My brother wrote me this note when he was 21 years old. It’s about the most legible thing that he ever wrote. Along with the epilepsy and diabetes insipidus that probably resulted from brain damage, the damage caused by the beating, he also had poor eye-hand coordination and his writing was barely legible.
It was a great struggle for Johnny to write anything and this had been a problem since he was a small child.
He had a milder form of paranoid-schizophrenia than my sister, but it was debilitating just the same.
In 1964, my brother was one of the first students who went to both regular and special education classes. Before then, special ed classes, and special ed students were kept completely separate from the regular student body. This is what drew attention to him. He had always fit in with the “regular” students before the change in his school routine. Putting him in special ed for a few hours each day is what alerted the students that he was now different and so began the bullying.
So when I say that the kids ran from him in droves, I mean 100% of the regular students in an upper middle class junior high in Northeast San Antonio, Texas, ran from my little brother in droves down the halls every day, screaming that the monkey man was coming, and then shrieking with laughter when they’d finally provoked him and he’d come back lunging at them, eventually charging and sometimes chasing them, trying to scare them away, only to garner more laughter and heckling and justify their claim that he was indeed, their monkey man.
For the record, my brother never hurt a single thing in his life, intimidating as his appearance may have been for some people.
He had no problem with understanding things. He was as intelligent as me, even more-so. He was candid in sharing his astute observations made with the unfiltered clear sightedness of a child. His words cut to the chase, but anyone who knew him could tell you that his intentions were always kind. Like me, he never liked bullies.
So, despite all the social bullying and ostracizing he had suffered in his childhood, as an adult he was pleasant with everyone. His nurses and doctors always seemed to adore him. People adored him when he was interacting, that is. It was the interactions that were rare. He spent most of his time walking around in circles talking to himself, laughing at himself, yelling at himself, fighting with demons, laughing with demons.
I’ve saved this note that my brother wrote to me in 1975, 46 years ago. It represents so much to me. I keep it in a ziploc bag with all my photographs. He wrote me this letter on a very special day when I picked him up on the eastern side of New Mexico and took him to my home in Socorro, NM, a few hundred miles to the west. He hung around my house for the day. It was a house all alone at the base of the Lemitar mountains.
These mountains weren’t accessible for camping, and they had a good share of rattlesnakes, so the mountains in my backyard were for scenery only, as far as I was concerned. The house cost $30 per month and had two bedrooms and a huge space in the back for a garden. On the day Johnny visited, we had all the windows open in the house and the breeze was blowing through. I played music as I cleaned the house and Johnny hung out, taking walks both inside and outside the house.
At one point during the visit, I heard him in the back of house, softly crying, and discovered him in the back room, lying on the bed in tears. This was the first time I’d seen my brother cry or show any weakness since his junior high days. He’d developed a hard core long before then and didn’t like to show any kind of vulnerability. I was surprised to find him crying and I sat down beside him and asked him what was wrong. He told me that he just wanted to know what it felt like to be normal. I was devastated. I guess that over time I’d come to convince myself that he didn’t realize he wasn’t normal, that he’d learned to be comfortable somehow, living in his own world like that.
I’d already had my life knocked off track three years in a row trying to rescue my little sister. My school career had been put on hold four years earlier when I went to jail and faced a trial for an older sister’s crime. This was my first time back in school since then and it was a respected college for engineering. I was working at the college library. I was 25. It would have been a lot to give up in order to try and take care of Johnny, and I couldn’t afford it, realistically. I wished I could take my brother in and help him heal, but it didn’t seem realistic at the time. In retrospect, I wish now that I had tried.
I took him back to Artesia and it was a long hard drive back home that night. A few days later I discovered he had placed this note in the pocket of my car door. If you knew my brother, you’d understand what an accomplishment it was to write a letter with such clarity and have the foresight to plant it in my car. It was a keepsake to remember how much that visit meant to him. In case you cannot read it, the note says “Please remember Fleetwood Mac, the Rock and Roll music we heard in Socorro, NM”.
I never forgot that note, or that day, so on the night he was dying and they let him talk to me on the phone, from 1000 miles away, I kept telling him “I remember you and me and Socorro and Fleetwood Mac” . It had been 32 years since he’d written that note, so I’ll never know if he knew what I was talking about. All I could hear was his fading voice softly telling me that he loved me over and over again, until my big sister took the phone away from him. I was halfway to Texas when they called and told me he was gone.
The night I returned from his funeral, after the 1000 mile drive, I dropped on the floor of my home, now having my second heart attack, and they flew me to Albuquerque for what would be my second stent procedure. As they wheeled me in for the surgery the doctors were playing Fleetwood Mac. I was astonished that a healthcare staff so young would be listening to old tunes like that but they were.
And I knew in no uncertain terms that this was Johnny sending his message back to me. He remembered. Tears rolled down my face as I heard the music and the doctors tried to comfort me, thinking I was crying about myself. I couldn’t tell them it was my brother, that I’d just lost him and he was sending his love through that music. It was too fresh. I just smiled at them through my tears, and then lost consciousness.
Oikos 