This and That
If I were on a tv show with weird, obsessed fans, I wouldn't want to troll the internet to see what people were saying about me, but then, totally accidently, I constantly would because I'm kind of weak that way.
Domesticity 3
Deb did Justin a disservice when she dubbed him Sunshine.
Of course, the pretty blond hair and blinding smile don't help much either.
People shouldn't be so shocked to find an artist's temperament behind all that camouflage, but they are. I mean, three fucking years on now, and I'm still getting these ridiculous, "What's wrong with Sunshine?" questions.
And my, "He's a moody fucking twat, what do you want?" is still met with horrified looks, like they can't believe I would pass off the normally cheerful boy's sullen attitude with a shrug and a roll of the eyes.
But see, I know Justin in ways they never will because they won't let themselves see much beyond the fair-haired aesthetic. And I know when he's in a mood because I drank the last of the orange juice or his latest project isn't where he wants it to be versus a serious downturn that owes more to a sense of being overwhelmed than anything else.
I cut him some slack in the mood department anyway. You know, a baseball bat to the side of the head can change certain things about a person's normally sunny disposition. So can realizing the parents you thought were perfect are really just as fucked up as the next poor slob, and understanding that fairness doesn't have much of a place in the real world, and throwing in with a boyfriend who is probably the most repressed, unavailable son of a bitch in the free world. These are all things that can make a boy less than buoyant on occasion.
I always give Justin the opportunity to work himself out of a funk, and most of the time he does. Really, the only time I step in is when he starts avoiding me, because then I know he's off his game.
So it dawned on me, after suffering through a day or two of the Concerned Citizens for Justin Taylor brigade that the aforementioned Taylor *hadn't* shaken his pert little ass in my face for a few days.
I knew exactly what was going on. He gets himself into these fucking states where he doesn't eat or sleep-instead he obsesses over a class or the disappearing rain forests or the genocide of some fucking tribe in the middle of nowhere. And then all the day-to-day shit of his normally over-scheduled anyway life overwhelms him for a bit.
A couple of days passed with our trading voice mails-his sounding harried and vague, mine increasingly irritated. Finally, I had no choice but to venture over into Collegeville USA.
"Brian!" he said, opening the door to his apartment, ever delighted to see my charming face. "What are you doing here?"
I held my hand out to him. "Hi, I'm Mohammed. How are you?"
Justin's face morphed into a look of terrible concern. "Oh shit, your God Complex is back, isn't it?" he said, stepping back to let me in.
"Where the fuck have you been?" I asked, looking around his place. It wasn't too trashed. I'd condemn it of course, but on the Taylor Scale of Home Destruction, it was fairly moderate.
Justin returned to his laptop at the kitchen table. "Trying to reduce 'The Liberalization of Religion and its Effects on Modern Art' into 10,000 words," he said. "'Cause really, how important is *God* in art anyway?"
I grinned. "You're asking the wrong guy," I said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's all about Me."
Justin buried his face in his hands and said, "How likely, like, on a scale of one to ten, do you think it is that a meteor will hit this building, and I won't have to turn this paper in?"
"Mmm, two," I said.
Justin sighed. "Fuck."
Under the pretense of looking for something to drink, I made a quick check of the fridge and his pantry. "Your milk expired when you were in high school," I said.
"Is that what that smell is?" he asked.
"I don't know. What did this black circle start out as, any idea?"
I pulled...some fucking thing out of the bottom drawer of the fridge and showed it to him. He furrowed his brow at it. "I don't know. Lettuce maybe? An apple?"
"Jesus. I told you it was a bad idea to rent a place so far from your mommy. She'd drop by all the time to keep you in fresh produce if she could."
"Yeah, I would *love* that," Justin agreed. "Leave my fridge alone, it's fine."
"In a toxic, it's-probably-giving-you-brain-damage kind of way, yeah, it is."
"Give me a break. Your fridge is totally pathetic."
"True, but you can identify everything in it."
"Water, booze and poppers. It's not like there's any mystery."
"Still, the point stands."
I called a pizza place we'd found that actually used ingredients that didn't come in a can and ordered one large cooked pizza and two pizzas that could sit in the freezer for awhile.
While Justin moaned and groaned over his paper, I ventured into the bedroom. After five minutes, I gave up trying to figure if an article of clothing on the floor, over the lamp, under a chair or on the bed was clean or dirty. They all went in a dirty pile I'd drop off at the cleaners on my way to work in the morning. "You live like a pig!" I called, too horrified by the state of the bathroom to do more than kick a couple of towels into the dirty clothes pile. Fuck, I should have grabbed some tongs from the kitchen.
"Thank you, honey. I dig you too!" Justin called and I snickered in spite of myself.
I came back out to the kitchen and sat down across from him and waited. It only took a few minutes for him to sigh and look at me, and flush from his neck clear up to his forehead. He shook his head at me and shrugged and gave me that little apologetic smile.
"It's just kind of shitty right now," he said, which was what he always said.
I nodded slowly. "Give me one thing," I said. "One thing I can do to make it less shitty, and I'll do it."
Justin mulled this over for a minute or two. "Well, I saw this cool pair of cargo pants and sweater at Old Navy and I really, really wanted to buy them for you, but you'd never wear them." He sighed brokenly, like the tragic Tiny Tim character he was, then waited.
It was quiet for awhile. I stood up and held out my hand to him. I pulled him up and hugged him tightly. "Justin?"
"Yeah?!" he said, with such over-the-top hope in his voice that I couldn't help snickering into his neck.
"Give me something else."
He laughed a little, and we just stood there hugging each other for a little while. "There isn't anything to do," he said. "There's just all this shit right now and then there won't be shit for awhile and then there'll be shit again."
"Shit like what?" I said.
"I don't know. Shit like working a hundred fucking hours a week at the diner, and a professor who hates my stuff, and you were right about how fucked it was to double up my course load for something as stupid as graduating with my class and if I could fucking sleep for more than two hours at a stretch maybe a complete thought would pass through my fucking Swiss cheese brain and I could actually finish a fucking assignment and..."
"What professor hates your stuff?" I asked, knowing that had to be an exaggeration.
"Andre Krause. Illustration 560. He hates me, he hates my art, he hates people who like me, he hates people who like my art, he hates people who like people who like me..."
"It sounds like he doesn't like you or something," I said.
Justin nodded in agreement. We were still standing there in the kitchen, locked in an embrace. Somehow it made talking about this kind of shit easier.
"You know how sometimes when people criticize your stuff, you can totally see the envy and jealousy in their eyes. Like, it's so right there at the surface that their words just roll right off you?"
"Yeah?"
"Krause doesn't have that. He just really, really thinks my stuff is for shit."
"Fuck him. Who cares?"
"I know. But it's like...he's on this mission to save the earth from having my crappy fucktastic art inflicted upon it, and I mean, shit. And the thing is, I know I'm totally, like, themeing or whatever right now, but, so fucking what. It's what I feel, it's the message I'm sending right now, this second, *here,* now. He so fucking doesn't get *now.* To him it's only about posterity and what they'll say 300 years from now, and 300 years from now it'll all mean something totally different from what I ever intended, and that's out of my hands so I don't give a fuck."
I smiled into his neck. "Except that you do," I added.
Justin moaned. "I'm such a fucking grade whore. But the A's are so pretty. Pretty, pretty A's, all in a row. Sooo pretty."
"Ya want me to go beat this asshole up? I can do that."
Justin laughed, a real belly laugh that shook us both and made me start laughing too. We fucking laughed our asses off forever at that. "Just when I think they could not love me any more than they already do at that school, an idea comes along that's just perfect," Justin said, groaning under the strain of the laughter. "God, can you imagine the next day in the dean's office? This one might really put him over the edge with me."
"Come on. He digs you as much as I do!"
Justin laughed and imitated the dean's sanctimonious tone. "Mr. Taylor, do you mean to tell me after almost flushing you out of the program because of your gimp hand, after making a special exception for you with your new computer, after suspending you for almost single-handedly destroying one of the finest internship programs in the state, do you mean to tell me that your *boyfriend* has now assaulted one of our esteemed professors?!"
We were laughing too hard to say anything for a minute. Then Justin wheezed and continued, "And then I'd have to go into the whole, 'well he's not *really* my boyfriend per se, Dean, but he has fucked me more than once, which is totally major for him..."
"Fuck, stop it!" I said. "It was just a suggestion. Oh God, I'm gonna puke."
"Shit," Justin said, still struggling to catch his breath. "There's your one thing," he said. "I haven't laughed that hard since Michael wore those suede pants with the fringe."
"We were so happy. Now I'm going to cry," I said.
"I thought Ben loved him," Justin said. "I really did."
"Ben is too busy getting that tanning shit sprayed all over him to pay attention to things like Michael raiding Roy Rogers' closet. More's the pity."
"Ben's gayer than Emmett," Justin said.
With that astute observation, Justin returned to his paper. I coaxed him into eating dinner using a few well-placed pepperoni slices, and we had some dessert in the shower. I pushed Justin onto the bed after we'd toweled off, ignoring his protests about his paper.
"Quit the diner," I said, suddenly. "That's too many hours for suck-ass pay."
Justin rolled over onto his back and considered this. "I *have* always wanted to live in a cardboard box," he said thoughtfully. "And when you think about it, eating is *so* last year."
"We'll give up our spacious second home and consolidate," I suggested lightly. "You'll have a nice roof over your head and all the Ho Ho's and Ding Dong's your little heart desires."
"Figuratively *and* literally," Justin agreed.
"What's a figurative Ho Ho?" I asked.
"Indeed," Justin said with a sage nod of his head.
"So, what do you say?" I asked, pulling back to look him in the eye so he'd know it was a serious offer. It always was.
Justin shook his head briefly. "Not yet," he said.
I sighed and ducked my head, exaggerating my defeat a little because it made him smile.
We'd fought about his moving back in a few times, until I finally believed his refusal wasn't an attempt to manipulate me into some fucked up promise to...do something or say something or be something that I had no intention of doing or saying or being.
He had to be somewhere in his life or his head-some fucking place he wasn't yet-then he'd move in. What the fuck, I could wait.
"So I don't get to do anything to make it all better?" I said in mock sadness.
"I guess sometimes God can't even fix everything," Justin said with a shrug.
I crawled on top of him and started humping him with a slow, steady beat. "In a few minutes, when you're callin' my name, you won't think that." I promised.
Justin smiled, then laughed, such a fucking contagious sound. "You're the only guy who thinks 'What?' every time you hear 'Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!'"
I laughed with him. "I'm the only guy who should," I said, and then I fucked him into oblivion because oblivion was all I had left to offer.
"Hold me really tight," he murmured, right on the edge of sleep. "And don't let go for a long time."
"I won't," I whispered into his ear.
I waited a few minutes before silently adding, "You shit."
God fucking damn it! He says these things to me, these fucking things, and it's always when he's half asleep, and my dick's up his ass, and he says these things that are so fucking...
I mean what the fuck is the antidote when he says things like that to me?
How the fuck do you keep him out when your fucking cock is lodged up inside him, and you're lying against a back so smooth and soft it's like it's never fucking seen the light of day, and he says this fucking shit to you that makes you want to drive over to some dumb fuck art professor's house and get in his face and tell him to back off your fuckin' boyfriend and how totally fucked up is that?
Christ, I oughta just get in my car, head south, and keep driving 'til I hit water.
But I can't because I've gotta fucking hold Justin really tight for a fucking long time.
Jesus Christ.
Domesticity 3
Deb did Justin a disservice when she dubbed him Sunshine.
Of course, the pretty blond hair and blinding smile don't help much either.
People shouldn't be so shocked to find an artist's temperament behind all that camouflage, but they are. I mean, three fucking years on now, and I'm still getting these ridiculous, "What's wrong with Sunshine?" questions.
And my, "He's a moody fucking twat, what do you want?" is still met with horrified looks, like they can't believe I would pass off the normally cheerful boy's sullen attitude with a shrug and a roll of the eyes.
But see, I know Justin in ways they never will because they won't let themselves see much beyond the fair-haired aesthetic. And I know when he's in a mood because I drank the last of the orange juice or his latest project isn't where he wants it to be versus a serious downturn that owes more to a sense of being overwhelmed than anything else.
I cut him some slack in the mood department anyway. You know, a baseball bat to the side of the head can change certain things about a person's normally sunny disposition. So can realizing the parents you thought were perfect are really just as fucked up as the next poor slob, and understanding that fairness doesn't have much of a place in the real world, and throwing in with a boyfriend who is probably the most repressed, unavailable son of a bitch in the free world. These are all things that can make a boy less than buoyant on occasion.
I always give Justin the opportunity to work himself out of a funk, and most of the time he does. Really, the only time I step in is when he starts avoiding me, because then I know he's off his game.
So it dawned on me, after suffering through a day or two of the Concerned Citizens for Justin Taylor brigade that the aforementioned Taylor *hadn't* shaken his pert little ass in my face for a few days.
I knew exactly what was going on. He gets himself into these fucking states where he doesn't eat or sleep-instead he obsesses over a class or the disappearing rain forests or the genocide of some fucking tribe in the middle of nowhere. And then all the day-to-day shit of his normally over-scheduled anyway life overwhelms him for a bit.
A couple of days passed with our trading voice mails-his sounding harried and vague, mine increasingly irritated. Finally, I had no choice but to venture over into Collegeville USA.
"Brian!" he said, opening the door to his apartment, ever delighted to see my charming face. "What are you doing here?"
I held my hand out to him. "Hi, I'm Mohammed. How are you?"
Justin's face morphed into a look of terrible concern. "Oh shit, your God Complex is back, isn't it?" he said, stepping back to let me in.
"Where the fuck have you been?" I asked, looking around his place. It wasn't too trashed. I'd condemn it of course, but on the Taylor Scale of Home Destruction, it was fairly moderate.
Justin returned to his laptop at the kitchen table. "Trying to reduce 'The Liberalization of Religion and its Effects on Modern Art' into 10,000 words," he said. "'Cause really, how important is *God* in art anyway?"
I grinned. "You're asking the wrong guy," I said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's all about Me."
Justin buried his face in his hands and said, "How likely, like, on a scale of one to ten, do you think it is that a meteor will hit this building, and I won't have to turn this paper in?"
"Mmm, two," I said.
Justin sighed. "Fuck."
Under the pretense of looking for something to drink, I made a quick check of the fridge and his pantry. "Your milk expired when you were in high school," I said.
"Is that what that smell is?" he asked.
"I don't know. What did this black circle start out as, any idea?"
I pulled...some fucking thing out of the bottom drawer of the fridge and showed it to him. He furrowed his brow at it. "I don't know. Lettuce maybe? An apple?"
"Jesus. I told you it was a bad idea to rent a place so far from your mommy. She'd drop by all the time to keep you in fresh produce if she could."
"Yeah, I would *love* that," Justin agreed. "Leave my fridge alone, it's fine."
"In a toxic, it's-probably-giving-you-brain-damage kind of way, yeah, it is."
"Give me a break. Your fridge is totally pathetic."
"True, but you can identify everything in it."
"Water, booze and poppers. It's not like there's any mystery."
"Still, the point stands."
I called a pizza place we'd found that actually used ingredients that didn't come in a can and ordered one large cooked pizza and two pizzas that could sit in the freezer for awhile.
While Justin moaned and groaned over his paper, I ventured into the bedroom. After five minutes, I gave up trying to figure if an article of clothing on the floor, over the lamp, under a chair or on the bed was clean or dirty. They all went in a dirty pile I'd drop off at the cleaners on my way to work in the morning. "You live like a pig!" I called, too horrified by the state of the bathroom to do more than kick a couple of towels into the dirty clothes pile. Fuck, I should have grabbed some tongs from the kitchen.
"Thank you, honey. I dig you too!" Justin called and I snickered in spite of myself.
I came back out to the kitchen and sat down across from him and waited. It only took a few minutes for him to sigh and look at me, and flush from his neck clear up to his forehead. He shook his head at me and shrugged and gave me that little apologetic smile.
"It's just kind of shitty right now," he said, which was what he always said.
I nodded slowly. "Give me one thing," I said. "One thing I can do to make it less shitty, and I'll do it."
Justin mulled this over for a minute or two. "Well, I saw this cool pair of cargo pants and sweater at Old Navy and I really, really wanted to buy them for you, but you'd never wear them." He sighed brokenly, like the tragic Tiny Tim character he was, then waited.
It was quiet for awhile. I stood up and held out my hand to him. I pulled him up and hugged him tightly. "Justin?"
"Yeah?!" he said, with such over-the-top hope in his voice that I couldn't help snickering into his neck.
"Give me something else."
He laughed a little, and we just stood there hugging each other for a little while. "There isn't anything to do," he said. "There's just all this shit right now and then there won't be shit for awhile and then there'll be shit again."
"Shit like what?" I said.
"I don't know. Shit like working a hundred fucking hours a week at the diner, and a professor who hates my stuff, and you were right about how fucked it was to double up my course load for something as stupid as graduating with my class and if I could fucking sleep for more than two hours at a stretch maybe a complete thought would pass through my fucking Swiss cheese brain and I could actually finish a fucking assignment and..."
"What professor hates your stuff?" I asked, knowing that had to be an exaggeration.
"Andre Krause. Illustration 560. He hates me, he hates my art, he hates people who like me, he hates people who like my art, he hates people who like people who like me..."
"It sounds like he doesn't like you or something," I said.
Justin nodded in agreement. We were still standing there in the kitchen, locked in an embrace. Somehow it made talking about this kind of shit easier.
"You know how sometimes when people criticize your stuff, you can totally see the envy and jealousy in their eyes. Like, it's so right there at the surface that their words just roll right off you?"
"Yeah?"
"Krause doesn't have that. He just really, really thinks my stuff is for shit."
"Fuck him. Who cares?"
"I know. But it's like...he's on this mission to save the earth from having my crappy fucktastic art inflicted upon it, and I mean, shit. And the thing is, I know I'm totally, like, themeing or whatever right now, but, so fucking what. It's what I feel, it's the message I'm sending right now, this second, *here,* now. He so fucking doesn't get *now.* To him it's only about posterity and what they'll say 300 years from now, and 300 years from now it'll all mean something totally different from what I ever intended, and that's out of my hands so I don't give a fuck."
I smiled into his neck. "Except that you do," I added.
Justin moaned. "I'm such a fucking grade whore. But the A's are so pretty. Pretty, pretty A's, all in a row. Sooo pretty."
"Ya want me to go beat this asshole up? I can do that."
Justin laughed, a real belly laugh that shook us both and made me start laughing too. We fucking laughed our asses off forever at that. "Just when I think they could not love me any more than they already do at that school, an idea comes along that's just perfect," Justin said, groaning under the strain of the laughter. "God, can you imagine the next day in the dean's office? This one might really put him over the edge with me."
"Come on. He digs you as much as I do!"
Justin laughed and imitated the dean's sanctimonious tone. "Mr. Taylor, do you mean to tell me after almost flushing you out of the program because of your gimp hand, after making a special exception for you with your new computer, after suspending you for almost single-handedly destroying one of the finest internship programs in the state, do you mean to tell me that your *boyfriend* has now assaulted one of our esteemed professors?!"
We were laughing too hard to say anything for a minute. Then Justin wheezed and continued, "And then I'd have to go into the whole, 'well he's not *really* my boyfriend per se, Dean, but he has fucked me more than once, which is totally major for him..."
"Fuck, stop it!" I said. "It was just a suggestion. Oh God, I'm gonna puke."
"Shit," Justin said, still struggling to catch his breath. "There's your one thing," he said. "I haven't laughed that hard since Michael wore those suede pants with the fringe."
"We were so happy. Now I'm going to cry," I said.
"I thought Ben loved him," Justin said. "I really did."
"Ben is too busy getting that tanning shit sprayed all over him to pay attention to things like Michael raiding Roy Rogers' closet. More's the pity."
"Ben's gayer than Emmett," Justin said.
With that astute observation, Justin returned to his paper. I coaxed him into eating dinner using a few well-placed pepperoni slices, and we had some dessert in the shower. I pushed Justin onto the bed after we'd toweled off, ignoring his protests about his paper.
"Quit the diner," I said, suddenly. "That's too many hours for suck-ass pay."
Justin rolled over onto his back and considered this. "I *have* always wanted to live in a cardboard box," he said thoughtfully. "And when you think about it, eating is *so* last year."
"We'll give up our spacious second home and consolidate," I suggested lightly. "You'll have a nice roof over your head and all the Ho Ho's and Ding Dong's your little heart desires."
"Figuratively *and* literally," Justin agreed.
"What's a figurative Ho Ho?" I asked.
"Indeed," Justin said with a sage nod of his head.
"So, what do you say?" I asked, pulling back to look him in the eye so he'd know it was a serious offer. It always was.
Justin shook his head briefly. "Not yet," he said.
I sighed and ducked my head, exaggerating my defeat a little because it made him smile.
We'd fought about his moving back in a few times, until I finally believed his refusal wasn't an attempt to manipulate me into some fucked up promise to...do something or say something or be something that I had no intention of doing or saying or being.
He had to be somewhere in his life or his head-some fucking place he wasn't yet-then he'd move in. What the fuck, I could wait.
"So I don't get to do anything to make it all better?" I said in mock sadness.
"I guess sometimes God can't even fix everything," Justin said with a shrug.
I crawled on top of him and started humping him with a slow, steady beat. "In a few minutes, when you're callin' my name, you won't think that." I promised.
Justin smiled, then laughed, such a fucking contagious sound. "You're the only guy who thinks 'What?' every time you hear 'Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!'"
I laughed with him. "I'm the only guy who should," I said, and then I fucked him into oblivion because oblivion was all I had left to offer.
"Hold me really tight," he murmured, right on the edge of sleep. "And don't let go for a long time."
"I won't," I whispered into his ear.
I waited a few minutes before silently adding, "You shit."
God fucking damn it! He says these things to me, these fucking things, and it's always when he's half asleep, and my dick's up his ass, and he says these things that are so fucking...
I mean what the fuck is the antidote when he says things like that to me?
How the fuck do you keep him out when your fucking cock is lodged up inside him, and you're lying against a back so smooth and soft it's like it's never fucking seen the light of day, and he says this fucking shit to you that makes you want to drive over to some dumb fuck art professor's house and get in his face and tell him to back off your fuckin' boyfriend and how totally fucked up is that?
Christ, I oughta just get in my car, head south, and keep driving 'til I hit water.
But I can't because I've gotta fucking hold Justin really tight for a fucking long time.
Jesus Christ.