On Finding A Photograph Long Misplaced

 

First there is the shock of recognition, a sucker punch hard to the jaw and tears that swell but will not break; my mouth falling open in a round, silent, Oh.

A black & white snapshot from my whole life ago, long-forgotten but now here in my hand like a sudden chill on a warm day, a door that slams when there is no wind. There is his straight-up, Dagwood hair that was white at first and then darkened to a gentle brown with the part falling in the middle; his chest a glockenspiel of bones. Oh, southern mother. Oh, Greek father. My brother and I, five and three, stand in the scraped out backyard of a post-war housing development too new to have trees that are anything more than leafy sticks poking up from the ground. We bookend younger cousins who stand between us, all of us shirtless in the palpable heat of summer. But he stands slightly apart, just enough to be noticeable.  Oh, beautiful boy. I remember the shorts he is wearing, brown with the jagged outline of a Scottish terrier stitched in coarse, yellow thread on each pant leg and last seen in a wicker laundry basket when Eisenhower was President. His one skinny arm is bent out like a wing, the other drawn up so that his cheek rests in his hand, a gesture from the 1890s—my maternal great grandmother did that. He replicates it, utterly guileless and natural, his curly-lipped smile and clear eyes; he has our mother’s face.

In a few years, I will find my brother in the kitchen late one night standing on his tip toes to reach the hissing gas hob on our white enamel stove. He will look at me with eyes that droop and slide  down his face like the melting blue eyes of choir boy candles at Christmas. “Try this,” he says, indicating the front burner where he’d blown out the pilot light. “It will make you feel so good.” And from that moment, I am afraid of him; from that moment he retreats a little more each day; from that moment he is lost. He is not even ten years old. “Oh, Dark Angel,” Judy Henske sings in her spine chilling song about addiction, “Roll me in your dark wings. Watch me fall and let me die.”

July 11, 2002. I am sitting at my desk at home in California. It is morning and I am still in pajamas. Soft, threadbare pajamas I have worn for years, that I have slept in and cleaned the house in and watered the garden in and I rise to top off my coffee and somehow my legs become entangled in the fabric of these familiar-as-my-hand pajamas and I fall to the floor almost laughing at the absurdity of it I fall to the floor and look at the clock as I am going down and I see it is a certain time and I shower and dress and the phone rings and it is my sister in Wisconsin who tells me our brother has settled his tab with a single, self-inflicted gunshot to the head and I ask her, “What time? What time did he die?” and she answers the time I fell.

July 11, 2013. I am sitting at that same desk in my Oakland loft. It is morning and I am still in pajamas. All around me it has grown very quiet and this realization startles me because I live in a working seaport of lumbering freight trains and 250-foot, skyscraping cranes offloading freighters from China and Japan; freeways, airplanes and light rail crisscross in front of and behind my building but all sound has stopped and I look up, wondering why. The sound of shattering glass, when it hits, flings me from my chair and I bite the inside of my cheek racing to the kitchen. There is one cupboard door slightly ajar. I tug it open ever so gently and jump back as the shards of every wine glass I own, every old fashioned glass, every tumbler and beer mug and shot glass and high ball and martini glass spill to the floor in a crystal waterfall and I stand amazed, stunned in the wreckage of a collapsed shelf until I notice every other shelf has held. Nothing else is broken. No plate or cup or saucer. No picture is askew on the wall. No water has sloshed from the cat’s bowl. I log into the California earthquake site. There has been no seismic activity, only a clean, flat line for the day. I consult the calendar, hanging plumb and squared to the wall in the laundry room, even though I know. It is the anniversary of my brother’s suicide. He is saying, Look at me. Remember me from before I was a drunk. Be silent in your grave of ash, clever boy.

March 1, 2014. It is Dump Run Day in my building. An enormous truck will arrive at 9 AM. We can throw out anything we want. Thrilled at the opportunity, I am digging through every closet and drawer. My rule is this: If I haven’t looked at it or used it in the past year, it is gone, baby. And deep, deep in some far corner, lying in wait like a witch’s hex, 'You will prick your finger and die,' is a spiral bound wallet of black & white snapshots dated, in my mother’s handwriting, July 11, 1954.  “Hello,” says my chicken chested brother from the watery world of memory and death. “Remember me?” he asks from our father’s plaid hammock, his hair falling away evenly from the part in the middle of his forehead. Or here, in this photo, his abashed grin, hand demurely at his cheek, embarrassed that his brain spatter  will one day ruin the wall. “Do you?" he pleads looking right at me. "From before Peter? Before Margaret?” mentioning our brother born the following year and our sister still so far in the future. “When it was just us in our Rootie Kazootie tee shirts, our Red Ball Jet ‘run faster, jump higher’ shoes, our mukluks and rooster slippers, our terrycloth bathrobes with ‘Champ’ printed across our tiny, rabbit shoulders; when we rolled around in the back of that mint green Buick station wagon big as a hearse, before child seats, before seat belts, before there was duck and cover and bomb shelters and cigarettes and liquor stores and bars, and me drinking while you slogged away at university for ten years getting degree after degree trying to unlearn what you already knew?”

Yes, I do.

My middle name is Anne to square with his. When I was very small my parents sometimes introduced us to their friends as Mark Andrew and Rebecca Anne-drew, I was so close to my brother. But alcoholism is a progressive, degenerative disease and my enduring memories of him are of what a mean motherfucker he became.  In July, on the anniversary of his suicide, I honor his struggle as an addict. I don't consciously do anything that could be interpreted as using. No alcohol or weed. No sugar. I won't even take an aspirin for my ancient, aching knees.

Today, on his birthday, I'll put a candle in the window at dusk, play the theme song from Peter Gunn, an old TV show we liked, and eat a sandwich of fried Spam with yellow mustard on toast, a ration Mark and I ate constantly those early summers when we took to the field behind our house as dead-tired, unshaven and starving privates-first-class lost behind enemy lines, Japanese zeroes buzzing the tall grass in search of us acting out our father's Army stories. He was my first friend, he of the blue sky, drifting cloud summers only we knew.