ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
This is, as far as I know, the last Russell Lewis story. They have not been published (or written) in the order they happened, and all of the stories that have been up recently took place BEFORE the first Russell story. This comes after Jill Barnard and after The Gift of True Light. This takes place after. In fact, the main action takes place on the same night and around the same events as When You're Expecting, except for this is Russell's end of things, not Jill Barnard's. And now....
THE DOOR
BEHIND THEM
“So whaddo you think of her?” Ralph Balusik asked Russell, taking a sip from his shake.
“I like her,” Russell said, shrugging. They were in the new Value Burger on Elmhurst Street.
“That’s it,” Ralph put down the shake. “That’s all you can say?”
“Whaddo you want me to say? She’s a great girl. I like her. Vanessa’s really cool. Alright? In fact,” Russell added, sitting back and taking a swig from his Coke, “so cool I was surprised she’d go for someone like you.”
In stead of reaching across the booth to slug him in the arm, Ralph sat back and said, “I know.”
“Hunh?”
Ralph smiled.
“I know, Russell. Van seems a little high class for someone like me. I don’t know what she sees in me.”
“Well,” Russell played the line between funny and honest. “You are on the football team—even if you don’t get that much play, and it is summer. And you’re really not bad looking—”
“You don’t think so?” Ralph looked pleased.
“No,” Russell shook his head. He had always assumed that with the exception of a few ugly ducklings in the sophomore-graduating to junior class of Our Lady of Mercy everyone was more attractive than himself, and that they didn’t have to be told.
“And you’re nice,” Russell went on. “Once you let people see that.”
Ralph grinned and shrugged, sucked noisily from his shake and looked disconcerted at the noise.
“Sometimes,” Russell said as a station wagon sped down Elmhurst, “do you ever pull away and watch yourself doing stuff and wonder—what the hell am I doing?”
“That’s you Russell. The rest of the world isn’t that deep.”
“I don’t think it’s deep, just that...”
“Just what?” Ralph sat up straight and raised an eyebrow, all ears now.
“Just that I never actually pictured myself sitting in Value Burger, or anywhere else eating lunch with you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Russell eyed him.
“Aw, com’on, now Russ. I know I gave you a hard time in the past, but—”
“Ralph, all through Freshmen year you spit at me to get myattention—”
“I was a kid.”
“You did it this year too.”
“I’m growing up now.”
“And then you’d call me a faggot.”
Ralph shut up.
“You wrote in my yearbook, Russell Lewis—you’re a fag. And I’m not trying to hold it against you. I’m just saying this is a weird turn of events. You and Jason, doing at the mean shit you two did. They way he would look at me. “Well, yeah,” Ralph looked suddenly not so at ease. “Yeah, that was… That was an asshole thing to do. And I’m sorry. I really am.”
“And Jason.”
“You know he didn’t mean it. You….”
“What?” Russell looked at him.
“Whaddo you think of Jason?”
“Jason Lorry?” Russell said unnecessarily, shrugging. “I dunno. He’s alright. He’s not a jerk anymore. He says hi in the hallways.”
Russell didn’t really want to think about Jason Lorry.
“Well, he likes you,” Ralph said. “He always wants to know if you want to hang out with us.”
“That would be… weird.”
“Com’on, Russ.”
“He treated me like shit. Called me a fag, grabbed my ass. Made me feel…. Look, I’m not against him, it’s just, I’m not social and everything, and… All last year was a weird turn of events. The Virgin Mary stunt, getting suspended. Gilead, the party, people pretending to like me... You! It’s all weird,” Russell shook his head.
Ralph laughed. He looked, for a moment, very knowing. There was that old insolence in his hazel eyes.
“You’re really smart, Russell Lewis, but sometimes you’re dense as fuck.”
Now it was Russell’s turn to look incredulous.
“For a guy you don’t know anything about guys,” Ralph went on. “That’s how guys are. No body pretends to like you. People like you. You know I like you. You’re my friend.”
“When did you start to like me?” Russell asked. “Was it the party? After the police raided it and me and Gil—”
Ralph, looking very older brotherly, put up an exasperated hand. “Russell, I always liked you. I was just fucking around. Getting your attention I guess.”
“Did it ever occur to you to just say hello—like a natural human being?”
Ralph laughed and then said, “No. But that might be my resolution for junior year. I’ll put it in my Rolodex: act human. It’ll be the second thing I put in my Rolodex.”
There was silence and then, baited, Russell said, “Well, what’ll the first thing be?”
Ralph smiled at his friend, sucked the last of the shake out of the cup and said, “Get a Rolodex.”
Robert Keyes had come to the house before Christmas. He was blond and pale with wrap around shades and pulled them off to reveal sincere blue eyes.
“Sir, I read your stories and I’ve come to be a writer and live in your house.”
Chayne had heard that white people could be ballsy, but he’d never really known this to be true, and this was the ballsiest young man he’d ever met.
“I can pay good rent, and I can cook and clean. I’ve got references—”
But at cook and clean and rent, Chayne had already opened the door. This wouldn’t be the first white boy he had collected and unlike Russell, this one paid rent.
In the backroom that was becoming his library, Anigel Raez stretched out on the old daybed that had belonged to Chayne Kanzierski’s grandmother, and turned the page of the typing paper as he read the manuscript for the short story. She heard Robert’s footsteps and felt Robert’s shadow looming over her and said, “I can’t read with you hovering over me.”
“I just wanted to know if you were done yet,” Rob, against his will, kept pushing himself up on his toes and clasping and unclasping his hands.
“Not yet, and the funny thing is that the more interruptions I get the longer it takes me to finish.”
Rob Keyes sank down on his heels and sighed and then the doorbell rang and Chayne called, “Somebody make themselves useful!”
Rob went to the door. Anigel had come two months back to visit her brother Bobby and been seen by Russell who brought her to Chayne who liked her and thought she should live here with him and Robert.
“But… I can’t,” she began.
“What else are you doing?” he asked.
And so she had become the third resident on Curtain Street.
Rob was gone a moment, talking a lot to someone at the door, and now, in curiosity, Anigel Raez got up and went to the living room, only to see that Chayne was already there too.
Rob was talking to some grizzled old man he had ushered into the living room.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything? We’ve got lemonade. I think juice—apple juice, Chayne?”
“Yes, Rob, apple—”
“And I went and got some V-8 and we’ve also got—”
“Robert.”
“I’m just trying to be a host, Chayne.”
“Thank, Rob. Can I help, you sir?”
“Do y’know a Thomas Lewis?”
Chayne looked at the old man again. Medium height, white, grizzled, looked like a drunk pulled off the corner of some country town in a 1950’s TV show.
“I know’m,” Chayne said. “You’re at the wrong house. But I know him. I—”
“Just...” said the old man. “If you see him tell’m Arrell’s looking for’im.”
“Arrell?”
“Um,” the old man nodded.
“God bless,” he said, and tipping his hat, walked out of the house, down the steps and down the lane.
Rob’s elven face looked intrigued as he shut the door and he and Anigel followed Chayne into the kitchen.
“Now that—” Rob started.
“I know,” said Chayne, and they both said, “could go in a story.”
When Ralph dropped Russell off and honked three times before speeding away in his mother’s station wagon, Thom Lewis was standing in the yard looking half young, half silly as he watered the lawn in white tee shirt and khaki cargo shorts, a floppy fisherman’s cap on his head to keep away the sun, his legs covered in black hair that Russell had not inherited.
“Y’should have invited Ralph in,” said Thom.
“He had to go home.”
“You got a phone call,” Thom told his son.
“From who? Whom?”
Thom shrugged and knitted his brows. “One of your friends.”
“It’s not like I have raging social life, Dad.” said Russell, heading into the house. “Gilead must be back.”
As Russell entered the house, Patti shouted from the kitchen. “Gilead called. He just got back from Washington.”
“Cousin Chayne!”
“Cousin Gil,” Chayne murmured in the monotone that did not mean he was unhappy to see his little cousin.
“Russell,” Chayne added, as the boy came into the house with Gilead.
“How is Sharonda?”
“Mom’s fine,” Gilead said, walking into the kitchen.
“And Washington?”
“Dirtier than I expected,” Gilead admitted, tilting his head and then sitting down on the couch between Rob, whom he greeted as Russell took the large wing back chair by the picture window and Anigel. “But fun. I think I wanna go back. The National Shrine was something else.”
“The what?” said Rob.
“It’s the really big Catholic church on CUA’s campus,” Anigel said. “One of the ugliest buildings—at least from the outside—that you’ll ever see.”
“What did the inside look like?” Chayne asked Gilead.
“Well the basement has all of these chapels, rows and rows of chapels.”
“In the basement?” interrupted Russell, and Gilead nodded, put Chayne shushed Russell away with a hand and said, “But whaddid it look like Gil? The acutal church?”
“Oh, I never saw it,” Gilead said.
“What?”
“I never got around to actually seeing the church proper. I was worn out by the basement.”
“Well did you at least go to the Smithsonian?” Anigel demanded, sounding a little put out.
“Of course.”
“What was it like?” Rob leaned forward. “I went all over Europe, but I never saw our capital.” he chuckled at himself.
“It wasn’t bad,” said Gilead.
“We’ll never make a travel writer out of you, will we?” Chayne muttered. Then he snapped his fingers.
“That’s right!”
“What’s right?” Gilead looked at his cousin.
“This man came by. Grizzled. Old.”
“Whaddid he look like?” Russell asked.
Chayne cocked his head at the boy and repeated, “Grizzled. Old.”
“White?” Gilead suggested.
“Well... Yes. He said he was looking for your father. And his name is Arrell. You know any Arrells?”
Russell stuck out his lips, furrowed his brow and looked amazingly like Thom for a moment. Then the moment was gone.
“No,” said Russell.
“Well,” Chayne shrugged and sipped from his glass.
“Speaking of weird,” Russell said now. “I still can’t believe I’ve been hanging around with Ralph this summer. I mean. I thought he hated me for the last two years and I returned the favor and now....”
Rob made a dopey face with his elven features and said, “Peace rains at last!”
“I told you,” Gilead said. “It’s like when you’re walking down a street and you see a dog just growling and barking at you. At first you’re a little scared. A little pissed off. Then you hear it whimper and you realize—It’s just trying to talk to you. The damn thing just doesn’t know how to.”
“You’re saying Ralph’s a dog?” Anigel asked Gilead.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Gilead hedged, “but... Sort of.”
MORE TOMORROW....
THE DOOR
BEHIND THEM
“So whaddo you think of her?” Ralph Balusik asked Russell, taking a sip from his shake.
“I like her,” Russell said, shrugging. They were in the new Value Burger on Elmhurst Street.
“That’s it,” Ralph put down the shake. “That’s all you can say?”
“Whaddo you want me to say? She’s a great girl. I like her. Vanessa’s really cool. Alright? In fact,” Russell added, sitting back and taking a swig from his Coke, “so cool I was surprised she’d go for someone like you.”
In stead of reaching across the booth to slug him in the arm, Ralph sat back and said, “I know.”
“Hunh?”
Ralph smiled.
“I know, Russell. Van seems a little high class for someone like me. I don’t know what she sees in me.”
“Well,” Russell played the line between funny and honest. “You are on the football team—even if you don’t get that much play, and it is summer. And you’re really not bad looking—”
“You don’t think so?” Ralph looked pleased.
“No,” Russell shook his head. He had always assumed that with the exception of a few ugly ducklings in the sophomore-graduating to junior class of Our Lady of Mercy everyone was more attractive than himself, and that they didn’t have to be told.
“And you’re nice,” Russell went on. “Once you let people see that.”
Ralph grinned and shrugged, sucked noisily from his shake and looked disconcerted at the noise.
“Sometimes,” Russell said as a station wagon sped down Elmhurst, “do you ever pull away and watch yourself doing stuff and wonder—what the hell am I doing?”
“That’s you Russell. The rest of the world isn’t that deep.”
“I don’t think it’s deep, just that...”
“Just what?” Ralph sat up straight and raised an eyebrow, all ears now.
“Just that I never actually pictured myself sitting in Value Burger, or anywhere else eating lunch with you.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” Russell eyed him.
“Aw, com’on, now Russ. I know I gave you a hard time in the past, but—”
“Ralph, all through Freshmen year you spit at me to get myattention—”
“I was a kid.”
“You did it this year too.”
“I’m growing up now.”
“And then you’d call me a faggot.”
Ralph shut up.
“You wrote in my yearbook, Russell Lewis—you’re a fag. And I’m not trying to hold it against you. I’m just saying this is a weird turn of events. You and Jason, doing at the mean shit you two did. They way he would look at me. “Well, yeah,” Ralph looked suddenly not so at ease. “Yeah, that was… That was an asshole thing to do. And I’m sorry. I really am.”
“And Jason.”
“You know he didn’t mean it. You….”
“What?” Russell looked at him.
“Whaddo you think of Jason?”
“Jason Lorry?” Russell said unnecessarily, shrugging. “I dunno. He’s alright. He’s not a jerk anymore. He says hi in the hallways.”
Russell didn’t really want to think about Jason Lorry.
“Well, he likes you,” Ralph said. “He always wants to know if you want to hang out with us.”
“That would be… weird.”
“Com’on, Russ.”
“He treated me like shit. Called me a fag, grabbed my ass. Made me feel…. Look, I’m not against him, it’s just, I’m not social and everything, and… All last year was a weird turn of events. The Virgin Mary stunt, getting suspended. Gilead, the party, people pretending to like me... You! It’s all weird,” Russell shook his head.
Ralph laughed. He looked, for a moment, very knowing. There was that old insolence in his hazel eyes.
“You’re really smart, Russell Lewis, but sometimes you’re dense as fuck.”
Now it was Russell’s turn to look incredulous.
“For a guy you don’t know anything about guys,” Ralph went on. “That’s how guys are. No body pretends to like you. People like you. You know I like you. You’re my friend.”
“When did you start to like me?” Russell asked. “Was it the party? After the police raided it and me and Gil—”
Ralph, looking very older brotherly, put up an exasperated hand. “Russell, I always liked you. I was just fucking around. Getting your attention I guess.”
“Did it ever occur to you to just say hello—like a natural human being?”
Ralph laughed and then said, “No. But that might be my resolution for junior year. I’ll put it in my Rolodex: act human. It’ll be the second thing I put in my Rolodex.”
There was silence and then, baited, Russell said, “Well, what’ll the first thing be?”
Ralph smiled at his friend, sucked the last of the shake out of the cup and said, “Get a Rolodex.”
Robert Keyes had come to the house before Christmas. He was blond and pale with wrap around shades and pulled them off to reveal sincere blue eyes.
“Sir, I read your stories and I’ve come to be a writer and live in your house.”
Chayne had heard that white people could be ballsy, but he’d never really known this to be true, and this was the ballsiest young man he’d ever met.
“I can pay good rent, and I can cook and clean. I’ve got references—”
But at cook and clean and rent, Chayne had already opened the door. This wouldn’t be the first white boy he had collected and unlike Russell, this one paid rent.
In the backroom that was becoming his library, Anigel Raez stretched out on the old daybed that had belonged to Chayne Kanzierski’s grandmother, and turned the page of the typing paper as he read the manuscript for the short story. She heard Robert’s footsteps and felt Robert’s shadow looming over her and said, “I can’t read with you hovering over me.”
“I just wanted to know if you were done yet,” Rob, against his will, kept pushing himself up on his toes and clasping and unclasping his hands.
“Not yet, and the funny thing is that the more interruptions I get the longer it takes me to finish.”
Rob Keyes sank down on his heels and sighed and then the doorbell rang and Chayne called, “Somebody make themselves useful!”
Rob went to the door. Anigel had come two months back to visit her brother Bobby and been seen by Russell who brought her to Chayne who liked her and thought she should live here with him and Robert.
“But… I can’t,” she began.
“What else are you doing?” he asked.
And so she had become the third resident on Curtain Street.
Rob was gone a moment, talking a lot to someone at the door, and now, in curiosity, Anigel Raez got up and went to the living room, only to see that Chayne was already there too.
Rob was talking to some grizzled old man he had ushered into the living room.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything? We’ve got lemonade. I think juice—apple juice, Chayne?”
“Yes, Rob, apple—”
“And I went and got some V-8 and we’ve also got—”
“Robert.”
“I’m just trying to be a host, Chayne.”
“Thank, Rob. Can I help, you sir?”
“Do y’know a Thomas Lewis?”
Chayne looked at the old man again. Medium height, white, grizzled, looked like a drunk pulled off the corner of some country town in a 1950’s TV show.
“I know’m,” Chayne said. “You’re at the wrong house. But I know him. I—”
“Just...” said the old man. “If you see him tell’m Arrell’s looking for’im.”
“Arrell?”
“Um,” the old man nodded.
“God bless,” he said, and tipping his hat, walked out of the house, down the steps and down the lane.
Rob’s elven face looked intrigued as he shut the door and he and Anigel followed Chayne into the kitchen.
“Now that—” Rob started.
“I know,” said Chayne, and they both said, “could go in a story.”
When Ralph dropped Russell off and honked three times before speeding away in his mother’s station wagon, Thom Lewis was standing in the yard looking half young, half silly as he watered the lawn in white tee shirt and khaki cargo shorts, a floppy fisherman’s cap on his head to keep away the sun, his legs covered in black hair that Russell had not inherited.
“Y’should have invited Ralph in,” said Thom.
“He had to go home.”
“You got a phone call,” Thom told his son.
“From who? Whom?”
Thom shrugged and knitted his brows. “One of your friends.”
“It’s not like I have raging social life, Dad.” said Russell, heading into the house. “Gilead must be back.”
As Russell entered the house, Patti shouted from the kitchen. “Gilead called. He just got back from Washington.”
“Cousin Chayne!”
“Cousin Gil,” Chayne murmured in the monotone that did not mean he was unhappy to see his little cousin.
“Russell,” Chayne added, as the boy came into the house with Gilead.
“How is Sharonda?”
“Mom’s fine,” Gilead said, walking into the kitchen.
“And Washington?”
“Dirtier than I expected,” Gilead admitted, tilting his head and then sitting down on the couch between Rob, whom he greeted as Russell took the large wing back chair by the picture window and Anigel. “But fun. I think I wanna go back. The National Shrine was something else.”
“The what?” said Rob.
“It’s the really big Catholic church on CUA’s campus,” Anigel said. “One of the ugliest buildings—at least from the outside—that you’ll ever see.”
“What did the inside look like?” Chayne asked Gilead.
“Well the basement has all of these chapels, rows and rows of chapels.”
“In the basement?” interrupted Russell, and Gilead nodded, put Chayne shushed Russell away with a hand and said, “But whaddid it look like Gil? The acutal church?”
“Oh, I never saw it,” Gilead said.
“What?”
“I never got around to actually seeing the church proper. I was worn out by the basement.”
“Well did you at least go to the Smithsonian?” Anigel demanded, sounding a little put out.
“Of course.”
“What was it like?” Rob leaned forward. “I went all over Europe, but I never saw our capital.” he chuckled at himself.
“It wasn’t bad,” said Gilead.
“We’ll never make a travel writer out of you, will we?” Chayne muttered. Then he snapped his fingers.
“That’s right!”
“What’s right?” Gilead looked at his cousin.
“This man came by. Grizzled. Old.”
“Whaddid he look like?” Russell asked.
Chayne cocked his head at the boy and repeated, “Grizzled. Old.”
“White?” Gilead suggested.
“Well... Yes. He said he was looking for your father. And his name is Arrell. You know any Arrells?”
Russell stuck out his lips, furrowed his brow and looked amazingly like Thom for a moment. Then the moment was gone.
“No,” said Russell.
“Well,” Chayne shrugged and sipped from his glass.
“Speaking of weird,” Russell said now. “I still can’t believe I’ve been hanging around with Ralph this summer. I mean. I thought he hated me for the last two years and I returned the favor and now....”
Rob made a dopey face with his elven features and said, “Peace rains at last!”
“I told you,” Gilead said. “It’s like when you’re walking down a street and you see a dog just growling and barking at you. At first you’re a little scared. A little pissed off. Then you hear it whimper and you realize—It’s just trying to talk to you. The damn thing just doesn’t know how to.”
“You’re saying Ralph’s a dog?” Anigel asked Gilead.
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” Gilead hedged, “but... Sort of.”
MORE TOMORROW....
