Uncle Andrew

“You’re hearing a lot of things about your uncle. You need to know: he’s not a bad man. He struggles with a very difficult disease.”

—Grandma.

I wrote this on Andrew’s Birthday. I apologize if it doesn’t make entire sense. But I won’t wait another year to put it out on his birthday.

Andrew is too much my hero.

To lean on Dewey Cox, “Wrong kid died.”

Today’s my uncle’s birthday. Or it would be, if he was still alive.

First dim memory I have of Andrew came at a family Christmas gathering when I was a little kid. There was a ping pong table in the basement that year and plenty of the younger members of the family were playing; I had a change but, believe it or not: I was a pretty bashful kid.

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to play,” Andrew told me before leaping in himself, already a few drinks deep. One of the most enthuasiastic games of ping pong I’ve ever seen, but I don't think he won a single point because he was so drunk. He didn’t give a damn that he’d made a fool out of himself, he just laughed it off to help make me feel comfortable.

That’s my first memory. The first memory told to me about Andrew was allegedly when I was a few years younger and my dad, thinking it would be funny, apparently left the room and sent Andrew in instead to see if I would notice the difference. Allegedly, I was terrified of him. And whil, admittedly, I was a shy kid, I dunno that I see myself being scared of the big guy.

But then, the woman who told me that story hated Andrew.

Post-mortem and in public, she’s a lot more restrained now. But she’s never had a nice thing to say about that man. Bum, mooch, loser, deadbeat, failure—well, anyway, this is about Andrew, not slander. So let’s start at the start. He was born on this day in 1960 and he was the youngest, the baby of the crew.

Like myself, this would lead to comments throughout his life that he was “spoiled” as the “baby.”

As a kid, he shared a certain codependence with his twin, which I looked into once for a paper on the Diathesis-Stress Model in early college. At the time, I believed that one’s money indicated a successful rise from the trauma of their father’s early death while the other was overwhelmed. I disagree with this now. I believe the loss of their father in their early teens broke both of them, just in different ways.

While Andrew became more emotional, which would lead him toward the bottle to numb his intense feelings, his twin would become much colder and crueller. His own addiction to alcohol is not as severe as his brother’s—but he’s a drunk. Another of my earliest memories is being pulled over for him driving drunk in the old Pontiac FireBird.

You might recognize. My dad used to drive the Bandit.

Turns from wealthy to white trash when you imagine one of these with faded paint and three kids crammed into the back while the officer can smell the booze on his breath and saw all the swerving. This car would sit, rotting, in our driveway for over a decade until the original owner purchased it back, horrified at its condition.

While the twins insisted on wearing different clothes and otherwise distinguishing one another, their similarities farm outweighed that, and not just physically. While my old man had that Firebird, Andrew had a Corvette Stingray I can’t recall ever seeing. Drinking and driving tends to do that to one’s license.

Both of them began lawn mowing businesses, they purchased their first two homes and a condo together, they even lived together in one while renting out the others, their cars were obviously mirror images of one another, even at one point there was mention of a woman named Maureen, I believe it was, who was apparenttly the love of Andrew’s life—but she died young, I believe it was from cancer.

That’s all I can speak to there. She was mentioned on one car ride near I believe late elementary school when my parents were complaining about Andrew and how everything went downhill for him after that but “he truly loved her.” As per usual, I was pretending to be preoccupied reading by streetlight or asleep while listening.

I suppose that’s not true. That’s not all I have to say about that.

This little tidbit had stuck in my craw for a while and seems significant in the course ofhis life, especially if it was (as it seems) around the same time Scott met Alice.

After a lifetime of having his twin there and their codependence growing, Scott met Alice and began to drift off; he found a partner he was getting close to, but then she died and opened up all that trauma from his childhood again. When he needed the person he had grown to know he could turn to—he couldn’t.

Alice didn’t want him at parties, she thought he was an embarrassment who was arrogant. According to mom, Andrew was Satan incarnate: she claimed she’d walked in on him once demolishing a hair dryer, upset he couldn’t get hjis hair straight (my old man’s still vain with his hair dryer, too; both were, I guess). She claimed he was arrogant and would make comments that he was the “better looking” twin. And when I was a kid in the nineties and dad would come home late from the “library” smelling like a bar and we’d get mysterious calls from women asking for my dad and evasive of mom, she ignored the obvious and decided Andrew spent his nights trolling bars to pick up women while pretending to be my dad.

I heard how my old man would hurry to hang up on Andrew when he called to talk to someone, brushing him off and tuning out what he said. Hell, it’s the same way they treated me when I was struggling with addiction and I’m their son; they’ve done it to me while I’ve been in early recovery with jaundice and debating whether to go to the ER. Good deals at Costco, gotta go.

So, Andrew turned to the bottle.

I suppose their codependence also comes through in a track Scott insisted play at the service for Andrew:

Before the service, the day after Andrew died, dad had a tough time. He explained this song was like the pair of them growing up: always together, always a package deal, and how when he found out Andrew died he felt like, “a piece of myself had died.”

Big words fora guy who’d been neglecting him for the better part of three decades.

“Everyone sees the tear in the seam, but talks about the weather,” I’ve mentioned before, I believe. I love me some Buckingham and this album is great—but this was the track that dad insisted we play at Andrew’s service. One of them, at least. And it reminds me of the end of Andrew’s life. The whole last chunk of it gets to be a convoluted story.

See, Andrew’s problem kept spiraling.

Eventually, that condo he’d bought with my dad ended up becoming his. My grandparents wanted to help Andrew and he needed a place to stay. Dad, unwilling to work with them, cut a deal and got the land Grandpa wanted for his dream house. Now his McMansion sits there.

Andrew still struggled and ended up getting more DUIs and a year in jail.

We had to spend an Easter cleaning out his place, which basically meant dumping almost all of it. I have a little turtle state from there I still keep around as a memento of him, but it’s seem some wear and tear over the years.

Yes, the little guy is missing two legs

After getting out, he moved in with my grandparents and ended up earning some animosity from the rest of the family after they left for a winter in Palm Springs and he spent most of it drunk without cleaning. I’ve cleaned up enough of my own 7-14 day relapses, I can only imagine.

Everyone wanted Andrew out of there and my parents discouraged me from going down there to see them. Sometimes I would stay with them on weekends (later this would change to my abusive half-siblings) and this got stamped down on. One particular time, we swung through Blocbuster and I remember Andrew and I were going to watch Terminator 2 before my parents flipped out.

By this point, I found Andrew confusing: I always got along with and liked him. He always went out of his way to be friendly to me: he’d ask me what kind of music I was into one time and the next time I’d see him, he’d tell me he’d gone to the library, figured out how to work the computers, checked out the artists’ discography, checked it out, and made me a copy. I still have a case I use for DVDs and blu rays that came from Andrew giving me a bunch of Rolling Stones and U2 music. He’d go through and tell me which his favorite tracks were and why.

Which is why, of all things, I know that my dad’s favorite U2 song (last we talked, he said he’d changed his mind to ‘City of Blinding Lights’) but it was ‘Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses’ for Scott and ‘One’ for Andrew.

(No, I am not exactly proud I used to be big into U2. I listen to better music now).

Which I think really kinda embodies the difference between the twins:

“Who’s gonna run your wild horses? …who’s gonna take the place of me?” for Scott while Andrew turns to, “We’re one, but we’re not the same, we’ve got to carry each other.”

Whether he’s your twin or your old man, trying to have a relationship with Scott is pretty much standing there while he jerks himself off about how great he is while spitting in your face because “our work” means “my work” in his eyes.

But then came the illnesses. It was while Grandpa was helping move things out of Andrew’s condo that he slipped and broke his shoulder. That led to him going to the hospital and the first time anyone started to notice more signs of Alzheimer’s.

When Grandpa’s biological daughter came up to bring him to a doctor, allegeldy for nefarious purposes, was when my parents pounced and ended up geting power over both my grandparents’ persons, financess, and medical decisions.

And while doctors recommended a nursing home or a live-in nurse, they decided that was too expensive.

Andrew, who they didn’t trust to live on his own, now was to be looking after both of his parents in their ailing states. Once or twice a week, a nurse would come in for an hour to check their pills and otherwise: his show.

Everything. He even had to help them bathe, which my mother loved to mock. But her and Scott had power of purse strings and they wouldn’t give the money for that and, for some “sick, twisted” reason, Andrew didn’t just leave his parents to drown in the bathtub or fall and crack their skulls in the shower.

Everyone expected Grandpa to go first, since his Alzheimer’s had been longer-acting, but then came the call that Grandma slipped one night while getting up and she ended up needing a hip replacement. We thought she’d recovered from that.

It was a weekend my parents had taken off for the lake hosue; they’d decided the whole grandparents situation was stressful, and invented a lie they were going to see Alice’s side of the family for an emergency in ber home part of Washington (based on later accounts, the most likely ‘emergency’ around this time were the cousins who let pigs loose, the cops got called out to corral them, and ‘Pigs chasing pigs!” was the punchline for years; but her dragging me to Vancouver immediately after wisdom teeth surgery is another story. No, I did not get the pain pills the doc gave me; her and dad “needed them” but they “aren’t like other people who do pain pills”).

I was staying with my half-sister and insisted we go down there to see them. When we got there, the place was pretty damn dirty so I didn’t end up spending a ton of time socializing as other family showed up, went through and cleaned the fridge.

Andrew, another loner, kinda hung out with me and we chatted on and off.

The rest of the family kinda hung out with Grandma but frankly they more crowded around her and ended up taking what would end up being decried by my family as very morbid death-day pictures.

Later that night, Grandma died. Folks found out before us, told half-sis to keep my car keys from me, I wasn’t having it and drove there anyway.

We get there and, well, she had already passed away. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting. There wer a few other family members there and my half-sister showed up not long after me. So did the coroners or whoever takes a body—told us we probbly wanted to step out of the room, people generally don’t like seeing the process of getting a body into the body bag and carrying it out, it can appear disrespectful to a loved one to see their body handled like an object.

Andrew hid most of the time—not because he was drunk, because he was distraught. It was also here that I found out Grandma’s final words: “Who’s going to take care of Andrew?”

Well, it wasn’t Scott. He came home from the lake and I got to hear from both him and Alice, at length, about how difficult Grandma’s death was on him while I stood there and listened. He left Andrew and Grandpa in the condo together.

And they just kinda did their thing. When I visited I mostly remember the two of them sitting together, Andrew trying to keep him comfortable. He still wasn’t much of a house-keeper and this would ultimately lead to my eighteenth birthday when I found out there were feces stained on Grandpa’s mattress from Alice, turned it in, and outraged Scott for bringing “the government into my business!” before threatening to ruin my life and try to get me in jail for goofy teenage pranks like stealing a Speed Hump sign at, like, sixteen.

Then Grandpa passed away.

The condo was supposed to go to Andrew (and, next in line, actually, to me). As much as my parents seemed to think the community didn’t want him around, it seemed like the other members of the community got along with him well enough: it was a senior community, but they’d lowered the age restriction so he could stick around, after all.

Dad didn’t see this, he saw cash and probably gave Andrew the same pitch he did to me about the condo: outdated, needs to be repaired, not worth it. I imagine it was worth it, considering I believe it was sold for $220k and now is worth nearly a million. See, by selling the condo instead of allowing it to go to Andrew, that $220k became split up as a financial asset instead of property or some weird, conniving shit my dad did.

Oh. And I had to clean out the storage unit, which was where Andrew would go to drink. It was pretty gnarly. He was clearly ashamed of his drinking and so he would hide out there and drink 4Lokos and other chasers mixed in with harder drinks. Presumably to avoid tramping up and down three flights of stairs, he’d also pee into the empties and there were a lot of them.

But that’s okay, Scott didn’t think Andrew deserved it anyway and he was happy to tell Alice that with the now-shifted inheritance (he was executor), they could keep $10k in both checking and savings at all times.

Andrew moves into an apartment not too far from an Ivar’s where I used to go with my grandparents and JP Patches’ lawn. His license hasn’t been restored due to DUIs and so he often had to use taxis—though he suggested I migjht drive him around. My car was supposed to be for helping Grandpa and Grandma get to the hospital for chemo (they’d wanted to gift it) while my folks insisted I pay for it (more unpaid labor) but I figured this was fine.

Dad, who never paid me more than an alleged $12 an hour (getting a raise was impossible; $500 Mon-Fri. for a $1 raise, then $600…), told me to start Andrew at $15-20 for groceries and charge all I could. I didn’t bleed him dry up to dad’s satisfaction, but I did drive Andrew around and it was clear he enjoyed talking to someone.

Sometimes, he would talk about old friends he’d tried to reach out to on the phone or online and how they ignored him or brushed him off. A few times, I think I even recognized his side of conversations from times I’d hear Scott pick up the phone, brush him off, and hang up. I started to get an idea how alone he felt and how happy he was to just have someone to talk to.

And while dad always encouraged me to gouge him: I’m really glad I didn’t. Because Andrew would always tip me a ten or a twenty extra. And I can’t imagine the guilt I’d feel on top of what I do if I’d been ripping him off on top. Cause I’m sure, even if I had been, he still would have gotten out of the car, told me to wait, and hurried up to grab a bill before coming back down to hand it to me.

And this is where we get to that tear in the seam.

One day, Andrew comes down and he’s not well. It’s a severe change from the last time. His slip-ons don’t fit, his feet are bloated and he’s struggling to walk, there’s a strange sickly-sweet smell coming off of him, and he’s sweatier than I’ve ever seen him. We only have a few errands and it takes a lot of effort to dig up where dad’s mowing lawns.

Mom’s working with him that day and should be able to help me track them down—but as soon as I mention Andrew, naturally, it becomes one of those situations where, “Oh, I forgot how to use my new phone! Whoops!”

But I track ‘em down. It’s an early lawn I was taught, Seaview area, my half-brother chipped the driveway once when he worked for Scott and I was warned very sternly against repeating this mistake. They exchange a few words about music, my dad brushes off his clearly-ailing twin, and walks off back to work. Never mentions it.

Andrew dies not long after. Passes out drunk with a lit cigarette and the ensuing fire takes his life. Has to be identified by dental records and the coroner allegedly tells Scott his liver was so ruined he only had months to live.

We’re standing at the service, talking about music, and as dad’s song plays, I just think about that tear in the seam, he saw it, and he talked about the music, any new concerts, blah blah blah, and walked off. ‘Say We’ll Meet Again’?

Why? He’s had three decades to talk to his twin. Three decades of hanging up the phone and walking away, turning his back. He literally saw the man on death’s door and walked away. And now he wants to meet again? He had his chances. And he didn’t change.

At that service, he made a big declaration of how he was going to celebrate Andrew’s life by having a Halloween party annually, like when they were in their twenties. Not one of these has happened, though his Halloween decoration collection has grown. I’m not sure having debauched frat-like parties is a great way to honor your dead twin, however, if he ever does do that.

Not too long after, I had a friend struggling with addiction, I turned to dad for advice and he did Andrew’s memory a real solid. “Why are you asking me? I’ve never known an addict.”

Without her nemesis around, Alice rewrites his memory; these days, mentions of Andrew tend to be prefaced with, “He had his demons,” before ending as if he would agree with any words that came out of her mouth.

Neither of them really honor Andrew’s memory right.

Andrew had a genuine love for music that really could have gone somewhere, if only he’d had a few lucky breaks or a few reliable friends. I don’t just mean that because he could copy disks and give complex reviews, though Rolling Stone would’ve been lucky to have him. There was something deeper in his love, I don’t know how to put it.

In the trauma after Grandma’s death, he reflected a bit on his childhood and times with Grandma. He also brought up a goofy story from around the time his dad, Walter, passed away. At the time, he’d been working on a class project for a fuddy-duddy of a school teacher who didn’t think much of the music of the era.

He didn’t agree and decided to disprove him by putting in a ton of effort, digging through deep cuts and explaining why they were worth listening to and whatever else he could piece together; maybe the teacher listened and changed his mind, maybe not, but he got a good grade. That was the kind of guy Andrew tried to be and, given my family was allegedly big on constructive criticism, I’d say this was the way to go.

I’d contrast that with his twin: in high school, he was known by one teacher as “Mogilla the Gorilla” for being so unruly, quit college after one day, and even decades later would recount a bitter story to me where he snapped at my Grandpa he was “not my dad.” Nor could he get over the time when Grandpa came in and criticized ‘Bloody Well Right’ by Supertramp.

He didn’t write a paper and try to change Grandpa’s view. He just took his investment lessons, then his property for his dream home, then his money and left him to die on a shit-stained mattress. That’s the kind of guy Scott is.

To paraphrase an aunt, also unfortunately deceased, who I was told said something like this while spreading his ashes, “I hope wherever you are, Andrew, you find a peace you couldn’t find here.”

Yes, my folks hate that aunt, too.