Home Is Burning (12 page)

“What are you doing up, DJ?” he'd ask me.

“Oh, just enjoying a glass of wine. You want one?” I'd say.

“Absolutely. I love wine, and it'd be nice to catch up,” he'd say as I poured him a matching glass to the brim that he'd grab with his fully functional hands and begin gulping down without spilling a drop.

We'd go out to the gazebo in our backyard. He'd talk about all the running he was doing, and about how he found the hobby to be a relaxing and rewarding escape. I'd tell him about my job in L.A. and ask him about strategies for how to start saving for my own home. He'd give me suggestions. He'd tell me about all the traveling he'd do once he decided to retire. I'd tell him about how much I loved Abby and how well our relationship was going. Marriage was a strong possibility. We'd pour another glass.

“Life is pretty darn good, isn't it?” he'd say.

“Yeah, it's great,” I'd say.

We'd listen to the crickets' synchronized chirps and stare at the Wasatch Mountains glowing in the moonlight, letting the wine settle in and overtake us with warmth and happiness. The future would feel safe and certain. We were invincible. Nothing was going to stop us from living long, healthy lives.

DING. DING. DING.

I was pulled back to reality by my dad's doorbell. He needed help. I set down my glass of wine and walked to the bed. I lifted him up and unhooked his BiPAP machine.

“For the love of God, please don't say ‘Bathroom,'” I said.

“Pee,” he said, struggling to catch his breath.

“One piss coming right up,” I replied with forced cheer. I grabbed the urinal next to his bed, helped him get his cock out, and placed it in the plastic tube, which started to fill.

“I'm sorry about all this,” he said, looking down at his peeing penis.

“Oh, no worries. Your father only dies once, so I couldn't miss it.”

He looked up at me with a tired smile. “Well, thanks for being home, DJ. We couldn't go through this without you. Love you.”

“Love you, too. Sorry you have to go through this. And sorry we're not great at this new job yet, but we'll get better. We're gonna try to make your life as good as possible.” We both managed smiles. It wasn't the same as sipping wine under the Utah sky, but it was nice to be back with the old man.

I put him on his BiPAP again and laid him down for some rest, remembering, of course, to give him a kiss on the forehead. I grabbed my glass of wine and took a big sip. “Welcome home, Dan the Man,” I whispered to myself.

 

THE LITTLE GIRLS

Of the five of us kids, the biggest victims in this whole mess were my little sisters, Jessica and Chelsea.

Greg, Tiffany, and I had the benefit of having been raised by our loving, normal, caring parents while they were relatively healthy. We had graduated college. We were supposed to be adults now. We had made it through the most vulnerable and impressionable period of our lives with nearly perfect childhoods. I mean, we had season tickets to the Utah Jazz games, took vacations to warm places during the winter, went skiing, rode around on boats. Fuck, we even had one of those Brookstone back massager/vibrator things, which Greg and I eventually discovered we could use for masturbation. Yeah, our mom was battling cancer on and off, so we had to deal with the occasional hardship, but we were mostly spoiled dickheads living in our family's golden age—the byproduct of the American Dream working out for our parents.

Sure Tiff, Greg, and I had our own personal ups and downs in our teenage years. Like the time Tiff accidentally took a hit of acid in junior high school. A couple of “friends” told her it was just a piece of gum, but it wasn't. It had LSD on it. An hour later, some innocent Mormon student found Tiff rolled up into a ball in the bathroom, muttering nonsense and hallucinating some evil shit. A few teachers were able to get her under control, and they called my parents to come grab her. They got her home, then my mom overreacted and took her to the hospital.

The doctor ruled that she just needed to ride out her trip, drink water, get to a safe environment. She was in no real danger and was brought home. My parents contained her in her room, but she got out, found me shooting hoops in the driveway, and accused me of being the devil with lightning bolts shooting out of my head.

She missed the next couple days of school.

When she made her way back, word had traveled within the
Lord of the Flies
–like atmosphere that is junior high school that Tiff was a bad kid, a burnout, a loser, and she was branded with the scarlet letter “D,” for “Druggy.”

She had also ratted out the girls who gave her the acid. They didn't take well to that and were now threatening to give her a good beating. They shunned her from their social circle, so she was now friendless. She had lost not only a few brain cells, but her whole social identity. She started dressing the part, wearing a black top with black, baggy jeans covered in holes. I'm not sure exactly what that style is called. It was like a bizarre druggy/dropout/grunge/goth combo. She would subsequently attend four different high schools and never truly recover socially.

I was admittedly a giant dickhead to her growing up—a true bully with a mouth like a shotgun. And after the LSD thing, I had more ammunition than ever. I was a nonstop thorn in her side, reminding her of her mistakes and shortcomings and making her life a living hell. She did kick me in the balls in Vegas once, however, so I figure we were even. So yeah, teenage life at school and at home was hard for Tiff and left her with little confidence.

My teenage years were pretty innocent. I was mostly a good kid. I was pretty scared of drugs and alcohol after Tiff's little devil experience, so I focused on school, basketball, making comedy videos in our basement, and masturbation. I did fall in with a group of bored pranksters influenced by MTV's
Jackass
, so we'd occasionally get into trouble. We were all horrible and awkward around girls, so most of our nights were spent trying to mimic the wildness of our
Jackass
heroes. Our best gag was this prank called “Poo Phone,” where we'd rub shit onto a public phone receiver, call it from an antiquated cell phone, and watch as some poor bastard answered, only to discover that he had just placed shit in his ear. “You've been poo-phoned,” we'd yell into his shit-covered ear.

But I was mainly just a good old boy, living in a simpler time, before things like mass school shootings and Facebook tainted our world.

Greg had his ups and downs in his teenage years. He suffered from a leg ailment, hemiparesis, as a result of his cerebral palsy. It left him with a limp in his right leg that made it tricky to play most sports, though he still managed to move around the tennis court. He had a couple of surgeries to attempt to fix it. For a few years, it seemed like his leg was always covered in a cast. But, instead of sulking, he focused on building his mind. He was an avid reader, was always working his way through a vocabulary-builder workshop, and participated in activities like debate and theater. He loved writing and knew he wanted to be a writer from an early age. He was an innocent kid with a head full of dreams and big words.

He also secretly spent his teens dealing with his own sexuality. He knew pretty early on that he was gay, but he was trying to find the right time to come out. He didn't want to do it while still in Utah. The state just wasn't that gay friendly back then. Greg figured he'd be dragged behind some hick's truck or socially ridiculed. So he waited for the right moment. He decided that moment was when our whole family was vacationing in Palm Desert halfway through his freshman year at Northwestern. Most college kids spend spring break pouring alcohol on their brains and slamming genitals together, but Greg decided he'd liberate himself another way. Greg and I had just seen
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
. We were waiting for the rest of the family to get out of some other bullshit movie. So we went into a Borders bookstore, and he told me the news as we strolled through the aisles.

“So, Danny. I have an announcement. I'm gay,” he nervously said as quickly as he could, like he was ripping off a Band-Aid. He had told me last because he knew of my bully ways. He figured I'd tease him for being gay the way I'd teased Tiffany for accidentally doing LSD. Little did he know that he was my favorite person on earth, and I'd love him no matter what. I pulled his trembling body in for a giant, brotherly hug.

“Greg. That's awesome. Very cool. When did you know you were officially gay?” I asked him.

“I knew in the fifth grade when I jacked off to Chris O'Donnell in
Mad Love
.”

“Jesus, we watched that movie together,” I said, a little shocked.

“Yeah, well, I also watched it alone. And jacked off to it,” he said.

“Well, I love you and support you no matter who you're attracted to, even if it's Chris O'Donnell,” I said, proving what a great and tolerant person I was. It was a load off his mind. I think he was expecting me to call him a faggot and love him less.

His announcement wasn't that shocking. I had suspected he was gay for most of our lives. I mean, he had a cardboard cutout of the Scarecrow from
The Wizard of Oz
in his bedroom standing there like a salute to homosexuality. Only once had he talked about girls with me. It was around his junior year in high school when he asked my advice on finger banging one of his friends. The phrase “finger banging” sounded so clunky and forced coming out of his mouth that I knew it was simply a last-ditch effort to try to appear straight. I was the wrong person to ask. I had had no luck with very many girls before somehow landing Abby.

“Fuck if I know,” I had told Greg. “I think it gets wet and you just rub around there, or something. Watch porn,” I advised him. “Porn teaches all.”

The blind leading the gay.

Greg's other friends from home had also assumed he was gay, so when he came out, he received nothing but love. It was a relatively smooth transition out of the closet. So, though I'm sure he had some inner confusion and torment, he had a pretty great run through his teenage years.

*   *   *

Jessica and Chelsea caught a few years of the Marshalls' golden age, but they were in their mid-teens when our stupid, rich, perfect bubble popped. Having two terminally ill parents is worse than being stuck in the closet with a limp or having a bad acid trip. Well, maybe it's not worse than the bad acid trip. I've never done acid, so I have no idea.

Chelsea turned sixteen a few months after my dad was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, but she acted like she was nine. She was born extremely prematurely—three and a half months, to be exact—and at birth she weighed in at two pounds, fifteen ounces. One of her kidneys hadn't developed properly, she was deaf in one ear, and she required several surgeries just to keep her alive. She almost didn't make it. But she pulled through and turned into one of the funniest, weirdest people I know. Chelsea and I had always liked each other. I felt sorry for her because she had fought so hard to survive. I took her under my wing, looked after her, ran around being crazy with her, and taught her that farting is just a part of being human. I even gave her a nickname: Moe Ham. “Moe ham” were my first words—my fat-ass attempt to say “More ham.” I'm not completely sure why I started calling her that. It just seemed fitting. She just looked like a Moe Ham. I'd later call her Fart Princess, because of her farting. I'm not great with nicknames.

I loved how crazy Chelsea was. I found her unpredictability hilarious. Once, for example, when she was about three years old, she chased my friend Mike around the house with a piece of her shit in her hand. Mike thought it was funny at first but almost broke into tears when Chelsea tossed it his way and it nearly smacked him in the face.

Another time, when she was about four years old, I wandered away from my dad and Chelsea at Toys ‘R' Us. As I was searching for Nerf toys, I noticed diarrhea running down one of the model playground slides. I finally found my frantic dad and he said, “DJ, we've got to get out of here. Chelsea just shit down one of the slides.”

In other words, she's pretty obviously related to me.

My parents didn't worry too much about the public slide shitting and the shit tossing because Chelsea was just a little kid. “Every little kid does that sort of shit. Give her a break,” my mom told me once when I brought up how odd it was. “She probably learned it from you.”

They figured she was a little immature because she was born premature. My mom never liked labeling her kids' problems or medicating them. Whenever I suggested that Chelsea should be on something for her hyperactivity or see a therapist for her unusual behavior, my mom would remind me that doctors wanted to put me on Ritalin when I was a kid.

“You were a little spaz, Danny Boy. If I listened to doctors, you would've spent your childhood in a fucking straitjacket. So shut up about Chelsea,” she'd say.

Chelsea was also the baby of the family, and we treated her like one. We even turned Moe Ham into “Baby Moe,” and still call her that today. We also figured that her behavior was a reaction to our mom having cancer. She was attached at the hip to my mom, following her around the house and talking her ear off about dance. We figured maybe she fixated on bizarre things and acted strangely as a way of coping.

“Give her a break. Her mom has cancer,” my mom would tell us any-time we gave Chelsea shit for acting weird.

“But you're our mom, too, and we're not weird,” we'd say back.

“Yes, you are. You're all weird,” she'd tell us. “In fact, Chelsea's the most normal of the bunch.”

But as Chelsea grew older, it was apparent that she wasn't like other kids her age. Once she became a teenager, we officially knew something was up. She was always kicking major ass in school—getting straight A's—but my mom still had to help her get ready every day. She refused to use a fork. She would eat her hair. She couldn't order for herself at restaurants. She'd lick all the salt off pretzels and then put them back in the bag. And she refused to sleep in her own room, electing to sleep at the base of my parents' bed, or sometimes right between them.