I love that so many of you enjoy reading about my Uncle Charlie. Honestly, he is one of the two pillars upon which I stand.
After I posted my article about Uncle Charlie yesterday I was reminded of one of my worst moments as a young human by that little voice in my head that never forgets my absolute worst moments and likes to replay them for me like a greatest hits of shitty human behavior.
I was fifteen at the time. I was in love with a girl he liked to call the Little Red-Haired Girl a la Charlie Brown. My dad didn’t like her at that point in our relationship, but my Uncle Charlie thought she was alright. That I loved her made him default to doing the same.
At this particular time in my adolescense I was living with my Uncle Charlie and grandma because my dad was ready to murder me. My behavior truly was reprehensible – I had failed something like eight out of twelve classes in one year and was not improving much the next. It was looking more than a little likely that I would not graduate high school so my dad sent me a block away to live with my Uncle Charlie, the hope being he could help me remove my sizeable head from my own ass.
While my Uncle Charlie was very much a reasonable man who eschewed the asswhoopings my dad was more than happy to give, I still was an absolute asshole of a child and I gave him no cause to think, well, reasoning with me would be of any use. So, as a petulent little fuckface that I was, I sat down and wrote the Little Red-Haired Girl a letter listing all the reasons my Uncle Charlie was a right fucking prick.
I use to like to assuage my guilt for what I wrote next by telling myself I didn’t know he was sick. He was training for the L.A. Marathon and looked like adonis when he took his shirt off. He had no right to go through my stuff. I didn’t mean it like that… all the hollow shit a dumb teenage boy can conjure when he knows he was so very fucking wrong.
I wish that faggot would just leave me alone.
I blamed him for reading a letter that wasn’t meant for him. He didn’t flinch. He just asked if that was how I really felt. Did I really want him to leave me alone? Did I really see him as a faggot?
Fam, the look on his face was the first time I saw a look I would come to know too well on the faces of the people I love. I broke his heart in a way I could spend my life trying to mend and know it would still not ever be enough. There’s I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. And then there was that look.
Where there was a piece of my heart you alone occupied, there is now a void that I don’t think I can ever refill.
That’s the best way I can articulate that look. It is almost forty years later and I still see him sitting there at the dinner table with his heart completely broken.
And I knew. I knew that of all the people on the planet – even more than his own brother, or his own mother – he counted me above them all. I was his star. I was the one person who loved him completely and without reservation. I was the only one who never needed to get used to anything or accept something… I just fucking loved him. And that was what made it hurt so much more than if it had been literally any other person on the planet.
It was written out of anger. It was never something I meant in that horrible way it is screamed in vitriol by homophobes. But I failed. I apologized again and again once I realized the hurt I had leveled at this human I truly considered my hero. He forgave me, or said he did. And knowing him, he proably forgave me the moment I said sorry.
But I didn’t forgive me. Not for a long time.
Two years later he was sick. Real sick. My dad said I needed to get my goodbyes in because it was weeks if not days. He was bed ridden, but out of the hospital because he refused to die in a fucking hospital. I remember thinking Auschwitz when he got this close to the end. That’s what AIDS does to every Adonis; it breaks them down to soft, saggy, transluscent skin over veins and bone just like we all saw in those old WWII documentaries.
I sat with him for hours. There were a few things he told me that I latched onto.
Take care of the Littel Red-Haired girl, Charlie Brown. I laughed thtough tears.
I’m sorry, Uncle Charlie. I never meant –
I know, mijo. I know. There is nothing to forgive.
I just wish –
Shh, it’s okay. Take care of your dad for me. He’s not as strong as he likes the world to think he is.
I don’t know what I wished. I wished I had never written it. I wished he was never sick. I wished he knew that he was the coolest man I have ever known even all this time later.
I don’t want you to leave feeling like I’m in need of a pick me up, some words of encouragement along the lines of, you’re Uncle Charlie fogives you. It’s never about that anymore. It’s about the reality that I have to carry it. That the grace I allow myself is measured against how I behave today. I am not that stupid fucking kid lashing out at the people that loved him the most.
What I am is a fifty-two year old man who was asked a few days ago what advice I would give a teenage boy who does not have a father figure for this kind of advice. And that kid (and every kid like him) is who this story is for (I decided halfway through writing this). You are going to go through so many changes, kid. Your body and your heart and your mind are going to pull you in three different directions and it will cause you to say and do some of the dumbest shit a human being can say and do. And you will hate yourself for it. For a long, long time. So save this next part for those moments.
I am telling you now – I forgive you. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t hurt me when you said or did that stupid thing. It only matters that I forgive you. Because I love you and I know what it is to be where you’re about to go. And your mistakes were my mistakes once upon a time so, I forgive you. Now dust yourself off and try to be better a better human tomorrow.
