Sometimes I want to call you baby, just because I know how much you hate it.
You’ve been the young one, the cute one, the baby, for far too long, and you’ve
become increasingly intolerant since it first started. You were the one with the
curls, the wide white smile, the huge blue eyes. Babyface, wet mouth. Cherub
curls. I recognized it in you the first time I saw you, and so did the rest of
the world.
You always react to it somehow; you can never just ignore it. At fifteen,
laughing it off, making a joke of it. At sixteen, masking frustrated tears with
a sneer. At seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, sighing like its just another part of
your job that you hate, but can’t avoid.
And now, you, at twenty, more of a man than any of us, spitting fire when you
get called the baby. When Britney called you her baby you threw a lamp and
didn’t speak to her for three months, and when you finally called her up it was
to call it all off. She should have known better, she should have known
you better, she should have known.
We know, and we don’t ever call you anything but Justin. That’s why you’ll
never leave us, no matter how many offers you get, asking you to put out a solo
cd. The ones who offer are the ones who still call you the baby, but we never
do, and so you stay.
You’re still the baby of us, in many ways, but in many more ways, you are the
most mature. You’ve been surrounded by the smog of celebrity since you were just
a child; you have grown up with it and it has stunted you, like a kid who has
inhaled Mommy’s cigarette smoke and still coughs at twenty-five. It has carved
you from a soft thing into a diamond wrapped in black velvet. Pretty, pretty
sheen, sharp edges, cloaked in softness and darkness.
I get to see the darkness. I get to see the softness.
I get to see you, but I’m not even sure if you want me to see you, or if
you’re just so used to me that it’s like being alone. Maybe you’re only so naked
with me because there’s no way to cloak yourself from me. I’ve known you
forever; we were baby celebrities together—you and me and Britney and
Christina.
It’s almost ironic. Back then we were so adult, so mature, all of us jaded
child stars, and they forced sweetness and innocence down our throats.
All-American dreams, all of us; big smiles and mouse ears. Now we are weak,
vulnerable, naïve, shielded from reality by the golden gleam of fame, but they
force high-heeled shoes and sex onto the girls, making them child strippers,
tiny Lolitas. They turn us into fresh-faced teenage wet dreams with dark sides,
our hips touching the stage as we drop to our knees.
Britney tries to be exactly what they want her to be, without the
smokescreen. She gets caught drunk on camera; she swears a blue streak when she
knows they can hear her; she gets her tits done and shakes them on a table at a
nightclub where photographers are. Christina just gets tinier and tinier,
retreating back into that place, into that person she was before. Smooth, flat
lines of no hips beneath the fishnets; hair bleached the platinum that only
five-year olds have naturally.
And us? We cope with it by doing this, exactly what we’re doing right now.
You’re lying in my arms, naked in more ways than one. Your sweat is rubbing off
on me; my cum is coating your stomach. We are breathing the same air.
You have a faraway look on your face. I hope you’re thinking of me, but I’m
pretty sure that you’re not. Maybe I’m just a distraction to you, a method of
being the opposite of how they want you to be, but I might be more. We’ve known
each other forever. In many ways I am you. I’ve been here since I was a kid,
too. I still cough at twenty-five.
You’re the baby, but I’m the childlike one; the one who keeps hoping.
I always hope for more from you, and you always give it to me. But now I want
something else.
I want to push my boundaries with you. I want to know how much you’ll let me
get away with, how much you’ll put up with, how much you love me.
I want to call you baby, but I don’t want it enough to lose you.
THE END