Content Warning: this post contains frank descriptions of sexual violence and child abuse. I have included these as they are part of my personal history, and important to the discussion at hand.

Chapter 1: Start at the beginning…

Texas was mine, but I wasn’t sure I was going to live until morning to enjoy it.

This was, after the past six months of my life, one of the most cruel things I could possibly consider.

Imagine a reality in which you first learn that you are dying, that something is leaching the life away from you, bit by painful bit. And suddenly, as if you won the lottery and found an ancient brass lamp containing a wish-granting genie in the same day, you experienced a turn of fortune so unbelievable that it made you question your own sanity. And then the bookend to that escape from your inevitable death was to discover that everything was a hoax, that you had, in fact, entered your final moments, and the sheer sadism of having ever entertained hope filled you with alternating waves of disgust and despair.

This was where my heart was when I started texting my parents to defend my territory; shattered from despair and angry at the sheer viciousness of a life where hope dies of cancer but evil just keeps on thriving.

A year before this moment I was recording my final farewells to my wife. I was in a downward spiral fueled by a domino effect of health complications. My weight created sleep apnea so bad that every minute of the night I was depriving my brain of oxygen. The lack of sleep was making me gain more weight. The weight gain was causing high blood pressure and pre-diabetes. The health problems were making me worry. The worry was making me more and more depressed. The depression was making me crave the most unhealthy comfort foods. On and on the cycle went, and any attempt to jettison myself from it only made things worse.

I had bone spurs on my toes and bad knees from ridiculous workouts I put my body through. I wept over a diet in which my strict adherence to a dietician-mandated one thousand calorie a day limit caused me to collapse into an involuntary narcolepsy in the middle of every day. I beat my fists against the unfairness of a “paleo eating challenge” at my gym where I was the only contestant to adhere to the rules without compromise, and the only one to lose less than fifteen pounds.

In the midst of all this one thing became strikingly clear: without some form of intervention I was statistically doomed to die before middle age, and my death was going to make a very young widow of the woman whom I loved more than anyone.

The baffling stroke of good luck came from a handful of people in positions of power at a corporation, of all things. My current and former managers became aware, because I was trying to prepare them for the reality that the sand in my hourglass was becoming scarce, and spoke to the CEO of the company personally. Meetings were held, terrifying ones, in which all of the leaders of the company discussed what could frankly be done in a world where an employee was dying but the corporate health insurance was unwilling to do anything because the policy would not cover any procedure in which the root diagnosis was remotely associated with the word “obesity.” I was dying, and the insurance company was willing to watch it happen because, on paper, my being obese made me unworthy to save.

The heads of my human resources department and the chief legal council for the company hatched a plan. They structured a one-time bonus that would pay for nearly the exact cost of the surgery to save my life, all I had to do was sign a contract that I would not leave for two years afterwards, or if I did I would pay back the life-giving bonus.

As elated as I was at this opportunity to gamble on having a future, the surgery was in itself full of peril and complications. They were going to excise part of the digestive apparatus in my body, removing the overly efficient parts of me that were actively converting every calorie I ate into fat, regardless of how few calories there were or how constantly I exercised.

I had to meet with dieticians and psychologists before I could go under the surgeon’s knife. Their job was to prepare me for the reality of this change in my body, and to sign paperwork that would testify that I was a safe candidate for this radical restructuring of my body.

The psychologist was so fascinated with my answers to her questions that she brought in two young PhD students to observe our interview. At the end she shook my hand and told me,

It’s not often we see someone with your kind of background who isn’t some kind of violent criminal or serial killer. You’re really interesting.

I’m sure I blushed, looking at a pair of young ladies who, years before I would’ve done anything to hide my past from in order to have a fighting chance at asking one out on a date. But here I was, laid bare in the most clinical way for their education. I endured it because as dehumanizing as it was, I still wanted to live.

I lost thirty pounds on my pre-surgery diet, dropping to a lean four hundred pounds. Any other time in my life I would’ve known that those thirty lost pounds would be back, and bring along some friends, but as I weighed in for my last doctor’s visit before my surgery, I was hopeful that this was merely the start of something new and lasting.

The surgery itself was an exercise in confusion and terror. The anesthesiologist placed the plastic mask over my mouth and nose and told me to count back from one hundred. When I got close to the “tens,” the surgical staff realized that I was immune to the drugs that were trying to put me unconscious. I wasn’t naturally immune to anesthesia, but the “fight or flight” systems of my body were augmented by the horrors of my childhood in a way that allowed a deluge of hormones to flood every nerve and counteract any possible vulnerability.

The nurses gathered around me, some put their hands on my shoulders, others stared down at me with a mix of awe and pity that transformed their expressionless surgical masks into the exaggerated features of a carving of “tragedy” one might find depicted on a theater wall. I remember one woman saying, “It’s okay,” over and over until the darkness finally took me from the room.

But I awoke to being slapped in the face, so it definitely wasn’t “okay” in any sense of the word. The nurse in the recovery room had witnessed my oxygen levels dropping severely in my sleep, and out of concern she resorted to slapping and shouting to try and pull me out of a potential respiratory crisis. As I realized what was happening, all of those desperate hormones flooded me again, accompanied by anger.

I had told everyone at the hospital about my severe sleep apnea before this. I had asked if they would need the machine that kept me breathing safely for during or after the surgery. Every single one of them had condescended, they told my wife and I that there was nothing to worry about and that it would be completely under control.

“If you really feel like you need it, your wife can bring your machine to your hospital room for after surgery,” the last nurse had said skeptically.

But here I was, being slapped and yelled at. “Don’t sleep!” she was shouting at me, shaking my shoulders  and propping up my torso at an odd angle.

When they finally were satisfied that I was sufficiently awake enough not to drift off again, they wheeled me into a room where my wife waited with concern.

Later she told me “You looked so angry when they wheeled you in. I thought you’d look happy or relieved but you were just red in the face and pissed off.”

As humiliating and scary as that experience was, I put it out of my mind because I had a new mission: I had to walk.

I had been warned by nearly every medical professional that, at my size, there was a severe risk that being sedentary might lead to a fatal blood clot. They had attached these uncomfortable sleeves to my legs whose job it was to periodically contract and squeeze them, forcing blood to move from my extremities so it wouldn’t pool and create a lethal chain of events. I never let those things settle into their dubious job because as soon as I felt like I could stand, I was pacing laps on the hospital floor. I kept telling myself, just keep walking and you won’t die.

But even after coming home and recovering from the stitches and scars, the process of healing and losing weight was complicated and difficult. I experienced all the symptoms the doctors worried me about: “dehydration” that I combatted with constantly drinking water, “malnutrition” I fought with an array of pills and supplements so complicated that it took my wife hours each day to lay them out by hour and purpose, “lack of hunger” which I ignored as I forced myself to choke down protein soups and shakes every two hours, even rivers of “sweat caused by a supercharged metabolism” was kept in check by an ever rotating array of towels and sweatshirts.

Eventually Candice began to prod me about my diet. Sure, I was getting (and often exceeding) the amount of protein I needed to keep my body from digesting its own muscle, but I was doing it by relying entirely on these powders and concoctions. They were expensive and impractical to a long term way of living. I wasn’t weaning on to any healthy version of the food that she was eating.

And so I tried, with incredibly frustrating results, to slowly introduce solid and “average” food so that I could align with some kind of dietary normalcy that would alleviate her worry.

But nearly every new solid food I tired would make me vomit. And I wouldn’t just vomit that particular meal, I would vomit everything, every soup, every drink, every pill and powder. The terrifying part was the little whisps of blood I would see.

There was a risk, I had read in my research of this surgery, of a number of life-threatening complications. I had to stay vigilant for secondary infection, for mechanical problems with my digestion, and even for the possibility of rupturing the sutures holding my healing digestive process together. Here I was almost every day hunched over cold porcelain kneeling on unforgiving linoleum tiles, and wondering if this was the sign that things had finally taken a deadly turn.

Maybe, I thought, the doctors could fix it and save my life. But if I couldn’t afford the surgery in the first place (and the insurance company didn’t want to save my life by paying for it) I certainly couldn’t afford some sort of intervention to fix what might be going wrong. Even if they could fix it, would that mark the end of this incredible experiment? Would I end up back in the same boat I was in before all of this, watching the pounds come back in cripling shame and depression? Would I have to face my boss and say “Thanks for the help, but I guess I’ll be having my fat-smothered death anyways.”

I would rather keep vomiting up blood and take my chances, so that’s what I did, knowing that I might not be okay, that this might not be saving my life the way I had hoped but rather punctuating its end in misery.

I came into the world screaming in misery, I guess I’ll go out like this.

I found myself at three in the morning one night, having vomited for hours, trying to distract myself from the very real possibility that everything I had endured to save my life may have failed. And, like many people trying to distract themselves, I found myself on social media.

When I say that Texas was mine, I say that with all the possessiveness that a youngest child can manage. The youngest child in most families often spends years getting their clothes and toys handed down. They share birthdays and holidays with other children and siblings. It often feels like your existence is quite the imposition on a family stretched to breaking by a lack of resources and patience.  We learn to talk earlier than our older siblings, and are rewarded for this cognitive feat by being told we talk too much and too loudly.

I grew up in upstate New York, just a few hours from one of the most famous cities in the world, but reaped none of the tangible benefits of that proximity. I remember one year, on a field trip to the City, getting outvoted by my brother when we were presented with the opportunity to visit the Natural History Museum or to see the aircraft carrier Enterprise. No dinosaurs for me on that trip (or ever, actually, I still have never seen that museum) because my older brother’s vote was the perpetual and undefeated tie-breaker in any such debate.

After twenty-four years in the dark and depressing reality that was not my choosing, I escaped to Savannah, Georgia for art school. Since then, I’ve only been back to New York a handful of times including once to visit my dying Grandfather and once to bury him.

While Savannah represented freedom from New York, it wasn’t a place I could call home. I made an ill-fated detour to Santo Domingo after college to try and make a life there. When that failed a childhood friend offered me a couch in Austin, Texas.

“What about my life… about ME… makes you think I’d be happy in the land of rattlesnakes and ten-gallon hats?” I asked him. I appreciated the offer but it seemed even more ludicrous than trying to find my fortune in a Caribbean island.

“Dude, it’s not like that. It’s your kind of place. Just give it a chance.”

Truthfully, I was out of options, so I took his offer. And he was right.

Austin was a town of freaks and weirdos, a place for artists and dreamers with a sprinkling of lucrative tech business to keep the opportunities going. Within two weeks I had a job. Within a month I had a car. Two weeks after that I was signing a lease on my own apartment.

And with the new city came a chance to reinvent myself. I got more tattoos, I started dating, and I met my future wife. I began to lay the foundations for what would give me a reason to fight for my failing life. For the first time I would have regrets about dying young, and it made me cling to this city in a way I had never bonded with any place before.

Along the way I had been both estranged from my parents and reconnected with them. While in college I had confronted them with some of the grimmest realities of my childhood, and while their response was not any form of taking responsibility or making amends for their failures as my parents, they at least did not actively deny the abuse that I was coming to terms with.

In the midst of this, they would regularly try and get me to communicate with my brother. They would plead, cajole, guilt trip, condescend… any tool in their arsenal was fair game if it meant that I might eventually assuage their guilt by speaking with him. By the time of my surgery in 2018, my father’s most recent tactic was begging me to let him give my brother and sister-in-law my current home address.

“Why do you want them to know where I live?” I asked, knowing nothing my dad could say would make me change my mind.

“It’s your brother, shouldn’t he at least know where you live? Maybe so they can send you a birthday card or something?”

“Absolutely not,” even as I said it, I knew my dad wasn’t the kind of person to respect my autonomy in this regard. He still viewed these kinds of disputes as if I was a ten year old kid making my case about why the Natural History Museum was a better use of our last afternoon in New York City.

This was the idea that I connected to when, in the wee hours of the night, I saw posts on my sister in law’s social media bragging about the trip they were making. They were telling the whole world, “We’re headed to Austin, Texas!”

It was beyond bizarre. As far as I knew, they still lived in Nebraska and there was no reason for them to really travel here. Sure, Austin was still home to some tech businesses and communities of film creatives, and my brother was a network tech who had dreams of being a famous director. Even so, they had no reason to come to Austin then, when I was at such a weak point, when I was staring at flame of my flickering mortality.

I began to text my parents.

“If this is because of you guys, if you gave them my address, I can’t be held responsible for what I will do if I see them. I will do anything and everything in my power to protect my family from the monster you call a son. I will end your legacy if I absolutely have to.”

My texts went off into the ether, into the darkness, with no reply and no apology. I fired them off like a warning shot, and the silence made me feel like perhaps the warning was heeded.

The two police on my front porch the next morning proved me wrong. They were shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot as they spoke to me.

“This is a wellness check, really,” the one officer wasn’t even trying to make eye contact, “I understand you wrote some threatening things to your parents?”

“Officer, do you know what this is really about? Did they tell you what he did to me?” I could feel my father’s hand on my chest, pushing me down, wanting me not to struggle to help myself or my family, encouraging me to accept my silence and my death. I wasn’t about to give him what he wanted.

“I know there was some conflict between you and your brother.” Both cops were now actively looking at everything BUT me. I wasn’t about to let everyone in this awkward situation off that easily.

“My brother, the person my dad is defending by sending you here,” I was trying to choose my words carefully but they sounded like gunshots coming out of my mouth, “is a child molester.”

“Well, that’s none of our business really, but…”

“And anything bad that you can possibly do to a child he did to me. So my parents don’t want me to tell anyone about it, and because I spoke up for myself last night, they went and called the cops on me, and here you are. My parents are using you.”

“That may be the case,” the first cop snapped out of his embarrassed trance and made eye contact again. His tone was less professional and more of the kind of informal friendly advice I’ve heard from police over the years when they are trying to avoid having to be called in to deal with something, “but my suggestion is that you never speak to any of them again. No more contact.”

“You are absolutely right,” shock and concern at having these armed men on my front porch was giving way to rage, “and because I won’t be able to tell them, feel free to tell my parents that I will definitely die rather than ever, ever speak to them again.”

While those were the words coming out of my mouth, there was a different scene playing in my mind. It was a montage of every time my brother and I watched television or movies with my father. He would always say, particularly when the movie had anything to do with the Mafia or with Italians, that you never ever call the police. That wasn’t our way, it wasn’t our culture. Italians dealt with things “in the family.”

The montage ended with the moment years ago when I confronted him with the horror of what my brother did to me as a child.

“Dad, your son, the one you’re so proud of? He raped me. Over and over again. He raped me and he beat me afterwards. One night he even chased me with a knife promising to slit my throat. Remember when you found me and I was so beaten that there wasn’t any white left in my eyes? It was all just red and bloodshot. He was trying to choke me to death.”

“What was I supposed to do?” he asked with tears in his eyes,

Was I supposed to call the police on my own son?

And it was at that exact memory I realized who my father actually wanted to help, who he had been helping all these years. Given the opportunity, he absolutely WOULD call the police on his youngest son, but only if it was within his power to help the oldest.