I used to say that while he had that crowd he was still basically a nice enough person. He’s a runt and was always the weakling so he retains a kind of piddling sincerity in his goofy or awkward demeanor that people can find endearing. Anymore though, and upon every time I see him, it’s this feeble boasting and lewd stories on overdrive, repeated enough that you wonder if he’s rehearsed them in the bathroom mirror each morning. That “tight little Latina chick he fucked real good” is going crazy because she’s pushing 30 and isn’t wifed up with kids, so has been blowing up his phone. The sentiment in and of itself I don’t mind more than the scummy feeling I get as I hear how he describes it.
Have you heard about his paycheck? Along with some of his friends, who somehow despite the money they’re making are living the Chicago version of what the people I see in Bloomington are. 4 or 5 guys to a house, 60%-80% of their paychecks going to rent. While these guys are gentrifying neighborhoods, pissing off the locals, the only thing they can conjure as worthwhile expenditures of money are various barely affordable indulgences. One of his friends, in a story my brother took great joy in relating, crouched down next to a homeless man to ask about and belittle his experience and then tell him to get the fuck off his corner of the block.
The closest parallel to his and their behavior I can draw is to my own. I’ve certainly whored it up and would love to continue doing so. I’m not a fan of Bloomington’s homeless population anymore than the people who’ve actually been threatened or who have to deal with a dozen overdoses or fights a day. But I don’t feel I insist on describing for no one who asked the intimate details nor approach the problem of homelessness with drunk “wit” and ridicule. This faux “alpha” condescension and pretension derived from pounding the frat bro script is stomach churning.
Now, my brother has resented me for as long as I know. It’s why I’m so good at recognizing, and then antagonizing, the people who think I’m just a measure of socially blind. I was the smart kid picking things up easy where I have memories of him pronouncing “the” as “ta-huh-eh” when he was learning to read. His and my mom's mutual resentment meant that he didn’t just get away with antagonizing me as “the little brother” but was encouraged in a passive aggressive way through my mother. Now, as he’s got his job stuffing rich cunts with cum and his downtown Indianapolis apartment for over $1000 a month, he still resents me. He knows my attitude to my intelligence and life. He knows I’m quicker witted. But mostly he knows that he doesn’t live up to my standards.
Consider that effect in his bro mind when I’m comfortable telling you when and why I’m sleeping in my car. Where does someone like me get off looking down on someone like him? He can’t reconcile that superficiality well before he acquires the introspective tact to ponder how weird it is to repeat, “Wait, she’s 60!? She’s 60? Well, damn, she looks good for 60!” about my aunt to her brothers and me. Because, of course, if your first instinct isn’t to fluidly reduce the world into sexualized ranking, you don’t understand the bro code and language. You think
As it is my nature, I pick choice moments to antagonize. I say I’d only go back to school for the joke and the ability to insist that people call me “Dr. Nick” in an allusion to The Simpsons. He got his master’s from Purdue Calumet (which he remembers as simply “Purdue”) and played his role as the indebted, hundreds of applications sending, basement-dweller until finding the in vitro clinic he works at now. He runs marathons with his bosses and relates a story of one of them hoping to venture out into consulting and wanting to bring him along as the business grows. I said, “Now don’t forget about me if you guys get real big! I don’t know the specific lab stuff, but every company has a marketing or back end logistics department!” He got real quiet. Aren’t I crashing in my car? Didn’t I fuck up the coffee shop? What do I know about his privileged place!?
He has a singular story of his worth or place that’s been adapted from a cadre of insufferably superficial and shitty people. He’s so steeped in it that he’ll never figure out that no amount of his “success” is ever going to speak to me like he really wishes he could. It doesn’t speak like he thinks it does to his bros, he thinks it does to my dad (who’s just happy if we’re happy), or to the world at large that is increasingly moving towards sentiments regarding collective survival over drunken chest beating.
I maybe see the the kid once or twice a year. The conclusion of this year’s Cubs game rendezvous had us gearing up to leave. We’re 3 minutes away from my house at a gas station as I get a text from my dad about a key I borrowed that’s still on my key ring. I tell him we need to go back. “Fuck!” He speeds back to our house, I drop off the key, get back in the car, and find him staring at me, mouth agape.
“What?” I ask.
“Thanks, Josh! For taking the extra time!”
“If you didn’t return, you would have mostly just been fucking dad over.”
“You know, I’ve been going out of my way for you this weekend.”
“I didn’t even want to come.”
“I didn’t want you to come! Now we’re taking even more time...”
“Well do you want to talk about it, or drive?”
“Drive!”
I present his steering wheel to him.
He didn’t care about the 6 minute detour there and back. He’d been looking for an excuse to say something to me all day. About anything specific? Probably not. He bought me a hot dog at the game. He drove, though no one asked him to. None of it out of the kindness of his heart, or because I asked for or needed anything from him, but because he needs to view me as lesser. He needs to diminish the scar on his brain I represent for him. In fact, I know he regrets telling me he never wanted me to come, because a few months ago he drunkenly texted me about hanging out and not seeing me enough; these plans of course he never really had any intention of following through with, but his brain plagued him nonetheless.
So the dislike I have might better reduce to a pity. We’ve never, I mean never, had a particularly good relationship. He’s filled with all the hopes and dreams and sentimentality that keeps him going back to our abusive mother he vehemently hates when I talk shit about. You know, because who am I if not the person who recognizes that and provokes the ever-strengthening of that head-fuck of a bond. The day I have at least as much material wealth as he (which, I’d be willing to pull out the calculator today given the amount of stupid shit he obligates himself to pay for), but it will be a day that he will wither. If I ever get my doctorate and persist in calling my time in school a joke, he might one day get the balls to haul off and hit me! Though, I suspect he knows that he can work out every day and it won’t speak to the anger I carry that would correct for his decision. If we don’t just want to rely on once bigger and older, always bigger and older.
And yet, it’s not even remotely that serious. It’s just a magnified example of the general tragedy that is my family. It keeps the thought in the back of my head that were I to ever have children, they could fall in with the Josh’s and no matter what I provided or imparted, I’d have to figure out a way to swallow (like that bitch he met last week) their path. He could drop the douche guilt and work less on self-aggrandizing and more on self-respect, because the difference is recognizing yourself with respect to the rest of the worlds you inhabit. He’s in his, I try to be in “the.”
