My birthday is tomorrow. I’m turning sixty-one, the Year of the Nap. A couple of gift cards for coffee and clothes, tip the pizza man, and that will be that.
Not that I’m ungrateful. I live in a big house in Kansas City, Missouri, with two teenagers and my ex-wife. Yes, you read that right. We’ve been divorced a dozen years — five more than we were married — and we know now what we didn’t know then: that family is what matters, that love is relative, that life is full of unexpected turns.
My ex and my kids are all I have, if I ignore my younger brother — which I can’t, because he’s outside tooting his car horn and blaring what sounds like a Robert Johnson blues song.
He told me he was going to buy a camper van, and here it is, a rusty tan Explorer, but the E and the X have fallen off the logo, leaving just “PLORER.” He says the roof leaks, which explains why it smells like a wet ashtray inside. My brother wears his usual getup: XXXL tie-dye T-shirt, King Biscuit Blues Festival ball cap, saggy stonewashed jeans. October in Missouri is not cold enough for his favorite full-length leather duster.
He’s only just arrived, and my head is already pounding.
My brother lives in the California desert but summers in a trailer in Tennessee, which is like swapping hell for the equator. He’s currently on the last leg of a circuitous cross-country run. Picture Dante’s Virgil visiting all nine circles of the Inferno in a camper van. At the end he’ll be back in the desert again, where the sidewalk doubles as a frying pan, but for now he’s here to help celebrate my birthday.
“Not bad, huh?” he asks, unlocking the van’s side doors.
He’s wanted a camper van ever since our dad died three years ago. Dad left us both some dough, and my brother didn’t waste any time spending his. He bought a modest house with an elaborate surveillance system (it may or may not have once been a meth lab) and now this van, which he got from an old hippie couple for five grand. He put another nine hundred dollars into the engine but ignored the mechanic’s advice about the transmission.
“Screw that dude,” says my brother, who’s no more of a mechanic than I am.
Our father, a Baptist preacher, didn’t raise us to have a lot of common sense. After our mother left him, his congregation asked him to step down, and he was just a man with two sons, no wife, and no church. My brother and I became his cult of two, watching sitcom after sitcom while he tried to figure out what to do.
My brother starts toweling off a pair of iguanas with a dirty rag. “This one’s Gilligan, and this one’s Mary Ann,” he says, letting the lizards cling to his belly as he lights his second Camel in five minutes. “And this,” he says, draping a seven-foot ball python around his neck, “is Lilly.”
He refers to them as his “family,” not unlike how Charles Manson did his followers.
While my brother leans into the van to grab a plastic bag of pet supplies — two heads of lettuce and a box of dead mice — I pick up his dirty terrarium to bring inside.
Our father disciplined us harshly as kids. He told us it hurt him more than it hurt us, but I don’t think anyone believed that. We all just passed the pain down: father beats older son, older son beats younger brother, younger brother brutalizes family dog, brutalized dog disappears.
Dad screamed at us for that, too.
My brother’s all about peace and reptiles these days. He delicately wraps tiny harnesses around his iguanas’ legs so they won’t escape.
I escaped home after graduation, got a job, and never looked back. My brother was too traumatized to get away, and our father took advantage of that, supporting (or enabling) him into his early thirties so that he, our dad, wouldn’t be alone.
Having suffered the self-inflicted wound of my divorce, I can sympathize with my father’s loneliness. And I apologized long ago to my brother for treating him the way I did: beating and belittling him and condescending to him. But dang if I don’t still feel bad every time I see him.
He carries a cane now. That’s new. Its handle is a silver skull in a top hat, like some souvenir from the Church of Satan gift shop. “I just use it for stairs,” my brother says, grunting up the six steps to my front door. Carrying three hundred pounds on arthritic knees and a bad back, he’s fifty-eight going on ninety. In fact, our elderly dad was in better shape, until his prostate gave out.
My precociously geriatric brother coughs, lights another cigarette, and takes a break on a porch chair, resting the devil’s walking stick beside him.
“Got a good deal on a dozen cartons of Camels,” he says, breathing hard, “but I’m almost out of meds.” (...)
Even as a grown man, my brother struggled under our father’s disapproval. Meanwhile Dad bragged to his friends about my career as a television-news reporter. He had no clue I was also a drug addict and a drunk.
I confessed all this a dozen years ago — not to my father and brother but to Jesus. The Gospel seed my father planted in us as children had finally sprouted. Since then, I’ve slowly, tenuously reconstructed my life and family and moved on from my past. But now, with our father three years in the ground and my brother sitting in front of me, low on meds and holding Satan’s scepter of the damned, the past is not so past. My brother pours Dr Pepper from a two-liter bottle into a thirty-ounce plastic Subway cup he never goes anywhere without, like a fast-food-sponsored athlete in training for a diabetes competition. He sips, stubs out his smoke, and pulls out his marijuana pipe, the stem of which is a Confederate flag, as if he bought it in a Klan head shop. Twice he has called me after getting arrested for pot: “Dude,” he said each time, “you’re not going to believe what happened.”
He was right. I couldn’t believe he’d made the front page of the local Tennessee paper for irrigating two acres of marijuana that weren’t his. And I couldn’t believe he’d thought his California-issued medicinal-marijuana card would keep him from getting busted for possession in Texas. (For something that’s supposed to relieve his anxiety, weed sure seems to be the cause of a lot of it.)
In my brother’s mind it wasn’t his fault he’d let some dude borrow his hose to water a pot crop, any more than it was his fault he looked like a central-casting drug dealer: long ponytail, purple-lensed granny glasses, Fu Manchu mustache. It was the cops’ fault. The crooked, profiling cops.
But he’s not getting caught on this trip, he says. He’s packing his stash wrapped in tinfoil, sprayed with deer urine, and taped to the inside of his engine, as per a YouTube tutorial.
“Good luck sniffing that out,” he says, tapping the pipe’s bowl on the heel of his Teva sandal.
I don’t ask where he got the deer urine from.
Not that I’m ungrateful. I live in a big house in Kansas City, Missouri, with two teenagers and my ex-wife. Yes, you read that right. We’ve been divorced a dozen years — five more than we were married — and we know now what we didn’t know then: that family is what matters, that love is relative, that life is full of unexpected turns.
My ex and my kids are all I have, if I ignore my younger brother — which I can’t, because he’s outside tooting his car horn and blaring what sounds like a Robert Johnson blues song.
He told me he was going to buy a camper van, and here it is, a rusty tan Explorer, but the E and the X have fallen off the logo, leaving just “PLORER.” He says the roof leaks, which explains why it smells like a wet ashtray inside. My brother wears his usual getup: XXXL tie-dye T-shirt, King Biscuit Blues Festival ball cap, saggy stonewashed jeans. October in Missouri is not cold enough for his favorite full-length leather duster.He’s only just arrived, and my head is already pounding.
My brother lives in the California desert but summers in a trailer in Tennessee, which is like swapping hell for the equator. He’s currently on the last leg of a circuitous cross-country run. Picture Dante’s Virgil visiting all nine circles of the Inferno in a camper van. At the end he’ll be back in the desert again, where the sidewalk doubles as a frying pan, but for now he’s here to help celebrate my birthday.
“Not bad, huh?” he asks, unlocking the van’s side doors.
He’s wanted a camper van ever since our dad died three years ago. Dad left us both some dough, and my brother didn’t waste any time spending his. He bought a modest house with an elaborate surveillance system (it may or may not have once been a meth lab) and now this van, which he got from an old hippie couple for five grand. He put another nine hundred dollars into the engine but ignored the mechanic’s advice about the transmission.
“Screw that dude,” says my brother, who’s no more of a mechanic than I am.
Our father, a Baptist preacher, didn’t raise us to have a lot of common sense. After our mother left him, his congregation asked him to step down, and he was just a man with two sons, no wife, and no church. My brother and I became his cult of two, watching sitcom after sitcom while he tried to figure out what to do.
My brother starts toweling off a pair of iguanas with a dirty rag. “This one’s Gilligan, and this one’s Mary Ann,” he says, letting the lizards cling to his belly as he lights his second Camel in five minutes. “And this,” he says, draping a seven-foot ball python around his neck, “is Lilly.”
He refers to them as his “family,” not unlike how Charles Manson did his followers.
While my brother leans into the van to grab a plastic bag of pet supplies — two heads of lettuce and a box of dead mice — I pick up his dirty terrarium to bring inside.
Our father disciplined us harshly as kids. He told us it hurt him more than it hurt us, but I don’t think anyone believed that. We all just passed the pain down: father beats older son, older son beats younger brother, younger brother brutalizes family dog, brutalized dog disappears.
Dad screamed at us for that, too.
My brother’s all about peace and reptiles these days. He delicately wraps tiny harnesses around his iguanas’ legs so they won’t escape.
I escaped home after graduation, got a job, and never looked back. My brother was too traumatized to get away, and our father took advantage of that, supporting (or enabling) him into his early thirties so that he, our dad, wouldn’t be alone.
Having suffered the self-inflicted wound of my divorce, I can sympathize with my father’s loneliness. And I apologized long ago to my brother for treating him the way I did: beating and belittling him and condescending to him. But dang if I don’t still feel bad every time I see him.
He carries a cane now. That’s new. Its handle is a silver skull in a top hat, like some souvenir from the Church of Satan gift shop. “I just use it for stairs,” my brother says, grunting up the six steps to my front door. Carrying three hundred pounds on arthritic knees and a bad back, he’s fifty-eight going on ninety. In fact, our elderly dad was in better shape, until his prostate gave out.
My precociously geriatric brother coughs, lights another cigarette, and takes a break on a porch chair, resting the devil’s walking stick beside him.
“Got a good deal on a dozen cartons of Camels,” he says, breathing hard, “but I’m almost out of meds.” (...)
Even as a grown man, my brother struggled under our father’s disapproval. Meanwhile Dad bragged to his friends about my career as a television-news reporter. He had no clue I was also a drug addict and a drunk.
I confessed all this a dozen years ago — not to my father and brother but to Jesus. The Gospel seed my father planted in us as children had finally sprouted. Since then, I’ve slowly, tenuously reconstructed my life and family and moved on from my past. But now, with our father three years in the ground and my brother sitting in front of me, low on meds and holding Satan’s scepter of the damned, the past is not so past. My brother pours Dr Pepper from a two-liter bottle into a thirty-ounce plastic Subway cup he never goes anywhere without, like a fast-food-sponsored athlete in training for a diabetes competition. He sips, stubs out his smoke, and pulls out his marijuana pipe, the stem of which is a Confederate flag, as if he bought it in a Klan head shop. Twice he has called me after getting arrested for pot: “Dude,” he said each time, “you’re not going to believe what happened.”
He was right. I couldn’t believe he’d made the front page of the local Tennessee paper for irrigating two acres of marijuana that weren’t his. And I couldn’t believe he’d thought his California-issued medicinal-marijuana card would keep him from getting busted for possession in Texas. (For something that’s supposed to relieve his anxiety, weed sure seems to be the cause of a lot of it.)
In my brother’s mind it wasn’t his fault he’d let some dude borrow his hose to water a pot crop, any more than it was his fault he looked like a central-casting drug dealer: long ponytail, purple-lensed granny glasses, Fu Manchu mustache. It was the cops’ fault. The crooked, profiling cops.
But he’s not getting caught on this trip, he says. He’s packing his stash wrapped in tinfoil, sprayed with deer urine, and taped to the inside of his engine, as per a YouTube tutorial.
“Good luck sniffing that out,” he says, tapping the pipe’s bowl on the heel of his Teva sandal.
I don’t ask where he got the deer urine from.
by Corvin Thomas, The Sun | Read more:
Image: Brody Scotland
