Brothers who are not brothers
Hank carries a picture of him and Pauly from back when they first met at the Little Falls Laundry, having shown it to me so many times the edges are worn from his greasy fingers plucking it out of his wallet again and again.
He had someone snap the shot when they were both outside on
the street in Little Falls and tries to convince me he and Pauly look alike,
like brothers, and then gets angry with me when I fail to see it, though both of
them have long hair, wear jeans and eyeglasses.
He needs this so much I sometimes suspect, Hank might even
murder Pauly’s real brother just to take his place, and once plotted to marry
Pauly’s girlfriend’s sister on the off chance he might become a brother-in-law
as the next best thing.
Pauly and I don’t look anything like each other, yet we’ve
grown close, he telling me stories about how long it took for his mother to
give birth to him, how he ought to have been born on Christmas, delaying for
three whole days of labor before finally consenting to embrace the world.
Hank couldn’t wait for Christmas to be born and hurried his
arrival on Christmas Eve, expecting to get a birthday present as well as a Christmas
present every year when the season comes round.
“Wouldn’t it have been amazing if we’d been born on the same
day,” Hank told me once, still clutching that stupid picture and the fantasy of
brotherhood even Garrick – who was born a day before Pauly – can no longer
tolerate and tells Hank to “shut the fuck up.”
Garrick, Pauly and I all at the same Kindergarten teacher at
St. Brendan’s although at different times, and long before we actually met, a
humorous memory each of us carries as this is some other kind of bond a
frustrated Hank can’t share, each of us living briefly in the same neighborhood
in Paterson where we likely passed each other without knowing it, meeting years
later elsewhere as strangers.
I keep thinking of how I made my mother wait for me, even
though I was born in May, as if holding out for Mothers’ Day rather than
Christmas, the long hours of labor in which I resisted coming into this world,
somehow suspecting I wouldn’t like what I found when I got here, an amusing tidbit
Pauly and I sometimes ponder along with the question of afterlife and whether
or not we have been recycled like old newspaper, choosing the circumstances of
our new life after having lived previous lives before.
Pauly is always off on these strange tangents when I’m with
him, as if for some reason, he’s come to believe I understand him better than
the others would, more than the always practical Garrick, who tells him to “shut
the fuck up,” when he gets in these moods, and the always disappointed Hank who
claims he would have chosen to be Pauly’s brother had he had a choice.
Pauly gets irritated when I tell him I would not have come
back if I’d been here before, knowing what I know now, having seen what this
place is really about, preferring birth as a death sentence than a multiple
life sentence for crimes we’ve never committed, or committed in a previous life
none of us can remember, that slap on the butt we all get when we first come
out, our first real sense of the pain we will continue to feel until we stopped
feeling pain at all.
“Don’t be morbid,” Pauly tells me when I’m in this mood with
him, and then hands me the joint as if that will make me forget, making me
laugh, making me grateful I don’t have a photo of us in my wallet as proof of a
non-existent brotherhood we already feel a part of.
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