Born to be Wild

I had a yellow and white gingham minidress that I’d found at a local Salvation Army.  Purple lipstick that didn’t suit me.  Combat boots.   I was fifteen years old and I had my first boyfriend.   Me & my friends went to basement and garage shows, any all ages show that we could find.  We’d travel from state to state with friends who had licenses in their parent’s cars.   We’d scour record shops where I’d spend all of my time lingering over the zines while my boyfriend found rare bands, rare records, more for his collection.   

On days with nothing to do, my brother would get restless.  He was two years younger than me but already had more experience with trouble than I would have in my lifetime.  He was born oppositional and from early childhood did whatever he wanted and feared nothing.  He was constantly injuring himself jumping from trees and going as fast as he could go on his bikes.  When he was very little, we would play outside of our house and he’d be in his little red and yellow toy car, the kind that toddlers would use their feet to propel forward like Fred Flintstone.  We had a long driveway with a steep hill to the bottom and he loved to go to the very top of the driveway and gather up speed and then lift his legs to go faster and faster until he crashed at the bottom.   When this wasn’t good enough, he’d recruit me to push the car from behind with a running start so that he’d go even faster but I was always terrified that he would get hurt and hold on too long to the car.   “Let go! Let go!” he’d yell as I hit a run, so he could go as fast as possible. 

He was wild and reckless.  He’d been getting in fights and stealing things and setting fires for a few years by then.  He stole cars regularly for joyrides and I knew but never ratted him out.  He had no fear of anything, if you caught him or scolded him he’d laugh in your face.   He’d started being real mean to dogs and this he hid but I knew it.  He tried to burn down our shed just to see how long it would take.   There was no kind of punishment that mattered to him.  He found it funny when he got caught and anyway it didn’t matter because he’d just sneak out whenever he wanted to anyway.   There was a coiled rage inside him that you could see, simmering, begging for an excuse to be released.

By that summer my reputation as the family outcast was on record and no matter that all I did was read and keep to myself I was always on the outs while my brother could do no wrong - especially to my mother.  My father would scream at him and make threats when he’d get caught doing something and they’d fight but nothing would come of it.  My brother was cowed by no one, not even my notoriously mean and violent father.  If my father lurched at him to strike him, he’d just laugh with a cold look in his eyes and he’d fight back.  He seemed much more mature than me, he took more risks.  He did not know what fear was. I envied this.  I was afraid of everything. 

It had always been this way.  When we were little, my parents doted on him and praised his every move.  He was rambunctious and hyper and wouldn’t listen and they told stories about his outbursts to make their friends laugh.   They sent him to a private nursery school while they had neighborhood old ladies look after me.  I don’t know how they afforded it, because we were broke all of the time and frequently had our power turned off when bills went unpaid, and all of my clothes were hand-me-downs.  He had to be sent there because he was too defiant for a babysitter.  My father coached his basketball team and made his Pinewood Derby car with him for Cub Scouts until he was inevitably kicked out.  In contrast, I would get dropped off at whatever activity my mother thought would make me more social, often left for hours to wait to be picked up while she ran her errands.   

As a little girl I was prone to panic attacks.  I had a terror of anything that raised adrenaline - everything my parents loved - go karts and rollercoasters and driving fast would make me hysterical.  I’d cry and beg them to not make me go or to slow down while they laughed at me and told me to shut the hell up.  Once on a family vacation my parents brought us to a go kart place and as usual I was panicking and crying, standing in the line begging them to not make me get into a go kart.   I was sure I couldn’t do it. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, while they dragged me forward in the line.   My parents laughed at me and told me how ridiculous I was and that I needed to grow up and stop being so melodramatic.   “Our little actress” they’d remark to each other, mocking me.   A woman standing in line behind us with her own family spoke up, confronting my parents about how they were talking to me.  I don’t remember what she said, but she shamed them enough that they told me to go sit down in the bleachers to watch if I refused to have fun.  My relief at not having to go on the go karts was quickly replaced by the cold dread I felt knowing I was going to get it.  For embarrassing them.  As usual. 

My mother had a passion for pranks and for scaring me in particular.  She would hide in the house and jump out at me, making monstrous faces and lunging at me just to watch me scream and cry. Her pretend lunges were pretty close to the real thing.  I never got used to it.  One time she’d climbed in the large towel cabinet built into the  bathroom wall.  It was high up, she would have had to hoist herself into it, and she laid in wait for me to come in there to terrify me.  The cabinet had doors with wooden blinds on them, so she could watch silently to see me coming.  This was the same cabinet where I’d found her cocaine stash; the little bottle and the tiny spoon, the baggies full of white powder.  I didn’t know exactly what they were until years later but I knew it was drugs.   When she jumped out at me I fell into the tub trying to get away from her and badly bruised my side and my leg.  I cried just like I always did, just like she wanted me to, just like she hated me for.  When she commanded me to stop and I didn’t she became incensed and raised her hand at me to hit me until I quieted my sobbing and only let out uncontrolled attempts to breathe. 

My brother never gave them these problems. He jumped back at them, making them laugh.  He had better monster faces.   He didn’t care.   He insisted on getting a skateboard when he was about five and my mother borrowed it one day to go down a huge hill, falling and breaking her arm.  She didn’t know what she was doing, but was sure it was easy.   She told the story with tears of laughter rolling down her face, cut up about her own sense of adventure.  There were daily reminders of how much I disappointed her by never doing these kinds of things, and so it didn’t surprise me at all that they saw the wildness of my brother as a good thing.   He was like them.    I was something else, something strange, something unknown.  I didn’t fit, they thought.  They were right. 

My brother was my companion, though.  He was loyal to me and he knew that I was loyal to him.  When my father would get drunk and start screaming and beating my mother, I’d creep over and tell him to hide under the bed or in the closet, while I went out to try to calm my father down and stop him from killing her.   My fears for myself evaporated only in these moments, when I would take on my father’s uncontrolled rage and step between them trying to reason with him and distract him long enough for my mother to get away.   

When they had parties, my brother would often sleep through them while I’d get called into the kitchen.  My parents for some reason thought it was endlessly amusing to put me on the spot and demand that I sing something or sit on my father’s lap while he slurred that I was his “good little girl”.  Their friends would ask me questions about school and somehow everything I said was hilarious to them.  They liked it when I would perform for them, but I could never do it right.  Eventually my mother would get aggravated with my presence and order me back to bed and I felt great relief to escape the smoky kitchen.  They never called my brother out to entertain like this, he was too little and too precious and anyway it was funnier to make me do it.   In this, I was united with my parents. We all seemed to agree that he was to be kept from any of this.

At night, I’d go to his room and climb up to the top bunk, somehow feeling that sleeping there was safer.  This is also where I’d go to sneak food.  By the time I was eight years old, my mother had started carefully monitoring what I ate, as she was very concerned that I was getting too fat.  She’d sit across from me and when I took a bite of food she’d catch my eye and blow her cheeks out, signaling to me that I was going to explode if I did not stop eating.   If I ignored this, she’d take a serving spoon and slap the fork out of my hand with it.  She began putting all of the snacks up high where she thought I couldn’t get them, and told me they were only for my brother.  In response to this, I began eating in secret.  I’d find some way to grab a handful of food and put it in my pocket until I could be alone.  One time I’d managed to grab a big bag of generic sour cream & onion chips and gleefully brought them up to my brother’s top bunk to eat the whole thing while I read a book in solitude.   Of course, I eventually got caught but these moments brought me absolute pleasure and I was unwilling to give them up entirely. 

He’d put a sign on the door of his room, directing everyone to call him “Tiger” from now on.  He had a karate outfit left over from the brief time he’d taken classes before being kicked out and he’d wear it around practicing his punches and kicks.  He often protected me, fighting the boys in the neighborhood who would terrorize me.  Once when a group of boys chased me from the bus stop, tackling me and rubbing dog shit in my hair, my brother caught up to them and picked a fight with the ringleader.  He’d later steal his bike and throw it in the creek.   This was wordless, a silent agreement between us.   My brother could not understand me anymore than my parents did but he was my ally.  

I trusted him to be strong when I couldn’t.  I knew that he had something in him that I did not and he was the only person who didn’t torment me. He seemed to understand that I had plenty to be afraid of.   Our parents would frequently kick us out of the house for an entire day so they could nurse a hangover or just not have us in their faces, and we’d spend long days in the woods.   My idea of fun was very different from his, and he’d quickly get bored of my silent walks and go looking for trouble but he was never far.   On a snowy day when we’d been booted from the house as usual, I took a sled and went down the hill behind our house but crashed through the old rotted fence and careened down the steep gully towards the creek. 

On the way down, my face was scratched by the broken fence and errant branches and I eventually crashed into a tree and landed on a rock.  I had the breath knocked out of me, blood on my face and hands.  My winter coat was torn and I knew for sure that this would get me in huge trouble with my mother.  I was nine or ten then.  When I could breathe again I began to sob.  I laid there in the snow.   I was sure that there was no way I’d ever be able to climb back up.  I didn’t believe I could do anything then.  I was hopeless,  I was useless.  Before long, my brother appeared.  He’d been somewhere else in the woods, doing who knows what, but he’d heard me sobbing and he came.   He pulled me up and started pushing me up the gully, shoving me every time I stopped climbing and pulling my sled behind him.  Eventually we made it to the top and into the basement where I pulled off the torn coat and cleaned up the blood on me before heading into the house.  He never breathed a word to my parents. 

This agreement between us lasted through our teen years, even when we’d begun to fight ourselves like siblings do.  I might scream at him and lock him out of the house for being a little shit, but the moment our parents were back we were united.  We’d look at the time and realize we had to get the house in order before our father came home and wordlessly we’d work in unison to hide the evidence of our laziness and whatever rules we’d broken that day.  The two of us never once told on the other to our parents.   For me this was no big deal as they were unlikely to believe me anyway but for him this was something different, as if he’d wanted to he could have told my parents anything and they would have punished me for it no matter what.  

Oddly, it never occurred to me that my parents preferred my brother unfairly.  I never complained to them that he was their favorite and they mistreated me. I accepted my role in the family and did not question anything about how I was treated.  It was just how it was.  By the time I was in high school, I’d learned how to fade out and numb everything so that the panic attacks mostly stopped.  I’d spend all of my time alone, reading books.  I slept a lot.   I had few friends.  I rarely if ever got in trouble unless it was skipping class or not doing homework but somehow I was constantly grounded at home, sentenced to endless housework for my smart mouth or my many disappointments.   

One hot summer day with nothing going on, wearing the yellow and white dress with the lipstick, my brother asked me if I wanted to go for a ride.  He showed me the keys to my father’s old Honda Tercel.   They’d left it behind… did they go somewhere in my mother’s car?  I don’t remember these details.   But we had the car, we had the keys.   My brother, then 13, had been driving whatever he could steal for a while by then.   Oddly, I trusted him.   It never would have occurred to either of us that I should be the one in the driver’s seat.   We got in the car and decided to go visit some friends of mine, nothing really doing but the excitement of having the car was enough.  We hung around all afternoon and then decided to head back home.   We took the highway.  

We had the radio on in the car, tuned to the local classic rock station that my father usually listened to.   As we merged into traffic and picked up speed, Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild” came on and my brother turned to me with a goofy grin and turned it way up.   I started to laugh at how corny and perfect it was and we sang along and drove the few miles until our exit.   We made it across town without any problems, but just as we were approaching our house my uncle pulled out at top speed.   He’d apparently come to the house to check on us, saw the car gone and figured out what had happened.   He’d been lying in wait to catch us hidden in the street next to our house, knowing that if he parked in the driveway we’d see him and leave. 

My uncle chased us through the neighborhood streets before eventually catching us up and forcing us to go back to the house.   He of course told our parents and we were both punished.  My punishment included being grounded for the rest of the summer, having to clean and organize the basement and also not having anything purchased for me to prepare for the new school year, in addition to my father’s belt.  Things went on in this way all through high school, with my brother and I drifting further apart as he got involved with a new crowd and was always gone stealing or drinking or getting into fights.  One day I came home and laid on my bed and looked up at the ceiling.  My brother had scrawled with a marker “Yo hoe what you know is you smeel like shit.”  I found it absolutely hilarious, especially the misspelling, and could not get mad at him.    

My brother was arrested the first time when he was 14, for breaking into a Judge’s house.   He was sent to Juvenile detention and stayed there for most of my Senior year in high school and my first year of college.   I’d surprised everyone by applying to and getting into our state university.  When I’d told my parents, my father said only “We're not paying for that.”  So I figured out how to apply for student loans and went anyway.   

I left home at 17 and I never looked back.  I did not consciously understand that my family had been abusive or that anything was wrong for many years.  I would have told you that I had a mostly happy childhood, with a family who had problems like any other.   I could not explain why being around my parents filled me with a combination of panic and rage.  I tried to hide my loathing for them - especially my mother - because I thought that I was the problem.   I moved to Ireland and New York City and Mexico and eventually across the country.  After getting out of Juvenile Detention, my brother left school and got his GED.  He was arrested a few more times for petty crimes and fights.  He could not hold a job and supported himself mostly by stealing.   He lived in my parent’s basement.  He had lost his boyish sense of adventure and replaced it with ice cold, calculated violence.   

When I was 24, living in New York, he got high on cocaine and robbed a bank at gunpoint.  The bank teller put a dye pack in the bag of cash they gave him, which exploded all over him shortly after he ran from the bank.  He was caught easily.   My parents called to tell me the news and they seemed shocked that he would definitely go to prison, though it was no surprise to me.  “This never would have happened if you’d stayed here to support your brother,” my mother said to me on the phone. “He needed you, but I guess you’re too busy having fun to care about your family.”  I said nothing in response.   He went to prison for several years, eventually getting a degree inside and coming home with plans that never came to fruition.   He moved back into my parent’s basement and wasted no time getting back into drugs and a life of crime.  

I went home for a visit during this period and missed the last train back to the city.  My brother offered to drive me; it was about three hours by car.   It had been years since he’d driven me anywhere, and I recalled that time we’d taken my father’s car to him with a smile on my face.  But he just nodded without looking at me and said “yeah” dully, before reaching over to turn up the music, some hip hop that I wasn’t familiar with.  When we got on the highway, he began speeding and driving more and more aggressively.  He was weaving in and out of traffic, passing every car that threatened to slow him down.  It was making me extremely nervous and I repeatedly yelled at him to stop, but he ignored me.  He just turned the music up louder.  I closed my eyes and held tightly to the door and willed myself not to freak out.  We finally made it to the city and he stopped abruptly in front of my apartment building, turned the car off and just sat there, looking forward.  “What is wrong with you?!” I yelled, “What is your problem?!”  And he turned to me slowly then and looked at me with no expression.  “Shut the fuck up and get out.”  I searched his eyes for some sign of my brother, something to connect to.   There was nothing there.  

Years went by and I eventually cut off contact with my parents entirely, though I’d occasionally take a call from my brother.  I’d moved across the country by then, and I offered to help him if he wanted to move out with me.  I’d help him to go school and start a new life.  But he refused, saying he was who he was and he liked where he was.  We had not spoken in several months when I heard from my cousin that he’d been arrested again.  Actually, he’d been arrested twice.  The first time, he was out partying and got into an altercation with a woman.  He punched her in the head so hard that she lost hearing in one ear.  Then while out on bond, he got arrested again.  This time he got high on meth and went on a daytime rampage of robberies, beating an old man in his home and then attempting to carjack two women before being caught by police while trying to flee on foot.   I realized that he was gone forever.  

I thought about my brother and our childhood for a long time.  I thought about how I’d failed him, how I’d abandoned him to his fate.  How I’d always held him back, how his bravado had never really rubbed off on me.  I could not save him and in his eyes I was only an anchor.  He wanted to go fast, and I wanted to stop him, I wanted to slow him down and save him from his own destructive desires.   I conjured up my memories: We were children, and he was wild and carefree.  He was inside his little red and yellow car, at the top of the hill.  He wanted nothing more than to feel the thrill of the speedy descent and the crash that would leave him bruised but exhilarated.  He wanted me to help him go even faster, to run behind him pushing the car with all of my strength until just the right moment.  “Let go! Let go!”   I did.