Counting Down to 10,000 Days Sober — Day 9986

Brotherhood pt. 3

I’ve tried writing this post three times over the past couple of days, only to end up deleting a few thousand words each time and start over. Today is attempt #4.

When I was a kid, my brother was my hero. He was always bigger and stronger and smarter than I was. In private, we shared the chaos and fear of growing up with a violent, alcoholic dad and, in public, he smoothed the way for me with his public reputation as a straight-A student, a natural leader and an all-around “good kid.” All these things were true about him. He is still a stalwart, dependable guy with an unerring moral compass whose first thought in most situations is “How can I help?” You would want him as a friend. I was lucky (mostly) to have him as a brother.

As previously stated, I was a bit more of a mess. I was needy, emotional and physically small, and I was made to feel even smaller and even more powerless by my unpredictably rage-y father. I clung to my brother and insinuated myself in most of his social life because I didn’t have one of my own. His friends mostly liked me, but I’m sure I was also insufferable at times and while I know now it was completely normal for my brother, as he got older, to want to do things “just” with his friends, at the time it felt like abandonment and betrayal to me. I really had no one else. But of course, we did fight as kids too. Which is (or was) mostly normal, or at least seemed that way because we were surrounded by chaos and violence. We played hard physically, always: tackle football in the hallway, hand-breakingly hard ‘guts frisbee’ games played at extremely short range, you name it, there was a lot of “boy energy” in us both.

My brother is funny, very funny in his own low-key way, but in this one area of expertise I can say: I was funnier. Because I had to be. Because I needed to be. Out in the world, my brother had his physical size and prowess (and his academic chops) to help him navigate the world. All I had were my quick wits and quick mouth. It was (and still is) so deeply ingrained in me that it is almost subconscious: When I meet a stranger, I can (and must) immediately figure out what will or won’t make them laugh. I never feel comfortable with anyone new until I’ve made them laugh. Just the phrase “Made them laugh” is illuminating — Making someone laugh is a way to exercise some (tiny) level of control over them. It was the only control I could exercise over anyone. I also knew that when someone was laughing, they couldn’t also be screaming or hitting. …sure, that might come later, but an abused kid learns to live moment by moment.

I could make my brother’s friends laugh. I was comic relief, but I was also annoying. I know I was. I didn’t know when to ‘shut it off’ and this behavior followed me well into my 20s and with my own friends until I finally got on-stage in a real and regular way and had an outlet for my junkie-like need for laughs that didn’t have to involve my (or my brother’s) friends as the audience. …but I’m getting off on a tangent with this.

There is a Before, a During, and an After.

The BEFORE is before my dad got diagnosed with cancer and got sick. These years have already been covered enough, I guess, in previous posts. Just sort of an endless loop of uncertainty and weirdness, occasional violence and the ever-present threat of unexpected violence. It was a walking-on-eggshells childhood that my brother and I shared.

My brother and I were partners in survival during those first stages of our childhoods, but he also reveled in his status as “the oldest.” He invoked this status to explain why he always got to ride in the front seat (while I had to sit in the back,) pick what TV show we would watch, and which chair he would sit in (which always seemed to be whatever chair I was sitting in.) This is typical “older sibling” behavior that occurs in normal families too. Nothing unusual there.

Then came the DURING.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer roughly when I was in 6th grade (it might have been more in the middle of 5th grade. Details are fuzzy) and my brother was in 8th grade. At that moment in time I was very clearly still a child/kid, while my brother had already turned the puberty corner into adolescence, and was about to start High School. This is probably a natural point where siblings like us would start to grow apart, but I was still too attached to him. It is odd when I think back, because I wasn’t an unpopular kid in elementary school. As always, I was considered funny and I managed to have ‘at school’ friends at least as far as the most telling indicator: I never had to sit alone at lunchtime. But for reasons probably related to the chaos of our home, those school friends didn’t translate to the outside world or after school. This is why summer vacation was especially lonely for me in those later elementary school years when my brother DID have friends he wanted to go out and play with (without me) while I didn’t have anyone else.

So my dad got diagnosed with lung cancer. It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise for a heavy drinker and 2-pack a day smoker of Pall Malls, but it was a world-changer. Maybe parents in this situation keep kids better informed these days, but back then we really weren’t told much beyond “Dad has cancer and is very sick. Just pray for him and he’ll be OK,” which was a hell of loaded thing to tell me, because ever since I could remember, I had been praying to my Catholic God to please, please kill my dad …and now God was killing him so it had to be all. my. fault. because I had prayed for it.

The next two years are admittedly the blurriest of my memory. I know Middle School or, as it was called in our town “Junior High School” is pretty much the worst, most awkward and sh#tshow-y part of everyone’s childhood story. Mine was no exception, and dealing with a sick dad sure didn’t help. This is also when I seriously became a Gen-X style “latchkey kid.” My mom was still trying to work as a school teacher (remember: she had a genetic disability that was slowly killing her) and now she had to take care of my dad who was constantly “back in the hospital” for more radiation and chemo treatments or to treat the side effects of those treatments. I can’t put numbers to it, but in my cloudy memory, it happened a lot. I would walk home from school, let myself in, and then sit at the dining room table and do my home work. My mom would be at the hospital and my brother, now in High School, was spending as much time as possible there either for sports practices or after school activities… and who could blame him? I would sit alone in the house, “being good” and doing my homework, waiting for someone else to come home.

I have to admit that the times when my dad was in the hospital were the few times during my entire childhood that I felt relatively safe in the house. I could almost enjoy the peace and quiet because I knew he wouldn’t be blowing back into the house in a few minutes (or hours) drunk and angry. …and as a good Catholic boy, I felt guilty for feeling that too.

I slogged through 7th and 8th grade in a daze. I remember having my first crush on a girl in 7th grade, who also happened to be about 4–5 inches taller than me. I also remember my dad still being terrifying enough that in 7th grade, when I dared to choose a “creative” elective (string art) instead of an “academic” one, I broke into a sobbing fit when I had to explain/defend my choice to him. He ended up slapping me for crying and, I think, because he feared my “creative tendencies” were symptoms something else. They weren’t, (see mention of ‘crush on girl’) but he didn’t know that. I certainly wasn’t going to talk to him about such things or ask for advice about anything. ever.

Maybe it was a 70s thing or maybe it was just us, but back then I don’t think kids were taken to the hospital much to visit sick parents. I again apologize for how hazy my recollections from this period, but I know one thing for sure — all those weeks and eventually months my dad spent in the hospital, my brother and I were taken in to visit him 2 or 3 times at the most and that was only in the very beginning. He would be gone for weeks (maybe months, I’m not sure) and then return to the house shaky, diminished, and smelling strangely industrial. …and yes, he kept smoking and drinking. I have clear memories of him guzzling beers and puffing away on the back porch with a dark blue “point the radiation here” box drawn on his chest.

I wore my knees out praying every night. I’m not kidding, at bedtime I would kneel beside my bed start praying, only to wake up on the floor in the middle of the night. I was begging God for forgiveness because I had asked him to kill my dad. Begging for him to get better, which is mind-boggling now. Did I really want him to heal up and continue to beat the sh#t out of me? really? I was getting more and more isolated and undoubtedly weird. I remember I gained a lot of weight for the first time in my life. I felt fat, and filthy and as always behind my classmates. When I started 7th grade, I could pretty much still pass as a 5th grader, a fat one.

It only got worse in 8th grade. I had gotten so strange that 6th graders felt free to f#ck with me between classes. I managed to stay funny in the classroom, in a desperately needy kind of way, I’m sure, but every journey down the hallway was a minefield. I acted tough, but it didn’t work. I acted invisible, but that didn’t work either.

My brother and I grew a bit further apart during this time. He was in High School after all and making his way: starting on the football team, being voted Class President, making the honor roll, while his little brother was becoming a pariah in his class. How bad was it? The one friend I had known since kindergarten literally said to me, that September when 8th grade started “Don’t talk to me anymore. I have new friends now.” Yeah, when you’ve blocked out huge chunks of memory, some things remain fresh and vivid. That moment is one of them.

My dad died in October during my 8th grade year and my brother’s sophomore year of High School. How did I handle it? I pretty much lost my mind. I turned weirder I guess. I had no friends outside of school (and few left in school.) I even, for a brief period tried to be a bully myself, picking on the one or two kids in my class who were even more ostracized than I was. …and I was really, really bad at it. I knew it while it was happening and I was ashamed of myself. I still am. …but in my defense I was half out of my mind. I can only imagine all the meds a kid today would be on if they acted the way I was behaving in 8th grade in 1976.

My brother buried himself in High School life. I still tried to tag along with his friends at every opportunity, and enlisted my mom to force him to take me along with him a thousand times when I know (and knew) he didn’t want me along. I had no one else. I don’t think he realized that. He started to get resentful. He also knew only one way to register his annoyance with me — physical violence. He was (always) bigger than I was. Any physical confrontation between us was already decided before it started. He could and would casually pull me out of the chair I was sitting in by my legs, even if we weren’t arguing about something, just to remind me of my powerlessness and his dominance I guess, or to make up for some previous time I had annoyed the sh#t out of him. I responded with the only weapons I had; my quick wit and sharp tongue. I knew I would lose the fight, but if I could provoke him into taking that first swing, it felt like victory.

So, things got violent between my former best/only friend and myself. Looking back now, I see it all for what it was. HE was freaking out and losing his mind too. He was angry, scared and frustrated by it all — our dangerous childhoods, our dad’s sickness and death — just like I was. He responded the only way he knew how, the only way that we had been taught and the only way that worked for him: physically and with anger. Everything between he and I became a fight that turned into a battle that turned into a war. I still needed him desperately, maybe even in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way, but he was so angry, so reminiscent of my dad’s seething and unpredictable rage that I grew to fear/hate him the way I had feared and hated my dad. He hated me too. He told me so, countless times, under his breath just before or after a violent outburst that he would tell me was my fault, because I had provoked him. He hated me, but he never, ever feared me. Not physically. Maybe he feared what I might say, but that is hardly the same thing.

I don’t know how either of us got through that school year. I also don’t know how my mom got through that year. I don’t know quite how she felt, losing her husband and the father of her children, even if he beat those same kids. I don’t know how she survived my brother and my now constant fighting as we were all processing (or more accurately: failing to process) a death in the family.

I do remember dreading that summer after 8th grade, and with good reason. It didn’t take long. My brother and I were at each other’s throats immediately. By Day Three of summer vacation, he wasn’t even trying to dial down his temper. We were having an argument in the kitchen. As always, he was losing the verbal part of it, as I ran rhetorical circles around him, mocking him as I did it, and watching the rage rise in his face until he picked me up by the armpits and body slammed me backward into the corner of the kitchen counter. He held me up, off my feet, and slammed me into the corner again and again — harder each time. Since it was clear he wasn’t going to stop I actually reached into the cabinet and pulled out a can of vegetables, but instead of actually bringing it down on his skull, I just said “I could hit you with this can…” This warning did not make him stop, instead it made him slam me harder and harder into the corner until I heard and felt something pop in my back and I dropped the can. When he finally let me go — with one last very hard shove as a final reminder, I was sob/screaming. My mom entered the kitchen and, in one of the few times ever, really lost her shit. Again I marvel at how crystal-clear some memories are. She screamed at my brother “It’s only the third day of summer and you’ve made him cry every day. This is not going to continue!”

My brother stormed out of the kitchen yelling that I had “started it” and how unfair it was. I just remember crying, like I always did. I also remember my urine looking weird for days afterward and me being afraid to tell my mom. I figured out years later that I had been pissing blood because that “pop” I had felt in my back was a broken rib that likely injured my kidney. I’ve never told anyone about it. Until now.

Here’s another thing I remember from that same summer after 8th grade: My brother taught me how to finally ride a bicycle. No kidding.

For reasons toooo long to catalogue here, ( yes, most of them having to do with my childhood chaos,) I didn’t learn how to ride a bike when most kids do. This was another thing that made me slightly ‘weird’ and made it harder to have neighborhood friends because packs of little boys on bicycles don’t want to deal with that one friend who can’t keep up because he has to run behind them. It was just another of many instances where I was a “late bloomer” and I didn’t feel as up-to-speed as my peers and was somehow “falling behind” them. …like I always did.

And so my brother, my first/best friend who had morphed into something almost as scary and dangerous as my dad, took a few days out of his summer to help me finally, finally learn how to ride a bike. I wouldn’t and couldn’t have done it without him. I spent that summer’s lawn mowing money on a red 10 speed bike and was finally able to taste the pleasures of town-wide freedom that a kid can only experience on their bike.

The rest of the summer is a blur. I’m sure there were more fights. I’m sure there was a lot more crying. I’m sure there was a trip to Cape Cod to visit mom’s friend (the one with the drunken abusive husband who once drove us, drunk, across the state.) I know there was overwhelming dread about my approaching Freshman year at the “huge” High School (huge. ha. There were barely 800 students, total, in the the entire school.) But once again my brother came through, wrangling a day in late August when we could get into the High School and walk around together, just the two of us. It gave me a chance to find my homeroom and the cafeteria etc., and to familiarize myself with the zig-zag of the hallways, all without the chaos of 100s of other kids scrambling around. … and of course we both knew I would enter the school protected by, and riding on, his already-established reputation and popularity.

I didn’t quite get to the AFTER and, obviously there is more to write, but every Medium guru says any post much over 3000 words isn’t going to get read so… more next time.

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