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“I don’t know, LaRusso. This really doesn’t seem like my thing,” Johnny says. And it doesn’t. He can already tell he isn’t gonna like this, like, at all.
“Aw, c’mon, Johnny. Just try it. You might surprise yourself. And me.”
Johnny narrows his eyes. He's one second away from jettisoning this whole stupid idea and going home to his own TV. It's bigger, and he has better taste. But of course, LaRusso has to be a petty bitch about it and twist Johnny's arm.
“I watched Iron Eagle with you last week, so fair is fair,” he says, starting to sound aggrieved, his eyebrows getting a workout in.
“Yeah, but Iron Eagle is badass. This looks really fucking boring.”
Daniel’s hand lands on his knee. His palm is smooth and cool, like the leaf of some plant Johnny can’t name. He shouldn’t be able to feel that through a layer of worn denim, but he can. How can something so cool and light burn him like this? He goes still and does not shake it off. He lets it rest there, like something delicate he doesn’t want to harm. He’s not sure when that became a thing he didn’t want, but it did.
“Come on. Don’t be a tough guy,” Daniel says, squeezing for good measure, his tone slightly wheedling and just a bit too low for comfort. Johnny swallows. He feels like he might be sweating even though it’s always cool in the tiny paper window house. “Just watch this movie with me, Johnny Lawrence.”
LaRusso looks into Johnny’s eyes with his big Bambi browns, and because Johnny has spent a lifetime schooling his features so that no one can see what he is feeling ever since the night his face broke open and he poured his guts out all over the All-Valley mat, he doesn’t flinch. To his credit, he doesn’t roll his eyes either—much. But inside of him something gives. Something melts like warm chocolate. “Fucking fine,” he finally agrees. “But we’re watching Iron Eagle 2 next week. No complaining, either. You’ll watch it and like it, LaRusso.”
LaRusso laughs in that easy way of his, and Johnny smirks, proud that he’s the one who made it happen. Daniel has a nice laugh—sue him if he likes to hear it after all the time they’ve spent yelling at each other. “Okay, Johnny. Whatever you say.”
Johnny squishes down the way his heart lifts up its head at that expression. It’s just a thing people say. But he likes it when Daniel says it to him. “You know it,” he says, because LaRusso is expecting at least a small dig, and he doesn’t want to seem like he’s being weird. There’s nothing weird about two guys getting together to watch a movie after class on Friday night. Every Friday night, lately. It’s this whole thing now, apparently.
They settle in on the surprisingly comfortable couch and begin watching a movie about two guys falling in love in Northern Italy during the 1980s. If Johnny is overly distracted by the fact that the movie takes place the year before he met LaRusso on that Topanga beach, he doesn’t say anything. He tries not to think about it. But he can’t stop thinking about it. LaRusso is sitting close—not too close, but close. Johnny can smell the fancy wine on his breath whenever he exhales. It’s a nice kind of sour. It seems fitting. These are Daniel’s people, after all. The Italians. The cadences of their voices are just like him, even though he isn’t even sure whether LaRusso can speak any more Italian than any fan of The Godfather can. Johnny has never asked. He could ask, he knows. Daniel loves being asked questions, and maybe that’s why Johnny never asks him anything. It feels like too much of something. Like he’d be telling the truth again. You’re Alright, LaRusso.
He wonders why Daniel chose this particular movie. It’s like, what? A signal? Of what, exactly. This is nothing like either of their lives, even with the Italian element. Nothing like their story. But something about it punches Johnny right in the heart. He watches it very very quietly. He doesn’t make a single sound. He barely breathes. He can feel more than see LaRusso serving him side-eye more times than he can count, but for once, LaRusso doesn’t say a word either. He’s watching the film, but he’s also watching Johnny watch it. And Johnny can’t move. Can’t think straight. Can’t understand what he is feeling. He only knows that he is feeling a lot.
There is a big tanned blond guy and a scrawny mouthy brunet. That part Johnny knows something about. The kid has such a lanky, lean body. Big eyes and thick eyebrows. A shocking honesty and pushiness, but there is a lot of other stuff going on there too. He’s young. Naïve. Full of bravado, which means he’s vulnerable. Johnny knows kids his age by now. Those legs. Endless and smooth. The bad clothes that don’t fit right because nobody makes clothes for a guy that age and size. Thick hair that floofs around in the summer breeze. Johnny stares and stares. And remembers. It all comes together and swirls around in a kaleidoscope of colour and soundtrack and dialogue he doesn’t totally understand but he doesn’t think he needs to. He knows what it’s about. He can sense what it’s about. And for some reason, that feels okay.
He realizes how at rest he feels in this house, and he’s not sure that’s okay. Daniel beside him. A movie his stepfather and Kreese both would have killed him for even knowing about, let alone if he’d been caught actually watching it. He rests his head back against the sofa and watches two men kiss on a Mediterranean knoll, the younger cupping the older supposedly more sophisticated lover’s entire cock and balls with a frank determination that he recognizes the flavour of, if not the exact execution. And not for the first time, he wonders what the hell all that aggression was really about, way back when. One year after this film takes place. He knows he’s not really peeking through a window into 1983. He knows he isn’t out there in America, blissfully oblivious on one coast while Daniel is the same on the other as this story is taking place. Fated to collide. This is a film, and his life is real, and so is the man next to him. But somehow when he looks at the screen and sees those two pairs of long legs entangled, the camera zeroed in on a very suggestive thigh pulsation… somehow it is his life he’s looking at. He doesn’t understand why. He only feels like it’s true. Knows that it is. He knows it like he knows his own name, or Daniel’s.
Is it better to speak or to die? the characters ask themselves. Johnny has never asked himself this question. He’s not much of a talker, and he has no quit in him when it comes to the worst things for him. And right now maybe the worst thing for him is silence. Is the space between his hand and Daniel’s. He is aware of every inch [four]. He is aware of each breathe Daniel has taken since the stupid blond leaves the skinny brunet [nine]. He is aware of how many seconds have passed since he himself took a breath [17, the age he was when he should have just fucking kissed Daniel LaRusso instead of beating his ass into oblivion]. But he didn’t know that then. He only knew something was terribly wrong in his life, and it had LaRusso written all over it. Now he thinks maybe everything that’s right in his life has the same name on it.
They watch the brunet cry for what is an uncomfortably long time, but Johnny can’t be mad about it. Like. What the fuck, right? Is this a love story or one of those Scared Straight scenarios—literally. He stares into that face and imagines being the reason for all that pain. He knows something about that. He also knows what it’s like to look exactly like that. And maybe, just maybe for him it was about a boy, too.
The credits roll and they breathe their breaths and their hands stay four inches apart and Johnny’s beer has gone flat before he finished it but not because he passed out, and that has got to be some kind of record. Some kind of significant first in his life. Johnny feels like his whole body is his heart right now and it hurts and it’s beautiful, maybe. Just like this fucking movie he can’t unsee.
After a long time, Daniel finally says, “So. Is it better?”
“Is what better?” Johnny’s voice is hoarse and quiet, and he isn’t sure it entirely belongs to him anymore. Something has happened to it. He turns to look into Daniel’s big deep eyes. He can see himself reflected in them. He can see his whole face like his face is his life and Daniel can look at the whole thing and then show it back to him.
“To speak. Or to die.” Somehow LaRusso says that like there is no other question on earth, just like in the movie.
Johnny looks at his mouth. Not as plush. He isn’t sixteen anymore. Johnny’s got nothing to say about that—he will never see seventeen again either. “Neither,” he says. And pulls Daniel LaRusso into his lap. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t die. He just kisses the holy hell out of him. JohnnyJohnnyJohnny… he thinks as he tastes the wine on the scrawny, mouthy brunet's tongue mingled with the longing of thirty-six years. But he can’t really call Daniel by any name but his own, and so he does.