Neither Tara nor Jayson knew much about what Gavin did in his half-bar lair, but whatever it was it didn’t lend itself to coherence during the few minutes a day he emerged for either a beer or a piss. Jayson didn’t think he’d ever seen Gavin standing upright without holding on to something for balance. Gavin was more like a recurring guest star than a regular cast member in the Blocher family drama.
The one time Jayson had found an excuse to go into the basement since Gavin’s arrival he noticed thousands of Polaroid pictures taped up on every available wall surface. When he later asked Franck about them, she explained that Gavin took a Polaroid of everyone he’d ever met. He had been doing it since he was a kid because he believed in the Native American philosophy that photographs stole people’s souls, and he wanted to collect them. Jayson was growing impatient waiting for Gavin to photograph him, and began keeping a comb in his back pocket to be ready at any moment for when Gavin came after his soul.
Still Jayson liked the fact that Gavin was around. His lethargy somehow balanced out his sister’s endless energy. What Franck lacked in height, she made up in stature–instituting a set of rules on the Blocher household so rigid that even Terri Wernermeier looked laidback in comparison. Of course no one paid any attention to them–especially the untamable Toni. When Franck wasn’t busy painting watercolor self-portraits of her vagina, she was huffing and barking her way around the house, trying to impose some sort of structure on the Blocher chaos. Her persistence was as endearing as it was futile.
Against her mother’s orders, Tara began spending most of her time after school at the Blochers’, waiting for the infrequent moments Gavin made brief appearances aboveground. She could hear his footfalls coming up the wooden steps from any corner of the Blocher house and would immediately race to the kitchen for something to drink in hopes of intercepting him.
‘Hey there,’ she would say, trying to open a Diet Squirt as seductively as possible while leaning against the sink.
At most he would grunt back at her, but usually he simply avoided acknowledgment of any kind. This didn’t deflate Tara’s crush in the slightest. ‘Did you see that?’, she’d say later. ‘He paused for a moment after dropping that beer bottle. I think he wanted to ask me to wipe it up!’
Jayson neither indulged nor dissuaded Tara from her crush. He had too many of his own problems. Chief among them was his latest indignity. Someone had written ‘GAYSON WHERE’S MAKEUP!’ on his locker in bright red lipstick. Bad spelling was one of Jayson’s biggest pet peeves, so this particular insult was doubly bothersome to him.
‘C’mon, Tara,’ Jayson pleaded when the Disorder in the Court rerun broke for commercial. ‘Why do you think someone wrote that?’
‘Beats me,’ Tara said for the third time.
‘You’re lying,’ Jayson said, ‘I can tell because you’re chewing on your hair.’
Hearing this, Willie, who was lying on the bed above where they were sitting on the floor, suddenly fixated on Tara’s hair, wondering if it was edible.
‘If I tell you, will you promise not to get mad?’ Tara said, dropping her Newport butt into her half-empty Squirt can.
‘I promise,’ Jayson lied. ‘It was Trey.’
Jayson nearly swallowed his Big League Chew. If his life were a sitcom, he would have done a spittake. Only Jayson’s life wasn’t a sitcom. It was painfully unfunny, and growing more so by the minute.
‘Trey wrote that on my locker?’
‘No…someone else did the actual writing. But Trey took the silly Dalcon Crest videotape we shot this summer to school and showed everyone the parts where you wore all the different dresses.’
‘It was Dallasty!. Not Dalcon Crest,’ Jayson corrected, still not able to fully comprehend the information he’d just been given. Trey had betrayed him? His oldest friend? Trey was the last person in the world he ever thought would hurt him. Ignore him, yes…that was just part of the ninth grade social shuffle. But to actively smear Jayson? That was incomprehensible. ‘Why would he show people that?’
‘Because, douchebag,’ Tara answered, ‘everyone was giving him shit for giving you a boner, so he thought he’d show them what a weirdo you were.’
‘But why would he show people a tape with us kissing on it?’
‘He didn’t show that part, idiot. He just showed the parts with you in the dresses and wigs,’ Tara answered. ‘Now shut up, show’s back on.’
Jayson shut up. He wondered if he would ever be able to speak again. Trey. Trey did this to him. He was devastated.
The boner incident had been horrible, but this episode was unsurvivable. Jayson didn’t know how he would return to school knowing that everyone had seen him in a dress. He suddenly realized how silly he must have looked–like the cross-dresser on that All in the Family episode. Jayson was furious that he’d allowed himself to look so stupid. So abnormal. So freakish.
Jayson had always thought that he was the normal one in the circus that surrounded him. He’d always, in the back of his mind, felt that Toni, and Willie, and Garth, and Franck, and Gavin, and everyone else who’d ever found themselves part of the Blocher menagerie were the mutants, and that it was he who put the thin veneer of normalcy out in front of the world. But it was so clear to him now. He belonged in his queer family. He was one of them. One of the freak show.
Jayson hated that he had come to believe, he had really believed, in the religion that claimed that after twenty-three minutes and two commercial breaks everything would turn out okay. He believed in and worshiped that glowing blue altar which taught him when to laugh, when to cry, when to applaud, and when to love.
He had faith that even an incident as earth-shattering as a locker room boner would eventually be absolved right after these commercial messages. With a little ‘pluck,’ a little ‘moxie,’ a little ‘gumption,’ every trauma was supposed to be overcome.
But it wasn’t true. It was over. He was different from everyone else–and not in a good way as he had always presumed–in a funny way. A queer way. Things didn’t work out for Jayson at the end of the episode–they worked out for Trey. No one cared how Jayson’s storyline resolved.
Jayson came to a soul-shattering conclusion.
Oh God, he thought. I’m not the star…I’m the wacky neighbor!
‘I think I hear Gavin coming upstairs…let’s go!’ Tara said breathlessly, interrupting Jayson’s stream of self-loathing consciousness.
‘Nah,’ Jayson replied. ‘I don’t feel so well. I think I’ll hide out up here.’ He listened to Tara skip away down the hall.
Jayson’s funk continued to deepen in the weeks after Trey’s betrayal.
‘Why are you being such an ass around here?’ Toni finally asked Jayson after the fourteenth consecutive dinner in which Jayson didn’t utter a word.
Jayson didn’t answer.
‘Answer your mother,’ Franck commanded.
Jayson looked down at the Beef-A-Roni mixed with La Choy Chop Suey that Toni had ‘invented’ for dinner.
