Timmy

My Mom and Tim

During my junior year abroad in Germany, I received a letter from a person I didn’t know. It was very thick and the return address was a prison in Nevada. I was intrigued, but also concerned. How in the world would someone in a Nevada prison get my mailing address in Germany?

And then I remembered my brother Tim. 

Tim was one of my twin half brothers. The twins, Tommy and Timmy, as they were known growing up, were fraternal and what the doctor called “mirror twins.” This is because Tim was born breech and Tom wasn’t. The doctor said they would be polar opposites their entire lives and in some ways he was right: Tom liked sports and Tim liked baking, Tom was left handed and Tim was right handed, Tom was a poon hound and Tim was gay. 

One thing they did have in common was being really fucking crazy. 

The twins were ten years older than me, the Oops Baby. I don’t have a lot of memories of Tim from my childhood, but the one that always sticks out was when I was about 8, making him 18. My parents had just taken me to Disney World with my grandmother. Despite it being the Happiest Place on Earth, I was a nervous wreck because my mother kept talking about how long the lines were and I didn’t want to make my grandmother stand in them. We rode 3 or so rides and I said we should probably go home. They would tell people my entire life that I was the only child who was ever bored by Disney World. I was just worried about my grandma.  I never told them the truth. 

Upon arriving home, I went to my new bedroom, which had just months ago been Tom and Tim’s. Walking in, I found my brother in bed with a man, both of them wearing dog collars.Now, I didn’t know what this meant or whether it was right or wrong or indifferent, but I did know this was MY room now and Timmy was in it and having some sort of super weird sleepover. I yelled, and my brother’s friend grabbed his clothes and ran out a back door across the five acres our house sat on.  After a lot more yelling, I saw my brother sitting outside, smoking a cigarette, wearing a pleather version of the red Michael Jackson jacket that was all the rage in the 80s. I remember thinking he looked a lot different than he used to and being super jealous of that jacket. 

This is how I found out my brother was gay and also when my Dad made his second drop off at the Navy Recruitment Center. 

Tim didn’t have to spend long in the Navy, as those were the days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and he told as soon as he could.  He apparently moved to Reno upon being discharged and I didn’t see him again until after high school. 

My freshman year of college he called my mother and said he was really sick and needed help. Tim had HIV and didn’t have health insurance. My mother told him to come home. 

When he got home, we found out that one reason he didn’t have money to see the doctor was that he had been a sugar baby to a man we will call Jerry, because that was his name. Jerry said he was descended from German royalty, but his family had to flee Hitler and Germany when he was five. If he ever returned to Germany, he would be a count and have his own castle. 

Two things here: first, my brother bought all of this, hook, like and sinker because he loved fantasy more than reality. Second, Jerry should have gone back to that castle because it would have been better than where he wound up, which was prison. 

Jerry owned a tuxedo rental shop and it turns out he did more than fittings there: he also prostituted young men and sometimes underage boys out of the shop. Tim said alternately that he had no idea this was going on and that it wasn’t hurting anyone. At any rate, when Jerry got busted, he went to his very own American castle called the Arizona Correctional Facility and my brother, a blackjack dealer, lost his meal ticket as well as his ability to pay for medical treatment.

To be clear, I don’t want to discount the fact that my brother was very sick, but it really wasn’t an excuse to give Jerry my senior picture and my address. 

Which brings us back to the letter I received that day in Germany. It turns out that Jerry was letting inmates “borrow” my picture for reasons I can’t let myself think about and he was also bartering my  address to  fellow inmates who wanted “pen-pals.” 

One of these prospective pen-pals had written the letter I received that day. The letter started off tame. The author told me he would only tell me what he was in prison for if I wrote him back. What a tease! Then he got into his likes and dislikes. Likes were long walks on the beach, the sound of rain on a tin roof, and sunsets. Dislikes were broccoli, country music, and the mongrelization of the races. Although it did seem like we had a few things in common, things didn’t work out and Jerry and Tim were told to never give my address to anyone ever again under any circumstances. 

By the time I got back from that stay in Germany, my brother was doing much better and had a new boyfriend named Jon. Jon’s supposed backstory was that he had been a rent boy and cokehead in New York City for years before getting HIV and moving back down south. I don’t know who was paying him to do anything with those teeth, but what do I know about gay prostitution. 

Jon was as much of a liar as Jerry, only we got to experience the fall out of his lies in real time. He was fond of going around our Small Town, Tennessee, telling everyone his last name was our last name. This led to a lot of questions about his parentage and a lot of small town speculation. It was also confusing that he might be dating his own brother. 

The two of them became very entrenched in my parents’ lives: Jon cleaned the house for my mother, Tim helped do the books for my dad’s construction business. I was at college and Jon was not my biggest fan, as my mother was happy to tell me. “When is the princess coming home?” he would allegedly ask my mother. I suppose it takes one to know one.

Jon and Tim had met in Nashville while playing illegal poker machines in a bar near the subsidized housing they both lived in (they were both on disability). It’s so cliche, I know, but true love often is.  They both worked several cash under the table jobs in spite of the fact that they were on disability and they both went to a doctor who would write them a prescription for whatever they wanted and they could get it filled for free and they would do this for friends and family. This all seemed fairly sketchfest to me, but no one else seemed to mind, so maybe, as usual, I was the crazy one. 

I guess to offset their insanity, Tim and Jon were generous to a fault. Like make you wildly uncomfortable generous. One Christmas they got us all tickets to Universal Studios and insisted on paying for everything the whole day. I don’t know how they could afford to do that, but I do know that I got them something of much less value and felt guilty about it. We had a great time, but there was a lot of talk of how they were footing the bill and wasn’t that burger expensive and look how generous we are! It was fun but uncomfortable, which describes a lot of experiences in my life, I guess. 

Speaking of generosity, my father was extremely generous to Tim and Jon, like he was to everyone else. He bought them a house and cars, and helped them out financially when they needed it. He even paid for Jon to have his teeth fixed.  For his part, Jon decorated their house to look exactly like my parents’ house, which was a little odd, but he was related by proxy and lies, so I guess it made sense. He even made the exterior look similar with landscaping and paint. 

Eventually my parents retired to Florida and Jon and Tim followed them there. I’m not sure if that was because my father sold their house or if they just wanted to be close for financial reasons, but they wound up living in a double-wide in Daytona, which was about a half hour from the small town my parents bought their condo in.  They would continue to live in that trailer park, breeding pekingese dogs and keeping 4-6 of them at any given time. It’s a good thing it was a double wide. 

My parents would divorce not long after this move and my father died exactly one year after the divorce.  When my uncle called to tell me my father had dropped dead on his way to the bathroom one night, I went to Murfreesboro, where he moved back to after the divorce. My future husband went with me, which is a great way to test your new-ish relationship to see if it’s waterproof. My husband and my father’s cousin both insisted I call a locksmith that night to change the locks on my dad’s condo. The idea seemed ludicrous to me. When they said they would go do it, I gave in and let them so I wouldn’t have to hear about it anymore. 

That same night, around 10pm, I got a call from Tim, asking why he couldn’t get in dad’s condo. Again, if your relationship can survive this “I fucking told you so,” moment, you are ready to get married. Apparently he and his boyfriend were convinced that dad had money hidden in the walls of the condo, like it was some old mystery mansion on top of a hill.They said  they were just making sure no one else got in and stole anything. I reassured them that I had the only key and all was safe and sound. 

The day of the funeral, everyone went back to my uncle’s house for lunch. It was a jollier affair than I had expected, with a lot of people sharing a lot of funny stories about my father. As everyone prepared to leave, I noticed my brother and his boyfriend lingering and I asked them what their plans were. 

“Oh, we’re just waiting to hear the reading of the will.” Like it was a god damn Agatha Christie novel. 

It turned out my father had changed his will to make me the sole beneficiary as well as the executrix. There was a time when this would have meant a lot of money, but this was not that time. I understood why my father had made this choice, as my half brothers were all from my mother’s first marriage and he was definitely still reeling from the divorce and didn’t trust her at all, and therefore, I suppose, didn’t trust that she wouldn’t get even more of his money from my brothers if they inherited it. He had also found out that my mother had embezzled a significant amount of money from his construction company before he retired, and as Tim helped with the books, it stood to reason that he had helped with the embezzlement too. 

I told Tim and Jon this and, to their credit, they seemed to take it pretty well. 

Not long after they left, I got a call from my uncle’s long time receptionist at his former real estate brokerage. She told me that Tim and Jon had just called her, and before she could say anything, Jon yelled, “Well, we didn’t get nothin!”  and hung up the phone. I guess they hadn’t taken it so well after all. 

In the coming months, a legal battle would ensue over a boat that my father had owned and on which he had taken out a sizable loan. The boat was missing and supposedly in the possession of a man who had supposedly been my father’s friend. It just so happened that Tim and Jon worked for this man washing boats.  In what I can only imagine was some kind of weird retribution for the will, they both gave depositions in the lawsuit that  were hilarious in their ridiculousness and obvious in their lies. It was clear that the person who had my dad’s boat had offered them some kind of compensation if they backed his story. My husband and I took to doing dramatic readings of the depositions when the stress got too high. 

The day I had to fly to Miami for the summary judgment was awful. I went with my uncle and knew my brother and Jon would be there. The confrontation I feared never happened and they came and went without so much as a kiss my ass. 

Tim called me a few times after that. In his own way, I think he wanted to try to explain why he had done what he had with the lawsuit. He  was still angry about being left out of the will and I was the only one left alive to be angry at. He made sure to let me know how unfair his life was. I talked to him and told him I loved him, because I did, but I never saw him again. 

When I got the call that he was dead, I didn’t break down. I don’t know if I ever really cried. He had died from complications of AIDS after having a hip replacement. He had contracted MRSA in the hospital and just couldn’t fight it.  My mother had the body cremated quickly and there was no service, so there was nothing for any of us to do. 

The next day I got a call from an unknown number that turned out to be Jon. He wanted to make sure I knew Tim was dead and I told him I did and gave him my condolences. They had, after all, lived together for over 20 years. 

I asked Jon what he planned on doing now that Tim was gone and he said he was going to go live with “Mama.” As far as I knew, Jon didn’t have any family who he kept in touch with, but he was talking fast and I just listened. 

After a while, I realized that his “Mama” was actually my mother. This took a minute to sink in. He was going to take care of her since I wouldn’t and she would take care of him and they didn't need me. They also had Denver. 

“Wait, who the fuck is Denver?” 

Denver, it turned out, was a young “disabled” man who had been living in the trailer with my brother and Jon. Denver was going to go live with my mother so that, I assume, she could now cash his disability checks instead of Tim. Family really is so important. 

I talked to my brother Jeff the day Tim died. There was really no one else to call, as my brother Tom had stopped talking to me years earlier and my mother was in no fit state. 

“Should we feel sad?” Jeff asked. 

“It seems like we should,” I answered. 

But we didn’t. We had lost a brother we never really knew. It was sad because he was gone and because, to me anyway, his life was sad.

It’s hard to tell people I have a dead brother. They always ask how he died, and when I tell them, they are horrified, because AIDS is a horrible way to die. And maybe if he had died any other way, I wouldn’t feel like such a bad person for not grieving him the way people think you should grieve a sibling. 

We don’t get to choose the people we are related to and I think we connect to some more than others. I feel like I barely ever connected with Tim. I just don’t think he was built that way. He didn’t have a lot of friends. He loved Jon and he loved his Pekingese dogs. I think he loved our mom and our shared grandmother. And the show “Charmed.” He definitely loved that show.  But I don’t know if he really loved me and I don’t know if I really loved him. To go back to that letter that inmate wrote me, I think there were a few things on our likes and dislikes lists that were just never going to jive even though we shared DNA. Being related to someone doesn’t automatically make you a match.