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Photo by Hobart, taken from current road trip.
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20 Stories About
My Dead Brother, Ollie
(excerpt)
Andrew Bomback
1.
I won’t start with the obvious story, the one I’m sure you’re interested in, because for starters that’s not the way Ollie would have told stories about himself. And because your definition of obvious probably differs from mine. For me the obvious story to start with is the one that is my favorite, which is when I was six and starting first grade. That would make Ollie ten and a fifth-grader. My parents had decided to stop sitting in the chair next to my bed and waiting for me to fall asleep; they told me that I was big enough to fall asleep on my own. Ollie came into my room on the first night of this new arrangement to give me advice on how to fall asleep. “What I do is create this fantasy,” he said, “where I’m like the world champion of wrestling, and I’m walking down the aisles to the ring, and everyone’s cheering for me, and there are all these women kissing my muscles, and my arch enemy is waiting for me in the ring, and he’s all scared because he knows I’m going to win. And I’m just so happy, you know, and confident. It’s a great feeling.” I never followed his advice. I didn’t need to, to be honest. I just fell asleep back then. But sometimes now, when I’m having trouble falling asleep, I’ll remember Ollie’s pep talk, his fantasy, which doesn’t help me fall asleep, but usually gives me enough of a laugh to stop worrying about not being able to fall asleep.
3.
In the summer of 1989, when I was fourteen, I took a job as a junior counselor at a local day camp. Ollie worked at the camp, too, as a chef. He said he enjoyed hanging out in the kitchen and listening to the radio. He said he enjoyed the company of the other kitchen workers more than the company of the camp’s counselors. On an especially hot day, I went into the camp kitchen to sneak an extra pitcher of fruit punch for my group, and Ollie was sleeping in the kitchen’s walk-in refrigerator. He was lying on his back, with just a bathing suit on. “Hey,” I said, nudging him with my foot and then stepping over him to grab a pitcher. “Hey, are you alright?” He opened his eyes and smiled at me. He put his finger to his lips and smiled, as if we were sharing some top-secret joke.
4.
That same summer Ollie dated Inez, a Puerto Rican girl who was one of the camp’s waitresses. She was a few years older than Ollie, a student at the community college just trying to make some extra money during the summer. Her family lived in Puerto Rico. That’s really all I know about Inez. Their relationship was short, but afterwards Ollie often sat in our living room, watching a grainy videotape of a Puerto Rican beauty pageant in which Inez had competed when she was younger. He said she had given it to him, but I suspected that he had stolen it from her. Ollie memorized the lyrics to this Spanish song that Inez sang on the tape. A few years ago, when Ollie spent a weekend on my living room couch, I heard him singing that Spanish song in the shower.
5.
I might as well talk about that weekend a few years ago. I was twenty-three, in my second year of medical school, and Ollie was working at a restaurant in SoHo. He had been renting a basement room in Astoria from an elderly couple, and he showed up on a Saturday morning with a suitcase and a story about the plumbing backing up, the apartment being flooded. He stayed for the weekend and then took the train to my parents’ house, where he ended up living for almost a year. At the end of that year, he was hospitalized for the second time. My father, recently, at a dinner where too much wine was served told me that Ollie had deliberately flooded his Astoria apartment and had caused almost two thousand dollars worth of damage to the elderly couple’s home. I didn’t respond; my father took another sip of wine, put his arm around me, and said that he never really felt safe when Ollie was living with them for that year.
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Andrew Bomback's "20 Stories About My Dead Brother, Ollie" can be read in its entirety in Hobart #3.
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