“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.” My Uncle Brett stands in front of me and soaks me in. Drink in hand, he hangs like a marionette under the cheap chandelier in the rec room.
“Save it,” I say. “You don’t care.”
************************************************
My father had planned the whole thing: booking the room; catering it himself with lunch meat, potato salad and beer; and inviting anyone who knew Mary. That included family from as far west as Seattle, as far east as Massachusetts and as far south as Tennessee. And Uncle Brett.
I was in charge of selecting the music. My father asked me to bring “some of that jazz stuff” I have “so damn much of” to play as peaceful, background music. I turned to my 1,200 plus collection of compact discs, cassette tapes and records and wondered if John Coltrane would have been able to select the most apropos of his many splendid recordings. I selected a mellow Cuban jazz album, a soft piano recording and some new age thing that had snuck its way onto my shelf.
And that was all I had to do, except read the same bible passage that I had read in Seattle, when we had sent Aunt Mary off to the hereafter for the first time.
The first time, I could barely stop myself from breaking down as I sat there in a pew three thousand miles from home in front of strangers who wouldn’t remember me in a month’s time.
For the memorial service six months later, the one that was planned in advance so that everyone could clear their schedule for a convenient mourning, I found it hard to pick up on that frequency of emotion. Perhaps the difficulty was caused by the monsignor who couldn’t remember Mary’s name without checking his notes. Maybe it was my grandfather talking about every irrelevant thing that popped into his mind, from World War II stories to what he had for breakfast that day.
Or maybe it was the lurking presence of Uncle Brett returning to the fold after years of waltzing Matilda around the country. His face was creased with lines, his hair a black-gray scouring pad, his fingernails yellow, his clothing suspiciously neat.
Uncle Tom cried during the eulogy. He was the youngest of the five children, Mary the oldest. There was never a clearer case of an older sibling-younger sibling/parent-child relationship. Tom had gained fifty pounds since learning that Mary’s tumor was inoperable. I expected the trend to continue long past the memorial.
My father was the second oldest, my aunt Patricia the second youngest. She cries at movies, in church, the DMV, when she sees children, when she sees someone she hasn’t seen in a long time and when she leaves them. Whenever she talks to me she seems very sincere.
Uncle Brett was the middle child.
*************************************************
“Tomato juice?”
“Yup,” I say. “Keeps my girlish figure.”
“Smart ass. What are you up to in Massachusetts? Still writing?”
“Yes.”
“What are you writing? Can I read something?”
“Um … sure.”
He is apparently sober. It seems that the drink in his hand is ice water. No one could guzzle iced rum, vodka or gin like that, could they?
He makes it official. He asks if he has ever wronged me personally. Step nine.
I say, “That’s what I’m writing my book about.”
“Seriously, tell me.”
There is silence. The piano music I selected is playing, an avant-garde piece that cuts through the room like spilled kitchen knives. Someone says, “Who picked this garbage?”
*************************************************
I once dated a girl who informed me that I only liked listening to the depressing songs in any given selection of music. This isn’t true. It couldn’t possibly be. Listening only to the downbeat tunes from my massive collection would result in homicide or suicide. Or alcoholism.
My favorite song is “Love Shack” by the B-52s. So there.
**************************************************
Uncle Brett once told my cousins and me a story about a girl he dated in THE SIXTIES who looked like Jane Fonda. He might have actually tried to claim she was Jane Fonda had it been the case that:
- He was more drunk
- We were naive enough to buy it and had appreciated the significance of dating such a celebrity
- We gave a shit about this story in the first place
Brett told us this during a Fourth of July celebration in the Poconos. It was 1994 and he was telling us a story that was at least 25 years old, had nothing to do with us and served only to intimidate. The supposed facts were that he and Jane Fonda-but-not had a date at a revolving restaurant in the top of a tower overlooking Niagara Falls. Then he insinuated that he had sex with her.
During the story, a spectacular fireworks display was erupting behind him. The pyrotechnics were exploding over a lake, the reflection illuminating the night as other vacationers salted the rim of the basin. I had the feeling that I was – if only for a brief moment – part of what was happening.
But Uncle Brett’s stories nagged at me persistently and it wasn’t long before the spectacular man-made aurora borealis took a backstage to my relative’s stories about THE SIXTIES.
************************************************
He’s still waiting for a response to his step nine question. “Well?”
It isn’t fair, I think. For years Brett ruined holidays and special events with his drunken escapades. Now he’s doing the same thing without a drink in his hand.
I still don’t say anything.
************************************************
Bear with this horrible analogy: In the solar system, my aunt Mary would be Mercury – very active, opinionated, feisty, the first. My father is Earth – the seemingly most important, successful and productive compared to his siblings. Aunt Patricia is Saturn — on the outskirts of everything and oddly fascinating. Why did she move so far away, yet cries when she has to leave?
Tom, the youngest, is like Pluto, and like that celestial body’s downgrading from planet to ice chunk, none of us would be shocked to learn that Tom is not in fact a member of the family, but a wayward, hairless Sasquatch. But, like Pluto, no one hates him for being simpler than the rest. Everybody loves Uncle Tom.
Uncle Brett is Mars. He is a lesser man than my father, like Mars is a lesser version of Earth in some respects.
The analogy is really straining at this point. They aren’t made to work well.
Because Brett grew up the younger brother of my father, he defined himself differently to set himself apart. In early childhood they were remarkably alike, but later on not so much. My father has always been a hard worker; Brett has been on disability for no good reason for over twenty years. I think they hate each other but won’t say so.
Brett immediately targets me at these gatherings to confront my father’s hatred for him through me. I only figured this out halfway through the memorial luncheon, the first time Brett didn’t cross a room solely for the purpose of giving me a heaping pile of shit.
Maybe he hoped to sway my opinion of him. Perhaps I would eventually turn on my father and defend a lazy alcoholic.
So that makes me the Moon, and Mars is trying to exert its gravitation pull on me to lure me away from Earth.
Not working.
************************************************
When I was young, we used to have both sides of the family over for Christmas. That was a happy time, when I was too preoccupied with presents and dessert to think about anything else. My cousins and I would play for hours. There were always temper tantrums when they had to leave at the end of the afternoon.
I used to look at my room as a work space and my toys as the building blocks for potential inventions. A laser gun was reconfigured into a doorbell. A string attached to the bedroom door would turn on the light switch as soon as the door was opened. String, tape, pulleys and water balloons were used to assemble a device that kept out intruders.
Everyone thought it was so cute. My mother still mentions this character trait to me now, as if she has preserved a pre-pubescent perfect child for her memories. I will mention something from the present that might make her uncomfortable – the reality that I meet women and take them home once and maybe see them for a while or maybe never again – and within ten minutes she will say, “Remember when you used to . . .”
The last time I made something out of tape, string, rubber bands, toys and the like was 1988. I was twelve. I had my younger cousins enthralled with a network of noise-making gadgets interconnected with string needing only a trigger to set off the entire mess.
That was when a drunken Uncle Brett stuck his head into my room and said, “So this is what you do when you’re not playing with yourself.”
***********************************************
My grandfather is done eating a small slice of the cake that my father purchased for the memorial. He gets up from the lone comfortable dining chair that my father provided for him to sit on. His prostate is bothering him, he says. “This damned chair …”
Gramps makes his way to the foyer. I see him coming from over Uncle Brett’s shoulder.
My uncle turns and says, “There he is. How you holdin’ up, dad?”
“Bretty-Brett-Brett. Oh, your old dad is miserable. Couldn’t they pick a better day for this?”
“I know!”
Part of the purpose for this interaction is to push off grief for another day, the way another drink or another cigarette would. Another part entails Brett buttering up Gramps so that later he can ask for some money. There are other parts, I’m sure, of which I am unaware, similar to the way my father and Uncle Brett are two sides of a coin, each one providing precisely what the other lacks.
I assume this is the reason why my grandfather says, “You’re the real hero of the day, Bretty. Murph, did he tell you about what he did?”
He means me. I nod. He’s referencing the fact that this prodigal son has come back for good and hasn’t touched a drop in two months.
“Damn hero,” I say.
The conversation is cut short because my father, who organized the entire event, is going to make something of a keynote speech.
************************************************
One time, when I was three years old, Uncle Brett swept through town and insisted on taking Little Murph out to McDonald’s. According to what I’ve been told, I ate so slowly that Brett vowed to never take me anywhere again. There, over cold French fries, he decided I was a brat. This makes it clear to me that he started it. He has since tried to claim that we were once buddies and that I turned on him at some point.
My mother tells me the French fry story every time I call my uncle an asshole.
************************************************
My father is speaking from the heart about his sister, Mary. She meant a lot to him, and he is having trouble getting through his speech. He wants everyone to know how much Mary changed people’s lives, how she would fight any injustice and how she hoped we would all follow in her footsteps. Above all else, she had wanted the family to always stick together.
I find it hard to concentrate because I am staring over at Brett, wondering what he is thinking. Is he sad? Is he waiting for this moment to be over so that he can grieve alone?
Is he going to run back to the bottle?
I am jolted out of my reverie by silence. My father is choked up and can’t continue. Aunt Patricia and Uncle Tom walk over and put their arms around him. Uncle Brett also walks over and puts his arms around them. There is something going on that no one else in the room is privy too, certainly not distant cousins and in-laws, and clearly not I. My grandfather is also shut out, but if he never saw this sibling camaraderie before then he wasn’t paying attention.
***********************************************
Even though he is a hairless Sasquatch, Uncle Tom was able to find a woman to marry him. Her name is Aunt Fern, a saint with a big voice and a boisterous personality.
I met her at her father’s house in 1991 at a party intended for everyone in both families to get to know each other. I played outside with her son from another marriage, Bobby, while the adults talked.
Later that night, we all played Scattergories. If I remember correctly, that’s the game where a letter is picked and each team must come up with a list of people, places or things that begin with that letter. Any two teams that select the same word don’t receive points for that entry, so the more clever the word choice the better.
I don’t remember who won.
I don’t remember the layout of the house, the color of the paint in the living room or the car Aunt Fern drove at the time. I don’t remember Aunt Fern’s sister at all, but apparently she was there. I don’t remember meeting Fern’s father, who passed away shortly after that party.
I do remember that during the game Uncle Brett stood up to argue every time he missed a point. To insist that “Jermano” is a type of dog. That there shouldn’t be a time limit. To demand a restart. For a new partner.
By the end of the night, all of the air had been sucked out of the room.
**********************************************
I could go on and on and on and on. This is an old collection of slides that doesn’t quite line up properly, but the circle will be unbroken.
There are a few more things to add before it ends.
One, I really want to punch Uncle Brett in the face. I could do it and he’d hit the floor, cold. I’m not bragging, it’s just that he has wasted away to nothing. Believe it or not, THE SIXTIES were kinder to Keith Richards.
Two, I really cannot punch Brett. Ever. I would be the outcast then. The family would not forgive me. Besides, I think my father has first dibs.
Three, I acknowledge that I should just let it go.
And one more: I truly don’t hate THE SIXTIES or those who survived them. Just the ones who couldn’t move on.
**********************************************
For the first time I can recall, my uncle is talking to me and he is coherent. He isn’t soaked in booze.
“Just tell me. What’s your problem with me? What did I do?”
And then I let him have it.
Shored#Bitless 