On my return from the Dolomites, I was met with a family crisis: We hadn’t heard from Mark, my oldest brother, for over a month, and we were getting worried. Eddi, my middle brother, and I finally got in touch with Mark’s buddy Carl. “Can you go to Mark’s house and call us and hand him your phone?” Eddi asked.
Carl put him on the phone, and Mark said cheerfully, “Hey, bros. Everything’s cool. It’s all good, man.”
We knew it was a lie. Carl had told us that Mark wasn’t looking that good. His slim, handsome face had gotten puffy and red with bags under his eyes. His penetrating blue eyes had dulled, no longer looking directly at you. Even worse, the water in his house was shut off again. Carl said that Mark was catching water from his roof gutters and boiling it on a Sterno burner.
This was not the Mark I had always known. Ever since I was little, his energy and prowess seemed practically mythical to Eddi and me. Mark was nine years older than me, six foot two and muscular, with wavy dark hair and very blue eyes that seemed to have a remarkable effect on those of the opposite sex.
When we were kids running around our neighborhood, he was always the one who could throw the ball the farthest and run the fastest. In high school, Mark was the captain of both the football and baseball teams. In one football game that has become family legend, we sat in the bleachers as he scored every touchdown and made the winning field goal too. Mark also had the high school record for the longest field goal in New Jersey, fifty-three yards. My dad thought he was good enough to go to the NFL someday. Even as a little kid, my vision wasn’t good enough to see Mark scoring touchdowns, so I would often take his trophies down from the mantel and feel the figures, crouched down in a runner’s position or arm straight up catching a baseball in a mitt. My favorite, though, was a figure wearing shoulder pads and a helmet. He was leaning forward aggressively sprinting for the end zone, with a football tucked in the crook of his elbow. The smooth metal figure was tall and lean and rippled with muscle, perched up high on a marble pedestal, and that was exactly how I pictured my big brother.
Even though he was a superstar, he’d also be the guy who jumped down an entire flight of stairs, no doubt showing off, right before the big game, and sprain his ankle, out for three weeks, when his team really needed him. When I was little, he was experimenting building a fire inside a tent in the backyard, using matches and a can of gasoline. It lit up and burned him over a third of his body. He ran by me toward the house howling in pain. I remember the smell of charred flesh, and he was out half of another season. Instead of scoring touchdowns in Pop Warner, he had to go through painful skin-grafting procedures.
To be honest, everyone in my family was pretty competitive. At Christmastime, we’d always have a series of spirited family competitions, the Weihenmayer Olympics, and Mark always won everything. However, one unusual winter vacation, Eddi won the bowling contest, my dad won a close game of darts. I’d just gotten an awesome present called Simon, an electronic disc with panels that lit up with one of four different colors and played four different sounds; you had to remember Simon’s order and repeat it. I mimicked Simon’s pattern through seventeen colors, eking out a win over Mark in the heated championship. Of course, we all rubbed it in for the entire vacation. “Bowling champion,” Eddi said, raising his arms. “Dart champion,” my father added. “I’m the Simon Says champion,” I added, feeling a little lame but proud to at least claim something. Mark tried not to show it, but I could tell he was bothered. Throughout the week, he kept challenging us to games: cards, pool. At dinner one night, he even tried to pull us into a pinball contest. He was getting increasingly desperate to win something. Eddi started goading Mark on.
“You could be the pizza-eating champion, or maybe the Hula-Hoop champion.”
Mark continued to be grumpy, so Eddi finally went into the garage and started bouncing a tennis ball against the wall and trying to land it in an empty five-gallon bucket. Mark came out and was immediately interested. Soon the game had progressed into three different buckets placed at varying distances from the wall and each with increasing points. The rules became elaborate and complex, all of us, especially Mark, arguing over each score. We played for hours, and to Mark’s relief, in the final showdown, he emerged victorious.
“I’m the Buckets Champion!” he shouted, losing himself, his fists pumping in the air. When we all broke out laughing, Mark’s fists may have lowered slightly for just a moment, but he held a brave face. For the following year, Mark lorded over us that Eddi may have won at bowling, Dad at darts, and me at Simon Says, but he was the true champion, because he had beaten us in the most extreme gladiators battle of athleticism, concentration, and sheer willpower, the elite sport of Buckets.
As I became a teenager, Mark moved to Orlando, which was, according to him, “the coolest place in the world.” Mark never crossed the line into lying, but Eddi expressed it best through a word he made up. He called it “bragadeering.”
“Down in Orlando,” the weather was always sunny; the girls were the hottest; the beers the tallest; and the competition on the volleyball court the fiercest.
When Mark came home to Connecticut for another holiday, I took him to a friend’s house party. I went to fill our cups from the keg, and when I came back, Mark was surrounded by a group of high school kids. His arms waved wildly, and the kids around him were all laughing hysterically, as he bragadeered one of his outrageous tall tales.
“Down in Orlando,” he started, “me and my friends had been out at the clubs. We stopped off at Krystal Burgers on the way home. When the lady behind the counter turned around, I lifted up onto the counter and farted into her microphone. It ripped through the speakers like a bazooka, and all the workers poured out of the kitchen to see what the explosion was. The first thing they saw were my butt cheeks hovering over the microphone. They looked pretty angry. We grabbed our fries and got the hell out of there.”
Mark was the kind of older brother who would pick you up from the bus station three hours late, but he’d make up for lost time with a bag of Krystal burgers and his truck crammed with two hot girls. You’d be squeezed between them on your way to a day out at Disney World. He’d always have free passes, all scored from a friend. Your sixteen-year-old mind might have envisioned riding the spinning cups in the Mad Tea Party ride, but you never could have dreamed you’d be wedged between two exotic dancers in skimpy halter tops with their arms wrapped tight around you and kissing your cheek, all because you happened to be the little brother of Mark Weihenmayer.
To me, he also appeared fearless in all the ways I wasn’t. When I was little, we lived in an apartment. Mark would come home past his curfew, and instead of walking through the front door and getting in trouble, he’d climb seven floors up the outside of the balconies and sneak into his room. One slip and he would have been a stain on the pavement. Later we moved to a Connecticut town with a river running through it called the Devil’s Glen. Mark would be the one launching off the forty-foot cliff nailing perfect one and a halfs—a full flip followed by a dive—into a six-by-six-foot pool of water. On one of our annual trips to visit Mark in Orlando, Eddi arrived a few hours earlier than my dad and me. The first minute he walked through the door, Mark started bragadeering about his brand-new truck. He was in a high-energy mood, awaiting Eddi’s arrival, and he had to take Eddi out on a test drive to show him all the amazing features. So before Eddi had even brought his bags inside, he was sitting in the passenger seat and Mark was revving the engine. He zipped out of the apartment complex and shouted, “Hold on, Ed Boy!” then tore across the road, bounced over the curb, and floored it up a dirt path along a canal. Mark cranked up the radio to show Eddi the incredible bass on the speakers. He raced circles around a huge, open, undeveloped area full of jeep trails. Then he spun around doing doughnuts, dust flying up everywhere, clouding the windows. Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” blared through the cab, and Eddi clutched the handle over the window. It felt like Mark was trying to flip the truck as he steered toward a sandy, ten-foot mound. A steep narrow trail led up to the top, with orange fruit trees lining the sides. Mark skidded to a halt at the bottom of the hill, and with his foot on the brake, he began revving the engine, jumping the truck up and down without actually moving. Mark looked over to Eddi, now clutching the dashboard. “Don’t you love this, Ed Boy?”
“Are you actually going to try to climb this thing?” Eddi asked, looking up at what looked like a dirt bike trail, not wide enough for a truck.
“I do it all the time!” he shouted back, letting go of the brake, gunning the engine, and rocketing and fishtailing to the top. Eddi shuddered as they shot by tree branches scraping the doors and thwacking the side mirrors. At the top, the truck stopped abruptly. Eddi went flying forward, and his head cracked the windshield. The wheels spun, and the truck became totally stuck in the soft mud. Refusing to surrender, Mark kept spinning the wheels and grinding the engine in a fruitless effort to work the truck free. It seemed like forever before he finally gave up, looked over, and asked, “You all right?”
“I’m okay,” Eddi replied, wiping blood off of his forehead. “What are we gonna do?”
Eventually the two of them dug the tires out with sticks they found in the woods, and Eddi muscled the back of the truck over the top of the hill, while Mark, behind the wheel, gunned the motor, shooting sand all over Eddi. When they pulled into the apartment complex, Mark finally looked at Eddi’s head. He had an inch-and-a-half-long split in his scalp and was covered with dirt. “Ed Boy, you’ll be okay.” Then he pointed at the tiny quarter-size crack in the windshield. He laughed. “Your hard head cracked my windshield. Don’t tell anyone what happened. Just say you hit your head going over a bump.”
Eddi kept the secret, even with a headache and bloody lump on his head for the rest of the vacation. Mark continued to make inside jokes about the accident and continued to bragadeer about his new truck and all it could do. “Down in Orlando” didn’t seem so great after all. As time passed, Eddi’s split forehead got smaller, and the crack in the windshield got bigger. “Your forehead cracked my entire windshield, Ed Boy.” With Mark, you never knew what adventures awaited, Playboy bunnies on the tea cup ride or a bloody lump on your head.
The next day, we went out for pizza. Eddi, now living in Pensacola, had been given some peppers that he brought. “My friend says they’re pretty hot,” Eddi warned.
“Down here in Orlando,” Mark jumped in, “we make the hottest peppers. They’re hotter than in Mexico. I grow some myself.”
“These are Red Savina habañeros,” Eddi replied. “They’re pretty hot. You can’t even pick them up without your eyes watering.”
Eddi must have still been annoyed by his throbbing forehead, because he didn’t tell Mark they were so hot, the only way they were used was by drying them and cutting them up into tiny pieces for relish.
“Keep talking, Ed Boy. Yours may be hot, man, but they’re nothing like the ones I grow. I know what hot is.”
We ordered the pizzas, while Eddi went out to his car and got the peppers. “Hey, you want to put some of these on your pizza?” Eddi asked, returning with the peppers in a baggie.
“Yeah, put them on. I love hot stuff.”
Eddi loaded them onto his pizza while Mark watched. He may have been having second thoughts, but he now couldn’t say a word. Mark ate a slice, piled with peppers, and we all waited in anticipation. The image has been lodged in my mind through many retellings. Eddi said Mark’s eyes began to water, and his face turned red and then purple. “His face kind of dis-configured and contorted,” Eddi said. His thin lips were all pinched together in a grimace disguised as a smile, as if to say, “Everything’s cool here.” We kept asking Mark, “You gonna eat the rest of your pizza?”
Without saying a word, Mark actually picked up another slice and finished the rest of his pizza. When he was finished, he said, “No big deal,” and then drank his beer.
“You want another pizza?” Eddi asked. “I got more peppers in the car.”
“No. I’m good,” Mark replied, clutching the edge of the table with white hands and droplets of sweat collecting at his hairline.
* * *
Mark had a successful small business, an aquatic lake-scaping company. He was a hard worker, spending twelve-hour days standing in murky lakes and retention ponds, hauling away tons of invasive plants and trees and replanting native species. He had tons of equipment that he was proud of: boats and backhoes, three different-size chain saws with a variety of blades, sharpeners, and chains. He’d tie a rope to the bumper of his truck and trail it behind him until he was chest deep in a forest of thick grasses and melaleuca trees. He’d use the large knife strapped to his waist to cut the huge trunks and then dive down under the water to dig out the roots by hand. Many times, the rope had enabled him to yank himself to safety after being charged by a nest of moccasins, or, even worse, a ten-foot gator. Orlando was known as the City of Lakes, so there was lots of demand. Mark’s business was thriving, and he was not able to keep up, even with a team of a dozen employees. When his girlfriend, Julie, got pregnant, it was the happiest he’d ever been, so much so that he was about to get married. Every night after work, he’d sing nursery rhymes to Julie’s belly and have long conversations with the baby girl inside. “Volleyball’s probably the best sport for you. I bet you’ll have a pretty decent vertical leap, and if you’re going to serve, you got to be tall, so keep eating in there.”
He dipped a carrot stick in ranch dressing and fed it to Julie.
“Your mom played softball,” he went on. “Those ladies are bruisers.”
He leaned down, placed his lips right up against her belly, and whispered, “Some of them are lesbians. You may wanna stay away from that crazy scene.” With that, he received a punch in the arm. “Now, tennis, that’s a good sport. You have to be quick if you’re going to have a good volley. It’s all about fast-twitch muscles. We’ll need to start working on your two-handed backhand pretty soon, not right away. We’ll let you learn to crawl first. And I wouldn’t mind golf either. Not my first choice, but there’s a lot of strategy there. I can be your caddy, because most people focus on their drive, but it’s really all about the short game. Remember: ‘Drive for show, putt for dough.’”
Finally, he settled down and began reading storybooks to his unborn child. His favorite was about Pippi Longstocking, a quirky little girl who lived alone in a cottage with her monkey and her horse and was constantly going on adventures with her two best friends. “‘Pippi was indeed a remarkable child,’” Mark read, his voice happy and playful. “‘The most remarkable thing about her was that she was so strong. She was so very strong that in the whole wide world there was not a single police officer as strong as she. Why, she could lift a whole horse if she wanted to! And she wanted to!’
“She sure is strong,” Mark said, closing the book for a moment. “Just like you’ll be someday. You’ll be just like her. You probably won’t have freckles or red hair like her, but you may have pretty pigtails. Actually, that trainer your mom is always staring at in the gym has red hair,” he said, now grinning mischievously at Julie. “So maybe you will have red hair after all.”
He laughed and patted her belly and received the second punch of the night.
Soon after that, we were all invited down to Orlando for Mark and Julie’s big wedding, but shockingly, the night before I was to fly down, he called me on the phone. “It’s off,” he said angrily. “Don’t fly down here.”
“You’re getting married, and I’m flying to the wedding in a few hours, and you’re calling it all off?” I said in disbelief.
“I’m dead serious. We just got in a huge fight, and I canceled the whole thing. You can still fly down if you want. The facility is already paid for, so we’ll have a big blowout. We’ll call it the ‘eff the wedding’ party.”
Despite the relationship going south, Mark was there for the birth of his daughter, Gabrielle. Of course he was behind the camera, giving a play-by-play near the hospital bed. He loved being a dad and threw himself into parenthood in his customary style, like gunning his engine up a steep embankment. He took baby Gabbi’s footprints and had them printed on T-shirts, which he gave out to all his friends and family. He had those same footprints enlarged and printed on the side of his boat, and he rechristened it Little Miss Gabrielle.
On my next visit, I sat beside Mark as he reclined on his couch, his baby Gabbi lying on his chest. He lifted her up into the air. “Feel her little fingers,” he said eagerly. “Feel her toes. Feel her cheeks. Feel how soft they are. She’s beautiful, bro. She’s totally perfect.” He stood her up on his belly, facing him, and wiggled her back and forth in a little dance. “She loves disco,” he said, lifting her arms up in rhythm as Gabbi squealed with laughter. “Most of all she loves this song I made up for her,” he said. “It’s called ‘My Song to Gabs,’” he announced, his voice husky, as if he were a crooner like Frank Sinatra about to perform in front of Carnegie Hall. I could hear her little feet bouncing on his belly as he sang:
It’s just a dumb little song
But it’s one I have to sing
And it says, “I love you, I love you”
It doesn’t even rhyme
And it’s really really goofy
But I still sing out loud,
“I love you, I love you.”
When he stopped singing, Gabbi reached her hands out toward him, wanting more.
* * *
In 2001, Mark, along with my dad and Eddi, were planning to accompany me to base camp on Mount Everest to see me off. We especially thought an adventure would do Mark some good by getting him away from Orlando for a while. He had always partied and lived hard, but the canceled wedding had put him in a funk. Even worse, Gabbi’s mom had decided to move away to New York State to be closer to her family. Mark had flown up there for a few weekends, but gradually the visits had trailed off. On the phone, I started noticing Mark’s voice changing, growing more faltering, his words coming out a little slurred. The day he was supposed to fly out of Orlando, he got in a big fight with a new girlfriend and left a message that he wasn’t sure if he was still going on the trip. I called him and begged him to get on that plane. He showed up in Nepal having forgotten most of his gear. Mark always prided himself on having the best equipment, always bought, of course, down in Orlando, at the most amazing camping store. On one trek, he’d bragadeered the entire time about his pack, named the Highlander, which had all the coolest zippers and special compartments for pulling out candy bars at the perfect moment, or a first-aid kit the second I skinned my knee. “The Highlander carries way more weight than your measly little Cub Scout backpack,” he said with absolute pride.
So it was unlike Mark to show up without the Highlander. He had even forgotten his insulated Gore-Tex hiking boots with the coolest lacing system that he’d been talking about for months. Before flying up into the Khumbu region to start our approach to base camp, he had to scour the markets of Kathmandu and finally found a pair of knockoff boots. Within two days of our hike, all the metal eyelets were falling out, and one of the rubber heels came unglued, flapping from the boot. Mark’s feet were wrecked, and his toes were covered with blisters. At 14,500 feet in the village of Dingboche, we went into a small Sherpa teahouse, and Mark was delighted to see beer for sale. He grabbed a six-pack off the shelf and went into the kitchen to pay. Mark didn’t know I was just around the corner, standing outside the door. When he didn’t think anyone was watching, he faced into the corner and sucked back the first can in a matter of seconds. I could hear his throat swallowing. It didn’t seem he was even enjoying it, more like the way someone would take medicine, as quickly and efficiently as possible to kill the pain. Back in the common room, he proceeded to knock back the rest. Mark didn’t realize how the effects of alcohol were amplified at altitude. He told some loud stories, but he didn’t seem like the life of the party anymore. His swagger had always been charming, but now there was an edge of darkness just beneath the surface. The group moved away, feeling slightly uncomfortable, and started up other conversations. Something had tipped within him. We had to put him to bed that night, and in the morning, he had a raging hangover to show for it. I could barely rouse him out of his sleeping bag to start the day’s trek toward base camp. I sat in the entranceway of his tent as he slowly shoved clothes into his pack. “You can’t be getting hammered,” I rebuked him, “especially at altitude. Last night wasn’t you. It was … well, it was embarrassing.”
“You don’t think I know that?” he shot back. “Everything embarrassing I’ve ever done, everything bad that’s ever happened to me, I can write off to the love of my life. Her name’s Anita … Anita Drink. Everything terrible in my life is because of her.
“My first memory,” he said, “was sitting beside my dad on his tractor.”
Although I never thought about it this way, Mark and I were technically half brothers. My father had been a marine aviator stationed at the naval air base in Pensacola. He had met my mother, a divorcée and full-fledged Southern belle. They had fallen in love and gotten married, and he had adopted her two young children, Suzanne and Mark. Mark’s biological father had been a hard-charging, hard-drinking farmer from north Florida. Like Mark, he was the star of his football team. When he was sober, he was the first to open a door for a lady and leap to help her with her groceries. However, when he was drinking, as my grandmother put it, “he wanted to whip the world.”
“My dad always had a brown paper bag lying next to him on the seat,” Mark added, “and every few minutes, he’d tip it back and take a long drink.”
“That was your father, not you,” I argued. “Why can’t you just quit? Just go cold turkey?”
At first I didn’t think he was going to answer, because there was only the shuffle of gear. “It’s not a matter of wanting to,” he finally said. “It’s like you’re dying of thirst in the scorching desert, and you haven’t had water for days. All you can think about is a cold glass of water. The idea of it consumes you. It doesn’t matter how many times people tell you not to take a drink, or how many times you lecture yourself that water’s no good for you. You take that drink, because if you don’t, you’re afraid you’re going to die.”
Over the next few years, I tried hard to understand what was going on as Mark would try to get sober, succeed for a time, and then fall back into a kind of abyss. My dad, Eddi, and I put our heads together on what to do—how best to help. If Mark went quiet for a time, my dad and his wife, Mariann, would drive the three hours from Jacksonville to his house to find a sink full of dirty dishes, hampers overflowing with dirty laundry, and the house in ruins. Mail would pile up in the mailbox to the point that the mailman stopped delivering it. Bills would go unpaid for months. Sometimes they arrived to see that Mark’s water and electricity had been turned off. The meager food in his refrigerator had all gone bad. Dad and Mariann would spend these weekends cleaning up, paying bills, and getting everything turned on again. My dad, being a marine and ex–Wall Street executive, had always conducted his life with discipline, so it was particularly torturous for him to watch Mark’s slide. Each weekend would end the same, with a long fatherly lecture, telling Mark to clean up his act, reconnect with his daughter, and start the process of reviving his business. He even offered to get Mark’s bookkeeping back in order and help him reconnect with clients he’d let drift away, but Mark replied bluntly, “The last thing I need is for you to come down here looking over my shoulder.”
After Mark stopped paying his mortgage, we knew he was in jeopardy of losing his house. Dad, Eddi, and I brainstormed again. This time, we decided to put our money together and purchase his house so he wouldn’t be evicted. Eddi would send him regular care packages of canned food. No one could send money, since it would immediately go toward beer.
Countless late nights, I was awakened by phone calls from a Mark who seemed alien to the brother I’d known. There was very little laughter and bravado anymore. His calls were rambling, sometimes slurred tirades, going in circles. “I lie awake all night,” he said, his voice flat and monotone. “Listening, just lying there listening for the sound of the AC to kick on, or for the humming buzz of the refrigerator. I look forward to those sounds. They’re constants in my life. Something I can count on.”
One night, he really scared me. “I saw Jesus,” he said. “He came down from the cross. He had bloody holes in his hands and blood coming from his eyes and out of his mouth. He told me I didn’t deserve forgiveness. I’m a bad person. I’ve hurt everyone I know. I’ve done a lot of terrible things.”
“That wasn’t real!” I practically yelled over the phone line. “That was in your mind. We’ve all done bad things.”
“I haven’t seen Gabbi in two years. I don’t deserve forgiveness.”
“Mark, you told me once that you can’t quit. So you sit there and try to suck it up, to pretend it’s not a big deal, like eating those hot peppers that almost killed you. But you need to get some help.”
“Quitting ain’t the problem,” he quickly responded. “I’ve quit probably fifty times, lying on my couch in withdrawal, shaking, going into convulsions, sweating it all out. It feels like a ton of ants crawling under my skin.”
“Mark,” I protested. “You should be under a doctor’s supervision. They’ve got drugs to help you through detoxing.”
“Ah, I don’t need doctors,” he replied scornfully. “Once I felt my heart stop, and I rolled off the couch on the floor and pounded it back into beating again.”
I wondered if this were even possible. Down in Orlando, I thought bitterly, where the girls are hot and the sun is always shining, and where you catch water off your roof gutters, where you lie alone on the couch with insects crawling beneath your skin, and where your heart stops and you pound it back into beating.
I could actually relate to Mark, more than I’d care to admit. I’d spent a lot of time shoving people away, not accepting help from anyone. I didn’t want people to look down on me. Accepting their help was like a core shot to my dignity. It signified that I was a pathetic weakling. In a way it was easier to shut out the world, rather than being vulnerable. “You’re a good person, Mark. You’ve been a good brother, and you deserve a great life. You deserve to get old. Do you remember when I was going blind? I hated it so much, I refused to learn Braille or use my long white cane. I’d step on them and bend them on purpose. I’d drop them off bridges and down sewer gratings. Mom used to get so upset. There was one day, I was so pissed off, I climbed up on the roof. It wasn’t like I was going to jump or anything, but I didn’t think anyone understood what I was going through. You climbed up there too and sat next to me. You told me you loved me and that you believed in me, that I’d figure it all out. Then you started swinging my cane around like nunchucks and doing karate tricks with it. You said you wished you could switch places with me, that you’d make a super cool blind guy, that you’d purposely tap your cane into the hottest girls and ask if you could feel their faces. By the end, you had me cracking up.”
I heard a muted chuckle on the other end of the line. “I needed help then,” I said. “I couldn’t do it alone … without you. So you need some help now, for Gabbi’s sake. You can start by forgiving yourself—that’s the only way to heal, so you can be a dad to her. She needs you.”
I was positive that getting sober for the sake of Gabbi was what motivated him to agree to a six-week rehab program. However, typical Mark, he had to go down hard. He showed up at the center raging drunk. The nurses and staff had to physically restrain him as he slowly sobered up and began the painful process of detoxing again. The doctor described his hallucinatory episodes as “bipolar disorder brought on by alcoholism.”
He said, “For much of Mark’s life, he seemed to be able to handle it, but then there’s a tipping point when the brain is chemically altered by the consumption of alcohol.”
A similar thread had weaved through my mother’s life, one minute smiling with her arms wrapped around me, the next lying in bed for two days not moving or even responding when I tried to talk to her. So Mark had been born with the double whammy: bipolarism from his mom and alcoholism from his dad. Like me going blind, he had won the lottery, except just the opposite.
On my next trip to Orlando, Mark was doing better. He was on a dry spell. He was supposed to pick me up at the baggage claim at the airport, but he was late as usual. As I pushed my talking watch and brought it up to my ear to listen, a rude guy pushed by me. “’Scuse me. ’Scuse me,” he mumbled as he shoved by. A minute later, the rude guy was coming back the other way. “’Scuse me,” he said again, elbowing me even harder. A third time, he pushed past, this time shoving hard enough to make me take a step backward. I was about to say, “Hey, you, what the heck. Quit pushing,” when the mumbling guy burst into laughter. Then a giant smile broke over my face, as Mark, who had always outweighed me by thirty pounds and towered over me, lifted me up in a bear hug. “I totally got you, bro.” He laughed with joy, taking complete pleasure in getting one over on me. Of course, I thought. I should have known. How else would Mark greet me? Others got a mere handshake, but in Mark’s world, you got picked up and swung around until you were dizzy.
Later in my hotel room, Mark and I ordered up a movie. It was Old School with Will Ferrell. We ordered dessert through room service and lay on the bed eating ice cream and talking. In one scene, Will Ferrell gets mistakenly shot in the jugular by a horse tranquilizer gun. His voice goes into slo-mo in the middle of his kid’s birthday party, and he falls headlong into the pool. Mark and I rolled on our backs, belly laughing, practically going into convulsions. Mark seemed so clear-headed, I decided to share something with him. I blurted out, “Ellie and I have been thinking Emma needs a brother or sister. We’re thinking maybe we could look into adopting.”
“What’s there to think about?” Mark replied. “Being a dad is the best thing in the world.”
“We’re not sure,” I kept going. “We’re kind of waffling back and forth. We thought about having another the natural way, but it’s like when you look for a new house. I get so irritated when people have to build a brand-new one from the ground up, when there are so many amazing houses to choose from. I think the same goes for kids. We’ve already made one, so why not get one who’s already out there, somewhere?”
“What if you get a bad one,” he said softly, “like me? He’d wind up breaking your heart.”
“Do you remember one time when you offered me one of your eyes?” I asked. “You said you’d give me one—when a surgery was possible. You told me that we could walk down the beach together side by side, and I could check out chicks on the left side and you could check them out on the right. And you made sure to say that you had first dibs on the hottest one.”
Mark laughed. “Sounds like me,” he said.
“So if he turned out like you,” I continued, “I’d be okay with that. If we actually do this, I’m expecting you to meet him someday, and I’m also counting on you for that surgery. I’ll have one blue eye, just like you, and I’ll use it to hypnotize the ladies.”
I hoped that Mark could finally say good-bye to those demons, to reinvent his life. He had the support and love of his family. He had the dream of being a good father to Gabbi. When we said good-bye, I gave him a big hug. I only wish I’d held on longer.