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Uncle Michael believed that Porsches were nothing more than “glorified Volkswagens.” He believed that Apollo 11 actually landed inside a studio in Burbank, that it was all just Hollywood playing us for fools. He didn’t burn down our house the way my Uncle Johnny did, but he knifed a bartender for cussing out my father. At least Uncle Michael thought he was cussing out my father.

He was one of the first artists I knew well. I doubt he would have called himself an artist: he made extra money airbrushing the sides of vans and the tanks of motorcycles. He created the kind of images that convinced my mother bad men had moved into our neighborhood: naked and enhanced women, Schwarzeneggeresque warriors, cartoon characters who looked like they were on drugs. He was good enough to make a living at it, but he said he didn’t want to.

One of the best compliments I’ve ever received came from my Uncle Michael. I had taped and repainted my bicycle in baby blue: really clean lines and not a spec of spray on the chrome. When Michael saw it in the garage, he said that I would make a fine body and fender man. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Could it be true?

That’s what Michael went to prison for the first time: working in a chop shop, using his body and fender skills to disassemble stolen cars for resale.

He had a sexy wife with bad acne. She looked like Cher as she left drinks for me under the bar at my parent’s parties. Strange kid that I was, I then ran upstairs to record my voice on a cassette recorder hoping to track the progress of my drunkenness. Mary also told me how handsome I was, often. Maybe a little too often. Mary said it in a way that I was certain meant something.

I remember riding back from work with Michael and my uncle-by-marriage Ray and a carpenter named Danny while all three men were talking about the texture of women’s bodies. And, no, I’m not going to tell you what they said. From there, they drifted into a conversation about how great it was to sleep with married women. All of them were in their mid to late twenties, and all of them were scoundrels. A scoundrel is the word for a sociopath who you like. I felt so privileged to go unnoticed in their presence. My uncle-by-marriage was notorious for inviting a former girlfriend who had been a Playboy bunny to our family Christmas party, and I felt privileged to be there, too.

At a certain point, Uncle Michael, who was sitting in front of me, looked back and remembered who I was. It was an odd moment, and I can still see the look on his face: like he was trying to remember who I was or why they shouldn’t talk this way in front of me. At 12 years old, I never kidded myself that I was important to him. I’m sure he had forgotten I was there.

“But, listen, guys,” Michael said. “That’s a bad thing, isn’t it?”

“What’s a bad thing?” Danny asked.

“Sleeping with married women,” Michael said. “Sleeping with married women is a bad thing.”

“A very bad thing.” My Uncle Ray winked at me. “You go to hell for stuff like that.”

Danny, who was physically incapable of discretion and is probably dead by now because of it, said, “What the hell are you guys talking about? It’s a great thing. It’s a freaking glorious thing.”

One of my favorite words is “avuncular.” It means, basically, uncle-like, and, for many years, that’s what I strove for, unclelikeness. Not the kind of uncle that Michael was, maybe, but the fun guy who told you things your dad wouldn’t. The kind of guy who could be paternal but also get you into trouble.

Being an uncle, for me, was about freedom. An uncle is the kind of guy who drives his own car so that he can smoke on the way to the party. A father, on the other hand, is the guy who gave up smoking because he never wanted his son to see him, even passing by in another car. Being an uncle is a way of having influence, but not having to lose any sleep over it. The kind of guy who gets the kids all riled up with lots of crazy games. And then goes home.

But then I found the right woman, and I had to become the right man. That’s the good news and the better news, but it’s also the bad news and the worse news. There’s a romance about the desperado, the live-fast-die-young crowd that I had to admit wasn’t going to be my way.

The thing that constantly amazes me about life – and maybe I’m just stupid in this way – is how whichever peak you’ve just climbed, there’s another one behind it that looks just as nasty as the last one did. It occurred to me recently that almost every morning of my life looks like the view up from the base camp at Everest. With a cup of coffee in my hand and a big smile for the Sherpas, I’m thinking, there is no freaking way.

I don’t think my father ever saw much wrong with Michael. It was the same for me. Not because we didn’t see his problems – on the contrary: he was a heroin addict for starters, and, once, when I was in grade school, he went to jail for three months because he knifed a bartender. I won’t ever get the whole story, but he was high on amphetamines and the bartender said something bad about Danny, that guy without discretion, and Michael thought he was talking to my father, who was out drinking with them that night. And that was that: assault with a deadly weapon. Just jumped behind the bar and knifed the guy.

Clearly, Michael wasn’t free, but he seemed to enjoy himself in ways that neither my father nor I – hyper-responsible older brothers – could have imagined. Even his criminal activities seemed like evidence of a life we would never get to live. I want to say that he was charming, but that’s not a big enough word. There’s a kind of person, usually Irish, who can cause disaster all around him and not seem to suffer the consequences. My father and I suffered consequences for what we’d only thought about doing, and we watched Michael as though he were from another species.

Many years later, when the only time I thought about Michael was to remember that he was a heroin addict in order to thank God that I wasn’t, a friend of mine was sending me books from a publisher in New York to review. I never got around to reviewing them, but I read some good books. I’m pretty sure, for example, that I was the only person in Laguna Beach that year reading John Keats: The Making of a Poet, Aileen Ward’s biography of John Keats.

Keats was a great young English poet who died at the age of twenty-six feeling that his writing career had amounted to nothing. Far from it, actually, but as Keats suffered his last battle with tuberculosis in Rome, he instructed his best friend to make his nameless epitaph read, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” I loved this story because I was also twenty-six when I was reading the book, and I was, pretty much, exactly the same kind of self-dramatizing post-adolescent that Keats was, minus the huge talent for poetry.

My favorite part of the story, though, was what happened after Keats died. His friends, not capable of passing up the opportunity to give a big middle finger to the men who had savaged their buddy’s work, edited the epitaph to read “This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a Young English Poet, who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart, at the Malicious Power of his enemies, desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” Which, if you visit the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, is the way it reads to this day. I think Keats would have been pissed: his version was much better.

I had an odd moment as I finished that big ass biography. I sat for a while just staring at the last pages of the book, knowing that I was missing something. Then, I brought a calculator from the other room and figured out exactly how old Keats was on the day he died. Then, I figured out exactly how old I was on that day, reading the biography. They were the same exact amount of days.

I had no idea what to do with this information, but it seemed incredibly significant. Eventually I decided that it meant I should quit whining about the sad drama of my life because here was this really great writer who hadn’t even been given a day more than I had right now. Come to think of it, that’s often the message that I get when I rub up against what the Irish mystics called “the thin places of the world”: quit whining.

What does this have to do with my Uncle Michael? Three years later, I was walking through an ordinary day when I suddenly realized that this was the day my Uncle Michael had died, depending on who in my family you talk to, of lung cancer or a heroin overdose. He had been twenty-nine years old, and, now, so was I. This time, I didn’t even get the calculator. I absolutely knew it.

Uncle Michael’s conviction that Apollo 11 didn’t actually land on the moon is still one of the saddest things I know about anyone. It was so much more than the fear of being a sucker. What has to happen to make a guy who loved motorcycles and cars so much not love rocket ships that go to the moon? What has to happen for any man not to love a Porsche? I’ve lived many days that he didn’t get to live, and, God, I hope he and John Keats are proud of me.