THE SHIP MY BROTHER BUILT

LOGAN MYHRE

PEPPER MAGAZINE

T h e S h i p M y Brother Built

My mom always joked that my brother Freddy and I speak a different language. Freddy is 5 years my senior and I’ve never understood a word he’s said. He’s the type of guy that will try to convince you that he is going to do something, give you the nitty gritty details of how he’s going to do it, and then sucker you out of your lunch money. Usually this lunch money was mine and usually he used it to buy black tar heroin.

So, imagine my surprise when, after almost 8 years of not speaking to or even laying eyes on Freddy, I received a hand-written invitation in the mail to a concert he was apparently involved in. I will admit, my first thought was he was trying to squeeze some cash out of me. I looked over the invitation for some sign of scam, but really all it said was the address of some bar named The Tonic and a time–the following Friday night. After a quick google, I found that The Tonic, located in a suburb of Chicago, was a real piano bar and was just an hour drive from my house in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. On a whim, I decided to attend.

I honestly didn’t even realize that my brother still played the piano. The only association I had of him and the instrument was his absolute hatred for it and our father, or well, my father. Freddy was actually a precursor to my father and mother’s relationship, which explained my father’s general apathy towards him. I recall Freddy at 17 years old packing his things and storming out the front door, all while my father sipped his coffee and prepped for his day as a professor of English literature at The University of Chicago. Freddy was gone for 2 weeks before he came back, out of money and coming down from what I later was told was the start of his relationship with heroin. Around 1 year later, he left for good. I was only 13-years-old. he would learn the piano. I have distinct memories of my brother, probably around 10-years-old, sitting at the grand piano in our childhood home and crying while my father continued his lessons as if Freddy was an eager participant. I still don’t know why this was the only thing that my father forced onto Freddy. When I asked him years after Freddy left he said it was to teach him discipline and self-control, but I didn’t buy it.

I, on the other hand, was my father’s pride and joy. In his eyes, I was his only son and he was grooming me to become the next Vonnegut or Hemingway. Being the prodigal son isn’t as glamorous as Freddy seemed to think it was though, so I suppose the acrimony between us was destined from the very beginning of my life. I graduated and went to Stanford and studied, you guessed it, English literature, while my brother never finished high school and went who knows where. All of this really came back to me as I drove to this bar and I tried to imagine what I would do or say when I saw my brother. I didn’t know if he was still using. I didn’t know if I would recognize his face when I saw him. I honestly don’t think I ever really recognized Freddy, at least not the one my mom used to describe to me. The Freddy that existed before my mother married my father, the Freddy that existed even after that, before he started using heroin and stole all of my saved allowance out of the secret spot I had showed him just a few years earlier.

I pulled into The Tonic’s parking lot and sat in my car for probably 20 minutes wondering if I could overcome the anxiety that had me strapped to the leather seats of my BMW. I didn’t want to fall back into the white water rafting that used to be my relationship with Freddy. I couldn’t take the constant fear that I would get a call saying he had OD’d and died out on the streets alone. I had managed after all these years to detach myself

from those feelings and I wasn’t even sure why I came. But I missed my brother. I missed his quips and the times when he taught me to shoot a basketball or to talk with the girls in my grade. The thing that actually pushed me out of the car was the realization that the show was about to start. I paced quickly across the lot and showed my ID to the bouncer outside, paid the $5 cover fee, and found a seat inside.

The bar was unspectacular in every way. I would try to describe it but if you imagine a bar then you’ve basically hit the mark. An expensive looking grand piano sat at the front of the bar on a stage raised around three feet above the floor. While I was ordering a drink, a man came out on stage and sat at the piano, not really acknowledging the crowd. I’ll admit that it took me longer than it should’ve to realize this man was Freddy.

He looked so much different than the last time I’d seen him. The thing that struck me is that he didn’t look as old as I thought he would. I imagined Freddy would be haggard, his body destroyed from the poison he had long injected into it. But he still looked as rebelliously youthful as I remembered him. Freddy appeared to have gathered his thoughts and finally looked around the venue. His eyes met mine and he stared for a few seconds. He looked back at the piano, took a deep breath, and began playing.

As soon as Freddy struck the first note, I felt his presence fill the room. He and his song was filling every inch of The Tonic. It was a solemn tune, but not in the modest way that some solemn tunes are presented. It was imposing. He demanded attention and everyone in the room was giving it to him. After just a few measures I began to feel my stomach crawling upwards to my throat. Freddy was owning a tool that had been crammed down his throat as a child. I was actually thankful to my father in that moment. This was the only thing he ever gave Freddy, and even though Freddy didn’t want it, he was using it now as a way to express something he would otherwise find inexpressible. Freddy had taken back that tool and we were on the ship he built board by board with it. Maybe it was a bridge and Freddy was inviting me to cross it. Maybe it wasn’t something for me or for the rest of the audience, but just for Freddy.

His first song faded out and he played another, then another. He was playing urgently, like he had to get the notes from his head out to the audience before he forgot them forever. I realized that my brother was telling us his story. His songs told a journey of neglect, then of rebellion, then selfhatred and a journey to the very bottom. There was so much I wanted to know about him. There were clearly tales being told that I hadn’t heard before. I hadn’t seen Freddy in 8 years and it was clear that there was very little he had in common with the young man that fled our home.

The last song sounded similarly to the first but came back more confident and more complete, and as the story goes, so did Freddy. I began to weep. Not for the song, but for my brother. Freddy looked stoic on stage. These were songs he had practiced and played a thousand times, but I could tell that he was giving it his all. I could see sweat forming on his forehead as his hands dashed over the keys. His body swayed with the music. He looked free, like every quick note was a sledgehammer to a brick wall in Freddy’s way and every release of the piano’s sustaining pedal was him letting go of some tragedy from his life.

I felt like I was finally hearing my brother for the first time. I heard the betrayal Freddy felt from mom for marrying my father, the apathy from my father that ruined Freddy. I deeply regretted so desperately wanting that apathy. When Freddy hit the last note of the last song, he looked up and we made eye contact again. He smiled. I wiped my eyes, stood up, and applauded.