Jude looked at his daughter, turning in a beautiful young woman so fast, she had always reminded him of his sister as a child. Today she looked more like the old pictures of his mother as a young woman, she had inherited all the things that came along with that kind of beauty as well.
"So tell me what happened", he said but she just kept twisting her hair, alternately pushing her cheek in and chewing at it from the inside. That was just like Aunt Zoe he thought.
"The other girls are cunts."
"Okay, I really don't know what good it does to talk that way."
"They call me names, think I am weird- they're right I'm a freak."
The call came around the time that school would have been letting out, telling him that he would have to go pick her up. That she had be involved in a fight.
"You're not a freak", and he struggled with what to say next, he wanted to say that he understood what it was like to feel awkward and alone. He wanted to tell her that he remembered being the long-haired artsy kid in the 8th grade back in Arkansas where his family was from, he remembered the taunts, the name calling - before he even knew what some of those words meant.
"Your behaviour is totally out of hand, fights at school, cussing in front of me- your father- that word. What am I supposed to do with you?"
She sat there twisting her hair, her expression held no clue to the thoughts she kept inside.
"Go on up to your room we'll talk later".
She left the room like a hurricane, knocking small bits from their places, and loosing a groan in an accusing manner like only a teen-age girl can. At fourteen she was already a force of nature. The women in his family always were, his own ideas about who he was and the strength to be that alone came from somewhere else, in fact the most unlikely of sources.
When he was 11 years old one of Jude's fondest pastimes was going through stacks of the hundreds of brightly colored comic books that he owned. Picking them up one at a time and studying a few moments the style that they were drawn in, the lettering on the cover- sometimes if one made a significant impact on him for whatever reason, he would write the name of that one in a notebook kept close by. At that time Jude already had a dozen notebooks like that, just long lists of titles of comic books that for some reason he'd found noteworthy. On the day that Jude first met him he had been sitting on the couch drinking a Dr. Pepper and eating English peas straight from the can, there were six stacks of comics in front of him and he was watching a VHS copy of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, this was 2010 or so almost no one still had a VCR. The door burst open and there was Carrie in her splendor , six feet tall and blonde and built like Jessica Rabbit. She was the center of the universe, she had a strange power over men but more than anything else he knew she had his back. In her right hand was a huge purse full of every other thing in the world and endless comic book money. She earned it hard, a forty year old waitress at Gypsy's downtown. The sunlight washed around her making her look like the Madonna, or at least an 80's video with the singer of the same name, in her right hand she held take-out, the only kind of food Jude ever knew about until he got married himself.
"Hey Jude!" her voice like Kairo syrup, southern and sweet.
"Hey", quietly.
"This is Ethan, he wrote a book! He is gonna sleep on the couch a while".
And that is where he would lay down but often he'd be in Carrie's bed by morning. Bad dreams, Jude used to think.
She crossed the small living room into the kitchen to make the boy a plate and he walked in. He was a grey bearded cowboy looking guy with a shiny western-styled jacket and boots, he carried one of the short glasses of coke from Gypsy's low next to his side. Holding the sweating glass by his finger tips.
"Hello Jude, I'm Ethan Blue."
He had a musty smell about him.
"Are all these yours?, he asked, and they talked about comics for hours.
For the next few years Ethan Blue would be sort of a fixture in his life, sometimes living with them for a couple of weeks and at others a couple of months. He was always in and out like that, sometimes he would leave the state to read from a book he had written, often Carrie would just be worn thin of his grand personality, the smell of his pot smoking day and night and she would take him to an alternative life on the far side of Little Rock. Another family, much like this one, Jude didn't like to think about.
While he was around it was like having a clown/guru/kung fu master to play with, after they grew to know each other the relationship was stronger than most "real" father/sons could boast. Sitting next to each other on the couch, leaned in with shoulders touching they would spend time together and talk about Ethan's son, Jude's father, how to talk to girls and who might win in a fight between Lemmy and Henry Rollins.
"Elijah told these boys at school that I act gay".
Ethan slowly picked up his ever present drink, bourbon and coke, and swirled it with his finger. Jude watched closely, sometimes he could get at the truth with adults better by watching than actually focusing on their words. At 11 he knew most adults could not be trusted. Ethan was different but this was a huge deal to him, he knew what gay was because his older brother off to college was gay. Elijah was his first cousin, a year older and it had double crushed him when the other boy had talked bad about him. By making gay bad the insult seemed to carry over onto his brother. The whole thing loomed enormous. He wanted the calming serene version of Blue to give him peace or the crazy drunk kung fu version to get Elijah and the other boys from the football team -he didn't care which.
Ethan was a self-described scoundrel whose very job was life as performance art. He did a Dean Martin meets Hank Bukowski thing that people watched like a car race. Everyone waited for the wreck but in the mean time they were buying beers. He was loud and obnoxious. He fairly made his living behaving improperly but despite all of that he loved Jude and weighed what he would say carefully.
"Maaan, that is all kind of fucked up." The words came out in a low growl, his breath a little labored.
Jude nodded, fought back a tear. He and Ethan had cried together at the end of a couple of touching movies they had watched, even that one where the guy got executed and that nun would come to see him, but this was different. It was important that he not cry at least not until he heard what else the scoundrel poet had to say about the matter. Blue set down his drink and leaned a little more deliberately into Jude. He let the back of his hand rest against the outside of the boys leg. It was a simple act of intimacy before the most important thing Ethan Blue might ever say to anyone.
"You know gay is just a thing, whatever right? People fall in love sometimes a man and a woman, sometimes a man and a man... whatever."
"I know the weird thing, the way it hurts you know- because people, a lot of people are just saying that to be hurtful - to turn it into an insult. It works. You know growing up people called me those names. They said I was gay because of what I liked, how I acted- I pierced my ear - nothing now but back then holy crap- anyway you know you are being insulted and you want to separate yourself from it somehow- you know show everyone else "I'm not that" but then part of you knows that there is nothing wrong with it and you feel like you are betraying your brother or something- dude, that's just all kinds of fucked up."
Jude never looked up he sat there staring straight ahead into the television but he pushed his leg over just a fraction.
"It's tough on guys like me and you sometimes, creative people, people that are really smart. And you are really smart, screw those grades and what people say at school- you are smart in a way they will never get- the way we talk about stories and stuff the way you can play the drums and the bass already and you never had a lesson. Screw them. But you gotta do it. I know school is hard for you here, you gotta do it but I promise you will be the one someday. All of the sudden things will turn over and you will magically draw people to you. All of the sudden you will be the interesting one. It happens. You will be sick of people wanting to know you."
He reached for his glass then paused, "Elijah ."
He picked up the glass and took a long sucking drink through the ice, wiped at his mustache with the back of his hand.
"It hurt your feelings most of all 'cause it was him said it, didn't it?"
For the first time Jude looked up, tears welling, he nodded and his facial muscles tightened in that way they have, just before you lose control. Then it passed.
"Dude, there is this thing where the person that says something like that is the first victim, then you know- you'd be the second. Eastern stuff I think. So you know what I'm saying- already Elijah is feeling bad, bad about himself trying to show out for other boys. Why would he feel like he had something to prove by saying that? You know he has that Dad - ol big boy and he is probably feeling all insecure so he makes Elijah play football, maybe Elijah wishes he could be more like us just kicking it... see the whole world is full of people all up in their feelings and the sooner I realize that if I like who I am then it don't matter, the rest is just small shit. It ain't none of my business what other people think of me. So long as they don't act out hateful. If I had to guess I'd say Elijah feels as bad about all this as you do right now."
Jude was relaxed now, it did make sense.
"Now go play me a drum solo while I smoke a bowl."
After Jude had started writing he would pretend to visit sometimes, with the old man that he imagined Ethan Blue had become. The COPD smothering him, his liver shot, life a little more burdensome that it needed to be but his mind and his views on things were as strong as ever.
"How do you know?"
Blue reached for a bottle of Jim Beam, poured a drink, his hand betraying him, he spilled a little.
"What, -how do you know what?"
"How do you know, if you really don't give a damn about the others, the critics - really anyone else? How do you know then what you are doing is worth a damn- if it has any meaning? As a writer, a father, a human being? How do you know if you aren't just screwing shit up?"
By now his breathing, in Judds mind, sounded like the bad guy in Star Wars, a movie they'd watched together many times. It was the only sound in the fantasy, the advice no longer came.
Ethan had passed one winter a few years back but it didn't keep Judd from talking to him, usually sitting in front of an old electric typewriter he had, a dog earred copy of poetry written by a musty cowboy a long time ago always in reach. His phoned dinged some sort of notification and broke the spell he'd been lost in.
"Can we talk?," he said gently. She sat clicking away at something on the keyboard, she wrote teen angst with the best of them, online sites but she showed a natural talent. Looking up just for a second she let it all down a moment, the layers af anger, the pain and confusion. She was his little girl again, and he tossed her the book.
"I want to tell you about a guy I used to know...".
