The Stray.

He didn’t have to take me in.

I don’t know if I had the record collection that he did if I would want some dumb kid to rifle through them with donut glaze covered fingers and stare at the artwork.

My favorite was Who’s Next? by The Who, of course back then I thought of it as “the funny one where the cover is a picture where the band got done peeing.” Bonus points to me if that’s how the record is referenced in 1001 Records You Need to Listen to Before You Die.

I can’t imagine he enjoyed being dragged to the toy section every time we were at a department store, but he took me all the time.

He made sure we had a weekly trip to the record store, where he would keep introducing me to The Beatles while I kept introducing myself to “Weird” Al Yankovic. Then that would be followed by the weekly stop at the bookstore.

He took to me to my first concert. The Monkees reunion with “Weird Al” as the opening act. I was in heaven. He also took me to several more concerts during my lifetime. I loved them all.

He didn’t have to accept me. David was my mother’s boyfriend, they met when I was a toddler and soon after that, I was his son. Even when he and my mother split apart as lovers, he stayed my dad and he and my mother stayed extremely close too.

I really hope the reason they stayed close was because they would constantly go to Eyes Wide Shut parties where they would boink everyone in the room while wearing farm animal masks. If that is the case however, then I won’t forgive them that we were still lower middle class.

If they were doing some nasty shit in Talmadge Buttersmiths’ library every night, mom should have at least brought home more than she did after a hot night playing BINGO.

As a kid, I was always confused at why I didn’t have a biological father. Then, the more I was with David, the less I cared, the less my absent father bothered me. David was the one taking me to the movies and then mini golf and then the arcade… in one day!

David would call me every morning from kindergarten to my senior year of high school to wish me a good day. He never missed a day. On days when I was sick or skipped (mom was cool and gave me like eight personal days each school year) he’d call multiple times and when I was a kid, he’d make sure to come over right after work to make sure I wasn’t alone too long (mom worked longer hours and her work building was further) and on those days he usually brought pizza. Fucking bliss.

David very much shaped my love of the arts, my sense of humor and my love of basketball and football. He passed in 2006 when I was Twenty-Eight and still needing his guidance. I still could use it now.

Thankfully, David’s family took me in as well. It took like three cook outs with his family and then his sister became my aunt, his nephews and nieces, my cousins. It’s a family I still am very close to. I love them all very much.

When I was diagnosed with stage four cancer, my mother had already and very unexpectedly joined David in the great beyond. Of course, I wanted them both to still be here, but in a very real way, they were.

Andrea who already was my everything, somehow became even more to me, and I saw so much of them in her.

The weekend of the initial diagnosis, we went to stay with her parents and with the way they treated me, I broke down. Here was another wonderful family embracing me as one of their own.

They didn’t have to take me in, but they have been with me every step of this journey, sometimes taking me to chemo, sometimes taking me to a surgery or a scan, sometimes letting me drag them to the toy aisle of a department store. They are my mother and father now.

Andrea’s brother has become my brother, her sister in-law, now my sister, her nephews now my nephews. I will brag and say that I locked up the cool uncle gig way before the cancer diagnosis, when I taught each one of her nephews how to roll out of the way of an elbow drop.

Shit, Andrea and I now live with her parents as I heal from this and work to get stronger. So, I guess they are embracing some of my Latino culture. All that’s left is for them now is to hang garlic in the kitchen to help fight off evil spirits.

It has been paramount to have them. While fighting stage IV cancer, you need every bit of love and hope you can get and I am so lucky that Andrea’s parents have been there for that.

When I was in my early thirties, one of the best friends I ever had, Mike Destefano, passed away. Like my mother it was sudden, unexpected, tragic and an enormous loss, a loss like my mother and David, I will never recover from.

The owner of the Hyena’s Comedy Club in Dallas, TX, knowing how close Mike and I were, asked if I could do the shows in Mike’s place (that’s a story for another time that I plan to share). I called Mike’s Brother Joe and his Partner Lois and asked them, “Shouldn’t I be at the service?” and they both said, “No. Mike knew you loved him and would much rather, as a comic, insist you take the gig.”

I drove from Los Angeles to Dallas, allowing myself a few days to visit mom and cry and miss my friend. The night before I was going to drive to Dallas for the gig, I packed and babysat my Godson Carlos who was like five or six years old at the time. Carlos saw me sobbing and asked why I was crying packing socks. “They all have holes in the toes you little shit! That’s why I’m fucking crying!” then I did some moves with my nun chucks to put the fear of God in him.

What I really did was tell him that one of my best friends had just died. Carlos sat there for a moment, then looked at me and said “well maybe, you’ll meet people in life that remind you of him so it’s like he never went away at all.”

I was fucking stunned that kid had just spit that out and I swear it happened. Besides giving him the world’s smallest strike zone for the rest of my life, I also never forgot that moment and now living with my parents… he was right. I’ve been taken in more than once now and I will be forever grateful.

It’s such an amazing to see in others what was lost when loved ones passed.

I have family and friends that remind me of mom, David and Mike, and I’ve never felt more fortunate and have never felt more at home.

Tip Jar (If you wanna)