by Diana Joseph
The boy is so different from boys I grew up with, from my rough-and-tumble brothers, from boy as I thought I understood the word. This boy doesn’t like to be sweaty, he doesn’t like to get dirty. He doesn’t like to play sports except for Madden NFL on Xbox 360. He says words like “flash memory” and “firmware dump” and “removable hard drive”; he made a video of himself downgrading 2.6 to 1.5 on his PSP that is over six minutes long; he says he has a bunch of illegal games and stuff he got off the Internet. “If I died and they searched my PSP, they’d know,” he says, “but they’d need a warrant.”
The boy doesn’t run. His walk is plodding, pokey, he drags his feet. He doesn’t like to hurry. He has a bike and knows how to ride it, but he’d rather not. Riding a bike means going outside. He doesn’t like leaving his room. When I asked him if he thought he might be agoraphobic, a thirteen-year-old agoraphobic, did he think he needed help because I can get him help, he told me that was a mean thing to say.
“You’re mean,” he said. “A mean woman is my mother. Can you get me help for that?”
At two-seventeen this morning, Louis and the boy were playing Halo on Xbox 360. I could hear them talking. I don’t think they were having a conversation, exactly. They didn’t seem to be talking to each other. Their voices were pitchy falsettos. What they were saying creeped me out.
“Mother?” the boy said. “Oh, Mother!”
“Eep!” said Louis. “Eeeep!”
“Why, Mother? Why?” the boy shrilled. “Oh, Mother!”
I don’t think he meant me. I think he was talking about some other mother, the universal mother, the one every boy has to turn his back to if he’s to become a man.
“This game is so violent, Mother!” the boy harped. “Why are you letting me play such a violent video game, Mother? Mother? Mother!”
Maybe the problem is I can’t spread a blanket across the living room floor and put him there. He’s too wiggly. He gets up and walks around. Pokes his head in the refrigerator. Pours himself some Mountain Dew. He settles on the couch, then he’s on the phone, then he’s rooting through the junk drawer looking for a deck of cards or a fishing lure or that great big ball of rubber bands he made back in fourth grade. He says he’s hungry and he needs a ride.
The boy is a bleeding heart when it comes to choosing favorites on game shows: if two contestants are white guys and one contestant is a black guy, the boy will root for the black guy every single time. If you ask him isn’t it kind of weird to like someone just because he’s black, the boy will ask if you’re a racist. If you say something snarky about all the blue-hairs at the grocery, it must be Senior Citizen Discount Thursday, the boy will ask if you’re ageist.
The boy has strong feelings about hate. He uses the word a lot. He hates people who call attention to themselves. He hates to be the center of attention. He just can’t stand to have a lot of people looking at him. He hates even the idea of people thinking about him. He hates pancakes, the way a new car smells, and the feel of newspaper. He says newspaper feels cheap. He hates Jon Bon Jovi, he hates when the temperature rises above seventy-five degrees, he hates generic macaroni and cheese. He hates pierced ears on men, and sometimes, just to mess with his head, I tell him get in the car, we’re going to the mall to get your ears pierced. “I’m not a junkie, Mom,” he says.
The boy has still never said he hates me. I’ve been waiting for him to say it, but he hasn’t said it. I keep waiting and waiting. Why hasn’t he said it?
I expect he will sooner or later. I’m ready for it, I’m prepared. It won’t be a surprise. And when he does, I know what I will say in return:
What the hell do you want from me now?
I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!
I adore you.
Officer Frenchie
When a state trooper passes me on the highway, I grit my teeth, check my speed, and hope nobody put a dead guy in the trunk while I was in Wal-Mart last night at two a.m. When a squad car pulls up behind me at the red light on Front Street and Second, I nervously keep watch in my rearview mirror. Even though I’m pretty sure I’ve done nothing wrong, committed no crime, I’m wearing my seat belt, I came to a complete stop at that stop sign, I slowed down to twenty miles per hour in that school zone, my insurance is paid, my tags are up-to-date, I used my turn signal and my headlights are in working order, I still feel anxious. Guarded. Uptight. I still say Oh, great, it’s the cops or It’s the fucking cops or Watch out for the fucking pig cops like I am Bonnie in the getaway car, smoking a cigarette while waiting with toe-tapping impatience for Clyde to get his ass out of that bank, overstuffed bags of cash in his hand. Even though I am almost always completely innocent, I am still not crazy about the police.
Some girls are. Some girls dig cops. It’s the uniform, the gun, the nightstick. It’s the shiny badge, the way it glints in the light. It catches your eye. It’s the promise of power and safety and protection and masculinity, the boy in blue, the crime fighter, the one who goes after the bad guys, the one who kicks ass. Yes, there are little honeys out there who love a cop.
So says the cop who is also my baby brother. His name is Travis, but since childhood, he’s been known as Bye-Bye. He’s just returned from an all-expenses-paid vacation to Laguna Beach, California, with some little honey who’s got a thing for cops.
Bye-Bye has called me up to tell me all about it. I’ve been on the phone with him for an hour already, listening to his Californian adventure. He wants to know how do you say “X-rated” in French.
The little honey’s father is a B-list Hollywood celebrity; she and my brother met two weeks ago, but apparently she’s had her eye on him for longer than that. She’d seen him around when he was on bike patrol. Honeys like bike patrol, he says. Girls want to give him their phone number, want to take him out to dinner, or make him dinner, or get into his pants, or crawl into his bed. He says he has to be careful, because honeys are horny and he is the hive. “They want me,” he says. “They just can’t help themselves.” When he’s on bike patrol, Bye-Bye’s uniform is a department-issued navy blue shirt and navy blue shorts. His badge shines like a diamond, but it’s those shorts that catch the female eye. “I can’t help I look so good,” he says. “I’m just doing my job.”
I was five and a half years old when Bye-Bye was born, and aside from a clear memory of taking his hospital picture to first grade for Show and Tell so I could stand cutely in front of the class, tossing my hair and generally showing off, I don’t remember his early years at all. I don’t remember my mother being pregnant with him. I don’t remember my mother going to the hospital so he could be born. I don’t remember her bringing home a baby. I don’t remember anyone even talking about a baby.
I feel like I should remember something. Especially since there’s quite a bit I do remember about the year Bye-Bye was born. It was 1976. “Afternoon Delight” played on the radio fifty times a day. The Supreme Court ruled on Gregg v. Georgia, and the Ramones released their self-titled debut album. The United Kingdom broke off diplomatic relations with Uganda, and like every American who was between the ages of five and twelve on July 4, 1976, I have pleasant memories of participating in the celebration concert extravaganza that my hometown put on to honor our nation’s bicentennial. I can still feel the scratchy polyester of the blue jumpsuit I wore, the lacy collar on the white blouse, the little red jacket. A white plastic hat completed the look. It kept sliding off my head during the performance but I nonetheless felt adorable. I also felt proud to be an American. I can still belt out every word to such patriot classics as “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
But I don’t remember any baby at my house in 1976.
I don’t have a memory of Bye-Bye until he’s six years old, then boom! All of a sudden and out of nowhere, there he is, another little brother, a wild boy everyone calls Bye-Bye because he likes to flush the toilet and wave so-long-see-ya-good-bye to its contents.
I already had one brother who was cuter than me; now I had one who was more clever.
In my first memory of him, Bye-Bye is standing on the front stoop of our house. It’s late summer, the sun is golden, and the smell of my mother’s roses is almost overwhelming. Bye-Bye is stripping off his clothes, he’s gyrating his pelvis. He’s bumping and grinding and thrusting like he’s auditioning for a gig with the Chippendales or the leading role of plumber / porn star. He’s grinning, devious and self-satisfied. This has got to be something he’s seen on HBO, and though I have overheard our parents whisper to each other that HBO is not appropriate for children, Bye-Bye has watched HBO. A lot. All those times he so sweetly fell asleep on our mother’s lap and she was too tired or too lazy or too hypnotized by the tawdriness that was HBO to carry him to his bed, Bye-Bye was really wide-awake. He was watching HBO and here are the consequences.
Bye-Bye is naked on the front stoop, shaking his stuff. Our mother isn’t around during this, and I have no idea where she is, but I’m sure she instructed me to watch him. She no doubt said keep an eye on your baby brother. That would be why I’m in such a tizzy about Bye-Bye’s burlesque show. I’m worried that even though he’s the one naked on the front stoop, his body brown, his penis pink, his butt white, I’m going to be the one who gets in trouble. I can still hear myself telling him, asking him, begging him, “Bye-Bye, please, put your clothes back on, please, please, before somebody sees you,” but he keeps dancing naked on the front stoop. He’s doing a kind of hula dance that morphs into the hustle. “Please, Bye-Bye? Please put your clothes back on?”
He says no. He won’t. And you can’t make him. Nobody can.
Nobody will be able to make Bye-Bye do anything he doesn’t want to do. Not when he’s in second grade and smoking Winstons. Not when he’s egging the principal’s car in fifth grade or chugging beer in seventh or skipping school in ninth. He gets in trouble with teachers, he gets suspended from school, he gets in fights, once even beating up a kid for saying your mother is a whore. It would seem that juvie is in my brother’s future, but he gets through high school, and he goes to college on a football scholarship, and when he drops out after only one semester, nobody is surprised. When he becomes a bouncer at a strip club, nobody is surprised. Nobody is surprised when he stays out partying all night, or when he crashes his motorcycle, or when he dates girls who have stage names, or when he has a tattoo etched on his biceps that he says is a tribal something or other though I think it looks a lot like barbed wire, agricultural fencing to keep the cows in the pasture.
It would seem my littlest brother is headed for a life of bad boy-ness, becoming an enforcer for a Chicago mob family, perhaps, or a white rapper. But when he decides to go to the police academy, to become a crime fighter, a law enforcer, a George W. Bush-supporting Republican, I can’t say anybody is surprised. Who better to keep the order than someone who spent so much time thwarting it?
Male pattern baldness runs in our family, and Bye-Bye is among its unfortunate victims. He deals with this genetic injustice by keeping his head shaved, which makes his eyes look enormous, his forehead, huge. Like if he head-butted you even lightly, your skull would crack open like an egg. At five-feet-seven-and-three-quarters, my brother isn’t tall, but he’s wide and he’s solid. He weighs one pound over two hundred. His body fat is 4.7 percent. He works out five days a week, for an hour and a half to two hours, a workout that’s carefully planned: chest and cardio and abs on Monday; shoulders, traps, and abs on Tuesday; calves and cardio and abs on Wednesday; shoulders, forearms, cardio, and abs on Thursday; biceps, triceps, cardio, and abs on Friday. He can bench-press more than four hundred pounds. He wears a gold necklace from which dangle two of what he calls pendants and I call charms: one is a bodybuilder lifting a barbell over his head; the other is the number 42.
Bye-Bye likes to look good. He has twenty-five pairs of shoes, he has beautiful silk ties and a gold watch, he has well-fitting suits. He also has a T-shirt that says Things Not to Say to a Police Officer and the list includes “Oink! Oink!” “Aren’t you the guy from the Village People?” “Gee, Officer, your eyes look glazed—have you been eating doughnuts?” and “No, you assume the position.”
He was wearing that T-shirt the last time I saw him. Because we live so far apart, we don’t get to see much of each other, and I wanted the time we could be together to be special. That night while we were out for dinner, he drew a picture of an enormous speckled and spurting penis on my address book; then he said it’s ridiculous that I still make my son go to bed by a certain time; then he told me a joke about a man with a sunburnt dick, how the guy had been advised to dip his dick in milk, and how when he was in the midst of doing so, the man’s girlfriend, a dull-witted blonde, said, “I always wondered how you guys loaded those.”
My brother knows hundreds of similar jokes. At least twice a week, he calls to tell me them. During these calls, he also describes his love life and mocks my parenting skills. Sometimes I wonder why he would call me. I don’t seem to be his audience. I have never been even mildly amused by one of his jokes, I’m defensive about my parenting skills, squeamish about his love life, and alarmed by his sexism. So we don’t have much in common. Right now, Bye-Bye is telling me that same joke: the one about the man who stayed out in the sun too long—only this time the guy has been advised to dip his dick in yogurt, and the blonde wants to know if it’s fat-free.
My brother is partial to blondes. He comes home from a night at the bar with matchbooks, cocktail napkins, and scraps of paper upon which all the little honeys have written their phone numbers. There are so many blondes that he can’t keep them all straight. He needed some way to distinguish them besides the color of their hair so he developed a system of shorthand: R-Bl-BT, for example, or Y-Br-VBT. The first category is the color of the girl’s shirt, R meaning red, Y meaning yellow. The second—Bl and Br—notes the color of her eyes, blue and brown, respectively. “I better not even have to tell you what BT and VBT stand for,” he says.
I tell my brother I’m not stupid. “Bright teeth,” I say, “and Very Bright Teeth.” When he tells me wrong, guess again, I say, “Big Trees” and “Very Big Trees.”
And that’s all it takes to get him going. He’s off, he’s running, I’ve been on the phone with him for two hours, and now it will be two more. He’s attacking my politics—“You’re all about saving trees but putting serial killers back on the streets,” he says. “Aren’t you?”—which leads to him attacking my position on the war in Iraq—“I say we just bomb those fuckers, but you’re all about giving the terrorists the soft kind of toilet paper and fresh goat meat, aren’t you?”—which leads to him attacking my apparent lack of taste—“Chicken livers are delicious, but you don’t know what’s good, do you? Your taste buds are fried like your brain.” He tells me he has undeniable, indisputable proof that marijuana is a gateway drug. “You think dope should be legal and dopers should have drive-thru windows, but you haven’t read the studies,” he says. “Because you’re a pothead.” Then he tells me the story about when he held a twelve-year-old in his arms, a boy who would eventually die from the gunshot wound to his neck, the kid popped during a home invasion gone wrong, a botched robbery where the perpetrator was out for the stash belonging to the kid’s mother.
“Poor little bastard,” my brother says. This isn’t the first time or even the second or the third he’s told me about it. “Poor little fucker,” my brother says. He tells me to hold on a minute, and I hear loud rustling, like he’s crumpling newspaper or a plastic grocery bag into the receiver. It’s not hard to imagine Bye-Bye is inserting a plug of Copenhagen between his lower lip and gum, or flicking a booger across the room, or catching a fly in his fist, or asking a little honey what time is it. When the rustling stops and he returns, it’s to lobby for loosening the restrictions on my son’s bedtime. “Look,” Bye-Bye says, “you’re the one who wants to free criminals and support terrorists and smoke dope, so why are you such a bitc
h to your own kid? Just tell him, dude, if you’re gonna be a mean little asshole because you’re tired from staying up all night, I’ma gonna sticka my foot up ya ass. You baby that kid. How long are you going to let him dangle from your tit? It’s time to get a stick and beat him with it. Sister, you got to tell him get off my tit, you little sucker! Let go!”
Next to the picture of the speckled dick my brother drew in my address book, he wrote a 42 and put a circle around it—the number on his high school football jersey. My brother voted for George W. Bush, not once, but twice, and he told me he’d do what I think is unimaginable, inconceivable, unfathomable, and irresponsible: “I’d vote for my man a third time if I could. Hell, yeah!” When he vacationed with that B-list celebrity’s daughter in California, he showed her some love on Friday night, and apparently she was a kinky sex freak, because afterward she said she wanted to introduce him to her best friend—“Another kinky sex freak!”—and on Saturday night and for part of the day on Sunday, the three of them did like they were French.
“I bet you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” he says. My brother is so crude and nasty and arrogant, and I don’t always believe the things he tells me, maybe because I don’t want to. But he is also the only person in my life who has never hung up the telephone without first saying he loves me.