Looking back, I think Chester not only understood but accepted that his normal life would always seem inconsequential beside his little brother’s death sentence. He loved Ralphie and never tried to hide it. When Ralphie would have to enter the hospital, Chester would ask our class to pray for his brother, and we’d stop whatever we were doing to kneel beside our desks and pray with uncharacteristic earnestness. They were the same blood type, and sometimes Ralphie received Chester’s blood. Chester would be absent on those mornings and return to school in the afternoon with a Band-Aid over a vein and a pint carton of orange juice, with permission to sip it at his desk.
Outside the classroom, the two of them were inseparable. I’d see them heading home from Sunday mass, talking as if sharing secrets, laughing at some private joke. Once, passing by their house on Twenty-second Place, a side street whose special drowsy light came from having more than its share of trees, I noticed them sitting together on the front steps: Ralphie, leaning against his brother’s knees, his eyes closed, listening with what looked like rapture while Chester read aloud from a comic book. That was the reason I chose a comic as a gift instead of getting him something like bubble-gum baseball cards. His bruised, shivery-looking lips made me wonder if Ralphie was even allowed to chew gum.
The open affection between Chester and Ralphie wasn’t typical of the rough-and-tumble relationships between brothers in the neighborhood. Not that guys didn’t look out for their brothers, but there was often trouble between them, too. Across the street in the projects, Junior Gomez had put out the eye of his brother Nestor on Nestor’s birthday, playing Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Nestor’s birthday present, a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. In the apartment house just next door to ours, Terry Vandel’s baby brother, JoJo, wrapped in a blanket, fell from the second-story window to the pavement. Terry was supposed to have been baby-sitting for JoJo while their mother was at work. Mrs. Hobel, walking below, looked up to see the falling child. For weeks afterward, while JoJo was in the hospital with a fractured skull, Mrs. Hobel would break into tears repeating to anyone who would listen, “I could have caught him but I thought the other boy was throwing down a sack of garbage.”
As in the Bible, having a brother could be hazardous to your health.
For a while, the mention of twins or jealousy or even pizza would trigger a recounting of how, just across Western Avenue, in St. Michael’s parish, the Folloni twins, Gino and Dino — identically handsome, people said, as matinee idols — dueled one afternoon over a girl. It was fungo bat against weed sickle, until Gino went down and never got up. Dino, his face permanently rearranged, was still in jail. Their father owned Stromboli’s, a pizza parlor that was a mob hangout. Every time I’d ride my bike past the closed pizzeria on Oakley, and then past the sunken front yard where they’d fought, it would seem as if the street, the sidewalk, the light itself, had turned the maroon of an old bloodstain. I’d wonder how anyone knew for sure which twin had killed the other, if maybe it was really Dino who was dead and Gino doing time, ashamed to admit he was the one still alive. If they ever let him out, he’d go to visit his own grave to beg for forgiveness. Shadows the shade of mourning draped the brick buildings along that street, and finally I avoided riding there altogether.
Out on the streets, I kept an eye out for my brother, Mick, but at home our relationship was characterized by constant kidding and practical jokes that would sometimes escalate into fights. I was older and responsible for things getting out of control.
Once, on an impulse, while riding my bike with my brother perched dangerously on the handlebars the way friends rode — in fact, we called the handlebars the buddy seat — I hit the brakes without warning, launching Mick into midair. One second he was cruising and the next he was on the pavement. It would have been a comical bit of slapstick if he’d landed in whipped cream or even mud. I wasn’t laughing. I was horrified when I saw the way he hit the concrete — an impact like that would have killed Ralphie. Mick got up, stunned, bloody, crying.
“Jeez, you okay?” I asked. “Sorry, it was an accident.”
“You did that on purpose, you sonofabitch!” He was crying as much with outrage at how I’d betrayed the trust implicit in riding on the buddy seat as with pain.
I denied the accusation so strongly that I almost convinced myself what happened was an accident. But it was my fault, even though I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I’d done it out of the same wildness that made for an alliance between us — a bond that turned life comic at the expense of anything gentle. An impulsiveness that permitted a stupid, callous curiosity, the same dangerous lack of sense that had made me ride one day down Luther, a sunless side street that ran only a block, and, peddling at full speed, attempt to jump off my J. C. Higgins bike and back on in a single bounce.
It was a daredevil stunt I’d seen in Westerns when, to avoid gunfire, the cowboy hero, at full gallop, grabs the saddle horn, swings from the stirrups, and in a fluid movement hits the ground boots first and immediately bounds back into the saddle. As soon as I touched one foot to the street, the spinning pedal slammed into the back of my leg and I tumbled and skidded for what seemed half a block while the bike turned cartwheels over my body. Skin burned off my knees and palms. I’d purposely picked a street that was deserted to practice on. But a lady who could barely speak English poked her head out of a third-floor window and yelled, “Kid, you ho-kay?” She’d just witnessed what must have looked like some maniac trying to kill himself. I waved to her, smiled, and forced myself up. Amazingly, nothing was broken, not even my teeth, although I had a knot on my jaw from where the handlebars had clipped me with an uppercut. I collected my twisted bike from where it had embedded itself under a parked car. Had it been a horse, as I’d been pretending, I’d have had to shoot it. If someone had done to me what I’d just done to myself, I would have got the bastard back one way or another. My brother let me off easy.
But years later, when he was living in New York, studying acting with Brando’s famous teacher Lee Strasberg, Mick and I spent an evening together, drinking and watching a video of On the Waterfront. During the famous “I could have been a contender” scene, when Brando complains about his “one-way ticket to Palookaville” and tells his older brother, “Charley, it was you …. You was my brother, Charley. You should have looked out for me,” Mick turned to me, nodded, and smiled knowingly.
Chester was anything but a tough, yet despite his quiet way, you got the impression he’d lay his life on the line if anyone messed with Ralphie. You could see it in how he’d step out into a busy street, checking both directions for traffic before signaling Ralphie to cross. Or how, whenever a gang of guys playing keepaway with somebody’s hat, or maybe having a rock fight, barreled down the sidewalk, Chester would instinctively step between them and Ralphie.
That willingness to take a blow was an accepted measure of what the gang bangers called amor—a word usually accompanied by a thump on the chest to signify the feeling of connection from the heart-although in matters of amor, as in everything else, the willingness to give a blow was preferred. There were guys in the neighborhood who’d lay their lives on the line over an argument about bumming a smoke, guys capable of killing someone over a parking space or whose turn it was to buy the next round. There was each gang’s pursuit of Manifest Destiny: battles merciless and mindless as trench warfare over a block of turf. There was the casual way that mob goons across Western Avenue maimed and killed, a meanness both reflexive and studied — just so people didn’t forget that in capitalism on the street, brutality was still the least common denominator.