Day 5 and beyond. Reflecting on who my brother was

I wrote this entry today about looking back on my brother’s life. Please read them in day order…

 

 

 

I thought about a guy I met at my brother’s funeral called Jim. As a boy, Jim had been in my class at primary school. I had never spoken to him. I remember seeing him bash up the teacher and jumping out the second story window.

 

Jim and his brothers had spent most of their years in and out of institutions, foster care or in the juvenile justice system. I remember seeing Jim’s decrepit, rotten, fall down drunk father walking to the bottlo’ and back. Jim’s brothers were all now heroin addicts. Jim rode a motorbike, hadn’t finished school, was unemployed and lived on his own.

 

Jim told me how Marty had taught him to play the guitar; how Marty was the only stranger his dog wouldn’t bite. How Marty used to come over to their housing commission house and vacuum and clean up year’s worth of neglect, or bring them food, booze or pot.

 

I had never spoken to Jim before, he is not someone I would have thought I would be friends with before this funeral introduction. I spent many subsequent days at Jim’s place, drinking, talking, being befriended by his mongrel dog. Jim and I were poles apart in terms of our life experiences but someone I knew would become a life time friend. Jim felt that he would be alone for the rest of his life.

 

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.”

James Baldwin

 

Marty had been a bad boy in his youth, hanging out with his Pacific Islander mates, stealing cars and street fighting anyone that would look his way. He had studied Choy Le Fut, Kung Fu in China town with them and their Asian mates. He was strong, lean and was known for his ‘fists of fury’. He was the local terminator. If any of his friends were embroiled in a fight, some one would go fetch Marty.

 

He had a long standing feud with the boys from Eddy Street, Lilyfield. That year, at my eighteenth birthday, my brother high on LSD and speed came out of the pub at the end of the night to be attacked by twenty boys.

 

I remember being filled with this animal protective spirit, I ran into the melee when no other man would. I punched and kicked and bit my way to getting my brother out of that situation.

 

I remember seeing police paddy wagons surround the area but they were too scared to get out. Finally, my brother regained consciousness and went on a rampage and smacked most of these guys out until the rest made a run for it.   

 

On another night, he came and went straight into the bathroom. I followed him in. He was in a bath filled with blood; the <st1:address

w:st=”on”>Eddy Street boys had attacked him with machetes.

 

One of the Islander kid’s mum was a minister in an Evangelical church. He went along one day and had ‘accepted the spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ’ and had ‘spoken in tongues’. He had been “born again”, dunked in the big bath of God. He then denounced violence and would always talk his way out of a fight.

 

We fought a lot during this period; he tried hard to ‘save’ me. He broke all of his Led Zeppelin records as they were in his eyes ‘evil’. He didn’t want me to read ‘the philosophers’ because they had been inspired by the ‘dog arse’ (the devil). He would read and try to explain the bible to me. I had never been baptised nor had a Christian religious education. I did actually learn some of the bible stories during that period.

 

He told me about the Christian conspiracy theories of having to be vigilant in not accepting barcodes, or being tattooed, or allowing chips to be implanted under your skin, to enable a cashless society. He reminded me of the bible story of the three men who were persecuted for their Christianity who preferred to be beheaded, rather than give up their beliefs. He said that I would need to make that choice before the time came ‘the rapture’.

 

He was intense at age seventeen; he had left school and it was during the time of 20% youth unemployment. He was the ever faithful servant of God preaching the gospel to homeless kids in pool halls in Kings Cross, the cinema strip in George Street Sydney, or Redfern station.

 

The strange thing was that despite having this religious zeal, he was the most inclusive and accepting Christian I have known. He didn’t seem to judge anyone, particularly those on the fringe of society. Many of our friends, including our best friend Ben had started their own slide down with drugs and heroin addiction.

 

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it".

Rumi

 

From then on, we had a steady stream of kids stay with us that either had criminal records, were homeless, selling themselves or the mentally ill. Many were or had been drug addicts, or without family or education.

 

They would doss on my mum’s lounge room floor and her minimum wage was spent on food in those first few days and we stayed hungry for the remainder of those two weeks, as these people spent time ‘getting back up on their feet’.

 

Over the next year or two he began an inner battle. He felt that the closer he moved towards God; the more that he was hunted by the dog arse. He longed for a connection with his father, which never came. He started to experience depression and with this he ‘backslid’ into his old ways. Living with the real humanness of his wards, he was constantly exposed to what he saw as ‘temptation’.

 

His shadow side was a party boy who loved his ‘earthly delights’; music, poets, sex and drugs. He started to go to the pub, parties or raves to dance and take drugs with his mates. He had many girlfriends at the one time. They all seem to accept that was just the way it was with him.

 

<p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt”>For the next three or so years, instead of preaching he sat at home during the days now to pull cones and feverishly write poetry.

 

I tried helplessly to get him interested in getting work. I would try a number of tacts to get him involved back in day to day life. I would encourage him, nag him, berate him and beg him. He did get one opportunity to work briefly in Japan on a car exhibition and stayed on a US army base whilst he was there. He came home and thanked me; he said he ‘had the time of his life’.

 

His poetry was dark and with his depression came the odd call to come be with him before he did something ‘stupid’. On one occasion my mum (who didn’t drive) had to run for 40 minutes to get home frantic that he was going to top himself. He would cry and try and call up the spirit. He would close his door and I would hear the sad sound of “alala alalala balala balala balala balala balla”. I would go be with him and he would calm down and tell me, that speaking in tongues was better than any drug high better than any orgasm.

The year before his death, he had lost his religious zeal; he was much more reconciled to his sin sitting beside his faith. He had taken on some type of roguish, messianic quality for me then. He seemed calm and at peace.

 

"Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to".

Alan Keightley

 

The weekend before he died, I had experienced my own epiphany. Mum and I had bought him his favourite things and gave them to him the week before Christmas. I was so happy to have accepted that he was never meant to be like the rest of us and I wanted to demonstrate to him how much I just loved him the way he was, a contradiction.

 

“The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.”

John W. Gardner

 

He was so joyful that last day I spent with him, he said, today I truly feel like you love me. I can truly feel you love me. That is when he told me about the old lady, the ‘angel’ that had told him a secret. He would tell us what she said but he smiled and said, “I know everything I have done has been right. Everything is going to be alright”.

 

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit".

e.e. cummings

 

Later in his bedroom, Marty and I lied down together; he hugged me as I cried. I was fighting my own battle with depression. He cuddled me and told me everything was going to be alright. As I left the room he said to me, “Never give up on life Blue, never give up on life”.

 

In the days after the funeral, I had read the cards and letters from people had sent to express their condolences.

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They were all of a similar pattern, I remember one in particular, a letter from a guy who wasn’t able to make it, he lived interstate now, he said. He had been a heroin addict living on the streets and that since he had Marty. He had helped him get clean, he went back home to his parents, had gone back to school, met his now wife and was now studying law.   

 

Marty managed to believe in everyone but himself.

 

Post script –

Jim has a beautiful, intelligent partner who he has been living with for years. He has also been working for years and has lost all of the bitterness he once had about life.

 

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”

Edmund Burke