Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [35]
Sometimes fights took on a festive, holiday feel.
Jeff, the only biological Finch son and a resident of Boston, kept his distance from his more eccentric Western Massachusetts clan. But when he did come to town, all the Finches and many of the patients would gather—Poo’s mother, Anne; the oldest Finch daughter, Kate; occasionally Vickie would show up. Hope and Natalie, my mother, and sometimes the doctor’s “spiritual brother,” Father Kimmel, with his “adopted daughter,” Victoria.
If a ham had been baked or a chicken roasted, it wouldn’t be long before animal parts were hurling through the air.
“Yeah, that’s just because you think you’re too fucking good for us,” Natalie might shout.
“Calm down, Natalie. I’m busy in Boston. I’ve got a job out there.”
Hope would try and lay a guilt trip on him. “It wouldn’t hurt you to visit Dad at least. It’s not like you’re in California.”
“Yeah,” Anne would agree. “I’m a single mom with a son. Are you trying to say you’re busier than me? Because if you are, you’ve got. . .”
Long-buried resentments would float to the surface like dead fish. “Well, Mr. Boston Hot Shot, I seem to remember a certain five-year-old boy who liked creamed corn.”
To those of us who were not blood relations, the effect was something like watching a porn film. It made us want to try it at home.
“Yeah, well, you’re a lousy fucking parent,” I might scream at my mother later that evening.
“And you’re a selfish goddamn son.”
If he wasn’t physically sitting in the armchair clapping, the doctor was certainly mentally egging it on. “What a glorious expression of anger,” he might say, his voice rising above the cacophony. “Get it out, get it out, get it out!”
HE WAS RAISED WITHOUT
A PROPER DIAGNOSIS
M
Y LIFE CAME COMPLETE WITH A FACTORY-INSTALLED BIological brother seven years my senior. All my life I suspected that he was missing some essential part. He didn’t require a constant diet of movies to stay alive and whenever I tried to explain my desire to own a beauty empire, he suggested I become a plumber instead. My brother, Troy, was like nobody else in the family. He did not share my mother’s wild mental imbalance or my father’s pitch-black dark side.
And he certainly didn’t understand my appreciation for all things unusual and/or reflective.
Some considered my brother to be a genius. And while it’s true that he could program computers the size of deep freezers when he was twelve and had read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z the summer he turned fifteen, I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.
“But you’d look so much better if you just shaved your beard like Lee Majors,” I would whine, wielding my clippers.
“Huh,” he would grunt. “Who?”
My brother had a unique way of communicating through grunts and snorts like, one can only assume, our very distant ancestors.
When presented with a menu at a restaurant, he would glance up briefly from his technical manual and bark, “Bring me the meat lump and five iced teas.” He would say this the instant the waitress walked to the table, before she had the chance to even say, “Hel—”
My mother interpreted my brother’s uncommonly abrupt nature to be the direct result of my father’s lousy parenting. “Poor Troy,” she would say. “He’s just so heartbroken by that bastard he can’t even talk.”
My brother would look at me and grunt. “Huh. Do I seem sad?”
I would say, “Well, you’re not exactly perky.”
He didn’t seem especially sad to me. He didn’t seem to contain any emotions whatsoever except a sense of mischief and humor at the expense of others.
Once he phoned our father in the middle of the night to tell him I’d been arrested for drunken loitering in the town of Northampton and had to be bailed out of jail. My father