greglaviolette.com An Unspectacular Life, Part 9

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An Unspectacular Life, Part 9
04/23/09

Sorry for the delay. I've been working on getting the garden in. I'm building
raised veggie beds and using the sheet mulching or lasagna gardening method
of building up the beds. I'm slowly taking down my garage before it falls
down and using the wood from it to build the frames. I started some seedlings
about six weeks ago and others more recently. I'm being a bit ambitious. I
have planted three kinds of tomatoes including tomatillos, sugar baby
watermelon, habaneros, jalapeños, chile de arbol, poblano, banana and green
peppers, cilantro, basil, butternut squash or canteloupe (I didn't label the
seeds when I saved them), zucchini, cukes and beets. I haven't found any kale
seeds yet. Oh, and today is my one month aniversary as a raw foodie. There's
no turnig back.

Im tentatively calling the serial, "An Unspectacular Life". There will of
couse be a by-line but it has yet to present itself.

PART NINE

Without Kevin to worry about, I danced until the club closed and when it did,
I was a sweaty mess. I walked with Drew, Brandon and John to an twenty-four
hour doughnut shop. I hadn't seen John since he moved and we had a lot of
catching up to do. I filled him in on Laurie and Mel, which ate most of our
time, and told him that I had seen his old boss from the t-shirt transfer
shop at the mall but she avoided me. He said that she probably didn't see me
but I assured him that she definitely had. She looked right at me then
quickly turned her head and darted off. She had always been friendly when I
came into the shop but acknowledging me in public would somehow make her
guilty by association, something that I really didn't understand. She was a
middle-aged British woman and I was an eighteen year old gay style victim. If
we had been seen talking at the mall, there was no way that someone could
have possibly thought that she might also be a young gay fashionista or even
an old lesbian. An onlooker would have mistaken her for my mother or an aunt.
I claimed that her avoidance was discrimination. John disagreed. Drew and
Brandon agreed.

John had gotten a job in a flower shop and was enjoying it even though the
owner was an old queen who kept putting the moves on him but he was always
able to deflect. I expressed to the table that I didn't ever want to be an
old horny queen. I thought it was probably the worst thing anyone could be.
Drew said that AIDS would see to it that none of us would ever be old. I
hadn't been affected or really ever thought about AIDS. I knew that it was
out there but it seemed to only be affecting clones. Some people said that it
might be poppers. If it was, the clones didn't seem to think so. They kept on
snorting the stuff on the dance floor. Brandon said that he knew someone who
had recently died, a friend of a friend. It would only be a few years before
friends of mine started falling.

Drew was working in a salon where he could wear whatever he wanted and listen
to whatever music he liked. To me, there could not be a better working
environment. How could this even be anything like work? I was forced to wear
a uniform and listen to a rock radio station. Drew didn't really take
advantage of this amazing liberty. He was a fashion light weight. He never
took any big style chances but never failed to let me know what he thought of
mine. There was always an unspoken tension between us. Basically, we were
friends because we were both gay and shared a drum corps history. He was
always a bit smug but never had any reason to be. He was as white trash as I
was. He was also a clepto which was known by everyone but never talked about,
to him at least. Whenever he was around, things went missing. One time,
before I moved out, he was over and forty dollars disappeared from my
mother's purse. Another time, John, Drew and I were practicing our colour
guard drill in my backyard and my tiger eye ring, which I took off and put on
the picnic table, vanished. He was never caught in the act but we all knew
that he was the thief. He was also a very bad liar.

When John was living with his sister and Laurie, before he moved in with his
mother, he and Drew decided that they were going to move to Florida. They
took the Greyhound and got as far as Jacksonville before they had to turn
back for lack of money. The trip was not well planned. When they got back,
two days after they left, Drew told me about their adventure. Apparently it
got ugly quickly. At their first stop over, they went to a restaurant. Money
was tight so Drew ordered the most inexpensive sandwich on the menu, a
grilled cheese. John, I was told, ordered steak and a baked potato with
dessert. On their second stop over, they realized that they would be in dire
straights soon if something was not done. John, Drew recounted, turned a
trick for twenty dollars in the bus terminal washroom. I knew that John would
never have pimped himself out, especially in a public bathroom (he was pee
shy and couldn't eve use a urinal) so I asked him about it. He was more
offended by the steak lie because he said that Drew always spent more money
on food than he did and John prided himself on his frugality. I asked him to
not bring it up with Drew. That's how we handled the Drew problem. We simply
never discussed it with him.

It was five-thirty and everyone was sobering up and getting tired. Drew asked
me the time every ten minutes while we were at the doughnut shop knowing that
all of my watches were just accessories that didn't work. He was getting
irritating not only to me but to John and Brandon as well. I don't think that
he realized how we all felt about him and that we tolerated him out of some
sense of loyalty to the past. They walked me to the bus terminal a few blocks
away. It still wasn't open but would be in fifteen minutes. I said that I was
fine to wait alone and on a deserted street, kissed them good night and
watched them walk away. Suddenly, I felt lonely. Not because I would miss my
friends. I would see them soon. It was that I was going back to a place that
I was out growing and I was getting so tired of being a verbal punching bag
because, for some reason even unknown to me, I was compelled to dye my hair
blue black and wear smoking jackets. It was time to start thinking of moving
on.

I slept on the bus and had to be wakened by the driver when we arrived. I was
still a little drunk. It was September and the morning was cool which helped
to revive me. I walked the six blocks to the restaurant, went in the back
door and directly to the bathroom to freshen up. What I saw in the mirror
shocked me. The combination of Final Net, dance floor sweat and sleeping on
the bus had remolded my hair into a right leaning ratty bun-like mound on the
top of my head. The side of my face that I had slept on was cross hatched
with red lines from my bunched up lab coat which I had used as a pillow and I
stank. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that I had been raped
and left for dead. Less than twelve hours ago, I was the poster boy for the
second British invasion. Now I looked like the poster boy for a high school
alcohol abuse campaign. The caption under my pathetic effigy on the poster
would read, "Do you still think drinking is cool? He does. Boozers are
losers. Think before you drink."

I had to put my head under the tap in the staff washroom sink to release the
hold that the Final Net had on my hair. I washed my face and popped a couple
of Clorets into my mouth. I got into my whites and went into the pantry where
I rubbed some corn starch under my arms. It was nine o'clock and I was
present. We were serving brunch and I didn't know how to poach an egg so I
was put on fryers. For the next the next six hours I stood over a hot deep
fryer waiting for things to float, listening to Led Zepplin and Aerosmith. I
was paying the price and hating Kevin more and more as the day dragged on.
When three o'clock finally came, I left without saying good bye to anyone and
practically crawled back to Lily's apartment in the back of her wicker shop
to my room and my bed. I fell asleep listening the The Cure's, "Seventeen
Seconds". Lily woke me up at seven. I had a phone call. It was Kevin.