Sometimes I play with the boy next door. His family is Japanese and they raise carnations. They must have a home but I don’t remember it. Only the greenhouses—rows and rows of greenhouses fill the entire lot next door. I play with the boy amongst all these sweet smelling flowers, racing up and down the rows of pink red yellow white, the sun filtering and flickering through the thick plastic that covers the roof and sides. His family also puts together flower arrangements and in one greenhouse there is a series of workbenches with boxes and boxes of floral supplies – ribbons and little bows in a wondrous rainbow of colors, little plastic signs saying Get Well! Congratulations! Best Wishes! Deepest Sympathies! I wish I could play here all the time and that little boy could be my best friend but my parents are a bit unnerved by his grandfather, who, whenever he sees us, smiles and waves and tells us to “Remember Pearl Harbor.”
No. Dennis is my first real friend.
He is short for his age – but I am shorter. He has brown hair; clear deep and intense grey eyes. He has an opulence of toys. He is the spoiled baby of his family, the only boy. He always wears pajamas.
He is dying.
Of course, I don’t know that he is dying. The mothers just say ‘he’s sick’. His mother and my mother are friends by fate. Their husbands are partners; both of them radio refugees from the East Coast. So they get each other.
Dennis has leukemia and in 1964, this is a death sentence. He will die in two years, a month shy of his eleventh birthday.
His family gives him everything he wants, indulges his every whim. But of course, what they can’t give him is a chance to be normal. To go to school. To have a friend. He is older than me by three years. He is the same age as my brother, Sean. But he’s emotional and young. He needs a girl friend. This is where I come in. I am the designated friend.
Sometimes it’s easy to play with Dennis. He has lots of G.I. Joes and we go out into his backyard and cover them with mud and have them fight against each other through the grasses and ice plants. We tie bandanas around our heads and paint our faces with mud. We are Rambos before there was a Rambo. Dennis has a great imagination and we can play for hours in the yard creating worlds and characters and scenarios and when we play the real world falls away and we are masters of our universe.
When Dennis tires, we sit in the shade and rest. Sometimes, I turn on the hose and wreak havoc on villages of rolly polly bugs, creating a mud river of destruction down the hillside. I start to sing… in the town where I was born, lived a man who sailed to sea… After a minute or so, Dennis joins in and together we sing: we all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine.
Dennis is sick and not always easy to be friends with.
Sometimes my mother brings me over and Dennis won’t play at all. He stays in his parents’ bed, the lights off, the room dark. I try to talk to him but he won’t answer. I go and watch TV until my mom takes me home.
Dennis likes superheroes. Batman and Superman. But mostly
Batman. Superman has a TV show though and so we lay on his parents’ big California king bed and watch Superman. Superman killed himself, you know. Committed suicide. Shot himself. Everyone knows that.
We tie his mother’s scarves around our necks. Big floral prints. Horse heads and horseshoes. We jump madly on the bed and try to fly. And sometimes it feels like you linger for one split second longer and maybe you really do fly.
One night in winter, a new show comes on TV. It’s Batman. Dennis and I go insane for this. We scream with the comic graphics POW! WHAM! ZOKK! The show comes on twice a week SAME BAT TIME, SAME BAT CHANNEL! And Dennis and I watch a lot of them together.
Dennis is so BAT crazy that just watching the show isn’t enough. One Saturday night, Dennis’ mother takes us both to a midnight movie showing of the original black & white 1943 Batman movie and its sequel Batman and Robin. I have worn pajamas to the drive-in movies but tonight I’m wearing them inside a movie theatre. In fact, I am wearing a pair of Dennis’ pajamas. I am dressed just like Dennis, in one-piece footie pajamas. We stay for both movies, stuffing ourselves on popcorn and candy. I fall asleep during the second show. Dennis stays up and watches them all.
I don’t see Dennis for quite a while. “He’s sick,” says my mother. Finally, we go to visit because either we are moving or they are moving. We are going to say goodbye.
Dennis doesn’t want to see us. He doesn’t want to see me. His mother finally gets him to come into the family room and he has no hair. He is pale and his eyes are cloudy. He is tired and fussy and turns away when I try to talk to him. For the first time, he scares me. It doesn’t look like him anymore. He is dying and I am living and it is hard for us to look each other in the eye.
When Dennis dies, we don’t go to the funeral. Dennis’ parents have moved to Los Angeles and the funeral will be held there. My parents have been divorced a month and now are quickly going bankrupt. Our house is filled with anger and bitterness and loss. I don’t think my mother wants to take children to a child’s funeral.
My mother sends flowers. I imagine they are carnations. And that they hold a plastic sign saying “Deepest Sympathies.”
