Chapter 2

By his twenty-third birthday, his parents had sold the bar and moved on to a senior living trailer park in Florida. His sisters, who always seemed to act as a pair, married the Polanski brothers, who he always believed were dumb as posts. They moved out of state. He missed his sisters, but the removal of the Polanski brothers from his intimate circle was the silver lining of that cloud. They were macho assholes whose supply of “faggot” jokes was minuscule, yet repeated in endless cycles at every family gathering. Dennis longed to whack them up the side of the head with a two by four. He and Matt laughed at their solution to the Polanski problem. Matt said, “Hell, Den, it could only raise their IQ, it couldn’t get any lower.” This would result in laughter, kisses and hard loving. He missed the loving.

The water was up to his ankles and he was numb from the cold. Once, the cold bothered him. He used a fully-lined wet suit to ride the sporadic East Atlantic waves. Dennis traveled to the West Coast but the beaches of Malibu and Carmel did not appeal to him in the same way as the greenish gray of the Atlantic. It was this water that called to him when he was lying in a ball on the floor of the apartment he once shared with Matt, screaming in pain. The cold was nothing in comparison. To Dennis, pain had color and texture. Moderate pain was a deep orange band pulling tight, taking the breath from his lungs and tightening his joints into a vise-like grip. Orange could be managed by medication. Severe was blood orange spikes hammered into flesh, unrelenting in their assault. Blood orange watched the second hand of the clock waiting for the next dose of painkillers. It could cause you to beg and scream, if you let it.

Unbearable was red, the red of fire, brimstone and hell. Red consumed you with thousands of needles each precisely tuned to a nerve ending. Red knew each ending with intimacy. Red took your mind and left you on the floor in a ball, screaming. Dennis had done a lot of the ball thing.

He wasn’t a coward. The pain hadn’t sent him to the beach. It was the dreams—dreams destroyed, ripped out of his heart and flung into oblivion. After he became sick, it only took two months for Matt to leave.

Dennis spent four weeks in the hospital, and four in rehab. He was about to come home, and despite his weakened condition, he looked forward to being in Matt’s arms. With Matty at his side, he could conquer anything. Then his cell rang. It was Mary Katherine. She was on her way in from Pennsylvania to bring him home. Matt had called her. “He got a promotion and packed up and moved to Cleveland, Ohio this morning. He said you knew, he thought he’d be able to pick you up but he caught an earlier plane.”

Dennis sat at the edge of his bed, stunned. He’d spoken to Matty last evening, telling him what time to pick him up. Matt didn’t even have the courage to tell him on the telephone, much less in person. He was in a semi-catatonic state. He didn’t respond to the staff in the rehab center and they were ready to call the doctor and have him committed to a psych ward for what they thought was a catatonic state but Mary Katherine and Nora arrived in time. Both sisters gathered him in their arms, and got him into the car. They stopped off and picked up some of the things from his ravaged apartment. He couldn’t even make the stairs. Nora stayed in the car while Mary Katherine, the elder by a year, went to pack.

They thought he was asleep on the trip back to Westchester. Nora drove while Mary Katherine described what she saw. According to his sister, Matt took most of everything they had. He didn’t even leave the mattress; he took it and the frame plus both antique maple dressers. The little bistro table with its two chairs was gone from the kitchen as were all of the small appliances, dishes, pots, glasses and silverware. Mary Katherine knew who had paid for everything; she and Nora had shopped with Dennis because Matty had no interest in “domestic” issues. He took almost all the towels and the linens, leaving only one set of sheets and a few of the threadbare towels from college. The bastard left only one folding chair in the living room. Mary Katherine ended her recital with “The devil at least had the decency to leave the boy’s art and his supplies. If he hadn’t I’d have sent Stanley to get it all back.”

“And,” Nora joined in, “Chet would have been right beside him or not bother coming home.”

Dennis was almost amused at the idea of his homophobic brothers-in-law riding to his defense like the white knights of old. He was a man; the sisters could coddle him a bit, but then he would go home and pick up the pieces.