“…see some old
friends, good for the soul…”
-Bob Seger,
“Hollywood Nights”
I ran into an old friend this past week in Orlando. When I say I ran into him, I mean he was
waiting for me at the airport. My wife
pointed in the direction of a guy I’d never seen before. It turned out I was looking at the wrong guy
and didn’t see my brother, Eric, until I damn near bumped into him.
Though we were born to the same parents and lived in the
same house for sixteen years, we’ve seen each other only sporadically since. I was off to college and then he was off to
college out-of-state, and then I was married and raising kids and then he was
married and raising hell and…if you’re my age, you probably know what I’m
talking about. Both of us loved theatre
arts and our chosen career paths took us in opposite directions. My path was writing for the stage while he
was still accepting the audience’s applause as a musical theatre
performer. His choice took him around
the world and placed him in front of tens of thousands of people. My choice led to the dining room, where I
wrote words I hoped an actor would one day speak.
We saw each other when I visited him in Findlay, Ohio once
or twice, Cincinnati a couple of times, Key West once. Between jobs he dropped into Michigan to visit
our parents and at various times met my wife, my first child, and later my
second child. It sounds ludicrous, but
somehow, twenty years go by, then twenty-five.
The only visit of any length we had during that period was
when the entire family, including my parents and children, cruised on a ship
where Eric was the entertainment director.
He had found his calling, it seemed.
His job was making sure everybody that crossed his path was having a
good time. From my personal experience,
he was very good at it. If he was going
to be at an event on the ship, we made sure to be there. If it was Karaoke, we attended and sang our (off-key)
hearts out. If it was doing the Macarena
on the back deck, we stumbled through that, too. Eric was always the funniest of us all, the
first name you would put on the list of party invitees.
When we stepped on the cruise ship, Eric’s marriage had just
ended. He was seeing a lovely young lady
named Renee whom we liked instinctively, yet…when a relationship is brand new, and
you’re worried that your children might get attached to a person you DON’T
REALLY KNOW, you don’t go all in. We
hoped for the best, for both of them.
This is how you bump into your brother in an airport and
don’t immediately know who he is. I’m
not saying that’s right. That’s just how
it was.
Life had taken a swerve for Eric and Renee. The cruise ship regimen lasted for a few
years, but constantly being on the water, unable to get away from the
hard-partying vacationers, the grind ultimately took its toll. After a period of years, the now-married
couple settled in Orlando, with Eric finding work as an entertainment director
on land, where he got to go home every night.
Renee followed her muse and developed a following in dance
instruction. While they were driving
stakes into the ground in the Sunshine State, my children were growing up and
leaving the house. An unexpected burst
of creativity lifted me back onto the stage as a writer and a performer. We
were certainly aware of what was happening in the other’s life, but had
precious little time to appreciate it.
There was a period of time where only one of us was on top of the world
at any given moment. If something cool
was happening for him, I was scrambling for money in Michigan. If I had my picture in the paper in Ann
Arbor, he was moving from one rental to another. It was a brutal cycle.
Last week, after we met at the airport, Eric and Renee took
us to the land-locked resort where he holds court. The respect and friendship I saw on the faces
of the people he works with was palpable.
Kath and I cruised through his fiefdom treated, not like the King and
Queen perhaps, but certainly a Lord and Lady.
For a couple still putting one kid through college, it was a royal
reception. We ate dinner at one of the
restaurants on the property and on Sunday morning Eric and I made breakfast
side-by-side in the suite he put us up in.
We had talked late into the night about where we had been and what we
had seen. I searched his face for clues
of who he had become, wondering if this is the same guy I took baths with more than forty-five years ago. Even the sound of
his voice was somewhat strange to me.
Again, I know I sound ridiculous. He’s my brother, of course I know him! Yeah, but not really. I’m not the same person I was five years ago.
Even the last year has changed me irrevocably. I am now at a point in my life
where I have cohabitated with my wife long than any other person. So, Eric and I patty-caked through the
weekend, loath to somehow offend the other, talking about everything and
nothing, with the sound and fury of the Florida attractions serving as white
noise.
We’ve both slowed down a bit. I’ve passed fifty and Eric stands on the
welcome mat. We’ve both had some minor
health issues in the last year and we each take a handful of pills in the
morning. When we went to the amusement
park on Monday, we did not arrive before it opened with a plan to stay until
the gates closed. We used sunblock and
re-applied throughout the day. We wore
hats on our bald heads. We found out
which rides each person wanted to experience and when we’d accomplished that,
we left, eating a nice dinner outside the park.
It was barely sunset when we got back to their place.
We were given a hero’s welcome at the door by Eric and Renee’s
three lap dogs. After the loss of Flash
this fall (see: http://cuttingadeadmanstoenails.blogspot.com/2016/08/day-one-august-18-2016.html), for Kath and I it was a balm
for our souls to have some animals to play with. The pooch that seemed to take to us most was a
Chihuahua mix named Phoebe, who was so butch in her manner I took to calling
her ‘Bruiser’. Of course, I called her
by this macho nickname while cuddling her in my lap.
As I am an anthropomorphist from way back, at some point I
began using the dog as my puppet, speaking for her in a menacing Mexican
accent, asserting her dominance over the other dogs. Eric responded in kind, pledging mayhem from
the other side of the room, both of us using the dogs as surrogates, creating
characters and scenarios on the fly.
This went on for (maybe) five minutes, but when it was over, the
distance between my brother and I was gone, too. It was just like the old days. By Wednesday, I had returned to my former
role of instigator-in-chief (also known as senior shit stirrer), goading the
others into turning the final presidential debate into a drinking game. Eric gamely joined me and later regretted it…again,
just like the old days.
But as I laid in bed on Monday night, I couldn’t help but
chuckle to myself. I thought of the
child psychologists that use dolls or puppets to help their young charges
express things that are difficult to talk about. In a manner of speaking, a pair of Totos had revealed
the men behind the curtain. Neither of
us had managed to become the Great and Powerful Oz, but with the amount of
smoke and mirrors, we certainly had some folks fooled…and some, for a long
time.
By the end of the week, we were talking in concrete terms
about when and how we would get together again.
We were also wielding the needle in that way siblings have, finding and
exploiting weak spots to maximum advantage.
I can say shitty things about my brother, but I wouldn’t recommend you
trying it.
I just might sic Bruiser on you.
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