For Jo-Anne

My earliest memories present themselves like keepsakes from a deceased grandfather’s cigar box: oddly shaped things, mysteriously disjunct (though hardly random), and always accompanied by the drowsy odor of cedar. These earliest memories—gathered around the third year of my life—are sometimes the relics of my own primitive thought process.

The moon, for instance. I had no concept to explain the moon’s behavior. I knew nothing of its phases, the ecliptic, or even the source of its light. To me, the moon changed of its own accord: opened and closed like an eye, and sometimes hid. Sometimes it imitated a clipped thumbnail. I remember standing at night in our massive backyard, holding out my thumb, fitting, in place of my drab little cuticle, the thin crescent moon—transforming myself into a hybrid of heaven and earth.

I also took interest in things closer to the ground. I seriously contemplated the physiology of worms. They lived underground (which was wonder enough), they had neither heads nor limbs, yet, when removed from their underworld, they exhibited great purpose to return. But the most fascinating thing was their ability to be duplicated on the spot.

I first discovered this phenomenon while my parents were fussing with the vegetation in the yard. It was a hot day and the air was thick with the fragrance of fresh cut grass. My older brother was dividing his time between playing with a wagon loaded with weeds and helping Dad empty the grass catcher. I was left to entertain myself, so I dug with my hands in a shady flower bed, captured a clutch of worms, and then arranged them on the rusty metal lid of our incinerator. I used a popsicle stick to increase their number exponentially. To my delight, the new offspring appeared as energetic as their former—longer—selves.

Later that day, like an unwitting agent of cosmic justice, my older brother accidentally ran the push mower over my left hand, severely slicing my pinky finger. I remember next to nothing about the stitches, but the scar—still visible—took the outline of the pyramid eye on the back of a dollar bill. (If the Treasury Department—or Free Masons—had intended to create an image disturbing to young children, they succeeded.)

Machines did not go unnoticed. An escalator was a terrifying device, swallowing stairs and possibly small children. I refused to ride one. Automobiles were another story. They had wheels and horns and all sorts of things for people to push, pull, or twist. They stopped at places where men in jumper suits washed windows, opened hoods, and connected hoses giving off a gloriously intoxicating aroma. My brother and I always breathed deeply at gas stations: we’d stick our heads out the windows like goofy cocker spaniels.

There were other machines that pleased me. My dad’s power drill looked exactly like a ray gun. Mom’s sewing machine made soothing noises. I liked airplanes, too. They were in the sky, and the sky was always filled with surprises. One day I looked up and saw a machine that excited me more than any airplane. I had seen one like it on television: Captain Video piloted one of these things.

“Look!” I said to my older brother. “Rocket ship!”

“There’s no such thing as a rocket ship,” he said. “That’s a blimp.”

I stared analytically at the flying machine, hoping my brother was mistaken. It did seem too lethargic for a rocket ship. And there were no flames shooting from an exhaust. “What’s a blimp?” I asked.

I relied on my older brother to help keep me informed. He was three years my senior and already reading way above the level of the rest of his class. He read more books than were required of him, so he always had backup for his outrageous claims; such as when he set out to convince me that there were once monsters, called dinosaurs, having their way with the planet, long before Adam and Eve made their entrance.

“I never seen any,” I said, with all the side-glance skepticism a just-turned- four-year-old could muster. “Where do they live?”

“They don’t live anymore,” he said sadly. “They’re all gone. They all died.” He then showed me his book containing illustrations of the beasts—with and without their skins. There was also an illustration of a prehistoric dragonfly, fluttering above grazing herbivores, tree-sized ferns, and a murky swamp. I wanted to jump into the illustration: it looked like a pleasant place to live.

“I seen that bug,” I said.

“Not like that one, you didn’t,” said my brother. “That’s a giant dragonfly—it was bigger than you are. We don’t have those any more; they’re all gone, too.”

I didn’t ask him where they—the dinosaurs and giant dragonflies—had gone, but I realized they wouldn’t be coming back. I was drawing on my own recent confrontation with the baffling disappearance of life, having “broken” my pet turtle, trying to remove it from its shell. I was not attempting to hurt the animal, of course; I had simply trusted too much in the anatomical representations of the cartoons on television.

Television wasn’t all bad, though. There was Howdy Doody and Andy’s Gang and Señor Wences. There was also Laurel and Hardy: our role models. We studied their routines and mannerisms religiously. I became Stan; my older brother, being the one in charge (and also carrying the hero’s portion of “baby fat”), took the part of Ollie. We wore derbies and bowties and walked around the neighborhood looking like the ghosts of turn-of-the-century carnival midgets. We sometimes went into the Woolworth’s for candy. My brother would do most of the talking:

“Good afternoon,” he’d almost sing. “I am Oliver . . . Nooorrrville Hardy. And this is my friend, Mr. Laurel (hm-hm-hm).” He’d flutter his fingers near the edges of his bowtie, and then we’d both tip our derbies, with the precision of seasoned vaudevillians. These routines almost always elicited free candy from the salesclerk, who was often-enough, a kindly grandmother type.

In our borrowed personae, we were given license to interrupt the checker games of elderly men, the duties of city workers, and the Sunday picnics of complete strangers. We considered ourselves immune from the burden of invitation. One day we even wandered into the chapel of a local mortuary.

The small room was dimly lit by artificial candles and the muted rays of the morning sun, pushing through a stained glass window depicting the risen Christ. Below the window was a chocolate-colored casket. The casket was open, and its occupant’s profile was just visible above the casket rim, like a sail leaving the horizon. Before this, I had seen caskets only in movies and cartoons (again, cartoons). In the movies, caskets were either hastily constructed pine boxes, filled with the losers of gunfights, or else they were a daytime refuge for vampires. In cartoons, the casket functioned like a Jack-in–the Box for skeletons dancing to xylophone music.

My brother and I drew nearer to the open casket, stopping about two feet from it, as if bumping up against an invisible barrier. The man in the casket was in his late-twenties or early-thirties. He did not look as if he were sleeping; he looked artificial: a seamless dusty-gray face and veinless hands. I didn’t know what to think. I looked to my brother and noticed the color had left his face and his eyes were bugging out like Eddie Cantor’s. The next thing I knew, he was halfway to the exit—in full sprint. I followed his cue. Outside, we cut a diagonal path across the parking lot, never looking back in response to a man shouting from the mortuary door.

For weeks afterwards, we’d shudder every time the telephone rang, and we took involuntary turns waking each other with tag-team nightmares.

Twenty-two years later, my brother would be experiencing waking nightmares. I found out about it after he had been hospitalized for suffering an alcoholic seizure. He had no health insurance, so he was placed in the rehab ward of one of those horrible county hospitals. I hadn’t been in touch with my brother for a couple of years (and I was a little shocked that his “party drinking” had reached this level), but when I got the word, I telephoned him immediately.

“Hello?” he answered in a distracted tone.

I was relieved to hear his voice, and surprised that he had his own telephone. “How’ya feeling?” I said.

“Not good,” he said. “I got ‘em bad, doc.” His breathing was rapid and there was the background radiation of extreme anxiety.

“Got what?” I said.

There was a long pause. “Is this Doctor Luscher?”

“Doctor Luscher? No. This is your brother.”

Another pause. “I know,” said my brother. “I was only joking. How are you doing?”

I was moved by his courage to put up such a front—especially during the height of apparent delirium tremors. I could tell he was suffering horribly, yet he was attempting to mask his fears. I didn’t want to prolong his torment, so I cut the conversation short, ending with the declaration that I would see him soon: Christmas at the parents. He said he was certain he’d be out of the hospital long before Christmas.

After hanging up, I thought about how little I knew about my brother’s life—especially after he had left home at the age of eighteen. I tried to piece together the odds and ends of what I did know. I knew he didn’t like any reminder of human mortality. I recalled his twelfth birthday, when our parents took us to Knott’s Berry Farm. My brother wouldn’t pose for a birthday picture in the stand-up prop coffin. Dad was joking with him, pulling him by the elbow, trying to coax him into the coffin. My brother jerked his arm free and ran off to the Calico Saloon and ordered a large boysenberry juice. I joined him at the bar. At a more solemn ceremony, twelve years later, he showed up late to our grandfather’s requiem mass and stood in the rear of the church. Afterwards, he didn’t attend the graveside service, but went directly to the reception, and was self-embalmed with bourbon by the time the rest of us arrived. He remained dignified, however, and held our grandmother’s hand, responding sympathetically to her grief and bafflement.

Throughout his twenties, he made a precarious living as a freelance musician. He played guitar and bass in both folk and blues bands, traveling extensively in this capacity. Occasionally, I’d receive postcards from some of the places he was touring. He had written on one large postcard—almost as an afterthought—that he had taken a bride in Germany. I think he was serious but I never heard any more about it. The postcards that followed were written in the cryptic shorthand of someone still believing in the childhood telepathy of brothers. If there were hidden messages, they remained hidden to me. The last postcard I received read: Coming to theaters and drive-ins in Inyo and Kern counties . . . Goodtime Charley’s back in town again . . . I am numb. Numb, I say!

The last time I would see my brother alive was three months after his thirty-second birthday, at the Christmas gathering at our parent’s house. He looked thin, jaundiced, and older than his years, but was almost sober. Even though he was strapped for funds (he had been working in part-time fits and living in a borrowed trailer for the past six months), he managed to come up with odd but somehow appropriate gifts for everyone. For example, though he had never met my wife, he managed to find out (probably through our mother) that her professional life involved the teaching of poetry and literature. He presented her with a Souvenir of Venice ballpoint pen and a used copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The book was an old hardbound edition, emitting an odor like stale pipe tobacco and brown sugar. My brother neither inscribed the title page nor made any attempt to blot out the original presenter’s dedication:

To Barry,
love, Grandma and Grandpa
Xmas 1932.

He presented Mom with a new rosary (which was put to use one month later, at the Rosary said before his own closed-casket funeral) and a pair of pink slippers, resembling two abandoned globs of cotton candy. Dad received an old promotional photograph of Clark Cable as Rhett Butler. He also got an antique mustache cup—prompting him to grow a mustache, which was begun as an attempt at a Clark Gable but ended up a replica of Jerry Calona’s trademark growth. My gifts consisted of a moth-eaten Shriner’s fez, embroidered with a sequin pyramid eye (dead-center); and a newly-framed childhood photograph of my brother and me with Santa Claus, staged in an artificial “Winter Wonder Land,” in a corner of The Broadway Department Store, in Anaheim, California: 1955 (we were eight and five, respectively).

The photograph had been snapped a mere thirty minutes after my brother had told me a dark secret concerning this Santa Claus and all other department store Santa Clauses. The photo reveals much. Santa is the only one looking directly at the lens, but he looks as if he had just consulted the wall clock for the time remaining in his shift. My face has the distinct half-smile and averted stare of someone who would never develop a functional poker face. My brother is wearing an Eisenhower jacket, an unconvincing smile, and an inscrutable sadness. He’s staring beyond the walls of The Broadway, through the picture frame glass, into a future where he won’t be getting what he hoped for.