My relationship with my brother, Richard, has always been a tough one to explain. People just don’t get it, and watching someone wrap their head around it has always been, well, fun. With the exception of a year and a half when I went off to college and then moved to New York City, we’ve lived together. Even now, as full-on adults, we still live together. We’ve spent our entire lives together. We don’t fight and we rarely disagree on anything, even though for the most part we’re total opposites. I don’t know a life where I couldn’t sit on my couch, yell “Rich!” at the top of my lungs, and have him not answer. He’s just always been there. He’s never judged me or made me eat shit for any of my mistakes and has always been around to pick my ass up when I fall.
I’d like to say that he’s the perfect older brother, the kind that you only read about in books, but the reality is nobody would ever find our relationship believable. I’ve never seen or read anything like it. He never resented only being referred to as “Roz’s brother” when I was the popular one, and now he gets a total kick whenever someone finds out he’s my brother and he’s the Richard I tell stories about on the radio. “Yup, that’s me. Roz’s brother.”
Our mom and dad put a lot on him when we were kids. When I was two and he was five, he was in charge of me. It was his hand I held when we walked across the street, and he was the one who’d slap mine if I tried to stick it into a light socket. Our parents gave him equal power when it came to making sure I didn’t kill myself, and they gave him free rein to clobber me when I tried. When he was around, I was his responsibility. This was something that would either make him resent me for the rest of his life or make us form a bond that would, to this day, be hard for people to fathom. That was the chance our parents took. I’d like to think they knew what they were doing, but now that I’m a dad myself, I can confidently say they did not. There’s no way they could have. All they did was remind us that we were brothers, and that meant something—it meant everything. It meant that we needed to be accountable to each other even more than we needed to be to them.
My brother was the first person to notice my tics, years before I’d be diagnosed with Tourette’s. He called me Twitchy. We spent so much time together that we’d go on these long stretches where mine was the only non-parent face he saw. If I was having a particularly bad tic day, with lots of eye-rolling, blinking, and eyebrow raising, he’d ask me if I was “taking snapshots.” There were times I’d really be in the zone playing the guitar, like in a deep fog, ticcing like crazy while trying to work through something like “Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden, and he’d yell, “Hey, Twitchy,” to break my concentration.
“Yeah?” I’d say as I snapped out it.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Nothing. Just checking.”
And that was that. Neither of us knew what the twitching was, or if it was even a “thing,” so for the most part we just ignored it.
Rich was the Artist; I was the Rock Star. That’s who we were at home, those were our reputations at school—these were our dreams. I’d sit at one corner of the basement playing guitar, and he’d be at the other end drawing. Even as a kid, he was the best artist anyone had ever met. I’ve never met anyone like him. I’ve never met anyone who turned the thing they were best at when they were five years old into a career they’ve done for their entire life. You’d hear stories like this with guys who were great at hockey, or a young singer who crushed it on Star Search and went on to become famous, but this stuff wasn’t an option for kids like us. Not in the town we grew up in, anyway.
For Rich there was one path, and one path only. From that first day, before I was even born, when he opened his first box of crayons, that was it for him. He travelled in a straight line from being the talented, and sometimes weird, “art kid” always covered in marker and paint, to being an incredible sculptor, character-artist, and animation director who’s done Emmy-nominated stuff for PBS and shows for Netflix and just about every other platform that runs cartoons.
As far as I can remember, he’s only had one job his entire life that didn’t have him at a desk drawing—and of course we did that job together. We did everything together.
In our town, when you were a broke, underage kid who needed a little pocket money, your options for summer work were slim, so, just like Kevin Bacon in Footloose, we took jobs at the flour mill. “Pest Control and Maintenance” is what they called it, but really, what we were hired to do was kill rats and possibly each other. We weren’t old enough to work legally, so this was a “cash at the end of the day” deal. The basement of the old mill was no place for a kid: dirt floors, low ceiling, mouldy piles of wet flour, and rats. Tons of rats. The rats were the problem, and we were the solution.
We were handed a shovel, a BB gun, and two pairs of old steel-toe boots that were about three sizes too big for each of us. Our boss explained that half the job was done already, and whoever was here before us had already nailed plywood sheets against the lower half of the dirt walls. He taught us how to mix a bucket of concrete and showed us where to pour it. “So, the holes in those walls are where the rats live, and you guys are going to pour new walls with that concrete,” he instructed us. “One of you needs to dig out the holes, and the other one needs to pour the bucket into that gap. Once you start digging, and as soon as that shovel hits that wall, those rats are going to come screaming out of there. That’s what the gun is for. If they’re too big for the gun, that’s what the boots are for.” So that’s what we did. We stomped, shot, and smashed rats with a shovel. For four bucks an hour.
Once all the rat work was done, which took about four days, we were allowed out of the basement and into the sunshine. The flour mill was right across the street from Fairy Lake, so there was always a breeze filled with that smell that all small-town lakes have—a combo of moss, fish, and goose shit—but we were excited to get outside and do some work wearing our own shoes that didn’t involve killing things…with our feet.
Our boss took us up to the top of one of the huge silos out back. Getting there was a trip. A few flights of stairs and then a ride up the “man lift,” which was a revolving vertical ladder that went up and down between floors that you would hop on and off of like a ski lift: grab a handle, hook your foot in a loop, and up you went. Once you were on the roof, there were three catwalks that led to each of the silos.
“These have already been primed. Now they need to be painted,” our boss told us.
Rich and I stood near the edge and looked down. It was a long drop, with no railing. “Paint what?” my brother asked.
Our boss looked at us like we were idiots, like he always did, then looked down. All the way down. He didn’t want us to paint the top of the silo. He was asking us to paint the side. We were sixty feet up, and there was no ladder.
“Grab that,” he told Rich, and pointed to a pile of rope. “Bring it here.”
As he instructed my brother on how to “safely” tie the rope off to the edge of the metal catwalk, I stood there trying not to shit myself, wishing we were back in the basement shooting rats. On the other end of the rope was a lawn chair. Not a fancy lawn chair, just a lawn chair, one of those white plastic stackable ones that you can pick up for under ten bucks just about anywhere. Across the seat of it was a five-foot piece of two-by-four, attached with more rope, with a can of paint hanging off each end.
“You’ll probably want to stay up top,” our boss told my brother. “Put your feet here, brace them against this, and lower him down.” Him was me. “When he’s done a little bit, unwind more of the rope and lower him down a bit more.” He was now wrapping the rope around one of those things you use to wind up a garden hose on the side of your house. “Safety first,” he told us. “Safety third,” I mumbled back. “When he gets to the bottom, he can jump off and take the man lift back up and help you pull the chair back up here. You guys can switch off if you want, but I wouldn’t. He doesn’t look like he can hold you.”
He told us where the extra paint was, and where to clean the brushes at the end of the day, and then he bailed. For the next thirty minutes we just stood there looking off the side and then back at the lawn chair. Rich picked up the rope a few times, then put it back down again. “We are not doing this,” he finally said.
I was relieved, but to be honest, had he said, “All right, hop on,” I would have. That’s how much I trusted him. I never wanted to disappoint him.
“Follow me,” he told me as he turned around and made his way across the catwalk. “We’re going home.”
“What are we going to say?”
“We’re quitting,” he shot back.
“Yeah, but what are we going to say?” Aside from soccer before the season even started, neither of us had ever quit anything before. We’d never stood up to an adult before or told someone to go fuck themselves. We hadn’t ever made it clear that we would not stand for something, or that we deserved to be treated better than this. This was our moment, and I was excited.
“Don’t worry about what we’re going to say,” he replied. And I didn’t. I just trusted him.
We walked down, and out the side door, then made our way across the gravel parking lot. Our boss was alone, smoking a cigarette beside his truck. It was hot as hell that day, so his T-shirt was off and hanging out of the back pocket of his cut-off jean shorts. He looked pissed off and sweaty. As we got a little closer, he and my brother locked eyes, and Rich started walking faster. I thought, for sure, he was going to run up and drop-kick that guy’s ass into the creek behind him. I’d never seen Rich like that before.
When we were finally all face-to-face, our boss went from looking annoyed to absolutely concerned. “What’s the matter? What happened?” he said as he took his T-shirt out of his back pocket and handed it to my brother to wipe his tears with.
Wait. What?
I looked at Rich and he was bawling. Tears raging out of his eyes, snot out of his nose, and he was hyperventilating.
“What. Happened?” our boss asked again.
Catching his breath, and fighting to get the words out, Rich told him “the Story.” “Before we started painting, we went back down into the office to get our drinks out of the fridge, and I called our mom to say we’d be a bit late today. She told me that one of our friends, in Georgetown, was riding his bike and got hit by a car.”
I didn’t know what I was watching, but I went along with it, nodding along while, unsuccessfully, trying to whip up a few fake tears of my own.
Rich was spinning a story with such incredible detail that I almost started to believe it. What our friend’s injuries were, what the doctors were saying, how long this poor kid lay in a ditch for before someone finally found him. It was a hit-and-run! The cops were involved! The kid might die! We needed to leave!
Neither of us had any friends in Georgetown.
When Rich was coming up with this story in the short time we had before we reached our boss, I’m guessing he wanted to make sure there was no chance this guy would force us to stay. And there was certainly no way he was going to let that asshole call me a pussy for not wanting to get in that chair.
We were leaving, and we were leaving now. So that’s the story my brother came up with. And it worked.
Rich is the smartest person I’ve ever met. It took me a lot of years to realize that I wasn’t smart. Like not at all. I pretty much cruised through school riding on charm, charisma, and really great hair. Later in life I had a couple of wild awakenings where I understood just how not smart I was, when I realized all the things I didn’t know—which was a shit ton. I did a lot of my education later in life. I was C-minus product of the public school system, and only made it out because teachers didn’t want to fail me. I was a terrible student, but it didn’t matter because I’d decided I was going to be famous. Actually, I was already famous back then, it’s just that nobody knew it yet. I was raised on teen sex comedies, metal, and the glamorization of the American Shopping Mall. I was a Rock Star. I looked the part, acted the part, had the clothes, the big hair, the girls, and the attitude. The problem was, I was never good enough to even make a dent in music, and I was too terrified to ever step on a stage.
Rich was not a Rock Star. Rich was a nerd. And I say that respectfully with my whole heart, and if he were reading this, I’m sure he’d agree with me. He’s still a nerd, and to a certain extent I guess I’m still that little Rock Star. We’re both older versions of those two inseparable kids that were each other’s best friend and biggest fan. The two kids that knew the only way we were ever going to make it was if we made it together.
In the mid-1980s, our parents made a catastrophic error. A mistake that almost tore our family apart. They wanted to be a bit closer to work, so they decided to move us out of our small town to the sprawling suburbs just outside of Toronto. A big city. This was the Waterbed House. I was in grade five and Rich was in eight. We’d have to go to two different schools, because they didn’t have junior high out there. So I went to the primary school and he went to the high school.
I wasn’t happy, but I adjusted fine enough and did what I normally did: found an older girlfriend and spent our afternoons dry-humping on the pull-out couch in her basement, then I’d go home and play guitar and watch wrestling videos alone in my room. Her name was Chloe, she dressed like Madonna, wasn’t a virgin, and her family was weird. She had two older brothers who used to eat her parents out of house and home, so every day before her parents left for work, they’d leave three pieces of white bread and a jar of Cheez Whiz on the kitchen table, then wrap a huge chain around the fridge and padlock it shut. Then they’d run wire cable through all the handles on every cupboard in the kitchen and lock them too. Nobody was getting into anything. I remember they had an old dog whose name was also Chloe. And the weird thing was, they had the dog before they had her! She was named after the dog.
Chloe and I were together for about six months, and then she cheated on me and dumped me for an older kid across the street named Carlos Ferrari. Let me just make something clear right now. Most of the names in this book have been changed. Some of them aren’t even close to the real ones. But Carlos Ferrari was this dude’s real name, and I’m using it on the off chance he reads this one day. I hope he reads this. I want him to know I still think he’s a dick for doing what he did.
I have very few memories of actually being in the Waterbed House. It’s one of the parts of my life filled with holes, questions, and blank spaces. I don’t have one single memory of sitting down to eat as a family or watching a movie together. I don’t remember laughing, where our kitchen was, or where we put up the Christmas tree. I do remember feeling isolated, though. Our parents knew Rich and I hated it there, so they got us waterbeds. Yup, that was their big solution. Like waterbeds would fix everything. Then they got us our own TVs, and when we got home from school we’d both disappear into separate rooms. We didn’t have a finished basement to hang out in anymore, and I don’t remember feeling anything other than detached. We weren’t “us” in that house. The move was a mistake.
At first my brother and I looked at this move as an adventure. A fresh start. A chance to be someone new, and for him, a total reinvention. Family Ties was the biggest show on television, and Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton was a legend. My brother loved that guy, so much so that on his first day of school he showed up in a dark blue three-piece suit, with his binders in a brown leather briefcase. This was his new look. This was the new Richard. He was the kid who showed up to a city school, with no friends, in a three-piece suit. But he wasn’t Alex P. Keaton; he was a target. Students and teachers bullied him. It was merciless and never-ending. It was violent. Even when he ditched the suit and tried to disappear, it was still brutal.
I do have two very clear memories of that house. And only two. The first was watching the space shuttle Challenger explode on live television, and the second was the day Rich came home one afternoon and told me he was running away. I was in my room watching TV before our parents came home, and Rich walked in crying. These were real tears, not like in the parking lot at the flour mill, and as soon as I saw him upset, I started crying. I didn’t know what was going on, but I could tell he hadn’t been to school that day. He sat on my floor with me and opened his school bag. He was carrying a couple of changes of clothes, a little bit of allowance money, and a few family pictures that he’d pulled out of the albums from downstairs. Three of the photos were of me and him. I don’t know all the details or what led him to want to run away, that’s not my story to tell, but I did get the sense that he came back that day to say goodbye to me. I knew what was happening.
“What are you doing?” I remember asking.
“I just can’t anymore,” he answered without looking at me.
Now, over the years I’ve needed my big brother thousands of times. Too many to even count. This, I can truthfully say, was one of the very few times he needed me. He’s always been my protector, and the guy who never judged me. He picked me up when I fell. But in that moment and for the first time, with the two of us in tears on my bedroom floor with our backs up against that goddamn waterbed, he needed me.
I remember pulling his bag away from him and tucking it under my arm. Then I reached out and grabbed his hands. “No,” I said, while bawling and shaking my head back and forth. “Please no. Don’t.”
I don’t know if what I said helped. Knowing Rich, I think he stayed because he was the big brother, and he didn’t want to leave me.
I’m not sure when, or how much, he told my parents, but within a few months they listed the house and we moved back to Acton. My mom called the school principal back in Acton and asked if my brother could attend their grade eight graduation, even though he hadn’t attended that school for a single day that year. Mom knew that Rich needed a win, and so did his old school.
We moved back to town, Rich got to graduate with all his old friends, and we all pretended that time away never happened. We were home.
After that, my brother and I spent every second of every day in our new basement, drawing and playing guitar while coming up with the perfect plan to get the hell out of that stupid small town again. Together.