On the night of the last game he ever played, he was booed by everyone in the stands. Both sides, both sets of fans, joined their voices in chorus. Nana threw the ball as hard as he could against the wall when the referee made a call he didn’t like. The ref kicked him out of the game and everyone cheered as Nana looked around, raising his middle fingers at all of us and storming off the court. In the stands that night, booing, I saw Ryan Green. I saw Mrs. Cline. I saw my church, and I couldn’t unsee.
* * *
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Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. I thought about that verse a lot in those days. Three pages of my childhood journals are filled with that verse, copied over and over again until my handwriting gets sloppy, lazy. I was trying to remind myself to love God, to love my neighbor.
But the instruction is not simply to love your neighbor. It is to do so in the same way as you love yourself, and herein was the challenge. I didn’t love myself, and even if I had, I couldn’t love my neighbor. I had begun to hate my church, hate my school, my town, my state.
Try though she might, my mother couldn’t convince Nana to come to church with us again after our Sunday in the last pew. I was relieved, but I didn’t share that with her. I didn’t want everybody staring at us, making their judgments. I didn’t want further proof of God’s failure to heal my brother, a failure that I saw as unbelievably cruel, despite a lifetime of hearing that God works in mysterious ways. I wasn’t interested in mystery. I wanted reason, and it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I would get none of it in that place where I had spent so much of my life. If I could have stopped going to the First Assemblies altogether, I would have. Every time I thought I might, I would picture my mother up there at the altar, twirling and falling, singing with praise, and I knew that if I didn’t go to our church with her she would simply go alone. That she would simply be alone, the last person on Earth who still believed that God might heal her son, and I couldn’t imagine anything lonelier than that.
37
Now I want to write about Nana’s addiction from inside it. That’s how I want to know it, as though it were my own. I took meticulous notes of his final years in my journal. I wrote like an anthropologist with Nana as my sole subject. I can tell you what his skin looked like (sallow), what his hair looked like (uncombed, uncut). I can tell you that he, always too skinny, had lost so much weight that his eyes started to bulge against the sunkeness of his orbital sockets. But all of this information is useless. The ethnography of my journal is painful to read and unhelpful besides, because I can never know the inside of my brother’s mind, what it felt like to move through the world in his body, in his final days. My journal entries were me trying to find a way into a place that has no entrances, no exits.
Nana started stealing from our mother. Small things at first, her wallet, her checkbook, but soon the car was gone and so was the dining room table. Soon Nana was gone too. For days and weeks at a time he went missing, and my mother went after him. It got to be so that she and I knew the names of every receptionist and every cleaning lady of every motel in Huntsville.
“You can give up if you want to,” my mother would sometimes hiss at the Chin Chin Man over the phone, “but I will never give up. I will never give up.”
The Chin Chin Man called regularly in those days. I’d talk to him on the phone for a few minutes, answering his boring questions and listening to the way time and guilt had changed his voice, and then I would hand the phone over to my mother and wait for the two of them to finish fighting.
“Where were you?” my mother once said to him over the