by Mancow Muller

Mark Muller is the red-blooded type of American male we don’t see anymore. I blame the estrogen in the public water supply. My brother ain’t some big-talking, noaction sissy-boy. He’s the guy every male wants to be. Being a man used to mean something completely different.

“A man’s bond is his word, son,” my father would preach to us.We Muller brothers—Mark, John and I—paid attention to him. We could mess up, no problem…but if we lied? Dad’s belt would do vicious laps across our backsides.We don’t lie, but that doesn’t mean our storytelling abilities are held back by the truth. A handshake is as good as gold with us.We will not sell out a brother or a friend or a business partner. We underpromise and overdeliver. We have found that this simple behavior has become extremely valuable in a world now populated with liars.

Mark and I hunted for venison to feed my father while he lay dying. Cancer patients are told deer meat is healthy for them. I found great irony in having to score Dad a bag of weed when he was ill. “Smoke the marijuana, son, and next time you’ll do the cocaine. Barry Goldwater’s daughter thought she could fly and jumped off a building after smoking the grass!” He would lecture us Willy Lohman-style. Okay, we knew he had it all wrong, but we loved him anyway.

Brothers always have each other. After a copperhead snake bit my ankle in Raytown, Missouri, when I was ten, it was Mark who cut the bite with his buck knife, sucked the venom out and tied off my leg, saving my life. In Arizona eight years ago, when our hot air balloon crashed, Mark broke his own arm shielding me from the rocky cliff we’d slammed into—saving my life again.

Growing up in the heartland city of Kansas City, Mark frequently modeled for Hallmark’s greeting cards. This brought him wads of cash and all the women that go with being goodlooking and rich at 18. Mark is eight years older than me. My parents made a huge mistake when they put us together when we were younger. You see, our family showed championship Tennessee Walking Horses, so we traveled a lot. Mark and I often shared motel rooms. Good idea? No—horrible!

There was the cast member just out of her Minnie Mouse costume at Disney World who I saw deflowered in Florida, the Atlanta Waffle House waitress 20 years Mark’s senior and that cute television weathergirl in St. Louis. Watching your brother piledrive a woman and hearing him say his little brother right beside them was asleep—that was just creepy. Didn’t these women think I had to be dead or drugged to be able to stay asleep through their passionate screams of ecstasy?

Somehow, in 1976, at the Las Vegas Hilton, my dad talked his way backstage, where our family got to hang with the greatest entertainer the world has known: Elvis. It was America’s bicentennial, and the green room was transformed with red, white and blue. My dad was a kitchen cabinet salesman by trade, but he turned into talent agent Broadway Danny Rose when promoting my mediocre impersonations of Kermit the Frog, Nixon and Carol Channing to Mr. Presley. I was seven, and our sweating host rolled with laughter at my inane routine.
Elvis enjoyed my family. We amused him. We were straitlaced, Bible-loving Midwesterners. He showed us his pearl-handled pistol and did “ghetto handshakes” with my big brothers. While my mom and dad talked to the stage manager, Mark and John revealed to the King how obsessed they were with Las Vegas chorus girls.
Later, at 2:15 in the morning, four chorus girls arrived at our hotel room—a gift from the King. The quartet took turns with my big brothers while I “slept.” Elvis’s gift of those girls to Mark and John gave me a story that is first on my list to tell at every cocktail party. Less than a year later I cried when I found out that nice man named Elvis had died.

Maybe it was that childhood meeting with Elvis that so affected my brother Mark—or maybe it was his death—that encourages him to live so fearlessly and over-the-top. There’s his car-racing team, Thundercock Racing; his trips into the wilderness; and his speedboat, which may one day spell the end for him. But Mark will not go out with a whimper; he’s going down guns-a-blazing with a cigar clenched between his teeth!