Jungle-Land, Part I
1
My earliest memory of Randy is from when I was about eight years old. He was my younger brother by only one year, but people would often mistake me for being much older. At eight, I was already a good two to three inches taller than the next tallest kid in my class. The evening that I remember so vividly occurred sometime in the mid-1970s. I woke up in the middle of the night and found that my brother, who should have been sleeping next to me, wasn’t there. From the dark gloom of my bedroom, I could hear my mother’s wails drifting down the hallway. The sound sent goose bumps marching down my spine. I knew that there was something terribly wrong. I jumped out of bed and ran down the long hallway to my mother’s room. When I burst inside, my little brother was laying on the floor of my mother’s room, blood gushing from an opening above his eye. My mother was hovering over him, alternately screaming and talking to someone on the phone. She gave the person on the other end of the phone our address and begged them to hurry before hanging up.
Randy wasn’t moving. I remember that well. I also remember thinking that it couldn’t be real. I’d seen many scary movies in my life, and that was not what a cut should look like. There was blood of, course and lots of it, but the wound was all wrong. In the movies wounds were always neat round holes or razor-edged slits in the skin. The wound on my brother’s head was jagged. Not only was the shape of the cut wrong, the appearance of whitish stuff poking out from inside it also made me believe, for an instant, that they were playing some kind of cruel joke on me.
Even though I half-thought that they were trying to mess with my head, I still couldn’t move. It wasn’t until the ambulance arrived and I was shuffled aside by the paramedics that I was finally able to look away from him. I remember one of the paramedics gently easing my mother out of the way while his partner worked on my little brother, bandaging his head and starting an I.V. Soon after the ambulance, the police came. A lump magically appeared in my throat when I saw the two uniformed officers enter the room. After the paramedics put Randy on a gurney and shuffled him out of the house, one of the cops asked my mother what happened.
“I’m not sure,” she said, pulling one of her Winston 100s from a half-empty pack and lighting it. “I was sleeping and felt the bed jolt. When I got up to check it out, I saw him on the floor. He must’ve tripped and hit his head on the bed-frame.” The cop – seemingly satisfied that my mother didn’t clunk my brother over the head with a hammer or something, handed her a business card, told her that she could follow the ambulance to the hospital, and then rushed out after the paramedics.
Mom drove like a crazy woman to the hospital. We waited in the reception area for what seemed to my eight year old mind like forever, until a nurse finally came out to talk to us. The Nurse said that Randy was going to be “just fine” and that he only “required a few stitches.” She also advised that he stay in the hospital for another twenty-four hours for observation. He actually stayed in the hospital for another three days.
Those three days, my mother and I went to the movies, ate out at a restaurant, and she even let me stay up late and watch television. My nights were filled to bursting with old reruns of The Fugitive, Ironside, Dragnet, and the Untouchables. I had a blast – staying up late with my mom. It was the first time since Randy was born that I got my mother all to myself. Yes, it was good times for me, good and brief. When Randy came home, it was back to the same routine. I kind of resented him a little for spoiling all of my fun, but it was a minor resentment at best. In the end, I was happy to have my best friend back home.
The day he came home my mother tried to make Randy stay inside the house, but he refused. We decided to celebrate by going down to the railroad crossing a few blocks away, and play war. We made a fort out of tumble-weeds and then protected it with our lives from an invisible horde of oncoming monsters who were trying to break through our position. It was dreadfully hot that day, but we didn’t care. We had our best friends back, and that was all that mattered.
My grandparents were rarely seen around the house. They worked every night at a country-western bar and would usually still be sound asleep when my brother and I came home from school. To get my mother out of their house at some point, they got her a job as a waitress. After that, it was mostly just my brother and me at home during the day. I was fine with that. We had already grown accustom to taking care of ourselves by that time.
Randy’s grades in school were one of the few things that my mother liked to brag about. Twice during that time he came home with straight-A report cards. My grades, on the other hand, were pitiful. After helping Randy with his homework every night, I found it hard to concentrate on my own studies. I would try to hammer out a couple of subjects before bed but would usually leave most of it undone – sometimes falling asleep at the kitchen table in the middle of trying to work out a tough math equation. My failing grades were a tremendous source of guilt for me. Still, I felt proud of myself for making sure that Randy got good grades.
Sometime around my tenth birthday, my mom brought Uncle Bill home. He wasn’t our real Uncle, just some dude that she met at the bar. Over the next few months, Uncle Bill hung around more and more. We didn’t complain. He took my brother and me to the movies, to the park, and even began to stay at the house with us while our mother and grandparents worked at night. One night, my mom asked him to go to work with her, but Uncle Bill refused to leave us alone. A big fight broke out between them and in a storm of hot air and spittle; Uncle Bill told our mom that she was the worst mother he had ever seen. That was the end of the line for Uncle Bill. We never saw him again.
Uncle Bill was the first in a long line of ex-boyfriends, and ex-husbands that my mother ran through. There was Uncle Mark, Uncle John, Uncle Jason, Daddy Rich, Daddy Neil, and Daddy Jared. Uncle Mark was the next one up to bat.
Whenever I see Cheech and Chong movies, or the movie Hair, I think of Uncle Mark. Everything he wore was denim. Blue-jeans, Jean jacket, even a denim soft cap to cover his long, shaggy hair when he didn’t feel like combing it. Our mother had a history of heavy drinking and meth use, but Uncle Mark was the first person we had ever seen who smoked marijuana. I couldn’t see the greatness of the weed that he seemed to enjoy smoking so much. It smelled like burned rope, and the stink would follow him everywhere he went. Uncle Mark didn’t work. He would often say that he was saving his energy for a true emergency – that way he would be useful when everyone else was exhausted. He would just sit at home all day smoking his pot and playing his guitar. It was as if the guy looked up the definition of hippie and followed it to the letter.
Not surprisingly, Uncle Mark didn’t last long. Our mother didn’t throw him out like she did Uncle Bill- he sort of threw himself out. One morning, I woke up for school, spent the accustomed twenty minutes shaking Randy out of bed and then another five minutes rushing him to get dressed. Once he was dressed, we went downstairs, tiptoeing the whole way. We kept our book-bags by the front door so we wouldn’t have to waste time looking for them and end up being late for school. I pulled my backpack on and then turned around to help Randy put on his … then I froze. Uncle Mark was hanging half-way down the wall with a long white sheet tied around his neck. The other end of the sheet was tied to the wrought-iron railing at the top of the stairs. His mouth was closed, but I could see the tip of his purple-pink tongue poking out through his bluish colored lips. A slight trickle of blood ran down from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were open and staring.
“Don’t look at him Randy,” I said. “I’m going to get grandpa.”
Randy didn’t reply. As I ascended the stairs, taking care to avoid the section that Uncle Mark was hanging off of, I peered back down at Randy and froze again. He was sitting next to the door with his thumb in his mouth and rocking back and forth.
