I won’t sugar-coat it; my older brother Chuck was the bane of my existence when we were growing up in Price, Utah, where my earliest memory involves a three-tiered bunk bed in a dwelling we called “the little house.” Later on, our family moved to “the big house,” where instead of being stacked like cordwood, we three brothers were laid out side by side like enchiladas, in a double wide bed. After our kid sister Carolyn was born, we three sons were relocated to a basement barracks-like bedroom, each of us with his own cot and foot locker.
Jim, the eldest, was the over-achiever. Me, the youngest, was the best behaved. Chuck, stuck in the middle, liked to describe himself as the black sheep of the family, even though in the eyes of his parents he was nothing of the sort.
As we were growing up, Chuck expended a great deal of energy trying to kill me. In one of our home movies, the two of us can be seen seated in a giant teacup at Disneyland. Chuck has a grip on the wheel and is spinning the cup so violently that I’m hanging well over the rim, my head snapped back at an unnatural angle. To say the least, Chuck was having a better time at Disneyland than was his little brother.
The year was 1956, the first time I ever laid eyes on Los Angeles. I was put off by the jam-packed freeways and hillsides covered by row upon row of lookalike bungalows. Chuck, on the other hand, was intrigued. By the early Nineteen Sixties he’d found a job there and quickly adapted to the Southern California lifestyle. Meantime, I’d taken up residence in a one-room shack on the backside of the Wasatch Range with no running water save for nearby Snake Creek. One day Chuck came by for a visit but didn’t stay long.
Temperamentally, the two of us are opposites. Whereas I spent a lot of time avoiding bullies in middle and high school, Chuck was involved in a scuffle almost every other day. Should a lowrider occupied by Hispanics drive past, he’d shout, “Junket!” Evidently, to liken a hot rod to a Chinese sailing vessel is a grievous insult, one that inevitably results in fisticuffs. Which my brother thoroughly enjoyed!
Years later, I figured out that the insult was actually “Junk it!” That set me on a path whereby I became interested in proper elocution, the practice of which can result in upward mobility even if you happen to reside in a one-room shack in the boondocks.
In our late teens, Chuck and I finally had something in common in that each of us had become enamored of a girl named Kay–not the same Kay, but similar in that each was a redhead and each considered herself to be of a higher class than us. Thus both Chuck and I were strung along until finally a suitable suitor came along, at which time we were summarily dumped. Free at last, each of us went on to marry women of much higher class, sans the baggage of snobbery. That said, Chuck could not resist boasting about his many prized possessions, all of which were costlier than mine. I’d retaliate by engaging in onedownsmanship; i.e., bragging about how little I paid for my stuff at Goodwill. It didn’t work. Shifting gears, I told him about the time my neighbor let me take the wheel of his new Nissan Z sports car. Chuck countered by declaring that a Nissan Z car is no match for his Porsche 911.
At various times, each of us had lived in Austin, Texas, although Chuck had never walked Guadalupe Street nor set foot in The Broken Spoke. Instead, he and his wife lived in a gated community adjacent to an upscale golf course. Later on, he relocated to another mansion in Ivins, Utah, where he’d be living the good life today had he not been stricken by dementia. As I type this, my brother Chuck is on his death bed somewhere in his adopted home of Los Angeles. By the time you read this, he will have most likely taken his last breath. I will mourn, same as I will mourn the loss of my other brother Jim, who currently languishes in hospice care in his adopted home of Seattle. I dearly love them both, no matter that the three of us have little in common, save for the fact we once shared cramped quarters in the basement of a not-so-big house in a little coal mining town that hardly anyone has ever heard of.
