Now there was only one thing I needed: to talk to my big brother, my great protector for so much of my life, and to tell him that we had stood up for his life today. That we were now one massive leap closer to my freedoms in California being his too. That thanks to the eye-opening call to action he’d tasked me with in his coming-out phone call that sunny Sunday half a decade earlier, my joy would soon be his joy, my liberation would soon be his liberation, and that the light I’d felt grow inside when our mother had held and accepted me for me would soon be his light too—no matter where in our great country he chose to call home or whom he fell in love with. It was now, at long last, time to finish that conversation we had started in San Francisco. Except that now, this call was impossible.
III
One winter earlier, as we awaited a long-delayed decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, my phone rang in Los Angeles. It was Marcus. I picked up, eager to hear about his healthful recovery as our case bobbed about in legal doldrums. Instead, he could barely form words through his new pain. “I need your help. Can you come to Michigan? Right now?”
Months after the very hopeful prognosis following his surgery, Marcus began experiencing back pain. He had seen physical therapists and chiropractors to try to figure out where it was coming from and how to heal it, but it just kept getting worse. He described it to me as the worst toothache he’d ever had, but deep down in his back. I did as my mother had taught me: I attacked his pain with optimism, no matter how foolish. I tried to convince him that there was a solution and we would figure out what it was. But I could hear that he was growing weary of the same old assurances. Our best efforts only seemed to open doors to new problems. So I got off the phone and booked another ticket to Michigan.
In the time it took me to get there, an X-ray revealed a shaded area on his spine where Marcus had been describing his pain for months now to doctors and nurses who kept downplaying it. One look from a specialist and it was crystal clear that my brother’s cancer was back—and it couldn’t have found a more dangerous new home.
* * *
—
Walking into Marcus’s small Michigan apartment, I felt sick to my stomach. The place was a maze of filth: dirty clothes, unwashed dishes, and containers of rotting fast food stacked to the ceiling. Marcus’s boyfriend wasn’t simply a disappointment; he was a monstrous narcissist. He couldn’t be bothered to take care of their home, much less my ailing brother. When I found my way to the living room, an unbearable sight stunned me still. Surrounded by empty prescription pills bottles, my big, tough Marco was in a fetal position, long unshaven and unbathed, and in terrible pain on their soiled sofa.
When Marcus looked up at me, his eyes deeply sunken and ringed in gray, he thought I was a phantom. He closed his eyes again, grinding his jaw, forcing back what looked to be excruciating pain. I gently eased my way down onto the couch beside him and started stroking his hair. “Where does it hurt, Marco?”
His eyes opened again, this time meeting mine, trying to comprehend the fact that his little brother was beside him here in Michigan.
“Where does it hurt, Marco?” I softly repeated.
Slowly recognizing that I was real, he began to sob. He was in too much pain for words. He pointed to an area on his lower back, then gripped my hand so tightly I could feel his pain. His body was thinner than I’d ever seen it, but his hands were still big, rough, and strong.
“Can I touch it?”
He nodded. I began massaging the rock-hard, severely cramped muscles by his spine. Thankfully, my touch did relieve a bit of his pain, at least temporarily, and he slowly regained some awareness—enough to let me know what he needed most: water, food, a cigarette, more medicine, better medicine, a doctor who gave a damn, and to get the hell out of the home of this horrible, stinking man in whom he had misplaced his trust.
I’ve rarely become so angry that I’d use a word like “vengeful” to describe my feelings, but I wanted to kill. My goals in Michigan suddenly changed from care to rescue. I dropped everything, and started sorting through the soiled clothes, garbage, and discarded medical supplies for my brother’s belongings. I called any and all of Marcus’s old friends, people who he would trust and who might prove willing and able to lend a hand.
Trying to get care for my uninsured brother in Michigan was like hitting a brick wall repeatedly with my head, with no helmet and the entire state government pushing from behind to make my skull crack harder. At one point, a doctor who was supposedly a specialist in bone cancer looked at me as if I were a dusty old chalkboard, not a human being, and within earshot of my big brother said, “What do you want me to do, cut him in half?” And he walked away. Welcome to American medical care for the uninsured working class.
In the evenings, in an effort to sort my brother’s lifelong treasures from his lover’s stinking trash, I stumbled upon one heartbreak after the next. The deepest stab was a letter from Marcus’s dean congratulating him on his fine performance and stellar grades, and informing my once underachieving big brother that he was now on the dean’s list of exceptional students. The letter had come just a week before Marcus had called me about his new back pain. Marcus’s old question of “Why now?” was becoming increasingly impossible to answer without cursing God.
And then a small glimmer of hope arrived. Correction: a rather sizeable glimmer. Marcus’s old friend Steve was suddenly out of a job in Salinas, California, and was up for “kicking any asses that need kickin’, and getting our boy outta that fuckin’ bitch hole.” I booked Steve’s ticket, and he was with us in a day. The first thing I said when I saw him again was “You, my friend, are huge.” I had forgotten how big he was.
“Why, thank you very much.” He loved his big-boy size, and I was grateful for it. This was definitely the guy you wanted by your side in an emergency move scenario, and on more than one occasion, his three hundred pounds easily backed my big brother’s neglectful lover out of the apartment so I couldn’t literally wring his neck.
Steve and I came up with a plan, which we shared with Marcus as he clenched his jaw against the pain. Instead of continuing to do battle in hostile territory, we would get Marcus home: to the South, to Virginia, and to my mom. During her own cancer treatments, she had exercised her charm with the doctors and nurses, quickly becoming a beloved star among her dedicated docs—doctors who might prove more willing and able to help heal their new star’s son. I added, “And we’ll pull off this trip by Christmas, Marco. I promise.” That got a huge smile.
But Christmas was only a few days away now, and there were some major hurdles to get past. Marcus couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes without unbearable pain, and as his intestine-constructed neo-bladder was still healing, he was temporarily dependent on a catheter to help drain his bladder through his urethra, and that needed changing often. So sitting in the cab of his truck or in an airplane seat wouldn’t work. He needed to lie flat. I tried to rent an RV, but in this area at this time of year, we’d have to wait another three days before one became available. That would mean missing Christmas. And that would mean breaking my promise.
So in his rough country way, Steve suggested, “We put a bed cover on his truck ’n’ slide him in back on topa his mattress that’s on topa his boxes. Put the dog back there with him ta keep him warm, and git walkie-talkies so he can chew our ears off up front if he starts freezin’ or dyin’. And we drive this bitch home ourselves. You ’n’ me.”
It was the dead of winter in one of the coldest states in America, the back of Marcus’s truck wasn’t heated, and I’m so severely claustrophobic that such a plan sounded like an absolute nightmare to me. But to Marcus and Steve it just sounded like another survival stunt that fit in just fine with the thousands of others they’d somehow pulled off before. They were ready to go.
It was the middle of the night and it had started to snow. Nevertheless, we followed Stev
e’s plan, trying not to hurt Marcus too badly as we slid him into the back of the truck. Max jumped right up in there with him, their bodies pressed against the new hardtop. Then Steve did something that really worried me. He put a battery-operated electric heater in back with Marcus—in what would soon be a very cluttered, tight, and enclosed space—defying every warning on the heater’s label. I protested, but Marcus and Steve overruled me. It was that damn cold.
We fed Marcus a heavy dose of pain pills, shut the back gate, and tested the walkie-talkies. Steve took a giant swig of something I pretended was water but knew full well was far stronger, and we hit the road in the middle of a snowstorm to try to make it home in time for at least one last “best Christmas ever.”
But my calculations quickly proved overly optimistic. Marcus had to stop every fifteen to thirty minutes to drain his neo-bladder, not once an hour. And on one of the early stops, he seemed frighteningly loopy. “Read the damn sticker!” I said to him and Steve. “It clearly states that this heater is not to be used in small spaces. It could be putting out deadly gasses, or catch the whole damn truck and my fucking brother on fire!” They paused, laughed, and called me a drama queen. But they let me throw that heater in a dumpster. Now it was truly freezing in back, but Marcus refused to let us turn back or get a hotel room. He was determined to make it home.
Up front, Steve and I burned through packs of Marlboro Reds on the long and winding roads into Pennsylvania’s hills, snow falling so fast and hard we couldn’t see most of the turns until we were halfway through them. Marcus stopped talking over the radio. I genuinely worried that he might die in the back of the truck, so now I was the one insisting on frequent stops—to shake him awake and make sure his heart was still beating.
A day and a half into our journey, running on no sleep at all but insisting he keep the wheel, Steve began to drift off while driving. My job became shaking him awake when his eyes got heavy. When my shaking stopped working, it became an elbow to the ribs; by the time we crossed the Virginia state line, I was punching him in the shoulder as hard as I possibly could to get any response.
Then a bit past daybreak on Christmas Eve, Steve pulled the truck up to the wide, welcoming porch of our family home.
For the first time in hours, Marcus radioed me from the back. “Let me out.”
I pressed the button. “Ten-four, bro.”
“No. Hurry the fuck up. I need out.”
He sounded angry and desperate, so I rushed to the back, opened the gate, and started gently pulling him out.
“Come on. Pull harder!”
I did. Max leaped out, then Marcus emerged, and I hustled to pull his wheelchair out from under the mattress so we could get him inside.
“Fuck off with that.”
He didn’t need to explain. He didn’t want his chair. Like mother, like son.
Then softer, “How do I look?” he asked.
“Horrible,” I said.
“Then fuckin’ fix me, asshole.”
And in the freezing cold, with absolutely no respectable gay tools at my disposal, I did my very best to fix his hair, to adjust his clothes, to scrape the crust from his mouth and eyes, and to make him look as handsome as humanly possible given the circumstances.
“You done? I gotta go shove a tube up my dick and fake-piss,” he said.
“You look perfect,” I lied.
Then I quickly ran around the truck to intercept Steve. I begged him to stay in the truck until Marcus had been through our front door for at least five minutes, maybe ten. Steve was then and will always be my superhero, but at that moment he was a superhero stinking of booze and smokes. He didn’t need an explanation. I left him with “I love you, Steve. If you weren’t a bear, and maybe twenty years younger…”
He shot back, “And if you had tits, baby.”
I turned around. Marcus was already halfway up the driveway, walking under his own power for the first time since I’d flown out to Michigan. And just then, the front door opened. Our mom was in a wheelchair with oxygen tubes in her nose, but her arms immediately reached out with strength for her eldest boy to be wrapped up in. Todd had come home the night before. He and Jeff were just behind my mom. Marcus glanced back my way, and I’ll never forget the look. He smiled a genuine “Thank you” through his pain. This walk to my mom’s arms would be one of his finest moments, perhaps the greatest, most selfless performance of his life. With each step, he was giving our mom the greatest gift he could this Christmas: hope. Like she had done for us so many times in our poorest years, he didn’t want to ruin her Christmas with the painful truth.
They held each other for what seemed like forever, and as I watched them, a deep, unfathomable fear sank into my gut. A fear that would soon be confirmed.
After I’d helped Marcus with his catheter and into and out of a bath, we all went to one of the hospitals my mother had gone to for care. They loved her there. Despite all the challenging side effects from her aggressive treatments, she was indeed in remission. A survivor yet again. And at this hospital, with the promise that we’d pay cash to do things right, they finally provided what seemed like humane care for our Marco. A special bed was sent to our home, appropriately strong drugs were prescribed, and a plan of action was drawn up for an aggressive round of targeted radiation. But when it came time for a prognosis, the news was no Christmas miracle. “There’s always a chance,” the kind doctor said, “and we are going to fight hard for that chance, but if I had to guess…I’d say six months to one year.”
I hadn’t eaten any real food in more than a day, so there was nothing to throw up, but after days of denying myself tears, my grief began trying to escape in other ways. I remember repeatedly dry heaving in a hospital bathroom stall as quietly as I could. This had all come on so suddenly: my mom and now my big brother. I was doing all I could to help fix them, but nothing seemed to be working. Now, the thing that had always mattered most to me, that had helped me stand tall, that had fueled my courage, that made me strong, was slipping through my fingers. My family was dying, and with it, I feared, my own hope and strength would too.
IV
We enjoyed a glorious Christmas together. We hardly noticed the tubes in my mom’s nose, the wheelchairs all around, or the new bed in the living room that kept Marcus more comfortable. And when my mom gifted Marco her treasured 1967 Camaro, which had been gathering dust and rust in the garage for years now, he burst into tears. She must have known he’d likely never use it, but we all knew he loved that car. And she understood the value of optimism, and how those keys in the hands of an old Southern grease monkey provided more hope than any words could. And for that small reason, and for so many larger ones, Marcus meant it with every ounce of his being when he said, “This is the best Christmas ever, Mom.” Because he likely knew this was the last time he would ever tell her that. It was the greatest gift he could give.
In the weeks that followed, it became clear that my brave big brother wasn’t getting better and likely didn’t have six to twelve months. I had flown back to Los Angeles just before New Year’s Eve only to receive a call from our mom that I needed to get back to Virginia quick. In the short time I was gone, Marcus had dropped half his weight, and one leg was so thin that it didn’t look alive anymore. He could no longer walk and was struggling to maintain consciousness. The cancer was moving very rapidly up his bones and into his skull. It was clear now that Marcus likely should have died far sooner, still in the squalor of his Michigan apartment, and that the promise to get him home had pushed him to hold on long enough to feel our mother’s warmth once more. Now time was not our friend.
Perhaps sensing what I still refused to see, Todd had stayed in Virginia instead of flying back home to where he now lived in Texas. Marcus, Todd, and Jeff had shared long talks about old NASCAR races and fishing holes, and then a New Year’s Eve in the hospital when Marcus’
s pain flared so badly he needed an IV to help relieve it. There, doctors ordered a complete MRI but never shared the results with Marcus. It turns out the cancer now ran the entire length of his spine and pelvis. It was devastating news. Soon Marcus was headed back home for good, the IV drip at his side feeding him a steady dose of morphine. The only aim now was to make our big brother as comfortable as possible.
When a nurse came by the house to check on Marcus, I asked her about his pain, about his level of awareness. Sensing my paternal nature, and hearing the question I was refusing to ask outright, she showed me a button I could press to give my big brother more painkiller “as needed.” But I could read in her caring eyes what she legally or ethically couldn’t say: “It will be over soon. Help make this as easy as possible for him.”
I expected to be in Virginia for weeks. Instead, a few nights later, it became clear that Marcus was slipping fast. He no longer wanted to suck the water from the lollipop-shaped sponge we held to his lips. He could no longer form sentences and struggled to find simple words. Then one night, after sitting by his side all day, my mom kissed his hands and told him how much she loved him, and Jeff carried her up to bed to try to get some much-needed sleep. Todd and I stayed by Marcus’s side, mostly in silence, just “being there” with him.
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