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I would like to have more control over my antagonist. I think my own recovery program and healthful routine is working for me, but I’m not immune to feeling overwhelmed and hopeless about my son. Let me back up a second.
In the present moment, I am writing from the comfort of my house and big chair. I woke a bit late, due to the boy-sighting last night. I feel a bit groggy still. In my normal morning routine, I put the coffee on and take a five-minute dip in my hot tub. This morning in particular I listened to the birdsong greeting me with the dawn. My mom was an avid birder. She would’ve been able to tell me what bird it was. And for this love of birds she hated squirrels (“They eat my bird food.”) and cats (“They eat my birds.”). When she was about my age now, she had a pellet rifle that she pumped and loaded. She would shoot the squirrels out of the high cottonwood trees still reaching up from the land of the big glass castle. It’s a good thing the rifle was nearly silent. The neighbors, the family that purchased the castle, were nonethewiser. She didn’t shoot cats.
At her downtown home she cursed like a mad woman when Smudge, the grey and white neighbor’s tomcat, would show up in her backyard. It was legend how hopping mad she could get. “That damn Smudge!” she’d yell, surprising anyone in the house. And she’d fling the glass door open. “Go on! Get out of here!” She retired her rifle when she sold the house on the hill and moved to town.
If there was anyone person in my life who could show up, give a sign, that they had made it to heaven and were now actively watching over me, it would be my mom and the cardinal. Recently, I’ve been embracing more of my father’s story, so his presence gets warmed when I see the red male. For the longest time all cardinals were my mom. Now, they chase each other around the trees in my culdesac as a loving, not fighting, couple. It’s all in the noticing. It is the story I’m telling myself. Is there a spiritual presence above somewhere watching over their son? I don’t think so. I’d like to think so. I’m going to go with the neurochemical squirt I get when I light up the memories and regrets about my father and mother.
Birdsong at dawn has the traditional meaning of survival.
In the hot tub this morning I followed the cantador as he flittered in the branches of a neighbor’s house. I listened to learn his song, but I had no frame of reference. My thought was, “Get to know birdsong. Which bird is singing. A little more about the bird.” This idea and eventual practice will crystallize the idea of birds as messengers of love and support from my mom and dad. My missing sister and brother would be using different cosmic signs if they were trying to influence my mood. I guess that’s where photos and alters come in. I light a candle each morning, like I did this morning, and also a stick of incense.
Some mornings I pass the smouldering joss stick along the alter saying “Good morning” to my ancestors. This morning, I lit the holy Sai Baba incense and a scented candle and sat here to write. Some mornings I skip it all together. Today, specifically, I needed a little boost. If they are up there somewhere, I occasionally ask them for help.
My sad brother must be the patron saint of my wayward son. Bad boy streak. Keeps driving away (drunk in my brother’s case, ignited in my son’s case) just as a plan is being agreed to. I don’t understand. What I’ve learned: I don’t need to understand. My role is to be supportive and loving even when we are in massive disagreement about what remedy is needed for his health at this time. He’s taken up smoking cigarettes, like my brother. The smell is an immediate burst of chemical memories, regrets, and wondering how the deathwish my brother had jumped to my kid. My son loved his uncle Tom. Well, as much as any of us could. That man was like an armadillo. Digging around in his own sadness and shame. Impenetrable. Defiant with a tragic weakness. It’s not funny that lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking is what killed my brother. My son knows it’s stupid. It’s being recrafted as sexy, cool, fun, and dramatic by the movies and media of the time. Well, I rationalize, at least he doesn’t drink.
Years ago, my brother became a counselor at a summer camp in nearby Driftwood. His nickname, “Armadillo.” I was a camper one some while my brother, a truly beloved counselor, was holding court with the Stallion cabin. I was a Shetland Pony at the time. A number of years later, I would return to Friday Mountain as a CIT, counselor in training. My nickname, “Lil’ Dilla.
I don’t recall the specifics of more than two of my brother’s five or six car crashes, but one happened that summer I was a CIT at the same time by brother was a counselor. He must’ve been nineteen. Adult counselors were given one night off per week. The morning after, my brother didn’t return. Whispers went out that something had happened to him. Looks of concern were passed my way. No news.
By dinnertime, Armadillo came back looking like he’d been in a car wreck. Yep. This was not a DWI car wreck, however, those would come later. He simply rolled my dad’s crappy yellow Jeep on the way back from his night off. “A deer walked right out in front of me,” he would say over and over as an excuse. The alcohol was not mentioned. I think he walked away from the wreck and walked back to camp, straight to the infirmary. He and I finished out the camp session and then I was back home with mom and dad. He had two more sessions to go.
Over the years, my brother should’ve died in one or more of the firey crashes he found himself in. The DWI laws were just waking up to repeat offenders. And by his late thirties, his final drunk crackup was his last. He had a fetish for Alfa Romeos. On his way home in the GTV-6 he was quite fond of, he decided to take a spin down a road near the lake on his way home. There were so many reasons in his retelling, the bigger reasons kept tightly hidden beneath emotional suppressive fire. The winding hill he careened down passed directly under a pedestrian bridge of the rich developer of my friend’s dad’s (the helicopter ride hunting buddy) who had also become, many years before, my brother’s godparent.
It was not a high-speed crash. He simply missed the sharp 90-degree turn at the bottom and slipped his brown Alfa into a jam between a boulder (meant to stop cars from driving directly into the lake) and a metal gate. He walked away from the crash to avoid another DWI. The laws had stiffened significantly by this time, and one more charge (number 4, I think) would send him directly to prison.
It became the pivotal moment in my bother’s life. He got sober or go to jail. His new lawyer said, “You get to an AA meeting tonight. When you’re arraigned I want you to share your new sober lifestyle.” Gay AA became my brother’s new tribe. And those folks knew how to have fun, alcohol and drug-free. For my brother, it was like an instant family. For several years, after that, as my brother really did begin to pull things together, my wife and I would attend his “pool parties” as the token breeders. They liked to joke with us straight people. It was a term of endearment and wonder, I’m sure. It was a warm and welcoming group of friends. Everyone just trying their best to stay alive by staying off booze. It changed everything about my brother’s life. It would be another five years before he stopped smoking, at 50, he began to unfold his grand design for living in Mexico.
With the money we did get from my father’s estate, my brother was hyper-enthused about a rundown motel along the beach in some forgettable village. He dreamed of making it a gay Airbnb. That one never happened, but on one of his discovery trips, he discovered the Taj Mahal of cinderblocks.
A man had begun building his dream house on the top of a hill overlooking the ocean, but as things happen in Mexico all the time, he stopped, ran out of money, or was killed by the cartel. The early photos show a pile of cinderblocks with a million-dollar view of the ocean. Sayulita became my brother’s Shangri La.
He took on a private investor (a semi-father figure that took a shine to my brother’s ideas) and purchased and designed a castle on a hill. Hm, this echoes my father’s need to out mansion his father. I wonder if my brother was putting a spiteful “fuck you” on his dad’s tragic attitude. Villa Picassa was completed the same summer the Mexican cartels began to shoot each other up across Mexico. Since the violence continued to erupt in Puerta Vallarta, my brother’s luxury rental project, miles up the coast in Sayulita, had very few bookings. The timing sucked. His castle in Mexico was epic.
As the years ticked on, he had to go back to his original investor for more money, the house needed repairs. You can never trust the work you get in Mexico. Anyway, the house leaked during the rainy season, and an additional loan was procured to prop up their investment property. I’m afraid, however, that my brother used that money for living expenses and did only the minimal repairs. The drug wars blazed on, tourism continued to flounder, and my brother gained weight and sadness–sleeping late in the picturesque bedroom in the bottom of the Villa Picassa.
It’s the lack of movement and overeating that inflated my brother’s girth while adding harsh stress on his heart and overall health. As the story was told, he was on his way to a meeting when he stopped at Starbucks for his usual day fuel, some soy add sugar-free caramel latte over extra ice. “I like it the most when it’s all melted down,” he said. He ran into a friend who expressed some concern about my brother’s appearance. When asked, my brother was unable to name his destination after Starbucks. “I’m taking you to the hospital right now,” his friend said, saving his life in a split second of grace. “Leave your car, I’m driving.”
He was in the middle of a cardiac arrest. They sedated him, got him stable, and notified his family. He was in Mexico without health insurance. Alone.
At my brother’s mansion on a hill, there were annoyingly loud birds. Chacalacas. Their howls were not musical or songy. They sounded like screaming babies or peacocks with less variation. Their screams became part of the morning feature in Sayulita. I think I stayed at Villa Picassa four times before my brother passed and his adopted father figure and investor was given the ownership. I heard it was going to be turned into a recording studio. Oddly, the TripAdvisor listing is still live, still asking you to confirm bookings with Tom.
Um, there is no Tom. Unless he’s in the screams of the chacalacas or the thumpboom of the mangos as they fell off the trees into his lap pool.
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