6. The Bee’s Knees, Weiner Dogs, and Felonies…

Note: This is the sixth installment of the serial publication of my memoirs, “What’s Left Behind.” To read previous chapters, go to https://medium.com/whats-left-behind.

I am told that, when I was born, Colin would not leave my side.

My brother, a mere three years old, insisted on taking care of me, wanting to help feed me and wafting plumes of baby powder around the house trying to change my diaper. When I was two months old, William came home from school with chicken pox and gave it to Colin, who was told, by all means, to stay away from his baby sister. But Colin, forever diligent about checking on me in the middle of the night, dismissed this directive, and a few days later, I was blighted with blisters right beside them.

Somewhere along the way, that love and protection faded.

I sometimes wonder if my mother — so happy to finally have that little girl she always wanted — doted on me so much that Colin began to resent me. Because, from as early as I can remember, the brother that I knew was never in my corner; the brother that I knew, it seemed, had the sole purpose of making my life miserable.

It was a bitter, snowy morning shortly after Christmas. Colin was in the living room playing his new Atari while our mother took a shower, and I, for whatever reason, left through the back door to go outside — in my nightgown and bare feet!

Perhaps I had to let Odin out. Or let whichever cat we had at that time back in. It’s also entirely possible I just wanted to see the snow. Even today, I will look for any reason to go outside in a fresh snowfall.

I remember stepping down from the back porch, the ground’s pillowy softness compensating for its biting cold, then the slam of the door seconds later as it closed behind me. I turned to see Colin’s impish face pressed against the four-paned window, laughing at me barefoot in the snow, my feet now freezing, the wind chilling me through my nightgown.

I twisted the doorknob frantically, then began pounding on the window when — SMASH!

My hand burst through the glass, tearing a near-two-inch gash across the underside of my right wrist.

The very next day, I was standing in the threshold between the kitchen and dining room when, for reasons I don’t recall and probably no reason at all, Colin kicked me — square between the legs.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked, running over as Colin made a beeline for the front door, laughing.

“He kicked me!” I wailed, doubled over from the sharp pain that pierced my middle.

“Where?” she asked, sizing me up for evidence of injury.

Not knowing any other word for it, I merely repeated what I’d heard Colin call it a hundred times.

“In the pussy,” I whimpered.

WHACK!

My mother smacked me across the face so hard, I fell to my knees, holding my stinging cheek, unable to decide what hurt the most.

I have a lot of respect for my mother.

As displaced or confounding as that might be, it’s difficult to harbor resentment when I think of the sheer emotional strain she endured on a regular basis. Between a heartless husband, a belligerent son who habitually drove her to tears, and the constant preoccupation with trying to make ends meet, life chipped away at my mother a little more each day.

Colin, it seemed, possessed some diabolical intuition for this vulnerability, using her emotional turmoil as leverage, and, in a matter of circular causality, grew increasingly incorrigible the deeper she caved.

By extension, this had a profound impact on my own life. In my mother’s eyes, I was already an angel — her pride and joy, flawless and faultless, a paragon of virtue. But the worse Colin behaved, the more my mother praised me for being the good one.

The one “who made it all worth it.”

Then again, I was the good one.

Compared to the amount of trouble Colin was getting into, my own mischief was hardly noteworthy. My worst offense was probably waiting for my mother to get in the shower so I could raid her dresser drawer for quarters, then hurry off to the Te-Amo Smoke Shop and back before she was out. It was never a considerable amount of money. It didn’t procure anything more than Bubblicious Gum and Garbage Pail Kids. Over time, though, I came to own hundreds of those cards, and it amazed me that she never once questioned how I got them.

But while I was pilfering quarters in the hopes of acquiring the most comprehensive collection of Garbage Pail Kids in America, Colin was out drinking, smoking, and using marijuana as young as ten years old. He ran away from home regularly, stole from my parents — and almost never went to school!

Colin hated school.

After he was held back in the second or third grade, they put him in Mrs. Catalano’s Special Education class. When that didn’t help, Colin was taken out of Lincoln altogether and enrolled in another school that would hopefully provide the education and support he needed. But the more they moved him around, the less he wanted to go, and every morning, like clockwork, a battle ensued.

First, Colin pretended to be fast asleep while my mother dragged him bodily from the bed. If and when she managed to get him up, he feigned one sickness or another, sometimes going as far as making himself throw up. When all else failed, he would hide his shoes, insisting he couldn’t go to school without them — until one day, my mother forced him out of the house in his socks, and he started hiding his pants instead.

Each day, I was elected to go to the window and wave away the little yellow school bus that came to pick him up.

My brother hated that bus. He called it the “tart cart” and cried that he didn’t want people to see him in that half-sized bus. But then Colin got what he wished for because, eventually, the tart cart grew tired of its futile trips out to Seventh Avenue, and, in its stead, the truant officer would come in his rusty, blue Cadillac. One morning, he showed up at the house, and Colin, flat-out refusing to go to school, clutched the metal frame of the Castro-Convertible. I watched in astonishment as the truant officer seized shrieking brother by the ankles and tried to yank him from the sofa.

I didn’t like school either, but I didn’t think it was that bad!

Like most kids, I often sought the company of my big brother; and like most older siblings, he shooed away his little sister. Sometimes, if my persistence was effective, Colin might let me hang out with him and his friends. But it was under the sole condition that I went where they went, did what they did, and kept my mouth shut about all of it.

“This is the best way to do it,” Colin explained to me.

He was standing on the front bumper of a white Cadillac Eldorado, both hands clasped around the front emblem.

“Bend your knees and then PULL!” he grunted as he yanked the emblem forcefully from the hood.

“These are the best ones, too,” he said with a triumphant grin holding up the 24-karat hood ornament. “You get the most money for the gold ones!”

I stole one emblem my entire life — and my only recollection of the event is the fear and angst that stayed with me for weeks after.

It was this fear that protected me from following in my brother’s footsteps; it was this fear — this enduring, domineering superego of mine — that, regardless of how much time I spent with my brother, rarely pushed my own mischief past the limits of classic childhood shenanigans, like ringing the neighbors’ doorbells and running away.

It was the poor woman who lived next door to us, downstairs from Mr. Vandervender, that was taunted most; we must have rung her bell at least twice a night for an entire summer. When we weren’t bothering her, we picked on the old lady with the Weiner dog several houses down.

I remember crouching behind a parked car as Colin ran up to the single-story, red-shingled house and rang the bell. Unfortunately, the old lady was ready this time, watching and waiting, and he had barely made it off the porch when she came charging out of the house with a broom in her hand, her yappy little dog at her heels.

In hindsight, I probably could have stayed behind the car and gone unnoticed. But fear spurred me to take flight after my brother as he tore down the street, cutting across a neighbor’s front yard, then trampling their garden and hopping the back fence into the woods behind.

As I turned to cut across that same yard, I saw the old lady still chasing me. Crushing what was left of the neighbor’s flowerbed, I slipped my right foot into the chain-link fence and threw my left leg over the top. But as I hoisted the rest of my body, my pants pocket snagged on the fencepost, and I was left hanging upside down in a caricatural escapade that couldn’t have unfolded better if it were scripted.

“Colin!” I screamed after my brother who was almost out of sight. “I’m stuck!”

Through the fence I watched the old lady gaining ground.

“Colin, come back!” I screamed again, but my brother kept on running.

Suddenly, my pants tore and I crashed to the ground. The old lady had just about reached the fence as I jumped to my feet and hightailed it into the woods after my brother. But, true to form, he was nowhere around.

I walked through the woods up to County Road and back home. My pants pocket had ripped clear through, scratching my leg. When I walked into the house, my mother was on the phone in the dining room, and I wondered if it was with the wiener-dog lady.

“What happened to your pants?” she asked, hanging up the phone.

“I fell.”

That was true.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

Also, true.

“Weren’t you just with him?”

“Yeah, but — ”

“Okay,” she said, dismissively. “I’m sure he’s around.”

My mother said that a lot about Colin. I think it was easier than finding out what he was actually doing — which, in this case, was breaking into Mr. Vandervender’s garage.

After recetnly spying a large cache of Coca-Cola 12-packs, Colin had made it a habit of breaking into the garage, throwing a case of soda out of the window, and taking it upstairs to the abandoned pigeon coop, where we drank them.

“Watch this!” Colin said.

He shook the can and struck it against a nail sticking out of the wall, spraying soda violently around the room. Laughing wickedly, he would douse me with effervescent foam before redirecting the stream into his mouth.

When Mr. Vandervender caught-on to my brother’s thefts, he complained to my parents and threatened to call the police if it continued. My mother asked if I knew anything about it, but I said no, and she had no reason to think I was lying.

After all, I was the “good one.”

When Colin was ten, he began hanging out with Randy — an older kid who lived on the other side of town, next door to the Getty gas station.

That was when things got bad.

That was when the police started coming.

I will never forget the day Colin came home and gave me a shiny new, red and black, 20-inch BMX — my first bike since my Cabbage Patch Kids Big Wheel.

I was riding around in front of our house when I saw a police car pull up, and two officers stepped out and walked toward me.

“Hi there,” one of them said.

“Hello.”

“That’s a nice bicycle.”

“Thanks!” I answered proudly.

“Where’d you get it?” the officer asked me.

“My brother gave it to me!”

“Where’s your brother?”

“In the backyard,” I answered, pointing down our driveway.

One officer knelt down next to me as the other headed toward the yard.

“Okay, listen,” he said. “I need to take this bike with me.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it belongs to someone else.”

My little heart sank as I lost my new bike faster than I got it

I later discovered that Randy had broken into the local bicycle shop while Colin stood outside, watching for the police. Together, they stole two bicycles, a moped, and the small bike that Colin had given me, and I spent the rest of that day sitting in the police station with Colin — who was arrested for something along the lines of aiding and abetting in theft and burglary — while my parents wrangled over who was to blame that their ten-year-old was now a felon.

Continue on to Chapter 7: Brothers and Sisters and Skeletons in the Closet…