Brother, Brother

I returned to NYC - full-time - late in the summer of 2004.

I drove from Boulder, across two-thirds of the country, and planned to arrive at my loft the same time as the moving van - to off-load.

Since the movers would take five or so days, I planned to stop and visit friends and family along the way, before I turned up outside my hometown apartment door.

It turned into a pleasant mini-odyssey. I stopped to see a fabulous (and I do mean fabulous) long-time friend in Chicago, a former-favorite assistant in Pittsburgh (married, with a baby, a lovely husband and home, all of which she deserves), and I hoped to stop in to see my brother and his family on the Jersey Shore, before I swung north and home.

All went swimmingly, until I got to my brother's.

A bit of backstory. My brother and I are less than a year apart. I was born in January, and he in December of the same year. Eleven months apart, true "Irish twins."

After I completed kindergarten - the school system determined I was of the correct age to attend but my brother was not - my mother prepared me for the first grade. Apparently, the school system's age designations shifted, and my brother was put into the first grade with me. In essence, he "skipped" kindergarten. Nevertheless, we entered and remained in the same grade for the entirety of our elementary and high school education(s).

Although we are not twins, I suppose we developed some degree of non-verbal communication. Our childhood was not an easy one. I make light of it now, and say that we were raised like wolves. We fought a lot, but I know I always had a deep care and concern for my brother, even if I rarely articulated it.

When he was very young, he had repeated bouts of strep throat, and as a consequence, as many bouts with big, penicillin-filled needles. He was just a little boy, with a tiny, bony butt, and shoulder blades that stuck out like a newborn bird's.

Bacterially, I possessed the hardier constitution.

But he grew stronger and bigger than I - and he pummeled the blazes out of me, often for the slightest insult - in my opinion anyway.

It wasn't easy. Our father was of a capricious, rage-filled nature. He was gone often, but when he was home, I know that a knot of tension and worry kept me on guard, on watch. Although we misbehaved as any kids did, sometimes - and without warning or apparent reason - our father would explode, and knock the crap out of us. My brother got worse than I did. And I hated it - I was the wide-eyed tearful witness, helpless to defend him, or myself. And terrified. There are episodes that I remember, that I will not forget.

Still, as an adult, my brother and I grew close, I think as adult siblings do.

Over the years, I have found it easy and enjoyabe to sing his praises. We were both voracious readers, but I made a career out of it. He was more musically talented than I, and a natural athlete. I was more obviously competitive than he - in my pursuits (academics, socially, high school musicals up to my senior year, college admissions, a college scholarship), and I know I probably irritated him when I cheered him at his high school track meets, questioning the results, wanting to understand the nature of his races.

Still, we were both hell-bent on escaping our "crazy family," as he called our parents. I went off to university, but not before he one-upped me, and took off without notice. He was only seventeen years old, but had packed his room clean - and was gone.

I recall he told me, some weeks later, that I couldn't leave him there "with those crazy people." That's a line he was able to use on me again, decades later, when my mother called us together for a Christmas celebration. I didn't want to go, but my brother persuaded me. Mom had moved to New Mexico by then, and my brother and I spent a couple of days hammering up the steep hiking trails of Sandia Mountain.

By then, my brother was well on his own road to success. After a years-long stint in the Arizona (call it his college-equivalent), he returned to New Jersey, and pursued two life tracks. One was his own residential carpentry-building company. The other was bicycle racing. He succeeded at both, on the local level.

He also went through a series of long-term monogamous girlfriend relationships. Some of these were fraught with "sturm und drang." One early debacle resulted in resentment between us, and I resolved thereafter to never get involved. The serial romances continued, through a first, disastrous marriage and divorce, through a few more women - before his present marriage. He fathered a daughter at the age of forty. I doubt that the marriage has been easy (given his behavior pattern), but I do not doubt that he adores, is crazy about, and loves his daughter.

For some wacky reason, he ceased communication with my mother. He gave me flimsy, unsubstantiated reasons, once - but hey, that's his issue, not mine. And yet I know that the limited interaction with her granddaughter causes my mother anguish - which seems so unnecessary.

Despite these challenges, I still always thought and spoke so highly of my brother. His business has grown exponentially - in accordance, in part, to the absurd growth in real estate value anywhere within one hundred miles of New York City, and especially anywhere close to the Atlantic ocean and adjoining waterways.

At the age of forty-seven, he is a paragon of athletic fitness, and looks some fifteen years younger. In many ways, he resembles a certain uber-famous movie star, who has starred in a series of wildly successful films about casino and art thefts (no, it ain't Clooney, guess again).

Somewhere along the way, his values seem to have grown more conservative. Money can do that. September 11 did that to some.

I have remain steadfastly skeptical. I lean left of center, but I understand and value the worth of a dollar. Perhaps NYC Democrats are like that - in any event, we seem to care about our city first, and we understand that we are different from the rest of the country, liberal or reactionary-right. I prefer to question authority, to use my own mind, to query, to take little at face-value. I am not a fan of the present U.S. government leadership - and the truth will out, as it does. I suppose I am more Aristotelian in my thinking - I want my nation's leader to be super-smart, someone whose mind and character I can respect. Like so many others I have had to wait - and it will be a full eight years gone.

Because we were raised overseas - in Okinawa during the Viet Nam war, and in Germany, close to the Czechoslovakian border during the Cold War - I have an innate respect for the U.S. Armed Forces - the people on the ground, doing the hard, terrible work. If I have developed an intolerance for anything, it is that, in war time, the people who suffer most are women, the elderly, and children. I am no fan of war. I don't care if academics can argue about it's historical necessity. Bah.

Why this tangent?

Because, when I returned from the West, when I visited my brother and his family, he instigated a conversation over dinner that turned ugly. The presidential election was looming. He asked me what I thought of John Kerry, and I responded that I was concerned the American public would not embrace his wife - she seemed too European-aristocratic for mainstream voters.

I do not know why or how this angered him, but he went berserk in an angry, neck-vein-throbbing tirade about how we had to support this president, how he loathed liberals, how we had to support our troops, etc. I admit, after I attempted to counter the assault with reasoned questions, that I tried to mollify him - to calm him down. A knot of tension had sprung forth in my stomach.

To this day, I do not believe his rage and anger had the slightest thing to do with politics.

And I know it had nothing to do with me.

I suspect that my brother resents that I am unencumbered by my personal family responsibilities (there is, ahem, a downside, but on balance, I do prefer my choices and my freedom). I suspect that he has, unwittingly or not, taken on aspects of the dreadful nature of...our father.

I stayed that night in my brother's house, after he mumbled downward into relative quiet (just like our father would do after a rage-attack). I shared a bedroom with my then four-year-old niece. I awoke in the middle of the night, to see the little girl thrashing and babbling in her sleep. Sleep disorders, hmmm, surprising?

My brother's wife remarked to me after he lost his cookies, "I have never seen him go off on anybody like that - except on me."

Holy shit. That could not be good.

I know from my own personal work, that if I place myself in a situation that is not safe for me (emotionally or otherwise), then I will remove myself from it.

And that's exactly what I did. For all my brother's smiles and niceties the following day, I had placed a call to my one-and-only high school girlfriend, who lived in Princeton with her two boys, a girl, and her adoring husband. She bade me come stay with them directly - and we had a glorious time, catching up, hanging with her (first and foremost) and her kids.

I made it to the city and my apartment on time, my heart slightly heavy, but ready to press forward into my future.

I have had minimal to no contact with my brother, my sister-in-law, or my niece.

My mother told me just last week that she learned that my sister-in-law is moving out, with my niece. My brother and she are separating.

I am not surprised.   

Comments

[Gregorious Battalius]

The amazing thing is, I remember right when this ill-fated sibling visit happened and you said it off the top of your head nearly EXACTLY as you've written it above. As chilling now as it was then.

[Jackie F.]

Oh, how sad! Yet totally understandable.

Sounds like you've done well for yourself regardless.