A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. – Proverbs 17:17, King James Version
I woke up, feeling like I had just survived my house burning down. The light was coming into the room from the big picture window, illuminating the living room. It was poorly furnished – the kind of furniture you get when you moved into your first place. I was sleeping on Aunt Sarah's old couch, the one she kept for years. Doc had it now, it was stained with beer and ranch dip and my face was numb from where it had been pillowed on the armrest.
How had the night ended? I was pretty drunk, the last I could recall. We were watching movies – an old Chow Yun Fat gunfighter from the early 90s. Lots of chop-socky dialog that I found endlessly hilarious...It was an ironic counterpoint to the implosion I had witnessed a few hours earlier. I was emotionally drained…I sat there, four or six highballs into the evening and melted into the couch like Jell-O. At some point, the movie ended. At some point, I fell asleep. At some point, one of the worst nights of my life was over. Now I was here.
Doc decorated his place like the punk house it was. The walls were layered with concert posters and fliers on top of yellowing wallpaper. Burned out black light fixtures would have lit up an intense splatterpaint mural that someone had created over the fireplace. It looked sad and pathetic in the daylight. The newer TV set sat on top of an ancient Magnavox console along with a cheap DVD/Tape combo player.
I heaved myself up to a sitting position but the effort was making my eyes throb. I saw an empty bottle of Jack and it vaguely came back to me that I chugged at least part of it. My joints ached, my mouth tasted like wet cat litter and I needed something to eat. From somewhere in the back of the house, I heard a door open.
Doc entered the room, still wearing the board shorts he had on last night. He had the genes from the good side of the family – the surfer's body and the blonde hair with blue eyes. His face was beginning to betray his age…the sun had started to give him crinkles around his eyes like Grandpa. The cigarettes had started making his voice rasp, too. In the morning, he sounded like Lee Marvin. He lit a smoke with a sigh and sat down next to me on the couch.
"I gotta quit these things," he said – staring at the mess on the wall.
"Who did the paint job?" I asked. Doc wasn't an artist.
"Sherry," he said, thinking. "No…It was Bobbie." We sat like that for a few, Doc flipped on the TV and turned it to the Saturday morning cartoons. I had a flashback from fifteen years ago of us doing the exact same thing in the exact same house – kids on a Saturday morning with a whole world of possibility ahead of us.
I found myself studying Doc, remembering how much I'd worshipped him when I was younger. Doc was my older cousin, older by 6 months; he replaced the brother I lost when I was 4. His home replaced the one that shattered around me when I was 10. My parents never got over my brother's death, he was 16 when I was 4 and died in a rollover on the highway with his buddies. In one sense, it was a completely Hollywood ending for my brother and for my parent's marriage. They never forgave each other or themselves for losing him. It was supposed to look like the freeze-frame diorama of grief and sorrow that doesn't affect you after you've left the theatre. It's a whole lot less dramatic when it's happening to you. It just sucks when it happens to you. The family lined up on each side and I found myself at the bottom of the craters, somewhere in the middle. I was the single piece that reminded everyone he knew of a tragic loss no matter where I turned. That part was very un-Hollywood.
The family recriminations over my brother and then over my parents lasted for years. I was just a kid and becoming very tired of having to keep track of who wasn't talking to whom. I was exhausted from watching my parents fight and then not fight, talk and then not talk and then get in the habit of not being home. It helped them practice for the Really Big Goodbye. When Dad finally did leave, I lost the last shred of hope. I don't even know what I was hoping for. Even if we couldn't get Jack, my brother, back… maybe, just maybe this family could learn to be happy with what was left.
Doc still had the old house – Sarah had given it to him when she remarried. When we left the house for some breakfast, I paused on the curb and looked around. The view was full of little touchstones that I had drawn strength from in the past. Aunt Sarah's house was on the ocean in Santa Cruz and the street dead-ended into space. It marked the cliffs that dropped down to the beach and then to the Pacific. It was a popular beach access – the air was always tangy with salt and the streets were always sugared with sand.
The house and the street had always meant refuge to me, and so did Doc. Mom started letting me come over for sleepovers more often after the divorce. She would head over the mountain on the 17 on Friday afternoon – me with my G.I. Joe sleeping bag and pillow and a shopping bag full of clothes. It was a sleepover for both of us, come to think of it. She stayed in the guest bedroom and I was in Docs'. Later, she found a house in Santa Cruz that she could rent cheap and we were closer than ever after that.
Doc kept the convertible, too. It was his Dad's project car that he finally gave up on…a '63 Chevy Nova painted two-tone like a Bel-air. Doc took the top down and fired up the engine, the glass packs gave it a throaty burble. Through my sunglasses, I caught our reflection in passing store windows – we looked like something classic, like two hoods in a B-movie about teenagers from hell. Cruising up the streets of Santa Cruz in the crisp sunshine, I started to feel a little bit less miserable and started to enjoy the day.
I noticed several calls on my cell phone. One from my Dad, one from Mom, another number that had to be my Aunt Theresa. Voicemails…a text message. I tried to delete them all without reading or listening to them but the phone opened up the text message. It said "PLEASE CALL ME – DAD".
"Typical," I said to Doc. We were pulling up to a Denny's for some breakfast. "Drop the A-Bomb and then call to apologize in the morning."
Doc shrugged. "At least they apologize now."
"Well, apology for them," I said. "More like call up and act like nothing happened." Arguments in my family followed a more well-known path: allow tension to build, let said tension explode into a vicious public diatribe on all your character flaws dating back to when you wore diapers. After the conversation, feel bad but realize that admitting you felt bad would hurt your negotiating position – therefore you pretend that none of it happened and you let the other guy do the work of bringing it all up. Then, your option is to act all surprised – did the other guy really think it was such a big deal? Geeze, you clearly have a problem letting go of the past. The only thing more infuriating about it was the fact that I'd yet to come up with an effective means of countering it all.
The fight last night was sickening on a lot of levels – they couldn't keep it together long enough to finish with Grandpa's post-funeral get-together. They had to bring up a bunch of silly horse crap surrounding stuff Grandpa left to different people. That had to lead to yet another protracted "this-is-what-is-wrong-with
When we were 10, Doc was a skateboarder and among the kids experimenting with break dancing. He taught me the moves so that I could go back to San Jose and be the coolest kid in the room – if for only 45 seconds or so. Adding to all my socialization issues, I was the smartest and least coordinated kid in our class. Calculate the velocity of a red 4-square ball as it left the foot of the biggest kid in our class to soar far into the 'outfield' as we played kickball. I could never come up with the appropriate quadratic equation to figure out how humiliated I was being the first kid out in dodgeball, the kid who never won at 'Duck, Duck, Goose' and the kid who had to sit out the Christmas crap because his parents wanted him to be in touch with his Jewish heritage.
"I hate the Dreidel," I yelled at my Dad to hurt him during an argument when I was 15. I never forgot the shock and sudden hurt on his face. He stopped yelling at me about something – something about Judaism when it all just flooded up into my throat. Being angry about being Jewish, being my Dad's son when his entire life was one long apology for not being as successful as the rest of the family. I thought it was the religion that was doing it to him and I screamed it at him. It was like watching the air come out of a popped balloon. Not an explosion, just a rapid and complete deflation. In the silence that followed, he turned and went to his room, slamming the door.
We do it to each other…we do it to ourselves, my mother told me one night. A girl with no major beliefs about anything latches onto a diffident Jewish boy studying law at Santa Clara University. They fall in love, they marry – the two halves begin the process of joining together. The families are distant, but when the boy comes along, that's got to bring everyone together...right? Like pure sodium to water – it turns out. The bright explosion that results is the two families agreeing that being around each other would never happen. The Dayton Accords were decided with less negotiation. Mom and Dad breaking up just gave them more ammunition to work with and it had been building up in a stockpile for years before.
I ordered pancakes and coffee – my stomach wasn't up for greasy eggs or hot sauce. The hangover made me hunch over my cup of nutty-tasting Denny's coffee…lotsa cream, lotsa sugar as Harvey Keitel might say. I knifed a mound of whipped butter over my cakes and frosted it with maple syrup. We didn't talk…Doc already knew what I would say and it had reached a saturation point with me where I couldn't stand to think about it all, much less discuss it.
Escaping the party last night – I found Doc outside, smoking a cancer stick and talking with a fat cousin I hadn't seen in years….Larry, I think his name was. Doc saw me come out of the rented hall like a charging bull. We hadn't been around each other for years but in a flash, he was back to being the older brother I needed and he knew his job instantly.
"Whoa!" he caught my shoulder and stopped me mid-charge. Blindly furious, I had dashed out to start chucking the decorative rocks at cars and breaking things. I wanted to break something – I wanted to break them. I wanted to take a garbage can and smash the windshield of my Aunt Theresa's Jag, slash my uncle Bob's tires and maybe for giggles set my Dad's lawn on fire. Break them, mess up their phony lives…write 'faggot' on Bob's lawn with herbicide, let it burn in and then watch him stew for a few weeks until he bought the green lawn dye. Not just 'fag'…'faggot'…The whole word. They want to see childish? We'll see who can fling the biggest booger.
Knowing them – they'd press charges. It was a kindness on Doc's part, then, to keep me from making a bigger ass of myself then they'd managed. I slapped his hand off of my shoulder and that just gave him the momentum he needed to swing around and wrap his arms around my shoulders and make me have to drag him. "Whoa, buddy," he said. "Where you going?"
"To do some damage," I said, in what I hoped would be my best tough-guy voice. The Jewish kid who looked like Justin Timberlake's shorter, less-good-looking brother wasn't gonna out-tough his skate-punk cousin, the kid who modeled his life after guys like Henry Rollins and Mike Ness. All the drugs, fighting and booze – none of the creative vision. Nothing else to offer the world but the ability to give or take a punch. Well, no – I wasn't gonna top him. But he was a prince in that moment for not rubbing my face into it.
After breakfast we turned toward the mountains and started on a long drive to nowhere-in-particular. As the miles cranked by and we settled into the drive, we caught each other up on the pieces of our lives that we had been too busy to share before. Doc was fascinated by the start-up that I was part of. I was still ruefully jealous of his Dharma beach bum lifestyle. We started slinging old jokes at each other – he plugged in a mix CD of old rock tunes we'd crank when Aunt Sarah was out of the house. I let the breeze and the sun take away all the hurt and the anger. We were two brothers again and the time and distance between us seemed to melt away.
"No point in fighting," Doc said to me, his eyes on the road. "What would it prove?" I knew the answer to that question, the same as he did. The point was that there was no point. I wanted to stop having to make a point out of everything. Losing my Granddad was one of the most pointed experiences of my life. Grandpa packs it in at 86 and the family implodes into the hateful little fiefdoms it was too afraid to be when he was around. They'll fight over a rotting cardboard box of 78s but they won't hold it together long enough to get Grandma out of sight. Stop trying to make a point out of everything – stop making sense. Doc's whole life didn't make sense, it seemed. Maybe that was why we had drifted apart. But at 30 years of age, realizing that trying to keep things ordered and sane in this family was going to be a full-time job, I needed a break from all of that. Slice the Gordian knot.
My cell signal would come back and drop off again, based on where we were. Sometimes we'd lose it behind a hill or sometimes it would be full-bars in some desolate two-lane stretch. Whenever it came back, more calls would be in the log. The kid who always called back, always returned calls, wasn't calling back. It felt great to let the burden I didn't know I was carrying go.
It was dark when we got back to Doc's. I finally scored a shower and he lent me some clothes. He broke out a bottle of expensive tequila and we got plastered again. Just like when we were kids, somewhere in the movie we were watching around 2 AM, we both fell asleep sitting side-by-side on the couch. The feel of someone else there, next to me, was reassuring in the very same way that it was 15 or 20 years ago. I didn't have to face the darkness alone and that was what I needed.
I was reaching out in the darkness to find someone or something to hold onto. Back at that time, I had a cousin who was more like a brother. He offered a shoulder to lean into and the calm strength that said "I know you're a dork – I just don't care. I love you, bro."
It saved me then and it's saving me now.
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