Tales of the Traveling Twins

I got my first job teaching English overseas at the end of a painful and pathetic period of my life as a drug-addicted degenerate barely surviving in Eugene, Oregon USA. I was 42 years old. My preferred pick-me-up at the time was methamphetamine, the down-market stimulant of choice for a slew of sad sacks like me who got hooked on uppers and pornography, the ultimate double whammy in the powerful and lethal world of addiction. I went to Eugene to be with my identical twin brother, Marlon, who had purchased a mobile home there and who, like me, had been traveling for many years on dead-end escape routes to nowhere. Wanderlust had seduced the Tanner twins long ago. It propelled us along our converging our roads of self-destruction, driving us to the brink of madness in the twisted twin tales we would forever share.

Eugene was a relatively pleasant and livable American city filled with plenty of decent people. Most of the ordinary folks who put down roots there must certainly have enjoyed satisfying lives in the serene and slow-moving community. As the second largest municipality in Oregon, Eugene offered its residents a splash of big-city culture mixed with a touch of small-town charm. The city boasted scenic parks, quaint neighborhoods, and trendy redevelopments in the uptown and downtown areas, but the sleepy burg would always be known first and foremost as a blue-ribbon collegiate town, with the University of Oregon football team topping the talk-of-the-town list. The Ducks provided a source of great pride and solidarity among the townspeople from bankers and barristers to bums on the street. The Ducks were their team. They belonged to college football and it belonged to them.

On the surface, Eugene was the kind of place most of its respectable citizens could be proud of. But I had lost my own sense of pride and no longer felt proud to be an American. The mounting social ills of my country, particularly the crumbling infrastructures of cities like Eugene, made me feel angry and ashamed. The USA had become the most sinister and self-absorbed superpower on the planet. The abundant and propitious America of my youth - in the freewheeling 60s and high-spirited 70s - was long gone, and the quality of middle-class life in the states had been sliding downhill for decades. Life was good at the top of the food chain but going from bad to worse at the bottom.

As an unfortunate yet self-made bottom feeder, I rolled into Eugene a week before the 9/11 terror attacks with a little less than a grand of cash in my pocket and everything I owned packed into the back of my '86 Nissan hatchback. I arrived late in the afternoon on a bright September day. Merging my way into the heart of the unfamiliar city, my restless mind flooded with an overwhelming sense of loneliness, fear, and despair. I was a middle-aged man oddly out of sorts with the world, a bum who had hit the road one too many times. In the wake of my final getaway from San Diego, California - the birthplace of the traveling twins and home to a mixed bag of our treasured and traumatic memories - I felt as though I was immersed and drowning in a liquid universe from which there was no visible escape. I was swimming for my very survival, like a lone shark in a dim, unfathomable sea, and I needed to keep moving to stay alive.

Marlon had given me his phone number, but not his address, so I checked into the Franklin Inn and called him from my room.

"Hello?" he said, his voice making me feel instantly less lonely.

"It's me," I chirped, "I'm back, bro."

"Hey man, what's up?" Marlon said coolly. His lukewarm manner made my heart sink.

"Marty T is in the house man, I made it to Eugene!" I jauntily proclaimed, hoping to spur him on.

"Okay, glad you made it, man. Where are you?"

"I'm at the Franklin Inn," I sighed, "near the university."

"Sure, I know where it is, be there in 20 minutes."

As identical twins, Marlon and I shared a duplicate set of genes and many of the same traits. One of our matching idiosyncrasies was a profound connection, a rare and mutually exclusive extrasensory perception deep within our DNA. He must have sensed I was in trouble and on the run. We had spoken on the phone only twice in one year, since our devastating and destructive shouting match on the way to the Los Angeles airport that halted our foolhardy plan of starting a new life together in Hawaii. The blowup had ripped us apart. When my solo sojourn in the Aloha State flamed out, I flew home to San Diego and called Marlon to tell him I wanted to come to Eugene. He had reluctantly encouraged me to join him. Feeling anxious and exhausted after a three-day cocaine binge, I rashly quit my job as an assistant producer at a video production company, packed my car, and headed north, calling it quits on my hometown for the very last time.
For as long as I can remember I have lived with the persistent and perplexing feeling of wanting to flee, to check out, to attempt a daring and desperate disappearing act and to reemerge in a new and exotic place where I might somehow reinvent myself. It was a trick I had tried again and again but could never pull off. Since my glory days as a high school football star I had been cruising full speed ahead without a compass, and like a ship in uncharted waters nothing could have stopped me on my collision course with the raging storms of destiny.

I was waiting outside in the parking lot of the Franklin Inn when Marlon pulled up in his big Dodge conversion van. He parked in one of the empty spaces and smiled at me through the front windshield. Seeing him made me feel a little better. The sun had dipped behind the 2-story hotel, and the air in the shaded lot was now cool and crisp and scented with a hint of pine.

Marlon got out and we greeted each other with a big, hearty bear hug. We must have looked like a couple of bears, too. We each stood 6'4" and carried a lot of bulk from our years of heavy weight training. At least fifty pounds overweight, Marlon appeared portly but sturdy, and his chubby face, though abundantly aged and wrinkled, still beamed with a boyish and mischievous charm. Seeing my identical twin brother again filled me with a wonderful feeling of exhilaration. Our reunions always ignited a supercharged, almost electrical spark between us. We had not seen each other for an entire year (the longest separation of our lives), and as we clung to each other with a deep and heartfelt affection the distinctive soapy smell of the skin on his thick footballer's neck nearly brought me to tears. God, how I missed him, I thought. How much I had always missed him.

On the day we were born, in the last laid-back summer of the golden 1950s in La Jolla, California, I had slipped into the world first, with Marlon joining me about two minutes later. I weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces at birth, while my younger but bigger twin tipped the scales at a whopping 8 pounds, 2 ounces. Our mother named me Martin Ray, after her favorite California wine maker, and she gave Marlon the middle name of Brando, after her favorite movie star. And so our lives together had begun. Just before midnight on June 19, 1959, the Tanner twins were on the map.

They called us "TNT" in high school. We were big, talented football players. Marlon played fullback and middle linebacker and I played halfback and outside linebacker. We kicked ass, winning the league title and sharing the most valuable player award three years in a row. In our junior and senior seasons we made first-team All-State and All-American. As gifted and natural-born athletes, we also started on the baseball and basketball teams three years running. We were unstoppable jocks and inseparable best friends. How then could we have foreseen the brevity of such greatness? How could we have possibly known our halcyon days at La Jolla High - those fleeting and happy-go-lucky dreamscapes of our youth - would be the best of our lives?

Marlon and I separated from our warm embrace and then stood nose-to-nose, playfully grappling with each other like two humongous wrestlers in a freak show. "So, how's the new trailer?" I asked.

"Lookin' good," he said, squeezing his monster meathooks around my well-built biceps. "It's outside of town a little bit, in Junction City, but it's in good shape. We can go out there now and see it if you want."

"Well of course I'd like to see it," I said, pushing him away.

I wanted Marlon to invite me to move in, but he had made it clear on the phone that he did not want us to live together again, saying his mobile home was too small for us to share. Over the years we had tried being roommates many times, but our attempts always ended miserably, creating a great deal of friction and rancor between us. For the first time in his life Marlon insisted on having his own space. I made an effort to sound okay with his decision, but deep down I felt hurt and little betrayed. I had helped Marlon out many times in the past when he needed a place to stay.

"I thought you might like to take a look around Eugene first," he said.

"Fine by me."

We got into his van and he started the engine. "Sounds good," I said, forcing a smile. Something was off, not quite right between us: a deep, painful wedge long in the making.

"Yeah, it's a good van," he replied. He sounded cool and detached, like a man who expects to find the worst in someone he meets for the first time. I didn't like the small talk, but I knew it could go on for hours. I decided to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Marlon took me on a whistle-stop tour of Eugene. We drove around the university area, where I gazed nostalgically at the ivy-covered brick halls and tree-lined walking paths of the famed campus, wondering about all the great athletes who had gone there. After high school Marlon and I would have cut off our left nuts for a chance to play for the Ducks. But Oregon, along with a swarm of other Division One teams, never came calling. The celebrated and indomitable Tanner twins were never recruited as a package deal after Marley's horrible bodysurfing wipeout in the summer of '77, when he fractured two of his cervical vertebrae in the shore break at Marine Street Beach. His sudden and shocking accident was the twist of fate that shattered our major college football dreams for good. Marley spent the next three years in and out of hospital rooms and sports rehab centers, while my own fervor for the game withered away like pebbles on a windswept shore during two uninspired seasons at Mesa junior college.

And that was that. Without so much as a single explosion on the gridirons of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, TNT fizzled out of football like two colossal duds in a highly touted and much anticipated fireworks show.

Marlon had steered us into the sedate downtown district. Sitting beside my ill-fated and long-lost companion, I observed the passing pedestrians and places of business with a feeling of such raw detachment that I felt nearly transparant, like a hulking ghost forever condemned to roam the world seeking earthly pleasures it will never again savor. What I sought and so desperately longed for was simply to belong. I wanted to fit in, to feel right about the purpose and meaning of my life. The last time I felt really good about anything was in high school, when Marlon and I played on the football team and made all-American. That time had come and gone 25 years before. I wanted to feel the same kind of passion and jubilation about my life again, and I still believed Marlon could supply the missing pieces of the puzzle. I wanted him to make me whole.

Sitting in the captain's seat of his oversized van, with his substantial spare tire nearly touching the steering wheel, Marlon looked more like an out-of-shape bus driver than a former high school sports star. He was working as a taxi driver, and would sit lethargically in his cab for hours each day driving his fares around the city and stopping for huge meals at all-you-can-eat restaurants. His favorite eatery at the time was a vegetarian salad bar and buffet owned and operated by the local Hare Krishnas. Marlon had a voracious appetite and enjoyed a particular gusto for nutritious fare. Sadly, he seemed at times unable to experience the joys of eating, and was so strangely disconnected from life that he missed out on the tactical and sensory pleasures of food, consuming his meals more like a machine than a man. My identical twin brother suffered from manic depression most of his adult life. The doctors called it bipolar disorder. Whatever it was, it really messed Marlon up.

"Well, let's head out to my new digs," said Marlon, rubbing his Buddha-like belly, "It's about time for din-din."

"Sounds good, bro," I said.

We drove to the end of 6th Avenue and then curved onto Route 99. Heading northwest and later due north, we passed a succession of run-down commercial and residential districts, a hodgepodge of new and used car and motor home lots, truck and tractor dealerships, dilapidated business centers with payday loan stores, seedy sex and video shops, and slummy trailer parks. A variety of greasy spoons and mom-and-pop burger joints also lined the shamefully neglected highway. To the west, the sun had sunk below the distant Oregon Coast Range, still visible along the western edge of the Willamette Valley, and the last light of the long day would soon be dissolving from dusk to dark.

We had entered the Land of the Living Dead, the deteriorating outskirts of yet another promising American city in decline and rotting from rampant greed and corruption. Here, in this decaying urban wasteland, lived the poorest and weakest of the working classes, losers and has-beens and underachievers (many of them alcoholics and drug addicts) who had run out of luck or fallen on hard times and existed on the fringes of society eking out meager livings on the minimum wages of bottom-of-the-barrel jobs. Such was life for millions of my compatriots in the new millennium. They were the new breed of Americans, the ignorant masses of ethnic minorities and white trash subsisting on or below the poverty line, lost in the shuffle and long forgotten by the country's capitalistic fat cats and power brokers. And it was a place my twin brother now called home.

Then, out of nowhere, a topless strip club called Cheetahs appeared on the left side of the roadway. "Hey, have you checked out that place yet?" I asked, feeling a rush of sexual excitement.

Marlon grinned, "Sure, five-dollar pitchers on Wednesdays. They've got some sexy girls, too."

"Maybe I can get a job there as a disc jockey," I said hopefully. "I'm gonna need to find a job and a place to live right away."

"Good idea," Marlon said. "There's a few strip joints around town, and they just built a new one over on West 11th. It's fuckin' huge, man. They've been advertising for deejays in the paper."

"Really?" I said, my mind turning with excitement. "I'll have to get on that right away."

The wheels of my cocaine addiction were spinning once again. Deejaying in a classy gentlemen's club sounded like the perfect gig: I could get high at work and watch beautiful naked girls dancing the night away; after hours, I could party and do drugs with sultry go-go girls, the wannabe porn stars in the cyber age of online sex. Such fanciful fantasies seemed entirely reasonable to me, an out-and-out dope and porn junkie consumed by the smutty cravings of a filthy mind.
Marlon turned left at a stoplight. We crossed over some railroad tracks and he turned left again, into the wide, gravel entryway of his mobile home park. A large wooden and weather-beaten sign at the top of a rusty ranch-style archway revealed the name: Tivoli Mobile Home Park.

"This is it," Marlon announced. "Welcome to Redneck City."

"It doesn't look so bad," I said, trying to sound cheerful. But deep down I already knew he had plopped down twenty grand for a broken-down mobile home on a junky plot of land in dullsville.

Marlon's dwelling turned out better than I expected. Built sometime in the 1970s, the two-bedroom, 60' long by 14' singlewide appeared exceptionally clean and in very good condition, except for the thin flooring, which creaked and seemed a bit rickety in spots. It was a plain and humble abode; a no-frills pad with fresh carpet and paint and a new roof that would keep my twin brother safe and warm and protect him from the harsh Oregon elements - rain, hail, sleet, and snow - for many years to come. But I could see right away the trailer was too small for Marlon. His immense frame dwarfed the domicile as though it were the home of a hobbit, and it wobbled slightly beneath our weighty bodies as he took me on a quick tour.

The kitchen was up front. It was small but bright and cozy, with decent appliances and a classic yellow-top dining table sitting beneath a row of front windows. Next came the living room, a snug and compact area partially furnished with a king-size sofa, an end table and a lamp, and a television on a stand.

"Looks comfy," I offered.

"Take it easy when you walk back here," Marlon cautioned as he led me down a narrow hallway to the bedrooms. He tiptoed ahead like a burly, out-of-shape ballet dancer. "The floor is a really shaky in some spots."

"What do you mean?" I asked, trying to disguise my annoyance with concern. It was just like Marlon to make a big deal out of something so small. The flooring would certainly hold up to normal walking, even from hefty guys like us.

"Just don't walk too hard," Marlon commanded. "The floor is weak and it might cause some damage down the road."

"Okay, okay," I said, shaking my head with disapproval.

"You see?" Marlon shouted. "You see what you do to me every time?"

"What are you talking about, bro?" I asked defensively.

"You, Marty, I'm talking about you, and the way you always disrespect me and put me down. I'm sick and tired of it, and I'm not gonna put up with it anymore. I'm not gonna let you treat me this way Marty, not now and not ever again. This is my place, not yours, and if you're gonna act that way then you can just fuck off and leave."

And so the meltdown had begun, the inevitable fallout from a thousand falling-outs in our troubled and turbulent past. We had become hapless duelists in a tit-for-tat tug-of-war to the bitter end.

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry, Marlon," I said, "Please don't get so upset. I don't mean to treat you that way, but it's just a floor, and it's not gonna break."

Marlon's dimpled cheeks flushed with anger, and he glared at me with his beady, steely blue eyes. "Goddamn it, Martin Ray!" he screamed. "I don't care what the fuck you think! It's the same old story with you every time and I'm not gonna take it anymore! Now, are you gonna walk the way I want you to, or not? Because if you're not, then I can drive you back to your hotel right now and you can do whatever the fuck you want."

His sudden outburst surprised me. "No, no, no, that's not what I want, bro," I stammered, feeling terror-stricken and guilt-ridden at the same time. "I'm really sorry, man. I know it's your house and your floor, and I don't want us to fight like this. Please, Marley, please forgive me, okay?"

I had given my younger twin his nickname years ago, when we were teenagers and the legendary reggae singer Bob Marley was at the top of his game. Calling Marlon by his pet name often calmed him down when we squabbled. His strapping shoulders relaxed a bit and he peered at me with a sullen and indignant expression on his face.

"Yeah, I hate it when we fight, too, bro, but you've gotta stop being so selfish and abusive all the time, or it's just not gonna work out between us."

Abusive? I thought. What the fuck does that mean? What does being selfish and abusive have to do with being sensible? But I bit my tongue, saying, "I know, I know Marley, you're right. I'm sorry, man. Please forgive me."

As we hugged each other with unabashed affection a gloomy feeling of desperation washed over me, as though no matter how hard or long I held on to Marlon, that my real brother, the cocky, can-do twin of my youth, was long gone; he had faded away in poignant and puzzling fashion and was simply no longer there. It was the kind of downhearted feeling a man gets when he knows things are never going to work out the way he wants them to. My beloved identical twin brother had perished beneath the dark and turbulent waters of bipolar madness, and there was nothing I could ever do to bring him back.

The rest of Marlon's mobile home - the tiny middle bedroom and the boxy master bedroom and bathroom at the back end - was also clean and in good shape. A back door on one side of the master suite opened to a good-sized yard covered with patchy uncut grass and a few scraggly fruit trees.

"I can build a deck off the master bedroom here," Marlon said, gesturing to an area just outside his bedroom doorway. We were standing in the yard. It was nearly dark and the clear evening sky had become a canopy of twinkling stars. Though modest (and perhaps a little less than ordinary), I liked Marlon's new residence and secretly wished I could live there with him and maybe even help him build his dream deck someday. But I knew it would never happen. His violent, unstable temperament and odd way of thinking drove me crazy, and he seemed to be getting worse every year. I could put up with him, but only for short periods at a time. Still, I wanted that mobile home of his and covetously wished it were mine.

I never really had a home of my own. Not since Marlon and I were kids, anyway. Over the years I rented and lived in dozens of rooms and apartments but never stayed in them for more than a year or so at a time. There always seemed to be someplace new to go, and the roots I put down were never deep enough to keep me planted in one place for long. That was the way it had always been for the traveling twins. I never knew why. The reasons why people are the way they are and do the things they do will always be one of the great mysteries of life. Some people are stable; others are not. Some people stay put; others do not. The unbalanced and transitory nature of our lives - which took us on innumerable rollercoaster rides filled with manic highs and lows - had evolved over many years of rash decision-making and impulsive gallivanting. The true source of our behavior, the reasons why we were the way we were and did the things we did, would never be fully known or understood. Such was the game of life, and our lives as the traveling twins.

It had become a tad chilly outside, so Marlon and I went back in and sat down at the kitchen table.

"I fixed us a nice dinner," Marlon grinned cheerfully, "a brown rice, tofu, and broccoli dish with nonfat, nondairy cheese."

"Wow, sounds delicious bro," I said, feeling somewhat famished after my long day on the road. "Glad to see you're still into healthy food."

"Sure man, always," Marlon said, pulling his casserole out of the fridge. "You want iced tea or raspberry soda?"

"Soda sounds pretty tasty," I said.

What I really wanted was an ice-cold brewski, but I knew Marlon was off the sauce again, at least for now. Like me, my impetuous twin took frequent timeouts from his beer benders, and we both smoked marijuana in the same obsessive-compulsive way. Unlike Marlon, though, I gradually became a chronic abuser of cocaine and crystal meth, and in the end I was smoking, snorting, and injesting large quantities of these narcotics to satisfy my ever-growing sexual addiction. I eventually got hooked on the dangerous one-two punch of dope and X-rated debauchery. During this final stage of the game, at the height of my hard-core depravity, I engaged repeatedly in all-night orgies with a titillating selection of handpicked adult videos and a ready supply of personal lubricant. Unfortunately, my dirty days as a vulgar voyeur were far from over.

"So, you think you got a pretty good deal on this palace?" I asked, taking a swig of raspberry fizzy water.

"Yeah, I looked around a lot and it was about the best mobile home in this part of Oregon within my budget that included land," Marlon said proudly. "I had to invest in the new roof and carpet, but other than that it was pretty much in good shape and ready for me to move in. Once I got my bed and a few furnishings, I was good to go."

"I really like it," I said, nodding my head with approval. "It's got a good vibe, bro. I think you made yourself a very good investment here."

"Thanks, Marty."

Marlon nuked his vegetarian dish and we dug in, wolfing down the wholesome and tasty chow like two rookies at a pro football training camp. The tension between us slowly began to dissipate, and soon we were chatting away like a couple of schoolgirls reunited after a long semester break. As identical twins Marlon and I shared a unique and distinctive style of speaking, our own intuitive way of using the language. We were the ultimate sentence finishers. Conversing in near-telepathic fashion, our rapid-fire tête-à-têtes were some of the best in the dialogue business. Gene for gene, identical twins like us were the undisputed chatterbox champs of the world.

"So, how's the taxi gig?" I asked.

"Not bad, but it's a long haul," Marlon replied woefully, gulping another big mouthful of insufficiently chewed food. My enormous twin hombre ate like a ravenous beast in a barnyard.

"What kind of hours?" I inquired.

"It's a long fuckin' shift, man, at least twelve a day."

"That's a grind. Dough any good?"

"About a Franklin a day, give or take, wages and tips."

"Not bad."

"Yeah, it's okay," Marlon shrugged, "the money's all right but the hours sure suck."

We ate in silence for a few moments, devouring our plates of casserole like two starving pirates at sea. We gluttonously chewed our edibles and swigged our potations as though quenching our hunger and thirst for the very last time.

"Do you like it here?" I queried.

Marlon chuckled. "Yeah, it's not bad, but it's a one-horse town if there ever was one."

"Make any friends yet?"

"No, not really. I've been to some bars on Main Street and met a few of the locals. And I've been flirting around with a foxy babe who works at my gym downtown. I asked her out for coffee a few days ago."

"What did she say?"

"N-O."

"Did you ask her why?"

"Yeah, she said I was too old for her."

"How old is she?"

"I'm not sure. Thirty-five, maybe."

"That's not young."

"No, it's not. And the bitch is divorced with two young kids."

Marley finished his first plate and quickly spooned out a generous second helping. Then he poured himself another glass of iced tea.

"What's up with Ellen?" I asked.

"She's down in San Diego. Still calls me every fuckin' day, too."

"She got the condo?"

"Yep, she bought me out."

"That was lucky."

"She didn't want to, but I convinced her."

"How'd you do that?"

"I threatened to kill her cats."

Marlon chugged his drink and jumped up to get more ice from the freezer. He seemed to be getting a little agitated.

"Do you miss her, bro?" I asked.

"Sure I miss her," he said, pulling ice cubes from a plastic tray. "I miss her all the time."

"Then why'd you leave her again, Marley?"

"Because I was sick and tired of her lazy ass and shitty eating habits. I swear to God Marty she's the laziest fuckin' woman I've ever known with the worst diet of all time. All she ever eats is processed junk and fast food. It's no wonder she gained so much weight in the last couple of years. I've tried again and again to get her to exercise a little, even just walking around the neighborhood or swimming in the pool once in awhile, but she always has an excuse about feeling so goddamned tired all the time. Now she has health problems and her doctor keeps telling her to eat better and get more exercise, but she never does. It drives me fuckin' crazy, man."

I polished off my first serving and dished up round two. "She did seem tired a lot of the time," I concurred, hoping to calm him down.

"Fuckin' a," Marlon groaned, sitting down at the table again.

"Does she want you back again?" I asked, taking my seat at the table.

"Yep, the gal never quits. Now she says she wants to come live up here."

"Is that what you want?"

"Hell noooooooooooooo!" howled Marlon, making his voice high and screechy at the end like a funny character in a cartoon. He usually started acting zany whenever he felt annoyed or uncomfortable.

I sure wished I could believe him. Marley had run out on Ellen so many times it was hard to keep track of his desertions. My impulsive look-alike got a big charge from his spontaneous adventures to new and unknown places. He would often disappear for weeks and months at a time, crisscrossing the country in his camper vans or staying with various sects of the Hare Krishnas and other communes across the country. He was a real-life drifter, my twin bro. But he always came back. No matter how far or how often Marlon ran away, he had always returned to me, his genetic counterpart, the selfsame rolling stone who knew and loved him best.

And then Marlon had met Ellen. After she came into our lives everything changed. Marley no longer boomeranged exclusively to me, but embarked on a juvenile and exasperating modus operandi of repeatedly flying the coop and then scampering back and forth between the two of us like an overgrown puppy. I watched Marley come and go in his spur-of-the-moment fashion so many times I eventually started closing down his welcome wagons.

Marlon looked squarely at me across the table. "What's up with you, man?" he asked, his mellow voice full of sarcasm.

"Well, I'm not doin' so good, bro" I bemoaned.

"What happened in Hawaii?" he asked suspiciously.

"I really fucked up, man. I had a good job as a dive master in Kailua-Kona on the Big Island. It was beautiful there, bro. First I rented a studio on a small coffee plantation up in the hillsides a few miles outside of town. Then I moved into a killer 4-bedroom place with three other divers up on one of the hills above Kailua town. The house had huge windows everywhere and this giant deck along the entire front part that had an amazing 180-degree view of the ocean for miles and miles up and down the Kona Coast. It was unbelievable, bro, you should've seen it."

"Sounds incredible, man."

"I was only working part time at the dive shop, so I ended up getting a second job on the weekends as a deejay at the bowling center."

"The bowling center?" asked Marlon, blinking his eyes and making a 'what the fuck?' expression.

"Yeah, pretty funny, huh?" I said with a weary yawn. I was beginning to feel dog-tired after such a long day on the road and with so much warm grub in my gut. I sorely needed a hot shower and some serious shut-eye. "It was a promotion," I continued, "'Rockin' Bowl Weekends' or some shit like that. All I did was play music and announce these contests for the most strikes or spares in a round or the highest current scores of the night, and then gave away prizes and announced the names of the winners on the microphone."

"Sounds like a pretty easy gig," Marlon said, stretching his heavyset legs across a long section of his kitchen floor. "How'd you fuck that one up?"

I slumped in my chair, shamefaced. "I started smoking ice and doing coke again, that's what happened," I muttered ruefully. Ice was a crystalline form of methamphetamine prevalent among dopers in Hawaii.

Marlon looked disgusted. He folded his muscular arms across his broad chest and shook his head in disappointment. "Wow, Marty, you sure know how to ruin a good thing," he said irritably. "But that's you, bro. You never know how good you've got it until you throw it all away."

We sat in silence for a long time. I soberly considered his words of wisdom, letting them roll around in my head and hoping they might somehow sink in. And I wondered with great penitence, as I had wondered so many times before, if I was ever going to learn to stop throwing my life away.

Marley broke the wordlessness. "So what happened next, bro?" he asked.

"Well, I met this guy who worked in one of the local tourist shops selling cheap diving and snorkeling gear. One thing led to another, and on New Year's Eve my mountain bike just sort of steered itself over to his place, and before I knew it we'd scored a shitload of coke and the party was on, man. I was up all night, first at the bars and then back at his house watching porn channels on satellite. I was supposed to work on the dive boat the next morning, but I had to call in sick. Then on New Year's Day we drove up towards Captain Cook and scored another eightball from some fucked up Hawaiian couple living like hillbillies in a shack with a bunch of kids and chickens. I took my cut, rented a bunch of porn videos, and stayed up all night again jerking off in my bedroom. The others divers I lived with kept knocking on my door to see if I was okay, but I was too fucked up to talk to them, so I had to keep yelling at them through my door that I was fine and just had a bad back and needed to rest. I called in sick three days in a row. Those guys never treated me the same after that night."

"Well, of course not," Marlon snapped disapprovingly. "They must've thought it was pretty strange that you wouldn't open your door and talk to them. What'd they say at the dive shop?"

"Not much, really, but they stopped giving me shifts on the boat and made me their gofer instead. They had me running errands and cleaning scuba gear and filling tanks, stuff like that."

"That sucks, dude. What made you finally split?"

"It's a long story, bro," I said, slumping in my chair and swallowing one last bite of casserole, "and right now it's about time for me to hit the sack."

Marlon shrugged. "Sure thing, man," he said brusquely, "let's get you back to your hotel then."

I knew Marlon was really pissed off about what happened to me in Hawaii. I had always been a little too honest with him about my tribulations, and over the years he had become a kind of sibling psychotherapist, a willing but unpracticed confidant who dutifully listened to my misadventures but secretly resented me for dumping so many of my worrisome troubles upon his solid yet shaky shoulders. My twin bro was built like a fortress, but his mind was a house of cards. Despite his psychological frailties, Marley had always been my savior of sorts, my go-to guy whenever I was on the ropes and ready to throw in the towel. I could always count on Marley. He listened to my problems and supported me when no one else would. He understood me. But this time, something had changed. I could not put my finger on it, but the identical twin brother I broke bread with that night was not the same one who had always been in my corner. Something was different about him and it scared the hell out of me.

"What are you doing up here, Marty?" asked Marlon, his face as cold and stony as a graveyard headstone.

Bad vibes struck me like bolts of lightening in a silent yet deafening storm. A tempest was looming, the kind of negative kinetic energy that pulses in the most unloving and uncharitable regions of the human heart. We were dead ducks caught in the palpable shock waves of rancor and distrust.

"I wanted us to be together again. You know, like old times."

"That's not gonna happen, bro."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we just can't be together like that anymore."

"Why?" I asked in bewilderment.

"Because I can't stand being around you, Marty, that's why."

A walnut-sized lump stuck in my throat. "You can't stand being around me? After all the times you knocked on my door when you were broke and needed a place to stay and you didn't have anywhere else to go? And you say something like that to me? What a fuckin' joke, man."

"No, you're the joke!" Marlon barked. "I'm sick and tired of cleaning up your shit, man. You come up here with no job and no place to live and you think you can just walk in here and take over the place. No way, dude! I came up here to be alone and to get as far away from your bullshit as possible. The last thing I need is you coming around to stir the shit. You can't stay here with me, Marty, not one night. You're on your own this time, bro."

It was a long, uneasy ride back to the Franklin Inn. Marlon and I did not speak a single world to each other the entire trip. His behavior had put me in a peculiar state of shock, a panic-stricken frame of mind that made it hard for me to think of what to say that might patch things up between us. I wanted to say something that would get us back on the right track. But I could not find the right words. Perhaps the words no longer existed. At that moment a dreadful thought occurred to me, a notion so distressing it made me feel like putting an end to my miserable life right then and there. Deep down in the bottom of my heart and soul I knew things between Marlon and I would never be the same again. Still, I had hope. Marlon and I were after all two peas in a pod, wayward wanderers cut from the same cloth and connected upon conception by an invisible umbilical cord binding us to a lifetime of conjoined brotherhood.

The moment Marlon pulled into the parking lot of my hotel I glumly sighed, "So this is it, then?"

"This is what?" Marlon snapped, thrusting the automatic transmission shank under his steering wheel into park.

"This is goodbye?" I muttered despondently. I needed Marlon more than he would ever know, and the last thing I wanted was to piss him off, especially when I was counting on his help. Making it on my own sounded like a daunting and dreadful chore. I could not imagine starting my life over again without him.

He shook his head. "No, no, no, that's not it at all, man. Like I already told you, I just need my own space right now. And I need you to stop treating me the way you always do, Marty. The way you act so superior all the time. I just can't take it anymore."

I had no idea what the hell Marlon was talking about. I only knew he appeared more edgy and unsettled than I had ever seen him before. He seemed insanely agitated and bewildered by the inexplicable adversities of his life, by regrettable events and situations he desperately wanted to erase from his past. Marlon was tormented by his memories. His deranged and deteriorating mental condition seemed to keep him in a constant state of vexation. He was a madman trapped in a torture chamber of his own emotional pain, constantly seething at his tragic and unchangeable past. But I still loved him. No matter how disturbing his behavior, I would always love him.

"Okay bro," I pleaded, "I'll try to stop making it so hard for you to be around me. I'll try to be a better brother."

"Okay," Marlon said, the tone of his voice softening.

"Can you forgive me, man?" I begged.

"Yeah, sure, I forgive you Marty."

"Can you help me look for a place to live tomorrow?" I asked expectantly.

"Sure bro, I can drive you around," he said.

"What time do you want to pick me up?"

"Just call me when you wake up," Marlon said. "We can get a paper and go look at some apartments."

"I'll have to rent a room in a house, or maybe a small studio."

"Okay, no problem, bro. Just call me in the morning."

"Okay man, see you in the morning, then."

We said goodnight and Marlon drove away. I had never felt so lonely in all my days. As I glumly trudged the stairs to my room I nearly burst into tears. I almost felt like dying. I took a long, hot shower and then whacked off to a soft porn movie on cable, but nothing made me feel any better. I lay in bed for a long time, pondering my immediate future and wondering if coming to Eugene had been a big mistake. It was one of the saddest and most depressing days of my life. I was pretty sure Marlon felt the same way, but the distance between us was making him hard to read. I finally went to sleep, but in the last few moments of consciousness I still had no idea what to make of Marley or our chances of starting a new life together in Oregon.