Home Is Burning

by Dan Marshall

  “Heard your new boyfriend loves you so much he disappeared to Maine,” I said, already going into attack mode.

  “So when are you going back to California?”

  “So who do you think BCB’s fucking behind your back in Maine?” I fired back.

  Pretty soon after I arrived, Tiffany stopped coming around as frequently. Our contemptuous relationship kept her away. She had too much going on for me to make her feel like shit every time she came home.

  Jessica and Chelsea were at school most of the day. When they were around, they didn’t help with my parents. They were too young, too confused to really do anything anyway.

  “So you don’t do anything around here, do you?” I asked Chelsea one night.

  “Nope. That’s not my job,” she proclaimed.

  “What is your job?” I asked.

  “School, dance, and farting,” she joked as she danced off to do her homework.

  With my mom, Tiffany, and the little girls mostly out of the picture, I turned to Greg. Once my mom had started fading into her chemo daze, Greg had taken over the caregiving and house-management duties. He had been home for a few months and was doing a great job, but he was already a little burned out—which was understandable. He was only twenty-two. He should’ve been back in Chicago nailing dudes he met at gay bars. But instead, he was home wiping our dad’s ass.

  Greg and I had always been close—brothers but also best friends. We were only two years apart, and grew up with our rooms right across the hall from each other. As a kid, I had an iguana named Oozy, who escaped his cage, bit my finger, and took over my room. I was terrified of him. So for a long stretch while we figured out what to do about Oozy, I slept in Greg’s Wizard of Oz–decorated room. We’d stay up late talking about life, tennis, the Jazz, movies, our fucked-up family, etc. Even when we finally caught Oozy and gave him away to a pet store, we still had our brother sleepovers. We did everything together. We wore the same clothes. Fuck, we even had matching Speedos, which we once mistakenly wore to a popular Utah water park called Seven Peaks. “Hey look, it’s the Speedo brothers,” one bully yelled at us. We retired the Speedos shortly thereafter. No matter what was going on with our family—with the world—Greg and I still had each other.

  But Greg was angry with me for taking so long to come home while he trudged through this bullshit alone. He had thought it was going to be more of a team effort. We’d usually talk endlessly, but he was sort of ignoring me, acting a little bitchy and standoffish. After a few days of tension, we finally had a heart-to-heart. I was unpacking a few books and clothes. I decided to set my bed up in the front dining room of our house because it was the only available room that wasn’t torn apart by the construction.

  “Settling in?” Greg asked, sticking his head in the doorway.

  “Yep, there’s construction shit all over the room in the basement, and Jess has my old room, so I figured I’d set up shop here.”

  “Yeah, Jesus, this house used to be so fun. It’s a shitshow now,” he said.

  “Remember the epic Nerf wars?” I asked.

  “Oh, man, those were the best,” he said. “And American Gladiators.” In the summer of ’93, Greg and I had gotten obsessed with the TV show American Gladiators. Greg even called me when I was away at John Stockton’s basketball camp to tell me who had won. We were so in love with it that we set up our basement to replicate the Gladiator events and would invite our friends over to compete against us.

  “I loved American Gladiators. You were better than Nitro,” I said.

  “Though not as gay,” he said. “God, all those men in spandex banging into each other, no wonder I loved it.” We smiled at each other. It was nice to remember when it was good, when our house had been in its prime.

  “Oh, how’s your pubic lice, by the way?” I asked.

  “Completely gone. I beat it. Only took two months!” he said.

  “Atta boy, Gregor.” I gave him a big high five and pulled him in for a congratulatory hug. We laughed. I looked at my old pal.

  “Sorry it took so long to get home,” I said, getting more serious.

  “Well, we didn’t know it would go this fast with Dad.”

  “Yeah, really hit the poor guy hard. Fucking Christ. Who knew?” I said.

  “It’s only going to get worse. God, I sort of hope he doesn’t go on the respirator,” he said.

  “You know Mom’s going to hook the fucking thing to his throat herself if she has to,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s true. Fuck, it’s going to suck.” Greg shook his head. “Well, glad you’re back to help.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” I said.

  And just like that, we were best pals again—a couple of American Gladiators ready to face this thing together.

  My mom was pretty self-sufficient. She had had cancer for long enough to know how to manage it. She had shaved her head, partially for effect and to shout out to the world, “Look at me. I have cancer,” but mainly so she didn’t have to go through the process of watching her hair fall out, piece by piece. Several of her friends had agreed to drive her up to chemo and sit with her at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. She’d get ready in the morning, they’d pick her up, and then they’d drop her back at home in the afternoon. She would march up to her bedroom and settle into a long, deep cancer sleep. She had, at some point, become absolutely addicted to yogurt. It was all she was eating, all she could really keep down. All we had to do for her was make sure we always had yogurt in the fridge. But that was it.

  Taking care of my mom was easy, but she did suffer from something we called “chemo brain.” Chemo brain resulted from her still being a little out of it from the cocktail of lymphoma-fighting drugs they’d given her. Basically she was just really scatterbrained and would say crazy shit. For example, she was really pushing for me to ask for Abby’s hand in marriage, even though this was probably the worst time for that. One night while I was watching HBO, she stumbled down to grab a yogurt and started chatting with me.

  “So you know how you love Pez?” she said. When I was a teenager, I started a Pez collection to ensure that I would never get laid.

  “Yeah, I mean, that was like ten years ago,” I said.

  “I was thinking you could put an engagement ring in a Pez dispenser and ask Abby that way,” she suggested.

  “Wow. That’d be an awesome way to scare her away for good,” I replied.

  “No. She’d love it. You’d just ask her if she wants a Pez, she’d say yes, then the ring would pop out. She’d be so surprised,” she said.

  “And what if she doesn’t want a Pez?” I asked.

  “What kind of monster turns down a Pez.”

  “Okay, great suggestion. I’ll go pick out a ring and Pez dispenser tomorrow,” I said sarcastically.

  “Great!” My mom then floated away with her yogurt.

  We were always on the lookout for chemo brain and would warn each other when she had it. “Watch out, Mom has chemo brain,” we’d say. We’d know to ignore anything she said at that point.

  The main focus was on my dad. His arms were gone. Well, not really gone—they were still attached to his body; he just couldn’t use them. His diaphragm was getting weaker and weaker by the day, making breathing very difficult. He needed to nap while hooked to his BiPAP machine at least a few times a day. He couldn’t dress himself. His speech was slow and labored, his voice so soft you could barely hear him. He required three feedings a day. He was done with regular food. Just water and cans of Promote, all injected into his stomach through his G-tube. Once his breathing got bad enough, he’d go on the respirator, at which point he would be permanently hooked to a machine and bound to a wheelchair or bed.

  There was very little talk of hiring an aide to help with some of my dad’s more intimate care. My mom insisted that we just do it. I brought it up only once.

  “Shouldn’t we hire some asshole to at least get Dad ready in the morning and handle some of the bathroom bullshit?” I asked my mom j
ust before she left for chemo one morning.

  “No, it’s not that bad. God forbid you lazy kids actually do something around here. A little hard work won’t kill you,” she said.

  “But a little hard work also wouldn’t kill a hired aide,” I said.

  “Shut up. Your dad doesn’t want some ugly aide touching his penis and watching him shit. You kids can do it. He’s your father,” she said, slamming the door and ending the discussion.

  It was official. We would provide all the care. And my mom was right. A little hard work wouldn’t kill us. We were unemployed. We could handle it. It was time to roll up our sleeves and just fucking deal with this. So Greg and I became our dad’s little helper monkeys—Greg taking the lead as head helper monkey.

  Greg started training me to be the assistant helper monkey by teaching me what to do when our dad needed to go to the bathroom. Though he could still walk, getting him up and down was a hassle, so we started using a bedside urinal, which was this disgusting plastic container that looked like a Nalgene water bottle gone horribly wrong.

  “Now, you place his penis in the urinal so he can pee,” he said, while placing my dad’s penis in the urinal.

  “And he’s okay with a gay person touching his penis?” I joked.

  “Your gay jokes aren’t funny anymore, and he doesn’t care who touches it at this point,” Greg said.

  “So long as it’s not an ugly girl,” my dad said. I had already helped him take a shower, so I felt strangely okay helping him pee in bed. My cherry had been popped. I mean, it was still weird as shit, because it was my dad’s penis, but it was just something that had to be done. There was no getting around it.

  The feedings were next.

  “You just take this syringe and stick it into his G-tube. Then you pour in a glass of water, three cans of Promote, then another glass of water,” Greg explained.

  “And you just have to watch it go in, all slow like that?” I asked as I watched the yellow goop slowly drain into my dad.

  “Yes, you can’t fill Daddy up too fast, or he’ll pop,” explained Greg. Greg called my dad “Daddy” sarcastically, when he was in goof-around mode.

  The hardest part of the new job was the BiPAP machine.

  “You have to put the mask on first. Place it over his nose and mouth, and tighten the straps around his head. Then you turn on the machine. Once it’s humming, you can swing him into bed,” Greg explained, swinging my dad into bed like a pro. “Then be sure to give Daddy a big kiss on the forehead, and tell him how much you love him,” Greg said, with a little sarcasm. “LOVE YOU SO MUCH, DADDY.”

  “Do I have to do the kissing part?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s the most important part,” Greg said, planting another kiss on him.

  “God, you’re so gay,” I said.

  “Not funny,” Greg said.

  “Dad would laugh, but he’s hooked to this fucking machine,” I said.

  * * *

  Greg eventually trained me to do a pretty good job caring for my dad, and we worked together to look after him full-time. But, even though Greg and I had some things under control, we were still sloppy in our handling of this mess. There isn’t a manual for this sort of shit. So, we made a lot of mistakes.

  One day, we accidentally left him on the BiPAP for three hours while he needed to take a shit. He had no way of letting us know that he needed help, and he couldn’t get up on his own, so he shit his pants.

  “We’ve got to figure out how to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” I told Greg as I dug shit out of my dad’s pants, missing my life in L.A.—the palm trees, the lifestyle; fuck, even the traffic didn’t seem so bad. “We’ve got to get control of this.”

  Our stupid solution was to place a cowbell next to his bed, forgetting that he couldn’t reach over, grab it, and jingle it like a child on Christmas morning. That obviously didn’t work. After the bell, we decided that the best way for him to alert us was to have him kick at the bed when he needed to get up, since he could still move his legs. But his kicks weren’t loud enough and wasted a lot of his energy. We’re fucking idiots.

  Thankfully, our bald across-the-street neighbor, Ralph, stepped in. When we were growing up, Ralph had been one of our mortal enemies, despite the fact that he was the only other non-Mormon in the neighborhood. I was terrified of him. My neighborhood friends Mike and Bob would skateboard in the street right in front of Ralph’s house. Ralph hated hearing them out there, so he threw his dog’s shit in the road to fuck with them. Mike retaliated by throwing Slurpee cups over his fence into Ralph’s backyard. Ralph responded by saving up those Slurpee cups for months and then setting all fifty-something of them at Mike’s door as a warm “fuck you.”

  Things got really bad with Ralph after one of Mike’s friends mooned him as he drove by in his self-made car. (Ralph was an engineer who built things he wanted, like cars.) Ralph swerved into Mike’s driveway, got out of the car, and charged toward the ass-flasher, saying, “I’m going to tear your fucking head off and shove it up your ass.” He then asked a simple question to the group while rolling up his sleeves. “You ladies ever get your asses kicked?” We were about fifteen years old at the time, so Ralph had the foresight to back off, maybe picturing the headline BALD 60-YEAR-OLD ENGINEER SHOVES 15-YEAR-OLD’S HEAD UP OWN ASS FOLLOWING MOONING.

  But the incident still scared us. We were so scared, in fact, that we would hide in my backyard and launch water balloons at his house. We even got to the point where we filled the launcher with some of the shit he had tossed on the street and tried shooting it back his way.

  But when my dad was diagnosed with ALS, Ralph underwent a transformation. I guess there’s good and bad in everyone and tragedy can amplify either. While some will shy away from the challenges tragedy presents (as I did initially), others give a William Wallace–esque scream and charge toward it with whatever weapon they can round up. Ralph was in the latter category. He said, “I don’t like many people, but I like your dad.” I mentioned that it’s virtually impossible to hate my dad, and he responded by saying, “I know. I tried. I couldn’t. He’s a good man. Couldn’t be a better guy to get this horrible, horrible disease.”

  Thankfully, Ralph was a handyman, and though he didn’t have any hair, he had a lot of tools. In fact, he had a whole back room in his house full of them. Having only ever used a hammer for killing ants on the sidewalk, I was pretty amazed by both the number of his tools and his ability to use them.

  Ralph would help out however he could—all while sporting an angry, judgmental scowl. I complained to Ralph about how my dad couldn’t alert us when he needed something, and told him about the bed shitting.

  Ralph shook his disappointed head and said, “You guys really don’t know what you’re doing over there, do you?”

  “Not really. There’s not a manual for this sort of shit, so we mess up a lot,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve heard the whole ‘manual’ speech from all of you. I think it’s just important to use your head, be logical. This stuff isn’t that hard,” he said. “He can’t be shitting the bed.”

  So Ralph built a doorbell for Dad to ring whenever he needed anything, sort of a “Please come help me” button. Genius. It wasn’t that fancy, just a doorbell button screwed to a piece of wood that emitted a single, pleasant DING when pressed, but I could spend the rest of my life trying and never make something like that. I can hardly make a fucking sandwich.

  We set the doorbell next to my dad’s hand, and it worked great. He had enough strength to hit it. It seemed to bring a lot of order to the house. My dad would ring it whenever he needed to get up, then we’d go help him. All Greg and I had to do was sit back and listen for the bell.

  * * *

  Part of the job required that Greg and I watch my dad during the night. The bell made that easier. We’d take listening shifts. We called it “Daddy Duty,” which is also what we called the massive shits he’d take. While on Daddy Duty, listening for the bell
was all encompassing. Since my parents’ bedroom was on the top floor, hanging out and playing pinball, drinking alone, or watching TV in the basement was not an option. I’d started smoking cigarettes, because that seemed like the right thing to do in this situation and because I’m an absolute moron, but those were out now, too, since we couldn’t hear the bell outside.

  Once the bell rang, Greg or I would sprint to my dad’s bedside. We’d sit him up—which was getting easier and easier since he was losing so much weight—then take the BiPAP mask off. He’d take a second to collect himself, swallowing a couple of times and taking a few deep breaths, before making his request. He’d keep it pretty simple with one-word utterances.

  “Pee” meant he had to urinate. We’d grab the bedside urinal, get his cock out, and he’d have a little piss right there and then. We also kept some Kleenex bedside for the wipe up. The urine would be dumped on my sleeping mother. Just kidding. It would go in the toilet with any used Kleenex. We’d flush and wash our hands.

  “Bathroom” meant he had to shit. This involved standing him up and helping him walk to the nearby bathroom. We’d usually stay toilet-side and watch him, making small talk about the Utah Jazz or all the cats that were now running around our house. He hated the lack of privacy, but, hey, we hated having to watch our dad shit, so it all balanced out. When he was done he’d say something like, “I’m done,” and we’d wipe him up, pull his boxers back up, smack his ass, and put him back to bed.

  “Nose” meant he needed to have his nose wiped. For whatever reason, the BiPAP would always give him a runny nose. Since he was a marathon runner, I’d make jokes like “Your little nose is running a marathon there.” He wouldn’t laugh at my shitty joke. We’d grab a Kleenex and he’d blow his nose load into it.

  “Up” meant he wanted to get up. This usually was the request issued at the start of the day or if he’d been napping. We would help him get up and go to another part of the house to sit and struggle to breathe.

  “Kill me” meant he wanted to die because the pain of slowly losing the ability to move, breathe, and talk was becoming too much. We’d grab the bedside gun and fire a round into his head. Even this loud noise wouldn’t wake my mom from her cancer sleep. We’d use the Kleenex to wipe up the blood and remove the fingerprints from the gun.