Red as Blue

By Ji Strangeway

Ji Strangeway’s graphic novel, Red as Blue, beckons LGBTQ youths and GenXers to beautifully come of age all over again.

15-year-old June Lusparian is an outcast caught between worlds. Half Mexican and half Armenian, June hovers on the border of adulthood, searching the streets of Paradise and the halls of Paradise High for signs of redemption – symptoms of life. She longs to carve open her own space to find a beating heart in a barren world. Only her secret gift for music offers a hint of hope. When she falls for blonde, cool girl Beverly, captain of the Spirit Girls cheer squad, June hopes she may, at last, have found that one true thing. 

But as their nascent romance grows, June learns true connection requires more than a bond of pain and the ache of desire. Paradise is more than an idea, more than a town. And forgiveness never falls from heaven of its own accord. Set in a fictional desert town in 1980s Colorado, RED AS BLUE is a moment of eternal tension on the verge of explosion. With a unique, genre-bending style that is sometimes lyrical, sometimes sharp as a razor’s edge, and always engaging; Ji Strangeway paints word-pictures of the volatile world between worlds in which June struggles to find relevance and worth at Paradise High. But June’s Paradise is on life-support, barely breathing. 

Will death be the only answer?

• Language: English
• Publisher: GYATRi MEDIA
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780998877839

Book preview

SOMETHING RED

PARADISE VALLEY, AMERICA 1984

@FLEA MARKET

110 degrees. High noon. She has trained her body not to sweat inside the wool trench coat. A scrawny five-seven shooting above frumpy five-fours her age, JUNE LUSPARIAN (15) is a vertical in a world of horizontals. Makes her think of the cursed Ugly Duckling. Since kindergarten she knew…That story’s bullshit, cuz it don’t stop nobody from hatin’ me. But that coat is hiding a bigger problem—a body molding its own Play-Doh. She’s growing hips, breasts, and everything that makes life hell.

Red dust gathers on the dome of her black combat boots. Flickering specks spell out: Loser, Nobody, You ain’t got no life. Untied shoelaces slap leather like sloppy chalkboard erasers chopping up words and wiping out bad ideas. Lost words. Confused and broken. Better to have whole, dirty words than clean, dismembered ones. Even so, the dust resurfaces…why bother? Her no-good soul is already dirty.

She stares at soiled laces twisted like dreds. The chore of reaching to tie them weighs her down. Heavy thoughts add 10 pounds to her head, like a watermelon ready to drop and explode. She sighs…It don’t matter. Just gunna hafta tie ‘em again anyways.

June draws her hand from the coat’s deep pocket. Her first three fingers brought to life with BIC black ink: Sad Face index, Angry Face middle, and Scaredy Cat ring with bulging eyes. No happy face…I hate happy people.

Sad Face wiggles: I ain’t good fer nuttin.

June points the gun barrel index with thumb clicked back against temple, then blasts. PURHGGGKKK!

Life ain’t nuttin but fulla pain, Scaredy Cat cries. Angry middle finger flips, Sez who?

JUNE

Sez me. We’re born dirty, sez bible humper Falwell.

Angry Face: Fuck Jerry Fartwell!

This is June’s fan club. Her left hand waves hello to the exalted. At least she gave you faces! We still ain’t nobodies!

CHILD VOICE (OS)

Daddy, daddy, what’s that boy doing?

DADDY (OS)

That’s no boy, Tony. That’s called sign language. She’s probably deaf.

June shoots them a dirty look. She peels a stick of Big Red and tosses the foil into the dry wind. Sunlight bounces off the paper mirror cartwheeling in the air. It smacks onto the headlight of a Bronco pickup rumbling through. June rolls the flat gum into her mouth. Smacking and chomping to beat out the juice, she savors the sharp pain of hot cinnamon biting her tongue.

The Bronco rips by. BANGGG—! A metallic object topples from a heap of velvet paintings and crashes inside the truck bed. June jumps. Clouds of dust dissipate to reveal a luminous glow enshrouding the pickup. A silver beam reflects from the shiny object and cuts June’s vision to momentary blindness.

#BURLY MAN’S CORNER

BURLY MAN (40) siphons a Winston and throws down a blue tarp to lay out velvet Elvises. June sloughs to his corner. He climbs into the pickup and heaves milk crates of vintage magazines, dropping them like bombs onto the desert dirt. Red dust explodes into the air. Vintage Life magazines erupt and careen to June’s feet...Marilyn Monroe, The Talk of Hollywood, Grace Kelly, Winner of the Academy Award, John Wayne, Memories of a G-rated Cowboy.

She picks one up. 1968. The Marvels of Egypt’s Past. King Tutankhamen’s inscrutable, golden face stares at her from the faded cover. Original cover price 35 cents.

Everything at Burly Man’s shrine preserves the dead. Dead Elvis, real dead kings, and venerated idols that made the slick cover of Life, yet everyone in it is dead or on Death’s waiting list. Burly Man retrieves the shiny object that had blinded June earlier, a sad carcass of what used to be a fine aluminum guitar, and leans it against a Tiki totem.

The metal has been hammered, drilled into, and finally shot with a rifle and left for dead to liquefy under the merciless sun. Rain and insects have navigated through the bullet hole to bring rust and corruption to its internal wounds. Brittle cracks shaped like plant roots branch from the hole. They vein the dented body, most likely beaten by a sledgehammer. This thing couldn’t be killed. An enticing delicate neck, easy to choke, has been miraculously spared. Two spikes atop its head flare like Bird of Paradise blossoms taking flight. Schizoid letters inscribe the guitar’s curves with the epithet: Hell Hath No Fury.

JUNE

Um, ‘scuse me mister, but um, what’s hath no furry?

BURLY MAN

Fury, sweetheart. It means crazy. Like women. This one caught up with me, and here, look, that’s what she did.

He points to the hole.

BURLY MAN

I dodged a bullet with this baby.

JUNE

Fer reals?

BURLY MAN

Sometimes you need painful reminders to keep you on the level. This guitar makes a great shield, don’t it? That’s a three-o-eight caliber right there.

JUNE

Oh, rad!

BURLY MAN

I had it for seven years. Seven years bad luck, you know? But now, I don’t know… over ten years. Probably, I might’ve learned some lessons.

JUNE

Like, music lessons?

BURLY MAN

(laughs)

No, kiddo! Life lessons…on being faithful.

(shrugs)

Hey, I’m a man you know. I love women. Whaddya want?

JUNE

I reckon I want this guitar.

Burly Man drags out an old amplifier.

BURLY MAN

Well, I’ll be straight witcha. I’m trying to get rid of this Silvertone, but people need a guitar to use it, you know? So, if you want this box, I’ll give it to ya for fifty bucks. I’ll also throw in that fine work of art.

June glances over at the black velvet of chubby Elvis in a white jumpsuit and a pink lei.

JUNE

Huh? I hate Elvis.

BURLY MAN

No, kiddo, I mean the guitar. It’s one of a kind. Built like a Mack truck. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Well, they don’t even make ‘em at all. A real find, you know. Hell, it took a bullet and still plays swell!

JUNE

(eyes the amplifier)

Well, what the heck do I need this big thing fer?

BURLY MAN

This, my friend, is what makes her scream. It’s a great amp.

JUNE

Huh?

BURLY MAN

This is what gives the git-tar sound.

June reaches in her pockets and grabs all the cash she has.

JUNE

Well, I’m savin’ up fer a guitar mister, and I even quit eatin’ lunch. I don’t want that ratty box...all I got’s this.

He counts $10.52 and scratches his head. June traces the jagged cracks running from the bullet hole. She picks up the guitar and plops down on the dirt. She closes her eyes against the sun. Calmed by the view of nothing but the velum red screen of her eyelids, she rocks to and fro...

Burly Man watches June strum and lose herself in the scrap metal. He mulls. You can’t even pack sardines in that tin. And that ‘66 cardboard amp? Built like a rat trap. If seven years of misery hasn’t made him decent, then what’s the use of holding onto that junky memento?

She’s dreaming so loud that Burly Man could mouth the lyrics…We found you hidin’…we found you lyin’. Chokin’ on dirt and sand…

The steel strings cut into June’s fingers and she winces. Red streams of life burrow into the faces of her fingertips. Sad Face slobbers with joyous tears of sweat, and its frown smears upward with a Billy Idol snarl. June wipes her palm and smiles.

BURLY MAN

Hey, look. If this thing wasn’t made of one hundred percent metal, it’d only be good as firewood. So, why don’t you just run off with it? When you get famous, I’ll be real old, and, maybe you can pay me back with interest!

June jumps to her feet.

JUNE

Fer reals, mister?

BURLY MAN

Yep! And I’m just kidding about the interest.

JUNE

Oh man, I promise you mister that yer gunna be real interestin’ when you get old!

Burly Man laughs. He wipes a palm across the dusty amp to reveal a streak of faux linen over Masonite. He offers the Silvertone to June. She reaches for the gift. All five hopeful fingers tremble with glee.

@SCHOOL BUS #NEXT DAY

Rowdy teens bounce off the gator-green vinyl seats and tear down their inner walls. Apes in the back row dive into the morning ritual: chips, trash, and crumbled paper soil the air. A bacteria-enriched spit wad pelts June’s cheek. She wipes it off with her trench coat cuff. Gross...there ain’t no way out.

Modest 1950s ranch homes hug Rainbow Boulevard—the longest road in Paradise Valley. Houses whip by, evaporating from view. Battered red, white, and blue flags dance in the mocking wind, flapping like limp pizza triangles strung along miles of used car dealerships only to be trailed by brown coffins of furniture warehouses.

Paradise.

Flat buildings everywhere: flat liquor drive-thrus, flat motels, flat roasted piñon and Black Cat fireworks shacks, and flat all-nude bars desperately mask the fact that life can’t be hosted here. June stares out the window at this never-ending eternity…I reckon somethin’s wrong with me cuz ev’ryone is alive in Bum Fuck Egypt ‘cept fer me. The deadness stirs up in her a longing for bigness, a big city maybe…something tall and worth looking up to. Looking upward at least.

She gazes up to a 15-foot dagger atop a steeple cutting the sky. It’s a cross. Paradise is doomed. The pain of seeing that cross is kinesthetic, like how the mere sight of cotton candy makes her four cavities hurt. Paradise is a far cry from LEAVE IT TO BEAVER reruns. She fills her head up with TV white noise and stares with stolid eyes. In the aisle next to her, a bully pushes a Mexican kid who teeters then deliberately falls—to squash her.

MEXICAN KID

(Spanish/English)

CABRON! SHE HAS COOTIES!

JUNE

Get offa’ me, you beaner!

MEXICAN KID

YOUR MAMA!

The bully and the Mexican kid jump her. Fists hurl. She looks up to see blackness smash her.

JUNE (VO)

Ev’ryone hates me.

@PARADISE HIGH SCHOOL #BATHROOM STALL

Slow and soothing, a cold sharp point slices. June’s skin is numbed from scars like fertile land tilled over and over until it stops giving. A 15-year-old feeling ancient as eighty, she will endure eternity before she gets to die.

Summer solstice is supposed to be happy, bright, the longest time of the year. Her mom thought it would be cute to change her true name, Nune, to June, the never-ending month of sunshine. That’s for the girl who wishes she was never born. This happened after her Armenian dad left the picture. Half-Mexican and half-Armenian, she’s got her father’s dark eyes; a father whom she’ll never know.

Stooped on the toilet seat, June paints mental haiku by scoring her arm with a seam ripper—she’s ripping her life apart to watch her wounds stitch again. Her face is like a beautiful vase that’s been cracked in many places then seamlessly joined back together. No one can see her invisible pain, yet something’s wrong.

She thinks about the magical number, three. When cheerleaders yell, GO-GO-GO! the ballers charge like bulls, or when the Chicanos yell, FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!, limbs hurl. So too—

JUNE (VO)

If you say somethin’ three times, it’s gunna come true. Like that girl in Wizard of Oz. She kicked three times and got to go home. Well, I wish I was dead. I hate myself, I hate myself…

June’s mantra didn’t come from herself but things other kids say to her. Their words are inscribed like yearbook autographs stuck for life, and she can’t stop flipping the mental pages. Beads of blood peak on her anemic skin, and pleasure fills her face. Pleasure wrought with frustration. She’s surprised—after all this time, she’s still making blood. It feels new, bold, and good.

BAMMM—! The door bursts open. Footsteps patter across the tiles, hurried and desperate.

I hate you, Christian! a tearful voice cries.

Blunt THUDS against the porcelain sink. KLINK— KLINK—KA-CHERRRRRRRR...Glass-bits rain on the tile and spray under June’s stall. She freezes and listens to a terrified creature yowling like a tortured cat. June’s face mirrors the horror.

JUNE (VO)

She ate somethin’. Glass, I reckon.

Groans relax into a whimper. June’s seen blood before, but not like this. The lines on her arm scratched off like days of a prison calendar—now child’s play. The suicide body lets out life. A viscous trail introduces itself to June’s combat boots and kisses them.

JUNE (VO)

It darn looked like someone done kicked over a can of paint. Some stupid chick killed herself over some dude.

She hops onto the toilet seat like a giant Gulliver peering down at the miniature sea of—

JUNE (VO)

Red. Everything gone red—

@PARADISE HIGH SCHOOL #MAIN LAWN

Boys in skintight Levis slap high-fives and slide and bump the carnales handshake. Mexican girls pile out of a Monte Carlo. They got big feathery hair, erect like palm trees stiffened by hurricane-proof Aqua Net. Chicanos fill