The cliff cascades with ice plant, a blanket of gaudy crimson that nearly blinds in the setting sun. But I also love the challenge, climbing the mountain because it's there, proving every day that the nightmare hasn't won yet. The neuropathy in my left leg throbs with every step. This is my daily encounter with what I've lost in stamina. I take it very slow, gripping the rotting banister as I puff my way. I know it as clear as anything when I turn and climb the eighty steps up. I never had any time for that family porn, even when I had all the time in the world. Sometimes out of nowhere perfect strangers will ask: "You got any brothers and sisters?" No, I say, I was an only child. My real life stretches from coming out to here, fifteen years. I never look in the mirror if I can help it. I put all that behind me when I came out, Brian and Dad and their conspiracy of silence. I brood about all the missed chances, the failures of nerve, but I never go back as far as being a kid. At the bottom I sit at the lip of the shallow cave that opens behind the steps, the winter tide churning before me, the foam almost reaching my toes. Once a day, toward sunset, I walk down the blasted wooden stairs jerry-built into the fold of the cliff, eighty steps to the beach below. I sit out here on this terrace, three thousand miles from the past, and stare down the bluff to the weed-choked ocean, and the last thing I think of is Chester, Connecticut. Me, I was so screwed up I missed being tormented by him. By then of course Brian had become a delirious high school hero, the darling of the Brothers as he glided from season to effortless season, football and hockey and baseball. No more roughhouse, no more nugies and body checks. As soon as Brian understood I was queer-and I swear he knew it before I did-he iced me out for good. He was twenty-eight, I was twenty-five, though in fact we hadn't really spoken for at least ten years before that. Brian and I had our last words then, raw and rabid, finishing one another off. Well, nine anyway: since the day my father was buried in the blue-collar graveyard behind Saint Augustine's. I haven't thought about any of that in twenty years. This boy who never ceased to make me suffer, beating me down and plucking my wings like a hapless fly, and all I ever seemed to feel was that I'd failed him. It was because I wasn't good enough to play with my big brother. But the reason I cried had nothing to do with my differentness, not then. So I never stood a chance, lean and olive and alien as I was. And the Irish hated everybody, especially wops. Hell, it seemed the whole county was Irish, from Hartford all the way to New Haven. I got all the Italian blood instead from Mom's side, so that I was the only Sicilian in a mick neighborhood. That's why I was so diabolical to him, because I didn't look anything like Brian or Dad, both of them fair and freckled, lobster-red in the summer sun, big in the shoulders like stevedores.
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I'd stare in the mirror above the dresser in the room we shared, still gasping the sobs away, hating my sallow skin and my blue-black crewcut. He'd lumber away and grab his glove, off to find one of his buddies from Saint Augustine's, tough like him.
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I'd blubber and bite my lip till Brian would release me in disgust, full of immense disdain because I couldn't take it. "You big fuckin' baby."Īnd I would, I'd cry, not from pain but sorrow. "Is Tommy gonna cry now?" he'd taunt me, rubbing those knuckles across my scalp. That was Brian, a terrorist before his time.
There are boys in Ireland now throwing pipe bombs and torching cars. He'd loom above me with that flame-red Irish hair, his blue eyes dancing wickedly, and he was brute and cruel as any man. Then he'd snap his fingers against my nose, or drool spit in my face while I bucked and jerked my head, or singe my hair with matches. But he'd pounce and drag me to the floor and pin my shoulders with his knees. M Y BROTHER USED TO TELL ME I WAS THE DEVIL, THIS would be while he was torturing me-not beating me up exactly, since he didn't want to hurt his knuckles and maybe miss a game.