‘So what’s wrong with that?’ Toni asked. ‘Didn’t people like it? I thought it was a good show.’ However frustrating Toni could be, the one thing that Jayson could count on from his mother was her ability to never look at a situation the way a sane person would.
‘Now they’re all calling me “Gayson,”’ Jayson explained.
‘And “homo,”’ Tara said.
‘Not “faggot”?’ Toni asked.
‘We used to say “queer,”’ Franck added.
‘Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay,’ Willie started. One of the symptoms of Prader-Willi syndrome was repetitive verbalization. Willie always chose the most inconvenient times to manifest that.
‘That doesn’t seem like something Trey would do,’ Toni said.
‘After Jayson got a boner in the shower next to him, Trey started getting teased too,’ Tara explained to the table. ‘So he threw Jayson under the bus.’
‘I’d appreciate it if everyone would stop bringing my penis up at the dinner table,’ Jayson pleaded.
‘Why not? It seems to come up everywhere else,’ Tara joked, chortling through a mouthful of Orientaly.
Jayson stood up to clear the table. He didn’t need to relive the worst moments of his life any longer.
‘So what are you going to do about this?’ Franck asked.
‘Nothing,’ Jayson replied, scraping the globs of congealed food onto one plate.
‘God, you really are a little fag, aren’t you? You don’t have any plan on how to get even?’ Franck said. From what little Jayson knew about her history, he had learned that the four-foot-eight, handicapped lesbian had solved most of life’s dilemmas with her right fist. ‘I guess I’m going to have to be the man around here,’ she sighed.
‘Well, you do have the mustache,’ Jayson muttered.
‘You’re not going to punch my brother, are you?’ Tara asked, suddenly a little frightened.
‘I don’t punch kids,’ Franck clarified, defensively. ‘What do you people think I am?’
‘A violent, crazy dyke,’ Jayson answered, rinsing off the last of the plates.
‘No–a violent, crazy dyke with a plan’, Franck corrected.
‘What are you talking about?’ Jayson asked.
‘You’ll see soon enough,’ Franck answered. She caught Gavin’s dilated eye and winked.
Jayson ignored her, pouting his way through the next three hours until bedtime. He slept fitfully, waking up sometime after midnight, desperately thirsty from his two helpings of sodium-laden Orientaly. He made his way downstairs, and on his way across the darkened living room to the kitchen a voice startled him. He yelped.
‘It’s just me, Butter Bean,’ Toni said, her voice coming from the darkness where the sofa would be.
‘What are you doing in the dark?’ Jayson asked. He squinted and just made out the tip of her smoldering Newport.
‘Just thinkin’,’ came her reply. ‘Come over here and sit next to me.’
Jayson felt his way across the dark room, taking small steps in order not to trip over the coffee table. When he finally felt the cold arm of the vinyl faux-leather couch, he sank down next to the warmth of his mother. She put her soft arm around him. Jayson could tell she was only wearing her bra.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Jayson asked. In the total darkness, he realized he could imagine his mother being anyone he wanted her to be. Mrs. Cunningham. Mama Walton. Alice the waitress. The possibilities were endless.
‘I was thinking that this is the first time I’ve seen you unhappy.’ Jayson heard the slow inhale as Toni took a final drag on her cigarette before snuffing it out somewhere in the darkness on the other side of him. ‘I mean really unhappy.’ She paused before exhaling. ‘And I’ve realized that I’m not happy when you’re not happy.’
Jayson sighed.
‘You haven’t been writing nothing,’ Toni continued. ‘Or acting, or filming…fuck, you aren’t even singing television theme songs around the house anymore.’ It was Toni’s turn to sigh. ‘It’s hard to believe that you’re this upset just because some kids didn’t like your movie.’
‘It was a pilot episode,’ Jayson corrected. ‘And they didn’t just “not like it,” they think I’m perverted.’
‘I got news for you, Butter Bean,’ Toni replied. ‘You are perverted. I’m perverted. Willie’s perverted. Franck, Gavin, even Tara is perverted. All “perverted” means is that you aren’t like other people.’
‘So far,’ Jayson said, ‘you’re not helping matters.’
‘Since when did you think you were like other people?’ Toni asked. She had a point. ‘You’ve always known you were different. I can’t see why the fact that other people know it now, too, should change anything.’
Jayson got goose pimples. His mother was right.
‘If you weren’t different from them, how could you become a celebrity?’ Toni continued. ‘There’s only…what…a couple hundred celebrities in this world?’
Jayson was going to correct her by pointing out that he’d just seen a special CBS presentation of Night of a Thousand Stars, but he didn’t want to stop the soothing lull of her voice.
‘And none of these other hicks around here are gonna be celebrities,’ Toni continued, ‘so of course you’re perverted to them.’
Jayson listened as his mother flicked her Bic to light a fresh menthol. In the few seconds of light from the flame he looked up and saw the soft roundess of her cheeks. He wanted to lean up to kiss her, but her speech was like a lullaby and he found his eyes drooping shut.
‘I don’t know much about showbiz, Butter Bean,’ he heard her say as he dropped off to sleep, ‘but it seems to me like all you gotta do is find the applause and go stand in front of it.’
Terri Wernermeier was growing more and more apoplectic at the increasing amount of time Tara was spending at the Blochers’. Most nights Tara fell asleep on the floor of Jayson’s room, but since Terri was too terrified of Toni and Franck to knock on the front door to retrieve her, Tara wound up spending the night at the Blochers’–going to school the next day in the same clothes she’d fallen asleep in.
Eventually, no doubt at Terri’s urgings, Detective Philip Unsinger started calling Tara over to the picnic table to take part in Jayson and Willie’s court-mandated ‘rap sessions.’ The first time Unsinger included her, Tara amused herself by pretending to listen raptly to Unsinger’s ‘Life Lessons,’ tsk-ing loudly whenever one of Unsinger’s obviously fictional wards went from ‘God to Odd,’ and whose body was inevitably found ‘violated and broken, face down in the gutter’ of some large city. After two months of examples like these, Jayson finally asked Unsinger if any kid he’d ever worked with had actually survived.
After sitting and nodding along attentively to Unsinger’s rambling, Tara would try to outdo herself when the time came to ‘trade in’ a bad behavior for a piece of Unsinger’s toxic sugarless candy. At first her trade-ins were only mildly shocking. She would convince him that she’d give up her two-pack-a-day cigarette habit