Lonely Hearts Chapel

Excerpt from Chapter 4 of LONELYHEARTS 2016, my upcoming campy, surrealish, coming-of-age dramedy novel about a bipolar pansexual at the end of the world.

(…in which we meet a character known as Dead Eyes, “so-called because of his almost-black brown eyes and vacant stare. I assumed it was because he was stoned all the time, which he was, but he hid it well. He had the same vacant stare even when sober. It was just his personality. People called him Dead Eyes as a term of endearment, though; not of ridicule. All the girls at school seemed to think it was sexy. And honestly, they were right. There was something about his way of looking right-through you that made you more desperate than ever to be noticed.”)

During our visits, he always poured himself a few small glasses of his parents’ scotch. Whenever he accidentally ingested a large amount, he would pour a little water into the bottle to raise the liquid level and make his thievery less obvious. His parents rarely spoke to each other anymore, and they slept in separate bedrooms; so if they noticed some scotch was gone, they would probably just assume the other drank it.

His parents’ lack of communication, with each other and with him, had become important pieces of something he thought was happiness. Whenever his parents left him alone, he would come alive by deadening himself. With booze, cigarettes, weed. He would usually offer me some–‘to loosen you up,’ he would say–but I would usually decline all but the occasional dainty sip of scotch. ‘Such a pussy,’ he would always laugh at me, and I would respond by giggling an ‘I know, I’m sorry’ before pulling him into a rough and wet kiss to distract from my uncoolness.

I often found myself distracting him with flirtation because we didn’t share a lot of interests or opinions. Even if we did, he probably wouldn’t have enjoyed discussing them. I said once that I thought his parents sleeping in separate rooms was oddly romantic; then I blushed and touched him, and I admitted that it reminded me of the type of togetherness he and I shared; I said, whenever I got married, I would need to have a separate bedroom / office of my own, where I could retire without waking my spouse on the nights I stayed up late.

He said it was ‘fucked up’ that I’d want separate bedrooms.

I asked him if he ever thought about being married someday, and he said it bummed him out to think about that. He said he’d need to marry a woman, so they probably wouldn’t have sex much because he wouldn’t ‘be that into it.’

I asked why he watched porn of women if they didn’t turn him on, and he said it was different with porn because he could almost imagine that it was a guy doing all the things the girl-on-screen was doing.

Plus, he said it’d be too hard to remember to delete his Internet browsing history every single time, like he’d need to do if he watched gay porn; just in case his parents ever snooped on his computer.

When he said that, I remembered a slogan that I’d seen every day on the door of my first-grade classroom; in big block letters, it read: EVERY CHILD IS A STORY WAITING TO BE TOLD. And then I thought about Dead Eyes’ parents, and how they treated him more like a letter they were writing: to distant relatives, to friends from college, to members of their church. He was somebody else’s letter instead of his own story, and I was sad for him. He ‘couldn’t’ be gay and still have parents, because that would disappoint them too much. Back when he joined the basketball team (instead of football, which his father played,) his parents’ reactions made it clear to him that such a disappointment was the biggest kind they could tolerate while still supporting him, emotionally et cetera.

I often wondered if his parents would’ve been proud to know that their son was addicted to the same scotch as they were.

Read more excerpts (and soon, the first five chapters) here.

Be gentle; this is only a tentative cover.

Love always,

your Mister