Introducing... The Nelsons

Some one once told me that the only person in my life, who will ever really know what my life was like, is my brother. She told me this immediately after I had had a long, angry, violent fight with my younger brother. Needless to say, at the time, I did not believe a word of that nonsense.

             It was not until years later, minutes after I found out that my brother had died, that I believed. I had a deep twinge of pain, and regret hit my stomach like a Buick smashing into a brick wall. Now there would be nobody who really knew what my life was like. I was alone in my memories, and my baby brother was gone.

            A lot of time has passed since Nicholas died. I have had a lot of time to think about the events leading up to his death, and the events that immediately followed. One question remains. Who is to blame? When a seventeen year old boy loses his life, whose fault is it? Sometimes I wonder if it is mine. I tried to save him, mostly from himself. I wanted him to have a better life.

            We grew up in sunny Southern California. Life was hard, as it is for all adolescents, but it was not all bad. Our parents got divorced in the early Nineties. My mom moved away, out of state I think. She moved a lot, and ended up in Washington State.

            We stayed with my dad. This was a decision left to me at age seven. We were already living with my dad. My mom had her own place to live. She came to stay at our apartment, after selling most of her stuff. My dad slept over at his girl friends house.

            Late on the night that my mom was going to leave, for what could have been forever, she came into my room. She sat on the edge of my bed and looked down at me. My brother had already fallen asleep in his twin bed next to mine.

            She asked me if I wanted to go away with her. She said that if I did, we would take my brother and just go…now… my dad would never find us! Even at seven I thought to myself, “how dramatic”. I was in a good school with lots of friends; I had two cats, and lots of toys and hamsters. My mom said I would have to leave it all behind, but we would be safe.

            Safe from what? I should have asked.

            I told her No! I was a young child that did not want to leave everything to go away in the night. So she said I only had one chance to make this choice, and she left me to think about it.

            I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I remember is waking up to an empty apartment. My brother was out playing, and my mom was gone.

            I started to cry and called my dads girl friends house to see if he was there. He had already left to take my mom to the train station. She had left me without saying goodbye. When you are young, everything is dramatic. I thought I would never see her again. Children get over things fast, but it would be a decade before I would forgive her for leaving without saying goodbye.

            Life got hard soon after that night. My dad drifted into an alcoholic stupor, and looking back, never really returned. My grandma took over in my moms place. She would come over and clean our apartment, buy us food and clothes, and reprimand us for our bad manners.

            Years passed and my brother and I grew into pre-teenagers. I was two years older than him. We fought a lot! At times I think we actually hated each other. We were both shoplifters and liars. We only got along when we were doing something we shouldn’t be.

            It had become our summer routine to ride our bikes to the local convenience store, steal as much candy as we could, and then go eat it at a park. Actually my brother would do the stealing. I would go buy a large fountain drink; he would tuck his pants into his socks and just drop the candy down his pants. This worked very well because he was sort of scrawny. We wore thrift store clothes, which never fit right. His clothes were always too big for him, making the candy pants un-noticeable.

            We were living in a house down the street from my grandmas’ house by the time this was our routine. We would eat and mostly live at my grandmas house then go home to sleep. One night after a long day of stealing, we were at my grandmas’ house watching TV. The Simpson’s was on. The episode was about Bart stealing, and getting caught. My dad, right at that moment, found our stash of stolen candy and goods in a couch that no one ever used. His reprimand to us both was “just don’t get caught”.

            That was it? No trouble? No consequences? Who wants to rebel if nothing will ever come of it? I no longer found interest in stealing. Looking back I just wanted my dad to react in some way, but he didn’t. Ever.

            His only reactions to anything were fits of rage, brought on by nothing. Everyone around my dad spent a lot of their time with him walking on egg shells. Doing anything not to bring out the angry violent beast that slept within.

            One day, my grandma ordered pizza for dinner. My dad had been taking a nap. When he came out, five minutes after the pizza arrived, he asked if any was left. I said no as he opened the box. When he saw that there was in fact pizza inside he punched me in the face. I got a black eye from it.

             When you grow up in a house of secrets and violence, you are taught what to say to strangers. I was hit with a baseball while playing with my brother. That was my favorite.

            On another occasion my dad, who had broken his ankle jumping off of a swing, was yelling about something and grabbed his crutch like a baseball bat and swung, full force at my head. I was thirteen at this time, and had had enough. I caught the crutch and tore it from his fist. The force knocked him off balance. I grabbed up the crutch and with all the hate and anger I had saved over my life I swung, stopping inches from his head.

            I threw the crutch down at his feet and told him, that this was the end. If he ever raised a hand to me again, I would kill him. He must have believed me, because that was indeed the end. He moved on with his violent anger. He focused instead, on my little brother.

            After all of the madness I could not stand it anymore. I wanted to move away. I had rekindled a relationship with my mom, and she was willing to let me move there. At age sixteen I did. While I was away in Washington, life for my brother got worse. He stopped going to school when he was 11 or 12. He started to deal drugs for my dad. He was never home, and always in trouble.

            One summer I paid for him to move up north with me and mom. It seems that everything that happened in his life from that moment on led directly to his death.  If I had decided to leave him in California, would he still have died here? Would he have died anyway? If I had not decided to intervene, would he have grown up happy and healthy in Southern California? No, I believe that he would have died sooner. Perhaps he was ill fated from the start.

            I am only human. My memories are rose tinted through the haze of my own experiences. I remember a lot, as it seemed to be happening to me. Children remember things in their own way. I do not want to lead you to think everything I say is absolute fact. Too many people who were there have died for me to get the actual truth from anyone. So here is my truth, as I remember it.

            Our lives are confusing, all lives are. In order to understand why things happened the way they did, you have got to know the people, that made the choices, which influenced those lives. So I am going to go back before the beginning and introduce you to The Nelsons. One story at a time.