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.]