Casting Off
I recently reconnected with someone I hadn’t seen in years who was a friend of my older brother Mark, from high school; Chuck. He was already working for a large corporation by the time I left school, and we had both turned hometown Cedar Rapids into our geographic midlands as we took separate North American coasts as home. Thirty years after our moves away we were pulled together again, if only for a few moments of renewal, by social networking and my older sister.
“Dan, my God, is this you?! I ran into Sally a couple of years ago in DM and she told me about Mark. One of the saddest days of my life. How are you ….”
I read this as if a message pulled from a bottle, adrift for years before settling near my path. The words had spoken deeply to me and I scratched a short reply, put it back into the vessel and threw it to the foamy, outgoing surf of my memories of Chuck and Mark. I thought if I didn’t hear from him again it wouldn’t matter because his note, brief and simple, returned me to another world and time that I retreated from. This moment was a spark carried back in the wind from a distant fire I had long ago doused in my past.
I really didn’t know Chuck that well -- he and my brother were seven years older than I and they used to pal around together. I was the deadweight brother hanging around their necks whenever they wanted to go out and have fun. Hearing the sidedoor hinges sharply squeaking from their attempted getaways, my mom would pop out of nowhere and demand, “Mark, are you boys going out? You need to take your brother with you!”
Great, on a Saturday afternoon I could be enjoying Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges, but the drawbridge chains started rolling and the moat opened up behind me – I had no choice but to follow along. oh yeah, here we go again, rolling my eyes to the back of my head. These forced tag-along outings quickly shifted from the ‘boys hanging around’, to the ‘idle tough guys ready to torment a younger twit’. It was my own damn fault for being there. They were saddled with the responsibility of watching me but they also benefitted from juicy opportunities for creative sibling torture. They had to be careful not to go too far – if you left marks or made the kid cry, you got into trouble. It was things like “open your mouth and close your eyes, and you’ll get a big surprise” (ryegrass, wads of clover, soap, carpet fuzzballs, dirt, you name it, and I always fell for it) or threats to throw me down into the bear pit at the Beaver Park Zoo, my god, the odor, or ditching me in the woods. That was their favorite one.
If we were an episode of “Leave It To Beaver”, Mark would be Eddie Haskell, and Chuck would be … Eddie Haskell – there was no Wally Cleaver; righteous, protective older brother. I kept wanting to believe they were kind-hearted, I guess they never pounded me to smithereens, and to Chuck’s credit, he sometimes offered light-hearted words for safety: “Don’t worry, Dan. Your brother’s really kidding, he’ll be back before tomorrow, just hang loose, my man,” then they’d ditch me.
They did their share of boozing as rebellious high school youths in the 60’s and like a 16 year old parolee, their driver’s license swung the iron gates open to freedom and excess. I won’t forget the next morning when Chuck slept overnight at our house after a night of partying. They’d had too many cheeseburgers along the way and he barfed several from the top bunk in Mark’s room. Imagine the splash.
And for Mark, there were the drugs; the Saturday afternoon community service. He’d had plenty of ‘issues’ about which I’d only found out later because my parents kept me in the dark, wanting to avoid the ‘drug conversation’ with their 9-year-old. I’m sure bringing up post-World War II kids in America wasn’t easier than any other time. Drugs and alcohol are never simple to deal with and even more complex when the language used to treat those problems hadn’t fully developed yet. I think my parents realized he was more than they could handle; they practiced avoidance, let him serve out his time with his community service then hoped for the best. He built a black plywood cave under the basement stairs as a quiet place to hide when he was high.
He had an active well of fresh resentment to my parents. There was some kind of behavioral infraction for which my father felt appropriate for punishment. Mark was an astonishing artist and was given oil paints regularly along with lessons. He painted The Matterhorn like Van Gogh from an encyclopedia and scenes from movie posters and it made the insides of the house smell like the pacific northwest, delicious with turpentine and linseed oil. There was one canvas in particular that he painted with glow-in-the-dark paints of the Creature From The Black Lagoon that he placed on an easel like a sentinel right around the corner from the bathroom. The blood red of the mouth was like lipstick and the pale green eyes pierced the dark like rapiers’ thrusts. It nearly caused me kidney stones because I was too afraid to get up in the middle of the night anymore.
He never let go of the evisceration he experienced when my father halted his art career - no more paints, no more lessons. It didn’t matter what he had done wrong and I don’t think he even remembered the details but it was enough to throw him into long term shock from the emotional abrasions to his ego. The punishment was not meted out to encourage time and reflection, but rather, to create a timeless, throbbing pain deep to the bone. I think Mark’s life after that was consumed with finding ways to smooth the scarring.
I recently reconnected with someone I hadn’t seen in years who was a friend of my older brother Mark, from high school; Chuck. He was already working for a large corporation by the time I left school, and we had both turned hometown Cedar Rapids into our geographic midlands as we took separate North American coasts as home. Thirty years after our moves away we were pulled together again, if only for a few moments of renewal, by social networking and my older sister.
“Dan, my God, is this you?! I ran into Sally a couple of years ago in DM and she told me about Mark. One of the saddest days of my life. How are you ….”
I read this as if a message pulled from a bottle, adrift for years before settling near my path. The words had spoken deeply to me and I scratched a short reply, put it back into the vessel and threw it to the foamy, outgoing surf of my memories of Chuck and Mark. I thought if I didn’t hear from him again it wouldn’t matter because his note, brief and simple, returned me to another world and time that I retreated from. This moment was a spark carried back in the wind from a distant fire I had long ago doused in my past.
I really didn’t know Chuck that well -- he and my brother were seven years older than I and they used to pal around together. I was the deadweight brother hanging around their necks whenever they wanted to go out and have fun. Hearing the sidedoor hinges sharply squeaking from their attempted getaways, my mom would pop out of nowhere and demand, “Mark, are you boys going out? You need to take your brother with you!”
Great, on a Saturday afternoon I could be enjoying Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges, but the drawbridge chains started rolling and the moat opened up behind me – I had no choice but to follow along. oh yeah, here we go again, rolling my eyes to the back of my head. These forced tag-along outings quickly shifted from the ‘boys hanging around’, to the ‘idle tough guys ready to torment a younger twit’. It was my own damn fault for being there. They were saddled with the responsibility of watching me but they also benefitted from juicy opportunities for creative sibling torture. They had to be careful not to go too far – if you left marks or made the kid cry, you got into trouble. It was things like “open your mouth and close your eyes, and you’ll get a big surprise” (ryegrass, wads of clover, soap, carpet fuzzballs, dirt, you name it, and I always fell for it) or threats to throw me down into the bear pit at the Beaver Park Zoo, my god, the odor, or ditching me in the woods. That was their favorite one.
If we were an episode of “Leave It To Beaver”, Mark would be Eddie Haskell, and Chuck would be … Eddie Haskell – there was no Wally Cleaver; righteous, protective older brother. I kept wanting to believe they were kind-hearted, I guess they never pounded me to smithereens, and to Chuck’s credit, he sometimes offered light-hearted words for safety: “Don’t worry, Dan. Your brother’s really kidding, he’ll be back before tomorrow, just hang loose, my man,” then they’d ditch me.
They did their share of boozing as rebellious high school youths in the 60’s and like a 16 year old parolee, their driver’s license swung the iron gates open to freedom and excess. I won’t forget the next morning when Chuck slept overnight at our house after a night of partying. They’d had too many cheeseburgers along the way and he barfed several from the top bunk in Mark’s room. Imagine the splash.
And for Mark, there were the drugs; the Saturday afternoon community service. He’d had plenty of ‘issues’ about which I’d only found out later because my parents kept me in the dark, wanting to avoid the ‘drug conversation’ with their 9-year-old. I’m sure bringing up post-World War II kids in America wasn’t easier than any other time. Drugs and alcohol are never simple to deal with and even more complex when the language used to treat those problems hadn’t fully developed yet. I think my parents realized he was more than they could handle; they practiced avoidance, let him serve out his time with his community service then hoped for the best. He built a black plywood cave under the basement stairs as a quiet place to hide when he was high.
He had an active well of fresh resentment to my parents. There was some kind of behavioral infraction for which my father felt appropriate for punishment. Mark was an astonishing artist and was given oil paints regularly along with lessons. He painted The Matterhorn like Van Gogh from an encyclopedia and scenes from movie posters and it made the insides of the house smell like the pacific northwest, delicious with turpentine and linseed oil. There was one canvas in particular that he painted with glow-in-the-dark paints of the Creature From The Black Lagoon that he placed on an easel like a sentinel right around the corner from the bathroom. The blood red of the mouth was like lipstick and the pale green eyes pierced the dark like rapiers’ thrusts. It nearly caused me kidney stones because I was too afraid to get up in the middle of the night anymore.
He never let go of the evisceration he experienced when my father halted his art career - no more paints, no more lessons. It didn’t matter what he had done wrong and I don’t think he even remembered the details but it was enough to throw him into long term shock from the emotional abrasions to his ego. The punishment was not meted out to encourage time and reflection, but rather, to create a timeless, throbbing pain deep to the bone. I think Mark’s life after that was consumed with finding ways to smooth the scarring.
No comments:
Post a Comment