Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  The next day, Dietrich and I were walking down the street, coming back from the store. We had grocery bags in each hand. Douglas pulled up in another sports car, jumped out, ran over, and hit Dietrich in the face, knocking him down hard. He pulled out a knife-shaped block of wood—something he made in wood shop at school—and waved it at me. I ran around a parked car. He thought that Dietrich and I might rush him, but we were too scared.

  “C’mon motherfuckers. I know you fucked up my car. Ernie told me. And I’m gonna get you. I’m gonna kill both of you motherfuckers! Just wait.” He got back in his car and drove off. “Just wait, motherfuckers! You guys are dead.”

  Now I really had to do something. I called Steve, my comicbook friend, who had grown to over six feet tall and hated Douglas as much as the rest of us. He called some of his friends, and I called some more of mine. I went to Douglas’s house, threatened him, and told him to meet me on our street the next day after school.

  At about 4 p.m. the next day, Douglas led a caravan of eight cars, with some big, mean-looking guy behind each wheel. I only recognized a couple of his guys. Where the rest came from, I had no idea. Slowly, deliberately, they got out of their cars.

  But I had my crew, too. I had about ten guys, with sticks, billy clubs, and brass knuckles. We were on one side of the street, and Douglas’s guys on the other. No one moved, we just stared and showed our sticks, clubs and fists. On Douglas’s side, though, at least two or three had knives. We waited and stared. Somebody had to make the first move.

  Suddenly, Dennis came rushing up the street. He was screaming and waving his arms. “Goddamn you, Douglas! You motherfucker! I’m tired of you fucking with my family!”

  Dennis stood at the end of my line of guys. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun. He aimed it at Douglas.

  “This is the last time, you motherfucker!” Dennis was so angry he was shaking. I’d seen him that way many times. “Nobody fucks with my family.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to scream at Dennis, “What the fuck are you doing?” But a small part of me wanted Dennis to shoot the son-of-a-bitch, or at least wing him. I just froze.

  Douglas didn’t move. He said nothing. He stared back at Dennis, almost daring him to pull the trigger. Dennis shot the gun. A whiff of dirt flew up at Douglas’s feet.

  A black-and-white police cruiser appeared at the bottom of our hill, racing toward us. Dennis threw the gun in a bush behind me. We all stuffed our weapons in our pants, tossed them inside the cars, or threw them in the bushes—and hoped the cops didn’t do a search.

  “What’s going on here?” one officer said.

  “Nothing,” we said.

  “Nothing?” said the officer. “I got a call that something was going down. Bunch of cars. Bunch of guys. And nothing?”

  “Somebody was wrong,” we said. “Just a discussion.”

  The cops said something to each other.

  “All right. Don’t make us come back. If we do, everybody’s going to jail.”

  They drove away.

  We lingered for a while, then broke up, and everybody went home. Nothing else happened. Everybody just decided to forget about the whole thing.

  “But,” I told Dad, “I never got my eighteen dollars.”

  Dad shook his head. “That was really stupid. Did Dennis miss on purpose or was his aim just way off?”

  “I asked Dennis that. And you know him. He’d say one thing one time, then another thing another time. I don’t know. The two sides were standing close, right across the street. So it was practically point-blank. But Dennis was shaking, the way he gets when he’s really mad. So I don’t know.”

  “Where did he get the gun?”

  “I found out that he got it from a guy in the neighborhood. It was a .22 and I don’t know what happened to it. Dennis wouldn’t say, and I didn’t want to know.”

  “The shit you pulled, Larry.” Dad buried his head in his hands. “My God, why didn’t you stop Dennis—at least tell him to put the gun down? Somebody could have gotten killed. And your brother could have been sent to prison for murder. All ’cuz someone owed you eighteen dollars.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not smart.”

  “You got that right.” He kept shaking his head. “Well, you’re right. You sure got away with a lot of crap I didn’t know about.”

  21

  “YOU WEREN’T LIKE YOUR BROTHER”

  Even with all the shit I pulled, Dad was right. I wasn’t like my little brother. He came out of the womb pissed.

  “What’s the matter?” Mom said, when I came home from a high school party one night. She could tell I was upset.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You mean you don’t want to tell me.”

  “I mean you don’t want to hear it.”

  “Try me.”

  I told her Dennis and I had walked to a house party given by friends who lived one block over.

  “Larry, your brother is in the back smoking marijuana,” somebody said. And there was Dennis sitting on a beanbag chair just toking away.

  “Marijuana!” Mom was hysterical.

  “So I said ‘Dennis, Let’s go home.’ He stood up, went like this,” I imitated him inhaling, “and he blew the smoke right in my face.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  Then she launched into another one of her why-can’t-you-and-Dennis-get-along pleas.

  “Some day, I don’t know when,” I said, “Dennis is going to kill or be killed.”

  She was outraged.

  “It’s not a wish, Mom. It’s a prediction.”

  While we were all scared of Dad, Dennis was the most afraid. His feelings were hurt easily, and he masked it by joking and showing off, being defiant at school and at Sunday school. I brought home A’s. He brought C’s, D’s and, increasingly, F’s.

  Dad poured another cup of coffee. Talking about Dennis unsettled him.

  “I wish I had known. I wish I had known.” Dad put his head in his hand. “I could have done somethin’ about Den. I know I could.”

  When we were kids, I’d tease Dennis, and he’d throw his plastic model plane—the one he’d spent hours gluing together—at me so hard that it shattered when I ducked and it hit the wall. We argued once during breakfast, and he picked up his plate—that had just been stacked with fresh pancakes and butter and syrup—and threw it at me. He missed, but splattered the uneaten breakfast on the walls, the curtains, and the floor. Dad, as usual, was not home, and my mother cleaned up the mess and never told him what happened.

  Dennis was handsome, funny, and charismatic. But he decided to be the anti-Larry. If I wanted to do something, he refused. If I excelled, he was indifferent or pretended to be.

  After I stopped working for Dad, I got a job at the burger and hot dog concession in the basement of the museum off Exposition Boulevard. I was a good worker, and they asked me to recommend others who might want to work there. I told Mom, and she told me to get Dennis a job. I didn’t want to because I knew we’d end up fighting. We did, and he quit after a few weeks. But even I had to laugh at some of the stuff he would do to amuse himself at this job that bored him to death.

  One day, we ran out of Coke for the fountain. It was his job to inform the customers. And they weren’t happy. Some had stood in line for over a half hour.

  “Sorry, sir, we’re out of Cokes.”

  “Out!?”

  “Yes sir, sorry.”

  After the hundredth time, Dennis decided to shake things up a little.

  “Sorry, sir, we’re out of Cokes.”

  “Out?!”

  “Yes,” Dennis said calmly. “You’re familiar with out—opposite of in.”

  I laughed so hard my stomach hurt.

  A studious-looking guy—thick glasses, pocket protector—ordered a couple of burgers, two bags of chips, and a large Coke.

  “Sorry, sir, we’re out of Coke.”

  “Out!?” The guy shrieked, waving his hands in consternation.r />
  “Yesss!” Dennis shrieked back, mimicking the gesture. It was hysterical.

  I tried to tell him how to do things safely and more efficiently. He deliberately did the opposite of what I told him.

  “Dennis, don’t hold the hot dog in your hand while pouring on the chili. The chili is hot. You’ll get burned.”

  A man ordered a chili dog. Dennis picked up the hot dog, dipped the scooper, and poured the chili over the dog. It ran over the bun and onto his hand. I could practically smell his skin burning, but he wouldn’t let me have the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so.” The longer he held that dog, the more his hand burned.

  “Oouuuuccchh!” He finally dropped the chili dog on the floor and frantically waved his scalded hand. I enjoyed it. He soon quit.

  Dennis graduated from marijuana to barbiturates. Users called them “flatheads.” When he took them, he became drunk-like—angry, vicious, and violent. The first time, the high school called my mother—her work phone the only number on file—and asked that she immediately leave work to pick him up. They called him a danger to himself and to others.

  He refused to get in her car. She pleaded with him—all this right in front of the main high school entrance.

  “Get your hands off me, bitch!” he screamed.

  “Please, Dennis, get … in … the … car!”

  “You don’t tell me what to do! Nobody tells me what to do!”

  This went on for some twenty minutes. He finally got in the car and screamed at her all the way home.

  “I don’t have any freedom!”

  “You let Larry and Kirk do things I can’t do!”

  “I’m a man and you treat me like a child!”

  When he got home, he went to his bedroom and slept for ten hours. This scene was re-played over and over. He’d go to school high or get high when he got there. The school would call Mom, she would leave work, then wrestle him into the car while students inside pressed against the windows and watched the show.

  She was humiliated. And I had to hear about it from other students. As much as he resented me, Dennis never cursed at Mom when I was there to hear it.

  My father never knew. Mom never told him. By the time Dad knew about Dennis’s drug use, he was a full-blown addict and a high-school dropout who ran around with guys Mom called “low-lifes and thugs.”

  “I wish I had known,” Dad said repeatedly. “I wish I’d known. I could have done somethin’.”

  The cold war between Mom and Dad started the day she quit the restaurant. She didn’t want his help in handling the home front—and he wasn’t about to volunteer. She got her phone company job and became a supervisor. She showed him! She assumed she was making more money than Dad. She didn’t know for sure because he wouldn’t say how much he made. They stopped filing their income tax returns jointly so that one side wouldn’t know what the other made—even though they stood to save money by filing together.

  She vowed not to ask Dad’s help for anything, including with Dennis. She considered it a personal failure—and therefore a victory for Dad—if she couldn’t deal with Dennis. She wasn’t about to give Dad the satisfaction.

  Dennis was crying out for help even as his defiance of Mom grew more and more bold. She tried to reason with him and accepted his promises to do better. When he didn’t, she made more excuses, and he made more promises.

  Dad came home, meanwhile, and went to bed—oblivious to Dennis’s demons. Would it have made a difference?

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’d have liked to try.”

  Because Dennis was indifferent to school and drank and did drugs, Mom refused to sign him up for driver’s education. Of all the teenagers in the neighborhood, Dennis never learned to drive and was the only one without a license. This enraged him.

  One night, he swiped my set of keys for Mom’s car. He tried to drive it but crashed the car not even two blocks from the house, ran from the scene, and denied any involvement. Dad came in that night just as Mom was confronting Dennis about the accident. Dad was outraged.

  “Did you take those keys?”

  Dennis denied it.

  “How did that car hit that pole?”

  Dennis didn’t know.

  “So somebody stole your mother’s car, crashed it, left the scene, and the neighbors all lied when they said they saw you runnin’ away from the crash! Goddammit!” Dad pointed to the cat. “Even Cream Puff is shakin’ his head.”

  Dad stepped over the coffee table, grabbed Dennis, and shook him. He slapped him.

  “Don’t you lie to me! I’ll make you wish you had never lived!”

  Dennis broke away and ran from the house. He was gone for several days.

  When he came back, he was worse. Things started missing from the house. He would sell them to buy drugs. My collection of record albums disappeared. Ditto for my coin collection.

  “No, I haven’t seen them,” Dennis said when I confronted him.

  “Right, I guess Dad stole them.”

  “Fuck you!”

  If he was high, he’d yell at the ceiling about how much he hated me. “God, I hate your guts! I just can’t stand that motherfucker.” He’d point to me.

  And the feeling was mutual.

  Dad said very little. He never knew about the stuff that happened before he got home. He knew Dennis stopped going to school and eventually he learned about the drugs. By then, Dennis came and went when he felt like it and when Dad tried to talk to him, Dennis simply disappeared, sometimes for weeks.

  “One day, Dad, I almost killed him. If it weren’t for Mom, I would have.”

  I asked him if he wanted to hear about it. He did.

  “Are you sure?”

  I promised a friend I’d meet him for breakfast, and had gotten up to shower when I heard it. Dennis was screaming at Mom.

  “Fuck you!” “Fuck this!” “Fuck that!”

  I lost it. I put on some pants and shoes and ran to the front of the house. I grabbed him by his neck and rammed him against the wall.

  “I told you never to talk to her like that! Do you hear me?! Do it again, and I’ll kill you!”

  He was shaking and scared. I released him. He calmed down and I got into the car and left. About a block away, I realized that I left my wallet with my driver’s license. I turned around to get it. I intended to dash right in and out, so instead of pulling in the driveway where the car could be seen from the kitchen—which was where I last left Mom—I just parked on the street.

  When I walked in, I heard him again.

  “Fuck you!” “Fuck this.” “Fuck that.”

  I charged him.

  We fought from the front of the house to the back and to the front again. He broke a dining room chair over me. I threw him into the living room television set. I knocked him down and smashed my fist into his face. He could have hit me with a hatchet—I wouldn’t have felt a thing. I kept charging. I pounded him for the years of putting up with his ridicule, for embarrassing Mom by taking pills and fighting with her in front of the whole school, for stealing from me, for endangering Mom and the whole family by bringing his “low-lifes and thugs” into our house, and for all the times he got loaded and—while I was trying to study or play piano—he shouted to anyone who could hear how much he hated me.

  I wanted to destroy him.

  “Please, Larry, please, you’re killing him!”

  I wanted to.

  She tried to grab my arm as I delivered blow after blow. I shook her away and kept pounding. Dennis had long stopped struggling, and I continued to land blow and after blow.

  Mom charged me from behind, jumped on my back, and put her arms around me.

  “Please. Please. You’re killing him.”

  “All right. All right,” I said.

  I stood up over him. He began to stir again.

  “Fu—, fu—, f—,” he mumbled, weak and battered but still defiant.

  I decided to finish the job.

  “You want some more
! You want some more!”

  “Please, Larry, please,” Mom cried hysterically. “Just go! Leave! I’ll handle this. You … just … leave.”

  I left. He never cursed at her again.

  Out of all our fights, from the earliest ones over a tricycle, to the ones about him stealing from my piggy bank, to the times he charged me with a butcher knife or with a broken glass bottle, this was where we came the closest to someone getting killed. Dennis was seventeen, and I was eighteen.

  Dad came home that night and went to bed, just like any other night.

  I wanted out of that house, out of this city, away from Dennis, and away from Dad.

  Two weeks later, I was on an airplane bound for college—putting 3,000 miles between Dennis and Dad and me.

  That was our last fight.

  It wasn’t until I took psychology in college that I had a clue about at least one big factor in “what was wrong with Dennis.” I read about sibling rivalry. It was as if the author wrote the book after sitting in our home and taking notes.

  Because Dennis and I were so close in age, we had many of the same teachers. I made mostly A’s. Dennis struggled. Not because he didn’t have it. He was quick and sharp. He just didn’t care, or pretended not to.

  “Why aren’t you like your brother?” a teacher would ask. “I don’t understand, you brother was always prepared,” said another. Or, “This work is poor. Are you sure you’re Larry’s brother?” Dennis heard this again and again. Today teachers are more sensitive. At least I hope so.

  “There’s a song,” I told Dad, “that goes, ‘it must have been cold there in my shadow.’ It must have been awful the way teachers and kids compared Dennis to me. To a lot of people, I was a star. My light blinded him.”

  “Maybe,” Dad said, “but that’s no excuse. I wish I had known. I could have done somethin’.”

  But Dad never asked Mom about Dennis, about how he was doing, or what he could do to help. And that’s exactly how Mom wanted it. They silently negotiated a policy: Don’t ask, don’t tell. Would an early intervention by Dad have changed anything?