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.

Family Values

                        Normal?

My daddy was a helluva guy.

When I was growing up

in the late 1940s and early 1950s

he was the only GP in a small town

and did house calls, even at night.

Of course he was the town’s public-health officer

and a member of the volunteer fire department.

He also played viola in a symphony orchestra in the nearby city

and took oil-painting lessons

from an African-American artist,

who later became the first such

to break through in the art biz.

Sometimes he even had time to joke around with me,

which were maybe the best times of my life,

or watch sports with me on TV – once that became possible.

Perhaps most importantly, though,

he was my only protector

from the almost-constant

emotional and psychological abuse

that my self-centred, megalomaniacal, totally insensitive

control-freak virago of a mother directed my way,

and was even sometimes able to protect me

from my relentlessly malicious bully of an older brother,

although that bullying usually happened when he wasn’t around.

Then, when I was nine and he was 46,

he died of a heart attack.

The rest of my childhood

and my adolescence

was far from a piece of cake.

I’d have to be a dolt

to wonder why

I’m so fucked up.

                  Mumsie & Paul

My mother

was a control freak and a megalomaniac.

My mother

was totally self-absorbed and insensitive,

obsessed with obtaining

immediate ego gratification

with a cold-blooded and blindered focus.

My mother found enormous delight

in one-upping and humiliating people

and in putting people down.

My mother

was incapable of kindness.

My mother

aggressively asserted

that every one of her personal taste preferences,

however accidental, random, or whimsical,

was a universally superior value,

and that anyone who didn’t share any one of them,

or who had a preference for one she didn’t share,

was inferior and deserving of mockery and ridicule.

My mother

respected only power

and never let me have any

or even begin to think that I could.

My mother

treated me like shit.

My older brother

took after my mother

in many nasty ways,

and added a few destructive abuse techniques

of his own.

Unlike her reptilian unawareness

of anything but her immediate objectives,

he abused me with gleeful malice

and made it clear that in his opinion

what she was doing to me was hilariously funny.

         More Unavoidable Ignorance

I wonder how my daddy

perceived and conceptualised the phenomenon

of his wife being consistently and inexplicably

horrid and abusive to his innocent, adorably cute –

I have the photos –

post-toddler younger son,

and of how, despite him telling her repeatedly

to let me have peace,

she persisted in tormenting me.

Since he died young, though,

I’ll never know.

        Not Exactly Nostalgia

I learnt early,

from when I was about three onward,

that when my older male sibling –

the word brother having connotations

that don’t apply –

was developing his chops

for his a life-long malicious joy

in putting down and humiliating others

by bullying me relentlessly,

if I went to my mother for help

she would scold me

and make unfair accusations,

such as that I stayed up nights

thinking up ways to aggravate her.

After all, she bullied me relentlessly, too,

thereby indicating to her other son

that I was fair game.

   Gentle Upbringing and Finer Sentiments

It started when I was little,

the dichotomy of me and what I do.

My mother and my so-called brother

made it clear that I,

myself,

was less than shit,

but that what I did had value

if it was useful to them,

entertained them,

or made them look good.

My mother in particular

considered me to be

little more than a thing she owned,

and did so

until she dissolved into dementia.

How could I choose one

from thousands of salient examples of this?

I felt nothing,

one way or the other,

when the abusive old sheila

finally died.

         The Dorsey Brothers

It was when I was about five or six.

My older sibling

had engaged in some act

of outrageous bullying,

tormenting me,

right in front of our mother.

The maternal unit

responded by telling my crying face

that it was normal for brothers to fight,

that it had always been that way,

citing Cain and Abel –

about whom I’d heard –

and the Dorsey brothers –

about whom I hadn’t.

This, she indicated,

made it okay.

My problem with that was

that I was two years younger than he was,

which meant that our fights,

although perhaps normal,

were always

nasty experiences

for me.

Since he took enormous delight

in picking them

all I could do

was to avoid him

as much as I could.

Still do.

               Hattie’s Whorehouse

I must’ve been maybe six or seven

when my mother left my daddy.

He’d just returned home after a few days away

at a general practitioners’ convention.

I remember sitting somewhere

and listening, uncomprehending, to the shouting,

then staying well out of the way

as my mother stormed up the stairs, packed a suitcase,

then stormed back down and out the door.

My daddy explained to my older brother Paul and me

that Mommy was going to be staying in a hotel for a while.

That was okay with me.

Some time later the phone rang.

After a brief conversation

he called us to him and told us

that she’d forgotten her toothbrush

and was returning to get it,

and that when she got home we were to beg her to stay.

I remember sorta cowering at the top of the stairs

while Paul did the begging,

and of course she stayed.

I don’t recall feeling anything at all, one way or another,

except maybe confused.

Her suitcase had still been in the car.

Paul later told me, sniggering, that the fight had been about

her finding a matchbook in Daddy’s things

from a place called Hattie’s Whorehouse.

I don’t know if he made that up,

but I imagine some out-of-town indiscretion was involved.

I didn’t know what a whorehouse was then, anyway.

Forgot her toothbrush!

Yeah, right.

               The Night My Daddy Died

The night my daddy died

I was writing a skit for my Cub Scout den,

a faux radio news story

about some bullshit incident in the bloody Bible, of all things,

when I heard my mother shout, “Jess!”

and saw her run to the phone.

The night my daddy died

I kept letting people in at the front door,

which was also the door to the waiting room

of my daddy’s GP practice at the front of the house –

the ambulance people with their useless oxygen tanks,

first one doctor in a brand-new Packard luxury car

with an outside light on the side panel

between the front and back doors,

the purpose of which I couldn’t suss out,

then other doctors, and finally the undertaker.

They all acted strangely toward me

in different ways.

The night my daddy died

each time someone arrived I flipped the switch

for the light in the new sign out front

that had my daddy’s name and office hours –

until I realised that the bulb had just burnt out.

He wasn’t going to need the sign again, anyhow.

The night my daddy died

my mother thought it would be a good idea

to send me to a neighbour’s house to sleep,

but I walked back home

in my pyjamas and bare feet to my own bed,

even though it was a cold autumn night

the night my daddy died.

The night my daddy died

I lost the only protection, however intermittent,

that I had, and I needed plenty.

The night my daddy died

I hardly understood what had happened,

and had no clue that at nine-and-a-half

whatever slim chance I might have had

to interact realistically with other people

later on

was gone.

                       The Last Thing

As soon as his eyes rolled back into his head

she abruptly cut off her snarling and shouted his name,

then ran to the phone, but it was already over,

and neither the ambulance crew with their oxygen

nor every doctor who could get there

– he’d been popular amongst his fellow GPs –

could do squat except pull long faces

and mutter shit about ‘so young.’

A few days later

I heard her say over the phone,

‘The last thing he heard was my nagging voice.’

I may have been only nine and a half,

but I understood immediately and without doubt

– and I can still hear this clearly in my memory’s ear –

that her tone expressed amazement, nothing more:

no sorrow, no regret, and certainly no remorse.