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| 1968 - 2015 |
It happened over two months ago but I only found out a day or two ago by taking a glance at various
Marshall had been in the midst of a particularly nasty Koyo. Like mine, he lost virtually everything but unlike me had had a large network of caring friends who loved him dearly. Problem was, he'd moved thousands of miles away from them all and was struggling almost alone.
I wasn't really among these hundreds of dear friends, I hadn't known him long enough to develop our acquaintance into that. But from the first day I met him, there was something in me that clicked on. A need. A need to love him.
I wrote about him, of course, as our paths crossed at a time when I had pretty much just started this blog. In the two and a half months he was around I actually wrote about him a lot. Perhaps more than I did about Ric.
I wasn't physically attracted to him. He wasn't really my type. But I really did want to be friends with him and had he stayed in Central Florida, I would have given it my all to establish that. Since we seemed to click well in regards to our interests and outlooks I think it would have happened. Who knows, he was good-looking and seemed a sensitive romantic...we may even had gone there.
There was just a magnetic quality about him. And if you looked in his eyes for more than a few seconds, he looked like a cold, wet puppy abandoned in the street. There was such longing there.
I've literally spent the last couple days reading through every post on his Facebook account (which his sister says will remain open) and reading back to my posts here about him. I can't put my finger on it. But let me tell you, when I looked over to his Facebook wall two days ago and saw condolence message after condolence message I literally felt gut-punched. It was just like that night back in '98 when I found out that Lisa had died a few years earlier.
Re-reading old posts reminded me that I knew Marshall was dealing with some demons even back then. He'd told me a little. Not much, he hardly knew me, but enough. He was very open and honest. He wore his heart on his sleeve and you knew he was the real deal. No wonder he had so many friends.
Marshall grew up in rural Mississippi, his father, though he didn't talk about him, must have been a real man's man, working a man's job, no doubt. Marshall mentioned his relationship with his family had been strained and he only connected a bit with his sister. He was brought up in a strict Jehovah's Witness home and his family remained wholeheartedly Bible-thumpin' though I think his siblings gravitated as they grew older into a less fanatical denomination. Like Southern Baptist. Just as whacked in my book.
When Marshall graduated high school he enrolled in community college and jumped on the opportunity to enter into the Disney College Program. So in the late 1980's he left Mississippi to live and work at his dream job, here at Walt Disney World.
He told me he loved working there and made a ton of life-long friends but I guess he found opportunities there limiting. After a few years in management there, he left for hopefully bigger opportunities in the call center industry. He talked to me of the fun times he had working night shifts at a company that provided directory assistance and later he transitioned over to AT&T as a team supervisor.
But something happened to that job, and, from what I gathered from my digging through his Facebook timeline, to a lot of other jobs in between. Whatever it was, it brought him to the point of taking a job as a temp customer care rep at Symantec in April of 2006 and was placed in the same office with me, a fellow former call center manager now back on the front lines.
Marshall wasn't long for our team though. Other shit was apparently going down at that same time. He talked about his dysfunctional housing situation...apparently he and another guy owned the house he lived it together and they were now in the midst of a break up. I'm not sure if this guy was his lover or just a friend. Marshall seemed closed down about discussion of only one subject, sex. I got the distinct impression it was a complicated thing with him.
Oh, don't get me wrong, as I posted back then, there was no question he was gay and he didn't seem at all closeted about it, but he didn't talk about ex's or dating or anything of that nature. Reading through his Facebook timeline, it might have been that though he didn't try to outwardly show it, he may have had more than a few conflicts of conscience over the contentious nature of his orientation and his apparently deep-rooted fundamentalist religious beliefs.
And let's not forget his self body image.
From pictures, and his stories of his past, Marshall was always a big boy. But in his early twenties he started to get REALLY big. Over 400 pounds big. His weight might have been one of the reasons for leaving Disney. I would expect even in a supervisory role, a Disney cast member needs to be relatively fit. Disney, even just one park, never mind the three others and all the other surrounding Disney resorts here in Florida, is physically demanding due to its size and, especially, its volume. Over fifty million visitors a year.
Sometime in the early 2000's though, Marshall opted to undergo gastric bypass surgery and by the time I'd met him in '06, he'd lost over half his body weight. So his shyness about the subject of sex could also have been due to either a lingering fat-hating self-identification or the undoubtedly persistent flaps of loose skin around his lower torso.
So the housing thing had him looking for new digs and I don't think he had a lot of capital or credit to find something comparable in the then booming Florida housing market. And I think his home's co-owner screwed him out of his due share as well. He somehow got it in his mind that he'd find a better life out west and made seemingly half-thought out plans to move to Arizona.
I think he was going to room with either a former Disney co-worker or perhaps school mate from Mississippi. I'm not sure. I know he didn't have a lock down on a job though. He was talking about possibly being an amateur poker tournament organizer.
Well he instant messaged me (Remember Yahoo Messenger back when cellphone texts were expensive?) and told me he got hired at TeleTech, a well-established call center provider. He was a scheduler (a person who uses statistics and call volume predictions to maintain optimal staffing) so he didn't have to be on the phones and was hoping to break into management again soon. I wished the best for him but I was a little jealous. I knew he was on his Koyaanisqatsi journey and unlike mine, it looked like he'd land back on his feet in a relatively short period of time.
Well he didn't get management there after all and when I got a Facebook friend request from him about a year after we lost touch he was positive about his prospects and seemed to be much happier.
But then, a few months later, something happened. I don't know if it was a sudden thing or things had gradually built up to a head. He lost his job at TeleTech and was kicked out of his apartment. I remember bitterness about the woman friend he was living with and I don't remember which came first, the loss of the job or the housing. And digging through his timeline on Facebook now reveals nothing since I think he deleted a lot of what was going on then.
Over the course of the next few months he posted about being in financial ruin, having a huge legal issue to deal with and having to move to Wisconsin to stay with his sister and her family who may or (likely) may not have really wanted a sinner homosexual living among them. I gather from reading back that they too were strapped financially but with kids to feed. You know it must have been freakin' stressful as all hell. Probably making my awkward stint living with my father while my mother was dying back in '03 look down right cozy.
Eventually after jumping from one low paying job to another, and then finding nothing as the Great Recession swarmed over us all, he was out on the streets. Or close to it. He took housing in a revivalist Pentecostal-style (speaking in tongues and shit) halfway house program in the ghettos of Milwaukee.
Not sure why he was out of his sister's house. Inability to contribute towards rent? Perceived laziness? Differing spiritual outlook on life? Oh, that was all the stuff Ric tossed me out on my ass back in '03 which led to my sucking up to my father during the height of my Koyo. But it well could have been the same for him. Although his sister and her family may have had the added animosity about his orientation to boot.
Though its not established or corroborated by any hard evidence in his Facebook account, I think another Koyo similarity was in play with Marshall, mirroring my experience...addiction.
I think he mentioned back when he was in Orlando about his choice to not drink. He didn't say it was for any reason like alcoholism and I kinda assumed it was because after bypass surgery you really lose the capacity to be able to drink much anymore. But I do recall that a big catalyst that led to his break up with his Florida home's co-owner, according to him, was addiction. His partner couldn't stop. I don't remember if he was talking about booze or drugs or if he revealed to me the abused substance or substances at all. But if his relationship with him was similar to relationships in my life, Marshall may well have been a co-participant and codependent in the addiction.
This would explain a lot of course. Unable to hold onto jobs, jumping from one thing to another on the spur of the moment, wandering around the country searching for a home and never finding it, all the while feeling like you're in a vast downward spiral about to be swallowed up whole into some great and dark abyss. Helpless. Helpless. With the only apparent relief; the faint glimmer of ephemeral solace found at the bottom of a bottle.
As his situation deteriorated he reached out to his Facebook friends for help by starting a social media fundraising campaign. He raised only about $150. With some friends giving but cautioning him to use it the right way. We know what that means.
In photos taken and posted to his timeline Marshall shared a few of himself. He was consistently and steadily re-gaining the weight. By the last picture of him on there, he was probably back in the mid-300's and his face was puffy and beat-up looking. He looked like someone in his 60s, not in his mid 40s.
He'd gotten all "holier-than-though" as well. Probably as he was desperately searching for a better way out of his nightmare than whatever he was "using." He was frustrated by his illogical, inconsistent and comically fanatical halfway home staff and roommates. He mocked their aberration of the "true meaning of Christ" and their hypocritical ways. But he started to get preachy to his Facebook friends, quoting all manner of Biblical scripture and trying to convince his audience that he was in synchronicity with the true mind of God.
To me, its pretty much the same as the kooks he derided though, of course. But I know when you're as low as you can go, you start to grasp for whatever straws you can. And if you grew up thinking that God was your only salvation, then it's likely you'd follow in the footsteps of our poor Marshall.
His sister, who had maintained, seemingly, only an occasional Facebook relationship with him after he left (was thrown out of?) her house, announced a day after her revelation as many of his Facebook friends were perplexed by Marshall's sudden death, that "He had an enlarged heart."
His estranged brother had the gall to post that he felt saddened by the loss of his brother but let it firmly be known that he felt Marshall had made some wrong choices in his life and would never agree with them. (I would assume one of those "choices" was to be a sinning homosexual.)
I have to close this very long post now. I'm kinda thrown by how much Marshall's death has affected me. I've actually had a couple pillow-hugging bawling sessions over all this. It just sadly reinforces my unshakable belief that all of life is just hopelessly meaningless. We're born, we strive, we struggle and eventually, without fail, just die. It is the one thing that endures. Love, hate, peace, war, good and evil. It doesn't matter. Even the very definition of those words subtly change over the span of time. But death...death is forever locked in a meaning that never changes...in that it, like its counterpart life, ultimately has no meaning.