Hamilton became increasingly hostile to me through the tenth grade and the summer after. I was really at a loss for what to do about him. Mom wouldn’t hear that there was any problem whatsoever, and Dad wasn’t about to get into it with her, but it was really wearing on me. This was a lot worse than the first time through.
I have heard many sermons and paeans to brotherly love. Supposedly we would always be able to make up our differences and eventually come together, but it was never that way with us. He was always too self-centered and too stubborn to ever compromise on anything. On my first time through he would get so annoying that I would end up hitting him, but this never solved anything. Now I would just walk away from him. No matter what I did to him or what threat was made or what my parents ordered him to do, if he didn’t want to do it, he wouldn’t. Most people learn through pain — the stove burns, so don’t touch it. He refused to learn. Was he a psychopath? A sociopath? Psychotic? Whatever was going on, I couldn’t fix it, and Mom wouldn’t consider that the ‘good’ son might have problems.
I was the ‘bad’ son, since I wouldn’t live my life the way she wanted it. Even when Dad got sick with the Alzheimer’s’ and some other problems, she would call me up from 300 miles away and make me come home, just so I could see him and she could complain about how far away I was and how I didn’t care enough. Christ, Mom, why the hell do you think I moved 300 miles away!? Marilyn and I used to joke that whenever we had a problem raising the kids, we would always imagine what my parents would do — and then do the exact opposite! (Of course, Parker told us that he and Janine did the same thing, and he had such a poker face we couldn’t tell if he was kidding us or not.)
He always thought he was smarter (okay, he was) and that made him immune to normal people and civilized behavior. I can remember one Thanksgiving, in the 2010s, when we were driving home from Suzie’s house. I hadn’t lived in Maryland in forty years, and needed directions. He and Mom were driving with us, and he refused to give me directions, instead trying to tease and make fun. For the love of God, we were in our mid-fifties and he was acting like a four year old. I finally ended up yelling at him, in front of our mother, to “Knock your shit off and give me the fucking directions!” Even then he refused until Mom, now in her eighties had to order him to behave.
Now, he was even worse. It seemed that the more successful I became, and the faster I went through school, the more he hated me. He had always tried to pry before, but now I could see that he was actively trying to break into my locked foot locker, and was vandalizing my possessions. Needless to say, when confronted, he would lie and deny. Sometime this worked, and sometime it didn’t. When he squirted ink on my ties, he managed to get some on his hands, and that was pretty irrefutable. I measured my closet and mail ordered a metal cabinet and put that inside my closet. Hamilton was furious, as was my mother, but Dad let me. I got another padlock and wore that key around my neck as well.
Even Suzie figured out that there was something wrong with Ham. When Marilyn died, and then Alison, Suzie and her family came to the funerals, over three hundred miles away, but Hamilton didn’t even send flowers. Now, this time around, his disdain and dislike had changed to hatred.
The first time, Marilyn and the kids didn’t even want to be around him. Maggie wouldn’t even visit without Jackson being with her, and Mom wouldn’t allow that until they got married. Most of the family thought he was kind of creepy, sort of like Norman Bates in Psycho, but without all the nasty killing business. Now I wasn’t so sure about avoiding the killing, especially my desire to kill him!
On the other hand, I had learned a lot on my first trip through. Specifically, Alison having Williams’ Syndrome was a learning breakthrough. The most important thing to remember when you have a child with learning disabilities (or, as we called it in the far less politically correct Sixties and Seventies, mental retardation) is to have patience. There are many things the child will never learn, no matter what you do or how loud you yell or how hard you hit. Not that I did, I was never a monster, but you really learn patience. Hamilton taxed my every limit.
I had learned. Back then we had often gotten into fights, when his behavior and mulish stubbornness had pushed me too far. Now, I would just simply get up and leave the room. I generally only slept in my bedroom now, and any of my belongings were under lock and key.
Mind you, this was all very depressing. I had spent the first 21 years of my life in this environment, being told repeatedly that I was a failure and a disappointment. Now I was going through it all over again, and vastly exceeding what I had done before, and being told I was even more of a failure and more of a disappointment. I understood what was happening, but it made for some very black days at times. This recycling bit was not all that great at times.
I also changed my overall appearance. Prior to this, I had always tried to dress like a hippie, just like every other kid in school. All of us non-conformists simply had to conform to each other. The uniform was blue jeans, a tee shirt, and sneakers. An exciting change, for some of the tougher kids, was boots, like biker boots. Hair was worn long, as long by the guys as it was by the girls. At the time, I grew my own hair so long that it went below my shoulders and I had to wear a headband, suitably painted with a Peace sign, to keep it under control.
Oh, if I had only been able to save that hair! Even then I knew that male pattern baldness was genetically transmitted, and that it ran in the family. It runs down the women’s side, skipping generations, and Mom’s father had been a cue ball. I was going bald by my mid-thirties.
So I changed my wardrobe. By the time I was out of school, I had realized that the back seam on Levi’s really rubbed my rear end wrong, and had shifted over to khakis and chinos. I also switched over to sports shirts, with collars, which actually looked pretty good on my muscular upper body. Wear them a little tight and the girls really noticed. I got a haircut, not ridiculously short, but like something a fashionable twenty-something would wear. That actually took some doing, because back then you had to search to find a stylist for a man. Men went to barbers, and the choices were limited to crew cuts or a ‘regular’, which was just long enough to part on one side. When I grew out of my denim jacket, I bought a leather jacket, bomber style.
And I bought a hat. Way back when, on my first go-around, I had started wearing fedoras almost from day one in college. This was years before the Indiana Jones movies made hats popular again, but I didn’t care. It made me a bit different, and the ladies didn’t mind. I looked good in a hat. I just started a few years earlier this time.
Ten years before, every man in America owned a hat. Then JFK wandered down Pennsylvania Avenue bareheaded and overnight the hat industry in America entered bankruptcy! In the future, everyone idolized him, Camelot cut short, all that sort of nonsense. In reality he was a fairly decent domestic President and an abysmally bad foreign relations President (okay, he did all right with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he’s the one who put us into Viet Nam, and the Bay of Pigs was his baby), but he sure wasn’t Washington and Lincoln reincarnated. The one thing you can’t argue about is that he was young, vigorous, virile, photogenic — and didn’t wear hats! You couldn’t pay men to wear a hat by the end of the decade.
Mind you, I got razzed about it the first couple of times, but the first time I wore it, it just happened to be raining. I simply said, “Go ahead, laugh, see if I care. My head’s dry. Hmmm?” I said this to Ray Shorn, who looked like a drowned rat at the time. He flipped me the bird and I laughed right back at him.