Tell Me It's Real

  “Give me dairy,” everyone said, “or give me osteoporosis!”

  “This can’t possibly be healthy,” I muttered.

  “Is he going to open the door?” Sandy asked. “I tried to break it down, but he must have changed his doors to some kind of unbreakable metal.”

  “Or you could just eat more,” Mom scolded him. “I saw you, like, three days ago and I swear you’ve lost at least thirty-eight pounds.”

  “It’s all the crack I smoke,” he explained. “I don’t have time to eat because I’m too busy thinking crack thoughts.”

  “What are crack thoughts?” Nana asked.

  “Oh, things like the government is going to come steal my babies.”

  “You don’t have babies,” Dad said, obviously frowning. “Unless I missed something and you adopted that Croatian baby that Paul wanted.”

  “I don’t have babies,” Sandy said. “But crack makes you think crazy things. That’s why Whitney said crack is whack, God rest her soul.”

  “You shouldn’t be smoking crack,” my dad said sternly. “First Paul’s a pony, and now you’re smoking crack and having the government steal your babies? Who is Whitney? Is that your dealer?”

  “Whitney Houston,” Mom said. “You know, dear. She was that singer who sang that song you like that Helena performed.”

  “‘Hit Me Baby, One More Time?”

  “That’s Britney, dear.”

  “‘Dirty?”

  “That was Christina.”

  “Umbrella?”

  “And that was Rihanna. Larry, you’re embarrassing yourself. You have a gay son, for God’s sake. How can you not know your divas?” Mom sounded affronted. “Paul? Paul! If you can hear me, don’t listen to your father! He obviously doesn’t know his ass from his elbow!”

  “Language,” Dad scolded. “And I know my divas. I know them very well. What about that Woman Goo-Goo that Helena performs like?”

  “That’s Lady Gaga,” Sandy sighed. “Did you really look at me and think I was Woman Goo-Goo? I don’t know how I feel about that. I just might be offended.”

  “Your hair was very pretty,” Dad deflected.

  “Thank you, sugar,” Helena purred. “You need to come back and see me sometime. I sure do miss you when you’re not around.”

  “Oh, you,” Dad giggled, obviously blushing.

  “Oh Christ,” I gagged.

  “Language!”

  “Dear, as much as I love you flirting with Sandy in front of me—Sandy, you should know Larry would most likely be a bottom, so I don’t know really what you two would do together aside from bumping bums—we’re here for Paul.”

  “That’s right,” Nana said. “He’s obviously very depressed, and this is a cry for attention. I don’t want him to go all emo and cut himself.”

  “I’m not going to cut myself,” I said.

  “Paul could never be a cutter,” Mom said. “He’s too much of a baby when it comes to pain. He’d go the Sylvia Plath route and stick his head in a gas oven like a real lady.”

  “Bull,” Dad said. “He’d take sleeping pills and then choke on his own vomit.”

  “You’re both wrong,” Sandy said. “He’d get drunk on gin and fall asleep smoking Virginia Slim 120s and accidentally set the bed on fire.”

  “For some reason, I don’t think the best way to start an intervention is by discussing the best way for the person you are intervening on to kill themselves,” I told them. “That person might take it the wrong way.”

  “Mary J. Blige,” Dad exclaimed. “She’s another diva! She did that song ‘No More Drama’. I think that was my favorite costume you had, Sandy.”

  “Oh, baby doll,” Helena exclaimed. “I love it as well.”

  “That’s such an apt song for right now,” Nana said.

  “If you start singing it, I’m going to lose it,” I growled at her.

  She sniffed. “I’ll have you know that I was considered quite the singer back in my day. I didn’t even have to show my breasts like all the young women do now. What happened to talent for talent’s sake? Now if you want to be famous, it’s about how much meat is on your dress or how much nipple you are willing to show.”

  “It’s a tragedy,” Dad agreed. “I don’t know why we have to live in a time with meat nipples or whatever you said.”

  “Shall we get started?” Mom asked. “I have a feeling if we don’t start now, we’ll never get this done, and Paul will waste away in there because his pride won’t allow him to give in.”

  “My body will just suck up its fat stores,” I reminded them. “Maybe it’ll be a good idea for me to stay in here. When I finally come out in a week, I could go into modeling and forget this week ever happened when I’m walking the runway in Milan.”

  “You’ll have to change your name,” Sandy said. “Paul doesn’t sound like a modeling name.”

  “Well, I think Paul is a handsome name,” Mom said. “I picked it, after all. But I could see how Sandy could be right. Maybe you should change your name to Gregorio?”

  “Or Tunus?” Dad said.

  “Or Talon?” Nana added.

  “Ooooo,” they all breathed.

  “Talon is a good one,” Sandy said. “Okay, let’s get started.”

  “What are you guys doing?” I demanded through the door as something started to scrape on the other side.

  “None of your business,” Mom said. “Go back to pouting.”

  “I wasn’t pouting!”

  “Dear, remember that little pouting face he would get whenever he didn’t get something he wanted? I always thought that he looked like a little cherub with those cheeks, even if it was the most annoying thing on the planet.”

  “Yes,” Dad said, “but you fell for it every time.”

  “That’s because I’m a good mother.”

  “You are pretty good,” I agreed. “Most of the time. Right now is not one of those times.”

  The scraping continued until I realized that they were unscrewing the hinges from the door so they could take it off its frame. “I’m going to call the police and tell them you’re breaking in!”

  Sandy snorted. “If you do, can you make sure the fire department comes too? I am pretty sure I am owed some eye candy after having to put up with these shenanigans. And tell them I want the fireman to look exactly like the fireman calendar you had in 1999.”

  “Mr. October,” we both groaned. Mr. October had been the most drool-worthy man ever to walk the face of the earth. My teenage fantasies of him (he who I had named Rodrigo) had included everything from him saving me from dragons (I was on a bit of a fantasy kick there for a while) to he and I being spies and falling madly in love on an undercover assignment, only to be betrayed by a mole higher up and being torn apart (no worries, though; the fantasy continued and after the betrayal, we were reunited three years later in a fiery passion on a beach in his homeland of Italy).

  “I want firemen too,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just call them anyway.”

  “I thought we were doing this because you were in love with someone already?” Nana asked. “I don’t think your parents raised you to be a whore.”

  “Language!” Dad barked.

  “I think he might try to beat our record,” Mom said.

  “I’ve known him longer than a week,” I said for some damn reason.

  “Yes, but you didn’t actually talk to him the first time until Monday, right?”

  “I don’t think I told you that, so the fact that you know kind of creeps me out.”

  “I have spies everywhere,” Mom said, cackling.

  “She really does,” Dad said.

  “Sandy is your spy, isn’t he?”

  “You bet he is,” Mom said.

  “No firemen for Sandy!” I decreed.

  “You’re going to make me a spinster,” he muttered.

  “And that should do it,” Dad said. “You know, you kids today with your fancy iPads and iPhones and iTunes and iPods. None of those would have hel
ped you here. Maybe I should market this as the iScrewdriver and see how much money I could make.”

  “Billions,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure the market value just dropped 300 percent on my house since you unscrewed this door. Thanks, Dad.”

  With a grunt, he lifted it out of the way and set it against the wall. I glared at the four of them, especially when I saw that Nana did not have Ding Dongs and a burrito from Los Betos. One should not promise Los Betos if one cannot deliver, for it might make another person extraordinarily pissy.

  “You done pouting?” Mom asked.

  I crossed my arms and stuck out my bottom lip. “I’m not pouting.”

  “He’s not done pouting,” Dad told Mom.

  “Okay, well, let’s get this intervention started,” Nana said gleefully.

  They all started forward into the room, forcing me to take steps back until my legs hit the bed and I had to sit. Nana pulled out my desk chair and sat in it with a grunt, scooching closer to me until our knees bumped together. Mom sat to one side of me and put her hand on mine, and Dad sat on my other side, pressing his leg against mine. Sandy sat on the floor near my feet, and I suddenly understood what it meant to have your family smothering you.

  “Who would like to begin?” Mom asked.

  “We’re not really doing this,” I snapped. “This is ridiculous!”

  “I will,” Nana said as she pulled a massive pile of paper from her purse. She began to read in a flat monotone. “Paul, when you do stupid things, it makes me sad. I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d—”

  “When in the hell did you have time to write this?” I asked, dropping my jaw. “These things just happened! Sandy just called you!”

  “I already had something written,” Nana said, affronted. “I modified it on the way over here. Can I finish, please?”

  “Of course you can,” Mom said, patting her hand.

  “No, she can’t—”

  “Paul,” she shouted over me, starting to read again, “when you do stupid things, it makes me sad! I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d gone behind your partner’s back to see his mom! And then, to make it worse, you locked yourself in your room and started to cry!”

  “I didn’t cry—”

  “It hurts me to see you like this! I want you to be happy, but you keep sabotaging yourself! You need to allow yourself to be happy and to stay off meth and—Wait… I don’t think I got this far to change it. Hold on a second.” She pulled a pen from her purse and squinted down at the paper, starting to scratch off words and muttering to herself.

  “You know,” I told her, “I don’t know what’s more unreal: the fact that you already had an intervention speech written out in case I got strung out on meth, or the fact that this is actually happening right now.”

  “I like to prepare for every eventuality,” Nana said.

  “I told you to open the door,” Sandy said mildly. “Since you didn’t, this is what had to happen.”

  “We’re here because we love you,” Mom said.

  “And because Vince is pretty great,” Dad said. “You’d have to be pretty stupid to let him go.”

  “He made me go,” I reminded them.

  “You probably just surprised him,” Mom pointed out. “He wasn’t expecting you to be there and it freaked him out.”

  “Okay,” Nana murmured to herself in concentration. “I should also probably take out the part where I ask if I could have your stuff if you ever overdosed. That doesn’t seem applicable here.” She crossed out even more. I wanted to ask her how many pages her intervention speech ran, but didn’t think I wanted to know the answer.

  “You probably would have done the same thing,” my dad said. “Scratch that; I know you would have done the same thing. But it’s not about you. This is about him. This is about how he’s going to lose his mother very shortly. This is about how he’s going to need someone to lean on and that someone should be you.”

  I tried to stand, but they wouldn’t let me. I was starting to get pissed, but at who, I didn’t know. “You know,” I growled at them all, “everyone keeps saying that to me, that he’s going to need me, that he’s going to depend on me, but that’s bullshit. If he needed me, he wouldn’t have sent me away. If he needed me, he would have told me what was going on. If he wanted me as much as he claimed, he would have fucking let me in instead of allowing me to act all stupid and do what I did. So you’re right. This isn’t about me. This is all on him.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mom said firmly. “It’s not fair and you know it. Everything around him right now is heightened to an extreme.”

  “Exactly,” I snapped at her, trying to ignore the hurt look on her face. “Everything is heightened. There’s no way he would have fallen for me that quickly. There’s no way I could love him this fast. Everything is just moving at light speed, and it’s because of what he is going through. That’s all it is. It’s just that and nothing more.”

  Dad snorted. “You were always such a terrible liar.”

  “That’s a good thing, though,” Mom said. “Rather him be bad at it than good.”

  “He tried to tell me once that this singlet I found at the thrift store looked good on me,” Sandy said. “But he kept twitching like he’s doing now and it totally gave him away.”

  “Did you buy it anyway?” Dad asked.

  “No. Paul made the very good point that most likely someone else’s balls or vagina had been smooshed in that before I got my hands on it, and I couldn’t in good faith wear it without getting grossed out.”

  “Oh, man,” Dad groaned. “Maybe I should be a homosexual. Smooshed vagina? No offense, Matty, but yuck.”

  “I’ll support you with whatever you decide to do,” Mom told him, reaching over me to hold his hand. “I could always be your fruit fly if you do come out.”

  “That would be interesting,” Dad said. “Do you think I could be a leather daddy?”

  “You could pull it off,” she said. “I know you can.”

  “Paul has chaps you could borrow,” Sandy said, a little bit of Helena poking through. “I would have no problem seeing that. You’d be pretty hot, Larry.”

  “I probably shouldn’t add that I’d have Johnny Depp officiate your funeral,” Nana muttered, scribbling furiously. “Somehow, I don’t think that would be appreciated.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the world who wishes he could be deaf,” I said to no one in particular. “And blind.”

  “You don’t wish that,” Mom said. “What an awful thing to say.”

  “You should probably take that back,” Dad said. “You don’t want to piss off God and wake up tomorrow blind and deaf.”

  “Fine, I take it back,” I mumbled. I didn’t really want to be blind and deaf. “But if God is granting wishes, I wish you’d all go away.”

  “I don’t think God is a genie,” Sandy said. “But if he is, I wish for those two-thousand-dollar boots I saw in the boutique downtown. In red.”

  “I wish for world peace,” Nana said. “And then six billion dollars.”

  “I wish for more wishes,” Dad said.

  “I wish for my son to stop being so pigheaded,” Mom said.

  We waited.

  “And for Vin Diesel to come to my house and be my naked maid,” she finished with a blush.

  “I could take him in a fight,” Dad said, flexing his arms. “I’ll be your naked maid when we get home. Do you need dusting, Mrs. Auster?”

  “I am feeling pretty dusty,” Mom agreed, winking at him.

  “I’m sitting right between you two! Gross!”

  “Gee, thanks for pointing out the obvious,” Dad said, rolling his eyes.

  “Finished!” Nana said. “Paul, when you do stupid things, it makes me sad. I couldn’t believe when Sandy called us and told us that you’d gone behind your partner’s back to see his mom! And then, to make it worse, you locked yourself in your room and started to cr
y. I wish that things could go back to the way they were before. Like the way they were yesterday. Yesterday was a good day. Do you remember? You came over to my house with Vince and we all had dinner and I showed him Slutty Snow White and Johnny Depp loved him and Vince tried to eat your face outside after he found the bike. I wasn’t supposed to see that, but it was kind of hard not to notice when you got slammed up against the side of my house. In conclusion, you should go after Vince, and never do meth because you’ll lose your teeth and get weird spots on your face. No one likes weird spots.” She looked up at me and smiled.

  “That was lovely, Gigi,” Sandy said, leaning his head against her leg. “You are such an eloquent speaker.”

  “Thank you, honey,” she said, preening. “It goes on for an additional sixteen pages, but I felt that was enough to make my point.”

  “Paul, do you love him?” my mom asked suddenly.

  I didn’t have time to think. “Yes… oh shit. I meant no. Of course not. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  They waited.

  I sighed. “Yes,” I whispered. “I don’t know how or when or why, but yes.” I hung my head.

  My dad reached up and rubbed my back. “Paul, did you know that me and your mom almost got divorced?”

  I snapped my head back up. “What? What are you talking about? You guys met, everything was rosy, and a week later you were married. There was no divorce. There wasn’t even an almost.”

  “No. Not completely. Oh, I knew I loved her right away, and I knew she loved me after she tried to kill me with her car, but I didn’t know if that was going to be enough.” He smiled over at my mom whose eyes were a bit watery. “It’s one thing to love a person, but it’s another to love them regardless of their faults. And I had a bunch of them.”

  “He really did,” Mom mused happily. “So many faults.”

  “So many,” he agreed. “So when I asked her to marry me, I was sure she was going to laugh at me, even if she did love me. It was going to be too fast, I thought she’d say. We were too young. We didn’t really know a thing about each other. But I knew what I wanted, and I wanted her. For the rest of my life.”

  Sandy sighed and wiped his eyes. “So lovely,” he sniffed.

  “But she said yes. She said yes with this little laugh she has that sounds like bells. She said yes and we got married down at city hall and she moved in the next day. A week later, she moved out.”