Think about that person in your family who’s always messing up. Not only that, it’s that person that always needs your help when they’re in trouble. You always need to fix a problem they create. You always need to protect them, sometimes even from themselves.
(Think! Can you see that person in your head? If you can’t see that person, then that person is you! Think about it!)
Anyway, it’s a habit for them — you know, screwing up. Maybe it’s always been a habit for them. It’s a pattern for you too — fixing it. It’s something you’re so used to — maybe even something you expect to happen! And this whole dynamic almost seems to define your relationship…
…until it doesn’t.
That person in my family and my life is my brother. We’re four in total, I’ve got two brothers and a sister. I’m the oldest. My first brother is two years younger than me and we’re different people.
He’s emotional. I’m calm.
He’s aggressive. I’m diplomatic.
He feels. I think.
He acts, then thinks.
I actually have a decision-making process.
He’s trying to figure out what he did wrong 5 years ago to get him where he is now.
I have a five-year plan.
He doesn’t know what a five-year plan is.
I remember one time when we still lived under the same roof. I was finishing high school and I was learning how to create formulas in Excel so I could do a financial forecast for my first year of college. I looked over to my brother’s desk and he was drawing penises on Photoshop. Penises and boobs.
Penises, boobs, and what looked like vaginas. But he wasn’t getting those quite right…
Do you see where I’m going with this?
Now, before you start thinking that I’m the arrogant, aloof, asshole big brother who doesn’t understand, respect or accept the wonderful eccentricities of his younger and more “free spirit” little brother.
Before you think that I just want to pick on him for some reason, let me tell you some stories that perfectly represent the dynamic of our relationship. I think you’ll understand things better.
Here are my three stories:
The slingshot incident
I was 14, he was 12. Our dad had just given him a slingshot. Oh, not just any slingshot. We’d had wooden slingshots before that we made ourselves. We could never hit anything with it. We tried. But this one wasn’t just any slingshot, it was a professional, ergonomic, leather and black metal slingshot with padded wrist support and a rubber handle. Holding it felt like you were holding a gun if you had never actually held a gun before. The thing was a hand cannon and my brother couldn’t wait to take it outside and wreak havoc with it.
My dad knew my brother was going to do something he shouldn’t so he tried to put the fear of God into him. Tried being the keyword here.
My dad pulled him aside and said, “Don’t you even think about shooting any animals with this. No birds, no dogs, no cats, no little bunny rabbits! Only God knows what would happen to us if you kill an animal with this — they would probably deport us from this country!” (Just an aside: we were recent immigrants in the U.S. and we didn’t quite know the rules).
My brother didn’t listen to a word my dad said. He was mesmerized with the slingshot. I remember him looking at it with the same intensity that he would look at his first torn up porn magazine page a few years later. You know that look?
Anyway, you don’t give a kid a slingshot and expect him not to shoot rocks, pellets and marbles at living animals in the same way that you give a kid a BB gun and expect him not to shoot his eye out.
So, you can see where this story is going. The next day, I’m playing baseball with some friends.
Matheus is nearby — hunting.
He’s looking for anything that’s alive and that can’t speak.
Those were his only criteria, I think.
Is it alive?
Good.
Can it tell on me?
No?
Oh, good.
Did he find something to shoot at? Yes. Yes, he did.
He found a bird.
Now, if you’re a city boy or a city girl like we were, you probably didn’t grow up around hunting and you probably don’t know that animals, whether it’s an elephant in Africa, or a bear in Canada, or a bird in the backwoods of Kentucky, don’t necessarily always die right away after you shoot them.
Sometimes it takes a second shot.
Sometimes it takes more.
Sometimes it just takes time.
And oftentimes, it’s not a pretty sight.
Well, Matheus hit that bird.
And, the bird didn’t die.
This wasn’t part of his plan.
This freaked him out.
His noble idea of being a hunter was drastically destroyed by the reality of having to deal with the responsibility of taking a life — of dealing with an actual dying animal in pain and desperation.
What he did was stupid, but he wasn’t a psychopath. The bird wasn’t the only one who was desperate.
Matheus found me at the baseball pitch. He’s was crying. His eyes were flooded with tears and his tears ran down his face. He could barely talk.
He babbled and sobbed.
I understood.
I picked up one of the baseball bats that were laying aside and asked him, “Where is it, Matheus?”
And he took me there.
It was a robin.
Big red chest.
Beautiful bird.
It was flapping around desperately. Its wings were broken.
I think my brother expected the rock to just bounce off the bird. Maybe just knock it down the tree.
It didn’t.
The rock went through it like a bullet.
Violently and without compassion.
It was going to die but it wasn’t going to die soon.
Action is better than inaction. I justified what I was about to do to myself first. Either I fix this problem now or the bird suffers for another few hours, days maybe and dies anyway.
I took care of the problem.
Afterwards, we dug a hole and we buried it deep. It wasn’t meant to be a grave. We didn’t mark it. It was really just to hide the evidence.
No one had to know. No one needed to know.
Problem solved.
The desperate voicemail incident
All right. That was heavy.
Sorry.
Let’s lighten things up a bit.
This story is from many years later. I’m a sophomore in college in the U.S. At this point, my dad is finished with his coursework and my whole family has moved back to Brazil, including my brother.
I come home one day and I see I have 4 messages in my voicemail machine. Remember those? A voicemail machine.
Four messages flashing. I click to play.
It’s my brother.
He’s desperate.
He can barely breathe as he tries to speak.
“Please, Filipe, please, you’ve gotta help me!”
I immediately think: oh shit, oh shit, what happened?
What the hell did he do this time that he needs to call me across the world, which he never does in the first place, to help him solve.
Let me remind you, I’m in the U.S. and he’s in Brazil.
“You have to help me, man, please, please…”
At this point I’ve got both my hands on my head massaging my temples, expecting the worst.
Did he kill another animal?
Oh my God, did he kill a person?
Did he borrow money from the wrong people?
Did he get a girl pregnant?
Did he get caught with drugs?
Hard drugs or just marijuana? Cause, you know, marijuana isn’t so bad. I mean, he’ll probably go to jail for a night or two but it’s really not that bad. Wait, that’s here in the U.S. What are marijuana drug laws in Brazil like?
How bad did he screw up this time?
And then he says it…
“Man, you’ve gotta help me, I need help, you’ve gotta help me please…
“I bought something on eBay and I don’t know how to pay for it!”
What?!?!?!
“Oh, and I don’t have the money to pay for it either.”
Oh, shiiiiiiit!
Thank God.
No one’s hurt.
The animals are safe.
There’s no girl carrying the spawn of my brother inside her.
There’s no marijuana involved in this.
Apparently, he signed up for eBay. Got into the excitement of bidding on a South Park Stan Marsh hat. Won the auction. Then realized that he had NO IDEA how to use Paypal and how to actually pay for the damn thing.
This problem cost me $5.33 plus shipping — a lot less than the dignity and integrity I had to give up when I killed that bird years before.
Oh, and remember that I told you there were 4 messages in the machine. They were all from him. Each more desperate than the other, each more emotional.
The “I-broke-our-little-brother” incident
I told you I have two brothers and a sister. Our little brother was named after our dad so we just call him Junior. Junior is the youngest one and we loved beating the crap out of him. What we couldn’t get away doing to each other, we’d both do to him.
You know, boys. We roughhouse.
I’m 11. My brother is 9. Junior is 5. I get home to find — you guessed it — a desperate Matheus.
My parents aren’t around. The maid is taking care of us — kind of. Maids aren’t like babysitters. Babysitters get paid by the hour so they really care about you for those few hours. Maids get paid monthly so they don’t really care that much. If you aren’t bleeding horribly, they don’t care. They have better things to do. Those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves. Those wet clothes are not going to hang themselves. You know what I mean.
Matheus walks over to me.
He’s desperate.
But this time it’s different. He isn’t emotional. He isn’t over-the-top desperate. He’s done something bad and he needs help. Shit hasn’t hit the fan quite yet. It’s going to when mom and dad get home.
But that hasn’t happened yet.
He walks over to me and says it…
“I think I broke Junior.”
I immediately look at Junior who’s sitting on the couch across from us. He doesn’t look like he’s in pain. He’s eating a popsicle and watching TV.
“I gave him the popsicle so he would stay still.” Matheus explains.
Good thinking.
“What do you mean you think you broke him?” I ask.
He walks over to Junior and stands him up. Junior is only wearing underwear. We both bend down. Matheus points to Junior’s hip.
“See? Here.” He looks at me. “It’s bent. Don’t you see?”
“Dad is going to kill me!” He looks like he’s going to start crying.
I look over the area above Junior’s hips. I turn him gently to see him in profile. I see the abnormality. I turn him back to face me. I compare the two sides of his hips.
“Yes, there’s definitely something different on this side.” I point to Junior’s left side.
I look up to Junior’s face. He’s still eating his popsicle and watching TV. He doesn’t care about what’s going on and he’s obviously not in pain.
I touch his hip but keep my eye on his face. I’m watching to see if there’s pain. There’s no reaction. I push on his hip a bit more. No pain. No reaction.
I place both my hands on either side of his hips and I try to bend it back to normal.
No reaction. But it also doesn’t work.
It was a good try.
He’s a little bent. But he’s not “very” bent.
It’s imperceptible.
“You can barely see it,” I tell Matheus. “I mean, you would really need to be looking for a bent hip to notice this.”
He’s not in pain. So, that’s okay, right? If it were a big deal, he’d be crying and screaming and we’d be riding in an ambulance right now, right?
So, I pull Matheus aside and I lay out the plan.
We’re going to dress him up so the bent hip isn’t so conspicuous to our parents when they arrive.
(Just an aside: I was 11, so I obviously didn’t use the word conspicuous. I’m paraphrasing)
I mean, you can barely see it but we’re not taking any chances here. We’re not idiots. Our dad has the temper of a bull but our mom has the eyes of an eagle.
But, there’s another thing on our side. Probably the most important thing. Junior obviously doesn’t know he know has a bent hip. For all we know, it was already bent before we saw it.
You know what I mean?
I’m trying to give you a glimpse into the minds of an 11 year-old and a 9 year-old concocting a plan to keep their little brother’s henceforth seemingly deformed hip a secret from their parents.
So, we put the plan into action. We started dressing him up. We gave him shorts to wear. He put those on just fine. Then, when we gave him a shirt, he refused it.
“Oh no, you have to wear it.”
“Don’t wanna,” Junior said. “Why do I have to?”
“Because you’ll get sick if you eat ice cream without a shirt on. Everybody knows that. Matheus, go get him another popsicle.” I said, and Matheus rushed to the kitchen and came back promptly with another popsicle.
The shirt was finally on.
Mission accomplished.
Now, all we have to do is wait. Wait for the moment of truth. Wait for mom and dad to get home and NOT notice Junior’s bent hip.
Mom and dad arrived.
And… they… never… noticed… it.
We never said anything.
Junior couldn’t care less about his bent hip. I don’t think he ever realized he had one.
We all forgot about it.
Problem solved.
***
So, here’s the thing. I helped my brother solve problems that were real and big (at least to us kids). I helped him solve problems that seemed huge but weren’t so serious. And I helped him solve problems that weren’t really problems at all (just don’t tell my mom).
One time I fought with my brother about something he said or did, I don’t remember what. It doesn’t matter why. What I do remember is what I told my mom after the fact.
I told her, “If Matheus wasn’t my brother, I wouldn’t be friends with him.”
I meant to say, he’s got a completely different personality from mine. If we weren’t bound by blood, he would probably be someone that I wouldn’t befriend. A stranger that passes unnoticed through my life.
But he isn’t a stranger. He’s my brother. And, no matter how crazy our brotherhood dynamic gets, he’s always going to be my brother. If he screws up, I’m going to be there. That is — if he wants me to be there. And likely, even if he doesn’t.
I want to tell you one last story to close this up with.
We were kids. We were playing with other kids. The playing got rough and a fight broke out. One boy picked up a piece of wood and hit me hard and fast across the face.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been hit hard across the face with an object like that. You don’t really feel the pain right away. At first, you’re in shock. I remember thinking… holy shit, I just got hit hard on the face with a stick.
Whoa.
The boy who hit me realized how serious it was and he was in shock too. He stepped away and dropped the stick.
That’s when the pain comes rushing in to your face. About 3 seconds after the actual hit.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” I screamed.
My brother saw the whole thing from a few meters away and he went absolutely crazy.
The kid who hit me was older and way taller than me. My brother was shorter than I was. But, did this stop Matheus from giving this boy the playground beating of his life? No, it didn’t.
I didn’t actually see it happening. I just heard it happening. And I heard about it afterwards.
While it was happening, I was on my knees, cradling my face and my bleeding nose. All I heard was Matheus screaming…
“You never hit my brother with a stick!
You never hit my brother with a stick!
You never hit my brother with a stick!
You never hit my brother with a stick!
You never hit my brother with a stick!
You never hit my brother with a stick!
You never hit my brother with a stick!
You never do that.”
Apparently, he repeated this chant over and over again while he beat this kid up. Not with a stick, with his bare hands.
So, moral of the whole story: it’s really good when your brother has your back.