O Brother, Where Art Thou?
This is my favorite picture of me and my younger brother, whom you all know as Ned. (For the sake of this entry, I will refer to him by his real name, Justin). This picture was taken in June of 1988 (almost 18 damn years ago, and it seems like yesterday), one of my dad�s infamous �I�ve got five pictures left on this roll� photo shoots. I was 17 and Ned was 15. You can see that at 15, he was already quite the Dead Head.
Those who are familiar know that Justin has a ton of problems, not your average everyday life problems like I have, but big-ass cannot function in society as a productive member of or anywhere near even close kind of problems. Alcoholism, depression, a big old case of untreated ADHD and being raised without having to take responsibility or face consequences for anything he ever did wrong have contributed to his demise. That, and he�s an idiot.
The past ten years or so have seen Justin in and out of jail or rehab, and most of his time out of either of those facilities is spent homeless. Currently, the Hillsborough County Department of Corrections is where he hangs his hat, at least until May, more likely August.
But Justin wasn�t always such a loser, and trying to explain that to folks who have only known him in the past ten years (i.e.; my husband) is difficult. I mean, he wasn�t an honor student at school or anything, and he did his share of drugs and partying young, but he was a popular, well liked guy back in the day, and he almost had a clue, too.
So, this entry is about the brother I lost, the cool brother, the brother that had half a clue and whom I hung out with and liked.
I was 2 � when Justin was born. He was �my baby�. People would come to visit, and I would say, �That�s MY baby�. As he got older, I took on a mother hen role with him, always watching him and making sure he didn�t disappear, as he was known to do (I�d link, but it would take years to find the entry, but readers might remember that recently I told a story about Justin leaving the house when he was 3 and going to the local grocery store, where he got driven home in a police car. An omen of what his life would be like, I guess).
I�ll admit I was a brutal older sister. If he pissed me off, I�d beat the crap out of him. I was awful. I feel bad about that, even though I was just a kid.
We fought like brother and sister growing up. I think that my own two little ones, Minnie and Mickey, fight a lot, but nothing compared to Justin and I. We were rough kids, too. If we were around, people knew. We were loud, active and extremely rambunctious.
We also had a much older brother, Gary. Gary gave Justin his own share of older brotherly shit that I was left out of. One night, when Justin was about 7, Gary and his friends took him out of bed, took him outside, threw him in our pool and as if that wasn�t enough, they threw a cat into the pool with him. In an act that only true brothers could understand. Justin learned about wedgies and noogies long before I did.
Shit, just looking at that paragraph, I can kinda see why he�s so fucked up. Kid never had a chance. Throw in his abusive older sister, the whole �mom getting sick and dying� thing, the alcoholic, drug abusing dad and the whole dysfunction behind everything, and I�m kind of amazed he didn�t kill himself.
What�s not surprising is that he started drinking and drugs pretty early in life. He was 12/13 when he started drinking and smoking weed. We started at roughly the same time (I was 15), but he was just a little before me.
I can remember one time, when I was 15 and he was 13, our family had a big 4th of July party. I was working that day, so I didn�t get to go, but my dad, grandmother, Justin and his friend Brent (who, as it happens, was on the wrestling team in HS with Hub, and happens to be where he got the name for Butthead, which is really Brent) all came to pick me up after work.
Justin and Brent were shitfaced. Shitfaced! They�d stolen beers all through the party and got themselves damn tore up. How my dad and grandmother didn�t know is beyond me. Call it super heavy duty denial power, I guess. All I know is, the three of us were in the backseat riding home, and Justin and Brent were such typical drunks, complete with putting their fingers to their mouths and going �shhhh!�. And slurring and stammering.
I could probably use some of that super heavy duty denial power in my life now. It could really come in handy.
Around the same time, a few months prior, we had each started taking the pot. He�d started before me with Brent, and then I started with my friends. Well, I knew this guy Rodney in gym class who would sell me joints, two for four bucks. Ah, those were the days. So, a few times, I brought home some weed, and we started taking the pot together.
Those nights were hilarious. Some of my best memories with Justin. My dad worked second shift, so we would just spark it right up in the house. And then, because we were new with the pot smoking thing, we would lose our minds and do the dumbest shit ever.
We wanted to listen to music. We had one of those old stereo set-ups, am/fm receiver and a turntable. Not even a cassette tape deck. And honestly, my dad didn�t get rid of his fucking 8 track deck until like 1985. Anyway, yeah, big speakers, the whole nine.
So, we had some Ozzy records to listen to, Blizzard of Oz and Diary of a Madman. They were actually Gary�s, but he�d left them when he went into the USAF. Listening to them on the stereo just wasn�t good enough, and we couldn�t crank it too loud cuz my grandmother lived on the other side of the duplex and would have a cow. And we couldn�t find the friggin� headphones to save our lives.
So. We put the speakers together, face to face, and lay our heads (one at a time, of course) in between them and cranked the tunes at a reasonable volume (between the hours of 9 am and 11 am---ha ha just kidding, movie quote). It was a trip. It was so fun, as silly as it sounds.
Another night, I can�t even remember what started us laughing, but something was so funny, we lost it. We couldn�t even breathe, we were laughing so hard.
Suddenly, Justin announced that he had to pee, but moving was rough with all the laughing. Then, he pissed his pants. OMG, I died. Our only bathroom was upstairs, so he headed up to change his pants.
He went up the stairs, one by one, and with each step said, �I pissed my pants� in a different voice. That�s like 16 steps or something. When he got to the top, he yelled, �GODDAMMIT I PISSED MY PANTS!!!�.
I�m surprised I didn�t piss mine. It might sound silly like a location joke to you, but I�m sitting here giggling over the memory of it.
We soon started running around in the same circles. If they were his friends first, they soon became mine, and vice versa. Especially when we started �entertaining� at the house when my dad was gone. Everyone knew Jackie and Justin, and that�s still evident today no matter who I see. Shit, when he wrote to me from jail last month, his PS was �Chuck says hi!�. When I went to the club for the Superbowl, I mentioned that I bumped into a guy who said, �Hey! I just saw your brother last week!�. Every time I bump into someone from back in the day, the next question after �How are you?� is �How�s your brother doing?�.
I met Smokey, one of my best friends, when Justin brought him home from junior high school with him one day, looking to pick up a bag of smoke. We all hopped into my little Subaru and went to see Sampson (�Half Baked� Fans: to this day, I still crack up when I see that movie, since my HS pot pusher was named Sampson. More irony, my drug dealer Sampson? Is a cop now. A legitimate police officer. I swear to God) to pick up a bag.
One of Justin and his friends� favorite things to do back then was clean that Subie. They�d come out with a ton of roaches and get high, and I had a clean car. I�ll never forget that. �Hey, Jackie, can we clean your car?!?�.
As we got older, we still hung out together. Notable was one night in July 1992, just after I�d moved back from NY, when me, Smokey, Justin and Stephanie (from NY, but was living with her dad in MA at the time) all headed off to a keg party together.
What a night. We had so much fun. Got totaled, too. Some guy had bumped into Smokey on accident and spilled his beer on him a little. Smokey repaid the favor by dousing the guy with his entire cup full every time the guy came near him. OMG, it was hilarious.
It was one of those nights where I got so trashed, I just slipped out of the party and into the backseat of the car to pass out and ensure that I got home. I also passed out ON THE TOILET when we got home. And Steph found me like that. Lovely.
Justin made off with about half of the contents of the house�s medicine cabinet. He�d started the klepto shit a few years earlier. The next day he had this tube of �Rhuli gel� from there, and I was like, �Why the fuck did you take that?!� and he said, �Hey, that�s good shit for bug bites�. He was right. I still use the stuff on the skeeter bites in the summer, it fucking rules, only now it�s made by Band-Aid. Thanks to Justin and his sticky fingers.
Life went on like that for a few years. My dad even started partying with us, and we had fun. Sure, there were starting to be signs that Justin was headed for loserville once he got into his 20�s. Like the way he went to high school for an extra year (like me) and did NOT graduate, or the way he never even tried to purchase his own vehicle, at least. But, he did manage to keep himself a few jobs, and did well at them.
Ha ha, for a while he worked for a full service gas station (that has been closed for a few years now, but still has the signs up advertising gas for $1.08 a gallon and it makes me very�reminiscent. I remember the days when gas went up over a buck a gallon and people were flipping. *sigh*) and he got paid on Fridays, and he�d head right down to a bar called Sharkey�s (now defunct, tax issues or something like that) for happy hour. He�d come home bombed and I�d ask, �Where were you?� and he�d slur, �shhhhah-keys�, so until that bar closed, we always pronounced it the drunken slurred way. It caught on, too, lots of people said it that way.
Then, in came Nina. Nina was 16 and Justin 22 when they first met and she had a raging crush on Justin. Justin had never had a girlfriend, ever, although one time his buddy Aaron caught him fooling around with a girl at a party when they were like 16, but that was the extent. Definitely something that was due to my mother�s death and abandonment issues, for sure. It was Aaron himself (he was a little stud muffin himself, very cute and always had girls, like lots of them, except for the one he wanted since he was 9--me!) who predicted that Justin would #1 marry and #2 lose his mind over the first girl he fucked. Well, #1 didn�t happen but #2 did.
Nina and Justin finally hooked up despite her age. Well, it�s not like her mom was going to do anything about it, because she pretty much handed Nina right over to Justin to take care of. We were all �WTF!�, but what could we do? Smokey and I had many hours of talking about Justin and the mistake he was making, but we couldn�t change anything.
They did love each other. They were two kids who were each desperate for love and they found it with each other. This was in 1995, when the song �Wonderwall� by Oasis came out, and that was their song. I still totally associate it with them and their desperate love whenever I hear it. �Because maybe you�re gonna be the one to save me� is the line that sticks out to me most.
He changed a little during their relationship. He did a lot of dumb shit he�d never done on account of Nina. His friends started alienating from him because he just wasn�t the same guy.
Like, one night he took my grandmother�s car out. He was out all night. They were all of a five minute walk from our house, but since Justin was too drunk to drive, he had Nina drive. Nina had no license, no experience driving and no driver�s ed. She was 17. Oh, and she was just as if not more drunk than Justin. So, she drove home, and as they pulled into the driveway, she hit the gas instead of the brake, and the car slammed into our shed. The car was fine, the shed was not.
Then stupid Justin woke me up to tell me about it, and I was bullshit! WTF! I verbally assaulted Nina like you wouldn�t believe. Justin, too.
I�d never blame Justin�s downward spiral on Nina, though. If it hadn�t been her, it would have been another girl. That�s all it would take. She did do some douche-baggie type shit, but she was a kid herself.
They started breaking up after a year or so of being together, and that�s when he really started acting more like he is now. He went down to where Nina was staying with a billy club one night and got himself arrested. Dummy.
And then she was pregnant with Jaegan, and they got back together. Things were okay until Jaegan was about five months old, and Justin was acting like an ass. Drinking, acting out, being very violent. He punched a downstairs neighbor of their�s in the face (a �woman�) and got arrested for domestic. Nina kicked him out. They were �tuit finis�.
And thus the downward spiral really started. That�s when Justin became the Justin he is today.
It makes me sad. Of all the people in the world, he is my closest biological relative, and the one I am furthest from. Trying to reason with him and BEG him to straighten up is impossible. I�ve mentioned before that I fully expect to see him as part of a homicide someday, either on the giving or receiving end. It breaks my heart, but I�m powerless against it. I suppose, he is, too, he just needs to wake up and realize that.