Imaginary Hippies

He was doing the very thing he swore he’d never do.

“Perhaps we should sit?” the woman asked . Her back was stiff and her fingers long. She was delicate, yet she commanded much of the room. The wing backed chair she occupied looked small. The room was rented. Her suit was Channel. Her nasal accent gave history, a hint to some overseas living. She motioned to the couch and then across to two chairs by the window when he didn’t take a step forward. Plenty of options in this room but he didn’t budge. She bided her time.

“I think better on my feet.” He was very uncomfortable “If it’s all the same to you?”

“You’re making me nervous.” she took a sip from a water glass that was on the table beside her “Relax. This is a long process, only made longer if you stay standing.”

Jared softened his spine. “I swore I’d never write a book.” He said as he made his way to the only hard chair in the room and dragged it closer to his interviewer. And he definitely never thought a woman named Buffy of all things, would be the one to do it. But she was the best, and if he was going to do this, it had to be with the best.

“This is a voluntary process.” she reminded him. Scribbling a few lines in the pad on her lap.

“Is it?”

She sighed “Of course it is!”

“It doesn’t feel that way.”

She shifted her seat. She couldn’t stand small talk. All the unnecessary coddling of Hollywood’s elite. It’s exhausting trying to get them to let down their walls. Open up and say ANYTHING for Pete’s sake! “Let’s talk about something light. Start with something simple and see where we go from there? Is that ok?”

Jared nodded.

She poised her pen on the first line of a new page, though she had long ago pressed record on her digital voice recorder sitting on the coffee table between them. She preferred her own notes to build the book. The digital recorder would pick up the quotes she’d add at a later date. The therapy session began: “Tell me about the first time you picked up a guitar. How old were you?”

“Well,” Jared crossed then uncrossed his legs “I was little. Really little. And it wasn’t my guitar….I’m not sure anymore who it belonged to.”

He knew exactly who it belonged to. He was six or seven and the guitar was off limits which made it that much more interesting to a little boy living in yet another new house with a new set of rules and old people. The guitar his memory conjured was beautiful and tempting. Made by a company called Guild. Their model F-512 which looked so much like 12 string John Denver played for Kermit on Sesame Street. Little Jared wasn’t supposed to touch the guitar. But he couldn’t help himself. He just had to get his hands on it. It was worth the talking to he’d get for being “out of line.” Or the wack he might get upside his head when the owner of this guitar got home from whatever bar he was at. The new boyfriend was a real prick. But he knew how to play guitar and Jared wanted to be just like him not only because he could play guitar but more importantly he could make Jared’s mother sing.

Jared couldn’t remember the house, his bedroom or the kitchen, but he never forgot how good it felt to touch over that guitar. Jared knew he would be in big big trouble if anyone caught him, Randy made that quite clear, but Jared didn’t give a shit. He was a kid. And that guitar was tempting. Laying up against the wall in the living room – within reach every time Jared switched the channel on the TV set.

That afternoon, the last afternoon they spent in that apartment, Jared’s fingertip grazed the strings. And he positioned his other hand at the neck of the guitar. Mimicking the finger positions he thought he saw on Sesame Street. His hand wasn’t big enough so he laid his fingertips on the only string he could reach – pluck plucked twice and it barely made a sound instead of the beautiful country twang he was expecting. It didn’t sound like it should, no matter how hard he tried. He couldn’t make the same sound as John Denver. This guitar sounded stupid. It didn’t work right and it was dumb. Jared pushed the guitar off his lap. Hard with both hands. And it toppled to the ground, ringing out thru the apartment with a big whoosh of stale air. Something cracked. The only sound the guitar made that Jared could recognize.

Jared could feel heat flash across his body at just the thought of that afternoon. He composed himself. “I think the guitar belonged to a friend of the family.” he said softly, testing the words to see how they sounded out loud. “We were..um…in a commune. It was summer time and everyone was wearing bright colors and denim. Bell bottoms maybe?”

Jared painted a picture of a scene that didn’t exist in his memory. A colorful afternoon filled with sunshine and art. A day that he never experienced but a tale easily told to this writer who was sitting across the room from him chewing on her pencil. He didn’t let his mouth speak about the blood from the gash on Shannon’s forehead. Delivered when Randy came home and found the guitar. The wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding, even after the screaming stopped. Jared curled in a ball in the closet. Shannon taking the blame. Again. He didn’t talk about that. Instead he told tale of imaginary hippies and a life he never lived. Tall tales about art that didn’t exist for another 15 years. When he was almost grown and Mom finally met a decent man. A man she wasn’t interested in, but was kind to them all.

He spent the next few hours filling up pages in the interviewers leather notebook. Not a word of what he said was true but it flowed from his lips easily. The struggle of a single-mother, fists full of food stamps, rising up from the muddy banks. Jared dreamed about getting away. Escaping. Just the three of them, making their way out in the world one step at a time. But they lived in nice houses, on streets with green lawns and cable TV. Who would want to run away from that? From a life of privilege? Who grew up hating where they were from, when everyone else was trying their hardest to make it to where he’d been? He wished his mother pulled them through life by her bootstraps but the real story wasn’t so kind to his mother’s reputation. A sweet woman who he forgave long ago, that put her sons through the ringer for ‘love.’ A type of love that he’s not sure he ever learned to understand. One that hurt more than anything else. Love that was all consuming and confusing. Love that didn’t feel like love should. Love that seemed an awful lot like hate. Or indifference at best.

Jared’s not sure he knows what love really is. Or what it’s supposed to feel like. Scratch that. He feels it – at least when it comes to her. That’s why he protects the truth. And why he doesn’t want to write this damn book. Though his publicist insists the public is ready to find out who he really is. They’ll never really know. Because he’ll never tell.

“Let’s jump ahead a few years. You moved around quite a bit. Were you able to make friends easily?”

“I became very popular once the other kids realized I had weed.”