John Doe

Mary Chapin Carpenter has a song called "John Doe No. 24," which I thought about when I received notification that someone carrying my brother's wallet was found unconscious on the street and lay in a medically induced coma in the hospital. John Doe #12. They needed someone to identify him, and I agreed. He wasn't easily recognizable, but there my brother was, a ventilator handling the bulk of his breathing.
Not too long before this incident I considered how my sons, separated by three years, fight like this brother and I did growing up. The difference being that eight years separates us. He always wanted to watch "The Flintstones," while I preferred "Ultraman." I loved "Ultraman."
This brother never appeared to give much thought to the fact that he was wrestling someone eight years his junior when he would kneel on my arms and rock his knees back and forth across my biceps. Perhaps because an intellectual gap didn't exist  And by the time I hit 7th grade, the physical playing field at least had leveled. I think I was in 8th grade when he grabbed our mother and I had to physically intervene. Sometimes when he knelt on top of me he would encourage me to break free by exhorting me to treat him like a "nigger." Of course his rationale for remaining on unemployment and then receiving public assistance was that the niggers did it, so why shouldn't he? This coming from the same person who wouldn't try an antidepressant because he didn't want to be a drug addict. Sometimes he would pull up my shirt and swing his long red hair on my stomach because it tickled, and not in a good way. I once had a schnauzer given to me by my mother's co-worker. I won Gretel over by feeding her peanuts or something like that, and she would attempt to bite my brother at my command. I still derive satisfaction from the memory of him leaping onto the couch in an effort to get away from her. Eventually we had to surrender Gretel because she bit a neighborhood kid.      
My brother used to consider it cool to come into our shared bedroom and fall over drunk. When he was about 14, my mother had to roust me from bed one night to go pick him up at the police station in a nearby township because the police had corralled him wandering down the street drunk. I lay in my bed after we returned home listening to her crying and slapping him. They never have relinquished the creepy dynamic between them. She as an octogenarian and he as a middle-aged man have behaved very much like during his teen years. And they attempted to draw other family members into their destructive orbit. But I don't suppose they even knew they were doing it.
 He didn't seem to experience remorse when he drove into the detective's parked car and then hightailed it home and hid in our basement and I had to run interference. Or when he got arrested for driving the wrong way on the interstate, or smashing into the guardrail. Or when the music would rattle the walls of my adjoining bedroom at all hours when we grew a little older and he would sell drugs to a parade of unfamiliar comers and goers.
I don't think he ever possessed the intellectual capability to process that he had done something wrong. He always has appeared not to have the capacity for guilt. I used to marvel at his resilience in that respect. Not only was he born with a predisposition to alcoholism, he seemingly exited the womb predisposed to never feel guilt. Self-interest has driven his nearly every act.
He and a friend once destroyed the neighbor kid's metal fire engine, the kind you would sit in and pedal, and I lied to cover it up. Just like I lied when the detective whose car he hit came to our door. He spent time in jail for stealing, but that didn't stop him from stealing again. He let my psychologically compromised mother wander off in the rain and in fact would allow her to shelter and feed him for as long as she would. And he stole from her simultaneously. He, brimming with pride, once kicked the side of our car in with his new steel-toe construction boots.
All the while he considered himself smarter than everyone. And all the while our mother served as his apologist. Our father poked him with a fork at dinner so that he would remove his elbows from the table. He had dyslexia. He wasn't as good at sports as our other two brothers and me. He was used to getting attention and then I came along. She never ran out of excuses. She blamed others for his transgressions.  And were she to discover the current state of affairs, she likely would blame the rest of us for that, since we separated them by having her enter assisted living. Nothing lies beyond their potential.  
He endangered my life more than once. On a river in a small boat that he made highly unstable because he couldn't remain upright. On a motorcycle when I was in grade school, going so fast that the wind blurred my vision. When we used to go bowling on Sunday mornings and he would get the Dodge Duster up to its maximum potential before shifting into neutral and coasting.
So his recent descent created a quandary. Sad? Yes. As selfish as he has been, did he deserve to have someone identify him and ask questions about his predicament? I did it, so obviously I thought so. Should anyone be in such circumstances alone and anonymous? And he was John Doe No. 12. There are 11 others there. Someone's son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother? I think my father died under similar circumstances, alone in a hospital, his liver shot.  I can't help but wonder to what extent the hospital should expend resources on my brother now. A lot of cost and effort are involved for someone who is not a productive member of society, a drainer of resources rather that a contributor. 
My brother has since awakened, though they describe him as incoherent. I harbor no illusion that he will have had a revelation and change his ways if he recovers. I also harbor no illusion that he he would do for me what I have done for him, modest as that may be.

As He Lay Dying-4

Time's passage allows for grief to recede slightly and the preceding years' shared experiences to come more sharply into focus. Life proceeds, and for those of us with children, it proceeds apace.
And then, in the midst of the hectic nature of life, events long past creep through, carrying along on their currents a mixture of amusement and sadness and lives lived and offering, however fleeting, moments of reflection.
For Dave and me, I've often used fishing as a prism through which to view our relationship. That's not unique; I think other people have covered that ground, that of the bond between those who fish. We fished consistently, sometimes quietly, other times boisterously, sometimes conversing, sometimes not and sometimes drinking. Partying might be an equally valid window through which to view our shared experiences. We fished, we drank, we smoked, and sometimes we did all of them at once.
But in a relationship covering roughly 30 years, we did other stuff too. Like the time we went to J.C. Penney so Dave could get suitable clothes for a job interview? The blind leading the sartorially blind. Yes, that looks quite respectable, I offered, as a 24-year-old whose taste in clothes was fashioned by a product of the Depression mother, she who allowed me to attend school sporting desert boots through which my toes poked. 
And the job to which those clothes, so carefully selected, led him somehow involved us going to an Indian, as in Native American, ceremony. To break it down, he somehow hitched on to a sort-of headhunter firm (based on his management degree), and the guy to whom he was assigned fancied Indians. So off we trekked, into the wilds of New Jersey, to experience the rain dance and the hawkers of turquoise jewelry. During the course of that trip, we discussed the responsibilities required of such a job. The guy who liked Indians also happened to manipulate people for whom he found jobs by appealing to their parents if they, the job seekers, balked: "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jones, your son's not there? Can you please tell him that the people who offered the $80,000-a-year job would like an answer?" I, maybe  idealistically, objected to the tactics, while Dave objected to my objection. But, eventually, he came around and saw things my way.

Somewhere around that time we took a New Year's Eve trip to the Poconos to visit our friends who had rented a cabin for the occasion. The most memorable part of the night was when Kevin, who I didn't know and perhaps have seen once since, ran from one room to the next, jumped, arms spread, and farted in his unsuspecting girlfriend's face as she sat on the couch. To which she replied, memorably: "Kevin, that was most vile." Dave pointed him out to me on subsequent occasions through reference to the flying fart.
On the way home from that trip, on New Year's Day, we detoured to a small airport and subsequently found ourselves in a small plane circling the mountains. When I asked the pilot about his qualifications, as we were coming in for a landing, he said he received his training right there at that little airfield. And later, Dave said to me that I expected him to say he received his training in Vietnam. He was correct, I expected his credentials to extend beyond the community airfield. But as we floated above those mountains, we transcended for a while the trials that awaited us upon our return. We lived through it, as we did so many other circumstances...