Journey Home

This essay was originally published in 1995 in "Main Line", an experimental student publication of Sacramento City College. I'm sorry to say that it's subject, my brother, Joseph Mitchell Brooks died soon after its publication. Mitchell joined my other brother, John Douglas Brooks and our father, Joseph Herman Brooks, who also died from their own addictions. All three died before the age I am now (56). My hope is that all three are at peace.

The night wind blows the vertical plastic rod that hangs from the blinds and it taps the blank white wall of my bedroom. I lie here feeling the unused space in my bed, moving my feet from the pocket of warmth into the chill of sleeping alone, three pillows folded into my arms.

I turned twenty-seven yesterday, and the tap, tap of the plastic rod is like a plumbline pulled taut over the years then snapped twice so the blue chalk billows and the cut is marked. There is an age in every boy's mind when he knows he will be a man and I wonder how I got there. But there is always a beginning, when a callused thumb first presses the chalked string to the sheetrock, and the years are pulled from you in a straight, blue line.

My brother was the first man I ever tasted.

I was six and asleep when Mitchell, six years older, woke me and the friend who was spending the night. At the time, I shared a room with my two older brothers, a double bed to myself -- they shared the other. He led us to the bathroom off the hall that separated my sister's room from ours.

Inside, he turned on the light, and we blinked against the brightness. Rubbing sleep from our eyes, we asked him what he wanted.

"I want you to suck me," and Mitchell pulled down his underwear. "Suck it," he said, and it bobbed at us. Mesmerized by how different he looked than I, how large it seemed, the exoticness of the curly dark hair, I barely heard him promise that it tasted like candy.

"But, you'll pee in my mouth," I said, and my friend guffawed.

Now, twenty one years later, Mitchell sits behind bars at a Louisiana correctional facility. The last time I saw him was through a glass partition. It was Thanksgiving of last year, and we stumbled for conversation as we held the plastic phones to our ears, our voices sounding metallic and distant.

His body looked swollen, his face bloated and pale; dark circles had dug themselves into his face below eyes the same as mine, hazel-green with long lashes and thick eyebrows. Hair that used to be a mane of blond rebellion hung limp and thin and receding. That night, I traced his hairline over a picture of myself with a pen, trying to draw myself into the future. The ballpoint cut the glossy surface with each pass across my head, till the pen broke through, revealing the dark wood of my mother's dining room table.

My brother has spent most of my life behind bars for one petty crime after another. If I could, I would plug the holes in his life with my fingers.

I always felt invisible while Mitchell's presence in a room was palpable -- red and salty and sharp. While Mitchell was wondering what a blow job felt like, I was eating dirt because I liked the way the grit felt between my teeth. Mitchell feared nothing, not even the blows of my father's belt that left purple welts across his back, most certainly not the snitching of his youngest brother whose whines slid the belt from Daddy's waist.

I never told anyone about that night when I tasted the hardness of him I slipped that memory between the mattresses in my mind, to be forgotten. I wouldn't even recall his erection five years after that night when I got my own for the first time.

I was eleven years old and taking a bath, the old tub's bottom scarred and scratched with four-generations of use. Lying on my stomach and propped on my elbows, I peered into the overflow drain that resembled a miniature metal fan. The drain pipe had slipped from its mount, and a crescent-shaped view of the ground beneath the house was visible. The house lumbered on cinder blocks, and the dogs would climb into its shade to escape the heat. I could just make out Puppy's tail wagging in the evening sun that dusted the bathroom with light.

I called for her and pulled my body forward, then shoved backward against the tub, water sloshing at the drain, splashing onto the dog's face causing her to dart from under the house with a yelp, to return only when I called her.

It must have been the sliding motion -- surely not the adoration of our dog -- that caused that first erection. Not a big deal at eleven, except no one had suggested that it would happen.

Staring down at myself in abject shame, I made the only assumption available to me. "Please, God" I prayed, getting up on my knees there in the tub, my hands clasped in front of me, trying to hide the evidence. "Make it go away, I'll never be mean to Puppy again,' I said as the dog's whines reached for me through the drain.

For a year, I fumbled in that inky-blackness of ignorance as if it were a game of Marco Polo in the muddy shallows of Toledo Bend Lake where as a toddler, my father would take my two older brothers and I fishing in its waters, and hunting in the surrounding woods. I have a polaroid of Daddy standing between Mitchell and Doug, my brothers just reaching his waist. They are dressed in flannel, wool caps pulled low over their eyes, rifles propped in the crook of their arms. In the muted color of Daddy's eyes, staring at me from the yellowing gloss of the polaroid, I see answers.

But I recall the image of my father at Thanksgiving last year, the way he looked asleep in the twin bed of my grandmother's A-frame house where he now lived; the withered feel of his skin as I touched his shoulder, his eyes bloodshot and rolling from mine to the bottle of beer, warm and flat where he had left it on the nightstand. By the time I was old enough to ask the questions, Daddy's eyes were already empty, the answers abandoned, leaving only their dark impression behind.

I was so naive about sex, so much so that it was my younger cousin who explained sex to me as we spread hay on the ground for the horses, shattering my belief that women got pregnant by undressing in front of a man. Even after he told me, I couldn't make the connection between the stilted picture of intercourse he painted and my sliding back and forth on my stomach every time I took a bath. The latter was like humping a blank canvas -- no picture, just sensation.

A Playgirl magazine on the bottom rack at Adolph's Gas and Shop when I was twelve would be the first brush of color in the, until then, black and white portrait of my life: A man was on the cover, dressed in light blue shorts, sitting with one leg tucked under him, his hairy chest exposed. The blue of his eyes and the suggestion in them whispering that he wanted me to know what was hidden behind the terrycloth shorts. I stuck that magazine down the front of my pants, and tried to cover up the crinkling when I sat in the backseat, the pages biting into my stomach as Daddy drove home in silence, the pain beginning to feel good by the time we arrived home.

As I pored over the images in that magazine, the memory of my brother resurfaced, the taste of him, the awe I felt. Along with it came an understanding of the stiff washcloth beside his bed, the sounds that drifted to me from across our room at night. These things were like clues to my own sexual journey, left for me to find as Mitchell began to drop in and out of my life.

Every culture has its rituals of manhood when the boy is pronounced a man. And I wanted desperately for Mitchell to notice me, as he had when I was six. I would sleep in the nude, the covers placed to look accidently kicked off. I would try to stay awake, waiting for him to come home, for him to notice my maturity, to see I was becoming a man. I don't believe I ever made it, always falling asleep before he stumbled into the bedroom drunk, the blanket pulled to my chin while I slept.

I wanted Daddy to recognize me. But it was my mother who taught me how to pull the razor across my face, blonde fuzz floating into the sink. It was Momma who took me to the Christian bookstore where I found a word for what I was at sixteen, me flipping through a pamphlet on demonology, the black ink condemned me even as the word rolled easily off my tongue: homosexual.

The magazines began to pile up inside the dark blue trunk at the foot of my bed, the fear of their discovery pushing me to sneak out at night with their weight in a paper bag. I would drive into the woods, choosing dirt roads at random until the darkness had texture. Over a bridge and into the black murky water, beneath a rotting stump, in a hole that I dug with my hands, I would toss them, wondering on the drive home if I tossed with them any hint to who I was, a name on a scrap of paper, anything that could be traced back to me, the black ink of that word fingerprinting me as guilty.

There's a slowness to growing up that way, each second becoming audible as in a game of hide-n-seek when you're bent into the hamper amid the sweet, cloying odor of dirty clothes. If enough time passes, you begin to feel that the game has been forgotten, that the other kids have gone home. That no one is looking for you so no one will ever see you.

Now, 1,500 miles away from home, in a place where my name rolls off people's tongues like vegetables on a cutting board, clipped and precise, I feel the weight of myself push into into the bedsprings of my bed. A manila envelope sits on my desk, Mitchell's prisoner number above the return address. Inside are penciled portraits of beautiful women, the pencil marks like gray ditches where he has pressed the lead into the paper, creating a relief map of their bodies. I think of my brother's fierceness becoming accustomed to the cage, growing to rely upon it and I rise to close the window, to still the tap, tapping of the plastic rod.

When I was nineteen and a sophomore in the small college town of Ruston, Louisiana, I found directions to a gay theater scrawled in ink on the second stall of the men's restroom on the third floor of the campus library. The blue ink carved a path out of the darkness for me, clawed into the surface of the paint.

I hastily returned to my dorm and scrawled a note, slipping it under my then girlfriend's dorm room door, saying that I needed some time away, to think about our relationship. I followed the directions I had copied from the stall until I found myself three hours away in Dallas Texas, standing in front of La Cage Theater.

I entered through the single glass door, "Adults Only," stenciled in black paint across the pane. For five dollars, I purchase my pass to the theater in the back, four screens in separate rooms, a dozen mottled burgundy-upholstered seats facing the flickering images. I sit in the back row of one room as Joe Cage's "Kansas City Trucking Company" imprints me, branding the black ink indelibly into my skin. The man next to me, his face hidden in the darkness, takes my hand, moves it toward his lap and places himself into it as if he were introducing himself. And I think, as he hardens in my palm, that I am no longer a child.