Jake Shears - Boys keep swinging

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For my rocks, Kelly and Mark

And my rolls, Josh and Brody

I WAS BORN A SHOWMAN. For years, even my birth played out in my head as a grand entrance. I assumed my mothers giant stomach had exploded in some public place, followed by a balloon drop, confetti cannons, and people celebrating in the streets. It would have been a mess, a gory birthday party, with a lot of cleanup involved, not to mention my poor mother would have had to have been put back together.

I haunted all corners of my house, like a jazzy poltergeist with swinging hips and splayed hands. I terrorized my sisters unsuspecting girlfriends. My favorite catchphrase, ironically, was I looooooove women! I was desperate for their revulsion . Ew, your brother is like... so gross. But then I would ratchet up the charm, a perfect little gentleman. Aw, hes so sweet. Whered you get those blue eyes, huh?

In kindergarten, I told flat-out lies. I confessed that I was very sick, bathing in the concern of my classmatesand especially that of their mothers. God, sympathy was satisfying. One afternoon, my mom picked me up from school and my teacher said she hoped I would get better soon. My jig was up. You cant try to make people believe things that arent true, my mom said afterward.

But human pity was preferable to the distant regard my stuffed animals offered. They lined my bedroom shelves and did not bother to applaud my one-man shows, which I performed against the wooden footboard of my bed. No matter how loud I sang they just stared back. Tough crowd.

My imagination was wild and irrational. The first time my mom took me to the doctor for my blood to be drawn, for some unknown reason I thought everyone would be wearing Victorian garb, that Id be auctioned off to the highest bidder in some antiquated display. I was so sad, thumbing through a booger-ridden Mr. Happy book in the waiting room, thinking it would be the last time I saw my mother. I was relieved that there ended up being no auction, but the drab gray room into which they led me, where two ladies told me Id feel something like a beesting, still wasnt half as cool as the Dickensian scenario I had imagined. Unsurprisingly, I cried.

My sisters would get their hair done at a beauty parlor that had a huge painting on its front window of a woman with giant, Medusa-like locks. Is that what youre gonna look like? I remember asking just before they shut the backseat car door in my face. I was disappointed when they finally emerged from the salon, not with giant, freaky hairdos that could barely fit into the car but with simple, feathered blowouts. If only it had been my salon, they would have looked like super-vixens with ashen bushfires encircling their painted faces.

Maybe that was why when I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, the first thing I could think of was a hairdresser. I loved going to the barber with my dad, feeling like a big boy riding in the front seat. My first haircuts were from a vampy woman outside the Phoenix suburbs by way of sleepy desert side roads. She had long black hair and smoked as she cut, a cigarette clamped between her lips while I sucked on my binky.

Later, my regular barber spot was in the entryway of a Smittys grocery store. When I sat in the chair, a very tan, wrinkled man would ask me if I wanted the G.I. Joe or the Mr. T? Duh, the Mr. T: He had a Mohawk. My dad, as if he believed the barber were serious, tapped his shoulder and said, Just a regular cut is fine. I was crestfallen when we left. My hair looked like it always did.

One day in a Stride Rite shoe store, an older, masculine woman wearing a polyester pantsuit found out I couldnt tie my own shoes. She showed me the bunny-rabbit-ear method, making two loops and twisting them around each other. Suddenly I could tie them myself. I walked out of the store with a pair of lace-up Hot Wheels sneakers that she swore would make me run faster. On the playground, when I put them to test, it was total baloney. I ran no faster than I had in my old Velcro-fastened shoes.

It seemed that everywhere I went, someone was up-selling a total dud. Whether it was some toy slime creature that didnt secrete like it had in the commercial, or Michael Jackson not actually performing in Captain EO at Disneylandit was just a 3-D movie of him that played all day longthe world was full of exaggerations. I felt gullible, and often embarrassed at my expectations of real magic. Sometimes I thought people could read my overeager thoughts, and it humiliated me.

I didnt understand that what I saw on TV wasnt real. I stood paralyzed one Saturday afternoon, a dirty Cabbage Patch Kid dangling from my hand, as Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed Pink Floyds The Wall. They showed a clip of schoolkids walking into a meat grinder and getting turned into sausage. Where was that grinder, and what would cause me to fall into it? The image was now branded on my psyche, but so was that song. I needed to hear it again. I found my mom in her bedroom and did the best rendition I could, hoping shed be familiar with it. What did We dont need no education mean?

Soon after, she took me to a plush multiplex to see the musical Annie . Id been singing Tomorrow to the secretary in my dads office, to my friends mom, to anyone who would listen. The movie theater had gigantic glass windows in the front, and inside, red and orange velvet curtains and patterned carpets that stank of butter. Every theater door was a mystery; each one marked a new universe. But I was certain we would walk into the wrong theater and see something just as horrible as those kids falling into the meat grinder.

Another time, my mother took me and my sisters to see Ghostbusters . As soon as the first specter popped out at the five-minute mark, the fabric of my reality unraveled even further. I dragged my mom into the theater lobby and, of course, cried. We went shopping in the adjoining mall while my sisters finished the film, and I watched as my mom flicked through a rack of leggings, the thin material in her fingers just like the scrim between our world and dimensions unknown. I was so scared that some hideous creature from hell would burst from behind the ruffle-neck maroon blouses and create total chaos.

One single detail could now send me into an obsessive state of fear. There was a shot of someones hand in a bottling plant at the beginning of Silkwood : It seemed a harbinger of doom. The video for Dont Come Around Here No More played behind my eyelids when they closed, Tom Petty scooping up Alice in Wonderlands insides as if they were a cake. I couldnt sleep alone. Id wake up in the middle of the night, pad into the hallway, and just stand there. The house was alive and breathing. I crept into my parents bed on my moms side. With a gentle hand shed lead me back to my room and wait until I fell asleep. But sometimes shed just give up and let me sleep next to her. That habit continued almost through high school.

Still, I couldnt leave well enough alone and was fascinated by what scared me. I would make my sisters give a play-by-play of Aliens or Gremlins. They were patient and skilled at breaking down the movies into acts, turning blockbuster thrillers into bedtime stories. I could browse forever in our video store. The VHS boxes were graphic and scary, and I hovered near their lewd cardboard cases until I was made to retreat to the childrens section, where I supposedly belonged. How I resented the woman at the counter. She always suggested I take home boring animal movies, or family westerns. I felt obligated and rented them to be polite, not wanting to hurt her feelings. At home, Phar Lap or The Golden Seal played while I sat alone and watched, bored. I hated the movies she recommended; there was never anything even resembling a Muppet, and the horses always died at the end.