Back Door Man * Chapter XV * Dennis

A memoir of the years 1944 - 2008. This is the final chapter of my years on the North Island, the story of an aborted, futile, intense love for another lost soul, Dennis.

XV DENNIS

Recreating the experience of knowing people three and four decades after, souls in whom I invested emotionally, and recording less sensitive matters of detail surrounding events, I find my ability to remember dates and timelines, which was never sharp, is duller now. While specificities remain ambiguous, I’ve surprised myself at how much I have been able to recall by making the prolonged effort to complete this work. And when I reread a chapter, I find myself asking, “How much of that really happened, and how much is creative license?” I really don’t know.

In the year between the ’78 and ’79 seasons on the Kona Winds, I lived on UIC. Carl and I had no higher goals than to enjoy ourselves wallowing contentedly in those all too familiar instant gratifications, pot, booze and good food. Pot was cheap and more plentiful than it was when Richard and I first arrived. We shared our pleasures, wit, and impromptu dinner parties, eaten on our small folding card table, with neighbors our own age and our young friends, Randy and Dean Benton. Larry thought us too foolish to dally with but his brothers did not.

Why do some straight teenage boys feel comfortable around older gay men like ourselves, seek out their company, and spend all their free time with them? There was the lure of pot, and my home cooking, which must have been at least a change from their mom’s. And there was our company, which was laid back, extremely jovial and came with no holds barred. Those things would have appealed to them. There was also just about no one else up there their own age with whom they related as they did with us or who had the same degree of nonjudgmental acceptance we gave them. We found them great company but we didn’t seek them out, they came to us " as we knew they would. We never phoned, they just came by when they saw we were at home; we didn’t even have their phone number. They shared their stash with us when we had no pot and sometimes told us where to score and vice versa.

Randy, who must have been about sixteen or seventeen, didn’t drink much but Dean sometimes did. They were tokers looking for laughs, not trouble - their second hand knowledge of life in jail and its effects on Bobby were enough of a deterrent. They valued their safety and security, home and family above all else. We usually saw one or the other but not both together at the same time. Neither of them talked about the other or about Larry. They kept family matters private. I don’t recall that Dean went to school though Larry did and I suppose Randy must have, too. School was another subject they never mentioned.

Joyce Benton, their mother, was a short woman in her mid to late forties, with curly, graying hair. Though I never saw her intoxicated, she always had a cigarette and a glass. She was a talker but she had nothing to say to me and Carl as we were her son’s friends and she wanted to keep our two worlds separate, a sensible attitude. What they may have said to each other about us never came up and they impressed me as an exemplary, cohesive, one parent family.

The boys stood around six feet tall with Dean slightly taller, straight, and lean. Randy was more of a hippy in appearance; his hair, which became stringy between washings, was longer than his brother’s. He was still a bit unsure of himself while Dean was eighteen and more confident and outgoing. He had the looks of a model. Randy was the only one of his family who was not good looking " though one could hypothesize that he would become better looking as he grew older. Built alike, they both had great asses. But, unfortunately, Randy’s face just didn’t measure up to the high Benton family standard. He had a slight acne problem, over large, slightly protruding teeth and a weak chin. He was sweet, considerate, and polite and we liked him a lot. They often stayed late, seeming not to want to leave. Sometimes I crashed before they went home, which was just across the road. I never gave a thought to what happened between Carl, who always out drank me and the Bentons after I crashed. After all, they were straight.

Decades later Carl told me, he and Dean had sex many times, while I was sleeping and while I was working, but he never did with Randy. Randy was a horny lad, too, possibly bisexual, at an age when he just needed to get off or lose his virginity, and wouldn’t fuss about with whom. Was he hoping Carl or I would put the moves on him? Did he know what Dean and Carl were doing? He was too shy to come on to us. It’s a shame neither of us could see him as a sex object. It wasn’t fair to him. His face was just a bit off putting, at the time " at least to me; he wasn’t on my radar. It would have been a boost to his self-esteem if one of us had relieved him of his cherry. But I just took him as a straight boy and didn’t want to lose him as a friend by coming on to him.

Then between the summers of 1978 and 1979, Larry came by one rainy morning just to herald the appearance of another larger-than-life character with this warning: “Don’t have anything to do with him. My cousin, Dennis, is staying with us; he’s nothing but bad news.” He could have been more explicit but he said no more and left.

And Larry was only trying to be kind to a friend and his former employer. He had good reason - he hadn’t forgotten my foolishness with Bobby and hoped to spare me a refrain of regret. But I forgot his counsel, swept away like faltering cries in a howling wind when Randy, with no word of warning, brought his cousin over for cards that same storming evening and our eyes met. Looking into his deep brown orbs I saw trouble, I knew he was all wrong, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him and I hoped Randy and Carl didn’t notice that I was gaga as I tried to act cool.

He was young and handsome, and concerned that we notice his machismo. He had Love tattooed on his right knuckles and Hate on his left. I’ve seen this a few times since; it’s a common enough jailhouse production but it was new and puzzling to me then. I thought, “Why not one or the other?” I soon discovered that he was every bit as enigmatic as his tattoos. When I asked him about the love/hate thing, he couldn’t explain what it meant. He had just let someone do it during a period of boredom. It was, among other things, a testament to how much pain he could endure.

Dennis Wilson was twenty-five, and hailed from Campbell Creek where his father and a younger brother, fishermen, still lived. He was persona non grata there; none of his family wanted anything to do with him or with his older brother, Clair, who’d also been in jail a good part of his life and was not getting out. He spoke of Claire as though they had once been close. He also had a sister he loved who never gave up on him.

He told us they'd paroled him after many years learning bad things from bad men in Okala. He never explained the reason why he went to jail and I remained torn between curiosity and a dread of learning the details. He came to Coal Harbor to chill out with his cousins, the Bentons - whom he referred to comically as the Bent-heads, alluding specifically to Bobby’s problem. More than “chilling” living with them was one of the conditions of his parole.

Joyce said he could stay there as long as he behaved. It was generous of her to give him that break " it was why they gave him parole. It was no easy decision to allow him to live with her family " especially considering what Bobby had already put them through. Taking Dennis on after his parole, giving him a chance to make it in the real world when his own father wouldn’t take him on, proved she had heart. And she probably half-knew that her kindness came out of her own wishful thinking. She was an old hand at self-delusion after raising four sons and two daughters on her own in the liberated ‘Sixties and ‘Seventies.

She expected her nephew to adhere to the conditions of his parole, adapt to life outside, and find employment. But freedom was a state of mind he never found easy; it always led to trouble. Randy, Larry, and Dean knew his background and the odds against success; they all came from the same town. But fate was going to surprise us with a plot twist no one would have guessed when, within twenty-four hours, Dennis moved in with me - to the relief of the boys, if not also of Joyce. Wee small Larry always maintained distance between us; this rearrangement bolstered that need.

But back at the euchre table on that inclement night, we played partners at cards, and rubbed our legs under the table like adolescents, unable not to touch, trying to not jerk the table and give ourselves away, waiting impatiently for Randy, now the odd-man-out, to leave. Out sentiment was palpable, he must have felt it. Yet he ignored it and I wondered if he was torturing us or if something else was going on.

Probation came with rules, one being that Dennis had to sleep in a designated place acceptable to his Probation Officer, that bed being in his cousin’s family home. From experience with Bobby on probation, Randy would have known that and the other probation rules Dennis would disregard and break one by one as each became constraining. He expected Dennis to sleep at his house and this accounted for his lingering over euchre, which went on and on. The card game ended and Randy left only after Dennis said he was going to stay with us awhile. He must have realized his cousin was bisexual or gay; he had to know why he stayed behind but he still would have expected Dennis to return afterwards. His mother expected a lot of Randy at sixteen.

Having been celibate since I arrived on the North Island and long been accustomed to it though it was never my choice, a whiff of the prospect of sexual pleasure was irresistibly thrilling. And Dennis was a doll. We jumped into bed with no formalities. Dennis was horny, too, but he couldn’t have been hornier than I. At some point that first night, Dennis thought it necessary to tell me he also liked sex with women sometimes, which significant tidbit I filed amongst the chaff at the back of my mind and forgot. Neglecting to note the implications of his statement, I found his physical charms were all I could ask. It was wonderful having sex with an eager and beautiful man, kissing, fondling, sleeping and waking with him there beside me, both of us erect.

Carl had him pegged. Early in the game when I asked what he thought of Dennis, he said he was unpredictable, dangerous and angry - someone to be handled with great care. While we lived together, and after we broke up Dennis ran through a number of cars - wrecked them. When I cut him loose, he became completely unhinged and started acting-out, in Coal Harbor and Port Hardy, hoping to gain my attention. He pushed a stolen car off the Coal Harbor pier. A few months later, after revisiting Port Hardy to appear on charges of driving under the influence and reckless driving, rumor that I never believed alleged that he murdered an older man who came on to him after he picked Dennis up hitchhiking.

Shacking up was a poor decision " and less a conscious choice than just the consequence of our lust and his preference for living with us over staying with the Bent-heads. Carl and I set a poor example for an outsider like him: we all liked drugs and alcohol too much. He felt comfortable because he thought we didn’t judge him. (Actually, we were judgmental but we tried to keep our opinions to ourselves and not to criticize.) At the beginning, I liked his company a great deal; I ignored my intuition and listened to the promptings of my flesh. Carl remained above such concerns, assuming my infatuation would run its course and neither of us would be hurt. He was right: my flesh wounds healed eventually and only Dennis sustained harm. He always knew he’d land back in jail " he was fatalistic; it was only a matter of how much freedom he could stand before they’d catch him at something. He didn’t feel at home on the outside.

He was used to conversing with other criminals; his plans were all childlike fantasies and as changeable as North Island weather. He thought the only reason to work was to save a lot of money; he couldn’t see himself as anything other than either on the inside or a working stiff. He thought working in an isolated setting suited him best because there he’d stay out of trouble. This may have been true. His plan consisted in working enough weeks to file a UIC claim while saving what he earned, then collecting pogy until it and the savings were gone, and lastly hopping back on the wheel and repeating the cycle as long as he could stand it on the outside. The object of this was to be free, for periods, to do what he wanted. What that was remained ambiguous but would always be something involving a second hand fairly beat up vehicle that he would quickly turn to s**t. I quickly came to realize the process had a heavy, dark air of inevitability about it.

He couldn’t stand to be without a car. They were his nemesis and he never did anything but destroy them. The way he drove vehicles was like a bug collector pining live insects on a cork board: he no sooner turned the key in the ignition than the vehicle began to smoke, sputter and expire, spreading the agony to all those with eyes to see and ears to hear. He drove stoned and drunk (as we all did), recklessly and outrageously fast. (Carl and I were much more mindful of how vital a vehicle was. Though I didn’t have a license, before we met Dennis and while Carl still had a car, now and then when we left the Seagate Carl would ask me to drive because he was too out of it. I’d learned not how to drive but how to manage a car on almost deserted roads. I believed the duty of getting us home alive would keep me sober enough to do it, which it did. I drove with circumspection and a sense of fearsome accountability " for my welfare and for that of a car full of passed out fellow travelers. These things kept me alert.)

Out of jail, this time the winds blew fair for Dennis for a while and I hoped things would work out; of course, they didn’t because he was a screw-up. He bought a small junker and work came knocking. When demand for the red metal was high and copper went up on Wall Street, Utah Mine grew desperate for extra men. It heated up again in early ‘79. Carl had just come back from the UIC office where he had gone for help finding work. They directed a Utah crew boss, Gunther Kuffus, to our door. He offered all three of us employment. Carl and Dennis agreed to start next day, but I knew better. I would never set my eyes on Utah Pits.

From the stories, they delighted in retailing for my delectation over dinner - of how often and how they cheated death on a daily basis - it had to have been a harrowing place to work. They worked unsupervised, a two-man Laurel and Hardy maintenance crew. Their job was to paint huge circulating air ducts, large enough to walk along above the roaring grinding machines fifty feet below on the floor of the refinery. The paint they used was like the air they breathed, laden with toxic chemicals, a deadly brew they ingested all day long.

The one time they toked at work Carl came close to killing Dennis. They tried it as an experiment to see if they could do their job stoned, and one which proved they’d been right all along not to try. They’d been working with an air compressor and left it turned off on the floor while they toked up. When they came back to it, Carl absentmindedly flipped the switch. With no one holding the hose, it began to snake out of control and it could have killed Dennis if Carl hadn’t switched it off right away. They never toked at work again.

They routinely stopped for refreshment at the Seagate after work and sometimes they were nearly delirious by the time they arrived home for the dinner I had waiting for them. Although atypical in many ways, in one Dennis illustrated the young men drawn up island for work: they were immature and had city ways and habits. When they found themselves making what seemed a small fortune they overindulged in drugs and alcohol to escape the dullness of isolation that was the reason for their high wage.

Dennis had a hair trigger. This is one instance. Carl and Dennis kept track of their hours at work but Gunter believed Carl was padding his. At the mine in front of Dennis, Gunter told Carl he was going to dock his pay. Carl is self righteous, short tempered, and quick to judge. He became indignant with Gunter, whom he never liked and distrusted. He fired back that he always came and left with Dennis and their hours were the same. Carl soon came to think Dennis had misunderstood, and that he believed Carl had implicated him in the same alleged misdeed and that Utah would dock his own pay, too.

Dennis said nothing until they were back in Coal Harbor. Inside our tin can, Dennis grabbed the phone and threatened to smash Carl’s head with it for his betrayal. Dennis’ rage blew over and neither of them ever said another word about it. Carl still says he never felt closer to being murdered than he did facing Dennis at that moment. I witnessed the episode but it didn’t make that impression on me. If Carl hadn’t reminded me, I wouldn’t have remembered. I have reservations about Carl’s perception of the event; I think Dennis was pretending and Carl was taken in. If he was pissed off at Carl, he was not the type to wait to say something.

He probably gave that performance just to impress me. Dennis was volatile but I never felt as personally threatened by him as I did by my own emotional susceptibility to him. Once, I would have done anything a bad boy asked of me, but I’d learned something from my mistakes " my freedom and my life were more dear " and I listened occasionally to the murmurs of my wee small voice, which was shouting, “This one’s trouble”. Dennis exemplifies my weakness for unworthy men: I’m attracted to high maintenance individuals " Peter Cope, Jude, Robin " I need to rescue society’s outcasts but I can’t change their behavior and only enable them to continue their antisocial pattern. In this relationship, I had such fear of setting him off that I watched him closely, kept control of myself to some degree, and allowed things to go only so far.

Before long, I could see no future in a partnership with Dennis. After we drove together to a few places, I became afraid for my life to drive anywhere with him in a car again. But I couldn’t offend him by saying, “I don’t want to die”. Memories of those fright-filled rides with him at the wheel are permanent. Every time he drove off in his car, I wondered if he’d return. At times, I wondered which eventuality I wanted.

There’s only more-of-the-same to this tale; I’ll omit the refrain and skip to the last episode, the event that came bitterly between us. I had mentioned that I had a few old hits of Windowpane on hand and several times he suggested doing them together and I had always demurred. Then one Friday night Dennis talked me into dropping with him. I had not wanted to do it. Although I’d never done acid with him, I knew how unpredictable it would make him. An unstable wild-child and LSD are a volatile mix. Regardless, that night he had his way. We toked up first, quaffed a few, dropped, and found ourselves at that dreadful place, the Seagate, before it came on.

Soon we were stoned all right but I wasn’t enjoying it much as for one thing, it had been two years since the last time and I didn’t like the atmosphere. I felt self-conscious there, as I knew I would. It was a typical, wild Friday night with the ritualized mating of horny, inebriated and stoned straight youth, half natives and half whites, permanent and temporary residents, gathered tightly and uneasily in that smelly, cavernous pub. The ratio of macho men to bush women being no less than five to one, testosterone ruled " and such competition can be troublesome.

Unstable. Unpredictable. A wild child. I already knew that about him. But what I would soon learn was that LSD acted upon Dennis like an aphrodisiac. We had only been there a few minutes when, without a word, Dennis decided to go after a woman. He was so stoned that, seeming to detach from spaceship earth, he stood up and left me to pursue the scent of a native girl at a table with other native people some distance away. I was appalled and greatly surprised at this thoughtless act, so uncharacteristic. I attributed it to LSD. But I still indulged myself in petulance, which being high " and alone - made much worse. After a short term of brooding and self-pity, without a word to him, I left that hole and hitched back.

Carl was carousing with some of our lady friends; I sulked in the trailer by myself, had another drink, and took something to bring me down and ease me into sleep. I lay on my bed, weaving fitfully in and out of light dreams and hallucinations until I came fully awake at the unexpected familiar sound of his car grinding to a halt on the gravel. I had expected him to return the next day. Now I really had to wonder what had happened. Had something gone wrong? He was tripping so hard that he left the engine running when he came inside. In my bedroom, he was excited and breathing heavy, as though he’d left the woman’s bed to rush back.

In my dejected bitterness, I failed to catch the significance of his coming back to me at two in the morning: he hadn’t turned his back on me, and screwing her was merely a way to prove, for his satisfaction, that he was not gay but bisexual. It was important to him and being on acid had made it necessary to act it out. He had needed her for that but it was over and now he wanted me. He was naïve enough to be genuinely surprised that what he had done had pissed me off. He wanted to know what had happened to me back at the pub. He asked how he had wronged me. And he reminded me what he’d said when we met: he liked sex with women, too.

One can’t feel the onset of creeping asexuality, how it gradually usurps the lustfulness of youth. It doesn’t always, however. Doubtless, many vigorously sexual older men would vociferously disagree. Well, here’s to them " I truly envy them. Except in late adolescence and as a teenager, I was never highly sexed and with masturbation and porn, I’d had no need for two-party sex. I don’t mean that in 1979, I didn’t still desire men but I did it only to prove to myself that I still was desirable. Cohabiting, establishing a lovers relationship that included sex several times a week, never entered my mind. Dennis and I together as we were before that night was an extraordinary arrangement for us both and unsustainable.

On acid, now more than ever I desired Dennis and I wanted sex. But over and above that, I wanted him to be mine and he had just proven that could never be. This had been my pattern for a long time, the reason I had always failed to establish long-term intimacy and partnership " I didn’t viscerally need sex; I had to be desired but I believed myself unworthy of it. Thus, I could not possibly succeed. In turn, on the rare occasions when I had sex, my lack of self-esteem diminished my performance, which embarrassed me. Eventually I stopped trying. Since, aside from this interlude, I had lived celibate and would resume it again, not needing intimacy, it was this that had allowed me to impose my rule of sexual exclusivity on him. Now Dennis had broken it. But he had learned his rules of sexual conduct in prison: never lose hand; never lose face. Both of us had felt that our own codes were self-evident and we hadn’t discussed them. But I couldn’t say he hadn’t been up front about his sexuality from day one and I wondered why I hadn’t been up front, too.

That night lust and contrition suffused him with a tantalizing glow. He trembled with barely restrained hunger. Straight sex had made him more licentious and he wanted to follow her with me. All his senses seemed bent on pleasure. He wanted me; he begged. I resisted; I was weakening. I wanted him because he was beautiful and because, after my humiliation at the pub, here he was, humbling himself and showing his inner animal. I blushed at such passion.

But something always spoils these nearly perfect moments and once again, something did. I’d never smelled c**t, but I smelled it on him then: it was as if he bathed in it. But it blended with the aroma of a flowery, sweet perfume that under other circumstances I might have liked. I couldn’t like it because it was hers and it was on him. That really bothered me. I said I would let him into bed with me but I asked him to shower. I knew the smell of c**t and her perfume would ruin my attempt to give him the pleasure I wanted to give him. But he wouldn’t, which was either shortsighted, if he really wanted me, or just pig headedness - because, whichever it was, his reward for this behavior was zero.

Her scent was a love trophy. He liked it and he wouldn’t wash it off for me. He didn’t understand how much he’d hurt me and now added insult to my pain by refusing to wash her off. He wanted our three scents to commingle, to envelope himself in her and myself and provide an open sesame to an olfactory aphrodisiac that would crown his debauched night. No doubt, acid heightened our desire and I might have savored make-up sex " possibly the best sex I would ever have had, if I could have ignored the scent of her female genitalia on my lover’s c**k.

I spoiled everything for us both by not surrendering in this battle of wills; I still insisted he shower first and when he wouldn’t I told him to leave and come back for his s**t in the morning. Meek and defeated, to my jaw-dropping surprise, he went outside, turned off the car engine, and lay there like a dog in the back seat. It was amazing, the hold I had on him. Neither of us won anything by refusing to back down. Had either of us given in we would only have postponed breaking up until later and endured other psychological cruelties from each other meanwhile. I did a pitiless, difficult, but necessary thing; it saved a great deal more pain later. At the time, I didn’t see how complex not backing down was. I thought all it did was hurt me. I did it more as a face saving measure than for any other reason.

Neither of us slept and we never made love again. I began to miss him immediately and with that came wrongly felt remorse and regret. Something would not allow me to undo what I had started. That parting was the most heart-wrenching break-up of my life. Nothing is one sided: my capacity to forego sex had set up my failure to communicate and love with passion; I could live in isolation if I chose to. But I wish I had understood in my adolescence the effect it had on me when mother interrupted me and Ralph on the cot in my basement as we tried to have sex in the more or less normal way of barely pubescent teens.

In the morning Dennis came inside, hoping for reconciliation but too macho to ask. It took only minutes to gather up his few possessions, there were few words between us, and then he left. I was beside myself with an overwhelming sense of emptiness, grief, and failure, realizing how much I would miss him in my bed and worried about what he would do living on his own. For a while, he managed well enough.

By mere coincidence, Richard’s outfit hired Dennis to work at his camp. It was the first of several camps where he attempted to decompress while working and saving far from urban temptations. Over the summer while I was on the Kona Winds, losing myself in work, he wrote me five letters, the only contrite, begging love letters I have. He signed them all, with sincerity, I’m sure, “Love, Dennis”. That was thirty-four years ago. Until last month, when I found them in my scrapbook, I had completely forgotten that he ever wrote to me. They show he cared for me and wanted to be with me. There is not a word crossed out or one correction. All the lines are straight, his handwriting tiny and legible, like that of someone who wrote many letters. His spelling and grammar, while not perfect, are not bad and are the only indications that he may have been distracted from lessons in school. He writes exactly as he spoke; reading them, the years vanish in an instant and he’s warm and right beside me again. They have a charming directness and innocence. He must have become a letter writer in jail, reaching out to those who’d rejected him, whom he found it difficult to live with and communicate with on the outside. They recall memories sweet and melancholy. His Coal Harbor interlude with his cousins and us had been a relatively idyllic one, for Dennis.

At the time, I found it painfully difficult to resist his desire to try again; I had anchored him somewhat and without me, he started to fall apart. If I had known that would happen I might have acted differently. But then again I thought not " I was afraid of my emotional susceptibility to him. What good would it have done? Knowing he was hopeless, I rejected his urgings in order to save myself. Rereading his letters revives the emotions I felt in ‘79 as they arrived at the post office. At the time, I passed them to Carl for his opinion. But when I reminded him of them recently, he didn’t remember them either. We’d both forgotten. Without keeping them, I wouldn’t have realized that though the three of us lived through these events together we each experienced them differently.

June 4, 1979

Dear Paul,

Hi, just a few lines to say hello and let you know how I’m doing which is not. . . I’m hired on as a Rigging Slinger so I’m making more money than I thought and am getting along good with everyone up here. Richard came down to get me when the plane landed. Tonight Richard and a couple friends and I got really blitzed on hash and grass so at least I’m not going without that, just sex. Ah well, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do when another three or four months pass probably because I’m not really sure where your head’s at, it would be nice if you wrote and told me at least I would know one way or another. Anyway it would be nice to hear from you once in a while. One way or another? [Was he saying in effect that he still wanted me?]I’m going to be in Port Hardy in three weeks to pick up my car at Klassen’s and make my car payment at the same time. [F*****g cars!] I don’t think it will take any more than two or three days. I’m going to leave it in Van so that when I come back down I’ll have it. . . I forgot [?] to phone my parole officer before I left but my sister said she would phone this morning so I guess that will be cool. I sure hope you’re not still made about that lousy f**k I had the last night I was there but remember I told you when I first got to know you that I liked girls. Well I guess that’s about all I can think for now except to say hello to Carl and “Moe,” Larry [Moe, Larry and Curly, the Stooges, a reference to the Bentons] and everyone. . . Bye for now . . . Love, Dennis.

June 8, 1979

Dear Paul,

Hi, got your letter yesterday and thought I’d answer right away and let you know what’s happening with me. First of all you know how I feel about you, and I would like to see you again, but under different circumstances and also in the future, not right away as I would like to make enough money so that I don’t have to work for a year or so. [I took this last sentence as an indication that the immediate pain of splitting up with me was healing, a good thing but also somewhat difficult to accept with equanimity.] This is the place for me to do it, but it will take a few months and I will have to stay in camp steady to do it. I’ve already made up my mind and that’s what I’m going to do. So the best thing to do for now is just to stay in touch and you can keep me posted as to what you are doing and I will do the same. . . Richard just left, he comes over all the time and we get pretty loaded at night, not that we are getting it on, because we’re not. [Although Dennis and I no longer were an item I still wanted exclusivity, I suspected he and Richard were screwing as they were both highly sexed creatures. They would have had no reason not to, both horny guys, both good looking, both gay, both lonely, BOTH SINGLE! But knowing they were would have made me jealous regardless. I didn’t interrogate Dennis about it and his denial was voluntary and made it that much more suspect. But I believe Dennis because if they were I think he would have said it.] Just sitting around and talk all night. Now that I’ve gotten to know a lot of his history and etc . . . I’ve really gotten to like him. Just as a friend. I’ll phone you in about a week or so, or before you go to work. [I was back on the Kona Winds.] Tell Klassen Motors that I will be over to pick up the car in about a month because I want to leave it in Vancouver before the next time I come down from camp.[Cars again. ]. . . . Bye for now.

Dennis. P.S. Say “hello” to Carl and everyone . . .

 

 

July 23^rd

Dear Paul,

Hi, well guess you heard all the bad news about me [“Bad news” might refer to having stolen a car belonging to a Coal Harbor local and pushing it off the end of the pier.] except a little worse than usual. I’m not exactly sure what is happening with the Police except that they know where I’m at and I have to go to court in September. Probably will end up with about six hundred in fines. I also phoned my parole officer and told him what was happening . . . Well, minus a few little tidbits. You must really think I’m nuts . . . well really I’m not, just trying to be someone and am doing a terrible job of it, anyway I’ll really have to get my act together or go down fighting and I’ve been through that before and know where I’ll end up. [Here Dennis has drawn a tiny square with a most unhappy “happy face” behind bars " him looking out of his cell. I still find his words sad, expressing his honest self-appraisal and his premonition of the inevitable. That tiny little unhappy-face touches me.] Anyways got your little note you gave Tom to give me, but am still a little baffled by it. Why did you keep pushing me when I seen (sic) you? I kind of got the impression that you were very uptight at me and at the same time you were trying to get me uptight and I didn’t want that to happen, but it did and I split. I can only be pushed so far Paul, before I say “F**k it.” Anyways next time I see you, I hope it will be under better circumstances, that is if you still want to see me . . . I can’t leave here until Sept. as I don’t want to until I go to court. This way it will look better for me. Well anyways hope you’re doing well, and that this lets you know that I care about you lots. Bye for now . . . Love Dennis P.S. Say hello to Carl and tell him if I visit again I’ll keep it down to a dull roar . . . [Here Dennis has placed a tiny demonic smiley with horns. He put a lot into his smiley faces.]

 

 

 

[Undated] . . . Dear Paul,

Hi, received your letter about a month ago [Not answering for a month is a sure sign that he was getting over our separation and adjusting to isolation.] and was happy to hear from you, you must have run out of ink about three times. Hope you’re not mad at me for not writing sooner. Guess I don’t have any excuse except, I hate writing letters. [Maybe sometimes, but I don’t think that was generally true.] I went with my sister and brother in law up to the interior for a holiday. We rented a motor home and it had a stove, fridge and bath. We had a real good time. Went to a couple cabarets and lots of swimming and picked up a real nice tan. [I would love to have seen him tanned. He fails to mention his sister’s name and I can’t remember if he ever told me. She obviously cared about him.] I’m also broke that’s why I’m back in a camp, trying to get rich again. [We were equally hopeless with money.] . . I have to go to court in Port Hardy on Oct. 2^nd ’79 at 9:30 why don’t you meet me there? I have an impaired charge and a dangerous driving charge to go up on. I already have a lawyer up there so I shouldn’t have any problems. I hired him a few days ago and he got me a remand for 30 days. I put in for UIC about a month and a half ago and am still waiting so my sister will be signing for me and keep the checks until I go down. Well it kind of looks like I’ll be here until Christmas. What are you doing at Christmas it would be kind of nice to be with you? Let me know. Hawaii sounds nice to me. [Me, too. Was he inviting me to Hawaii for Christmas? He was the only one who ever proposed taking me anywhere for Christmas. But it didn’t matter as, because of the clouded legal limbo Dennis lived in and my own legal limbo around leaving Canada and entering the US, it would have entailed too much trouble for both of us to leave Canada. Had we by some miracle actually gone somewhere, I would have been constantly afraid of what stunts he’d try as well as constantly reminded of my own outstanding AWOL charges and the Canadian warrant. The subject never came up again.] I guess you heard about my car? Anyways I took it to Performance Unlimited to get it fixed and Fred didn’t do a very good job as the motor seized half an hour after I started it. [No need to ask why.] Needless to say I didn’t pay him and am not planning on it either. Guess you also heard about the ’79 Pinto I rented. [Don’t recall a Pinto. He probably totaled it somewhere.] It’s a wonder I’m still alive. My parole officer knows about the impaired and dangerous driving and also that the car was stolen. [Here another happy face smiling mischievously at me] He told me he heard from the pigs that they found the car off the wharf in Coal Harbor. Anyways no proof of anything. [Almost a confession.] I guess you are now finished for the season on the Kona Winds? Are you going to work anywhere else or are you going to just lay back and collect pogy? Well today was a real tough day, just before quitting time I was watching the Chaser undoing the choker and a log rolled off the top of the pile and onto his leg needless to say he’ll be on compo for a long time . . . (See it’s not all fun out here.) Guess the Bent-heads are still up there heh. How are Randy and Larry? Say hello to them for me okay. Also say hello to Carl. Have you heard from Richard lately? Guess I should write him but seem to have enough people that I have to write as it is. I guess I had better write Clair tonight before he disowns me. [Imagine their relationship! They corresponded from different prisons. My impression is that they were close.] Well Paul can’t think of much more to say for now except if I don’t get a letter from you or if I don’t see you at 9:30 on the second I’ll take it you have decided to forget it. Okay. Bye for now . . . Love, Dennis

 

September 24 1979

Dear Paul

Hi, just a note to let you know I got your letter and I’ll see you on the second in CH or on the third. I’ll have to be back here on the fourth. I’ve been working steady since I got here. Double time yesterday. Big night in camp tonight as eighty cases of beer came in on a barge about 10 minutes ago. So I will have to make this short so I can go drink some. Actually it’s been a real drag in camp and I definitely need a holiday, anyways another five days won’t kill me . . . I hope . . . Well guess I’ll stop here as anything I have to say can wait till I see you. Bye for now . . . Love, Dennis P.S. Say hi to Carl and tell him I’ll try not to make any splashes when I arrive. [A reference to the stolen car he pushed off the pier. Here Dennis placed his last happy face. I don’t recall attending that court appearance. I might have but I think not as it would have been too painful and I’m sure I couldn’t have forgotten it. I suppose they fined and released him. Soon we all heard the rumor that he’d murdered the older man.

Before that, he sent a card around Christmas ’79 in which he wrote the following:

 

Hope to make it up for New Years and I sure hope you can understand me. You may feel I don’t care for you, but I do and you will always be close to me because that’s the way I feel about you and I can’t help it. Bye for now, From Dennis. “Lots of Love”

 

No one else ever did, or would love me as Dennis did. He also told me so plainly in his letters, something else only he did. I did not deserve such frank expressions of attachment and love. I could not believe him. I lost him, squandering what was precious and unique. I missed him terribly for months. Recalling Dennis after so long, resurrecting him through his letters, he’s right there just the way he was then. I ache, for him and for myself, as I did in 1979. I suffered greatly by losing him and by gradually forgetting my pain; putting it behind me, failing to hold on to and understand my pain, diminished me in the universal way that all suffering, once forgotten, devalues the bearer.

Had I stayed with him while he tried to find his own way, with his faltering, his mistakes, and his misbehavior I could have landed in jail myself - I still had that old outstanding warrant casting a shadow over me. Assuming he wanted to change and asked for my help, which he never did, I was too drug dependent and selfish to give him what he would have needed. Being his anchor weighed me down, too. I could look after myself without anyone’s help, and I was capable of helping others. The idea of sharing my life always seemed preferable but actually caring for someone required more than was in me to give.

I allowed him to misread me. He saw me as a nonjudgmental, accepting, open minded, and pot smoking, hard drinking Hippy. That’s the Paul Duggan Dennis loved. He thought we shared those qualities. However, neither of us was any of those things. He based the assumptions on those delusions, notions that I crushed when his conduct became intolerable. He was actually a gentle soul, misunderstood and rejected by everyone, who vented frustration with a destructive and rather mad demeanor.

He had low self-esteem and compensated with bravado. He was young, newly sprung, uncomfortable with liberty and unused to looking after all his own basic needs. Carl and I both dreaded what he might do under pressure. He reacted poorly to constructive criticism intended to help him. He disdained society for its low regard and fear of people like himself. He was still the adolescent he was when he first went to jail. He was not a leader, and social isolation and confinement with other criminals had made him a misfit. He knew the odds were against his making a life on the outside.

I discovered these things gradually. I was accustomed to celibacy with its lack of intimacy and avoidance of commitment. I never thought it possible that I would have a lover again. His sudden appearance on the stage during Act II of my life wasn’t an instance of “Beware what you wish for...” What I got in Dennis was another unconventional lover, which brought home to me just how conventional and bourgeois I was at heart. He liked Carl, the Bent-heads and me because he thought we accepted him. We, at least Carl, and I, made him feel like somebody. And as far as he had the language for it, the desire to try, and enough self-awareness to explain himself to another human being, he did that for me unselfconsciously while we lived together.

His vulnerability and his fatalistic view of himself as a victim, of which I think he was not aware, were compelling. But as our relationship grew, the blanket acceptance I had wanted to give him became nervous, conditional, and apprehensive at the close. I wished to have a positive effect on him, one that would help him adjust and find his place in society. But I was out of my league and not in touch with reality. It was a nearly impossible task I’d set for myself. I had no idea the process could take decades " and end in failure " and I didn’t know how to go about it. Had anyone given me the odds against succeeding at it, I would have backed down. Confronted by his complex sociopathic personality, my own inexperience and deep-rooted personality disorders led me to misinterpret what he said and did. And no doubt, he misconstrued me. On a daily basis, his constant frustrations with everyday things all of us who have never been inside simply do without thinking but that he never did for himself in jail caused unending eruptions of temper that interfered with closeness.

Through his letters, I learned that Dennis had needed me more than I ever needed him. He had loved me ardently and faithfully, in his fashion. I failed to see how he’d cared for me because I felt unworthy of it. You can’t create intimacy if you don’t first respect yourself.

 Free, without the tension of never knowing what he was up to when he wasn’t present, what trouble he might drag home, or what schemes he might dream up - I could not go backward.

I have two photos of Dennis. The one Richard took at a logging camp where they worked - another one of Richard’s lucky shots - brings him back to me as nothing but a photo can. Looking at his face, I feel young. He appears to have just awakened after dozing in the sun, when Richard, having composed the portrait in his mind’s eye, woke him and snapped the shutter. Dennis is somewhere outside lying on his stomach with his face in three-quarter profile, in natural light with the sun behind him and his head resting on his right hand. He looks at peace, smiling, thoughtful in a light blue plaid work shirt, handsome and sweet enough to eat with a spoon. That’s how I hope I will always remember my dear, darling Dennis.