Chapter 45: Advice to a Young Man

It was weeks before life finally got back to normal for us, if anything could be considered normal. We literally could not go anywhere the first week. Every trip to the store had us mobbed by screaming girls. Sometimes men and women joined in too. Every time we walked into the cafeteria, the whole school erupted in cheers. Forget about going to movies or restaurants.

There were nut cases too, religious types and whackos who threw things at us, hurled insults, or tried to grab us and yell at us about our sins. Occasionally, guys tried to proposition or outright grab Charlotte, but she was never out in public alone, especially at night.

We were invited to do interviews on various talk shows and news programs. Everybody wanted to hear our story. We even got an offer to make a movie out of it. We turned that down too. We really didn't need the money, and we already had all the fame we could stomach. Another guy offered us a million dollars if he could write our story into a novel. Charlotte said no. If anyone was gonna write our story, it would be me, not some two-bit hack who would rape the soul right out of it going for all the juicy sensationalism.

Charlotte and I got literally dozens of offers a week for sex. Both of us got propositioned by both guys and girls, constantly. We politely turned them down—especially the strangers—but after a while it became harder to be patient and graceful. We soon got to the point of just turning and walking away whenever the issue came up. We were never rude to anyone, but man it got old pretty quick, even from the hottest hotties. Other people wanted to film us making out, even kissing and groping each other, and that was just way too creepy.

"There's already a movie all over the internet, if you wanna see that."

As Charlotte's pregnancy began to show more and more, the offers dwindled for her. But things got harder on me. You'd be surprised how many girls were trying to use Charlotte's pregnancy against her, as though it made her less desirable to me and gave them an opportunity to steal me away. People like that are just gross. Most of them were thrilled of course, and supported us a hundred percent, but there are always bad apples in the bunch. I mostly ignored them, but some of the more aggressive ones, I had to tell where to go and how fast they should try to get there.

We got letters. We got phone calls. We got photos sent to us. Most of them were from fans who were inspired by our movie. Some were creepy, with photos attached with way too much information. Some were of course threats from religious nutters, warnings of hell and damnation, you name it. Because we all know, if you wanna covert someone to your cause, the best way to go about it is to tell them God is just ready, willing, and eager to destroy them. Idiots.

Probably the strangest thing of all is that people wanted to know everything we were interested in—our favorite foods, our favorite movies, what style of clothes we liked, what kind of music we listened to. Within a few weeks, half the girls in the city had dyed their hair blonde and were wearing the same styles as Charlotte. The rest of them had the t-shirts people had made with lines from our movie printed on them. Others had t-shirts with our pictures on them, or screenshots from the movie. It sounds weird to say, but I almost got sick of seeing myself after a while. I mean, I was just me. Nothing was really different than when I'd been just an average nobody. It was just crazy.

Steve and Sheila got some attention too. It was eventually revealed (by certain students in our school) that they were the ones involved in the production with us. Steve's mom was of course mortified and nearly disowned him, but his dad got really busy trying to figure out how to make money off of his son's new-found stardom. Steve got interviewed a few times by the news around our city, but he didn't talk much. The best thing that happened to him was he got some job offers to be in television production.

Shelia was the real brains behind the operation though. That could not be hidden. She got all kinds of offers to be interviewed. People wanted to know her life story as well, and how she got involved with us. She turned them down and only did one television interview with a talk show host she actually had respect for and had always wanted to meet. The best thing that happened to her was the offer she got to attend a very prestigious art school in New York. She accepted of course, and Ron agreed to pay all her expenses on the condition that she direct at least one movie for Lawsen publications after she graduated.

Sheila also got a chance to go on an all-expense paid cruise with her mom, after telling the talk show host she hadn't had a chance to spend much alone time with Vanessa since her dad died. She took two weeks off school and they came back tanned and smiling from the Bahamas. The talk show's producer also arranged for a professional family therapist to accompany them, and they came back much closer than I'd ever seen them. They weren't perfect of course, but the improvement was obvious. I was happy for them.

Mom started seeing this guy Dave more and more. He was a doctor at one of the hospitals she worked at, a divorcee like her. I was happy for her. I was also happy that it made her not mind so much if I spent half my life at the Lawsens'. If she'd been all alone, I'd have felt really bad.

Amy was doing okay, up in Kelowna. She started calling more and more though, feeling upset about the fights she was getting in with her grandparents. We tried our best to smooth things over from afar, but there was only so much we could do. The house was just too small for the three of them. And a teenage girl was just too much to deal with for a couple of retired seniors ... and vice versa I suppose.

It was decided somewhere around that time, that Charlotte and I should leave for Canada to look after Amy. It was originally Stephanie's idea. We could live in Amy's mom's house, which had been sitting vacant the past few months, take care of her and practice being a family until the baby came. Amy had school to finish before she came to live with the Lawsen's permanently. She was staying with her grandparents now, but that couldn't last for the next few years. And since Charlotte and I had to move out on our own with our baby soon anyway, we all figured we might as well go there. Amy could help us with the baby and we could help her with school and such. (It was also seen as a way to help us to lay low for a while, get us away from the weirdos and religious nuts around the neighborhood. But that part was left implied, not spoken of directly. ) Charlotte was thrilled with the idea. She ran to the phone to call her sister and tell her the good news. The hardest part about the plan was breaking the news to my mom. She didn't like the idea of me leaving for a whole other country, but she eventually saw the wisdom in it. We decided to leave right after school was done.

Then we dove head first into our exams and passed with good grades in spite of all the chaos. And even though we weren't seniors, we were invited out to the prom as honored guests of the graduating class. This is where the story continues, because the day before the prom, Charlotte had nothing to wear.

Ron and Stephanie were like a second set of parents to me by then. I slept over there so much, ate so many dinners with them, watched so many great movies, and even went on a few family trips with them. They soon began joking about adopting me as a son, to which Charlotte added, "Son-in-law, soon enough."

When Charlotte came home begging her mom to take her shopping for the prom, Ron offered to take me along too. We jumped in the car and headed off to the local mall. Charlotte and Steph went one way. Me and Ron went another. It was one of the first moments I ever spent an extended period of time alone with him, and I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

"What do you feel like wearing tomorrow, Anthony?"

"I dunno. I've never done this before."

"Your dad never took you shopping for clothes?"

"Not since I was a kid. He left us quite a while ago."

"So Charlotte tells us. That must have been tough to get through."

"I dunno. I guess it was, at first. Then you just get used to it and it's like, you can't even remember what it used to be like when he was there."

We were strolling through the mall and I was trying to ignore the girls staring and pointing at me. Luckily it was a weekday morning, and most of them were in school. But there were a few who were done their exams already, just like Charlotte and I were.

"I moved out from my parents by the time I was fifteen," Ron said. "As soon as I got my first job, dad started insisting I pay my way around the house. Fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there. One time he demanded my entire paycheck because they had a big repair bill on the house that he claimed was partly my fault. It wasn't of course, but I paid him anyway. But after that I started searching for my own apartment. I found this dinky little one bedroom place for two hundred a month. I was probably the only fifteen-year-old in town with his own apartment, but I felt like a king. I worked hard. I paid my bills. I kept the place clean. I even had my mom over for supper a couple times. My dad wouldn't come though. He called me an ungrateful bastard and rarely spoke to me again."

Ron led me into a formalwear store and waved the sales clerk away who swept down upon us like a vulture the moment we set foot on the carpet.

"I learned a lot of important lessons in those years," he said. He held a few jackets up against me, moving from rack to rack as he talked. "I learned the value of money. I learned the importance of hard work and dedication. I learned the hard way that people will try to rip you off every chance they get, especially when you're a kid."

A young lady walked up and asked me for my autograph. Nothing new. I smiled and signed her shirt with a black marker. Then she went away again. Ron didn't even look up from the clothes rack he was flipping through.

"I dropped out of school at some point. I wasn't learning much anyway, going to school half dead from working a late shift. Once school was done I was able to work fulltime and then the real money started coming in. And let me tell you I worked my ass off at those jobs. I worked at a movie theater and as a bellhop in a hotel. Neither were as much fun as they sound. I studied in the library at night because I knew I'd have to go back to school eventually if I wanted something more than minimum wage jobs. Plus I liked keeping my mind active after a long day of repetitive drudgery. I basically just checked out all the textbooks I'd had in school and read through them cover to cover. You learn a lot more from those things when you're doing it because you want to, and not just to get the bare minimum to pass a test. The history books were most fascinating to me. I think that's how I originally got the idea to get into movie making, day dreaming about turning those old historical characters into action heroes."

"That would be cool. Abraham Lincoln vs. John Wilkes Booth. Bang! Bang!"

"Write me a script, man. I'd totally do that."

"I will."

We were done in that first store. We walked out without buying anything.

"So did you eventually go back and finish school?"

"Nope. I tried to enroll the next September, but the principal basically laughed at me and told me to go back to whatever junk yard I'd crawled out of. I was stunned of course, and pretty intimidated, but as I looked around at the dead-eyed morons who would be my classmates, I realized I was way more advanced than any one of them. I had a life already. I had bills. I had keys to my own place in my pocket while they were all still sucking their mommies' teats. The kicker was, there was this teacher creating a poster on the hallway floor. I glanced at it as I walked by and told her Thomas Jefferson wasn't president until 1801. He was vice president in 1796. This old bitch's jaw just dropped and she made some excuse about him being president either way. I just shook my head, realizing once and for all that I didn't even need to be in school."

We headed into another store.

"Now, I'm not telling you not to take school seriously. Fuck no. I'd kill you if you dropped out now. It's a different world we live in these days. Even back then, dropping out cost me a lot. I was just too stubborn to realize it at the time. Most of all it cost me in social skills. Believe it or not, I was a very awkward kid. I had no idea how to talk to people. I just did my work and went home. I read my books and went to bed. And then I did it all over again, and that was pretty much my life for a whole year. And forget about girls. All I saw in girls was just a pretty face who wanted to spend your money. Mostly that was true, but at the time I thought they were all like that."

"And then you met Stephanie."

"Yup. I walked into a diner in my neighborhood and there she was. It wasn't love at first site or anything. I mean, she was amazingly beautiful, but I just saw her as eye candy for the first few weeks, until I got to know her better. I was a regular, not knowing how to cook much for myself. We spent a lot of time chit chatting as she cleaned up for closing time. Eventually I got to like her. She must have thought I was a complete dork, but she never said so. She always treated me with respect. At some point we agreed to see a movie together, just as friends, but somehow we wound up making out in the theater. Apparently she liked me a lot more than she'd let on. I guess she thought it was cool that I had my own place and all that. Anyway, it took off from there. Pretty soon we were seeing each other constantly. And within three weeks we'd gone all the way, which was quite a big deal back then."

"That was around 1985?" I asked, counting a back from Charlotte's birthday in 1986.

"Eighty-four, eighty-five. Somewhere around there. Anyway, we screwed like bunnies every day at my place, after she got out of school. Then she would head off to work and I'd go visit her some more over there. Eventually, I just asked her to be my girlfriend. She was actually my first girlfriend, my first lover, and later, my first love. I never told her about the virginity thing though, until we'd already been doing it for months. I was too embarrassed. I used to ask her all kinds of questions about sex, what her past lovers were like, what turned her on about them, what turned her off. We talked and talked and it never even occurred to me to be jealous of her other lovers. She was the goddess of everything sexy to me. I honestly thought I was lucky to be with her. It wasn't all smooth and perfect of course. We got in all kinds of fights. Some were ridiculous nonsense fights. Some were serious. We almost broke up a couple of times in fact."

"How'd you guys keep it together? I mean, when the going got tough."

"Well this is something I've been wanting to talk to you about, Anthony. You're going away soon, and you're gonna have a lot of responsibilities, a lot of worries. I wanted to chat with you about some stuff before you went, if that's okay. Things are gonna be hard for you and Charlotte too, as you may already know. But there's a few keys you two have to hold onto if you want it to last forever."