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
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.
