Dennis: Part 6

I have a lot of nice memories with Dennis.

Like when I slept over his house the night before Easter Sunday and in the morning, he gave me an Easter basket. It was so doofy, but sweet.

We went to the beach with Zach and Nicki in the spring.

I stayed over his house all the time, and there wasn’t much to do in his town, but it never bothered either of us. We would walk downtown and go to the movies. It was an old theater, a historical landmark. The diner in town was a historical landmark too. It was an old train car that had been converted. His grandmother didn’t care much what he did, so I stayed over his place all the time and she never minded.

His cousin was a real pain-in-the-ass though. I can’t remember her name. That shouldn’t matter. I gave everybody a fake name anyway. Everyone else, I have their real name in my head. Not with her. She was my age. She’d been in the foster care system too. Both she and Dennis had moved in with their grandmother after tracking her down when they turned 18. They both still had siblings in the foster system.

Are you wondering yet why I knew so many people who grew up in foster care?

The answer is meth.

That’s it. Meth and poverty. Rural New Hampshire has a lot of both.

Zach identified as black (he was very clear that he didn’t want to be called biracial), but he had one black parent and one white parent. His mom was white. She’d been addicted to meth. That’s not what killed her though. She hung herself. I knew Zach for a long time before I knew that. Where was his dad? I don’t know. Zach never said. He and Nicki went to visit his dad once and all I ever heard about it was they had some huge fight and Zach punched the dashboard of the car after.

Zach smoked a lot of weed, but wouldn’t do anything harder. He hung out with other people who did, people I never met and who didn’t come around our core group. Zach vented about the people who did meth. He said that meth was one of those ‘poor white people drugs.’ You’d never hear about a meth problem in an inner-city black neighborhood. Zach always wanted to move some big city. Said he was sick of watching cool people smoke their teeth out and die. I heard he did move to a big city eventually, years after I knew him.

And what was Dennis’ story? Where was his parents?

I did ask him. He had some scars on his body. I didn’t see them until he started having sex with me. He asked me not to ask him again, and he never volunteered the information. He never told me anything about his parents. He never told me how he got those scars.

Well, let’s get back to his cousin. She was a cunt and I couldn’t fucking stand her.

She didn’t work. She never showered. All she did was play World of Warcraft at the desktop computer that was set up on a desk in the corner of the living room. If I went upstairs to pee or have a cigarette in the middle of the night, I’d walk through a dark living room with a glow over in the corner. She never turned to look at me. She was up all hours playing WOW. It was very popular in….2009? I guess it must have been 2009 by then. But like I’ve told you, it’s sort of tough to keep it all straight sometimes.

His cousin played WOW until her arm and hand started having a lot of trouble. Sometimes her fingers wouldn’t move the way she needed them to. She dropped things. She was always in pain and always rubbing her forearm.

Dennis’s grandmother had mobility issues. She used a rascal. In rural New Hampshire, if it’s not meth it’s food. People get strung out or they get fat. Not everybody, of course. But enough people that you can tell there’s something not right about the place. Even though leaving the house was very hard for her, she took Dennis’s cousin to the doctor. I guess we can call his cousin Michelle. She was all riled up the time that Obama came to speak in their rinky dink New Hampshire town. She talked about it for ages afterwards. I think she’d approve of the name Michelle.

So Michelle had her arm in this splint after they went to the doctor. She wasn’t supposed to play World of Warcraft until her arm got better. But I’d still come upstairs in the middle of the night, a pack of Marlboroughs and a green lighter in hand, and there she’d be, sitting in the corner of the living room with that glow around her. She played with her arm in the splint. She kept wincing and dropping things, but she didn’t stop playing.

The only time Michelle showered or left the house was when her boyfriend would come to visit her. He lived several hours away and didn’t come very often. She had met him playing WOW.

What pissed me off about Michelle was how she took advantage of Dennis. If she wanted to leave to see her boyfriend, she’d come downstairs and tell Dennis to go clean the snow of her car.

The first time she did it, I was flabbergasted.

“You want him to what?”

She stood at the end of the bed. She’d walked right into his basement room without knocking, and I was still in bed with Dennis, nothing but a tank top and underwear on, but I was ready to fight a bitch right away.

“My car has snow on it,” she snapped. She held up her arm with the splint on it.

I scoffed. “If you can play on the computer until four in the morning, I think you can brush some fucking snow of your car.”

Dennis kissed me on the cheek and said, “Jen, I don’t mind. Don’t get upset. I’ll be right back.”

Michelle shot me the cheekiest smirk, before flouncing out behind him.

There were a lot of other silly things like that. She told him to do her laundry. To make her food. Dennis was actually a pretty good cook.

I would jump in. “Do it yourself, Michelle. He isn’t your slave.”

“Stop, stop,” Dennis would say. “I don’t mind.”

Eventually he revealed that this was another part of his code of honor.

“I’d never disrespect a woman,” he told me. “A code of honor means you treat women with kindness and understanding.”

Now I know what this sounds like, I swear I didn’t make this man up after spending too much time on r/justneckbeardthings. I know he sounds like a fucking meme. I’d swear on a Bible or anything you asked me to that this was a real human man that I once knew. And shit like this drove me crazy. It was so weirdly subservient and m’lady.

“She’s taking advantage of you,” I pointed out. “She doesn’t have any respect for you. You don’t have to be mean, but you also don’t have to let her boss you around like that.”

But I never did get through to him, and anytime I tried to intervene, he asked me not to.