Giro d'Italia is 21 days.
Vuelta A Espana is 21 days.
Tour de Family would be 26 days, it would be the grandest tour of them all, and by day four I was over it.
Thomas Wolfe was right, let me tell you, but he'd have done better had he omitted the word "again." Or maybe it should have been "You can go to that house you grew up in, but don't mistake it for home; it's more like the place that will finally define 'home' as that dump you currently live in 3.000 miles away, a place you'll suddenly be very happy about."
And that's exactly what would happen post-tour de family.
At the end of the long weekend, the sister-in-law and two nieces were wise enough to amscray. Brother number two and his wife wanted to stay a couple more days, and then I would drive north with them. I'd been out of the house a total of about an hour.
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Twenty years ago I packed up a van and drove west. I drove the farthest I could get from my family before drowning in the Pacific. I slept in my van, I muddled through, I figured it out. I would speak to my father regularly and no one else.
I was living on the upper west side of Manhattan. I loved NY, I love cement, I wanted more light. Before the big drive I stayed a few days at my father's house, and then stayed a week with brother number two. He was married to his second wife and had three daughters, two his, one hers from a previous marriage. By the end of the week I wanted to kill myself, so horribly, horribly suffocating was that household. It was a blanket of oppression that sucked all the air and life out of everyone and everything, and it was all brother number two. Never before or since have I witnessed such internal carnage so externally lived. I was convinced his daughter would pull a Sylvia Plath by the age of ten. She would have been the lucky one.
Brother number two sits and chain smokes and sits and waits to be served and tended to and taken care of and he never says thank you and he never says please and he never helps himself and he complains, disparages, overwhelms, bitterly, savagely, and to the death. It is a singular horror of an existence, and he is not satisfied until he drains everyone.
I was so disgusted by what I witnessed there I never looked back.
Brother number two was born scrambled. He was a beautiful, scrambled kid who one day became not too beautiful; more like hell-bent on taking his scramble and ramming it as far in the wrong direction as it could go. I don't know the chicken from the egg, but eventually his actions and my stepfather met each other and brother number two would encounter horribly violent beatings from this interloper-faux-authority. His was a life of an alcoholic, suicidal, MIA mother, a violent and weak stepfather, a scrambled and desperate existence, and an eternal loss/fatal need for unconditional love.
All of us walked away with some version of this, none so deep and eventually so ugly as his.
I sat in my room during all this listening to the screams, the pounding, while drawing pictures from photographs in Sports Illustrated magazine. I was partial to skiers. And Bruce Springsteen.
I've never skied.
Brother number one managed to walk away relatively intact. Brother number two just wasn't equipped to do this, and set up camp in his life's lowest common denominator. I landed somewhere in the middle. Brother number four was too young? I think? Or permanently out to lunch. We'll get to him.
Twenty years ago I didn't want to live there, in that all consuming, soul-crushing, oppressive encampment. I wanted to go west, into the light, to a different possibility. When I finally left his house at the end of that week I thought, Christ...never again.