Things That You're Born With

Learning: Consecutive Substack Story 1214

Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash

When I was about five I started thinking my mom was the cruelest woman in the world.

I was the youngest kid of twelve, until I wasn’t, then I was again.

My brother Colin drowned at summer camp.

Seemed like we were mourning for two years, during which my brother John would come home drunk and my mom would scream at him to quit drinking all day at Dooley’s and to go get an apprenticeship.

I swear to all the disciples and angels I thought my mom wanted John to get on an actual boat, where I was afraid he would drown like Colin did. I was in shock that my mom wanted another son near big scary water just because he was a drunk.

One night my dad told my mom that her words had no sway with John because she didn’t work.

They argued pretty fierce, though my dad would somehow interject his love for my mom in the argument (I love you pretty lass, but you’re being dumber than a two-wheeled unicycle).

Pretty sure that argument was the beginning of my mom owning a little consignment resale shop called Flaherty’s Rainbow.

My mom loved rainbows, and I thought she loved them because there were pots of gold at the end of them.

In my mind one of us was gonna find a pot of gold and then John wouldn’t need to get on a ship and maybe we could pay god to bring Colin back.

I believed it all.

My sister Connie got sent away to school and I hoped they didn’t have a pool where she could drown, and she promised me she wasn’t going away to swim.

When Connie came home from school my mom had another baby, my little brother. They named him Colin and I thought that it was a little strange to have a dead brother named Colin and a living one named Colin.

Connie told me she named the baby after Colin and after she turned eighteen she was moving to Tucson and the baby was gonna be hers.

It took me a while to figure out that one day my mom wasn’t gonna give me a baby and make me move to Tucson with it.

By the time I was twelve John had quit drinking, he was an apprentice electrician and in a lot more danger of zapping himself than drowning, Connie and Colin were living in Madison, Wisconsin because Tucson was too hot, and my dad got me a job washing dishes at the Hibernian Hall.

And someone threw a brick through the window of Flaherty’s Rainbow.

Part of my job was to bring fresh racks of glasses out to the bartenders at the Hibernians.Technically I was too young to be working there, much less behind the bar, but cops on the west side of Detroit had way more to worry about than a twelve year old kid washing dishes.

I overheard a lot of conversations from old drunks, mad drunks, happy drunks, and drunks so drunk I couldn’t understand a damn thing.

The day after someone threw the brick through the window of my mom’s store I heard a few guys say it was a shame.

I heard a few guys say it was stupid.

And I heard one guys say it was because my brother Sammy is a faggot.

The guy who said it ended up fighting.

The next day two more guys got in a fight over the same thing.

And that night, my father showed up, got a pint of Harp, walked up on the stage where they eulogized dead people, announced raffle winners and where Charlie Taylor would play Finnegan’s Wake until guitar picks he dropped littered the floor, and said anyone that wanted to call his son a faggot could come up on the stage and fight him.

I knew for sure that I wasn’t supposed to start fights in school over name calling.

And I knew for sure my brother couldn’t be a faggot because the Flaherty boys were tough.

And then my father slugged back his Harp, said that his son, any of his sons, could plant a damn kiss on whomever they chose to plant a kiss on,and that he was putting up a five hundred dollar reward for information on who threw the brick.

Almost before he was done talking Billy Cochrane said “Ricky Kelly was in here bragging about it.”

My father almost said “shutup.” I knew his shutup face.

“Because of the rainbow or because…”

My father didn’t finish his sentence but I had no idea why someone would throw a brick at a rainbow, unless it was to knock it over to make the pot of gold easier to get to.

“Ricky Kelly busted that window. I ain’t no narc, but he said it him damn self.”

My father nodded.

Some other guys in the bar nodded, agreeing with Billy.

When I got home I told my mom everything.

And for a minute I think I got something wrong, because my mom was telling me that it was okay that Sammy was gay, and the name calling wasn’t just name calling, it was…it was a mean way of telling the truth and it was uncalled for, but that was the world and Sammy needed extra love from his family.

I was twelve years old and the only worse thing in 1981 than your brother being queer was you being queer and I was pretty sure I wasn’t queer, so it was the worst thing.

My mom spent six months trying to convince me it wasn’t even close to the worst thing, that she had buried a son, and that all her kids could be queer as far as she was concerned and sometimes she wished the girls were, because she couldn’t help raise any more babies.

Then my mom told me she loved me whether I was queer like Sammy or a drunk like John and my sister Katie.

I told her I was neither of those things, I was just a kid who was so dumb I used to think an apprenticeship could sink, so I thought she was the cruelest woman in the world and that if Billy Cochrane could get five hundred bucks from my dad just for repeating something Ricky Kelly said out loud, then maybe there were pots of gold at the end of rainbows.

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