And that makes you think of Jesse?

Yeah. None of my cousins got to experience this sort of peace. But it’s Jesse that came so fucking close.

After you died, he got out of prison for the umpteenth time. He got sober, got a real job, and started a family. He was still in the barrio living in the projects, but he was doing better and on his way to actually doing well.

You should know, dad, he absolutely loved you. He understood that you were the difference between me ending up like him. We sat outside of Homeboy smoking, talking about our lives, the parallels, and ultimately the divergence. The difference was you.

Where I had one useless parent, he had two. That kind of math adds up to no kid having a chance. That he achieved anything at all is nothing short of a miracle. But even standing there smoking, talking, I could feel it - that restlessness, that constant looking over his shoulder that comes from a life just trying to survive.

He told me writing helped. Showed me a story he was working on about the night Joey was killed. It was heartbreaking. It was raw. It was really, really good.

A few weeks later he called me up and said he was acting in a play. It was a play about an immigrant woman coming to LA and all the shit she had to endure just to get here and then all the shit she had to endure just to be allowed to even exist.

“Yeah, fool, I play a shitty, abusive boyfriend.”

I was amused because of all of the things he was - that was never it. As long as you never fucked with him or his people he was sweetness personified. And being a dick to a woman was anathema to his character. But on that stage in LA, he was an Oscar worthy asshole.

He had it - that thing the French call je ne sais quoi.

We went out and celebrated and he was floating the rest of the night. I felt like he finally made it. He started with the deck stacked so high against him and fucking made it, if not all the way out, definitely on his way.

It wasn’t long after that performance that the Air Force moved us across the country to Florida. So I wasn’t there when Jesse lost his job. We talked on the phone, sure, and he played it off like it was no big deal.

“I can find another job.”

I think he got high instead. The mind of an addict.

His number stopped working and he disappeared. His wife didn’t know where he was. I was an entire continent away. He ended up in a hospital.

Then he wasn’t.

I really don’t remember how long after that I got that call.

As I walked through Passy towards the 6 line I thought, “I wish Jesse could have seen this.” And I took the metro the opposite way one stop - just happened to be the stop on the other side of the Seine. And I rode across the Seine taking it all in, wishing his life had been something different than it was. I thought to myself, this place would have healed him.

He was one of the sweetest, best humans, but he started from so far behind the start line that it didn’t even become visible until the race was almost over.

I got off at the next stop, walked to the other side of the track, and went back over the Seine on my way home.

I suspect some of it started when …

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The smell of albondigas filling his apartment in Los Feliz. His Thanksgiving feasts in West Hollywood. His annoying pet birds.

Seriously, why the damn birds?

Then I remembered the little café across the street from his apartment on Los Feliz Blvd. The waitresses would fawn all over him. One—I think her name was Teri—went so far as to tell him she thought he was beautiful. He was, but it was the first time I ever saw women swoon.

I remember asking him after breakfast if he found women attractive, and he admitted that he did sometimes. He said he loved dark-skinned Black women. When I was in Senegal last year, I thought a lot about Uncle Charlie. It’s entirely possible that Senegal has the most beautiful people in the world.

You two didn’t always get along. You never really explained why to me. But then, you weren’t the talker. And yet, you always trusted him with me. You knew he loved me as if I were his own. More than that, you knew he could reach me where no one else could.

When I went to live with him for a time, I was sure you and I would never recover. I wanted to hate you, but that fucking voice in my head would scream at me about all the little things I wanted to pretend didn’t matter. And then Uncle Charlie would sit with me at dinner and talk to me in a way nobody else ever could.

He was the one who told me about your dad making you two sleep in the car in the driveway. He told me about the abuse you both endured. He was the one who pointed out all the times you showed up for all of my stupid shit. Yeah, the plays, the sports, but even the silly dreams. I wanted to be on TV, so you took me to meet a director you were sure I was making up. You took me to my tapings. When I was convinced I was going to be the biggest rock star on the planet, you bought me my first electric guitar, and then my first bass.

Even when I was in trouble (fucking always), you made it a point to leave me my music.

“Tell your guitar what you can’t put into words,” you said.

Uncle Charlie reminded me of all of this.

“You have a dad that shows up. You have a dad who comes home every night. You have a dad who puts you first every single day.”

“I thought you were supposed to be on my side.”

“I am on your side, mijo. So is he.”

That time with Uncle Charlie almost broke me. Not because he did anything wrong. He put a mirror in front of my face and forced me to own my own bullshit. I was not ready for that.

I remember wanting the Uncle Charlie who was my buddy—the guy who took me to concerts and drove me around in his ’49 Ford. I didn’t like this asshole who was gently calling me on my shit in a way that forced me to actually deal with it.

He was already sick by then. If I had paid better attention, I would have recognized it. But it wasn’t bad enough for my adolescent ass (assolescent?) to notice.

Not yet, anyway.

By the time he got really sick, you and I had reconciled. Uncle Charlie sat us down and forced us to shut the fuck up while the other of us talked. Each of us—you and I—wanted to murder him at different times that night. That amused him.

You agreed to let me change schools. I agreed to grow up and do the work.

He got sicker.

I begged him to forgive me for anything I ever did. He cracked a smile and told me not to be silly.

I sat with him and was hit by the smell. That blend of medicinal and decay. This beautiful creature was reduced to thin skin loosely draped over bone, covered in lesions. At least he was home and not in some fucking hospital.

He died in your arms. You didn’t care that he’d bled on you. You didn’t want to let your brother go. You wept.

I have often thought that a part of you didn’t just die that day—but that a part of you is frozen in that room at that moment. Two brothers holding onto one another, holding onto the only constant either had ever truly known.

It still amuses me that you decided on the Green Bay Packers as your new team. Your logic—they’re owned by the people of Green Bay, so they’ll never leave—was flawless…

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“Nobody could force you to do anything.”

Except, maybe the US Military. Okay, maybe not even them.

You were here when I woke up nineteen years ago. You were gone by the time I went to be…

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Is that a quirk I get from you or from my mom?…

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I never bother…

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I flew home in time to get to you before checkout. You told me that some assholes were picking on some young gay kid, and you intervened. For your…

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Since I cannot draw I have had to utilize AI to create images for me. I would explain AI to you dad, but you’d probably make some lame joke like, “AI, I can’t draw either!” Then laugh way too hard at your own joke.

As I was gathering some images together this morning I caught myself thinking of some of the old photos I have of you. So I dropped this one into ComfyUI and asked it to clean it up. Suddenly, this faded image of my two heroes in the time before my existence came through a lot clearer. I was not prepared for the tears that would come as I sat here staring at my MacBook.

I never asked what lead to this photo of you two, or even how old you were here. I only know it was before my time because Uncle Charlie was away in the military by the time I came along.

Now you’re both gone.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since last night’s letter. My two heroes are dead and gone to wherever we go next. I know Uncle Charlie was a believer. I know that it filled him with self-loathing because he was a gay man trying to please his church full of fuck-heads who did not approve. I remember when his ex, R- got married to a woman. I thought it was strange. That’s when I learned about conversion therapy. I met R’s wife once at grandma’s house not long after Uncle Charlie died. She was sweet, demure, just sort of there.

I ended up with his journals after you died. He struggled with his faith and homosexuality big time. I hated reading it. The self-loathing of it all was enough to make me wish god was real so I could kick Him in the fucking teeth for causing this kind of pain in a man I knew to be better than almost every other man gracing this big, blue ball.

When you died, grandma took small solace in believing that you and Uncle Charlie would be reunited again. You weren’t the believer that he was. Your god was less defined, less ecclesiastical. Your god seemed to be the connection with… all of us? Nature?

We never really talked about it except that one time I burned tossed out the Book of Mormon. You weren’t angry that I chucked in the garbage so much as that I did it to prevent you from reading it. I was heavy into my own religious bullshit at the time and, as young believers often do, I believed my faith was the only faith.

You, on the other hand, were always curious. Always searching, but never really explaining what it was you were looking for. You told me you don’t pray to a god in heaven, but you “do pray, or meditate, or whatever you wanna call it,” when you’re alone. That sometimes you removed yourself from places just to do that very thing. You tried explaining that you didn’t need a god in a book when you can see god reflected in the world around you.

I don’t know if you expected to see Uncle Charlie again. When Jen died you didn’t feed me the usual line of “she’s in a better place,”

just,

“she’s gone and I am so sorry, mijo.”

I know that, save for memories and dreams, I don’t expect to see you again. When I die I expect - hope - that the energy that fills my soul will return to the stars and dance around the universe until the stuff of me is needed somewhere else. Not in some reincarnation way; in an energy never dies, it simply transforms sort of way.

That’s why I spend so much of my time looking up, honestly. I like to imagine that the stuff of you is floating around Orion while Uncle Charlie is lingering near the moon. I don’t know why, I just know that when I look at either I think of each of you and you seem not so far away.

By the time I was five my best friend in the world died. I didn’t know BeeBee was …

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I remember a call you made to me on September 11th. Yes, THAT September 11th.

I was not prepared for the sound of your voice to be so full of fear. You are the strongest man I have ever known so as I sat i…

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