Vergil’s Coffee

My mom missed my birthday this year and she didn’t call until Friday. My birthday was Tuesday and so she missed my birthday by three days. Don’t worry, I’m not crying about it, I’m just making note of it.

Good thing she doesn’t make note of the many times I called the next day after her birthday or a major holiday. Still, isn’t family—especially your mom—supposed to call you on your birthday of all things? In fact, when she did call, I let her know that my brother had actually emailed the day after my birthday (which would mean a lot, since he and I didn’t talk much over the past 30 or so years). “Michael called,” I told her. “Oh,” she said. “Pretty incredible, isn’t it?” I said. “Yes,” she said, “I’m so thankful that you two are talking again.”

True: Michael and I have talked more in the past year and a half than for the first 40 or so years that I’ve know him.

“And,” I said. “He emailed me the day after my birthday.”

“Yes he did,” she said.

I think I’ve always felt bad for Ishmael (the first born of Abraham…before the name change). You remember the story: Abraham and Sarah have been promised a lot of kids and Sarah is getting impatient because she’s barren so she instructs Abraham to sleep with her maidservant: Hagar. Nine or so months later, Ishmael is born. But later Sarah gets pregnant and has Isaac, so Sarah sends Hagar and Ishmael away so Isaac can carry on the line.

I think I feel bad for Ishmael because he was born into an ideal situation (promise of a pretty good inheritance) and yet, his step brother is born and gets to take all of Ishmael’s rights and position. Ishmael, for no fault of his own, is now cast out of the house and into another land.

And it’s this thought of disconnect that I have felt for my brother and my father for the past 30 or so years; for my father, for the divorce when I was 4 years old (after being adopted into the family 3 years earlier); for my brother because I really never got a chance to talk with my brother until the night I got the news that he just had traumatic brain surgery and we weren’t sure if he’d make it through the next few days.

Traumatic situations have a tendency to be the thing that forces us to confront our families.

Perhaps I did hear my brother a few times growing up on Washoe Court though. We used to share a room until he moved out when my asthma got so bad that he couldn’t stand waiting to see if I would breath through the wheezing. So, he moved out onto the couch in the living room and then later, as a teenager, would move into the garage. Aside from the time he almost shot my eye out with a b-b gun, I still blame Michael for making me (or tricking me) into pulling the fire alarm at Yulupa Elementary School one summer.

But all of these events are in the void of our father and I think since our father and mother divorced, I contend that my brother and my sister felt that separation each day of their lives.

I think the time I felt closest to my brother was the time the boys from down the street came into our backyard and slaughtered our rats. Michael has always had an odd taste in pets; from the iguana to the snake to the two rats that multiplied into well over a hundred strong family. Michael and I think the neighbor boy built an A-frame shed to keep all of the rats and we moved the large Plexiglas aquarium full of sawdust and white and black rats to the new abode.

Sometime later, perhaps weeks, I was interrupted from riding my red dirt bike by my sister yelling or screaming something about “They’re dead!” And I remember getting off my bike and running toward Stephany who really couldn’t answer my question “What happened?” Michael was in a daze and said “The rats, someone’s killed the rats.” And I stopped at a scene by the A-frame shed of blood and half-severed heads and bulging eyes and mouths agape and stiff claws. There was a hacksaw and more blood and I think even an ax and I ran back to Michael and Stephany and we didn’t really say much until my mom found out later.

These were our pets, but technically, the rats were Michael’s, we adopted them as family and treated the rats as our own. And now most were slaughtered, for no apparent reason, and we all—with Michael—felt bad about the deaths.

Our last night in our house at the end of Washoe Court, Michael and his current band put on a “farewell concert” with lights and pyrotechnics. I used my Pentax K1000 to take some experimental pictures playing upon the low lighting environment. The concert ended early when the small explosions smoked everyone out of the house and that was probably a good thing as some were talking about the cops showing up later.

And it’s here where my brother and I have the most connection: through music. I remember when I brought home my ethics book from the private school I was attending and Michael laughing at the section of the text that talked about music. He was quite amused by the Devil caricature playing the electric guitar. “There’s no way that rock is the Devil’s music,” he said. I was a bit perplexed: since going to the religious school, I had started to think that my brother’s playing in a rock band and hanging out with folks who spent more of their time stoned or high on cocaine was maybe playing for the Devil’s side. We hadn’t hadn’t talked much and so I was a bit surprised that he was talking to me.

“People who look like they’re playing for the Devil,” he explained, “are really doing it for the money…it’s a show, it has little to do with the Devil.”

And I think I knew he was right and I think at that point I got knocked off my high horse of judging Michael for playing non-religious music and started to listen to what he was playing.

And I feel bad that I missed out on over 20 years of his original compositions and have missed out on many gigs that he and his bands played in Santa Rosa and Healdsburg and Windsor. One tape, from his Positive Energy days, I played constantly. There was some song about “Time” and I remember playing it in my cassette player on a beach on the Russian River and some girl asking about it and asking about my brother and telling me that I had a cute brother and to be sure I would tell him that. Another more recent tape, had terrific tones and atmosphere and I would play it in my Ford Festiva’s cassette player. I think I even imagined a story structure that would encompass Michael’s music with my story line.

A month or go, Michael called, out of the blue, and we talked. I usually bring up the fire alarm incident because I think it’s kind of funny. Michael told me a lot about his recovery and how a small group of people have gathered together on the internet to create a site (the “Angioma Alliance” I think it’s called) where people could learn more about the rare condition (cavernous angiomas) that he and others have. He told me about how deep the scars carve into his head and about the sharp, dull headaches. He also told me about his job and a boss who kept Michael on the company’s insurance even though the boss was probably encouraged to drop Michael as the medical costs piled up. We talked about mom and her cancer and acknowledging with a pause, that “she is getting older, you know?”

And then he caught me off guard when he said that felt that I got the bum end of the stick growing up. He felt bad about the circumstances that were given to me. And I said “Actually, I always felt that you and Stephany had the bad deal; that the divorce affected you guys more because you were older.”

“Maybe,” he said.

I think we often make ourselves the protagonists when we tell our stories and of our families. We see ourselves as the dynamic character who learns something in the end and the rest of the characters of our families being a smattering of stock characters who change little. And yet, all the while we’re retelling our stories from our point of view, our brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers are retelling the same events with as much reflection.

And as I write this on my brother Michael’s 47^th birthday, I think I’m ready to revise my stories to include more than one central character.

Happy birthday Michael; talk to you Sunday.