Amsterdam Angel

Walking in the door I could see down the back hall into the kitchen as I took my shoes off. My mother was leaning stiffly against the kitchen counter with her back to me. An unfamiliar and strange feeling brushed over me. Immediately I thought that I was in trouble. My mind raced, wondering what they knew. I had been experimenting with drugs with a few of my fraternity brothers and was terrified they found out.

I approached cautiously. Still, my mother did not move. I stood at the end of the counter; she turned and looked at me. Her expression was cold like a statue. I could not tell if it was anger or sadness. She had a lost look in the depths of her eyes. I knew something was horribly wrong.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“Erek has been in an accident,” she said softly. An image of him lying unconscious in a hospital bed hooked to machines rushed to my mind as I waited for more information. I felt like I was in a movie, as a gentle force turned my head to the next scene of my father coming around the corner. His eyes reflected immense fear. Time seemed to slow.

“D-d-dead. Erek died,” was all he could manage to say.

A cold darkness penetrated my body, so intense and frightening. Time stopped and sped up again. The world around me as I knew it crumbled away and it felt like my entire being dropped into a vault of dry ice with walls one hundred feet thick. My eyes flooded in an instant. As my heart’s tears made contact with the dry ice it changed the solid to gas, clouding and confusing me why this happened.

As my spirit tried to push on the dry ice vault the piercing sting it produced caused me to back off of death. Death’s dry ice produced a scorching and searing a burn while it continued to change forms with my tears. It was a burn without the heart of a flame but with all of the pain. And the question of the unfamiliar and strange feeling I felt when I entered the house had been answered. Death had struck our home like a bomb out of nowhere and claimed one of our own.

My mother should have suspected I was gay in kindergarten. Every time I went to school, usually in my signature outfit of Osh-Kosh overalls and flannel shirt, I would go to the easel and put on the oversized apron. All the colors of the spectrum were at my fingertips in old Campbell soup cans, each with a large bristled brush. I would paint a rainbow each time and proudly give it to my mother. Sometimes a sun shooting rays off or maybe a bird and a cloud would appear but there was always a rainbow.

It was the only thing I knew how to paint. The only thing I wanted to paint. And my mother seemed so impressed by my talent—always displaying them on the refrigerator before she fixed us lunch and together we watched The Love Boat—and I enjoyed making her happy. So I continued to paint rainbows as my true colors shined through.

Long before my days of painting rainbows, labels had been given. From birth the label of boy was immediately attached to me. Along with it people around me and on television practicing the belief that boy falls in love with girl. Polish, Dutch and Catholic American Michigander were a few of the other labels I received.

Dealing with death and sexuality life imitates art as Evan begins to "Choose His Own Adventure" like the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books he and Erek read as children as he goes on a journey of adventure and learning about life.