I know it seems like the plot of a bad Mel Brooks
movie, but I got into a fight at a funeral - maybe I should have said Larry
David and perhaps it wasn’t really a fight - would you believe a heated debate
with a piece of Italian bread thrown? - and this wasn't just with anyone, my
fight was with the brother of the deceased who just happened to be an NFL
linebacker, and a murderer, alleged, but that’s a bit premature…I should have
mentioned that part first, and he didn’t kill his brother, and at the time, no
one knew he had ‘possibly’ killed someone; he was like the spy only his handler
knew about.
I already told the story of a friend who had
committed suicide, and this was that friend, who I called Chuck, not his real
name, but it seems appropriate considering how he had so casually tossed his life
away. Chuck was a rehab outpatient when we first met and he was clean for
a good number of years before the backslide…first it was beer, then cigarettes
with pot right on its heels, and we got an “it’s just a cigarette dude, chill
the fuck out” every time we brought it up so we stopped bringing it up and
yada, yada, there we were at his funeral, a wake actually, with three hours in
between sessions and me attending, per the mother’s request, dinner with the
immediate family - it turned out to be the shortest dinner in the history of
the world.
I was close with two of the three brothers and the
third, the football Erik, who was built like a young Frankenstein, I knew in
passing. As bread was broken, the blame was passed around with most pointing
the finger at themselves wishing they had done this or said that, the rearview
mirror armchair quarterback type talk that probably goes on after most
suicides, and then there was Erik.
He had been an absentee brother somewhere across the
country which might as well have been Romania with everyone else doing the
heavy lifting but he somehow came with his luggage filled with enough blame for
us all. He pointed and things said under his breath became shouts before long
with us accused of everything short of being the second shooter on the grassy
knoll. And then came my turn, which I expected, but not in the way I expected
it. The fault was with me being there at all since I wasn’t blood family, and I
got his point, I just took issue with the way he pointed.
The mother defended me saying that I had just as
much right, maybe more than him since his plate remained empty for more than a
few Christmases. He pointed and shot, “Get him the fuck out of here. I want him
gone.” He got louder and more aggressive and the Italian bread I was eating
somehow, someway, hit him in the face. I’m not saying I threw it, I’m also not
saying that I don’t throw it, but some jumped up, and chairs flipped back, and
the whole lot of us spilled out into the parking lot with my 5’10” 175lb frame
dwarfed by his 6’2” 250lb mass; he thought he was a real Smartacus, yet he
seemed clumsy, very clumsy.
I might have been a little less aggressive if I had
known that he had known the old ‘I killed someone and didn’t get caught’ trick.
And no it wasn’t in Iraq and it didn’t happen amidst the chaos of war. There
was one girl and two guys and one wound up with a bullet hole in him with his
blood on the outside…it was a question of who done it for over a decade.
We all know that personal recollection is
inaccurate and that eighty-six people in the same time and place have very
different accounts and there were probably a few people there who could poke
holes in my story. It’s been fourteen years and some will say I pulled out an
Uzi and others will remember a small disagreement over how much to tip; the
truth is probably somewhere in the middle. There are only a few things I know
for sure: the crime was in 1994 and the arrest in 2009 and somewhere in that
fifteen year time frame, I almost fought a professional football player at his
brother’s funeral, and a piece of Italian bread paid the ultimate price.
