(scroll down below for the riveting first four.)
Brother number two and wife number three live in her childhood home. It is a standard, 1960's era split-level suburban south Jersey house. The rooms are small and there is one bathroom. The house is showing its age but clean and cared for. The small rooms are filled with oversized furniture, there is a ladeness that permeates the house. I couldn't get to the window in my guest room, the bed was so big there was no floor space. I had to crawl over the bed. Every room is like this.
This coming from a person who owns no furniture and has no guest room to offer anyone.
The house is laden with the burden of furniture, weight, past, misfortune, and want.
After brother number two returned to work he was a goner. He was never civil again. He came home every night, sucked the life out of air itself, and chain smoked while staring at the TV. No one and no thing existed but his eternal burden. His wife was still out on disability and was good enough to entertain me the next four or five days. She drove me to Starbucks every day, something I desperately needed and was unable to coerce from anyone the first week. It turns out when you leave LA there is not a Starbucks on every corner, you actually have to drive twenty minutes. This she did for me daily, and then she toured me around historical bits and pieces nearby, and this was very satisfying. These are great little towns that have no industry and no reason to move there, sadly. If I could get a job there I could get a decent historical house for nothing, though if there were jobs to be had I wouldn't be able to afford the house.
For four or five days she toured me around and told me stories about her dysfunctional family and all her dead friends. "See that tree over there? That's where my son's friend died when he drove his car into it." There were like fifty of these stories, there were many trees, signposts and telephone poles.
One night we sat watching a made for TV movie on her favorite network, Lifetime, during which she showed me every friend on her facebook page and gave me their life stories. Around friend twenty I was certain I would not live to see friend twenty-one.
But I did, and more.
Newly diabetic brother number two, wife number three, and I went to the grocery store one day and they spent twenty minutes in the snacks aisle reading boxes of baked goods, sweets with fake sugars, item after item with the magical mix of white flour + high fructose corn syrup + sugar + sucrose + hydrogenated fats. This is the formula that's made America great. After not finding the holy grail Sugar-Free Twinkies my brother, sighing and defeated, said, "There's nothing for me to eat anymore. There's no food for me here."
Tour de family lesson number three. I will never live in my brother's basement.
It's hard because he wants me to want to be there. They tried for me. They are genuine and well-meaning people with hard lives who are doing the best they can. I cautiously approached his soul-sucking, chain-smoking, waiting-to-be-fed wall of silence one night and very gingerly asked, "Do you cook at all?" He answered No, that was yet another thing his mother never taught him how to do. All I could think was, dude, what have you been doing to help yourself the last thirty years?
And this is where it really goes wrong for me, his arrogance and his hubris.
There was a person who begat us and it went terribly wrong from there. We all carry scars to different degrees. But at some point you are a grown up, sort of, as much as you can scrape it together, and you have to make at least some decisions about next. What comes next, who will I become next, how will I proceed next, what do I do next. I accept that he was unable to do better than he did, but the privilege of need, the bitterness of need and the arrogance, at the expense of all others, of entitlement is difficult to both witness and assimilate.
But it is only a degree of myself. He is only a more exaggerated me, and being forced to witness this ugliness in this depleted vacuum ... cured me. Brother number two cured me.
Freely fling the contents of your diaper or die quietly in a van down by the river? My brother was a flinger, shameless or maybe just desperate but nonetheless. My wanting to return into the fold of family was exactly shirking the responsibility of my own diaper. But in the two weeks since I'd left Los Angeles to nuzzle the bosom of family I would see my folly, that my family doesn't actually like me too much, and there would be no nuzzling. Also, its remaining members are so much more damaged than I it served as a fun-house mirror to my own desperateness: it turned out I'd have to beat them off with a stick for a teat; the caricature of desperateness cured me.
I would return to Los Angeles happily.
Or in my case, "happily." Because all said, still I am not without my own many holes, damages, and the grand failure of resolution. But better to die in a van down by the river than fifty years too late desperately fighting for a withered teat.
chapter 3.