So I break my own rules about revealing stories I’d never write. I’ll tell you a story that was secreted away from most until I discovered it a few years later. It then explained the empty Sominex bottle I saw in my brother’s desk drawer that ended staying there for years.
**
Saint Raphael Academy would hold sometimes tours of their school for parents of kids who attended. It was a PR event and a way to scare up some newer attendees from the younger brothers and sisters. I was brought along by my parents one Saturday in November of ‘75, after which we’d do the usual shopping at Ann & Hope, Sears and the like. My brother, who was 15, was old enough and too bored with shopping to come along anymore so he stayed home.
Up until then, the only religious people I’ve seen sort of close up, were priests who said Mass and the one nun I knew during “released time” which was the back door for us public school kids to get prepped for our First Communion. I was never a parochial school kid till high school so I had little up close experience with the various members of the church.
When my parents and I came to Saint Ray’s tour, I was surprised to see these particular priests who roamed the halls who weren’t really ordained priests. They were DeLasallian Brothers, a Catholic teacher order. They are less ardent and militant than the Jesuits who will teach you whether you liked it or not! I had never known there were various divisions within the church who specialized.
The DeLasallians wore cassocks with this odd cardboard thingy scrunched up to their neck. I never asked any of them what it meant as I kept a closed mouth while my parents did the talking.
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| LaSallian Brothers. They usually don't smile this much. |
As my parents spoke to one, the brother turns to me and asks, “Are you going to come here in a few years? (Always gotta keep the school’s quota packed and paying!). I told him, “I don’t know” with a shrug.
“Whaddayamean you ‘don’t know!?’” he bellows.
I was taken aback by that. This Crusader for Christ in his magical outfit scared me some. My Dad interjects that it was more than a few years (like five years) before considering that idea. I was nine then.
After this we go shopping, the typical weekend for us here. When we come home, I begin to notice my Dad, then my Mom, marching up and down the stairs to my brother’s bedroom. I ask what’s going on and they both blew me off. OK, I know when I’m being cut out from what’s going on.
I then see Dad brewing a pot of coffee and brings up a large cup of it to my brother upstairs. I ask, because my brother rarely drank coffee. OK, something’s up and I have to ask again. “What’s going on?”
“Ken’s just very tired...he needs a pick me up.”
Ok, I’m nine, I got an answer and go back to watching the Three Stooges.
Then a second and third and a fourth cup of coffee goes upstairs.
OK, weird I think, but a lot of times I just kept to myself when I heard or saw stuff I knew I’d never get a full explanation for. If I got a tiny bit of a reason or explanation, I knew it was all I knew I was going to get and generally, if the topic wasn’t deliciously juicy, I’d accept being brushed off. You’re a kid, you get the brush off all the time.
Finally Ken comes down, looking like one of his next morning’s hangover or a very rotten case of the flu. He eats dinner with us and no one is really talking.
That whole episode dies that night. The next morning comes as if nothing had happened.
**
My brother would keep a journal and hide it in his room and being the younger, nosy brother, I dug it up one day and I got read all about his private life a few years after the coffee “event.”
It was mostly about his school days, getting drunk or high at various friend’s homes and hanging out, wasting time at the Stop n Shop mini-mall near our neighborhood. Some of that was eye opening as I got to see a teen’s life as a fifth grader. When ever I was mentioned in it, I was characterized as the “annoying kid brother.” As I read the daily entries, I come across and read about “Ann.”
In those pages, my 15 year old brother gushes about this Ann who was classmate and a Stop & Shop mini-mall loiterer as well, like all other teens in this area hung out at. He describes her in great detail about how she looks, holds herself and any conversation he has with her no matter how trivial the topic was. He then starts wondering if she “likes” him in any small way. This goes on for weeks and the descriptions of her become like a daydream.
Then there’s a good month, a long gap, before he writes again.
The next several pages, stunned me. I had no idea of what had been kept from me.
In due time, he had finally asked out Ann and she unfortunately declined to accept. My brother being a decent writer, he managed to expertly detail the event, even including that horrid cold November day, the ice spots on her driveway and the flurries flying around him as he walked away. I remember that passage well.
He writes how crushed he was. How certain he felt she’d say “yes” and how his entire world felt like it collapsed. He took her “No” as a complete rejection of his entire being. There was nothing left.
Then I read how he would escape all that, by waiting for that Saturday when he knew he’d be alone because, “My parents and brother will be going to a Saint Ray’s open house and go shopping after.” Leaving him alone the whole afternoon. He goes on to describe how he swallowed a half bottle of Sominex (sleeping pills for those of you who don’t know) and also writes of the aftermath of “not doing it right” and Dad’s coffee cure.
“HOLY FUCKIN’ SHIT” I say to myself as I read this. It then explained the Sominex bottle in his drawer, that I’d see for years, which he probably kept as a reminder. Odd curio to keep around though.
I was 14 when I read that and I had no real life’s experience to parse it.
I do now.
Ken being a 15 year old BOY...became enamored with his first love. He made the mistake of exalting her to a level of heavenliness no one person should be raised too. He fell in love with the idea of being in love, only to have that bubble burst rapidly by Ann’s “No.” Plus there was his own personality quirks that probably never helped either. I get it, you’re 15 and that first major crush hits you and you have no experience nor coping mechanisms to deal with it as it’s all uncharted territory. It’s your first time on a wild roller coaster ride of emotion. I had my own first crush with Dianne K. who never wanted the time of day from me, nor any other boy at her age for that matter. At 15 she just wasn’t ready or interested in guys just yet. Oh well, I moved on w/o the attendant obsessiveness like my brother draped girls with.
Perhaps it’s me, but I didn’t lionize girls at that age. I was more sordid, coarser...driven by plain lust at 15. When I saw a neighborhood girl sprout breasts and hips at 14, and looked in one year’s time she grew to 19 years old, I just wanted her with my 15 year old testosterone filled brain. Some girls “fill out” pretty damned fast and to fruition and she was one of them. I didn’t have grand daydreams of romantic love about her. Well, some maybe but guys think first...with their dick...right?
**
That ugly Saturday so long ago, with my Dad’s cure of massive caffeine boosts to rouse him from all that diphenhydramine he had swallowed had another aspect to it. That was a failure to invite medical professionals into this. Why? I can tell you.
Growing up here, it was a sin to let the neighborhood or others outside of this family to know what was going on, especially anything negative. I have said before I grew up with an Edwardian etiquette and there are some great benefits to it. The major cardinal rule here was: You don’t splatter your life onto anyone else, where they end up having to wipe off YOUR mistakes they had nothing to do with. Keep your fucked up life to yourself! Do NOT let your cesspool run into the neighbor’s yard!
To this day, I really hate wiping other people’s fucked up lives off of my arm when it could have been helped.
Today though, letting your personal filth run down the street annoying everyone else is sort of accepted now. However growing up back then, any neighbor of ours who had fist fights spilling into the front yard got you labeled as white trash fast and demoted on the social hierarchy.
I suppose calling an ambulance to the house would be like waving a giant red flag to the neighbors that day that something soo juicy and gossip-able was occurring. Lucky my brother wasn’t so drugged that a full pot of coffee couldn’t cure.
And it was all neatly and quietly buried.
**
I have never paid much attention to his love life after that really. He had joined the Navy, disappearing for a few years. When he came back the first thing he wanted to do was move out of this house. It was the reason he fled to the Navy in the first place, to escape home. He got himself a tiny apartment in Providence and was gone again.
Since he worked with Trinity Rep he was happily involved on Providence’s art community. He also managed to be a published columnist for a few local newspapers for years. Those circumstances led him to attain a bit of his dream life.
Though as the years passed, his cystic fibrosis was becoming more apparent and wearying for him. He tried to keep up with his social group at various art festivals, openings and such. It got to the point where I ended going along to make sure he didn’t drop at any of these events. Which, I have written before, was how I was introduced to the art community in and around Providence and the various kinds of people you meet at them. It was eye opening for me. I met stinking rich people, hermit like painters who only came out to galleries, many professors from RISD and a cabbie wannabee novel writer who played classical music in the cab for his fares.
And..this one blonde women I kept meeting at these events who palled around my brother, Vicky.
I had finally asked Ken about her and I got this luscious and sort of dreamy description of her. I hear him listing nothing but positives about her and damn near her entire life story.
“Oh Christ, here we go again.” I think. “He’s elevated another one to a Goddess...where did I read this before?”
She spent a few years in his life and came over the house a few times. I know she thought of me as the blue-collar, ill-educated kid brother at times. Thanks to the fact I didn’t know everything about art nor did I dress up when I went to these events with my brother. I make a great impression on people when I don’t care!
Once while I was under my car, sawing off the exhaust pipes with a cutting wheel, I was wearing my old Army jacket from 1980, filthy jeans and probably stinky sneakers. Vicky had come by and I heard her shoot a “Hello” to under the car as she passed me. I pulled myself out from under, covered in rust, metal fragments and I looked like a coal miner. I spoke with her briefly, saying Ken was inside and as I spoke, she looked me up and down kinda slowly. OK, I know that body language. I know a judgment when I see one. She on the other hand was dressed, as best as she could afford, in the latest 2003 NYC’s fashion.
“OK, thanks.” and she left to go inside.
Back under the car with the tools, I muttered to myself, “Fuckin’ bitch.”
Yanking away on the pipes under the car I then think on her further. She doesn’t come around often that I can make out and I know my brother’s feelings towards her. He lights up like a Christmas tree when she comes around and I know women can spot warmth and “slightly too much affection” when they see it. She has to be completely aware of what he thinks of her because he telegraphs it so clearly. Hell I am a guy and could read it.
I also know she knew of his diagnosis to which there would be no cure, but only stalling the inevitable. What possible future could she have with him when I quietly (and the doctors) knew he’d be gone in a year without a transplant. Everyone else could see he was slipping, but not how dangerously close as I knew. But still, everyone else was aware enough to figure out Ken was in his 4th quarter of the game but not when the two minute warning would occur.
I think further. What was she up to? Stringing him along? Looking to gain something from his pile of cash? Secretly sponge-ing off of him w/o my knowing it? Did she keep him around as another “male orbiter?” Guys who really like-like a woman but the woman keeps them at bay. Did it give Vicky validation of her attractiveness? Yeah, all negative estimations of this on my part! I could not see how she wanted any relationship with him with a lethal disease like that.
**
When it got so bad, when Ken had to be intubated by the doctors who were tirelessly scanning the transplant list to find the right candidate, I would visit every other night at RI Hospital. He couldn’t talk with that tube jammed down his throat so he wrote questions and answers to me on a legal pad. It was the only way to communicate.
It got to the point where the physicians knocked him out 24 hours a day with heavy doses of morphine as strangling to death is very unpleasant. When your oxygen is low but not low enough to make you pass out..day after goddamn day tortures you.
One night, after work, I had nearly walked into his room when I saw Vicky, sitting there with her back to me. I then quickly and quietly backed off into the hallway. She never noticed me.
I then peer around the door jamb to watch. She sat there, wringing her hands, speaking softly to him and sighing a lot. She told him she’d show him her latest painting, “Tits on the Half Shell,” which was a sort of parody of that old painting.
While watching this I then saw the truth, she did care about him, even if I was not great fan of hers to begin with. I got my answer about what she wanted from him all along, which was just a close friendship. Even if it had incorporated, mistakenly on my brother’s part, a hope to lead to something more in the future.
I then make some noise and came into the room, to give her a second to react to my presence. She got up, faced me and started to tear. She too had figured out how desperate it was getting seeing him hooked up to all that medical equipment.
“OK,” I think, “You may have been disapproving of me but you weren’t of him and you were there in the last months.”
In my head I think further: “I absolve you Vicky. I forgo any animosity I may have had toward you. You can keep yours for me if you wish. This wasn’t about me anyways.”
**
A few yeas after that, while attending Project Object, the remnants of Frank Zappa’s group at the Call, I ran into Vicky on the sidewalk.
She was dressed still to the nines in the latest fashion and still was painting. Though she complained to me that she wasn’t finding art too lucrative a way to make a living. What artist does really? She then points to a guy nearby she said she was engaged to marry she had met a few months after Ken’s passing. She had grown older, in her late 40’s now and was showing it (so was I, getting slowly decrepit from age). I thought that this guy was her final attempt at landing a husband, as she had not had great luck prior in her life.
Be that as it may. At least she was there for Ken in the end, even if he lionized her. In Ken’s mind, she was a hope that could possibly work and think happy thoughts about. He once opined he’d love to vacation in Bermuda for a Christmas with her. I had sat there quietly and thought, “You ain’t going anywhere...not with your dire, unpredictable need for O2 at times.”
There have been times I stepped away from popping someone’s seemingly harmless fantasies, if it’s all the hope they have at the moment. What good is stark reality when it blackens the few months someone has left? When there are no more answers for them, what possible good is unfeeling, hard-eyed advice? So, knowing what I knew, the diagnosis, getting the really ugly facts from the Dr and how Vicky too knew there wasn’t a future with Ken and where this was going to end up, I let many of Ken’s dreams slide. It would be cruel to do otherwise.
Let him obsess over a girl like a teen boy if he wanted.
