The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (21 page)

“You want a beer?” Scott asked. He was watching TV now.

“No, thanks. I’d better get going actually.”

“Sure you can drive?”

“Oh yeah. I’m not that drunk anymore really.”

Outside I had to walk in front of Scott’s living room window on the way to my car. I couldn’t resist a glance inside: he was staring at the TV with owlish concentration, but stiffly flourished a hand as I passed.

part IV

stille nacht

A
year later Scott was in a medium-security prison. The one time I visited, he went on about the lawsuit he was bringing against the Oklahoma City Police and Department of Corrections. “
That’s
going into my lawsuit!” he liked to say, calling himself “the white Rodney King.” His own quixotic posturing seemed to amuse him (ditto my mother, in a different way perhaps), while at the same time he seemed quite serious.

Things had fallen apart a few months after our good Christmas in 1994, at a time when my parents were relatively hopeful. Scott had decided to go back to school. He seemed to realize that he’d never get a decent job without a college degree, and by “decent job” he meant something interesting and exotic, not a mundane compromise like the marines. He planned to major in music and become a record producer. He was picky about schools, too. He refused to attend community college and was “too old” for a vo-tech like the Drahn School of Business; however, his failure to last a full semester in two previous tries at four-year colleges made a third try problematic. Fortunately our father knew someone on the board of trustees at Oklahoma City University, and after a certain amount of haggling he was able to arrange Scott’s enrollment for the fall 1995 semester.

Scott seemed excited, full of plans. When I saw him that summer he showed me a mahogany lectern he’d bought on credit so he could do his homework standing up, because of his bad back. Well in advance, too, he’d gotten a number of textbooks for his classes on musical theory and the like, along with some noncurricular material about the record business. But it also seemed to depress him, vaguely, that by the time he graduated he’d be pushing forty, and not-so-deep down he doubted he’d graduate at all.

“What about the time I . . . ?” he’d say to our friend Andrea, whenever she tried to encourage him. Because she went out of her way to seem unshocked by the many disasters of his life, Scott compulsively told her the worst, the better to talk her out of having faith in him. “But you’re so
smart
,” she’d say, or “That was a long time ago. Put it behind you. It’s never too late to start over.” And Scott would nod—receptively, pensively—then say, “But what about . . . ?”

The bad news came in late August, a few days before Scott’s classes were scheduled to begin. My mother’s old boyfriend, Dave, called me in New Orleans.

“I think you’d better sit down,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”

For a terrible moment I thought he was talking about my mother, who at the time was visiting friends on Long Island. Then I thought he meant my father, worse still, since we’d yet to reconcile; in Marlies’s absence it made sense that Dave would be the first to bring news, since at the time I doubted even tragedy could compel Sandra to call me.

“Your brother had a car wreck.”

This was something of an anticlimax, given what I’d been hearing from Andrea, and I remember feeling miffed at Dave for that melodramatic “you’d better sit down.”

“Really? Is he dead, or what?”

He wasn’t dead. The rather wacky facts of the case were these: Scott had managed to re-create (and improve on) his colossal smash-up of the Cadillac fourteen years before—that is, he’d lost control on an exit ramp and driven almost head-on into a concrete embankment (no mere guardrail this time). Had he been driving his old BMW, he would have been killed instantly; but his BMW was in the shop. He’d finally gotten around to having it painted, also on credit. As for the rental he drove—at suicidal speed, stone drunk—it was a late-model Ford and therefore had an air bag, which saved his life.

Dave noted, however, that Scott might have some brain damage. “The bag hit his head pretty hard. His face looks like he fell asleep on a waffle iron.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Yes and no. He talks, but he doesn’t make much sense. Repeats himself a lot. You know, his short-term memory is shot.”

“You told Mom?”

“Oh yes.” Dave allowed himself a chuckle. “You can imagine: ‘That asshole! He can
rot
in the hospital for all I care!’ Etcetera, etcetera.”

“Did she say
Unkraut vergeht nicht
?”

“In so many words.”

But when I spoke to my mother that night, she seemed drained of her usual bluster. She’d been having such a good time on Long Island; it made sense that Scott would spoil it.

“Pam’s children are so sweet and
normal
,” she said.

Pam was her American “sister,” part of a nice Port Washington family that had taken care of my mother as a wayward nineteen-year-old, newly arrived from Germany. Pam, like her parents, was nothing if not conventionally middle class, conventionally decent, and so represented a sort of Road Not Taken in Marlies’s life. Once or twice in New York I’d met Pam’s children—two grown daughters and a son—and I can vouch for the fact that they’re all likable, handsome young people with good jobs.

“Such beautiful manners!” said my mother. “I mean they wait on me hand and foot. ‘You need another drink, Marlies?’ ‘Here, take my chair.’ That sort of thing.” She sighed. “Even before I heard of this latest . . .
shit
with Scott, I was thinking how nice it would be to have kids like that.” I was about to point out the invidious implications of that remark when she added, “I mean can you imagine Frank calling his mother a
cunt
?”

Frank was Pam’s son, and I certainly couldn’t imagine him calling his mother—or any woman, ever—a cunt. At the same time I couldn’t imagine Pam saying any number of things that Marlies was apt to say on a routine basis, and I was tempted to suggest as much. But I let it go.

“If only Scott could stop
drinking
,” I said with only moderate sarcasm, “he’d be just as nice a boy as Frank.”

“Bullshit!” my mother replied, and when I asked whether she planned to cut her vacation short and see about Scott, she was even more adamant: “Hell no! That asshole! He can
rot
in the hospital for all I care . . .”

I felt reassured by this return to form. If Scott’s latest mishap had the effect of waking my mother up, of distancing her from Scott’s awful life, then it was a good thing.

AFTER A WEEK
or so, the worst effects of Scott’s head injury had worn off, and he began calling me on the phone. His voice was a bit slurred and he still repeated himself a lot, but he was coherent enough. What he mainly lacked was the capacity to censor himself, to sift the truth as we all must (alcoholics and drug addicts especially) in order to put forth an acceptable public self. I didn’t listen very carefully, but what I heard was pretty sordid: he missed drugs the way a glutton missed snacks, and spoke in rhapsodic detail about freebasing and needles and so forth; he said a lot about sex that I simply tuned out. Andrea—who often called with updates I didn’t particularly want—was glad to remind me of anything I might have missed. For example, she assured me that Scott had hustled his body for drugs, quite a bit in fact, and quoted him as follows: “‘They have something you want, you have something they want.’” I tried not to imagine the kind of people who’d barter drugs to fuck my brother.

Later Scott denied all this—certainly he didn’t remember saying it—but there was no denying what was found in his house. There were dildos of every conceivable size, shape, and color: double-dicked, stubbled, strapped, gargantuan, wan, uncircumsized, black, white, yellow. And then there were my brother’s crack stems, twenty or so, all of them blackened with use. There was also a small box of photos: Scott, nude, striking a number of homoerotic poses—e.g., leering over his shoulder with comic salacity while he thrusts his buttocks toward the camera and spreads his cheeks for a good view of his anus. Years later my mother showed me these and couldn’t help giggling: “What an old
sow
!”

It was Sandra who discovered that last item—for
that
I would have liked to be a fly on the wall. She and my father had decided to evict Scott while he was still in the hospital, and Dave was good enough to help her box up his things and haul them back to a storage shed at my mother’s place. (“Let this be a lesson to all of us,” Dave said afterward. “Make sure you hide your dildos and crack pipes before you take off on a drunk-driving spree.”) I’d always assumed such lurid artifacts were the main reason Burck and Sandra had decided to banish Scott for good, and I considered this rather rash and bigoted, all the more so in view of my bitterness toward them at the time. Scott was sick: what he needed was a nice mental hospital where he could watch TV in a haze of medication; more to be pitied than censured.

But, according to Andrea, my father couldn’t have been more callous. “If you call me here
one more time
,” he said to Scott (as Andrea told it), when the latter persisted in ringing his office from the hospital, “I’m gonna have the DA come down there and drag your sorry ass away in leg irons.” Andrea’s version of events seemed contrived to persuade me that my kindly, liberal-minded father had reverted at last to a mean old Babbitt:
poshlost
.

But this was not the whole story, as I learned some years later, during one of my rapprochements with Burck.

“I think it was the head injury that did him in,” he remarked one day, as we sat by a pond at his ranch with Jack, Sandra’s Australian Cattle Dog. “When we visited Scott at the hospital—”

“You guys went to the hospital?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “Well, of course we did. We were worried about him. But he was just”—my father winced at the muddy water, shaking his head—“
repulsive
. Worse than I’d ever seen him, and I thought I’d seen the worst. He yelled at the nurses like I wouldn’t yell at
Jack
. His language was beyond disgusting. Beyond abusive. Finally he said something to Sandra that I—well, that was just
it
as far as I was concerned. That was it.”

He coughed, then abruptly bent over in his chair and clapped his hands. “C’mere, Jack! C’mere, boy!” The dog panted and gamboled at his feet.

IT WAS TRUE
Scott wasn’t a model patient at the hospital. He constantly complained about pain—indeed had suffered a certain amount of trauma to his neck and other parts, never mind his head—and was duly medicated, which snuffed whatever remained of his inhibitions. He staggered around the halls, bellowing, more or less in the nude, whenever he sensed the nurses were neglecting him. He badgered other patients too. Finally (so said Andrea), he and Maryam were caught screwing in his bed, and maybe that’s what led to his expulsion—either that or indigence, once my father made it clear he didn’t intend to pay Scott’s bills anymore.

On the day of his removal I got a call from his friend Thomas, who said a lot of indignant things about my parents’ refusal to get involved. He assumed I’d be an ally.

“He’s their fucking
son
, man! And now they’re fucking him same as they did you!”

“Well, in Scott’s case—”

“You know where he is now?”

“Where?”

“He’s sitting in a fucking
wheel
chair in the parking lot, nowhere to go. Andrea and I just
now
had to tell him he doesn’t have a house anymore.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Not well.”

“Did he mention the dildos and crack pipes?”

“The what?”

“Look. I’m sorry about this, but I’m not sure what you want me to—”

What Thomas wanted me to do was call my father and find out where Scott’s birth certificate and service papers were, so they could get him admitted to the VA. Thomas himself had tried calling the ranch, but Sandra was put off by his tone and hung up on him; now she wasn’t answering at all. It was a weekend, and she always screened my father’s calls on the weekend. I hadn’t spoken to either of them in over a year and was, if anything, more likely to be screened than Thomas. Nevertheless I felt obliged to try.

“Hi, folks,” I said, when the machine beeped, “sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if you had any idea—”

Sandra picked up and greeted me with a kind of no-hard-feelings civility: what could she do for me? What indeed. I knew it was pointless to ask for my father. I explained about Scott.

“I see. Well, as I tried to tell Thomas, we don’t have anything like that. Maybe your mother . . . ?”

I sighed. My mother was the one who’d advised Thomas to call Sandra and my father in the first place (
not
, I suspect, because she thought they had Scott’s papers, but because she wanted them to suffer equally).

“I’ll give it a try,” I said. “Well. Nice talking to you, Sandra. Say hi to Papa for me.”

“I will!”

I waited for Thomas to call me back.

“What’d they say?”

“They don’t have his papers.”

“Fuck!”

“You could take him to your place.”

“He needs a
hospital
, man! If your fucking parents—”

“Lay off my parents. They’ve been putting up with this shit for twenty years. You want my advice? Walk away. Leave him in the parking lot. Maybe someone will come along and roll him somewhere nice.”

This silenced Thomas for a moment or two; then he said something loud and nasty and hung up. I was glad to be rid of him, and I didn’t hear from him again for a long time. Andrea was a different matter. For a number of weeks she kept leaving updates on my answering machine: Scott was in the VA; Scott was thrown out of the VA; Scott had broken into her house and stolen something; Scott was HIV positive, or so she’d heard (from whom?). Often she called simply in the hope that I’d pick up—her silences on my machine had a kind of identifiably needy quality—but I vowed never to answer my phone until I was quite sure she’d stopped calling for good. Finally she moved back to Seattle, or so I later heard.