Chapter 3
From that day on, Tom and Matthew spent nearly every evening at one another’s houses listening to records, tapes, CDs (which were actually a relatively new invention at the time) and, embarrassingly, playing air guitar to it all. Gradually, their shared love for the same music created the foundation for a lifelong friendship…one that, strangely enough, probably had not the slightest likelihood of developing when the two had initially met.
“Have you ever seen Queen in concert?” Tom asked Matthew one afternoon. They were sitting in Matthew’s room listening to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album on the stereo. Tom had brought over some Math homework to do while they hung out together. Matthew claimed that listening to music actually helped him study better, especially when he did English homework.
“I have not,” Matthew replied.
“I wonder if they’re any good live,” Tom mused. “Being a studio band and all.”
Tom had actually not known what a studio band was until Matthew had enlightened him to this sparkling bit of musical vocabulary. A studio band was a band whose music was so out there and so insane that it usually rendered them incapable of playing live (and outside of the studio).
“You’d be surprised,” Matthew told him. He was highlighting lines out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with one hand while taking notes on a pile of white and blue college ruled paper with the other. “Have you ever seen their video Live at Wembley?”
Tom shook his head.
“We can try to get our hands on it,” he said. “I saw it a couple of years ago, and it was amazing. I thought they’d suck, but they were actually incredible.”
“You think they’d have it at Blockbuster?” Tom asked.
Matthew sucked in his breath. “I think we’d have to go more indie for that,” he replied delicately.
“Right,” Tom said. He was so happy to have a friend who knew everything important there was to know. He glanced at Matthew’s gun shoes. They had raised eyebrows from both of Tom’s parents, but Tom thought they were cool. He secretly wanted a pair of his own, but he didn’t want Matthew to think that he was completely copying him. Besides, he didn’t know if he had the guts to wear shoes like that himself, both at school and in his own house.
Matthew grumbled. “I am so glad I wasn’t alive in…when was this book written?” he flipped A Midsummer Night’s Dream over to examine the back flap “…1596,” he said. “Can you imagine living in a world where plays like this were your only entertainment?”
Tom shrugged. “I don’t think Shakespeare was all bad,” he said. The truth was, in the years before he had been cured, especially on nights that he couldn’t sleep, Tom Beckett had alleviated his insomnia by reading an anthology of Shakespeare plays that belonged to his mother. At first he had grabbed the book up because he thought it would bore him to death and force him to fall asleep instantly, but instead he’d found himself oddly intrigued and involved in the stories. It wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to admit to anybody, not even himself really, but at best estimation, Tom had probably read over fifteen of Shakespeare’s plays.
“Maybe it’s just because I’m being forced to read it,” Matthew said.
“I think that songs are like poems,” Tom said.
“I don’t know…” Matthew said. “I mean, have you ever read something that made your heart freeze? Or jump? I don’t think I have…but that‘s what happens to me every time I listen to music.”
“The feeling like you could do or be anything you want,” Tom added.
“Exactly.”
Tom wanted to believe he could feel that way with other things, too…not just music. Rock and Roll couldn’t be the one and only god there was, could it? But Matthew seemed so convinced, and was the smartest person Tom knew. He was usually right about everything. Tom decided that he would believe Matthew's philosophy about music for now, and keep himself open to finding out more for himself later.
“A rock and roll agnostic,” he thought to himself.
The only thing that kept Tom away from Matthew’s house and afternoons filled with music were the Firescout meetings, something that Tom was beginning to find, more and more than he had less and less in common with. It wasn’t as though he didn’t like the Firescouts, his fellow group-mates, the troupe leaders, or the activities, it was just that he found himself frequently asking: If I had the choice between pitching a tent/starting a fire with sticks and a flint rock/learning how to use a compass to navigate the woods/insert any given outdoorsy activity here and listening to Queen with Matthew, which would I pick?
Mmmmmm, Queen. Definitely Queen.
Definitely Queen. Or Bowie. Definitely Bowie. Or any other of the musicians and groups that he and Matthew adored and worshiped always won out over the outdoors. Not that the outdoors weren’t great. They were The Outdoors. They would always be great. But rock music had a kind of urgency about it that couldn’t be ignored. It made your heart pound faster and faster every time you heard it and fell in love with it, and you knew that the harder you fell for it, the sooner it was going to kill you, because a human body could only take so much before it overdosed on that level of euphoria and exhilaration. Of course, at thirteen years old, Tom couldn’t articulate all of this to himself, but he knew it. Just because you can’t say something doesn’t mean you don’t know it’s there.
Mr. Beckett was beginning to know it was there as well, and it scared him. Got under his skin and was starting to itch and squirm and turn him into a walking, fidgety reptile. It wasn’t as though he and Mrs. Beckett believed that rock and roll was “the music of Satan” or anything like that. In fact, they thought that kind of thinking was silly and unfounded. The only thing Mr. and Mrs. Beckett cared about was that their only son did not completely screw up his life. They did not exactly know how rock and roll might do that to him, but they did have the vague feeling that he was obsessed with it (to be fair, he was). They also had the vague feeling that they did not understand quite how deeply his obsession ran, and this bothered them even more.
Was it even really possible to love something that much? Mrs. Beckett had said to her shrink in a session. She had never listened to any music, so she obviously didn’t know that the answer was, of course, a complete and definitive and resounding “yes.”
The final badge that Tom Beckett had to obtain before being promoted to panther status in the Firescouts (a very coveted thing for a thirteen year old boy who cared about those kinds of things) was for constructing a ship in a bottle. It seemed like a kind of random rite of passage, and it was. The whole story behind it was that the founder of the Firescouts had been more or less obsessed with ships in bottles, and actually possessed some kind of deeply-ingrained personal philosophy about how ships in bottles were actually like people and bottles were their lives. It was the kind of thing that sounded like it could be pretty interesting, but regardless of its potential for interest, everyone brushed it off as the rantings of an old kook who happened to have a lot of money and a little bit of power, and this was the only information they needed to know in order to move forward with their serious lives.
Tom had been reluctant to complete the last assignment, and he didn’t know why. His father wanted him to be done with it more than he did.
“A ship in a bottle?” Mr. Beckett said when he’d heard about the task. “Any idiot can make that.”
It was clear from the tone of his voice that he felt it was the kind of project his precocious son could easily complete in a couple of hours. But as the weeks peeled off, one after the other, it became harder and harder for Mr. Beckett to wait around. What is wrong with Tom? he thought to himself. Didn’t he want to be a Panther? Wasn’t that kind of thing important to him?
After two weeks, he decided to bring the issue up to Tom directly, during dinner.
“Why haven’t you made a move on the ship in the bottle yet?” he asked. There was no lead-up to the question, no clue that it was coming, and this was not helped by the fact that Mr. Beckett had been holding the question in for so long, seething and festering as a result, and it came out in a rather aggressive way.
“I’ve been really busy with school,” Tom said. Though this was true, the actual truth was that he had been busy listening to music as well. It was the kind of thing that a person said to another, knowing full well that it was garbage, and fully expecting the other person to know it too.
“That’s garbage and you and I both know it,” Mr. Beckett said. “You’ve been spending all your time with Matthew Yin and not getting anything done.”
“We’ve been doing our homework!” Tom protested. This part was true, and no one at the table could argue that. Tom Beckett had always been a straight-A student, and even with this new change in his life, this was exactly what he remained, though he had begun to resent the expectation, in the same way that he had begun to resent all expectations placed on him. Maybe it was not so much that he had begun to resent them, but more that he had begun to wonder exactly where they had been coming from all this time.
“You know we have to pay money for you to be a part of that organization,” said Mr. Beckett.
“Then maybe I shouldn’t be in it,” Tom said. “Seeing as how it’s such a waste of money.” He had never in his life talked back to his parents. It was not the music that was influencing this, he thought to himself in that second, but the thoughts created by the music. Was that essentially the same thing, or was it different?
His father stood up. His mother jerked a little in her chair. Seeing as how she suffered from Generalized Anxiety Disorder, this entire conversation was doing absolutely nothing to help her nerves.
“You disappoint me, Tom,” he said. “You don’t realize your own potential. You can quit the scouts if you want to. That will disappoint me. But if you quit before you finish this Panther project, you’ll disappoint me even more.”
Everyone knows that disappointment from a parent is something like a hundred times worse than anger. So this hit Tom hard, especially considering the fact that his father had never made a speech like this to him before. To a boy who was used to disappointing his parents, a tirade such as this might have only scuffed the surface, but for Tom, it was like someone had impaled him with a rusty screwdriver. His mother, though mostly focused on how terrible the conversation had made her feel, tried to calm her son down.
“It’s just that your father doesn’t understand this obsession with music that you have,” she whispered to him.
Tom knew that if he spoke, his voice would quaver. His father’s words had broken him a little, left him crestfallen and instantly almost completely devoid of any self-confidence. He hated feeling this way, and even more the fact that he now knew he could feel this way. Was it possible that he had been blind to his own behavior? All this time he had believed that his infatuation with music was a boon to his existence, not a detractor. But from the outside…could it be that he was, in fact, unhealthily obsessed? And if he was unhealthily obsessed, what did that make Matthew, and every other person on this earth for whom that kind of music was their only refuge?
“It’s not normal, whatever it is,” she retorted, becoming visibly more agitated. “I don’t really understand it myself, honestly. Your father’s right. You’re wasting your time. You could make something of yourself. You could make us proud. Is that so much to ask?”
“It is not a waste of time,” Tom said through gritted teeth.
“Yes it is,” she said. “You sit around and you listen to records all afternoon and evening. And you’re not doing anything with your life in the meantime.”
“Listening to records is not ‘doing nothing,’” he said. He believed it. A lot of people wouldn’t have believed it, but Tom Beckett did.
“By any normal, human standards, it is,” she insisted. Mrs. Beckett stabbed her fork into a limp carrot and shoved it into her mouth, chewing resentfully in a way that made her face appear particularly sour.
By the following afternoon, the entire ship in a bottle fiasco had come to represent to Tom Beckett an object of torture and imprisonment. He did not go over to Matthew’s house that afternoon, but stayed in his room. Matthew called him on the phone.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You sick or something?”
“I had a fight with my parents,” Tom said. “They don’t like me spending all my time listening to music. They’re mad at me for not doing this stupid shit-in-a-bottle project for scouts.”
“Why don’t you just do it and get it over with?” Matthew asked.
“Because that means I lose,” Tom said. He said it so straightforwardly that it almost surprised him a little bit.
“Lose what?”
“I’m doing exactly what they want. Being the perfect little conformist son.”
“It’s just a ship in a bottle, Tom. It’s a compromise.”
“Is that what you do?” Tom asked. “Compromise?”
“I guess.”
Tom hung up the phone and glanced over at his desk. His father had purchased all of the pieces necessary to make the ship in the bottle and placed them on his desk. If it was that important to his father, he thought finally to himself with a grand sigh, he didn’t see why it was so impossible to do this one last thing – even though a part of himself still greatly resented it, and another part of himself still stung blindingly from the things his father had said to him the evening before. He stepped over to his desk and picked up the pieces of balsa wood, as well as the glass bottle. He wondered why people liked putting ships in glass bottles anyway. Ships were supposed to roam the seven seas, not be confined in emptied Coke bottles in the bowels of a dusty garage. Whoever came up with the idea, Tom thought to himself, must have been a very angry and embittered person.
A few days later, Matthew knocked on the Becketts’ front door. Mrs. Beckett answered.
“Tom is very preoccupied building his ship in a bottle,” she explained to him.
“Yes, I know, Mrs. Beckett,” Matthew replied. “He just called me on the phone and said he’s putting the finishing touches on it right now. Once he’s done, we’re going to listen to some records if that’s alright?”
Mrs. Beckett didn’t dislike Matthew - by all accounts, he was a polite, well-spoken, unnaturally self-possessed young man. But she often found herself feeling quite self-conscious around him: every word Mrs. Beckett uttered, every widening of the eyes or clearing of the throat she made in his presence, threatened to betray her true feelings…which was that she did not understand, for the life of her, why Matthew dressed the way he did.
She eyed the boy up and down, trying to do so in a way that concealed exactly what she was doing. The platform shoes, the purple crushed velvet top, the S&M style lacing that ran up the sides of his black pants, and then, of course, there was the eye shadow. Today it was red. Mrs. Beckett only ever wore red on her lips. She cleared her throat, wanting to ask Matthew so many questions:
Matthew, are you the type of person who thinks they were a man born in a woman’s body?
Matthew, are you deliberately trying to make people think you’re a freak, or do you just like expressing yourself in the most outrageous way possible?
“It’s called glam rock,” Matthew said, breaking into her thoughts. He’d said it politely. Perhaps more politely than she deserved. But that was just because there wasn’t a single cell in Matthew Yin’s body that didn’t carry in it the eternal disease of politeness. As Mrs. Beckett tended to associate flamboyant dressers with abrasive personalities, Matthew’s unending politeness was another aspect of interacting with him that threw her dizzied brain for a loop.
“Excuse me?” she said, caught off guard.
“Glam rock,” he repeated. “You know…Bowie…Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars? Or the New York Dolls?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Tom’s got a couple tapes,” Matthew explained. “You should listen sometime.”
Mrs. Beckett nodded stiffly. It was instantly clear to both her and Matthew that this would never happen. The shared silent realization hung in the air between them.
“Well, I guess if Tom is almost finished you can come in,” she relented, stepping aside to let Matthew in.
“Looks good, Tom,” Matthew said as he entered Tom’s room. The model ship - a pathetic, unassuming wooden thing with white sails - was sitting on Tom’s desk next to a clear, empty bottle. “Looks like all you have to do is insert the ship in the bottle and you’re done.”
“It’s awful,” Tom bemoaned. “There’s something missing.”
Matthew dropped his book back on the floor and sat down on Tom’s bean bag chair. All Matthew wanted was to start playing some Queen records. It had been a particularly inane day at Grover Cleveland Middle School and he needed to listen to them. He was like a junkie, itching for the music fix.
“Looks perfect to me,” he shrugged. “Just put it in the bottle and you get your Panther badge already.”
Tom paused and fixed Matthew with a tentative stare. “Were you talking to my mom earlier?”
Matthew nodded. “She asked about my clothes. I told her it was glam rock. But I think I just confused her more.”
Tom slapped his hand against his forehead. “That’s it! That’s what’s missing!”
“From what?”
“What this stupid ship in a bottle needs…is glamor. Color. And texture. It needs to pop.”
“Isn’t the assignment to make a plain ship in a bottle with white sails?” Matthew asked skeptically. He spotted a piece of paper with the instructions from Firescouts on it on Tom’s desk and picked it up.
“‘Ship’s sails must be white…’” he read aloud. “‘...or project will be disqualified.’ ‘It’s italicized and everything.”
“Well, what if I don’t want my sails to be white?” Tom protested petulantly. “What if I want them to be…” He glanced around the room, eyes landing on Matthew’s crushed purple velvet shirt that reflected light from all angles of Tom's room. “Where did you get that shirt?”
“Garage sale on Sherman,” Matthew replied. He bought most of his “after school” clothes from garage sales and thrift stores. “And don’t even think about it.”
Tom exhaled loudly and flung himself onto the bed.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” His voice was muffled by the pillow.
“Doesn’t what bother me?”
Tom turned his head to face Matthew.
“I just don’t understand how you can pretend, every single day, to be someone you’re not. You go to school dressing and acting like everyone expects, but then you get home, and you shed your…layers or whatever. Like a lizard sheds its skin…and you get to be your real self, the real Matthew. Why can’t you be that way all the time? And why can’t I?”
“Okay, look,” Matthew sighed, sitting next to Tom. “Do you know why I wait until I get home to dress this way?”
“Because you’re a glam rocker,” Tom answered, as though it was obvious.
“Yes, that’s part of it,” Matthew sighed. “But it’s more complicated than that. About a year and a half ago, I decided for the first time to wear an outfit just like this one to school. My mother tried to stop me…not because she thought I was doing something wrong, but because she already knew that other people wouldn’t understand. I, on the other hand, thought everything would be fine.”
Tom stared at his friend. He’d never heard this story before.
“It wasn’t?”
“Let’s just say I didn’t last an hour on school property before I was dragged out to the field behind the school and beaten up.”
“You got in a fight?”
“I wouldn’t call it a fight,” Matthew replied dryly. “I wanted to fight back, but I couldn’t. I was in too much shock. I couldn’t believe people would actually want to hurt me for the way I dressed.”
Tom looked like he’d been punched in the gut himself. He stared vacantly into space.
“The guys who did it got suspended afterwards,” Matthew continued. “But it was bad. I mean, they had me on the ground, kicking me in the stomach. They broke two of my ribs.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?”
Matthew cleared his throat. “Because I’ve put it behind me,” he said decisively. “I had to learn the hard way that you can’t always be yourself…not all the time. So trust me when I say that…you don’t need to go through that. You don’t need to find out the hard way like I did.”
A long silence. Tom reflected on everything for a moment, staring straight ahead of him into space.
“But I want to go through it,” he uttered finally in a small, defiant voice.
“Excuse me?”
“I said,” Tom sat up and faced Matthew directly. “I want to go through it. I want to know what it feels like to be punished for being who I really am.”
“Tom…”
“I’m different from everybody else, Matthew, and so are you. You showed me this music and it showed me how different I am. We’re gonna be different the rest of our lives. We might as well start getting used to everything that comes with it.”
“You weren’t the one lying on Cougar Field with a chest full of broken bones,” Matthew pointed out, trying not to let his voice quaver.
“That should never have happened to you, Matthew,” Tom said. “But don’t you see the difference between now and then?
“What? That now I hate people and don’t trust anyone?”
“No!” Tom exclaimed. “The difference is that now we have each other! When other people don’t like who we are, I have your back and you have mine. You don’t have to go through it alone anymore.”
“I don’t think I can go through it ever again,” Matthew said. “I just can’t. I can’t.”
Tom understood Matthew’s meaning. He rose to his feet.
“Okay,” Tom said. “Then I’ll do it. In honor of you, my best friend in the entire world. The person who gave me a new life, in more ways than one. I’ll take this stand as a tribute to you.”
Matthew blinked as he attempted to take this all in. He was touched by Tom’s commitment to authenticity, to self-expression and to solidarity…
…but he also thought it was a really stupid idea.
“You’re gonna get in trouble with Firescouts,” Matthew pointed out. “And lose the Panther badge. And your dad…”
“I don’t care about any of that,” Tom interrupted. “Don’t you see, Matthew? This is a defining moment. The moment when we decide to break free and live life on our own terms. It’s like the Queen song goes: God knows, God knows I want to break free.”
“Please,” Matthew chuckled sadly. “Don’t bring God into this…or Queen for that matter.”
But from the transfixed look in Tom’s eyes, Matthew could tell that his friend had made up his mind, and there was nothing more he could do, no room left for convincing him to be sensible. When Tom Beckett got like this, there was no talking him out of it. He only hoped Tom didn’t come to regret his actions, though he was certain the feeling of regret was inevitable.
“Matthew,” Tom said. “I need you to let me cut off a piece of your shirt.”