bird

HE AINT HEAVY

HE AINT HEAVY, HE'S A PERVERT

Our families are ourselves. My mother has her own philosophy about families and I think she put it best when she said to my sister, who after suffering three miscarriagess in her first marriage was then rendered infertile due to radiation and chemotherapy six months into her second marriage, " Well maybe it's a good thing you don't have kids, you spend eighteen years raising someone and all you wind up with is a goddamn jerk"

Always go home. At every chance. Honor your parents.

Just a few years ago my transient and often imprisoned older brother was living once again at my parents house. He was in his early thirties and it looked as though he was actually going to become a person. He had a job and now thanks to our parents an address as well. My mother and Stepfather winter in Florida. They had taken to hiding there at holiday time. My mother said it was to avoid having to " hand out Christmas gifts to ungrateful bastards." In one way I see their point, for a good long time none of we children liked or cared for either of them very much. But I suspect they avoid the holidays and the accompanying tidings of love and family closeness due to the shame they are filled with for having raised us like veal. So these two tightfisted, short, unsentimental and angry Lutheran people, mustered up enough confidence in my borderline retarded brother to ask him to be the caretaker for the split level hell in which we were partly raised and mostly tortured.

I'm not sure if it was the double responsibility of himself and the house that became overwhelming for him or if the solitary winter accommodations wore down his resistance to stupidity, or if just being from New Jersey eventually did him in, but he was arrested one night for brandishing a firearm while speeding on a motorcycle through town. (Incidentally this was the first arrest in ten years in which he did not use my name and social security number.) Somehow he was bailed out of county jail. But before he got out, my parents asked my stepsister to check on the house. My stepsister is a well meaning and genuinely likable woman, but she has also been somewhat of a nervous shortsighted hen in the past. In my parent's house she found guns ammunition, survivalist propaganda, empty liquor bottles and pornography. In every corner. One would imagine that she would have grown used to emergency situations since her own pregnant teenage daughter was abducted by her 31 year old husband and whisked off to North Carolina for a few days of imprisonment and brainwashing by him and his family. But instead henny-penny ran straight to a phone and called her father. Who through his clenched false teeth bitterly relayed the message to my mother who phoned me. They wanted him gone.

I volunteered to travel back to New Jersey by bus and to deliver my parent's eviction notice. It wasn't the guns or the ammo or the liquor that brought my parents to this conclusion, it was the fact that they had left him money to pay the utility bills and he didn't. He spent the money on porn and liquor and gas to fuel the motorcycle that he rode around town wielding firearms on. That was a breach of trust that according to their standards could never be mended. I learned at ten to not even spend the change you get when you buy a gallon of milk with their dollar. What the hell was taking him so long. There was a great big small part of me that was tired of his antics and couldn't wait to cast him out of their house. So I made my way back to NJ and to the police station where I asked for an escort to my mom's house. I had called him many times the week leading up to my visit. He never answered the phone or returned any calls. I didn't know what I would find and considered that I might even be taken out by a rifle from the family room window upon approaching the house. So I came with a policeman in tow. I let myself in and disengaged the alarm and he turned the corner looking down at me standing in his underwear in disbelief. The officer stepped up the stairs and scoped out the scene. I remember saying "Kevin you should have returned my calls". After about two minutes talking to my brother as I scouted the premises for weapons; of which I could find none: the officer decided to leave.

Alone with my brother. Something I hadn't done since childhood. It had been the better part of twenty years since we spent time together alone. I learned early on to avoid playing with my brother. And I had learned to summon a rage of my own that masked my terror of him and fueled me with adrenaline enough to fight him toe to toe whenever necessary . I had always made a wide berth around his temper. His rage was often so illogical and huge that it surpassed even my mother's. Just when you were sure that she would beat him dead for one of his tantrums, she would instead become glassy eyed and quiet. His rage I think was a mirror of her own. It sobered and shamed her. What we would learn in time about Kevin, was that he had a hearing disability from birth. So he was often being smacked around for not listening when in fact he just couldn't hear. So we begin to understand his rage…. Playing with Kevin was rarely fun. More often than not it was dangerous. One had to learn to defend oneself while playing with Kevin. But there's only so much you can do when your older brother is bearing down on your six year old skull with a baseball bat with the ugly force of a fatherless, beaten, deaf ,retarded boy. I had always been aware that Kevin was slow on the uptake and that it made him angry. My mother said it was on account of a lack of oxygen at birth. Whatever the cause I still contend that long or short term he should have been institutionalized like any other disturbed child in the neighborhood. It would have afforded us all a little peace of mind at the very least.

As the police car sped off Kevin became enraged. I began mentally mapping out an escape route and the quickest path to the cutlery draw. It had been so long since I had lived at home I couldn't remember which draw held what. I tried to reason with him, reminding him that he just wasn't acting as normal people do. To his credit he did calm down and he listened as best he could (he never would wear the hearing aid .The price of which my parents could never let any us forget ie: "Your brother's hearing aid cost us $600 and it sits in his goddam underwear draw and now you want money for books!")Eventually and due to my masterful manipulating of conversation, things calmed down further and we sat at the dining room table and talked. Me with my coat still on and him still only in underwear. He explained the survivalist literature as preparation for a great race war. He put my mind at ease by telling me that he had only three guns ,none of which were in the house: and that he was going to be ready when the revolution came: and that our father, would that he had survived his fatal self induced heart attack at 33 years of age , would have felt the same. I was confused because I don't recall my family being particularly racist. I couldn't imagine what had fueled this new found hatred. I thought perhaps my brother had bitched-out one too many times in prison and this rage was his way of processing a situation in which he felt unfairly taken advantage of. Bitch. And then I remembered something. There was an old family story that at the age of two my dead father's mother had taken me to the market where I began to loudly point out all the people of color at the check out line. "Look grammy there's a nigger! And there's another nigger!". I had been trained, much as our dog had been trained to chase the one garbage man in town who happened to be black. My father had been a nasty racist (but somehow overlooked my mother's dark skinned Italian aunts who all looked like 'high yellow' black women) and now my brother latched onto this ideology. He must have spent those isolating hours in his underwear reading porn and imagining what life would have been like if Dad hadn't died. Somehow from the asshole of our early childhood he retrieved this pearl of a memory. He had to have really searched for this one because once widowed my mother maintained no particular point of view of anyone. The only people my mother ever dismissed were those who did not make good on their debts to her. But Kevin clung to this memory of Dad when he realized he had nothing else. No money, no education, no family. It grounded him. It made him his father's son. It made him matter. I couldn't help bursting his bubble though. You see Kevin is the most obviously ethnic of my mother's children. Had we the inclination my sister and I might be able to cross the threshold of the Aryan Nation headquarters after the Great Race Armageddon , but my brother would be either shot on sight or used as free labor. My brother could never pass….This didn't sit too well and after another thirty or so minutes of arguing I finally got around to my point. The eviction. He took it well. He had expected it. I told him it wasn't fair to our mother to make her worry over any of us. That it was time to become his own person. I told him he had two months to leave. He was gone within a week. We never heard from him again.

Two months later my parents returned and I traveled home once again to visit them. My mom told me that the house was in quite a state when they returned. It seemed as though my brother left abruptly, taking only his guns. Leaving clothes and pornography. She said that she had his things out in the shed and wasn't sure what to do with them. We went out back to the shed and she showed me the large garbage bags filled with his things. In them were his clothes his soldier of fortune magazines and his pornographic collection of lactating pregnant women. Stacks of high glossy shots of mothers-to-be spraying milk from a distance on ecstatic recipients. Men on their backs masturbating with their mouths open. Hoping for a drop. I turned to my mother and nearly in tears said " He left these here for you to find?" Realizing that she couldn't possibly escape the irony or the symbolism of my brothers twisted treasure. That we three issue of her, even in our adulthood were still in need of mothering. Some of us obviously more than others. There she stood in the doorway of that shed, in the shadow of my forgiveness and in front of my brother's polluted ,accusing pile and she said, "Yeah that asshole. I was going to throw them out, but Ed thinks he can sell them to the guys on his softball team".

And my stepfather did. From the trunk of his car with the Marine Leatherneck plates down at the ball field during the Senior Citizen League play-offs.

My Sister Moses

Just last week my sister Carol hosted a wedding reception in her backyard. Our dear friends Laurie and Dave had gotten hitched at City Hall months before and this gathering was for the close friends and family who couldn't make it into the city that day.

While I was happy for Laurie and Dave and equally happy that I was going to be sent home with a week's worth of leftovers, I was not necessarily looking forward to being around other people. I have never been terribly social and as the years pass I become more and more like that ancient, white muzzled, half-blind shepherd mix that lived in the neighbor's yard next to all of us. The kind of dog who for thirty minutes slowly finds its way back in the house by following it's own shadow on the ground. It is best to maintain a distance from such a dog. They are easily surprised and quick to quarrel. It is always wise to let such a dog come to you.

When I had arrived in the early morning to help set up there was a small group of older women prepping food in the kitchen and laughing. "Oh Jim! Did you hear your Mother's message? It's absolutely priceless! The funniest thing I've heard in some time. You just have to hear this message.Carol did you save the message for your brother?" My sister I saw was far away. Whatever my mother had said on the answering machine had to have been monumentally hilarious for my sister to have retreated so completely in a kitchen so full. She was tying her son's shoes and answered back in a hollow and all too familiar tone that "No. I think it got erased." Carol wasn't laughing. I didn't press the issue.

I was happy to accept some pretty important chores that morning that included blowing up party balloons and spreading cedar chips under the deck. Something had crawled under my sister's newly finished deck and found it a peaceful spot in which to die. A faint sulfur smell was seeping from the boards and polluting one of her artfully arranged seating areas. Luckily I was accompanied through the morning by Laurie's cousin Steve the Marine, who showed up on a hog and smoking a cigar. Steve whose specialty was Supply and Demand (yes sir!) was a geek all grown up. His awkward adolescence informed his adult character. He was kind and attentive. A perfect gentleman and full of empathy. Not in spite of his awkward looks but because of them he was smoking fucking hot. Steve was strapping and he was hanging tough. As I passed the balloons to him, I tried letting them go, so that he would have to reach up to catch them, and in doing so his Metallica t-shirt would ride up on his sizeable shoulders and reveal a soft hairy trail over his taut and ample tummy. He was a biscuit and I wanted to dip this bitch in gravy. I wanted to pour bourbon down his rough and ridged spine and take those sweet smoky shots from his ass crack. I wanted to tell him that Boston was only a few hours ride away and if we hurried we might make it to City Hall in time to change history. Don't ask. Don't tell? Don't worry. At this point nothing would suit me better than a slab of husband who wouldn't, nay couldn't hold my hand on line at the movies. Mr. I'll marry that meaty ass in Mass. and cook you eggs every morning for the rest of your life. Golly Gomer! You had me at hog. He was the perfect distraction from the intrusive crowds of curious old friends who wanted to play catch-up with me. Steve was going to be my date for the wedding. He would keep me from the mean company of myself and we would spend our honeymoon beating each other senseless head long into love.

At one point Steve asked me about the cedar chips "Cedar is supposed to cover up the smell of something that died under the deck" I offered. He was impressed at my sister's 'resourcefulness'. I wanted to knock him down and have sex with him on the lawn in front of our parents.

Part of my disinterest in spending time with others has everything to do with my present financial situation. I've been working very hard and without pay for sometime now. In my efforts to focus on work and succeed I had taken the opportunity to push all meaningful relationships aside. Family and friends had seen less and less of me as the years passed. I took full advantage of being single and childless and hurled myself into my work. I took a risk and sunk all into a worthwhile venture that has not panned out. That's OK, I can stand it, but I'd rather not have to explain myself. On a few occasions my sister and mother both had expressed concern that bordered anger at my unwillingness to get out while the getting was good. The conversations with them did not play out prettily. Not having asked for help meant not having to answer to anyone. That's a time-honored rule. A bed made and laid in is not to be disputed. What's more, a man is living out a dream in front of you. It's a bad dream, it's a nightmare, it will fail miserably, but for the love of Pete just let the man have his dream already! He'll figure it all out at exactly the point he should.

So it's clear that I had not the first dime with which to buy the newly married couple a gift. My gift was to be the unofficial photographer. My bust-ass, broke, dreamless self was to be the one to record this day of days. Laurie wanted candid shots and she couldn't have picked a better person to invade the small circles of guests and while remaining unseen click away, capturing their least interested and least engaged selves. I did my best to be sure to get shots of all the partygoers. It was the perfect assignment for someone who had absolutely nothing to say. For someone who couldn't bring himself to speak. While it pained me to keep leaving my husband's side throughout the day, I could not pass up the chance to avoid having to borrow money to buy them a gift. I kept busy and avoiding meaningful conversation by pretending that a photographable moment was happening only feet away. All the darting and dashing and avoiding was tiring work. At one point I had given up the charade and just sat in a lawn chair staring out at the party through the viewfinder in blissful silence. For a good three quarters of an hour no one bothered me. It was the only way that I could have enjoyed the day.

Early in the evening as, the sun softened the scene in my sister's backyard the small party had splintered up into even smaller groups. Those with children stood in the center of the lawn to intermittently put out a yielding arm or leg to slow down their wilding, sugar high kids as they tore around the property. Those over fifty found refuge on the cedar freshened deck and off of the grass. The Marine was making time with a lady friend of mine (that’s cute Steve, let’s keep up the façade) and through the viewfinder I found my mother under the reception tent holding my nephew Jonathan in her lap and my sister sitting beside her. They were talking softly about the boy. The light was too low for a good shot, but I tried to hold as still as possible in hopes that something of the moment might show up.

My mother and sister didn't always sit so close. From the time she could speak it was clear to all in our family that Carol was blessed with a super-human intellect and cursed with a distinct self-awareness. My mother was likewise bestowed with a super-human rage whose flames were fanned by the sudden and tragic death of my father, and a firm belief that nothing ever goes well. Left alone in parenting my mother had no yin to her yang. And if there was one thing she couldn't abide by, it was a Little Miss Smartie Pants. Beside herself in grief my mother seemed to have lost the power of speech and resorted to communicating via objects. Not so much puppet theater really, more along the lines of flying shoes, wooden spoons, belts anything within reach could be used to express a thought. She whooped the hell out of us. We each had our own way of responding to mom's nonverbal dialogue. I would hide behind the house afterwards sobbing and praying that God would strike her dead. My brother, at the first hint of a discourse would put up a screaming defense. Bleating and pleading like a demon lamb being led to slaughter. His 'No Mommy! No!!!' always worked like a charm. We hated him for it. My sister's tactic was to stand still and never let anyone see her affected. After a time seeing my sister unmovable, my mother gave up. She regarded my sister as a lost cause and an irredeemable problem. By the time my sister entered puberty she and my mother had very little left to say to each other. As the eldest daughter often does, Carol was obliged to assume many of the responsibilities of a grown woman including childcare and housewifery and like any put upon child she eventually rebelled by taking the adult role playing a step further through chain smoking, dating, carousing and drinking. I'm not sure that my mother felt the need or the opportunity to have the talk about impending womanhood with my sister. But I do remember them discussing it briefly, one time.

My sister, like all girls of her generation entering the full flush of maidenhood was dealing with her own menstrual cycle as best she knew how. It was something to be avoided, hidden and tucked away in a corner, like an unwanted child or a family pet turned unpleasant. These days, feminine hygiene commercials are filled with positive energy and girl power. "Rock-ish" music underscores moving images of commiserating, giggling girls rolling their eyes and lolling about on big comfy couches. Today's message is that 'Your period is what gives you power'. Old school feminine hygiene commercials came in low and soft with Satie or Bach. They spoke to you quietly as you convalesced. They offered more comfortable, private alternatives for the next cycle. Yesterday's message was 'Your period is what leaves you prone'. But the one common message that remains no matter what the era is 'Imagine that it's not happening'. Wrap, mask, plug, spray, soak, flush, swab, disinfect and cover it up. Never intrude and never let them see you down. Naturally any thirteen-year-old girl would be less than receptive to this looming red threshold. Especially when what's most clear about the 'condition' is that it is irrefutable proof that you do in fact share common ground with your mother. So I can understand that on one particular day my sister did all she could to erase the evidence that it was happening to her and overloaded the toilet with paper. I recall my mother's shouts from the bathroom. My brother and I raced down the hall. When one of us was assaulted we all wanted to watch. None of us wanted to feel as though the beatings were exclusively ours. As we peered through the door my sister stared at the floor unwilling to acknowledge that her tragedy was being witnessed. She stood in a shallow sea of toilet paper and her own menses. My mother growling about paying for a plumber and arms flailing stormed out the bathroom we thought to fetch a plunger. My sister left alone did not stir. As we stared, it was not clear to my brother and I what we were watching but my sister knew too well and she wanted so badly to be left alone that to regard us long enough to ask us to leave would have shattered the fragile reality that she had created for herself. This wasn't happening for Carol. She had already retreated to a very private place. No doubt a dry place. In a flash my mother reappeared. Above her head she held not the plunger but my sister’s twirling baton. It was to be used to dislodge the paper and menstrual dam that was causing the flooding, but my mother saw fit to first use the baton to make a point. With all her force she brought the baton down on my sister's skull. The baton mercifully took some of the force and bent in the shape of my sister's head. I watched my sister momentarily shrink as her vertebrae collapsed in on itself. I remember that the echoing thud of my sister's formidable brains scrambling around her head made me shudder. The sight of the blow reverberating through the ends of her long hair almost brought me to my knees. It's safe to say that my brother did not have the same empathetic response. Kevin was of the school of thought in which when someone was down you were obliged to kick them, if only to remind them of how far they had fallen. Kevin chimed in with something appropriate like 'Yeah, she told you so". My mother then handed the baton to my sister and told her to fix the problem and clean up the mess and closing the door behind her left my sister to her task.

My mother should be commended for preparing Carol so thoroughly for a life so fraught with loss. She was a pharaoh wielding a baton and chasing the tribes into the wilderness. In that journey some of us would vanish and some would continuously wander but Carol would be the one that life seemed to target. In comparison very little has happened to the rest of us along the way, but the years that followed my sister leaving home were littered with hard times and unspeakable sadness. She had been locked up, abandoned, implicated, hungry, alone, childless, divorced and radiated. Yet somehow through all the blood and tears and vomit, Carol had kept a grace enough around her to offer my mother a place at her table. My mother, proud as a tower, bent herself with humility to stand in the shadow of her daughter’s good will. Capturing the moment in the reception tent, although faint, was proof enough that mercy and repentance are afforded to any of us willing to pay the price. To see them together was to know they had each earned their peace and what’s more it was to know their sincerity in being a comfort each to the other.

I spent the rest of the evening avoiding my mother and she sensed it. As I continued to scan the crowd I would catch the sight of her in the distance looking directly into the lens. She was confused and was wondering what she had done, what had happened for me to remain so apart. I was too tired from troubles to acknowledge what I was feeling. I was overwhelmed. Seeing them together, my sister grown up, my aging mother and this red headed new comer who had taken my place between them broke my heart in a hundred ways. I was swollen with love for them, and for my mother in particular. I had been resigned to spend the day separate from myself and here I was suddenly too present. I ached at the sight of my mother transparent in her remorse for a life lived in anger. Compassion on compassion came over me for her. From a distance I was assuming a part of their shared peace and it made me all too aware of how frightened I have been and ashamed of all the years that I have wasted living on the periphery of myself. I have been keeping an arms length from experience so as not to get beat. I felt left behind and alone behind the camera.

I wanted to apologize to Steve for man handling him in my mind. I wanted to make amends for having complicated our relationship by using him as a way of punching a hole through the fear that I had brought down upon me like a shroud. But alas, while I was in the bathroom earlier Steve had left without saying goodbye. Having lost Steve I had lost my distraction and I couldn’t help facing my family. So I watched them moving together in this new rhythm and I allowed it to make me glad. As I watched my sister smiling and animated thanking people for coming, my mother in all her newfound tenderness tempered through time, was left holding Jonathan. As she stroked his hair with her spotted and work worn hands I couldn’t help but to think how thin his little skull must be.

Before I headed out for the train my sister waved me over to the answering machine. She hadn't erased the message. She hit play:

"Carol, it's your mother. I've been thinking about that smell from the deck and do you remember when Sam Boyd's sister shot their mother in the head on Thanksgiving Day and then hid the body in the U-Store-It place? Well, no one found her body for five months because they couldn't smell her. The sister had wrapped the body in cedar chips to mask the odor. So I was thinking, why don't you go out and get a bag of cedar chips and throw them under there! I bet they'll work. OK. Just wanted to let you know that I was thinking of you. We'll see you later on today".

My sister looked at me, bent at the waist and finally began to laugh. "That's our mother. Can you believe it?" she asked. I couldn't believe it actually. I was disappointed in myself. After all this time and all any of us really ever needed was an empty trunk and a few bags of cedar chips.

(see the deboned and filleted version brought to you by the fine folks at www.themorningnews.org)

He Aint Heavy, He's A Pervert.

Our families are ourselves. My mother has her own philosophy about families and I think she put it best when she said to my sister, who after suffering three miscarriagess in her first marriage was then rendered infertile due to radiation and chemotherapy six months into her second marriage, " Well maybe it's a good thing you don't have kids, you spend eighteen years raising someone and all you wind up with is a goddamn jerk"

Always go home. At every chance. Honor your parents.

Just a few years ago my transient and often imprisoned older brother was living once again at my parents house. He was in his early thirties and it looked as though he was actually going to become a person. He had a job and now thanks to our parents an address as well. My mother and Stepfather winter in Florida. They had taken to hiding there at holiday time. My mother said it was to avoid having to " hand out Christmas gifts to ungrateful bastards." In one way I see their point, for a good long time none of we children liked or cared for either of them very much. But I suspect they avoid the holidays and the accompanying tidings of love and family closeness due to the shame they are filled with for having raised us like veal. So these two tightfisted, short, unsentimental and angry Lutheran people, mustered up enough confidence in my borderline retarded brother to ask him to be the caretaker for the split level hell in which we were partly raised and mostly tortured.

I'm not sure if it was the double responsibility of himself and the house that became overwhelming for him or if the solitary winter accommodations wore down his resistance to stupidity, or if just being from New Jersey eventually did him in, but he was arrested one night for brandishing a firearm while speeding on a motorcycle through town. (Incidentally this was the first arrest in ten years in which he did not use my name and social security number.) Somehow he was bailed out of county jail. But before he got out, my parents asked my stepsister to check on the house. My stepsister is a well meaning and genuinely likable woman, but she has also been somewhat of a nervous shortsighted hen in the past. In my parent's house she found guns ammunition, survivalist propaganda, empty liquor bottles and pornography. In every corner. One would imagine that she would have grown used to emergency situations since her own pregnant teenage daughter was abducted by her 31 year old husband and whisked off to North Carolina for a few days of imprisonment and brainwashing by him and his family. But instead henny-penny ran straight to a phone and called her father. Who through his clenched false teeth bitterly relayed the message to my mother who phoned me. They wanted him gone.

I volunteered to travel back to New Jersey by bus and to deliver my parent's eviction notice. It wasn't the guns or the ammo or the liquor that brought my parents to this conclusion, it was the fact that they had left him money to pay the utility bills and he didn't. He spent the money on porn and liquor and gas to fuel the motorcycle that he rode around town wielding firearms on. That was a breach of trust that according to their standards could never be mended. I learned at ten to not even spend the change you get when you buy a gallon of milk with their dollar. What the hell was taking him so long. There was a great big small part of me that was tired of his antics and couldn't wait to cast him out of their house. So I made my way back to NJ and to the police station where I asked for an escort to my mom's house. I had called him many times the week leading up to my visit. He never answered the phone or returned any calls. I didn't know what I would find and considered that I might even be taken out by a rifle from the family room window upon approaching the house. So I came with a policeman in tow. I let myself in and disengaged the alarm and he turned the corner looking down at me standing in his underwear in disbelief. The officer stepped up the stairs and scoped out the scene. I remember saying "Kevin you should have returned my calls". After about two minutes talking to my brother as I scouted the premises for weapons; of which I could find none: the officer decided to leave.

Alone with my brother. Something I hadn't done since childhood. It had been the better part of twenty years since we spent time together alone. I learned early on to avoid playing with my brother. And I had learned to summon a rage of my own that masked my terror of him and fueled me with adrenaline enough to fight him toe to toe whenever necessary . I had always made a wide berth around his temper. His rage was often so illogical and huge that it surpassed even my mother's. Just when you were sure that she would beat him dead for one of his tantrums, she would instead become glassy eyed and quiet. His rage I think was a mirror of her own. It sobered and shamed her. What we would learn in time about Kevin, was that he had a hearing disability from birth. So he was often being smacked around for not listening when in fact he just couldn't hear. So we begin to understand his rage…. Playing with Kevin was rarely fun. More often than not it was dangerous. One had to learn to defend oneself while playing with Kevin. But there's only so much you can do when your older brother is bearing down on your six year old skull with a baseball bat with the ugly force of a fatherless, beaten, deaf ,retarded boy. I had always been aware that Kevin was slow on the uptake and that it made him angry. My mother said it was on account of a lack of oxygen at birth. Whatever the cause I still contend that long or short term he should have been institutionalized like any other disturbed child in the neighborhood. It would have afforded us all a little peace of mind at the very least.

As the police car sped off Kevin became enraged. I began mentally mapping out an escape route and the quickest path to the cutlery draw. It had been so long since I had lived at home I couldn't remember which draw held what. I tried to reason with him, reminding him that he just wasn't acting as normal people do. To his credit he did calm down and he listened as best he could (he never would wear the hearing aid .The price of which my parents could never let any us forget ie: "Your brother's hearing aid cost us $600 and it sits in his goddam underwear draw and now you want money for books!")Eventually and due to my masterful manipulating of conversation, things calmed down further and we sat at the dining room table and talked. Me with my coat still on and him still only in underwear. He explained the survivalist literature as preparation for a great race war. He put my mind at ease by telling me that he had only three guns ,none of which were in the house: and that he was going to be ready when the revolution came: and that our father, would that he had survived his fatal self induced heart attack at 33 years of age , would have felt the same. I was confused because I don't recall my family being particularly racist. I couldn't imagine what had fueled this new found hatred. I thought perhaps my brother had bitched-out one too many times in prison and this rage was his way of processing a situation in which he felt unfairly taken advantage of. Bitch. And then I remembered something. There was an old family story that at the age of two my dead father's mother had taken me to the market where I began to loudly point out all the people of color at the check out line. "Look grammy there's a nigger! And there's another nigger!". I had been trained, much as our dog had been trained to chase the one garbage man in town who happened to be black. My father had been a nasty racist (but somehow overlooked my mother's dark skinned Italian aunts who all looked like 'high yellow' black women) and now my brother latched onto this ideology. He must have spent those isolating hours in his underwear reading porn and imagining what life would have been like if Dad hadn't died. Somehow from the asshole of our early childhood he retrieved this pearl of a memory. He had to have really searched for this one because once widowed my mother maintained no particular point of view of anyone. The only people my mother ever dismissed were those who did not make good on their debts to her. But Kevin clung to this memory of Dad when he realized he had nothing else. No money, no education, no family. It grounded him. It made him his father's son. It made him matter. I couldn't help bursting his bubble though. You see Kevin is the most obviously ethnic of my mother's children. Had we the inclination my sister and I might be able to cross the threshold of the Aryan Nation headquarters after the Great Race Armageddon , but my brother would be either shot on sight or used as free labor. My brother could never pass….This didn't sit too well and after another thirty or so minutes of arguing I finally got around to my point. The eviction. He took it well. He had expected it. I told him it wasn't fair to our mother to make her worry over any of us. That it was time to become his own person. I told him he had two months to leave. He was gone within a week. We never heard from him again.

Two months later my parents returned and I traveled home once again to visit them. My mom told me that the house was in quite a state when they returned. It seemed as though my brother left abruptly, taking only his guns. Leaving clothes and pornography. She said that she had his things out in the shed and wasn't sure what to do with them. We went out back to the shed and she showed me the large garbage bags filled with his things. In them were his clothes his soldier of fortune magazines and his pornographic collection of lactating pregnant women. Stacks of high glossy shots of mothers-to-be spraying milk from a distance on ecstatic recipients. Men on their backs masturbating with their mouths open. Hoping for a drop. I turned to my mother and nearly in tears said " He left these here for you to find?" Realizing that she couldn't possibly escape the irony or the symbolism of my brothers twisted treasure. That we three issue of her, even in our adulthood were still in need of mothering. Some of us obviously more than others. There she stood in the doorway of that shed, in the shadow of my forgiveness and in front of my brother's polluted ,accusing pile and she said, "Yeah that asshole. I was going to throw them out, but Ed thinks he can sell them to the guys on his softball team".

And my stepfather did. From the trunk of his car with the Marine Leatherneck plates down at the ball field during the Senior Citizen League play-offs.