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revelations

a hypothetical chapter in the life of neil perry (featuring a concerning amount of james dean references)

word count: 4512

cw: emotional abuse/manipulation, implied self harm

It wasn’t until Neil Perry arrived at Welton Academy that he realized his family was painfully middle-class. All the boys in his class had summer homes, trust funds, Roman numerals tacked onto the ends of their names, and not one of them, to Neil’s knowledge, had gone to public school. He was twelve years old, had more brains than he knew what to do with, and, for the first time in his short life, he was alone.

It hadn’t been his idea, of course—his father’s detractors were quick to call him a “social climber”, a name his father detested, and yet he had no hesitation sending his only child to boarding school and inundating him with schoolwork just for the chance to say he had a son who was a Harvard-graduate doctor. Neil didn’t understand the appeal of the whole scheme—it was costly, time-consuming, and had put his mother in tears on multiple occasions—but according to his father, he wasn’t supposed to. “You’ll understand when you’re older,” was the chorus that came every time Neil tried to ask why he had to leave his friends and go to a school so far away. He was not, though, too young to understand the sacrifices his father was making to send him there, and thus why it was imperative that he be the best student possible.

Neil was not much one to question what his father said. His mother had taught him that from the time he was old enough to comprehend it: his father was the man of the house and his authority was not to be questioned. It was better for everyone involved to just give in. There were incentives to being good, too—Neil always remembered the pride on his father’s face when he was told that he was the smartest kid in his elementary school, how they’d all gone out for milkshakes after, how the story was repeated at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter to the never-ending praise of his relatives. By the time sixth grade was done and the course of his life was suddenly set in stone, Neil figured the whole Harvard thing had to be pretty easy, seeing as he was doing so well with the plan so far.

And then Welton actually happened, Neil began to mature, and it was no longer so simple.

As it turned out, it took a lot more than brains to make it in a place like that—there was a whole new social code to learn, much higher standards than he was used to, and not a familiar face to guide him. He called his mother every day that first week, feeling desperately homesick and missing her kind, soft voice, her cooking, the way she held him when he was upset. She repeatedly assured him that everything would work itself out, but he was nearly inconsolable. He was surrounded by boys he didn’t understand, teachers who were no longer impressed by his every movement, all to reach a goal that was as mysterious to him as the distant planets. “You’ll understand when you’re older,” she said, parroting his father’s words, when he asked why he was sent away. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t just know now. ‘Older’ seemed a very long way away.

By the time he was fifteen, and two years into Welton, things were better. As it turned out, he was not the only outcast at the school, and it didn’t take long for him to form an inviting, if not close-knit, group of friends to lighten the weight of the constant pressure on him. His father’s expectations were as high as ever, but he was on track to make it through. His future was some vague, shiny thing that was still just a little too far away to touch, and he was okay with that.

The summer of 1957 came barreling in, Neil waving goodbye to his Welton friends and retreating back to the cold air-conditioned walls of his house, enveloped in a sense of solitude his home used to be respite from. But he was Neil—could not stand to be alone—and he sought company wherever it could be found.

Most of his friends from elementary school were still around, going to the local public school and planning on becoming electricians, construction workers, maybe working at a bank if they were real high achievers—a far cry from Neil’s Ivy League destiny. Little kids could get along with anyone, really; you pretend to be dragons with someone on the playground once and suddenly your mom is driving you to their house or you’re playing little league together. But Neil had grown since then, the others had grown too, and now he felt it was like meeting whole new people, a whole new self to introduce them to.

That summer, it was a boy named Henry who taught Neil how to smoke cigarettes and sneak into the movies and play spin-the-bottle and kiss the girls it landed on. Neil remembered him as a kid, spinning wild tales that no one ever quite believed but were all ravenous for anyways, and he still carried himself with the same bravado, the eagerness to prove his manliness, and thus, his worth. Neil sometimes felt like he was a little pet to Henry—the dandy going to a fancy boarding school who would not understand the habits of the lower class, even though they’d grown up in the same neighborhood—and the other boy would have him around for show-and-tell purposes while the rest of them play-pretended maturity. It was a summer of drinking root beers on the sidewalk in front of the corner store, pretending they were real, watching little kids kick a ball down the street and acting like you were superior while secretly wishing to be among them, to be young again. Neil felt like James Dean. It was wonderful.

☽ ☼ ☾

“You and your fucking James Dean,” Henry hissed, spitting on the ground like he was chewing tobacco. “What’s so special about him, anyways?”

Neil laughed, flicking a bottle cap over and over off his thumb. “I don’t know, I just think he’s great. You’ve seen Rebel, you’ve got to admit he looks cool as all get-out.”

That was not the full truth. Neil was, in fact, quite obsessed with James Dean, a matter he kept deeply hidden out of embarrassment. There was something alluring about the man’s smile, the gleam of mischief and discontent in his eye, the flawlessness of his slicked-back hair and the messiness of his personality. To Neil he was magical—Rebel Without a Cause had flipped his twelve-year-old self’s worldview upside down, sneaking out of Welton for the very first time to see it, then doing it twice more. He couldn’t explain the fascination, it just was what it was. His death was colossally tragic, but even the grave could not keep that man out of Neil’s head.

“‘Get-out’, what the hell is wrong with you?” Henry laughed, poking fun, as he often did, at Neil for his verbal piety. What could he say, it was the way he was raised—every time he swore, he could hear his mother’s voice in his head, telling him God didn’t like it. His friend Charlie from school said it was a Catholic thing.

Neil laughed too, not really thinking it was funny, kicking a pebble along the ground.

“I think he looked cool,” said Mary-Ellen, Henry’s girlfriend of an astonishing (for their age, and for Henry,) two months, who was the only other movie buff of the group and the closest thing to what Neil would call a true friend.

“Oh, of course you do, Mary-Ellen,” Henry said, standing and taking out a carton of cigarettes and a pack of matches, putting one white stick in his mouth and discreetly glancing at the street around them, making sure no one was watching, before he struck the match and lit it. He breathed out, gray ashy smoke filling the air. “You’re just as bad, swooning over all the hunks in Photoplay.”

Mary-Ellen shrugged, scooting closer to Neil on the curb to fill in Henry’s empty space. “They’re interesting, though, aren’t they, Neil?” That was Neil’s other guilty pleasure—reading Hollywood tabloid magazines. Movies had always been an escape for him, and dammit if he wasn’t going to try and make the magic last long after the credits finished rolling. Mary-Ellen was the only person he knew who would read them with him (and provide them—Lord knew what his father would do if he caught Neil buying thay stuff).

“Ha, Neil probably only likes them for the Jayne Masfield spreads,” Henry said, taking another hit of the cigarette and blowing the smoke to the wind. Neil had to admit, it was attractive. He couldn’t quite see whatever Mary-Ellen saw in Henry, but there was something about the easy way he carried his masculinity on his shoulders that Neil admired, his own always feeling a bit like Atlas carrying the weight of the heavens.

☽ ☼ ☾

Neil knew why his dad was the way he was. His own father died when he was only nine, killed in action somewhere in the French countryside, a closed-casket funeral. His mother had spiraled, instilling her two surviving sons with religious fervor and the willpower to defy the tragedy of their father. But then there was the Depression, Thomas Perry’s college degree doing him little good in finding stability for himself and his new wife (and the children they were supposed to be having, that kept not appearing). Several miscarriages and a New Deal government job later, Neil was born into a somewhat-satisfied middle-class family. But Thomas wanted more, more, wanted Neil to inherit the opportunities he felt he’d missed. He was their only child, their only chance—he had to be perfect.

There were things his parents didn’t talk about—Neil assumed that was the case with every family. His grandfather was not brought up; Neil assumed there was embarrassment there, bitterness about his wasted life and early death. His parent’s troubles conceiving was another sore subject—it was only brought up when Neil was being scolded, when he needed reminding about how he was lucky to be alive, how hard his parents had worked to even bring him into the world. It was his father saying those things, forcing his wife to leave the room in tears. He called her “sensitive” behind her back. “Typical woman,” he’d say to Neil with a short, clipped laugh. And then he’d glare when Neil didn’t find it funny, too.

☽ ☼ ☾

“Oh, Natalie Wood’s so pretty,” Mary-Ellen said with a sigh, staring at the cover photo of the woman in question, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a striped scarf wrapped around it. They were both on their stomachs on the dark wooden floor of Neil’s bedroom, elbows propping them up. Neil’s small portable radio bubbled in the background, playing Young Love by Tab Hunter. “I’d give anything to look like her,” Mary-Ellen went on, stroking a finger over Natalie’s pale printed cheek. Neil loved Natalie, too, remembered her from Rebel lying in James Dean’s well-built arms.

Neil gave her a little laugh. “Come on, you’re plenty pretty already.”

Mary-Ellen blushed heavily, glancing at him. “You think so?”

“‘Course. All the guys are after you for a reason.” It was true一she was really pretty, in the way Neil found most girls pretty, like looking at a painting. When he tried to think about it, he often saw girls in the same way he saw God—unearthly, distant, untouchable. Being near them, kissing them, made them tangible for a moment, but then they pulled back and the moment, the feeling, was gone. Neil never quite got the hang of religion, and he never quite got girls.

“Well, I’m not a glamorous Hollywood star yet, so I think she’s still got me beat.” The two laughed as Mary-Ellen began flipping through the magazine, looking for interesting articles or photos. Something about a musical starring Doris Day that was coming out soon, a write-up about Jayne Mansfield (Neil internally groaned, remembering Henry’s comment), and, “Oh, what's this?”

Mary-Ellen laid the magazine in front of him, revealing a full-page photo of a handsome man amid some greenery, the opposite side showing photos of him doing various manual labor tasks. “Oh, that’s George Nader,” Neil said, still studying the photos. “He was in Congo Crossing—Henry and I snuck out to see it last year.”

“Well isn’t he a dreamboat,” she said, both their eyes transfixed on the page.

“Yeah,” was all Neil could think to say.

Because he was a dreamboat. Neil figured he wasn’t supposed to say it, being a guy and all, but he’d been thinking it since he first saw the man. Dark hair perfectly slicked back, thick biceps visible below the his cut-off shirt sleeves, a playful grin on his well-carved face. He was the perfect masculine man, and yet there was something in the way he was looking into the camera that twisted something in Neil’s gut.

“Here, ‘article continued on page ninety-three,’” Mary-Ellen read, picking up the magazine and flipping to the indicated page. For a split second, Neil wanted to tell her to stop and stay on the pictures, but he retracted the thought before it could leave his mouth.

☽ ☼ ☾

Mary-Ellen left the magazine there that night, surely by accident. They got caught up in conversation (they always did) and then her mother came around asking for her home, and his mother came up asking for her to oblige, and she did, and Neil was alone again. His father wouldn’t be home from work for another few hours, and he had some algebra he knew the man would insist he start studying to give him an edge for the next upcoming school year, but Neil couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he picked up the magazine, flipped it to the page he had admittedly been thinking about all afternoon, and stared and stared and stared until his brain started to rot.

☽ ☼ ☾

“Dirty Commies, back at it again. Problem’s just been getting worse, ever since McCarthy died,” Mr. Perry said, frowning at the newspaper in front of him. It was after dinner, and the Perrys were completing their nightly ritual of sitting in the same room, fulfilling completely different tasks. Mr. Perry was reading the newspaper articles—he only read the headlines in the morning, so he could make comments at work. Mrs. Perry was mending one of her son’s shirts, the repeated motion of her hand and needle a smooth wave. “Boys will be boys,” she had said fondly when he told her of the tear. Neil was on the other end of the couch, a copy of Moby Dick in his hand but his mind making no attempt to comprehend it. Still thinking about the stupid magazine.

Mrs. Perry sighed, as she always did when her husband brought up politics. She didn’t like the subject, she’d tell her son when he was out of the room. Men making messes out of things, as per usual. She didn’t like how partisan it was—couldn’t they all learn to get along?

“Do you have something to say, honey?” Mr. Perry asked sarcastically, and Neil froze up in his seat. He hated when his dad was like this, picking fights because he knew he could win.

“No, no,” his mother replied, as quickly and casually as she could. She hated Joe McCarthy, but only Neil knew that.

His father scoffed, folding the paper and laying it on the end table next to him. “I can’t read any more of that crap. You should have gone into politics, Neil, maybe fixed a few things in this country.”

He shrugged. “Not too late,” he replied, half serious.

“Hm, no, you’re too much like your mother for that, too soft.” He smiled a little. It was not something he took pride in, his emotional hurricane of a son. But the words now were not said with malice, only a father’s fondness. All three of them smiled, because they knew it was true.

☽ ☼ ☾

The next day, he found the magazine.

It was Neil’s fault, really—he was stupid enough to leave it lying on the floor, open to the only page he thought worth looking at, when his father came in to check on the state of his summer schoolwork. It had, predictably, sent him into a rage that Neil could have no reaction to other than sitting on his bed, eyes at the floor, nails digging into where he held his arm, eyes downcast, taking the beating. Thomas Perry never laid a hand on his son, but his tongue was much sharper than his fist ever could be, and was much better at finding Neil’s weak spots.

“...son of mine reading filthy, common trash like this?” he roared, ripping the magazine apart straight down the center. “Who at Harvard is going to let in some nancy who spends all his time off in Wonderland instead of studying, huh?”

Neil felt the anger and shame rise in him, tears pricking behind his eyes and, despite his better judgment, he bit back. “It’s just fun, it’s harmless, it’s—”

“Enough out of you! I don’t work my ass off every day to send you to that school just for you to come home and fill your brain with this garbage.” He threw the tattered pieces of glossy paper on the floor. “Let me guess, it’s those friends of yours, hm? They put you up to all this nonsense? Was it that girl?”

Neil’s mouth opened and closed again, gaping like a fish. He was helpless when it came to scoldings like this.

“You stay away from her, hear me? She obviously likes you—don’t need you getting mixed up with types like that.”

Neil gulped. He knew his next line—it was practically scripted for him. “Yes, sir.”

“And I don’t want to see another glimpse of anything like that—”he pointed to the scraps on the hardwood, “—in my house ever again, understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

☽ ☼ ☾

That was not the first time Neil questioned his purpose in living. It came on him in waves every so often, binding him to wherever he sat, eyes wide with terror—sometimes filled with tears, sometimes dry as a desert. Couldn’t there be something more than school and college and work? Could something be greater outside the airtight walls his father had built around him? Wasn’t there someone who thought about things the way he did—wanting, hoping, praying to break free?

That night, he felt the wrong words ringing in his head. All the opportunities he’d been given, needed to get into Harvard, yeah, he’d heard that before. She obviously likes you. That was new.

Every time he’d hung out with Mary-Ellen flashed through his head like a movie, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d missed something in their relationship. Was the whole thing much less uncomplicated than he’d gone through the years believing? He almost laughed at the thought that she could have a crush on him. There wasn’t anyone better to dream of than sad, soft, screwed-up Neil?

Neil stared at the scraps of the magazine. Somewhere in the pile, the warm eyes and keen grin of George Nader stared back. He knew that if this were a movie, this would be the point where he’d run back down the street calling Mary-Ellen’s name, or go to her house and try to sneak in her window, desperate to declare his love for her. If this were Rebel Without A Cause, he would whisk her away in his Mercury Coupe and take her to the old, run-down mansion to play family like small children, his father be damned. But this was not a movie, and Neil was no James Dean. Even if he was, there would be something missing—he had no Plato. The story wasn’t complete without Plato.

Why did it seem that everyone else around him was obsessed with boys and girls and relationships? Neil had never felt anything like that particularly strongly—was something wrong with him? It couldn’t be that he didn’t want any of that—he did—but why was it that every time he tried to picture it it seemed like a piece of the puzzle was always missing? And why did it hurt so much to think that? Why couldn’t he just want whatever his father wanted? Wouldn’t that be so much easier?

He thought about praying, asking the Lord for forgiveness (he wasn’t sure what for, it was just what you were supposed to do) and to iron out whatever was wrong with him so he could go on with his life and live out his father’s dreams. But the words didn’t come, and Neil begrudgingly thought that if God made everyone perfect, then this wasn’t something He could fix, was it? It was Neil’s fault, Neil was the mistake, and Neil was the one who had to find that missing piece. Maybe if he found Mary-Ellen, got his Hollywood ending, he could solve it. Maybe he would take her to that old mansion and there would be no Plato and that would be fine and no one would have to die and he would go home to his parents and they could all just go on living. Maybe if he kissed her until he couldn’t breathe he would find himself enjoying it and realize it had all been a fluke. But when he tried to picture the moment, it was James Dean’s face in his head.

He curled up on the floor, back to his bed frame, shoving the ruins of the magazine out of his sight. He couldn’t stand to look at it. He couldn’t stand himself. He kept driving his nails into his arm, coating the freckled skin until it was covered in bruised half-moons. He tried to breathe, doing his best to keep the tears from falling—and failing, like everything else he’d ever done.

☽ ☼ ☾

It must have been late at night when his mother came in, wrapped in her robe and with her hair bound in rollers. She forced open his window—the room was very stuffy, he realized—then sat down on the bed next to him, mattress spring creaking under the weight of her.

Neil loved his mother—loved her soft voice, her clear blue eyes, the softness of her wrinkled hands. She had crow’s feet from the way she smiled with her eyes, and the same dimples Neil had. The two of them were more similar than they were different, always had been. He felt more relaxed around her than he ever did his father, her expectations lighter and her words gentler. How many nights had an argument broken out between father and son and it was her arms he crawled into, that caressed his hair while he cried, told him everything would be okay?

Sometimes he wished she would speak out—stand up against the mistreatment of her son, speak her true beliefs. But how could he blame her for her cowardice when he was the same way?

He was too big to be held now—they both knew it—but that didn’t stop her from putting an arm around him, gently rubbing his neck as he buried his head into her shoulder blade.

“Did he tell you?” he asked in little more than a whisper.

“Yes,” she said quietly in return.

“I didn’t think it was that big of a deal,” he said, shifting slightly to lay his head against her.

“It’s not, darling, it will pass. These things always do.”

“But he was so mad. I don’t get it.”

“You’re different from him,” she said, staring off into some unknown distance. “You always have been.”

Neil sat up, not moving her hand from his shoulder but using his own to cover his face, sinking into his knees. “Why can’t I ever be good enough for him? What does he want from me?”

“Neil, you are good enough,” she responded tenderly. “He wants a family he can be proud of, and you make him proud.”

“But it’s not ever enough—there’s always more, more, more that I have to do, something else I have to be. What if I can’t do all of it?”

“You can, love. I know you can.”

“I can’t.” A bitter silence consumed them.

After a long minute, his mother took a deep breath, taking his face in her hands and turning him to look at her. “He loves you. No matter what you can or can’t do, he loves you.”

Neil was silent for a moment, his jaw tightening.“He doesn’t act like that’s the case.”

His mother sighed, releasing him, taking his hands instead. “Don’t take it so hard, Neil. He’s not trying to hurt you—you’re just letting your emotions get the best of you. That’s a woman’s job,” she laughed, but he didn’t laugh with her. “Why don’t you go to bed, darling? You’ll feel better after some sleep.”

He sighed, shoulders sinking down. “Alright,” he said, mostly just to please her.

She stood up, leaning down quickly to give him a kiss on the forehead. “I love you, Neil.”

“Love you too,” he said, and watched her walk away.

☽ ☼ ☾

Life went on, as it always did.

The local movie theater was still playing Giant, so Neil snuck out to see it for a third time. He ran into Mary-Ellen on the way there, and she decided to go see it with him, so it was the two of them side-by-side in the dark, cool theater. She asked if he was excited to go back to school, back to his far-off world of yachts and nepotism. He said yes, meant it mostly. About halfway through, she curled up against him, her head on his shoulder and he knew that, if he had been there, Henry would have been furious. He didn’t really care, though; didn’t care if his parents came home early and found him gone or if he didn’t get into Harvard or anything. He’d make it through. He always did.

He watched as James Dean stumbled drunkenly around the screen, bemoaning his lost love in his career’s eleventh hour. There was something bitter in the performance, some prophetic knowledge that his actions—ironically, the very same he was portraying—would mean he’d never see this film to completion, that audiences would flood its theaters to mourn him. How unhappy had he been, Neil wondered. Was his success not all it had been cracked up to be? Had there been a part of him that maybe wanted to be crushed in the metal shell of that car?

Mary-Ellen moved her hand to rest on top of his. Neil made no motion in return. When it ended, they both sat in their seats, completely still, the brightening house lights glinting off the tear tracks on Neil’s face. He felt incredibly, fantastically alone.

(tagging folks who commented on the companion piece to this! @noblerinthemind @cowboylexapro )

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