One Down

I have written before about my extended family by virtue of my father’s multiple marriages and dalliances over his life. By last count there are nine of us siblings with six females and three males. I am the oldest of the males…at least as far as I know. That’s the thing about my father, you can never really be sure because owning up to his parental obligations was simply not a high priority to him. He would rather cast his seed far and wide and rather indiscriminately than to bothered keeping track of how that all turned out.

One such example took place in Mexico City, where he went to manage high profile construction projects like The Camino Royal Hotel. Along the way, he met the daughter of one of the wealthier family fortunes in Mexico. They married in an elaborate ceremony and very soon thereafter produced an heir in the form of a namesake son who carried his adopted name, Andre Marin (I say adopted because my father was born Silvano Prosdocimi in 1923 and later changed his name in 1963 to his middle name Andre and his mother’s maiden name Marin…moving Silvano to the middle name spot). Therefore, he bestowed this somewhat artificially created name on a son in 1972 while I was away in college and he was onto his fifth (or so….since who could know for sure) marriage.

My father, who was a lifelong smoker of great volumes of cigarettes, suffered from both coronary and intestinal arterial disease and after several bypass procedures and repeated returns to his beloved cigarettes, died very near this very hilltop I inhabit in 1993 at the age of 70 (my very age today). He collapsed from heart failure during an evening stroll which he took to sneak an evening cigarette. I buried his ashes (hmmm, that’s appropriate) nearby at the Mission San Luis Rey and eulogized him for his mourners, which included at least four of his wives, including my mother, his first two wives (yes, they married twice). Who wasn’t in that crowd in January, 1993 was his long-since estranged Mexico City wife or his namesake, Andre Marin, Jr..

Indeed, Andre Jr. had never met our father and the next year, at the age of 22, came to NYC for the FIFA World Cup matches as a Mexican sportscaster. He had called me late one night a month or so before and introduced himself to me as my brother (I had had no known brothers at the time, so it started as a rather strange call). We met for dinner in NY C at Bice on 54th street, an appropriately chic watering hole of which I’m sure our “Bella Figura” father would have approved. I had met our father several times (literally once as a child and four times as an adult, to my best recollection). Andre Jr. had never met him and was in search of resolution for the gap that situation had created in his heart. When we met that night, I noted how much Andre Jr. resembled Andre Sr., right down to the ever-present cigarette in his hand and the already gravelly voice with the highly Hispanic-accented English, spoken in between Bogey-like smoking breathes and cigarette maintenance gestures. Andre Jr. was courtly and serious, as had been Andre Sr..

I never saw Andre Jr. again after that, but I did freakishly hear him the very next day on the Howard Stern show on my car radio. He had called into the Stern show to discuss the World Cup and was on the air being thanked by Howard Stern for calling, only to be dissed to great applause after he hung up by Howard saying to his audience, “like any of us give a shit about soccer in this country”. Ten years later Andre Jr. married and I was indirectly invited to join the ceremony in Mexico City, but demurred for long forgotten reasons and general lack of familial closeness. He went on to have three sons, just like Fred McMurray (favorite sitcom star of my youth).

Yesterday I learned through one of my half sisters, the middle child of the nine of us, that Andre Jr. had died at the young age of 52. According to a news posting to the worldwide soccer fan community (he had become quite a renowned Mexican announcer of the sport), he died a week after a double lung transplant, presumably required by all his lifelong smoking habit. I do not know if he named one his sons Andre to carry on that name, but I will note that he died on the 107th anniversary of my mother’s birth, strangely enough. Perhaps having the Andre Marin artificial name fade away would not be such a tragedy.

I have a text chain with three of my half sisters, all of whom live out here in California. That’s how I heard of his death. We reprised what little we collectively knew about Andre Jr.. What we did not discuss too much was our thirty-year dead common father. That alone should invoke some cautionary tale to this. He is a stronger memory to two of those sisters (both whole sisters to one another), and the third sister has, like Andre Jr., no memories of him. She was born about 60 years ago into a family of six kids who lived in the San Fernando Valley, near where the other two were raised. She was the product of a tryst between Andre Sr. and her mother in somewhat stereotypical suburban infidelity fashion. She discovered her way into this clan of Andre children with the help of 23 and Me and a little bit of sibling sleuthing. We have embraced her and she feels connected in a way that Andre Jr. seemed to also need, but never overly pursued. We all accept our common bond in a curious way without completely grasping how a man can choose to live a life that disregards the same sort of connection to his very own offspring. We’re not even entirely sure he knew that this San Fernando Valley love-child he sired even existed. My take on it, especially having gotten to know her a bit in the last few years, is that this all accrues as his loss more than ours or hers.

And yet, here I am, sitting here in the middle of the night writing about the loss of a brother I hardly knew from a father I barely knew much better. They shared in common far more than he and I ever shared, in a strange way. They shared a name, even though it was an artificial name. They shared their Latin good looks and accented voice. And they shared a weakness for smoking that did them both in before their time. I guess I should consider myself lucky that my acorn fell much further away from that tree than did Andre Jr’s. I do not carry his name. I am decidedly devoid of Latin good looks and a charming way with women. And, I have never smoked or imbibed alcohol to any degree. What I have done is pay close attention to the mistakes made in not appreciating one’s family and not caring enough to connect in more meaningful ways with those who share the same blood as me. That is the richness of life that has greatest value, at least to my belief. So, I bid Andre Jr. a melancholy goodbye (though I hardly knew you) and note for the record books that one of nine (the youngest, to my knowledge) is down, but the rest of us remain anything but out.