Brotherhood II

  More Ugly Memories That Won’t Go Away

Before I terminated social interaction between us

more than two decades ago,

my sibling frequently

displayed huge enjoyment in flaunting

his bigotries,

his fascist ideologies,

his shittier values,

and his schadenfreude –

rejoicing in the anguish of people

he’d never met

and who’d done him no wrong –

aggressively in my face.

He could have had no healthy, brotherly

reason for doing this,

could he?

     Operant & Respondent Conditioning

I could be wrong about this,

but in regard to the difference

between operant and respondent conditioning,

I think this is about a bit of both.

Decades of being the recipient

of almost relentless

and joyfully malicious tormenting by way of

taunting, disparagement, ridicule,

mockery, derision, humiliation,

sneering, jeering,

belittling, bullying,

condescension, patronisation,

and general put-downs

by my elder sibling

at his every opportunity,

delivered as if each were hilariously funny,

not to mention his frequent and aggressively

smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous, pompous

projections of chauvinism and bigotry into my face,

did indeed condition me

by my early forties

to feel physically sick to my stomach

by the sound of his voice,

the sight of his face,

or the memory of either of them.

             A Different League

Displaying a predictable delight

in vexing and frustrating my attempt

to establish some semblance of fraternity,

my sibling obstructed all my efforts

to describe the differences between rugby and league

with inane interruptions and digressions

and prideful expressions of ignorance,

thereby refusing to allow me to experience

the bonding others feel with brotherhood,

and making my life-long hatred of him

discolour my enjoyment

of every league match I’ve seen on the telly

in the decades since.

Well, I’ve always enjoyed watching

rugby more than league, anyway.

                      Not Learning To Kick

I didn’t learn sport skills as a boy.

My daddy was always busy, and then died,

and my older brother preferred

to ridicule me for not already having them,

to gloat about his superiority over me in them,

or both,

so I made it into adolescence without many basic skills.

I grew up with American football

in an age when people kicked with their toes.

Then, when I was in my mid-teens,

all the big teams began to use

what was then called soccer-style kickers.

I thought that was real cool, and decided,

since I did have strong legs,

to teach myself how to do it.

The idea of asking anybody to teach me never occurred to me.

That would’ve left me open to ridicule

over and above what I’d received all my life from my family.

The major problem with teaching myself, though,

was that all I knew was what I’d seen on TV,

and I’d misunderstood that completely.

I knew that they struck it with their instep,

but I didn’t know what an instep is,

and since I’d watched them approach the ball from the side,

I thought that an instep was the inside of the foot,

rather than the top of it.

Never having had a coach tell me

to put my laces through it,

I spent many hours out in a field

alone

kicking a ball incorrectly,

and making no progress at all.

                        Busty Rusty

Barely keeping his sniggering under control,

Paul told me that he’d been to a strip joint in Boston

where the feature act had been called

Busty Rusty and Her Fabulous Fifties,

the “fabulous fifties” referring

to her bosom being 50 inches in circumference.

Fifty inches is 127 centimetres.

Giggling maniacally, he told me,

“She took her right tit,

wrapped it around her left shoulder,

and then kissed it over her right shoulder.”

Although I was only sixteen,

I really didn’t think that was either funny or sexy,

and I certainly don’t think so now.

I suppose they called her Rusty

because she had red hair.

                               Singing

In the back seat of my elder sibling’s ostentatious car,

my then-five-year-old daughter

began singing something somewhat tunelessly,

as five-year-olds are wont to do.

Sitting next to her, my early-stages-of-dementia mother

made complimentary grandmotherly noises,

and my sister-in-law, also in the back,

also made sounds of approval.

My sibling, behind the wheel,

asserted in a nastily ridiculing tone that she certainly hadn’t

inherited her singing ability from her father,

then glanced over toward me on the other front seat

with a stomach-churning smirk on his face.

My mother, changing the subject,

or maybe just wandering off at a tangent,

made some comment about my father’s musical talent.

My sibling, his smirk more pronounced

and his voice dripping with gleeful malice,

ploughed on as if she hadn’t spoken,

with something about my singing being

the most ugly sound possible.

Then my sister-in-law pointedly changed the subject

with a remark about the meal we’d just eaten, or something,

but without a pause my sibling, smirking and sneering,

claimed that hearing me sing made strong men vomit

and others leave the room to avoid doing so.

He bore relentlessly on in this manner,

enjoying himself enormously and

ignoring the back-seat efforts to change the topic,

for at least five minutes.

Thirteen years later I performed

in a musical production.

The audiences appreciated my vocal solo,

delivered in a strong blues growl,

and my bass harmonies

in the ensemble numbers

received praise from others in the cast.

  Oppressive Imaginary Conversations

For years they came up on me involuntarily,

imaginary conversations with my sibling

in which I always began,

“You know what I think, Paul?”,

followed by my describing him to his face

as the scummy lump of evil shit that he is.

Then, after my world fell apart and I shifted into neutral

in order to survive,

I became free of these for several months.

Too bad they started coming back.

Maybe I can make them go away again;

replace them with some variation, at least.

                    Fiduciary Responsibility

I should be,

as my Aunt Goldie put it a year or two before she died,

on Easy Street,

because my stepfather

had his own civil-engineering company

and a genius

for fitting the maximum number of units into a subdivision

whilst at the same time respecting

the contours of the land.

He therefore did all the subdivision design work

for the county’s two biggest developers

and heaps of others

at a time when it was

the third-fastest-developing county

in the United States.

He left most of it to my mother.

When she died I received an audited account,

and about half the estate

was in the confiscatory tax bracket.

In the three or four months after she died

my sibling,

as executor of the estate,

gambled away well over half of it

on the New York Stock Exchange –

he’d always fancied himself a whiz with the market –

and didn’t tell me about it.

I, meanwhile, made financial commitments

based on that audited statement from the lawyers.

When he finally told me about it

ten months later,

he just explained in a cavalier tone of voice,

that the kick in my guts wasn’t his responsibility.

It was the market.

Unprovoked Nastiness … For Pleasure?

I could only conclude

that granting each person

the minimal amount of basic respect

to which every decent human is entitled,

unless and until that person demonstrates

being unworthy of it,

was an approach

that he considered to be

deserving of his ridicule,

or had never truly considered at all.

Brotherhood I

Trigger warning: dirty laundry

     A Note To My Sibling

You’ve never conceived of me

on an interactive level

as anything other than

a thing

for you to have a jolly time

tormenting.

It doesn’t matter to me

that you can justify it to yourself

as just brotherly

kidding around,

because it wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter to me

that it’s the result

of conditioning

that you acquired

by following the cues

that our inhuman horror of a mother

gave you as a birthright.

Our radically different upbringings

in the same house mean

that I see the way we were

and are

in a manner

that your self-centred,

malicious mind

can’t imagine.

                      Throwing

As soon as I was big enough,

I guess when I was three,

my mother began to shunt me

outside to the back yard

to play with my brother Paul,

who’s two years older.

Being boys, what she instructed us to play

was ball.

Being little, my coordination

was incompletely developed,

and I threw the ball clumsily

in a shot-put sort of way.

Instead of mentoring me

and teaching me to throw properly,

he immediately started taunting me,

in that sing-song chant cruel children use,

“Riki throws like a girr-ul! Riki throws like a girr-ul!”

He did this every time she forced me to play catch with him,

for years and years and years.

Sometimes he did it in the house

when we weren’t playing ball at all.

I cringed every time, which made him smile.

Even when we became adults

he’d bring it up sometimes,

with a little smirk on his face,

as if it were some reminder of warm fraternal bonding.

Of course, I never did learn to throw properly.

It kept me from being adequate at sports that require it.

Even in my sixties I couldn’t help but feel inhibited

when throwing a tennis ball for my dog,

and preferred the cricket bowling action.

I flung sticks for her sidearm across my body.

Thanks, Paul.

Just one of the thousands of destructive impacts

that you’ve had on my life.

    Cold Water in the Shower

When we were in high school,

from time to time my older sibling

would sneak into the bathroom

when I was taking a shower

and pour a pitcher

of cold water on me

from over the shower curtain,

and then exit giggling.

When I reminded him of it

a half-century later

he seemed to think it was still funny

and told me I was “spewing”

when I called that response

sick and evil.

He then claimed that he wanted

reconciliation.

                          Shvoogies?

When I tried to explain to my sibling Paul

about my activities as a basketball coach,

He dismissed the sport of basketball as,

and I quote,

“a bunch of Shvoogies running around in their underwear.”

I supposed that by ‘Shvoogies’ he was referring to human beings

with ancestors who’d been victims

of the African slave trade.

I also supposed that he thought he was being funny,

especially since he giggled after he said it,

but I thought he was far from funny,

and certainly didn’t giggle with him.

                At the Start of Nightmare Week

The last time I had the misfortune

of having to endure my sibling’s physical presence,

was a nightmarish week in 1990.

Early on in the adventure,

whilst I was still jetlagged,

and after he’d warmed up by putting me down

and trying to wind me up

by frustrating my efforts

to have a meaningful conversation

with the stratagem of responding to my every sentence

with dickheadedly inaccurate non-sequitur put-downs of New Zealand,

he commented on New Zealand’s then-recent

decriminalisation of homosexuality

by aggressively asserting that

all homosexuals should be lined up against walls

and shot – illustrating this by miming

the firing of an automatic weapon with his fingers

and making the corresponding noise.

Then he indulged himself in the

aren’t-I-a-naughty-boy-not-really-I’m-so-pleased-with-myself

half-giggle and half-snort

that it has always disgusted me to have to hear.

Not wanting to get into a pissing contest with him,

under the circumstances,

I didn’t remind him of the time, thirty-two years earlier,

when he was fourteen and I was twelve,

that he tried to rape me,

but I’ll never forget the pressure of his hand on the back of my neck,

or the foul stench coming up from his genitals,

or his mocking laughter after I’d struggled free and was fleeing.

          Sick and Evil

Y’know, it struck me recently

that my elder sibling

probably still thinks

after more than a quarter-century

of estrangement

that just because

he had such a jolly good time

relentlessly bullying, vexing,

belittling, tormenting,

and otherwise abusing me

as we grew up,

and at every opportunity

thereafter,

that I’d enjoyed it, too.

I’ve read about

that twisted shit going on

in his ilk’s minds

whilst they’re doing it,

but clinging to that

contradictory, disingenuous

self-delusion

into old age

is sick and evil.

    One Problem, Though

All too frequently

I find myself

filled with fantasies

about directing vituperation

into the smug, smirking, sneering face

of the morally inferior subhuman

who is my parents’ older son.

But then I remind myself

that in order to do this

I’d need to confront him,

and the sight of that face

and the sound of his voice

have made me feel

physically sick

upon encountering them

for decades.

(Hair colour in cartoon is wrong)

Make-Believe & Beyond

                            Signs

I knew the situation was hopeless

when the second thing she said to me

was, “What’s your sign?”

My sign.

Maybe she –

or one of her friends –

had stuck a ‘kick-me’ sign on my bum

when I wasn’t looking.

These things happen sometimes.

But maybe not.

Maybe I was supposed to have one of those

‘Hi! My Name Is’ signs stuck to my shirt pocket

with my name written on its blank space in marker,

but somehow nobody told me and I’m the odd one out.

Or maybe I wrote ‘Dick’ on it and stuck it to my flies.

But maybe not.

By the way, the sign I like the best,

in the abstract,

is ‘No U Turn’

a nice metaphor, eh?

but I don’t think that was what she meant, either.

I think she’s a birthday bigot,

and, like all bigotry,

I think that’s ugly, evil, and stupid.

Y’know, I bet she doesn’t care what I think, though.

She doesn’t have to.

All she has to do is know my sign.

She didn’t know it right then when she asked,

but no matter when my birthday is,

I’m just not her cup of tea.

Make my sign the one that says, “Exit.”

           Metaphysics

Sometimes it really pisses off

the child in me

that things that aren’t real

– magic, water sprites,

telepathy, matter transmitters,

and so forth – 

really aren’t,

but at least sometimes music

or psychoactive substances

or sleep

allow me to imagine

that they are.

        The Molecules

The molecules

inside my nervous system

dance,

and that dance is me

and what I have to contribute

to the universal soul.

In three weeks

all the molecules

in my nervous system

will be different ones,

the half-lives of molecules

being what they are,

but the dance

will be the same,

only incorporating three more weeks

of experiences.

      Sex and the Occult

I attended a séance once

when I was twenty years old,

having the day before

had sex with the young woman

who was acting the medium.

The séance, of course,

was a load of crap,

and I never had sex with her again.

A couple of years later

I had, for a few months,

the fortune to be the toy boy

of an ex-nun more than twice my age.

She paid some big-woo Hollywood astrologer

an obscene amount of money

to do my chart.

Its relation to reality

was on-target somewhat less often

than if its pronouncements,

which were mostly vague, anyway,

had been made completely at random.

        The Luck of the Draw

I can’t respect the intellect

of people who confidently assert

that there’s no such thing as luck,

luck being the unforeseen

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control.

Even attempts to control events,

being the cumulative

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control,

are really the result of luck as well.

The ludicrous fantasy

that things have been intended,

or were Meant To Be,

can be amusing at times,

but taken seriously is stupid and ugly –

something for stupid and ugly people.

       Sceptical Agnosticism & the Soul

I consider myself to be agnostic rather than atheist,

although the concept of the abrahamic god

is clearly ridiculous and pathetically childish,

in addition to being contradictory, anthropocentric,

contrary to empirical reality, and just plain ugly.

My problem with mainstream atheism

is its uncritical dismissal of the concept of the soul,

which seems to me to be an abandoning of scepticism.

Sure, it’s possible, even likely,

that when the circulatory system

stops feeding oxygen to the nervous system

that the energy in the nervous system

simply converts into potential energy

and loses all its data patterns.

It seems to me, however, that it’s also possible

that the nervous system’s patterned energy –

which could possibly exist as electromagnetic waves;

no one knows for certain –

could escape into the atmosphere, or even space,

retaining some of its data.

We don’t have the technology to test this hypothesis.

We can’t see television or wireless broadband

or other types of electronic waves

as they travel through the air

without the appropriate instruments, either,

and neuroscience technology is still in its infancy,

basically just tracking the flow of blood in the brain.

It seems like a maybe-maybe-not situation to me.

      Dream Magic

Air like dream magic

bloats the pale twilight

cool winds make people

think about gods.

I stay in my unit

where the air’s more consistent

and my loneliness seems

less acute but more hard.

You said that you’d see me

when I needed that and also

knew, as you did too,

that you were most unlikely

to return.

Despite the dream magic,

I know that the gods

are people’s creations,

like flower arrangements

and marzipan-frosted cakes,

but rarely so benign.

The night’s darkness softly closes

over the innocence of dusk,

caressing daylight’s hardness,

hiding banalities;

the raucousness from elsewhere

in the suburb and city

stirs up the spirits

in their godlike nastiness,

then subsides into the

air like dream magic.