Scar Tissue
A topic I seldom mention: that much of my otherwise comfortable upbringing was marred by domestic violence on a near-daily basis. I was blessed with two loving parents who shared joint custody, and cursed by a sadistic bully of a brother already showing early signs of the mental illness that would eventually consume him.
He was four years older and much bigger and stronger than me, so I had little means of defending myself. Sometimes it was suddenly pummeling me with brutal punches. Sometimes it was dunking my head in the toilet. But what my brother most seemed to savor was prolonged psychological torture in which he would do his damnedest to break my spirit, spending hours either sitting on me such that I could hardly breathe or trapping me in an endless headlock. The highlights of my childhood were when my brother went to sleepaway summer camp; I’d enjoy a few weeks of blissful respite and then burst into tears when I was told he was coming back.
Why didn’t my parents intervene? To some extent, because my brother and I were latchkey kids several afternoons per week who spent a lot of time by ourselves. To some extent, because loving parents have blinders and never want to believe bad things about their children. To some extent, because they were naïve ’60s-era liberals who felt that enough Shel Silverstein and Peter, Paul, and Mary would yield groovy people, man. And to some extent because they felt so bad that my brother had been a social outcast from his earliest days on the playground, and so perhaps unconsciously concluded that it was the rest of the family’s duty to hold our breaths and walk on eggshells and treat him with kid gloves. It was the early ’90s: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Autism spectrum weren’t yet household terms, and there was no way to anticipate the schizophrenia that would come in roaring a decade later.
Thankfully, the beatings tapered off by the time I hit the third or fourth grade, and there were a good few years when my brother became a fitness maniac who didn’t go out of his way to abuse me. And then disaster struck. My brother had such a hard time socially when he entered middle school that, midway through the sixth grade, my parents had moved him up a grade to an “alternative” school called Crossroads that was well-known in the St. Louis area as a destination for troubled kids. Unfortunately for my brother, after a year or two Crossroads hired a new director, an uptight white guy named Billy with a white goatee and ponytail, who was intent on shifting the institution’s reputation from a kennel for weirdos to a more respectable and “progressive” school for artistic and diverse young creatives. One day, some troublemaker who’d constantly taunted my brother grabbed him by his backpack straps and tried to pull him to the ground. In self-defense, my brother managed to work his assailant into a headlock, and for that Crossroads expelled him even as the attacker got a slap on the wrist.
And so back to public school it was. Alas, somebody happened to have called in a bomb threat to the school the day before my quirky brother arrived, and when he showed up midyear with a crew cut carrying a duffel bag rather than a backpack, he acquired a cruel nickname that he could never quite shake: Unabomber. My brother was highly intelligent, and might have fit in to some extent had he been placed in honors courses, but he wasn’t disciplined enough in his schoolwork to qualify and the kids in the regular classes ragged on him constantly. Underlining his vulnerable outcast status was that his handwriting was illegible and he was the only student in his grade who took notes on a laptop. One day, a black classmate kept pretending to steal his computer and my brother obliviously told him to “get back where he belonged,” prompting many of the school’s deseg kids to grandstand and call him a racist. He hadn’t been a racist, not in the least bit, but the relentless bullying drove him to drop out of high school in the 11th grade and soon down online rabbit holes that converted him into becoming a rabid racist and antisemite, despite being half-Jewish and that Winona Ryder was his celebrity crush.
Spending his hours stewing watching Jerry Springer and playing Doom II, my brother spiraled further into darkness and rage he was all too eager to inflict upon the rest of the family, including the cat, and especially me as the supposed golden child who’d apparently had everything handed to me on a silver platter. No longer would he address me by my name, but as “Jewboy,” and a typical conversation was him screaming that he was going to kill me and everyone else who’d ever wronged him, too. He didn’t beat me as often as he had when I was younger, as I’d become somewhat capable of self-defense, but he was always breathing down my neck and took to frequently overturning the dining table, throwing chairs across the room, and grabbing my mother’s beautiful artwork off the walls to snap over his knee or hurl into the houseplants.
I repeatedly begged my parents to throw my brother out so I could have some semblance of a normal life, and they would tell me again and again that sometimes even when it was stressful we had to make sacrifices for family members; I felt like the designated sacrifice. The truth was, they were petrified that he’d kill himself, or maybe perpetrate the next Columbine before suicide by cop, and at one point he did acquire a shotgun that my Dad thankfully found and hid in the back of a closet amidst rolls of wrapping paper. For several years in my own homes I lived in near-constant fear for my life.
The spring before my junior year of high school, I was selected among 330 peers statewide to spend three weeks at the University of Missouri over the summer as part of a free annual pre-college program for gifted students called the Missouri Scholars Academy. The experience turned out to be among the most intensely formative of my life. The day I arrived, I was an obese, shy, nerdy introvert who’d reflexively gravitate to whoever looked like they’d geek out about Star Trek; out from under my brother’s thumb, I changed my diet and started running and began figuring out how to talk to girls. As each day passed, and I felt like I’d found a new life, I more and more dreaded going back home to hell.
The first couple of days back my brother was on relatively good behavior, but his psychotic antics soon resumed and intensified. It was as if any success on my part magnified his failures, and he was determined to drag me down to his abyss—and he nearly succeeded. But my mother had seen the new light in my eyes, and she couldn’t deny that light dimming and flickering as her firstborn strained to choke out my future, and that finally drove her to a decision she should have made years earlier: she picked up the fucking phone, called my Dad, told him that joint custody was over, and that he needed to come collect his elder son immediately because my brother would never set foot in her house again. That remains the greatest day of my life.
Immediately, I thrived: I lost 90 pounds in six months, joined the cross-country team and earned the Most Improvement Award two years in a row, got myself elected president of my senior class, and managed to get into an Ivy League school. A lot of people assumed the class presidency was just a stunt for my college applications, but it wasn’t. I mainly just wanted to see how far I could go without my monstrous brother at my throat. And even that was a matter of degree; I was close with my Dad, so I still saw my brother frequently, and his banishment turned him even more vicious, but at least I could sleep at night behind locked doors without active terror that I was about to be murdered.
Whereas my mother could be a battleaxe when provoked, my late father was a quiet and gentle man who himself had come up frequently slapped around by my alcoholic grandfather. As a social worker driving his busted station wagon into dodgy neighborhoods checking up on folks inhabiting various states of mental disability and derangement, my Dad channeled his extensive experience trying to defuse tense moments with his father into talking down all manner of crazy people. That proved invaluable in managing my brother’s outbursts: my Dad had a pretty impressive track record of deflating my brother’s rages with well-timed mellow jokes subtly poking fun at the hissy-fits’ performative nature, but there were still many times that my brother battered him despite their forty-year age difference.
Gradually, by emphasizing that it would help him feel better and that it would bolster his case to get on disability, my Dad was able to coax my brother into going on heavy psychotropic medication. For a time it worked and my brother’s behavior veered into the range of appropriate—he got his G.E.D., took a few community college classes, and worked on honing his writing. He was a wonderful writer when he applied himself, better than me. And then he discovered the euphoric mania of taking a fistful of pills at once so that he would be up for three or four days at a time, followed by a steep crash that would have him out cold for days. I never knew when venturing into my Dad’s house if I’d find a blissed-out stoner blabbering about Oprah sending him secret messages through his online horoscope, a tweaked-out Nazi chasing me out the door, or a strung-out junkie asleep on the couch. Usually it was the Nazi.
One thing was clear: absolutely any information that my brother had regarding my life he would twist to use against me, so I took care to impart as little information as possible. Early one Friday evening the spring of my senior year of high school, I endured a violent home invasion when my mother went to the movies and forgot to lock the sliding-glass back door. I was upstairs in my bedroom listening to Pearl Jam when I heard a strange noise. I went to my door and suddenly a masked intruder smashed me in the face with one of my mother’s flowerpots, spun me around to put a knife to my back, and inquired as to “where the jewelry at.” I happened to know where a few hundred dollars of cash was at, but that’s not what he asked for, and his frustration was clear when I showed him where the jewelry was at and it was all exotic ethnic trinkets of no street value. When the intruder asked “where the basement at?” I thought he was about to slit my throat, but mercifully he just locked me in the basement and ran off. We had a phone down there, so I was able to call 911, and the house was cordoned off with yellow police tape by the time my mother got home.
I told one friend what had happened that evening, and by Monday morning it was the talk of my high school. Suddenly I was a celebrity and everybody wanted to ask me about it, never once considering that maybe I didn’t want to relive the event again and again. I’d already had more than my fair share of post-traumatic stress disorder, but the PTSD from the home invasion finally drove me into therapy; for about a year after the attack, I could not help but compulsively check every ten or fifteen minutes that all doors and windows were locked. Literally everybody I knew heard about the home invasion, except for my brother, because the perp happened to have been black and I wasn’t willing to give him any more fodder for his racist rants.
Over time, my brother’s insanity spilled out into public. He abruptly turned on a friend of the family who had humored him by selling some of his strange homemade novelty t-shirts at an indie record store, berating the guy out of the blue. He got banned from the nearest supermarket for sexually propositioning a check-out girl. By mail, he sexually propositioned one of my mother’s middle-aged neighbors who had once hired him to do some yard work. Hell, he even sexually propositioned my mother’s own sister, also via U.S. Mail. Because my mother was adopted, that might not technically have been proposing incest, but I don’t think that made any difference to my brother. One day, he started screaming and throwing punches at another supermarket, so he got tazed and arrested.
The arrest was pivotal, because it enabled the state’s psychiatrists to step in and change his medicinal regimen from pills he could abuse to a monthly shot that he could not, so once again my brother’s behavior swerved back to minimally appropriate. It was good timing, too, as my Dad suffered the first in a series of strokes a few months later that soon rendered him bed-bound. As a retired social worker, my Dad knew full well how horrendous nursing homes could be and he was very much in denial about still being able to live independently. But the writing was on the wall: at some point before too long we’d have to sell the house to pay for a nursing home, and my brother would need a new place to live. To my brother’s credit, he did his best for a few years to help take care of my Dad and do what he could to make up for the years of abusing him. My mother put in tons of research and legwork to get my brother on the waiting list for the optimal place she could find for him to live: a subsidized Section 8 apartment building overlooking The Loop, one of the St. Louis area’s prime cultural drags.
It was during this time that I did something I never imagined I could do: I forgave my brother for all he had done. He really had gotten some unlucky breaks in life, both neurologically and in repeatedly finding himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d had a tough time, much of his early cruelty had been paying forward what the world had offered him, and schizophrenia made people do wild things, or so I resolved to believe. There were flood waters under the bridge, but I tried to build the bridge anyway. I’d long since moved to New York, but when I was back in town I’d hang out with him, cook him a couple of giant cheeseburgers per week, and regularly take him out to eat. It was a fraught relationship, as he was a pathological liar almost constantly being blatantly manipulative, but his maneuverings were so clumsy that they sort of faded into white noise after a while, although occasionally I’d experience vivid flashbacks to darker times. My mother and I spent countless hours shaking our heads at my brother’s maddening behaviors. Without doubt, he had some real limitations and disabilities; equally without doubt, he shamelessly milked and exaggerated those problems in order to passive-aggressively shirk as much responsibility as possible. His sense of entitlement was roughly the size of Jupiter.
After two and half years a spot opened up at the building my brother had been on the waiting list for, and as it turned out he lucked into one of the best units in the entire high-rise: for a few hundred bucks a month he got a spacious studio on the top floor with a respectable kitchenette and a dramatic view of the Gateway Arch and the St. Louis skyline. One can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison, as his building was poorly maintained and most of his neighbors were pretty marginal, but an apartment of that size and condition with that kind of view would easily cost six or seven thousand a month in Manhattan. My mother set up for my brother a self-sustaining life on ultimate easy mode: he didn’t have to work, he didn’t have to pay taxes, all he had to do was stay on his meds, visit our Dad at his nursing home, and keep out of trouble. Doing nothing, he had more expendable income than I did.
One of the benefits of writing for Columbia University was that after a few years I generally only had to be on campus during the academic year, so I could spend a few months each year back in St. Louis visiting family. Unlike most nursing home patients, who are left alone to rot, my Dad had a cavalcade of visitors most days who gave him reason to stay alive. Every day that I was in town, I’d bring him fruit and ice cream and try not to complain too much about the MSNBC he typically had on blaring. Once Covid came along, I knew he wouldn’t last long. I last saw him the day before he passed, saying goodbye through a narrowly cracked window as I shivered in the winter cold. My Dad died of loneliness less than a year into the lockdowns, and there was nothing I could do. My brother and I grew a little closer after that, depositing some of my Dad’s ashes in a distinctive tree stump along one of his favorite hiking trails.
For a number of years I’d spend time with my brother playing video games and watching Youtube videos, but I grew increasingly uncomfortable as his apartment grew ever more cluttered and strewn with trash. To try to converse with him was to have to try to ignore the multiple cockroaches crisscrossing the wall behind him at any given moment. I don’t know if the filth and slovenliness came from sheer laziness, as all he liked to do was lay on his stained semi-collapsed mattress scrolling on his phone, or if he derived some form of comfort from hoarding garbage, but by early 2025 I no longer felt safe entering his apartment. I would still visit him downstairs and take him on errands, as his car had broken down, but the apartment had become a biohazard. And he obviously had started passing weeks and months at a time without bathing or doing laundry; often when I’d take him to lunch or to get his shot, the passenger seat would stink for days such that I couldn’t drive without windows open.
Last spring, my mother was diagnosed with cancer, so I started spending most of my time in St. Louis to help supervise her treatments. In December she fell and broke her hip, forcing me to remain in St. Louis full-time by her side to shepherd her end-of-life care. Following two hospitalizations, readers may recall, I moved her in February to an ostensibly fancy nursing home that promptly threw out my mother’s $43,000 custom dentures. The facility is run by a den of sleazy scoundrels who immediately rushed to avoid taking any responsibility, but I was successfully able to threaten them into agreeing to replace the dentures.
And then, catastrophe. On the very day my mother took an ambulance van to have her molds taken by a dentist the facility had hired to fashion replacement dentures, the facility found bed bugs in her sheets. I was utterly blindsided: the facility may be run by liars and thieves who deserve to be sued into oblivion, but they do keep things reasonably sanitary. There could be no doubt where the bed bugs had come from: my no-good brother, whom I had taken on any number of errands and brought to the facility to visit my mother on perhaps half a dozen occasions. He had to have known that he had bed bugs, there was no way he couldn’t have known, and he was smart enough to understand how easily they spread, and yet he carefully avoided ever once tipping me off. It was the most spectacular example yet of that maddening passive-aggressive question mark that always loomed over my brother’s behavior: had he failed to mention his bed bugs simply because it would have inconvenienced him for me not to drive him places, or had he deliberately given me and our mother bed bugs out of malicious resentment that had been festering for decades?
I knew in my bones that it had been primarily deliberate, that he was proud of giving us bed bugs and that he found the situation hilarious, but I couldn’t prove it when he inevitably denied ill intent. Nonetheless, I immediately disowned him and cut off all contact, forever, other than texting him as of that time when our mother has passed. And on that same day of realizing that I’d been so profoundly betrayed, the very piece of trash cracker responsible for the theft and destruction of my mother’s dentures—aggravated grand theft under Missouri law—got up in my face in front of half a dozen employees to scream that I was a filthy loser on the verge of getting banned from visiting my own mother. She knew I’d demanded that she be fired, so she clearly relished taking maximal advantage of the moment to try to maximally humiliate me. Mark my words, she will live to regret it.
And so my mother and I got placed in quarantine for a whole month; our door was kept closed, I could not leave the room other than to enter and exit the building, and aides would only enter the room after donning what looked like spacesuits. Understandably, the facility insisted that my house get inspected for bed bugs, so I called a company called Rottler that’s considered the gold standard for St. Louis-area pest control. Rottler must have had an off day, because their agent came to inspect my house and car and he assured me that I had no bed bugs, and yet I steadily grew itchier and itchier over the next few weeks. It reached the point that my arms, hands, legs, and feet were covered with dozens if not hundreds of burning welts that totally overwhelmed my immune system. I assumed my brother must have given me fleas or ticks and called Rottler again, and the second time they found a bed bug infestation in my own bed.
I’d never had bed bugs, I’m a financially comfortable Ivy Leaguer who owns property on the Upper West Side. And yet my brother, my own flesh and blood, managed to defile my inner sanctum, the place where I sleep. Rottler was able to solve the problem for nearly $2000 over the course of several weeks, but not before I acquired what seems to be permanent scarring on my hands and feet. I’m haunted by how many more innocent people my brother must have blithely infected all the times I took him places with upholstered furniture, like his social workers’ offices in the Central West End and the IHOP in Clayton, or all the subsequent riders in the Ubers he’s taken to his appointments without me as his chauffeur.
With quarantine concluded and my mother growing ever more frail, I was eager to get back to the urgent task of replacing her dentures. The dentist had informed me that she needed an oral cleaning to proceed, and the facility promised that it would have that oral cleaning done in-house, but week after week passed with the facility making flimsy excuses for why the scheduled cleaning hadn’t taken place. Blatantly, they dragged their feet in aim of making me decide that my mother was too fragile and give up on replacing her teeth, so in frustration I sent a couple of hotly worded emails threatening legal action and withheld $10,175 from a $50,000-something bill in protest: $10,000 pending the facility replacing her dentures, and $175 for a bogus late fee that was the facility’s own fault. And then the facility did something enormously shortsighted: they dispatched a greasy shitbag of an attorney to declare that I had no case, to rescind the facility’s promise of replacing the dentures, and to essentially threaten my mother’s life in cold blood if I did not immediately pay every cent. It was ostensibly a threat to evict her, but with my mother’s condition hovering between life and death that would be tantamount to murder.
With a figurative knife at my mother’s throat, I was forced to pay up and give up on the dentures. In the end, my brother got his revenge against my mother, whom he had long hated for “lying to him” that if he applied himself life might get better. And maybe that despicable lawyer had a point: it may well be that the good ol’ boy Republicans who dominate Missouri politics have the laws rigged so that a David like me has no legal chance against a corporate Goliath like his client, we’ll just have to wait and see. But what the facility failed to comprehend is that the formal courts are irrelevant in this case, as I ply my trade in the court of public opinion. This David has his trusty sling and a mountain of stones that I’ve been stockpiling every day since the facility perpetrated that fateful felony against my mother. So long as she is alive the facility has all the leverage, but when she’s gone they’re going to find that I hold their fragile reputation in my hands. Goliath is going to make a reasonable settlement, or a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs and Goliath will emerge much the worse for wear.
A couple of weeks after that contemptible attorney issued his outrageous death threat, I received a frantic call from my saintly aunt, the matriarch of my Dad’s side of the family who’s been so reliable and indispensable for both of my parents in their times of mortal need. She had just received a rambling email from my brother breaking the news that he was being evicted, had to be out in less than a week, and that he urgently needed a place to stay. My aunt said that she respected that I’d disowned him, but asked that I at least look at the email and go down to the building to see if I could talk them into reconsidering or at least giving him more time to move out. What she forwarded me was a florid and preposterous narrative that my brother had been viciously hounded and persecuted by sociopathic bullies in management holding him to impossible standards in a diabolical scheme to gentrify the building.
And so I found myself walking into his building for the very last time to try to see if I could offer management the proverbial blank check to reverse their decision and restore the arrangement my mother had worked so hard to secure. To my intense distaste, my brother happened to be waiting in the lobby and had the gall to try to start a friendly chat as if he hadn’t annihilated our relationship. I just raised my hand at his face and said “No.” Inside the building’s office, I met the management team that my brother had cast as somewhere between Nurse Ratched and Heinrich Himmler, and it turned out that they were polite, competent, reasonable professionals, including a social worker. They acknowledged that the building had experienced a bed bug outbreak, and noted that they had been able to spray and fumigate almost all problem areas in the building, but that the exterminators couldn’t effectively treat my brother’s apartment with all the trash on the floor giving pests places to hide, so each time they’d wipe out bed bugs from the rest of the building the pests would radiate back out from my brother’s apartment to reinfect the building all over again. They explained that they were not gentrifying the building, but housing residents in motels for a couple of months for the building to receive much-needed maintenance and for everyone’s units to be renovated.
For eight months they’d been trying to get my brother to pick up his trash so they could sanitize his apartment: first they cajoled, then they begged, then they warned, and then they threatened him, and each and every time he promised he’d take care of it and then returned upstairs to not lift a finger. There was no amount of money I could offer them to reverse their decision or give him any more time, and they were frankly thrilled to wash their hands of him. I would have preferred if they had been willing to change their minds, but the truth is that I’d have done the exact same thing in their position.
So, for eight months my brother had been fully aware both that he had a raging bed bug infestation and that he was on a collision course with an eviction notice. I saw him dozens of times and he sent me hundreds of stupid texts, and yet not once did he mention either of those mounting crises. Had he simply told me that he was in a jam and removing all that trash was too overwhelming a task for him, I would have grumbled and yelled at him a little bit, and then I would have hired a cleaning crew and Rottler to get his apartment back in the range of habitable. Instead, he chose to stay strategically silent for months when he knew it was only a matter of time before he’d be evicted, and he even chose to wait several days after he received his formal notice of eviction before emailing my aunt. The evidence incontrovertibly proves that he wanted to be evicted, and that he deliberately waited to ambush my aunt—and by extension me—in order to give us as little maneuverability as possible.
Why would he do this? Had my brother warned me or my aunt that eviction was on the table, one of us would have gone to management to sort out what was going on and arranged for his apartment to be cleared of trash. But that would have left him answerable to the management staff that he despised and still subject to the occasional unit inspections that he resented. Had he gotten in touch with my aunt sooner, that would have given her more time to work with his state social worker to find him a place at a homeless shelter or group home. He felt he was way too good for that. My aunt and I are both busy and preoccupied: she, running a small business and recovering from injuries from a recent car accident, and me spending 9-10 hours a day every day at my mother’s side. My brother selfishly wagered in his months of scheming that, since any apartment we could find for him would almost certainly cost more than his entire disability check, we’d end up throwing up our hands and he’d either move into my aunt’s house or, as I suspect was his real goal, manage to slither into my house so I’d have to pick up after him for the rest of his life. He thought he was playing chess when he can hardly play tic-tac-toe.
After the stunts he pulled, there was no way I was going to bail my brother out. My suggestion was that he try his luck on the streets; Fredo betrays the family, then Fredo deserves whatever’s coming to him. But my aunt doesn’t carry the same decades of baggage and begrudgingly stepped up to help. First, she placed him in a dingy motel until he ran though the last of his money. Then she very reluctantly took him in for a number of days, insisting he bathe and making him spend all day outside on the porch and spraying his temporary room three times a day in addition to daily fogging. I am sure my brother assumed that he would at very least be able to stay with my aunt for months on end, but she made it clear that he had to leave as soon as possible. After a week or two working with my brother’s social worker, she managed to find a south St. Louis group home willing to take him in despite the eviction on his record, and off he went.
I will never see him again, but my aunt showed me some pictures she snapped of my brother’s new residence. It looks as grim as can be, just a few hairs away from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Whereas the apartment he threw away provided him a fridge, an oven, his own bathroom, and a spectacular view, the group home provides a small austere room, a communal bathroom, no view, and three meals a day that are apparently disgusting. He’d made some cool friends at his old digs, but I’m told that he hates both the residents and staff of his new home where he’s likely to spend the rest of his life. He used to have hundreds of dollars of expendable income that he would squander ordering stupid shit off the internet that only ended up more trash on his floor, but the new place collects all but $50 of his monthly check. The damned fool is hoist by his own petard.
I realize now how badly I erred in trying to be generous with him over the years. Generosity only works when it’s small gestures offered intermittently; any more than that, and the recipients tend to start feeling resentful and entitled to ever more largesse. My brother liked the cheeseburgers and free rides, perhaps part of him loved me in some sense, but a bigger part of him hated me ever more for making him feel small. It would have been better had I never forgiven him and just let sleeping dogs lie. Certainly, my mother would have had her dentures back by now had I cut off ties long ago.
I’ve been using the term “my brother” as a matter of convenience, but the reality is that I don’t have a brother anymore, if I ever did. The lying, cheating, manipulating fuck-up over in that south St. Louis dump is no relation of mine, and dead to me. After forty years of abuse and betrayal, it is one of the great blessings of my life to finally become an only child.
Is brave if you to share.
Thanks very much for sharing this, it's very powerful. You might think of expanding it into a memoir or a shorter piece to publish in the mainstream press. We don't talk enough about the pain of sibling bullying. It's always focused on schools. But you can change schools; and eventually you graduate. It's hard to escape your family members.