Three Things to Know about My Uncle Mike

The Story of my Uncle Mike Who Once Lived in a Mexican Garbage Dump

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fastidious, introverted, stuck-up nephew must be in want of an uncle Mike. An unabashedly criminal yet gregarious fellow, larger than life and immune to the pressure of social niceties. A real, physical person and yet somehow an apotheosis of uncles. A charming story-teller, bearing his soul to all but also not necessarily brave in his honesty because he cannot conceive that his audience doesn’t want to hear about certain things. Imagine a large, barrel-chested man with a mustache, leaning in with the manner of one relaying a felonious conspiracy, and whispering, “People don’t get what you’ll do to make the pain go away if you have a bad back. I mean if someone tells you to hang yourself upside down in your bedroom closet while jerking off, you’ll try it.” And then, while you are still recovering from this statement, this man lights a cigarette and adds, “I did.”

Yet for all that he is also a man of strange innocence. There are limits in him etched in stone, which he does not even perceive or know. They are not the highest or most absolute of limits, they are not the limits carved into the Ten Commandments, but they exist nonetheless. Limits that say, yes, perhaps you can start your life of crime early, stealing social security checks out of the neighbor’s mail while you are still in grade school, but at the very second you can start stealing from a business instead you must immediately do so. A limit that says, if you have the choice between stealing from someone’s grandma or a faceless corporation, you steal from the corporation and immediately revile anyone who does otherwise without memory of your previous actions.

My uncle Mike is a man who lives his own understanding of the American Dream, which in his telling of the grand tradition is to win a disability lawsuit under dubious circumstances and thereafter be free from the toil of work. A man of infinite leisure and largesse by way of a settlement with the labor union —for an amount which he is proud to have never disclosed to another soul including two wives— and yet also a man of a concretely fixed income.

“Guy! I gotta talk to your dad right away.”

It was uncle Mike, of course, calling on the house phone in a state of utter dismay. I had only recently graduated from high school and hadn’t heard from him for a few months. And I had only picked up the phone because it hadn’t stopped ringing for several minutes.

Someone had died, he said. I want to pretend to have some idea of who this person was, but the truth is much more embarrassing. I still have no idea of my exact relation to this person, even after the events which you are about to read. All I know is that she was an old woman, and I think she was my dad’s aunt… maybe? My uncle Mike knows, as does my father, but neither of them bothered to explain it to me then or later. And besides, neither of them were the type to become emotional. Death happens and there’s no use crying.

Who died was irrelevant to them and to this story. All that mattered was the funeral and, in my uncle Mike’s mind, specifically the transportation to the funeral.

The reason for my uncle Mike’s distress was the problem of gas costs. He explained that the funeral was something like four hours away. That part of the family had always viewed our part of the family as trash, so we had no choice but to go. However, my uncle Mike had estimated everyone’s gas consumption on the back of an envelope. It would be almost twelve dollars cheaper, collectively, if everyone gave him their gas money and we all drove up in his motorhome. I found this claim to be dubious and was certain he was going to come out well ahead in this deal, but he insisted that it was urgent and that I get word to my father as soon as possible.

So, stupidly, I passed the message along.

That day my father was strangely unwilling to argue, still fresh from his fourth divorce. When he acceded to the plan, my uncle Mike, ever the salesman, hung up to let the rest of the family know. None of my father’s siblings are anywhere near as temperamental, so if my dad decided to give in none of the rest would put up a fight. My father seemed so depressed that I even offered to go along with him to the funeral which he accepted with a grunt.

I regretted the commitment some days after when my uncle Mike pulled up in his ramshackle, “you-won’t-the-deal-I-got-on-this-thing” motorhome and got out wearing a pair of shorts, a loudly-colored striped t-shirt, and smoking a cigarette. He held several printed pages with directions, as this was during the brief period of time where Google Maps existed but there was no electronic voice or map to guide you as you drove. My father to his credit, in a rare pair of khaki pants and a collared shirt, asked my uncle Mike if he was going to change when we got there. To which my uncle Mike looked at him as if he had gone insane, then gestured to himself as if to say, “What could possibly look better than this?”

I think my father regretted not arguing about driving his own vehicle when he got into the motorhome. I sure did.

While my family has its problems, reproductive fitness is not one of them. This was proven out by the presence of two dozen relatives, all crammed into the motorhome so that we had maxed out all of the possible seating space and a few people were laying down in the bedroom compartment. It was a distinctly uncomfortable way to travel. And so, we began our journey North, toward Seattle and our wealthier —I think— distant cousins.

The problems began almost immediately. My cousin had printed out the instructions for my uncle Mike, but he immediately began to view them as inadequate once the driving was underway. Not for any true inadequacy, but simply because he could not accept a computer telling him what to do. He tapped his head, calling out that the directions could not have foreseen the traffic we would face along the route. He claimed to know a better way.

And so we became lost.

And then we hit traffic, anyway.

I did not feel anxious. I was even happy with this result. I kept my happiness to myself as uncle Mike hurriedly flipped through the directions, trying to reestablish the end destination with the route he had chosen. I concluded that we would miss the funeral. Simple and easy. It wouldn’t be the first time we were so late for something we arrived after it ended. I would be spared being brought before people I had never met and didn’t know to be presented as the “smart one.” I was fresh off winning a NASA scholarship and had been paraded in front of several relatives at that point, in a sort of tribal show of strength. I smiled as the clock continued to tick forward and past the start time. Open and shut. Done. An uneventful day.

Really, I thought, this was better for everyone. I love my family, but we are loud and brash and nobody needs a motorhome in the parking lot at a funeral. For lovers of the Hobbit, we are the Sackville Bagginses always bringing along some kind of commotion or unrest. Once everyone else accepted defeat, I would be able to return home and immerse myself in a book. Giving up was the path of least resistance and the path that would most quickly lead me to the next book. This style of thought, which would take the better part of two decades to leave me, is probably why it took so long to establish myself in the professional world.

Unfortunately, for this particular event, within the chest of my uncle Mike beats the heart of an unconquerable champion.

Realizing we were already late, my uncle Mike slammed on the brakes —sending several of us passengers to the ground— and jumped out of the motorhome to get clarification from a gas station attendant. As luck would have it, we were close! Uncle Mike hit the gas and made a few quick turns and suddenly there was a cemetery within view.

And then I felt it, Dear Reader. The blood falling from my face and pooling in my feet. The light-headed dread that comes from impending social doom. We were over forty-five minutes late. We were over forty-five minutes late… to a funeral.

In what seemed like seconds, we could see an active burial taking place up a steep hill. The casket was there, waiting to be interred. The service had moved from the church to the grave site but it hadn’t completed.

It wasn’t over yet.

Oh God, it wasn’t over yet.

“Park down below, Mike,” my dad murmured over the roar of the motorhome’s engine.

It was the obvious thing to do, and yet the blinker had not been engaged.

“Come on Mike, park it. We’ll say hello to them after,” one of my aunts insisted.

A dozen voices joined the chorus. My uncle Mike said nothing, but the roar of the motorhome’s engine increased as it started up the hill. Surely he would park soon. That was the only reasonable course of action, but we also all knew him too well to take it for granted.

It dawned on all of us in the same moment.

He had no intention of parking in the parking lot.

“Park!” I added, lending my voice to the chorus of dozens of family members.

“Park the f—ing motorhome, Mike!” My father thundered.

“I didn’t come all this way to miss the burial,” uncle Mike said, simple and to the point. A man on a mission, who refused to fail. The voice of a man, who but for the simple matter that his goal was entirely wrong, could be trusted to complete any mission.

“Then park it and walk up the hill!” I shouted.

“It’s too steep. I wouldn’t make it in time,” uncle Mike replied, as if this was the only possible consideration.

As we continued the climb up the hill, something seized us to make the dread of a rollercoaster seem laughably small. Animal terror filled the motorhome, like rats on a sinking ship. We shouted at Mike to stop again and again, all of us demanding that he just park. Just park! Stop! Desist! When he gave no reply, we bargained with him to park it halfway up the hill, or three quarters, but surely not right next to the f—ing burial site. You couldn’t park a motorhome next to an active f—ing burial, what are you insane? Are you f—ing out of your god damn mind?

My father, who had the most immediate access to his anger, was up next to the driver’s seat, psychotic with rage, demanding with a red face and spittle flecks that Mike park the f—ing motorhome right there.

Too quick. Too late. Not enough time.

With some shared psychic estimation that the funeral attendees would be able to hear us at that certain distance, we all went silent and accepted the inevitable. We ducked or, in some cases, dove to the ground. We knew. He was going to do it. He was going to park the motorhome directly next to an active burial.

A burial for someone that the overwhelming majority of us didn’t even really know.

I wished I had never agreed to come along, but not only that. I wanted to die. I wished to have never been born. I wanted to find some sort of access panel on the floor of the motorhome that would drop me onto the road below. I would accept whatever injuries awaited, gladly. Then I would run as fast as I possibly could in the other direction from the burial.

I swear to Christ, in whom I did not believe at the time this happened, that as soon as my uncle Mike parked the motorhome, again directly next to the burial, I heard the priest say, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” And then I heard the casket going into the ground. At that exact moment.

“I am not getting out of this motorhome,” my dad whispered.

My uncle Mike looked over his shoulder, at all of us huddling down to hide from view.

“Cowards!” he spat.

He was like Pericles about to face the Kraken, whatever fear lived in him well controlled and unable to change his chosen course.

He climbed out of the motorhome utterly unafraid and went to stand in the crowd of black-suited men and black-dressed women, all of whom were staring daggers at him. And he stood there, completely uncaring for how he looked in his loud colored-stripe-shirt and his out-of-season shorts and directed his full attention on the remaining not even two minutes of the funeral. I risked looking out between the blinds, which I had hastily redirected as soon as I had realized the inevitable. I had to see. I had to know how bad it was. And by the expressions I saw, it was severely not good. The most “not good” thing that had perhaps ever happened to me that didn’t involve violence.

Not a single other person left the motorhome, except for my dad who had to apologize after the funeral was over. I had to be almost pried out when we went to the reception, which was held at the home of the decedent’s daughter. When I was brought forward, entirely against my will, as “the smart one” I could practically read her mind. Not smart enough to avoid parking next to my mother’s funeral in a motorhome, though.

Other than for that, everyone was surprisingly… I suppose the kids would say “chill.”

After all, they knew uncle Mike as well as we did, even if I’m not sure who they are.

In these next few parts, I will make the case that my uncle Mike is still a much better person than I am.