Last year, at the end of November, in all probability on a
Wednesday, my big brother Jeffrey took his own life. Jeff was my best friend
and one of two people there for me every day of my life. The void left by his death is immense.
I have not told many people about it, and it has taken me
months to write this because I could never get past this point. My fingers
hover over the keyboard and right now, this moment, it’s not clear whether I’m
about to get past this point. This is where I've been for months, stuck right here. What to say? How to say it? How to go on?
Jeff was at the top of my cosmology. Almost everything I’ve
experienced or understood in life came to me through the lens of our
relationship, the little brother’s view up. Technically we were half-brothers,
hence the name, but it was never that way, at least not after I was 1, when he
fed me a marble. The story as it came to me was that my dad picked his blue
baby up by the feet and shook the marble free. Thus having failed to rid
himself of the interloper, Jeff decided to be a big brother instead, a role at
which he excelled.
Among many other things, he saw to it that no one would pick
on or beat up the scrawny kid. No one except him. The square red carpet in the living room became a boxing ring,
and no matter who was Ali, Foreman or Frazier, he always won convincingly, and
always in 15 rounds, even if I had been crumpling to the mat since round 3. But
Jeff also took awkward little brother into Philly for soft pretzels and
pinball and ballgames. We shared a room and bunkbeds, and regularly traded spots – whenever
he wanted to switch really, though he was benevolent enough to put together
complicated packages of baseball cards and candy as payment. He was a superb deal-maker and that never changed.
Jeff was good at everything and I was good at nothing,
except school, which he was also good at. Jeff was a lefty pitcher at Lower
Merion H.S. and could throw a curveball. He was a great basketball player
despite being 5'9". He took me to Sam Goody to buy my first album (Styx The
Grand Illusion); the year before that he
took me to my first concert: Kansas, at the Spectrum, 1976. As I was getting
ready he said, “You’re wearing THAT?” It was a stripey T-shirt like what I’d
wear to school. “No, you haveta wear a concert shirt to a concert.” Which is a
problem when you’re 9 and have never been to a rock concert before. The Yes
shirt he loaned me came down to my knees.
I often told him that he was responsible for me
having a life in music. He replied that any big brother anywhere gets their
younger brothers and sisters into music. But the fact is that when I was 12 and
still listening to the lame ’70s, he brought home Joe Jackson records, and Elvis
Costello, and the Pretenders, and a year later, when I visited him in Ann
Arbor, it was suddenly Joy Division and New Order, the Cure and Public Image and the Psychedelic
Furs and a monster-size Plasmatics poster with a giant Wendy O. Williams
mohawked head and the imperative “DON’T BE A WANKER – DON’T MISS THIS SHOW”
Heady shit for a 13-year-old in 1980.
Jeff had charisma. That is an understatement. He always had
cool friends and girlfriends. Everyone got nicknames: Maven. Golden Boy.
Swampy. He gave me the only nickname that ever stuck, and all of his friends
still use it: Hikey. When I was 5 Jeff and the other big kids deemed me too
small (also: uncoordinated) to play football in the street with them. I went
crying to Mom, who demanded my inclusion. So they let me hike the ball for both
teams and then immediately run out of the way.
There is one story that Jeff took great joy in telling,
especially when he would get to meet a girl I was dating. I was 6 or 7. He was
babysitting me and my sister Julie and somehow, it ended up we were having
cereal, and I made a joke at his expense and laughed. “Stop laughing or I’ll
dump that bowl of cereal over your head!” I can remember just how far over the
line that seemed to my kid mind. No way he’d do it. So I dared him. And he
didn’t hesitate. In finishing the story, Jeff would always lean forward for
emphasis, laughing and talking at the same time, animatedly dragging his
fingers over his face. “Mike was crying and had milk and tears and Frosted
Flakes running down his face!” And so I did. Now I’ll have to tell that story
to anyone new.
Jeff went everywhere and did whatever he wanted, and took me
along a lot of the time. He graduated from Michigan and moved to Minneapolis to
wear a suit for some company. I moved to Minneapolis for college and to be near
him, but by the time I got there less than a year later, he’d already had
enough of that kind of life, the suit, the cold. I helped him move to Southern
California, where he spent the rest of his life. He got a business degree at
UCI and then took a plunge and went for yet another degree, in the “horse
race-track industry program” at Arizona, the only school with such a thing. He was
well-known and well-liked in his field. I kind of hate horse-racing and have
never gone to a track without him, but it was never an issue for us.
Jeff was very good at gambling and handicapping. He always
had a tight grasp on how much he was up or down in any calendar year, and never
got into trouble with money. He bet on horses and played poker — even took home
money at a handful of World Series of Poker events, though to hear him tell it,
all he did was lose. Once I picked up the phone and heard his voice, ashen.
“Hike…I just lost 20 grand at Hollywood.” You WHAT?? And this will explain how he saw the world: He had
expertly handicapped that day’s Pick 6, and the first five dominoes tumbled as
predicted. So did the sixth, but he could not foresee the steward’s inquiry
that DQ’ed his last horse. That money he lost was merely supposed to be his. Another time he did hit the Pick 6 at Hollywood, and I think once more
elsewhere. Like everyone in horse racing, he desperately wished for a Triple
Crown winner to come along and inject some life into the sport. I was with him
at Belmont in 2004 to watch Smarty Jones (the Philly horse!), who was heavily
favored to bring home that third win. We had good seats — Jeff always had good
seats — and we were perched above the finish line. Looking at the heavy odds on
Smarty Jones earlier in the day, Jeff decided the only way to win anything
substantial would be if he composed a typically impossible
trifecta-box-something-something bet. He told me I could go in on his
impenetrable bet if I wanted. I gave him $20.
If you’ve never been to a big horse race, no matter what you
think of the sport, it’s pretty damn dramatic when they come around the home
stretch, and this was the biggest race of the year, maybe decade, and Smarty
Jones had it. One hundred twenty thousand people rose to their feet as one.
And then, for the only time in his career, Smarty Jones got passed in a race.
At the wire. By a 36-1 longshot with late speed. One hundred twenty thousand people, stunned in unison. Even I felt bad for horse-racing. Jeff gave me a sideways
look, grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the betting windows. This was when I
learned that Jeff was a master hedger. Sure he wanted Smarty Jones to win like
everyone else. But he bet against him. And because he was good, he had liked
that 36-1 horse, Birdstone. And my $20 investment got me about $800.
Jeff went to Super Bowls, the Sugar Bowl, BCS championship
games, the Final Four several times, every regional and sub-regional NCAA hoops
weekend in California that he wanted. He went to see the LA Kings win the
Stanley Cup last summer, because he just could. He went to Thailand and all
over Europe. Even if he was never really rich he was a master of anything that
involved money. He knew how to parlay airline miles into free nights at
five-star hotels where you could make it 67 degrees instead of 68. He knew how
to sweet-talk any hotel employee in the world into getting him the quantity and
quality of pillows he needed, and anyone he couldn’t sweet-talk he just bribed.
Jeff took me to the Rose Bowl, where Michigan lost to
Arizona State. He took me to countless Michigan football games in Ann Arbor,
where I saw them lose to UCLA, Iowa and Ohio State. He took me to Amsterdam and
Paris. He flew me out to visit him regularly, and once put me in first class,
“just so you can see what it’s like.” He took me to game 3 of the 2000-01 NBA
Championship and to two World Series, one of them won by our hometown team. That
year we sat in deluxe, heated VIP boxes with free food because the woman who
distributed VIP tickets at Taco Bell – the No. 1 ad-buying client of Fox Sports
– absolutely adored him. Everyone adored him. I adored him and idolized him and would have done
anything to stop the slide he had been on for the past six years.
He wanted to stop it too, and he tried. The vortex of
anxiety, depression and loneliness that consumed him had been building since
2006, when a mystery ailment that was never properly diagnosed put him in the
hospital and left him changed. He knew whatever was wrong with him began then.
So, his suicide was not a sudden thing. It sounds completely insane, but the
possibility of him doing it was a part of our life for years. He talked about
it all the time, to us at least – his closest friends, his ex-wife, me, my mom
to an extent. He didn’t see any reason to live past 50. He had no kids and truly believed that the only things waiting for him were increasing pain and
decrepitude. He didn’t want to be old. We’d see an elderly person walking in
the street, bent and using a cane, and he’d say, “There you go Hike, keep
eating your vegetables and you could have that too.” But he had known happiness
and tried so hard to win it back. He went through a lengthy series of
medications; he wore out therapists. He scouted for other places he might live.
He endured several sessions of shock therapy to try and reset his brain. During
the last one his heart stopped for 15 seconds, and after they successfully
brought him back he felt cheated of an easy out.
Essentially, for the last three years of his life, he tried
to prepare us for this. He didn’t want to hurt us. I think the thought of that
kept him around. He took his time and one by one tried to make each of us understand his decision. The conversations we had…it had been a long time since I
suggested any new option for him. I said I’d move to California to be with him
but he knew I’d be unhappy living there (he was right, but I told him I didn’t
care). The last year, all I tried to do every day was say anything to calm him
down and help him relax. I’ve never had such dark conversations with anyone. He
let me see everything he was feeling, and I’ve never been so sad for anyone
else’s pain. This, my favorite person in the world. I couldn't bear the thought of him leaving, nor could
I bear to see him suffer like he was.
He would be going nuts over Michigan’s run in the NCAAs.
He’d be saying how they had no chance tonight while at the same time checking
out how many miles he’d need to get a first-class ticket to Atlanta. He’d get
there without a ticket and would scalp his way in and would probably make a few
hundred dollars in the process. If he knew I was thinking of posting this today
he’d say, “Wait a day or you’ll mush it for them.”
The last I heard from him was the Monday in November. He
replied to a phone message with a text: “At Clippers game. Had a calm day. I
feel okay.” That was the pinnacle for him, to be out among people
and just be able to be calm.
We scattered his ashes at the finish line — “where it always
went wrong for Jeff,” as his friend Tom said — at Del Mar, his favorite
racetrack. I found the ticket stub from that Clippers game among piles of
others from championships and Springsteen concerts. Next to the PRICE it reads:
$VIP.
I miss him more than words can say.
