Follow Carmen, a young and deeply closeted gay teenager as he navigates the 1980's and 1990's yearning for love and trying to find where he fits in.
This story is rated M because it contains elements of death (including children), homophobia, religi...
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This story ends in the summer of the year 2000. As this is written it is the year 2022. Lots of things have happened in the 22 years between then and now, but if I tried to cover all of those things in detail this book would never end. However, I feel that I owe it to anyone who has read the story this far to include some of the more important things. I will now present some of those events in bulleted form, in chronological order.
2000: After I came out, the life Troy and I had building became even stronger. Troy became a regular part of my family.
We both quit smoking, shortly after Darryl's death. We just woke up one morning in late May and decided that we didn't want to smoke anymore. The fact that a pack of smokes was due to go up to $6/pack on June 1 helped (for the record, they're around $22/pack now). I left my job building police cars and instead started manufacturing vehicle electronics of my own design and selling them on eBay. The products I was selling included headlight flashers, LED emergency lights, and sequencing units for turn signals in certain vehicles such as the 1987/1988 Thunderbird. I was actually very successful at it. So successful that...
2001: Troy quit his job to help me with the marketing side of my business. We were now doing it full time and were selling as many units as I could make.
2003: The summer of suck. I say this because of a bunch of things that happened that year. Much of it was just general province-wide disaster, some of it affected us directly.
First, there was the spring flood in March. This caused a lot of damage in the province including the road into our cottage. There were embedded thunderstorms in that rainstorm, and one of them passed directly over our camp. Lightning struck it, and the camp burned to the ground. The neighbour across the road sat and watched it burn. There was nothing he could do: The washed out road destroyed phone lines so he couldn't call out, and even if he could have, firetrucks could never have gotten in.
Dad converted the basement of his home into a full, independent apartment. He invited Troy and I to stay there. Never in my wildest dreams when I was younger would I ever have imagined the day that I was living at my parents' house with my boyfriend, but here we were.
During construction my mother fell down the stairs and broke her ankle.
Warning: Another suicide is mentioned below
Two days after we moved in I got a phone call from my old friend Trevor, the one who had drunk himself into a coma in 1987. I hadn't heard from him in years, and he was not calling with good news. Rodney had committed suicide in Newfoundland. I knew he was living there, and had even been talking to him a few days before. Nothing seemed wrong when I last talked to him. His sister called Trevor's parents because they were the only old contact of Rodney's that they knew, and they told Trevor. Trevor had actually called my parents' house looking for my number, he didn't know that I was now living there. Trevor came by to talk in person and explained that Rodney's girlfriend had dumped him, and on his 30th birthday he wrote a note that mentioned me, Trevor, and Dale, and then killed himself. I did not ask what was in the note, and I did not ask how he did it. I did not and still do not want to know.
