“Sean, let’s go out. I’ve got a babysitter tonight and Tom’s working late.”
“But Law&Order SVU’s on,” I protested, finishing my beer. The dark brown longneck bottle felt comforting in my hand.
“You really need to get out of that basement, baby. Come on, we haven’t been out once since you got home, you can’t sit around feeling sorry for yourself forever.”
“Oh yes, I can.”
For the first time in two years I was home, staying in my brother’s basement. My boyfriend of 5 years, Marcus, had just dumped me, right at the time the magazine I was working for went under. I thought life couldn’t get any worse until I slipped in the bathroom one night while I was drunk and broke my arm; there was only one thing a person in my state could do, and that was go whimpering home with my tail between my legs to try to recover something of my dignity and self-respect, or what little I had left from before I met Marcus.
“Besides, I don’t feel like going all the way over to the city tonight,” I whined. “I hate clubbing, Rachel.”
“Clubbing? There are no clubs around here, just bars, and that’s exactly what you need. Get your ass off that couch and take a shower. We’re not going to the city. I’m taking you out bar hopping tonight, and I don’t care if we do run into every redneck we went to high school with, you’re going to have fun if it kills you.”
I hung up the phone, dismayed. When Rachel got an idea into her head there was no stopping her. She was my awesome best friend since ninth grade, and the only person I still talked to from high school. While I lived in the city, seven hours away, we kept up a close e-mail friendship, but until I got here a week ago I’d never met her son or her boyfriend. She’d dropped out of college after a year just like me and also like me, she never got around to going back. She just wanted to party and have fun, she was planning on coming and living with me in the the city but she ended up getting pregnant and having a kid with this much older guy, Tom, who made a lot of money so she didn’t even have to work. Hell, I’d live with him too. When I dropped out of college I’d stayed in the city. I swore I’d never move back home. Funny how neither of our lives were what we expected when we graduated twelve years ago.
Three weeks from thirty. Jobless. Loveless. Arm in a cast. Staying in my brother’s basement, where I watched TV and drank beer all day. Not exactly what I had in mind when I went away to college with dreams of being a famous writer. When I landed the job at Shaft, the now-kaput magazine, and met Marcus, the bastard ex-boyfriend, I thought I’d really made it. As a teenager I used to sit in my room listening to the Cure with the shades drawn, dreaming of a hip city existence, lots of cool clubs filled with hot guys.
Well, I had that, at least till I met Marcus; he wouldn’t let me go out partying with my friends. He wanted me home. And I worked long hours on the magazine, so that I barely remembered what the inside of a club looked like, or what people even did on weekends. Well, all that was gone now; and I missed the job, but I was glad Marcus was gone. I wasn’t dating anybody and didn’t want to date anybody; which was good, because there wasn’t anybody around here for me to date anyway.
I got up and took the shower like Rachel commanded. Upstairs, my brother was having his usual Friday night party before his kids came tomorrow, he was smoking weed and drinking with his friends, all guys I’d known since grade school. I used to hate them; they picked on me and called me weird, and I thought they were shit-kicking redneck assholes, in their camouflage hats and pickup trucks and mullet haircuts, the same ones they’d had in high school. Andrew’s wife Lindsey left him last year and had the kids during the week. I couldn’t blame her for divorcing him, really; he was a dick, but he was still my brother, and he was letting me stay here, drink his beer and smoke his weed. That was the common ground, after all these years. It was only once I started smoking weed in college that I actually starting having anything to do with my brother. Sure, he had his moments, but he was pretty cool, and now that we were all past the bullshit cliques of high school, I liked his friends too. After all I’d known them my whole life.
“Sean, I never knew you were so cool, man. I always thought of you as Andy’s freaky little brother,” someone said in a drunken haze the other night, while we were all watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall on Andy’s bigscreen TV, smoking the biggest doobie I’d ever seen.
Andrew played sports; I was more the creative type. While I went off to find myself, he re-opened our dad’s auto shop, which had been locked up since he died. Also, I’m gay and Andrew’s straight. Other than our new-found common love of smoking dope, the only thing we ever had common before was our ability to fix cars, passed down from our dad; but I didn’t want to stay in this town and work on cars. I wanted something more out of life. I’d wanted the kind of life where you took your car to an overpriced mechanic instead of lifting the hood yourself. Now I was out of work and I could help Andy around the garage with one arm in a cast, but I wasn’t a lot of good.
Rachel showed up in the middle of our non-stop guy party. In high school none of these guys would’ve looked at her but now they were all flirting with her. She was a cute, petite redhead with big boobs, what was there not to like? But they all had kids and wives or girlfriends at home that they were miserable with already.
“You having a party, Andrew?” she asked my brother.
“Does Howdy Doody have a wooden dick?” He was leading all his friends in a toast with his beer raised. “To Lindsey. I’m so glad the bitch is gone.”
“Do they know you’re queer?” she was asking me as we got into her car. It was so dark out here in the country. I was so used to the ambient light pollution of the city I had forgotten how dark it was.
“Yeah, probably,” I shrugged. I didn’t bother to hide it but nobody ever said anything.
“If they didn’t know before, they know now that they’ve seen you in that outfit.”
“You don’t like my outfit?” Except for the bulky fiberglass cast on my right arm
I thought it looked pretty good. Boot cut cords, brown boots, a tight long sleeved shirt, a zip up black leather scuba jacket-- hey, I might be almost thirty, but I’m not dead.
“No, it’s great, baby. It’s just not what we’re used to around here,” she told me, but she was laughing when she said it. Nothing I’d ever worn was what they were used to around here; in school people made fun of my clothes. I was just light years ahead of the times twelve years ago, when I used to dye my naturally blonde hair black and let it fall into my face. Now all that vintage fashion we used to search the thrift stores for could be bought at your local Wal-Mart.
The black hair was gone. The punk rock, cooler-than-thou attitude was gone. All that teen angst, being an artsy gay guy in a redneck midwestern small town where people cruised on Friday nights in pickup trucks with mudflaps, none of it amounted to shit. Here I was back again and Rachel and I turned the radio up really loud and sang along with the Violent Femmes as we drove into town.
“There’s this new bar,” she was telling me. When she drove up I saw the Bud Light sign, the neon reading the name of the place: The Wild Goose Saloon.
“No,” I was shaking my head, laughing hysterically as she led me up to the door. Thank God I was half-stoned and had been drinking most of the afternoon already or I never would’ve believed I was going inside. Sober I probably wouldn’t have, but now it seemed hilariously funny. “Wild Goose Saloon. Hell no.”
