Stories

Adam is a 14 year old boy living in a commune in the wilds of Oregon. The story deals with events during the summer as he becomes sexually aware and involved with Gabriel, who is a couple of months older.

Boccaccio's Decameron, a story of renewal and recreation in defiance of a decimating pandemic, relates how ten self-isolated Italians pass the time regaling each other with tall tales during the Black Plague. While Covid19 wasn't nearly as decimating, the opportunity for such entertainment did exist. As a takeoff on that idea, this short story might well be a modern version of one of the tales, recounting events of earlier, less stressful times.

This is the second story in the Wearing Green on Thursday series. Bruce Hutton has graduated from high school, gone on a road trip, loved and lost his best friend, and is now an engineering student at Stanford University outside Palo Alto, California. We follow his life and loves as he becomes comfortable living as a gay man in the 1980s.

Andy and Donnie have been friends since the beginning, growing up in the same neighborhood, sharing the same friends, and now playing football on the same team in middle school. They’ve been inseparable throughout it all; but now a new line has been inserted in the equation that is their lives, one they have to learn to deal with, or face having their friendship perish:

Love.

Obviously, this is a continuation of The Root Beer Boys and picks up where that story ended. Same characters, other relationships begin to develop among the boys.

A young man in reluctant thrall to his burgeoning sexuality. A best friend who doesn't understand why he's been pushed away. Two other young men, who may or may not be related, in the throes of a weird-but-friendly competition. A baseball card and a shell necklace and a reefer before the storm. A ruined shotgun shack. And, lastly, a psychedelic patchwork quilt. What do these things have in common? Free love.

An athletic high-school senior and a studious freshman form an unusual friendship.

Love takes off the masks that we fear that we cannot live without and know that we cannot live within. -James Baldwin

At sixteen, James has an almost perfect life. Then two boys enter his life and turn it upside down. Dion is a shy boy who James can't understand. Donovan is the star basketball player who James admires. Read how an incident with one boy will bring him closer to the other as masks are slowly removed.

Two boys from totally different backgrounds. Two different and equally dramatic histories. Two testing struggles. A tempestuous love affair in a provincial German town. Narrow-minded middle-class attitudes, venomous and hypocritical Catholic morality, archaic, harsh foreign prejudices. Street Art rebellion and a society basking in a false sense of security, ignoring the largest future natural disaster and the threat of war.

The book opens with two introductions and continues through a tumultuous series of events to a not quite inevitable conclusion!

Set in the Sanitaria Springs universe - Noah isn't a joiner. He draws, but not well. He hooks up, but can't seem to figure what's supposed to come next. He's the middle child, nobody's favorite anything - but then comes the annoyance and the mystery, two separate paths - which will he follow?