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An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year, 2015
For the Marshalls, laughter is the best medicine. Especially when combined with alcohol, pain pills, excessive cursing, sexual escapades, actual medicine, and more alcohol.
Meet Dan Marshall. 25, good job, great girlfriend, and living the dream life in sunny Los Angeles without a care in the world. Until his mother calls. And he ignores it, as you usually do when Mom calls. Then she calls again. And again.
Dan thought things were going great at home. But it turns out his mom's cancer, which she had battled throughout his childhood with tenacity and a mouth foul enough to make a sailor blush, is back. And to add insult to injury, his loving father has been diagnosed with ALS.
Sayonara L.A., Dan is headed home to Salt Lake City, Utah.
Never has there been a more reluctant family reunion: His older sister is resentful, having stayed closer to home to bear the brunt of their mother's illness. His younger brother comes to lend a hand, giving up a journalism career and evenings cruising Chicago gay bars. His next younger sister, a sullen teenager, is a rebel with a cause. And his baby sister - through it all - can only think about her beloved dance troop. Dan returns to shouting matches at the dinner table, old flames knocking at the door, and a speech device programmed to help his father communicate that is as crude as the rest of them. But they put their petty differences aside and form Team Terminal, battling their parents' illnesses as best they can, when not otherwise distracted by the chaos that follows them wherever they go. Not even the family cats escape unscathed.
As Dan steps into his role as caregiver, wheelchair wrangler, and sibling referee, he watches pieces of his previous life slip away, and comes to realize that the further you stretch the ties that bind, the tighter they hold you together.
| ISBN-13: | 9781250068859 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Flatiron Books |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 778,688 |
| File size: | 619 KB |
THE BOMB
"I fucking love it here," I said like a spoiled white asshole as I looked up at the cloudless sky, seeing only palm trees against the perfect blue.
"I know. I could stay here forever," said my girlfriend, Abby.
Abby and I were celebrating her twenty-fourth birthday at the JW Marriott pool in Palm Desert. She had flown into Los Angeles from Berkeley the night before, and then we had driven out to the desert in my shitty Subaru. We were drinking frozen tropical smoothies full of alcohol, the endless sun beating down on us as we read pointless books with entertaining storylines. The pool band played "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and various Beach Boys songs on a loop. We had incredibly important conversations about incredibly important topics, like where we should eat dinner and how much post-dinner sex we should have. Shit, maybe we'd even hit up a late-night hot tub session if we had the energy after all the eating and fucking. The world was ours.
My parents owned a time-share at this Palm Desert Marriott, and I had grown up vacationing there. It was our family spot. We were from Salt Lake City, Utah, so Palm Desert was one of the closest warm destinations. We liked coming here to get away from our problems and from all the Mormons who lived around us. My mom hated Mormons with a passion. When we first moved to Salt Lake from Pekin, Illinois, our beloved family dog, Basquo, was running around the neighborhood. An evil Mormon kid started throwing rocks at him and pulling his tail, so Basquo bit him. Our Mormon neighbors ganged up on my mom and dad and demanded that we put Basquo under. My mom had disliked Mormons ever since, blaming them for the death of our dog. She trained us to distrust them as well, and made sure we knew there was a normal world outside of Utah. So, as kids, when we'd land at the Palm Springs Airport, my mom was always sure to point out the glowing neon COCKTAILS sign in the terminal bar.
"See, this is what normal places are like that aren't run by a Nazi religion," she would say. "They have bars everywhere."
"Okay, great," we'd say back, not really sure what all that meant.
We spent several Thanksgivings and Easters in Palm Desert. Fuck, we were so comfortable with the place that my gay brother, Greg, came out of the closet here on a family vacation.
I brought Abby to Palm Desert to let her in on the Marshall family tradition of relaxing in the sun and getting away from all of our troubles.
At the time, I didn't have many troubles to get away from. Things were going great. I was living in Los Angeles working my first real job at a strategic communications and PR firm called Abernathy MacGregor, making my own money for the first time in my life. Though the job was occasionally difficult and consuming, I was still very much in that post-college dicking-around phase. I lived in an apartment right off the Sunset Strip, where my roommate Gabe and I would sit on our balcony cracking jokes while watching beautiful struggling actresses walk by on their way toward chasing their Hollywood dreams.
Abby was getting her Ph.D. at Berkeley in materials science. We had met sophomore year of college at Berkeley and had been together since — four years now. She was way smarter than most attractive blondes and was amused by my offbeat sense of humor instead of repelled by it. We were madly in love. Even though we were in a long-distance relationship, marriage seemed inevitable.
Everything with my family was going pretty well, too. Sure, my mom still had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She had first been diagnosed in 1992, when she was only thirty-seven years old. I remember the day. She left for the doctor's one morning thinking she had a stomach bug and returned a cancer patient. My four siblings and I were all under eleven. We didn't know what cancer meant. My little sister Chelsea couldn't even pronounce the word. "What is can-sore?" she asked upon hearing the news.
"It's not good," I said, not really sure what it was myself.
Terrifying words accompanied my mother's diagnosis — words like terminal, inoperable, untreatable, and advanced. It was deemed stage four, or "end-stage," cancer, and she was given only a couple months to live. But, looking her kids in their watery eyes, she vowed to not let cancer leave her children without a mom. She decided to fight it with all her will and strength, no matter how many chemotherapy treatments and surgeries it took. She wasn't going to let cancer beat her.
And it didn't. After nearly seventy rounds of chemotherapy and several surgeries, at age fifty-one she was still standing. The cancer wasn't gone, but it was under control. She and her trusted oncologist, Dr. Saundra Buys, would keep a watchful eye on it. When her immune system or white blood count would begin to drop, she'd start chemo back up. It was a big part of her life and a constant battle. But right now she was feeling good and wasn't receiving any chemo. In fact, she had a full head of hair down to her shoulders.
My dad was doing better than ever. He was fifty-three and cruising along toward retirement. Sure his hair was graying and he was slowly going bald, but life was good. He owned and ran a few weekly newspapers in a variety of small towns across northern Utah, Idaho, and the Pacific Northwest. His business did well and he was financially secure. Plus, he worked for himself, so he was able to manage his hours in a way that allowed for him to have free time to spend with his dipshit family. He'd start every day with a cup of coffee and a dump, and end it with a glass of wine. He was living the dream.
Things were coasting along so nicely that he had recently picked up a new hobby: marathon running. His best friend, Sam Larkin, had gotten him into it a couple years back. I personally think you have to have some sort of mental disorder to want to torture your body via a marathon, but my dad seemed to love it. He had always been an active person — skiing every weekend in the winter — so I guess it made sense that he got addicted to another form of exercise. He was running at least fifteen miles most days of the week. He had to run no matter where we were. It was his meth, his life. It was how we all knew him now — our dad, the marathon-running health nut.
He had just finished running the Chicago Marathon on October 20, 2006. It had been his second marathon of the month. The first was St. George, in southern Utah. My dad was working on qualifying for the Boston Marathon, which is like the Super Bowl of marathons for these runner nuts. He needed to finish the St. George race in under three hours and thirty-five minutes to qualify for his age bracket. The obsessive training paid off. He qualified for Boston by only a few seconds.
My older sister, Tiffany, was working at Fidelity Investments in downtown Salt Lake. She had just finished undergrad at the University of Utah, where she majored in international studies. She had ambitions of going to law school next and was taking a class to help her study for the LSAT. She had just bought a house in a trendy Salt Lake neighborhood. She was a snowboarding fanatic, and even though her studies and work didn't leave her much free time, she'd get up to the mountains a few times a week during the winter season. She was seven years into dating her boyfriend, Derek. Derek was a Park City townie who worked at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory and loved mountain biking. He had a tattoo of a naked lady running along his right arm that he'd let me look at when I was bored at family dinners, so I liked him. He had a giant heart and fit in perfectly with our family. My sister was still trying to figure out all of her career aspirations, but she was happy, settling into a very nice life in Salt Lake close to her beloved mountains.
My gay brother, Greg, was in his last year at Northwestern, in Evanston, Illinois. He was majoring in journalism and fine-tuning his incredible writing skills. He was busy enjoying the freedom that being out and proud brought about, especially now that he lived in a more liberal city than Salt Lake. Greg is a tall, wickedly smart blond, so he had his pick of cock. He was born with cerebral palsy, but after several leg surgeries, he was left with only a slight limp. Oh, and he was uncircumcised. He said that he had a "gimmicky cock that every guy on campus wanted to try out." If life is about fucking as much as possible, then Greg certainly seemed to be nailing it. After college, he planned on getting a journalism job at a newspaper or radio station in Chicago and living in the city with friends.
My little sisters, Jessica and Chelsea — who we always called "The Little Girls" — were in high school. My adopted Native American sister, Jessica, was a popular tenth grader who didn't give two fucks about school or anything. She spent most of her time flirting with boys and hanging with friends. In her early teens, one of the people she had been hanging around was her much older Mormon lacrosse coach. Because of the age difference we thought the relationship was just a bit creepy, so we started calling her coach Creepy Todd. But that appeared to finally be over. She had a couple more years of school, then hopefully she'd be off to college.
Chelsea was almost sixteen. She wasn't popular, so she focused on school. She was a little off socially. We always thought she was just immature, but we had recently begun to suspect that she actually had Asperger's, a mild form of autism. My parents had started looking into getting her some help for it. But Chelsea was a straight-A student and smart as a whip at anything she put her mind to. People with Asperger's often obsess over something, and her obsession was dancing. She was able to masterfully steer any conversation right back to ballet. Oh, and she was absolutely terrific at making fart and ass jokes — a trait I admired and one that had always made us close. A sense of humor is all you really need to get through life.
All in all, my siblings and I were lucky, living with the proverbial silver spoon jammed firmly up our asses. Having two loving parents who were financially stable gave us every advantage to succeed in this mostly unfair world. We always had a nice big roof over our heads, were able to pick whichever college we wanted to attend, and knew that, no matter our failures, our parents were there to help guide us toward success and happiness. I hate when a person uses the word blessed like some pious asshole, but we were so blessed — the genetic lottery playing out in our favor. Things had been good, were currently good, and were expected to continue to be good. The future was bright for the Marshall clan.
* * *
"Would you like another drink?" the poolside waitress asked Abby and me.
"Oh, fuck, yeah. I'll have another strawberry daiquiri with an extra shot of rum, and whatever she wants," I said back.
"Piña colada," said Abby.
"You got it," said the waitress.
"I love you, babe," said Abby as she looked over at me and smiled her beautiful, radiant smile.
"I love you, too," I said back.
We leaned over and did one of those obnoxious kisses assholes in love sometimes do in public. If I had been watching this display of affection instead of partaking in it, I would've shaken my head and muttered "dickheads" under my breath.
"Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you to Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama," sang the poolside band.
When we got back to our room, which looked out on the impeccably manicured golf course, we popped open a bottle of wine, because why the fuck not? I had left my phone charging in the wall socket as to not be distracted from the drinking and sitting around at the pool.
"Holy shit," I said as I picked it up.
I had six missed calls from my mom, three from Greg, and two text messages from Jessica, who primarily communicated via text message, unless she was shit-faced drunk — then she might offer up a drunk dial. The texts just read "Danny?" and "Where are you?"
I instantly knew something was up.
I initially thought, Oh fuck, something happened to one of our dogs. We had two golden retrievers, Berkeley and Mazie, who my parents loved and were always calling to talk about. A thousand hypothetical scenarios ran through my head. Maybe Berkeley had been hit by a car. Or maybe he had swallowed and choked on one of the two tennis balls he usually carried in his mouth. Shit, maybe one of the cruel Mormon neighborhood boys had beaten him to death and carved FUCK THE MARSHALLS into his heart. The Mormons had written FUCK THE MARSHALLS on our mailbox in chalk once. Had they taken it to the next level? Was this the next Basquo situation?
I called my mom back. She answered. "Where the fuck have you been?"
"At the pool. What the fuck is up?" I responded, wanting to match her swear word for swear word — one of our secret games.
"It's your fucking dad," she said back, her voice now trembling.
"Fuck, what happened to Dad?" I responded, suddenly concerned. My dad was beyond healthy, having only missed a couple days of work due to illness his whole life. He won attendance awards at Pocatello High School for never missing a class. He had recently choked on a chicken bone while eating some soup our Polish cleaning lady, Stana (pronounced Stah-nuh), had made. Maybe it was related to that? Or maybe it was something else. He had gone to the doctor recently because he had started to experience strange muscle twitches in his upper chest over the summer. We figured it was probably caused by all the running he was doing, and that he just wasn't drinking enough water, so we didn't think anything of it. But his doctor hadn't been sure, so he sent my dad up to see a neurologist, Dr. Mark Bromberg, up at the University of Utah. My dad went to the appointment with a this-is-pointless-but-I'll-go-along-with-it attitude. It certainly wasn't going to be anything serious. In fact, I had forgotten that he had even gone to get it checked out.
"Dad has ..." My mom was crying too much to even get the words out.
"Dad has ..." She tried again. "Here, talk to your dad." She shoveled the phone off to him, continuing to cry in the background.
"Hey, DJ. How was the pool?" he asked, as if the phone hadn't been passed to him by a frantic, crying person.
"It was fine. Dad, what's up? Is it the dogs? Did the neighbors carve 'Fuck the Marshalls' into Berkeley's heart?"
"What? No. It's not the dogs," he said.
"Oh, thank God," I said. "Well, what is it then? The fucking chicken bone? Fucking Stana."
"Well, I have — Well, they think I have — Well, they think I might have ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease," he managed.
"Really? That sucks." I paused for a few seconds, not knowing which of the many diseases Lou Gehrig's was. "Wait. Which one is Lou Gehrig's disease again?" I asked, while sipping my glass of wine and thinking about what positions Abby and I were going to try during our post-dinner fuck festival.
"It's a neurological disorder where your spinal cord loses its ability to communicate with the muscles. It's sort of a dying off of your motor neurons that can lead to paralysis," he said, sounding like he was just repeating the words his doctor told him without really processing them. "Those fasciculations in my chest, I guess those were the first signs of it."
"Shit, but you're going to be all right, right?" I asked, clearly not really contemplating the magnitude of this news. "It isn't too serious?"
"I'll be fine." I heard my mom crying in the background and muttering about how he wasn't going to be fine, about how he was going to die. "I can live a long, long time with this. Stephen Hawking has had the disease for forty years or something, so don't worry about me," he said with optimism in his voice.
"But isn't Stephen Hawking, like, crippled, and in a wheelchair, and unable to talk, and always about to die?" I asked.
After a long pause, my dad said, "Well, the point is, I can live a very long time."
"Well, shit, Dad. This can officially be placed in the 'shitty news' file. Are you getting a second opinion?" I asked while polishing off my glass of wine.
"Yeah, we're looking into it. There are a lot of things this could be instead of Lou Gehrig's. It could be Lyme disease," he said back.
"Fuck. Really? Lyme disease?" I had heard of that one.
"Hope I didn't ruin your trip. Is the weather nice?"
"Yes, it's always sunny and hot here."
"Well, you should go back to the pool, or to a nice dinner," he suggested.
"Yeah, might need to. Can I talk to Mom? I love you," I said.
My mom got on the phone, still crying — a stark contrast to my dad's relaxed tone. She seemed convinced my dad was going to die any minute. I told her to settle down and wait for the second opinion before we shit the bed and went into crisis mode.
But this was major news. Our dad was the rock of our family. The stable one. The healthy one. The parent who wasn't going anywhere. We thought if we were going to lose a parent, that it would be our mom. This was wildly off script.
Excerpted from Home is Burning by Dan Marshall. Copyright © 2015 Dan Marshall. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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