My brother, Michael. Although I seldom refer to him as Michael anymore. I use full names out of a weird kind of respect but he deserves no more than the diminuative, Mike. If that. I have spent most of my life looking up to, admiring, and immitating Mike. Natural as a child since he is six years older and always appeared to be almost an adult to me. But it gets sick and now embarassing to admit that I carried that far, far into adulthood. I can't even remember why now, only excuses to try to explain, like that our father died when I ws ten and I made Mike a father figure. And he is very intelligent, probably a genius IQ, but I know I carried it on too far even after I realized that I was actually smarter than him in a lot of ways. Our brother Herbert admired Mike, too, but never lost sight of or ignored Mike's flaws the way I did. Mike ws always cruel in little ways while making a big deal about being big hearted. Especially when it came to our mother. She was far from perfect, somethimes actually abusive, and Mike never saw past those things as we grew up to understand her, forgive her, or love her. After our father died, my brothers threw huge parties at her house leaving it trashed every week end, and during those parties Mike would entertain everyone with the grossest immitations of her, the cruelest jokes about her, and never notice Herbert and I scooting closer together with plastic smiles on our faces to blend in with the laughing crowd, not daring to defend her. Mike and Herbert got in a fist fight once at that house and Mom tried to jump in to save Herbert and Mike grabbed her by the throat and shoved her into the bathtub where he already had Herbert pinned. There was a reel to reel tape recorder accidently on that taped the whole thing and Mike would listen to it and play it for his friends laughing. At the part where he grabbed Mom you heard me scream "Mamma!" and the anguish in my voice would make my eyes sting with tears everytime I had to listen to it. I still hear the cry in my head. Yet he still, the last I knew, tells that story like it's funny. Mom got a grunge job at a pharmaceutical company after Daddy died, (her Japanese Pharmacy diploma didn't matter much in the US,) making 8 dollars an hour. Mike would come amd tell her he needed money and when she refused he would start punching holes in her walls, "Look what that no cost you!" until her room was riddled with fist holes. (As were his own walls in his first married home. He even puched out every cabinet door in their kirchen and broke Terri's heirloom bed into little pieces.) All you will hear from him is that Mom threw him out at the tender age of seventeen (because he dropped out of school) after his father died. And still, I somehow had this insane brother worship until I was forty. All of my stories were full of holes, too. I guess I desperately needed a hero.Nor that Mike was only cruel to Mom and Herbert, but he was cruel to me, too. Yet  I always went  back to worshipping Mike. Introduced Jim to him, who still worships Mike to this day, even though we have been divorced for about 25 years. But Jim used to tell me that I had a brother complex, that no one could live up to what I expected because of it, and now I know he was right on because it wasn't even based on reality. I believed my own stories to the extent that I only started remembering the bad things in very recent years. Not that they ever stopped. Somehow along the way, I started to almost agree with Mike. But, understand, as adults, his attacks were so very much more subtle to me although that sounds ridiculous even to me with what I am about to write about it.

There were a lot of "little" things, like always saying my poetry was crap, but the first big thing that stands out to me was in the early 80's. I was married and had three daughters and was living on a farm in Iowa. My husband didn't make much money but we managed to live OK and I thought we had a pretty cool and very peaceful home life. Jami was the oldest and there was a five year gap between her and Jeanette, who was only a little over a year older than the youngest, Jessica. Nett and Jess were almost like twins, doing everything together and there was no one Jami's age for miles around the farm. She started bringing friends home who had bad or no home life and I started taking them in. The kids seemed to really like our home life and thrive in it and it just grew until at times I had five girls living with us besides my own three. Once when I was telling Mike about how it was and how much I enjoyed them all and how good it made me feel to take in kids, especially since I was homeless as a teen, his response was a huge sigh followed by, "Come on, Rhoda. You know that the only reason you are doing this is that you have messed up your own kids so badly that you are trying in this ignorant way that deprives them further to make up for it." I was shocked, hurt, couldn't believe what I had just heard, but didn't argue, changed the subject, got off the phone and locked it in the hidden places of pain.

I had another brother, a true brother, cursed with the name Herbert from birth, who I loved dearly all of my life. He was three years older than me, Mike three years older than him. Herbert was painfully shy as a chubby child and somehow the target of abusive treatment his whole life, When he became a teenager he discovered marijuanna and his shyness disappeared and he also grew to a stunning, well built, six foot one. He became a very popular partier and the wekend parties at Mom's house started out as his full of his friends. Then Mike started coming around, too, and joined the parties adding an older group of kids to the mix. Every kind of drug I can think of went through that house and those guys. My first high was when my brothers and their friends shut me in a closet and blew weed under the door until I passed out. When I woke up it was 3 am and they had all gone out and forgotten me. Mike and Herbert both did some huge amounts of LSD during the last years of the parties, and Herbert got lost. I mean he was never the same and became more and more insecure and paranoid the rest of his life. He stopped all hard drugs when he was about 21 but continued to smoke Marijuanna for the rest of his life. Michael continued with drugs like meth and Qualuden type drugs well into his late thirties, long after he had a wife and two kids. He had his own roofing company and Herbert often worked for him and had a love hate relationship with him. He admired Mike's genius brain and some of the things he could do, like fight, but he hated Mike's ego and superior attitude. Mike was embarassed by Herbert. Complained that Herbert followed him everywhere like to all of the remaining stoner gang's houses, Mike's friends now, until Mike "had" to sit down with Herbert and tell him that he wasn't welcome at any of their old friends houses and to please quit following him around. Mike and Herbert both told me about this. I coudn't imagine doing such a thing even if it was true! I was much more love-me-love-my-brothers. The cruelty of it and the lack of brotherly love cut me deeply, and I put in the secret place of Michael pain and just tried to love Herbert harder to somehow make up for it. In the years that followed Herbert became stranger and stranger, seing rejection even where there was none until he was seeing and hearing things that weren't there at all. I was in Iowa by then and heard everything by phone. When Herbert was about thirty years old he had become so bizzaar that Mike had him picked up on the job by the Dept. of Mental Health. Herbert was examined. I called the doctors treating him and they said that he had some schitzophrenic symptoms but didn't really fit the diagnosis, and they listed him as having psychitic tendancies. When he was released, Herbert went to our mother and told her that one of the things that was "driving him nuts" was that he had seen Mike "doing things" to his daughter, Linda. Mom, knowing our father, her late husband, was a pedophile, backed Herbert and they took Mike to court. Mike won eventually, but never forgave either of them for the accusation. And Herbert never took back the accusation during the eight years he survived after that. What I think about the accusation now: At the time I remained as noncommital as I could, wanting to believe Mike but also aware of our background. Then his son Joey started some weird behavior,  They say Joey was autistic because he didn't speak until he was three and banged his head and other things. But he spoke to me. Then there was Linda. When she was eight Jami told me that Linda said that she though about killing herself so I told Mike. His response was ANGER, somehow at Jami and me, for telling such a lie. Then, when Linda was twelve, I visitted Mike, and his wife, Terri, told me that they found out that a good friend of their family had been mollesting Linda and her cousin and many other little girls who went to his house to play in his pool. Terri said that she had been trying to talk Mike into turning the man in, or at least confronting him for six months and that Mike kept stalling. Terri was at the time suffering from depression so deep she laid on her couch for weeks until she was put on Prozac. I do wonder now if Mike ws afraid other things would come out if there was an investigation especially with Herbert's accusation against Mike four years earlier. In Mike's defence, the man was an elderly friend with a heart condition, against Mike was all the little girls who were still around him. Two months later Terri and Linda were in a horrific car crash that killed Linda and left Terri severely disabled.

I have to back up a little here. Terri and I weren't best friends but over the years we had developed a relationship that was growing in trust. She confided in me that Mike's friends were mean to her and accused her of being a bad mother, and she confided in me about their drug use. There was time when Terri joined Mike in it using Meth with him until she was skin and bones. At the end of that she came to me one day and told me that Mike had been gone for two days and asked for help finding him. She told me about the meth, and I told her that, If I were her, I would get off of it and take the kids and go to her parents' home in Alabama and tell Mike she would return when he, too, gave it up. Mike returned eventually, with a story about eating a bad burrito and getting sick and checking into a sleazy hotel where he lingered in a delerium until he was able to make it home. Whatever. I did try to check out his story but it was a hotel that rented rooms by the hour and record keeping wasn't their strong point. And Mike was FURIOUS when Terri told him what I had said. When he called me yelling that he couldn't believe his own sister would tell his wife to leave him, I tried and tried to tell him that I was telling her what I myself would do, and in fact had done similar with a past boyfriend, and that it was only to get him clean, not to get him divorced, But he told me he would never forgive me and has repeated many times over the years that he still hasn't and will not ever forgive me for that. I put it away, reasoned that it just hurt him so badly that he couldn't think straight about it but as the years went by and he never waivered I put it DEEP away. When he called about the wreck, I went to Texas and spent a month with him there. We burried his daughter together, visitted Terri every day in the hospital, and I developed a bond with Joey that would last over a decade.

When Terri first started to come out of the coma, the doctors advised that she be told about Linda's death. Up until then she didn't ask about them except to look at me occasionally and ask if the kids were OK. Mike went in alone with me waiting in the hall to tell her late one night. The next day there was a big group of friends in the room and Terri looked around at all of them and then asked for everyone except me to leave the room. She asked me if Linda was still dead, I choked and said yes, and she said that the others could come back in. That was the last I ever saw of the close bond Terri and I had been forming before the wreck. I left Houston right before she was released from the hospital so they could adjust to their new family structure without me. Mike spent the next years rebuilding Terri's lost memories and physical function and started a fireproofing business that would consume the rest of his life with Terri always at his side.

The new Terri seemed to have no memory of ever having grown close to me after Mike was done with her. In fact, she took to introducing me to people in a condescending way. "This is Rhoda, Mike's sister, you have to excuse her, she's a little rough" wink wink. Made me want to scratch my ass and hold out the hand to shake.

But my reward at the time was the new Joey. He was about eleven wnen Linda died, and became a prisoner in their home. He wasn't allowed to go anywhere or have anyone over while his parents were at work and they were often gone until nine or ten at night. His school work suffered although he is easily as intelligent as his parents, but there ws no one to really care. I was in Nebraska, but Joey and I talked regularly over the phone through his teen years and became extremely close. Mike hated it but didn't have the time to stop it. It lasted through Joey's first marriage, and ended when the war between Mike and I started, so I guess Mike eventually won that one.

Talk about UGLY. my family past is down right FUGLY. The only good thing is that it is the past. The bad thing is how much of it still bites me in the ass. My brother Mike used to take a huge bite out of me until I exwhoresized that demon by finally saying half of what I think about him and all he's done and what he really is in an email recently. I must say I sleep much better since then!

I gotta explain about Mike's  ocd "afraid". This is one of the most paranoid guys I know. He checkes the locks to his house repeatedly, over and over on nights when he's extra nervous. He once had a bow and arrow rigged to his bedroom door to pierce any intruder, and is constantly talking about hit men after him and plots against him. I've been on the phone with him at night and told him a spooky story and he said, "OK, now you have to stay on the phone with me while I recheck the locks."