Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [66]
Thankfully, my brother spent much of his time alone in his room, the walls of which were covered with images of trains: steam engines, cabooses, sometimes close-ups of the wheels themselves. Quite different from the walls of my room, which were decorated with pages torn from Tiger Beat and cigarette ads from old Life magazines.
Occasionally, we would do “activities” together. Once, we took an old pair of his jeans and an old shirt and stuffed them with bed sheets. Next we stapled the seams to create a “body.” My brother then led me down a path a few miles from our house, and we tied a rope around the body and slung it up over one of the rails of the power-line scaffolding. Later at home my brother phoned the local police and informed them that there had been a ritual hanging in the neighborhood. As sirens streamed down our little dirt road my brother smirked and chuckled. “That should occupy them for a while.”
My brother moved out of the house when he was seventeen and began living with a rock band. He wasn’t interested in playing an instrument; he was interested in building the various electronic components. Before long, he’d installed sound systems in many of the local bars and clubs. Then, thrillingly, he created disco dance floors at black nightclubs in Springfield. Word spread about a grubby, clever kid who was good with electronics. And this is how it happened that my strange and aloof brother built the rocket-shooting, fire-spitting, exploding guitars for the band Kiss. He built every special-effect guitar for the band’s Dynasty World Tour in his bedroom. His name began to appear in magazines next to the word “brilliant.”
This same year, his high-school classmates merely graduated.
Other kids say “My big brother can beat you up.” I was able to say “My big brother is a genius like Einstein.”
It’s twenty-five years later, and I’m home at the computer, e-mailing my friend Suzanne in California. She is telling me she found the head of a rat in her driveway, and I’m writing her back saying it’s a sign. “You’re only half a rat away,” I tell her, but away from what, I don’t say.
My brother calls. “Woof,” he says, his standard greeting for friends, family, the president, were he to call. “Hey,” I say back to him.
My brother’s rock-band days are over. He owns a very successful car dealership and service center where he sells previously owned Range Rovers, Rolls Royces, and other staggeringly expensive cars. He takes photographs—thousands of them—with his nine-thousand-dollar digital camera and then e-mails the images to me, which take hours to download. He is married now, and he has a son. We speak on the phone each day because he calls me on the way to work in the morning. If I am sleeping in and don’t answer the phone, he will simply call again and again until I am forced to answer.
My brother never asks how I am or what I’m feeling. He simply begins speaking, as though we have already been on the phone for an hour. Often, he begins midthought. “So the kid,” he says, meaning his son. “He’s not very happy with me.”
I ask why, what did he do now?
“Well, I told him about Santa Claus.”
There is helium in his tone of voice, a lightness that means mischief.
“I said, ‘You know kid, Santa can’t earn a living working just one day a year.’ And then I told him how on the off-season, Santa works at Europoort in Rotterdam, unloading container ships. Only he got fired for drinking on the job, and now he’s depressed, so there might not even be a Christmas this year.”
My brother laughs, and I smile at how awful he is to his ten-year-old son, who already takes his father with a grain of salt. “That’s horrible. You shouldn’t tell him things like that.”
He laughs. When my brother laughs, there is something mechanical to the sound, like the noise a train would make if it could chuckle. “Yup. And he believed it.”
My brother has been telling his son stories like this for years. Jack once believed that you can tell a nuclear-powered