When we first tried to build that greenhouse, the school made us pay for our own supplies, so we needed to generate cash. The cheerleaders had the car wash. The marching band had the bake sale. The swim team had rich parents. We needed to find our own thing. Besides being complete cock pockets, the only marketable skill any of us had was my ability to grill hamburgers like a boss. So that’s what we did. Every day at lunchtime, I got behind an old Weber grill and we slung burgers in the courtyard like Avon Barksdale slinging crack in the low-rises. It wasn’t long before business was booming. All the kids were fiending for our shit. We were selling out regularly and making some decent coin, at least for high school kids.
As the burger business grew and grew, one of the vice principals finally asked me if we had authorization. I didn’t lie, but I also didn’t answer her question: I told her we were raising money for the botany club. She let it slide for a while, but eventually, the school realized they were losing lunch money to our little operation, and they shut us down. That’s what happens when a scrappy upstart with a better product carves out a niche for itself in a market previously dominated by a natural monopoly. They snuff it out. All these lessons would help me immensely when I started getting into for-real business a decade later, but in the moment it made me hate everything school-related.
It wasn’t until the second half of high school that the military started to have some appeal for me. It began when two of my older brothers, Alan and Davis, were preparing to graduate from Marine Corps boot camp together and my parents and I went down to Camp Pendleton to visit them for Family Day.
Family Day is supposed to be an awesome day—a celebration. Except for the last day of school, there aren’t many days that a fifteen-year-old kid looks forward to like, “Holy shit, I can’t wait for that day to come.” But when you grow up with a hardcore veteran as a father, and your older brothers, who are like heroes to you, are graduating from boot camp together, it is a big fucking deal. And it is no joke.
I’ll never forget that Family Day. It was September 11, 2001.
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The culminating event of boot camp takes place two weeks prior to graduation. It’s a fifty-four-hour suckfest called “The Crucible” that, like the play of the same name by Arthur Miller, is excruciating to get through if you’re not a total masochist. But the Crucible is a mandatory experience if you want to call yourself a Marine. It’s a never-ending parade of marching, obstacle course running, team-building, and other sweet mental challenges designed to test your endurance and your sanity, all on very little sleep and even less food.
Davis got through the Crucible without much problem—just the normal bumps and bruises, aches and pains. Alan, on the other hand, struggled quite a bit, which was not like him. It took everything he had, plus a little more, to get through the two-and-a-half-day ordeal. The middle brother, Alan was the real badass of the Best family. He was the guy who never got tired, who encouraged everyone else to push through. If he had that much of a problem, something had to be wrong with him. It turns out, Alan had been sick for the last month of boot camp, coughing and spitting up blood. At one point he even had a 106-degree fever that caused him to lose his vision for three days. That’s fine if you’re one of these low-rent jihadis whose training involves shooting blind over walls and around corners, but in the U.S. military we like to see what we’re doing, so Alan went to the infirmary to get checked out. They did some chest X-rays and diagnosed him almost immediately with full-blown pneumonia.
Well, no wonder he struggled! His lungs were suffocating him from the inside out. Hillary Clinton couldn’t make it to her car with pneumonia; I can’t imagine anyone finishing the Crucible with a bad case of it, let alone the last week of boot camp and the physical and mental beatdown still left to endure. But try raising your hand and telling your drill sergeant you don’t feel well. See how that goes.
“Why don’t you keep your fucking skirt down, Marilyn, and if you need a good cry, rent the fucking Notebook! Get the fuck back in formation!”
A few days later, we got a call at home from the Navy doctor who had examined Alan. Pneumonia wasn’t the only thing he was suffering from. A biopsy conducted during the same exam found a “calcium deposit” in his neck that led to a much more serious diagnosis: Stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. For those of you who are not familiar with this wonderfully destructive disease, Hodgkin’s is a cancer of the lymphatic system that requires radiation and chemotherapy. It’s not one of the more fatal cancers, thank God, but it still sucks a mountain of ass. In some of the most superfun cases, it requires stem cell transplants over a twelve- to eighteen-month period to knock it out.
The night before heading down to Camp Pendleton for Family Day, my parents spent the entire evening talking about how they were going to break the news to Alan. I politely suggested a Male Stripper–gram because, I told them, that wasn’t the only calcium deposit Alan had been hiding, if you catch my drift. They did not appreciate my brotherly joking and kicked me out of the kitchen while they tried to navigate the situation. This was their child, on the doorstep of achieving a lifelong dream, and they were going to be the ones who might have to take it all away.
Then things got even more fucked. The next morning—Tuesday, September 11—I was abruptly woken up for school by my mother yelling, “Get in the bathroom, now!” She had an old-style TV hooked up next to her vanity where she did her morning makeup. The first plane had already hit the North Tower. While I stood there confused, in total disbelief like the rest of the country, the second plane struck the South Tower.
During the four-hour drive to Camp Pendleton in our shitty brown Buick sedan, we had the radio on in search of new details and updates as the situation unfolded in real time. News reports were full of endless speculation the entire trip down. All I could think to myself was “I hope the Marine base isn’t a target for these assholes.” My father, for his part, simply stared straight ahead out at the road, exhaling deeply every so often. Nothing more. He didn’t say a word, which meant nobody else said anything either. In those first twenty-four hours, nobody knew what the fuck was going on, but my dad knew: Two of his sons were about to go to war. Well, one of them, anyway.
When we arrived at Camp Pendleton, the place was a total shit show, and we quickly learned that graduation ceremonies were postponed indefinitely due to the base-wide lockdown. There were obviously more important things going on, which we totally understood. None of that changed the fact that we still had to tell Alan about his diagnosis. You can’t imagine how much it sucks to have to tell your brother and one of your heroes, on one of the most important days in American history, that he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma:
Me: Congrats on being a Marine, bro.
Alan: Thanks, Mat.
Me: By the way, you have cancer. You better semper fi-nd a doctor.