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| by Josh Olsen |
| My brother gave me a copy of a movie he made.
It’s a short compilation of various home videos, but rather than your standard, linear, chronological narrative, displaying, minute by minute, the members of a family as they grow old together, the method by which he assembled the DVD is much closer to a mixtape. Whether or not his technique was intentional, it is, I think, artful, and the seemingly random, out of context scenes he chose to include are, at first, amusing and even humorous, as I am suddenly reminded of names and faces and styles I have not seen, spoken of, or even remembered for over 15 years, half a lifetime ago, but it isn’t long before I begin to feel a sense of guilt. It’s been years since most of the people captured on the video have been a part of my life, but they’re still my brother’s family. He sees them at birthdays and Christmas and Easter, whereas I have stopped referring to them as my cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles long ago. Even my own brother has come to play a much, much smaller role. And, of course, there is also his dad. Our dad. My dad, as I used to regretfully call him. The final minute of my brother’s movie is of the last Christmas I would ever spend with, what was then, my immediate family. Mom, dad, brother, sister. Goddamn, it was somber. I remember it being a dark time in our house, but not so literally. It looks as though there wasn’t a single light on, aside from the Christmas tree’s candy colored, ceramic bulbs, which, through cruel, teasing contrast, only seem to make the moment appear even bleaker. We were all clearly miserable. Even my 3 year old sister, who, in between presents, gingerly caressed our mom’s swollen belly. In less than 2 months, she would give birth to my youngest sibling, but we would all have gone our separate ways by then. I would move in with my maternal grandparents, my mom, with my two sisters, would rent a small, one bedroom apartment, and my brother would remain in the custody of his dad, the man I would come to demonize in my memories and poems for lording over us with his brooding, pessimistic nature and unpredictable fits of blind rage. But now, separated by time and geography, I often find myself thinking, who could blame him? An unrepentantly unfaithful wife. A spoiled, adopted son who was ashamed to call him dad. He should have been the fucking poet of the family. And, who knows, maybe he was. The few trivial things I remember about him paint, in my mind, the portrait of a complex man… tattered Golden Age comic books, jazz trumpet, vinyl LPs of Steve Martin and Richard Pryor, stories of encounters with Hell’s Angels and midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, impromptu, acoustic renditions of Loudon Wainwright III songs, a healthy obsession with spaghetti westerns and all things Clint Eastwood. In another life, we could’ve been the best of friends, but, in this one, I’ve successfully avoided him since the age of 16. My brother, too. I abandoned and ignored him through his formative years, and when we do come in contact, once or twice a year, we might as well be strangers, though the tension and discomfort between us is palpable. If I were him, I would bring a fully-automatic rifle to our family get-togethers. Spray every last motherfucking one of us. But, thankfully, he never does. He always brings smiles and presents. Of course, he’s a quiet man, and socially awkward, but what more could we expect? My mom once told me, after he left the room, that she was afraid of him. That there are times when he snaps and calls her a whore, tells her that he wishes she would die and burn in fucking hell. And then she waited for my response. What did she want? Support? Sympathy? I gave nothing in return. The truth is, for what she did to him, for what I did to him, we both deserve to burn. I often want to tell him that I’m sorry, and maybe someday I will, but until then, while in the same room, watching home movies, sitting on opposite ends of the same couch, less than 24 inches, an eternity of time and space, between us, I pretend that everything’s OK. And when the video is over, and it returns to the title screen, I eject my brother’s DVD, slip it back into its rightful envelope, and wish that I’d never watched it in the first place. |
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| Jan. 2012 |
| 136 |