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115 SNOWBALLS SOMEHOW MADE IN HELL 6 Ten-year-old Kip gives a status report to Mom, who is away visiting her parents in Florida, 1958 Lukee is not getting along with Christie. They’re constantly arguing about who’s going to have the big, brown chair in Dad’s study. Christie will cross his right leg over his left. This makes Christie’s knee get in Lukee’s half and when that happens, Lukee rises up and bops Christie on the head with a cardboard roll filled with the rolled up newspaper. Then Christie rises up and makes a swing and a miss. While he’s off guard Lukee comes down with a good, solid whack with his cardboard roll. This only maddens Christie and he jumps up and connects with a right to the jaw. Mom says the earliest sibling argument she can remember was watching toddlers Kip and Jeff ride trikes in a circle and fight about who was ahead of whom, each loudly redefining the other’s position on the circle. Kip was born in 1947. With no brother to irritate him, correct him, or attack him things were peaceful until 1949, when Jeff was born; after which began a twenty-five-year-long series of arguments between brothers that ended only when we all went away to college and had Nixon to be pissed off at. Every brother was assigned a nickname calibrated to irritate him. Chris was “Rake.” Jeff believed Chris’s face was long and resembled the handle of a rake. Strangely, the name Rake pissed Chris off even more than the original appellation Jeff assigned him: “Mike Rosscopick.” (Translation: “Microscopic.”) The shape of brother Dan’s head also presented rich comic possibilities to Jeff. Dan, having a nearly circular head as a youth, was dubbed “Beach Ball.” Beach Ball was what you called Dan if you wanted to make him mad. But SNOWBALLS SOMEHOW MADE IN HELL 116 most of the time his name was, mysteriously, “Learbs,” for which no etymology exists. Our littlest brother, Collin, was randomly named “Neil.” This made him mad for reasons we never understood, but since it seemed to work we stuck with it. Even the oldest brother, Kip, was assigned a nickname: “Toe-PayDeh ,” the scrambled pronunciation of potato, a shape Jeff maintained precisely described the silhouette of Kip’s head. Kip, in turn, noted that Jeff’s ears made his head resemble a taxicab with the doors open and dubbed him “Tax.” Jeff’s friend, Chris Hallenbeck, appreciated the poetry of “Tax” but referred to Jeff as simply “Debbie.” As for me, Chris decided I was “Buggen,” a name derived from “Flying Rug” (Sprinters flew through the house). It then became “Ruggen” and finally Buggen. Referring to a big brother by his nickname resulted in “chesties.” To give someone chesties you pinned him to the ground with your knees, holding his arms out of the way, and rapped the knuckle of your middle finger on his sternum for ten minutes. It didn’t hurt at first but after five minutes of steady rapping it seemed prudent to call your brother by his given name. Out in the front yard, we played games that hurt people. In the winter, our front yard became a Currier and Ives print done by Quentin Tarantino. We created a vicious brand of snowball pressed to the density of croquet balls. Creating such ordnance took fifteen minutes of packing and squeezing after which we misted them with water and put them in the freezer for an icy sheen. If a snowball could somehow be made in Hell, this was it. Parking one of these babies between the shoulder blades of a retreating brother was a satisfying experience, and when one of us came in the house crying, within a half hour his parka was back on and he was out in the yard using his anger to squeeze a new snowball to the density of a diamond. In the summer, we played a short, rule-free version of football called “Smear.” The object wasn’t getting touchdowns, making passes, or even winning . It was about smearing the guy who had the ball. Five brothers lined up on one side of the yard and kicked off to a lone brother who—standing way down at the other end of the yard—appeared an inch high and extremely vulnerable. The single offensive player had one shot at getting a touchdown, but this never...

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