We roamed in packs, seeking out anyplace with a hoop and a little space, climbing fences, taking on all challengers. Washington Elementary; high school blacktop; curving driveways and buckling courtyards. In those open-air chambers, I began my career in diplomacy.
I learned how to talk to people as individuals. How to align common interests. How to derive pleasure from the success of others.
My brother Luke was half an inch taller than I was and nearly as fast. At eleven he could dunk a tennis ball; at thirteen, the real thing. His nickname was White Boy Can Jump. He worked on his shot incessantly, developing a beautiful stroke, like calligraphy. For raw talent, you’d take him over me, every time.
Yet he spent many of our playground hours squatting on the sidelines, impatiently waiting on next, flapping his arms and pounding on his bony, scabby knees. His teams never seemed to be able to grab onto winning streaks like mine did.
Standard rules called for game till eleven by ones. Luke would start off hot, knocking down five, six in a row. Then the opposition would gang up on him, smothering him in double and triple teams. He’d continue to hold the ball, passing only to clap his hands and demand it back, jacking up hero shots as he fell out of bounds. Every so often one went gliding in, causing everyone in the vicinity to erupt, clutch their heads, fall over in exaggerated faints, ohhhhhdaaayyuuummm. Their reactions provided enough reinforcement to keep him chucking away.
More often, the ball skipped off the top of the backboard.
For him, it was glory or death, all or nothing.
He easily made our high school team but clashed with the coach and ended up quitting after a year, leaving a legacy — ball hog, arrogant, uncoachable — that tarred me. I had to work twice as hard to earn my spot, and I made sure to pass more than I shot, sometimes at a ridiculous ratio. I was once benched for forgoing an open layup.
I can’t say for certain when Luke began using drugs. I wasn’t around the first time someone offered him a joint. I don’t know where I was. Probably at practice.
I can, however, guess about where he acquired the habit: the very same courts where we’d once lived in innocence.
His first arrest came during junior year. They picked him up, along with two other guys from our childhood circle, for misdemeanor possession. The judge saw a decent kid, no priors, intact family, parents gainfully employed. Luke pleaded no contest and received a suspended sentence plus community service.
For a while he managed to stay clear of the law. He’d learned his lesson, and it was: don’t get caught. At home, though, things got ugly. He fought bitterly with my parents. It takes a lot to rile my father up, and one of the more unreal and cartoonish moments of my teenage life was watching him and Luke come to blows, after my brother announced he was dropping out of college. Trying to get between them earned me a black eye.
My mother’s response was to detach and deny. Casting about for a place to put her attention, she landed on me. Luke had flushed his future away. I, on the other hand, had no ceiling. She never missed a game of mine. She heaped praise on me.
Me, I couldn’t decide what to feel about my brother. Pity. Contempt. Guilt, for the canyon widening between us, our fortunes diverging in lockstep. I entered Cal, and he moved in with a friend in Fruitvale, taking part-time work as a clerk at a sporting goods store. I shouldered the rising hopes of a team and a school, and Luke bounced in and out of jail on minor drug offenses or petty theft. Sixty days here, ninety there, each stint setting him up for the next screwup.
We had no idea how badly he would screw up.
I doubt he did, either.
Nobody wanted to deal with him. I was the one worth rooting for, even after my injury. More so: everybody loves an underdog.
One night — high on crack, reeling under a blood alcohol level of .15 — Luke stole a car. He later claimed that his intention was merely to joyride. Careering north on International Boulevard, doing seventy in a thirty-five zone, he blew through a red at 29th, T-boning a Kia.
The driver, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Rosa Arias, was killed instantly.
The passenger, Arias’s nineteen-year-old niece, died the next day of her injuries.
Luke suffered a broken femur, broken ribs, a punctured lung, a lacerated spleen. He spent four days in a coma. The first person he saw when he came to was a nurse. The second person he saw was the arresting officer.
Pleading guilty to two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter enabled him to avoid prosecution with the intoxication enhancement, shaving a couple of years off his sentence.
Even with Mom’s gift for denial, this was overload. She reevaluated the past, all those miles driven to and from arenas in San Jose, Sacramento, Las Vegas. The mornings she’d woken up hoarse from screaming nonstop through the fourth quarter.
With me hobbling through rehab, and Luke headed off to prison, her division of resources must have seemed to her beyond neglectful. Criminal.
When I enrolled in the police academy, she became fixated on the idea that I could use my newfound knowledge and position to help Luke. She was wrong, of course. His fate was out of my hands. But what truly got to her was realizing that, even if I’d had leverage, I wouldn’t have used it. Not for him.
I was embarking on a career as an officer of the law. My duty was to the community — to protect decent folks from outliers like my brother.
Those were the days when Christmas stumbled and fell, and Thanksgiving, too, and birthdays devolved from dinner to a phone call.
Once I was at the Coroner’s, I softened to her a bit, chastened by death and what it does to people. But there was still nothing I could do to pry Luke free any faster. And I don’t think I’m alone in struggling to be as generous with my family as I am with strangers.
The biggest sticking point remains my spotty visiting record. Like most state prisons, Pleasant Valley is open to the public on weekends. Usually I’m working, a built-in excuse. I manage to think up others for those rare instances when I am free.
If nothing else, there’s the drive, which is abysmaclass="underline" three hours, more with traffic.
My mom goes twice a month, and every so often she’ll call and invite me to join her. Already knowing the answer, she plays up her disbelief when I say no. But her hurt, her regret, her continuing sense of failure — those are genuine.
Now, sitting in my car outside my parents’ house, I gazed down the block at a ladder of windows brimming with milky cheer. LED icicles strung from the gutters dripped into the void. On the passenger seat, the take-out bag crinkled, its contents breathing sweetly.
The majority of the surrounding houses had been redone, ranch homes leveled, replaced by McMini-Mansions pushing at the margins of their lots. The house where I’d grown up remained the same: fifteen hundred square feet of lumpy tan stucco, a sun-melted caramel fronted by succulents and weird red gravel, like a transplanted piece of Mars. Thirty-year mortgage, manageable on the combined salary of a public school teacher and an office manager. With the housing market back up, it might be worth it for them to sell, downsize, take early retirement. I’d raised the point before and met breezy dismissal.
Why in the world would they leave?
If it was worth X now, it would be worth more in five years.
Luke could have his old room, once he got out.