My Half-Brother
My half-brother was the nicest kid in the world. I was three years older than he was, and he was everything I wasn’t. I was loud, obnoxious, rambunctious, fighty, prone to flinging rocks and bullying the crap out of people. A series of events in my early childhood had forced me to grow up real fast, so I took no crap.
It broke my heart to see him or my later sister cry, so I would hunt down and kick the crap out of the kids who had hurt him. Word gets around, but my parents moved around a bit, so about once every two years or so I’d have to hoist some arrogant little fucker in the air by his collarbones and slam the back of his head into a wall, because he had punched my brother or something similar.
My sister could handle herself, for she was usually smart enough to recognize and avoid bad situations. My brother assumed everyone was a wonderful person, and I assumed every situation was bad. I still watched over them both, though, and helped them with homework and answered their questions about life in general.
I had no idea that roughly half the beatings I received from my parents were because he had done something and blamed it on me. I just assumed they were hateful and malicious and crazed and thoroughly stressed out. I would tell them I didn’t know who had broken/damaged/stolen x, and they would beat the y out of me. Anyway, I had no idea.
I even involved my bro in my musical pursuits, and he studied with such diligence that he soon became one of the best drummers I had ever heard. He could reproduce, note for note, the extended version of “Moby Dick” from Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same.”, and just about anything from just about any professional drummer. As a guitarist, I turned out to be a pretty good bassist, guitar necks being too narrow for my fingers to pick the strings out properly – so we just rocked, for years.
Both he and my sister seemed totally in control of their lives, which was all I could have hoped for. Due to my own ignorance, college was not an option at the time. Instead of living another year with my crazed family, I told my brother and sister to watch out for each other, as I was going to join the military. They swore they would, and I left them in each other’s capable hands, so I thought…
Except my brother, in my absence, had become even more brutal and violent than I had ever thought myself capable of. He was kicked out of the martial arts school our family attended for violence, had assaulted his girlfriend with sticks and threatened to stab her on more than one occasion, stopped drumming and took up alcohol. He managed to keep his grades good enough to win a scholarship to an arts college, and failed out his first semester because he didn’t “feel that the non-musical classes were necessary”.
The college administration finally contacted my parents, and told them that he could start again the next year with a new scholarship, as they still felt that he was brilliant. My parents found that he had knocked up some fat nasty skank, had gotten married, and was living under a van in front of his new wife’s parents’ house. Tears and tribulations ensue, and cut scene.
My father felt at the time that I was responsible somehow for this mess, and tried on a few occasions to hit me up for money to support my waste of genetic material brother and his chavvy slapper of a wife. I laughed at him many times for that – I was stationed 3000 miles from them and in no mood to be charitable to a fuckwit that had thrown his future away, and told him so. My mom told me that my brother used to call me “the bourgeois fascist” during this time, so I had no inclination to give a shit, especially as I had letters from my sister, herself now in college, which delineated the crazy shit that he had perpetrated – the violence, the sabotage, the theft and appropriation of items, and how my father was about to give my brother his prized vehicle - a mint 79 Ford LTD– “cause my new grandkids need a safe ride.”
My sister strongly protested this, and after a long phone call, in which my sister and I sat down and put all the pieces of the story together, both her and I laid out all the stuff we knew and had heard, and sent it to my Mom, who immediately freaked and threw my brother and his bitch wife out on the street. It seemed that my brother had been getting very friendly with my mother’s ex-husband; a person that my brother mistakenly thought was his real father. He had been feeding him information for a little while – including my whereabouts.

It was at this point that I made it very clear to my brother that I would in fact kill him and his so-called father if I ever heard from either of them.

That was eight years ago, and I haven’t heard from him since. My sister moves out to join me and my friends and family out in the Wild West in a few months. She turned out just fine, and I survived, but as far as either of us is concerned, we each only have one sibling. Once she is out here, I am perfectly fine with watching the hurricanes line up to have a go at a long-neglected section of the Eastern Seaboard. Some simultaneous earthquakes wouldn’t be unwelcome there, either – just sayin’.

Family is who you make it – and I hope you spent Christmas like I did; in the company of people that are actually worth a damn. If not, why not? Trust me, it’s a lot more pleasant.


Apologies for length, girth, smell, etc.
(aeon chicken Like the Millenium Falcon, only slower and noisier, Sat 27 Dec 2008, 10:51, 3 replies)

Good reply, thanks. Hope you enjoyed your holiday.

(sorry., Sat 27 Dec 2008, 12:00, closed)

What is it they say?
You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family.

You did the right thing, and a belated Merry Chistmas to you and yours.
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Sat 27 Dec 2008, 14:56, closed)

You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family.
Yes you can, you can adopt.
( Grokthought wouldn't pay that for Chinese 5-Spice, Sun 28 Dec 2008, 0:55, closed)