In the Army he stayed ripped by spending hours at the gym. In Munich, in the mid-1980s, he competed in bodybuilding competitions. The photos of him from that era show a man with a deeply chiseled body and a confidence that could have been bottled, copyrighted, and sold.
In early 1997, at the age of thirty-four, Jeff still committed himself to tenacious workouts. Despite being married with two kids and attempting to start a new career after thirteen years in the Army, he always made time for exercise. Such was his dedication to the gym that I wondered if he might have a slight mental imbalance that manifested in manic fitness pursuits. Or, equally likely, he was simply vain.
I’d taken a trip to Atlanta during my winter break from college.
On this trip I’d mostly hung around with my brother and his family and Kim, visiting the outlying aunts and uncles occasionally or seeing them when they dropped by my brother’s house.
Jeff relished being older and in better shape.
“Hey, kid, want to race three miles? I can still kill it in seventeen minutes, twenty seconds,” he’d say with a big grin, or “Hey, kid, want to see how much you can deadlift? Bench-press? Squat?”
One afternoon I agreed to a session at the gym. He said his body had been aching, that he’d been going to a chiropractor. He chalked it up to “old age” and the rigors and stresses of raising children and starting a new career.
I expected that Jeff would kill me at the gym, beat me by a hundred pounds on squats and fifty or even seventy-five at bench.
We warmed up on bench with two plates, 135 pounds, merely feathers. I knocked out fifteen repetitions. I knew I’d hurt badly the next day, but I didn’t want to look like a total wimp in front of my brother. We jacked it up to 185, then 205, then 225. I held my own with Jeff. We were both surprised. He complained about pain in his back. He stretched. He said the sauna would cure all that ailed him.
We set up the squat rack. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds. Three sets of fifteen repetitions was our plan. Jumped rope for two minutes to warm up. I was sweating. I liked this, I felt good and strong and able. Jeff blew out his first set without a problem, going way deep into the squat, his ass just inches from the ground. I knew that if I tried to go that deep I’d rip something—my shorts, my quadriceps, or my brain stem.
I barely completed a full squat and my brother heckled me. But I finished my reps.
“Dude,” I said, “I haven’t done squats in four years. I won’t be able to walk for a week if I go as deep as you.”
“You’re weak, kid.”
He slapped me on the ass, lovingly.
He blasted out another set. I watched my brother, a fine physical specimen, and I thought of the man inside the body—the mind, the heart—the father, husband, son, brother. I was a son and a brother but not yet a husband or a father. These two other, further dimensions made him seem, in some ways, deeply ancient and removed from the petty rush and tumble of my life: books, beer, girls, and moody rock music.
I wanted to know the man inside the body. I’d seen him with his children, patient and loving. He spoke to them in a calm and reassuring voice. I’d seen him discipline them occasionally, for minor childhood infractions: running inside, screaming at the top of their lungs, an innocent food fight at the table—flying orzo and broccoli.
These same kinds of crimes when we were children would have warranted major censure from our father: no television for the night; no phone for a week; occasionally, a spanking or the belt.
Jeff didn’t have the best marriage. He and Melody mostly disagreed on child rearing: she approached the children as friends, colleagues, seeking their advice; Jeff thought that this was destructive to family cohesion and consistency and that being friends with your children was something best attempted when they were out of college or later.
They’d both had affairs a few years earlier, he first, then she. I never got the complete story, but he’d told me once about making love to a woman in the Arizona desert and that he’d paid dearly for the misdeed, a misdeed returned in kind. He’d deserved it, he said. Now back to the work of the marriage.
He was trying to start a new gig, as a physician headhunter for hospitals. He lacked eighteen credits for his bachelor’s degree. He had plans to pull together his education and career and marriage.
I grunted out my next set. Jeff began limping around the squat rack.
He said, “I think that’s it for me, little brother. My back is wrecked. I need to ice it tonight and see my chiropractor ASAP. I hate getting old.”
To his chagrin I threw on another fifty pounds and pounded out a last set.
“Thirty-four is old,” I said.
THAT NIGHT JEFF and I went out alone to dinner. We grabbed BBQ at a down-home place off the interstate.
“Look at these disgusting people,” he said, gesturing around the restaurant. “You and I worked out today. We’re in shape.” He paused. “Well, I’m in shape and you’re coming back. We can afford some ribs and a few beers. These people eat like this every day, go home and sit on their asses, and drink more beer and wake up tomorrow morning and do it again. I gotta get out of the South. I miss California. People are in shape, they care about what they eat, they exercise.”
“Not everyone out there is in shape, bro. There are fat people everywhere.”
I knew he harshly judged overweight people, a bias he’d inherited from our maternal grandmother, but tonight he was particularly critical. There were, in fact, a number of people in our own extended family who could stand to lose twenty pounds or more, and I didn’t feel like condemning them.
“Not like this fat. This is pure obesity. This is gluttony.” He spit the word gluttony out, condemning the entire South to heart disease, diabetes, sepsis, and a well-deserved early grave.
He went into his story about lifting weights one weekend at Venice Beach, way back in the eighties. I’d heard it dozens of times and I tuned him out, gazing at the mountains of discarded pork ribs and the empty sweet tea glasses and beer bottles that littered the tables. Gluttony, indeed, a very fine portrait of.
I thought I knew the source of his agitation. During my shower I’d heard him and Melody fighting, in the closed-lip, low-boil way that couples practice when other adults are in the house—or at a nearby table if they’re dining out. I chose not to bring it up. Really, I didn’t care why they had been fighting. I was enjoying my ribs and my beer.
And my little sister had set me up on a date later that night with one of her friends and I looked forward to meeting the girl.
“Listen, bro,” he said, pulling me out of my fantasy about Iris.
He paused and his face hardened; he worked his jaw, and his deep blue eyes darkened and his mood went from sun-bright baby oil muscle beach revelry to deep South thunderstorm: hail, flooding.
“I might need to come out and live with you for a while. We’re talking about splitting up. For a trial. Melody will take Kelley back to her mom’s in Minnesota. And I’ll take Christian with me. I want to come back to Sacramento. I’ll bang out three quarters at UC–Davis, finish my degree, and start grad school. I’m thinking physician’s assistant.”
I had no idea how to respond. Did my older brother just say he wanted to come live with me, his five-year-old son in tow? How could he possibly have just said that?
“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you need. I’ve got a roommate right now, but I think he’s moving out soon. If you need it, I’ll keep the room free.”
“I could give Christian that room, and you and I could share your room. I want him to feel like he has his own space. It’s going to be tough on him. But I think this is the right move.”
Share your room? Where will I have sex with girls? The last time I shared a room with my brother I was five and he was thirteen.
“Let’s just see how it works out,” I said, my eyes ablaze with worry. “I’m sure Christian will want to sleep with you for a while. It’ll be new and scary for the little guy. And it’s a big room.
It’s the master. There’s room for two beds.”
But if my brother needed a place to stay I would share a room with him, or sleep on the couch, on the floor, wherever.
“It’s just not working out. I thought getting out of the Army would save our marriage. No more moving around, no more nights and weeks and months alone. Home every night with the wife and kids. I just don’t know if that is what she wants. Sometimes I think she wants me gone. And sometimes I want to disappear.”
We drove back to his house in total silence. I’d never been married but it didn’t seem to me as if splitting up and taking your kids to near-opposite ends of the country could do any good for a couple and their family. But I couldn’t say that to my brother.
We entered the house and the kids came running and Jeff and Melody kissed and embraced and I wondered what kind of nutty drama these people were living.
LATER I HAD my date with Iris, a skinny little Georgia punk goth with dyed black hair and combat boots and a foul mouth. She drove me around the rolling West Georgia hills to nearby cemeteries, many of which held dead Swoffords, and we listened to the Velvet Underground and some bands I’d never heard of. She smoked clove cigarettes and we kissed in church parking lots, at the edges of graveyards.
A FEW WEEKS later, back in California, I answered my home phone one afternoon. It was Jeff. He sounded small and far away.
He said, “Brother, I’ve got cancer. It’s bad. And I’m dying.”
OVER THE NEXT several months I visited Jeff whenever I could. His prognosis was never great, but he always put a positive spin on his illness: he was going to beat the thing, he was young and otherwise healthy and there was no reason he wouldn’t survive—no reason other than that he had stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and that the cancer had appeared on his spine, in his left lung, in his stomach.
The reason his back hurt so much when we were lifting weights that day was that the tumor on his spine was about the size of a grapefruit—a grapefruit on his spine, blueberries on his lymph nodes, peach on his lung, plum in his stomach.
Why when describing tumors do we invariably use fruit comparisons? Is this to soften the blow of the horrible news? Throw fruit, not cinder blocks.
So with my brother it started with a grapefruit. The word was on everyone’s tongue, as if to say grapefruit was to not say cancer. You say grapefruit, I say live.
WHILE MY BROTHER died I lived in Sacramento, putting the finishing touches on my five-and-a-half-year bachelor’s degree. I worked three or four nights a week at a unionized grocery warehouse, the swing shift, five p.m. to one-thirty a.m.
If it looked like overtime, we’d send a guy to the Texaco truck stop down in the shadows of the Highway 80 overpass to buy five or six cases of beer before the two a.m. cutoff.
I drank beer behind the truck stop two or three nights a week for five years. The beds of our pickup trucks and the hoods of our cars were our local bar, and we were the bartenders—tellers of bad jokes, keepers of dark secrets. Many of the older guys had fought in Vietnam. Most of the talk was about the shit work we did and the shit union that took so much of our pay and the shit bosses who constantly broke up our poker games because they regularly ran an hour or longer past lunch. Shop talk.
Most of the older men had been divorced once or twice. There was Dave who made ninety grand a year with overtime and still somehow managed to live from his car. There was Evan, who broke his ankle in a snake hole his first night in Vietnam and spent six months recuperating and screwing Navy nurses on Okinawa, clearly one of the luckiest men on the planet. For decades he’d played blues guitar downtown at the Torch Club. He told stories of playing with the legendary Johnny Hartman back in the day.
There was the other Dave, my age, smart as hell, but he loved the work of a forklift jockey. He’d start a semester at some college or another every year and drop out two or three weeks in.
“Just in time to get a refund. What a bunch of dummies,” he said one day, after dropping out.
“The kids at college?” I asked, feeling implicated and hurt.
“No, man,” he said, with a grand gesture toward the warehouse floor. “Douche bags like me who are gonna drive a forklift for the next forty years and break their backs three times humping hundred-pound bags of dog food.”
But Dave would leave. His parents owned a massive dairy farm south of Sacramento, and the Valley construction crawl would soon take over the farm, to the likely tune of tens of millions of dollars. He knew that. Everyone knew that.
There was my best friend, Douglas Ahim, a former Ugandan child soldier who somehow in hell ended up in Sacramento after running with Jamaican gangs in London throughout his early twenties. I was one of only about three guys in the warehouse who could understand his Swahili/British English/Jamaican English/American English mash-up.
Supervisors were constantly yelling for me: “Swofford, what the hell did Ahim just say?”
I learned years later that his incomprehensible accent was a ploy when he said to me, “If they don’t know what you’re saying, they can’t bust you.”
Somehow he got a job as a plant mechanic and spent the next few years sleeping on the roof of the warehouse while making thirty dollars an hour, laughing at the rest of us as we sweated and cursed and loaded hundred-pound bags of dog food onto pallets.
They were all good men, solid working-class guys, but they called me college boy or college fuck, good-naturedly of course, but some didn’t like me because they knew I’d get out.
But there were nights behind the Texaco, while my brother died, and I drank beer until five a.m. with this motley band of laborers, when I felt closer to them than I had to other men, closer than I’d felt to my marine comrades, closer than I felt to my father or brother or the boys I’d grown up with: they all knew my brother was dying in Georgia, but here in West Sacramento, behind the Texaco, no one mentioned it, and this not mentioning it showed they cared.
We sat in the shadow of one of the greatest highways in the Western world. I could jump in my truck, gas up, head straight east, and five days later I’d arrive in Manhattan.
While we drank and talked shit to one another dozens of big rigs idled behind us, truckers pissed next to their trucks, truck stop prostitutes worked their turf, dogfights and human fights broke out, drug deals went down, and we smelled the stench of commerce; the brilliant shine of vice assaulted us in the burning fluorescent lights of the truck stop; on the other side of a massive dirt berm rolled the Yolo Causeway, nectar feeder to the Sacramento Valley, feeder of the world.
And none of the men I drank beers with talked about my dying brother. This is the brute civility and humility of the working-class man, the man from Springsteen songs and Carver short stories. For many months this brute emotion held me up when otherwise I might simply have crashed to the pavement under the weight of my grief and the weight of the deadly flesh rotting in my brother’s body.
A BIZARRE BEHAVIOR I acquired during the year Jeff was sick: The first time this happened, I had ordered through the intercom at a fast-food drive-through lane. Tacos. But as soon as I’d ordered I knew I did not want to eat those tacos. Tacos were all wrong. There was no way that tacos would satisfy me. And if I ate tacos my brother would die. But I’d already pulled forward, and someone else was behind me, so I couldn’t back out. At the window I paid for the tacos, but before they had a chance to hand me the food I sped out of there. I drove around for a few hours trying to find the right restaurant. I sat in my car in dozens of restaurant parking lots: Italian, Mongolian BBQ, Chinese, French, New American, steak houses, burger joints, chain family-styles, fast food.
At the Mongolian BBQ restaurant I sat down, and then I realized that if I filled that bowl with meat and noodles and had the guy behind the grill cook it, my brother would die. I sat at the table and drank iced tea for a while, glass after glass of iced tea. I hated iced tea. The nice waitress asked me every few minutes if I was OK and didn’t I want to fill my bowl, didn’t I kn
ow how it worked at the Mongolian BBQ, that you filled your bowl with vegetables and noodles and meat, and selected any number of tasty sauces, and then gave it to the man behind the massive grill; it was a grill, not really a BBQ, but the man behind the grill sautéed your bowl of food at high heat and then you ate it at your table, and you could return as many times as you pleased, up to three trips, before incurring a three-dollar surcharge for more visits? Did I understand?
I performed this extreme act of indecision a few times a week for many months until my brother died.
One night I did this with my girlfriend. We sat down and ordered food that I refused to eat at two or three different restaurants. Finally she said, “Why don’t we drink some whiskey?”
JEFF CONTINUED ROUNDS of rigorous treatment throughout the spring and early summer. He’d lost his hair months before and had dropped about thirty pounds, but the athletic vitality that had always defined him remained noticeable in his graceful movements and his carriage.
I’d arrived for the July 4 holiday weekend and was told there would be hiking and a picnic during the day, followed by fireworks at night. A friend of Jeff’s had made a big run to an Alabama fireworks mecca and once dusk settled we were going to light up the neighborhood.
Jeff had been in some pain in the morning and we had made a slower start than intended. I could tell he didn’t like Melody’s driving. As we pulled out from their subdivision he sharply criticized her for not using her turn signal. My sister Kim and I, in the very rear seats, rolled our eyes at each other. There were times when Jeff reminded us of our father, and that scared us: Kim because of the memories of the stern authoritarianism of Dad, and me because of the fear that the father/son cycle was unbreakable and that regardless of will at some point every man becomes his father.
But I also considered that it might just be that the man was dying and that not using a turn signal seemed like a flagrant dismissal of the safety mechanisms he required for every aspect of his life, as though while he censured his wife he meant to say, Honey, I might beat this goddamn thing, so please do not kill us in this car.