I Had a Brother Once
Page 6
how he died, this uncle she
cannot remember. when she
was five, i told her the story
of how he joined the polar
bear club one new year’s day,
charged into the icy sea with
the rest of the crazy people,
the youngest of the bunch
by forty years. she listened
somberly, then asked if that
was why he died. i said no,
no, he was sick, & she has
not asked since. i take his
picture out, show her,
try to open the blinds,
let in some air, some light.
it should not be a mystery,
i cannot have this limning
the edges of her childhood,
curling them back like
burning newspaper.
i will have failed if his death
is the master key that
opens up her father when
at last i hand it over.
all she knows right now
is that she may not make
breezy jokes about killing
herself, as kids will do.
i have almost tipped
my hand, i think, jerking
the car onto the shoulder &
twisting backward in my seat
to forbid, forbade, my voice
more taut than i intend.
she can already lawyer
me to pieces, find the
loopholes in my language
& cannonball right through.
felicia would have adored
her. they cut with the same
blade & same panache,
rhythm to spare & puns to
order, orchestrators of activity,
collectors of people, players
of games of skill, lovers of
theater & theatrics. but what
came for david might very
well be hiding inside vivien.
an inheritance from ben.
from marion. from nights
of long knives & caves
of fire, simmering in the
deoxyribonucleic acid,
they say panic ruins
the meat, & her mother’s
family is no better on this
score than mine. if this
thing is in my daughter,
if it passed clean through
me like a round shot from
a gun & found her, she
is going to need the words
my brother never had, the
words he could not even
leave behind. soon after
his death, my mother
tried to make me promise i
would never write about
david. i said nothing &
continued to say nothing
until now, & still do not
know if she asked because
it is nobody’s business or
would be too painful to
see rendered on the page
or simply because when
my mother was a girl,
felicia promised never to
write about her & this,
she feels, is what a writer
owes his family. but i will
make a different plea to my
children. i will implore
them to write it, speak it
all. shed light & who knows
what else you might shed.
if i am lucky, the worst is
done. i did not realize
the good times were
the good times then
but i know eden now.
i have three beautiful
daughters like some
fucking farmer in a joke
& a partner i love &
goddamn it is all so
fragile. just outlive me,
all of you, that’s all i
ask. let nature take
this round.
the things he gave me
are totemic & devoid
at once. a hand drum
from ahmedabad, a
costa rican hammock,
a cuban baseball jersey,
some low red candle
holders from the crate
& barrel outlet store,
a ginger grater he
swore by, a wooden
molinillo that was
a favor at his wedding,
a yerba maté gourd &
metal straw, a kurta pyjama.
on his birthday & the
anniversary of his death,
i gather a few into a pile
& think this, this is all i
have left or tell myself
i had a brother once.
on those days you cannot
wait for the levee to break,
you have to bash it yourself,
get it over with. there is no
hiding from dates. the body
recognizes the planet’s
obliquity, the length of
the night, the sweetness
of the air, the pollen count.
i can feel april eighteen &
may twenty-eight coming
weeks away, my ribcage
swinging open like a fucking
advent calendar.
there was a time the mask
slipped, or rather a time i
tried to wrest it from my face.
it was two thousand
fourteen, during the brief
respite between mid april
& late may, & i was one of
five storytellers slated
to perform before a boston
theater packed full of public
radio enthusiasts. these stories,
i would come to realize,
followed an established arc.
the first few minutes were
fun & games, & then came
the turn: stories about marriage
became stories about cancer,
& then stories about how to
go on. stories about pregnancy
became stories about down
syndrome, & then stories
about how to go on. my piece
was the closer & nothing
about it matched. it was a
standup routine, essentially.
there was a turn, but it cued
laughter, not a gasp or hush.
the lesson learned was facile,
& even that served to set up
a punchline. we rehearsed
the night before & i heard
everybody else’s. they were
all so brave, so honest, &
i walked back to my hotel room
feeling like a liar & a cheat.
my story was about the book,
a cavalcade of swift vignettes
describing sudden minor fame
& how being mistaken for
a parenting expert had
caused me to question my
own parenting, the grafted
on dilemma that resolved
at last into an opening scene:
adam co-hosts a fundraiser
with an actual sleep expert,
who badly misreads his
&n
bsp; audience of rich donors
& presents a highly technical
slideshow that bores them
to distraction, while also &
perhaps inadvertently throwing
adam under the sleep training
bus. this cements adam’s
feeling of fraudulence, but
then, the turn, he retires
to his suite & finds an email
from said expert, revealing
that, as he has just this moment
learned, his son is an old friend
of adam’s from summer camp.
adam has only one memory of
the kid: that twenty-three years
earlier, the two of them were
arrested when adam ripped
the head off a lifesized
cardboard cutout of mc hammer
at the back bay tower records,
an act motivated not by theft,
though there was theft, but
a desire to defend the purity
of hip hop culture by decapitating
an intruder. the sleep expert
sprang adam & his son, guilty
only by association, & drove
adam home, & when present
day adam the fake parenting
expert puts this all together,
it becomes a balm for his
distress. perhaps, he muses,
the lesson, we are all
experts & we are all frauds,
since even the great &
powerful doctor made so
egregious an error in
judgment as allowing
his son to hang out
with me.
what was this claptrap? i
paced my hotel room unable
to fall asleep. it was
one thing to have worn
the mask in real time,
for the sake of my family
& future & in the name
of forging on, & quite
another to bound onstage
tomorrow & present this
bullshit version of
the recent past, erase
my brother as my brother
had erased himself, erase
my suffering as if my
brother had been right &
he had not destroyed us.
i knocked on the director’s
door & told her i could not
do this, that i wanted to
rewrite my entire piece.
a narrative was buzzing
inside me: this was shaping
up to be a defining moment,
stirring as fuck, the scene
where the leading man stares
down at the speech he is
meant to deliver, crumples
it into a ball, speaks from
the heart instead & reclaims
his integrity, his soul. i would
stay up all night drafting, fingers
flying over keys, truth
splashing onto the page
until i was out from
beneath all this shit at last.
she told me it was out of
the question, that my job
tomorrow was to end
the show on a high note,
that they put these evenings
together very carefully.
i nodded, left, took a long
cold walk through a city
i no longer knew. part of me
felt thwarted & another
was relieved. i told the story
& it killed, then told it
in another dozen cities.
i wrote three comedy books,
five middle-grade novels,
two supernatural thrillers, a
screenplay that became a movie,
three or four more that did not,
three tv pilots. i never broke
a sweat. i talked about writing
something serious, another
novel, the way a man who
isn’t leaving his wife talks
about leaving his wife. i said
i knew i had to write about my
brother somehow, & daniel
& begley & kev listened
patiently, year after year.
david’s widow met someone,
had a daughter. my parents
started laughing again, though
they still refuse to celebrate
birthdays, as if to do so
would constitute betrayal.
there is a gravestone for
david now, though his body
does not lie beneath it, on
martha’s vineyard next to
felicia & ben, about whom
the running joke is that now
they can lie there not speaking
to each other forever. the mc
hammer story had been on
the radio by the time i
told it onstage at a private
club in san francisco the
night i met jamie. we went
out for drinks a week later,
putting an end to a run of
not dating jews that began
the year i should have been
bar mitzvahed. i told her
about david within half an
hour, before we even made
the commitment to move
from the bar to the table,
& it felt simple, clean,
nothing more or less
than the act of a person
wanting to be known.
this is beginning to
feel like an epilogue,
white titles flashing
on a black screen,
loose ends weaving
themselves into bows,
the score cresting in a
reprise of the theme as
coats are gathered &
phones thumbed back on.
that’s not what i intend,
& who knows if writing
this will help or hurt, or
help as much as it hurts,
whether this is ritual
enough or ritual at all.
i have a weakness for
stories that end with
stories being written,
characters revealed as
authors, taking control
of their own narratives,
but that should not be this.
david took control, it could
be argued, & i can find
no peace in that, cannot
agree inside any more
than i can argue outwardly
when my mother, perhaps
seeking to wall off other
kinds of conversations, or
wring what comfort she can
from the desert of her grief,
says he must have been in
so much pain, as if this is
the final word, & why not,
she is right, it is true even
if we can only guess at
the shape & weight of
that pain, can never know
what it was like for him,
as him, & something
must be the final word,
why not say the kaddish.
holy shi
t—we did that.
i had totally forgotten.
the first year after david
died we gathered all the
california people, some
of whom had slipped through
the phone chain & still did not
know, just as i had feared.
they came to the house &
the oldest jew i could find
recited the prayer of mourning
& i don’t know if it ripped me
open or soldered me shut. but
you were mourned for, david,
you were loved, you are loved
& mourned for still, you
cannot leave entirely,
i will not let you go.
acknowledgments
Kevin Coval. Daniel Alarcón.
Sarah Suzuki. Josh Begley.
Idris Goodwin. W. Kamau Bell.
Adam Lazarus. Mitch Zuckoff.
Kathryn Borel. Sheila Heti.
Kristin Campbell. Joan Morgan.
Elizabeth Méndez Berry. DJ Frane.
Chris Jackson. Andre C. Willis.
Richard Abate. Johnny Temple.
Ricardo Cortés. Oliver Wang.
Eli Epstein. Jeff Chang.
Torrance Rogers. Bryant Terry.
Weyland Southon. Davey D.
Sy Kaufman. Neil Drumming.
Eugene Cho. Theo Gangi.
Andrew Bujalski. Dave Cohen.
Jean Grae. Danny Hoch.
Chinaka Hodge. Mark Johnson.
Douglas Mcgowan. Josh Lenn.
Thomas Fraser. Dug Infinite.
Mark Pellington. Blake Lethem.
Sophia Chang. Emery Petchauer.
Nate Marshall. Angel Nafis.
Courtney Morris. Martín Perna.
Vinnie Wilhelm. Zoe Wilhelm.
J.Period. Lauren A. Whitehead.
Josh Healey. Jason Santiago.
Joe Schloss. Rachael Knight.
Marc Bamuthi Joseph. Dave Barry.
Kamy Wicoff. Matthew Kaplan.
Alan Zweibel. Matthew Zapruder.
Charlie Mansbach. Nancy Mansbach.
Vivien Mansbach. Zanthe Mansbach.
Asa Mansbach. Jamie Greenwood,
most of all.
These people helped me write this book. Some got me through the earliest days of grief & shock, or the later ones. Others read parts of this manuscript & offered insight & support, or talked through with me, over the course of years, how I might write this, or inspired me to try at all. I am grateful, deeply grateful, to them all.
about the author
Adam Mansbach is a novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic, and humorist. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Go the Fuck to Sleep, which has been translated into forty languages and has sold more than three million copies worldwide, and the 2014 sequel, You Have to Fucking Eat. His novels include Rage Is Back, Angry Black White Boy, and The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award.