Boys and Their Mothers, Man

A Letter To My Father

In a previous letter, someone asked if you and Uncle Charlie didn’t always get along because he was gay. Of all the possible reasons for friction between you two, that was the last one I could imagine. Homophobia wasn’t in your DNA. If anything, I think you were hurt that he didn’t trust you enough to tell you outright.

I suspect some of it started when you were both young and good-looking—and he was just a little better-looking, so the girls gravitated toward him. I mean, come on, I hate that A- is the better-looking brother in our group. At least he’s had the decency to go bald.

But more than petty, competitive brotherly bullshit, I think the friction I sometimes saw between you two was the result of having a mother who had no problem playing you against each other. The heartbreaking part—the part I recognized early on—was that she didn’t even need to pit you against each other. She was really good at making each of you feel less than, all on your own.

I watched her berate Uncle Charlie because he didn’t make enough of his adult life about her. I watched her do the same thing to you after he died. You got the added bonus of being compared to him. She treated him like a stand-in boyfriend, expecting him to take her on “dates”—Sunday drives through the Hollywood Hills, dinners, shows, doting. And when he failed to live up to her expectations, she could be cruel.

You were just sort of… there.

This was something we did talk about. Sometimes it almost broke you.

It was a strange, heartbreaking thing. No parent should ever have to bury a child. No child should ever have to feel like an afterthought to a parent. No matter the age of either.

But I also know the friction between you and Uncle Charlie couldn’t have been anything more than superficial. I know this because you trusted him above everyone else with the single most important thing in your life—until my siblings arrived: me.

You don’t hand over your most prized possession to someone you don’t trust. You don’t ask for help reaching the person you love the most from someone you think might influence them negatively. You don’t tell your son, “I don’t know how to help you, but I think your Uncle Charlie can,” if you don’t know, deep down, that your son is going to a man you trust with your every fiber.

No, I believed then—and still believe—that some of the friction between you two when I was very young was just typical sibling rivalry bullshit, combined with some frustration on your part that your big brother didn’t trust you enough with the biggest secret of his life.

I believe that throughout your adult lives, you were both played against each other—intentionally or not—by the one person you should have been able to trust the most: your mom.

The funny thing about Grandma is that after you and Uncle Charlie died, she often tried to wedge me into the Uncle Charlie role. I recognized it for what it was, and I called her on it.

Boys and their mothers, man.