our compliments.
Sincerely,
Mike Brown
It was the beginning of the end of any potential popularity he thought he might have been able to cultivate that school year. Even the grinning, bikini-posed, baby-fatted Charlene Tilton seemed to be not smiling but sneering at him.
This wasn’t working out as planned. He was supposed to start school with the rumor that he ‘had a project floating around Hollywood.’ Then Lorimar would pick up the series, and Jayson would drop out of school immediately after the school held a huge, jealousy-fueled, goodbye rally for him.
The plan almost seemed as if it might work for the first couple of weeks. Within a matter of days, Jayson had most of the school believing Lorimar Pictures was screening his Dallasty! episodes. While there may have been some doubt about Jayson’s story, no one was willing to write him off completely just in case he actually did become famous–Dynomite magazine-level famous.
Even the obvious popularity handicap of having a retarded brother seemed mitigated after the season’s first ABC AfterSchool Special aired, entitled Slow But Steady. The special featured Scott Baio as a retarded kid who was adopted as a mascot by his school’s cross country track team. Because of Baio’s popularity with the female OHS student population, the most popular clique of girls decided to treat Willie as their own Scott Baio. Willie became more popular than Jayson. At least, Jayson had thought, until he got his Hollywood deal.
But this letter from Lorimar would bring the whole thing crashing down.
Jayson had no contingency plan. The rejection meant that he would have to resign himself to another four years of middling popularity. Over the summer, he’d had hope. More than hope. He’d convinced himself that his life was about to change. At the very least, he’d been certain that even if Lorimar didn’t buy his scripts, someone, someone at the network would spot Jayson’s youthful enthusiasm and fly him out to Hollywood–if only for a small segment on Real People about talented kids. Something. Anything to get him closer to his goal and farther away from the PBS-style drudgery of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. He honestly didn’t know how much longer he could survive here. Had anyone ever died from obscurity?
Four days after Jayson received the rejection letter from Lorimar, events took a turn from bad to unimaginable. It was like that Happy Days episode where Fonzie was cursed by a gypsy inexplicably passing through Milwaukee.
It was precisely at the fifty-third minute of the tenth hour of the twenty-first day of Jayson’s high school career that Jayson’s personal popularity ratings plummeted to the cellar after a very special episode of gym class.
Due to rain, Jayson’s class was kept inside. And Jayson’s gym teacher, whom Jayson had pegged as a female homosexual from the first day of class, only seemed familiar with one indoor activity: dodgeball. She announced each class of dodgeball with such excitement that Jayson wondered if she ended each evening with a rousing game of one-on-one dodgeball with her female homosexual roommate in their livingroom.
Jayson was cursed with the dodgeball double handicap of being unpopular–thus a popular target–yet having the quick reflexes that enabled him to dodge almost any throw. Being one of the last boys standing in the game yet having the most valuable bounty on his head kept Jayson in the glare of the humiliating spotlight for what seemed like hours rather than the allotted 45 minutes. Even Trey, who shared the same gym class with Jayson, had uncharacteristically turned on him, beaning him particularly forcefully right before the shower whistle was blown.
As much as Jayson dreaded public nudity, at least the shower call meant an end to hurtling orbs of rubber.
Stripping off his standard issue OHS gym T-shirt and gray shorts in the locker room, Jayson examined the growing purple welts on his stomach and chest. The biblical marks of loserdom. Glancing in the mirror that ran the full length over the sinks, he noticed his right eye was swelling shut from the memorably forceful thwang of red rubber hitting skull hurled by Trey.
The showers were in a roughly twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot floor-to-ceiling beige tiled vault off the locker room. There were no dividers. No curtains. Just eighteen nozzles jutting out toward the center drain. Very Auschwitz. Given the Germanic heritage of southeastern Wisconsin, and the age of the building itself, it was, in fact, very likely designed by a close relative of a concentration camp architect.
Jayson’s personal Phil Donahue secret, when coupled with normal adolescent insecurities, meant that he was one of the fastest showerers in the ninth grade. He’d recently begun noticing that his genitalia were often on a different programming schedule than his brain, so the less time spent naked, the safer. Who knows what random thought might set his penis into action?
Jayson was examining a particularly angry welt on his forearm when Trey stepped up to a shower nozzle next to him. Jayson knew he shouldn’t have paused under the showers.
‘Hey, nice game,’ Trey said. ‘You were in for a long time.’ ‘Et tu, Bluto?’ Jayson quoted from his favorite Popeye comic book.
‘Sorry about that,’ Trey apologized. ‘I thought you were gonna duck.’
‘Well, I thought about ducking until I spotted the four other balls heading for my crotch.’
Trey turned and looked Jayson in the eye.
‘I’m really sorry. I am. I didn’t mean it.’
Something about the sincerity in Trey’s light blue eyes reminded Jayson of how inseparable the two of them had been during the summer months before they had to return to school and put up protective facades. Before they were forced to splinter off into different, respectively appropriate groups of friends. That was always Jayson’s favorite time of year. Summer. When he had Trey all to himself. When Trey didn’t have to worry about being seen with Jayson. Summer was the time when Jayson had always been happiest. It was the only time when there were no secrets, and no facades. Jayson even thought that he would probably trade in every dream of Hollywood if he could only have an eternal summer with Trey.
Jayson suddenly felt the buzzing wings of a million dragon-flies brushing against the inside of his thighs…
‘Gayson’s popped a boner!’
Jayson didn’t know who said it first. It didn’t matter who said it first. What mattered was that it would be repeated, echoing across the unforgiving concrete walls of Oconomowoc High School for all of eternity.
‘Gayson.’
The secret was out.
‘So Gavin hasn’t said anything at all about me?’ Tara whispered, blowing a perfect smoke ring. She, Jayson, and Willie were in Willie’s room watching afternoon reruns on channel 64.
‘What the hell would he say about you?’ Jayson replied. ‘Tell me Jayson. That underage neighbour girl. Fuckable?’
‘Shhh!’ Tara admonished, ‘he’ll hear.’
Tara had been obsessed with Gavin since his illustrious arrival. It was easy to understand why. Jayson was also intrigued by the hygienically challenged,
