The backbone of this novel, which included these chapters, formed the brunt of my final project for my BA earlier in 2022. At the time of this publication, the novel proper is 75% complete, so what you are reading here is but the establishing timelines in my narrative. This narrative is, at once, a fictionalization of my teenage years in Rhode Island, my subsequent twenties and thirties, and the formative summer of 2006, which places itself between the teenage chapters and the adulthood chapters. Intended as both a love letter to my youth and a coming out yarn, At Dusk is ultimately a eulogy for, and account of, the unique, indomitable person that was my best friend, Chris Purro. This work is entirely for him, and it is my intention for At Dusk to exist as an enduring piece of my brother.
Thank you for reading.
1
I was never good at making friends. There was a brief time in my youth, most of high school, and maybe a little after, where I was great at it. Perhaps my personality was in bloom or some shit. Hard to say, but either way, making friends was never my strength. I don’t like people, but the ones I do like I actually love. I have to love you to let you get close.
One of what feels like an endless lineage of shrinks told me that it’s a defense mechanism, this only letting a few people “in” over my life. I don’t like shrinks, they minimize everything emotional to facts, while ignoring the emotion behind the fact. I like to see my reservations as a litmus test of sorts, like you must possess x quality to be my friend, or family, or whatever. More people could benefit from such withholding.
But yeah, as I babble, I myself must possess some measure of love for you to consider you. Weird? Maybe. Arrogant? For sure. But I’ve had enough human-induced pain in my life, from before I met you, to well after, to warrant these safeguards. You are one of the few to ever get so close, so quickly, that it could be called something as hyperbolic as “love at first sight.”
We were 12 or so, at least you were, I may have barely been 13. I was new to the public school system, having been subjected to Catholic schools from grades one through six, and the shift from that largely pristine, decidedly advanced education, to our meaner, leaner junior high was jarring. I did not fit in well, or really at all. My name for most of seventh grade might as well have been Faggot. In retrospect, it seemed mean kids being mean was just them having a grain of inelegant foresight. I know you regretted it years later, but you were, here and there, one of those kids, too. I don’t blame you; neither of us was ever taught to properly manage feelings, per the legacy bestowed upon us by our respective fathers.
It was mid-October, during what barely quantified as a music class, and not music as in we played instruments, as if. Our teacher, one of an endless roster of nameless middle-aged men, had us designing our liner notes for fake bands. It was fun. I had a knack still for drawing dinosaurs and dragons, so mine came out like a heavy metal album cover. Ironic since we were years shy of actually discovering metal.
You on the other hand, being you, who came in every day to show off your collection of Eminem and Limp Bizkit CDs, generic for the time, did a spoof of those artists. You weren’t a half bad artist, I’ll say that. Crude as it was, your would-be CD cover was a mix of rap aesthetic with nu-metal crudeness. Somehow you made it all work, a sliver of the creative ambition you would cease to exude as we grew.
“Can you draw me one?”
Your voice was caught between childhood and puberty, a nasally squeak, which made sense considering how short you were. Your hair was a light brown, carefully brushed waves that sat unmoving over your light brown forehead. I considered you, all of you, for a second, and agreed to your request, the first conversation, as it were, that we ever had.
As I finished the touches on a decidedly saurian dragon, its snout blunt like that of T-Rex, our teacher, number whatever in the nondescript lineage announced that we had nothing to do, which meant drum pads. Those fucking drum pads. A four foot stack of the most foul-smelling rubber you could imagine. Coarse to the touch. Awful to smell, truly. I didn’t even want to beat on them with sticks, let alone move with my bare hands. Sensory as I always was, I strayed away from them, grade be damned, pretending to read the beats in the tattered music books, feigning thoughtfulness.
“This is so cool.” You said of the Jurassic dragon I had added to your fake CD cover, its detail out of place among the alien-like figures you clearly lifted from the art of Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.
“No problem.” I smiled and went back to my faux-drum padding, perhaps clearly uncomfortable with the rubber horror before me.
You brought your chair around, throwing your backpack on the table over your assigned drum pad, pretending as if the infernal supply of those pungent black pads had run short, and proceeded to issue an offbeat on my pad.
“Why are you sharing a pad, James?” The nondescript asked as he circled the room like a bored vulture, spreading his smokey cologne about as he did.
“I didn’t get one, so we’re just going to share.”
The nondescript eyed your previous seat with brief suspicion, focusing on your bag for a second, then something in his mind reminded him that he wasn’t paid enough to care. He grunted approval and continued his unenthusiastic circling.
You went back to playing a half-hearted Eminem beat on that demonic drum slab, stopping only to make brief unwarranted jabs at classmates, none of which made you very popular, no more than me, anyway. You were hilarious to me, and we didn’t say much. You kept fucking with the drum pad, and I went back to adding just a little more detail to your dragon.
2
It was one of the longest days of my life, and it was in no small part due to it being the fine line that was being drawn between my childhood and adulthood. James’ own such moment was a mere two weeks prior. Basic training. Basically being yelled at into submission, as it would turn out, and having our unchecked PTSD worsened.
The preceding summer, our last summer, had been mercifully slow. Fast some nights, when we’d be drunk, or high, or otherwise. Endless nights, short days. It was six months of The Life. My dad, who also mercifully didn’t move me mid-senior year, was still quick to pack up the whole house within a week of graduation. I could have gone with him to Virginia, the lesser evil of his shitty ultimatum, then join the military, or graduate then enlist, the greater evil.
James’ own father was an enigmatic presence, one I only met thrice as we grew up: once feeding a swan by the lake in front of his apartment, the second as a disembodied hand opening their door and lastly as a blurred visage bearing the bird as he drove down a hill towards us. He was of a similar quality to my own father, though worse, and expected James to enlist as well. In retrospect, we both could have done anything we wanted, what with being eighteen and all, but what fresh from high school, minimal ambitionists had any idea what to do when they grow up, let alone be aware that they were already expected to be. What is freedom when you have no clue about the world?
The end of childhood had us suddenly becoming closer than we had been, with much of our friendship in high school being relegated to hallway hellos and occasional hangouts. I still don’t know how it happened, but I know it felt like we had suddenly never had that years-long schism in our friendship. None of what happened mattered, only what would.
In the last month of high school I had convinced him, a person who found little meaning in ceremony, to walk the stage during graduation. I remember wanting him to feel appreciated, despite how middling our grades were, as it meant what we had accomplished was still an accomplishment. In his otherwise unfairly unpraised life, he needed it from time to time.
As if in turn, though I’m certain James had no concrete intention, was to convince me to join the military with him, in this case the Air Force, as opposed to my dad’s preference of the Army, in which I was already on my way to becoming a convoy driver. Fun. What surprised me about his request, about the desire to convince me, was not in asking me to join the same branch, but asking me to join with him. Such specificity.
It was an odd thing to consider, leaving home, everything I had known for the last decade, and in truth, looking back, joining the military was a horrible choice. I had a girlfriend, a steady one, a friendly ruse of a relationship as it would turn out, as would any romantic relationship I had with women. I had a job, the same grocery gig I’d retained since I was fifteen. I had somehow managed to find a roof over my head post-graduation, by the kindness of friends old and new. So why did the decision to go with him come to me so naturally? The answer was something I would scoff at internally for years, but somehow, even then, I knew.
And as I sat on that plane, embarking from Boston to San Antonio, I considered not the childhood I left behind, but that somewhere down below, in some city I had never been, was just a single root of familiarity, of family. Our recruiter, like all recruiters, turned out to be a smooth-talking fucking liar, as James had left two weeks ahead of me, but by the end of basic training, it didn’t matter, we would find ourselves graduating together for the second time in a year.
3
The summer after high school graduation was, and still is, sixteen years later, the best time of my life. Despite the impending, but somewhat unknown, expiration date, how effervescent it would all turn out to be, none of it mattered. We all reflect on our youth with a mix of fondness and abject horror, ours was certainly no different, but I think we were little shits. Sometimes just plain awful, but it's an awfulness we outgrew, something to look back upon with a mix of fondness and audacity.
I had been living with Tasukers, as she was so affectionately named for our reasons, sharing a room with her after nearly being homeless post-graduation, in part due to my outright refusal of my dad’s shitty ultimatum. I owe her much still to this day, in no small part due to the roof she provided, let alone the years of friendship. James had already been spending most nights at my house even before graduation, sleeping on my floor, or in the guest bed, whatever suited him. Since graduation he had mostly been living in the same room as Tasukers and I, and somehow nobody cared about the sheer frequency of his presence either. It felt good knowing he was safe, for some reason.
James was fine sleeping on the floor, always was, but there were some nights where he would be at our house for days on end, and I’d let him sleep in my twin-sized bed, and I’d take the floor, or a couch, wherever. We rarely slept anyway.
We spent a considerable amount of time running around in the dark, especially at the nearby high school. Not our high school, somehow I don’t think we’d dare, but the one in the town over, and maybe because it wasn’t ours we had minimal qualms with vandalizing its various outdoor sports areas. Cutting tennis nets. Drawing dicks in the wet clay of their second outdoor track. Breaking random shit against the brick of the main building. Wanton. Chaotic. Youth.
In the end, the damage was minimal, and we spent most of our time running the main track in full clothes, band shirts and jeans, pretending to get in shape for basic training. Not that we were out of shape, what with us boasting the usual metabolism of eighteen year olds, but we felt we couldn’t run for shit. We decided that running to get in some manner of shape meant four laps with lit cigarettes flopping in our lips. It didn’t really do much as it turned out, surprisingly. We’d spend evenings running these laps, the smoke pouring behind us as if we were limber locomotives, pausing on the bleachers to finish our smokes, then light and repeat.
Then we decided to start climbing, and not something as sensible as a tree, but something as odd and ill-shaped as a football goal post. They were tall yellow forks, the paint course from the wear of its decade-old coating. James, the limberest of the two of us, assessed the curvature of the goal’s base, a broader circumference than the twin prongs above.
“Man, I don’t want to fucking climb this shit.” I bemoaned, my smokey lungs speaking for me.
“Then don’t climb.” James chuckled as he positioned himself behind the curvature.
“Don’t fuck it.”
He tilted his head at me, seductively ran his hand down the broad curve, made a soft though exaggerated moan and thrust his pelvis back and forth mockingly at the goal post. He spat on its back, demeaned it, then gave it a playful slap, the metal of it ringing across the empty field. He finally tensed his compact frame as he draped himself over the curvature. His limbs hugged the pole tighter as he ascended, until he slipped quickly to the side, then upside down.
I stifled a gasp as I positioned myself slightly beneath him, he dangling above me like a sloth. His baggy cargo pants hung down to his ankles, the sheer thickness of his leg hair catching in the stadium lights. He strained against the gravity beneath him, his ascent placing him twelve feet above me now. The curvature extinguished into a T-shape that further splayed out into the goal’s signature twin prongs. James swung his legs rightside up, his torso following suit. His bony hands gripped the T firmly as he navigated to the left prong by inching forward on his ass, his legs pretzeled beneath him. Finally reaching the prong, he carefully rose, his shoulder leaning into the sun-warmed metal, his right arm anchoring his balance. He half removed his shirt, letting it hang over his right shoulder like a baggy shawl, the collar still wrapped around the gentle slope of his neck, resting just beneath his Adam’s apple. The sole stadium light seemed on just for him, its brilliance illuminating the sweat of his back and deepening its slender contours diving into his waist.
James turned to me, smiling, his profile illuminated as if framed by a halo. “Come up, Elliot.”
I sighed as I attempted the curvature. I was taller than James, and had a good twenty pounds on him, and still benefited from the football player’s physique…somehow, two years after being on the team. But in the lightest of physical comedies, I was also terminally clumsy and no matter how I tried I could not muster the agility required to ascend the goal post. This was made clear as I fell eight feet down, landing hard on my back, the wind blasting out of me in a frustrated heave.
“Are you ok?” James inquired through a sprinkling of laughter.
“Yeah, fuck it.” I resigned as I lit another cigarette, back resting against the base of the goal post, James perched above me, his own cigarette exorcising smoke into the cooling night, his figure a silhouette against an ethereal light.