The Rest of the Story

I’m picking up where I left off in my story of the Rise and Fall of Dan Tyler.
Bear with me.
When Caren and I moved to Portland, Maine after my birthday in 1999, we had a plan to go there with several friends of ours. One of them, Jessica, had spent many summers waitressing at a place in Kennebunkport (where the Bushes liked to vacation) and she had many a tale about how lucrative the jobs were, and that she had previously been rolling in the dough.
Just prior to the move, I had gone to NYC for the first time with two other friends of mine for a post-semester stretch-of-the-legs, as it were, after a long, but enjoyable stint at MSU.
Caren and I had, by this time, recognized we weren’t suited to be in a romantic relationship anymore, especially as my gayness was bursting at the seams, and indeed, while in New York, I met and fell in love with a young man named Nick along with the City, itself.
New York is sweltering in the summer, frosty in the winter, and so-so in the Fall, but, ah, New York in Spring! It’s the stuff the Beetles and Sinatra would sing about. There is a bounce in everyone’s step after the freezing snows, and on every street-corner, there is a flower kiosk, where a bunch of roses can be bought for five bucks or less.
Nick and I traipsed together with my friends Bret and Tony (from Montana) laughing, and dancing, and loving life. Good times.
Caren and Jessica in the meanwhile had packed up Jessica’s Volvo stationwagon along with Tucson and Jessica’s dog and boyfriend and had started East; thus upon my return to Bozeman, I leapt into that tiny Nissan Sentra we used to own and followed a week or so behind.
Frustratingly, when we arrived in southern Maine, not only was housing very difficult to find, but jobs were in short supply. Also, it turned out that Jessica was pregnant, so she and her boyfriend decided to head back to Arizona-where we had met them in the first place once-upon-a-time.
Caren snagged a job, that I cannot exactly say was cushy, but it was VERY lucrative--waiting tales at a crab shack right on the wharf where all the tourists from New England would ferry up to Nova Scotia and back, and although she stank like a deep fryer every night when she came home, Caren did quite well for herself.
As for me, well, I landed three different jobs all at once, waiting tables at three separate, yet struggling restaurants, and after a while, I decided to dump out of the restaurant biz and try something new.
I had seen an advertisement for “direct care workers” who assisted mentally and physically handicapped young adults in group homes, and I thought that would be much more to my liking.
And it was.
Dear god, I cannot sufficiently explain how proud I was of myself and the work I was doing. All I knew is that I was helping people, actually making a difference, if you can dig it, and I didn’t have to sell my soul doing a song and dance for some crummy tips!
Of the many clients I came to work with, one young man captured my heart*, and to this day, I cannot think of him without tears welling I my eyes, and there is a sliver of my heart, which will ever remain cold and empty.
*Note: my feelings for him never ventured into a romantic crush or anything like that. No, the love, admiration, and mutual trust which developed between the two of us was highly professional and on the up and up, yet at the same time, it became profoundly personal, intimate, and brotherly. Keep that in mind, as you read: I loved Jerome as the younger brother I never had and I attempted to treat him as the older brother I’d always wanted--with dignity and respect and trust, and the promise that I would never abandon him.
As I have said, all of my clients had some degree of mental retardation, most of whom also suffered a wide variety of physical problems from blindness to MS to traumatic head injuries, but Jerome, was wicked smart. I imagine, he would have scored quite highly on an I.Q. test. Moreover, he was extremely perceptive, unselfish, and kind, but whatever sick god there may be out there cursed Jerome with a horrific condition called Lesch-Nyan Syndrome-an extremely rare condition (at the time, there had been only seven documented cases as such, worldwide) which played havoc on his metabolism, and somehow, this affected his mind so that he would involuntarily attempt to hurt himself and needed to be encased in full restraints 100% of the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-fucking-five days a year.
The onset of his disease became evident when he was about five years old, when this normally healthy and precocious little boy became wracked with horrible back pains and seizures. At first his doctors were afraid he might be epileptic. The he was diagnosed with early onset cerebral palsy. Finally, a full body examination revealed he had developed kidney stones the size of GOLF BALLS!
I was stunned to read this in his dossier, remembering how terribly they hurt you, and presciently, I would be inflicted by such torturous pain. But mine were the size of rice grains; how a little boy’s managed to grow so large...well, nature, never ceases to amaze.
After an infinity of tests at some of the best hospitals in New England, Jerome’s official diagnosis was finally made, and especially as he grew older, his self-mutilating tendencies drew nigh.
How so? For example, on one dreadful afternoon, he bit his entire lower lip off and spat it on the floor, and as a preventative against another self-attack, nearly all of his teeth were removed. Thus, he spoke with a malformed slur, and through he remained very self-aware, he had great difficulty in refraining from attempting to hurt himself.
Additionally, his psychosis prompted him to projectile spitting and vomiting as well as a near Tourettes syndrome where he would call people names--not so much to hurt them, but to provoke them, so that they would become angry with him, and thereby satisfy the sadomasochistic demon which begged to feel the ire of others.
He was aware of his own entrapment--both within his body, and within the full restraints we were mandated to keep him, and understandably, he hated his fate, and often voiced desires to depart this mean world. Can you imagine knowing, your entire fate lay within the hands of others and how well they performed their duties? Thus, he was cursed with a deep anxiety, reflected as an almost incapacitating stutter, which so many untrained individuals tried to fill in for him, eliciting more anxiety and frustration, if not down right outrage.
Yet, for seven dollars an hour, warm bodies off the street, with no inkling of how to effectively deal with a client such as this were expected to play nurse, psychologist, caretaker, and friend--but pray, do not get too attached to him, we were admonished.
Yeah, right.
Perhaps, because I treated him as a human being, worthy of respect, and entitled to live as happy a life as this so-called government was supposed to provide for him, we became very close.
And ultimately, too close.
After working with him for six months or so, Caren and I moved into a truly spectacular apartment, and one day he asked if he could see it.
I saw no reason why not--except he was forced to be completely restrained in a wheel chair with his arms and legs lashed down with leather restraints. All the same, I could see no harm in loading him into the van and taking him by our new home--just so he could see it. Just so we could pretend he wasn’t a client, and I wasn’t a worker, and we were just two chums out to check out my new digs.
I had learned how to do a single-person transfer from his chair to his bed, and had even been working with him, teaching him to walk.
He weighed all of 75 lbs dripping wet, so when we pulled up to my place--a third floor apartment, I sequestered Caren’s help in lifting him up the stairs so he could see the new place, visit Tucson, finally meet out cat, etc.
All things went quite smoothly, and I didn’t give it a second thought when we returned to his home, where I exchanged him with the other workers on the night shift, but invariably he told them what we had done, which was reported to my superiors, who ultimately fired me ”...for failing to observe safety protocols and recklessly endangering a client’s life..”
I was banned from ever contacting him in person, my mail, or by telephone, and I was, in a word: crushed.
Not only had I lost my job, but I felt I had let him down, because now I was forced to abandon him--a thing I promised I would never do.
I cried for days, hating myself, hating the world, and felt so goddamn guilty, I was ready to throw myself off the nearest cliff.
And it wasn’t long before I did...at least metaphorically.
I won’t go too far into my relationship with Anthony except to say the first three months were the most wonderful of my life. You of all people, can empathize with the intoxicating power of love! To be the center of someone else’s world, and vice-versa, what could be better?
I’ll leave the gods to answer that one, but if you have ever felt like you were missing a piece and suddenly, without warning, you have found it, and it fits you--he fits you--like the proverbial glove, which rhymes with love … and oh, what a feeling!
Love is a a sort of madness unto itself, though, more’s the pity. It boosts you through the clouds, but then...then you find out whether or not you strapped on a parachute, and as I fell like a wingless angel, I plunged into an icy lake of fire, arguments, beatings, and abuse.
So there you have “...The rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey was wont to say. And so it goes.

Epilogue
It wasn’t until years later that I began to probe the layers of emotional fall-out, which I caused myself via that deadliest of suicide attempts, and only after years of both therapy and academic research was i to learn about the phenomena of Survivor’s Guilt along with my own personality taking on that of Jerome’s: hence, the stutter, the panic attacks, etc.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’d make one hell of a case study for some ambitious psychiatrist. Perhaps I’ll write a book.