The Brothers K (51 page)

peace.

Did you hear about the baby just born that was both sexes? It had a penis and a brain
.

—overheard at the University of Oregon Medical School

A
ll intentions to the contrary, Irwin was unable to remain a virgin past his third year of high school. I mention this in introducing Everett’s sex life because the order in which siblings or close friends attain sexual experience frequently inflicts profound psychological repercussions upon those who bring up the rear.

Every time Irwin answered an Altar Call at church, it was for the same time-honored reason: he had once again fondled some young maiden overfondly. Perhaps I should explain that the Altar Call, at least by preacherly intention, is a demand for a once-in-a-lifetime act of total repentance and religious rebirth on the part of a “sinner.” So when Elder Babcock would cry out for that last lost soul still skulking out in the pews, when he’d demand that this wretch—he or she knew who they were!—immediately swallow their pride, step forward, and let the Holy Spirit
pour like Sani-Flush into their toilet bowl of a heart, it did not please him at all to see no one but the redundantly saved Irwin jump yet again to his feet, stride up to the altar with a big grin on his face, chunk down on his knees, and re-re-reconsecrate his life to Jesus. Another irony was that every time Irwin made this trek, a number of ex-fondled and unfondled girls in the congregation were staring overfondly at his backside, hatching schemes and battle plans which pretty well guaranteed he’d soon be back at the altar again.

A
ll intentions to the contrary, Everett remained a virgin until he went away to college. But he knew a little about Irwin’s escapades—and he did not handle this knowledge well. Irwin tried to be discreet about his amorous exploits, but when he’d come home from dates with his underpants lost and his shirts on inside out or crawl in our window in the wee hours with a maddeningly fuggy hum rising off him, it wasn’t hard to draw conclusions. And our conclusions, vague as they were, drove us to gang up and grill Irwin so long and mercilessly that he could sometimes be forced to speak …

“They have this thing!” I remember him announcing to three brimming vats of testosterone disguised as his brothers one night when he was only fifteen, but fresh back from a tryst (in what they later learned was poison oak) with a lovely, full-breasted, lithe-bodied seventeen-year-old Adventist girl whom Everett had been ineffectually chasing since kindergarten. “This wonderful little funny little thing down there! Kind of a toggle-switch deal! And when you work it for ’em, when you barely even toggle it, man oh man! They just go
nuts
. I mean, you wouldn’t, they just sort of, they start to, man oh man! and then they kind of, it gets all sort of, I don’t know! until it, oooooh! and they sort of, waaaaaaaah, and you can kinda … aw
shoot
, you guys! I can’t explain it! All I can say is
watch out for that thing!”

Needless to say, we did. Constantly. And everywhere. On the ground, in the sky, in the fine print on sides of cereal boxes, in our lockers at school, in roadside gutters on the way home. The thing was now seared on our brains; it was the star of our semiconscious lives; it was the ineffably cute swimmer who sent the white shark of lust knifing through the sea of our blood, giving us the obvious Attacking Shark Shape in the obvious place during every dull sermon, every school class, every sultry night or lull in the day. But before long it grew painfully obvious to Everett and me—particularly in the vicinity of mirrors—that, lacking Irwin’s godlike body, godlike joie de vivre, godlike luck and other key
godlike equipment, possessing in fact no parts like any part of Irwin save the wildly pulsating hormones, we looked very much like a couple of charmlessly horny doofuses from Camas, Washington, and very little like the sorts of Romeos whom beautiful girls jump out and ask to work their things for them.

To deepen our Doofuscosity, the deceptively monkish Peter, when he was sixteen, tried to describe to us (after Everett had refused to let him sleep for four or five hours) what transpired when he and an equally intellectual girlfriend had come to some sort of agreement, met in some intelligently selected trysting place, and indulged in some sort of technically sexual behavior. But it was nearly as hard for me to imagine what sort of antics would produce an account like Peter’s as it was to imagine a genuine “thing.” He told us: “Well, yeah, it was fun, I guess. But the trouble, see, was that we knew we didn’t love each other. So even though we got excited and all, it came down to a matter of, I don’t know, not mauling each other exactly, but just sort of
operating
each other. Like a couple of cars or something. Yeah, that’s about right. It was like we’d each invented this car, see. But there was no way of seeing how well our two cars ran without her getting into me and me getting into her and each of us test-driving each other. So that’s what we did. We test-drove our cars. And we
were
our cars. Which was very exciting, and confusing, and made us feel all this gratitude and shame and wonder and embarrassment toward each other. But when it was over, we felt way too much the way you’d feel after test-driving a regular old Ford or Chevy or something. You know. It was like, okay, everything runs great, yeah you’re welcome, thank you too. And that was it. Which just isn’t right. The driving itself was just too wonderful to end up feeling like that. So I won’t do it again. I mean, not in that way. I want a form of wonder that doesn’t turn me into a car. I want a wonder that
lasts.”

“Well, I want a wonder with
breasts!”
Everett roared.

B
ut no such wonder offered itself. Everett had girlfriends in high school, but there was no joint “test-driving.” And even after he arrived among the sixteen thousand coeds at Washington and found himself devastatingly attracted to a new subspecies known as the “hippie chick,” he had to undergo a transformation so complete that it resembled a left-wing parody of a successful right-wing business career before he was able to attract them in return. For starters he established social credit, and the equally crucial social discredit, by becoming one of the first truly longhaired males anybody had ever seen. He then upgraded his living situation
by trading his dork-ridden dorm-cubicle in on a room in a romantically deciduous off-campus hippie house. Next he began developing his product (himself) by playing every remotely romantic role he could find time for, becoming a classroom wit, a street-corner flower-seller, an activist in whatever causes were most active, a waiter at the hippest U district coffeehouse, an aspiring poet, a soapbox orator, the chief humorist and honky-baiter for an underground paper. He then insured these investments by going to work for the university’s bona fide bluestock newspaper, but concealed this unsightly hint of career conservatism by becoming its most incendiary columnist with his weekly offering, “Give Chance a Peace.”

At that point Everett finally arrived at his long-sought solution to the puzzle of The Thing. But the name, face or nature of the girl he found it with hardly matter since a whole string of less long-sought solutions soon followed. In fact, after
Hats
and “Give Chance a Peace” brought him name, fame and a little gold earring that Gay Liberation would one day force him to rue, Everett attained so many short-sought solutions-to-the Thing Puzzle that it lost its mysteriousness altogether and became a requirement, like PE. He no longer wanted a woman. He wanted
Woman
. He wanted to show the godlike Irwin what it was to be
really
desirable. He wanted what Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did not mean at all by “the Ten Thousand Things.”

In other words, he no longer knew what the fuck he wanted. But Irwin and I saw him seldom enough, and he was still charming and funny enough, that we figured he was thriving and pretty much admired him to the skies. The only one of us who felt differently about Everett at this time was Peter. But Pete lived three thousand miles away, and his rare letters—which were mostly to Freddy—talked about religion and metaphysics, not about his big brother.

It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

“L
ike most of you, I oppose the American military mission in Vietnam. Unlike some of you, I don’t consider that opposition ‘revolutionary.’ Perhaps
it’s your country’s unusually bloodless beginnings that give the word ‘revolution’ its mythic ring to students in this country. But having studied many revolutions, and having survived two of them myself, I have become familiar enough with some of their hidden costs to want to share them.”

The speaker was one Dr. Edward Gurtzner—an antiquated, cigar-chewing Austrian history professor who’d witnessed the tenth anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution in Leningrad as a child and the Nazification of his homeland as a student. In a recent letter Everett had called him the best lecturer on campus, and added that his European Intellectual History class took place in a hall full of three hundred students, so that if I wanted to attend I could do so and remain faceless. Everett would make suggestions like this casually, but stuck as I was in a Stone Age called “high school,” I did not receive them casually. University life had become magical to me, and I slipped away to visit Everett every chance I got. To me the University of Washington seemed like the center of an embryonic world that was about to burst forth and revivify, if not replace, the stale old world at large. And in this embryonic world my brother had become some kind of combination firebrand, stand-up comic, knight-errant playboy superstar. I read his crazy columns, heard him quoted in coffeehouses, found him clowning for a different young woman every time I visited, joined him on a march or two, and felt he’d become a hero of our time. He was, of course, full of crap, and always had been. But he was also full of goodness, and I never doubted that the goodness would eventually KO the crap. Anyhow, when his letter mentioned Gurtzner, I called that very night to find out the professor’s schedule, skipped school and hitched to Seattle the very next day, and made my way into a back-row seat maybe ten minutes into a lecture. And though I didn’t know what I’d missed, the little I’d heard had me feeling already that I’d arrived, once again, at the center of things.

“In order to become a true revolutionary,” Dr. Gurtzner continued, “you must first of all jettison your ability to recall or honor the complexities of a nuanced historic or personal past. More details explain things more, but less details confuse things less, and a leader out to galvanize thousands of zealous followers must consistently shun complexity, even at the cost of lucidity and truth.

“For this same reason, friendships with those who fail to become co-revolutionaries must be eliminated. The revolutionary ideology, once installed in the mind, must be the sole regulator of all human relationships. Those who refuse to undergo the same ‘installation,’ however much you
may love them, are no longer to be trusted. Jefferson himself complained of this loss. There were excellent people among the Tories. There are
always
excellent people on both sides. And to adopt an ideology is to take to one side only. This is why even the most justifiable revolution is certain to destroy friendships, families, cross-cultural exchanges and every other nuanced type of human connection. Believe me, this is an inevitable cost.”

The size of the lecture hall, the wild garb and serious faces of the students, the gravity and formality of Gurtzner’s manner, all of it thrilled me. Everett hadn’t spotted me yet, but I’d no trouble spotting him, sitting way down in front, wearing blue jeans with little U.S. flags on the knees—and I was even thrilled by the knee emblems. But I’d begun to feel just a little confused by what I was hearing. In fact I tried to catch Everett’s eye, to assure him with a wink or grin that I didn’t think Dr. Gurtzner was talking about any loss of nuance or growing distances between him and our family, or at least between him and me. But he was too far away, or too intent, to spot me.

“Because he has eliminated both his past and his friendships,” the old man continued, “the revolutionary soon finds himself disenfranchised, impoverished and surrounded by compatriots whose beliefs he has already memorized, whose utterances he can therefore predict and whose company he often begins to abhor. This is what we might call the Valley Forge stage of the revolt. And it takes a great cause indeed to carry the rebel forces past it. Rebel comrades are, after all, not natural friends, not community, not family, but merely unchosen, inescapable company. And since it is frequently those persons who can’t tolerate their own personalities who are the first to pawn their inner selves in for an ideology, rebel leaders have a tendency to be what we might justifiably call ‘intolerable people’—people whose early abdication of their lives has given them seniority and authority over those who are often their betters.”

Hearing the way Everett cleared his throat (and the laughter it created around him), I was certain that he intended to say or do something to “set the record straight” soon. A lot of students were glancing at him, so I guess everyone who knew him felt the same way. It made Dr. Gurtzner’s lecture nerve-wracking, but also terribly exhilarating: “Out on the streets, and in the society at large, what the increasingly disgruntled rebel forces soon long to see is not peace but panic and upheaval, not understanding or tolerance but solidarity, not the weaponless fight to instill life in ancient traditions but a vandalistic smashing of all tradition. Once the struggle moves from the text and tongue out into the world,
all
cultural
icons and social modi operandi are to be obliterated, for chaos adds fuel to the revolutionary fires. As for the increasingly frequent injustices, the abdicated responsibilities, the injuries of the innocent, the expatriations and deaths caused by the rebel forces themselves, these are to be written off as minor compared to the oppression inflicted upon humanity by the power to be toppled. ‘Regrettable but necessary side effects’ is a favorite phrase …”