Futureproof Read online

  I slip into Jonas’ bedroom where he sits with our mother, examining a textbook.

  “Listen, Ma? I’m going over to Jason’s house and we’re gonna hang out, listen to music and stuff. I’ll be back sometime tomorrow morning. He’s a guy I met in drama class.” I talk up the part about drama class because this implies that I’m actually getting into being in the performing arts, that my mother was right about that after all.

  She sits there sizing me up, narrows her eyes.

  “Sure, you can go. As long as Jason’s parents said it’s OK.”

  Jonas looks up at me. His envy is obvious, seeing as he’s only thirteen and therefore in possession of far less privilege than me. I give Mother a long, appreciative hug, scrub the top of Jonas’ head with an absent hand.

  “Keep hittin’ those books, kid. Maybe you’ll get to be as smart as me someday.”

  “I’m already smarter than you,” he says, punching me on the arm.

  This will be the first time I’ve ever spent a night out with no parental supervision. The half-mile walk up the road to Tabitha’s house is open and resplendent as the sunset riots out before me. It’s as though God himself has condoned these preliminary steps into the world. Altogether it is the sort of autumn evening one remembers through the tang of wood smoke, when the leaves are all brilliant oranges and reds and the temperature is sheer perfection—the kind of night when you can feel the rest of your life unfolding according to plan.

  Tabitha is smoking a cigarette on the cement stoop outside her apartment. Her “friend” 8-Ball is on his way over to pick us up, she says. She drops the cigarette, stubbing it out with her slipper, and heads back inside to the bathroom. Her mom is watching TV in the back bedroom. She yells an acknowledgment to me and I yell back. Her mom is always nice to me in a pitying, I-know-your-parents-suck-and-you’ll-be-lucky-to-get-out-alive kind of way, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

  “I don’t know why you have to wear so much makeup,” I tell Tabitha. “You’re already beautiful without it.”

  “I know you think that, but there’s still the matter of the rest of the sane world thinking the same.”

  “Well…fuck ’em if they don’t.”

  I smile at her mirror-face. She glares back, a lipstick half forgotten in her hand. “Please leave me alone for a minute so I can finish.”

  I continue watching her. “You’re not wearing a bra, are you?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Can I feel?”

  “No!” She laughs and pushes me, narrowly missing my shirt with her lipstick. “Get out!”

  I step outside the bathroom. “Do you think we have time for a quickie before it’s time to leave?”

  She slams the door.

  Tab’s friend 8-Ball talks a thousand miles an hour, punctuated by cackling laughter that makes you want to quit your job and follow him. And he’s a maniac on the road. He cuts off other cars with complete disregard and takes hairpin turns at 60 m.p.h.

  “He always drives like this,” Tabitha yells over the blaring stereo.

  “Do I look scared or something?”

  Tab shrugs and looks away. “Maybe. Not really.”

  “Good. Because I’m not.”

  We screech into a parking lot, the bottom of 8-Ball’s rust-bucket Ford scraping against the curb.

  “We’re heeeerrrrre,” Tabitha intones in her best Poltergeist impression.

  “We’re where?” I ask. “This is the big surprise? A run-down movie theater?”

  “It doesn’t matter what the outside looks like, silly. It’s what is happening on the inside.”

  “Good one, Tab. ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ Great. Gee, I think I know that lesson. I remember it from A Tale of Two Cities in Hingleton’s class. The picture of the guillotine on the front cover made it seem like the book would actually be interesting but it fucking sucked.”

  “Dude.” 8-Ball turns to me matter-of-factly. “Chill. This is going to blow your goddam mind. I promise.” He gives me a Cheshire cat grin that is more disturbing than reassuring.

  In the parking lot kids sporting baggy pants are skateboarding, ramping off the cement staircases on either end of the theater sidewalk. As we approach the dilapidated box office I can see people milling around the lobby through a fog of cigarette smoke. One guy wears a foot-long Mohawk that sticks straight up. Another one has white makeup caked all over his face and lipstick smeared haphazardly around his mouth. There’s a couple decked out in leather bondage gear making out in a dark corner. There are four comic book dorks playing ancient Atari arcade games against the wood-paneled wall.

  It’s a wild, beautiful circus, without the juggling. My eyes burn with all there is to take in. These are the people Victor always refers to as freaks.

  “Well, whaddaya think?” Tabitha whispers in my ear.

  “What is this place?”

  “This, my young friend, is The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

  As we walk into the theater, a guy dressed in red-and-black leather chaps is yelling from a stage in front of the movie screen.

  “Rule number six!”

  “SEX!” the crowd yells back at him in unison.

  “SIX!”

  “SEX!”

  “Have it your way! Rule number seven: There is no rule number seven! Rule number eight! No sex with your date unless you brought one for me!”

  I give Tabitha my “What an idiot” look.

  “Just watch,” she implores.

  “Are there any virgins in the house?” the leather-chapped freak yells.

  I look around the theater. Amazingly, only a few hands go up.

  There is no way in hell I’m admitting to this guy that I’m a virgin. He looks like the demented ringmaster of a bondage circus.

  “We’ve got a virgin right over here,” a voice proclaims, not six inches from my head.

  I glance at Tab and 8-Ball and shriek back in horror to find them vigorously pointing at me. 8-Ball is laughing so hard tears are rolling down his cheeks.

  “I am not a virgin!” I yell in desperation, turning to Tabitha. Here sits a woman who at one time had her hand on my actual throbbing member. That has to be worth something.

  “Not a virgin like that, Luke. A virgin at Rocky is someone who’s never seen the movie.”

  I watch in dread as the Ringmaster approaches me with his little green-tinted sunglasses and a cast of willing lackeys following behind him. I’m led down the aisle along with the other unfortunates who’ve been ratted out by their so-called friends. As we are marched onto the stage I take solace in the fact that at least I’m not alone.

  The crowd mocks us, chanting, “VIR-GIN! VIR-GIN!”

  Two girls dressed like low-rent hookers approach the stage. One has reddish hair pulled up on top of her head and is wearing a black teddy that shows off her tits nicely. The other has dark, wiry hair that grows in all directions, a body that would stop a truck. I recognize her from school. She winks at me, which is comforting.

  The “hookers” line us up across the stage, facing the crowd.

  The first guy to be deflowered looks about my age and appears ready to shit himself. The crowd yells:

  “Make him deep-throat a hot dog!”

  “Have him run around the building naked!”

  It is decided that he should have to receive simulated anal sex from the redheaded hooker. He does a piss-poor job of it. Barely a sound comes out of his mouth. He’s obviously never taken any drama classes.

  Then it’s my turn.

  With his bony fingers gripping my arm, the Ringmaster asks the crowd to hand down my fate.

  The decree is announced.

  I am to give the kinky-haired hooker simulated cunnilingus. The proclamation is barely pronounced and I find myself awash in relief. There will be no public speaking or fake sex noises. I just have to pretend to lick this woman from top to bottom, a scenario I’ve imagined about a million times. I stick my tongue out as far as it will go, like t
hat one ugly bastard from KISS. The crowd cheers me on.

  Twenty seconds later the girl lets go of my hair and I scurry back to the relative safety of my seat, feeling the blood drain from my face, the adrenaline really starting to kick in.

  “Thanks a lot, Tab.”

  “Oh, you’ll be alright, Luke. Wasn’t that fun?” She flutters her eyes at me.

  As the theater darkens for the showing of the film, small groups begin slipping off to poorly lit areas of the theater: guys making out with other guys and girls doing the same. A line of men snaking their way into the Women’s Room and leaving minutes later with smirks on their faces as they zip their pants. After the last guy zips up, a trampy-looking woman emerges looking disheveled but grinning nonetheless, evidently proud of herself. She goes by the name Squirrelly because, she brags to anyone who’ll listen, she “can fit more nuts in her mouth than a squirrel.”

  The debauchery taking place in the theater mimics the movie’s ethos of “Live your life based purely on the pleasures that you can derive from it.” My mom says Satanists have that same ethos, but then again, so did Walt Whitman.

  In the movie, a couple gets a flat tire in a rainstorm and has to go to an apparently haunted castle for help. It is soon revealed that the inhabitants of the castle are two lesbians, a resurrected Elvis impersonator, and a flaming transvestite named Frank N. Furter.

  Like some even more demented Dr. Frankenstein, Frank creates this buff-looking homo guy named Rocky, whom he can screw whenever he pleases. I think in the end somebody ends up being from a different planet. The movie pretty much sucks, even with the crowd yelling out ad-libbed dialogue over the actors.

  I keep coming back, though, because these people, despite their moral depravity, despite their lack of social interaction skills, they accept everybody that shows up, no matter what.

  There is a certain loneliness that hangs in the air, and we all feel it. We are all at home with it. Behind the façade of people being irresponsible and reprehensible and in all other ways completely morally bankrupt, there is a hopelessness that holds us together. This sadness is the glue between skaters and cross-dressing faggots, between the mohawked punks and computer dorks who’ve catalogued and categorized every episode of Star Trek, going so far as to speak to one another in Klingon. One night some idiot showed up wearing sunglasses and a wife-beater in fifteen-degree weather. These people don’t function in any “normal” reality. They must stay holed up in their parents’ basements, plotting revenge on the world five days a week, but on Friday and Saturday night they turn out en masse to mingle with their kind. I mean, the movie is a geek magnet. But despite these surface differences, they are there for you, whether you’re the coolest dude on earth or a man trapped in a woman’s body. Or vice versa.

  And the girls. There are so many gorgeous girls—beautiful but fucked in the head just the same. I’ve begun to realize that fucked-in-the-head is my type. It just feels wrong to try to get with a regular, “college-trek” girl. They always have parents that want to size you up, explore your goals in life, find out what your parents “do.”

  I cannot talk to those kinds of people. I can’t stand most of the people here, either, but they accept me and that’s good enough, better than I can expect anywhere else. I usually sit in the corner of the theater, occasionally yelling out a line or two just to stay with the game and maybe messing around with Tabitha’s breasts for as long as she’ll let me before she’s off to get laid by the next asshole.

  Other than that I keep to myself and try not to make eye contact.

  TRANSMISSION 03:

  a promising career snuffed out in its prime

  January

  After months of rehearsal, my drama class is producing its first big production of the year. A circus elephant named Helga is cared for by an apprentice trainer named Red (played by yours truly). Red always mistreats the elephant, and then one day the elephant snaps and kills the little bastard. The ignorant hick town where the circus happens to be that night decides that the elephant must be prosecuted for murder. Helga is convicted and sentenced to death. There are protests against her execution, but in the end the elephant gets hanged by the neck from a scaffold.

  It’s a play for kids, a period piece in the vein of Bambi and Old Yeller, where the protagonist is an animal that has to die so the spoiled little brats scarfing popcorn in the audience will finally wake up and realize that life is full of absurd suffering and heartache.

  The “elephant” in our production is actually three girls wearing gray sweat suits who weave their hands together so that their arms semi-resemble a trunk. I have to ride on their shoulders and get “thrown” from the beast during one scene. Without fail, I kick at least one of the girls in the head every time they lean forward to dump me onto the stage. We practice and practice but my foot inevitably comes up and levels one of them. Aside from that repetitive mishap, the three performances at our school theater go off without a hitch. We are given standing ovations every night. Terry, our theater teacher and the show’s director, decides that our play is good enough to take to the state level.

  The weekend of the competition I come down with a vicious case of the flu. I can’t stop coughing, my throat is constricted and inflamed, I have a fever that won’t break.

  But the show must go on!

  I try to stay positive and am helped considerably in that arena by the reality of there being only one dressing room at the high school where the competition is held. Which means, glory be and hallelujah!, we’re all going to see each other naked—yet another of my long-term fantasies, about to be fulfilled. I’ve already seen Tabitha, of course, but now there’s also the mouthwatering possibility of Katie and Nickie and Emily nudity on the horizon.

  The excitement is short-lived.

  As we unload our costumes and equipment, I find myself less invigorated by the impending promise of female nudity. It is slight consolation, the possibility of all those gorgeous breasts, because I feel like hell. Only the expectations of everyone else in the play keep me going. I have a small part, and I’m only in a couple of scenes, but what do they have if the guy that gets killed isn’t there to get killed? They’ve got nothing! In the guise of hapless, moronic, doomed Red, I am integral. These are the words of inspiration handed me by Justin Blackburn. He’s the dashing actor who has landed the leads in our school plays for three years running.

  So with my head spinning out, I struggle on, beating down my affliction for the good of my fellow thespians, for the good of our school. I’ve got my head in my hands, trying to remain conscious, sitting at a white table so bright it hurts to open my eyes. Emily Adams walks over and stands directly in front of me while a couple of other girls wrap her supple breasts in Ace bandages for her part as a prepubescent girl. Or maybe she’s supposed to be a boy. Regardless, I open my eyes and there they are, right in front of me, two perfect, seventeen-year-old teardrop breasts. My stomach turns over on itself. I put my head back in my hands.

  Terry approaches me as I stand in the wings waiting for my big entrance, when I’ll demonstrate to the audience my utter lack of consideration for animal cruelty laws. She puts her hands on my shoulders and whispers, “You can do this, Luke. Some of the greatest performances of all time have been executed under incredible duress. You can do this!”

  I am seeing three of her. Her voice echoes. Then she’s pushing me out on the stage and for a moment I am terrified. I have to act angry and sullen, demonstrate an unhealthy level of self-confidence. I begin reciting my lines and immediately realize that I can’t talk very loud, can’t project my voice from the stage, from the depths of my diaphragm, as we have been over so many times in class.

  This is a disaster.

  This is a fucking plane crashing into a field full of lollipop-clutching tourists. I am the worst thing to happen to the stage since the invention of moving pictures. I want to run away and continue running, out of the theater, out of the school. Everyone will hate me and I will have ru
ined our chances at high school thespian fame, replacing it instead with a notoriety reserved for pedophiles and washed-up former child actors. But even if that scenario proves livable, I’ll never outrun Darin Krenapter, the track star with one of the leads in this play. He thinks he’s the next goddam Dustin Hoffman. His mom probably convinced him of it.

  I tell myself that I must endure, I must find it in myself to battle this affliction. I look down at the floor, gather the power of all the sick-unto-dying actors who have gone before me. And then I stomp over to that “elephant” and smack the shit out of Kara’s ass, she being the back end of our pachyderm.

  “Listen here, you fat bitch!”

  The audience begins murmuring.

  “I’ve had it with your thinking you can push me around just because you’re bigger and stronger and fatter,” I enunciate. “I have opposable fucking thumbs! What do yoooouuuuu have? You walk on your toenails, for God’s sake.”

  The audience is gasping.

  “You’re going to stand on that goddam ball if it means the death of me!” I inadvertently add some foreshadowing in my delusional state.

  Kara, Darla, and Sarina, the triumvirate of girls that comprise Helga the elephant, stare at me in shock. I turn for a moment to stage right and Terry is flipping out, pacing back and forth and pointing violently at her copy of the script. I wink at her. This is the part where I climb up on the girls and violently assert my human mastery. But the girls just stand there looking at me in open-mouthed horror instead of shaping their hands into the form of a two-tier stirrup, like we’ve practiced ten thousand fucking times.

  “Put your hands down!” I whisper. They comply. I struggle to maintain the strength it takes to scale the three actresses-as-elephant. I finally get there and let fly a snarl of dominant mastery.

  At this point the girls run around the stage with me on top of them as I pretend to physically abuse them with a bullwhip. Then they stop and try to fluidly kneel down so that to the untrained eye it looks as though I’m violently thrown off and trampled to death.