My Brother, Adem

My parents met each other and began dating sometime in the late 1960's. In 1969, my father was drafted into the Army, and he was pretty sure he would be killed in Vietnam. He told my mom not to wait up for him. Like a lot of love stories, I'm sure it sounds a lot more tragically romantic than it really was. My mom met and married a Yugoslavian man named Ahmet. He would always say that he was Turkish, as there is apparently some shame in being Yugoslavian.

In 1971, she gave birth to their only son, Adem. Her marriage to Ahmet soured soon after that. In 1973, my father was discharged from the Army, very much alive. I'm not really sure if his return precipitated it or not, but my mom and Ahmet got a divorce, and my mother married my father soon afterwards. She kept custody of Adem as per a mutual agreement..

I was born in 1975, the day before the last U.S. troops were evacuated from Vietnam. The Watergate scandal was in full swing, and Nixon would resign from the presidency a couple of months later. It was the official beginning of the "me" generation of excess and apathy. Though many say that 60's activism died with John Lennon's murder in 1980, I'd say that it had become seriously ill in 1975.

Like most younger brothers, I idolized my older sibling. My first word was "Adem," and I would crawl around our crummy apartment in Queens calling after him ceaselessly. He'd close a door on me, and I'd peek my face under the crack in the door and keep announcing, "Adem! Adem! Adem!" He was predictably annoyed by his younger sibling. Knowing him like I do now, I'm sure part of him was flattered.

My brother and I were terrific readers as kids, both of us excelling far beyond our grade level in elementary school. My brother was also very able at math, even scoring a perfect 100 on his first state-wide Regent's math test. I was never as adept with numbers, but I still got good grades. I feel like Adem was a lot smarter, in a measurable sense, than I am. He grasped simple instructions and subtle teaching cues better than I could. Neither of us were particularly ambitious about school, though. We received high marks in elementary and junior high school without exerting very much effort.

In 1980, my family moved into an attached house with two units: one for my retired grandmother, and one for my family. My brother and I occupied the attic, which was two rooms: one room at the top of the stairs, and another, more private room at the front of the house. We shared that as a bedroom for the first two years, but I took the back room eventually. My mother says that Adem wanted us to share the front room so that I "wouldn't get scared," which is a cute but incongruent story. At age five, I would have wanted to stay in a room with him, in any case.

In the first grade, I accidentally squirted ketchup on a classmate's white shirt during Assembly Day, and as I rushed to the bathroom to get wet napkins, shameful tears streaming down my face, my brother found me in the hall and comforted me. I remember watching Soap with Adem on our television set in my room. We would watch a nightly roster of Honeymooners, Johnny Carson, and David Letterman during the Summer. I guess these were sharing times, though I don't have any touching memories to relate. Adem had an uncanny ability to guess the correct time to the minute if he had seen a clock within the last twelve hours. I would test him throughout the night to tell the correct time without looking at a clock, and to my memory, he always got it right.

Adem was always a more problematic child than I was. I could entertain myself all day, drawing pictures, recording Saturday Night Live sketch rip-offs into my portable radio, or playing pretend games with the next-door neighbors. My brother would be hanging out a candy stores outside of the immediate neighborhood, playing arcade video games. Adem was a very charismatic and kind of imposing person, and he always had a lot of friends that looked to him for guidance and instruction. I had only one really good friend as a kid, and he didn't go to my school, so I only saw him on weekends. I think this kept me out of trouble and shaped the way I came up in relation to my brother.

When I was in fifth grade, my brother was accepted into Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school for math in New York City. Things started going sharply downhill when I was in the sixth grade. My brother cut class at first, then completely stopped going to school altogether. This resulted in numerous family arguments, which in my home took the shape of interminably long lectures by my father. Later, I would be on the receiving end of these marathon lectures, and I'd simply walk away when I'd heard enough. But my father and brother would hash it out for hours, my father's speech usually a calm, even tone and my brother's belligerent shouting and storming about. He was, by this time, a massive character, about six feet tall and quite broad shouldered. He began to grow his hair long per the approved metalhead style. He never hit my father, though. It never came to blows.

I think it's worth mentioning that, though Adem was not my father's biological son, he almost never invoked this fact. I only remember one time, when Adem was sixteen or seventeen, when he said it during the heat of some argument. Nothing was really made of the comment later on, and I think they both understood that though they apparently hated each other, they were father and son.

So it was around 1986 that my brother really started fucking up. As a result, my parents spent a lot more time dealing with him and I spent a lot of time alone. I don't mean this to be my sob story; I have lots of happy memories of my own around this time. I had a small group of friends with whom I'd skateboard and argue about rap music (one friend was a ferocious Van Halen fan). It was a very creative period of my childhood. Still, it was during this time that I would take the subway into Manhattan without my parents' knowledge, so I was acting out in some small way. I don't think I resented my parents any more than the average eleven year-old, and I rarely got in any trouble that deserved a lecture from my dad.

Adem was kicked out of Stuyvesant High School and started attending my local school, Francis Lewis High. I was in seventh grade at the time. Understandably, my brother and I became very estranged. I was twelve years old, he was sixteen. I may have wanted more brotherly guidance, but I hated when he was around a lot more. My parents and Adem were constantly fighting, and my brother's behavior became very erratic. He would come and go as he pleased, staying out until all hours of the night and cutting class like it was a requisite for graduation. My brother's temper would flare up and he would break things, one time shattering a bathroom mirror and cutting himself up pretty badly.

Adem hung a sheet over the doorway between our rooms for privacy, but I probably snuck in there to peek around once a day. It was an incredibly messy affair, piled high with laundry and records and Fangoria magazines. I would sneak into his dresser and steal his porno mags when he was out. I'd read his love notes and try to find any available evidence concerning who he was. He would often know when I had been in his room, and would yell at me for it. I was never deterred.

He would play King Diamond and Metallica records at blaring levels every evening, and he'd take ridiculously long showers while playing Megadeth on my parents' stereo at window pane-shattering volume every day. When I was about thirteen, I walked in on my brother while he was rolling a bunch of joints. I stood there for a minute, dumbfounded, and my brother coolly said, "Well, you've caught your brother rolling joints." I stammered something and quickly walked away. After this incident, I remember my brother being almost constantly drunk and/or high. I recall a Christmas morning, probably in 1988 or 1989, when he came downstairs at eleven in the morning, stinking like a brewery, and handed me a terrible two-dollar bulletin board from the local stationery store. It was unwrapped and he made a half-hearted joke about it. I wasn't expecting anything from Adem, but this token and the way it was presented seemed worse than not having received anything at all.

In 1988, my grandmother passed away, and now our home had an empty apartment in it. Adem started hanging out there almost instantly, drinking lots of beer and smoking weed while watching cable television. I was still kind of scared to hang out down there, being that I had so many recent memories of my grandmother, but he didn't seem to give a shit. Eventually, I got over my fear, too.

In 1989, my brother dropped out of high school and got his Graduate Equivalency Diploma. Adem got the highest marks in his class, and I think he fell two or four points short of a perfect grade. Adem held a series of jobs after this, many of them hooked up by my parents, but he was fired from almost every one of them for perpetual lateness. One evening, I was eating dinner with my parents while Adem was out, and they brought up that they'd been thinking of giving my grandmother's apartment to him. I was incensed, and complained that he would basically be rewarded for being an incredible asshole. I guess I made a good case because my parents never formally handed over the apartment to Adem, but he would hang out down there every night.

In 1990, everything sharply changed for the worse. Ahmet bought my brother a car (an ancient El Dorado or something) and my brother would tool around the neighborhood, blasting heavy metal and drinking. He started to deal a little weed and smoked incredible amounts of it. I had entered high school by this time, and I was also experimenting with drugs. On rare occasions, we would sit around together, stoned off our asses, and watch television. These were the closest times we had together. I don't remember getting high with him, though. Not at that point.

I don't really remember what happened to my brother's car--either it just crapped out or he couldn't pay the insurance or something--but his car was gone almost as quickly as it came. He started driving my parents' Toyota Corolla, and one night I revealed to my dad that he had been dealing drugs from their car. This was the last straw for my parents, and they kicked him out to live with Ahmet. I don't think I planned on him getting kicked out of the house, but I definitely didn't argue the decision. I felt, and still feel, some guilt over manipulating my brother's life from behind the scenes--first with my grandmother's apartment, then getting him ejected from our house--but I can't deny that it also gave me a real sense of relief.

Not long after he got there, Ahmet kicked my brother out of his house. After a tumultuous cross-country journey with a friend of his, they parted ways near Las Vegas and my brother set up over there. Over the next six or so years, my mom would fly my brother back to New York for a week, usually around my birthday. At first, everything would be swell, but over the week he would regress to his old habits and he'd get drunk and high every day and fight with everyone in the family. I remember one time clearly: we were going to go to the Transit Museum with my mother, and he wanted to smoke a joint (of my weed) together before we left. I was on the phone, and the whole time my brother was bugging me to light up the joint. I brushed him off while I spoke to my friend, and eventually it was time to leave. My brother was incredibly pissed off. He kept going on and on, in front of my mother, about how badly he wanted to smoke that joint. I was nineteen or twenty at the time, and no longer intimidated by my older brother, so I told him to shut up about it. He kept at it, though, pressing my buttons while we were in the car on the way to the museum. He said that he couldn't get hungry without smoking pot, and intimated that he was prepared to make the day a living hell due to my indifference. I blew up at him, and told him how fucked up he was for wanting to be high before we went out to a museum with our mother, of all things. My mom started crying and stopped the car, but my brother just would not relent, still pissing and moaning about that joint. I hopped out of the car and started walking away, thinking about how fucked up the situation was, and what a dick my brother could be. For the first time, I realized that my brother was a drug addict. My mother came after me, and we eventually did go to the museum together, but this event left a strong impression on my mind.

In 1999, Adem's voice got very strange. I would talk to him over the phone sometimes, and he sounded very nasal and strained when he spoke. My cousin went out to visit him, and found that he had a lot of trouble walking. My parents sent him a cane at first, but my cousin convinced them that he was very sick, so they flew him back to New York to see some doctors. You could tell immediately that something was wrong. He had a lot of trouble standing up straight and was wobbly when he walked. It turned out that my brother had ALS, better known to most as Lou Gehrig's Disease, which is a disease that deteriorates the muscles and often results in death. Our family was optimistic at first, since some people deteriorate to a certain point and then stop. Some even recover a limited use of their muscular functions. Adem was still a pretty hearty guy at this time, so it didn't seem like it would be the bitter end just yet. My parents moved him in permanently to look after him.

Emotionally, my brother was worse than ever. He would get stinking drunk every night and play maudlin new wave songs at full volume from his bedroom. After a while, getting drunk was dangerous for Adem, so he would smoke incredible quantities of marijuana and watch moronic television programs constantly. I felt badly for my brother because of the disease, but I still had a lot of resentment for my brother because of the turmoil he had caused in my family. He had been a total fucking baby about everything his whole life, and often seemed to expect my parents to owe him a living. In a tragic way, he was now getting exactly what he had always wanted. He fought a lot with my mother and wanted her to care for him as if he was a child. My father stayed out of things, for the most part, since Adem's relationship with my father was antagonistic, to say the least.

Adem's condition worsened, both physically and mentally, over time. He was talking Adderal to keep his metabolism up, and still smoking copious amounts of weed. I think the combination did a lot to worsen his mental state. I took Adderall and smoked pot with my brother a couple of times when I visited, and I can say that the combination made me feel kind of schizoid. I can only imagine what the long-term effects were. One day, my father and brother had some kind of argument--I don't recall all of the details, but it resulted in Adem calling the cops on my father for hitting him. If you know my father, you know how improbable this is. The cops had the same notion, and I think they ended up taking my brother away overnight. Ultimately, my parents put my brother in a nursing home, where he would get better care and, maybe more importantly, be out of the house.

At the nursing home, Adem's condition declined rapidly. It was 2003, and he couldn't walk at all. I would visit him every weekend, wheel him around the neighborhood, sneak him a joint to smoke in the hospital courtyard, and watch movies. I felt badly for Adem, but I really felt worse for my mother who was worn out by the ordeal. Adem looked like skeleton dressed in skin that was four sizes too big for his frame. A lot of his cantankerousness was gone, but he still found a way to make things difficult, even as an invalid. Eventually, his condition got so bad that he was kept in a special ward at Flushing Hospital. It was clear to me that he would be dead soon.

The last time I saw my brother, he was laying in a hospital bed, totally unable to sit up or articulate himself. He would try to write what he wanted to say on a piece of paper, but he could barely hold a pen. There was an apparatus nearby to help him breathe and all kinds of instruments attached to his body. My mother was massaging his feet, which looked like narrow potatoes with toes on the end, and he was kind of staring off at the television, angrily defiant to the end. He still had his long hair, even though it meant that someone had to braid it for him every day to keep it from getting all over his face. To me, this was kind of a microcosm for my brother's whole attitude: to do what he wanted, how he wanted, no matter how much it inconvenienced everyone. As I looked at Adem, completely wasted away in bed, his mouth involuntarily opening and closing, his eyes half-lidded and fearful, I thought about this person that I knew very little and understood even less. This drug-addicted, brooding asshole that made my parents' lives horrible whenever he had the opportunity. The sensitive, intelligent man that dominated everyone around him. I didn't want him to die, but in the same way, I didn't feel like he necessarily deserved to live. What would he have accomplished if he never had ALS? Would he have straightened out, put away his puerile rebellion and made something of himself? Would he have gotten by on charisma and met the correct people that would elevate him to a better status? In my heart of hearts, I don't think he would have. In many ways, he lived a brutal, pointless life, and now he would be resigned to a brutal, pointless death. I clasped his gnarled hand and we watched each other for a while, tears flooding and streaming down our faces. He told me that he would try to visit me from the afterlife; I nodded and silently hoped that he wouldn't. We told each other "I love you," and I went home on the bus. He passed away five days later.

My brother was not a singularly nice person. Many people loved him, but it was always despite his many faults and how hard he was to get along with. How did he come to be this way? Was it something genetically-imprinted from his biological father? Was it the result of my mother's divorce from Ahmet, even though Adem was barely three at the time? Did the drugs cause his bad attitude, or did his bad attitude give him a predilection towards drug abuse? Were we so different because he was born in in a different era than me? Or were we more alike than I choose to admit? There is no way of knowing now, but he ended up being, by and large, a fucked-up human being. A fucked-up human being that was, incontrovertibly and without any regret on my part, my brother.