Plastic Jesus (7 page)

Only then was Peyton allowed into the room. He did not invite Jonathan to stay, nor did he bring his lawyer in; but there were two armed prison guards present, so Peyton would not have been able to injure Brinker even if he had managed to smuggle a weapon past security. But Peyton did not seem inclined to violence. He simply stood before the killer and spoke quietly to him for several minutes as Jonathan and the lawyer watched through two layers of scratched and smeary Plexiglass. The contrast between the two men was striking: Brinker in cuffs and leg irons, prison-grimed, anger wrenching his pudgy body into a strange shape, his face not so much unattractive as
unfinished
-looking (Jonathan thought the man looked rather like a fetus); Peyton slim and clean and straight-spined, his beauty exaggerated in this place of ugliness, his face calm, almost serene.

He finished speaking to Brinker, made a little bow, and turned to leave the room. The guards parted for him, and one stopped him to ask for an autograph. The psychiatrist, the lawyer, and the rock star rode home in silence.

Jonathan was hardly surprised when he saw the headline the next morning:
GREALY'S ASSASSIN KILLS SELF IN PRISON
. Despite the usual precautions—and, given public sentiment about this case, Jonathan doubted whether there had been many of the usual precautions—Brinker had fashioned his pants into a kind of noose and hanged himself in his cell.

Jonathan would not have dreamed of telephoning Peyton. But when he received Peyton's call that night, it surprised him little more than the headline had done.

“Thank you for getting me in,” said Peyton without preamble. “I'm not sure I could have gone on without that."

“I think you can do just about anything you decide to do,” said Jonathan.

A short silence, not an angry one. “You may be right,” Peyton said finally. “I'd love to think you are. In this case, anyway, I did what I had to do. Nothing more."

Jonathan's curiosity overcame his professional reserve. “What in the world did you say to him?"

“I simply told him that he'd given Seth the thing he wanted most: a martyr's death. He turned Seth into a kind of queer angel. Before, people looked at us and saw a happy couple—and that was good—but now they see a grieving lover and a martyred angel. It will give them courage. It will show them that love is worth dying for. Do you know what the last thing I said to him was, Dr. Pumphrey?"

“What?"

“I told him that this was the proof we needed. This was the proof that we really did change the world. And then I thanked him."

“You thanked him? You
thanked
him for killing Seth?"

“Oh, it was difficult to get those words out of my mouth. You've no idea how difficult. But look what happened.

"It worked."

The receiver on Peyton's end was replaced with a soft click, and Jonathan was left holding the phone, holding the whole damn story, and wondering just what Seth Grealy had really died for.

YES, I WOULD
The author's afterword to
Plastic Jesus

John Lennon was killed in New York when I was thirteen. I'd been aware of the Beatles before 1980, as if it were possible not to be. But the media coverage of John's death stoked my imagination, and obviously continues to do so today.

The first piece I published on this subject was the essay “Would You?” which you may have received as a free mini-chapbook if you bought the limited hardcover edition of this book. Though it has seen print before, I think it is a good companion to
Plastic Jesus
, and goes a long way toward explaining how this longer and more convoluted tale came to be.

21If you didn't get the mini-chapbook, all you really need (besides love) is to know that I've been obsessed with the Beatles, and particularly John, for quite a long time. After his death, I bought a few records, then bought a few more, and eventually plastered my room with Beatles posters and became a teenage hippie Beatlemaniac—quite an anomaly in a rural North Carolina high school in the early eighties. John was the latest and best in a long line of attitude-driven badasses I admired. He inspired me to start an underground newspaper, reconsider my own political and social beliefs, experiment with drugs (something I'm quite happy with, thanks), and generally become an in-your-face rebel quite a few years earlier then I might have done otherwise.

Today I have John's cartoony little self-portrait tattooed on my left bicep. People have wondered aloud whether I will get sick of it, but in twenty years I've never gotten sick of the Beatles, and so far it's only been comforting to have him around, even if he is just a few lines of black ink under the skin of my arm. More to the point, I have always believed the world would be a better place today if John and Paul had been lovers. Yes, I
know
they weren't gay. That has nothing to do with it. This is a
fantasy
.

A couple of years ago, Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press asked to publish a chapbook of my work. I didn't have anything new of sufficient length, but I had long been interested in publishing my untitled 1987 novella that eventually grew into
Lost Souls
. I didn't think it was a great work of literature, but I believed fans of the novel would be interested to see the genesis of the story and how it had evolved. Bill said OK, and this became
The Seed of Lost Souls
, illustrated to perfection by Dame Darcy of
Meatcake
comics fame. I enjoyed the whole experience so much that when Bill asked me to do another book, this one a ten-to fifteen-thousand word piece of original fiction, I said yes.

At that time, I'd been working on my fifth novel for about a year and getting increasingly frustrated with it. There were some things I loved about it, but there were
a lot
of things I hated about it. When I threw out all the things I hated—entire characters, subplots, decades—I realized that this particular story might work better as a novella. In fact, it might be perfect for that second Subterranean book. Gradually, the would-be fifth novel turned into the novella
Plastic Jesus
.

People love to ask writers where we get our ideas, but they don't seem to like it if the answer is too obvious. I've heard it said that my novel
Exquisite Corpse
is “nothing more than a blow-by-blow retelling of Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes.” (Funny, I must have missed the news of Dahmer hooking up with another serial killer.) And Dahmer isn't even beloved by millions of people around the world.

I know there are a lot of Beatles nuts out there, and I figure a few of them will probably read this story, and some percentage of those will be pissed off by it. I can't help that. All I can say is that they are no more your Beatles than mine, and what I have created from the experience of listening to them is no less valid than the joy they've given you. If you just didn't like
Plastic Jesus
, fine, but I don't want to hear mutterings about how I have “desecrated” the Beatles' legacy. This idea is ridiculous for two reasons: (A) My story is a gnat compared to the herd of elephants that is the Beatles' legacy; (B) The Beatles always spoke out against prejudice, and if you think the homosexuality in this story desecrates their memory somehow, then your heart has been touched by something that they were never about.

I always get my ideas from the events and personalities of “real life.” Some of these—the Lovecraft-like narrator of my story “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood;” Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne of
Exquisite Corpse;
Seth Grealy and Peyton Masters—remain recognizable through the veil of fiction. To those who consider this a failure of imagination, I confess that, by your definition, my entire body of work constitutes a failure of imagination; these are just the examples where you were able to recognize it. No, you can't get a refund, but if it bothers you, you can always stop buying my books.

To the rest of you—those who realize that
all
fiction is only “real life” twisted and reshaped by the mind of a writer—I offer no excuses; only the statement that, as with every other story I've published, I had no choice. I had to write it. I couldn't move on to anything else until I did. And it is finally the story I wanted to tell, and I have told it as well as I could.

* * * *

For information, unconditional love, and other things related to the writing and publication of
Plastic Jesus
, I'd like to thank Adam Alexander, Leslie Sternbergh Alexander, Marieke Bermon, Connie B. Brite, Ramsey and Jenny Campbell, Christopher DeBarr, David Ferguson (the Japan/acid/screaming scene was his idea and contains much of his language), Mary Fleener, Kaz, Linda Marotta,
Nerve
Magazine, William K. Schafer, Eddie Schoenfeld, Peter Straub, Richard Tuinstra, and Wolf. And a special thank-you to my agent, Richard Curtis, for understanding the form this story had to take, even though he might well have preferred it to become that elusive fifth novel.