Protecting My Little Brother

My brother was born in late 1960.  I was nearly three and don’t remember the day he came home.  What I do remember is how much I loved him.  I adored him.  I wanted to play with him, hold him, and protect him.  He was darling and handsome.  Right away, I thought he was cuter than I was.  That didn’t matter, because he was so wonderful.

As he grew, he collected matchbox cars and shared them with me. We played with the cars and our basic Lego blocks.  My grandparents owned and lived behind a gas station.  In our Lego towns, we’d pull up to the gas station, “Hello, Joe.  Fill’r up.”  I thought my brother had the coolest toys.  A wooden Playskool train set, Tinker toys, and an erector set.

He slept in his white briefs and tee shirts.  He’d get cold at night.  I’d find him on the floor in the hall in the dark curled up in front of the furnace.  We got bunk beds.  We’d rub each other’s backs at night.  I quickly learned he had to rub my back first otherwise he’d fall asleep when I rubbed his.

I was on the top bunk.  I’d reach my hand down.  We’d hold hands and squeeze three times for “I Love You.”

As we got older and our father got more violent, I had a great deal of pain about not being able to protect him.  My father would spank or beat him for some real or imagined indiscretion and he would cry and cry.  It made me so sad.  I would rather have been beaten than him.  When it was my turn, I was beaten longer than him because I wouldn’t cry.

I remember a particular incident when Zack and I were playing in our bedroom and then somehow started yelling at each other.  My father stormed in and yelled, “Okay, who started it?”  Zack and I looked at each other.  We didn’t have a clue who started it.  So, my father beat us both with a belt and told us to sit on the couch until the one who started it confessed.  Whereupon, that one would be beaten again.

I could sit on that couch forever, but my little brother was three years younger.  The pressure was too great.  Finally, he confessed to starting it just to get it over with.  I didn’t think it was true.  My father beat my brother again and then came to me and said, “You know why I had to do that.”  I looked at him in stark fear.  I didn’t have a fucking clue why he had to do that.  I didn’t think he had to do anything other than to tell us to pipe down because we were disturbing him.  I didn’t say anything because I was too afraid.  I numbly nodded my head forcing myself to say, “Yes.”

Life loped along with intermittent beatings.  My brother fell and got stitches in his head.  I fell and got stitches in my head…three times.  I’m pretty sure these were caused by my father a few times.  I don’t know how many times Zack got stitches.  I can really remember only one time and another when he fell on a playground.

My brother loved to take things apart.  He broke things which caused my mother to yell at him.  He could also just be standing by a bookshelf of plates and one or two would jump off the shelf and break.  I never even saw him move.  I have no idea why we even had plates on shelves below counter height.

He was also in love with scotch tape.  He believed anything could be fixed with scotch tape.  It was everywhere but we never ran out.  My mother understood the importance of having tape on hand.  My mother and I would find things covered in scotch tape as my brother tried to fix them.

I spent long hours sitting at the dinner table with my brother cleaning our plates.  It was my parents’ rule.  It didn’t matter how long it took.  I remember sitting in the dining room staring at our plates for two hours craning our necks to see what my parents were watching on TV in the living room.  We moved the Lima beans and frozen peas around our plates until somehow, someway there was nothing left.

One day, my mother did the laundry and my brother’s pants had a hole in the pocket.  She asked him how the hole got there.  He replied, “The cat ate my pocket.”  

“Why did the cat eat your pocket?”  He didn’t know.  “Okay, what was in the pocket?”  

“Some liver from dinner a couple nights ago.”

“Oh, so that’s how you cleaned your plate.”  

“I guess so.”  I was really annoyed that my brother’s pants had pockets and mine didn’t.

I was hard on my brother.  I thought I was his boss and assigned tormentor.  I couldn’t resist scaring him outdoors in dark summer evenings, sneaking up behind him.  “Boo!”

“Ahhhh!  Don’t do that or I’m going in the house.”

“I won’t.  I won’t do it again.”  I couldn’t help myself finding myself sneaking behind him again.  “Boo!”

“Ahhhh!  I’m going in the house!”

“No, no.  I won’t do it again.”  But, then I would.  I couldn’t control myself.  I was channeling Lucy and the football with Charlie Brown. 

He and I would sleep outside in make-shift tents.  First in one place and then another.  Sleeping in our too thin flannel sleeping bags and cuddling up together for warmth.  We would look at the stars and tell each other fantastic stories.  He was my true pal.

We would work together on my treehouse.  Sadly, I would yell at him if he brought the wrong piece of wood or didn’t work up to my standards.  I was the captain and he was my first mate.  

He was always willing to go along with my plan no matter how idiotic.  Once, I had him hold a bulls eye on his chest so I could practice with my bow and arrow that my grandpa had made me.  I missed the bulls eye and hit him with a sharpened arrow on his forehead right between the eyes.  Being a genius, it had never occurred to me that I could miss.  He cried.  “Don’t cry,” I pleaded knowing my mother would hear.

My mother came, took one look at the set up, and snapped my bow and arrows in half over her knee.  “Don’t you ever do that again!” She yelled.  

In my own defense, I can only say I learned something from that experience even if it’s just:  Sometimes, you miss.

It seemed to me that my dad was always disappointed in my brother.  My brother couldn’t throw a ball.  He wasn’t into sports.  He wasn’t rough and tough.  He cried easily and had a clown doll that he loved desperately.  I returned that clown doll to him a few years ago.  When we were little, my mother had put it in the washer and dryer.  The clown’s feet came apart.  My mom sewed on big red and white striped feet.  It still had those feet.

My father was an alcoholic who spent a lot of time in bars.  Eventually, he began to come home less and less.  My mother had a good sense of humor and played with me and Zack.  She had a great imagination and wasn’t afraid of being silly.  We’d go to a wooded park with a road through it and slowly drive with the top down on her old Cadillac.  We’d sit on the back and pretend we were waving to the parade crowds.

We’d go to the new marina in Des Moines and look at the boats and play spy in the evening.  Darting from street lamp to street lamp, I would hum the music to the Pink Panther.

My mother became increasingly sad with my dad’s absences.  She required more and more support and comfort from me.  My brother discovered the men at the fire station just behind our house.  The men took him in as big brothers.  He once brought home a poster with Snoopy on it that said, “Kids don’t play with matches.”  The firefighters had written in marker adding, “They have lighters.”

I was glad he became the mascot of the fire station. Unfortunately, I was left with my mother which proved intolerable by age 12.  By 14, I couldn’t live with her anymore and ran away.

I felt really, really bad for leaving my brother.  I could only hope that the firefighters would help him get through.  I still feel bad for leaving him with her, partly because, it wasn’t the last time.

My brother bounced between my mother in Des Moines and my father in Yakima.  At one point, my parents had him live with friends in West Seattle.  I wasn’t clear why.  I was living with my grandparents who had taken me in after I left Western State Hospital at 14.

My mother had always dressed us in white.  My brother had white pants.  With the family in West Seattle, he told me he was beat up by the other kids weekly for wearing those damn white pants.  My gentle little brother toughened up and learned how to take care of himself.  I couldn’t protect him.

He told me that living with my father and his second wife wasn’t any better.  They both drank all day, every day.  He told me that one night after their twins were born my father came home drunk after 2 in the morning.  Wanda was so angry with him that she met him at the door with a knife and attacked him.  He defended himself, but she knocked him down.  They were on the floor.  She had the knife and he was still trying to disarm her.  After about 30 minutes of her shouting, “I’m gonna kill you, Bob!”  Zack called the police, reporting it as a domestic incident, because he was frightened.  Wanda figured it was him that called.  Things were never the same with her, and he left shortly after.

After I graduated high school and was living in Des Moines, my 16 year old brother came to live with me.  He had bought an old Ford galaxy, was going to high school, and delivered papers early each morning.  While I had a partner, Elizabeth, living with us, I could support him.  I wanted to support him.  I wanted to be the one stable person in his life.  I wanted to be there for him.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t very stable myself.

I worked as a typist in downtown Seattle for Aetna Insurance.  I road the bus into town every day working 40 hours a week.  My take home pay was just under $400 a month.  Our two bedroom apartment was $200 a month.  In the fall of 1977, Elizabeth moved to Olympia to go to school at The Evergreen State College.  It was just Zack and I.  I didn’t want him to have to work.  Of course, he did work at a store up on Highway 99, now International Boulevard.  Still, we didn’t have enough money.

With Elizabeth gone, I got increasingly depressed and more dissociated.  My father had never paid child support for either of us.  My grandparents had supported me from 14 to 18 with nothing from either parent.  I was determined to ask my father to help me support Zack.  Zack got my dad on the phone.  I asked my dad if he would send me money to help care for Zack.  My father, the violent bastard, said, “You don’t really need any money,” with this deadly certainty.

There was a pregnant pause.  This was the same man who had said to me after beating us for no reason, “You know why I had to do that.”  Some primitive part of me. Some fundamental part of me just couldn’t say, “Yes, I do damnit.”  So, I meekly said, “No... I don’t.”  I felt as though I had failed a profound test when I wasn’t able to stand up to my father.  I felt ashamed in the most awful way.

It wasn’t many more months before I told my brother I couldn’t stay with him in Des Moines.  I was moving to Olympia to be with Elizabeth.  My brother at 16 went to live with my grandparents.  I was disappointed in myself, but I knew he would be fed, clothed, and safe.  I had to say good-bye a second time when I still couldn’t protect him.

After my brother graduated high school at 18, he lived with my mother and her second husband in Olympia for awhile.  He also lived with my father, his two younger twin children, his third wife, and her two young children in Yakima for several years.  Zack worked in the produce business with dad.  When my dad quit working for Associated Grocers in Yakima and moved to Kent, my brother moved with him.  He worked with him in a produce company and then decided to go to a technical school.  My grandparents paid for his two years of technical school.

When he graduated in computer tech, he moved away from my dad.  He got roommates and began to live his own life.  By now, my brother is a self educated engineer for a major tech company.  He’s married and had two kids.  Both were both after my father’s death.  From my viewpoint, he is a good father and husband.  He has a place with five acres that he’s virtually rebuilt.  He has foresworn alcohol.

He told me, “I go from my cushy home in my cushy car to my cushy job.”

He seems happy.  I love his kids.  For awhile, he rebuilt old clocks.  Now, he explores activities and learning with his kids.  They built Lego robots and now many other electronic things.  He went to counseling when things came up about being a father.  He makes triple the annual salary I do.  I’m happy for him.  

At times, my brother and I have discussed our commitment to not pass the abuse from our parents down to our kids.  It is hard to do things differently than how we were raised.  We both make mistakes.  That’s the nature of being parents.  I feel confident that neither of us beats our kids nor would ever take a belt to them.

I know I wasn’t responsible for my brother though I wished so bad I could protect him.  I still cry as I write these words.  My brother has survived and like me has come out on top.  He has a stable home, a good career, and protects his kids.  I wish that all the little children could grow up and do that.  We can only take care of one little kid at a time.  All of us have to start with ourselves.  And pass it on.

L’Chaim.

Joceile

11.11.18

[Picture:  My brother at 11 in 1972.] 

 

Night Monsters

The walk-in closet was a nightmare. I was never able to make peace with it. In my mind, I can walk into it and look. On the left is a long rod with hung clothes. In the back are old things, maybe some of Grandma Teresa’s things. On the right are large plywood shelves with big sliding doors. Eight feet by six feet. I mostly remember shelves with toys and games. The closet held a lot of stuff.

My clothes must have hung nearest the opening. I don’t have a clear picture of them. Zack’s clothes were in a little “shif and robe.”  I had a dresser. I don’t remember that well either except for training bras and the obnoxious menstrual pad belt that I was dreading using at 12. 

Before my brother was born and when he was still in a crib, I had the small bedroom.  My parents had the large bedroom.  I was three when Zack was born.  I don’t remember being afraid in the small bedroom except once when I was sure I saw an alligator go under my bed.  My dad came in and looked under the bed.  He assured me there was no alligator.  Not completely reassured, I got back in bed.  My feet were up.  I didn’t think alligators could climb so I went to sleep.

After my brother got old enough to sleep in his own bed, my parents moved Zack and I into the big bedroom and they took the small one.  The bedrooms were at opposite ends of the house.  Zack and I had our own beds along walls across from each other.  We had an old oil furnace with one fan that blew in the living room.  Consequently, the bedrooms were cold.  We each had an electric blanket that laid on top of our beds.

I think I was five.  I hadn’t started kindergarten.  With a December birthday, I had to wait until I was almost six.  I had long blond hair with ringlets down my back.  I woke up in the middle of the night because my eyes were burning.  I got out of bed in my nightgown and started for my parents’ room.  As I got near the foot of the bed, I saw a glowing orange oval on the bed. I reached out to touch it. My handed hovered near. I felt nothing but thought better of actually touching it. I just stared at it.  I’d never seen anything like it.

I made my way to my parents’ room and my mom.  I told her my eyes were burning.  She sat up.  As she tells it, she thought, “Her eyes are burning.  Why would they be burning?”  Then, she smelled the smoke.  “LeRoy!”

My mom says she and my dad rushed in the bedroom as my bed started to flame.  As they entered, Zack came out between them.  Dad went to my bed to douse the fire while mom went to the opposite side and opened the windows.  Dad carried the blanket outside smoldering.  I remember there was discussion about whether they needed to call the fire department which was behind our house and decided it wasn’t needed.  Mom made up the fold out couch in the living room for Zack and I.  She says we were all back in bed ten minutes later.  She acted as if it reflected our response and adaptation skills as a family.  I thought it only reflected our ability to ignore a scary event.

Over the years, I heard her talk about what might have happened had the fire caught my hair.  We still slept with electric blankets.  After hearing the story, people wondered why I still slept with one.  I believed the electric blanket had its chance to get me.  I woke up.  If it didn’t get me then, I didn’t think it ever would.  An electric blanket wasn’t the only dangerous thing in my house.

*******

At night, the large black opening of the closet haunted me. It had no door and was adjacent to the bedroom door to the rest of the house. Midway inside was a bare bulb with a hanging string to pull for lighting. Entry into the closet was required to turn on the light. I could not stand at the opening to turn on the light to confirm no monsters were present. I was always sure monsters were there at night. 

My earliest memory of the closet was awakening at night to see a man walk out of it. I was terrified and watched in horror as he came closer and closer and still closer to my bed.  I lay petrified watching him move nearer.  I stared at him as he bent over me.  Just as he stretched his hands out to grab my throat, I squeezed my eyes shut.  I didn’t feel his hands.  I waited with my eyes closed.  When I opened them, he was gone.  I breathed in relief.  My fear of that closet never ended.

I’m sure I told the story to my mom or friends at some point.  I never saw that man come out of the closet again.  I told myself if I saw him to just close my eyes to make him disappear.  I wasn’t put to the test but I was vigilant.

When I was eight, my parents bought bunk beds for Zack and I.  The bunk beds were against the wall under the windows with light sheer curtains my mom made.  A play area was created where my bed had been.  I had the top bunk.  My parents were sticklers for early bedtimes.  We got into bed at 7:30.  In the summer, I remember telling my mother I couldn’t sleep because it was light out.  She said, “Just lay there.  It’s still resting even if you’re not sleeping.”  I didn’t think much of that plan.

My brother and I loved each other dearly.  I dangled my hand over the side of the bed.  He reached up to hold hands.  We had a secret code.  I would squeeze three times for I-Love-You.  He would squeeze three times back, I-Love-You.  We did it as much and as often as we wanted.  

We two were finding our way in a sea of fright listening to my father come home drunk, arguing with my mother.  We had our share of beatings with my father’s belt.  Between us, we had five head injuries requiring stitches.  Three happened at home.  I don’t have an explanation for why or how they happened.  A doctor lived behind us with a clinic.  My mom thought he was only good for emergency visits.  He stitched up our heads without asking questions.

When we were young and my mom was waiting for my dad to come home, she’d play the piano.  It was in the hallway between our bedroom and the furnace.  I loved hearing her play hit tunes from the 40s.  “When the deep purple falls over misty garden walls...”  I couldn’t hear it enough.  Hearing her play was comforting.  She stopped playing as the conflicts with my dad enveloped our lives.  Mom didn’t have the patience to teach me to play though she tried.  She said we couldn’t afford lessons.  It was a sad loss for me with my long fingers.

My brother and I were big fort builders using dining room chairs, sheets, and blankets.  One time, we built the fort in the walk-in closet.  It filled the closet.  There was a pathway through the chair legs to a space at the end of the closet.  We packed in our sleeping bags and decided to sleep in there.  That night, Zack changed his mind and slept in his bed.  I braved the closet.  I liked the little secret place in the back.  However that night, the secret place did not feel safe.  I couldn’t completely wake up but I spent the night wriggling in my sleeping bag working to get out.  The passage way was full of twists and turns.  I wasn’t awake enough to escape.  All through the night I worked to get out of the closet.  I vowed, never again.

In the summer after fourth grade, my father finally let us have a dog. Poor neighbors several blocks away had puppies. We picked a black male. Zack and mom named him Snoopy. The three of us had asked dad for a dog for years. I was so excited. I slept on the floor in my sleeping bag with Snoopy. My mom kept reminding me that come September I would have to sleep in my bed without Snoopy. I wish she would have explained the corollary to that. I was too young to make the connection myself. 

Dogs weren’t allowed on beds. I didn’t understand that or maybe I didn’t want to.  In any case come September, Snoopy and I were both rudely awakened again and again and again.  After I went to bed, Snoopy would quietly, silently crawl up on the foot of the bed to sleep with my brother because he was in the bottom bunk.  My father would come in the middle of the night hitting Snoopy because he was on the bed.  No amount of imploring Snoopy to not do that by Zack and I made any difference.  No one implored, asked, or pleaded with my father not to do anything.  That wasn’t an option.

Unfortunately, the same thing happened at my grandparents’ beach house on the weekends.  My grandfather used a rolled up newspaper.  The effect on me was the same from sleeping to wide awake watching my dog get hit or harassed because I had taught him to sleep with me.  Helplessness, horror, and shame were the watchwords.  It was all my fault.  My father never mentioned it.  My grandpa told me he found the dog on my bed in the morning as if somehow I might have missed it.  (The full Snoopy story is here:  https://joceile7.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-underdogs.html.)

*******

The nightmares bother me the most. It’s not the night per se. I’ve walked almost everywhere at night. I’m not afraid of hardly anything outside. I’ve walked alone in places I wasn’t supposed to be safe. I can count on one hand the times I’ve been afraid walking at night. It’s in the house that scares me. It’s what can happen in the house that scares me. It’s what can happen in my bed. It’s the place that was never safe growing up. The universally unsafe bed where I slept. 

“Fuck you, LeRoy, and Dean, and Randy, and Leslie. Fuck you all for this!”

Pain comes late at night with no apparent source. I feel disquiet, uneasy as if something’s terribly wrong but I don’t know what it is. At nine at night, I feel fine. By 10:30, I’m uncomfortable. In an effort to delay the dragon, I write. It can be an intense reflection or a simple memory as long as I’m externalizing. The externalizing buys me time with a dose of comfort with those youngsters inside afraid of the monsters. 

After decades of introspection, understanding, and healing, my knowing the intellectual truth of the problem does not diminish the upset. I no longer feel powerless over dissociating into a trapped angry person without limits on good behavior. I still sit with this wrongness that appears as the evening turns late. 

I avoid the triggers of upsetting movies, television, books, and articles. There is absolutely nothing I can do about the earth’s rotation. I’m 63 years old. I haven’t lived with my father since I was 14. Yet, the programming of childhood trauma persists. I had no intention of writing about this at 9:00, 9:30, or even 10:00. At 10:20, the creeping feeling of something wrong began. 

Another way to combat it is to feel the rage. As a child, rage was a dangerous emotion.  I was highly attuned to the compliance demanded by my father. Any slight, real or imagined, was grounds for punishment. Worse was not being able to say two profound words:  No and Stop. 

I know this disquiet is wanting to avoid bed and sleep. In my house, my exhausted mother slept. My prowling father didn’t. He didn’t need much sleep just as he didn’t need much food. Predators feast on something else. They take energy from sucking power from others. I don’t know what neuro-chemical process is involved. I just know it’s potent. 

I laid in my bed afraid. If I was awake, I could hear him coming. If I was asleep, I awoke to invasion. It’s hard to say why hearing him coming was better. Maybe because I could prepare my mind and cease to exist. “I’m dead. I feel nothing. I’m dead... I’m not here. I don’t exist. I don’t have a body. There is no touch. I feel nothing.”  By self-hypnosis, I made myself numb. Pinch me, bend my arm hard, crush me with hands tough like a vice. I don’t feel it. I have no reaction. I Am Nothing. 

In my mind, I devolved into space. I went to a place between the molecules. I did not exist on this earth or any other. I was the space between. A tiny speck. I could not be found because I did not exist. 

If I awoke to him already grasping me, I had no time to prepare. The struggle to cease to be without warning caused me to feel instant, stark terror before I could force myself to disappear. It was much better to sleep lightly to awaken at the slightest stirring of air to know he was coming. His approach wasn’t loud. He was a hunter. He knew how to be quiet. My mother and brother were sound sleepers. I hated them for that.  It was just me and him in an existential battle. He proving his mastery. Me proving I did not exist.

This is where the rage lives. Master proving again and again that I have no agency over my own body. Slave proving again and again that it doesn’t matter. This is where the recovery is. Understanding that I matter. Believing that I matter even as I continue to age, running headlong into that time when I will cease to exist. This is the ultimate defilement. That I should work so hard to be alive and well even as I get old and prepare to die. Both are true. I am running passionately into the joy of being alive with the certain knowledge that I have no power over when my life will end. This is the crime of violation. I should never have to had to work so hard simply to know I’m alive. 

It’s 11:20. I am angry. This man and his brethren have caused me a lifetime of struggle merely for the right to feel my body.  Countless hours struggling with numbness and paralysis of my legs because I was trained not to feel.  Working to feel my body with it’s normal aches and pains so I can feel joy.  If I could dig him up and kill him again, I surely would.  The fact that men like him still roam the planet without penalty or accountability feeds my rage.  I can’t let my rage make me impotent in my life.  I have to feel the rage.  Feel the wrongness, the craziness, the madness of those who derive power from enslaving those with less physical and economic power.  

I am playing the long game.  I don’t know what happens when I die.  I will die with a smile on my face.  I got here on my own, Dad.  You didn’t win.  I have more power than you because I’m here and well.  I have more passion in my little finger than you had in your entire life.  You were the enslaved.  You chose to do what you were taught without questioning. Still, if I could dig you up and kill you again, I would.  You are the one who couldn’t feel.  

I rise.  I stand tall.  I walk.  I see the beauty in the land.  I see the beauty in the mirror.  I am the protector.  I am angry.  I’m alive.

It’s 11:55.  Midnight nears.  I am safe though no closer to sleep than I was hours ago.  It will come as surely as dawn breaks this struggling tradition.  A life without sleep is unsustainable.  A life with the wrong kind of passion is just as bad.  Perhaps this is why my dreams are so vivid.  Passionate sleep is my only option.  In my dreams, the sun is bright on many waters.  I visit those I love.  Love has never been lost for me.  It can’t be taken.  My heart is mine.

L’Chaim.

Joceile

2.8.21

[Picture:  The perfect family.  LeRoy, Zack, Me, JoAnn. Circa 1962]