The Foxwood Chronicles

By FreeThinker

Chapter Two

            Evan stood in the middle of his new bedroom and looked around as the attic fan in the hallway pulled an almost cool evening breeze through his window. He nodded with satisfaction. The movers had delivered his things the day before and his new room looked surprisingly like his old room, though a bit smaller. His movie poster for Valley Girl hung over his desk. His two U2 posters for Boy and October hung over his bed. His Blondie poster hung on the opposite wall. He had his stereo set up and Laura Branigan was singing “Gloria,” (no, not U2’s “Gloria,” but it was still good). He hadn’t tried the receiver yet; he couldn’t bear another disappointment right then. He could only imagine what radio on the plains must be like.

He had arranged his pictures on the shelf. His chest grew tight as he looked at the one in which he and Ricky and Robert were in their Speedos on the beach in Malibu. He and his friend Kristin were hugging at Venice Beach. He and Chip were grinning on the pier in Santa Monica. There were two pictures he hadn’t unpacked, however; the one of his father, taken just a month before his diagnosis, when Evan was nine, and the one of his mother in her office she shared with three other writers in Television City. He stared at the empty spaces on the shelf for a moment and then quickly turned.

Walking over to his closet, he slipped off the Topsiders he knew irritated his grandmother and slipped on some Birkenstocks. Perhaps she wouldn’t be as offended by sandals without socks.

He walked out into the hallway and looked at the doors for the five other bedrooms on the second floor. This was the house in which she had raised three boys and a daughter. Next to the Huntington’s house next door, this was probably the biggest house in Foxwood. And, she lived here alone. He couldn’t imagine why. It would make more sense to sell it and buy a condo. Maybe there weren’t any condos in Foxwood. Well, hell; she could move to LA. But, no. Evan remembered all the bitching she did every time she flew out to see them. She hated California. Well, his father’s two brothers both lived in Kansas City and his aunt lived in Des Moines. Why couldn’t she move to one of those places. Hell, Kansas City couldn’t be worse than Foxwood.

There were books everywhere. Man, this woman could open her own library. In each of the rooms and along the walls of the hallway were shelf after shelf of books, some looking positively ancient. Against one wall of the hallway, she must have stacked every issue of the National Geographic ever published.

He walked down the stairs to the foyer. The front door was open.

“Nana?”

There was no answer.

“Hey! Nana!”

He looked around the living room and into the dining room. There was no sign of his grandmother anywhere. He went back to the door and looked out. She wasn’t on the huge porch that wrapped around the house. He didn’t see her on the wide sloping lawn. Hmmm. He locked the door. You never knew. There could be crazy people in Foxwood, too. Heck, there were probably crazier people in Foxwood than back home.

He walked through the house to the kitchen. His mother would have killed for a kitchen this big, even if the appliances were from the antediluvian period.  He glanced out the window toward the back yard. There she was, seated on an old canvas lawn chair in the middle of the back yard, reading a National Geographic and sipping a glass of red wine. Well, this was certainly a lively way to spend a Saturday night.

The first thing he noticed as he stepped off the wooden back porch and into the thick, lush grass of the back yard was the quiet. It was QUIET. He could hear no cars, no sirens, no planes. Only birds. Oh, my God! How was he ever going to get to sleep?

In a short, quick panic, he slapped some huge tropical-looking insect sucking blood from his left arm as he slowly advanced through the grass to his grandmother’s chair. She looked up and grinned at his obvious inexperience with Midwestern mosquitoes.

“I don’t have to worry about malaria, here, do I?” he asked sarcastically.

“Don’t worry,” his grandmother replied. “We have a couple of doctors who pass through here once or twice a year on their way to Omaha.”

She wasn’t entirely certain that her grandson knew she was teasing him.

“Well, are you all settled in, now?”

Evan nodded as he looked around. The yard was huge, surrounded by a fence covered with honeysuckle and wisteria. Cherry tomatoes grew along the side of the ancient garage to the right, while iris and roses dotted the edges of the yard. Evan jammed his hands into his pockets and sighed.

“Why don’t you take a walk around town and get to know your new home. I know that it’s not going to be as exciting as Los Angeles on a Saturday night, but you might make some friends. Walk downtown. The kids always drive up and down Main Street on Saturday nights. It might be fun.”

Evan shrugged.

“OK.”

As he started to turn, his grandmother said, “Just a second, dear.”

He paused and looked expectantly at her. The look of concern on her face warned him that he was about to get another dose of love and reassurance. He sighed.

“Evan, I know you would have been going out tonight with your friends if you were still home. I know you feel like you’ve died. And, I don’t know what I can do to make it better for you. I would if I could. You know that, don’t you?”

Evan smiled and walked over to his grandmother.

“I know, Nana. I know. And, I love you. Yeah, I’m really bummed out about leaving Cali, but, I don’t know, I suppose it’ll work out. Don’t worry about me.”

“Look. Tomorrow after church…”

Church? Church? Oh, God.

“… we’ll go to the country club for brunch. I’ll introduce you to some of the kids there and you can get to know some of the better families here. How’s that sound? You play tennis. They have a great tennis court there and lot’s of kids play. It will be grand, won’t it?”

Evan smiled reassuringly.

“Yeah,” he said with as much sincerity as he could muster. “Sounds great.”

Evan walked around the corner of the house and looked up and down Court Street. The biggest, grandest houses in town lined the three or four blocks of Court Street between the Huntington house next door at the head of the street and the Fox County Courthouse at the other end of the street downtown. The houses were all huge, with wide, long porches and gigantic yards. They were all either of white-painted wood with green trim or of stone. As he walked down the street, he could almost imagine he was on the set of some movie from the thirties or forties about small-town America. He could see Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland skipping down the street or Jimmy Stewart wooing Donna Reed. Being a Hollywood brat, (well, at least the son of a "Hollywood" doctor and a "Hollywood" writer), he knew his movies.

A block down the street, he passed a yard on the right in which a couple of teenage boys, perhaps his age, maybe a year  older,  stood idly chatting around a lawn mower. Evan chuckled to himself as he contemplated the joys of spending a Saturday evening mowing the grass. They were both rather cute, one of them with shiny black hair and muscles beneath a sleeveless white shirt, the other a dirty blond. Both were watching him and, with a surge below his belt, Evan realized they were doing so with a familiar hunger in their eyes. He gave the usual male adolescent greeting of a single upward nod of his head as he passed. They both returned the greeting in the same way. Well, perhaps life in Foxwood wouldn't be completely devoid of pleasures.

Evan didn't stop, deciding he might need to tease them a bit more before getting to know them. He knew they were watching his legs as he walked on past them. He smiled. His legs were something he was really proud of, built up from years of tennis and swimming in the ocean. They were slim but muscled and Evan had caught more than one male, both adolescent and adult, checking them out in LA. Apparently, Foxwood wasn't going to be that different in at least one respect.

A further block down, on the left, stood a small red-brick church with a tall tower on the corner and covered with green ivy. In and of itself, it was not notable, beyond the imagery of small-town life that it and everything else he had seen evoked. However, what was interesting was the teenage boy, once again of about his age, sitting in the grass in front. He was just sitting, doing nothing, legs crossed, hands resting in his lap, face relaxed and devoid of any emotion, his eyes almost looking dead. Were it not for the almost complete lack of life in his expression, it would have been an attractive face, an unusual face that might have caught the attention of a casting director. It was quite a pretty face for a boy, almost feminine in a way, slender with high cheekbones, long and thin eyebrows, and delicate lips framed by longish, shaggy dark blond hair, parted just off the middle, sweeping and curling around his face and ears.

Evan nodded and smiled at him as he passed not ten feet in front of him, but the boy seemed oblivious of all around him. Accustomed to strange behavior back home, Evan, nonetheless, was curious. He started to stop when he heard a boy's voice, one that hadn't changed yet, calling from the small wooden bungalow beside the church, (the only house on the block, so far, that wasn't enormous).

"Adam! Hey, Adam!"

The boy remained motionless as another, younger boy, smaller and not quite as slender, with similar, though darker, hair, walked barefoot across the grass in front of the house and church. Evan crossed the street and proceeded onward, though he glanced back out of curiosity. He saw the younger boy standing before the older one, who was looking upward with an expression of innocence, though still almost devoid of any sign of intelligence. Evan concluded he must be retarded.

By this time, he could hear the rumble of cars drifting through the neighborhood. The ornate, almost ostentatious courthouse loomed before him. Several cars drove past in front of him as he approached what he assumed would have to be "Main Street," or whatever the main drag in this town was called. As he approached, he noticed quite a few teenagers, some his age, most older, walking along the sidewalks on both sides of Main Street or sitting on mail boxes or benches or cars parked along the curb. The street was lined with angled parking and most of the spaces were filled with cars, ranging from TransAms and Cameros to pickups and jalopies. He even saw a BMW, bringing back memories of home. Could he be nostalgic after only twenty-four hours?

Evan didn’t think he looked that different from the norm, but as soon as he turned off Court Street and onto Main, kids all around him turned and stared. He nodded and grinned a few times, but as he walked west toward the college,  he heard a boy sitting on the hood of a an early seventies Mustang mutter, “Who’s the fag?”

Fag? He was wearing khaki shorts, an Izod, and Birkenstocks. Hell, three-fourths of guys in his school wore that. It was 1982! His hair was cool, just what three-fourths of the guys in his school wore.

Evan didn’t respond; he just kept walking. He passed a drug store and some high schoolers giggled as he walked by.  A pick-up passing by in the long parade of cars and trucks cruising Main Street honked and a guy with shaggy dark hair poking out from under a Winston baseball cap leaned out the window and yelled, “Hey, sweet thang!”

Another guy sitting on the hood of a ten year-old Camero laughed and called back, “Gibson, you fag!”

“Gibson” blew a kiss to the guy and flipped him the finger.

At the next street, Evan turned off Main and walked away from The Cruise.

Contemplating various ways of committing suicide and taking as many of Foxwood’s best and brightest with him, Evan walked a block up before he turned toward the west again. The houses along this street weren’t grand; they were just old, though the people who owned them obviously wanted people to think they were grand. Once again, the lawns were neat, the houses well-kept, the trees were huge. There were people sitting on their porches chatting and sipping iced tea as young children played in the yards and driveways. Boys rode past on bicycles, birds sang in the trees, and Evan thought of Ricky and Robert and Chad getting ready for a night out in LA. His eyes grew moist, but he angrily wiped them dry and walked on.

He crossed the next corner as a car full of teenage girls drove past. The radio was turned up loudly and Evan cringed as he heard the unmistakably bad "Funkytown," accompanied by the girls in the car. He shook his head, laughing that they were still playing that dreck here after two years.

A second car passed him, this one a Chevy Citation, also full of girls apparently chasing the first car, and "Funkytown" was blaring from it, as well. How appropriate, he thought. I'm trapped in Funkytown, and he chuckled at the comparison.

The next block was the last one before he came to the campus of Foxwood College. It was a line of shops, bars, and eateries catering to the college. Across the street were several large houses that had been divided into apartments and rental rooms. Evan couldn't escape the song; from several windows, singers declared they needed to "groove with some energy."

Feeling depleted from the day's traumas and disappointments, as the sun sank below the trees to the west and the golden glow of sunset dissolved into the evening twilight, Evan was about to turn around when he saw some movement in the window of the business to his left. He stopped and peered inside. A couple of college age guys were inside painting the walls while a third walked through carrying a ladder. Evan was startled to see the Richie Cunningham clone from the plane earlier. This time, he was wearing tight jeans that really showed him off, and a torn white t-shirt that didn't make his slender torso and arms look too shabby. He had paint on his arms and face and when he looked up, their eyes met. Evan saw a look of recognition on the guy's face. Quickly he turned and began walking back toward his grandmother's house.

He suddenly felt like a little boy. How stupid that he should turn so quickly and act embarrassed. He was Evan Vanderlyn, for Pete's sake. He was used to flirting with the hottest guys around. Why in the world would he suddenly feel uncomfortable admiring a hot guy in a small town in the Midwest?

Suddenly, he realized he was scared. Back home, he had never faced ridicule or teasing or rejection. He was Evan Vanderlyn. His Mom wrote for the highest rated soap opera on television. He partied with the hottest and the most popular kids around. He had always been confident and in control. That was it. He wasn't in control anymore.

Yes. That was it. His mom had OD'd on sleeping pills. He didn't even know she was depressed. He didn't have any control over that. None of his mother's family had wanted to take him. He didn't have any control over that. He was trapped in a small town surrounded by hundreds of miles of cornfields. He had no control over that. Kids here were laughing at him. He had no control over that. And, a hot adult had apparently thought he was worth remembering. A month before, he could have handled that with no problem. Suddenly, he didn't know what to do. What was appropriate in Foxwood? How did you react to that sort of thing here without getting your ass kicked?

Evan was no longer in control; and, it scared him.

As he walked back through the neighborhood, past the old-fashioned houses, the gigantic fir trees guarding the wide lawns, and the churches, (oh, my God, there were churches everywhere), he felt more alone than he ever had. He needed Ricky and Robert. God, how he needed Ricky and Robert.

They were probably going to the party at Chad's that night. That kid from the new sitcom on ABC was probably going to be there and every girl and guy at the party was going to try to make a play for him. Evan wouldn't even have had to try. But, instead of making it with the newest teenage heartthrob, he would spend his Saturday night going to bed early before church in the morning. In a strange bed. In a strange house. In a strange town. A thousand miles from home. With his mother dead and his world turned upside down.

The sky was turning a deep, dark blue and the first stars were coming out as he walked across the front yard of his grandmother's house and around the side to the back door. His grandmother was in the kitchen pouring another glass of wine as he came in. He declined a glass of milk, gave her a peck on the cheek, and retired to his room. For several hours, he softly played the records and tapes of the music he and his friends had danced to over the last year or two, New Order, Soft Cell, The Go-gos, Flock of Seagulls, Billy Idol. At midnight, he undressed and crawled naked into bed. He curled into the fetal position.

]Foxwood was two hours ahead of LA. Ricky was probably only now showing up at the house in Brentwood. Robert would probably be there, as well, looking for either a girl or a guy, or both, to get it on with. Evan grabbed his pillow and clutched it, much as he had held his teddy bear a decade before. Tears of pain and loss, of frustration and helplessness, of rage and fear, flowed over his cheeks as his erection grew.

Who would Ricky find tonight to cuddle with, to kiss, to suck? Who would Robert fuck without his favorite boy? Would Chad, the master seducer, be getting it on in the pool with the new sitcom star?

Evan's mind was in Brentwood, on the back lawn, laughing and dancing, flirting and toking, disappearing behind the pool house with someone whom he had been teasing for an hour to give the poor schmuck the chance for his dream suck. He squeezed the pillow tighter and shut his eyes severely in an effort to push aside the pain.

Only twenty-four hours before, he had been lying in Ricky’s bed, their naked bodies entwined, Ricky’s arms gently wrapped around him, caressing him, kissing his neck, whispering gentle and loving endearments in his ear. Evan had run his fingers through Ricky’s soft, thick hair, so shiny, so beautiful. Their erections had been pressed firmly together as their hips ground in concert and Ricky’s legs had pulled them tightly to each other. The lude he had taken at the party earlier that night had made him almost insane with love for the Latino boy who had been his friend, his lover, since the fourth grade.

Their love-making had been so intense that Evan hadn’t heard Robert enter the room. He had been only vaguely aware of the covers being pulled back. However, he was fully conscious of Robert’s tongue as it had begun to lick his undulating ass. Crying madly as the two brothers made love to him, Evan had become lost in the frenzy of mouths and hands and penises pleasuring him. As Robert had climbed atop him and entered him, the older teen had leaned over and begin to kiss and lick Evan’s neck, whispering his love-making in one ear as the younger boy had in the other. As Robert had begin to thrust faster and harder, forcing Evan faster and harder against Ricky, all three boys had begun to groan and moan until Robert cried out fiercely and ejaculated into the writhing blond. Evan’s grinding atop Ricky sent the younger of the Martinez brothers into his own orgasm, his cream shooting between the two bodies and sending Evan over the edge.

Evan pushed the pillow aside and lay on his back as he played the previous night over and over in his head, stroking his rigidly erect penis and whispering the names of Ricky and Robert over and over. He replayed Robert’s orgasm in his ass and Ricky’s against his stomach, feeling his lust growing and the need mounting. However, it was the memory of what had happened after their three orgasms that send Evan over the edge as he lay in his grandmother’s house, reliving the night before and escaping the thought of living in Foxwood. He had lain between Ricky and Robert for the rest of the night, covered in cum and sweat, in the arms of the Martinez brothers, their breath sweet on his skin, their love flowing into him for the last time. It was that thought, the memory of them holding him for the rest of the night, that sent Evan over the edge. He thrust his hips upward and threw his head back as he stifled a cry and shot across his stomach and chest.

As he slowly returned to reality, he lay in his bed, listening to the hum of the attic fan in the hallway as it pulled the warm night air through his window and the transom above his door. He screwed his eyes shut and cried, biting his fist and wondering if he could ever learn to live without the drugs and sex and excitement of his old life. How would he ever survive in Foxwood? How?