My brother never seemed to have a chance. Once, as a kid, he had a handle on success. Dad derailed that. Nothing Charley ever did was enough. In fact, at their last encounter, Dad laughed in his face and threw his manuscript in the fire. “Writer’s aren’t worth shit,” he said. “And that includes you.”
As the years passed and our lives took their own natural flips and turns I’d only see him occasionally, at a bar where he worked on weekends or walking aimlessly near the zoo in Lincoln Park. It was a favorite haunt going back to the days before he married Elizabeth, before Tommy was born, before he started drinking heavily, before cocaine and the other women.
When the cops came to tell me of the bust I really wasn’t surprised. Not much any of us could do to help. He was always his own man, swimming into the rip and daring the gods to drag him out to sea.
After the sentencing and a few trips to Joliet we lost touch. He stopped writing and I stopped trying to connect. It had always been like that with us. Peaks and valleys. Not much level ground to build on.
Five years seemed to pass quickly. Ann and I had a couple of kids by then and work took the rest of my time. I heard Charley was out but not in town. There was a postcard or two. One from an ashram in Bombay, another from a leper colony near Tahiti. Tommy, a freshman at Brown, said he saw him over the holiday break working a soup kitchen in Boston. I guess they didn’t have much to say or so I supposed. He never mentioned him again.
This September, on the night of the full moon, I spotted him at last smoking with the men outside O’Leary’s bar, hair grey, thinner by far. He seemed to be outlined by a silver glow or maybe it was just the moonlight. I stopped and waved. He waved back and that was that.
It was spring. April. Some kids found him under an overpass. The Tribune noted his tattoos: On his left shoulder the letters R E S I S T and a clenched fist. On his right B E W A R E and the image of a cobra with a snarling human face.
