awhile.
You’ve seen much more excitement than memory serves, I’m
sure.”

Brandon extended his hand. “Brandon
Bennett.”

“
Wendy Lewis.” She
fidgeted inside a shopping bag, and shook hands with Brandon
Bennett the Actor.

“
Home Room, Eighth
Grade.”

“
Right.”

“
You look a lot like your
brother,” Wendy said.

“
I’m the oldest! He looks
like
me.”

Wendy’s courtesy laugh.

“
So, Wendy, you got a
break coming up?”

“
Nope. I’m off in fifteen
minutes.”

At the end of Wendy’s shift, Brandon drove
to the outskirts of the parking lot and fucked Wendy in his white
Bronco. He drove her home, and ended up staying the night.

When he left at about noon, she asked for
his number, and he told her the truth, that his phone broke. She
didn’t believe him, but she didn’t seem too upset about it. When he
saw that she didn’t care, he wrote down his number anyway, and
placed it in her jewelry box while she wasn’t looking.

He arrived at his parents’ farm in Hawthorn
at about 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. As he
got out of his Bronco, he studied the landscape. Everything was the
same. Same old manure smell, same huge, boxy house. Same Ten
Commandments display out front. The grass was grotesquely green.
Everything was bright, clean and perfect. The cedar siding had
fresh stain on it, the decorations were strategically placed around
the yard, and not one of them was crooked, not even slightly
purposely skewed.

He had always felt like this place was cut
off from the rest of the world. This place was too sanitized to
house actual human beings. It always reminded him of those classic
family sitcoms he was forced to sit through as a kid. It seemed
almost like this place had been preserved in a giant, air-tight
Tupperware bowl. Everything is controlled. People need a little
misery in their lives.

That’s what Brandon thinks, anyway.

From the looks of the driveway, people
besides Brandon were staying at the house. That made him nervous.
He didn’t want to go in. He stood on the top wooden step about six
inches from the door, giving it that spacey gaze he gets when he’s
deep in thought, which happens less with each passing year.

Finally, he knocked on the painted steel
three times. He waited for what seemed like five minutes for
someone to answer. He knew better than to just go inside. He wasn’t
a part of this household anymore; In fact, he was supposed to be
dead.

The door swung open and his mom, who at
fifty still looked thirty-five, stood before him. Her auburn hair
was curled and sprayed to a stiff, perfect mold. She had an
expression that was somewhere between a grin and a grimace.
Whatever it was, it looked weird and forced.

“
Brandon,” She said in
typical dramatic fashion, trailing off before fainting.

His father told Brandon to stay put while
they brought his mother to, right before he shut the door in his
face. He heard them speaking quietly, calmly, reasoning, but
couldn’t figure out what they were saying.

Finally, the door opened.

The inside of the home was completely
different than it was three years ago. It was spotless, as always.
But the walls were a different color, and the country bumpkin
knick- knacks had all been changed.

Brandon focused on the walls, on the
windows, and avoided eye contact with anyone. He was uncomfortable
beyond words. His mother put her hand across his back, onto his
shoulder, and without words, gently guided him to the den.

“
Brandon, you remember
Aunt Vida, Uncle Peter,” She said with wide eyes.

“
Of course. How are you?”
Brandon said in a monotone voice.

“
Oh honey, I’m doin’ all
right for an old woman,” She said. She seemed barely awake, and
definitely ancient. Brandon’s generally accurate guess was ninety
years old. Maybe older. Her blank look suggested she had never
heard of him or his movie career.

“
Where’s Chris?” Brandon
asked his mother.

“
He’s at work,” She said
in a forced, spirited, hopeful voice.

She looked at Brandon with awe, as if she
could not believe he was there. It confused him, as he was certain
that even if his fake death had been posted on the internet (and it
would not get past Lou and his band of minions for days), his
family would probably be the last people on Earth who would see
it.

Out of touch as she seemed to be, Brandon’s
mother had a lot to do with his success as an actor, and some have
suggested, his subsequent problems. As a baby, she started him out
on the Tennessee pageant circuit. A former pageant girl, she
behaved as expected of a woman in middle age who just nicked the
corner of show business in her prime.

When there was a casting call for a local
business’s commercial, Sandy was there with Brandon. When a country
artist needed a weeping child for their music video, Sandy was
there with Brandon. When Lou called Sandy one day and told her that
he would be interested in representing Brandon, she saw her own
name in lights.

After years as a commercial actor, Brandon
Bennett landed his career-starter as the subversive sidekick to
kids’ network star Toby Westwood on the sitcom “[title]”, a title
that Brandon could never explain in interviews. On the show, he was
normally dressed in dark clothing and presented as a teen badass,
and stole many scenes from Toby, as well as priceless exposure on
teenybopper magazines. Toby Westwood, a round-faced queen, a more
established star and bigger diva, did not like this. He tried to
get Brandon fired several times for pulling humiliating practical
jokes on him, and for speaking to Perez Hilton (as “A source”) on
numerous occasions regarding Toby’s sexuality. Lou saved him
several times, but could not keep him out of trouble forever, and
Brandon was written off the series one season before it was
cancelled.

At the end of their final episode together,
Brandon and Toby had to hug. On the last take, Brandon grabbed
Toby’s ass and yelled to the cast and crew, “Toby’s got a big
boner!” Toby locked himself in his dressing room and refused to
come out.

Cut to Summer 2010, and Brandon is giving
the closeted director/producer of a comic book franchise adaptation
an awkward lap dance for the role of a floating head in a comic
book adaptation, with no speaking parts. Toby Westwood was the
youngest person nominated for an Oscar this season.

Sandy’s words approached Brandon softly.

“
What…I just have to ask.
Being your mother makes this question seem cruel.”

Brandon’s eyes glazed over.

“
Why are you
here?”

He wasn’t sure who she was speaking to –
Brandon Bennett the Man, or the Actor. What did she mean,
exactly?

Did she mean: Why are you here, after two
years of silence? Or did she mean: Why are you here, and not in the
hospital, where Lou assured me you were after I saw an E! News
segment talking about your figurative swan dive off a Malibu
Bluff?

Or did she mean: Why are you here, a
cardboard cutout of a person, replacing my Son, claiming to be
him?

Brandon’s response was a shrug.

“
Well, Chris will be here
soon. He’s bringing dinner home. He’s also bringing his girlfriend
for the first time, so I guess your timing is perfect!” Sandy was
demented with forced glee.

Chris was not ecstatic to see Brandon. They
greeted and hugged, but there were no smiles, no chuckles, no
playful shoves to the shoulder. Chris looks like Brandon, only
slightly healthier.

Mother didn’t have much to offer the boys in
their reunion. She was preoccupied. “Where’s your girlfriend? I
thought she was coming…Oh, that must be her…Oh, you’re pretty! It’s
so nice to finally meet you!”

Wendy walked in with a Cheshire cat grin.
Sandra immediately started clanging pots and pans, leaving the
boys, and Wendy, to stare at each other.

The dinner table was wrecked with gravy and
brown flaky cuts of meat and greens soaked in leftover grease, and
silence. Topics of discussion ranged from weather to this year’s
crop, to cruise discounts to Brandon Bennett the Actor, to Chris’s
wonderful miraculous relationship. But no more than twenty words
were spoken in thirty minutes. Wendy brought up a party at her
coworker’s house to interrupt the clanging of forks, and Chris
immediately invited Brandon.

“
Oh, I don’t…”

“
Cut the crap,
Brandon.”

“
I’m kinda tired,
and…”

“
Everyone will love
it.”

“
No.”

“
Yes.”

Sigh. “Okay.”

The drive to the party
wasn’t really that awkward. Back at the house, Brandon poured his
cough syrup into a “World’s Best Dad” travel coffee mug and mixed
it with Diet Coke. On the road, he sipped it through a stir stick
and looked out the window at the big blur of corn stalks. The
windows were down, and he meditated on the humidity and imagined it
was bathwater.
Chills don’t exist. Drugs
don’t exist. California’s dead. History doesn’t matter.
Wendy, sitting “Bitch”, would occasionally break
the silence by mimicking along to her Depeche Mode mix tape and
looking at the boys to see their reaction (they did not react).
Chris, a country music fan to the core, ejected the cassette after
“Goodnight Lovers” finished playing, without giving Wendy so much
as a warning glance. She grimaced and positioned her torso to face
Brandon.

The house loomed larger than it was. The
windows glowed, two yellowish-white devil eyes, hungrily beaming
Brandon in. The situation they had there was a short fuse; nothing
good was going to happen in that house. A sweaty, bearded man
stumbled out onto the porch wearing a beer bong helmet. “Hey,
Wendy!” He called out across the yard. “Who are those two handsome
stallions in yer’ company tonight?”