The family can’t deal with his brother’s erratic behavior.
(from Like You’d Understand Anyway)
It’s a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut and I’m home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I’m trying every so often to stay out of it. Jonathan Winters is on Merv Griffin, doing his improv thing with a stick.
My father’s beside himself because he thinks my mother threw out the Newsweek he’s been saving to show my brother. It had some war casualties on the cover. “You couldn’t find your ass with both hands and a banjo,” he tells her, though she’s not looking.
“Go take a shit for yourself,” she tells him on her way through to the living room. He slams drawers in the kitchen. When he gets like this he stops seeing what’s in them. We have to double-check everywhere he’s looked to find anything. All of this is probably going to make my brother go off and we all know it, but none of us can stop.
Well, it’s more of a scene than a story, but it’s an interesting scene. Kinda complicated, hard to comprehend completely. That’s fine. I don’t have to be a know-it-all. Read it here.