MY LITTLE BROTHER DENNIS JAMES

Today is my little brother’s birthday. I’ve always called him that, my little brother. It isn’t just because he was my kid brother—I’m almost five years older—but also because I was always big and he was always small.

Jim in his forties

He would have been sixty-six today. I distinctly remember the day Whitie and Reba Mae brought him home from the hospital. I’d had to stay overnight at my grandparents’ house half a block up the street and wasn’t particularly happy about it. But I was really excited when they got back the next evening because Grandma Alice had told me that they’d be bringing me a new baby brother when they came. Why they’d had to go to the hospital to get him, I had no idea. Mysteries of the adult world.

It was already dark out and seemed like the dead of night to me since my bed-time was about nine, but it must only have been around six when they arrived. My sister Darla and I weren’t allowed to “fuss over him” right away. A quick look and Reba Mae whisked him into the other room to change and nurse him and then let the little guy rest. We could see him later.

Arthur Godfrey’s prime time TV show kept us entertained later into the evening. But as bed-time drew near, even with the special reprieve Darla and I got, I wasn’t at all sure I was going to get a good look at my new baby brother before I had to turn in. Finally, however, once the excitement had died down, my mother took me to have a look at him where he slept in his crib—which had been my crib and Darla’s crib before him. He was tiny, still a little purplish, and a bit grumpy-looking.  He had a noteworthy crop of dark-red hair. Reba Mae let me touch it. I petted his head and the hair was silky and his soft-spot was warm and tender to the touch. I had a feeling of seeing something almost holy.

The first thing we did was rob him of his first name before he was even old enough to protest. Whitie had wanted to call him Rusty because of the color of his hair. Luckily, Reba Mae nixed that, since it wasn’t long before that red baby fuzz changed to his real hair, which was almost as blond as Whitie’s. Compensation enough for Whitie—a boy hewn in his image after the first one turned out to be a dud.

Darla Hood

But Reba Mae’s naming skills were never anything to write home about either. Darla got the best of the lot since at least it was a fairly unique name. But she was named, not after some famous heroine—say feminist flying ace Amelia Earhart, or pioneering women’s rights advocate and early abolitionist Lucretia Mott. No, Reba Mae named her after Darla Hood, the pretty little girl that all the boys were crazy about in the Our Gang movies—better known to our generation as “The Little Rascals”.  

Me, I was named after a sappy Irish song, Oh Danny Boy, so that I would ever after have to explain, for any legal purposes, why I was a Danny and not a Daniel. To say nothing of the fact that with my middle name, Norman (after Whitie), and last name, Newland the whole mess had a distinctively mocking nah-nah-nah-nah-nah sound to it when you said it aloud. Danny might have been cute for a little kid, but didn’t she realize I might grow up some day?

So applying these same discerning criteria, she decided that my little brother would be called Dennis James, the name that was unabashedly engraved on his birth certificate. This was in honor of a game show host and sports announcer, who, on the Arthur Godfrey show, a favorite of hers as well, was also the announcer for one of the show’s sponsors, Old Gold cigarettes. She seemed to think Dennis James was the king of cool, so that was my new little brother’s name.

Show host Dennis James

But nobody stopped to think that the poor little guy probably wouldn’t be addressed formally all the time as Dennis James, and by the time he came home for the very first time, Whitie was already referring to him as Little Denny. And, oh crap!  Wait! Denny-Danny-Danny-Denny, the two names were almost identical (especially if the person saying them was from Cleveland)! Who knew? Too late to start calling me something else, and they couldn’t just refer to me as “Hey You”, so something had to give, and “Little Denny” suddenly became “Little Jimmy”. It wasn’t until he started going to school that he became Dennis again—for everybody but the family who would call him Jim for the rest of his life.

Turns out it wouldn’t have been all that necessary after all, since after ruining his name for him, when I was in about sixth grade and he was in first, I decided I wanted to be addressed as Dan. From then on, only the most stubborn of classmates and family members kept on referring to me by my given name.

Although in just about everything else I had a reputation for eccentricity, when it came to Jim, I was, unfortunately, pretty much the typical big brother. I made fun of him, kidded him, played tricks on him and even occasionally beat up on him. It was so much “fun”, because he was such an irascible, flighty, extreme little kid that it was easy to send him into an insane tantrum of screaming and head-banging and all manner of craziness, to our mother’s ever-lasting exasperation.

Darla, Dennis and Danny

But feisty little guy that he was, he never took these things lying down. He had a memory like an elephant and would find a way to get even. Like the time I’d been teasing him all morning, only to eventually get bored and leave him alone. Then, as he sat quietly by himself on the living room rug, drawing pictures and humming, I walked past and, zap! He sank a well-sharpened pencil into my thigh halfway up to the eraser and took off running.  Or another time when I thought all was forgotten, and when I walked past, he hurled one of Whitie’s glass ashtrays and nailed me in the back of the head with it.

Many years later when we were laughing about some of these squabbles, he reminded me of times when he would take vengeance and then I would chase him to try and get him back and he would almost always manage to lock himself in the bathroom, since I was way too slow to catch him. He said, “I’d be in there scared to death while you were yelling and banging on the other side of the door, and I’d be thinking, ‘Man, I sure hope this lock can hold that big moose back!’” We were in our thirties at the time and he said it like a joke, but it was the first time I realized he’d actually been scared, really, genuinely scared of me back then.

Brothers

We were sitting at his kitchen table having a beer when he said it and I stood up and went over and hugged him tight against my belly where he sat, because it broke my heart. He said, “Christ, Big Guy! Lighten the fuck up! We were just kids doin’ what kids do.” I wasn’t convinced and I still die a little inside every time I think of that tiny kid cowering and scared of his big brother.

And he was little. Darla once said, “In grade school, I think Jim weighed thirty-five pounds for, like, four years!” Hyperbole aside, he remained little until about junior high, when he suddenly sprouted. By the time he graduated high school, and after several years of running cross-country in track and field, he was average height, well formed, highly coordinated and fast enough on his feet that he could have made a helluva junior welterweight. But although he never backed down from anybody, he was definitely a lover at heart, not a fighter.

I didn’t just torment him as kids, though. We also played together, a couple of super-heroes joining forces against invisible enemies. Coal miners trapped in a shaft and looking for a way out, when rainy days limited our scenario to under the table with a blanket thrown over it on the screened-in back porch. A sheriff and his deputy on our palomino and buckskin stick-horses. Two detectives on the case to find a client’s missing daughter. And when we played with the other kids in the neighborhood—inevitably some variation of war—Jim and I were always on the same side and finding a way to make sure we were the winners and the ones who “saved the day.”

I also helped him fight some of his battles. It wasn’t that he was a wimp. On the contrary, in a fair fight, he was more than game. But he was just so little that he seemed to always be out-gunned.

What he lacked in size, however, he made up for in his sense of vengeance and justice. Like, if I ever picked a fight with one of his older enemies, it was my own doing, because if he knew about it, he wanted to be in on it. He wanted them to remember who he was. Like when a guy my same age was picking on him all the time until we one day lay in wait, bushwhacked the guy and I held him while Jim beat the living crap out of him and then punctuated it by kicking him in the groin. Obviously, the guy didn’t mess with him anymore after that. Or another time that a much older neighbor was bullying him until he and I got together, took our B-B guns, waiting around the corner of the guy’s house and, when he turned into his driveway on his bike, opened fire as fast as we could cock and shoot. I still remember the kid’s squeals and the sound of our missed shots pinging off of his bike fenders as he tried to cover the long driveway as quickly as possible and get to cover in his garage. Again, no more bullying after that.

But inevitably, I discovered girls and books and music and he discovered friends...and girls...and friends...and girls, and got way too cool to hang with a nerd like me, and I too sophisticated to be distracted by a kid brother. From the time I was in junior high on, about all we shared was a bedroom, and wouldn’t even have shared that if Jim had been successful in getting Reba Mae to let him have Darla’s room after she left for college. But our mother was adamant. Darla’s room would remain her room until our sister decided she was done with it.

But although he still had to put up with my sleeping there whenever I was home, from the time he was about fourteen, the room was basically his, since I was off to South America for the first time when I had just turned nineteen, and then went to Ohio State for a year before joining the Army and going away for another three years, before being gone for good.

“You know,” Jim said once, “when you first left, I was like, ‘good riddance!’ It wasn’t until later that I started missing my big brother.”

At first, whenever I was back from South America, where I lived from age twenty-four, our visits with each other were pretty much limited to family get-togethers at our parents’ house. And while we were glad to see each other and to play cards together and chat, the two of us with our respective wives present, there was a shyness. Like we were somehow strangers with a shared past who knew nothing about each other’s present. But then one year, he suggested a family trip to Traverse City, where we had often taken a daytrip as kids during our summer vacations at Lake Manistee in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Darla was working and couldn’t come, but Jim and his wife and I with mine along with Reba Mae and Whitie made the journey, and then, on a whim, made the trip up to Manistee as well and stayed in some rustic cabins like the ones we’d frequented as kids.

It was the first time that Jim and I had found some down time alone just to chat about old times, to share confidences and to drink oceans of beer together. After that trip, we were no longer just estranged brothers. We had become close friends. And that friendship just kept on growing for the rest of his life.

Jim was a hard worker, meticulous in everything he did, and ambitious in every job he had. He held executive positions in several companies and owned a business of his own before his personal life got the better of him and he decided he was done striving. He once said, “If I’d have been the kind of hyperactive kid I was back then in today’s world, they’d have had me on prescription Ritalin for sure.” And that was the impression he gave, of having energy to spare, of needing to calm down, to take the edge off. Which tended to make him a real party animal all his life.

He saw humor everywhere. I remember going out drinking with a favorite cousin of ours and his new bride once when I was in my forties and Jim in his thirties. After saying good night to our cousin, Jim said, “Mind stopping off at Walmart? I need a few things.”

We were both drunk enough to actually enjoy our shopping experience. I looked at things, picked them up, read their packages, wondering what they were good for, while Jim browsed for the things he needed. We also picked up snacks and more beer. This party wasn’t over yet.

Anyway, we go up to the counter and Jim starts placing the stuff in front of the cashier, a pretty young woman. A twelve-pack of Miller Highlife, a bag of mothballs, a bag of tortilla chips, a can of spray starch, a can of WD-40 oil, a potato-peeler, a block of sharp cheddar, a box of fish food, a bottle of Kero corn syrup and a carton of Marlboro Ultralights. When he sees all the items together there on the counter, it suddenly strikes him funny, and he looks at the girl and says, very confidentially, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to use them all together.”

The cashier looked puzzled. She had no idea what he was talking about. But he and I were tickled to death and couldn’t stop laughing. We laughed until our sides ached. And then we went back to his place and got a whole lot drunker.

At my mother’s funeral, two years before Jim himself died, I saw a relative neither of us had seen in ages. He was somebody we’d both liked, a fun kind of guy that many described as “having a drinking problem”, but who for us was more like what our own sister (who was a substance abuse expert) had described Jim and me as being—namely, functioning alcoholics. Anyway, this other guy had met a girl, who was an evangelical, gotten himself “saved”, shaved off his cruel little mustache and gotten sober.

After chatting with the guy for awhile, I went over to Jim and said, “Hey, did you see that so-and-so’s over there with his new wife?”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Yeah, briefly, but, y’know, I liked that sonuvabitch a lot better when he still drank.”

The last woman in Jim’s life really took a toll. She had a batshit crazy husband who had been a flight-deck commander in the Navy and now mostly devoted himself to his cocaine habit. The guy threatened Jim so often when he was high that my brother finally had to change his phone number and slept with his .357 magnum in the drawer next to his bed.

Shortly before Jim died, after she had up and left him from one day to the next, he said she had once, in a fit of depression, said through hysterical tears, “My ex is crazy! Do you think I made him that way?”  To which he had answered, “Of course not, honey. Don’t even think that. The guy is just damaged goods.”

“But you know,” Jim says to me then, after she was gone, “I wish she’d ask me that again. I’d say, ‘Yes, you drove him nuts! It’s what you do. You drive men crazy.'”

Jim and Whitie

I think so much about all these things whenever his birthday and this season of the year come around, because he died only a month after his fifty-first birthday, just in time for the holiday season. My sister and I spent the night before Christmas Eve in a hotel in Tennessee in the middle of a snowstorm, with Jim’s ashes locked in the trunk of his car. We were driving him back to Ohio from Florida where he had died. As things worked out, the celebration of his life was held on New Year’s Eve Day at the United Methodist Church in our home town of Wapakoneta.

When it was my turn to speak, it was hard to make a sound around the lump in my throat, but at one point something struck me funny looking out at all of his old buddies sitting in the pews. How ironic, I said out loud, with the way he loved a good party, that he got us all to turn out here together on New Year’s Eve.

He couldn’t have done it better if he’d planned it.

Happy birthday, Little Brother, wherever you are.