Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  I was in Africa when I got the news, and despite the unearthly heat, I felt cold for days. Precious James, my little brother, a kid who used to be at the Prendergast family reunions down at the shore, was gone, just like that. Talk about unfair: James had been right at the point of getting his life together and putting aside the violence that had been his great weakness when a bullet cut him down. I was thankful that he had reconnected with God at the end. I was finding my own way back to my faith, and I found some consolation in that thin silver lining in an otherwise desolate cloud.

  22. “That Never Happened”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  I ran into a dude I knew and he told me that my brother Tyrell had given him a bunch of clothes. Not sold—gave. I didn’t think much of it until this woman friend of ours said Tyrell had been by to give her his sewing machine. “You mean he sold it to you?” I asked, and she said, no, he’d given it to her straight out. Elsie called me that night, and as we’re talking, damned if I don’t hear motherfucking birds in the background. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Tyrell gave me his birdies. Aren’t they sweet?”

  He came by to see my boys, and he was the old Tyrell. Kind of fly, but sweet as ever. My boys loved him; they’d pile on and wrestle Uncle Tyrell to the carpet the minute he walked in the door. The boys and I were planning to go to the amusement park King’s Dominion the next day, and I asked Tyrell if he wanted to go with us. “Yeah!” the boys all cried. “Uncle Tyrell, come with us!”

  “Okay,” he said, laughing, and I felt good.

  Next morning as the boys were getting ready to go, I called Tyrell to remind him. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said. Half an hour later, the phone rings. It’s Elsie screaming her head off.

  Tyrell had hung himself.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  The news of Tyrell’s death hit me in many ways, but the hardest might have been the wave of concern I felt for Michael. I hadn’t spent nearly as much time with Tyrell as I had with James, but I was very worried about how losing a second younger brother might affect Michael. For as long as I’d known him, he’d talked with such laser-like conviction of wanting to protect and care for his family. Now two of his brothers had slipped away, horribly. Michael wasn’t able to stop James from being gunned down, and he couldn’t stop Tyrell from hanging himself. Michael’s lifeboat out of D.C.’s stormy streets, though anchored solidly by Nikki, was relatively new, and he was engaged in a Herculean effort to stay afloat.

  I was still going back and forth to Africa, and from my hotel room in Zimbabwe, I spent hours on the phone with Michael, talking through Tyrell’s death. (The security agents that usually tapped my phone in Zimbabwe probably felt bad about hounding me that week.) It was a moment I really needed to be Michael’s big brother.

  Right around the time of Tyrell’s suicide, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had to have major surgery, so the family circled the wagons, and as soon as I got back from Africa, I spent as much time as I could high-tailing it up I-95 from D.C. to Philly to be with him during this critical time.

  I had one strangely cathartic incident before Dad was released from the hospital after the surgery. He was hooked up to a lot of tubes, and he would periodically become obsessed with getting up and walking out of that room. Of course he was heavily medicated and needed to stay in bed for some time before he’d be allowed to move around. One day he was very agitated, and the fairly heavy dosage of painkillers wasn’t quite doing the trick. In his half-conscious delirium, he started trying to pull the intravenous tubes out of his arms so he could get up. I tried to keep his hands away from the tubes and restrain him from rising out of bed. He suddenly exploded with all the old fury of the days of my childhood, and he had some strange painkiller-induced flashback. He started yelling at me and threatening me like I was thirteen again. It was devastating at first, as I immediately reverted to that vulnerable place that I experienced when I was young and scared or angry.

  But then I remembered an exercise I had once gone through at a workshop given by a famous psychologist, in which you imagine yourself as a terrorized little kid in an emotionally painful situation from your past, and then you imagine your adult self entering the picture and protecting that little vulnerable kid. The exercise that I went through was actually happening in real life. My dad had taken me back to that place of emotional vulnerability and fear, but my adult self was able to step in, protect the little boy, and tell my dad that what he was doing—and what he did all those years—was wrong. I told him I still loved him anyway, but he needed to know that it hurt me.

  Because of the painkillers, I’m not sure he remembered the incident a half-hour after it happened. But a strange sensation of peace came over me when things had calmed down, a feeling that I certainly wasn’t accustomed to.

  Even though he was in a lot of pain, Dad had a hard time sitting around the house all day once he was released from the hospital. After all, he’d spent his whole working life in the car, driving coolers of Fred’s Frozen Foods from customer to customer. He needed to feel the road sliding under him again, so I got in the habit, on my frequent visits, of loading him into the passenger seat of the car and taking him for drives. We had no destinations in mind. I’d try to point the car in a direction that would let the sun stream in on him, which he really loved. He’d snuggle into a big blanket, talk aimlessly for a while, then rest his broad forehead on the window, and close his eyes. The cancer had taken a lot out of him, and he had really dodged a bullet, but at considerable cost.

  On one of those drives, I tried to get Dad to remember the past. In particular, I wanted to know more about the beatings he’d taken from his father. How often did it happen? Did he fight back? How was he affected by them?

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, opening his eyes and lifting his head from window. “That never happened.”

  I told him Uncle Bud had told me all about it, but Dad just shook his head.

  “No, he got it all wrong,” Dad said, wrapping the blanket more tightly and closing his eyes again. “My dad was the greatest. A good Samaritan, a friend to everybody.” He rolled his head toward the sun and closed his eyes, ending the conversation.

  I didn’t know what was accurate, given what Uncle Bud had told me. But between the onset of dementia, the shock of major cancer surgery, and God knows what kind of psychological scarring, Dad may have pushed whatever memories there were of that side of his father so far down as to be inaccessible. Maybe he was lucky that way.

  I wasn’t so lucky, however. Spending all that time with him got me reflecting on my childhood legacies. I began to realize that all the screaming and shaming I had been subjected to in my youth had left an echoing critical voice burrowed inside my brain, a voice that I simply redirected at myself when my dad wasn’t there until it became indistinguishable from my own. The voice would critique and yell and shame me all day long. Sometimes the inner voice would get externalized in sharp, shaming critiques of others. The voice, of course, was quite normal to me, but it was shocking and jarring to those around me. I was just repeating over and over what I had experienced, what I was familiar with. I would often be sharp and hurtful verbally to those around me while thinking I was speaking normally. The result? A hard pushback against any intimacy, including with Jean, from whom I was now separated, a harshness with anyone close to me, and the lead in technical fouls in every basketball league I ever played in.

  It was during this time that I finally began to address my own growing depression. My father’s illness, my separation from Jean, and the tragically coincidental loss of three close friends all conspired to intensify my omnipresent anxiety. I suddenly perceived a clear choice amidst the emotional wreckage: Either I could construct another emotional wall—my specialization—or I could let the entire edifice of self-protection tumble. I chose the latter route, exhausted from years of ducking and hiding, and the result was difficult but in a small way miraculous. I began to seep. For two months, small tears
would trickle from my eyes as I deliberately began clearing the emotional brush inside me, with the help of counseling, reading, and a little prayer.

  I spent days and nights going back into my past, finding old friends and family members to interview as I reconstructed parts of my own emotional history that I had completely submerged in my subconscious. The result was painful, but slowly, steadily liberating. I was able to finally draw connections between how I had protected myself as a kid, how I had built more and different walls when I started going to war zones and refugee camps in my early twenties, and how all that fed the ever-present bowling ball of depression in the pit of my stomach.

  As a last step in this process, I finally decided it was time to talk to my father about the fraught and explosive subject of our own relationship. After all those awkward dinners out studiously talking about sports, and all the long drives in the sun, I found the courage and the words to ask him why he thought he and I had fallen apart so completely when I was younger.

  “You were just completely out of control,” he recalled in a hushed but matter-of-fact tone. “You had no direction. Raising hell in the neighborhood, the drinking, the drugs.… You needed discipline, J.P. If I was hard on you, it was because it’s what I had to do to bring you back in line.”

  I was so stunned I couldn’t speak. Me? Drugs? Drinking? I was first or second, academically, in every school I ever attended. I was an athlete constantly striving to improve. I’d never touched a cigarette or a beer, let alone drugs. I’d been the Lizard! I think I went to one party as a teenager, a painfully alienating experience, and that surely didn’t qualify as raising hell in the neighborhood. I never even had a girlfriend back then. I’d spent my teenage years studying, working two or three jobs at any given time, playing basketball, or making music tapes from the radio, alone in the basement. And this is how Dad remembered me? He really didn’t know me at all; he had no idea who I was.

  Is that how I’d seemed to Michael during all those drug-dealing years? As out of touch with him as my dad was with me?

  23. “We See You Out Here All the Time”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  I keep thinking about that time that Stick called me from jail after stabbing Kenny to death with those barbershop scissors. He was convinced James and Tyrell, who’d watched it happen, had ratted him out to the police. “I hope your brothers die,” he told me, and damned if they ain’t both dead. It’s like he put a curse on them.

  Of course, it’s me who’s responsible. I brought James into the life to protect him, and all I did was get him hooked on the guns and the violence that ultimately killed him. As for Tyrell, I never saw him for who he was—none of us did—and that must have made him so lonely he couldn’t take it anymore. I wasn’t the only one; I know that. But I was the big brother. It was my responsibility.

  So many people that I loved are dead and gone now. Aunt Evelyn, Aunt Frances, Aunt Stella, Uncle Artie, Little Charles, Cool, Cousin Glen who I shot in the leg, Willie, Don, Kenny, James, Tyrell. I loved them all. I had another brother from my dad besides Tyrell and my sister Sabrina, and he’s dead too, stabbed to death in prison. His name was Jesse, and he lived with his mother, who died when he was in prison. I hardly knew him, but he was my brother, and without him in this world, a little piece of me is gone as well. Even Shitbag; I miss him too. Man, you live long enough and you end up missing everybody.

  I’ll tell you what feels good though: I am a real dad in a way no man in my family was ever a dad. We got a fifth boy now: Arturo Giovanni, whom we call Fats, born in 2004. Rolando’s a teenager now, tall and slender like his dad. He bucks on me occasionally, but he’s a basically a good dude; works hard in school and is nice to his mama and brothers. My four little guys are all stocky like me and just about the happiest little motherfuckers you’ve ever seen. They have no idea the kind of life I came up in, or the drug dealing that I did. To me, a candy store is a piece of the battlefield; to them, it’s a place to buy a treat. I see a homeless shelter and I have to look away, remembering those goddamn Hefty bags of my childhood. But I was down in D.C. with my boys and passed a place where some people were ladling out food to the homeless, and my boys were like, Can we go get some food? They have no idea, living out in the suburbs like we do, what that life was like. That’s a good thing. I like it.

  What I really love is at night, when Nikki and I are sitting on the bed watching television, and all the boys come in a pile up on us. Those fresh, smiling faces, so relaxed and content. They know a kind of love I never knew. We don’t have a lot of money, but that’s okay with me. I sleep with both eyes closed. And I’m there for my boys.

  They all play football, and Nikki and I go to every practice and every game. Nikki is the team mom. We see very few other parents out there. Last year I was folding up our chairs after a game, and these folks came up to us and introduced themselves; their boy was on the other team.

  “We see you out here all the time,” they told me. “You’re a great dad.”

  Can you imagine how that made me feel? Growing up with no dad, nobody even to teach me what a dad is? To have some stranger come up and call me a great dad? Man, I’m still floating, just thinking about that.

  Front row, from left: Nino, Marco, Arturo. Back row, from left: Lando, Michael Jr., and Michael.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  After surviving the first one, my dad had a subsequent bout with cancer, and this time—in his early eighties—there wasn’t much that modern medicine could do. His battle with dementia also was taking its toll on him and on my mom, who grieved for the husband who was disappearing day by day before her eyes. Two nights before he died, Luke and I stayed up all night in Dad’s room with him. He was barely conscious, occasionally reaching up for some distant vista that only he was privileged to see, but unable to articulate any of his thoughts. Luke and I talked to him all night, telling him and each other stories of our childhood, choosing to reminisce on the good times, the amazing legacy my father had left. We also told a lot of jokes, and every once in a while Dad would let out a little laugh, so we knew he could hear us.

  That night I also had some time alone with him, when Luke went off to spend some time with his family. I was able to tell Dad that although I didn’t fully understand everything that had happened between us, I was sorry for what he had gone through with his dad, and I was sorry that we had lost so much time over the years with our battles and my cold silence.

  And there was some stuff I wanted to tell him without Luke there in the room. It was then that my tough-guy façade came down. I was able to thank him for doing a lot of good things as a father. I was able to forgive him for the stuff that was bad. I was able to tell him I loved him. And finally, with a lump in my throat, I was able to say goodbye, even though I didn’t want him to leave.

  My dad’s death affected me in all kinds of complicated ways, as you can imagine. But the way that relates most to my long history with Michael is that on the day after losing my dad, I woke with an overwhelming need to find my other little brothers, Khayree and Nasir, whom I felt I had failed spectacularly.

  Fifteen years earlier, I’d foisted my responsibility to Khayree and Nasir on Luke, and he kept up with them for years, admirably. But eventually his own family responsibilities led to a loss of contact, and when that happened, I too subconsciously let Khayree and Nasir go. My life had gotten so full, had become so exciting, that it had been all I could do to maintain a shred of brotherhood with Michael and his brothers. Khayree and Nasir had simply fallen off my radar screen.

  But never entirely. As soon as Dad died, my desire to find Khayree and make everything right was overpowering. My whole family was gathered at the Berwyn house the day after Dad’s death. I excused myself, and then Luke’s wife Kim, my godson Dylan, and I drove into the dilapidated old neighborhood in Philadelphia where I used to pick up Khayree and Nasir. We began crisscrossing the streets, looking for a familiar face who might be able tell us where they were. It was futile, stup
id, the act of a grief-and-guilt-stricken madman, and it paid off. We came around a corner and standing in the middle of the street like a vision was Khayree’s mother, Dicie.

  She screamed when she saw us, threw her arms straight up, and praised Jesus loud enough for him to hear it in heaven. Khayree had just gotten out of prison in New York, she said, wrapping me in a hug for the ages, and all he was talking about was finding his big brother J.P. and getting another chance.

  “And Nasir?” I asked.

  Her face clouded over. “He’s dead,” she said. “Five years. Shot down on this very street.”

  She climbed in the car, and we drove to where Khayree was living. I spotted him as we pulled up, sitting on a folding chair in front of a run-down row house, his artificial leg stretched out in front of him. He’d grown much taller, and thicker, in the intervening years, ruggedly handsome and athletic. From across the street, I could see how he slouched over, and I worried whether a lifetime of disappointment and punishment had beaten him down. As his mom and I crossed the street toward him though, his face exploded in a smile, and he struggled to his feet to come hug me. We babbled apologies at each other, and when he asked about my family, I had to tell him my father had just died.

  Somehow what seemed right at that moment was for Khayree to just jump in the car and for us to drive straight to the house in Berwyn so we could be a family again and go to my father’s funeral together. The house was full of so much sadness that to resurrect Khayree in the flesh, and wash away the pain of his disappearance and the past strain it had caused between Luke and me, seemed exactly the thing to do. As it turned out, walking through the door with Khayree was an important balm for the family, and everyone was really happy to see him again.