I have since known many actual models, all of them skinny and adolescent-seeming. My sister Shannon, at seventeen, was already too womanly to be in the running.
Shannon had reddish hair, curled like lazy rapids, green eyes, small nose, and protuberant, exquisitely shaped lips. She was darkly pigmented for a redhead, tight-pored skin, bronzed and flawless. Shannon had been the only eighth-grader in the history of our beach town to go to the high school’s senior prom. By the time she herself was a junior, she had attained a level of local fame similar to that of a star high school football quarterback. Whispers followed her. Speculation: would she be a model?
Most of our classmates didn’t know she had a brother. We had never before attended the same school.
I arrived during her senior year. I was in ninth grade, finally deemed ready to transition to a mainstream school. I had been begging my parents for this for years. Whitney, the school for what were then called the handicapped, had been academically unsatisfying, in part because some of my classmates had intellectual developmental delays accompanying their physical shortcomings, but also because of an attitude, still prevalent, that those of us who suffered from some motor, muscular, or skeletal deficiencies should be made to feel good about ourselves in other areas.
I was the best student in the school—reading, writing, and doing mathematics well beyond my grade level. Even in my physical disability—Little’s Disease that had slightly ameliorated so that I now had decent range of motion but with my right leg still severely limited—I was less affected than many of my classmates. I had been born with the condition, and so my body had taken on the distorted shape that results from the hypertrophying of some muscles and atrophying of others: I was thick of chest and neck, but with arms and legs like twigs barbed with tight, disobedient musculature. When I was diagnosed at fifteen months, the doctors told my parents I would likely spend my life in a wheelchair, yet by the time I was eight I was hobbling around on crutches. And soon, with new drugs (the horrible phenol injections), laborious resistance-training therapy, and braces and specially designed sneakers, I learned to walk without a crutch. It was a curious, loping sort of gait that pistoned me up and down so that if you were watching me from across the street, you would see my head periodically bobbing over the roofs of parked cars. My right leg would sweep out and around instead of bending at the knee, then my left would make a more typical step. At first, I could only walk like this for a few meters, a half-hour a day, but within a year, I could keep it up through the whole school day. I told my parents and teachers that I wanted to go to the regular high school, the real high school. I was ready.
The morning of my first day, I pushed myself out of bed—I’d had my father dismantle the pulley I’d used as a younger boy—and swung myself onto the stool I used to dress myself, hurriedly reaching for my clothes to ward off my anxiety. This would be the hardest thing I had ever done, throwing myself into the mainstream this way, eschewing forever the protection of special schools, special classes, special treatment, the ghetto-izing shelter of “special.” I had been a king at Whitney, the popular boy in a school of rejects, as I saw us. And now, well, what could I be but the inverse of that?
Shannon appeared in my doorway.
“Dude, first day,” she smiled. She was already dressed, in a tight-fitting T-shirt that showed off her bust and jeans that similarly advantaged her rear. Presumably, it was outfits like this, on girls other than my sister, which should have made the prospect of regular high school so attractive to me. Shannon knew I didn’t like her to help me, and so she stood for a while in the threshold. I pulled on the Hang Ten T-shirt I had chosen for this morning and a pair of jeans. I had been growing my hair out so that it was down to my shoulders—where Shannon’s hair was a lovely dark red, mine was a mousy, disappointing brown. I had bought a denim notebook that I had adorned with a Lightning Bolt sticker, though I wasn’t sure exactly what that stood for.
OUR PARENTS HAD given Shannon their old Audi 100, olive green, sagging front bumper, partially scratched-out KMET 94.7 decal on the rear below the four-circle emblem.
“You nervous?” she asked as she buckled her seat belt.
I shook my head.
“You are!” she said, smiling.
I had thought I would resent her reassurance, but when it wasn’t forthcoming, I was disappointed.
At school, we parked in the lot, on a gradual slope above the campus, and then, as if by prearrangement, we immediately separated; Shannon, car key-chain stuffed bear dangling from her back pocket, marched off ahead of me, joining up with one of her friends while I made my slow, oscillating walk to my first class.
I have since read about how fledglings, when they are too big for the nest but not yet ready for flight, hide in underbrush, in shadow, waiting for their parents to come back with a morsel. They are at their most vulnerable then—to cats, snakes, other birds, people—and their only hope is to stay invisible. This was what my first few days of high school were like. I was actually in shadow, seated beneath the outdoor stairwell, eating my sandwich, watching my sister and her friends, invisible to them. They occupied what seemed to be the center of the entire school, the brick retaining wall of a circular planter that got the most direct sunlight of any spot in the school. My sister was in the vortex of concentric rings of power. Around her the other pretty girls, then, around them, a larger circle, the surfers and the volleyball players, the best-looking boys, and then a larger circle around them of slightly less attractive girls, and then another circle, of boys less handsome, and so on until finally, at the outer edge of all this, was me.
I don’t know why I had expected anything else. And I now wondered at my rush to go to a regular school. These were the years before mainstreaming, when it became more common for kids like me to attend a normal high school. Back then, I was expected to attempt to do everything my classmates did, which meant I had to strip for gym class, change into light-green-and-white uniform, and join my fellow freshmen on the basketball court or sports field, at least until the actual games commenced, at which time I was allowed to sit by myself on the sidelines.
But I never thought about going back to Whitney. Instead, I discovered that great panacea for all high school afflictions: marijuana. I knew that those students who socialized with me were themselves undesirable caste-mates. But I couldn’t be selective and so found myself spending lunch breaks with the lowest rung of high school society. These were the kids who looked like they should be grinding through differential calculus and AP biology and getting straight As but who were instead smoking too much dope, listening to Black Sabbath, and flunking out. There were popular stoners, the good-looking surfers, but they were a different species from our crowd, interacting only for the purposes of the occasional petty drug transaction.
But in that way, I found a little group of friends. While my parents were concerned about my sudden academic decline, they excused it as part of the transition to this new school. What I didn’t explain was that I was struggling in geometry and French because they were after lunch, and every day at lunch we went to chubby Doug Wirta’s house across the street from the school and took bong hits and watched reruns of The Wild Wild West. I would then invert a Visine bottle over my eyes, and make my ridiculous lope back to school, where I’d sit, absolutely bewildered, through Mrs. Morley’s explanations of the properties of lines and angles.
“YOU’RE SHANNON HARRIS’S brother?” Brett Saucer, volleyball player, surfer, beautiful boy, said to me at Doug Wirta’s house. Among Saucer’s quirks was exercising his Alaskan husky dog by having him tow Saucer around on a skateboard. You would see Saucer, slaloming at the end of the leash, the black-and-white, furry dog paddling along with his tongue flapping. Because of my precociousness and his academic indifference, Saucer and I shared a biology class—Mr. Farnham’s second-floor classroom crowded with amphibians, reptiles, and small mammals and smelling of decomposing vegetable matter. Saucer and I had never spoken. He had stopped by Doug Wirta’s house to buy a half-ounce of mumbo. The town was dry, and Doug was holding, so the rigid hierarchy softened to accommodate the transaction.
I nodded. I was seated on a leather sofa, a bong on the glass-topped coffee table in front of me.
“She’s so hot,” Saucer said. He had long blond hair that fell almost to his shoulders. He had a dimple on his chin that softened his otherwise stern facial features. I wondered, as I watched him, if popular kids knew they were popular or if they wondered if they were popular and so on, all the way up to my sister. And what if all through life, this worrying about one’s own status would be a constant. The prospect was terrifying. Saucer opened the baggie of marijuana and sniffed at it. “Do you even see that? ’Cause she’s your sister? Can you even tell she’s hot?”
I could, of course, but I just shook my head.
He looked around Doug Wirta’s house, the kitchen and dining area separated by a galley, the tongue-in-groove paneling, the reproductions of what I would later realize were George Rouault clowns. His gaze settled on me, then on chubby Doug Wirta, and he paused, as if he was suddenly remembering where he was, who he was with, and then he nodded, as if surprised by his present company. “Hey, why does Mr. Farnham have all those animals in his classroom if he, like, never uses them? I mean, not once does he put them in, like, an experiment.”
He had a point.
THE NEXT DAY at school, I was traversing the quad near the planter, my backpack sliding up and down my back as I bobbed along, my sneakers scraping the pavement. By now, I had assumed my invisibility was a protective cloak that would allow me to traverse real estate at the center of the universe.
“Dude,” Saucer said as I passed. He stood up from the planter, and pointed at me excitedly as if I were an elusive piece of trivia that he had been wracking his brain for. “Shannon’s brother!”
I felt a dozen faces turn toward me. I had no choice: I had to materialize in this world.
“Shannon!” Saucer shouted, looking around.
I could detect her before I saw her. Her place was to our right, about four hours counterclockwise around the planter.
Beautiful girls parted and there she was, standing at the end of a tunnel of teen pulchritude.
Thankfully, the onus of conversation was on Shannon and not me, because I was at a loss. Saucer, who genuinely had no idea that he had upset a delicate balance, was grinning widely. He was, I realized, happy to see me.
“Hey Barnaby,” Shannon said, and then the phalanx of lovely girls closed again and I was left with Saucer. He stood close to me, arms folded, nodding.
“Dude, this is the first time I’ve seen you here.” He nodded. His eyes were bloodshot. “Hey, let’s go up to your friend’s house at lunch. Rip some hits.”
SHANNON DROVE ME twice a week for my phenol injections, the purpose of which was to deaden the muscles in my hips and knees, supposedly to loosen them, increasing my range of motion. The shots were painful, a series of probing jabs deep into muscles and nerves around the hips and shoulders, the nurses vigorously attempting to inject as much diluted poison as deep into my body as they could. I had learned to lie quiet during this process, yet when I came to get my shots after smoking marijuana, my distorted sense of the passage of time made the pain seem elongated and horrible, and the deep stinging triggered a ringing sound in my middle ear.
Shannon and I had been closer before I became her schoolmate, I realized. Shannon had been attentive, in part because, I think, she saw me as not her equal or even of her species. I had been, perhaps, the family mascot, a great success in overcoming my worst limitations, but ultimately, just that: limited, easily categorized as not a real person. My appearance in her school, her occasional glimpses of my ridiculous gait down the outdoor halls, in the juice line at nutrition break, or mingling with my new friends and their prodigious amounts of orthodontics, had informed her that I was somehow like her, of her, was even—potentially—publicly associated with her.
She never scorned me nor avoided me, but I knew not to approach her while we were at school. There, we were strangers.
In the car, on the way to get my shots, she asked about school, about how it was going, and her tone was that of offering counsel, but when I told her that it was difficult, that I was finding the classes harder, that it was a challenge to make friends, instead of sage advice, she kept silent.
“Do you want to go back to Whitney?” she asked.
Why? I wanted to shout. Why would I want to go back? “No.”
“If you’re not happy. If it’s hard . . . I don’t know.” She pulled into the parking lot, slipped the transmission knob to P, and turned to me. “Dude, it’s like, I was just trying to think of what would be best for you. I mean, if it’s hard.”
I did my jerky version of a shrug, shoulders raised too high. I wanted to say something, tell her, Fuck you, you and your fucking friends, your fucking beautiful people! But I just got out of the car and went in for my treatment.
I’M NOT SURE that Saucer was the type to ruminate over his motivations for hanging out with me. Certainly, proximity to my sister must have been a factor, but he soon seemed to forget about that, or give it less prominence. On afternoons when the surf was flat down at State or Jetty or Sunset, he would pick me up in his beat-up Datsun B210 and drive us down to the bluffs, where we would take bong hits and listen to Pink Floyd or Ted Nugent on his car stereo.
I didn’t mind walking home. I told him he could just let me off at his place. He would park, go inside and leash his dog, grab his skateboard, and the two of them, sled dog and skater, would slide down Asilomar Street and out of sight and I would begin my long walk back home.
I helped him get through Farnham’s class, going through his project, a report on cheetahs, and organizing it into something like a passable piece of work. I stopped going to Doug Wirta’s at lunch and hung around with Saucer near the planter. For the first time, my being Shannon Harris’s brother was paying dividends: it was a simple identification, an easy answer to the question “Who are you?”
My father had given me his old Asahi Pentax 35-millimeter camera and, one afternoon, when Saucer picked me up and we went over to his house to get stoned and listen to music, I took a few photos of him, using slow-exposure, low-ASA black-and-white film—grainy, shadowy shots, as was the fashion of the time. He was the first subject I had shot besides my family—I had taken mostly pictures of Shannon, of course—and when I developed the photos, Saucer looked perfect, grinning, head tilted back, arms folded, beautiful, statuesque, seated on the white painted brick wall that set off the pool patio from an ivy embankment. “I’m totally using these for the yearbook,” he said when I showed them to him at school. Two of his friends asked if I would shoot their portraits. I rode with Saucer and his crew down to Sunset one late afternoon where they were going surfing, shooting them while they were twisting into their wetsuits and waxing their boards and then following them with some difficulty, hobbling over the guardrail and down to the rocks. I propped myself onto a gray boulder above the narrow spit of high-tide sand and shot as they paddled out and then, in the late afternoon as the sun set, snapped a few shots as they surfed. I lacked the lenses or proximity for any spectacular action photos, but after they were done with their session, as they were sitting on the guardrail in the last light, just after the first streetlamps along PCH had turned on with a sizzle, I shot them in low light with a flash, the three of them in shadows, two of them leaning against the guardrail and Saucer standing framed against the headlights of the oncoming traffic, his long blond hair still wet, with his wetsuit half peeled down his glistening, sinewy chest and stomach, the graduated U of his abdominal muscles closing in at the blond fuzz at the tippy top of his pubes. I go back and look at that series of photos sometimes, at Saucer, glorious, his muscled arms folded, his self-aware smirk of perfection, his beauty.
Saucer was my first cool friend, the first boy who could have chosen anyone but chose me, and I was grateful and delighted with this new type of connection. He was also the first associate of mine who my sister actually acknowledged and who, I later realized, might have incited in her some rare jealousy toward me.
ON FRIDAY NIGHT, April 21, I was out with Saucer and one of his friends. Bradley was driving his brown BMW 2002, Saucer was shotgun, and I was in the backseat, rolling a joint. We were parked on the bluff, overlooking the ocean near Temescal Canyon, listening, I believe—and I frequently try to reconstruct this scene—to the Knack’s first album, specifically the song “Good Girls Don’t.” But that turns out to be historically impossible, since that album came out a year later, but somehow, I am sure that we were listening to the Knack, and even recall an argument over whether this counted as punk rock or not. Bradley believed it did; I disagreed.
Shannon’s Audi pulled up next to us on the passenger side. Britt Dawson was with her. Shannon swished her hair once and tilted her head and made wide eyes at Saucer. I was instantly angry with her for this. Saucer was mine, I wanted to tell her.
Shannon had been accepted by UC Santa Barbara, the school of choice for many of her classmates as well, and was coasting through her last semester, dating twenty-two-year-old Robby Villabianca, basking in the final months of her reign.
She smiled at me. “What’s up, Barnaby?”
I shrugged. Get away, I was thinking, get away from here.
“Hey Shannon.” Saucer smiled. He passed her the joint.
From the passenger side of the Audi, Britt, who had graduated a year ago and was now at the local community college, held up a bottle of Southern Comfort.
“You want?”
Saucer nodded and Shannon relayed the bottle. We all swigged.
I swigged more.
There was a rearrangement of passengers, but I can clearly recall only the beginning and then the end of it. The beginning: Saucer was with me, in Bradley’s car, and we were together. Then, at the end of it, Saucer was with Shannon, in her car. Britt Dawson had relocated to the backseat. I had my camera but I only took one picture: Saucer, standing against the Audi’s front door, the driver’s mirror against the right side of his denim-clad butt, with Shannon’s face on the other side of it, smirking at the camera.
And then they were gone.
I SAW SHANNON in the hospital, both eye sockets blackened and puffy, irises bright red, her nose a smushed relic of its former perfection, tubes shoved up and through blackened nostrils, stitches thick like the laces on a football running from a point above her right eye all the way down and into her shaved hairline below the ear. There was no reassuring beeping or pinging, as I had seen on hospital dramas on television. I looked for the little squiggly lines that are supposed to indicate the beating of the heart, the human pulse, but instead I saw a read-out of numbers, meaningless numbers.
Shannon had been pried from the vehicle and transported by ambulance to Saint John’s, where she was quickly stabilized. She needed twenty-nine stitches on her forehead, rhinoplasty to repair her severely broken nose, several rounds of orthodontia to restore her smile, and skin grafts where her canines had torn through her lower lip. She suffered four broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder, and would contend with back pain for years. Britt Dawson emerged badly bruised with a fractured tibia and torn ligaments in both knees.
Brett Saucer had been thrown through the windshield, his carotid artery cut by broken glass. He was almost certainly knocked unconscious by the fall on hard pavement, and probably never woke as he bled out. It happened on Highland Drive, a stretch of road where kids like to drive fast, and Shannon was driving fast, and she was drunk and stoned, but who or what she was swerving to avoid would remain unknown, as her memory of the few hours before the accident would never return.
I knew then only that my sister was badly injured. The news of Brett Saucer’s death didn’t spread through our town until the next morning.
Shannon wouldn’t return to school. She instead went through a long and laborious rehabilitation, recovering from her literal and figurative loss of face. When she came home from the hospital, she was ensconced in her room, curtailed in a back-brace, her appearance ghastly with her shaved head, stitches, and facial bruises. But her fine features would win out, and over time, just a few months, she regained her former good looks, although not all of her beauty. Shannon completed her schoolwork by correspondence, and stayed on track for UCSB.
She didn’t last long up there and dropped out after a quarter and a half. She moved back to Los Angeles, and moved in for a while with the drummer from a local new wave band.
I would occasionally see Saucer’s father, who had taken up skateboarding, his urethane wheels making a mournful growl, towed by his still-happy hound on a leash.
I LIVE IN Tribeca, in a loft near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, a large, open live/work space that we have lavishly decorated. I have done well, my career as a fashion photographer—a snapper of celebrities, models, beautiful women, and, of course, advertising campaigns—making me wealthy, lending me confidence, and winning for me the love of my handsome partner, Oliver. We have adopted a son, Miro, a boy almost as handsome as Saucer.
I have shown Oliver the photographs of Saucer; they now seem embarrassing and melodramatic to me, but I still insist that the boy in them, the subject Saucer, is beautiful. I don’t know if Oliver agrees with me only because he knows what happened to Saucer, or if he really sees Saucer’s beauty. I still do.
Shannon has had a difficult life, the mother of two girls by two separate men, neither of them her husband. She endured a slew of lingering medical issues, some stemming from the accident—scoliosis, painkiller addiction, migraines. She never completed college and has, in some ways, lived off her good looks, winning over men with ease, though that is, as we all know, a diminishing return.
From time to time, with gathering frequency, she calls me and asks for money. Though these are not small sums, a few thousand here for rent, a few thousand there for a new car, I could easily afford them. But instead, I give her a maddening fraction of the amount she needs. If she asks for two thousand, I give her six hundred.
We never talk about Saucer.