The thing is if I do this tonite, then I can have the rest of the weekend off. Besides it gives me good practice for next week when I have to do this in order to go to my cousin's graduation party. I did blow off the family reunion, I should try to make it to this family event. I haven't Ike to my mom recently, so I do not know whether she is going or not, it is a phone call that I have been putting off because any more such calls just leave me depressed. At some point she will bring up the name of some deceased person and act like they are still alive, not knowing any better. Speaking of dead people, today would have been my brother's 49 th birthday. Perhaps today is a day when we peel back the layers on that relationship.
Okay, all kinds of a long hiatus there, and something I need to fix ( Corrections and retractions, circa P&M). I thought yesterday was the 18th, I was mistaken it is today, so today I would have been my brothers birthday (we will still dive into that hot mess soon enough), but since I last was on the page I went from riding the bus to Giant Eagle to catching a bus from Giant Eagle back into town ( and work ), banging out an 8 hour shift where I got my ordering done and I made my salads, walked to Kelly Os from work and had breakfast with Bobby, I felt a need to crush a breakfast burrito in homage to our soon to be Mexican overlords, then I came home and slept for like 6 hours, woke up a played a little MPQ and now I am back sitting on my park bench, albeit not as quiet as usual with the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix taking place a couple of hundred feet away. Now where were we, yes I was about to dissect my relationship with my brother. For those of you who have been here from the beginning, some of this may sound familiar, but as they taught us in radio, don't be afraid to repeat the hot points because the audience is always changing.
The thing about remembering being a kid is that your memory is often like that of a blackout drunk, nothing flows seamlessly in the beginning, instead it is patches of this that are meshed together, like some sort of AIDs quilt of the mind. Similarly that would be my first memories of my brother as well. I remember we shared a bedroom as little kids and rather than a door we would have this "childproof" gate in the doorframe. It would stretch across the frame and created this diamond like pattern when extended. Presumably it would be latched at night so my brother and I didn't get out of bed and go and fall down the steps. But like all good resourceful children, we managed to escape our pseudo prison, my brother could climb over the gate and I was small enough to fit through the diamond pattern, thus rendering such a device useless. So we would sneak out in the wee hours of the morning, and go downstairs, no we didn't fall down the stairs as far as I can recall, and go eat raw hot dogs out of the fridge. Hey, we were masters of escape, not of the culinary arts.
Enter lots of blank space, and my next memory I had was as us not being much older than that, but sitting on the stair case watching my father sit on top of my mother, choking her. When she stopped struggling he left, perhaps he thought he killed her, I don't know, but I just know that he left and she was there motionless. So I grew up with a basic understanding of the capabilities of my own gene pool. My brother and I went into our kitchen, that was where the phone was (who remembers days where cell phones didn't exist? ) and we called someone for help. I don't know if we called 911, but it feels like we might have called Chet, who was a friend of the family at the time. As it turned out my mother had passed out due to lack of oxygen, she would and did recover from my father's assault. Those were the only two lasting memories from our first house, the next I remember my parents were divorced, my dad remarried ( a process which he became quite adept at ) and I was living with my mom in my grandparents basement. Not that living in the basement was as bad as it sounds, their basement actually served as their house while they were building it, so it had a kitchen and bathroom and all of the necessary amenities of a normal house, just underground. Plus with my grandparents right upstairs, as well as my youngest aunt and uncle (Amy was 6 years older than me, Will was my brothers age) so it wasn't like I was a maladjusted kid at that point, lacking of social skills because I had no one I could relate too.
Meanwhile my dad would remarry Cathy, who was an old school type mom, I could joke that she was a survivalist before it was hip to be a survivalist. She did lots of things like take us (I say us, because as well as my brother and I she had two kids from a previous marriage as well, Phillip and Jennifer ) to pick berries and help with her garden and she did lots of canning and pickling. She could cook pretty much anything, so we would often eat stuff that my dad shot while hunting, which means I have eaten rabbit and squirrel and grouse.
But after my parents divorce, my dad also moved , into a trailer right down the street from my grandparents. I believe there was a custody hearing, I was required to spend the week with my mom and stay with my dad on weekends. My brother was in the same boat. I remember going to a couple of custody hearings where I would be sitting in what I can only assume was the judge's chambers and he would ask me what I wanted, and I would always say I wanted to stay with my mom, the choking incident burnt firmly into my cranium. I would offer my suggestion and then the judge would do whatever the hell he wanted to anyway. Each time I was there though I would get my personal visitation requirements reduced, so I must have been somewhat persuasive, going from every weekend to every other weekend to finally going to when I actually wanted to go, which was almost never.
Now I had a decent relationship with Cathy and my step siblings, there was never an issue where I didn't want to spend time with my dad because of them. More like just the opposite, I didn't want to spend time with them because it would also involve my dad.
I get that kids who go through a divorce often pick sides in that process, and for the longest time my brother lived with mom and I but eventually he opted to go live with my dad. Perhaps that is why we were never that close, more than likely though we are just two completely different people. My brother had an artistic gift, one that I could never muster, my talents are more with words and numbers. And my brother also fell in with the wrong crowd, or he was just a wrong person sans a crowd, but he would start getting mixed up with drugs and stealing things.
Anyone who works with me knows how much I can't stand thieves. Their fucking scumbags and my brother wasn't exception to that rule. He broke into one of our neighbors houses and stole a watch from their daughter and then gave it to his girlfriend at the time. I think it was shortly after this incident that my brother opted to live with our dad, which was fine with me, I had had enough of his pilfering. Because as well as stealing from our neighbors, he would also steal from Phillip, Jennifer and myself, taking our allowance money if we would not keep it secured away.
As we got older the divide between my brother and I just grew wider and wider. And the crowd that he was affiliating himself with was not my kind of people. My dad used to have a Cutlass 442 convertible with a black top. One of my brothers friends cut a hole in the roof of the car to break into it and steal the radio. Now I don't know what the market was at the time in my little Podunk town for factory installed radios but I can't think it was the smartest crime that his friend ever committed.
So I went about doing my things primarily with my mom's side of the family and my brother did the same with my dad's side of the family. My brother hooked up with this pig of a woman, which I say only because it is true. She was so unimpressive to me and my relationship with my brother had deteriorated to such a degree that when my brother announced he was going to get married, it was met with a ho hum from me. On his wedding day, I was sitting at the Civic Arena watching Pitt play Georgetown in a college basketball game on a school trip.
Meanwhile on my mom's side of the family, we have my grandparents. They had a habit of having little cubby holes and lock boxes in their house where they would keeps rainy day monies and some important papers. My grandfather was a truck driver, not in the sense of how you would imagine a truck, or 18 wheeler in the vernacular, he didn't haul long trailers behind his rig,rather his duty was to take his rig,have two or three other rigs attached to it and hail those rigs to drop off points all over the United States. When I hear people bitch about their commute to work in the morning they really have no fucking idea, his commute was from Elderton, PA to South Bend, Indiana. Not that he would make that trip back and forth every day, but when he left to go on one of his runs he could be gone for weeks at a time. Now by the time my brother had gotten married he was nearing the end of his trucking career. 30+ years climbing in and out of rigs had done a number on his knees, though I never heard him complain about it and when he was home he was still always on the go until his next load. He would be taking the grandkids fishing, or out walking dirt roads collecting aluminum cans, or scavenging flea markets, or going to bingo with my grandmother. There really wasn't an off switch with him. So my grandmother would often hound him to retire, he had earned a comfortable pension, she was working at the Post Office, so she would have a decent pension to fall back on as well. She had gone as far as to get the paperwork for his retirement, all he needed to do was fill it out and then they could enjoy a comfortable retirement together.
Enter my brother, who took it upon himself to break into their house and steal a bunch of those lock boxes and take off with them. My grandmother came home and immediately realized that she had been robbed, and because of how the place was robbed, the person didn't come in and ransack the place, they knew exactly where to go to get what they wanted, she immediately thought of my brother, as did anyone else with half a brain. So she went to the place he was staying to confront him. He was renting a trailer, and right next to his place was a four way intersection. So as my grandmother is driving down the road to confront him, my brother obviously took the long way home on his escape route, because he was approaching the intersection from another direction. He spotted my grandmothers car, pulled out in front of her and took off up the road ahead of her. He got maybe a half mile away when my grandmother saw his car along the side of the road with him climbing back into it, and turning around and heading back to his place. My grandmother followed him and confronted him at his place where he went all kinds of Egyptian stupid ( de Nile, de Nile, de Nile for those that don't get my sense of humor yet ( really? ).
So my grandmother comes home and calls a bunch of people, mostly my mom and her brothers and sisters (6 in all plus me, an Algonquin table if ever there was one ) and I am sure the discussion concerned what to do next. I am not sure whose idea it was by my memory credits Will, when the idea was to go back to where my brother pulled off the road before turning around. I remember riding along when we got to that spot people began fanning out in the wooded area along the road when the first thing was recovered, it was a sheet of paper. Apparently my brother had cracked at least one of the lock boxes open, scattering the contents he deemed unnecessary through the woods. Those unnecessary contents included my grandfather's retirement papers. At that point my brother was dead to me. I had told my grandmother she should press charges and throw his ass in jail. It would be the only way he would learn anything.
But she relented. All told, in addition to the retirement papers he took about $700 in cash and my grandfather's coin collection. I went about two years from that point without even speaking to my brother, until Cathy stepped back into the picture. By now my ex step mother ( my father has a huge problem with keeping his penis in his pants, another reason he and I don't get along ) but Cathy had an idea of getting the band back together on Christmas Eve, with Phillip, Jennifer, my brother and myself. It was a good idea in theory but in actuality it may have not been so good. I went with my girlfriend at the time ( yes I waited until I was 19 years old before having my first serious relationship, or as serious as what would be a failed relationship could be ). So here is my brother, now with two kids and a marriage to the horrid woman I mentioned above, and here I come strolling in, a college sophomore with what would appear at the time a decent relationship with a cute girl. Dare I say, by appearances it looked like I had my shit together ( I never have my shit together, I am just good at faking ) and I am there and I don't have two polite words for him. We get through whatever it was we were supposed to do that day and went to our respective homes. My girlfriend and I crashed at my mom's place on Christmas Eve, Christmas was always a big holiday with my mom and I was looking to waking up Christmas morning there. It would certainly be better than the day before.
Except I awaken to this wailing noise,not to sound disrespectful but it almost sounded animalistic. I remember being half awake wondering what that noise could be this early in the morning, it was 5 am on Christmas after all. I make my way out of my room and into the living room where my mom was sobbing uncontrollably on the couch. It would be a few minutes before she could collect herself to say what was wrong, between the time I was there the day before and Christmas morning my brother had hung himself. There was probably a bit of numbness when I heard the news, I do know that I went outside and shovelled snow for the soon to be expected visitors once they heard the news. But I can't say as there were any tears shed by me. That part of me didn't exist for him anymore.
I remember viewing the funeral as more of a UN peace keeping mission. Not that both sides of my family couldn't be cordial when needed, but even bars have bouncers though most nights nothing actually happens. It was amazing to see some of the people that did show up though, like our second grade teacher. I wondered if there were some connections there that I missed, or whether people were there to verify the news with their own eyes.
Long enough diatribe for you kiddos?
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