Kelly Kiernan - Waiting for Dimi, New folder 1
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Waiting for Dimi
by Kiernan Kelly
Torquere Press
Copyright ©2007 by Kiernan Kelly
First published in www.torquerepress.com, 2007
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Waiting for Dimi
by Kiernan Kelly
Foreclosure
.
An ugly word, it ranks right up there with
castration
and
emasculation
. God knows it has damn well near the same
results.
Yesterday, I owned a beautiful three-bedroom, two-bath
ranch on a quarter acre of land in a peaceful, if older, pretty
little subdivision. Today, all I have to my name are three
small cardboard boxes and a plastic Hefty bag full of clothes,
old remote controls, and a few mismatched pieces of
dinnerware.
The bank took everything else.
Or rather, the bank took whatever my ex had turned her
surgically sculpted nose up at during the divorce. Which
wasn't much.
Bitch.
It was Tennyson, I think, who said, "'
Tis better to have
loved and lost than never to have loved at all
." Bullshit. I've
loved and lost, and trust me, the lost part sucks the big fat
one.
Actually, that isn't really fair. I know that I never really
loved Holly. But the divorce still sucked big time, and believe
me, I'm paying for my crimes in blood.
She wasn't content to simply dump me and run off with
her new boy toy with his tennis whites, bottle tan, and
capped teeth. Oh, no. She had to grab my balls in an iron fist
and tear them clean off my body, via my wallet. No
anesthetic either, unless you count the bottle of Jack Daniels I
drank last night during my final hours in the house I used to
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Waiting for Dimi
by Kiernan Kelly
own. It didn't numb the pain, but it did give me the
satisfaction of blowing chunks all over the new rugs we had
put in last spring.
The only reason she'd been generous enough to give me
the house during the divorce was because it was mortgaged
up to the shingles. And did I see a single penny of the money
we'd taken out against it? No, of course not.
She
needed a
new BMW.
She
needed a cruise to the Virgin Islands.
She
needed a fucking fifteen hundred-dollar blue horsecoat Shar
Pei, whom she promptly named Princess, spoiled rotten, and
slept with more than she did me.
All
I
needed was to have my head examined. But as with
everything else, what I needed wasn't on her priority list.
The mortgage payment was simply beyond my means now
that I had to pay alimony. I'd tried everything to keep it,
taking on an extra part-time job, advertising for roommates,
but it wasn't enough. I tried to sell the house, but the market
was in a slump. By the time sales revived, it was too late. I'd
lost my home.
But that's the story of my fucking life—a day late and a
dollar short.
And so I'm sitting on the curb with a handful of worthless
junk and a hangover that could bring Superman to his knees
as the sheriff slaps a big, silver padlock on the door of what
used to be my home, waiting on the one person in my life
that I knew I could always count on.
Demetrjusz.
Dimi
to the world at large—only his mother,
an immigrant from Poland, called him by his full name. Hell,
only his mother could
pronounce
it.
4
Waiting for Dimi
by Kiernan Kelly
Growing up, Dimi's family lived above the delicatessen
they owned down on the corner of Midland Avenue. I spent
many nights in Dimi's family's kitchen eating
golumpki
and
pierogis
, listening to Dimi's mother sing off-key in Polish while
Dimi's father sat in front of their old nineteen-inch television
set laughing his ass off watching
Night Court
and
Family Ties.
As time went on, they became more family to me than my
own.
Both of
my
parents had crawled into a bottle shortly after I
turned five and had never come back out.
Not their fault, I guess. My oldest brother, David, had died
two months short of his high school graduation. It was a
drunk driving accident—he was DUI. From that day on I don't
think my parents were ever sober enough to recognize the
irony.
But Dimi ... Dimi had been my best friend since
kindergarten. It was destiny that brought us together on our
first day at school—his last name is Peretzie, mine is
Peterson, and by virtue of the Universal Grade School Law of
Alphabetical Seating, our desks were next to each other.
I remember it so clearly. Dimi came to class that first day
dressed like a miniature of his father in a pair of long pants
and suspenders, a long-sleeve button-down shirt, and a
Windsor-knotted tie. Who sends their kid to public school
wearing a freaking
necktie
?
He was a marked man from day one.
Dimi did, however, have a Transformers lunchbox, which
was probably the only thing that stood between him and
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