The last time I saw my Uncle Lee alive, I was pissing on a bush at a golf course.
A beautiful, sunny, and completely respectable afternoon, and I’m just watering the goddamn shrubbery. My organic father and I, we were three sheets to the wind, maybe four. We’d shown up late, laughing our asses off, stinking of cheap whiskey and bad decisions.
And Lee… Christ, he was pissed.
Not loud, angry, honest-to-God pissed. No. He was quiet. Seething. A tight, bitter, and completely joyless little knot of a man. We were a goddamn circus, and he was the one respectable citizen who’d been forced to watch. He threw his clubs in the back of his car at the end of the day, didn’t say a word, and just… drove off. A perfect, silent, and completely disgusted exit.
And that was it. The last time I ever saw him. A beautiful, ugly, and completely fitting final memory.
But you have to understand, he wasn’t always that guy. I remember him as a kid, a young scud, playing in my grandmother’s pool, climbing the avocado trees. I remember that house, a place that, when I visited my Aunt Ann years later, was a goddamn time machine. Nothing had changed. The same ugly carpet, the same weird smell. A perfect, dusty, and completely honest snapshot of a past that was already dead.
Lee was just… a good guy. He married a beautiful woman, Pam. They were entrepreneurs for a minute, selling cookies, doing pottery. A real, beautiful, and completely broke hippy-dippy number. And my dad, my organic father, he hated her. “She’s too controlling,” he’d rant. “She’s spending all his money.” Looking back, I think that was the first time I ever saw a man project his own goddamn issues onto someone else. A beautiful, ugly, and completely transparent performance.
And then, Lee changed. They separated for a while, and when he came back, he was a different man. He was a goddamn convert. He’d found the religion of “The Good Husband.” It was a beautiful, quiet, and completely soul-crushing transformation.
“If I can’t do it with my wife,” he’d say, “I’m not interested.”
He wasn’t a man anymore; he was a goddamn function. A provider. He worked a shit, blue-collar job he hated, building office walls, on his hands and knees, overtime, just to pay the bills. And the bills kept coming. A new roadster. A new pool. Lutheran private school for his two little blonde daughters, because God forbid they go to the public shithole in the Mexican neighborhood he was still living in. His wife, she had the clean, white-collar job, a furniture distributor. He was just the mule, pulling the goddamn plow.
And he got bitter.
A beautiful, predictable, and completely honest bitterness. He got angry. He became a Republican, the angry, “blame the Mexicans” kind, which was a hell of a goddamn joke, seeing as he was surrounded by them. The cost of living was too high, the world was going to shit, and it was all somebody else’s fault.
And our family, my side, we were the enemy. The fake, elite, liberal-leaning assholes. He couldn’t stand us. And he was probably right. But he was just so goddamn angry. The man I remembered, the kid climbing the avocado tree, he was gone. In his place was this… gizzard. This angry, puffy, gizzard-necked man with a failing heart, drowning in debt, and probably unable to even get a goddamn hard-on. A quiet, respectable, and completely honest portrait of the American Dream eating its own tail.
The final straw, the beautiful, ugly, and completely predictable snap, was over some goddamn George Floyd post on Facebook. My organic father, in a moment of beautiful, idiotic, and completely tone-deaf boomer logic, called him out. And that was it. The family just… broke. Politics, that beautiful, stupid, and completely impersonal religion, had finally finished the job that resentment and money had started.
His kids, the ones he’d bled for, the ones he’d built the goddamn private school walls for, they disowned him, too. The oldest one grew up to be a fat, liberal, antifa-commander-looking thing, still living at home, with a lesbian girlfriend and an opinion on everything. The little one, Holly, she was the smart one, had her dad’s character, but she went the other way. Became a quiet, tight-assed, Christian Nazi, married some guy, and scattered her kids across Ohio or Kansas, some goddamn place in the flat, empty middle of nowhere.
And you know, I think about that trip to Montana we all took. My dad, my uncle, and me. And I watched my father, my organic dad, the “Alpha Male,” just… crush him. He wasn’t “Uncle Lee, the patriarch” anymore. He was just “Lee, the little brother.” My dad controlled everything, the car, the plans, the whole goddamn show. I remember bitching because I was paying a third of the rental car and that old bastard wouldn’t even let me drive. Because if you can’t drive, you’re not in control. And my father, he had to be in control. He made us all feel small, like we were just characters in his goddamn movie.
And I saw Uncle Lee, a man who was a king in his own broken-down castle, just… shrink. A quiet, sad, and completely broken little man. That was the last trip we ever took together. That was the last time I saw him, until that beautiful, ugly, and completely honest day on the golf course, with me pissing in the bushes and him just radiating a quiet, black, and completely understandable hatred for all of us.
And then, he died. Heart attack. I found out on Instagram, on his daughter Holly’s page. We weren’t invited to the funeral. Weren’t even told, really. The family, his family, they drew the line. We were the “racists,” the “bad people,” the ones who had pissed in the bushes.
But I’m looking at the pictures she posted, the ones from after he’d moved, after he’d been disowned, after the whole goddamn show was over.
And the sonofabitch was happy.
He was smiling. A real, honest-to-God, beautiful smile. Not the tight, bitter, gizzard-necked grimace I’d seen for the last twenty years.
And that’s the punchline, isn’t it? The beautiful, ugly, and completely hilarious joke of it all. The man was drowning his whole goddamn life. Chained to a wife, chained to a brother’s shadow, chained to a couple of ungrateful kids, chained to a life he hated.
And the second all those chains broke, the second his wife got sick, the second his kids disowned him and his brother fucked off, the second all those beautiful, respectable “layers” were finally ripped away… he was free. He finally got to be himself.
And then he died.
Christ. The American Dream ran its course. He and his wife worked their asses off for forty years, for nothing. He’s dead, she’s got Stage 4 cancer, and the kids are scattered to the goddamn wind, probably blaming him for their own fucked-up lives.
You can’t write a better, darker, or more beautiful goddamn comedy than that.\
