Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  In fact, every family member benefited from Jason’s presence. Jimmy, Mom’s post-Daddy love, found Jason to be a helpmeet who, unlike my sons, knew his way around a toolbox. Jason had lived in homes where broken appliances were dismantled so they could be fixed. At the Britt-Merida abode, we called a repairman. A retired steel mill machinist, Jimmy (who at age eighteen was among the first black workers to integrate U.S. Steel’s apprentice program) enjoyed repairing furniture and household appliances at our home. Jason loved assisting him, often anticipating which screwdriver or hammer Jimmy needed.

  Mom was wary at first of this interloper, and of the incomprehensible gift we were offering a near stranger. She kept an observant eye on him for weeks before pronouncing him one of the least mean-spirited people she’d ever met. Jason called her “Grandma” (“I became his grandma,” she said), and he wrapped her in hugs even warmer than her grandkids’. Understanding her abandonment issues better than any of us because he had grappled with his own, he listened attentively to her every way-back-when tale.

  Not surprisingly, Hamani, Darrell, and Skye got the biggest kick out of their new “brother.” When Kev and I went out, Skye was entertained and fed by a babysitting veteran who’d helped raise five younger siblings. As Skye grew older, he admired the video gaming skills demonstrated by his “other big brother,” who taught him valuable shortcuts and tricks.

  Darrell would have enjoyed having a Spanish-speaking big brother who’d lived in exotic Puerto Rico even if Jason hadn’t been so much like him. Both were tempestuous, wary of trusting too quickly, and unsure as to how much they were loved. Jason worried that his mother was more enamored of his younger siblings; Darrell found living in Mani’s perfect-kid shadow stifling. In some ways, Jason was more relatable than his own brothers.

  Darrell understood Jason. Both were into hip-hop music; Jason had actually experienced some of the rawness celebrated in the videos I hated but that Darrell admired. Jason’s Latino friends Alex, Baloney, and Danny and his seemingly hundreds of cousins were tough guys whose swagger brought a whiff of danger into Darrell’s placid life. Darrell knew that if he ever stumbled into “shit” on the streets, Jason’s boys would help him handle it. Jason was convulsed by Darrell’s humor, by how he cleverly employed what he’d learned in school (“I’m so hungry, my liver just ate my pancreas!”) or plucked out of his imagination. As sad as we were to hear that Tupac Shakur had lost a testicle in a shooting, we had to laugh when Darrell asked, “You think they’re gonna call him One-pac?” Mani and Jason scandalized Darrell with jokes about masturbation, an activity that Mani and Jason called “Plan B.”

  Conversely, it was Jason’s and Mani’s differences that drew them closer. They were near-perfect counterpoints. On the surface, both were happy, popular teens. But Mani’s smile was born of genuine equanimity, of his appreciation for his affection-filled life. Jason’s grin provided cover for agitation and deep distrust. His caution suggested to Mani that it might be wise to sometimes temper his guilelessness. At the same time, Mani showed Jason the benefits of openheartedness—the courage it took to be vulnerable, the trust it could foster. The more-experienced Jason became Hamani’s personal girl-coach, a sexual consigliere who showed him that girls often like guys who keep them guessing, whose confidence (even if it’s feigned) helps them “own the room.” Jason lacked faith in his ambitions and goals; he watched how Mani, a wannabe film director, studied movies as if they were holy writ. Some school nights, the two slipped downstairs as Kev and I slept, playing Mario Kart when they weren’t jawing about life and girls.

  Teenagers are humankind’s most passionate specimens, and our boys had three unwavering obsessions: the NBA, Michael Jordan, and the sneakers hawked by both. This was the late 1980s. Jordan was a sports, cultural, and media god so inescapable, he seemed poised for world domination. In addition to Jordan, naturally muscular Mani also idolized buff Seattle SuperSonics power forward Shawn Kemp. Darrell, who had a scar over the same eye as Orlando Magic sensation Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway, bought Hardaway-endorsed shoes and tucked pennies into them. Jason acknowledged other players’ “sweet” moves, but his heart and sneaker money belonged to Jordan. Fierce family arguments often erupted over Jordan’s place in history when Kev dared ask if he was truly better than Magic Johnson and other legends. By high school, the boys’ fascination extended to action movies; they thrilled to Arnold’s, Bruce’s, Chuck’s, and Wesley’s bone-crunching adventures. Like their smart-mouthed heroes, the boys relentlessly jonesed on each other’s high-top haircuts, walks, annoying habits, and body odor: Man, your breath is kicking like [martial arts star Jean-Claude] Van Damme!

  Jason reminded us of how blessed Kevin, the boys, and I had been, growing up in stable, loving homes. He was effusively grateful for stuff our crew barely noticed: an attentive ear for every problem; money set out for his school lunch; the reliable appearance of the new socks or schoolbook he’d requested. He made me realize that for kids, consistency is as vital as love; maybe it is love.

  This Latino kid, one part hustler and more than a smidgen saint, shared lessons he’d learned from his less-affluent, less-stable, less-educated existence, which my privileged sons would never have known. He was the gift. The “other” who became ours.

  Just because someone belongs to you doesn’t mean he’ll stay. Almost a year after moving in, Jason said he wanted to “temporarily” move in with his mom. We weren’t surprised.

  Our beloved new son had lived as an adult for so long that becoming a kid again felt stifling. He missed his freedom. As the parent who helped him with homework, listened to his problems, and stayed on top of his dozen daily crises in addition to handling my own kids and my “real” job, I craved a respite. A few weeks later, Jason called to say that his mom needed him permanently. She was “guilt-tripping” him, he said, “asking why I’m not helping her.” He wouldn’t be coming back. When we protested, he said he had learned enough from us to keep studying and improving his grades.

  Six months later, he dropped out of school. Taking a full-time job, he promised to get his GED. Angry, hurt, and confused about the time and money we’d apparently wasted, I ruminated for weeks. Finally, I invited him over and asked what had gone wrong.

  Sitting with me in our den, Jason admitted that after moving in, he felt as if he’d wandered into the Brady Bunch. He’d always believed that Mani’s family had everything a kid should have: two parents who got along, had open minds, and provided a safe place where kids could talk about sex, drugs, or whatever came up. “Kevin wasn’t like dads who were always trying to prove something,” Jason said. “He showed strength without using violence or profanity or putting other men down.” Before Jason joined us, he’d had offers to sell drugs. He’d always said no, but living with us gave him a hint of the many options that were out there to pursue. He told himself, I can have a life like this someday.

  Suddenly he was in the “perfect family.” He was living in a big house; he had brothers his age and loving parents with nice cars who let him drive them. To honor this “dream come true,” he came directly home from school, did his homework, and got decent grades. Not everything was perfect, he said, “but things got solved. And not through violence, like I’d seen.”

  I felt better listening to him. Yet he’d left us. I had to know: “Did we fail you?”

  Jason’s response was so grown-up: “I have to prove I’m not going to end up a failure,” he said. Once a person leaves school, he said, people assume his chances for success evaporate. “But I’ve just begun,” he insisted, adding that he had every intention of getting a diploma. He said he knew Kevin and I didn’t agree with his decisions to leave our home and quit school. “But they’re my decisions.”

  That was that. We didn’t fail him, I decided. But we didn’t make much concrete difference, either. And he was gone.

  I was spent. Taking a three-month sabbatical from work, I hung out with Mani as much as possible before we transported him to the College
of Santa Fe to study filmmaking. Returning to work refreshed and in control of my time, I felt liberated, juggling only two kids after raising four.

  Yet Jason was still very much in my thoughts. Leaving as he had with so much undone disheartened me. If anyone deserved a quiet interlude, it was me.

  Do you think I got one?

  The one thing I wasn’t good at giving: myself a break. God knows I tried. For weeks after Jason left, I ignored my friend Bob’s weekly request for help with a Costa Rican exchange student from the American Field Service, the nation’s oldest exchange program. The poor girl had been kicked out of her adopted U.S. home when her host family’s daughter balked at sharing her mother. Now she had no home. Could we take her in? Finally, I couldn’t say no.

  Maybe it’ll be fun, I told myself. Before Jason’s first stay with us, my fourteen-year-old niece Raquel, Melech’s bright, lovely daughter, had spent a year with us. Her mother, Malcah, had felt her accomplished daughter could be a huge help with newborn Skye and that I’d be a good role model. It was wonderful. Raquel got great grades, was terrific at cooking and chores, stood her ground with her male cousins. Yet what I relished most was her girlness, our talks about shoes, clothes, friendships—everything except the sports that dominated chats with my boys. Maybe this exchange student would be as feminine and engaging.

  Our Costa Rican “daughter,” Martha Torres Solano, turned out to be an affectionate sprite whose charmingly accented voice ended every sentence with an exclamation point. (“My homework isn’t done!” “I am reading this magazine!”) Her stay with us was indeed a blast—until the day Martha was arrested for shoplifting at Bloomingdale’s after a blond classmate coaxed, “C’mon, all American kids do it!” After her arrest, Martha cried a río, spent $500 on legal fees, and fulfilled her twenty-four-hour community-service sentence. Her record was expunged. Today, my memories of Martha aren’t of her deeply regretted mistake, but of her squeals over Telemundo soaps, her iffy empanadas, and how much I enjoyed her.

  Still, when a chastened Martha returned to Costa Rica, my friend Mireille gave me a hard look and asked, “Have you finally had enough of opening your home to kids who aren’t yours?” My heartfelt response: “Are you kidding me?” I couldn’t have been happier to be out of the “other people’s kids” business.

  I had no intention—none—of getting into it again.

  Four years later—six after he left us—we learned that Jason was jobless and adrift.

  I wish I could say I was surprised. He’d never resumed his schooling and was living the rudderless life we’d feared. I was sincere in my resolve about not getting involved again. Yet I couldn’t look away; months of laughing, crying, fighting, confessing, arguing, and forgiving as a family couldn’t be undone. Kevin and I couldn’t stop wanting to help Jason fulfill his enormous potential. Mani was away at college; we had the physical and psychic space. When we asked our “other son” how he’d feel about moving in again—provided he got a job and earned his GED degree—Jason said, “It would be a dream come true.”

  Once again, we were bringing this complicated spirit, now a grown man, into our family. We knew the move could have unimagined repercussions. So what? He was ours.

  Jason looked into when local GED classes started. With Mani away, Darrell was thrilled at his prodigal brother’s return. Exploring music, movies, and videos together, Jason and he picked up their insult-fest where they’d left off. Darrell cracked on Jason’s oil-glistening Afro; his play-brother made fun of his cornrows. Night after night, would-be music producer Jason drove my Explorer to studios across metropolitan Washington, recording with other fledgling impresarios. Nothing thrilled him like creating music. After weeks of checking want ads, he found administrative work with an apartment rental company. Daily, he woke up at an ungodly seven a.m. so Kev could drop him on his way to the Post.

  Things were looking up, and they soared even higher when Jason met Vickie. A vivacious Teri Hatcher look-alike, Vickie had a petite body verging on tiny—until you got to the bodacious booty that delighted the men who watched her demonstrate Latin dance moves at clubs with her best pal, a salsa teacher who was one of Jason’s closest friends. We saw how warily Vickie and Jason inched toward each other; both clearly were scared of where they might be headed. But there was no denying it: Jason was in love. Vickie, whose middle-class upbringing contrasted with Jason’s, seemed equally smitten.

  So when Vickie announced that she was visiting family in Puerto Rico for four months, Jason was floored. Four months? He knew her family was nervous about their relationship; what did this trip mean? A month after she left, Jason’s abandonment issues in full force, he bumped into his first love at a party. After several drinks, he fell into bed with her. Genuinely remorseful, he confessed to me what had happened. Should he tell Vickie? I told him yes. “She’ll be hurt and angry, but I think she’ll understand if you explain,” I said. “Promise her it’ll never happen again. She’ll value the courage it took to tell her when you didn’t have to.”

  Calling Vickie, Jason confessed, apologized, and explained why he’d strayed. She dropped him flat. “I could tell the hurt in her voice,” he said, sounding truly wounded. “She said I broke her trust. That what I did was unacceptable.”

  Damn. I had advised him to take a risk that honored the man he was becoming, a risk he’d considered not taking because he didn’t want to lose Vickie. Sleeping with an ex is a major screwup, but Jason had taken responsibility, done the brave thing. And he’d lost his new love. “Honey, I’m so sorry,” I told him. “But maybe a girl who can’t forgive a mistake you’ve admitted and asked forgiveness for isn’t for you. You deserve someone who’ll love you even when you mess up.” He nodded but was deeply hurt.

  Then one of Jason’s superiors at work, a man whom he suspected was gay, began saying how well Jason’s clothes fit him, occasionally massaging his shoulders, touching his hair. When Jason pulled away, the man told him he wasn’t working hard enough. Like many Latino youths, Jason was intensely macho; the man’s actions made him uncomfortable, then angry. Since his first impulse—to knock the crap out of the guy—was out of the question, we explored other options with him. “Tell him firmly how inappropriate this is,” Kevin and I advised. Then: “Put it in writing, and tell him you’ll report him. What he’s doing is illegal.” Jason said he’d consider it. A week later, without discussing it with us, he quit, saying, “I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  Inhaling, we suggested he try working around something he loved: cars. He got a sales job at a car dealership. Though he hated wearing a suit and tie, Jason loved the response the look elicited. Women’s eyes lingered on him. One morning at 7-Eleven, “a woman opened a door for me!” he reported. “No one’s ever done that in my life!” But the job paid by commission. Jason stood all day in the August sun, talked persuasively to a dozen potential buyers and—after having paid for food and transportation—came home poorer than when he’d left. He knew about cars from helping relatives fix them. But selling autos is a different skill: “I work ten-hour shifts, but if I don’t sell anything, I don’t make anything.”

  Again, he quit. Kevin and I took another deep breath. In the next few months, we tried reuniting Jason with his estranged father; their initial warmth soon morphed into recriminations. Next, I told Jason about Election Protection, a nonpartisan group I’d written about that was working to ensure voters’ rights in the 2004 election. Jason was sent to Florida, where he was moved by his coworkers’ commitment and felt useful helping Spanish-speaking voters negotiate the polls. But coming home was a letdown. He seemed even more directionless.

  One night a few weeks after his return, Jason stormed into the house, livid about having been “disrespected” by a friend. Depressed, he’d gone to this man’s home and ended up discussing his problems with the guy’s pregnant wife. Unthinkingly, he sat beside her on the bed. Walking in to find Jason on his bed, the man abruptly told him to move. Stunned, Jason questioned his friend’s ange
r. Back and forth it went until Jason left fuming. Now he was furious.

  “I’m getting my gun!” he said suddenly. “That’ll force him to admit he’s wrong.” Flabbergasted, I blurted, “You have a gun?” Even in his outrage, Jason looked stung. “You know I’d never disrespect you guys by bringing a gun here,” he said. “But I know where to get one!” It took an hour to convince him that any husband might feel uncomfortable about seeing another man occupy such a private space with his wife. “Don’t you see how this could escalate if you start waving a gun?” I asked. “How you could endanger us, since you live here?” When he calmed down, I wondered: What the hell am I dealing with?

  I was dealing with Jason, of course, the tenderhearted, volatile young man we’d always known, who was becoming increasingly complicated. Then came the awful news that two of Jason’s young cousins had been in a horrific motorcycle accident. One died at the scene; the second survived for only a week. Even as I comforted him, I felt defeated. So did he. A helpless desperation had overtaken him, the old “nothing ever goes right for me” weightiness that had pressed his thin body into our sofa a decade ago. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t find work. There was no career he wanted to pursue, except for music, which pays the bills only for a lucky few. So we tried to help him with that, setting him up with local producers, offering introductions to people with industry contacts. Convinced that he’d never be taken seriously, Jason seldom followed up. He knew we wanted to support him. And he was just as certain that there was little we could do.

  After a year and a half of life with the adult Jason—eighteen months of family crises and relationship dramas, jobs lost and found, promises made and broken—Kev and I had to act. Jason was still helpful, painting the den bathroom and the patio’s concrete floor. He was still funny, kind, and had a listening ear for anyone in need. But he was in his midtwenties, jobless, and had given up even the pretense of getting his GED. Jason was getting free room and board, driving my car, coming in at all hours, and requiring counsel for an array of problems. We gave him a deadline by which to get a job or leave. He missed it. We gave him another.