My Brother The Asshole

At four years old, I had all of the qualities that mothers dream about in their daughters. I was sensitive, I loved picking flowers, and cats were my favorite animals. Unfortunately, I was a boy and, despite the haircut my mom had given me, I wasn’t even gay.

The first couple of years of my life, I spent my afternoons doing somersaults in the front yard and pondering the shapes of clouds. Most boys my age were playing with army men and fighting their friends, but I’d cry at the thought of a scraped knee. Then Chris was born. Ironically, my younger brother was the first person to force me to man up.

Chris was a turd of a kid. He was fat, mean and threw temper tantrums like they were baseballs. When you’re one year old, you aren’t too concerned with your blubber, so he ate like it was going out of style. His face was constantly covered in snot and pieces of food. As time went on, my parents grew increasingly impressed with Chris’s ability to ingest cuisine. As a result, they began holding regular hard-boiled egg eating contests (Chris vs. his previous record). He was disgusting.

From the very first time we met, it was clear that he did not like me. When my parents brought him home from the hospital, I was eager to hold my new little brother. My mom directed me,

“Sit down on the couch and we’ll let you meet him.”

I scrambled up onto the brown corduroy couch and tried to contain my excitement. When Mom placed him into my arms, I stared at his dark hair, big blue eyes and pale skin and told him that I loved him. He threw up on me. At first, I thought it was an accident. Then I got to know him.

By the time Chris was two, he was kicking my ass left and right. He’d hit me, pull my hair and was just a prick in general. I was still a pussy, so when he’d attack me, I’d start crying and run to my mom. This happened several times a day. Trouble really started when Chris entered his biting phase. Before that, my parents shrugged off the toddler punches and hair pulling I was forced to endure, but when he was leaving teeth marks on me, it became a different story.

Chris bit everything: people, animals, tables and other furniture. If something was nearby, he was going to bite it. Unfortunately for me, I was nearby a lot. I was still a pretty big wiener, so I never stood up for myself. It turned into a rather predictable routine: Chris would bite me, I’d start crying, I’d run to my mom and tell on him, and then she’d try to discipline him, but it wouldn’t work.

One day, I was having the time of my life watching Inspector Gadget

. Given my sensitive nature, I identified most closely with Penny. Chris was probably more along the lines of Dr. Claw. For the first ten minutes of the episode, I was by myself and marveled at Penny’s skills and the inspector’s gadgets. Then my mom came in.

“Cory, I’m going to make some dinner, so your brother is going to watch some television with you.”

I scooted over the cords on the couch to allow her enough room to place Chris down between the armrest and me. She set him down and made her way into the kitchen. I moved closer to him and put my arm around him to let him know that I loved him. Chris sank his teeth into my arm to let me know that he hated me.

I immediately ripped my arm away, started bawling, jumped off the couch and burst into the kitchen to tell on him.

“Mommy, Chris bit me! It hurts!”

She was tired of running through this everyday event. She grabbed me by my arm and dragged me back into the living room. Through gritted teeth, she said,

“Alright, we are not going to do this anymore. We’re going to take care of this once and for all!”

As she dragged me, I tried to keep up, but it was useless. My feet came out from under me and I began crying harder. When she made it to the couch, she slung me by my arm onto the couch next to Chris. She gave us both hard looks, then focused her attention on Chris.

“I have had enough of this. Chris, you need to stop biting people and, maybe if you know what it feels like, you’ll stop.”

She slid her gaze over to me. For some reason, I felt like I was in trouble, even though I’d just been attacked like I was a hard-boiled egg caught in the middle of one of his eating contests.

“Cory, you need to start standing up for yourself. You are going to bite Chris on the arm, just like he did to you.”

Momentarily, I stopped my crying. I was overcome with confusion. I was just the victim of an attack, now I was going to be forced to be involved in the punishment. It was like forcing a burglary victim to break into someone else’s house and steal their stuff back. I now safely assume that my mom didn’t get this idea from any parenting book.

Since I was naturally a sensitive kid, the thought of exacting physical retribution on another made me far more upset than the act of me being physically harmed, so I resumed my bawling even harder than before. With tears streaming down my face, I forced out,

“But I don’t want to bite Chris! He’s my brother!”

My mom saw the turmoil she was putting me through and she lost it. She began sobbing. I finally understood where I got my pussy ass attitude. She collected herself long enough to threaten me.

“You have to bite him or I am going to give you a spanking.”

I was even more surprised. This wasn’t something that even came close to resembling justice. I had just been attacked, and I was going to be attacked again if I refused to attack my attacker. It made no sense that me, as the victim of the crime, was going to be punished. While I was too stupid to explain what was wrong with this, I expressed it in the best way I knew how.

“But that’s not fair!”

My mom tried her best to explain to me why it was fair, but she was unsuccessful. Ultimately, my decision came down to whether or not I wanted to get spanked. Not surprisingly, I decided that not being spanked was better than being spanked, so I agreed to make Chris pay. I nodded at her to let her know I was ready.

As she faced us, Chris sat against the armrest to her left with me directly next to him on her right. She grabbed his left arm and motioned for me to bite it. I wiped away my tears and began leaning in, slowly opening my mouth, then I stopped. My natural instincts to care for my brother (even if he was a shithead) took over. I looked up at Mom,

“I don’t want to bite him.”

She did her best to look stern, but it was pretty pathetic with the tears streaming down her cheeks. Between sobs, she forced out,

“Do you…want…a spanking?”

As stated previously, I did not want a spanking. A bite on the arm was enough physical punishment for me in one day. Again, I leaned in to bite Chris as my mom held his left arm stretched out for me to bite. Somehow, we had both forgotten that Chris was a sneaky little bastard. In the time we’d spent arguing, he’d discovered a tape measure and hidden it between his right hand and the couch.

Just as my teeth were about to make contact with his skin, Chris brought out his secret weapon. With all the force he could muster, he swung his right hand, holding the tape measure, directly into my forehead. The force of the tape measure against my skull knocked me senseless. I flopped off of the couch and crumbled onto the floor. I bawled like a four-year old who’s just been clocked in the face with a tape measure. Chris peered his head off the edge of the couch and, for the first time all day, smiled at me.

Something changed in me that day. Chris was rubbing off on me. It was something he would live to regret. It wasn’t long before I was peeing in squirt guns and shooting him, tripping him for no reason and playing the stereotypical role of the asshole older brother. Sadly for me, Chris wasn’t one to give up.

I made it to six and he made it to four without either of us dying, but it wasn’t for lack of effort on either side. He was about to step up the war a notch. We were over at my great grandmother’s house for dinner when we decided to into the backyard for a game of tag with some of the neighbor kids.

The backyard was exactly what I picture when I think of an old person’s backyard. The lawn was small, covered in various garden sculptures, pots and a miniature greenhouse. The center of the lawn had a large cement birdbath that looked like something you’d buy on Ebay as a joke gift. The edge of the yard was covered in all kinds of plants, brown and orange lawn chairs, and a cathouse for an extremely overweight cat named Bootsy.

Chris was the youngest, the fattest and the slowest, so it should come as no surprise that he was “it” most of the time. The more he ran and missed tagging anyone, the more he frowned and bit down on his lower lip. The frustration on his face grew increasingly obvious and, as the older brother, I felt it was my duty to push him to his breaking point.

I ran near him, turned around, and then began running backwards to mock his weight problem,

“Hey Fatso! Can’t catch me!”

Given that I was only six, I kind of sucked at running backwards, so he quickly gained on me. By the time I had gotten back to running forwards, he had caught up to me. I’d successfully pushed him to his breaking point, but it didn’t work out quite as I had planned. I had hoped that his overwhelming aggravation, hatred of fat jokes and increasing dislike of me would cause him to crumble into tears. Unfortunately, his anger manifested in another way.

When he caught up to me, he decided that, rather than simply tagging me, he would take another route. He mustered up all of his strength and shoved me, as hard as he could, in the back, directly into the birdbath. My forehead smashed into it and, after bouncing off of it and collapsing onto the lawn, I was momentarily stunned. Blood trickled down my forehead and into my eye. I screamed and began crying much like the first time he smashed me in the head. Chris, realizing he was going to be in trouble, approached my mom to make sure that he told her his side of the story.

“He was just running backwards, then he turned around and ran into the birdbath.”

Luckily for Chris, I was sobbing so hard that I was unable to recount the actual occurrence. None of the neighbor kids volunteered the truth, so my mom scooped me up, put a rag on my head to try and control the bleeding, and my dad drove us to the hospital. By the time the stitches were in, I made the decision to keep the truth to myself. But Chris would pay.

It was around this time that The Karate Kid

came out. We were obsessed with it. We had karate pajamas that we wore whenever possible. We briefly took karate classes, but when we discovered it was less like Cobra Kai and more like day care, we quit. It didn’t help that Humboldt County didn’t have an All Valley Karate Tournament. To make up for this, we constantly pretended to face each other in the final round of the tournament, Chris in his white karate pajamas, me in my black karate pajamas.

My mom thought this was cute, so she decided to videotape us. I wasn’t about to lose to my fat little brother in a karate match, especially when it was being documented, so once the video started rolling, I poked him right in the eye. He immediately covered his face and began crying. As the movie had taught me, I was to show no mercy. I reared back and kicked him right in the balls. He crumbled the ground, beaten.

Later in the day, I convinced Chris that we should reenact another scene from the movie. Early on, Daniel gets beaten up by Johnny Lawrence, and while lying on the ground, gets kicked in the ribs. For some reason, I didn’t believe a kick to the ribs would hurt or cause someone to buckle. I failed to share the entire plan with Chris, but promised that he would get to play Daniel LaRusso, so he was eager to join in. When I got him into the proper position on the lawn, he was facing the ground in the push-up position, but his knees were on the ground. I walked around him to make sure everything was set up as I had planned. When I was satisfied, I kicked him as hard as I could in his midsection. He buckled and began bawling. Much to my dismay, being kicked in the ribs actually did hurt.

The karate matches and his failure to get his way all of the time had made Chris bitter. He was bitter at me, bitter at our younger brother and bitter at my parents. He expressed this bitterness by constantly telling people he hated them when he didn’t get what he wanted. If my mom refused to buy him a toy he saw on television, he’d scream,

“I HATE YOU!”

Then he would run into his room and slam the door. Eventually, Mom tired of being told that he hated her. She informed Chris that he was no longer allowed to tell her that he hated her or he would be grounded. She didn’t scare him. He would not bow to her threats.

Not long after the rule, Chris wanted to watch Duck Tales

, but Mom informed him that he had already used his hour of television for the day, so he had to go play outside. He was comfortably positioned on the corduroy couch, so he wasn’t eager to move. He briefly argued that the rule was unfair, but he could tell he was getting nowhere, so he went back to his signature move. He jumped off the couch, glared at my mom as he walked to his bedroom, then yelled,

“I HATE YOU!”

He stormed into his room and slammed the door. Mom had had enough. As soon as she heard the door slam, she marched towards his room like she was on a mission. She swung his door open, looked him straight in the eyes, and said,

“Guess what asshole? I HATE YOU TOO!”

She slammed the door in his face. I heard her walk to her bedroom and shut the door. I guess she needed to cool down for a few minutes. I snuck into Chris’s room to see how he was taking the news that his mom hated him. Initially, he appeared appalled, but his anger quickly returned with a vengeance. He made eye contact with me, then broke it off and began rifling through his closet. I watched as several toys flew into the middle of the room as though a tornado had come through the closet, and then it stopped. He had found what he was looking for. I was confused, so I inquired,

“Chris, what are you doing?”

He turned from the closet, gave me a dirty look, then his face softened and he sighed.

“I’m running away.”

He pulled a tiny blue suitcase out of the closet that had the words “Going to Grandma’s” inscribed upon it. I was confused and I furrowed my brow at him, so he explained further.

“Well, Mom hates me, I hate her and I don’t like it here anymore. I am going to live on the railroad.”

This was better than any birthday present I could have asked for. We finally agreed on something. My sworn enemy was hitting the bricks…voluntarily. He began pulling clothes out of his dresser and stuffing them into the suitcase. In order to help him get on the road as soon as possible, I ran to the bathroom and grabbed him his toothbrush. I asked,

“Is there anything else you want me to get?”

We hurriedly packed his suitcase, cramming as much as we possibly could. When he was satisfied that everything was loaded up, I sat on top of it while he buckled it shut. As he surveyed the room to make sure that he hadn’t forgotten anything, I went into my room and grabbed a goodbye present. It was a half a pack of candy that I’d been saving for a few days, but it was Lifesavers and it was the best I could do. I offered them to him as sort of a peace treaty as we parted ways. He accepted.

Since I was six years old and relatively stupid, I though Lifesavers were actually a solid emergency device that you could use in case of attack. I informed Chris,

“Now, if a bear or something attacks you, just eat one of these and you’ll be fine.”

He nodded his head. There was nothing left to say. He grabbed the suitcase and put the Lifesavers in his pocket. He sighed heavily.

“Well, I guess I’d better go tell Mom.”

He marched out of the room, proudly sporting the overflowing suitcase. I followed closely behind. Mom was washing the dishes. Chris set his suitcase on the floor and cleared his throat. She turned around. Chris looked at the ground, then raised his eyes and met her gaze.

“Mom, I’m running away. I don’t like it here anymore and I’m going to live on the railroad.”

A look of mock surprise came over her face and she made her best attempt at a gasp. Clearly, she’d been expecting this for a while. Or maybe she was just genuinely happy, I’m not quite sure. Her response sounded scripted,

“Alright, did you pack everything? Did you get your toothbrush, some fresh undies?”

He nodded. She dried her hands on a kitchen towel and walked towards the front door. When he met her there, she gave him a hug and said,

“Well, I guess this is goodbye, Chris. It’s been nice having you around. Good luck on the railroad. Remember, you’re not allowed to cross any streets.”

Chris had been unwilling to follow the rules while he was living in the house, so I was skeptical about him following them once he had emancipated himself. My mom figured that, without being able to cross the street, Chris wouldn’t actually be able to go anywhere. She too realized that he would not follow her rules once he was on his own. Chris marched to the beat of a different drummer. The only rules he followed were his own.

Mom opened the front door and Chris stepped through. I accompanied him to the end of the driveway. When we got there, I knew it was time to say goodbye. I stuck out my hand, and then he set down his suitcase and shook it. I wished him good luck and he was on his way. Maybe we’d meet up one day on the rails, me as a passenger and him as some crazy hobo. I was actually looking forward to it.

He stepped out onto the sidewalk and waved goodbye. I marveled at his courage and envied the adventure he was about to embark upon, but make no mistake, I was glad he was gone. As I watched him walk away, I heard Mom approach from behind. Then she passed me and quickly caught up to Chris and put her arm on his shoulder. He stopped and turned around. She quickly informed him,

“Chris, get back in the house. You’re not running away.”

Chris stared at her, confused. Moments before, she’d just been wishing him well on his journey and now she was forcing him back into the house. He didn’t get it.

“But I was going to live on the railroad. I spent a lot of time packing my suitcase.”

I saw his point. I’d helped him load up that suitcase and it was hard work. Now it was all for nothing. I was sad that he was not going to be able to embark on his great adventure. I was sad that I would have to continue to deal with his shit. He hung his head and trudged back into the house, left his suitcase inside the front door, flopped down on the couch and turned on the TV. When Mom reminded him that he had already used up all of his TV time, he stood up and yelled,

“I HATE YOU!”

He went into his room and slammed his door. Things were back to normal. One might think that the near running away would have taught Chris and I to value each other’s company more, but it didn’t. We continued to fight all the time. His indomitable spirit was always a challenge and his inability to abide by the rules of war landed me in the hospital more than once. Luckily, I was the bigger, older sibling, so I won a lot more than I lost. I’ll always treasure our battles, and I’m eternally thankful that I had such a worthy opponent.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 19.01.2010

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