Bobby and junior
Sun 6.14.20,
Today drinking coffee watching the crowd walk by, there's this young guy, dirty blond hair, longish crewcut, khaki pants, loafers and a navy sweater, looks like a Gap model with a shy, friendly manner. For a moment I think, It's Bobby! But of course it's not, my brother is not a young guy anymore.
I have (had?) two brothers. It's been many years since I've had contact with either. Junior disappeared in his mid-twenties and was never found, but more about him later. Bobby, who adopted my father's nickname Sam when he was a teenager, was the middle child. A pleaser. In many ways he was like my father, without the drinking habit. A very sociable person who knew everyone and kept in touch with them, everybody liked him, had good things to say about him, no party was complete without Sam; and in our little gang of three he was the voice of reason and practicality. Dad saw Bobby's stability as an indication of potential. He worked at the A&P in high school and had good grades. His godmother offered to pay his way through college when he graduated, but he turned her down preferring to remain with the gang at the supermarket where he was well liked.
At some point, he joined the National Guard and remained in it making a career of the military. I have spoken to men who served under him and they said he was a good leader and a decent man. They thought highly of him. There was a goodness to Bobby that at some point got stamped into the ground. Towards the end, when Dad was drinking so heavily, messing up, abandoning us, Junior and I developed a hard edge, and were callous towards him, but Bob had no such coping mechanism, his heart was breaking and he was pulling more and more into himself. he became this shell of a person whose bonhomie and geniality were replaced with a somber, judgmental attitude. He became competitive and jealous of me and we stopped seeing each other.
Junior (Armand) was the problem child in my family, the eldest and the one Dad picked on the most. Growing up, he was caught stealing a number of times. He once stole a radio from a tattoo parlor we were visiting and when the cops came to question him, he told them I was the one to have stolen it. He had a good head for figures and worked as an accountant for a trucking firm. He got himself a little apartment which he furnished with a phone in all three rooms. He was buying himself all kinds of stuff at this time. I remember a lovely crocodile leather case which unzipped to disclose a portable bar. He bought his new friends a washer and dryer for their wedding and gave me a picture of himself on his birthday. He was so over the top that you couldn't take this erratic behavior personally. Besides, there was something exceptional about Junior; he had panache, style.
He got engaged to a woman who was part of his new group of friends, and a few days later the police came to arrest him. Seems Junior had been embezzling money from the firm where he worked. I remember my father and Oncle Henri pacing the floor of my apartment trying to figure out how they were going to get him out of this situation. The sum was equivalent to about $40,000 in current money value. Junior sat at the table nonchalantly filing his nails. No sense worrying when he had two people doing a good job for him. Since the trucking firm had no insurance to cover embezzlement, they agreed to accept a promissory note from him. He didn't go to jail. What's more he didn't pay back the company. He signed up with the Air Force, married the girl whose parents agreed to give him another chance, and was stationed in Rozwell, New Mexico. You cannot attach a military man's pay for loans so there was nothing the company could do to get their money back. They certainly couldn't go to the cops at that late date. After three years his wife left him and came back home. shortly afterward, I started getting strange phone calls from businesses in Rozwell, jewelry stores, sporting goods places. Junior owed them money and they couldn't find him. Apparently, he had used my name as reference. When I called the Air Force Base, I was informed that they were also looking for him. He had recently re-uped receiving a $10,000 bonus for it, and now they couldn't find him. That was the end of Junior, I never heard from him again. Even the military couldn't find him.
He was an actor, playing at life. He got married for the show, the tuxedo, the wedding gown and flowers, the best men and bridesmaids, the grand spectacle at St. Peter and St. Paul Church, his picture in the paper. He was homosexual. With enough chutzpah you can get away with anything.
My brothers have been a big influence in my life and I dream of them all the time. They come in the night to point out my overdependence on one mode of being or the other. One has to develop a balance in life between two opposing poles of geniality and self centeredness.
The favorite essay this month has again been, Opening Moves
