March 2022

It was Friday night on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood and the weather in late March was just chilly enough for a light jacket.

A few minutes beforehand on the bus from our hotel, Jake and I had been accosted by an older gentleman in a navy cardigan who held a copy of Sally Rooney’s ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You?’ tucked under an arm.

“Where is your mask? Are you trying to kill people?” he yelled at us.

When he bored of targeting us, the man went on a monologue about the collapse of Los Angeles, how America was crumbling, and how he’d just done 400mg of cocaine in a public restroom.

After we exited the bus, Jake and I walked for several blocks to find a store where we could buy a joint before continuing past the all the shiny and packed gay bars to a rundown, crooked, one-story building called the Troubadour. We’d bought overpriced tickets to see a band called the Tallest Man on Earth which later turned out to be just one man who wasn’t all that tall.

There was a line when we arrived outside and, while we waited, I got a text from my older brother, Ben.

            B: Hey, what are you doing this weekend?

            I told him I was in LA until late Sunday.

            B: I see. I was hoping we could get dinner before I leave.

            I thought he meant a trip. He’d quit his job overseas six months beforehand to come back to Washington.

            B: I’m moving to Alaska on Tuesday.

            He hadn’t spoken to me for the past couple months, which was normal, but I had hoped that his moving back to Seattle meant we could build back some of our relationship that had been lost to distance over the years. In a lot of ways it felt like our brotherhood had been frozen since childhood because, for most of my adult life, Ben had been gone.  

            Jake and I scanned our tickets and went inside the venue.

Straight ahead was the stage in standing only room. It was small, maybe a couple hundred capacity tops and there were more flannel shirts in that room than anywhere else in Los Angeles. We took a spot center stage, ten feet from the mic, and waited for the opener.

            Then it hit me.

            “My brother is moving to Alaska on Tuesday,” I told Jake.

            Ben and I had never been close but there was something inescapable about our bond because of how we’d grown up.

            “It’s funny, you know,” I said, “I’m the one who writes but I think it’s my older brothers that have more interesting stories from our childhood.”

Ben’s body stopped growing a half an inch short of five foot three and later alopecia took every last bit of his hair. Our parents bullied him for recanting Christianity at fifteen until he left home the day he turned eighteen. He’d run away twice in three years between. I still remember waking to the sound of the cop’s voice who brought him back in the middle of the night.

Why would Ben run away when we love him? I had asked.

            Shortly after moving out of his basement bedroom, Ben joined the Marines, trading his newly minted autonomy for geographic distance from everything he wanted to forget. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then he returned to Washington only to bounce from one low-paying security job to the next until he’d found a permanent post overseas, protecting diplomats in a foreign country. He never stayed in one place long enough to build a community and sometimes I wondered if he knew what it felt like to have a place to call home.  

            I wondered if I hadn’t done enough.  

            And now he was leaving again.

            The first artist, Uwade, came on stage with a red guitar slung over her shoulder and a big, beautiful afro like a halo around her head. She played a song called ‘Nostalgia’ whose lyrics poked at something fragile inside my chest, something I hadn’t realized was there.

            I’m still learning to tell myself that it’s okay, that it’s not always my fault when things don’t turn out like I’d hoped.

Maybe one day.