DIED 1991
CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF that Sugar Crisp, I was singing in the babaloo Sugar Bear voice as I poured a bowl for our six-year-old daughter. My husband picked up the box and looked it over. This was my brother’s favorite cereal, he said. For a while, I thought he was Sugar Bear. So I added Sugar Crisp to the list: chess, fireworks, Lord of the Rings, ’80s synth-pop, a deejay booth, an Asian girl, a bottle of champagne or Bombay gin. A gray silk robe in our closet. A certain hospital in Washington, DC.
That night in the diner he told me about this brother, too, this intense, smart, sardonic, elusive little brother, and I could see it was almost like losing a child (you were responsible for them), like losing your parents (they are never the same), like losing your mate (you are alone with the memories). You are not the fair one without the dark one, the loud one without the quiet one, the big one without the little one, so in a way it was like dying yourself.
We have the copy of the Narcotics Anonymous blue book all his friends at rehab signed the day he got out to go to his court appearance. I would like you to leave me a recipe for that secret charisma you have, wrote Wayne. From Candy: I saw a great change in you, you’ve started to laugh. Back in DC, he immediately went to the neighborhood to score, then to his grandmother’s empty apartment to get high. His grandmother was in the hospital and would die herself a few days later.
My husband wonders still if he did it on purpose. If there was no such thing as heroin would he have found some other way to go out at thirty-one? They buried him next to The Bad Brother on their parents’ farm, and he and the brother who was left held a two-man twelve-step meeting beside the hole in the ground. Two older brothers as powerless as older brothers have ever been.
Remember the ten-gallon bottle of liquid Demerol he made when he worked at NIH? These legends are nothing but torture now. It is impossible to feel this is not partly your fault.