What Now?

Everybody here has a story to tell, I guess. There was a reason we were all in Australia, a reason we were all on that plane heading to Los Angeles. Lost Angeles, I used to call it when I was little, and man if that doesn't ever seem fitting now.

I have a story too, although it's not exactly epic. Up until now, there wasn't much in my life that hadn't happened in the lives of a million other people. No one likes to think of themselves as ordinary and boring, but there's a comfort in that as well. It's a fucking security blanket, to be honest, knowing what each day is going to bring. That's why I left, you see. Why I had to leave.

Bruce Springsteen wrote about towns like mine, little dirty backwater burgs where the men all worked in factories and the women bagged groceries and turned out the next generation of factory workers. We had a routine going, a nice little pattern, and my family had followed it faithfully for generations.

You're born, and if you're an only kid you don't stay that way for long. Because Say Hallelujah the lord wants you to be fruitful and multiply. Catholics take the wrap for that, but the other religions pretty much feel the same. We were Baptists ourselves, presented each Sunday morning to the First Baptist Church of Richardsburg, Ohio in our best clothes and wearing our best "We love Jesus!" faces.

You grow up, in a run-down house that always needs a fresh coat of paint, with a rusty car in the driveway that always needs chemotherapy. The yard gets mowed once a week, and it's full of dandelions. You have a little tiny backyard, with maybe a rusty swingset, and an old dog lying there in the grass watching you try and kill yourself on it. You share a room with your brothers if you're lucky, or your sisters if you're not. Each night, you sit at the table eating whatever is on your plate (and feeding what you don't like to the dog) and fighting with your siblings over the last piece of Sara Lee cheesecake.

You go to school in the same drafty old red brick building your parents both went to, and you may even have the same teachers that they did. There are thirty of you in a classroom that smells like old coats and classmates who still wet the bed and Mary Alice McHenderson, whose family owns about twenty dogs and is rumored to be 'no good'.

You learn to read and write and do math, and you get notes sent home with you for chewing gum in class or for pulling Mary Alice's hair or for talking too loudly during art class. You find your friends quickly, a group of boys who differ from you only in appearance, and who share your fascination with cartoon shows and treasure hunts. At recess you run wild, as wild as you can behind that chain-link fence. You play kickball and softball, and you get in trouble for throwing rocks through the fence at cars parked outside of the school. All winter long, the sky is gray and frigid and the ground under your Keds is frozen solid, and you and your friends exist in a kind of alternate universe, where you are kings and where there is no such thing as school.

Summer comes and you spend it playing ball in the park, and swimming in the public pool when you can bum enough quarters from your mother. When it rains you stay inside the house waiting impatiently for your mothers' soap operas to end so that you can watch He-Man and Thundercats. When you get bored you make prank phone calls until your mother catches you and makes you clean the bathroom as punishment, and you are angry because your brothers were making calls all morning and she never caught them. You decide you must be adopted. When the rain ends you go outside and look for rainbows and play in puddles with your brothers or sisters, and life is good again.

Then, things change, you change. You leave behind the little brick building and go into a bigger brick building, and you find yourself being suddenly forced to think about your future. What future? A future working in the factories, probably. Still, they fed you lots of lines about how you can go to college or join the army or become doctors and lawyers, and sure, some people do. But good colleges don't want people from little hick towns like yours. They want kids who grew up going to the opera and who work with people dying of diphtheria, and the fact that you were the champion of your high school baseball team three years in a row suddenly doesn't mean jack.

Maybe you do leave town, and move to another little town, and start over there. Maybe you end up marrying Mary Alice and going to work in the textile plant and having a mess of kids with her. Maybe you end up getting drunk and wrapping your car around a telephone pole, but sooner or later you do find yourself grown up and wondering what the hell you do next.

The men in my town gathered together on Saturday nights at Hugg's Tavern, where they talked about their jobs and their favorite sports teams. Where they bashed gays, rich people, anyone who wasn't white, and pretty much anyone else they didn't find appropriate. Did they all really think like that? Everyone claimed to. My friends and I repeated their words to each other as we were growing up, and I can't remember any adult ever telling me that it was wrong. Sure, the Afterschool Specials preached it to me, but what kid wants to be preached to? What kid is going to believe a cartoon character over his own father, whom he has been taught to respect and fear his entire life? Who is perfect in his eyes?

I was eighteen, with a fresh diploma in my hand and a job at Sal's Pizza that I'd held for the past couple of years. I'm the third son, and I have one younger sister who was fifteen. My brothers were both working with Dad at the textile plant, and a week after my graduation Dad comes and tells me that he's gotten me hired as well. My brothers are all happy about it, and they take me out to celebrate at Hugg's. I'm too young to drink legally, but Hugg doesn't care about anything expect his money so I get just as plastered as the rest of my family. My uncles are there too, and so are both of my grandfathers, and they're just as proud as they can be that I'm following in their footsteps.

So the next morning, I wake up, and I can remember everything that happened the night before. My family, and Hugg, and the smell of beer still clings to me. I look at my hands and I wonder what they'll look like after I work in the plant for a few years, and I wonder how they'll look to my kids, and if I should find a girl and ask her to marry me, and something inside of me just snaps all of a sudden.

I don't want this. I run to the bathroom, which smells like Comet, and I puke my guts out. Not from the beer but from this suddenly feeling of panic, like I'm trapped in a cage. I realize for the first time that I can't do this.

So I go back to my room reeking of beer-puke, and I pace around for a while and I wonder "What now?"

College? My grades were lousy, just barely good enough to pass because what was I going to use good grades for anyway? Why study when I could be out with my friends smoking joints and talking about all the imaginary girls I'd done.

It was like the town was surrounded by a huge desert. Sure, you were allowed to leave if that's what you wanted, but unless you had a plan on how to make it to the other side, your ass was coyote meat.

I had a few thousand saved up from Sal's, and an old car of my own that ran okay (my friends and I always patched it up when it threatened to die on me; you did not grow up in my town and not know how to fix a car).

Maybe I had a nervous breakdown, maybe that's what it was. All I know is that I pulled up this dented old globe my dad had bought for us, and I looked down and saw Australia, and that was it. That's where I wanted to be. I threw my clothing into a duffel bag and left a note for my family, and patted the dog goodbye. I took my cash and myself and I got the hell out of Richardsburg.

I don't know what I was hoping to find in Australia. Something new, something exciting, maybe? Something that didn't involve mindless routine and Baptist potluck suppers.

There are a lot of American kids there doing the same thing. Australia isn't all sheep farms, although there are enough of those that you won't lack for work if you want it. We were ranch hands, and we washed dishes, and we smiled gamely and put up with their jokes about Americans. I made friends, and I sat with them outside on the wooden fences and smoked joints, and I told them stories about the imaginary girls I'd done back in Richardsburg. The good ladies of First Baptist would have had a heart attack if they'd heard my tales about those wild, wicked girls I'd grown up with.

I wrote to my family now and then, and if I was in any one place for more than a few weeks sometimes I heard back. It was always the same; stop this nonsense and come home. It was condescending; I was a wayward child unaware of the major mistakes he'd made, but it wasn't too late to do something about them.

The years went by again, a lot of years, and it happened that one day I woke up and looked around me, and suddenly had to go and get sick, and I realized that I hadn't escaped the feeling of despair, of being lost. I'd just hidden it for a while.

So what now, I thought? What do I do now? Do I go back home to Ohio? Do I go back to the life my father has planned for me? What should I do?

Then I thought, California. Maybe what I'm looking for is in California. I wasn't bad looking; maybe I could be an actor or something. That would be exciting. I had a rough edge women liked, and I could see myself burning up the screen as the next Clint Eastwood. I'd never done any acting in my entire life, but why let that stop me, I decided. I wasn't getting any younger; maybe I was already too old for it. They wanted kids, and I was no kid, but what did I have to lose?

So I once again packed up everything and I hopped on a plane back to the States with visions of fame and fortune in my head.

This wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

I wonder if they had a service for me at First Baptist? If the girls I'd went to school with were now good Baptist ladies who shushed their children and told each other that I would have made someone a good husband if I'd only stuck around. They'd whisper in secret whether or not I'd had 'legal problems' or 'drug problems' and that had driven me away. They'd go to my parents' house with casseroles and kind words, and so Sawyer would officially be laid to rest.

The problem with that was that I was still very much alive, and wouldn't have minded some of that casserole, but how could they possibly know that?

There are complications to going back now though, more of the unexpected, and tonight I'm sitting here on this beach trying to make some sense of all of it.

"It's going to rain again." He sits down next to me, his arm brushing against mine. "You should come back to the shelter now, before you get soaked."

"In a minute." I look at him, and he looks like a pirate, I think. Something torn out of the pages of a comic book, and he doesn't look like a mathematical genius or like the kind of man who can sing an ill child to sleep, or anything like the person he really is. He looks, I think, like the kind of man who would be beaten to death in Richardsburg. The kind of man I was taught to hate growing up.

"We should talk." His voice is low, because this is only between us. "About what happened earlier."

I don't respond and I stare out into the churning black waves.

"Are we so different?" He asks gently. "I was taught to hate you when I was a child, you were taught to hate me, and we were both taught to hate the idea of what happened between us earlier. Am I correct?"

I start to get up but his hand on my arm stops me. "Stay."

"I don't know why I did that." I say at last. "I keep trying to figure out why, and I can't."

"Because it's different here, because it was something we wanted, and we took it. Do you regret it?" He looks hard at me, and I want to lie, but instead I shake my head no. "I should but I can't."

He nods. "Neither can I. So what now?"

I am startled by this, because I'm not used to him asking what to do next. He just knows. He knew this afternoon, and he should know now, and the fact that he doesn't upsets me.

"What happens when we leave here?" I blurt out. "What happens when we both go back to our lives?"

"I don't know." He shakes his head, and there is sand trapped in that mess of curls. "But I know that here... here we can perhaps make our own rules. Our fathers aren't here to judge us now."

Light and dark, he and I. Yet somehow I think we've led parallel lives, and now here we are. I am terrified, more terrified than I was after the crash, or when I ran away from home. I am scared to death about what I let him do to me earlier today, and what I want him to do now. I have this image, and I've held on to it my whole life, and suddenly it's cracking and breaking and that scares me most of all. Because he sees me. For the first time in my life, someone actually sees me.

"Come back to the shelter" he repeats, and I know he doesn't mean the big shelters the others share. He means the little shelter he's built for himself, his own private island, and I feel raindrops on my skin.

"Okay." It is the hardest word I've ever said in my life.

He gets to his feet and heads toward our little remnant of civilization and I follow behind him as docile as a lamb behind his ewe.

Because for the first time in my life, I'm starting to know what I want.