Brothers

My brother Arthur, was an only child for 4 years. Then I was born. I don’t think he ever forgave me. Thirty years later he was dead. Driving at midnight with a high blood alcohol level, he went into the side of a mountain. I've always wondered if he was drawn to see what was on the other side. 

Arthur had a passion for jazz. I’d like to think he was carried along on the waves of a bluesy sax into his own private paradise. Or maybe he heard a calling from the keyboard of Thelonious Monk. I realized later that I never really knew him.

I did know my friend Stanley who is more of a brother to me. We were born five weeks apart. Even our Social Security numbers are consecutive, since we went together for our cards. I’ve known Stan since kindergarten where he was the wardrobe monitor and I, the milk monitor. Or was it the other way around?

In our misspent pre-teen years and beyond, we studied together, went to the beach, ballgames and movies, and took a ten-day bike trip around New England together.

We also engaged in some dumb activities, like following odd people. One such was a man who walked the neighborhood talking to himself. Of course, he’d be considered more normal now than those who don’t talk to themselves. But then it was perverse. Once he led us down into a subway station and emerged on the other side of Queens Blvd. We imagined he was leading us into his nether region.

In fact, we were the odd ones, clumsily looking for the margins of acceptable behavior. Stan and I agree that we were socially retarded then. While normal kids were discovering girls, we were discovering how to hit a curveball or other Olympic-grade sports with the schoolyard as our venue. We even invented a new country on the map and a language known only to us.

I don’t mean to imply that we excelled as athletes, but we were world-class fans. Whatever character traits that confers, I have no idea except it has provided us with a vault of memories and an alternative universe to visit when the real world makes less sense.

We have lived our lives a continent apart but we call each other regularly. In a recent conversation, I was shocked to learn about  an aspect of our relationship, not so brotherly after all. I always knew Stan had a fine singing voice but I did not know he sang professionally in a choral group.

His mother had urged him to pursue music as a career and first to learn the piano. Unbeknownst to me, I was the villain in his family circle because I, unwittingly, pulled him away from his piano lessons with my two passions in those teen years. Namely, sports and politics. I had no idea of my deviltry until last week. At least, I’d been spared eighty years of penance.

Our immersion in politics never left either one of us. When we were sixteen, we got stoned at a concert. Not in today’s sense but literally attacked with rocks thrown at us as we took to the floor of a bus among shattered glass. We had attended the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, which was then deemed a subversive act. This was the beginning of the Red Scare that gripped the country in 1949.     

For my role in diverting Stan from his path as a possible diva at the Met, I plead no contest. At the same time I am left wondering what else I missed looking back down all those decades. What I had thought was an open book, turned out to be just a few chapters. Yet the pages Stan and I shared in the chronicle are still to be cherished. He went on become a PhD biochemist; I presume he sings in the shower.