Unlikely Brothers Read online

  When he was on the road, he’d write us stories on postcards, hotel stationery, and airline vomit bags, wherever he could put pen to paper. There was one long-running story he concocted about a family of Native American totem poles who were also secret heroes. We’d seen them at a roadside exhibit in Texas one time when we were bombing around in the station wagon on one of our road trip adventures, and they took on a life of their own through Dad’s electrifying tales.

  Uncle Dave and Dad were always mixing it up. Once they found themselves in Las Vegas in the same hotel where Elvis Presley was staying. So they got to know a couple of the waiters and either convinced or bribed them to be allowed to bring Elvis his room service meal. They hung around with the King in his hotel suite for a long time shooting the breeze. Another time they were in a big hotel and, in one of their more questionable moments, they found a wheelchair in a storage closet. So Dad got in the chair and Uncle Dave wheeled him into the restaurant, which was full of people at dinnertime. Uncle Dave ran the wheelchair into someone’s table and flipped the chair so Dad tumbled out. The diners were horrified, and a few rushed to Dad’s help. Suddenly Dad leapt up and shouted, “I’m cured, I’m cured. My god, it’s a miracle!!” And the place went nuts. I could go on all day recounting the stories we heard.

  And we also saw for ourselves Dad in action. In a Pittsburgh gym and swimming pool Dad used to sneak us into through a little-used basement entrance, he wriggled a meeting for us with Fred Rogers, who had just finished his swim and was just like he was on television in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. In Louisville we met the real Colonel Sanders, resplendent in his white suit, who told us the incredible story of how he started Kentucky Fried Chicken. He told Dad that he had heard of Fred’s Frozen Foods and liked what he saw, or tasted, from one breading guy to another, I guess. Dad was beaming the rest of the day, getting the Colonel’s stamp of approval like that.

  We got to go with Dad to these extraordinary events called “food shows,” where restaurateurs and food brokers of all kinds would display their wares in some big auditorium. Luke and I would slide down row after row, sampling these culinary delights and meeting some of the greatest traveling salesmen who ever lived. They were larger-than-life figures, with big laughs, strong handshakes, and endless stories.

  And Dad was the biggest of all of them in my eyes.

  It was with the neighborhood kids, though, that my dad’s goodness really shone. Some of my earliest memories are of Dad driving through the neighborhoods we lived in, rounding up kids to play baseball or football in the park. People called him the Pied Piper; every kid followed him. He was tall and strong, and he had a full head of silver hair from the time he was in his mid-thirties. His smile was as wide as a piano keyboard; people couldn’t help but like him. If we were driving along and saw an old lady who had to cross the road, Dad would stop the car right in the intersection and make us kids get out with him, and then we’d help the old lady cross the street, with the cars behind us honking away.

  Dad would pitch or quarterback for both teams, and he’d keep those kids entertained for hours with jokes, pratfalls, and high-energy goofballism. And if one of the kids clowned with him—pirouetting on his way to second base, crossing the end zone in a back flip—Dad would laugh and flatter him by performing his own deft imitation. I wish I could have frozen time right there …

  A big shadow hung over my childhood, though, amidst all this sunshine: We moved from city to city every few years. We left Indianapolis for Kansas City when I was in kindergarten, and we moved from Kansas City to Fort Wayne several years later, and then we went on to Philadelphia. In between, we would land for memorable stints in Dad’s hometown of Pittsburgh, as well as the farms of my mom’s people in Kansas and Oklahoma. Dad fit in every place we went; he was the most popular grownup among the kids for miles around. It was not unusual for a knock on the door to come at any time, and a kid there to ask, “Can Mr. P come out and play?”

  But moving really took its emotional toll on me. It always seemed that the minute I was starting to draw whole breaths in a new place, we’d be on to the next. Each time, a little reservoir of sadness and self-doubt, isolation and anger, collected inside me because once again I’d be the outsider, the loner kid on the playground. Admittedly, I was a sensitive kid. But the regular moving crushed my spirit in ways that I had increasing trouble recovering from. The day the moving van showed up in Kansas City, I drew a few pitchers of water from the kitchen sink, carefully carried them outside, and poured them into the soil beneath the hedges to make a vast arsenal of mud. I peppered the side of that van with the mud, trying to erase the moving company’s name, Bekins. I caught hell and a half for that; the Bekins driver nearly pulled my arm out of its socket.

  And then, somewhere around the time I was eight, an eerie darkness began falling across my relationship with Dad. I’m sure I was full of unspoken resentment toward him for uprooting us every few years. What I felt coming from Dad, though, was a new and growing impatience and anger with me that I couldn’t figure out. For example, I remember following Dad and all the neighborhood kids up to the park one day for a big baseball game. Everybody was clowning around—tripping each other on the grass, running the bases backward—and Dad was laughing, … until I got into the spirit and came to bat with my mitt on my head. Suddenly it was though a cloud had rolled in front of the sun. “Goddammit, J.P.!” he barked, and I shrank down into my shoes. On the way home after he dropped the other kids off, he started yelling at me for another perceived offense, and when I talked back to him, he spit at me in the backseat where I was sitting right next to Luke, and then he kicked me out of the car, making me walk the rest of the way home.

  Again and again, it seemed, Dad would single me out for a harsh, relentless, and unexpected scolding—often when I felt I was doing nothing wrong. The forcefulness of the anger was shocking and profoundly destabilizing to me, and so contrary to his sunny persona. He would pay so much positive attention to strangers, and then turn on me like a wolf. Once I got stung by a bee and he screamed at me for not spraying myself with insect repellent. He went on and on, his face bright red with fury at my mistake, all the while my hand swelling up because of my extreme allergy to insect bites. He was viscerally, blindly affected by my mistakes, or by any hint of defiance.

  Luke, Dad, and J.P.

  Most importantly, I think, he wanted me to be perfect—a standard I could never meet no matter how hard I tried. The weight of his expectations was crushing.

  When Dad would go off on his sales trips Monday through Friday, Mom was left behind with Luke and me. Mom had coincidentally studied to be a nun while Dad studied for the priesthood before they left their vocations separately, later met, and eventually married each other. She had endless energy for the church, for volunteering to teach art to kids in the Head Start program, for praying in front of family planning clinics (but not going with my dad to get arrested), for supporting the nuns of Mother Teresa’s religious order, and for her two boys whom she loved so much and so well. But it was tough for her to have to raise two growing sons while her husband was perpetually on the road and needing to move every few years. Not that Luke and I were bad kids; in fact, just the opposite. We were boys, sure, and we would get into fairly typical trivial scrapes and mischievous mishaps. But we were good student-athletes who didn’t break any major laws and didn’t come home in drunken stupors.

  In fairness, however, we were a handful for my mom, and, in retrospect, I figure there is no way she wasn’t a bit subconsciously resentful toward Dad for being away so much. It must have been very difficult for her to be perpetually in his huge shadow, watching him constantly playing the role of the class clown. So by the time he got home from one of his weeklong trips, she’d have assembled a multi-count indictment of every one of Luke’s and my transgressions. Taken individually, these wouldn’t have caused much of a blink, but remember, this was the pre-cell phone era, which meant that there was a week’s worth of inequities f
or two rambunctious boys, and the litany was bracing for any semi-absent parent. Here I’d be eager for Dad to get home to play and tell his stories, but then, the minute he walked through the door—his pork tenderloin sample cases still in his hands and his overcoat buttoned—Mom would unload: “They clipped all the flowers from the hedges.” “They broke the basement window.” “They made a mess of the garage.” Dad—tired from the road and most likely filled with his own frustrations—would simply snap. He had a legendary Irish temper, and he probably just wanted a drink, and a little peace and quiet. But his rage would all come raining down on me, the eldest son. The man could go from zero to sixty in a heartbeat—face bright red, screaming his head off at me, occasionally with a hint of real blackout violence, and bringing out his belt, which we nicknamed the “whistling wasp.” His rage-aholism, usually connected with his drinking, was utterly terrifying. My hero would turn into a monster right before my eyes, and over time his short, frequent, explosive outbursts were devastating.

  In each house we moved to, I would have a hiding place to which I would run during these outbursts. In our Kansas City house, the upstairs bathroom had a foldout cabinet that, when opened, would block the door, and to get away from any one of Dad’s memorable tirades, I’d run in there, open the drawer, then climb out the window and down off the roof. There was a spot, on the back roof of the garage and underneath a gigantic tree, that was my secret hideout; nobody knew about it, and nobody knew I was up there. I’d sit in there for hours with my hands squeezed against my pounding temples, absolutely invisible to the world, wondering, in my childish, guilt-ridden Catholic way: What did I do wrong? Why can’t I be good?

  It was in moments like these that my journey toward Michael began.

  Back then I didn’t forge a tight bond with Luke, who is a year and a half younger than I am. I kept Luke outside the walls. As anyone’s little brother would, he tried to follow me around, and I invariably stiff-armed him. Maybe I resented that I took the brunt of my dad’s anger and frustration. Dad was so easygoing with Luke, who had a knack for just going along while I couldn’t accept a shred of hypocrisy, unfairness, or authoritarianism from my father. Maybe I was jealous of how cool Luke was through thick and thin, while I was so sensitive, volatile, affected, and reactive. I slowly grew such a hard shell around my heart, to protect myself from Dad’s anger and the constant moves from city to city, that on some subconscious level I probably feared opening it up a crack to let Luke in. Who knows what else would have rushed in, or rushed out? It was safer for me to build my own little solitary citadel. Luke learned early on not to count on me too much for friendship, and he went his own way.

  Even though we weren’t as close as we could have been back then, my protective instincts for Luke were already in full incubation, which when combined with my own volatility didn’t bode well for anyone who wanted to give Luke a hard time. One time on the school bus in Indiana, some older kid stuck his foot out and tripped Luke when he was walking to the back of the bus. What a mistake. It took a few of the other kids and the bus driver to pull me off the kid who did it, after I set upon him like a wild hyena. Another time I was in the garage and some kid rode up on his bike and said something derogatory to Luke. I came sprinting out of the garage so fast that I almost caught the kid as he sped away on his brand-new ten-speed bike. I didn’t see that kid on our block for weeks after that.

  As part of his Catholic faith and love of kids, my dad gave money to Boys’ Town, the center originally set up for homeless boys that Father Edward Flanagan founded near Omaha in 1917. An icon from Boys’ Town that my father gave me hovers over the memories of my childhood. It was a wallet-sized picture of a smiling boy carrying a smaller, sleeping boy on his back. Beneath them is the legend “He ain’t heavy, Father, … he’s my brother!”

  I used to stare at that picture; something about it captivated me. Though I was the big brother in the Prendergast family, it was the little guy I identified with. I wished for somebody like that big brother, somebody to stand up for me and protect me from the irrationality of my father’s fury, and from the loneliness that lingered with me wherever we moved to next.

  What I think happened later inside my head was a kind of mental and spiritual backflip where I said to myself, okay, if I can’t be the little guy, I’ll be the big guy. Let me look for someone who doesn’t have that protector, because, as I know firsthand, it is the loneliest feeling in the world.

  In Fort Wayne I became a teenager, with all that that entails. My relationship with Dad continued to deteriorate, and I never really understood why. I’d try to be good—I brought home nothing but A’s, I played on five different sports teams, and never drank or did any drugs. But nothing seemed to invite his approval. To the rest of the world, he was Uncle Jack—the back-slapping, handshake-buzzer-wielding, fart-cushion-planting clown he always was. To kids in the neighborhood, he was an ice-cream truck on a summer day. As I got older, it was as though God had given him only so much goodness to spend, and he doled it out in every direction but mine.

  As communication became more difficult, my dad reverted more and more to the Korean War sergeant he had been when he was in his twenties. We were both dug in pretty deep by this time, so when he’d issue an order and I inevitably wouldn’t obey, things would escalate quickly, not unlike the worst caricature of a boot camp drill sergeant and the delinquent and defiant draftee. I refused to conform to the buck private to which he had tried to reduce me. He retreated more and more into military mode, and the war was on. Funny thing is, if he’d just have asked me, I would have done anything for him.

  Our relationship squeezed down tighter and tighter, to the point where not only did I stop speaking to him but I completely refused to acknowledge his existence. I would look in every direction but his. I would address my mother and brother around the vacuum that I made of my father. At meals, I wouldn’t talk at all; if I wanted the salt, I’d catch Luke’s eye and slide my eyes toward the salt shaker. Nothing more. Naturally, my anti-theatrics placed a heavier burden on Luke, but that didn’t occur to me at all at the time.

  Of course, ignoring Dad only enraged him further. I wasn’t a little kid anymore. I was getting bigger and bigger. I was an older boy growing into a young man, and I was challenging his authority on his own turf. I was growing physically and intellectually, but basically thumbing my nose at him routinely right in his own house. Now, as an adult, I can see how incredibly painful that must have been for him, especially since he was so poorly equipped to cope with it, or even acknowledge it. It’s not like his life experience—raised by a Pittsburgh steelworker, schooled in the Vatican’s brand of unquestioning obedience, and then thrust into the cheerful conformity of corporate sales—had given him skills for empathy or introspection. All he saw in me was rebellion, and rudeness. He’d close in on me screaming, especially when he’d had a few drinks, and I’d simply turn into a corner with my head bowed, the emotional equivalent of Muhammad Ali’s old rope-a-dope, coldly willing him away as he railed and raged and pushed at my back.

  But then, of course, I would turn it all on myself. My new hiding place in Fort Wayne, Indiana, was the neighbors’ garage. I’d spend hours crouched beside their rarely used car, my back against the tire, face in my hands, wondering why I was so unlovable.

  At just this moment—as if to physically confirm my un-lovability—my face exploded with a case of cystic acne for the record books. Knobby red lesions—shiny, greasy, and nauseating—so disfigured my face and neck that Luke took to calling me “The Lizard.” As a teenager, I simply squelched any newfound interest in the opposite sex. I kept myself hidden as much as possible behind long hair and a turned-down face. I took refuge in homework and basketball—especially basketball. It was an all-male world in which appearances mattered less than skill or effort, except for when the occasional impolitic kid could be overheard asking, “What’s wrong with that guy’s face?” I’d inherited my father’s natural athleticism and worked at it like a f
iend. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night would keep me from my appointed hoop rounds. For me, every game—no matter how informal—was Game 7 of the NBA Finals. And I followed professional ball with the concentration of a Zen master, studying Pistol Pete Maravich’s arsenal of moves, losing myself in the bottomless minutiae of strategy and statistics. I lofted myself on a cloud of inflated and delusional dreams of someday playing professional basketball.

  What so tortured me, at my core, was not just my father’s screaming and my acne-ruined face, but the terrible unfairness that lay at the heart of it. I was a good kid, and yet all that my father saw were my mistakes and shortcomings, and all the world saw was a mutant lizard. I’d work hard to make friends, and then suddenly we’d be moving to another strange city. It was, to my proto-adolescent self, so massively unfair. That word—unfair—was etched on a giant boulder at the center of my consciousness; I’ve spent just about every minute of my life since then trying to scrape it away, in all kinds of rational and irrational ways.

  It was this sense of unavenged injustice, I suppose, that led me to my other great passion at the time: superhero comic books. Something about these magical figures overcoming human failings to strike down unfairness resonated deep inside me. The ones I especially liked were the flawed heroes, the guys like Tony Stark in Iron Man who drank too much and pushed away everybody who tried to love him, and then exploded out of himself to become an avenger of nearly limitless power. All the best superhero stories seemed to turn on the same plot twist: That moment when a somewhat tormented, loner of a guy like me would undergo a freak accident—being bitten by a radioactive spider, say—and be transformed into a kind of savior or demigod. It’s what kept me going, the fantasy that someone as flawed and unlovable as I would suddenly, and unexpectedly, be magically transformed into something else.