Message of Love

Acclaim for the Lambda Literary Award winner

Every Time I Think of You

(the companion novel to
Message of Love
)

“Provenzano artfully works in the theme of nature to suggest hope for Everett’s physical recovery, as well as, in a difficult moment in Reid’s and his relationship, the recovery of love... Their love is a force of nature.
”
              –
Lambda Literary Review

“There are so many levels of nuance to Provenzano’s story. It’s an exciting voyage of discovery. When the story takes its more serious turn, it becomes a tale of heartbreak, courage, and healing. It’s a remarkable, uplifting story.”               –
Windy City Times

“The romance, simple and pure, yet heated and passionate, is strikingly genuine. Furthermore, they're both likable, so much so that the reader can’t help but cheer for them. Even the most jaded among us will experience a renewed faith in love and romance after reading it.”
                            – Edge on the Ne
t
“
Every Time I Think of You
opens readers’ eyes, minds and hearts to corners of the world they may never have realized existed. It's not easy to write a novel about sports, gay teenagers and sex in (and out of) wheelchairs. Jim Provenzano has done it, with grace and power.”                             – Dan Woog, The Outfield
“Provenzano’s characters are rich and complex. His sense of pace and plotting are dead on, and his prose is straightforward and never showy. It’s a well-told tale whose aim to inform as well as entertain certainly hits the mark.”               – Out in Print

“A beautiful story of friendship, devotion and love, as well as a practical lesson on dealing with physically challenged individuals.”                                           –
Echo Magazine

“Displays writing and plotting well above the typical gay romance; recommended for all libraries that have significant LGBT collections.”               – American Library Association

also by Jim Provenzano

PINS

Monkey Suits

Cyclizen

Every Time I Think of You

PINS the stage adaptation

Message of Love

a novel

JIM PROVENZANO

Message of Love, a novel. copyright Jim Provenzano, 2014

ISBN-13: 978-0615669243             

ISBN-10: 0615669247

BISAC: Fiction/Gay

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to action persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover Art; Getty Images. Used with permission.

Cover Design: Kurt Thomas

“Accidents Never Happen” written by Jimmy Destri; published by Chrysalis Music Group

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Gene Dermody, Carrie Euype, Paul Isaacs and Sean Drate, Michael Yamashita, T. Scott King and Scott Wazlowski for their support of this book’s research project; to Dudley Saunders and Eric Himan for their music; to Joel Brown, Marc Brew, Robert Drake, Seth Eisen, Brad Lyman, Tom Mendicino and Nick Ifft, Kelly McQuain and John Cawley, Kile Ozier, Scott St. John and others who shared their memories and personal experiences; to the librarians and archivists at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania, in particular Kim Bravo for her enthusiastic assistance, and to the Philadelphia Public Library Archives Department; but mostly to Stephen LeBlanc for amazing assistance.

for Raja Shortell

“Like the maji on the hill,

I can divinate your presence from afar.

And I’ll follow you until

I can bring you to a perfect world.”

– Blondie, “Accidents Never Happen”

Chapter 1

June, 1983

The smiling face of Everett Forrester looked down from a huge banner as guests assembled at the circular tables in the ballroom of Pittsburgh’s William Penn Hotel. ‘A Helping Hand,’ read the text below it as Everett, posed in a blue button-down shirt, was seated in his wheelchair, with a hopeful look, about to shake hands with an unseen person.

Other versions of the ad campaign, featuring teenage girls and boys of different races, offset his banner, and were hung at different places around the ballroom. But the image of Everett bothered me, as if he was the one needing assistance. If anyone truly knew him, and all that he and I had endured together through the past five years, they would know that the opposite was true. Everett was more often the one providing help.

Across the ballroom, I snuck a brief glance at Everett’s mother. In a stunning red gown, Diana Forrester’s hair was bundled up in an elegant swirl. Her earrings dangled, glistening as if she’d positioned herself in a spotlight. In between cheerful hugs and measured shoulder pats offered to others, her brief glance across the room toward me was one of mild contempt.

Moving to a swanky apartment in Pittsburgh, and having a daughter with cultural connections, had given her a new social circle to join, and recruits. It hadn’t taken her long to latch onto a local nonprofit and whip up a benefit dinner for handicapped kids in Pittsburgh. Everett simply had to attend, since he was one of the cause’s poster boys.

A few feet away from me, the real Everett waved me over and casually introduced me to yet another wealthy patron.

“This is my boyfriend, Reid Conniff.” His dark eyes sparkled, his bow tie tilting as he craned his neck up to them, smiling as he gauged their perplexed reactions.

The string quartet, positioned at one side of the ballroom, finished playing, signaling the guests to take their seats. Along with the mostly elderly donors, almost a dozen young recipients of the foundation’s generosity had been strategically placed at several of the three dozen tables at the dinner. To accommodate them, one setting at each table lacked a chair, and wheelchair-using guests scooted in as others sat.

While of course I had wanted to sit next to Everett, the seating chart placed us at opposite ends of the table. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d been relegated to the back of the room. But I understood the protocol. His mother helmed another nearby table, and Everett had been strategically placed between two of the more generous donors. His charm, I suspected his mother knew, might convince these patrons to give even more.

After a brief introduction, as Diana Forrester stepped up to the podium, a round of applause swept through the hall. I put on my glasses to see her more clearly.

Her speech was outwardly sincere, recited with a natural elegance and composure that showed her comfort in the spotlight. She spoke of the struggle of the foundation’s clients and the opportunities given them, then segued to the story of her own son. Across the table, Everett’s glance and knowing smirk said more than any speech. I was not surprised when the story about her dear son’s struggle completely excluded me.

I didn’t mind. It wouldn’t matter how much she twisted the facts to suit her purposes. For the past four years of college Everett and I had lived on the other side of the state, separated by hundreds of miles and thousands and thousands of trees.

Although it was a well-timed holiday weekend after we’d graduated, for us to drive in Everett’s new car across the state the night before, we still had to blow off a birthday party for a friend, rush through our move from Philadelphia, and postpone two rather somber visits to a few friends.

Since the entire event was planned around him, I had to go. It wasn’t just out of obligation, of enduring what would be a celebration more of his mother’s ego than the poor little kids for whom the gala was being held.

The sheer audacity of appearing again in a jacket and tie appealed to me as a sort of sartorial revenge toward his mother. Our relationship was much more acknowledged by her than at our first formal party escapade, back when we’d barely known each other.

While I’d grown accustomed to dressing up with Everett, I caught myself repeating a nervous habit, twisting the new piece of jewelry on a ring finger with my thumb.

Then I stopped, and relaxed. Because more, I felt a sense of fealty with Everett, which we had almost lost a few times; an argument, an affair or two, and the death of someone once intensely close to him.

That glint in his eyes toward me across the table wasn’t just part of the applause, the show. In his eyes, those dazzling near-black eyes, more important to me than our love or lust or friendship, was a look of pure trust.

Chapter 2

February, 1980

Everett is standing wet and naked, his back to me, in a dark shower stall I don’t recognize. Shampoo suds cascade down his back, over his rump and down between the dark fuzz of his legs like rain on a mossy tree trunk.

Tree stump? That’s not right. Anyway, he turns, but I pull back around a tiled wall, knowing that if he sees me, he’ll remember who he is, where we are, and he’ll melt back into sitting, into that metal frame.

Then I’m following him, clothed, leading a cluster of people who are jogging in a train station, and up the escalator they go, and I’ve lost him.

But seated at the side of the cold steel ramp, the flat part before the escalator ascends, he’s sitting, in shorts, and I worry that it would be cold if he could feel his legs, but then he smiles when I catch up to him and says, “Thanks, Bub,” and I know it’s a dream, because he never calls me that.

Once again, through the night I had curled myself up, turned away from him and hogged the blankets. I stirred, rolled over in our bed.

His tousled dark hair sprouted from the sheets across from me. I reached an arm over him to toss the blanket back over his feet and lower legs, even though he was wearing sweatpants and socks. The slim foam pad meant to lay between his knees had slipped down to his ankles.

In a sideways morning hug, he stirred, groaned an exaggerated stretch, and rolled over. Our groggy eyes met.

With his curly locks flattened askew, half of his face red and waffle-creased from the pillow, and a tiny eye booger dangling from a lash, the disheveled man of my dreams bid me our familiar greeting. “Giraffe.”

“Monkey,” I grunted in return.

He planted a kiss on my nose, then traveled lower.

“Are we going there?”

He mumbled consent from under the covers.

“Can I pee first?”

“No.”

“Should I empty Mister Pee Buddy?”

But any concern for his catheter and bag were brushed aside. He had already slurped his way down between my legs. We were definitely going to be late for class.

Everett’s occasional morning lust had begun to feel less like a simple urge, and more of an erotic gesture of ownership. Unconcerned, or perhaps enticed by the slight funk of my body in the morning, his kisses and licks continued along my chest, then lower. After an insistent tug of my shorts, and a little shift upward by me, I felt the warm wetness of his mouth around my erection.

Everett’s slurping sounds under the blankets matched my quiet sighs. It had become a frequent ritual, dutiful almost. He wouldn’t stop until I’d burst into his mouth with that overriding tingle, a consuming connection.

Rubbing his head, his shoulders, he responded with a hand crept up to fondle my nipple and the side of my nearly hairless chest. I knew better than to attempt rearranging our positions to a more democratic entanglement. He suckled on me, refusing too much variation on such mornings.

Satiated, I pulled the blanket and sheet down. My cock, glistening with his spit, still jutted up from my groin. Nestled next to it, Everett’s flushed face looked up at me.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

“What were you dreaming about? You were tossing like crazy for a while.”

“Spaghetti,” I half-lied. There was a moment in the dorm cafeteria, but he wasn’t in that part of my dream.

“Must have been some speesy-spicy sauce,” Everett joked. He toyed with my penis as it shrank. I quivered from his touches.

It was great to be his, to be all his. Wasn’t this what we’d wanted?

And yet, it seemed as if this one-sided and brief sex were part of some checklist Everett added to his daily duties, as if to say, ‘
I have satiated you. I claim you once again.’

With an exaggerated groan, I rose from the bed and began another day. He followed with his own measured shifts; half-rising, elbows back, fully seated, grabbing his legs, shoving them over and off the side of the bed, tossing the foam pad aside, then shifting up and into his wheelchair.

Our dormitory room on the second floor of Johnson Hall, one of the few accessible rooms at Temple University, was filled with books, framed art prints, and even a fancy old Persian rug. Despite its slight impediment to his wheelchair, Everett had almost demanded we use it to cover the cold linoleum tile floor of the room, which, as he put it, was “too much like rehab.”

When we’d moved in, I hadn’t argued with him, comfortable to concede to his decisions. It did make the otherwise bland room in the high-rise dorm more homey.

I made what we called ‘pre-breakfast,’ usually a bowl of cereal or a few slices of bread slathered with peanut butter and washed down with milk or a protein shake. Neither of us could endure the lines at the cafeteria downstairs which connected to Hardwick Hall. Our growling stomachs couldn’t wait. Making a quick breakfast became our preference to the cafeteria and its bacony odors, at least on our ‘early’ days when classes started at 8:30 in the morning.

He’d already rolled himself across the room and into the bathroom, where he took care of emptying his catheter, starting our usual shared morning shower. We loved being naked together, especially while wet.

Having laid out my morning’s clothes, and stacked my books in preparation for the day’s classes, I set our morning meal on the small counter above the mini-fridge, slipped off my sweatpants and T-shirt and joined him. With the tingling haze of my orgasm still making me a bit woozy, I nearly stumbled as I joined him, already seated in a plastic stool under the shower.

“Whaddaya got today?” he asked.

“Botany, Earth Science, then we both have English. You back tonight?”

“Not til after Poly Sci. See you at six-ish in the dining hall?”

“Hopefully.”

“‘Hopefully,’” he mimicked, as he grabbed me with a soapy hand. I stood, letting him lather my thighs and offer a few playful scrubs between my long legs. Even before his accident, I’d stood taller than him by a few inches.

“
Ecballium elaterium
,” he said, as he toyed with my penis.

“Flying something?”

He replied with a sideways shrug.

We’d begun a game to help my near-failing attempt at Latin 101. Tested up to Latin 301, since he had taken it for years at Pinecrest Academy, Everett took a bemused pleasure in spontaneously tutoring me with floral names at seemingly random moments. He had only glanced at the plant name worksheet, while I pored over it for hours.

“Squirting,” he hinted.

“Oh, the Squirting Cucumber. It’s a flowering plant; little fuzzy fruit bulbs that squirt goo and seeds, like five, ten feet.”

“Thus the name,” Everett nodded. He gave my dick a few tugs until I brushed away his hand.

“This cucumber’s pickled.”

My hand traveled down along his arm to a shoulder, which I scrubbed and lightly massaged. He caught me admiring his changed body, his thinner legs, and the contrasting new muscled curves of his upper torso, gained from his months of workouts through his recovery.

Finished showering before him, I wrapped my waist in a towel, and stood at the sink near him. As he hummed another song I didn’t recognize, I looked in the mirror as I shaved the two-day scruff from my cheeks, amused that my lanky frame, big ears and what he called ‘doleful’ eyes were what he considered handsome.  

Dressed, I prepared a few midday snacks, a water bottle for him, and busied myself, refraining from doing things for him that he could do himself, which was pretty much everything.

This ordinary sexy morning, this somewhat monotonous intimacy, was all I had ever wanted.

The first few days we had shared the dorm room, I thought that the simple act of unrolling a pair of his socks and placing them on the bed would be helpful. He didn’t, so I stopped being ‘helpful’ unless asked.

I didn’t have to wait for Everett, but I wanted to leave our dorm and cross the campus with him. That was my form of claiming. Through the few more minutes it took Everett to get dressed, I reviewed my notes from the previous class lecture. It became a habit that actually helped improve my studies.

Accompanying Everett down the hall, I put on my glasses as we took the elevator down one floor and out onto the campus. We wove ourselves through the morning herds of students, backpacks slung over my shoulder, and the back of his chair.

We approached the Temple University bell tower, a vertical slab that resembled something out of a future-primitive science fiction movie. The campus was covered in a slushy blanket of snow that had been shoveled along the main walkways into bulky piles shoved to the side.

“See you in English?” Everett’s breath escaped in a wisp in the cold air.

“You bet.”

And then he wheeled away, and I couldn’t help but watch him, his back slightly hunched over, his arms tugging the wheels with a quiet strength that, whenever he left me, sometimes tore me up inside.

Casual. Yes, that’s how we may have seemed to the other students, many of whom still gave us curious stares. Who were those two, I almost sensed them wondering, that lanky jug-eared guy and his cute friend in a wheelchair? Were they friends? Roommates? Something else?

We were something else, all right.

Settling in at the usual third-row aisle in my day’s first class, a sort of calm overtook me in the warmth of the lecture hall as I straddled my parka over the back of a chair. Everett was with me, in my mind, at all times. Alone, without him by my side, I could choose to chat with others, make new friends, just be myself.

But I knew I wasn’t.

As I absent-mindedly took notes on the professor’s lecture about gradient erosion, I was still thinking about my boyfriend, my Everett, the spoiled little rich kid who almost died, who almost pushed me out of his life, until I simply refused to let him go.

It was a Tuesday, one of my two favorite days of the week, the other being Thursday, when we both shared American Literature. Despite our completely different majors, a few general courses aligned us at first, and we made sure to get the same class.

After another brisk walk across the campus, I ambled down to the front of the lecture hall, where the gap in seating on the front right aisle was Everett’s wheelchair parking spot. Expecting to casually plop down next to him as usual –his previous class was closer than mine– I was surprised to see someone already next to him, engaged in a friendly discussion. I slowed my pace as other students walked around me.

The larger lecture classes usually led to students taking the same seats. Everett parked himself in front, because the ramped access led to the front of the room, below the tiered rows.

Already midway through the semester, it seemed odd that some boy our age, with gelled spiky hair and a formal shirt and tie, had parked himself beside Everett.

I approached them cautiously, deciding not to play the turf game. Hadn’t I just enjoyed my boyfriend for a pre-breakfast treat, or, more accurately, he me?

“Oh, hey, Reid. This is Gerard.”

I offered a cautious nod, hoping that by standing near them, this Gerard would get the message and move elsewhere. I seemed to recall him at the beginning of the semester in the back of the lecture hall, slouching in the back row, a cigarette pretentiously parked above his earlobe. A few weeks later, I noticed him in a middle row. And now, there he was, in my seat.

“Gerard was telling me about this eighteen-and-over New Wave night at, where was that? We should go.”

“Are there stairs?” I asked.

“It’s in the basement,” Gerard said.

“Well, too bad,” I said, refusing to move, standing before them, hoping I could mentally push this poser out of my seat and out of our lives before it got complicated and this curious dandy had to be told off.

But Everett, knowing my protective intentions all too well, and that I had many times carried him up and down stairs with a quiet pride, dismissed my stern behavior and turned back to Gerard. They cheerfully chatted about the B-52s, until our professor entered the room, and the other students settled down.

I took a seat in the row behind Everett, yanked the folding retractable desktop from its slot. It flapped down a bit loudly. Everett turned back to me and shot a glare.

For the rest of the lecture, I stared at Gerard’s shiny spiked hair every time he whispered some remark. I alternated by gazing at the back of Everett’s head, making doodles on a page of my spiral-bound notebook in imitation of his dark curls. Then I focused on the back of his neck, the nape, where tiny wisps of hair trailed down to the pale skin that I’d so often licked and playfully bitten on nights when we’d made love, or tried to. A pink glow almost illuminating his earlobes made them seem like a pair of tiny trumpets. Had I nibbled on them enough times to claim them, to allow him this one slight? I noticed a small twitch in his right ear, as if he were biting down out of habit, or flinching at some quiet pain. Why had I never seen that tic?

The first time I had met Everett, more than a year before, he also had his back turned to me. Naked in the snow in a strip of woods that separated his former Greensburg home from the more middle-class neighborhood where I grew up, we had sparked a most unusual friendship on that cold winter day. I felt a warm flush recalling it, and our intrepid encounters in the ensuing days before we separated for months at a time. That short time before his accident, a spinal cord injury on a lacrosse playing field, kept me locked to him, beholden somehow.