The scene opens inside Somerville Hospital in Somerville, Massachusetts. It's a warm July afternoon, clear skies and the temperature hitting a very muggy 85 degrees. The camera pans the hallways, the usual craziness of hospital halls overwhelming your senses. Men and women in scrubs dart from room to room, doctors in white coats snatch clipboards and fire off words of encouragement to their patients, while furiously rolling out instructions to every employee around them.

One... more rotund... male nurse is not handling the heat of the moment, and the heat of the building, so well, the top of his scrubs covered in sweat. A streak of hair greasily parts over his head, as if held down by a coat of Vaseline. A line of sweat shines from his second chin, and steam practically flows from the end of his pant legs. He darts down the long hallway, its white walls and light blue floor providing the usual sterile feel of a place that saw the sickness and death filling its floors as about as disposable as a pair of...



...latex gloves.

The man zooms further down the hall, crossing paths with the front desk associates.

Male Nurse: Where's Sullivan?

An exhausted, very Boston, woman in her mid-50s, lifts a wrinkled left arm up and points to Room 305 without a word spoken. The portly nurse doesn't skip a beat, lifting the corner of his lip up ever so slightly to give the lamest attempt at a "thank you" smile, before kicking his white New Balance sneakers back into gear. His shoes squeal as the rubber soles slide across the tile floor. You can practically feel the gust of wind in your ears, as he takes deep breaths, his pace quickening down the hall.



The camera is jolted awkwardly, up and down, up and down, zigging and zagging around stretchers and hospital employees. As quickly as you begin to orient yourself to the chaos, the camera flings itself right and through a doorway.

Male Nurse: Sullivan? Brian...

Sullivan.

A woman in her mid-30s completes the question for the nurse. She sits in one of the chairs next to the hospital bed, a pack of Newport cigarettes on her lap, faux-leather purse by her feet. She stands at roughly 5'4", with short brown hair, pale white skin that has aged far worse than her looks should show, and in a pair of hip hugger jeans with an old, white Disney World t-shirt on top.

Male Nurse: And... who are you?

The woman looks up at the man and smiles, shaking her head at his ignorance.

I just like to sit by the dying. I'm sort of a traveling tourist in this place, you know? I love to just hold the hand of random strangers with terminal illnesses, or people holding on by a thread after a lifetime of stupid ass decisions. You know, so they have... company.

The man looks down at his clipboard, then back at the woman, his bushy, black eyebrows closing in in confusion.

Male Nurse: Um, ah, ma'am...

She lifts her hands up and drops them in exasperation.

I'm his wife, dumbass. Patti Sullivan? It should say it on those papers you have in your very hand? His wife of 10 years.

The man looks back down at his clipboard, scans the piece of paper with his finger, then flips to the second page. His fingers stops about halfway down, and his eyes read from left to right. He taps the paper, grabs the pen attached at the top, pops the cap, and simply draws a check mark.

Patti: We good?

The nurse nods his head.

Patti: Great. Tell me what the deal is, then. What do I have to look forward to?

Male Nurse: Well, Ms. Sullivan, his liver functions are fairly poor. He has severe cirrhosis. You may have noticed that his eyes are a yellow-ish tint, his legs have filled with fluid, and we have had to make multiple emergency attempts to drain his bowels over the past day and a half. I'm afraid your husband has reached a point where we have a very limited window of treatment time, and an even more limited set of options for treatment. Realistically, the only option is a liver transplant, but the patient waitlist is incredibly long, and we only have maybe a week or two for a transplant to take place.

Ma'am, I hate to say this, but I would highly recommend speaking to a lawyer to have all of your plans in place for life after your husband.

Just then, the TV, a large, box TV, sits firmly on a cart, sharing its time room to room in this wing of the facility. CNN shows this man being confronted by reporters, after being handed a heavy fate:



The chyron reads...


The camera pans to the right, to a calendar hanging on the wall.


It's the year 2000. The Y2K fears have long since subsided, and now there was a news cycle to fill in a muggy, otherwise less-than-eventful summer. The summer Olympics were coming... in September. Al Gore and George Bush were soon set to face off to succeed Bill Clinton as President of the United States, and the news would be chock full of material... well after the election.

For now, fraud was the delicious story of the day. Olympic bigwigs being nabbed for fraud in connection with Salt Lake City getting the bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Men of power sitting in a room together, offering over a million dollars to Olympic organizers, simply to have the games held in the Mormon capital of the world. Men with incredibly deep pockets, very few morals, and even less concern for anything other than personal gain and wealth.

Here in Somerville, Patti Sullivan deals with the imminent demise of her husband, Brian. A man roughly 10 years older than Patti, Brian Sullivan was a life-long Bostonian, and a mean one at that. Brian met Patti at a bar... also in Somerville, when she was just 22. Being in his early 30s at the time, Brian impressed the dashing young girl from Allston with the stability of a paycheck, and the maturity that oozed from anyone that seemed like a "real" adult, however unearned that perception may have actually been.

Brian was as charming as ever when they met two stools apart on a lonely Tuesday night; Patti having just broken up with her high school sweetheart, and Brian grabbing a drink or two after a long day on the construction site... an anomaly of his, driven simply by the need to take the edge off after a particularly long day...

...or so it seemed.

Patti and Brian dated for roughly a year before conceiving a child. Their relationship consisted of a whole lot of sex, brought on by a whole helluva lot more drinking. Brian would bring Patti along with his construction buddies to the local watering hole here, or the burger joint there, and they would have such a fantastic time. Who wouldn't, when you spend it all drinking and fucking, drinking and fucking, rinse and repeat?

The night Patti got pregnant was the night they had sex in a closet at a house party of one of Patti's high school friends. You know, those parties where the same people who've known each other since they were five get together, drink Bud Light, and play beer pong, all while yelling homophobic slurs in the strongest Boston accents possible?

No?

Well... that's every house party ever held in Boston... just trust me on this. Every townie who'll never leave their zip code, let alone the Commonwealth. So what do you do when you find yourself swimming in this pool of hometown incest? You do it where your family can't see you.

And that, was where Anthony Sullivan was created. In a closet.

The man we now call Tony Santos was once Anthony Sullivan, creation of closet sex between two kids who were never, ever, meant to get married. Tony Santos became Tony Santos after a falling out years after this very moment... but for now...

Santos: What a god damn disgrace.

Tony Santos sits in the corner of the room, well away from his mother. He glances to the left of his mother and sees 12 year old Anthony Sullivan, flashing the overly tight brown Nikes that his parents were still forcing him to wear, despite his feet practically popping through the edges of each sneaker. Anthony sits there quietly, taking in news that no 12-year-old kid should have to hear: That his father was about to die.

Tony sits on a ledge by the window, his feet dangling over the vent below. 31-year-old Tony glances past his family, and notices a third chair, peculiarly empty.

Santos: Colleen.

Colleen Sullivan, Tony's much older sister. She had come from a past relationship Brian had had, well before Patti, and was currently off at college in upstate New York. She was always an over achiever, especially given the rough family background she accrued, and the empty bank accounts her family had. Colleen had taken the adversity she dealt with from the moment she was born, and turned it into almost perfect scores throughout high school, a class president post, and seemingly 10 other local leadership positions. From there, she took a full ride to the very expensive Syracuse University, and would be graduating in two years with a degree in Chemical Engineering.

But here she was, an empty chair.

Santos: Couldn't even make it to Dad's final fucking moments. Basically his funeral, his liver hardened by a rock and shriveled up like a prune. Nope, took a god damn summer job up in New York and left every high and dry. Leaving Ma to sit in this dingy ass hospital room, breathing in the smell of half-clean bedpans, while watching nurses stick him with IV after IV.

Look at her!

She's just waiting for the EKG to go flat. She's just waiting to see Dad's stomach stop moving... to hear him take his final breath. Because she knows it's coming. Sure, she thinks it's in a week or two, but it's actually fucking ten minutes from now, but she knows it's coming soon, and she's doing her fucking damnedest to brace herself for the biggest low... and the biggest high, she'll ever experience.

A fucking loss, and a fucking release.

See, what Tony's talking to is the conflict between the man the family once loved, and had grown to despise. That Tuesday night at the bar was no anomaly... Brian spent practically every night at the bar, getting plastered after work. He'd then wake up the next morning, have a 50/50 chance of long and painful diarrhea in the morning, and would then stumble to the construction site of the day, hoping he wasn't still half drunk from the night before... or at least sober enough to not kill himself or one of his buddies on site.

And man, when he had a family with Patti, he became a mean drunk. The bar ritual never ceased, so every night Brian would skip dinner for 5 or 6 drinks and some bad bar food, then stumble home. Once home, he'd skip past his wife and kids and drop right into bed. If you stopped him in his tracks, or worse, woke him up, you'd get verbally berated, sure...

...but if you were Anthony... you had a good chance of getting a good few hits with the belt. Brian never hit the women in the household, since that conflicted with his values, but his opposition to violence ended if you had a penis. And boy, would Tony get a beating every now and then.

Tony learned to take them, and even learned to hurt his dad without ever throwing a punch, or retaliating in any way. He'd simply let his dad know that he couldn't hurt him. He'd developed a personal shield through snark and arrogance, which helped him grow into an insecure, but seemingly invincible, teenager and eventual adult.

But Patti was wrecked. Colleen was too busy distracting herself with school work and extracurriculars, but Patti felt the pain of a verbally abusive husband, and a household that never felt like one happy family.

So here she was, sitting in this very hospital chair...

Santos: Waiting for the sweet release of death.

And there Colleen was, working at some crappy off-campus bookstore in Syracuse, New York...

Santos: Waiting for the sweet release of death.

And there Anthony was, sitting in a hospital room with the man who'd beaten and humiliated him at every turn. Watching the man who he'd feared, unable to function, unable to even move. He couldn't lift a finger, let alone a belt. Anthony couldn't be hurt by this man any longer... not verbally, and most certainly not physically. His bruises had long healed...

...on the outside.

Santos: You fucking pig. You disgusting sack of shit. You slapped me around for fucking years over things as small as me even looking at you the wrong way, you irresponsible shit. You failed fucking person. But look at me now...

...and look at me then.

Man, I was so... so happy here. You can't see it in my face, but man, you can feel it in my heart if you just focus hard enough. I was so, so ready to rid myself of you right here, and man, did I fucking rejoice the moment Ma told me you'd kicked the can.

But look at me now. I'm basically you. You'd be so proud of me, Dad. I've eaten pavement, gotten lost in major cities, and been in more bar fights than I can count. I've stumbled on the floor of airplanes, coughed up my own blood, and felt the fear that comes with a sore liver in the morning.

I had a family... and I ran away from them until they fucking died. I avoided my girlfriend, I shunned my baby boy, and I bolted the moment I found an escape route. And guess what? They barely even checked in on me after I left, because, just like the scared little boy in that very chair across from you, they didn't actually miss me. They just didn't know exactly what to do about a depraved fucking clown who they felt they should have some sort of attachment to, even though they knew deep down that they wanted nothing to do with me.

Tony's mom turns her head to the window, as if she's looking directly at her son. She peers through the window, her eyes tracing the small warehouses across the street, and the very faint view of the Prudential Center, far far away in the Back Bay of Boston. Her eyes, puffed up, not from crying, but lack of sleep and shouting matches with hospital staffers, droop a bit. She lets out a deep breath as the nurse continues to talk through recommended urgent post-death planning options, his words becoming nothing more than a bowl of word soup.

Patti looks back at the nurse, then to her nearly dead husband, and then back to the window. A tear streams down her face before hitting the Newports. Anthony grabs her hand to comfort her, before she quickly pulls it away.

Santos: It ain't easy, is it, Ma? Having felt so little love your entire life, to accept love from your own son? You vowed to never be like Dad...

...To never accept his drinking as normal

...To never let him abuse us, physically or verbally

...And to always show the love and kindness he'd forgotten, so your heart didn't shrivel up and die like the liver plopped somewhere on that very table.

But you failed, just like I have. We thought we were better than our less than ideal upbringings, and better than the people around us... but we turned out exactly the same.

Just then...



Brian Sullivan's liver failed completely, major arteries clogged, restricting internal blood flow and causing a massive heart attack to the still body laying on the table. The abuser was now dead, but he still lived on in the hearts and minds of every Sullivan in the room.

Santos: We couldn't live without him, and we still can't. We never truly will.

The scene fades to black.

September 2013 and May 2019 Star of the Month
1x Hart Champion
1x Television Champion
1x Xtreme Champion