Work Text:
There was nothing else for Tunny to do but go for a walk. He knew it wouldn’t clear his head, but his ass hurt from sitting down for so long and the desolation of the motel room was making him feel like he needed a one-way trip to a psychiatric facility. As he pulled a beanie on to hide his overgrown fade, he made eye contact with himself in the bathroom mirror. Although all he’d done in the past few weeks was sleep, he looked tired. Deep purple bags stretched beneath his eyes. He looked away from the uneasy picture in the mirror, threw a coat over his muscle shirt, and pulled his jeans over the same briefs he’d been wearing for the past three days. He was miserable.
Tunny’s suspicions were further confirmed as he wandered aimlessly through the grid of the city streets. It hadn’t taken much time since hopping off the Greyhound for him to realize that he hated it. Everything felt pointless. The streets reeked of urine and garbage; rats chirped and crawled behind restaurants and on subway platforms. Advertisements were plastered on every square inch of wall; crude graffiti was spray painted or Sharpied atop the torn posters. Young men and women spilled onto the street from bars and late-night tourists waved for taxi cabs. Every single person Tunny passed was a stranger. The city was huge and it was completely empty.
Jesus had described the city like it was holy. As a child Tunny sat in the pews and half-listened to the pastor preaching. Apparently, when he died, if he was cool enough with Jesus—Christ, not Bartlett—his spirit would be whisked away to some mountain where there was a city where nothing bad ever happened. And the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. Jesus had told him the same thing about Manhattan. I’m gonna make it big there, man. It was an elaborate fairy tale that should have been at most half-listened to or lightly considered. Believing in it wholeheartedly had led him to this. Tunny was beginning to doubt.
In retrospect, it had really all been about Jesus. He wanted Will and Tunny to accompany him, of course, and a massive element of Jesus wanting to leave Jingletown was to escape his broken home. Tunny didn’t exactly blame him, but he was haunted by leaving Will behind in a way that Jesus didn’t seem to be, and that combined with the fact that nothing Jesus said turned out to be true made Tunny feel something he couldn’t quite describe. Will had been one third of them. Sure, they’d exchanged a few letters, but in the dark of the motel room, when Jesus had disappeared amid the skyscrapers, Tunny lay in the bed and thought about Will back in Jingletown. He had Heather, but he was still stuck in suburbia, this time without his best friends by his side, dealing with the life-changing reality of unexpectedly becoming a father. In the city three thousand miles away, Jesus lived without a second thought regarding Will or Tunny. Tunny felt as though he were missing a limb.
He passed an electronics store, then stopped himself and tentatively took a few steps back. Televisions stacked on televisions spat out light onto the slick concrete from behind the storefront window. The audio was muffled through the glass but mixed with the typical city symphony of car horns and club-hoppers nearby the noise was almost unbearable. Different images burst from each screen. Dr. Phil was stepping in to help a teen in trouble on his talk show. Donald Trump was firing someone on The Apprentice. There was a revolving door of Britney, Paris, Justin Timberlake, Martha Stewart, Angelina Jolie on a litany of celebrity gossip shows. Most of the televisions were blaring news channels. North Korea successfully detonating a nuclear weapon. An earthquake triggering a tsunami. AIDS taking more lives in Africa than the World Wars. Two carrier strike groups in the Gulf. Al-Qaeda.
Then there were the commercials. 7-Up. Canned ravioli. Cereal. Children’s shampoo. Clean boots. A shining medal. Rotary wings against the backdrop of the American flag. A telephone number flashed on screen. Below that, a website URL.
Tunny never fit in. He was on the football team in high school, despite Will and Jesus’s teasing, but only because he’d been scouted by the coach. He got female attention for being a decent-looking tattooed football player in a small town school but even that never went anywhere. The hot girls didn’t care for his music or his pickup truck and Tunny and his girlfriends always mutually bored each other. Although he never admitted it, he barely fit in among Will and Jesus. They were an enigma. Sometimes they were crazy party animals, sometimes they were losers, sometimes everyone sat and listened to Jesus spin a prophetical yarn. Tunny was just there. Often he was the babysitter. Usually he was just Will and Jesus’s friend.
Tunny had always looked good in camo. He wore it with a NOFX shirt or a Black Flag sleeveless to show off the ink on his arms, shoulders, and neck. The thought of wearing it like that felt like a betrayal—but to whom? The shitheadery of his youth felt far behind him. Pouring out Slurpees on the floor of the 7-Eleven and tearing up his knees and elbows on the skate park cement hadn’t gotten him anywhere. Will was a country away in Jingletown. Jesus was always gone, trying to make good on his belief that the city was big enough for him. Abandoning everything they knew for a city Jesus built on empty promises was a mistake he didn’t know how to correct. Tunny was no one and he was going nowhere.
His mom had always been concerned about that. Gemma was the sweetest surrogate mother for Will and Jesus but she worried about their futures—especially that of her son’s. Maybe she’d seen past his angry teenage persona and knew that insecurity bubbled just below the surface. She knew of their plans to leave before they were old enough to know how to purchase a bus ticket. That had always been their collective purpose. They—all three of them—would take to the city as if they’d built it themselves, brimming with vigor and potential. Something, maybe life, had gotten in the way. Maybe it had all been a pipe dream to begin with, and Tunny was a gullible idiot easily fooled by smoke and mirrors. He fidgeted with the motel room key in his jacket pocket as he stared lifelessly at the television display. If only his mother knew how hollow and useless he felt. His past was a collection of second guesses; his future was null. He was utterly directionless.
On the televisions, a young man scaled a mountain, legs swinging as he pulled himself above the edge of the cliff. A young woman with her hair slicked back into a ponytail watched a helicopter land on arid desert dirt. A handsome man in aviator sunglasses pulled on a green overcoat adorned with medals and patches. The same telephone number and website URL glared at Tunny from half of the television sets. He pulled his mobile phone out from his pocket and flipped it open. No text messages. No missed calls. He dialed the number and held the phone to his ear.