Okay, a bit about Steve, my brother. Right here I need to explain that my Mom named him Steve, but later on as he became an adult, he changed his name to Zac. Zac will be what I call him from here on, it will save me confusion and maybe you too. It took me a long time to start calling him by this name, but if I messed up, he would always say "Steve don't live her no more!". I finally got the new habit, it took Mom a lot longer as well as other people he knew. You may be wondering why anyone would change their name, well, you had to know my brother. He was a very messed up kid, and grew into a very messed up adult. He was hard to live with as long as I remember, never like other kids, always either in trouble with the law, or in trouble with neighbors, or with Mom, or anyone else that got mixed up with him.
Not many people understood him, I think I knew him better than most, and even I didn't know him most of the time. It was a love/hate relationship we had, but unlike most sibling relationships, I think ours was different. He was two years older than me, but it was me they called out of my second grade class to go try to calm him down in another class. He was usually freaking out and almost always in a mood that scared most people. He was scary looking when he was scared or mad, or in any way upset and most people just tried to stay away from him. For some reason, he trusted me and I could usually get him to calm down and come back to earth. I never understood what was wrong with him and for most of my life I blamed it on the fact that he didn't have a father for a role model. No one to teach him that boys didn't cry and boys didn't hit girls, and all the other things that fathers could teach their sons.
One time at one of the many, many schools we went to, I was called out of class and told to go find my brother, he was headed for the high school down the street a few blocks. He had some bigger boys chasing him and they were going to beat him up, I guess he stole something from them, or they said he did. He went straight into the high school, not through the doors, but straight through a huge plate glass window! I never did catch up to him, but some kids I saw told me what happened. He made it through that one with only a few scratches on his hands. I think he lived under a lucky star in a lot of ways, because some of the things he survived would have killed anyone else. Things like that happened all the time when he was around. He was always stealing from someone, anything that he could pick up. He stole from friends, family, even me when he could. And if he didn't steal from me, he talked me out of it. Sometimes it was just easier that way, hard to explain. And some things, he not only stole, but then he would totally destroy. Our neighbors across the alley for instance, it was a family with two young sons, maybe a bit older than Zac and I. They had a garage across the alley from us and lot's of times we would see them out there all together, building model cars. They had shelves full of finished ones and even some under glass. Zac was never invited to join them, I guess they already found he wasn't a good one to be around. One day I got home from school, and he was at the top of the stairs in our house, and had a big piece of wood laid out at the top, it was a ramp. He had stolen them right out of that garage when they left it open part way. It had to have taken several trips for him to get them all! He was running those cars down the ramp as hard as he could, down the stairs and right into a wall! There was already a pile of wreckage down there, I would say about 20 of them totally destroyed, nothing left of them worth fixing. All in all I think he must have destroyed at least forty or fifty of them. Later that same evening we were playing in the back yard, and all of a sudden that man, the father of those two boys came out of nowhere, and was he ever mad, his face was beet red and he chased Zac right out of our yard screaming profanities and swearing he would kill him. Zac managed to get away, but it was close. Later the man came and talked to my Mom, told her what happened and told her he best not ever see him anyway near his place again, he would call the cops. She didn't have any money to pay him for the damage, and I think he knew she couldn't do that, but he was still so mad, I think Zac knew better than to show his face around that man for a long time.
This story will have to continue...next blog coming soon on this subject.
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