Blurb
Seriously ill, in pain with no money for medication or food, Dennis sets
out to North Beach to drown but ends up being saved more ways than he
can imagine.
Walking along the beach one evening, Luca Ferone encounters a body
floating in the water. Being told to kiss off after rescuing the man
isn't what he expected.
Dennis O'Shea was ready to end it all. Being saved wasn't in his
plans.One look in Dennis' eyes is all Luca needs to be lost. He won't
let anything get in the way until Dennis is his. Dennis doesn't go
easily but realizes that Luca is a man used to getting his own way. Can
the two find their way together?
http://www.mlrbooks.com/ShowBook.php?book=ACKDROWN
Chapter One
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.
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.
As days passed there
were fewer and fewer pieces to pick up. Nora and Mary Katherine were
patient, taking turns driving him into Jersey to see his doctors.
They would prescribe and test. With each new test and prescription
Nora and Mary Katherine would hope, and hope would be dashed. It
didn't look as if Dennis was regaining his strength. Living with the
Polanski problem full time hadn't helped. He shuffled off between
sisters, his brothers-in-law tormenting him with his helplessness as
soon as his sisters weren't looking. Dennis realized staying with the
girls wasn't a real option. He asked to go home.
All totaled up he
spent six months with the girls, six wasted months. He arrived back
home just after Christmas. He intended to begin teaching in January.
Dennis was out of work but paid a good portion of his salary under
the teacher's union disability insurance. But his sick leave was used
up in March, he needed to get his life back. He missed Matty; his
leaving had burned a hole in Dennis' soul. They talked, and Matt
confessed he had found someone on an out of town trip just around the
time of Dennis' first lupus flare. He had stayed as long as he was
able. Dennis was bitter. He needed no pity from Matt. A clean break
in the beginning would have been best for both of them. Matt never
had the balls to meet anything head on; Dennis just let him skulk
away, not even cashing the "guilt" check he sent in
replacement for looting their apartment. At least he had left Dennis'
checking account alone.
Dennis was numb
enough to lie down on the sand. The water ran up the Dockers and
splashed up over his arms and the sides of his shirt. The waves were
higher and breaking closer to his feet. His emerald eyes were shut
against the mist. He no longer shivered. The numbness of hypothermia
had begun. Soon he would sleep. He took his last two Percocet as he
struggled from the car to the sand. He'd parked on a little
trafficked street in front of Asbury Towers, a senior residence about
twenty plus stories high. Originally intended as luxury apartments,
it fell to a charity. The small street at its rear faced the ocean at
North Beach. The Towers sat next to the Sewage Plant which
occasionally gave off sulfurous odors. But North Beach was home to
those free spirits who didn't have the funds or the temperament for
the "cabana" or "beach pass" crowd. The beach
hosted lovers under blankets and surfers riding the waves without
life guards or park rangers asking questions. After a pickup at one
of the local gay clubs, a trip to the beach would ensue when the
lovers didn't have the price of a motel. It was at North Beach that
Matt first penetrated Dennis. Dennis thought it was the appropriate
place to end his life.
He was angry.
Although Matt didn't touch his checking, he'd wiped out their
savings. He sold fifteen of the paintings Dennis prepared for his
second art show and took the money. Dennis had no proof of Matt's
larceny. Matty had all of his PIN numbers, access to all of his
accounts. Matt was his accountant as well as his lover.
Matt was the one who
found him his agent. When he contacted her, she produced signed
statements from Dennis giving Matty permission to sell his art for
"medical expenses." Dennis denied giving Matt permission
but the paintings were already sold and he would have to prosecute
Matty to get the money.
Dennis tried to
work. The school administration sent him to a physician. The school
doctor said that Dennis was no longer physically able to continue
working. He recommended Social Security Disability and Medicare.
Dennis didn't have tenure, nor did he have the money or pull to
fight. He applied. The amount he received was ridiculously small and
Medicare took six months to kick in. His school insurance would pay
for his prescriptions, but the co-pays for the drugs he took
accounted for one-third of his check. His rent was high and he no
longer had Matt to share the expense. His small car was paid in full,
but gas was expensive and if he drove, he didn't eat. He only used it
to get to the doctor and it was March. Medicare wouldn't begin until
June.
It took a mere three
months for Dennis to be down to his last few dollars. Pills or food?
Neither. Instead he chose bliss, the water, his beach and silence.
The next wave came up over his waist. The undertow was treacherous
here. It began the slow pull into the sea. The salt water from
Dennis' eyes met the salt water of the sea and became one. He floated
a bit, mindless, numb-then sank.
Mary Lynn Hansel
Writing as AC Katt
Author of:
From MLR Press: Shattered Glass, A Matter of Trust
