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, andadvanced. 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.
Part of why my mom was able to fight cancer so successfully over the years was because of my dad's willingness to be the solid figure who kept our lives running smoothly. My mom was a terrific parent, but for a lot of my childhood, my dad had to take over parenting duties while my mom was undergoing chemo. There had been no hesitation on his part. His wife had cancer. He needed to step up, so he did. He was Mr. Mom. He built an amazing home and life for us all. It was very close to perfect, minus the whole bit about my mom having cancer.
When my mom was sick and busy with her cancer fight, we looked to our dad for homework help, rides around town, advice on life, allowance money, etc. He partook in all of our stupid hobbies: skiing with Tiffany, watching and playing basketball with me, playing tennis and talking politics with Greg, eating expensive Chinese food with Jessica, and aimlessly chatting about dance with Chelsea-all with patience and genuine interest. He never raised his voice. He was a kind, peaceful soul who was impossible to not like. The perfect dad for a bunch of imperfect children.
I wasn't expecting him to go anywhere. I was expecting for us to always have our rock. But this news-well, it could change all of that.
* * *
Once I got off the phone with my parents, we called Abby's mom-who always seemed to be near a computer-to find out more about Lou Gehrig's disease. This was before I owned an amazing iPhone, so Abby's mom was always our 411 whenever we were lost, needed a restaurant suggestion, or wanted to know more about a terminal illness killing my father. She pulled Lou Gehrig's disease up on Wikipedia.
I started to take the whole thing more seriously when she said things like, "lives for an average of two to three years," and "is considered terminal," and "may require a wheelchair after it leads to paralysis," and "many patients are on a respirator"-all of which I heard as: "Danny, your father and pal and road map to life is going to undoubtedly die soon and leave you a lonely bastard with a drinking and motivation problem."
Just so we're all clear, Lou Gehrig's disease-named after New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig-is a neurodegenerative disease that slowly kills off motor neurons. Without these neurons, the brain can't communicate with voluntary muscles. So say, for example, that someone with advanced Lou Gehrig's disease wants to move their arm or leg: their brain would tell their muscles to move, but they wouldn't be able to actually move their limb because the message can't get through. It also affects the diaphragm, which helps draw air into the lungs. The disease progresses rapidly and leads to muscle atrophy, fasciculations, spasticity, dysarthria, dysphagia, and a bunch of other words I can't pronounce. Its more technical medical name is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
A person with Lou Gehrig's disease can still feel everything, and their brain functions normally. They essentially become a prisoner of their own body. Some go on a respirator to extend their lives, but the respirator, on average, only adds a couple more years. Doctors are still not sure what causes it, and very little progress has been made in slowing its progression once it's diagnosed.
In other words, Lou Gehrig's disease is a real ugly motherfucker, and is pretty much a death sentence.
After hanging up the phone, I gave Abby a big, sad kiss and ran my hand through her perfect blond hair to help make me forget the tragic news about my dad, my buddy, my pal.
Abby wanted to take a shower before dinner, so I decided to reach out to my siblings in the meantime. I was the last to hear the news because I had been busy letting my brain turn to mush at the pool. I was closest with Greg, so I decided to give him a call first. I went out to our balcony with a glass of wine and dialed.
"'Sup, Gregor?" I said. I was expecting him to be relaxed. He is a calm, levelheaded person, having more of my dad in him than my mom. It was rare to ever see him worked up about anything. Though he does hate bugs.
But instead of exuding his usual composure, he started bawling. Shit is serious if Greg is crying. "Can you believe this shit? Why can't things ever stay good with this fucking family? I mean, isn't Mom having cancer enough for us to deal with?"
"Yeah, I know. It's fucked up. Dad thinks he'll be okay, though," I said.
"Danny, get fucking real for a second. I looked it up on Wikipedia. This disease is a death sentence. We're going to have to take care of him. Mom can't do it."
"I know, I read the Wikipedia page, too. But you never know. That kook Stephen Hawking has had this fucker for like a million years," I said.
"This family, I swear we're cursed. I mean. Dad. Dad. This is happening to DAD. Not Mom. DAD."
"I know. Well, let's wait for a second opinion," I said.
"What's the point? He has it. And now we have TWO terminally ill parents. One hundred percent of our parents are terminally ill," he said.
I didn't want to think about all this. I wanted to go back to vacation mode. "Guess where I am?" I said, changing the subject as I watched some shitbag golfer duff his approach shot.
"Where?"
"At the birthplace of your coming out," I said.
"Oh, I love Palm Desert," he said. We were silent for a second. "God, Dad's going to fucking die."
After I got off the phone with Greg, I called Tiffany. She and I always hated each other: the old first/second child rivalry in full effect. She's a very serious person who doesn't like to joke around. She is prim and proper, and thinks we should all be the same. I'm less serious. Conversations between us would usually go like this: She'd say something. I'd make a horrible joke. She'd say something bitchy in response. I'd say something mean back to her. Then it would end. Maybe things would be different now.
"Hey, Tiff," I said.
"Hey, Dan, you hear about Dad?" she said. She was crying, too. Really bawling her head off. Fuck, should I be crying, too?
"What? No. What happened to Dad?" I said as if I hadn't heard the news.
"He has Lou Gehrig's disease. He's going to be paralyzed and we're going to have to take care of him on a respirator. He's going to die before Mom," she said.
"I was just kidding. I talked to Dad a bit ago. I already knew," I said nonchalantly.
"God, can you not be an unfunny asshole for two seconds?" she said.
"As soon as you pull the stick out of your ass for two seconds," I said back.
"I'm late for my LSAT class. I'm gonna go."
"All right, great catching up," I said. God, I was a fucking asshole.
I sent Jessica a text and asked her if she was okay. She texted back that she was okay and said that Mom was crying and freaking out. I told her that it was going to be okay, that things would calm down. Chelsea didn't have a cell phone at the time. This was before every dickhead over five was carrying one around. I figured that she was just focusing on dance, and possibly making a fart joke or two.
Abby got out of the shower, looking like a wet angel against the Palm Desert sunset. She put her arms around me. She seemed even more beautiful and perfect next to this horrible news.
"You okay?" she asked in her sweet voice.
"Yeah, I think so. I mean, this can't be for real, right? My dad can't have Lou Gehrig's disease," I said.
"Yeah, maybe he doesn't. He's so healthy. He runs all the time," Abby said and forced a smile, trying to play along with my denial.
"Yeah, I'm sure he'll be fine," I managed.
We went to a steak dinner at a nice restaurant and loaded up on wine. I tried to put on a happy face, but I was mainly trying to comprehend what this news meant. It seemed so unreal that our family rock would go down like this. We had expected and even planned for my mom's death at some point. My mom always joked that she was busy picking out my dad's next wife. But for my dad to go? That wasn't possible. I figured the healthy bastard would outlive me and run a marathon on the day of my funeral.
He had always been there for us, and because we were all very spoiled, we were still dependent on him to help with our finances, fix any of our little problems, and just generally give us very grounded and sane advice about how to function in this complex world. He was good at life, and, with his support, so were we. This news meant we might lose the guy who had made our lives as awesome as they were. It might mean no more time-shares in Palm Desert. It was a scary thought.
And what would all this mean for my mom? Would she still be able to fight off cancer without my healthy father at her side? Or would the disease gain momentum and finally make its game-winning attack? And if my dad died before my mom, how would she function? She, even more than the rest of us, was reliant on my dad to keep her life up and running. Fuck, were both my parents going to die soon? Was I going to be an orphan? Little orphan Danny.
And what would happen to all my siblings? Tiffany, Greg, and I were in our twenties and could sort of look after ourselves. But what about Jessica and Chelsea? They still needed parents to guide them into college and adulthood. Would Jessica be able to hang on and get through high school? My dad always helped Chelsea with her math homework. Was she now going to suck at math?
And what would happen to me? My plan was to keep working at Abernathy MacGregor, then try to find something in the Bay Area so I could be close to Abby. I would move in with her, and then propose. Then we'd spend the rest of our lives together completely in love without a care in the world, and then probably get burial plots right next to each other so that we'd always be at each other's side. I know people get married when they're in their late twenties or early thirties these days, but I didn't think I was ever going to find anyone I loved as much as Abby, so why the fuck not get married sooner rather than later? Was this plan now fucked? Would I have to move home and take care of my parents?
What about my poor, kind, loving dad? He was such a sweet, gentle guy to have such a horrific diagnosis. How would he handle all of this? He was supposed to fade to old while still running and skiing and traveling and drinking his nightly glass of wine, all while doing his best to keep his wife alive. Fuck, he was planning on running a couple marathons a year for the next ten years. How would he handle losing his favorite hobby? How would he manage slowly losing control of his trusted body one muscle at a time? He had figured that he'd have twenty-five to thirty more years to cram the rest of his life in. But Wikipedia said he had only two to three? Fuck that. How dare this asshole disease pop up and ruin him? I already hated it. Fuck Lou Gehrig's disease.
I didn't want to think about any of this. I just wanted to drink and eat steak, and go back to being a spoiled white asshole on vacation in Palm Desert.
"What are you thinking about?" asked Abby. Her eyes were a little puffy. She had been crying off and on; it seemed I was the only person who hadn't cried yet.
"Oh, nothing. Just my terminally ill parents and how my life might totally be fucked now ... Let's get drunk," I said.
I ordered another bottle of wine and filled our glasses to the brim.
Copyright © 2015 by Dan Marshall
