The day after I handed in the sophomore theme Dad was released from the hospital, and when he got back we all saw that something had changed in him. It was like there had always been a cloud of charged particles around him, a tense, nervy, energy radiating off of him. But now, suddenly, that cloud had mostly dissipated. After his hospital stay his posture became more relaxed, his manner more casual. Dad still had a temper at times. He could still fill a room with his displeasure, but his temper flared less and less.
When I look back on that springtime it seems a miracle that we all made it out without a total and permanent disaster. It was family chaos that brought on that crisis and it was family chaos that saved us from it. I don’t pretend to understand this or to present it as a reasonable cure. I am only saying what is true. I was knocked out of the gray fog by my father’s collapse. It happened at the last possible moment to avert ruin. It was like some deity reached down and saved me, though he almost had to kill my father to do it.
6
The Trip
Any disciple who has entered any kind of practice must begin with seemingly unnecessary, futile things. But of course these things are part of the discipline. Without such seemingly trifling things there can be no perfecting of the practice.
—Reverend Kanero,
quoted in Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal
I was riding my bike on a highway in eastern Iowa. I could hear the crank of the gears, the drone of crickets, tires on pavement. All around were the endless cornfields. If I peered out into the waves of heat I could see Coyle on his bicycle somewhere far ahead, a gray smudge. Fergus and Dad were somewhere miles behind me. It was summertime, three months after Dad had gotten out of the hospital, and we were riding west across the great plains. I was fifteen years old.
Earlier that spring, just after getting out of the hospital, our father, exuberant after getting his clean bill of health, and wanting to do something excessive and dramatic, began thinking about taking a long vacation. Other families went on extravagant trips to Europe, to Japan. Dad wanted the same for us, but of course we didn’t have the money for a family vacation, particularly after his hospital stay. But Dad didn’t care. He wanted to do something enormous, something magnificent, arduous, impressive, mind-blowing, and needlessly extreme. He wanted it to be something everyone would remember. He was doing what he always did. He was being our father.
“What do you guys think about going on a big trip this summer?” Dad had asked. “We’ll see the country. Do something none of your friends have ever done, or even think is possible. How’s that sound?”
We were all quiet, and then Fergus said, “It sounds like a trick question.”
Dad kept his hands on the table. He paused for dramatic effect.
“How about we ride our bicycles to California?”
We just looked at him blankly. None of us had ever ridden our bikes more than ten miles. It seemed completely farfetched and more like an ordeal than a vacation.
“That’s going to suck,” Fergus said.
“Well, you better change that attitude, cause we’re doing it.”
Two months later Coyle, Fergus, Dad, and I had panniers on either side of our bikes, tents and soft pads strapped to the racks, and with the loaded bikes, we started west from our house in Seneca. It was just the boys on that trip. Maddy stayed home with our mother.
Dad had estimated we needed to ride sixty miles a day to make it to California over the summer. That was our goal. Sixty miles. Every day. We didn’t know anything about long-distance bike riding. We didn’t have very good bikes. We didn’t even know that when you rode west you rode against the wind every day.
On the first day, starting early, and riding for seven hours, we rode forty miles, and by the end of the day I was so tired I could not pick up my bike. I weighed a hundred and ten pounds at the time. My bike and the packs weighed around forty-five pounds. If the bike fell I needed someone else to lift it. Fergus, who was thirteen years old, could hardly stand upright, and at a gas station west of Aurora, Illinois, Fergus left his bike unlocked and walked out into a field, hoping someone would steal his bike and he wouldn’t have to ride it anymore.
On the second day we rode all day and when we were finished we’d gone thirty-five miles. By that point we were on Route 30, heading west among cornfields that stretched for a thousand miles. The towns were spaced eight or ten miles apart. From the edge of one town we could see the grain elevator of the next town far in the distance. Mile markers were small green placards on the right. You could see the tiny dot of green a mile away. And every mile was difficult. Our legs were often so tired we stopped between towns because we couldn’t go on. And we were still in Illinois, more than two thousand miles from the coast. California seemed a crazy goal.
On that third day Fergus made up a song, a simple song that he sang for, oh, about six hours straight as we struggled with our loaded bikes.
“We’re not going to make it, do-dah, do-dah…”
This song enraged our father, and because it did, Fergus kept singing it.
Fergus, with his mop of brown hair and his loaded bike, weaving on the flat, straight, mostly empty highways between the cornfields.
“We’re not going to make it…”
We rode thirty miles on that third day. We were falling far behind our schedule and we were bickering and in bad moods. It was going to be a humiliating failure when we didn’t even make it out of Illinois. Coyle started to ride far ahead just to get away from us. I was a little behind Coyle. Fergus went excruciatingly slow, hoping Dad would see what a crazy folly that trip was and give it up. For hours I was alone between Coyle and Fergus, the cornfields on either side, just me on Highway 30, no one else in sight.
On the fourth day we rode forty miles, but we were stronger at the end of the day. I was actually able to lift my bike myself. We even felt we could have gone farther. On the fifth day we rode fifty-five miles. On the sixth day we rode sixty. That was the first day we had made our quota. We were far behind our schedule, but still, we all felt pretty good. It was an easy sixty miles. We thought we could even have gone farther.
On that day, the sixth, I first noticed that our bodies were changing. We were all getting stronger. We were also getting more confident. I saw that it was not any one thing that was hard. It was just getting up and riding day after day, over and over. That was the trick. The bike trip, if nothing else, was a lesson in the surprising, cumulative effect of consistent effort.
On the seventh day we rode more than seventy miles. On the eighth day we rode seventy-five miles. We weren’t even that tired at the end of it. We started to think it might be possible to ride to California. Sixty miles a day wasn’t that hard.
I don’t want to give the wrong idea. That bike trip was not a wholesome family vacation. It was not some Brennan brother lovefest. I don’t think that was ever possible for us. Fergus resisted every minute of that trip. Coyle thought we were weak and slow and would rather have been home with his friends. We bickered with one another endlessly. But Dad had decided we were going to ride our bikes across the country and we were driven on by the force of his will and the threat of his fists. We threw rocks as we rode. We tried to drive one another off the highway. When we were not fighting or arguing or racing, we mooed at the cows as we passed, trying to get them to stampede. We let the air out of one another’s tires. But we kept moving west. At least three times I overheard adults telling my father that we were too young to be out there on the highway on our own. I never even considered that these people might have a point. They were soft, weak, spineless people who couldn’t understand us. It might be too young for other kids, but we were Brennans. We had a different kind of training. We did whatever we wanted to do.
In Cedar Rapids a woman pulled a shotgun on us when we stopped at the edge of her property. In western Iowa we were chased by a Doberman, the dog snappin
g at our heels and biting the backs of our tires. Outside Lincoln we rode through a sea of grasshoppers that crunched beneath our wheels and got caught in the spokes. In eastern Colorado a pig farmer showed us how you could hold a weed to an electrical fence and feel the electricity pulse through the fence and into your wrist, the muscles twitching in your arm as the current ran through the body and into the ground. The next day we saw the Rocky Mountains, seventy miles away, a black, jagged silhouette on the horizon. Two days later we were in the mountains, struggling up Trail Ridge Road, which rises from the plains to more than twelve thousand feet, the highest continuous highway in the United States. Our father had chosen the most difficult route over the mountains on purpose. He wanted us to get the full effect. We pedaled twenty-six miles uphill. I fainted when we got to the summit. Dad sat me up afterward, gave me a water bottle, and put some nuts in my palm and said, “Eat some peanuts. You’ll be fine. You did it.”
An hour later we were gliding downhill, our brakes smoking from constant use.
A few days after that we were out in the Great Salt Desert, which we crossed in a single day: one hundred thirty miles, the four of us wearing white hotel towels beneath our hats, looking like sheiks, the ground as flat as the surface of an ocean.
A few days later, in eastern Nevada, we got caught in a dust storm. Huddling beneath a viaduct, heads in our jackets, we breathed through our shirts as the storm passed. Afterwards, Coyle and I walked out from beneath the viaduct to see a monochrome world of gray, like being on the moon, the area around our eyes and the inside of our mouths the only color in all that vast, gray, dusty world.
A few days after that we crested the ridge near Lake Tahoe and crossed into California, and that was that. We had made it. We had ridden our bikes to California from our house in Seneca, Illinois. It had taken five weeks and we had fought the whole way but we had done it, and it was something we all talked about later and that became representative of our family. We might have less money than other families. We might have epic battles and be an embarrassment in the neighborhood. But we had ridden our bikes to California together. It was really something.
Near the end of the trip Mom and Maddy drove out. We had a few days’ vacation at Lake Tahoe. Then we drove back across the country with the bikes on the roof of the car, and later, no matter how much we complained about our father, no matter how much we said he was crazy, called him a slave driver, said he was impractical and foolish, we knew that he had also brought us on a bike trip across the country. What we had done was unusual and we were proud of it.
I bring this up now because I feel that with the stories I have chosen to tell I have half misrepresented my childhood. Everything I’ve said is more or less true. The upbringing was arduous. The fights were real. But there was also something beyond the fighting and struggles. My childhood was sometimes brutal, but it wasn’t unhappy. At least it was not all unhappy. We did work hard, but there was compensation in the independence we had, and in the feeling of accomplishment when we mastered something other kids our age couldn’t conceive of doing. And though we fought bitterly with one another, there was also an unspoken loyalty and the recognition of ourselves as a single unit, a distinct species, separate from other people. We were Brennans, which meant we were poor and we were violent and we were extreme in our views, but it also meant we were hard workers, and we never complained. We had grown up around kids we thought of as being coddled and complacent, and we took a perverse pride in the hardships we’d endured.
In those weeks after we got back from our trip to California, some of the happier memories from our childhood began to come back to me, memories that were a counter-pull to the ice inside, the resentment that I still carried from those battles with Coyle, which was undeniably the worst part of my childhood. Our rivalry never flagged, the ice never melted completely, and I suppose that’s not surprising, as we were both strong personalities. But there was another side to it. No matter how much we’d fought, or how much I resented Coyle, we had been forged in the same fires, and I knew no one was more like me than he was.
7
Philanthropists
An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he’s working on these days. “My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.” “Oh really, that’s interesting: one didn’t think there was a class system in the United States.” “Nobody does. That’s how it survives.”
—Christopher Hitchens
Every spring at New Trier there was a coupon book sale. The money raised by the sale went to the Chandler Fund, which paid for uniforms and sports equipment and scholarships. The sale was basically a way to get students to raise money for a good cause and to teach the benefits of community service. Students could organize into teams of five, and at the end of the selling period there was an award ceremony for the team that sold the most books. The winning team got free tickets to the prom, their own page in the yearbook, and were made Chandler Fund Knights, which could be put on a college résumé. For as long as anyone could remember, the winning team was connected to either Indian Hills Country Club or the Kenilworth Club. It was a rich-kid thing. The teams for the clubs sold to their parents and their parents’ wealthy friends. No one in our family had ever been involved in the coupon book sale. Our family was more likely to receive charity than give it. But that fall, when Coyle was a senior and I was a junior, I walked out to the soccer field during a free period to see the destruction from a tornado. There was a brown swath up the middle of the field, with debris littered everywhere and a chain-link fence tossed up in trees and a house along the far side of the field with a torn-off façade. I was basking in this glorious destruction when I saw Robert walking across the field toward me. Robert wasn’t playing tennis that year and we didn’t talk that much in the hallways, and though there’d been a softening of relations between us, it’s not like we went out of our way to interact, either. So, by the purposeful way he approached I could tell he wanted something.
“Did you see it?” Robert asked when he reached me.
“Are you kidding? I was crammed down in the field house with everyone else.”
“Same for me,” Robert said. “Barb Jamison saw it, the ditz. She thought the alarm was just a drill. Then she looks out the window and saw a funnel cloud going by. She said it peeled off the side of the house like wrapping paper and turned silver when it sucked up the water over the lake.”
“Cool,” I said.
“Totally cool. Anyway, we gotta talk. You know the coupon book contest.”
“I know it exists. I’ve never been in it.”
“Well, I have.”
“Congratulations.”
“Yes. It’s the thing I’m most proud of. My mom makes me do it. Anyway, the team I’m on has always won.”
“That’s great, Robert,” I said.
“You can stop with the sarcasm,” he said. “I’m not saying that to brag. I’m trying to tell you something. Liam and Tom are always the captains, which is annoying, because I do all the work. But their fathers buy the most coupon books, so they get to be captains, and I don’t get recognition.”
“That’s rough,” I said.
“I sense your heartfelt sympathy. But it sucks. If I’m going to work harder than anyone else I want everyone to know. I thought of making my own team, but everyone I know is already on a team. But you’re not on a team, right?”
It took me a moment to understand what he was asking.
“On a team to sell coupon books?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I’m not on any team and I didn’t plan on being on a team. That’s working for free. I already have a job. I get paid for it.”
“Well, think about it. We could do it together. You’re a hard worker. And I know your brother is, too. I could be captain. We could get some of Coyle’s friends. It
would be great to beat Liam and Tom. They’re so smug.”
I thought it was interesting that Robert talked as if he were essentially different from Liam and Tom, but I didn’t mention this.
“So, would you do it?” he asked. “You, me, and your brother.”
“I doubt Coyle would do it,” I said. “And even if he did do it, in what version of reality do you imagine Coyle volunteering to let you be his boss?”
“How about co-captains? Me and Coyle. And if we win you can put it on your transcript. That will be good for you. And it would be a way to stick it to Liam and Tom. Coyle’s gotta like that. Just ask him. Will you at least do that?”
I hesitated, but in the end said I would ask him, though I was pretty sure Coyle would say no. After Robert started off, he said, “How’s your dad?”
“Good,” I said.
“Glad to hear it,” he said.
He walked on and that was that. He didn’t mention that his dad had helped mine, but that was what he was saying when he asked about him. Robert couldn’t help bringing that up.
I figured I’d talk to Coyle, he’d refuse, and that would make it easy for me to refuse as well. But that night when I asked him, Coyle surprised me.
“Yeah, I don’t care, I’ll do the coupon thing,” Coyle said. “I’m not the one who has a problem with Robert.”
I just looked at Coyle like he was crazy.
“You slapped him in the face and refused to apologize to him.”
“That doesn’t mean I have a problem with him,” Coyle said. “That just means he pissed me off so I hit him. I beat on him and then got over it. I don’t hold grudges,” he said. “You should try it sometime.”
The Brother Years Page 17