MY BROTHER EDDIE
a.k.a. Rat Boy
a.k.a. The Sleaze King
and His Many Bad Deeds which were
Not His Fault
Five foot seven
Dark hair & eyes
Skinny
Long nose
Overbite (great lost battles of orthodontia) therefore
Called Rat-boy when we were kids.
A sweet kid, a nice boy. Everybody’s favorite. Not actually the valedictorian but might have been. Not on any sports team because of his epilepsy. Just petit mal: he stopped fitting at twelve, but needed pills, and he couldn’t drink or smoke or take drugs.
But – the cheerleader girlfriend. The hottest, always, and another in waiting. He had a pack of friends, and my friends used to say to me, “That’s your brother?” and mime fainting.
And straight “A”s straight through high school and the 4.0 GPA at Stanford. A Psych major. Psychology of Cult and Subculture – his projected MA subject.
Called Rat-boy when we were grown up.
“Five foot seven inches of sheer depravity,” his boast.
Dark eyes the kind that seem mascaraed, that are sex-ee.
Lean not skinny. Lean, mean from fucking, dancing, amphetamine.
Long nose/overbite I could still see plainly but others thought my brother was a good-looking man. A womanizer. Heartbreaker. Gigolo (actually; for money, for real).
More ways of looking at it.
All his best friends were women. He’d pound on their doors at 3:00 A.M., lonely. Insist on sleeping in their arms for no reason. “No ulterior motives, Missy, swear to God.” He’d cry real tears, just for “how I feel tonight, Jesus Christ.”
Crying spent, he wants to fuck.
“Come on, you didn’t believe my bullshit?”
“I’m just gonna lie here saying please. Please please please please . . . I’m just gonna lie here with this massive hard-on saying please.”
“Yeah, I know I’m a scumbag, but you gotta admit I love you.”
Called the Sleaze King, then.
– By choice. He has a name tag made up, like the kind checkout girls wear. Pins to the buttonhole of his Armani suit, and forgets. The patient dry-cleaner keeps pinning it back on.
– independently, so often it was uncanny. “Who is that guy? He’s like the total Sleaze King.” “That’s your brother? We used to call him the Sleaze King.”
Eddie
•always needed a haircut
•bragged he owned no underpants
•wore that Armani suit ten days in a row
•slept in it at night
•had lice twice as a grown man
Police cars slowed down to get a better look at Eddie. Eddie was always held up at Customs.
“Okay, so we’re living together for three months and he tells me from now on he’s going to try to live totally on borrowed money. And he gets this little diary, the kind that locks up with a little gold key, like for a thirteen-year-old girl? Like with kittens on it, my, God. And every time he borrows any money, he goes through this whole routine of unlocking it and writing down the debt. So, it’s like, mega serious.
“Then finally the lock breaks? Like, I didn’t break the lock, it was just lying around broken so one day I look at it. And you know, he wasn’t keeping all those records so he could pay people back, ever, he was adding them up. He borrowed 7,000 dollars in that time, it was only like a couple of months.
“So I confronted him. I mean, he wasn’t paying me any rent or bills or anything. And he says it would be lying if he spent that money on groceries, cause people lent it on the understanding it was for booze and drugs. Well, I didn’t throw him out then, but I got really, really close.”
Or, a pattern:
He comes home with her Saturday night. He leaves Monday morning.
Monday evening, his suits are hanging in the closet when she comes home from work.
“Didn’t we talk about this? I swear to God we had this total talk . . .”
“Don’t throw me out in the street, is all, cause that’s the one thing I know I wouldn’t get over.”
“Oh, did I mention I love you?”
When she comes home from work, she wakes him from an alcoholic stupor, every single day.
But he’s fun; he takes her places she would never ever go; they end up drunk in Death Valley at 3:00 A.M., with Eddie chanting rap lyrics at the stars.
Out of nowhere, Eddie begins to do housework.
He has said nothing throughout dinner; pressed, he gives her a troubled frown and says, “I just realized, you’re chaining me to the material, and I can’t remain on your level any more.”
Eddie stops doing housework.
He has said nothing throughout dinner; pressed, he snaps, “Look, I know you’ve got this great superstition about fidelity, but all that is, is two people agree to lie to each other, and you can’t actually coerce me against my one last purity.”
He’s apologetic, follows her around the house as she dresses for work. “You’re different and it frightens me. I think that’s what it is, I’m scared I’ll go and marry you or something catastrophic.”
By nightfall, he knows he is gay.
“What we actually need is for you to have children.”
“This is all a result of me not taking enough drugs.”
“Oh, of course, you’re never to blame. Have you noticed? Have you noticed that fucking refrain?”
His suits are in the closet, but he has not come home.
Spotted by a helpful friend later in the week, asleep on a patch of grass in the center of town, with a very drunk sixteen-year-old girl stroking his hair.
“But I never said I loved you.”
His suits are not in the closet when she comes home.
My mother said he made her believe in demon possession.
But she loved him more than women love their children. She would drive a thousand miles in a night to see him, if he called.
He loved other women, all women, instead of Mom. Mom, he would say, “Okay, but she’s a drunk. You know what I mean? Okay, but she’s a drunk.”
And they drank together, out on the private beach in wintertime, digging the shapes of their coats deep in cold sand, singing Roy Orbison tunes like one person, lonely and rich and lonely and rich.
And on a leather string, Eddie wears a tin medallion, engraved with a medical warning of an allergy to penicillin he does not have. And in his Valium depressions, he will take out a deck of cards and lay them down, one at a time, in front of him. He’ll say, “I wasn’t always like this, you know. I wasn’t born this way. To tell you the truth, I’ve got good reason to believe I’ve had a curse laid on me.”
And in the briefcase he is never seen without, there are three snapshots. Tucked away beneath the flattened Whopper wrappers and overdue bills, three photographs of a teenaged girl. She’s wearing pink dungarees, smiling in the seedy Chinatown of some metropolis. She has a Roman nose, brown eyes and hair, buck teeth – a face uncannily like a dachshund’s.
“That’s my sister,” Eddie says. “She went down in a drugs plane over Costa Rica. I don’t like to talk about it.”
But I’m his sister, his adopted but only sister, and the picture, naturally, is not of me. It’s of some other girl who actually resembles him.
On the back of each snapshot is written, in pencil worn down to a purplish shade of white:
LOVE, DC.
“Doesn’t it make you sick, when you think of all the homeless people?” said Eddie, and everything began to go black. The bright pool in its landscaped arena went out. I fainted
and woke on the kitchen floor. Which is green marble. Than which there is nothing more cold. And hard.
My first impression was that I had fallen there, and a jolt of pain ran through my joints. Yet I had fallen in the grass and was unscathed. That kitchen door is just the nearest to the driveway, so they had carried me in here. Someone had thrown the tiger blanke
t over me – covering my face but leaving my legs exposed.
“Hello!” said Ralph, and to Eddie: “She’s coming to.”
“Well, let her go from for a minute, I’m telling this story.” And to me: “Go from! Don’t come to! Go from!”
“Tell the story, then,” Ralph said. “But I’m not listening.”
“. . . yeah, so I got this idea if she’d just let me piss in her –”
“Oh, Christ . . .”
“IF SHE’D JUST LET ME piss in her . . .”
I fell still again, trying to breathe like a sleeping person though my heart was pounding. Ideally, they would finish talking and go off to bed, forgetting me completely on the kitchen floor. Then I could sneak to my bedroom in privacy. Certainly I wasn’t going to sit up and make an effort to be sociable. If they’d wanted that, they shouldn’t have dumped me on the floor. Or at least they could have crouched around me until I woke up. I couldn’t have been out more than fifteen minutes.
Even if they didn’t really want my company, they should have made sure I was all right. For all they knew, I’d fallen into a coma. I might just let them think that. I would have to stay a long time on the floor, of course, but it was a point of honor, and if I had no honor, I was lost. Certainly I was not a worldly success. But I could show real pluck, when it was called for. Years of introspection had given me inner strength. I had always felt I would be splendid in a war.
I could smell spaghetti on the boil, and the sharper scent of tomato sauce. It was Ralph cooking. I would have known it was Ralph even if I couldn’t tell from the footsteps, just because Eddie would never be cooking. So I felt I knew that about the guru: he would be cooking. Of course there are many possible interpretations.
The guru might consider menial tasks to be a form of worship. The guru might have come from a single-parent family. He might have difficulty sustaining a relationship, and thus have learned to cook his own simple fare. The guru might have pretensions as a gourmet. Without knowing whether the sauce came from a jar, however, I could not proceed on any of these hypotheses.
“. . . so finally she let me do it, and I did it, it was surprisingly hard cause I kept getting hard again so it really was surprisingly hard, har har, okay? And I thought, I thought it would be like this epiphany, I had this image of touching bottom and then I’d be able to come up, like it would be the lowest point, but then I’m looking at her, I won’t draw you a picture, but I’m looking at her and thinking, no. No way is that the lowest. Cause it’s not like, I slaughtered her, and she’s not a five-year-old boy, and way there are people out there lower than that.”
“Near enough.”
“And yet it wasn’t near enough, or are you even fucking listening? The point is, it wasn’t near enough! And I, then I’d just abused this poor woman, who was totally a really good friend before that, and afterward, she was just the girl I’d pissed in, I couldn’t, I’d look at her and just think, oh my God, I pissed inside you. I did. And I’d had to lie to her to get her to do it, like it was some fantasy I’d had since I was eight years old and used to watch my sister tinkle and get off on it, sorry Chrysa.”
There was a pause: I could feel them both looking at me, imagining me tinkling with my legs spread to show hairless genitals.
“I didn’t even actually,” Eddie said finally. “Unless Chrysa remembers it and I don’t.”
“I think we should get her to bed.”
“Right!” Eddie said. “I’ll get the feet!”
Then they both laughed for some reason for a long time. Possibly something side-splitting had happened when they carried me in from the lawn. If I asked Eddie later on, he was sure to be evasive: “Like, are you really sure you wanna know?” After long persuasion, he would tell me some crass lie – about my pubic hair. When I had squealed in humiliation, he would laugh at me again for having been gulled. Pressed, he would say he’d forgotten all about it, “really totally.” It was so childish! I’d forgotten how cruel Eddie could be.
And in the midst of this I heard a chair scraping and someone – Ralph – came walking over. He said to Eddie, “Keep an eye on that pasta,” and took me in his arms.
I don’t want to say he lifted me like I was nothing, but I was nothing, I was 89 pounds. And he went off with me, the blanket still over my face so I was like a kid playing ghost, and fading behind us Eddie calling sniggering from his chair: “Where you going with my sister? Man! Come back here with my sister!”
Down the corridor and up the stairs. The balcony then and the open night – through a thick woolen blanket, damp and secret with my own breath – and the feeling of riding, being given a ride plus that other thing of being in someone’s arms. So being in someone’s arms smelled of spacious jasmine far below and getting a ride smelled of close musty wool.
In the dark, I was trying to remember what his face looked like.
I pretended so hard to be unconscious. He could have thrown me in the swimming pool, I would have just sunk. He could have done anything –
No one had touched me in a long time.
And we came into my room, from the balcony entrance, which meant he had to pause a long time undoing the shutters and reach to tease open the top latch. He had to do all that with my dead weight cradled on one arm. Stepping into the room, he rocked me.
Then he switched on the light and pulled the blanket off my face.
I opened my eyes without thinking.
He didn’t look at all the way I had imagined him.
I shut my eyes again tight.
And for a short while he stood there, hunched over me as if gut-shot, shuddering with silent laughter. When the fit had passed, he said, “You’re not fooling anyone.”
He carried me over to the bed and paused.
The mattress, of course, was bare. All the bedding was stuffed underneath, with my books and papers, my mobile phone, my portable stereo. So he had a dilemma. I began to brace myself to be thrown on the mattress, possibly – and I felt this in the tension of his arms – with force.
But at last he bent down and placed me gently on the floor. He even pulled the blanket again up over my chin. Then he crouched down, extracted sheets and pillows, and began methodically to make my bed.
It took him some time, shaking out the crumpled linen, neatly tucking each sheet to. He even plumped the pillows. Then, when I was expecting him to come back and fetch me, he stood up, said, “Good night,” and left without shutting the French doors.
BOULDER SECTIONS
Argument
Eddie met Ralph in Boulder, Colorado, where they
were both then living, some ten days before the events described
above. Eddie had been visiting the home of a Tibetan drunk,
whom he was trying to recruit as a guru. The Tibetan, alarmed by
Eddie’s manner (Eddie had taken a bunch of pills), ran out into
the street for help. Eddie gave chase. Ralph happened to be walking
by, and, hearing the scheme, decided to take the Tibetan’s place.
Five days later, Ralph and Eddie drove to California, here to
inaugurate the Tibetan School of Miracles.
19. Boulder: “Colorado Ceramic Arts”
The pottery’s back door is open, releasing a vacant fluorescent light on the asphalt of the lot adjoining. In the white doorway, Ralph stands, a spooky figure because there is no radio playing and he is not smoking or even leaning and when Ralph isn’t moving he is absolutely still – even his hands, even his lips. It’s very dark tonight, starry but moonless, and now, at 1:00 A.M., the small-town air of Boulder has taken deeply. You only hear one car at a time, hear dogs bark and doors close.
He is tall with harsh, aquiline features; black hair chopped short; big, chapped, calloused hands. His frame is not athletic but workmanly, the brawny arms suggestive of use. His jeans are patched with drying clay. His hair and the stubble on his cheeks are grizzled with it.
Behind him the concrete floor has a kindred pa
tina, clay gone hard in all the pores. The walls, too, are splattered. And, in ranks, on long, unfinished timber shelves, sit jugs, vases, plates; drying or bisque, in a few fundamental shades of brown and gray. Every day, Ralph produces many times his weight in pottery.
He’s been in the shop since 7:00 A.M.: this is his usual work day. He drinks three liters of water in that time and sometimes bathes his head and upper torso under the cold faucet in the deep mud-streaked sink. The kilns’ heat takes it out of him again.
Since, alongside the usual cute pots, Ralph is making works of deeply meant and particular art, there is an air of high stakes about him; integrity. Sorrow, too – how he’s soiled with trying, and even the keen air of night does not cleanse him.
He also sells dope in the back of the shop to friends and friends of friends. Their children are allowed to make clay ponies while the grownups puff. For these transactions, Ralph accepts food stamps.
19(b). “Colorado Ceramic Arts”
He has scars on his legs from abscesses where Nepalese leeches once were torn away roughly, leaving residue. He has had shows of his works in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Liège, Belgium.
He speaks fluent Tibetan.
He speaks it because one of his stepfathers was Tibetan, and, as a boy, Ralph lived for years in the Nepalese Himalaya. This is where he first made ceramics: on a hand-turned wheel as a semi-runaway while his mother smoked heroin on Freak Street in Kathmandu. Although he won’t talk about those years, they were the last important time of his life:
when something really happened.
4. Nepal / 20. “Colorado Ceramic Arts”
•A white cat led him into the mountains to meet God.
•The rhododendrons bled down the valley and he knew something briefly.
•His sister carried him back in her arms.
When he came to, he was at a plastic table in a tea shop and she was playing goats and tigers, the local chess, with a waiter. At that time of year, there were no tourists in Pokhara.
The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done Page 3
