WTWTCH ... when you decide to finally sort your old letter drawer?

Yes. I opened ghost mail. And yes it's as weird as it sounds.

Holy shit. I’m sitting here in my office with Suki and have just opened mail from my beloved dead cousin, Timmy. I believe everyone in Duplin County called him “Cuz” where he held court in various dens of ill repute. But he was my cousin by blood.

Timmy was larger than life. At 490 pounds, if Timmy were Clark Kent, it’d take two phone booths for him to change into Superman.

He and his friends would go to Taco Bell and order “like sixty, seventy tacos. And it would blow their mind, man!” He thought it was funny. Because it was. Everybody loved Timmy. He was profane. Profound.

In fact, I made a short documentary called, what else, My Cousin Timmy which was my best effort (fresh out of film school) to portray his larger-than-life life. [watch free on Vimeo - 17 minutes]

Meet my Dopplegängster and cousin, Timmy.

Taco Bell antics aside, it turns out he was (quite literally) morbidly obese. He died five years after that doc from complications related to his “fat reduction surgery”. (I’m sure there’s a more medically accurate name for the procedure, but that’s what he called it).

And now he has reached from beyond the grave and sent me some ghost mail. As in, I found a letter from him postmarked 2004 (sent from prison, natch) that I had never opened. A ghost letter from my first cousin, who arrived on earth the same week as me, my Doppelgängerster.

You, dear reader, might ask “Why did you keep hold of an unopened letter for two decades?” Was it due to some oversight? Some misfiling, perhaps? Laziness? Overwhelm?

Am I ashamed I did not open it back in 2004? Of course, I am. Outraged. Embarrassed. Shocked. What can I say? My 33-year-old self was completely self-consumed. Maybe depressed. I thought, at the time, that I had enough problems — I didn’t need to add Timmy’s even bigger problems (a four felony count was outside my jurisdiction.)

And so today I slice open the sealed envelope. And unfold the ghost letter (see below).

His neat, cramped handwriting catches my breath. It takes me back to the apartment I was renting in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles (technically, an ex-girlfriend’s apartment I was subletting, only she didn’t realize she was my ex-girlfriend at the time). I was drowning in debt and staring down post-film-school defeat. Penniless, mooching off old emotions. It was all I could do to keep the power on.

It’s not that I didn’t want to open the letter back then. It was just one of those things that when it dropped through the slot on the door next to the bills and rejection letters, it was all just a little too much for me to bear.

I probably felt the letter contained an urgent request for something I could not do — to save Timmy, somehow, to offer him hope, to give him a chance at a better world. Hell, maybe even to break him out of the clink.

What Timmy didn’t understand (what I didn’t understand until right now) was that *I* was also in prison. A prison of unfulfilled dreams and squandered promise. Of potential that had grown dusty and delinquent at the ripe old age of 33.

At least Timmy got 3 square meals and an allowance. I recall him boasting to me once that he got paid “Fitty doll-ers per hour!” for his job inside the prison. When I gasped with envy—that was two grand a week, two grand that I desperately needed to keep my ex-girlfriend and the power company happy. When I exclaimed that was a proper fortune, he quickly corrected himself—“Shee-it. I meant fitty doll-ers a month!” But he said it with the same enthusiasm that made the two sums seem equivalently awesome. He said he made extra money making tacos by turning his toilet into a grill, which I still don’t quite understand.

The ghost letter from Cousin Timmy.

As you can see from the letter, I was wrong. He wasn’t writing me to add to my problems. He was writing to be the solution to my problems. Like some sort of big house agent, making deals for me to direct music videos with some of the talent he had hooked up with on the inside. He was hustling sure. Not for himself, but for me.

Damn.

If Timmy had survived, I’m sure he’d have been a reality TV star. A YouTube star. Maybe even given Tiger King a run for its money. Timmy had so much love and heart, despite all his felonies, his robust figure, his lips that had been bitten off and sewn back on (I recommend watching the doc). Nothing stopped him, not even the morbid weight he wore so lightly.

And he was determined to turn his life around. As he said in the doc, “Livin’ the way I am now, I might not even live to see forty.” Which was devastatingly true.

In order to get the weight-reduction surgery, he had to demonstrate to the doctors he was all-in by losing a hundred pounds the old-fashioned way. They were worried that at 500 pounds, the stress of surgery on his organs was too great. This was decades before Ozempic and the promise of massive weight loss without invasive surgery.

So he figured out how to drop a hundred pounds and got the surgery.

From what I heard, Timmy was stable for a few days post-surgery, probably getting around to all his usual nonsense. And then one night he stumbled into the too-small bathroom of his too-small house, opened up his mouth and said “oh shit” one last time. The surgeon had somehow knicked something vital in their rush to staple his stomach and the bleeding never stopped. He collapsed into a coma and passed away a few days later.

At his funeral, I played his video. Everyone got a kick out of it. Laughing and enjoying it, which I figured would have made Timmy proud.

I wasn’t laughing, though. I felt I’d failed Timmy in some way, particularly when he was working so hard to turn everything around. I on the other hand didn’t know whether to mock him or celebrate him, embrace him or avoid him. I think ultimately I felt like a coward when I watched them lower his XL coffin into the ground. But Timmy didn’t care what people thought of him — he was always comfortable in his own skin. Which is a beautiful way of being that I’m still trying to learn.

Oh man that letter tho.

It’s basically a pitch for me to direct some rap videos for some of his fellow inmates who were going places. He said that it’d “be a good opportunity for you to finally get in some ‘real’ money.” Which, as he somehow knew, I sorely needed.

The hardest part for me to read is the “P.S. Really Consider this” with smiley face. Not only did I not consider it, I didn’t even open up the letter for 20 years. That’s a tough thing to admit.

But even as I go and beat myself up, it’s dawning on me as I read his Ghost Letter that Timmy believed in me in a way that I could never believe in myself. Until, well, now.

Whew. Need to wipe the tear from the eye on that one.

Thank you, Timmy. For that faith. For always looking at the angles. For trying to figure out how to make me a star. Even when you were behind bars, you still were dreaming of how to make everything better. Even if it killed you.

Turns out you’re the star, Timmy. And you always have been. Thank you for having my back all this time. From behind bars and from the great beyond.

I love you, cuz. I hope wherever you are, you’re still living very, very large.