The Little Brother (5 page)

“Where're your glasses?”

He shrugged. After a moment or so, he shook his head. “I don't know,” he said, “sometimes I worry about what's going to happen to us.”

“Like what?” I said.

We were quiet for a long while. He had closed his eyes.

“Now I remember”—he said, opening them—“what I was going to say.” He looked at me. “Remember how Mom would always tell us that they had more than one kid so that we'd be there for each other, always look out for each other?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.”

“Promise me you won't let anything fuck us up.”

“Like what?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Like Mom and Dad.”

“They can't do that to us,” I said, my voice fierce. “I promise. Nothing will. Nothing can.”

He looked at me with relief and affection.

To this day, it pains me more than anything to think about this conversation, and the way that Gabe looked at me.

He trusted me.

5.

B
Y MY FRESHMAN
year of high school in Newport and Gabe's sophomore year in Cucamonga, I was visiting Mom every now and then (we had called a truce). She had joined a local Presbyterian church, and her ailments had improved. She volunteered on Sundays to sell coffee for a quarter from Styrofoam cups after the services, and she started to care more about her appearance. A four-month Weight Watchers membership helped her lose thirteen pounds, and she and a group of her friends started a walking club: Each morning they walked to Starbucks and treated themselves to lattes. As long as we didn't discuss my decision to live with my dad, we did okay.

Gabe came to Dad's on the weekends, sometimes bringing his friends. They liked it at Dad's for the same reason I did: not much adult supervision. They could drink, smoke pot, have sex, it didn't matter.

Dad had his “lady friend” by then, Nancy, a petite blond in her late thirties: quiet, smart, polite, pretty in a well-maintained way. Nancy worked in his office. On the weekends, she sometimes spent the night with Dad, but she wanted nothing to do with Gabe and me. We didn't see her much and talked to her very little. The
biggest indicator of her presence in our lives was the sharp, lingering scent of her flowery perfume in Dad's house.

Once in a while Dad alluded with reverence to Nancy's impoverished upbringing in a small Alabama town (she had a trace of a Southern accent), which included, as I recall, a mother who had a wooden leg, missing teeth, and an appetite for beating her children. Dad appreciated a rags-to-riches story, and Nancy's was a doozy.

Nancy didn't want kids. All she wanted, it seemed, was to make sure she maintained her beloved lifestyle. She was a myopic, rigid, religious Republican, which complimented our dad's more fiscally based politics. Her small-town Southern roots also gave rise to a vocal xenophobia and an irrational obsession with Armageddon.

She had no idea what she was getting involved with when she took up with our dad. But later she stuck by him like a dog, giving comments to reporters that sounded like those of a PR representative. (“Daniel Hyde's greatest sins are being a devoted and generous family man, a successful, self-made businessman, and a selfless contributor to his community. Those that speak ill of him are obviously just jealous of his wealth and success.”)

Unlike Dad, I didn't have a girlfriend. Not because I didn't want one. I didn't know how to get one. There were few couples at my high school. Mostly people hooked up at parties, and it was better when it was someone who you didn't know, someone from a different high school, because then you didn't have to see them on a daily basis. By my freshman year, I'd lost my virginity to a more experienced girl from Irvine, in a clumsy, limb-shuffling, spastic two-minutes: It was nothing to brag about.

I had a crush on Maria, a sweet, even-keeled Latina, a senior, older than me by four years, with sharp brown eyes and curly dark hair. She lived in Costa Mesa but went to school in the Newport district because her mother worked for the city. We shared a love of foreign films, and we went to a few art galleries together, but then she got a boyfriend who was in college, and she stopped hanging out with me. She graduated with honors and went on to Stanford, and then to Yale Law School. I keep track of her. I sometimes entertain the notion that she keeps track of me, too, and that my future accomplishments will impress her. But I try not to fantasize too much.

Those days, when I felt down, I sometimes wished that I still lived in Cucamonga. I missed my mom and brother. I couldn't really tell them this, since it had been my choice to live in Newport. But when I went back and visited, it was strange. I felt tangled up, like I didn't belong in Newport with my dad, and I certainly didn't belong back in Cucamonga with them anymore, either.

If all this seems confusing, it was, so much so that I tried counseling through my high school. I had four mortifying sessions with a well-intentioned counselor named Steve, who wore socks with sandals and believed strongly in the advantages of money to gold conversion. It didn't help that on our first session, I tried to be honest, describing the TV-shattering fight between Dad and Gabe. Steve put a hand to his cheek, gasped, and said, “No way! Really?”

In his small, windowless office decorated with cheerful and inane posters, such as one on the ceiling of a kitten hanging on a tree branch captioned
Hang in there! It gets better!,
Steve encouraged me to nurture and parent my inner child.

One afternoon, I canceled my appointment, leaving a message on Steve's answering machine saying that I'd call back to reschedule, and then I never returned.

Gabe struggled as well, but he converted Dad's three-car garage into his personal party headquarters and found his solace in drugs and alcohol and friends. Inside the garage was a tan-felt pool table and Dad's Porsche, and Gabe added a white wicker couch and a minifridge that he got from a garage sale. Dad bought an old white BMW for us to share, and we kept it parked at the curb, and then Dad bought Gabe a truck, which he also parked at the curb.

I didn't like Gabe's friends and avoided them when possible. At the center of his group were Kevin Stewart and another Crystal—not Chrystal Lemmings, she was long gone, but Crystal Douglas.

She claimed to be his girlfriend, but he said that she was “just a girl I see sometimes.” She wore distressed jeans, the expensive kind made to look old with expertly placed holes, and she spoke with a practiced, high-pitched, doll-like voice.

I've always been self-conscious about my SoCal suburban accent—hollow and flat—making it a point to enunciate, careful not to overuse the word “like,” and to avoid common slang.

Crystal Douglas was the opposite. She took pride in her hyper-regional speech: “Like, ya-know, I rilly think that's rad.”

Kevin Stewart was big and brutish and popular, handsome, good at sports, and he always had drugs.

I'll never forget how I met him. Lying on the couch reading
The Stranger
by Camus, no one at Dad's house but me, I heard a loud banging on the front door. We didn't keep it locked and I waited
for the solicitor or whoever it was to go away. But then I heard the door squeaking open, and in walked Kevin Stewart, wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap, Bermuda shorts, and no shirt or shoes, reminding me of Hunter S. Thompson (I'd recently read
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
).

He seemed annoyed to see me. “
Hola
,” he said. He spoke Anglo-accented Spanish, obviously thinking it clever. “
Dónde está mi amigo
Gabriel?”

“Not here,” I said.

I had the impression that he was peering at me through his mirrored sunglasses. Almost a full year older than Gabe, thick-muscled, with a shit-eating grin. To my irritation, he walked right past me, through the living room, to get to the kitchen.

“Smells good,” he said. “Is that coffee?”

Dad made coffee every morning, and then let whatever he didn't drink stew all day in its glass pot until he dumped it out at night.

Kevin smacked around in the cupboards until he found a mug, and then he poured himself a cup.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He sat at the table. “Lighten up,
amigo
,” he said, spreading his legs. Tan, with a diamond of hair at the center of his chest, on his left shoulder he sported a large, rudimentary tattoo of a four-leaf clover with a leprechaun peeking from behind it.

“Gabe isn't here,” I said. “He's at some skateboarding thing. You can try his cell.”

“Is there anything to eat?” he said.

I didn't answer, but he stood and moved toward the refrigerator. He pulled out a carton of eggs, a package of shredded cheese, butter, and a few tomatoes and started making himself something to eat.

I couldn't stand being in the house alone with him and left for Mike's. Mike and his family are Christians, but not in the preaching, let-me-convert-you-or-you're-going-to-hell way. More like they're good people and want to bring something to life rather than just take. They sought meaning and found it through their faith. Both his parents taught elementary school in Newport. Mike wanted and needed a scholarship to USC, thus his involvement in sports. He had three younger sisters, and his home was a bustling, happy environment.

Popular in high school without trying, he could have his pick of a best friend but nevertheless chose me. We enjoyed each other because of our differences, not in spite of them. He liked hearing my stories; his reactions were sincere—astonishment, compassion, pity, disappointment—and he didn't play games with people. It was nearly impossible for me to be cynical around him.

For about a month after I canceled my counseling appointment with Steve, I became a stoner, much to Mike's consternation. I got high at school every morning, before classes, during lunches, and after school every afternoon. My grades dropped. I gave up on college plans. I gave up on myself. I don't even like pot that much. It makes me paranoid and sweaty and dumb. I hear things, imagine things. It's like having the flu on purpose. But I was a pothead, maybe from some misguided sense of self-punishment. I carried a bottle of Visine with me in my back pocket at all times.

Late one afternoon, after I'd gotten high with a group of stoners in the high school parking lot, I sat in the bleachers and watched Mike's baseball game. Mike saw me and waved.

The crowd cheered during the game, but I just stared at the cracks and chipping red paint on the planks of the bleachers, my mouth and head cottony.

When the game ended, Mike trotted over to me.

“Who won?” I asked.

He gave me a disapproving look.

I stared back at him, knowing that my eyes were bloodshot and watery. He held his baseball cap. It had left a sweaty dent in the hair around his head.

“Listen,” he said. “I don't like you like this.” He started to speak but seemed to think better of it and shook his head. Then he said, “I mean, I know you're hurting, it's obvious. Your family's messed up. There's no doubt. But at least they love you. You love them.”

He put his hat back on and wiped his hands on his baseball pants. “I can't deal with you like this,” he said. “This is not you.”

His frankness alarmed me, as usual. My head went down.

“Get help, man,” he said quietly.

I looked at him and said nothing.

“I gotta go,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder for a few seconds. After he left, it felt like his hand was still there.

The following afternoon I ditched school with two other stoners: the son of a man who owned a well-known clothing line, and the son of the Bank of Newport's vice-president. Huge partiers, back-slappers, and high-fivers with fake IDs, they took pride in their bad reputations and spoke a few decibels too loud, calling
themselves “playahs.” They got in trouble for things like forgetting to take the empty kegs they purchased for a party back to the liquor store, cheating with answers to tests inked on their calves and forearms, and trying to pass off fake prescriptions by using names like Taco Bella and Colonel Sanders.

We got drunk and stoned at the beach.

Huddled near the rocks, alternately passing a joint and a Corona, we heard a noise—a cop on his regular patrol coming toward us. Tired-looking with a bushy mustache, probably in his forties, the cop walked toward us slowly, watching us shuffle to hide the blunt and bottle, burying them in the sand.

When he reached us, he said, “What do we have here?”

“Nothing, officer, sir,” said Ace. (They called themselves Ace and Ice. Don't ask—not worth explaining.)

The cop knelt, dug in the sand, and within a few seconds found our paraphernalia. “Let's go, boys,” he said, standing. His black belt bolstered a baton and a gun, and his name tag read
B. LESTER.
“Let's take a little walk to my car.”

After a few uncomfortable minutes or so of being searched, we were lined up in a row and sitting on the sidewalk in front of B. Lester's cruiser in the sparkling daylight, our heads hung in shame, when it occurred to me to mention my connection to Daniel Hyde, and Dad's to Sheriff Krone.