SOMEDAY THE BOY YOU GONNA LOVE IS GONNA CALL YOUR NAME 666

Jareth drawing house
Celia’s presentation
Debate
Jareth hears about it
Terry comes home to Alan/Margaret’s who’ve been watching scout and tells about it


Though he’d been given by now, oh, what was it?—about twenty minutes—the Oswego’s boy’s paper still appeared to be blank; a blind eye blinking upward toward the ceiling of the bungalow that housed the fourth and fifth grades, in which three hung fans slowly wheeled in an attempt to throw off the hot, dark heat of the Malibu afternoon. It was to these fans that the boy now looked and not to his page—dominated by two long rectangles onto whose lengths were tacked 6 cubes per side, drawn in the faint, bluish graphite of a mechanical pencil. In total, the page held 24 squares—an outpouring of artistic sentiment prompted by the assignment given to the class—Draw your house. Jareth Oswego’s final effort was as unrevealing as an ice-cube tray; empty boxes surrounding cornrows of dead-air.
In the house in which Jareth had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone, doors he had never opened, an entire floor, even—the loft reached by the flight of stairs that rose from his father’s studio—whose contents he could not describe. Aged eight, dark haired and slender fingered, with the shaded sills of sleeplessness that hang beneath the eyes of the bookish, Jareth was adamantly uncurious. Where others would snoop, the boy did not bother; conversations, held through paneled doors, did not draw his ear to the latch. For this, his parents called him “Wide Eye.” The name, Jareth would later learn, as he did his best to keep the Screenwriting for Dummies above the rising waters of his eldest sister’s lion-footed tub, referred not only to his tendency to stare, but to the angle of shot necessary to capture a whole picture at expense of its details. Perhaps this was the fault his parents had also desired to reference; More than one teacher had written him off as a “space cadet” (a trill which evolved into a “pothead” in his teens). Years later, onto his third lover by now, Jareth Oswego would be broken up with over the admonition, delivered in a San Francisco bagel bar, that he “Seemed to see nothing.” Looking out through the plate glass window to the street, he would note how two steps ahead of a meter maid, a civilian in cargo shorts was depositing quarters—an act of saintliness that were it not for his gaze would have died unobserved. And he kept watching, half testing himself, half proving to himself something he knew not to be true—that he was a natural observer of the world. He catalogued the details—the city employee’s standard issue black Reebok’s, the good samaritan’s car keys, which she held in her right hand by grace of a zippo keychain. But he would not notice that across the restaurant, a family had entered—their faces vaguely familiar, like the faces of statues that have undergone 100 years of rain. When they waved at him—the child waved, smiling—he found he could not remember who they were.
These were the sorts of things Jareth Oswego was supposed to—was expected to know—but that he did not. Things like the feelings of his lover and the layout of his house. And so, when asked in the third grade (maybe it had been the fourth? He could not remember) to sketch the house where he lived—Jareth Oswego had disappointed everyone.
Perhaps most disappointed by the Oswego boy’s effort was Gloria—they called their teachers by their first name. A twenty-something East Coast transplant, a bored nail-biter with oily hair and ensconcing, all consuming cable-knit sweaters, teacher Gloria had been drawn to the West by wishy-washy ideas of fame she was just beginning to give up on. She was no great beauty. Her one attempt at screenwriting had ended at 24 pages—but it was not her own fame that she truly, hungrily sought. Instead, it was a sort of proximity to it.
Born back somewhere probably in oh, god, Milwaukee or in some little cold cabin near Lake Eerie, she’d found escape as so many children have ever since the advent of the heinous machine—in the false families of the colored box, who lived in houses that grew up from the Malibu hills like teeth from the flesh of the mouth. When she had stayed home sick (an excuse she probably feigned) she watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and later, sucked at the straws of her sodas while consuming whole marathons of Cribs, the MTV show where musicians—mostly rappers—took girls with names like Gloria and Emily and Nancy and Susan on private tours of their barely-furnished homes, which focused mainly on the collection of souped-up Hondas they kept glistening, waxed in their pseudo-Tudor garages.
Gloria didn’t even like cars. But the genre of TV show, the “sneak peak” had given her an idea one morning, as she stood beneath the rat-trap apartment she could afford inland, five miles off the beach, where the smog hung low and dense and where the cigarette smoke of her waitress roomate clogged the old drapes, lending her whole life there a sort of fogginess that wiped away when the bus reached the PCH with its extended, unfettered views of the sea on the left and, on the right, the pseudo-Mediterranean villas angled toward the oceans like sailboats on a tack. Her heart lurched to see the houses. Though the LA she had found here was no more glamorous than the cabin or the apartment or whatever hole she had come from, Gloria understood that it was in these mansions that fame had hidden itself, furrowing into chenille carpets, crawling into the potted aloe veras and rising, inflamed, phoenix-like into the eyes of their offspring, the unremarkable children who stared back at her from across the desks.
If she could ask them to describe their houses, she thought, it would be like her own, personalized version of Cribs, an authenticity heretofore unseen. The idea had hatched that morning, waiting for the bus because—she would explain later, at a dinner party, to her friends, she had bought “on a whim” a “Star Map” from a man wearing a sandwich board. She had given him ten dollars and, the bus having come just then, deposited the wrapped map in her purse—which she happened to still be carrying.
Her host, a college friend, had cleared the pits of the olives they had sucked, earlier, from the living room table and they unfolded the map. She removed it from its sheeting hastily, self-concious that they were watching her, destroying its wrapping with the kind of gesture that said she had no interest in preservation, that the map held no use to her. And when she had unfurled it on the table, the names again shocked her into a stupor. It was like seeing your name on a gravestone in a cemetery of a town in which you had never lived. As her host’s pointer finger sketched a snail-trail along the PCH up to Sunset, Tacoma, the 405tk split, she read out the names: “Bresios—I teach his kid. Varner, Druberry, Realto, Oswego…”
They were all there. It was a roster. Maeanne Varner, ponytailed, a little stupid, daughter of John Warner, head of yes, Varner Dreamscastle; Blake Druberry, grandson, an exhaustive IMDB search revealed, of the silent film actor of the same last name and a current star of recent romantic comedies she hadn’t at all enjoyed; and Debbie Realto, Ella Cunningham, the Madison twins, Evan Bresios—whose father was the head of development for ABC-TV, LA, and Jareth Oswego—
“Jareth Oswego,” her host, Patrick, had said, smirking. “How’d ya like that.” Patrick had been studious, serious in college. He had majored in Economics, and driven out to LA to follow his girlfriend and complained of his job in finance in a studio, where he had been relegated to accounting. He was not a fanboy, a starfucker, they called them out here, and yet it was Patrick who asked, “What’s he like?”
What are they like, Gloria thought then. Her description had been hasty—they’re perfectly normal, they’re the same, they’re picked up in over-large cars, they, they, they they learn Spanish from their maids, they don’t know, she remembered a clean-up session after a ceramics demonstration given by a volunteer mother—they don’t know how to use a sponge properly. She provided the relevant details, falsified fables, all the while thinking of what she really wanted to see. She was not interested in what they were like; they were children. She was interested in where they lived.
That night, on the bus back, the windows of the bus turned to mirrors in the green, lavatorial light, she put her face right to the glass. With her nose smudging the window, she could see out, out into the lighted windows of the homes against the hills—islanded in the total darkness, small amber squares.

And now, Jareth Oswego, of all children, was the one with a blank page.
At Jareth Oswego’s elbow, Evan Bresios—looking on—gave a sneer, then turned his nose down to his own paper, which he was vehemently “coloring in” with a deep cobalt.
“That’s a strange color for a ceiling, Evan,” Gloria had said, in passing. “Is that a basement pool?”
These sort of questions tested Bresios’ patience—at base he was an artist, misunderstood. The pool, he explained, using a stubby finger to walk her through it, was outside, on the deck of teak that tacked toward the ocean. This indigo swathe was above his father’s screening room, made to stand in, for what he was now labeling neatly, the “artificial sky.” (There were shooting stars, and a switch at the side of the room could change the “time” to daybreak, evening.) Of course. She should have known.
The Bresios father himself could be found outside, burly and bowtied, flanked by an aloe vera plant on the stoop and his family, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the ease of manner of a prison lineup. Beneath him, a placard, “Jimmy Bresios, President of ABC-TV Development Division. These children—Gloria thought, these strange children. Having been given everything, they did not yet know to hide it away.
So what a disappointment to see the Oswego boy’s sketch. She leaned over him now. Yes, there at the southernmost end of the paper, a cube read, “Celia’s room”; at its opposite, “Leona’s”; and then on row labeled “Floor 1” a kitchen, dining-room and living room were as yet only half-described. Jareth had spent nearly all of the twenty minutes trying to recall how the back-parlor, in which he was never allowed, could be reached through the kitchen. His mind hopped up staircases, drained into sinks and flew through the French doors, whose panes were oiled with fingerprints, out into the back garden where a black hose lay twisted. Where did the hose begin? Where did the water come from? Best to start with the ocean which, with the crayon labeled “Azure” he spent the rest of the period coloring.
When Jareth thought down the long slim hallway on the second floor, he could only really say what was behind three of the doors—his room; his parent’s locked bedroom, and a closet stacked with towels that the maid opened and closed before bathtime. His parents’ bedroom. He had been inside only a few times—sent there on errands by Alma, or by the quaking call of his own mother’s voice when she had been sick with pneumonia for those two weeks when he was five, or one time—impelled by a door that had been left open. He had walked over, the seven year old had told himself, to close it. But when he reached the open slice of air between the frame and the knob, he entered.
The bed had been made, the sheets pulled tight to the sides and tucked into the frame. Along the right-hand side of the room, a long dresser of bleached wood held on its surface glistening minutiae: photographs in silver frames, small bottles of coloured water, a flecked comb of animal shell which he ran through his hair, looking at his face in a round mirror, before a sound at the other end of the hall—Alma opening and closing the towel closet—startled him and, laying down the comb on the bleached wood as he had found it, Jareth Oswego scrambled out, leaving the door—as he had found it—ajar.
It was a hot day for LA. The classroom was dark, the windows shaded and facing out not to the surf but to the hills, whose scrubby brush was studded by toys long tossed over the fence—tennis balls, a single rollerblade, a neon water gun bleached by the sun. Gloria ran her manicured finger down one of Jareth’s ice-cube trays.
“And where’s your room?” she asked, her voice weedy, prying.
“I haven’t fit it in yet,” he said. He knew his room to be between Celia’s and Leona’s, across the hall from the exercise room—where the Nordic Track elicited unoiled weepings whenever his mother swept across it—but he wanted to be sure.
Exasperated, nearly laughing at the wasted effort (for why assign the class of the son of Zed Oswego to draw a blueprint if he alone could tell her nothing?), Gloria said what Jareth would recall years later—aged 16 and one half, sloughing down high-school’s halls in a pair of his dad’s old boots (steel tipped, tassled, hidden beneath the luffing cloth of cargo pants), and running into Bresios, now prone to hide his chiding eyes behind the mirrored shades of Aviator sunglasses.
That teacher, whoever she was, had it been Gloria? had said, “Well I guess you don’t have to show anything you don’t want to.”
It wasn’t, Jareth had wanted to say, that he didn’t want to share the life he saw, it was that he didn’t seem to see it himself. He would like, he thought then, for her to come over and draw it, sitting in the corner—the drawing pad on her lap, like the court illustrators in the movies—and he would like her to show him what she saw.

At 16 and a half, Jareth Oswego was still at Waeburn. It was where all the Oswegos had gone, an obvious choice. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. Modern in design when it was conceived in 1963, the school was a cluster of low-ceilinged, hooded concrete buildings was connected over the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. The lawns between the halls had either been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched your legs if you sat down Indian-style, or had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets.
It did not rain often. The weather was dry, and the neon squirt guns of the kindergartners, left out for a week, would be brought in a different, lighter shade, having been bleached by the sun.
In a school of 512—even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by his younger sister, Celia. The reputation which plagued him was neither his eldest sister’s—she had gone on to Harvard, to the chagrin of all of her former teachers when faced with the younger Oswegos who could not live up; nor the reputation of the youngest, Celia, whose good looks had landed her on both the pages of B-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague the three Oswegos—at high-school, in their twenties, in their life—was the reputation of their father. It was not something that could be “played down” or “lived up to”—it was like being born in another country, or of another sex, or into another creed. It was a part of their identity as ingrained as numbers into the ivory faces of dies.
At age twenty-three, Zed Oswego had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with.

So how difficult it had been then, for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven by a dude named Guy Moldin, a bassist who claimed their little band—three members and a small-town following—could make it in New York.
Though in every academic Leona Oswego excelled, it was in music class that she had gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder, she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. The shrill, chirpy squeaks that after three weeks of half-hearted practice she managed to eek out could be heard ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls like the strained, peachy notes of a cat. A stab at Chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D'Ambrosio (the only boy). When called out by the frustrated conductor as to whether she truly knew the lyrics to "Little Drummer Boy," and asked to solo her rendition--Leona Oswego chimed in, pitch-perfect, with the lyrics, "Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." The following quarter, she was not asked to return and spent the period in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s successful rebellion could be measured best in that she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene. She had been accepted at Harvard. The place had been a name for her, a rebellion in the utmost—the symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders that Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures, had attempted to lustily rail against. The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope, and in the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt distended by. That night, at a family “celebration” dinner, her father grumbled, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was—Harvard—where lawns were raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, where kids sat around circular tables naming philosophers, where black and white and asian students sat forward on the edges of futons, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs. At least, that was the part of the dream that Jareth Oswego understood. Labelled in Waeburn’s high school hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos purchased in East LA headshops. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there, and Mitzy Hanks, if she wasn’t making out in the dark of a music practice room with Leg Fawkes (named Legend by his Hollywood parents, a name he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot. Despite the pastoral setting—they often slumped down, backs to the wall, to sit in the dry pile of leaves—the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns where puritan standards were high, teenagers were forced onto the backroads.
This was Jareth’s small rebellion. His father, really, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his bowl (a glass thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, what spoilsport. Anyway, it wasn’t really rebellion that drew Jareth to the stuff, he understood. It was simply that anyone born into the name Oswego desired escape. And that for Leona, escape came in her dreams of the tall lecture halls at Harvard where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or maybe just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood his sister. He understood the ways in which she was crazy and she, she understood her brother’s soft-spoken delusions. They were the two Oswegos who were most connected.
And then there was their younger sister Celia. To Leona and Jared, Celia’s rebellion was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The first thing was that she was beautiful—extra-terrestrially, numbingly so. In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement of the Oswego house—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would have been the one to chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother would say, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there” and their father, lovingly, would call her, in the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert, “My fawn.”
At home, Celia’s beauty was a farce. In High School, at Waeburn, it was everything.

It is an afternoon back in September, or October maybe, when Jareth, aged 16 and one half, is out in the “alley” with Evan Bresios. The smoke has cleared their lungs and the two of them, sitting cross-legged in the moldering Eucalyptus leaves, are quiet—nothing left to say but to watch the action in the parking lot. Gloria, the fourth grade teacher, eats a sandwich alone in her Honda, the crunching of the wrapper unhearable through the window glass. Barker, the principal, only about 100 yards away, is whispering into his cellphone—probably, Bresios says, a call to a prostitute. Jareth giggles, though they both know it’s probably a call to his wife, something dull like that. Nothing much ever happens out here.
And then there’s Mitzy, tugging Paul Dine whose worn flannel is tied around her waist in a loose knot. The two have probably been out fucking in a music room.
“Is your stuff gone?” Mitzy says, looking at the red-eyed boys, eyeing the imprint of the glass bowl in the exterior pocket of Jareth’s cargo pants.
“We just cashed it,” Bresios says, nodding. It’s okay though, Dine says, he’s got more out in his car, and so Mitzy sits down next to Bresios, her back to the cool wall, as she waits for Dine to come back from his car—a 1957 Chevy xxx with a fold-down back seat and an interior of red velour, very retro. He keeps his stuff in not the glove compartment (too easy to find) but in the fold-out drink holder, which when not folded out provides a neat slot next to the radio. Dine, the son of single-mother Tracey Dine, a character actress in A-list films that mostly take place in the forties and fifties (she’s got that look about her, that hard-set grimace, that hair that fluffs around the head like a whirling storm) has a vaguely retro look about everything he does, which is why, Mitzy thinks, she likes him. He seems not to belong not only to Waeburn, with its stomach-clenching 60’s architecture of social oppression, but to the time in general, to the other cars in the lot glinting, waxed, beneath a too-bright sun.
When he comes back, they smoke the stuff, Jareth and Evan admitting they’d like a little more, and the converation turns to the suck-itude of school in general, and in what had elapsed earlier that day. Mitzy saw xxxxx and Dine, who’d seen it too, filled in the details.
“God I just had a harrowing second period,” Dine starts. “It was your sister, Jareth.”
Jareth’s suddenly all ears. “What’d she do?”
“Oh is this the thing with Celia in Debate?” Bresios asks.
“What is this?” Jareth needs to know. “You know about this—“
“I heard about it from Luckor,” Bresios explains—Luckor being the dark, gossipy Russian boy always trying to get in on the ins with the smokers. He has third period with Bresios, ceramics, and while the two are spinning pots they always talk, though Bresios will claim not to enjoy it. “So she’s in Debate, right? What’s the topic again.”
“The topic,” Dine says, now taking on the role of teller, “was International Aid.”
AID TO AFRICA – SPLENDA – PEEING IN POOL