Boys in Gilded Cages (18 page)

And when they die with a thud, they go on
and live.

The first time Daryl
McAdams died, it was a false alarm. He collapsed in History class
after his heart simply stopped, as the macabre bitch Mrs. Danforth
read a back issue of
Cosmopolitan
. She removed herself
from her trance, looked down at Daryl’s twitching body losing what
little color was there in the first place, eyes half-opened but
mostly closed, inviting the light in but barely tolerating its
burn, and said to the class, “Why are you just sitting there? Call
an ambulance for Christ’s sakes.”

She started to return to her magazine, but
realized there were about twenty plump, adolescent faces gazing at
her, their teacher and caretaker for the hour, suddenly very aware
of a possible dead body in the room. She put down her magazine and
threw her hands incredulously up as a boy ran to the office.

Mrs. Danforth had surely heard the rumors
about Daryl, and the look on her face suggested that this was
inevitable-- That, if anything, she was surprised it took this
long.

So an ambulance was called, and Daryl was
revived at Delta Trinity Hospital. He was absent for the rest of
the week.

He walked the halls with a translucent
almost-halo for a few days after his return, his black t-shirt and
Levis emitting the stench of a dead boy but his olive skin glowing,
as he had resurrected simply because he felt like it, at God’s
inconvenience. I wanted to touch him every time I saw him. He would
eat a burger in the cafeteria and to me, he ate like a king,
chewing as slowly as he felt like and giving the monitor dirty
looks that seem to pierce his snitchy little skull. He read, and he
understood everything, though he pretended he didn’t in his
typically adorable fashion.

Every time I stopped to say hello, I
approached him with a look of cautious wonderment, just to touch
him. I’d ask Daryl if he’d finished his paper or something like
that, and touch his shoulder, then draw my hand back. It burned
me.

Daryl would smile politely, though he was
annoyed, for I had no business bothering him, but I couldn’t help
it. Then he would move along briskly. I didn’t mind.

The mystery he felt about himself was
evident to no one but me. Like the Son of God, he was pretty sure
he was alive, though the clock was ticking. He was no angel, and
though he nearly died and did touch death for a little while and
saw lights and heard deep omniscient voices giving him directions
upward, and all of that, he still felt physical feelings such as
nausea and drowsiness from the side effects of the pills he took
for whatever his parents thought was wrong with him, like he was
being gently asphyxiated, and good things too, like how a warm bath
felt after walking home from school in the cold.

Daryl McAdams was no angel and he guessed
that’s why everyone was so curious about his presence. Maybe they
wanted to know what Hell felt like, or maybe they were mad at him
for returning, maybe they were wondering how someone who never even
went to church and who everyone knew stole food and money from the
local drive-in burger stand on a regular basis, would ever be on
the list for Heaven, let alone wear the artifacts and come back to
tell the tale. He didn’t deserve to be let back, and they were
jealous.

Daryl had many unsavory habits and did many
unspeakable things, which were spoken about often. He was rumored
to be the town’s only drug dealer, and it was uttered several times
that he sold his own body. It was thrilling to overhear parents in
the supermarket ominously gossip amongst themselves about Daryl
like Babylon. I wanted to know him more than anything in the world,
because I know he hated our little village and I hated it too. The
bad habits that were supposedly killing him were his ticket
out.

It was the only way and on some level, it
was his mission to get out. I knew that someday he would succeed.
That thought kept me warm on some nights and I prayed I had the
strength to follow him someday.

The second time Daryl McAdams died it was
his fault. He took too many pills right there in the cafeteria and
then washed it down with Dr. Pepper while the school security guard
watched and did nothing, but still it was Daryl’s stupid fault
because he of all people should know how rotten those pills are and
how they fuck up your insides instead of actually help you.

He of all people should have known that and
he did know that and that’s precisely why he did it.

That day paramedics showed up with a social
worker and took Daryl’s twitching mass away to the emergency room,
and Daryl’s mom could only watch from the office lobby, crying a
lot but wearing big dark sunglasses as if that blocked the tears
from coming out, but it was obvious. They all stood and watched and
they weren’t surprised and they weren’t really that glad, including
myself. We were simply bored.

While Daryl was suspended everyone talked
casually and they were dismissive.

Daryl had died once before by accident, but
now everyone had room to suspect that dying in public had become
his new thing. “You got money, you’re allowed to go kill yourself.
You get to come back and do it again and again until you realize
it’s just not fun.” Everyone would say shit like this, referring to
Daryl being an heir to some sort of farm equipment fortune, farm
equipment their fathers all used but couldn’t be bothered to
memorize the name. They would say it a lot and I guess it got to
me. I realized that it was the spectacle he died for. As the blue
glow turned fluorescent, I saw that I misjudged him completely.

We dismissed what we would call growing
pains as laziness in thought, a lack of drive and a lack of
eventfulness in life; it was having everything that made his mind
go off the rails in the most predictable way, and caused all sorts
of things like his kleptomania and his tendency to hang out in
neighborhoods of houses with dirty rain gutters and taped windows,
where he clearly didn’t belong and didn’t fit in, and car crash
after car crash, a shiny cherry-red brand new whatever-car of the
moment with dents and bruises and scratches. Yes, in a few years
he’d be a sushi and wine aficionado and would take his inheritance
and move to Connecticut where no one ever frowned and everyone had
fake lawns. Everyone knew the day would come and we found it
pathetic that it was obvious to us but not to Daryl that only the
most banal of excesses wait, no matter what he did to subvert
it.

He’d ditch his outcast friends and their
terrible obscure taste in music and stop being so weird and stop
acting depressed, stop using it as a propeller into space as he did
during History class every day, or maybe he’d just wander off into
the bland membrane of that particular day and decide to stay there,
forever young and stupid.

The death of Daryl McAdams was no longer a
topic at school after a while, his strange glow had disappeared and
was replaced by the sweet, earthy smell of a rich man and he walked
the halls with a stupid grin, actually making eye contact with
pretty girls despite being invisible to them again. He no longer
had the sheen of a boyish rebel but seemed a needy old man in a
boy’s body and was repulsive. His gaunt frame became healthy in
every conventional sense and his skin got rosy again, like any
other person on Earth.

It took a lot of work to get used to it so
instead of trying, everyone just stopped paying attention, and
Daryl was kind of happy about that. That was the third death of
Daryl McAdams, and the last one I witnessed. He eventually did
actually die of course in the I-stopped-breathing sense, probably
many years later of natural causes so just consider it death’s
pre-show. He was a warm body that breathed and whose heart would
eventually beat like everyone else’s and he seemed to accept this
curse as if it were just another material gift, like a brand new
cherry red whatever-car.

I could be wrong about all of this, I’m
sure. But I fear that I’m not. Not only was it the death of Daryl,
it was the death of the libertine I had become gleefully obsessed
with. He was not Daryl, he was just Daryl, a chump with a stupid
hillbilly name who was borderline illiterate and self-destructive
and all too human.

I’ve seen it happen since, and so it goes in
adolescent mythology. The spark is just gone and I know it’s
happened to him too, and everyone noticed. Seemed strange to these
people, people who were watching and talking and thinking, that the
only person at school who wasn’t afraid of death would just coast
through life on cruise control like he had seen it all and was only
hanging around because he was too rotten for Heaven and too green
for Hell, and was just buying time until his inheritance came and
he could spend it on sins like your average rich dude, and would
probably never share what he’d seen with anyone, as if it had never
happened. But they all wanted to know and wanted to believe. As for
me, faith eludes.






WHAT HAPPENED TO BABY
JESUS?
By Bobby Faust

Bobbyfaust.blogspot.com

Since Momma and Father Redmond turned me
away last Summer, it’s been real weird. I’ve gotten calls from
every big news network in the United States and Canada. I even
accepted some of them: Fox News paid me a pretty good amount of
money, and some alternative blog named ManChild New York paid for a
week’s worth of hotel rooms and meals in New York. In exchange,
they set me up with a megaphone and filmed me confronting my former
family when they were in town picketing a movie premiere with
sympathetic gay characters. I wouldn’t be surprised if they paid
Father Redmond too. I would yell into the megaphone, mildly amusing
things that really don’t mean anything, like “God hates the
missionary position,” and “God is omnisexual.” My favorite was “God
Hates Signs.” Simple and harmless, and wouldn’t embarrass my
church. Father Redmond would ignore me until I got a round of
applause and laughter. Then he and his family of little girls and
boys would respond with inaudible lurching. I would imagine that
Manchild New York put subtitles up, I don’t know, I didn’t view the
video.

They ran the story the following day. From
the public computer at the Brooklyn Holiday Inn, I read the
comments, the only thing worth reading on the entire site.

“
This man is much too dumb
to understand what he is doing with the megaphone, but I’m glad he
agreed to be filmed.”

“
This whole thing is just
sad. A poor hillbilly was sucked into a cult, and now he is being
sucked into the snarky New York blogosphere. Or is he now doing the
sucking? Heh.”

This type of thing would have mortified most
people, but I’m used to it. As a member of the Redmond Family
Church, I was familiar with media nowadays and their bottom feeding
ways. And Father Redmond and his clan may look, walk, and sound
like your typical illiterate hillbilly fucks, but in reality they
are all lawyers on a mission that, even knowing they are lawyers,
may surprise you. Making money through litigation is their
goal.

Look at it like this. Let’s say you live in
Southern Missouri, where decent simple hardworking people are,
let’s say, sensitive and maybe ignorant about sexual difference, or
any kind of difference, really. Let’s say you are one of those
rural churchgoing families who had a son who was a veteran. Let’s
say that your son was not a closeted queer all his life, but
straight. He died in combat.

Now picture your son’s funeral. Saddest day
in your unremarkable life. Until now, you’ve never experienced
anything so profoundly tragic. You don’t know how to process your
possible upcoming layoff from the factory, much less the death of a
child—your eighteen year-old son who most likely didn’t know what
he had gotten himself into when he gave in to the Army
recruiter.

Now picture yourself in the sanctuary,
trying to focus on the words of the speakers, of the preacher,
trying not to cry because had your son been with you, he’d think
you were a baby. Focus on the colors of the stained glass. The
quiet breaks between the preacher’s breaths. In between those quiet
breaks, you hear an angry, squalling crowd outside: “God hates
fags!” “Thank God for dead soldiers!” Their voices crazed,
convicted, unrelenting. And these people are from where you’re
from, they’re local. The things they are saying are what outsiders
say. You’re betrayed by your own kind. They’re spitting in your
face on the most vulnerable day of your life. What would you do?
Myself, looking back, I think I would have shot them all, every
single one of them, the kids too.

So it’s no surprise that every now and then,
a member of the Redmond Family Church is assaulted, which is
followed by a lawsuit against the offending funeral guest—usually a
member of the deceased’s family. The Redmond Family Church always
represents themselves, and wins at least half of these cases.

How I got ‘sucked into’ the church is a long
story, and not really important. Religion effects people in
different ways. Some folks can read the Bible as children and
discreetly discount most of it for their entire lives, raise
Christian families and drag their children to church against their
will until they’re eighteen, hoping they take in that thirty
percent of the Bible and have enough good sense to discard the rest
as archaic tradition that doesn’t apply to them.

Or, you can manipulate it to make a living,
and recruit the faithful and stupid to help you make your
living.

My saga has been misinterpreted countless
times. Some say I had a mental breakdown and had to be
rehabilitated back into a normal existence. Some say I’m actually a
homosexual and was trying to extort The Family by making
accusations that Father Redmond and I had an affair (that was
actually their favorite).