Free All About Lulu by Jonathan Evison

no gain, I guess. Or maybe I was just scared.”
    Ross stared out into the hallway. I started picking fuzz balls off my bedspread.
    “I miss her,” I said.
    “Yeah.”
    A dense silence settled in, the kind that makes your ears ring.
    “Well,” I said, fi nally. “I guess I better get busy on my—”
    “Yeah,” said Ross, and he stood to leave.
    “You okay?”
    “Sure, I’m okay. But you won’t tell, right?”
    “Why would I?”
    “That’s cool.” He turned to leave, but then he turned back again. “So, I’m just wondering, what do you write in all those books, anyway?”
    I almost wanted to tell him. It might have been a relief. “Nothing,” I said.
    “Can I read some?”
    “Nah. It’s just stuff.”
    “That’s cool. I draw stuff sometimes. Doug thinks it’s gay.”
    “Screw Doug,” I said.
    “Yeah, I guess you’re right. So, I guess I’ll see you.”
    “Yeah.”
    He turned and left.
    Within a few months, Ross discovered his new self, and it couldn’t have been newer or more unexpected. While Doug and Big Bill spent their afternoons paining and gaining, Ross started smoking clove cigarettes and hanging out with a kid named Regan and listening to Duran Duran. Regan became his mentor: oft quoted, perpetually emulated, but always shrouded in mystery.
    “Where’s your imaginary friend Regan?” I’d ask.
    “Why don’t you look in your little notebook?”
    He grew his hair out and fashioned it after the lead singer of Flock of Seagulls.
    “Looks like somebody parked the Batmobile on top of your head,” I observed.
    “Looks like they parked it on your face and left in a hurry.”
    There was hope for the kid.
    Much to the chagrin of Big Bill, Ross soon started wearing eyeliner.
    “For Pete’s sake, you look like a raccoon. Take that off ! Why do you wanna go around looking like Boy Georgie?”
    “You look like a dill-hole,” said Doug.
    We were hard on him, it was the Miller way, but I envied Ross for fi nding his new self. I wished I could fi nd a new self, or even an old self, or any self that didn’t require Lulu as the main ingredient. I wished I had the guts to wear eyeliner, or swagger around with overgrown muscles. I wished I had some goal, some thing or ideal besides Lulu to drive me forward all of my days. I wished I had the desire or passion or vision to build something, anything —a rippling body, a body of knowledge, a goddamn brontosaurus in the middle of the desert.
    Something bigger than myself. But I had only one crippling desire.
    The ripples of change brought about by Ross’s transformation soon set the geography of our household in motion again. Ross moved into the trophy room, and everything from the trophy room—that is, everything from our former lives—was moved into a corner of the garage, where it soon hosted black widows. Doug, haunted perhaps by a phantom top bunk, yearned for new surroundings, and soon traded rooms with Lulu, who could never resist change.
    Thus deprived of my precious swath of light, I turned instead to my radio, always mindful of the fact that it had once been a gift from Lulu. The radio became my bridge to the outside world. I lay on my bed, gazing at the walls of my prison, while Ken Minyard on KABC spoke to me like a best friend about life, the universe, and Mexican food. About history, politics, and current events. And like a best friend, I listened. That was my role in the relationship, to listen.
    I had other radio friends: Casey Kasem, Rick Dees, Shadoe Stevens.
    The radio was never about the music for me, it was always about the voices, the power of those invisible supercharged voices to lift me out of the morass, to open windows of possibility and understanding, to conjure by the force of incantation and verbal charm any image, idea, or opinion, and also their amazing power to persuade. Ken Minyard made a Bobby Kennedy liberal out of me and I didn’t even know who Bobby Kennedy was. Casey Kasem taught me the fi ne line between