I posted the following article on Sunday, February 04 in 2007 on a site that I’m no longer actively posting on.
Well, my 55-year-old brother just phoned me. It’s around 2pm in Pittsburgh on a sunny, cold and windy afternoon. He wants to come over to see the Super Bowl. He’s getting settled in at the YMCA after being evicted from his very nice and cozy apartment for “terroristic threats” (he and the night security guard got into a verbal confrontation) and for the kinds of people (you don’t want to know) he let stay–not overnight but stay–in the apartment. On the phone he sounded cold and lonely. He was calling from a Subway Sandwich Shop just down the street. He had an emergency and had to get to a bathroom quick and the sandwich shop was as far as he got. Last night in a panic my 83-year-old mother who is in California now with my other brother and his wife phoned me because she couldn’t get in touch with my 55-year-old brother here on the phone. She’d been calling the wrong number for days. I gave her the right number. He told me she got in touch with him.
So, now he’s coming over. I told him he couldn’t come over here and drink up my beer. He has a good life-time pension from the city and he gets SSI so financially he does okay. I mean he really does okay. But he’s always broke. So I told him to bring something–a six pack, a forty, just to bring something. He wasn’t going to drink up my beer without contributing to the kitty. He said he didn’t want anymore beer because it’s probably what made his bowels cut lose in the first place. He would just go to a state store and pick up a pint of something (wonderful–by the end of the game I’ll have a drunk on my hands) and sip on that during the game and wouldn’t touch my beer.
I expect him any time after 5pm. Since I’m the older, supposedly more mature, brother I’m going to make every effort to make this visit pleasant. But after so many years you get tired and just want to say don’t phone me and don’t come over here again. But he’s my brother.
These are the things short stories are made of.
If you type in the words “His name is Robert” in the search box in the upper right of this blog and punch it in you’ll get a story titled “Denial.” This story came out of the relationship I’ve had with my brother. So, I get my story ideas from the same place you can get your story ideas: from life.
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