Rock and Roll

My little brother should have been a rock star. It doesn’t take much to imagine him, while working an axe, spitting into a mosh pit and starting shit with the biggest biker bumping heads to his music.

I understand I should not be writing about family. I have been warned people don’t like to be fodder for my daily thoughts. Unfortunately while walking the dog this morning this thought just popped into my head and wouldn’t let go.

My brother has had it rough for a lot of different reasons. He is tough and has always overcome. As far as really becoming a true rock and roll star, he spent his childhood suffering from otitis externa. He had tubes placed in both ears to help with drainage, or at least I imagine that’s why they place the tubes in people who suffer from this malady. I am not sure if it affected his hearing. I understand Beethoven was completely deaf, but he at least got a chance to learn what music sounded like before losing his ability to sense it with his ears. My brother may be tone deaf, or he may hear just find, I don't know for sure, all i can say is that he cant sing for shit and has never learned an instrument. Though he has supposed limitations and technical ones for sure, this guy loves music. He pumps it. he likes it loud and he likes it mean. I guess in the beginning he was into all the classics of rock, that I am sure, he was my teacher when it came to Hendrix and Joplin, but his taste has gone beyond that and has become murky in violence and noise.

I just don't get.

I am a book on tape type guy. I like podcasts and news radio programing.

I like calm and quiet moments with books.

I don’t seek out music to enjoy. If pressured I will admit I like songs that tell stories. I enjoy musicals.

I won’t search for them, I let these experiences find me.

My brother though has a collection of music that is amazing, ream after ream of CD's. If he joined the computer age I am certain he would have millions of torrents filling hundreds of hard drives.

I just don’t have enough interest in it to care too much one way or the other. This frustrates him. We have very little in common to talk about.

He also collects comic books.

I wish I could get into them, but fail here also. I have recently begun to read the Amazing Spiderman. I am starting from the beginning and have gotten to the 20th issue printed out of the 800 or so published since the sixties icon was created.

If we talked, he would not be impressed; I like Spiderman, or at least the idea of that super hero, he likes other stuff and no matter what I say about it he has to have what feels like the opposite opinion. I have come to learn there is little worth in having conversations about anything with him because of this little contrary habit of his.

It’s cool he likes loud music and abstract comics I have never heard of, but this is not what makes him rock and roll.

What makes him rock n’roll is his current attitude. He is looking for a fight. He doesn’t just have an attitude, he is actually looking for someone to fight and lose with.

He is an angry guy. I don’t blame him the least, his life has been cruel in a lot of little ways. It’s as if he has run into a beehive. Nothing fatal but annoyingly painful nonetheless.

And when I say he is looking for a fight he is not looking to kick the crap out of some stranger, beat some dude into the ground, or send some rando to the hospital. No he wants to fight hard but get his ass handed to him when it is all said and done. He wants someone to kick his ass. He wants to feel the inside pain of his life’s frustrations on the outside. He wants broken bones and ripped bleeding skin.

He made a friend recently who attempted to help him with his wish, not understanding my brother was going to be fighting back. That guy grabbed a sword when the fight quickly turned south for him.

My brother is six-two, 260 pounds and one of the strongest mother fuckers I have ever met, strong in that scary he doesn’t get tired way. In high school he held the record for pressing the bench press bar, 45 pounds doesn’t sound like a lot until you try to do it 200 plus times.

I have grappled with him before and if it weren’t for my predilection to fight up close and ability with arm locks I probably would have gotten a bit bloodied.

So to avoid losing this dude pulls a sword and attempts to run him through when the freight train that is my brother come steaming at him once the first punch he through landed and yielded a chuckle and a lunge. The sword was cheap and bent in half when an attempt was made to thrust it through my bro’s abdomen. Ironically not only did the would-be-killer’s sword get broken, but so did his nose. Not looking to hurt the poor idiot further the fight stopped there and my brother kept looking for his ultimate challenge.

And eventually he found it.

There is this Vietnam vet who lives down the gravel road from my mom, she calls him the pirate, so I call him the pirate.

He is leathery.

All bone and muscle.

She told me that he burned off his finger prints.

I believe her.

Whenever I have seen him he has a lit joint, an open bottle of Jack Daniels and a belly full of oxy. I obviously can’t see the pills floating around inside his body, but believe him when he says they are there. He brags about being inebriated in a way that suggests someone once might have asked if he would please try life sober and this is his main way of saying fuck off.

Being a sixty year old combat vet with no job I imagine that person as some employee of the Veterans Affairs hospital.

As an organization they don’t appreciate any drinking or drug use.

Tell them you drink the occasional beer they assume you mean you are getting black out drunk nightly and need medical help to get you to stop.

Deny this and basically no other treatment for any other ailment will be administered until you accept treatment for drinking or drug use.

But beyond his obvious substance issues, I am sure the Pirate has been to prison, I am also sure he has killed someone, not just enemy combatants, but fellow Appalachian rednecks.

More than one person’s final sight was the leering face of this sociopath.

So my brother fought him and got what he wanted, a loss. His nose was broken and he lost a tooth, for the first time in his life his eyes, both eyes, were blackened and if he had insurance and was able to get x-rays done they probably would have shown some broken ribs.

Getting what he wanted in that ass kicking led him to waking up sore for a few weeks, and a new goal, find a better way to deal with his internal angst.

Whether or not he ever spits into the mosh pit again the mother fucker will always be Rock and Roll.