Chapter Two Something Concrete 1 страница

When the azure sky rained down on us, encasing me in a moment in time, a moment in Gerard’s artistic fantasy, it seemed like nothing was real. It felt like we were all as fake as the flecks of lead that were seeping into our round pores, creating something that would never be washed away. It made no sense to me then, but I still was in awe over it. I felt like I was trapped inside a painting that I couldn’t get out of. But the worse part of it all, as I felt the paint harden against my own skin, constricting me and my dry flesh, that I didn’t want to escape this painting. I wanted to live in the artwork that Gerard had created because it seemed like it was something more secure than I had ever known. It was too much, especially added to the initial shock of the blue bombs that we were all still recovering from.

When we did convalesce, there were three clear emotions that echoed through; confusion, anger and amazement. Only instead of us possessing all three at once, we divided the task among ourselves, each taking the sentiment that suited.

Sam, of course, was fucking angry. He had choked down some of the paint into his windpipe – his own damned fault for yelling as soon as the sticky substance took hold of him. He ended up coughing and sputtering, not making any sense whatsoever as he retched over to the side of our mess, spewing swears and vomit on the sidewalk. When he was done, or merely composed enough to continue being pissed off, Sam looked up at Gerard who was still looking down on us, admiring his art from a safe view.

“I’m going to kill you, you mother fucking homo!” Sam yelled, shaking his bright blue fist into the air at Gerard. The artist merely took a long drag on the cigarette he was smoking, and smiled to himself.

“You’ll have a hard time getting up here,” Gerard smirked, blowing out a cloud of smoke around his glowing face. Despite the dirty act he was doing, sucking on a stick made out of tar and ammonia, he looked like an angelic being, the way the sun hit the back of his head, lighting up his cherub like face. But Gerard was no angel, and he continued to mock and taunt the poor boys beneath him, especially the bluest of them all, Sam.

“And besides,” Gerard added, his smile brimming at his earlobes. “You kill me now and you’d leave blue everywhere. They just have the find the boy stained with excellent haute couture. ”

Sam’s face immediately twisted up at the mention of a word he did not recognize. Sam had a very limited vocabulary as it was for English words; let alone French. The only things he knew synonyms for were swearing, and he was a master at that by now. He could call you an asshole in a variety of shapes and dialects. But this French shit Gerard was pulling? Fuck no. This only proved to provoke the young blue boy more, which really, had been Gerard’s intention.

“Are you calling me a faggot?” Sam shouted up at the artist, who let out a breathy laugh. I couldn’t help but smile as well. For someone who was pretty damn sure he was straight (Sam had always confided in me that there was no possible way he could like men because he ‘liked tits way too much’) he thought people were calling him gay an awful lot. I saw a brief glisten into Sam’s weakness then, not only about his sexuality but his fighting abilities. He may have swung his fists at Gerard, but the man was on a balcony; too far to hit and a safe enough distance to threaten. Sam was small and afraid, but he needed this big voice to survive. I probably would have called him out on all of his fallacies, but hell, I would have done the same thing as Sam.

Gerard seemed to pick up on this weakness, and did the unthinkable yet again. He pouted his lips and made a kissing face at Sam.

“Fuck you!” Sam shouted up again, not bothering to wave his fist around this time, but to continue retching on the sidewalk, spilling his fear onto the ground.

The paint was wiped away from Sam’s eyes and most of his face at this point, leaving traces of it around his nostrils from where he had breathed it in. I couldn’t tell where the paint was on me anymore, and I really didn’t care. I could breathe and talk and hear, so my major senses were taken care of. I didn’t need to worry about something that I knew would never come the fuck off, no matter how hard I tried. Travis’ paint removal job was going fairly well, but his was at a much slower rate.

Travis had been the one out of all of us to take hold of the bewildered emotion. He really had no idea what had just gone on. It was as if he had zoned out one moment, then zoned back in the next to find himself covered with a bucket of fucking blue paint. It didn’t make sense to him, no matter how many times he looked at me, Sam, Gerard and then around again. All of his prior (and most likely present) drug use had really affected his brain capacity. Either that or he was getting high off the paint fumes. Most likely, it was a little of both. I wanted to say something to him to put him at ease in some form or another, but my brain mass at that moment was pretty much diminished as well. But it was not from the paint fumes, my drug and alcohol abuse or even pure anger.

It was fucking sheer amazement. I just couldn’t get over the fact that he had actually poured blue paint on us. The act was pure and simple and downright fucking rude, really, but it was amazing at the same time. I wondered where he could have gotten the idea for this and why he chose to enact it on us. I was sure we hadn’t been the only teenagers hassling him ever before; why wouldn’t he use that technique on them? Why did he pick us?

But I couldn’t answer my own question, or decipher it or anything else. I just stood there, paint dripping down from my hoodie sleeves and watched him as he smoked. He puffed in and out and he grinned, looking around at his handy work. He even put his hand to his chest at one point, taking it all in. But it was when he caught eyes with me, that something in his countenance changed. Before he had been a prissy drama queen, arrogant as fuck over his new art. But when he looked at me, the over-gleam in his eyes fell and he just…looked. His eyes, once shallow and conceited became less demur, actually letting me inside. He smiled a little, but it was different this time. I’m not even sure how I would describe it. It was like he knew how amazed I was at what had gone on, and we were both sharing in our own personal joke. Whatever it was, it made me feel warm inside, like my heart had just started beating again after a long night of rest. And really, that wasn’t far from the truth.

It felt good; that is, until he threw his still lit cigarette down at us. I watched it fall, curious at what the hell he was doing at first. Then it hit me: paint is flammable.

Suddenly, I was no longer transfixed by him but this glowing ember rushing down towards a dumbfounded Travis. It hit the paint spots beside the confused boy and began to flash but it didn’t cause too much of a fire. It just started to burn a little, and spread slightly. Travis and Sam started to flip out, with Sam’s incessant yelling starting up again and screeching in my ears to move. Thankfully, by this point however, John was back from the liquor store, beer case in hand. He put it down immediately, his landlord duties coming back to him even in his impaired state. He took the hose from the side of the building, putting out the small flame and then working on Sam’s anger. It took John a few moments as well to comprehend just what the fuck had happened to us, but when I managed to spit out Gerard’s name along with some blue paint lodged in my mouth, he merely shook his head.

“Goddamn, that guy is weird,” was all he said as he turned the hose full blast having it mingle with the cobalt. He continued to hose us down, in public in front of his withered old building until most of what he could get was gone. After I was hosed off, I looked back up at the building, hopeful. But Gerard was gone, leaving me with nothing but faint wafts of cigarette smoke. I found myself suddenly grow cold, and I prayed that it was only the hose water grabbing a hold of my bones and shaking some life into them.

 

We got off what we could of the rest of the paint that night, throwing away the clothing because there was no chance in hell that it would make it. I somehow wanted to keep my attire, though it was paint streaked and caked all to hell. I wanted to keep this work of art because truly, that’s what it was. Each time I looked at the blue pallets on my shirt, I got that same warm feeling inside. I was a part of a painting. I was a part of something bigger than myself. And considering I didn’t even know my own fucking self, that was huge. And I wanted to keep it.

But as Sam and Travis watched me in my room, their eyes looking at me with a fiery demeanor as they held the beer in their hands, I tossed my jeans and ruined Black Flag shirt into my small garbage can in my room. They had drunk almost the entire case that day at my place, while I only nursed one can tentatively. I didn’t need the alcohol, at first. I felt fulfilled in some odd way. The beer was good to have around, but I only needed one and I only opened it near the end of the day, as the sun set behind the dirty Jersey skyline. I cracked it open, thinking my craving had returned as something fluttered in my stomach. But when the initial fizz hit my gut, nothing happened. I wanted, I needed something else.

For once, something I wasn’t going to find at the end of a beer bottle.

 

I scrubbed my skin for hours in the shower that night. There was still the faint aura of blue around me, but at least I didn’t look like a Smurf anymore. I told myself I was just not going to school if I looked cartoon-ish, but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be going anyway. I never liked school; I felt like it was a complete waste of time. But for the most part, I usually suffered through it. I figured I didn’t have anything else better to do. In my spare time I hung out with Sam and Travis or killed time in my room. I could just kill time at school and since Sam and Travis were there as well, I wasn’t missing much. There was never a reason to skip school, unless they went with me. There was no motivation on my part.

But still, as I fell asleep that night, those thoughts washed out and over me, just like the blue paint that still clung to my body and pores, seeping into my brain and soul.

The next day, I didn’t go to school.

Well, I at least went for the morning. I rolled myself out of bed, got dressed and got on with my day like a zombie. But after lunch in the cafeteria with Sam and Travis I just felt fucking empty inside. It’s not like I ever felt full of anything much before, but god, I needed to get out of that place. And quick. The way Travis stared into his sandwich and the way Sam’s voice sounded in my ear as he went on and on about how his mother was grounding him for his clothing being ruined just grated on my nerves. I was going to skip, but it wasn’t going to be with them. I felt like I needed to do something better; not piss around in front of a beer store. I needed to get out and do something for myself.

And finally, I had found the motivation to do so. In the bottom of an empty paint can.

*

The sky had been a dull gray shade of purple in the morning, the sun still warming up to the fact that it came out earlier and stayed present much longer. The purple image stayed with me for most of the day, so much so that I was surprised when I was greeted with a bright sun and an ocean blue sky when I stepped out of the prison-like school just before the ending lunch bell rang. For once it was not so overcast and gray. The sky was spread out like a table cloth and white fluffs of clouds dotted it every so often like cutlery placed at seats, waiting for visitors to come. I had picked the right day to skip.

I began to walk along the dirty sidewalk, kicking pebbles, twigs and candy wrappers as I went. The thick frost that had settled on the grass blades this morning was gone, and the new life struggled to poke though the dirt. It was getting there, but it didn’t seem like it was fast enough, the dirt still swallowing the green stems that poked through. I watched the soil while I walked for a long time, and was surprised when I found myself looking straight at the old local city park. I had been looking down the entire time, walking for the sake of walking. I didn’t want to go home because my mother would have been there and even if she wasn’t, I didn’t want to face an empty room. I’d much rather be in the empty world because at least then I could pretend that the person who sat beside me on the bench or a bus seat choose to be there and was my friend, even if we didn’t talk.

Sometimes the best conversations you have with someone are without saying words. The comfortable silence that takes you over wholly, wrapping you in a warm blanket of unheard but known words. I’d get that with strangers; the silence that I loved but never with my friends. Especially Sam; nobody could get any silence around him at all. The boy never shut the fuck up. It was good at times when I didn’t want to hear myself think, when I would constantly nit-pick apart everything I did. But now was not one of those times. I need silence to cover me because I still felt so cold from the ice water I had been fired with last night.

My feet lead me to the park, probably driven by some unknown instinct in me. As soon as I heard the gravel crunch beneath my feet on the walk way, I remembered the times my dad used to take me here as a child. My mom would never go; she was supposed to stay at home and make dinner, so that when my dad and I came back, something was ready for our empty bellies. Mom also didn’t want to go because she would get dirty and she didn’t want to play the way my dad did. Dad would chase me around the metal and multi coloured poles, grasping his strong mechanic hands at me. He’d scream and yell just as much as I did, like he was a kid again. I’d hide under the slide, pressing my hands to my face for what seemed like hours suppressing the giggles as I watched his brown shoes walk by again and again, pondering just where his ‘little Frankie’ had gone. And when he’d find me, he’d tackle and tickle me, finishing our evening of play time on the swings. I’d pump and push until I thought my legs were going to fall off and then jump head first over everything; sometimes over the sky itself. And after, I’d cling to the bright orange pole, refusing to go home until he’d promise me we’d come back again tomorrow and the next day and the next. He promised that we’d come back everyday, for forever and a day. And I believed him. I let him peel my body away from the metallic object, and have him carry me home because my legs were too weak to move themselves. And then we would eat dinner with mom, who would just shake her head. And life, or what I thought, was perfect.

It’s funny how those promises of forever are under a limited time warranty and only for certain conditions. If something breaks during those promises, then the warranty is void. My dad broke his back and suddenly fun time at the park didn’t exist. Fun time didn’t exist at all anymore. When my dad had hurt his back from part of a car falling on him at work, something other than that horrid bone must have broken inside of him. Or something got shoved up his ass and made him sour on everything. Either way, he was not my same dad. He was my father, the more technical term, and nothing else. Fathers don’t make promises; they only break the ones that a dad makes.

And from there, my childhood began to change form. The park or going to movies wasn’t what my father and I should be doing. I needed to get a better education and do well in school because my life could fall away from me in a split second. I could loose my job in a split second. Or my car. Or my wife. Everything, according to my father could be taken away from me in a split second. Including him.

But what my father never seemed aware of was that everything doesn’t have to change in a ‘split second’. They can change over a long period of time, eroding with each drop of water, each drop of an unfortunate circumstance placed upon you. I was the rock which the water dripped upon. I was cracking every day, just a little bit more. I was changing and everything was slipping away. It had taken seventeen years so far and the water had nearly worn me into two separate pieces. I was hanging on by a thin thread and the liquid was still falling; more than ever now. How much longer could I go?

I didn’t want to think about time as I walked to the park. I didn’t want to think about promises and failure and life in general. I didn’t want to think about forever, which in my mind, can only last a few days. Something is only as long as you say it is and with a word like forever, with its vast meanings, vague understandings, and intangible properties, it could be a matter of seconds. Split seconds, if you will.

But I was not going to think about that. I had come to this park not to reflect on the bad shit in my life, but to see the good in others. I had come to watch the children play and be like I once used to be like. A day care of young’uns, maybe four or five at the most, all traipsed out and around the play lot, holding hands and wearing matching mauve shirts to keep from getting lost. I placed myself with a loud oomph down on the park bench, just in front of the kids’ area slide. I watched as the group of children all let go of each other’s hands at once and began to run in all directions trying to find the best thing to have fun on. Once, they had been so afraid of losing each other that they had clasped onto their small sticky palms with a fervor only the dying could match. But in an instant, they had dispersed, mind’s totally clear and blank, wanting to fill up again with some other new emotion. It marveled me; how they could dispose of their feelings and create new ones just like that. I always dwelled so much and for so long on particular sensations. I couldn’t just drop things, no matter how hard I tried.

But instead of trying to improve myself or crying over what I had lost in my experience, I appreciated their innocence. I sat on the bench, my back leaning into the dull wood, let it grate on my spine. I placed my elbows up on the back of the bench, took in a sigh and just watched. The counselors from the day care kept a close eye on me, I noticed, as I watched the kids. I tried not to take offence; they were only doing their job. I found it so heart wrenchingly sick that if you were watching children (especially if you were a guy) it meant you were a child molester. I was only appreciating innocence; something that everyone else had lost, causing them to think these thoughts.

Other than the children and their group leaders, there were a few random old ladies with pink umbrellas for the unannounced rain and the occasional middle aged person, not stopping at the park, but just walking through it to get to their own destination. Though my eyes focused on everyone in the area at least once, since the middle-agers couldn’t be bothered to stop for much of a glance, they got the least of my time. They weren’t worth the effort. The old ladies and the children held the most beauty in my mind, but the people in the middle sort of scared me. I couldn’t stand reaching that age; the age of my parents, teachers and authority figures. It irked me. In my mind, it felt like you were trapped in those ages. You weren’t young enough to live, but you weren’t old enough to die. You were stuck in purgatory then, just waiting for something better to come along. I couldn’t stand the thought of that. I always needed answers for everything; yes or no. A or B. Being stuck in a gray area with gray hair scared the shit out of me. I never wanted to grow old. My eighteenth birthday was approaching faster than I ever thought possible. It was going to be within the next few months and I couldn’t stand the idea. I would be an adult; one step closer to the age of non-existent gray area. I didn’t want to go. I would have to be responsible and make my own decisions. High school would be over and though I hated it with a fucking fiery passion, I didn’t know what I wanted to do after it. I didn’t know if I was smart enough to get into university or if I wanted to be smart enough. I didn’t want to spend so much money (that I didn’t have) going to school and then failing at it. I’d rather chose to do nothing than have rejection inflicted upon me. And with my upcoming age, it would be inflicted. I wanted to freeze time most days, just standing in the same spot, the same town in Jersey watching these children in a park. Yeah, I could live like that, I thought to myself. I could live like that, if you could call it living.

I began to watch the children enough to see each of them in a new light, with their own distinct personality. I was observing a child I had called Billy, playing in the dirt, making what I could only assume to be a dragon lair when I felt the bench shift its weight. A dark figure appeared out of the corner of my eyes and I knew another person had sat down. But when I turned my head to observe them as well, I was met with a surprise.

Gerard the artist was sitting next to me. His body had fallen carelessly down onto the soft wood, still cold from the rain we had had the night before. He let out a sigh, the cigarette poised in his mouth bouncing slightly. He looked over at me and my surprised expression, smiled casually before dragging out of the small black tote bag he carried with him a large sketch book. He flipped it open a few pages, grabbed a pencil that was remarkably sharp and was placed behind his ears, put it to the page but didn’t draw anything. His pencil hovered over the crisp white textured page as his eyes drew away from my own and looked out at the scenery in front of him. He began to watch the children as well. But all I could do was stare at him.

Finally, after breathing in a mouthful of cold air tainted with his smoke, I shut it tightly and turned my attention away. I became aware that my body was tight and stiff, my hands digging into my kneecaps. I was fucking nervous to be sitting next to this man. But was it because he had thrown paint on me the day before? Or was it because of something totally different and off the wall?

Thank God I didn’t have much time to think, before his words interrupted my thoughts, muffled by the cigarette he refused to remove as he talked. “The paint came out nicely,” he told me without looking up from his sketchpad. He had found something to draw by that point and began to faint gray outlines to what looked to be a child’s head. I sucked in my breath before I got a chance to answer.

“Yeah… kind of…” was all I could say. I saw his eyes dart to the corner and glance at me, making me turn away from him even more. Turning away gave me a bit more courage, and I started talking again, my voice coming out stronger. “I had to throw away my shirt though. And my jeans. There was no way the paint was coming out of them.”

“You should have kept them anyway,” Gerard stated as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. My heart skipped a beat. The way he was talking to me, physically, he could not be farther away. He was poised straight ahead, absorbed in the sketch he penciled. But the words he spoke stuck me deep down. He had the same idea I had.

There was a long silence between us then, cutting through the chill in the air with a warm front. I could feel Gerard’s presence next to me. He wasn’t a large man or anything; he had a few extra pounds on him and was average height, but he seemed so close to me on the bench. And he was blanketing me in that silence I wanted.

“What did you come here for?” I asked suddenly. If he had had the same idea about the shirt as me, then maybe there was more to this man that I could relate to as well.

“People watching.” He nodded his head as he spoke, then suddenly stopped all other movements. He held up his drawing of the same boy in the sand, half drawn in front of his face. He scrunched up his nose while tilting his head as he looked. He sighed in the next moment, then placed the art pad back on his lap, flipping over a new page and starting all over again. “Inspiration,” he finished, starting another picture. The first one had been so good, though I had only seen it from an angle. It almost hurt my heart that he was starting over again, because I knew that I could not draw anything that good to save my life.

“Why did you do that?” I asked hurriedly, leaning over to his side and scanning my eyes over his empty page. He looked at me odd for a second before I gestured with my hand to his drawing. He nodded and shrugged, staring to illustrate again. I wondered if I was ever going to get an answer out of him, when he finally spoke.

“It wasn’t him.”

“Huh?” My mouth hung open in confusion.

“The boy in the sand,” Gerard started, placing down his sketch pad and actually talking to me. He looked me in the eye seriously and extended his hand, pointing to the child, Billy as I had named him, who was now covered in sand from head to toe. “That boy there, and the one I drew,” Gerard continued his eyes deep with something I couldn’t understand without drowning, “they weren’t the same.”

“But… how so?” My voice raised an octave with the urgent question and my brows furrowed into a lazy caterpillar. I had never been an art student since the seventh grade but I was pretty damn sure that when you drew something as good as he had, then it was the same thing.

He sighed, his broad shoulders heaving prominently. I was clearly taking up too much of his time and expertise not being able to grasp this concept. And though I didn’t want to bug him, I needed to know.

“The boy in the picture… his eyes were bright. Happy. And on a little bit of the dumb side. I left the pupils too raw; too unformed.” Gerard began to speak with his hands, furrowing his own brow trying to get his point across. “But this boy in the sand, he’s different. He’s not what I drew. He’s not happy.”

My confused countenance went from Gerard back to Billy. He was still playing in the sand, squishing dirt in his tiny fingers. He sure as hell looked pretty damn happy to me. Happier than I had ever been in the past few years, anyway.

Gerard sense my confusion (and stupidity) so he kept talking. “You see the way his eyes crinkle when he lifts his arms above his head? And the way there are already deep lines, making him appear older? This boy has been through a lot. I would probably say abuse of some kind, even if it’s not happening to him directly. Look at the way he flings the sand.” Gerard pointed at him once again, and though I didn’t care how rude we were being I looked at the kid. And god, Gerard was fucking right. He did have deep lines – wrinkles even – around his eyes. And when he flung the sand, his arms shot back so fast, too fast, like he was trying to hit something. Or avoid being hit. This kid, Billy, had something going on inside of him. Something that I could now see and something that Gerard had not caught in his doodle at all. Looking back between the two images in my mind, it was a stranger Gerard had drawn. It wasn’t the kid at all.

“Wow…” was all I could say. I looked back to Gerard who was smiling smugly. He didn’t need to brandish in his victory; he merely nodded his head, turning up his fleshy lips slightly and began to draw again.

“A picture needs to tell you what no one else can see,” he stated bluntly, his hand fluttering as he began to draw Billy once again, this time determined to get it correct.

I nodded and that was it. Gerard was right. The statement seemed so simple and yet so complicated at the same time. I would never have known that Billy was abused like that. And Gerard could tell it all from one glance. And now that he had told me where to look, I began to search my way through the swarm of children. I found a young girl, blonde hair and blue eyes wearing an off amber yellow dress with daisies on it. The purple shirt the kids were all wearing was pulled over the top of the dress, but I could still see the fine pattern that was etched across the skirt of it. I looked at her seemingly innocent complexion and tried to find something wrong with her, just like Gerard had with Billy. This girl, Gretchen in my mind, seemed sad already. Her dress looked loose and baggy and there was a tear in the side. Her face was slightly dirty, a smear across one cheek. I smiled, despite the severity of the situation I had perceived.

“That girl,” I stated to Gerard, pointing with my finger at Gretchen. “She’s poor, isn’t she?” I couldn’t help but grin like a fucking idiot when I said it and it made me feel like shit even more when Gerard shot me a skeptical look. My frown melted off my face from the heat of my embarrassed cheeks. But Gerard still looked at me weird.

“What?” I asked, my voice low and gravelly. I felt like I had just swallowed the pebbles that tossed around in my shoes.

“She’s not poor,” Gerard answered, shaking his head and giving me a dull smile. “Her dress was her sister’s. That’s why it’s big and is torn.”

“How do you know?” I shot back, slightly threatened that I was being challenged. He was enjoying correcting me; probably too much. He was trying so hard not to be arrogant, but his inner glee was coming through his pale skin.