A hulking, malevolent menace was Dennis

…a constant threat to the public domain as he lumbered through the town, big shaggy head swaying, bloodshot eyes glaring, his Eric the Red long hair flying behind him, a baleful sneer splashed across his surly countenance, looking for trouble. Dennis scared everybody because he wasn’t afraid of anything or if he was nobody knew what it was; the cops hated it when Dennis was involved – they knew he had hurled a table through Rita’s window and they knew he was waiting inside for them to come and get him; eventually they did – four cops - with pepper spray and mace, billy clubs and a taser for a backup, not to mention 9 millimeter Glocks they didn’t use.

…soon enough he was out on bail and racing through the hills on his aging Sportster, spoiling for a fight, aching to cut a gash through someone as surely as Eric the Red and his broadsword hacked his way through the Goths, the Visigoths and the Vandals, or whoever it was he sliced up, anyway that was Dennis, I say was because Dennis is now dead and if he wasn’t, in truth, I wouldn’t be able to write this for fear of him seeing it – he liked me for some reason but he wouldn’t like this - and I could end up on the business end of his shiv…

…but Dennis got murdered, by Dennis. In the same room where his father had murdered his mother then turned the shotgun on himself, Dennis went home one afternoon knowing he was going back to prison for nearly scalping his ex-lover by ripping her hair out in fistfuls (!) and took that same shotgun and blew himself away; the area breathed a horrified collective sigh of relief. Poor tortured Dennis, nurtured on all-consuming violence, died by it…a neighbor said she heard the bike roaring up the road and into the drive then Dennis got off and stormed into the house not even bothering to shut the door and within half a minute of this, she said, “BLAM, he blows himself into the next world.”
…Dennis was a pathological nightmare-come-true and a sociological phenomenon too when you think that his parents’ murder-suicide was transcended, if that’s the word, by his own in a moment of outrageous anger & despair. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Dennis even though when all is said and done he was meaner than a wolverine & the woman he so savagely attacked has quite a different view of him, to which I am also sympathetic. Nothing good comes from of any of it.

'The nature of men and women - their ESSENTIAL NATURE - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one

would believe it...' - W. Somerset Maugham