Halcyon Days

Since my mother's stroke, I've had occasion to correspond more frequently with my siblings. In doing so, I have sometimes taken advantage of the opportunity to enlighten them about some of the issues with which I had to contend growing up. Since my sister and two older brothers were largely out of the house when I was in grade school, my mother, other brother and I shared the house, or at least the first floor.
A succession of tenants occupied the upper floor, which my mother had converted into an apartment, but not with a separate entrance, in her bid to shoulder the financial burdens associated with retaining the house. There was my late cousin, Joanie, and her daughter Beth, who more or less ended up being a little sister to me. We used to make popcorn and watch "The Six Million Dollar Man" on Sunday nights. Joanie aspired to be a writer, but nothing much came of it. She smoked and died of cancer.
Then a guy named Steve lived there. He and I played some basketball in the backyard. Then a woman, Judy, occupied the apartment. I used to feed her nasty Siamese cat when she went on vacation. Somewhere in there, my brothers also occupied that apartment. I used to go up there and drink with them when I was in seventh and eighth grade. My oldest brother and I damaged the ceiling of the front room on the first floor by jumping off the back of the couch in the room above in between shots of gin. I think I was 13.
Since my two older brothers were intermittent residents, segregated in the apartment when they were there, and my sister was gone, they didn't witness much of the interaction between my mother, other brother and I. I'll call this brother David, since that's his name. He and my mother often worked as a team, conspiratorially, with me as the object of their collusion. When I was gone on a soccer trip, they rearranged my room to their specifications and were dumbfounded when I objected. When I was a lad of about 10, I once had the audacity to interrupt our dinner to confer with a friend on our front porch; they eventually came out together to hustle me back in, she brandishing a wooden spoon with which to whack me. Another time, when I was in the bathroom, he wanted to get in. It must not have dawned on them that I was using the restroom, for in he burst, with her blessing. They respected no boundaries and didn't consider my privacy.
As a 12-year-old, I intervened when he, 20 and under the influence of barbiturates and alcohol, grabbed my mother by the wrists and threatened physical harm in the entryway to our house. My naivete hadn't yet capitulated, and chivalry hadn't relinquished its hold and surrendered to cynicism, so the notion that my mother was more fallible than I ever suspected and that the two of them fed off one another's dysfunction had yet to take root. Another night, he drove up and down our street in his girlfriend's orange Camaro beeping the horn in an apparent effort to entice one of our other brothers out of the house for a fight. Somewhere around my 18th year, an angry detective who lived in the neighborhood banged on our front door, after my brother had slinked into the house and sought refuge in the basement with my dog. That Golden retriever wasn't going to bite no cop. The detective started to push his way in, but I stood my ground, and he came to his senses. I should have let him in, for my drunken brother had sideswiped his parked car.
We shared a bedroom for a while, and I recall his late-night entries. When I once told him he had fallen down the night before, he later recounted this to his friend and thought it was hysterical. He told me on another occasion that he had a dream about hitting a guardrail, and when he went to the spot the next day, there stood a guardrail with a dent. I've lost track of the arrests, but the earliest I remember was when I was five or six years old and my mother dragged me out of bed to retrieve him from the police station in a neighboring township. They had picked him up walking drunk down the road. When we got home, she threw him in the shower and in bed, and her screaming prompted me to get out of bed once again and witness her slapping him. The state police once arrested him in the middle of the night for driving the wrong way on the interstate.
Yet none of this seems to have dented his psyche. He hasn't worked in years and questions why he should work when there are other people out there who live off welfare. He's above accepting wages along the lines of those earned by Wal-Mart workers. He won't take antidepressants because he doesn't want to be a drug addict, though he smoked and sold a lot of weed from the room next to mine. On one of my birthdays, I drove him to the motor-vehicle office and sat there with him for about eight hours as he attempted to straighten out one mess or another. I don't recall a thank-you. When I was in grade school, he used to kneel on my arms while I was on my back and drag his hair across my stomach to tickle me. In an effort to motivate me to extricate myself from that position, he used to say, "Pretend I'm a nigger." Once when we passed someone collecting for the NAACP, he told me that the person wanted us to "give money to niggers."
Other times he took me fishing. We bowled together for a while. And the highly unusual occasion when my father was minding me and wouldn't let me out of the house when my brother tried to dupe him into allowing me to attend a nonexistent parade. The old man let me go, but surely he didn't fall for it. A rare display of humanity from both of them.
My mother told my brother many times that our father wasn't gone, that he lived on in my brother. I suppose she meant it, for she long ago seemed to have entered into a virtual conjugal relationship with him. She once sent me out of the room so she could discuss my Christmas present with him. I listened, and heard about the bike I was getting, and I grew angry at her for not having more discretion. The bike displeased me, since it fulfilled few of my requirements, though once again they portrayed me as the dimwit. They both have talked to me like that for as long as I can remember. I wonder why he showed me the dog stake in the back of her light-blue Chevy Nova hatchback. The twisting stake equaled the evidence that incriminated her in my pet's disappearance, when she had told me and apparently was willing to perpetuate the lie that he had run away. David has fancied himself a tough guy and on occasion has held forth with tales of his virility, although such a perspective was in absence when a fellow bar patron knocked him out one night.
My mother has a bottomless well of excuses for him. Just recently she chalked up his calls to her assisted-living facility to his loneliness, notwithstanding his alleged verbal abuse of the staff in the middle of the night. Growing up, she attributed his poor academic performance to dyslexia; he broke his arm when he was younger and then became confused about which arm to use, hence the dyslexia, according to her. Our father poked him with a fork if he had his elbow on the dinner table. His girlfriend aborted two fetuses, and he lamented that he could have had two children but didn't. Our cousin played with his pee-pee. The fallacy that his constitution rises to the level of "a good guy" when he abstains from drinking. Meanwhile, she has criticized people who don't work while simultaneously living with her jobless, middle-aged son.
Sympathy for someone with an affliction would be easier to summon if that person displayed the slightest humility or concern for others or an interest in listening to someone's opinion aside from his own. My mother years ago asked me to be the steward of David's inheritance upon her death, and I refused. With her not thinking clearly in the wake of her stroke, he now calls me for money. The unbridled gall stupefies me, but I suppose it shouldn't at this juncture. What will become of him when she dies remains unclear. A few shelters have evicted him, once for a racial epithet. His inheritance money should last him for a year or so. At one of my high-school soccer games, a prominent player on the other team was a mulatto. Another spectator later spoke to me about my brother, on the sidelines, calling this opposing player a "spic." When I confronted my brother about it, he said he didn't mean that the guy was a spic, just that he was playing like a spic. Oh.
My other siblings either are keeping their distance or ignoring or trying to come to terms with the state of affairs, the full perversity perhaps finally registering, but there is now no making order out of chaos.