by Mark Miller
The ugly truth that the movies don’t tell you is that after people die, and after you bury them, you still have a mess of bullshit to clean up. One of those fun things being a will. Colin had made himself incredibly present after my father died, and while I know that somewhere deep inside him he must have felt some sadness, it was mostly because he wanted to see what was going to be left to him. After my mother died, we got to pore over the will. Colin got nothing. It was clear as day. Not a dime. Not even a trinket with a note attached. Nothing. It fucking ripped me apart to be sitting next to him as he was told this. The drug monster in him was disappointed, but what was worse was the pain I knew he had buried somewhere deep inside, that fear of being unloved, unworthy. This reinforced all of his feelings of being worthless. After initially learning this, he disappeared for a bit. Then he resurfaced. After having consulted his girlfriend, he decided that guilt was in order. He started calling me and trying to manipulate me into feeling like I owed him some of the money that my parents had left me. In a moment of weakness, or exhaustion, or maybe pity, I decided to send him a few grand. I felt, at the time, that that was generous. I hadn’t been left a small fortune, and I myself was burning through what they had given me, living like my own form of cockroach. I had told him it was for his birthday and that I hoped that he would use it for good, knowing full well that he was going to blow it, probably in a few days, on drugs.
I left Texas for Pennsylvania on August 1. It was the twins’ birthday on August 5. I had friends and family I could have stayed with, but for some reason, sleeping on the couch inside my parents’ old and oppressively memory-heavy house seemed an appropriate self-punishment. I would lie there night after night and just get dizzy with the amount of self-loathing I had. The five stages of grief are supposedly denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. I was somewhere between anger and depression. I hated them for dying and leaving me with everything to handle. I hated them for being such shitty parents before they died, and then dying and not ever fixing it. I hated them for never showing me that they could have been better. And mostly I hated myself for being such an emotional cripple after their passing. I didn’t feel depressed so much as I felt like nothing mattered. I was sort of amazed at how little attachment I felt to anything . . . other than my kids. I couldn’t kill that off. So I just avoided them for as long as I could. When I saw them this time around, I felt I needed to stay for longer. I couldn’t deny how much I had missed them.
On August 14, my phone rang. Colin was calling me. Again. He had been trying to call me and I had been avoiding his calls. This time I answered. He was so obviously fucked up, it pissed me off instantly.
“Seriously, what the fuck do you want, Colin? I gave you money. What the fuck do you seriously want?”
“Wow. I just wanted to see if you had even made the effort to visit Mom and Dad at their graves. You haven’t, have you? Did you even care about them at all? It’s amazing to me that they left you anything when you obviously didn’t care about them, but I got treated like some awful piece of garbage and all I did was try to do things for them. . . .”
He was slurring his words, and the volume of his voice kept growing and fading as he allowed the phone to slip from his face and then caught it, causing the pitch to shift in some sort of odd melodic Doppler effect. It was the drug addict’s song, sung by the most practiced balladeer. I knew he was fucked up. I knew this wasn’t even him. In fact, I didn’t know who Colin even was anymore. Then I heard it. . . . I heard a female whisper in the background. . . . And I fucking lost it.
“Oh, okay, Colin. Thank you for the brilliant advice. I love taking advice from a fucking junkie. And tell that bitch to shut the fuck up too. That cunt doesn’t get to contribute in any way. You two are just a pack of fuckups.”
“Then what are you, Mark . . . huh? What. Are. You. You’re a big child. A baby. Always the precious baby Mark, always the favorite, and you know what? That’s the only reason you made it, because you were born weak and you are weak. I could beat the shit out of you then and I’d do it now, you coward. You don’t know what a hard life looks like. If I was there I’d kick your ass so hard you’d wish—”
I cut him off. Baby was what my father used to threaten to call me when he was trying to hurt me. Baby was a bad word. And here was my big brother using our father’s weaponry against me, knowingly. With everything I’d had to handle, and without him there to help me, I had no kindness left.
“You know what, Colin . . . I would love to see that. I’d love to see you try to kick my ass. You know why? Because you’re such a fucking tough guy over the phone, but you never seem to be interested in actually trying to solve this. Let’s meet up, motherfucker. Let’s do this. Or how about you go ahead and admit that you’d lose and instead do what you do best? Why don’t you take that money I gave you and go buy your fucking street junk and just take yourself out like we’ve all been waiting for you to do.”
I hung up. I wish I could say I regretted that instantly, but it was like so many other conversations and arguments with him that it felt like just one more exhausting, painful, pathetic spat. Nothing remarkable.
Over the next few days I spent my time either handling more of my parents’ affairs, hanging out with my kids, or drinking in any one of the many unbelievable dive bars that are near the Latrobe area. Sometimes I got lucky enough to get picked up by some poor woman drunk enough not to see how utterly unavailable emotionally I really was, and then I’d get a place to sleep for a night. Or rather a place to drink more alcohol, and at least be entertained by some new naked body instead of being flung around by my own thoughts.
Early August 19 I was in the gardens at Lynch Field, training a few guys outside. It was hot and bright, and I could smell the remnants of last night’s conquest on my skin and the alcohol leaching through my pores. My phone started ringing. . . . I pulled the pads off of my hands and answered it, wandering just out of earshot of my clients as I heard, “Mark, I’m calling from the Southwest Greensburg Police Department. . . .”
I knew this officer. I was confused. I hadn’t had a run-in with the law in a long time.
“Mark . . . I need to let you know something. . . . Uh . . . in a house in Youngstown . . . we found Colin. . . . We found your brother. . . .”
This had to be a mistake. Youngstown was just miles from where I was. Colin was in DC. This wasn’t right. “He’s been in DC . . . ,” was all I could mumble.
“Mark . . . state police found him.” He kept faltering. My anxiety was climbing. Just fucking say it already.
“Okay. Is he in trouble?” I knew this wasn’t the case. My whole body went so cold that goose bumps rose up on my arms.
“Mark, by the time the paramedics arrived, there was nothing they could do. It appears that he in fact overdosed. I’m sorry, Mark. They wanted me to call and tell you. I’m so sorry, Mark. . . .”
I was enraged. This is not the reaction you are supposed to have when you find out that the last living person from your childhood has perished.
“What the fuck was he doing here? How long had he been here, do they know that? Did they fucking figure that out? That motherfucker came here? Where? Where did they find him? Some fucking ditch? A squat house?”
“Mark . . . he was found in a house in Youngstown. A female friend—”
I cut him off.
“I’m just going to stop you right there. I don’t care what hooker junkie he was holed up with. . . . They found him in Youngstown? What . . Well, if he was with someone, then how did this shit happen?”
“Apparently she left for work and when she returned he was motionless on the floor, so she called the paramedics.”
I had told him to go die. And he fucking did. My last words to my brother, the last words I would ever say to him, and that he ever heard from me, were my telling him to go die, and he did it. Way to go, bro. That’s the most successful middle finger you have ever given me. You win.
“Okay. Fine. Well, I guess . . .
good. We all knew he was going to do it sometime, right? I mean, he was already in his forties; amazing he made it that far. Junkies don’t exactly live long. So, oh well. Thanks though.”
I was shaking. Somewhere between pain and anger exists this suspended sort of space. I felt like ripping a tree out of the ground and smashing everything. I felt like punching holes in all of the cars I was looking at. Across the field there were kids laughing. How the fuck are they laughing? This isn’t a normal day . . . how do they not know?
“Mark, there’s . . . there’s one more thing. . . . You are the only next of kin we could reach. . . .”
Oh no. No.
“Mark, we need you to come in and identify the body. I’m so sorry.”
Oh, fuck you, Colin.
Of the five stages of grief, I had bypassed denial. Now anger was all I knew. But next to the anger was something more insidious. Something worse. Relief. I was relieved that he was dead. Finally, no more late-night phone calls. No more wondering where he was, what he was doing, if it had happened yet. Finally I didn’t have to worry anymore.
The next day I swung by the Westmoreland County coroner’s office. I walked in and everyone shrank away as I told them who I was and who I was there to identify. I think I said, “Colin fucking Miller,” too. I was so full of anger and hate that I needed to leak some of it out just to keep from melting.
They brought me in the back and walked me toward a table that had a sheet draped over a long form. I started sputtering, “Come on, let’s go, I don’t have all day.”
All of this bluster, this bitterness and anger, was sealing in a hurt that to this day I cannot accurately find words for. A man I had always wanted to love me enough to help me, protect me, teach me how to be a grown-up, had abandoned me and used me up instead, and now, now he lay cement hued and shriveled on a table, and I had to say, “Yes, that is my brother.” Anger aside, the pain is still crushing to me.
They lifted the sheet. There on that steel table was my brother. He looked like he had been dipped in gray paint. My heart flinched and crawled backward as though it was trying to quietly sneak out of my body and away from all the pain while I was busy being angry.
“Yeah. Stupid motherfucker. That’s him.” And I laughed.
There was nothing funny about it. I just didn’t know what else to do.
As I walked to my car to drive back, I had a simple thought. I was about to sleep in the house I grew up in, where my mom, my dad, and my brother had all been terrible role models, where I had fought so hard to become more than what they had established for me.
And now I would sleep there alone, because they had all left me behind.
I spent the evening lying on the couch and looking online for plane tickets. I had to leave; I couldn’t leave fast enough. I shot a text to Justin, something sad and stupid. Something like Oh, hey, so my brother is dead. How awesome is that.
He responded in true Justin fashion: I love you Mark, and I am so sorry.
I didn’t respond. I lay there all night, not sleeping. I had no remaining immediate family left. And I still hadn’t cried.
So that was my 2007.
chapter fourteen
I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can’t live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.
—CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Colin wasn’t buried but cremated, and his girlfriend took his ashes. I didn’t even try to fight her. I don’t even know where she scattered them. It seemed sort of arbitrary anyway, the idea of fighting over his ashes. All of my good memories of Colin were tied in to music, and not only can you always visit a person whose memory you keep woven into music, you can’t fucking get away from them. I started avoiding the radio. I started wearing headphones everywhere with a steady diet of good nineties hip-hop playing constantly. In 2008 Beats by Dre released their headphones, which were perfect. Given that I have one cauliflower ear from my wrestling days, I can’t wear conventional earbuds. Those allowed for me to more effectively ensconce myself in my music and keep from having to interact with the outside world.
Two thousand eight was a blur. I decided I needed to start taking my training more seriously, so I ventured out to Las Vegas to train at Randy Couture’s gym. The talent level there at that time was intense, and I liked that Randy was an older fighter, older than me, who wouldn’t balk at the idea of my making a comeback. While I was there I met Cory, a friend in Las Vegas, and his mother, who took me in for a while and tried their best to keep me alive. Las Vegas was a bad place for me. When I wasn’t training I was restless, and Vegas offers any number of sins to keep a restless person busy. The bartender from Austin and I were still involved, but I was rarely in Austin anymore, and I really didn’t care about making it work or about staying faithful, so I wasn’t. I would walk from Cory’s house to the strip clubs late at night and post up at a table, drinking and enjoying the free attention. When you attend a strip club enough times, the girls get used to you and start feeling safe around you. They are out to make money, but they also want someone they can vent to. More than half of the ones I ended up meeting were functioning on at least one illegal drug almost all of the time, and they all could smell the broken on me, which for broken people is just an aphrodisiac. I spent a lot of nights at various apartments and taking cabs back to Cory’s, only to walk in after no sleep, grab my gym bag, and head out to train. More than once Cory’s mom caught me. She had been a nurse for many years, and she had that same “you can’t bullshit me” eyeball that Amy had been starting to acquire. Women in the health care industry are fucking tough. They hear all the excuses, over and over, and they have to navigate them, so when she would stop me in the hallway and say, “Mark, you look like hell, are you sleeping?” I’d avoid her eyes and mumble, “Yes, ma’am.”
She’d stand there, unimpressed, scanning over me, and then she’d say something like “Well, I’m making chicken tonight, so you should be here for dinner, eat a real meal for once. And here, take this.” She’d hand me a brown paper bag with a banana, a bottle of water, and oftentimes a sandwich. It was more mothering than I had experienced in a very long time. Then she’d walk past me saying, “You really should sleep, you know. You’d feel better if you did.”
Cory was like Justin. Brotherly, caring, concerned, but also a fun-lover. He tried to keep me motivated in training, even though I was doing such a half-assed job. Cory would drink with me, but he would also frequently say things like “You know, this really isn’t stuff you should be doing, you’re better than this.”
A majority of 2008 was spent bouncing between Austin and Las Vegas this way. I was drunk a lot. When I wasn’t drunk, I was stoned. When I wasn’t stoned or drunk, I was miserable. I had no idea how to get out of the rut I was in. So I decided to pull yet another geographical switch at the beginning of 2009 and move, this time to Los Angeles.
There was a management company there that had talked about wanting to work with me, potentially help with my attempt at a comeback. They helped me pick out an apartment in L.A.’s newly flourishing downtown, and they got me a few connections, but that was it. I had been talking online back and forth with MC and member of hip-hop group Dilated Peoples Rakaa Iriscience, so when I finally moved, he welcomed me into his group. Rakaa’s crew was far from sober, but they were upbeat, thoughtful, creative, and productive. Rakaa is a practitioner of a martial art himself, so he appreciated what I did and the training that went into it. We would sit and politick about all manner of things. Rakaa is one of the greatest people I have ever known and very quickly took to calling me family, which prodded at a newly sore spot in me. He used to ask me why I was going out so much, what I was partying for. He used to say, just like Cory, “You’re going to have cut all this out, Mark, you can’t train like you need to while doing all of this.”
Right after moving to Los Angeles, I scheduled an appointment with Mister Cartoon, a well-known gritty black and gray tattoo artist, to have a Japanese h
annya mask tattooed on my neck. At this point, with the time off, I had been building up my collection of body art and had finished my sleeves as well as a good portion of my neck already. Hannya masks traditionally represent jealous female demons in old Japanese theater. Seemed fitting to put one on my neck after partying with that bartender in Austin. Mister Cartoon wanted to put his spin on it. The drawing he came up with was of a hannya mask crossed with a sad clown. The resulting tattoo looks like a clown desperately trying to be frightening by wearing horns and fangs but unable to hide the sadness in his eyes. Clowns are a Mister Cartoon specialty. It could not have better represented me at the time. A clown trying to convince the world that he was mean and ferocious but in reality was just one big bucket of sad. Cartoon didn’t flinch or act affected when I told him my stories. Neither did Estevan, his business partner, who was also a photographer and videographer. In fact, no one from their crew really did. They listened, nodded, and then quietly, in those L.A.-softened Mexican accents, they would each say, “Man, that’s tough,” or “That’s brutal, but you made it.”
Every one of them had a story. Both Cartoon and Estevan had grown up on the streets of Los Angeles, running with gangs, deep into drugs; both of them had lost friends, family, grown up hard and ugly. And they both had gotten out of it alive. Sober, talented, and with a work ethic that Mexican-Americans seem to have invented, they both had forged new lives for themselves. They were rough. They both had undeniably dry senses of humor, and their empathy for others came in amazing waves. One minute you would see them laugh at a crackhead Dumpster-diving outside the studio, and the next you’d see them driving directly into the heart of skid row to drop off meals they had purchased just for that purpose. They were both equally callused over and deeply compassionate. And even better, neither of them slept very much. Most of Cartoon’s work was done late at night, so he would be in the studio easily from seven P.M. until four A.M. It was perfect. I suddenly had a place I could hang out around good people. I still wasn’t sleeping, but at least I wasn’t drinking as much.