Boy Kings of Texas (43 page)

As we're watching Indiana Jones, I begin to tell Dan how I had made our neighbor, Joe, play the role of Sapito when I was a kid, me pretending to be Indiana when I was twelve. I say, “Fuck. It must be a terrible thing to not be able to play the hero in your own imagination. Do you think it's my fault he's never left home and is managing the neighborhood Jack in the Box?” I feel really awful all of a sudden.

The CD player is unexpectedly playing the
O Brother Where Art Thou?
soundtrack, and Dan starts singing, “
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine . . .
” in the kitchen while he's preparing the barbecue sauce. I can't help it in the dark living room, and I start crying again, feeling hopelessly lost. Contaminated.

Something's over. Something's changed again.

By the time we moved out, after a full calendar year, Dan and I couldn't stand to be in the same room alone with each other. We had exhausted our supplies of stories, thinned ourselves to translucence, robbed each other of any sort of mystery or truth.

Any recollection or cleverness that got started out of one or the other's mouth was immediately met with a sense of disgust, a transparent mask of disapproval: Oh, not
that
fucking story again? I've heard it ten fucking times. Get over it; it's
not that funny.

We did this to one another often enough that we didn't want to be in the same room together anymore.

The division was severe, terminal. Our drive for mutual understanding drove us to hatred, alienation, as brothers.

Instead of transparency, we started keeping secrets.

There was a time when, if we needed comfort, reassurance, all we had to do was call each other, and we had a code: We would start out by saying, “OK, so check this out . . . ” and then one or the other would tell his brother a story about what he'd done, what he'd tried to get away with, and how he was caught, and how he was now in trouble at work, or with school, or with someone in temporary authority, but it was nothing: I can get out of it, and it will blow over, but I just kind of need for you to tell me that everything is going to be all right, you know? I just kind of need to hear you say, “Aw, fuck those guys, man. You didn't do anything wrong; it will be fine.” You know?

And so we would; we'd bolster one another's doubts, transgressions, and trespasses with reassurances, absolutions, or sympathetic confessions, because we had no one else, no system of trust based outside of one another's understanding of our animal compulsions, brought about by living with—and being raised by—Mingo,
pater noster.

Dan understood me as thoroughly as I understood him, and now, when we found we knew each other thoroughly, we were disgusted with ourselves, and with the other. No more could we call one another and say, “OK, so check this out . . . ”

It was done. We had broken all that had tethered us together, by wanting more of it. And so I moved out. And we didn't speak to one another for years.This is who Dan and I had been groomed to be, these two pillars of mutual disgust.

I tried to break out of it by moving as far away from Brownsville as I could; I had one clubbed foot in that life and the other in this one that I've tried to create in Seattle. But you can't run with two clubbed feet.

Dan is still my own personal hero, still my biggest brother. And for years, when we needed it we gave each other the biggest place of comfort I could ever think of: the absolution, the warmth of home, the understanding that whatever we did, the other person just understood, nodded his head.

That we became estranged after living together just makes sense now. It makes sense because we could always make sense of one another, but could not make sense of this conflict that was created within us by the twisted exaggeration of machismo that was my father's first principle. And it is also a copout. I feel that very likely we will never forgive each other, and that it was really our father's humiliation that divided us, the ghost of our Gramma's construction, this conflict and competition they evoked in us as brothers, how Dad sabotaged our personalities to make himself the best and biggest among his two brave sons, made himself the strongest and the weakest, so that we had to grow up and take care of him, and quickly, because he couldn't grow up or take care of us, let alone himself.

So now, even today, my older brother Dan remains my most immediate, my most beloved of human beings on this planet (with all the hellish opposites that this relationship can create). That we could no longer be around one another is the very reason I cannot forgive my father for what he did to us, how he underactualized us, how he prematurely sexualized in us this competition. And how in our eventuality, Dan and I are utter offenders to one another's good sense, disparate strangers on the street. How terribly sad. How terribly human. How pathetically biblical, and familial.

My brother Dan fell on the Dad-grenade, as the oldest boy. Took most of the blast, shielded me with his suffering, as the person closest to Dad besides Mom. How do you repay that?

In the end, I hope Dan knows how much I love him for that, love him still, and that he can still—even though we do not speak—hopefully carry that, in his heart; that however deep his resentment, misunderstanding, and hatred of me, how much his younger brother loves him, how I align him high among the brutal songs of trumpeting angels, the gilded testaments of broken saints, that Dan is still our family's hero. The caretaker of his and other people's families. That his song of sadness is still sung, and still remembered fondly.

And I have the hope that he will come to know that this debt, genetically imprinted, was deviously engineered so that it could never be paid back. That I could never even begin to reimburse him for what he suffered, except through witnessing and acknowledging it, as I have done here, and that—
that
—is what I tried to tell you, Dan, though you swatted it away dismissively like it was nothing. That? That's nothing. Move in with me and Orlene. It will all be better. Come on in, move into that bedroom there, and have at the groceries. Just not the canned goods we keep under the bed, or my personal stash.

And then you later hated me for it, when I tried to explain, and kept failing at reimbursement, kept failing at being a man in your eyes because you kept me as your little brother, constantly in the debt of your good graces and goodwill, protected by your generosity, at the expense of your respect.

Please understand, Dan, that yours is a debt that could never be paid, by anyone.

Epilogue

On Dan's first day on the job at Queen Anne Healthcare, a nursing home here in Seattle, he meets Phil Franzo, who becomes one of his patients. Phil just happens to be suffering from a bowel obstruction the size of a baseball that day. This is Dan's first procedure at his new job.

The nurse's assistant is a wispy Filipino boychick who has already known Phil Franzo for a couple of years. “Now, Phil, this is Daniel. Daniel is going to help you, OK?”

“Mister,” says Phil gruffly to Dan, lying on his back and holding his distended belly, “I'm full of shit, mister.” He's a small man with black horn-rimmed glasses, vaguely Italian and diminutive, from the World War II era, with old man black hair peppered with gray. He's adorable, except for this belly swollen like he was an African child with parasites. “I'm full of shit,” he repeats.

Dan has seen this before. It's a bowel obstruction, and it's a messy procedure.

Phil's stomach is distended and firm, like he's got a bowling ball growing in there. Dan removes his watch, straps on long gloves, and puts a bed pan along with a five-gallon bucket down by the bed, preps for what needs to happen. “Are you ready, Phil? This is going to hurt a little, but you'll be fine. Here I go.”

The assistant raises Phil's legs, and Dan's gloved fingers enter Phil through the tradesman's entrance and grab hold of the hard, dried obstruction. Dan pulls it free, slowly, and then Phil's lower GI tract begins the process of emptying.

Not a pleasant thing, sure, but it helps Phil. He begins to feel relief, and the Manila boychick assistant says to Phil, “Now, Phil, you say thank you to Daniel; he just did a very nice thing for you. Say thank you, Phil.”

Phil says, “Thanks, you prick.”

Dan falls in love with Phil Franzo right there. He's Phil Franzo's primary nighttime caregiver, and they've both made a new best friend on Dan's first day of work.

After three years of not speaking to me, Dan and Orlene fly to Brownsville to visit family for the first time after nearly five years of living in Seattle and come back with the determination to move back to Texas, to pack it in and move back home.

But once back he breaks the freeze between us and calls me unexpectedly one afternoon and invites me to a large Sunday dinner at his favorite seafood restaurant, later that week. I agree to meet him. I've missed my bigger brother. He tells me to meet him at the nursing home, after he's off work at six o'clock, and I do.

I'm nervous as I make the drive to the nursing home, and in my eagerness to see him, I'm terribly early, but Dan is overjoyed to see me, hugs me forcefully when I see him, and his bulk and strength are very reassuring, as he envelopes me in his nurse's scrubs. He kisses me on the cheek, and I do the same, in return. I'm surprised at how much I missed him, how big the vacuum he left in my heart.

He brings me to the nurses' station and introduces me to his fellow nurses: his best friend Llambi, the Croatian kid who I'm surprised looks like he could be a surfer from Santa Cruz; and of course Alex, whom I knew from before; and then, one of his favorite patients, Helen Ellis. Helen Ellis is Dan's other favorite patient because of the stories she tells him, as a former model from the 1960s and an ex-junkie who once dated Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns, possibly the toughest man who ever lived and played football. He used to beat the crap out of her, she tells Dan. He used to beat the crap out of anybody who pissed him off, especially women, she says. She doesn't seem conflicted about this, says it with a sort of antique awe, I notice.

Dan's not ready to leave yet, and he asks me to wheel Phil Franzo to his room while he does other nursing things, in preparation for his departure. Phil is in the lounge making a mess of his coffee and cold water, pouring coffee into the water, water back into the coffee, for no reason whatsoever.

“Phil! Philippo! This is my younger brother, June. He's going to take you to your room, OK? Say hello, Phil,” says Dan to Phil, then runs off to finish his shift.

Phil says, “Hi, you prick.”

I try not to laugh. I know all about Phil.

I wheel Phil to his room, get him next to his bed.

“Put me to bed, doll,” he says.

“What did you say, Phil?” I ask, not sure I heard correctly.

“Put me to bed, doll.”

“Phil, I'm not going to put you to bed. You can do it yourself.”

“Bah, you're a prick, mister,” says Phil, clearly disgusted, and starts to move from his chair to his bed.

A bit later, Dan and I are at the nurses' station saying good-bye to Llambi and Alex when Phil wheels himself by in super slow motion. Apparently, he didn't want to get into bed too badly and had shifted back to his wheelchair.

Phil rolls directly in front of the nurses' station and settles in next to a vegetative but still living Mary Ellen, aka Dances with Whiskey, who is now eighty-seven years old, though, as Dan continues to tell her, she doesn't look a day over eighty.

“Fire this prick,” Phil says to Dan and Llambi, pointing at me with his thumb.

We all burst out laughing.

“I want you to fire this prick,” he repeats himself.

“Why do you want us to fire him?” asks Llambi, winking at me conspiratorially.

“Because he's a prick,” Phil says.

I say, “Phil, your schtick's getting old.”

He says, “Fuck you, you prick. You're fired.”

Dan wants me to move back to Texas with him in a year, he tells me.

Moaning over Alaskan king crab at a Magnolia restaurant, he tells me that it's done here; that he's felt it for a long time, for the both of us.

“Look, I'll never speak bad of this place. I love Seattle. But we're getting older, and you don't know how old you are until you see your parents again. Can't believe how old they got,” he says while digging at the crab's interiors with a tiny, double-pronged fork. There's stringy meat all over our table. I have no argument. Things are coming down around my ears. My time is unstructured and I've been acting out like a borderline personality for months. But Dan doesn't know about that.

“Besides,” he says, “I don't want to be here when Phil Franzo checks out. I love Philippo; I don't think I can handle him dying.” Dan has served as a midwife to people's deaths in that nursing home on an almost weekly basis. He's like a death Sherpa now. He describes the process of death as similar to watching a ceiling fan wind itself down, as the body begins to shut down, until it just stops. To hear that he's grown this attached to one of his patients is considerable indeed. Franzo, a Brooklynite, had a stroke twenty years ago and has been at Queen Anne Health Care for eighteen years. He was slipping into more of a vegetative state until Dan and Llambi came along and engaged him in schtick, as boys.

“How's Phil doing?” I ask, wondering if there is something to his condition that I haven't been made aware of.

“Oh, Phil's doing great,” says Dan, and then pauses. “I just don't want to see him go.”

His face changes a bit, and he prepares to get into his Phil Franzo schtick mode: “You're a prick, Phil,” Dan says in his regular voice.

“I was born that way, mister. You're a prick, too,” Dan replies to himself in Phil's gravel pit voice, for my benefit.

“What's that make us, Phil?” says Dan as Dan.

“A pair of pricks,” says Dan as Phil.

Then Dan imitates Llambi from across the nursing home, and yells out, “I'm a prick, too!” waving his hand.

“Triplets,” says Dan as Phil.

Early on, when Dan was very new at this nursing home and he'd just met Phil, Phil would usually wheel himself into the smoking area and watch as people would come in and out of the nursing home at the three o'clock afternoon shift change.

There had been this twenty-five-year-old Somalian nursing assistant who'd moved to America with dreams of becoming an NBA basketball player. He would dress every day in an NBA outfit like he was going to play in a professional game, for the Lakers. Every day.

Phil would watch him walk in and out of work, and one day, Phil looked at him and said, as usual, “You're a prick, mister.”

The Somalian kid took umbrage at this, his American fantasy so delicate and fragile. He got angry, yelled something in Africani at Phil, and actually punched Phil in the stomach, which was lying flabby and exposed because his robe was open while he smoked his cigarette. The punch left an imprint on Phil's stomach.

“Ouch, you prick,” Phil yelled back.

Dan and Llambi saw this happen from across the hall and grabbed the Somali kid by the back of the neck and slammed him to the ground, unnecessarily putting their knees and weight on his neck until the cops showed up and sent the idiot back to whatever shithole Somalian village he was from, rescinding his work visa.

Phil watched as the cops showed up and the guys wrote up the abuse report, and then he remembered his manners, as he continued to smoke.

“Thanks, you pricks,” he said, to Dan and Llambi.

“I can't watch him go,” says Dan, in a moment of quiet, after we're done laughing.

“If you'd seen him when we got there . . . ” he trails off, his eyes water and he swallows, hard.

This is significant. Dan has helped many patients that he loved to their end, helped their families endure the inevitable and painful reality of expiration, of death. Of dying. He's charted all this on his own, with just his own personal navigational tools, his own love for their humanity and dignity. They can't teach you that in nursing school.

But Phil Franzo, he is different. He has imprinted upon Dan as something other than a patient he has to Sherpa through that final door. Dan loves Phil, like family. For the first time in his professional career, Dan cannot watch one of his patients die. Maybe it's because Dan brought Phil back from the brink of a vegetative state, with the affection and the jokes exchanged between men, between them and Llambi and Alex.

Maybe all this happened because I was out of his life, and that gave Dan the freedom to love others in the same way he loved his little brother, and it made his life richer. Spread that affection around, in a way he couldn't before.

And so now, here is Phil, at this point, aware, knows he's making the boys laugh.

They brought him back to life. And now Dan couldn't watch him die.

Phil died in 2008. I had posted some variation of these stories on some sort of online blog at some point when I was wooing some girl who turned out to be a polyamorist. Long story. I got a message from Phil's grandson, out of the blue, who had been Googling his grandfather's name. The kid was twenty-two, from New York state, and uncomfortable writing. He had been online, trying to find out more about his grandfather, before he shipped out to Afghanistan. Phil had been in World War II, and the kid was trying to find the courage that his grandfather once had, to do his duty. We exchanged email for a month before the kid shipped out. I shared all this with Dan, forwarded him every email exchanged, mediated questions and answers between Phil's grandson and what was left of Dan's memories of Phil. The kid loved all the stories about his grandfather, thanked me effusively for taking the time to write them and post them. I had no idea they were still online.

Dan was noticeably saddened to be reminded of Phil. Llambi had kept him up-to-date, even though Dan had moved back to San Antonio, and had told him of Phil's passing. Phil had been cremated and his ashes spread into the Stillaguamish River, about an hour north of Seattle, his grandson had written. Dan did not know that part. The kid said he and his mother, Phil's estranged daughter, felt that Phil would have liked that, because he'd been locked indoors for the thirty years or so after his stroke. My stories of his grandfather made him laugh, he wrote me, and he said he'd print them out and carry them with him when he shipped out, he said.

I did that—helped close the circuit for Dan and Phil, though it broke my heart to watch him grieve Phil's passing.