I was convinced that the home I lived in was cursed with something. I’d heard that the area was at one time a Native Indian burial ground filled with unmarked graves of the dead, right where they built our development, and exactly where our house was. Sometimes shoveling in the dirt as kids we’d pull up small bones. It was creepy and I was certain that evil spirits remained there, that they influenced the entirety of the neighborhood. My family wasn’t the only crazy one either. The whole neighborhood was dysfunctional. One could easily hear someone’s kid screaming with a belt smacking about every day in the summer with air streaming and windows open. It seemed as if the behavior by merely listening to it made it okay. But there were things inside our house that nobody heard because we were not allowed to scream. It would be my father and stepmother’s treatment toward my brother Bobby that I would never forget, nor truly forgive. The indelible, irreparable hole that this left in my heart forced me to self-impose a culpability that constantly had me rescuing him, and where once or twice it worked (like the time I single-handedly hunted down a group of boys that exploited him for crime. I proceeded to beat them each up separately), Bobby eventually escaped my reach. Despite this, my brother would remain an eternal priority with a place in my heart held by no other, this despite our living mirror opposite lives: me within global realms of freedom, he in the confines of the New York State Department of Corrections.
