"Brothers in Strife"
EDIT: possible triggers for trauma, physical abuse, drug abuse]
My eyes shoot open as the plane lands on the runway with a distinct kathunk. The last thing I saw before passing out had been the Mississippi, its curves slinking around my adopted hometown of New Orleans. As the cemeteries with their crypts apt to fit in an episode of Scooby-Doo grew smaller in my vision, along with the downtown skyline – the Superdome reduced to a microdome – I closed my eyes, put Bob Dylan on my iphone and drifted off to sleep. But now I’m awake and we’re taxiing on the runway in Raleigh, North Carolina. I look through the windows, and the Mississippi River is gone; all I can see that isn’t manmade airport structure are the trees. Not the trees of New Orleans, those glorious live oaks. Pine, birch, and others whose names escape me. These are the trees I grew up with. This was real foliage; though the colors haven’t really turned yet, I am glad to see that they haven’t fallen either. My brother is waiting for me, or is about to be, and as he has never been one for patience, I breeze through the terminal, bumping into the few people who do not get out of my way. My brother had just been down in New Orleans two weeks ago to visit me, stopping for the weekend during his drive home from Wyoming after quitting his job as an oil field engineer for a fracking company to join the Israeli army. Pause - I know that this is the part where I should talk about my worry and grief over his decision to move to such a dangerous part of the world and then go one step further, putting himself in harm’s way by joining the army. But it feels good to have him be the one in the Spotlight of Questionable Judgment. I had my fair share of that, getting in trouble for drugs and booze during high school and even after, having two knee surgeries a year apart that most doctors, including my father, doubted the validity of the injury and need to cut, and most recently my accident. Ok, unpause. The portion of those 72 hours we spent together were drunken misadventures. Otherwise, I was lying in my bed claiming to do homework or be studying while my soon-to-be-soldier brother was left to read and browse the internet alone. “Nah man don’t worry about it. You should study if you need to; don’t feel bad. I shouldn’t be the reason you don’t study.” So I went to my room, took my prescribed cocktail of xanax or valium and dropped out for a while to my sludgy sanctuary of sleep.
“What’s up, hermano?” he charms as I settle into the car. That’s one of our few inside jokes; an Arrested Development in-joke, so its not even that original. We do our ritualistic I’m not quite sure how to handle this side hug, and I thank him for picking me up. Fraifeld’s have never been great at emotions. Now it’s time to apologize though. I had missed my plane in the morning by a few minutes and then slept through the flight that I had been waiting for on standby. It had a seat for me and everything. It was classic OP. Leaving out that I had slept through the intercom calling all around MSY for OP to take his seat on the standby flight was also classic me. “Where were you? We called your name a bunch of times, and there was a seat for you!” “Really,” I challenged the desk attendant, “I didn’t hear it at all.” Of course I hadn’t. That much was true. You hear nothing during strung-out naps. I might as well have been dead to the world; I could have been in one of those crypts and not noticed that anything was weird. So here I am getting in town eight hours later than I am supposed to. My brother gives me some shit for it and then asks in a rare mischievous tone if I am ok with not rushing home for dinner and Kol Nidre. What do I care? God and I aren’t on the best terms these days. As far as I’m concerned, there may be no terms to be had. Sure, I tell my scheming brother as we speed off to the closest Mickey D’s to satisfy his endless hunger. Heis one that is prone to become hangry at any given moment so I’m more than happy to oblige him. Hanger averted, the updates about the parents start flying out of my brother's mouth with the disdain and confusion that was not at all surprising to hear from my older brother who had not had the experience, or misfortune, of living alone with our parents. He’d been doing it for two weeks. I had done it for a year of high school after he went off to college and then for a little more than a year after my accident. We still aren’t going to discuss the accident right now though. “and I finally told Mom that if she has anything else to say to me about the car that she better not be bitching about it cause Dad gave her ample time and options and…” Brother tends to side with our father more than our mom these days. Mom worries too much, my brother would say, it paralyzes her decision making. She gets upset over things that she has no control over. She is too indecisive, anxious. my brother would say all this and more about our poor mother who shared the experience of having a tortured psyche with me. But no, in his mind he wasn’t purposefully backing Dad or being oppositional to Mom. Dad just happened to be right in his’s eyes most of the time these days. My brother has logic’s back, you could say succinctly. Top two black-and-white thinkers I have ever encountered. I know that its hard for him to understand that emotion, stress, whatever, can and sometimes must override the pure logical solution. I always have the urge to smack him for it with the hope that both of us would crack up afterwards. After all, it is unbelievably ironic. Growing up, things were different. Growing up, my brother couldn’t stand our father. Growing up, he would torture my brother at Bar Mitzvah parties by offering to pay whichever girl in his class kissed him first. Growing up, he made travelling, a common occurrence, a nightmare for my brother. Growing up, my brother once unapologetically punched my dad in the balls with the might of a Super Sayain. Basically what I’m trying to get you to understand is that Dad, unintentionally (he has terrible social skills. Definitely probably somewhere on the spectrum,) made my brothers’s childhood hell. Witnessing all of that strife, as a young child, as the younger brother, as the one consistently trying to play peacemaker, fucked me up proper, and by proxy, I guess my brother and dad made my childhood hell. I couldn’t make a damn bit of sense of it. And it was all based on nonsense and control anyway, so I still hardly understand why most of those things happened and even less clear is how our normal-enough nuclear family could let that malarkey, for lack of a better term as I believe there is no adequate term for that degree of bullshit, go on as long as it did. But what I do understand is how my mom would seemingly transform into an ugly, bitchy, witch – all words she used during these transformations to describe herself – in order to stand up to her husband, the man who was bullying her son. You see, Mom understands trauma, and not just because she’s a therapist. She lives it, has lived with it for a long time, knows it on a first name basis. As a young girl, she was witness to my Aunt always finding herself in trouble and being spanked or hit with a switch that she would have to pick out herself from the yard. She saw what it did to her sister as the victim, and she knew what it did to her as a witness, and she knew what watching the news reels during Vietnam – bodies, lots of bodies – did to her as a young woman. She understands, and I agree, that being a witness can be a lot like being a victim. Or just like it. So while at the time it was all scary and confusing, I understand now where those transformations came from. I understand why at a gas station in some city, maybe Tucson?, during one of those cataclysmic family vacations (that in truth were medical conventions my dad had, or rather chose, to go to and got to bring us along, basically for free.) my mom undid her seatbelt and exited the car to confront my dad as he filled the gas tank of the rental car and said in response to whatever he had just said, “Well then you can be the one to call the lawyer.” I wasn’t that old, but I knew what kind of lawyer she meant. That is the closest that either of my parents have come to using the D-word in the presence of me or my brother. Even though he was the one being antagonized, watching all those bullshit fights between my brother and my dad, between my upper-middle class-let’s-find-something-to-argue-about-for-no-reason parents, traumatized me, made my childhood a wannabe war zone. I tune back in to what my brother’s saying and stop thinking about those formative childhood memories when he matter-of-factly throws out, “So Mom told you about the rabbi and that we’re doing services?” I wonder if he’s trying to pull my leg at first, but he had said it with a smirk too Jack Nicholson Joker-esque for it to be a joke. He would never give that much away with body language when attempting a serious prank. I manage to grunt out a bewildered um no or uh what, something like that. He doesn’t miss a beat and that grin stays like white on rice. “Yeah, so the Rabbi is either really sick or already dead, and Fionna just found out yesterday and is freaking out – of course. So she asked Mom if we could slash would do it since she knew we would both be in town, and Mom said we definitely could and probably would be willing.” I process what he just told me and immediately wonder if its fucked up, or how fucked up it is, that I am considerably more surprised and focused on having to lead services than I am concerned about the rabbi’s health. My reaction: “Sweet, sounds like we get to make Fiona’s wet dream come true.”
Fiona has to be one of the most pure hearted, well intentioned, and tenacious persons on this Earth. As a congregation that hasn’t had a rabbi for well over a decade, Fiona, with her para-rabbinic degree, or license, or whatever the fuck, has managed to extend the presence of Jewish life in my hometown of Danville, Virginia much longer than it should have existed. Rural southern Virginia isn’t a good place to be a lot of things, but a temple with a diminishing skeleton of a congregation has to be near the top of that list. Danville s the kind of town where everyone smiles and waves to strangers, says yes and no maam or sir. Danville's the kind of town with a couple large industries that serve as employer for most of the small town’s residents. Dan River Mill used to be the icon of Danville. Its biggest employer. Its reason people knew anything about Danville aside from having listened to “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down” by the Band or “The Wreck of the Ole ‘97.” But as the decades went on, aging the Greatest Generation to retirement and beyond and their Baby Boomer children nearly there, and Wall Street shit the bed, the Mill became less and less salient to Danville’s identity. Its tall red brick building visible as the only landmark from anywhere in Danville its last true relevance. Until finally some company from India bought it eight or nine years back. Danvillians collectively held their breath for a triumphant resurgence of their once proud staple, but that is not how things played out. The Indians intended to tear down the mill, building by building, brick by brick, and sell those iconic red bricks that once formed the buildings’ structure as well as its and the town’s identities. At the time, I didn’t understand that people losing their jobs and a high unemployment rate would soon affect me on a personal level. I didn’t care about the layoffs. I cared that, sooner or later, the tall red brick building, with the massive light-up Virgin Mary with baby Jesus abreast that I passed every morning at the start of my commute to school, would be gone. These days, all Danville has going for it are the Goodyear plant, the hospital, and an Ikea factory that made it on the Daily Show when the employees dipped their toes in the quagmire of unionizing. And of course, Danville’s biggest claim to fame, the, depending on who you ask, unfortunate or proud distinction of being the last capitol of the Confederacy. So you can imagine why Danville is also the kind of town where all the Jewish kids deal with Jew jokes and Holocaust jokes growing up and either completely assimilate or move away after college. This left the Temple a once affable and reasonably sized congregation for a town so small and in the south, as a fossilized congregation of mostly geriatrics with the handful of middle age former Yuppies, like my folks, sprinkled in. I’d seen so many familiar faces go over the years, been to so many funerals that I didn’t understand the pain and grief of death, the finality of it, its true gravity, until I was standing graveside at my grandfather’s funeral this past summer. But God bless Fiona for being the ever-worker bee that makes sure the Temple survived and had Shabbat services almost every Friday night.
Back in the car with my brother, I’m thinking bless her heart, because I can imagine the Chernobyl sized panic attack she has to have been living the last couple days. He is still chuckling over my quip about fulfilling Fionna's fantasy, and now we sit, listening to what ever shitty Pandora station he chose – more than likely T-Swift but I’m not certain – driving home, ready to simultaneously bullshit the service for the most holy day of the Jewish calendar and shock the ultra-reform, aged congregation with a mostly Hebrew service. Our goal in part, to deprive the choir of its tacky organ and shrill operatic arrangements of the Hebrew liturgy as often as we can. I get a strange feeling as we drive into Danville, past the Dan river that divides town and is its namesake. Past one of the last standing buildings of real red brick, a specter of Dan River Mill. Across the recentely renovated bridge, all modern looking and with four lanes now instead of the two I grew up with, when everyone in town called it Smurf Bridge because of the Tarheel blue railings - even though it had long been sun-faded grey and metastasized with cancerous rust. All these familiar things seem so alien to me, returning from having begun to establish myself in New Orleans. It was my first real semester back at college since the accident and the surgeries, since I got off the pain medicine. It feels like the groove I have carved out for myself is wobbling, threatening to collapse.
