My brother is always late. Under normal circumstances I would be pissed, but in this case, I kind of embraced the familiarity of his tardiness. All of a sudden a trait that had been a big pain in my ass became something somewhat charming and endearing. My brother has flaws. But he is my brother, my only sibling and I would die for him. I feel like some kind of dramatic war hero recalling a battle when I say something like that, but it’s true. I’d run through fire for my brother and I would bet ten paychecks he’d do the same damn thing for me.

A guy in a navy blue suit walks by, in front of a hustling overweight, pink clad waitress wearing too much make up and behind a punk rock chic with black eye shadow and trendy tattoos. Typical meeting place for my brother to pick, on the edge of a gentrifying neighborhood in the city with a cross section of people that reeked of diversity and urban chic. Just the right number of punks and hippies, blacks and Hispanics, rich kids just finished with college and neighborhood folks who were third generation. Artists, musicians, bankers, purchasing agents, wannabe actors and actresses, manic depressives, perverts, drug dealers, policemen, accountants, janitors, hostesses, party planners and assassins.

I sat and smoked cigarettes one after the other wondering why. They hadn’t tasted good in three or four years. Just blind ritual at this point. Coffee, smoke, beer, smoke, wine, smoke, marital strife, smoke, crap job, smoke, divorce, smoke, anniversary of mom’s death, smoke, father strapped to four or five machines straight out of Star Wars, completely unconscious and oblivious on the verge of death, smoke. Even my waitress looked concerned. I saw sympathy in her eyes. And I shot it right back at her, that knowing glance of sympathy. Two beaten people communicating without words, only the background noise of conversations, sizzling grease, traffic from outside, orders barked and received, fork and knife to plate, rattling dishes and the rapid fire Spanish of the busboys.

I handled the newspaper from time to time, between the moments that I would lose staring out the window or staring at other people discussing their lives. I would concentrate on certain names and countries and death tolls, but I wasn’t retaining any hard facts. I kept reading the date over and over again at the top of the pages, because I figured this would be the date on my father’s tombstone. It was time to give the damn Star Wars machines a rest. It was time to tell my brother that my father wasn’t going home. It was time to talk some sense into that boy.

More coffee and the waitress had become indifferent. I wasn’t eating and the place was jumping, people in and out, in and out, omelets, bacon, eggs, toast, pancakes, waffles, but nothing for me thanks. Just caffeine and nicotine and perhaps a discussion about killing my dad or something like that. Leave the fifteen percent gratuity and turn off the Star Wars machines. What did my waitress care? She had a six year old girl and an alcoholic boyfriend to feed. Eat, commiserate and move on.

Jake walked in the joint with a trench coat, black motorcycle boots and black sunglasses on and I’ll be damned if the sun had been out in a month. To the world he was cool, but to me he was always my little brother, dying to be cool, dying to have people think he was cool. He had to be the fireworks in the room full of nuns; the bull in the china shop. His hair looked messed up, but I am quite sure that messed up look required some sixty minutes worth of effort in the mirror. Either that or a hangover, a massive, pounding, justifiable hangover. My little brother Jake. With the passing of my dad, he’d be the coolest guy on earth.

"Well, I’m glad you could make it," I said, sarcasm hanging in the air with my cigarette smoke. One smoke left in the red and white pack.

"Quit smoking," my brother replied, as he tossed his red and white pack on the table and called out to our waitress for a black coffee, even though she was three booths away.

"How have you been?" I asked.

My brother doesn’t deal with reality. He deals with perceptions and comfort and good times. When mom died, it was denial. After a while it became a strange acceptance, like if you really pressed Jake, you could get him to admit that he thought she was coming back. Like she wasn’t really dead, just pissed at all of us and on a long vacation to show us we needed her. It was in his eyes. Mom’s not really dead; it was in his eyes. She’s just testing us. God’s just testing us. Why would anybody take ma? Like if she sat down in the booth next to us the day my father died, Jake would have said ‘What took ya so long?’

Now it was worse. Jake is still a kid. No, not actually a kid, he’s 29 years old. Yet, it’s still baseball games, Friday and Saturday nights ‘til 3 am and a new girl for every holiday. Money problem, ask dad. Car question, ask the old man. Extra ticket to the game, call pop. Wanna talk politics, sports, religion or what celebrity answered twenty questions in the March, 1977 issue of Playboy, give Joe Castle a call. Tired of sitting at your apartment alone, pissed off at the world and wondering where your life is going? My father would set aside hours for Jake and me.

So Jake fidgeted. He started to take his jacket off and then he finished his coffee in one long gulp and did some whirly motion with his finger and our waitress came back in three seconds and smiled at Jake in a much different way than she initially smiled at me. She would have lit his cigarette had he asked. He ran his hand through his hair ten times in a row, fast, raking it back with his fingernails, coming back to his forehead and raking it again. He rubbed his palm on his stubble and he looked up and down from his coffee. He hadn’t slept and I thought people deal with distress in different ways. I grabbed my brother’s hand on the table and he kept my stare. That’s my job. I’m the big brother.

"I’m not good Johnny Boy," he said. "I can’t sleep, I quit my job, Dina won’t leave me alone and she’s drinking too much again. The car won’t start, I think I need a new alternator and this crap with dad. Is that why you called me, is this about dad?"

"Well, everything the last week and a half has been about dad. You quit your job?"

"I need something to eat," Jake said.

"Waitress," I called.

Jake was a restless kid. Big heart, bad temper, no patience, always rooting for the underdog, always putting stray cats up in the garage. My mom thought he was going to be a priest and dad would always laugh when he heard her say his calling was in the church.

"He’s too pretty to be a damn priest," the old man would say. "You hear that phone ring, girls callin’ all hours. Priest, ya and I’m Elvis."

He rebelled in high school a little, some fights, some drug use, some disrespectful behavior, but it never got out of hand. He was too worried about hurting my mother and disappointing my father. He was on the edge, but he never jumped off. My brother has a good soul, my brother has an artist’s heart and I love him for that because I am not that man. I am hardened by life. I am beyond hope and optimism.

"He’s not coming home Jake and why in the hell did you quit your job?" As I asked Jake’s food was set down on the table in record time, while others that had arrived at the restaurant in our section before him still waited. The waitress winked at him and touched his shoulder and kept her hand there for four seconds, let her cheap perfume linger under his nose for just a moment and wiggled back to the kitchen window. He gave her a half look and a knowing cocky smirk and I remembered when he first met Dina in high school. She was beautiful, smart, goal oriented, kind and respectful and generous. Now, ten years later, she was a chain smoking, expletive spewing, Jack Daniels slurping wreck of a human being. She wore short skirts, high heels and tank tops that were too small, exposing the black Chinese letters stained to her stomach and lower back. She quoted beat poets clumsily and always carried a tattered copy of Cosmo in her black bag. I wondered if people like Dina ever woke up and wondered how the current day, the right now, came to be.

"I don’t like working in an office," he said, speaking for twenty five million people in America if not more.

I thought of my ex wife, trapped behind a desk, a college dropout, dreams deferred, then forgotten. Blaming everyone but herself for her lot in life. She was dying too, I thought. A cancer, not a real cancer, but a cancer of perception building in her mind and spreading to her arms and fingers and feet and toes. I am sure she can taste the bile in her mouth everyday when she says ‘Good Morning, Douglas Blair and Company, may I help you.’ I imagine she daydreams about beaches and unlikely scenarios like being discovered by a noted film director. I imagine those daydreams fade quickly and morph into visions of blood stained computer screens, irrelevant co-workers running for their lives and Jessica running down endless gray hallways, wearing army camouflage spraying scores of bullets a second from a hulking black gun.

"Mom’s dead Jake," I said, wondering right afterward why I had said something so blatantly obvious.

"I know Johnny," his hands were shaking, coffee and nerves and an alcoholic girlfriend.

"Dad’s not coming home."

"I think you mentioned that."

"Well, let’s end his suffering," I said.

My mom believed in this God that took her way too soon. First her beautiful, benevolent, world making, children loving God took one of her breasts and then shortly afterward he took the other. Years later this all powerful God brought me to a lousy greasy spoon to ease my baby brother’s apprehensions about taking my father off of life support, because damn if God’s cancer can be beat by a thousand armies, much less a couple apathetic doctors and two brothers who can’t figure life out.

Sometimes I still look up to the clouds when I’m talking to my mother and I blame God for this too. I blame him for selling my poor mother on that smoke and mirrors, opiate of the masses bullshit.

"Do you remember the first year you and I weren’t on the same little league team?" my brother asked me.

"Ya, I moved up and you had to play another year in the younger kids’ division. So?"

"Dad coached first base that year," my brother began. "I couldn’t hit like you and I was struggling big time, but I played because dad liked it so much. I played cause dad made it fun even when I wasn’t playing well. Well one day we were playing in a game that I remember was close and I wasn’t hitting well again. I came up late in the game and there were runners on base. I needed to get on base to keep the game going or else we lost, that was it."

The waitress came by and filled our cups. Tears were welling up in Jake’s eyes and she actually put her hand on his cheek and held it there for a second.

"You OK baby?" she said.

"Ya, thank you," my brother replied. At that moment he fumbled with his matches, our waitress took them from his hands and lit his cigarette as he leaned his head over his cup into the steam of the freshly poured coffee. She smiled wide and walked away, the perfume lingering again.

"So I’m up at the plate," Jake continued, "and I’m scared man. The team needs me and dad won’t stop clapping. You know how he was, is." I caught the stumble. Jake caught the stumble. He looked away for a second, took a deep breath and returned his eyes back to the table. His meal was untouched and our ashtray was overflowing. Two gallons of coffee had been consumed.

"Ya, I remember the clapping and the back slaps," I said.

"So I’m down 0 and 2. I mean I remember, I’m not just saying that. I had two strikes and I thought that was it. And I remember, just as I got back in the box, looking down at dad. He had this look in his eyes. It wasn’t hope. It wasn’t pity. It was just confidence, man. This relaxed confidence in me."

He let that thought sink in and so did I.

"So the next pitch I swing like I wanna drive the ball to Antarctica and instead it’s a dribbler just passed the pitcher to the shortstop. He’s got no other play but first and I didn’t look at the ball for a second after I hit it; I’m just digging. So I look at the first baseman and I can tell the ball’s coming. It’s going to be close. So I take one last stride and then I dive into first base like I was Rickey Henderson. And I’m safe Johnny, I’m safe."

My little brother’s right hand is shaking as he brings the coffee cup to his lips. He holds his left hand over the edge of the table and the smoke from his cigarette trails backward towards the front door. I’m lost in this time machine and Jake’s cheeks are stained with tears. Our waitress walks by without stopping, leaving a stack of white napkins in her wake.

"You know what he did after that?" Jake asked.

"No, I don’t remember this story." I said.

"He grabs me by the back of my jersey and pulls me up off the ground. He calls time and pulls me off to the side, up the baseline a little so it’s only me and him. And he looks in my eyes hard, our old man who never said anything worse than ‘damn’ in the house once in all our years growin’ up and what did he say?"

"I don’t know."

"He said, Jake, you are a fucking baseball player. I don’t care what anybody says from this moment on, I’m your father and I know. You’re a fucking baseball player, now let me hear you say it."

"How old were you, nine?" I asked.

"Ya, nine or ten. And I asked him ‘Do you want me to say it just like that?’ And he said ‘Ya, just like that.’ And I said ‘Dad, I’m a fucking baseball player.’"

"No way," I said.

"Yep. And then he ends with ‘You’re God damned right you are.’"

"Jesus, I didn’t know that."

"He’s my hero Johnny Boy. I don’t want him to die."

I changed the subject after that. We talked about our lives and we eventually invited our waitress, Julie, into the conversation. She had some troubles of her own and she had some advice to solicit and to give. She finished her shift, pulled off her pink apron and unbuttoned two buttons on her coffee and grease stained white blouse. She grabbed the last smoke from Jake’s red and white pack and turned into one of the guys.

On the drive to the hospital, we both silently realized nothing had been decided. I guess we were just resigned to the fact that the Star Wars machines were going to keep cooking until we could figure everything out. But when we got to the hospital, we realized the matter had been decided for us. My father had passed. And when my baby brother buried his face in my chest in my father’s hospital room and cried hard and loud, I took his head in my right hand and I whispered in his ear.

"You’re a fucking baseball player Jake," I said. And he shook his head up and down in the affirmative, as he continued to wet my shirt with his tears.