My sister Karen wrote a book about women who marry men on death row in Texas. My ex-brother-in-law Archie is on death row in Abilene. Big bro Henry operates heavy machinery and he’s selling his used Lexus or coaching Lamaze, and he’ll throw in an experienced LoJack. Koji, my kyodai, is faithful to the Utter Lifestyle™. He embraces acerbic brink clubbing, beta-carotene, dubstep and drag racing bars or he practices tax law in Biloxi. He gave me an emu leather wallet to hold his business cards.
When we were twenty we made mad, mad love under the Monument to the Discovery of Ether as a Painkiller in Boston’s Public Garden, now my stepsister Kim is a half-elf bard and special-ed instructor in Milton. I saw her once in Harvard Square buying used books. I waved and shouted and ran but she ran faster.
My younger brother Joseph spends his nights in the blogosphere as my sister Jo and his days digging the Big Dig with Viper night vision goggles. My sage, older brother Ace goes by Lawrence and lives in Portland where he paints Catholic saints on elk horns. He’s betting the farm on Armageddon. Angie’s the sister who sold me up the River Charles when I was three. What a wisecracker. She supports our troops, chiefly her son—who travels the desert with a swatch of his Spiderman quilt glued to the skin over his ribs. I sent him a six-pack of beer filled with water, which is more valuable than beer where he toils. God bless you Angie’s son!
My real twin Lacy Jean was born with Nam June Paik-A, a lightly sautéed chemical imbalance found in TV dinner trays and the brains of the mice in my bedroom that provide me with the milk that keeps me barefoot and pervaded by something intangible. I like to put my ear up to my sister Dolly’s round belly and listen to her Ike kick the can. It turns out Dolly is my mother and the woman we called Ma who worked on the line with Dad was just a woman who worked on the line with Dad, like she always said, “Put on the wooden overcoat.” I like my lips near Doll-mother’s navel as I sing a ditty Arch wrote for our wee brother worm:
When sorrows come, they come not single emissaries
But in battalions killed in a bar when he was only three
Amen! My next-in-line Theodore collects stamps, spots hummingbirds and was recently punched in the face by a popular on-line film director. Now he’s on scholarship at Juilliard’s. Jane was the girl next door who was more like a sister to me than I’ll ever know. We ran away from home when we were twelve and hitched western winds with freaks and graces. We lived two floors up, in a guerilla skateboarding space, secreted above a teashop somewhere in Malibu. At night we fell asleep to the Pacific’s elliptic shenanigans.
When I was bad Dad told me I had siblings that I would never meet or greet unless I was good. Amenities!
My step-twin Lois sells cage-free eggs in Newport or she predicts starquakes. Lifetimes back we spent a buck naked weekend high on skunkweed in her sponsor’s lobster shack out on Cape Hessian Rat—and now she might be dead or worse, offering copter lessons, first ride free, in Syracuse and Archie wonders, Lois, he surely wonders what would happen if I showed up at your helipad with a bottle of Jose Cuervo and a stick-free omelet pan, ready for instruction?