1 Chapter 1

1

Dennis Michael O’Shea could no longer walk by the sea. He used to put on a full body wet suit and chase the waves up and down the Jersey Shore from March through November. A year ago he was diagnosed with mixed connective tissue disease with lupus and a plethora of other medical issues that came along with it. Now, he couldn’t make it past the boards without stopping to rest. Dennis Michael wasn’t sixty-five or even a poorly preserved forty. Dennis had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday the day before. The date always marked the official start of his personal surfing season. This year he intended it to mark the day of his death.

The walk to the water was difficult. He’d had to stop several times to catch his breath. The trip from his small apartment on Sunset had already consumed most of his limited store of energy, but just a few feet and Dennis Michael could relax and meet his maker. He sat in a small eddy, the sand already wet. The tide was on its way in to the shore. The mist hung heavy over the water like a gray blanket silencing the roar of the angry sea. March was the cruelest month. The ocean could be angry or placid, temperature cold or temperate. Tonight, March showed Jack Frost’s face. The light cotton rugby shirt he wore did little to keep the chill from Dennis’ fair skin. It was a favorite and kept only for special occasions. The red, yellow and navy interweaving striped pattern shirt came from Abercrombie and Fitch. It had been a Christmas gift from his former lover, lost, as everything else had been, in the riptide of the previous year.

Grandma O’Shea had always instructed Dennis to wear clean underwear just in case there was an accident and he went to the emergency room. He smiled as he thought about his Grams. It was in her honor that he wore his only good shirt and pants, beige Dockers, to his own death. There was no clean underwear, Dennis went commando so Grams would remain unashamed; all his remaining briefs were holey, like the socks he tossed, just stuffing his feet into a pair of Nikes.

The small number of personal items he wished to leave his sisters were secreted in the trunk of his Honda. He left his art and paper making frames, supplies, glues and dyes and the few canvases of his work completed before he was struck down sat in the back seat. His work sold well at his first show after college. These were to go in the second show that never came. He left two of his canvasses with a note to the management company that took care of the apartment complex. His former agent would be able to find a buyer and the two canvases would pay his debt. They were his last assets. It didn’t matter, he no longer needed assets. Dennis had only two passions in life the first was his art, the second, Matt. The disease had cost him both.

His medium was paper. His agile fingers sculpted and shaped his hand-made papers into fantastical dimensions. He had his first showing just out of college at twenty-three. He used rags and linen and special fibers to create papers which he shaped with paste, dyes and glazes into visions of heroic fantasy. His art was very popular with the New Age crowd, but he had taken a new, more mature direction in preparation for his second show. His pieces had become more realistic, portraits of the mind. The gallery wanted at least forty pieces for a show, so he taught art at a local high school to cover his daily expenses and buy supplies. He worked feverishly at night putting his visions in three dimensions on canvas.

Matty had always been there. They’d grown up together in the Irish bastion of Belmar, just to the south. It was a working class life. Da owned a shot and beer joint on Main Street; Ma cooked in the kitchen and his older sisters had waited on tables. Matt and he knew pretty much from the age of ten that they were “different” from their schoolmates at the local Catholic elementary school. The sisters encouraged them more than the others to be priests. They had gone on to public high school at their own insistence. It was there they found out about labels, prejudice and what evil hate could produce. It solidified their relationship and moved it from friends to lovers. Dennis had never looked back. He and Matty attended the same college, roomed together, graduated and moved to the gay community in Asbury Park where they were just free to be. For three years, it was the stuff of Dennis’ dreams.