10.

HITTING BOTTOM, November 2006

Because he had us—his family, his clan—I believed Michael could defy the pattern of parolees. College was the first element to fall out of the plan. The commute was, not surprisingly, just too much. Michael may not have made it through even two weeks of classes. The job lasted until November, and then I got a nearly hysterical call. Michael was drowning. He couldn’t do it, he said. He wasn’t going to make it. When I had left L.A., with plans to return over the winter break, I had promised him that if, in the meanwhile, he ever called and said he needed me, I would be there. Receiving his call, I went straight to O’Hare. I flew across the country west of the Mississippi in a cold panic, trying to forestall speculation about what I might find. Arriving just in time to take him to dinner, I found Michael teary and despondent. With only twenty-four hours to spend in Los Angeles, I tried to lift him off the bottom.

His account of what had happened was that one day after work some of his Latino coworkers had called him nigger. He fought them in the parking lot, and walked away from the job, never to return. He never told his bosses or coworkers that he was quitting. He just didn’t go back.

So now he was back to square one, or less than that, since now he’d proven himself unreliable to an employer. He was mostly spending his time at home, in the house, playing Football and Basketball Workout video games with Joshua and Josh’s little brother.

This is, in fact, the best recipe for safety in rough neighborhoods: stay inside at all times with young kids for companions.

Sometimes, though, craving adult company, Michael would hang out at the little informal restaurant around the corner from his mother’s house.

Now he didn’t see a future. Didn’t know what steps to take next. The world hadn’t yielded up the fruits he’d fantasized at the end of the summer.

Nor was it supplying those I had dreamed of.

I didn’t have much to offer. I tried mainly to listen. I could promise to get him into an apartment, if he could get another job. But I wasn’t in a position now to stay in Los Angeles and help him pursue new job possibilities. I had too many obligations in Chicago. November was tenure review time, with mounds of scholarly papers to read and discuss in an unending cycle of meetings that the dean, in particular, is not supposed to miss. If anything, the very definition of being a dean is to be at those tenure review meetings. My own professional reputation was at stake. Michael would have to make the next push for himself. I would be back in a few weeks for the Christmas holidays and would be able to spend more time with him then. So I did keep my promise and come when he called, but I suppose in the end I wasn’t there for him as I had promised.

Just before the winter break, the university made the public announcement of my decision to step down at the end of the academic year. Bob and I flew out to L.A., both feeling newly unburdened, happy to escape Chicago’s precipitous chill, and looking forward to winter oranges and nuts. Shortly after we arrived in L.A., I got a good-news call from Michael. He’d found an apartment. He was ready to put the deposit down. Could I come and see it? Michael and I visited the fourth-floor unit, in a vintage 1920s building with Craftsman-style features, overlooking the 101 Freeway, just off of Fountain. It was big and spacious, with gleaming wood floors, and Michael began describing to me how he and his girlfriend Bree wanted to move in.

I was taken aback. I had had no idea he was seeing someone, let alone making plans to move in together. I imagine that my face must have conveyed surprise, although I think I tried not to react too strongly. Learning how to suppress visible emotion is an occupational hazard of deaning. What I wanted to know, I said, was what the job situation was. Had he lined up a new job? What did Bree do? Did she have a job? Our voices were echoey in the empty apartment, Michael leaning against a windowsill with the sky and freeway backdrop.

This was the one and only time in my life when my interaction with my cousin had an edge. There was somehow something shamefaced in him as he answered. No, he didn’t have a job. Bree was into hairstyling but, no, she didn’t have one either. What exactly were they thinking, I found myself asking? He didn’t have much of an answer and plainly the plan involved some degree of taking advantage of me.

In that moment, I encountered a different Michael from the one I knew. I saw something calculating, which I had never seen and would never see again. I didn’t ask to talk to Bree. All I was able to say was that, no, I couldn’t possibly pay the deposit plus some number of months’ rent plus cosign for an apartment when neither of them had jobs.

Michael’s face tensed.

He said he understood.

And that was the end.

I had believed that I could help. I had hoped we were entering the gate of horn, the passage of true dreams. Now, and only now, I realized that my dream of standing my baby cousin up on his own two feet was a fantasy. It had always had, perhaps, too much of me in it. From this point on, Michael ceased confiding in me. Our phone conversations never crawled below the surface. I no longer knew a way of helping. I couldn’t have, really, because I no longer knew what was going on.

I later learned that in the following months Michael had started working as a plumber’s apprentice for a friend of his mother’s. He had earned several vocational certificates while in prison. And he spent time with Bree. We would learn her possessiveness was violent, yet Michael spent increasing amounts of time with her. According to Karen, Bree cut him three times between December and May, and each time Michael tried to pass the cuts off as the result of someone attempting to rob him.

His mother would, almost kiddingly, tell him, “Michael, I really have to get some life insurance on you,” but he did not say no.

Not quite a year after his release, in May or June 2007, Michael got into a fight with one of Bree’s lovers. He suspected Bree of cheating and thought that if he could catch her and confront her, he would have a way out of the relationship. Late one night, he sneaked up under her window to catch them.

Michael related the story in a letter: “I wish every day that I would’ve stayed in bed. But how could I when my stomach was telling me that she was cheating? I figured if I catch her cheating, then I could resolve the relationship right there and then. I didn’t have the will to say it was over, but surely if I caught her in the act cheating then it would make ending it more simple. I was wrong, Danielle, dead wrong. Needless to say me and the guy had an altercation. He called the police and now I’m here.”

Michael went straight from the altercation to prison for a parole violation. This pushed back the date of his sentence completion by a full year, from June 2008 to June 2009. I wish I could describe how I felt when I got this news, but I just can’t.

It was such a catastrophic defeat that after Michael’s death, my memory obliterated all traces of his return to prison. I guess I sent him a few packages and must have written a couple of letters because I have his. But I was in a bad state before the news came—my marriage to Bob was coming apart. The intersecting professional and personal demands on each of us were beyond what we could handle together. And I simply have no memory of Michael’s second phase in prison, perhaps because of the torturous fighting as we moved toward separation, perhaps because of the magnitude of the defeat.

For years after Michael died, I told people that my cousin went to prison when he was fifteen, got out when he was twenty-six, and died one year later. A permanent amnesia seems to have erased the time from his second trip to prison to the end of his life. It was only when I came across an August 2007 email from Karen with a prison address for Michael that I realized—and it wouldn’t be correct to say “remembered”—that he’d gone back. There is a seed of truth in this trick of my memory. Other than just superficially, I was not there for Michael’s last two years, one back in prison and that final year, still on parole, until, in his final three weeks alive, he was, officially at least, free at last. The disappearance of this stretch of time and what I presume was also my disappearance on Michael are probably the most painful and shameful things I have to admit.

Now able to correct the distortions brought on by my shame, though, I can confirm that the barebones facts of my cousin’s biography are these. He was born on November 30, 1979, when Barbara Streisand’s “No More Tears” was the country’s number-one song. On September 18, 1995, at fifteen, two weeks before O. J. Simpson was acquitted for the murder of his wife, Michael was arrested for the first time for an attempted carjacking. On June 10, 1996, five days after the first birthday of the niece who, like me, would grow up to be a track star, he was sentenced to twelve years and eight months in prison. In November 1996, on his seventeenth birthday, he was transferred to adult prison. He got out of prison in June of 2006 when he was twenty-six, just before the Great North American Heatwave killed over 200 people. He went back in in June of 2007 when he was twenty-seven, got out again in 2008 when he was twenty-eight, and was finally clear of all supervision in June 2009. Less than a month later on July 18, 2009, at the age of twenty-nine, he died.

One of so many millions gone.