Boys in Gilded Cages (21 page)

“
Shut up, Keller,” Chris
said, putting a lip of tobacco in. Trailing behind the couple,
Brandon saw Chris animatedly whispering to Wendy.

It was a dim, dingy farmhouse inside,
converted into a dimmer, dingier bachelor pad. There were
shamefully hot high school girls, their teachers, probably their
parents, college students, and pretty much everyone Brandon had
left behind, but a bit aged. Brandon Bennett the Actor was
approached several times by horny high school students, elated to
be meeting the kids’ network rebel they masturbated to as tweens,
stealing cell phone pictures and pecks on the cheek. It did not
matter that he was dirty, or that he was impossibly thin, or that
he was wilting with cravings for narcotics, subsisting on cherry
cough syrup, slowly starving to death. It didn’t matter, because
with his presence, he validated those girls’ entire lives. They’d
go to school and be meaner to the goth girls, they’d play the
outgoing messages he was asked to record on their phones, they’d
show everyone the pictures, talk about how Brandon Bennett looks
like shit but he’s still hotter than any dude at this school, and a
much better lay, etc.

Brandon Bennett the Actor was not dead yet,
just dying a tad slower than expected.

In the midst of this bored and noisy scene,
Brandon heard Wendy yelling, heard things crashing, and the
slapping of skin. “You fuck! I fucking hate you! Go fuck her skanky
ass, you drunk stupid fuck! Fuck!” She was throwing Keller’s knick
knacks indirectly at Chris, slapping his shoulders and the back of
his head. Chris covered his face and curled up to deflect the
attack.

Brandon approached the couple and grabbed
Chris’s arm to guide him away. Wendy shoved Brandon into the
kitchen counter and tried to kiss him. He resisted and shoved her
away. “Oh, what? Don’t want an audience?” She removed a slip of
paper from her cleavage and threw it at Chris. Verging on tears, he
started to bend over to pick it up. “Go on,” Wendy said. “Read it
and weep, you fuck.” Before he could read it, Brandon grabbed
Chris, who by now was nearly a puddle. He put his arm around him
and headed toward the door.

“
Find your own way home,
Wendy,” Brandon said solemnly. Wendy dramatically fell backward and
pretended to be drunker than she actually was, but Keller caught
her and held her as she cried, smiling over her shoulder at one of
his buddies.

Brandon didn’t speak to Chris as he drove;
he gave him a sympathetic glance throughout the drive. Chris,
glazed over, sweet, stupid Chris, with his head against the window,
pouting like a child. Times like these, Brandon adored this
man-child, who shared his DNA and his parents and his home for
several years. What they didn’t share—Brandon’s wanderlust, Chris’s
boyish fragility of spirit—was appreciated.

Even though they had not spoken in three
years, Brandon thought of Chris often. He wondered if following
through with his promise to hire Chris to come to Los Angeles and
be his personal assistant would have toughened his brother up and
leaned his soft midsection; he wondered if Chris’s face, a reminder
of home, would have kept him out of the skank of Skid Row, off of
TMZ, from the kids’ network sitcom to the steady, respectable
income of an entertainment entrepreneur-slash-performer that you
must become to stay in the Hills. He wondered if his roots, the
most vanilla of clichés, worked anywhere near as well as methadone.
If there was anyone on Earth whose spirit was capable of resisting
the soullessness of L.A., it was Chris.

When they got home they lit a fire pit, and
they talked. They talked for a long time but it wasn’t about much.
Chris asked a few things about what it was like on the West, and,
for example, what the difference between a producer and a director
was, if Brandon had ever met any of his favorite actresses (he had,
in fact, slept with many of them).

Brandon wanted to say that famous people
don’t look as good as they do in photographs and in movies, that
interviews are their biggest performances, that Tom Cruise is
actually the least crazy person in the whole goddamn town, but he
wanted to protect him from the truth.

(When the men were boys, it had been Chris’s
own brother that ruined Santa Claus for him, and Brandon freely
admitted as a teenager that he didn’t believe in Jesus. The way
Chris looked at his brother after both bombshells were dropped
never left him. He got a dull ache in his chest when his mother
told Brandon that Chris came to her in tears, afraid that he wasn’t
“going to make it to Heaven”.)

When the liquor wore off and fatigue sat in,
Brandon got up, patted Chris on the shoulder and suggested they go
to bed.

“
Would you like to ride
with us to the Christmas Tree Farm?” Brandon’s mother asked him
after the dishes and the guests were clear, except for a few. “It’s
your grandmother’s thing. We started doing it a few years ago. She
didn’t make dinner yesterday, so it’d be nice if you could go with
us.”

He definitely did not want to go. He had no
idea what a Christmas tree farm was, but it sounded dreadful.

“
Sure,” He
said.

“
Is he going, or not?”
Aunt Vida balked across the room.

“
Yes, Vida, Brandon’s
going.”

“
Who?”

“
Brandon, Vida.” She
over-enunciated.

“
Who’s
Brandon?”

The drive to the Christmas Tree Farm was
pretty short, but dangerous. Brandon did in fact have to drive, and
no one felt inclined to warn him that the dirt road to get from the
highway to the place—winding and uphill—had no barrier to keep the
car from crashing into the descending bank of trees on each
side.

“
You can drive in that
L.A. mess and you can’t handle a ride to the Christmas Tree Farm?”
His father laughed from the back seat. He didn’t answer, partly
because he hadn’t driven in L.A. in at least a year.

Once there, Brandon’s family got their
picture taken with the bejeweled Santa robot on a bench on the
front porch waving his hands.

“
God,” Brandon murmured.
Aunt Vida shot him a glassy look and said, “Wouldn’t you like to
wait in the car?”

“
Vida,” Sandy snapped.
Vida moseyed into the cabin.

“
You boys look so cute,
all bundled up,” Sandy marveled. “ Get next to the gaudy Santa.
I’ll take your picture.”

She directed them on each side, squinting at
the hung over and opiate thirsty brothers through her disposable
camera’s viewfinder. Upon the click, Chris mumbled something about
a bathroom and stumbled off.

Brandon’s mother was a terrible
photographer. But she got that picture perfectly, and it went on
their mantle that Christmas, the centerpiece to her collection of
awful knick knacks.

What made Brandon return Lou’s million phone
calls was not an effort to return to his despondent career. It was
not an escape from Hawthorn, as his mother saw it so many years
ago. It was defeat. There was no escape from L.A. and Brandon
Benett the Autonomous Man was now relegated to the back, screaming
and clawing at the lobotomized actor in front until he was out of
air, once and for all.

One phone call. Turn on the fucking lights.
Deaden my eyes again. Let me hit my fucking mark.

He took the BART to Lambert International,
with Chris accompanying him. At the gate, the boys hugged. Knowing
Brandon’s fate, Dead Fish Chris could not manage a grip worth shit.
Brandon Bennett the Man pecked his brother on the cheek and headed
toward the terminal, surrounded by a sea of oblivious drone
travelers. Brandon didn’t say a word; he just left again.

THE MACABRE BITCH MRS. DANFORTH

Out of everyone, she was the only one not
asked about him after his death. Well, that’s how it seemed,
anyway. She was part of an old maid guild here in this town,
untouched by the sexiness of a teen death. When she finally got
married to a widower pastor at the age of forty-seven, the young
Daryl McAdams was in attendance, along with my mother, addled by
dementia, and Jim’s congregation. It was a quiet ceremony at Jim’s
church, which most of the townspeople seemed to regard as foreign,
or alien. Strange. It was a gathering of the country’s outcasts, I
suppose, but a call for celebration.

I guess everyone who was there to celebrate,
was there to celebrate the union of two people. For Danforth, it
was little more than a relief. A single woman reaches an age where
the quiet night becomes not quietness, but a tension. Unfulfilled
expectations cause tension.

There is no more frightening a sight than an
angry woman in her forties. The sight of her is akin to a runaway
rust bucket of a truck – useless and stiff but fervent in speeding
towards its own death. It’s an incredible sight. The rust bucket
speeding proudly towards collision into a ditch or a tree; probably
set on that path on purpose and if not, its demise is probably a
blessing to its caretakers.

For all of the glaring, the taunting, the
mailbox shenanigans, and her furious indifference to them, a person
may think she had become immune to ridicule. On the contrary, this
wedding is a direct result of it. Danforth is reinventing
herself.



I still insist that Daryl
and Danforth had a connection. A person reserves the right to deny
herself a kindred spirit, and to pretend that the boy was anything
close would be especially disingenuous. Many attach themselves to
him post mortem, and I’m not sure why.



He was not particularly
disliked, or feared. He did not have an aura. There was nothing
mystical about him and she found his spirit to be dull and subdued.
His face was not particularly memorable, and his name carried an
indistinct, typically rural ring. Starting with the first day he
plopped himself into the back row of her class, and ending with the
day of her wedding (my last memory of him), she saw a boy with no
future and no intention of making one. It’s hard to imagine his
story ending well, and of course it didn’t.



Despite this, she takes
private pride in believing that no one knew him like she
did.



She had stopped into the
Cue ‘n Brew on the way home from work to meet her dear friend
Esmeralda, who had just returned from California and was eager to
show off her new facelift.



She was, at that point, a
frumpy divorcee. It was clear from the moment they met durin gher
Junior year at Southeast Missouri State, that she only bothered
attending college to meet a boy who would one day become a doctor.
She was liquored up quite intensely when she pointed and whispered,
“Isn’t that the McAdams boy?” Daryl was bent over the bar, yelling
at Billy Joe, presumably because he wouldn’t serve him. Looking at
Esmeralda, she was undoubtedly analyzing his backside. This made
Danforth blush.

“
That boy is sixteen,” she
muttered.

“
I know,” Danforth said
flatly.

“
There is just no way…”
she trailed off, in a trance, mouth agape. “No way.” She stiffened
up and slid her straw into her mouth. Her eyes darted West, and
back at Danforth, then West, then back at Danforth. She must have
looked puzzled, because Esmeralda whispered, “He’s coming over
here!” Danforth felt a brisk wind, and Daryl was sitting there,
between her and Esmeralda, leaning on the back of the
chair.

“
Why, Daryl McAdams, what
on Earth would you be doing here?” Esmeralda drawled.

“
I’m trying to drink, Miss
Raymond, but your boy Billy won’t serve me.”

Danforth would later say that was the first
time she heard him speak. His voice was huskier, belied his age,
and his accent Southern. He stared Esmeralda down and she all but
melted.

“
Would you like to try
mine?” Esmeralda asked in an embarrassingly flirtatious
tone.

“
I don’t know, Miss
Raymond, what is it?” He smirked.

“
It’s free.”

Daryl shrugged, flicked the straw on the
table and swigged it down. “Mmm, that’s pretty good.”

Esmeralda giggled and propped her head on
her chubby fist. “Want more?” She batted her eyes. Danforth wanted
to vomit.

“
Miss Raymond, you’re
trying to get me drunk! You’ll have to carry me home, if you keep
it up.”

“
You’re a big boy, Daryl.
You can handle it.”

At school the next day, Danforth avoided
both Daryl and Esmeralda, but the latter had her radar on.

Over lunch, the two women talked about
Danforth’s bachelorette party.

Danforth was never one for a party, and
wanted to keep it simple. In fact, she wanted to have it in the rec
center at Hawthorn Baptist. Esmeralda laughed at her.

“
We’re having it at the
Cue ‘n Brew”, she said. “Billy Joe won’t care. Or we could go with
my original idea…”

“
We are not having my
bachelorette party at the strip club in Springfield. Jim would call
of the wedding.”

“
You should call off the
wedding.”

For the next few days, Danforth noticed that
Daryl McAdams was a more attentive student. During lecture, he eyed
her—analyzing something, with a look of focused, clinical
objectivity. It would have creeped her, if it wasn’t so
curious.

For a moment, she wondered if she had fucked
up by allowing Daryl to sit at their table, drinking. But she knew,
as did everyone, what Daryl did, and when she thought about how
many people—sitting in the bar, on that night alone—had been his
client, she realized that truly nobody gave a shit about Daryl, or
Danforth herself. Daryl was more or less a slave, and Danforth
invisible. She remembered that everyone in Hawthorn had a role to
play. Who cares, she realized.