"You have brains and your brother has personality," Mom often said. Today's parenting experts wouldn't approve of her childrearing techniques, but her opinion wasn't far from the truth. Although my brother John was intelligent, he didn't excel in school, whereas I was a straight-A Goody Two Shoes.
Over the years, we grew apart as he moved from New York to Miami, and I started a new life in Toronto. We'd exchange the occasional phone call and we saw each other at weddings and family reunions.
Four phone calls shattered this arrangement. The first: "Your brother has had a seizure." He collapsed when the busy restaurant he managed was shuttered for renovations and they dismantled the bar. Apparently, alcohol withdrawal is dangerous. He went into a 28-day rehab and decided to leave the hospitality world's temptations. It turns out that his warm personality and quick wit were ideal for selling cars, which he excelled at, except when he went on a bender and didn't show up for work.
The second call: "Sis, can you bail me out?" He was in jail because he'd been found sleeping in his car with an open container of alcohol. After many phone calls and a bank transfer, he was released from the clink.
The third call: "Your brother robbed a bank." It seems that a month earlier, he had successfully robbed a bank. Because it was so easy, he returned for a second go-round. The teller spotted him waiting in line wearing the same sunglasses and blazer from the previous crime. "I only had one bank-robbing outfit," he quipped years later.
Classified as a violent offender because of the 99-cent plastic pistol that never left his pocket, John was sentenced to 41 months in prison.
We called my brother Pepo after the neighborhood boys nicknamed him when he was 10. Now Pepo was languishing in a cell, surrounded, as he said, by "assorted scumbags, murderers, rapists, bankers, lawyers, and stockbrokers."
What does a sibling do in this situation? If you're me, you write a letter. I was relieved to see a return envelope from him appear soon after. To keep his mind occupied, Pepo began penning stories of growing up in Astoria, Queens.
He described getting a job in a barbershop as a shoeshine boy at age 12 after our father abandoned the family and Mom sometimes didn't have grocery money. He wrote about the neighborhood kids and their shenanigans, playing stickball, and getting cuffed by the nuns at school.
Delighted by his stories and his writing voice, I told him he possessed genuine creative talent. He didn't believe me: "Oh, you're just being nice so the guards don't find me hanging off the bunk with the band from my boxers around my neck."
Slowly, over five years in prison and halfway houses, my brother began to think of himself as a writer. He fantasized about getting his stories published. I encouraged this thinking because I thought his writing was solid, he had a funny and perceptive point of view, and because I didn't want him hanging off that top bunk.
Intertwined with his growing-up reminiscences were his prison tales. At first, he didn't want to scare me by sharing stories about his cellmates, like Topo, who committed his first murder at age nine.
More than once, he told me he felt closer to me because of our flow of communication. In addition to the letters back and forth, there were phone calls, albeit one-way because one cannot call into a prison. We developed a more intimate relationship, sharing thoughts and feelings that would never have been revealed if he'd been living in the busy outside world.
The day he walked out of prison, he was sent to a halfway house and was fortunate to find a job in a warehouse with a boss who understood the conditions of ex-cons who had to check in with authorities, submit to frequent drug tests, and so on. Still, he was paid the lowest legal wage.
I visited him twice in 2009 when he was back home in Miami. On that second visit, he was shaky. We held hands across a steakhouse table and wept. He feared violating his conditions by drinking. He couldn't bear being sent back to prison, a genuine possibility. He longed for the day when he would be truly free and could earn good money to support his family. But this was not to be.
Here comes phone call number four: "Pepo has passed away." In May 2010, he fell in his home and hit his head. We were devastated to lose him. All that potential, gone. He was only 52.
I vowed to transcribe and edit his letters. Some were 16 pages, handwritten, on yellow legal paper in my brother's almost-illegible scrawl. Today, his stories have come to life in a book. By reading it, I hope his children and grandchildren will somehow feel closer to this beautiful, funny, broken man.
