Three Weeks With My Brother (4 page)

My dad, on the other hand, was still somewhat of a mystery to me. With sandy, reddish hair, he had freckles and was prone to sunburns. Among all of us, only he had an appreciation for music. He played the harmonica and the guitar, and he whistled compulsively when he was stressed, which he always seemed to be. Not that anyone could blame him. In Los Angeles, he settled into the same grueling routine that he had in Minnesota: classes, studying, and working evenings as a janitor and bartender in order to provide us with the basic necessities of life. Even then, he had to rely on both his and my mom’s parents to help make ends meet.

When he was around the house, he was often preoccupied to the point of appearing absentminded. My most consistent memory of my father is of him sitting at the table, head bowed over a book. A true intellectual, he wasn’t the kind of dad who liked to play catch or ride bikes or go hiking, but since we’d never experienced anything different, it didn’t bother us. Instead, his purpose—to us kids, anyway—was to be provider and disciplinarian. If we got out of hand—which we did with startling frequency—my mother would threaten us by saying she was going to inform our dad when he got home. I have no idea why the very notion terrified us so, since my dad was not abusive, but I suppose it’s because we didn’t really know him.

Our years in Minnesota had driven us together as siblings. For years, Micah, Dana, and I had been one another’s only friends, and in Los Angeles that continued. We shared the same bedroom, played with the same toys, and were almost always in one another’s company. On Saturday mornings, we huddled around the television to watch cartoons, and we could spend hours playing with action figures from the now defunct Johnny West cowboy series. Like G.I. Joe action figures, there were cowboys (The West family—Johnny, Jane, and the kids), soldiers (General Custer and Captain Maddox), an outlaw (Sam Cobra), and Indians (Geronimo, Chief Cherokee, and Fighting Eagle), as well as paraphernalia that included forts, cowboy wagons, horses, and herds of cattle. Over the years, we must have collected every item of the set three or four times over. We played with the figures, conjuring up one adventure after the next, until they literally fell apart.

Because my sister was the youngest, she tended to stay inside with my mom while my brother and I gradually began to discover the outside world. My parents seemed to believe—rather naively, I now think—that we’d be safe together no matter how dangerous the streets were, and allowed us to freely explore the neighborhood on our own before I reached the age of five. Our only requirement was to be home in time for dinner. Neither my mother nor father ever bothered setting limits on how far we could travel, as long as we upheld our end of the bargain, and we took this freedom to extremes. Wherever my brother went, I’d tag along behind him with a rapidly growing sense of hero worship. We’d spend our afternoons exploring run-down apartments, or visit with our adult female neighbors as they stood along the boulevard soliciting customers. We could endlessly watch teenagers doing car repairs in the parking lot, and sometimes sat on the steps with various gangs as they drank beer and made out with their girlfriends. It was great fun—there was always something to see and do—and even when occasional gunshots sounded in the distance, I don’t remember Micah or I ever being overly frightened by them.

For whatever reason, we
were
safe there. I suppose it’s because everyone, even gang members, knew that not only weren’t we a threat, we were probably poorer than they were. We were desperately poor. As kids, we were raised on powdered milk, potatoes, and oatmeal—I didn’t know milk came in
liquid
form until I headed off to school. We never went out to eat, visited museums, went to a ball game or even a movie. The car my dad had purchased to get to work and the university had cost less than a hundred dollars. Once we started school, we’d get one pair of shoes and one pair of pants a year; if they ripped, my mother would iron on patches and keep ironing more on until our jeans looked as if they’d been originally designed with knee pads. Our few toys—primarily Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and the aforementioned Johnny West figures—had all been Christmas or birthday gifts; we gave up asking for anything we saw when we went to the store with my mom.

It’s only now that I realize that we were probably living well below the poverty line. We certainly didn’t know it at the time, nor, to be honest, did we care. And my mom wouldn’t have put up with our complaints, even if we did. My mom was a big believer in toughness. She hated whining, she hated moping, she hated excuses, and she was intent on eradicating these traits in her children. If we ever said something along the lines of, “But I want it,” her response was always the same. She’d shrug and reply evenly, “Tough toenails, tiger. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.”

Her views on “toughness” would make most contemporary parents shudder. When Micah started school, for instance, school busing was being used to force greater integration of the inner-city schools. As a result, the school down the street wasn’t open to him; instead, he had to walk nearly a mile to the bus stop—along busy avenues, through rough neighborhoods, with a shortcut through a junkyard. On the first day of kindergarten, she walked with him to the bus stop; the day after that, he walked by himself. Within a week, he told my mom that some older girls, seventh grade or thereabouts, but
huge
to a kindergartener, had cornered him in the junkyard and taken his milk money. Then they threatened him; they said that if he didn’t bring them a nickel every day, they were going to hurt him.

“They said they’re going to beat me up bad,” Micah cried.

There are a number of ways a parent could handle such a situation. My mom could have started walking him to school regularly, for instance, or walked with him one day, confronted the girls, and threatened to call the police if another incident occurred. Perhaps my mom could have found out who their parents were and talked to them, or found someone to carpool with. Maybe she could have even talked to someone at the school.

Not my mom. Instead, after Micah told his story, she rose from the table and left the room for a few minutes. When she returned, she was carrying an old Roy Rogers lunchbox; rusty and dented, it had been her younger brother’s years before. “We’ll put your lunch in this tomorrow, instead of a brown bag,” she said, “and if they try to take your money, just wind up and hit ’em with it. Like this . . .”

Cocking her arm like a lion tamer, she began swinging the lunchbox in wide arcs, demonstrating while my brother sat at the table watching.

The next day, my six-year-old brother marched off to school with his hand-me-down lunchbox. And just as they’d threatened, the girls surrounded him when he wouldn’t give them his nickel. When the first one charged, he did exactly as my mom had told him.

In our bedroom that night, Micah related to me what happened.

“I swung with everything I had,” he said.

“Weren’t you scared?”

With his lips pressed together, he nodded. “But I kept swinging and hitting them until they ran away crying.”

The girls, I might add, never bothered him again.

In 1971, we moved again, this time to Playa del Rey—another section of Los Angeles. For obvious reasons (the nightly gunshots began sounding awfully close) our parents believed it was safer for us than Inglewood.

I’d started kindergarten by then, but given the year separating us and the fact that Los Angeles continued to bus my brother, Micah and I found ourselves in different schools. While the students in my class resembled students that might be found in an Iowa suburb, Micah was bused to one of the schools in the inner city, and was the only white child in his class.

Still, in the afternoons, we were together, and we spent our time as we had in Inglewood, a couple of little kids with no fear of the world. We’d leave our apartment complex and spend hours going anywhere we wanted—we’d walk a couple miles down to the marina where we’d look at the boats docked in their slips or climb up the underside of highway bridges or utility poles looking for bird eggs, or explore vacant, decaying, or burned-out homes in search of something interesting that might have been left behind. Other times, we’d head behind our apartment complex, cross a few avenues, and hop a few fences to visit the high school. In the late afternoons, it was usually empty, and we used to love the wide-open fields, which were much larger than the ones at our elementary schools. We’d race or hide, or simply walk the hallways, looking into the classrooms. One day, we spotted a raven in the trees, and were instantly captivated. We began following it as it moved from tree to tree. After that, whenever we went to the school, we’d look for the raven, and suprisingly, we’d almost always find it. After calling to it for a while, we’d head off to do something else. Yet, soon enough, we’d see the raven again, in one of the trees near where we were playing. Pretty soon, we weren’t able to go anywhere near the school
without
seeing the raven. It was
always
around. The raven, we soon realized, was following us.

We began to feed it. We’d toss some bread on the ground; the raven would swoop down and eat it, then fly away. Gradually, it stayed long enough for us to approach. From there, we moved to feeding it plums, and the raven grew more comfortable with us. We got to the point where we could hold the plum outstretched on the ground and the raven wouldn’t hesitate to fly close and begin to eat. It struck us that it was becoming something of a pet, and we began to refer to it that way. Borrowing the camera from mom, we were even able to take up-close pictures of it, and we proudly showed them off when the photos were developed. We named the raven Blackie. Blackie was great. Blackie was cool. Blackie, we eventually discovered, was a monster.

As interested as we were in the bird, we found out that the bird had become far more interested in us. Particularly our hair. Because we were blond, our hair gleamed in the sunlight, and ravens, we came to discover, love shiny things. Ravens also build nests. Put one together with the other, and you can imagine what happened next.

We were at the school one afternoon when Blackie suddenly came swooping toward us, diving at our heads over and over, like a fighter plane attacking a ship. It was cawing at us, and we scrambled away. Blackie followed. His wingspan seemed to have grown exponentially overnight—and soon we were running and screaming for our lives as Blackie buzzed over our heads. We hid for a while near some Dumpsters, trying to figure out how to get back home, and finally ventured out again. With the coast clear, we took off running.

Keeping up with Micah was impossible, and gradually I slowed. In that instant, Blackie swooped down and landed on my head, which was quite simply the most terrifying thing ever to happen to me in my young life. I panicked, unable to breathe, unable to move a muscle. I could feel Blackie’s claws digging into my head, and—as if to amplify the horror—Blackie began to peck
hard
, its head bobbing up and down like the oil pumps in Oklahoma. I screamed. Blackie pecked harder. And that’s how it went. Peck, scream. Peck, scream. Peck, scream. Peck, scream. It felt as if the raven was doing his best to drill a hole into my skull in order to suck my brains out.

I vaguely remember my brother receding into the distance—he was oblivious to Blackie’s return—until the first scream. Wheeling around, Micah ran back toward me, shouting at me to push the bird off. My mind, however, was blank, and I was frozen. All I could do was stand there while Blackie killed me, one peck at a time.

Micah, of course, knew what to do. Screaming and waving his hands wildly, he was able to dislodge the evil demon bird from my scalp. Then, as Blackie continued to swoop at us, Micah took off his shirt and waved it around like a flag. Finally, Blackie retreated to the safety of the trees.

On our way home, I was embarrassed by how frightened I’d been. Micah hadn’t been frightened. Micah had taken on Blackie while I’d panicked. Micah fought while I froze. I came to believe that Micah, unlike me, could do anything. And as I struggled to keep up with him, I wanted more than anything to be just like him.

C
HAPTER
3

A
fter confirming and reserving our places on the trip around the world, Micah and I began to make the necessary preparations. Among other things, we needed to obtain a number of vaccinations, including yellow fever and Hepatitis A and B, as well as send off our passports for the visas for India, Ethiopia, and Cambodia.

As spring turned to summer, my brother and I talked about the trip frequently, but strangely, the more we talked, the more our responses to the upcoming adventure diverged. While Micah grew more excited about the places we would see, I grew anxious at the thought of leaving; when he called wanting to talk about the trip, I found myself avoiding the subject.

Call it buyer’s remorse, but I gradually began to feel as if the decision to go had been a mistake. As exciting as the idea was, as much as I wanted to visit all those places, I couldn’t imagine taking weeks to do it. Between work and family, time was the one thing that I hadn’t had enough of in what seemed like ages. If my home life was chaotic, my career was even busier, and the thought of traveling for pleasure not only increased my anxiety, but left me feeling guilt-ridden. If I had a month to spare, shouldn’t I spend the time with the kids? Or with my wife? If I barely had time to do everything now, how on earth could I even think of taking a month off to travel for fun?

Everything about the trip felt wrong. But then, if you knew where I was in 2002, you would understand why.

I like to think of life in terms of a stream, rapids, and waterfall. There are periods in everyone’s life when things just seem to float along. You’re in your canoe, paddling leisurely, enjoying the view. One day flows into the next, everything gets done, and somehow there’s still time to relax. Then, ever so slowly, the stream starts to move faster; it’s still possible to manage everything, but it takes a little more effort. Next come the rapids, and all of a sudden, everything is more challenging. Maybe there’s a new project at work, maybe someone in the family gets sick, maybe you move or get laid off. Whatever the reason, you spend those periods steering the canoe, struggling to stay afloat. You wake up in the mornings feeling you’re already behind, and each day becomes a frantic race against the clock in order to get everything done. And then the rapids begin to roil even faster, and you go right along with them. You “have to,” you “need to,” you “have no other choice.” You go, go, go. And in the distance, you hear the roar of the waterfall, and you convince yourself that your only option is to paddle even harder. You’ve got to steer through those rapids and somehow get to safety. Otherwise, the waterfall’s going to take you.