At the Drive-In with My Brother

For Albert, and Norma, too, lurking in the background

My brother and I used to go to the drive-in on weekends to get out of the house. Mostly it was after a long week of washing and caring for my father, on my brother’s part, doing the dirty things that needed to be done to keep a convalescent man in a decent state of hygienic solvency, basic cleanliness, though my father was too far gone to be aware, howling, as he was, in his room at all hours, in bed, propped up on pillows with his mouth open and pajamas wet. But my brother took care of my father as best he could, as best as his condition allowed, which was pretty dismal. He was gone then, too, himself, my father, preceding my brother into that terrible gulf of pain and irredeemable hopelessness that is my family’s legacy, that motherfucker, that bastard, that son of a bitch disease, called “la cosa” in my childhood, dictating everything.

The nature of it wasn’t known yet, what it was, exactly, a mystery. Trips to the hospital misnamed it. Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, pre-senile dementia came flying out of doctors’ mouths, typed on to labels stuck on to folders, printed on letters forwarded to the Railroad Retirement Board to guarantee a pension. Before he could retire, he had to be disabled. Before he was certifiably incapacitated, he had to be diagnosed. But words got thrown around. Nobody knew. Only that the chart, tracing our family’s history, smudged and barely decipherable on the tree, proved a rot, a blight in our genes, in our bones.

And it was horrible.

But my brother and I used to go out on Friday nights when the mood struck us; we wanted to get out of the house. It usually proceeded from his antsiness, sprawling in front of the TV with his head on a pillow, comfortably uncomfortable, becoming fretful and disillusioned with the bad Friday night offerings.

So he would say something like, “Let’s go to the drive-in, Steve.”

And I would say, “Okay, dude, let’s go,” not really caring if we went or not, too preoccupied with my own troubles—adolescent trials scorching me in their own right—besides my own immediate grappling with “the thing” in front of us, around us, all the time.

That thing was a beast, an unknown quality, a shadowy character I had heard referred to but never confronted head on until now, that dark and stealthy criminal robbing us of everything we knew, a mysterious, ugly stranger who was bound to show up in our lives, take over, by the earnest whisperings of my aunt and mom years before, for as long as I could remember.

They’d square off in a hall, across from each other, and talk, oblivious to all else around them, so important was the conversation they’d shoo us away from, my brother and sister and me, not wanting us to hear, I suppose, verification of those signs we knew meant something. We knew our father was different, but not how much.

His mental capacity, always disputed—he is slow, he is not—had become irreversibly damaged, so that any lingering doubts about his competence in the world had long been dispelled, shattered, vanquished. Banished from our own sense of security, which was real—we were a solid enough working class family—life seemed malign and at fault now. Even the damn TV, zigzagging in front of us, seemed a curse.

We had to get out, especially my brother. Perhaps some elemental sense of where he was heading urged him, though I doubt it. Maybe he knew he too was afflicted with the thing that drove us all nuts, scared us, ruined a normal childhood and life by its volume. It was bad, very, very bad.

And maybe his fleeing was from himself as well as my father in the bedroom. Maybe, but doubtful. I just think he wanted to get out, see some pussy, some tits and ass, as he called...