EXPLOSIONS DO NOT HAPPEN ALL at once, though it seems they do. The fuse may be a long time in lighting.
Thomas Lynn Dwyer’s fuse was walking to the trailer called 34456 at Monclova Terrace and finding his mother and her boyfriend buck naked having sex on the plastic covered sofa. It wasn’t the first time, but for some reason this was the last time. The smell of marijuana and the sound of Metallika were coming from his right, where his brother and his brother’s girlfriend slept. For some reason this was the beginning of the end.
Tommy had been planning it all a long time and saving up. He went to the tattoo parlor that day. His eyes watered and his face turned red and the tattoo artists told him, “We can do the rest of this later, guy. This might be too much to take in now.”
“No,” Tommy insisted, blinking back tears, his face chartreuse, “Now.”
“Man, you seem like this is sort of a ritual for you. It usually is,” the tattoo artist went on. “I could burn some incense and play some Ham Sahllahakla for you.”
Tommy didn’t know who that was and he was about to say that it sounded too pagan. But he what he actually said was:
“Yes,” and then let the tattoo artist, who had two ear clamps, a goatee and a stinger he kept licking as he did his work, continue. It was Nag Champa, what Mason burned, and it was the worst pain, needling through his arm, under his skin, that Tommy had ever known. He’d missed school for this!
His very favorite Christian music singer had just come out with a tell all book where he confessed that he’d been engaged in a life of pornography the whole time his career had been skyrocketing until, at last, Jesus took his voice away and he repented and then wrote a book about it. For Tommy this was another last straw. If gospel singers weren’t getting their voices taken away for being addicted to web porn or leaving their husbands for country singers... then it was the pastor at New Hope on the Ridge who had just been fired for sleeping with the girls in the youth group. Everything was so... awful.
It’s not that I don’t believe, Tommy told himself.
And Derrick.
Derrick and the born again Catholics he’d met at the conference last year. They were awful. They weren’t scandalous. They were just...
Balliol would say they were stupid. Balliol would... No, Mason would say it too.
And Derrick. The last time they’d talked Derrick had said, “I’m going to say a Novena because a friend of mine was telling me about one of the messages from the Virgin when they came back from Medjugorje. She’s angry at the Sodomites and she’s going to make them pay.”
His eyes had blazed when he’d said that. There was something off and vicious about Derrick. Who used the word sodomite? Why would the Virgin Mary be concerned about..?
Sully was...
No, Sully was NOT a sodomite. Sully was gay. Sully was his friend.
Sully is a goddamned sight better than any of the Christians I know.
I just said goddamn.
Even to himself, even in his thoughts, he didn’t swear.
And then the tears shot from between his shut eyes, hot, and the tattoo artist, Paul, said, “It starts with the needle, man, It starts with the needle just hurting so bad, but then you get to something deeper sometimes.”
He did not want any Christian music on. He didn’t want any Christian anything. This strange tattoo artist and the Ramma Lanma Ding Dong or whatever the hell was playing was just fine.
It’s not that I don’t believe. It’s not... Tommy said.
Only when he thought of all the things he’d believed...
They all meant nothing.
Tuesday afternoon, the second day of the school year, the second day Sidney had free run of the house with no teenagers, Mason had only been home about a half hour when Tommy Dwyer’s old sky blue beat up pick up truck screeched to a halt in front of the house and then Tommy hopped out with a U-Haul box and went up to the door. He did not knock. With his free hand he twisted open the door and came into the studio.
“Sidney,” he said. “I can’t go back to Monclova Terrace. I’ve thought about and now I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to take the room in the back of the house if that’s all right with you. You won’t even notice me. I’m not the sort to mooch so I’m going to earn my keep around here. I’ve thought about that. I can’t really pay rent, and that would just be a meaningless gesture, wouldn’t it? But I can cook and do chores and.… whatever you need me to do. So, how’s that sound sir?”
He stuck out his hand.
“I’ll be a very, very, considerate guest. Or tenant. I’m not the sort of person to impose on people.”
“Well, Thomas,” Sidney began putting down his brush and taking Tommy’s hand, “I hate to break it to you, but that’s exactly what you’ve just done.”
Tommy put down the box on the table in the study, looking at Sidney.
“You’d better get the rest of your boxes,” Sidney said. “You can put them all in the room tonight. The room’s a little cluttered. We can clean it on the weekend—”
“Dad—” Mason’s voice came from the living room. “The door’s wide open. What’s—”
Mason stopped at the sight of Tommy, boxes full of his clothing at his feet.
“Tommy’s living here, now,” Sidney said.
“Oh,” Mason said, nonplussed, looking from his father to his friend. “Why didn’t I know about this?”
“Mason,” Sidney said. “Until three minutes ago I didn’t know about it either.”
Sully was bringing in the last of the boxes behind Mason and Tommy and Tommy was saying, “Well, I didn’t know about it. I didn’t plan it until... Until I just started packing up stuff and I thought I’d just come here. I had to. I couldn’t not come here. You know? I can’t go back to Monclova Terrace.”
Tommy plopped down on the beanbag that was the closest thing that room had to a bed.
“I... I...” Tommy looked for words. Mason was expressionless but Sully had that constant look of protection and solitude that made Mason like him.
“Sully they said... Derrick calls gay people sodomites and says the Virgin Mary’s coming to punish them all. This is what I live with. Everyone’s so... Christians are so... My whole life. Everything I know... I... I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t. I’m supposed to be saved. I’m supposed to know the way and everywhere I look, everyone who promises me this way… They’re all wrong or they’re mean or cruel or they’re hypocrites. Or they’re... afraid. Of themselves, of what’s inside of them. That’s not why I became a Christian.
“It’s like my whole life there’s been the Way and the Truth and the Life, going to church and getting right with God. And on the other side is the way my family lives. But... I don’t want either one of those ways. I want something else. I want something real. I...”
He turned to Mason now. “I don’t believe in any of that stuff anymore. But I still want God. I still care about Jesus. Only... I don’t know which way to go. I don’t know what to do.”
Mason said nothing. It was Sully who suggested:
“There’s that daily Mass thing that we got invited to do with campus ministry—”
“No,” Tommy said. “No, I don’t trust it. Everyone’s trying to sell you something. They want to sell you their version of Jesus. I don’t want to be sold. I want something true. I’m sick of being lied to,” Tommy insisted.
“I’m sick of people who lie to themselves and clap themselves on the back because they just want to feel better. I don’t—I don’t” Tommy slammed his fist into his palm “have to feel better. I don’t have to feel good about myself. But I do have to have truth. I... just want to get to Jesus again. Only I can’t get to him by myself, you know,” he said. “And I don’t trust anyone else to help me. I don’t trust any of it anymore.”
“Well, now we’ve got two problems,” Sully said to Mason once they’d left Tommy to manage his new room.
“Balliol and Tommy. What are we going to do with them?”
“You really feel that way? Mason said, slightly amused. “Like we have to do something? Like we’re responsible?”
“Well,” Sully said, “Don’t you?” he looked at Mason so incredulously that Mason laughed.
“Yes,” Mason laughed. “A little. But when I hear it from someone else’s mouth it just sounds silly. The two of us running around like… my dad would say hens. Trying to take care of everyone.”
“Not everyone,” Sully’s voice was sober. “Just my friends. It would be nice if you could care for everyone, but it’s a big enough job just caring for your friends. I’m really worried about Tommy.
“I don’t pray as much as I should probably. But… remember when we were kids and we believed? I mean really believed? I remember losing all of that. Not trusting anyone, and that’s where Tommy is. I’ve been turned off to God for a long time just because I don’t trust everyone that talks for him. And that’s rough because, I mean, God’s not a person, you know? God’s not a he. God is God and when you’re turned off to him you’re sort of out of sync, turned off to everything. Nervous about anything that’s a little spiritual. You’re turned off to yourself. And, that would suck if that’s the place Tommy ended up in. So I feel like we should get him to a church and pray the Hail Mary or something. I don’t think I even know the Hail Mary.”
“I don’t either,” Mason shrugged. “But I’d learn it if it would help Tommy out.”
Sully said: “I never thought I’d say this, but Tommy needs to trust God again.”
“Or himself,” Mason suggested. I don’t think he even trusts his... intuition. You know? His senses.”
“Mason,” Sully’s voice was cautionary. “I’m going to say something and it’s going to sound blasphemous.”
“I own a Satanic Bible,” Mason reminded him.
Sully shrugged.
“Well, what if what I mean when I say Sully needs to trust God and what you mean about him trusting himself, his intuition, his senses and stuff... What if that’s the same thing? What if we always try to define exactly what it is we have faith in, what it is we trust, but the important thing is really that we have faith at all?”
“Some place,” Mason said, “somewhere, a fundamentalist preacher is turning over in his grave.”
“Probably Bob Jones,” Sully elaborated. “Probably someone who wants to burn all the sodomites.”
“I have been making what I call the Friendship Collection,” Mason announced Wednesday after school.
“It’s not like Hearts and Care Bears is it?” Swain said looking at the table in Mason’s room where everything was veiled.
Mason looked at her, disappointed.
“No.”
“Oh, good,” said Swain. “That’s not you at all.”
“I hope,” Bonnie murmured running a finger over her silver necklace, “that it’s not any of us.”
“Are you going to shut up and let me show the Friendship Collection?”
“Well,” Bonnie raised an eyebrow at Swain.
“Artists,” said Swain. “You know... temperamental.”
“Tell me about it.”
“This represents Sully,” Mason said. Pulling a handkerchief from over a six inch sculpture that no one understood at first except Balliol.
“Mason,” he looked around at the room full of monsters. “You’re nuts. I mean, really.”
Sully moved to pick it up and then said, “Can I?”
Mason nodded.
“You are weird,” Swain told him, appraisingly.
There was a leg with a mouth over the knee cap turned chin, a nose and at the top of the thigh, a gigantic blue eye.
“I always feel like,” Tommy began singing, “Somebody’s watching me...”
“I always thought I was cuter than this,” Sully said, grinning, then put it down.
“This is so weird.” He turned away from it and then looked again. “My God. I can’t stop watching it.”
Mason’s stuff is like that,” Tommy said. “You don’t want to look at it, but you can’t help yourself.”
“It’s a lot like life,” Balliol said.
“Well Rosario Castellanos—” Mason began, “—she’s a writer, a Mexican writer. Only not anymore because she’s dead, said that she was an eye. And I thought, that’s what artists, but especially writers are. Eyes. They watch everything. They tell what they see. And so Sully is an eye.”
“On a thigh,” added Balliol. “With a nose over the knee. I always wondered what Salvador Dali would be like? Now I know. What am I? I’m scared.”
Mason skipped over two and lifted a handkerchief over the last.
“Jesus!” Balliol said in a disapproving manner though he smiled as he picked it up and examined it.
Leaping out of a white skull arced a night black wolf, yellow eyes snapping and a half devoured man—the man was white—hanging from its blood rimmed mouth as he screamed in terror.
“Shall I explain?”
Balliol looked at Mason and said, “No.”
Mason shrugged. “There are two more. I haven’t done the Ladies. Just the Five.”
“We’re the Five,” Sully said, grinning. “Except now we’re the Four cause Addison’s not here.”
“Yes,” Mason told him. “We’re the Five.”
“I’m part of the Five,” Sully said cocky. “We’re like a secret society.”
“Yeah?” Bonnie looked at him with her eyebrow raised. “Except no.”
“Well what am I?” Tommy said.
“I thought about that for a long time,” Mason said at last, and presented Tommy with a gigantic, poisonous green serpent.
“Really?” Tommy said, his glasses dropping down his nose. He kept looking at it, and then finally he confessed: “I don’t get it Mason.”
Bonnie chuckled and then said, “Turn it over Tommy.”
And as Tommy was turning it over he made a face and looked at it.
“It’s a question mark!” Swain said laughing.
“Tommy, you’re a lot more than we think,” Mason said. “I just don’t know what you are.”
“I haven’t thanked Mason yet,” Tommy told Sully in his new room. “I don’t know how to. I’m so glad to be here, and I don’t know where else I would be.
“It would just be awkward to say thanks. It would just be weird. But I want to let him know that I’m glad to be here. Plus, I just found out something?”
“What?”
“This was going to be Mason’s studio. He was going to put all of his stuff here so it didn’t have to stay in his room all the time. And now I’m in it, and the only reason I know is because I overheard Mason tell Balliol. He wasn’t upset or anything. He just said, ‘I’d rather have Tommy than a studio.’ And then he added, ‘Most of the time.’”
Tommy collapsed on the giant mattress.
“It’s not a bed exactly,” he turned to Sully. “But it is like a bed. And. this is more space than I’ve ever had. You don’t know what it was like there.”
“Well,” Sully said. “I was there once.”
“But to spend your whole life there! For that to be all you know. Gosh, this house actually smells clean. This is so... I’m never going back. I don’t know how I did it. I don’t think I can go back. And you know what the weirdest thing is?”
“Huh?”
“I feel like this is home. I feel like this really is mine, like I’m not horning off of someone, like I’m not a guest.
“You know what I want to do?
“No.”
“Have sex,” Tommy decided.
Sully’s eyes flew open.
“I mean not right here or right now. But, I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been so... brainwashed. I’ve thought that everything was evil. I’ve never even gotten the chance to like a girl. I want to do that. I want to actually have sex. I get tired of just hearing about it. I get tired of hearing how evil it is. It can’t be that evil. What’s it like Sully?”
Sully turned red and then, instinctively turned away and mumbled, “Why don’t you ask Addison?”
“Hum?”
Sully said, flustered, “Addison’s straight. You can’t even do what I did. I mean… it doesn’t compare. You’re going to have girlfriends.”
“But see, I figure it would be better to ask you,” Tommy said. “Because you’re more like me. Or at least, you’re more like who I want to be.”
Sully looked surprised.
“I mean, Addison is good, but I understand you better. You’re, I shouldn’t say nicer. I guess, purer’s the right word.”
“You just don’t know me,” Sully tried to brush it off.
“Yes, I do,” Tommy said. “I know you very well. You’ve got... a good heart and everything. And I figure that... it just seems like I would be able to understand sex better if I knew what it was like for you.”
“But Tommy, I don’t wanna talk about what it’s like for me,” Sully said in a small voice.
“Oh. I suppose I shouldn’t have asked except—I don’t know who to ask. You’re the only one I can ask, Sully.
“I’m sorry,” Tommy told him. “I’ve embarrassed you.”
“I,” Sully bit his lip. “I was just trying to remember what it was like... the first time. I think I knew it was going to happen. I was afraid, Tommy, because I knew that I couldn’t really go back and I didn’t know what would happen. I... think I can only tell you how I felt. I’m sort of... I have hard time with the details. That kind of embarrasses me. But the feeling... I was afraid and then I felt like, maybe the way a snail or something feels when the shell is taken away, I wanted the shell to go away. I liked… being held, being touched… You know, seen? But I was scared, like he could do anything to me. No protection. And I was scared because Chris was like that for me too. We were both fragile. Neither one of us knew what we were doing.
“And, well,” Sully shrugged. “It felt nice. It felt more than nice. It....”
“I want to feel that way,” Tommy said. “You’re so lucky, Sully. To have someone like that. And now you all are together again.”
Then Tommy said:
“When you all got back together again... I don’t mean to be nosey, I just don’t know about this stuff...”
“Okay?” Sully said nervously.
“How long was it before you all...?” he whispered, “Did it?”
Mason walked in as Tommy asked this, and they both looked up at him.
“Well?” Mason said, at last, “how long was it before you all did it? Again? Please tell me, I’m as much of a virgin as Tommy.”
Sully blew out his cheeks and looked exasperated.
“If you just have to know,” he said, no longer shy, “we haven’t done it at all, and won’t be doing it for... a while.”
“Taking it slow?” Tommy said, sympathetically.
“Yeah,” Sully said.
“See, that’s why I admire you,” Tommy said. “You always do smart things. I bet you knew exactly when it was right for you and Chris.”
Sully looked at him, getting ready to say something else, then said, “More or less, Tommy.”
“Dad said,” Mason told Tommy, “that it’s your turn to empty out the dishwasher, and he’s so glad you’re here because he’s always wanted two kids to boss around.
“See?” Tommy crawled off the mattress. “It is just like being part of the family.”