Sex Lies in Stardom, a work in progress
Prologue

So…
 My name is Joseph, I’m 17 and, like many, I have a story to tell. I’ve finally gotten to a point in my life where I can stick a smarmy finger in my own face and say to myself, “Joseph kid, what the fuck’s wrong with you, it’s time you got your ass writing.” It’s time. Right?
Dreams tell you things. It makes me sick to hear people say things like “last night, man I had the strangest dream.” It makes me sick, it really does. ‘Cause see, people think that dreams are entirely your mind fucking with you. This is not true. Dreams tell you things that you don’t want to deal with. Your subconscious is bitching at you to face your daily horrors. This is true. Last night I had the following dream;

I was sitting in an outhouse which, seconds later, morphed into a restaurant. Dreams do that frequently. It was one of those pizza joints where they give you your own personal jukebox at a booth, and there are these clear red plastic glasses that are meant to entertain little children’s feasty eyes. Those glasses play off a child’s hunger, I swear it.
So, I was in this pizza place, I mean it was one but then I was in my bedroom and I was waiting. Don’t know for what. So Henry Winkler waltzes into my room and sits his suave ass down on my bed and I’m sitting next to him and he’s there he is next to me. He said “Joseph, what the hell you waitin’ for my man” and I open my mouth to speak and I wake up.

With no solution given, I’ve entrusted myself to come up with my own. So I’m writing. About my life. This is probably some vain attempt to shape my future. Or play the sensitive artist. I don’t know, we’ll have to see. Nonetheless, this book is for the writer, yes I’m selfish.
I’ll start with the beginning simply because, well, that’s where it all starts. I’ll start with the birth name. Those names are your first personal object, you own that. Some people change their names. Joseph has many variations. My name is interchangeable. I like that.

1)Joseph…I don’t mind this, it’s natural and adorable and I couldn’t love it better.

2)Joe…I hate this name. It makes me feel like one of those construction worker types who snort bread crumbs that their wife packed for them in tin lunch boxes and hoot at passing career galls. I don’t hoot at any kind of gall, I’m not straight.

3)Joey…I don’t hate this name. It does however sound too much like one of those teen bop boy actors on teenage fan club magazine covers just like my disturbingly beautiful ex-boy friend, who’s also named Joseph. I love Joseph. Joseph has been a teen bop boy since he was six years old. People call him Joey. For obvious reasons.



1

My grandmother hates cats. She once told me that if you stare into a cat’s eyes for more than a minute, it’ll send a ripple through your blood stream. It’ll make your eyes blur like you’re under water. It’ll make you feel woozy.
I feel woozy. Perhaps it’s the radiation from the TV screen. If you put your face up to a TV, your face falls asleep. I like to think it’s the radiation. But it isn’t the radiation at all. No, instead, it’s what is behind the glass. That beautiful teen bop boy. He’s got that kind of smooth skin and the hair that is long enough to curl around his ear lobes. His body is like an arrow. Straight. Speaking of straight. He probably is straight. Either that, or he’s one good fucking actor.
At this time, I’m 16. Standing, not sitting in the den. My sweaty hand placed plaintively where it shouldn’t be. If my mother or father walked downstairs at this moment, well there is no telling what might happen. Nothing abusive mind you. Only skull crushing embarrassment. My parakeet is to my right chirping, and my dog is breathing against my leg pushing a saliva soaked sock into my own paw, to tug.
The credits are rolling now. I close my eyes for teen bop boy’s name. I don’t want to know. He owns his name. That name is his personal object and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of crush experience, it’s don’t get too personal.

This is my weekly Wednesday night ritual. I’ve been starring at teen bop boy’s cat eyes for too long. I feel woozy.




2

My aunt loves cats. She has like twelve. At this time, my aunt Rudy is holing up in Long Beach, California with all her cats.
She’s in Long Beach because she’s hiding from her third husband Rony. Rony love Rudy so much that he had to keep her. And in order to keep her. He had to personalize her. He didn’t make her change her name or anything. No, he was set on what he called a “good sound beating”. He told me this over the phone one night, “Joseph he said. You get some girl on your hands and you keep her in line. Women don’t leave if they’re too scared to.” I hung up. I shouldn’t have. I heard she got a “good sound beating” for my disrespect.
I’m not a feminist. I hate labels. I was just raised in female dominated family. My Mom rules all. My sister too. Dad, well he just does what he’s told. Much like a dog would. Not like a cat.
I used to go to kindergarten and experience the raunchiness of life. The girls. The boys used to talk about their older brothers and the lives they led. With girls.
So, what we’ve established is that there are two contradictions in my life. I’m not a feminist. I just never had the idea that there was a stronger sex. Only stronger people. My aunt got strong. She ran.



3

I met teen bop boy when I was holing up at my aunt’s place in Long Beach California. I live in Santa Monica, where skateborders swallow non-skaters whole. I avoid skaters. Darkness cowered overhead as I pushed my way through the crowded street across from my aunt’s tiny hovel. She waved at me as she leaned out the window, calling her cat who, she hoped, had not gotten trampled by the mirage of actors, crew and Rolling Stone execs attempting to locate Sarah Michelle Geller for an interview. Another day in the filming of a movie.
My aunt’s place was clean when I entered. This is simply because she does not own enough things to strew about. The walls were covered of black and white photographs she had taken of things like, the plaque at the base of the statue of liberty or the one yellow flower in an ocean of red. Also on the walls was the boat propeller that she had pilfered after a recent and rare hurricane set on by El Nino. She had a coach, something resembling a bathroom, a stove and her own bedroom built by whatever my grandmother, her and my mom’s mother, had sent her to make the place look decent. There was no rug, about three litter boxes and a coffee table made from a wooden plank (also pilfered) and an old rusty dentist chair. Cats of all ages and sizes scurried around my feet as I entered. One vacated to the secure spot under the coffee table.
My aunt looked up and smiled wide. “It’s half past, bastard” she giggled. I was late. “Yeah, I know it.” I replied with a stupid playful smirk. “Hey, shouldn't you be on a broom somewhere stealing Toto?”
My aunt reclined in the dentist chair.
“Mickey you dumb fuck.” She yelled to the cat. “Get your fuzzy ass out of that make-up…thing.” My aunt was sort or plump, but not to the point where you could call her obese. She wore black mostly. Droopy things that would cause Grandma to scowl and bitch about her daughters lack of style.
Aunt Romy fed me let over mashed potatoes and chicken from the Kenny Rogers down the road. She watched my face as I filled my face with imitation gravy goo.
“So, uh, how’s the summer treatin’ your punk ass.” She said.
“My punk ass is great thanks, if not horny. You know any other gay punk asses in the tri-state area?”
“Hey don’t you live in California?”
She had a point. You would think queers would be abundant in California.
“Yeah but they all smoke and cheat and lie and bitch and fuck each other. I hate that shit. I want…a relationship.”
“How Melrose of you Joseph.”
Romy screeched shrilly to her cat, making another cat and my own hair stand up on hind legs and bark. She clamored downstairs to retrieve the ill gotten feline before it got itself trapped up some actor’s ass. I force fed myself more of the goop and trotted lazily toward the couch where I clicked on the Simpsons and sank into the cushions. , My nightly ritual at anyone’s house.
I woke up somewhere cold. My aunts place on the couch. I though of teen bop boy and tried to name him. Robby probably. Or Jonathan. They’re always named Jonathan. I thought of my friend Kirsten at camp and how she always called our friend John by two separate names slurred together so that it sounded something like, Joe-Nathan.
I had never met teen bop boy, but I got it bad for him. I felt like it was purely the product of loneliness. I put his beautiful face to a perfect boy and imagined that he was my lover. That we were in a band together and instead of looking at the audience as I sang, I kept starring back at him and he would smile back. A mix of my two longings. Music and a musically inclined beauty. Like teen bop boy.
 Fearing that I was becoming a masochist, mixing the pleasure of having him in my life and knowing that it was never to be, I slept.
I woke to the sound of my aunts ice-tea being stirred with scissors. I rolled and fell of the bed, landing on my already sleeping arm, feeling nothing. I was nauseous for some reason. I contemplated flu, but didn’t feel it there. So I shoved it off as hunger and stumbled to the juice on the table. Romy, while not a happy homemaker, takes care of me. After inhaling more of my aunt’s vicious goo, this time the slop resembled cream of wheat, I called my close straight friend Mickey who I give it to up the ass on occasion. Mickey, being a stunning beauty at all ends, chirped over the phone. Him being an early riser.
“Hey man,” I said. “What is up my friend.”
“Hey kid, nothing.”
I could always count on Mickey for good conversation. Mickey is a Goth kid with black hair that falls over his head, parted in the middle, with sharp spikes at the ends. He wears black nail polished and eyeliner, a nose ring, eyebrow ring, tongue ring, and many earrings. Needless to say, my parents hate him.
Still, with his appearance being over his head constantly and tauntingly, he knows the prejudices that face him. And Mickey is a good boy.
“I’m bored.” I said. “chill with me for awhile.
“Sure man.” Give me a few hours. Trains are scarce here.”
I was in the mood for screaming. At my aunt, at Mickey, at no one. I reached into my black book bag that was leaning against the beige couch, still warm from my sweaty dreams. Dreams that I would never account to anyone, let alone myself. The bag contained a note book. Black with white swirls all around it. Pictures of tombstones adorned the cover. Pictures of TVs being wacked mercilessly with a hammer and the words “kill your television” violently scrolled underneath. I opened to the last blank page and wrote…a poem. I fear telling people about my poetry writing. When I do, I call it prose for fear of being lumped into that teenage poetry writing sub-culture. I write prose.
My poem was about, of course teen bop boy. I think about him a lot when I’m close to Hollywood. I feel his presence and at night, I feel his hot breath against the back of my neck, cradling me, from miles away.
"I wish I had a map of your face", it began. "That way I can know the contours of your skin, to know the mess you’ve made of your make-up, to know where you curve and your cheekbones stand flat, finally. I thought you were the son of Sam-son with your long hair and bashfull stone eyes. You were never myseterious to me. Like bad meat, you’re a little hard to digest sometimes, but I’d eat you."
I’m crazy.
I heard my aunt watching TV in the other room. I felt something cold in my stomach. My belly felt heavy as if it was filled with bowling balls, and I collapsed suddenly, in pain. I passed out.



4 (third person)

Joey, sat on the toilet. Smiling. “No one even pictures me here”, he thought, “People don’t know how that yes, I do things that are human.” Joey arched his bare back. He felt like a king. He was a super human, non-bowel vacating, king. In his own right. He’s an actor. I huge fuckin’ actor. TV, movies, sitcoms of all sizes and maturitly level. Yeah, he could play it all. Be anyone. But know one knew, who he, in fact was.
Joey mused a little through gritting teeth. Pure proof of his acting skills, his manner of making the world belive, that he was attracted to that girl on the show. The girlfriend that he had one over in the first season, dumped in the second, and fought for and over in the third. His girl. That he never spoke to or gave a whizz about. No, he wasn’t straight, just a kick-ass actor that has to crap every now and then. Joey was feeling human.



5

  Polly's gotta new deal, the whole hole, sex like girls have sex, this won't hurt none, ouch, muscle Bang! Fear and loathing in where you least expect to, find the way home from, fecal disturbances in the intenstinal track of life, severe pain, dont hurt, just a muscle, BANG! Dont hurt, uh oh, better run.
"Uh oh, Better get Meco." Sirens.
"Joseph."
"Ah too loud," I sputtered.
"Joseph."
"Too damn fucking loud."
"You're in the hospital Joseph."
"Damn you and your, what?"
"Is the TV too loud."
"Everything, too damn loud."
       Sterile sheets, white room with black curtains, dont' get that in my head. Ah the drugs, ah Kerouac and his muscle bang. Been here before, not white room, dark room, green room, green people, green vomit.
"Somethings a little wrong."
"Everything is too damn-"
"Something fucked with your stomach."
"Probably your damn green turnips Ma."
"I'm not your mother Joseph, I'm the wicked witch of the west."
"Aunt, oh, damn."
"Happy to see me?"
"When did you return from under the house."