Scott

legal half brother?

there's a "cute" story my parents tell about my half-brother Scott, who lived with his mom and rarely visited. my little brother was asked if he had any other siblings while still young enough to know better; he replied "no, but Mark does."

but i didn't... not really.

Scott was from dad's first marriage and he is a decade older than me. my parents were married for several years before having me, and in that time, he lived with them at least part-time. he chose to live with his mom full-time when i was 3, sometime before my younger brother was born. and if he visited us more than 3 times after that, i can't remember them.

i don't blame him for that though. dad is emotionally unavailable and took his choice to live with his mom very hard. whenever he was mad or upset with us growing up, he would do what his mother did... give us his "silent mode." or as i took to calling it, he iced us out. his schedule would be too busy to make it to your events, around the house he would talk to others but not you directly, and if he did "deal with you" it was through anger / screaming; it felt like tip-toeing around a cave, hoping not to alert the monster who's eaten half your crew already.

despite that, i have 3 foggy memories of him visiting us. none of them are fully formed, but my memory (especially of childhood) is fuzzy at best.

the first was somewhere around middle school for me; sixth grade, maybe. it was my first year taking the bus instead of riding in a carpool, and i'd met a nearby girl who i had a crush on. we'd held hands on the bus, and even "kissed" once or twice, but nothing more than a peck. we'd exchanged school photos with each other on the way home, and i showed it to him while we talked in my bedroom. that's all i remember... me sitting at my desk, him on my bed, discussing a girl i liked. it felt important; or maybe just normal.

the second came a few months later, at my birthday. i got the first gift i ever remember from him... and a card which i kept on the corkboard above my desk until i moved away to college. it was Mr. Bungle's second album, "Disco Volante." the whole album was a bit over my head, my favorite band at the time was Hanson, but i kept revisiting it hoping to learn how to love it and maybe be more like him.

this one album, and that band as well, holds a place in my heart that's more spiritual than a hymn. it arrived from nowhere like a gift from heaven just as the rift between dad and i grew to levels we could never recover from. i had played sports my whole life up to that point, but the structure and discipline from coaches even at the JV level in middle school sucked the fun right out of it for me. i was getting more and more into music, and was becoming interested in writing and making web-pages online (this was 1997-1998). the school didn't have a baseball team so i'd managed to escape that hell quite naturally, but basketball was going to be a problem.

so, instead of having the hard conversation with dad that i wanted out, i decided to get kicked off the team. the best way to do that, was stir up some trouble and become a "bad example" and unworthy of that spot. but as i started to rebel at school, that quickly bled into the rest of life as well. i wasn't just the class clown anymore, or the quiet awkward kid with special interests... the attention i got, especially from the girls, was different. becoming an institutional pariah made me less of a social one. thus began what my mother still refers to as my "crazy year."

my third memory is years later, when i was a junior/senior in high school. he was graduating from SAIC in Chicago and the family was going up to watch him walk across the stage... even though dad refused to help pay for classes bc he wanted his report cards sent directly from the school. i was bitter, angry, and (perhaps more importantly) employed, so i skipped the trip and stayed behind with grandpa. the christmas following that trip, i got my second gift from him: a fancy leather keychain from the artsy place he worked. i'd just gotten my license and i used that keychain until it literally fell apart years later.

it was a dark stained piece with a gold fleur-de-lis stamped into the front-center. a keyring sat on either end of the oval-esque piece of leather which was wrapped around each keyrings and fastened on the back. i was oddly proud of it and when it finally fell apart in the year after my own college graduation, i was devastated.

this weekend he was admitted to the hospital with a bowl perforation. they diagnosed him with chrone's disease and have since had to operate to stop the infection, when antibiotics weren't doing enough, and remove the part of his colon that was damaged beyond repair. i don't know much about medicine or health stuff, learning about it makes me feel pains in my body and gives the OCD more things to obsess over when i feel a twinge or pain somewhere in the future... but it sounds serious.

yet i'm honestly ashamed to say that i couldn't muster any emotional response. maybe it's the autism or delayed emotional processing. maybe it's the history of family trauma and hatred of hospitals. maybe it's bc i threw my back out last week and the pain of that is eating all ability for outward empathy/sympathy.

no matter the cause, i found myself wondering... how do you mourn someone who's never been there to begin with?

one of the first deaths that really impacted me was an older kid who took me under his wing on my first school trip. we knew each other from church but he was a class clown and saw me, a lonely sixth grader, hiding at the back of the bus so he made me feel cool and brought me into his friend group. they were eighth graders and into music i'd never heard of. i tried to act cool, i watched how they dressed and moved and talked and tried to learn it myself. he stopped coming to church after he got to high school. i rarely saw or heard from him, and he died from suicide a couple years later. it hit me hard.

i'd transferred my need for a big brother on him and, like my real one, he was gone. i think i mourned them both at that time but have never admitted that to myself.

somewhere after that i stopped calling myself a middle-child and just accepted that i was the oldest.

i hope he's okay and that he pulls through this and lives a long healthy life. his wife, friends, and family deserve to have him around; he seems really great, they've been through a lot, and they obviously love him. but i don't know him and never really have.

the person i knew was built from family photo albums where I carefully observed what clothes he wore, the hair styles he chose, and the music he listened to. with those scraps of info, and little stories i'd picked up here and there, i created a Frankensteinian monster to call my bro.

i wanted out of the house, away from our dad, and to get a fresh start in a place where the no one knew me as the weird awkward kid they'd teased and bullied their whole life.

but i don't know how any of that worked out for him. i've never asked, and don't know how to form those sort of questions anyway.

just because my Scott is dead, doesn't mean i hope this one goes too. and maybe one day, when we're old and gray, i'll be able to ask those unformed questions and get to know the actual person behind those myths.

07.04.2022 / memory lane