Living wild and reckless has its consequences.
Everyone’s heard that at least a thousand times in one way or another, whether it’s about a news story, or it’s being said to them in harsh tones, or they’re scolding it towards a young person left in their care. The reason this saying is ingrained in people’s minds is because we, as a race, try to shy away from anything and everything that causes us pain. Death is a large part of human sadness. The death of a young adult is a story no one wants to hear, although it is a story everyone is used to hearing about. Young adults dying in car crashes or killing others with foul accidents that are more circumstance than actual faults – these color our society in broken sobs and laws passed to try to put down the numbers.
Miserable circumstances such as these channel in the worst aspects of human life but also breathe new life into other, more hopeful, parts of it. Not a lot of people that I have had the chance to know have ever taken the time to look at the benefits that come from one reckless life ending, even if they were benefited by that chaotic demise.
Benefits from a young death can range from another life not being taken from the front seat of a car to a life, barely clinging to air, being saved from a hospital bed. It’s not in human nature to look at the good things of death but there is always a brighter side to things that are of a dark and hopeless nature. I’ve seen the aftermath of a death that occurred long before anyone was ready for it. I know that not only bad things come from the careless death of a person who is barely able to make choices themselves. Bad things do come from a young life ending but there is a brighter side to that unfortunate circumstance.
That blurry line of good and bad has been haunting me for a very long time.
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When I was three years old my father got a job offer in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, moving myself, my mother, and his youngest child from his first marriage across the Atlantic Ocean. The move had jarred my brother and me, more I than he, but as I recall from my earliest childhood memories Thomas was never easily jarred.
Thomas was eight years older than I and a helluva lot more reckless than I would ever be, even as a young child I knew I would never relate to him. When we were children he would do everything in his power to piss my father off with the goal of being shipped back to England and his mother, who had given up custody of him long before I was even born. He would run around the house with his shoes purposely so muddy that my mother would be on her hands and knees scrubbing the stains from the pristine white carpet for hours. Eventually Dad had every carpet in the house replaced with hard wood just to counteract his older son’s misgivings. Thomas would also destroy my toys in an attempt to be sent away for cruelness alone; he would rip the heads off my teddy bears and take apart my action figures, dip my cars into pails of paint until the wheels wouldn’t turn, and one time he even destroyed the little battery operated electric guitar Mom got me for Christmas the day I unwrapped it. Dad would yell, shout, punish, and even walk away before he did something he would really regret. Sometimes I think it was hard for my father to love him, he would look at him and see his first wife, see all of his could-have-beens-wouldn’t-have-beens, but Dad tried. Dad tried and Mom tried and I…I was able to just love him. He was my big brother. To me he could do absolutely no wrong.
His cruelness got him yelled at and grounded and would have my mother in her bedroom for hours sobbing because he hated her. Dad almost sent him back to Essex when I was five because he had given me a bloody nose but my infallible love for my older brother kept him around. It took hours of begging to make my father change his mind. When I was done, exhausted and cried out, I was carried up to my room by a quiet Thomas. He tucked me in, whispered a thank you into my ear, and stormed out of the room. I barely remember this. My clearest memory of that day is the fear that they would take him from me.
To me Thomas was flawless. He was the absolute personification of the typical ‘badass’ in my mind. He had smoked since I could remember, chain smoking two to four packs a day, and drove a black car that was always blaring really loud and aggressive music. He had kept much of his accent from England and that had always helped him get girls. I thought that was another incredibly outstanding thing. I would mimic his accent as I grew older until I sounded almost as regal and sophisticated as he and my father did. Thomas might have hated me as I was a child but I had loved him in the way a brother lovers another brother for as long I could remember.
But, around my tenth birthday, things began to change between Thomas and I. Thomas had turned eighteen before I turned ten but with his birthday there had been no push of intelligence that I had believed there would be. What did come with eighteen though was an appreciation for me that I didn’t understand but I didn’t complain about in any way. Thomas started to spend time with me just for the sake of spending time with me. He would take me with him to the mall on the weekends to hang out with his friends, and although I was ‘annoying’ to some of them they still let me tag along, or we would just hang out in the food court by ourselves. A few times I had helped him get a girl’s number and he had reworded me with skateboards and hats. It was a mutually beneficial relationship to say the least.
I turned ten that year and as a gift Thomas bought me my first real acoustic guitar. It was made of an elegant dark wood with a beautiful body and a slender neck that made my hands feel rough and demanding in comparison. It wasn’t like the plastic ones I had been given up until that point while my parents laughed at my dreams of being a rock star and tried to keep me occupied and out of their way.
Thomas and I sat in my parents’ living room while hovered in the kitchen, watching without trying to make it obvious that they were. Thomas taught me how to play simple cords and eventually he taught me to play a few easy songs, songs I’d heard him play a thousand times before. Every time I made the right sound a surge of pride pushed through my chest and Thomas would let me know I was catching on quickly and even he looked proud. When I played one of the songs the entire way through perfectly he’d hugged me. I felt as if I would suffocate of happiness, simply because of the pride in his face.
At that point he had long since moved out by that point but he stayed for dinner that night and ended up sleeping over. The two of us played manhunt that night with my neighborhood friends and slept under the stars, my guitar at my side.
That was the last good day my big brother and I really had.
Thomas found that drinking was his favorite activity early that fall and that habit never really strayed. Whenever I saw him after that first beer he was drunk and angry. He and my father would fight constantly and over the dumbest things. Bills that Thomas was paying weren’t being paid the right way so Dad threatened to have him evicted from the apartment he cosigned on. The job Thomas had wasn’t logical nor fruitful but Thomas loved it, father hated the lunacy and screamed until he was red in the face. Even how Thomas dressed wasn’t quite good enough. It seemed that as time went on Dad got angrier and angrier with my brother, proving me right: my father had a very hard time loving my brother, trying to understand my brother, even simply dealing with my brother. It scared me to think that if he and my mother got a divorce would he treat me the same way?
Every beer Thomas drank drove him and my father further apart and made the space between he and I even larger. He was no longer allowed to pick me up after school and we didn’t spend anymore Saturdays at the food court in the mall. His visits were brief and supervised, taking place in the living room of my parents’ house. We weren’t allowed to play video games when he came over and I had to have all of my homework done before we were allowed to do anything at all. When the work was done and my Dad was satisfied enough to leave us alone we would break out my guitar and my song books and would spend an hour or two playing. Then he would leave and I would feel guilty because it always felt like his drinking was my fault.
Whenever he was around he smelled like the alcohol that was plaguing his body and he would get so irritated when I didn’t play the right chord or play an entire song without a single fault. He made me feel like even the biggest accomplishments were insignificant and every time I so much as breathed wrong it was my fault and my fault alone. Mom and Dad didn’t want me around that kind of influence but he was my brother and I loved him. For the second time in my life it had been my undying love for my brother that kept him from being pushed out of my life.
By the time I turned sixteen I saw my brother maybe once a week and every time we were eye to eye he was stumbling drunk and so out of it he couldn’t remember my name. There was no reasoning with him in any way. The alcohol was more precious to him than the time he and I spent together. One visit towards the end of the fall of my sixteenth year of life was a prime example of his alcohol laden antics.
Instead of sitting inside we were allowed to go out, my age being the prime reason I got to be out and about while in my brother’s company, and playing basketball in the driveway. Thomas was being a dick like usual when he was drunk and running at me in the middle of a shot. Dad came out and barked at us to stop, the anger in his voice crushing.
Thomas had stumbled back and glared at him, the ball gripped in his hands. “Excuse you?” He let out a snarl.
“You heard me Thomas. Stop before you hurt him,” Dad had come to stop between the two of us with his arms crossed over his chest.
Thomas craned his neck to look around our father at me. There was rage in his eyes, but something else sat behind them too. It was a deep seeded sorrow that bothered me to some extent. “I’ll see you later Ben,” he said with a timid upturn of his lips. “Keep practicing,” Thomas walked to his car with a hand stuffed in his jeans pocket.
I looked down to keep from yelling at my dad and saw Thomas’ wallet. It must have fallen out while we were playing. I scooped it up and a small paper, which had been sticking out of the right corner, fell to the ground. I let it be for the time being and ran to the car just as Thomas began to back out of the drive way. “You left this,” I said quickly when he rolled his window down.
Thomas grinned and took it from me. “You do know there is cash in here right?” There was an open beer in the cup holder.
I sighed and shook my head. “See you later bro.”
He looked hurt. A flinch in his posture and a quick goodbye led to him driving away. I sighed again and walked back towards the house, the piece of paper catching my eye. I picked it up. It wasn’t a paper. When I turned it over to inspect what was on the front of it I found out it was a picture. In the picture was a limp haired brunette girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. She had a sunken, grey hued face and dull blue eyes. Her lips were pale pink and heart shaped and there was an oxygen hose hanging around her ears and hooked underneath her nose. She was lying in a white bed with railings on the sides and a pale blue blanket tucked around her body. There were other machines hooked up to her besides the oxygen tank like an IV in her right hand and several wires protruding from the neckline of her hospital gown. In the picture she was smiling but it didn’t touch her eyes.
Dad walked over asking what the paper was. I quickly stiffed it in my pocket, careful not to rip or wrinkle it. “It’s just a receipt.” I mumbled and headed towards the house.
“Ben…” he sighed but followed me in. “I’m sorry okay? He’s out of control and I didn’t want him to h-”
“Don’t Dad. I get it, it’s okay.” I gave him a small smile and ran upstairs to take a shower.
Dad was still looking guilty when I came down for dinner but Mom helped to defuse the situation. By the end of the meal we were laughing and talking but my mind was somewhere else. I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl in the picture and every thought of her brought a little bit more dread.