Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [51]
But another reason I overcame the resentment was that I knew Paul was proud of me. I was sure of this because he was constantly arranging fights for me with neighborhood boys, and I knew Paul well enough to realize that he would not want to be associated with a brother who was a loser. A long straight city street, Lee Avenue, connected our scruffy garden apartment complex in New Brunswick with our elementary school, a four-story brick box with big windows and black iron fire escapes inside a tall chainlink fence. I remember fighting my way down that street on my way home on more than one occasion. I was tall and skinny with a high threshold for pain, and a pretty good fighter, especially once the punching stopped and the other boy and I began twisting on the ground. I had long legs that could scissor my opponents into immobility. My best move was the one I used on Paul: I pushed my opponent’s face to the ground and brought an arm around his back and lifted it until the pain forced him to say he had had enough. “My brother can kick your ass,” Paul would say, and he was only eight years old. He had stronger words, but that phrase usually sufficed. I hated the fighting but enjoyed my brother’s unspoken respect.
As boys, we took the bus to summer day camp together, sang in the child’s choir together and swam naked together at the Y, but as we moved into the higher grades, then high school, we occupied different worlds. I moved with the good kids; Paul with the bad, or those on the margins.
It was a difficult period for all of us—the root problem was the same, but the manifestations in our lives were different. My mother had met Johnny while separated from our father when we were small boys, and Johnny lived with us on and off for several years before they married. He usually slept on the couch in those nonmarried years, my mother’s gesture toward family morality. As far as Paul and I were concerned, he was tightly and irrevocably inside our family—a combination father and big brother. He always drank a lot, but he was a happy and exuberant man, with a big presence and sense of humor and mischief, and full of surprises and stories. He liked to sing country songs: Hank Williams, Johnny Cash. We were proud of his size and strength, and we craved his attention. He gave it generously, taking us fishing, watching television with us and planning preposterous trips—boat shopping, as if we would ever buy one—in his broken-down cars. Often we ended up in a darkened bar in the middle of the day, and he had us sit next to him, served birch beers by the bartender. Sometimes we played shuffleboard with him in the cool dimness of the tavern. We all loved him, and if it is possible to say who loved him most, that was probably my mother.
Just as I was entering the eighth grade, Johnny and my mother married and bought a house (“Waterfront Living, No Money Down”). He had finally, after long effort, obtained a union card for the merchant marine, but after two years and four extended trips at sea, his drinking had worsened. The money he made disappeared mostly to liquor and there were long periods of unemployment. My mother worked furiously to hold on to the house—I remember the mortgage payment to this day, $166. It was the amount she—we—had to come up with each month for the bank. It was clear by now that Johnny was an alcoholic, unreliable and often sick. He had hard vomiting episodes in the bathroom. Unable to make the payments, we lost the house. By then, I was a junior in high school. We moved to another garden apartment.
I went off to college at seventeen; Paul was then thirteen, entering his first year of high school. When I left, in September 1968, Paul was small, with light brown hair and little hands. When I returned three months later for Thanksgiving, he was bigger, his hair was darker and he was showing signs