Ch 30 - The Agony

The ticking of the clock was like a torture device that reminded Darrell of his idleness and each passing moment that he wasn’t doing something as he sat in the recliner watching television.  It was enough to make him want a tall glass of beer, maybe a few shots of whiskey because that’s how he used to pass the time.  That was his former coping mechanism for everything he didn’t want to feel.

It used to be work hard Monday through Friday, start drinking Friday night, recover on Sunday by nursing his poison and then be ready for work on Monday where he’d really dry out in the first meeting of the week.  He would regain his faculties, his brain would be stimulated by all of the problems and all of the solutions.  Then Wednesday became like Friday and he was constantly trying to recover, no manage, from the poison he drank.

He stabbed his thumbnail into the tip of his middle finger to try and bring himself back to the present as he sat there.  Walter was a few feet away quietly eating a bowl of cereal.  He felt like a burden to all of them.  He felt like his father had been to his mother and to himself when he was young.  He thought about how his father was a drunk.  He thought about how he didn’t want the man to know he was gay.  And he thought about his neighbor who had taken advantage of him when he was a boy and how that could be the blame for everything. 

His father would come home late and drunk.  His inebriation made him like a wounded animal in need of shelter and his mother, the faithful and dependable wife, would tend to him, care for him.  That went on for years with varying degrees of intensity and need, even after he was off to college. 

That was when he found himself, or at least could be himself.  So many trysts in dark rooms, making himself vulnerable to men who used him for his body and what he represented to them, another conquered man.  No one wanted to have a relationship, it was too dangerous.  At least the sex could be forgotten, denied, but a relationship, that was something else, something people would find out, something his mother would find out. 

For a moment he thought it would be easier when his father died.  He came out to his mother, sat her down on a Saturday of his weekend visit home and he told her.  She nodded and smiled, then said she didn’t blame him and it wasn’t his fault.

The neighbor, he thought, it was the neighbor who she thinks did this to me.  A boy not much older than himself who used to be the terror of the neighborhood.  Everyone seemed to have a story about catching him doing something wrong, everyone except Darrell.  Well, that’s not true, because there was that one thing, well those things.  His mother had almost caught them several times.

The worst was when his friend forgot a pair of underwear at his place, in his room.  His mother knew at once the underwear wasn’t Darrell’s.  She asked him about it and he told her that it was because they gotten muddy and that he was borrowing a set of clothes.  She didn’t seem to believe him.  She was suspicious.

But all of that was years ago and yet it felt real, like it had stuck to him.  He had told himself many times that there was some way to explain, some perfect argument, a rationale that would make his mother believe and yet he could never bring himself to say anything.  Somehow, each time, just before she would prove her willing ignorance to him.  She would say something that took the wind out of his lungs.

He moved the thumbnail to his index finger and worked another familiar groove.  It was enough to bring him back to the present and yet he felt it.  He felt that anger and sorrow right there in his throat,  He had been on edge since the accident.  It was the little, sentimental things that seemed to do it, something in a movie or some comment, even commercials.

“Walter,” he said.  “Would you give me a minute?”

“What?”

“Please, I’m not feeling well.  I need a moment.”

Walter looked him in the eye.

“Are you okay?  Do you need me to get something?”

“Would you go to the store and buy me a beer?” Darrell asked.

Walter let out a nervous laugh.

“You don’t drink,” he said.

“Please, something, anything, just go out.”

“I’ll get you some ice cream,” Walter replied.

“That’s fine,” he said.

Walter got to his feet, scratched at his chest, but continued to stare at Darrell.  The sight of him dressed in a small, comic t-shirt that rode up easily, skinny jeans that looked like a second skin, and his simple, ordinary shoes with thin bottoms reminded Darrell of Walter’s unguarded personality, his youthful curiosity, and his endurance for ridicule.  It was enough to make him cry.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Walter said as he approached him.

“No, please, leave me,” Darrell said.

Walter moved closer, touched his shoulder.

“I don’t want you to see me like this.”

“It’s too late.  You just have to let it out.  You’ll feel better.”

“No,” Darrell said with a shake of his head.

“Yes, you have to let it out.  You have to scream about it.  Even if no one listens and no one knows, you can’t hold it inside of you.”

That sent Darrell over the edge as his silent tears became vicious sobs and grunts of agony.  Walter moved closer, sat beside him on the recliner’s large armrest and placed his arm down around Darrell’s shoulders.  He rubbed Darrell’s shoulder and took a deep breath.

Ch 15 - Bottles of Beer on the Wall

Living together in the same apartment, sharing the same bed, was a serious commitment for Triston, Darrell, and Bobby.  No one made an advance, touched or grabbed unless it was expected and usually communicated before it was done.  They weren’t there for the sex.  They weren’t in a monogamous relationship, it was something else, a friendship.  They could talk all night long but they were also comfortable with awkward silences.  Each of them was in the bed for his own reason.

For Darrell it was sobriety, dependency, and preoccupation, the little annoyances and distractions that made him fill his day with something else.  It had gotten bad two years before he moved in with them.  He had his own apartment in that section of town that sounded like a bachelor’s neighborhood. 

Drinking on the weekends became drinking every night until he had a collection of bottles in the cupboards of his kitchen instead of dishes, along the counters, and windowsills.

Sometimes they had a utility by holding candles but afterwards, after he decided to detox, go to AA and quit, well they were a reminder.  He hated the sound they made, bottle against bottle, grinding as he carried them by the brown paper bag full, two or three in each hand to the dumpster where he set them to the side.  They were gone the next day, collected by one of the city’s many homeless, someone had hit the mother load.  He could smile about that minimal good that came from his habit, his indulgence, no his suffering.

When you drink for the good times is one thing but when you drink for silence that’s something else entirely different, he thought.  He had been a functional alcoholic, no one ever caught on to his self-abuse.  He’d sober up in the first few hours of work, drink a couple coffees until he felt ready for his afternoon meetings.  How could no one have known?

Maybe they didn’t want to know.  Or maybe, just maybe, people are more self-absorbed than he thought and no one could identify his problem, least of all his mother.  He didn’t tell her how bad it had gotten, just that he had decided to give it up and he was going to A.A.  She just smiled at him, hugged him.

But even sobriety was his new secret, especially why.  He didn’t want to relive those moments alone, sitting in the bathtub, on his back, and other impaired judgments including sex.  He had gotten lucky.  But he considered his best luck to be when he met Triston through a dating website. 

They had exchanged emails, IM messages, exchanged numbers, and gotten together for coffee.  It was over two black coffees that he confessed that he was looking for friends and not lovers.  Triston invited him to the apartment he already shared with Bobby.  The cabinets were bare, there were condiment packets in the refrigerator.

They talked for hours on the couch until Bobby came home, then they talked for another hour before he realized how late it had gotten.  When they invited him to stay the night he thought to refuse, to dismiss them and leave, but then he thought about his long walk home and his empty bed.

Sometimes, he reasoned, you can trust someone.  Triston was someone that if ever he felt a spiritual connection it would be with him.  Talking was easy.  He could imagine not talking to him for years, meeting up with him, and finding the same comfort.

That first night was awkward.  He worried about where his hands and feet ended up.  He worried about who was touching him and where.  There was just enough space between them.  He fantasized about cuddling together.  He wanted to hold someone.  Bobby was more his type but he thought Triston would have been the most open to it.  But he couldn’t bring himself to say anything that first night.

It came out over breakfast when they recognized he didn’t seem to have slept well.  Triston forced the conversation because he said he was worried about Darrell not returning.  It was one of those conversations no one wanted to have and yet it benefited everyone.  It was cathartic.

After that conversation he couldn’t imagine spending another night alone and he didn’t want either of them to leave.