Recognizing Him

It is him. I know it is him. That scowl, those eyes. How can two brothers be so different? The television camera did not stay focused on him for more than 10 seconds but there is no doubt it was him.

       The husky body, the dark clothes, the pale skin tone, everything matched even though it had been since two Christmases back that I had seen him in person.

       What possessed him, I flashed back, when he was only three years old, to go after one of my buddies with a hammer, intent on doing harm?

       How embarrassed was I when our fifth-grade class could hear the screaming he was doing, then recognized him, as the principal was dragging him past our door down the hallway.

       I was too young then to realize there was something gone wrong inside his head. He was obviously different from everyone else and no one seemed to know how to fix it, certainly not our parents nor even any of the various doctors they dragged him to see.

       As he grew older, his proneness to violence had times where it cooled and he would sleep for hours on end during daylight. Then be up during the night playing music on his record player that featured loud kettle drums, eerie unrecognizable instruments or electronic screeching of some sort, even explosions.

       An unskilled laborer and his much younger wife, our father and mother, were at a loss over what to do, often arguing about possible solutions. Neither of them had gone farther than high school, dad only making it to the junior year before joining the Navy because he was old enough after having gone through sixth grade twice.

       School did not seem to present that much of a challenge to my younger brother Kenneth. He did well, progressively over the years, in arithmetic, math, algebra, trigonometry and had a passing interest in physical science, rocks, the earth, minerals but would be studying in his upstairs bedroom late hours during the night with his music on and decide to throw something, a book, a pen, a coat hanger, anything he could reach, out of the window at passing vehicles then quickly turn out the lights so the occupants would not know where the object came from.

       As his age increased during his teen years, there seemed to be in him some fascination with World War Two and, in particular, Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party.

       Somewhere he found, or maybe bought with his allowance, a huge poster photo of Hitler that he affixed to one of sides of the double slanted ceiling in his room, positioned so it would be visible to anyone outside on the sidewalk looking up into his window.

       The music of Marlene Dietrich would be emanating from that window at various times, loudly blaring and startling anyone waiting at the bus stop across the street.

       His interest in this other culture grew to the point that he enlisted in the Army and made a special request to be sent to Germany after completing basic training and doing some other stateside duty in his study of weaponry.

       My buddies and I wondered if he was going to end up being rich by discovering some new type of warfare, ammunition or means of destruction as Kenneth’s interests, as he related in letters to home and rare conversations, grew in that direction.

       One time on leave, he was accompanied back home by a European female, a large, husky girl with light skin and short-cropped hair who kept her lips together at all times unless she was speaking which was a rare occurrence.

       While he was in Germany, eventually, weeks and months would pass with no word from him to anyone in the family or anyone who knew the family. Mom would write to him and there would be no answer. She got worried and sent a pleading request that he let us know if he was okay. What came in about three weeks was a postcard of the Brandenburg Gate with three sentences on the back – “I’m very busy now. I am okay. Sorry I have not written.”

       Mom found some comfort in that but I could tell she felt like she was losing a son to whatever he was involved in over there, optimistically believing it was Nicole, the female he had with him the last time he was home.

       He stayed in the Army beyond the required term of service he had signed up for, only going into his 30s before they gave him orders to transfer to southeast Asia which led him to decide this military life was now over.

       When returning to the United States, he lived at home for awhile, with no mention of Nicole at all, looking for employment and staying up all night while sleeping during the daytime.

       He found a job as a night security guard at a minimum-security prison about 90 minutes away and made good enough money that he decided to get a small house closer to there, moving out of his upstairs sanctuary to settle into that new life.

       We were never that close as brothers and the gap seemed to widen as the years wore on. He’d come home unannounced for a weekend here and there but was irregular about consistently visiting on holidays or even acknowledging that they existed.

       His life seemed to be satisfying to him but that was only because we never heard any complaints about anything. One time when the three of us decided to go see him, we called first to explain it would just be a weekend getaway.

       He answered that we could do what we wanted but that if he was busy and could not spend much time with us, that was the chance we were taking.

       With him just past 50 and me 10 years beyond that, our parents both died just a few months apart. He came to both funerals but was fairly uncommunicative and showed little emotion each time.

       It had been over a year since I had talked to him on the phone and even longer since I had seen him when the United States House of Representatives was attacked by an unruly mob on January 6, 2021.

       And there was Kenneth, wielding some sort of a pipe or elongated stick, waving it wildly among the crowd. I told no one I saw him but decided at that moment that I did not care if I ever saw him again.