Brother Love: `He Ain't Heavy...'
A fateful motel stay with my brother begins with an emotional bath. Later, fear he's drifted away from the room is replaced by relief -- he's simply drifted off to sleep.
This is part three of a four-part series from an 18-hour window in April 2021.
It began with my brother Phil, homeless for many years, voicing a desire to check into a substance abuse rehabilitation facility. It ended with me taking him to that program.
In between, we had a 15-hour stay at a Super 8 motel. Below, we pick up the narrative a few minutes after checking in to our motel room. If you have not yet done so, you can read Part 1 here & Part 2 here.
(This series is in addition to prior columns that I have written about Phil — you can find those, also labeled “Brother Love,” in my archives.)
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From recent experiences with Phil, I know that he’s liable to fall asleep the moment he sits or lies down, especially when he’s been drinking heavily. I suggest he lie down in one of the two beds, but he balks at the idea.
He dreads the idea of missing out on this window of time with something as mundane as sleep. I move to Plan B: getting him to take a shower, which would be his first in about a month.
On that occasion, I was visiting him in the hospital during a five-day stay there. On Day 4 of his hospitalization (which came after police found him asleep/passed out in front of a McDonald’s), I discovered his bathroom included a shower and urged him to take advantage of it.
Now he wants a bath, reminiscing about his long-ago history of taking baths while bouncing from hotel to hotel during his drug-dealing days.
I start filling up the tub, squirting the motel-modest-size hair conditioner into the gushing water flow, vainly attempting to generate some semblance of suds.
Meanwhile, Phil starts stripping down. It quickly becomes apparent that he’s going to need my assistance getting into the tub. Then it becomes apparent that he could use my help administering the bath.
Last time I had this role, my kids were very little—only slightly older than the image on my computer mouse pad that I see just about every day: redheaded toddlers smiling cheek-to-cheek as they look up at the camera, floatie toys in the background.
There are no toys here, just a miniature bar soap that I retrieve from the sink counter and a threadbare washcloth. I soap up the cloth and start scrubbing Phil’s back, then shampooing his hair—mercifully still short after his haircut four weeks ago.
That haircut, Phil’s first in at least 18 months, was a sight to behold. My usual Great Clips hairdresser, Ana, patiently and persistently mowed through the thicket of hair that had taken up residence atop Phil’s head. In the end, it flipped off, like an aluminum can lid, as one massive tangle of hair. It resembled roadkill.
After examining it, Phil instructed Ana, “Oh, take it away. Throw that out.”
He looked, and felt, so much better. For me, it was bittersweet. Just before the haircut, standing outside on the sidewalk hunched over my speaker phone, Phil had turned down an invitation to get into a treatment program in Chicago.
A day earlier, just out of the five-day hospital stay, he was talking in earnest about getting into a different detox program—only to get cold feet when a bed was not immediately available.
For me, it was a lesson re-learned: strike while the iron is hot, while Phil is expressing openness to getting treatment. It’s why we are here in this motel room, the TV blaring in the background and Phil tearing up in joy and gratitude that his day has taken such a dramatic detour from his norm.
He’s not trudging from one spot to the next, swigging booze, securing a few bucks from sympathetic motorists, riding the train through the night, and going to the liquor store for his next vodka-and-soda round. Rinse, repeat.
We are talking music—he’s been urging me to play Three Dog Night on my Spotify, and before the night is done we will eventually hear “One” and “Shambala” and “Mama Told Me Not to Come.”
Picking up on the musical thread, I tell Phil that he comes to mind whenever I hear The Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” He asks me to sing it, and it’s easy to oblige since the tune is already on repeat in my head:
“The road is long
With a many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where
Who knows where
But I'm strong
Strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother”
Three days later, recalling the scene with these words, tears flow down my cheeks. But in that moment, I don’t cry in that cramped motel bathroom. Phil has tears enough for both of us.
At 6 p.m., nearly 90 minutes after checking in to start our Super 8 Sequester, I use my cell phone to call the motel’s main line and get patched through to the room phone.
This sets up a three-way call featuring the Brothers Baron: Phil, Andy and me. It serves two purposes: Phil wants to talk to Andy, and I want to keep Phil anchored to the room while I head home for a shower, food and other overnight essentials.
The call lasts over 45 minutes. An hour later, after stopping to pick up a steak-and-cheese sub for Phil, I am back and find the TV is on, the lights are on, but my brother…nowhere to be seen. I check both beds, the bathroom, and poke my head back outside to see if he may be smoking a cigarette nearby.
For a moment, I fear he may have drifted off somewhere. I return inside the room and adjust my eyes—it’s a large-scale Rorschach Test. What do I see this time?
To my relief, within an arm’s length of where I am standing with a perplexed expression, I make out an object that is seated in a chair to the right of the television set. Slumped slightly forward with his back to me, Phil is ensconced in his Wizard robe that blends in with the darkness that has descended on the room.
He slumbers heavily, silently.
I seize the opportunity to turn off the heat—it’s now sweltering in here—and crack open the window a few more inches. A few minutes later, I nudge Phil enough so that he has attained a groggy, heavy-limbed state.
I pull him up to his feet and guide him into bed. It’s close to 8 p.m., and as far as I am concerned, that’s late enough for Phil to hit the hay. I can put the sandwich in the fridge and it can be tomorrow’s breakfast.
Summoning energy from an unknown force, Phil gradually comes to. At first, he thinks I am a train conductor, the person he often interacts with when coming out of a deep sleep. It takes a few minutes for him to comprehend who I am, and where we are.
Once he emerges from the disorientation, and offers a new round of communicating his gratitude, he is ready for the sandwich. “I can’t waste this time I have,” he says. “Turn on the lights, turn up the volume on the TV.”
Coming Saturday: Part IV, the Super 8 Sequester concludes with a drive to rehab.