Uncle Max

by Chris Kenry

Genres: LGBT Gay

Synopsis

The Summer From Hell? Meet fourteen-year-old Dillon: a self-described nerdy band fag in too-small clothes accessorized by a clarinet case and orthodontic headgear with a robin's-egg-blue satin strap. Fresh from the rigors of junior high school gym class and daily torment by studly jock Aaron Lewis, Dillon is in desperate need of a three-month reprieve. Alas, that isn't to be--not after his mother, Lana, stumbles across his stash of empty wine bottles and Sears catalogue pages featuring scantily clad male torsos. Unfortunately for Dillon, Lana has recently swapped booze and overflowing cleavage for fervent devotion to the one man who can never leave her--the Lord Jesus Christ--and to the Lord's earthbound henchman, Wayne Blandings, Assistant Pastor at The Church of the Divine Redeemer. Alarmed at the diabolic evidence of Dillon's drunken, perverted nocturnal hobbies, Lana and Wayne conclude that Bible Camp is his only hope. Now, on the verge of being shipped off to the Christian barracks, Dillon needs salvation of a different kind. . . Before you can say "halleluiah," Dillon's personal savior materializes--fabulously shirtless and smoking a French cigarette. Perpetually on the lam, Uncle Max needs a place to hang--and hide--out for awhile. But the flamboyant francophile can't seem to elude a colorful mini-entourage that includes his parole officer, Meredith; his sexy mountaineer boyfriend, Serge; and fellow con artist/antiques dealer Jane Nguyen. Much to Dillon's amazement, loathsome Lana isn't all he has in common with the dashing family black sheep. Sprung from the proverbial closet at last, Dillon finds himself under Max's supervision for the summer. This entails Hitchcock films, Balzac novels, and a crash course in shoplifting, from which Dillon swiftly graduates to insurance fraud and art heists. Now, as Max and Jane's devoted sidekick, he's the third member of the notorious "Balzac Bunch," who specialize in befriending blue-haired, blue blooded bridge players--and then relieving them of their priceless antiques. Too quickly, sultry July gives way to steamy August, and the heat is on in more ways than one. Now the cops are closing in, and only two things are certain: that autumn and Max's departure are imminent--and that for Dillon, nothing will ever be the same again. . .

Release date: July 19, 2012

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 293

Sample

If you don’t know what you’re looking for, Nguyen’s is not easy to find. Unlike the hundreds of other antique stores that compete for space on the crowded Antique Row, Nguyen’s does not have a flashy sign proclaiming its presence. Nor has the building in which it is housed been painted garish attention-grabbing colors. No, Nguyen’s is in an unremarkable, two-story building of blond brick with a large storefront window facing Broadway.

In this window, there are no artfully arranged displays of furniture, no silver tea sets, or chandeliers (its owner being too concerned with theft and sun damage to ever display any of her treasures to the public). In this window, there is nothing more than a floor-to-ceiling black velvet curtain. A curtain that acts both as a sunblock and as a backdrop for her sign—an artist’s easel on which rests a matte black canvas in an elaborate gold frame. On this canvas there are small, raised, gold letters spelling out Nguyen’s, and then below, in identical, although somewhat smaller script, is the exclusionary phrase by appointment only. There used to be a telephone number on the sign, which the curious could call to gain entry; but lately even this has been removed and replaced with an e-mail address, since the owner, who is impatient with most of the buying public, now does most of her buying and selling online.

Nguyen’s deals in high-end antiques, mostly of French or Asian origin, and is owned by Jane Nguyen, who is as minimal in appearance as her first name and storefront imply. On any day, in any season, she is invariably dressed in a simple, sleeveless black dress, the hemline of which, regardless of the current fashion, she keeps just above the knee. A simple strand of pearls or occasionally a gold brooch adds variety to what is otherwise a uniform. She is short, perhaps only five feet tall, and thin, and her long straight black hair is usually held back in a ponytail by a simple black band. Her one concession to whimsy is a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, the corners of which are encrusted with small, almost imperceptible, rhinestones. In addition to her encyclopedic knowledge of French antiques, she is known about town, and with the dealers and clients around the country, for these glasses, whose lenses (unbeknownst to all but a select few) have as much prescriptive value as a window pane. They are completely useless as anything other than an accessory, and somehow I knew, even before she confessed it to me, that the glasses had been my uncle’s idea.

Max was like that: always coming up with simple ways to make ordinary things extraordinary. His love of all things marinated or pickled is a perfect example of this. Okra, watermelon rind, cheap cuts of meat—anything that people usually wouldn’t consider eating, would actively avoid or even discard—Max could dress up in some colorful vinegar with a few floating herbs, et voilà! The mundane would become a delicacy.

“The French are wise that way,” I remember him saying (according to Max, the French were wise in just about every way). “They could pickle a piece of shit and make it edible. It’s all about potential, Dil. Never mind what things are, the important thing is what they can become.”

My name is Dillon, but he always shortened it to Dil, which is perhaps appropriate since I was nothing more than one of his very large pickles. An awkward, ugly, all-too-ordinary suburban adolescent who he marinated into something much more one summer almost a decade ago.

But, on this particular summer morning, it was to Nguyen’s shop that I eagerly made my way. I work there on the weekends and on some evenings or on the days when I’m not in class. I was not scheduled to work for another hour, but something I’d come across in the newspaper that morning while paying for my order at the coffee shop had caused me to rush over, paper in hand, to show Jane.

“It’s him!” I cried, breathless with excitement, dropping the paper on the desk in front of her, open to the page I’d been reading. “It’s got to be him.”

Calmly, Jane pushed the paper aside and neatly stacked the invoices on which she’d been working. She emitted an annoyed sigh and slowly put on her glasses. She was not yet forty, but her somber world-weary manner made her seem much older. She picked up the paper, scanned the articles, and then finally discovered the one I’d intended her to see. I watched her dark eyes behind the glasses as they darted across the text.

It was a small article on page two in the slender column devoted to celebrity news, which is, I have to admit, the first section I look at in the morning.

FORMER DENVER TYCOON AND WIFE ROBBED AT GUNPOINT IN SOUTH OF FRANCE, the headline blared. The article went on to detail how Lloyd and Beverly Boatwright-Stark, former Denver residents, had left St. Tropez early Friday afternoon en route to Monaco, where they planned to spend the winter. Roughly midway on their journey, their car was forced off onto a side road by another car and two motorcycles, all piloted by men in ski masks. The driver was pulled from the car, stripped, gagged, and tied to a tree. The frightened couple were then forced out and ordered by the leader of the gang—“in perfect, unaccented English,” they were quoted as saying—to hand over the undisclosed quantity of cash and jewelry they were carrying. They were then similarly stripped, gagged, and tied up. They were discovered some hours later, frightened but unharmed, by a group of bemused schoolgirls.

When Jane had finished reading, she handed me the paper, gave a dismissive wave, and said, “They always were flashy. Remember their house, remember that ridiculous pink taffeta dress she wore to the Governor’s Ball? Just like a blob of taffy! A woman half her age—and weight—couldn’t have gotten away with that! And look at this, look here,” she said, pointing to a line in the article. “... an undisclosed quantity of cash and jewelry? Christ! Who would drive around with a carload of cash and jewels? Only stupid ostentatious yokels like them, that’s who. Serves them right.”

“But what abou—”

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” she said, cutting me off. “But it wasn’t him. You know as well as I do that he probably never even made it there.” She then picked up her pen and went back to her invoices.

I was leery of her calm exterior. I had seen the sparkle in her eyes as they scanned the article and knew it had been caused by more than her gleeful distaste for the Boatwright-Starks.

“Oh come on! France! The Boatwright-Starks! Robbery!” I cried, naming three of Max’s passions. “Who else could it be?”

Jane looked up from her invoices. She stared through the crowded shop at the small strip of sunlight admitted through the door. She had taken off her glasses and her face looked softer, less severe. I knew that she was thinking of Max, but what she was thinking I could only imagine. My own thoughts of my uncle went from one extreme to another, with very little in between that was neutral, and I was sure that she felt the same. Whatever she was thinking, I thought it best not to intrude for a while so I stretched out on the large Empire sofa and took one of the small madeleines from the paper bag I’d bought at the coffee shop. I chewed absently and stared up at the ceiling, the newspaper resting on my chest.

Maybe she’s right, I thought. Maybe it’s not him.

I remembered the picture of the Jaguar as it was pulled from the ocean. It had fallen two hundred feet into shallow water. The hood had been accordioned to one-eighth its original length and both doors had been torn off on impact. His body had never been found. It was assumed that it had been ejected through the windshield and that what was left of it had floated out to sea. . . . Fish food. But I didn’t believe it. It was him in France. Somehow I knew it. I shut my eyes and tried to remember the last time I’d seen him; he’d been walking away, into the garage. I could see the outline of his lean body, his black hair; but try as I might, I could not make out his face. I remembered that his nose was crooked where it had been broken, that his eyebrows were enviably thick, and that his jawline was square and pronounced, but I could not see the whole picture. It was all in shadow. I tried hard to imagine him winding rope around the rotund, naked bodies of the Boatwright-Starks, as the paper had described, but I could see his features no better than they had through the mask.

“Dillon.” It was Jane’s voice. I looked up from the sofa. She had put her glasses back on and she was smiling. “Give me some of those,” she said, motioning toward the bag of madeleines. “We don’t open for another twenty minutes, why don’t you go lock the door and tell me about your date last night.”

I groaned and made my way to the door. Lately, I’d been trying my luck with personal ads in one of the weekly papers as a new way to meet guys who were hopefully a little less shallow and a little more intriguing than the ones I met in bars or at the gym. The results had been disastrous so far, but I have to admit, I did relish giving an account of the trauma to my friends the next morning. Bad dates, like disastrous vacations and injuries requiring stitches, always make for interesting stories.

I swung myself up from the sofa and handed her the bag. Then I wove my way through the maze of desks and sideboards and tables to the front door, turned the key in the lock, and went back to the sofa, dropping the newspaper in an elephant’s foot trash can on the way.

“Let’s hear it,” Jane said, leaning her tiny body forward on the huge desk and rubbing her hands together in anticipation.

“What can I say?” I sighed. “He was very nice to look at: broad shoulders, slender waist, beautiful hands. He had a nicely shaped head in which, unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing.”

“And you already refer to him in the past tense,” Jane chuckled. I went on.

“Yes. When my life is made into a stage play, the actor given his minor role will be disappointed with his brief moment in the spotlight, but at least his lines will be easy to memorize since they’ll consist mostly of one-word exclamations like Whoa! Cool! and Righteous!”

“That bad?”

“Oh, much worse. I had to drink just to get through it, but even that wasn’t easy,” I said, sitting up on the sofa, warming to the tale. “I was just a little bit late getting to the restaurant and when I arrived I saw that he had already been seated and had taken the liberty of ordering us a bottle of wine. It was an unnaturally pink wine that tasted awfully close to spiked Kool-aid, with a picture of some kittens on the label.”

I knew this last remark would offend Jane, the wine snob, more than anything.

“No!” she cried, leaning back in her chair.

“Oh yes,” I said. “And I couldn’t drink it fast enough. But let me get to the meal. Every time I paused he’d look over at my plate and say, in his booming voice, ‘Dude, you gonna finish that?’ If I said no (and I did quite often. Imagine the food in a restaurant that sells wine with kittens on the label), he’d reach one of his hamhock arms across the table and scoop it up with his fork.”

“At least he knew how to use one,” Jane laughed.

“Oh God, I’m not even sure he had thumbs! It’s too bad, really,” I said, shaking my head, “because, of course, the sex afterward was quite good.”

“So you slept with him.”

“Of course. I didn’t want the night to be a total loss.”

“Will you see him again?”

“I don’t think so,” I said wistfully.

“What if he calls?”

“Ahh,” I said, raising a finger, “then the phone will ring at the pay phone down the street from my house.”

Later that afternoon, as I sat polishing a long neglected silver tray that Jane was preparing to photograph for eBay, I asked her when was the last time she’d gone out on a date. Her head remained focused on the camera she was mounting on the tripod.

“A long time ago,” she said, curtly. “Aren’t you finished yet?”

I knew I had hit a nerve, but I continued.

“Do you think you ever will?” I asked.

Her head remained down, as if she were looking at the camera, but her eyes were looking up and off to the side. “Maybe not,” she said, and then went back to the camera.

“Is that because of him?” I asked.

“Because of whom?”

I didn’t answer but let the question hang in the air. She paused, shook her head slightly, and returned her attention to the camera. I went back to rubbing the tray.

“Do you think he’s ruined it for us?” I asked. “I mean, you not dating anyone and me writing off every new guy five minutes into our first date.”

“You’re still young,” she said. “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not that young,” I countered, “and you’re not that old. Do you think we’ll ever find anyone like Max?”

“Not if we’re lucky,” she quipped, and got up and left the room. I knew then, despite her flip response, or perhaps because of it, that I was right. He had ruined us. And the fact that now he was probably still alive made it even worse. In many ways a ghost of the living is much worse than a ghost of the dead, for there is always the possibility that he will come back, or that someday, walking in London or Prague or Paris, I’ll meet him again or even catch a glimpse of him or someone that looks like him. Max will always haunt us, I thought, just like Rebecca, or Lara, or Ilsa, or any of the other ghostly movie heroines. But instead of a monogrammed hanky, or the balalaika, or a few bars of As Time Goes By, I’ll think of him every time I have a date.

I went back to polishing the tray and tried again to imagine Max’s face, but I couldn’t. I could see it no better than my own murky reflection in the tarnished silver. And maybe that was what really scared me—not that I would always be haunted by him, but that I would forget him. That I was forgetting him. That slowly he was fading from my memory. Soon, I knew, it would be difficult to picture him at all; and the thought of that was like a hollow space in my life, a cartoon gunshot right through my torso leaving a perfectly round hole, an empty, hungry feeling.

Maybe he hasn’t ruined me, I thought, maybe I just don’t want to let go.

I finished with the tray, positioned it on the wooden stand in front of the black velvet curtain, and went to find Jane. As I walked through the shop toward the back room, past the elephant’s foot trash can. I looked down. It was empty. A few feet ahead sat Jane, looking dwarfish in an enormous wing-back chair, newspaper in her lap, again staring out the window at the street.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve started raining from the clear blue sky, as Max used to say, meaning that I haven’t let the clouds build up. I’ve cheated you out of all the thunder and lightning. I’ve started near the end of the story, and I’ve skipped the beginning and the middle entirely. I’ve left out the Balzac and the climbing and the egg, and everything, really.

But when did it all start? It’s hard to say. I suppose I could start with the night Max arrived, but it really began earlier, when my stepfather left us and when Lana found God. The summer I was supposed to go to camp, but then at the last minute, thanks to Max, didn’t . . .

To say that Lana was vindictive would be saying too little. Add to that spiteful, jealous, bitter, selfish, neglectful, cruel, manipulative, vain, and hypocritical, and you get a much more accurate portrait. Granted those are not the nicest things to call your mother, but when you consider that Mother was the name she least liked to be called, the others really aren’t so bad.

For those, and many other reasons, men have always left Lana. When I was five years old, my father left. When I was twelve, my stepfather left. Six years seemed to be about the limit that any man could stand to be with her. Somehow, I made it through eighteen, although certainly not by choice and not without scars.

She met my father when they were both very young and working as lift operators at a ski resort. At first, they were just casual friends, but that all changed one drunken night when they ended up together in a sleeping bag on the shore of Lake Dillon and I was accidentally conceived. That was their first mistake. Shortly thereafter, they made their second; they got married.

Jake, my father, was (and still is) a ski bum, which means that he has never wanted anything more from life than to search for untracked snow during the day and to drink beer with his buddies at night. Although that was sufficient for him, it was not nearly enough for Lana, who had read far too many Judith Krantz novels by then and expected her life to be full of champagne flutes, designer clothes, and yacht trips around the Mediterranean. Some of my earliest memories are of Lana giving very shrill vent to her material frustrations (reading Ms. Krantz had also given her an outline for dramatic tantrum throwing). My father would listen and nod his head, sometimes try to appease her, but usually he’d just grab his keys and coat and leave, not returning until the bars had closed.

One night, and unfortunately I was only about four years old at the time so I don’t remember the specifics, Lana must have pushed him too far. They argued, and my father, as usual, headed out to the bar, but this time he did not return at closing time, or even the next morning. He did not return at all. She called the police and filed a missing persons’ report, and the next day a massive search was begun.

Lana loved all the attention and gave several tearful accounts of his disappearance to eager television and newspaper reporters. About a week later the search was called off when we got a letter from Canada, which was, I suppose, as far away from her as my dad could imagine getting. He sent her all the money he had, said he would send more when he could, and that was it. He was gone. Out of our lives. I don’t really hold it against him; I’m sure I’d have left, too, if I’d been married to her, but I’ve never stopped begrudging him for leaving me behind.

Years later I learned that he did try to call and did send me letters, but Lana was vindictive and mean, so I never knew. She hung up whenever he called and must have thrown away anything that he ever sent. Consequently, I did not see my father again until I was in college, and then it was an awkward meeting, in an airport bar, between two strangers who each felt as though they should have known more about the other. For the most part the conversation was slow and stilted, but on one topic it flowed like water down a hill; that topic was our mutual dislike of Lana.

Alone after my father left, Lana bundled up all of her things from our trailer and moved back into her parents’ tiny house in Littleton. Since I was too big to leave on the doorstep of a fire station or push down the river in a reed basket, she packed me up and dragged me along, too. My grandparents, recently retired and happy to have the house to themselves, were not thrilled to be our hosts. Nevertheless, my grandmother, ever eager to play the martyr, did open her door to us—although I think she did it just so she could practice her bothered sigh. She helped get Lana a job as a receptionist in the office of a plastic surgeon. And since Lana did not yet have enough money for daycare, my grandmother sighed and reluctantly agreed to watch me during the day.

What I remember most from this time are two things. First, I watched an awful lot of TV Second, it was the first time I ever heard of Max.

From the moment I got up in the morning, I was plopped down in front of the television.

“Dillon,” my grandmother would say, “why don’t you take your cereal and go watch some TV That Captain Kangaroo’s on. Hurry now; you don’t want to miss it.”

My grandmother seemed to do nothing but sit at the kitchen table with her ever-present can of Tab, smoking cigarettes, doing her nails, and flipping through travel brochures for cruises of the Caribbean. My grandfather stuck to the small greenhouse he’d built behind the house, in which he was forever potting and repotting his orchids, and listening to talk radio on his Walkman. In fact, the Walkman was pretty much always on. From sunup to sundown, even during meals, he wore his headphones, which was fine because he never had much to say other than to shake his head every now and then and yell something on the order of “THIS COUNTRY’S GOING TO HELL IN A HAND BASKET” or “NUKE ’EM BACK TO THE STONE AGE!”

To which, my grandmother would nod, take a sip of her Tab, and reply, “Yes, dear.”

After we’d eaten, he’d return to the greenhouse or retrieve his metal detector from the garage and wander the neighborhood, digging up stray dimes and bottle caps as he went, yelling salutations at the neighbors. On rare occasions, like my birthday or on one of his good-humored days when he’d been nipping from the bottle of rum he kept hidden in his workbench, I was allowed to help with the repotting or go with him on his treasure hunts. But usually when I asked, he’d just pat me on the head and yell, “WHY DON’T YOU GO WATCH SOME TV!”

So I watched TV Hours and days and weeks of TV Cartoons, talk shows, soap operas, reruns, local news, on and on, over and over again. On top of the TV were several framed family photos, to which my attention would sometimes drift when the morning cartoons gave way to the afternoon soap operas. There was my grandparents’ wedding picture, pictures of Lana as a baby, and Lana on her first day of school, and Lana artfully posed and airbrushed for her senior class picture. Far to the left of these was a small hinged metal frame that opened like a book. On one side was a photo of Lana when she was about ten. On the other was a boy, about my age, with very black hair and a menacing smile on his face. I asked about him one day while I was helping my grandfather with the repotting. His brow furrowed and he stopped what he was doing. Then he shook his head and yelled, “THE DEVIL’S CHILD, THAT BOY.”

I waited for him to elaborate but he just went back to his potting, shaking his head angrily.

My childish curiosity was piqued by this response, which I took quite literally, having recently watched a matinee of Rosemary’s Baby; so later that afternoon when I was having my snack, I asked my grandmother about it.

“Nana, who’s that dark-haired boy in the picture frame on the TV?”

She paused midstroke in her nail painting and gave me an angry look, like the one she gave me when I set my glass on one of the end tables without a coaster. She took a long drag on her cigarette and arched one of her penciled-in eyebrows.

“That,” she said, her voice revealing her distaste, “was your mother’s little brother, your uncle, but he’s with the angels in heaven now.”

“He’s dead?” I asked, more than a little confused about how the devil’s child could be with the angels in heaven.

“Mmm,” she replied, and nodded vaguely. “Oh look, it’s almost three o’clock already,” she said, lifting me up from my chair and directing me toward the living room. “Isn’t your show on? That one with all the little puppets in the colored neighborhood? Take your snack with you; that’s a good boy. And be sure and use a coaster.”

I went back to my spot in front of the TV but as soon as she left I took the frame down from its spot once more. It was odd to look at that picture—a picture of someone roughly my own age—and know that he was dead.

Later that night, during my bath, while Lana was perched on the toilet lid filing her nails, I asked her about him.

“How did your brother die?” I ventured, as gently and gravely as I could, afraid she might erupt in a flood of tears and wailing. Instead, her brow wrinkled and she looked confused.

“Die? He’s not dead,” she said, indignantly, “Well, probably not yet, anyway. Which one of them told you that?”

“Nana.”

“Well, that figures,” she sneered.

“But what happened to him?” I asked.

She stopped filing her nails and smiled devilishly. “Oh, he was trouble, that boy. He had some trouble—” she said and seemed just about to tell me about it, but then caught herself and thought better of it. “He, uh, didn’t get along with Nana and Grandpa so he ran away, or they kicked him out, I don’t remember which one it was that last time. I was away then, up at Keystone.”

This was hardly a satisfactory response.

“But why did they say he was dead?” I asked. Again Lana started, but then stopped herself and her expression darkened.

“Look, kiddo,” she said, stabbing at the air in front of me with the nail file, her tone suddenly serious and impatient. “You just zip your lips on the subject for now. We can talk about it all you want someday when we’re out of here, but don’t bring it up anymore. They’re sick of us as it is so don’t you go and make it worse. Got it?”

I nodded, and sunk down among the bubbles. We did not speak of it again, and the next day I noticed that the picture-book frame had disappeared from its place on the TV I thought about it a lot after that, trying to imagine what he’d done that everyone was so afraid to talk about, but soon all thoughts of him were replaced by another man who appeared in our lives.

As I said, Lana was young then, blonde, blue-eyed, pretty, and prone to wearing tight sweaters, short skirts, patterned stockings, and lots of lip gloss. Indeed, that was why she had been hired at the plastic surgeon’s office. The doctor she worked for was well into middle age and it didn’t take long for him to take more than a professional interest in her. His midlife crisis had begun the year before and he’d treated the symptoms with the purchase of a vintage Jaguar. Although this undoubtedly made him feel young and free for a while, I’m sure, as with most accessories, the novelty eventually wore off. Lana, with her firm skin and youthful breasts, was surely closer to what he was looking for, so she soon became his next accessory. That she had an accessory of her own—namely, me—he didn’t seem to mind. He had two college-age daughters and a wife himself, so I was hardly the biggest nuisance in his life. In due time, he shed his wife and replaced her with Lana. She became his new model, his upgrade, his trophy wife. I was the trophy wife’s baggage, but as I said, he really didn’t mind my existence.

Lana, on the other hand, came to mind it a great deal. To her I suppose I was a symbol of her youthful folly, of poor decisions she had made, of failures . . .