![Picture](/uploads/4/3/5/0/43506379/9046017.jpg?362)
‘Hola Denise.’
Long pause.
Really long pause – The kind that only a non-self-engrossed individual would notice and react to immediately.
Then, silence.
My brother was calling from Los Angeles. I was settled at Berkeley, having moved up to Northern California to study architecture at Cal when I was 18. He and I were always buddies, the two siblings in the family that had the smallest age difference – two years. We grew up with long afternoons of playtime together, accomplices in all things shenanigan-ish and sibling-ish: from making backyard forts that we fully imagined to be spaceships, pretending that our German Shepherd, Odín, was a yet-to-be-determined-as-friend-or-foe alien life form roaming the new planet on which we had landed, to making fire balls, our nighttime tradition of raiding the medicine cabinet for rubbing alcohol and some puffy, white cotton balls. We would soak the cotton balls in the alcohol, light them with a match and let them float down from my parent’s second floor balcony in our house in Lima. These would make the most beautiful Chinese lantern effect as they ethereally fell through the night air and disintegrated in mid-trajectory, the bright amber shine giving way to charcoal-black specks on their exterior and then full darkness. I don’t know how we survived our early pyro ways. I think South American construction practices and materials helped, with our surroundings being mostly concrete and brick and terrazzo surfaces. I can’t picture these types of activities going over too well here in California, in this 2x4 wood-framed world.
It also helped us that our childhoods were highly unsupervised. Highly! Luis Héctor and I once got away with making clandestine cigarettes. I was only about 10 years old, so Luis Héctor was 12. Until that day, we had only ever made mock cigarettes out of scratch paper, scotch tape and baby powder – the type of mock cigarettes that you don’t light up and you definitely don’t inhale. You just load them with the talcum – a cotton ball serving as mock-filter and separation from your lips; you blow a big puff of white, allergenic mess all over the yard and laugh. But this time, we got to upgrade. Our oldest brother had come home for Christmas from university with a new hobby: he smoked a pipe. We felt the fanciness of this new college man activity. He was fancy in our eyes already in many, many ways: he was the first of us children to have moved away from Lima to study, majoring in Bacteriology, in glamorous Los Angeles, and he was a full 10.5 years older than me. Rest my case. In retrospect now, I picture my oldest brother at UCLA in the mid-70s – in quintessentially academic scenarios, with large, sepia-toned lecture halls and maybe a Paper Chase-type John Houseman professor leading a bunch of guys with wild hair and corduroy blazers with the obligatory elbow patches. I never quite understood elbow patches, but I, notwithstandingly, respect their strangeness and role in the fashion world back then.
We picked an afternoon when my oldest brother was out busy with friends and snatched a little bit of pipe tobacco from his bag. I remember so clearly that is was apple tobacco. I think that said to me that my oldest brother was gentle in his smoking – not an angry, addicted smoker – but someone that did not smoke too often and savored its subtleties when he rarely did it. We grabbed the couple of ounces of the loose leaves and our dear friends, the cotton balls, some scotch tape, and ruled paper. So, with scissors in hand and all our supplies, we sequestered ourselves in my parent’s balcony (I am starting to realize that the balcony was the backdrop to many a mischief.). In a few minutes of our secret arts and craft project, worried that we were going to get caught and excited because we were worried that we were going to get caught, we had a perfect white cylinder with the familiar pattern of teal lines of the school paper across its diameter. Luis Héctor got the honors of lighting it up; he puffed lightly, then I puffed lightly. It tasted….awful! I am sure ruled paper is not supposed to be inhaled. It is amazing, also, that we survived our chemically-laden early years. It seems clear that teal ink is not for human consumption. The only thing that distracted us from the terrible taste was the intoxicating apple scent. And then, all sensory amusements came to a sudden halt. Hila was at the balcony door. We were busted! She reprimanded us, but….she never told our parents. The Clandestine Cigarette Experiment never got to be a blown out event in our family. It was never the object of our embarrassment or our punishment or our ridicule. Hila dealt with it, and let us go. Amazing and effective. She was our mother at home, when our mother was at work, yet both were our mothers at all times. Luis Héctor and I would be spared so that we could live on to our next rascal adventure….
Telephone silent.
In my busy, 21-year-old head, swimming in frivolities, I was probably weighing the options of curling or straightening my hair before heading out into my day, too consumed to acknowledge his detachment.
Eventually...
He estado escuchando Howard Jones.
I loved Howard Jones’s music. That roused my attention back to his telephone call.
Even in my fog, I was starting to get annoyed at this phone call. It was not the first time that he called and just hung on the line without saying much, save for the sparse comments about the music he was playing on the stereo. It reminded me of the days in high school when friends would call me and stay on the phone for hours while watching the same movie or show on TV – sort of like being together, but remotely. Not much conversation was needed; it was a teenage way to pass the time.
“Why do you call me to say nothing?” – I complained, and then, fleeing from my disapproval, he would say goodbye.
Two days later, he called back.
He followed with an intense explanation about all the nuances of a song in the album that he had been listening to over and over for days:
You can look at the menu, but you just can't eat
You can feel the cushion, but you can't have a seat…
You're the fastest runner but you're not allowed to win (1)
Hey, Denise. Have you ever noticed that part in the song….?
I know that feeling well. After a major breakup when you are 18, or when my dad died and I immersed myself in my Tango LP’s for a week – the feeling that songs are only speaking to you in a private, surreptitious language.
But this was much more.
When it happened, my brother was just culminating my parents’ American dream – the effort of their immigration story – from Perú to the United States “so that the children could all have better chances at higher education.” Worrisomely intelligent, he had just graduated from UCLA, like my oldest brother, secured a new job that most starting engineers would not even have tried for, and he was in his new apartment – independent, promising and young.
In those days, he deteriorated. From lyrics, he moved on to thinking and believing things that were disturbing. It was no longer about a compelling song, but about the horrors of wars and massacres he had never lived through, but for which he ached with his soul – for all of humanity. I have never before seen someone’s psyche bleed out for events that happened before his time, for this world’s cumulative sorrows.
And so the song came true. Electrical engineer, avid academic, gentle and polite, living still but unable to partake in the world due to mental illness.
Broken hearts and dreams. A man in his early fifties now, who has not been able to have a Life since he was 23.
I love him, and I realize that for decades I have foolishly held mourning for a brother that is not dead.
Visualizing a world in which Luis Héctor can thrive is not too far-fetched. There are silly, simple exercises: I look at my two-year-old hound and I say to her, “Within your lifetime, you will get to play with my brother.” He is due to be released to the community within the next few years. My brother, that I adore, will someday soon be able to come spend a sunny afternoon at my house for a barbeque or go to the beach again. I think of him right now gifting his intellect on a weekly basis, in the hospital, to teach general education to patients that are hoping to get their high school equivalency certificates. He is doing something useful.
We have to be careful in Life to not give up on the things that are not lost causes. Love can hold a lot, beyond our ability to endure and hold hope. I have my brother. He is of this world, and the future is clear.
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother - performed by The Hollies, written by Bobby Scott and Bob Russell
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si7gu9yGz64
No One Is To Blame - written and performed by Howard Jones
www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0d6uA94YcQ
Long pause.
Really long pause – The kind that only a non-self-engrossed individual would notice and react to immediately.
Then, silence.
My brother was calling from Los Angeles. I was settled at Berkeley, having moved up to Northern California to study architecture at Cal when I was 18. He and I were always buddies, the two siblings in the family that had the smallest age difference – two years. We grew up with long afternoons of playtime together, accomplices in all things shenanigan-ish and sibling-ish: from making backyard forts that we fully imagined to be spaceships, pretending that our German Shepherd, Odín, was a yet-to-be-determined-as-friend-or-foe alien life form roaming the new planet on which we had landed, to making fire balls, our nighttime tradition of raiding the medicine cabinet for rubbing alcohol and some puffy, white cotton balls. We would soak the cotton balls in the alcohol, light them with a match and let them float down from my parent’s second floor balcony in our house in Lima. These would make the most beautiful Chinese lantern effect as they ethereally fell through the night air and disintegrated in mid-trajectory, the bright amber shine giving way to charcoal-black specks on their exterior and then full darkness. I don’t know how we survived our early pyro ways. I think South American construction practices and materials helped, with our surroundings being mostly concrete and brick and terrazzo surfaces. I can’t picture these types of activities going over too well here in California, in this 2x4 wood-framed world.
It also helped us that our childhoods were highly unsupervised. Highly! Luis Héctor and I once got away with making clandestine cigarettes. I was only about 10 years old, so Luis Héctor was 12. Until that day, we had only ever made mock cigarettes out of scratch paper, scotch tape and baby powder – the type of mock cigarettes that you don’t light up and you definitely don’t inhale. You just load them with the talcum – a cotton ball serving as mock-filter and separation from your lips; you blow a big puff of white, allergenic mess all over the yard and laugh. But this time, we got to upgrade. Our oldest brother had come home for Christmas from university with a new hobby: he smoked a pipe. We felt the fanciness of this new college man activity. He was fancy in our eyes already in many, many ways: he was the first of us children to have moved away from Lima to study, majoring in Bacteriology, in glamorous Los Angeles, and he was a full 10.5 years older than me. Rest my case. In retrospect now, I picture my oldest brother at UCLA in the mid-70s – in quintessentially academic scenarios, with large, sepia-toned lecture halls and maybe a Paper Chase-type John Houseman professor leading a bunch of guys with wild hair and corduroy blazers with the obligatory elbow patches. I never quite understood elbow patches, but I, notwithstandingly, respect their strangeness and role in the fashion world back then.
We picked an afternoon when my oldest brother was out busy with friends and snatched a little bit of pipe tobacco from his bag. I remember so clearly that is was apple tobacco. I think that said to me that my oldest brother was gentle in his smoking – not an angry, addicted smoker – but someone that did not smoke too often and savored its subtleties when he rarely did it. We grabbed the couple of ounces of the loose leaves and our dear friends, the cotton balls, some scotch tape, and ruled paper. So, with scissors in hand and all our supplies, we sequestered ourselves in my parent’s balcony (I am starting to realize that the balcony was the backdrop to many a mischief.). In a few minutes of our secret arts and craft project, worried that we were going to get caught and excited because we were worried that we were going to get caught, we had a perfect white cylinder with the familiar pattern of teal lines of the school paper across its diameter. Luis Héctor got the honors of lighting it up; he puffed lightly, then I puffed lightly. It tasted….awful! I am sure ruled paper is not supposed to be inhaled. It is amazing, also, that we survived our chemically-laden early years. It seems clear that teal ink is not for human consumption. The only thing that distracted us from the terrible taste was the intoxicating apple scent. And then, all sensory amusements came to a sudden halt. Hila was at the balcony door. We were busted! She reprimanded us, but….she never told our parents. The Clandestine Cigarette Experiment never got to be a blown out event in our family. It was never the object of our embarrassment or our punishment or our ridicule. Hila dealt with it, and let us go. Amazing and effective. She was our mother at home, when our mother was at work, yet both were our mothers at all times. Luis Héctor and I would be spared so that we could live on to our next rascal adventure….
Telephone silent.
In my busy, 21-year-old head, swimming in frivolities, I was probably weighing the options of curling or straightening my hair before heading out into my day, too consumed to acknowledge his detachment.
Eventually...
He estado escuchando Howard Jones.
I loved Howard Jones’s music. That roused my attention back to his telephone call.
Even in my fog, I was starting to get annoyed at this phone call. It was not the first time that he called and just hung on the line without saying much, save for the sparse comments about the music he was playing on the stereo. It reminded me of the days in high school when friends would call me and stay on the phone for hours while watching the same movie or show on TV – sort of like being together, but remotely. Not much conversation was needed; it was a teenage way to pass the time.
“Why do you call me to say nothing?” – I complained, and then, fleeing from my disapproval, he would say goodbye.
Two days later, he called back.
He followed with an intense explanation about all the nuances of a song in the album that he had been listening to over and over for days:
You can look at the menu, but you just can't eat
You can feel the cushion, but you can't have a seat…
You're the fastest runner but you're not allowed to win (1)
Hey, Denise. Have you ever noticed that part in the song….?
I know that feeling well. After a major breakup when you are 18, or when my dad died and I immersed myself in my Tango LP’s for a week – the feeling that songs are only speaking to you in a private, surreptitious language.
But this was much more.
When it happened, my brother was just culminating my parents’ American dream – the effort of their immigration story – from Perú to the United States “so that the children could all have better chances at higher education.” Worrisomely intelligent, he had just graduated from UCLA, like my oldest brother, secured a new job that most starting engineers would not even have tried for, and he was in his new apartment – independent, promising and young.
In those days, he deteriorated. From lyrics, he moved on to thinking and believing things that were disturbing. It was no longer about a compelling song, but about the horrors of wars and massacres he had never lived through, but for which he ached with his soul – for all of humanity. I have never before seen someone’s psyche bleed out for events that happened before his time, for this world’s cumulative sorrows.
And so the song came true. Electrical engineer, avid academic, gentle and polite, living still but unable to partake in the world due to mental illness.
Broken hearts and dreams. A man in his early fifties now, who has not been able to have a Life since he was 23.
I love him, and I realize that for decades I have foolishly held mourning for a brother that is not dead.
Visualizing a world in which Luis Héctor can thrive is not too far-fetched. There are silly, simple exercises: I look at my two-year-old hound and I say to her, “Within your lifetime, you will get to play with my brother.” He is due to be released to the community within the next few years. My brother, that I adore, will someday soon be able to come spend a sunny afternoon at my house for a barbeque or go to the beach again. I think of him right now gifting his intellect on a weekly basis, in the hospital, to teach general education to patients that are hoping to get their high school equivalency certificates. He is doing something useful.
We have to be careful in Life to not give up on the things that are not lost causes. Love can hold a lot, beyond our ability to endure and hold hope. I have my brother. He is of this world, and the future is clear.
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother - performed by The Hollies, written by Bobby Scott and Bob Russell
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si7gu9yGz64
No One Is To Blame - written and performed by Howard Jones
www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0d6uA94YcQ
(1) Jones, Howard. "No One Is To Blame". 1985. Dream Into Action. WEA/Elektra.