HONY Part 4
“Gene changed when he learned the truth. He’d spent his whole life thinking that he’d been in some horrible accident. That his disability had been a stroke of bad luck—like an earthquake, or a meteor. And there was some comfort in that. But suddenly this wasn’t an accident anymore. It was personal. And after that day in the living room, Gene entered his ‘fuck the world’ phase. He started fighting with everyone in the family. And he was especially mean to me: he’d twist my arm, he’d push me down in public. To be honest, I didn’t like him anymore. None of us did. And my mother is ‘five foot nothing,’ so she couldn’t control him. Eventually things got so bad that we were going to send him out of state to live with our biological father. But I didn’t want that. Because no matter how bad he’d gotten, he was still Gene. I was in college at the time, and I’d just gotten a new apartment with an extra bedroom. So I said: ‘Let’s give it a shot. He can move in with me, just for a little while.’ And you know what? It kinda started to work.
We each paid half the rent. For the first time in Gene’s life there was nobody telling him what to do. Every morning he would take the bus to his job at a landscaping company. And at night he’d come home and hang out with my friends. There was a group of us who would meet each week to play Monopoly, and Gene was always right in the middle of it. It’s always been his favorite game because he’s good at it. Every time someone landed on his boardwalk his left arm would fly into the air. He fit right in. Gene’s so easy to love when he’s being Gene. Pat him on the back once, and he’s your best friend forever. He’ll laugh and giggle at your stupid jokes. All my friends adored him. During this period we became peers— almost for the first time. Gene still loved to be silly. And he still always wanted to talk about our childhood: ‘Remember that time I rode the bike? Remember that time I sat on your dollhouse?’ He especially loved the dollhouse story. He asked me to tell it a million times. But we were talking about bigger things too. Like God. And love. And sex. It had taken a little extra time, but Gene was finally growing up.”
