Home Is Burning (32 page)

I started to head out of the room. He started to cry, sounding like a cow being kicked to death.

I turned back. “Ah, Jesus. If you want to support this marriage, I'll support you. I'll make you portable. But I'm doing this for you. Not for Jessica. Not for Mom. Not for Creepy Todd.”

He smiled and thanked me, implying that I was a hero (of sorts) and the best son in the history of sons. “Thanks, Dan. We couldn't do this without you.”

“Whatever, Dad. This horrible shit is ruining our lives.”

*   *   *

The next day, in our family's living room, in front of the windows facing out on trusty, snow-capped Mount Olympus, we were to hold a ceremony with some friends and family from both sides.

To prepare, my friend Dom and I spent several hours getting drunk. I had asked Dom to film the event, since I thought it was so fucked up. Having a dead dad, Dom was used to tragedy, so he didn't mind hanging around. I was surprised the rest of my family members—minus my dad—weren't drinking. However, when Tiffany showed up, and I asked, “Why aren't you drinking?” she turned to me with a sly smile and said, “Oh, I had six beers before I came here.” Tiffany wasn't a big drinker, so seeing her drunk was rare.

Minutes before the ceremony, Tiffany pulled Jessica into the basement to try to talk her out of the marriage. Jessica was already in her wedding dress.

“Jess, run as fast as you can,” Tiffany said.

“Ha. Yeah right,” said Jess.

“I'm serious. Run. You don't have to do this. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it,” Tiffany pleaded.

Jess didn't run. She went upstairs to get married.

“Fucking fucker,” said Tiff. “I need another beer.” So we all cracked open some fresh beers and chugged them into our tired, sad bodies.

The guests started to arrive.

Regina and I got my dad into his suit. I made his respirator portable. We got him into his chair and into the elevator, heading down to the main level where the wedding would take place. As I wheeled him into the kitchen, I saw a sea of Todd's Mormon relatives snacking and drinking caffeine-free sodas. It was what I imagined hell looking like. Once I got into the kitchen, I yelled, “Ladies and gentlemen! I present to you, the father of the bride!”

All heads turned to my poor, crippled father, trying to manage a smile, looking as sharp as a man with Lou Gehrig's disease glued to a wheelchair can look. Everyone was stunned—shocked into silence. Eventually, Greg started to applaud. “Oh, Daddy, you look so good!” he yelled sarcastically.

Everyone started clapping along with Greg. There were even a few hoots. My dad smiled. At least he'd get to see one of his kids get married.

I got my dad into the living room and situated him in the back. All the chairs were set up. We had a few family friends there, like Sam and Sue, but it was mainly Todd's massive Mormon family. They didn't know what to make of the marriage, either. One brother-in-law on his side said, “Well, this sure is a strange event.”

“Yeah, it's like a really fucked-up Woody Allen movie starring stupid people instead of intellectuals,” I said back, realizing as I said it that he was probably too much of a Mormon to ever watch a Woody Allen film.

My mom's friend Janet sang Beatles songs as she strummed away on her acoustic guitar. Todd and Jessica had brought in a Mormon bishop to marry them. I guess this was officially a Mormon wedding, in our childhood house. Fucking unreal.

Right before Jessica was about to walk down the mock-aisle and into Creepy Todd's arms, my dad looked over at me and motioned for me to deflate his cuff, allowing him to talk. I did.

“I want to walk her down the aisle,” he said.

“Dad, you can't really walk, though, remember?”

“I can go a few feet. I know it. As long as you hold me up,” he said.

“All right. I'll try,” I said.

Jessica appeared in her beautiful dress. She looked great. She looked happy. She looked like she was excited to start a new life. It was her rebirth as much as it was her wedding.

Janet started playing “Here Comes the Sun,” the same song my parents had walked down the aisle to some thirty years earlier. I wrapped the gait belt around my dad's bony rib cage and strapped the respirator around my fat shoulder, making sure not to step on any of the tubes dangling from the trach. I pulled him up out of his wheelchair and got him standing. I moved around so I could hold him up from behind. He looked over and smiled at Jessica. She smiled back. She slipped her hand into his. Everyone stood, and he started the walk down the aisle with his little girl, his fat son holding on to him from behind like he was Bernie from
Weekend at Bernie's
.

“I love you, Jess,” he said as he passed her off to Todd. “Good luck.”

*   *   *

After the ceremony, a very drunk Tiffany tossed Creepy Todd up against our garage and threatened to cut his dick off. Meanwhile, I sat drunk and naked in the hot tub with a few random non-Mormon wedding guests I was able to round up, because that seemed like the right thing to do.

 

SPA DAY

As this horrible Lou Gehrig's situation grew more and more intense, I started to expect more and more support and sympathy from family and friends. No one experienced my demanding wrath like Abby.

From my perspective, I thought Abby should have made my life easier by being more attentive and loving. After all, we had been together for five years now. I was initially understanding of her lack of empathy, but then it started to annoy me. She acted as though I wanted to go through this, as though I had a choice. I didn't. I couldn't leave my family to deal with my dad's disease alone. I was on Abby's ass to act as if she cared more. It's not that she didn't care. She really did. She loved my dad and me. She just didn't know how to handle everything. It wasn't her tragedy, and it was a little too intense for a cute blonde in her mid-twenties to go through if she didn't absolutely have to. So for her, the easiest thing was to ignore the situation, pretend it didn't exist, and hope her boyfriend came out of it relatively normal and well adjusted, so that we could continue living our happy, sunshine-and-Jäger-shots lives.

A couple of weeks after Jessica's wedding, Abby began to distance herself from me even more than she had over the past months. But I stuck with it. She was, in many ways, all I had going for me. I would often think, while feeding my dad through his gastrointestinal tube or cleaning shit out of his commode, At least I have Abby.

I loved my trips out to Berkeley to visit her. When I was there, I was still stressed and consumed by family stuff, but at least we were together and not talking over the phone. Now I can look back and say that if I could do those visits over, I would make them more fun and try my best to not bring up my family. But at the time, it just felt impossible not to talk about what was going on at home. It was the only thing going on in my life, and it was the most intense thing to ever happen to my spoiled fat ass.

In April, I called Abby one Saturday night when she was out with friends, and she didn't answer. I called a couple more times. No answer. She didn't call me back for a few days. I figured that she was having doubts about our relationship, and that her friends—who never liked me much and vice versa—were egging her on to break up with me.

Eventually she called.

She was crying. It was hard for her. She knew what bad timing all this was, but she also knew that she couldn't remain in a relationship that wasn't full of fun, but rather full of tragedy. She said, through her tears, that she needed some space—that I had gotten too depressing to be around. I told her that I was in Utah, and asked her how much fucking space she needed. She said that she needed more. No visits or phone calls for a while, until she figured things out and determined what she wanted.

So our slow and painful breakup began.

The agreement was that we'd take a “break.” I didn't know what that meant, so I instantly reacted by fucking a few girls I had met through mutual friends. I think that's the first thing most people do in such circumstances: they fuck the lowest-hanging fruit. I'm sure she did the same.

This fucking of other people didn't help, but instead made me much, much lonelier. It didn't give me solace or closure. It just gave me shame—and fears of having contracted chlamydia (tested negative three times—no big deal). I missed Abby and wanted her back even more. You can't fuck away the feelings you have for someone else.

After a couple of weeks, Abby and I started talking again, and there was still some hope that we'd get back together, at least on my end. I tried to be funny and full of life during our phone calls. I tried not to talk about death and my parents and my little sister marrying a Mormon. I figured that maybe if I focused on the positive, she'd remember what an awesome person I was.

I'd then hang up the phone, slump back into my depressed self, and go sit next to my dad. My dad felt bad I was going through this breakup. He would look at me with pained eyes, wanting me to feel better.

“I'm sorry about all this, DJ,” he said. “Abby is a really great girl.”

“Yeah, well, she's not being so great now,” I said.

“It'll work out if it's meant to be,” he said. He'd shake his head and look up at the ceiling. “This fucking disease.”

He couldn't help but feel that the whole mess was his fault. He felt guilty about everything—me, my mom acting crazy, Jessica—and I felt guilty that he felt guilty. It seemed like a turning point in the way he thought about his disease. Now it was clear how ALS was affecting all our lives.

My mom was a little more blunt about the situation. She liked Abby and had hopes that I'd marry her, but instantly turned on her when the breakup began. “You tell that little bitch to stop being a piece of shit,” she said. “Do you want me to call her?” My mom would occasionally text or call Abby when she was out of her mind on Fentanyl.

“No, Mom, stay out of this one. It's none of your business,” I pleaded.

“You're my Danny Boy. It is my business,” she said. “I'll go out to Berkeley and shove that laser, or whatever the fuck she works on, right up her skinny little ass.”

Even Stana decided to weigh in. “Danny, this girl, she is no good for you.”

“I don't know, Stana. I think she's pretty good for me,” I said.

“No, Danny. You have big heart, she have small heart. No big heart with small heart. Is no good match.”

My dad and I both started to really focus on each other, trying our best to cheer each other up. Regina was around, but my dad needed as much help as he could get, so I continued to put everything I had into him for a while—hoping that it would take my mind off Abby—and he put everything he could give right back into me. The snow was finally starting to melt, so we'd go for long walks. We had a favorite route through our neighborhood. My dad even learned how to use his little remaining arm strength to steer the electric wheelchair himself. We'd talk about some of the best Jazz games we ever went to, or our favorite family vacations. Mine was when he took Greg and me to the 1992 NBA All-Star Game in Orlando—the one where Magic Johnson came back from HIV to win the MVP. We got to our Disney-themed hotel late at night, and the pool was closed. But my dad helped Greg and me break in. I remember thinking it was cool as shit that I had a dad who would break us into swimming pools. My dad's favorite vacation was when we drove our boat up to Camano to spend time with his mom and go crabbing. He really loved it up there.

But my unhappiness was apparent. When Tiffany, my mom, and I were unloading my dad from our van for a walk up at Red Butte Garden, I lost my shit. His chair had caught on a seat belt. I tried to unhook it, but couldn't, so I started tugging on the seat belt and screaming, “Motherfuckers!” as loud as I could. I followed up the “Motherfuckers!” with a string of expletives that would make the devil cringe. I think I actually flipped off the seat belt at one point and punched the floor of the van. I started to cry and melted to the ground. I was losing it.

Other garden-goers—who were undoubtedly expecting a pleasant break from the day-to-day bullshit—were horrified. I'm sure they thought, Should that unstable fat-ass really be caring for that dying man? I probably shouldn't have been. But what the fuck else was I supposed to do? I had a full-blown case of caregiver fatigue, combined with a splash of heartbreak.

Depression was consuming me. I was drinking alone in the basement while playing pinball, about a bottle of wine a night. On the plus side, I was getting pretty great at pinball.

I was darker and a little more morbid than usual. One afternoon, I was picking Chelsea up from school.

“How was your stupid day?” I asked Chelsea.

“Good,” she said. “How was your stupid day?”

“It was shit. Everything is shit. Nothing matters anymore and everything turns to shit,” I explained.

“Oh, okay.” She nervously giggled. “Can we stop at 7-Eleven and get a Slurpee?”

“I don't see the point, but sure.” So we got pointless Slurpees. I was too depressed to drink mine, so I dumped it in the sink.

I knew I'd officially lost it when I bare-knuckle-punched the respirator when it wouldn't stop beeping. After that, my dad suggested I go see their shrink, Robin. I did. Initially I didn't like her because I thought I was smarter than she was. But eventually she started to offer up some good advice.

“Why would you want to be with someone who doesn't give you support and love when you need it the most?” she asked.

“Because she's adorable. God, I miss her,” I wanted to say, but instead said, “No, you're right. That's how I need to start to think about it. But I miss her.”

“You sound depressed,” she said.

“No shit, Sherlock,” I wanted to say.