Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [65]
“Maybe we won’t have seafood tonight,” Dennis said.
I watched as a mutton snapper glided over an old hubcap. “Yeah, burgers sound good.”
I stood up to stretch my back and saw the little monster child glaring at me from the safety of the other side of the boat. I winked at her, and she turned away.
And then in a moment of sanity, I realized I probably really had terrified that little girl. And I’d certainly ruined Key West for her. In fact, I was fairly certain that she would never return to Florida at all.
So clearly, Hemingway would have been proud of me.
ASS BURGER
T
he summer my big brother, John, turned fifteen, he read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z. As he finished each volume, he would leave it on my bed, so that I could do likewise. But I did not do likewise. What little factual information I absorbed in my life was gleaned from lectures the Professor gave to Gilligan.
For Christmas that year, my brother was astounded that I did not know how to use the slide rule he had given me. “What the fuck?” he said in his deep monotone voice. “You must have read about how these things work.”
I glanced up over the liner notes of my new Marlo Thomas Free to Be You and Me album and told him that of course I didn’t know how it worked; I didn’t read the encyclopedia like he did.
His mouth opened in disgust. He simply could not comprehend this. “You didn’t read any of them?”
I told him I looked at some of the pictures. “Those transparent pages with naked people and their insides, that was neat,” I said.
“Well, that’s just unacceptable. I mean, you’re reading at a third-grade level. Don’t you find that alarming?” Considering I was in the third grade, no, I didn’t.
And from this moment on my brother treated me as not just his younger brother, but his “borderline retarded” younger brother. In fact, this is exactly how he introduced me to his friends: “This is my younger brother. You can just ignore him; he’s basically retarded. Our mother smoked while she was pregnant with him, and I guess there was brain damage.”
But to me, it was my brother who seemed retarded. Either that or a genius, I couldn’t decide. All I knew for sure was that he was a peculiar creature. While he could not fathom a younger brother who did not share his fascination with quantum mechanics, I likewise could not comprehend that my brother didn’t own a single pair of platform shoes. As far as I was concerned, he was in training to become a creepy gas station attendant, while I was going to be a star.
So what, exactly, was he?
On the one hand, my brother knew how to create something called a circuit board, which, when attached with wires to a series of strobe lights and placed next to our sleeping mother, provided a shocking amount of fun. He could create an entire automobile engine Frankensteined together from parts he found at the dump. The floor of my brother’s room was littered with transistors, tiny batteries, wires, bits of lead from his soldering iron, red-and-black rubber-capped clamps. Instead of a baseball glove, my brother had an oscilloscope on his dresser. And if you asked him, “Are platinum records really made of platinum?” you would get a thirty-minute discourse on the periodic table, including the half-life of each element.
But on the other hand my brother seemed like somebody best confined to a basement. Not only was he gruff and abrupt, but he spoke in a deadly monotone at all times. He never made eye contact. And he took no pride in his appearance, seeing nothing wrong with wearing pants that had been too short for years. When my parents had guests, my brother often asked shockingly rude questions: “Didn’t you have an abortion last year?” he asked my mother’s friend Nancy. When my mother shrieked, “John, that is absolutely none of your business. How dare you ask such a question,” my brother simply grunted and then snorted, “Well, I thought you said she had an abortion. One of your friends did. I thought it was this ‘Nancy’ character.