Part II - A Game of Chess
In which I present the second part of my memoir, "My Own Private Waste Land"
Part II - A Game of Chess of my memoir presents my relationship with my brother, particularly the ways in which we were uncannily similar, to the point where people thought I was him for the majority of my life, despite the 10 years between us. For me, it was one of the most enjoyable parts to write and difficult to edit, but I’ve done my best to kill my darlings.
I would love to know if Part II resonates for you, dear reader. So without belaboring, here’s Part II.
II. A Game of Chess
10 – Who is that walking always beside you?
Who is that walking always beside you?
The dead cast no shadows
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
Impatiently
Distant thunder threatens rain
The arid plain cracks into dust
You paid the ferryman his pennies
We pay with tears
A deluge is yet owed, is coming
1971. My brother moved away from home when I was seven, so we didn’t live together long, but I was devastated. He held me as I cried and said we could write letters. He would teach me how to play chess by mail. He would be gone, he said, but he would always be my brother. I was learning chess at school. Playing chess by mail would be a way for us to stay in touch and far cheaper than long-distance calls.
Away for a week in Mexico City for work, Mom brought me back an onyx chess set in milky white and red. Lynn was the king and I was a pawn, but I didn’t know that then.
I walked in my brother’s shadow. It wasn’t that Lynn was larger than life and used up all the oxygen in the room. He didn’t eclipse the sun. On the contrary, he was the sun, the inspiration that fueled my earliest growth. Beyond the family resemblance of shared genetic material, the arrangement of bone and facial features, skin and tissue, the texture of hair and voice and stature and the ten years that separated us, we shared the same temperament, a connection like separated twins are said to possess, reinforced by family, friends, even strangers.
We came from different worlds. Lynn’s social consciousness was formed by the social unrest that overflowed from the marrow of the American spirit into the streets. A hippie, a flower child, a vegetarian, anti-war, anti-violence, he grew a ponytail, planned his flight to Canada in case his draft number came up, lived a clean life. We shared a room, but just as my own social consciousness was awakening, he moved to the garage, put tapestries over the exposed two-by-fours, placed a mattress on the floor, hung lighted beer signs from the liquor store where he worked, and set up his record player with his albums, America and its “Horse With No Name” anthem and Harry Nielsen, from whom I learned the F-word – “You’re breaking my heart / you’re tearing it apart / so fuck you.”
He was a natural athlete, a southpaw. He loved baseball and basketball, frisbee, running, and hiking. When everyone else toweled off panting on the bench, he practiced his Jerry West jump shot. He made his own fruit dehydrator and gravitated toward simple living, woods, trees, mountains, and water, part John Muir, part Thoreau. He topped his food with wheat germ and bought peanut butter that needed stirring. As soon as he could, he left the smog and cement of Los Angeles behind and made the rainy Pacific Northwest his home.
I adopted many of my brother’s social values in a world that had largely moved beyond them. I was born two weeks before JFK’s assassination and inherited the values of Camelot, an America full of promise and hope, a world in which the American Dream existed. I carried the name of the assassin. Parents stopped using that name for a generation, which didn’t make me unique. Rather, my name made me a pariah.
But I also adopted most everything my brother detested. I loved Los Angeles and its dry, desert climate, a city-dweller in the home of earthquakes and Hollywood, raised on television sitcoms and creature comforts. Early on, my head was wrapped around electronic games. I hated wheat germ and liked smooth, sugar-laden Skippy peanut butter. I was young enough to be influenced by my brother and his generation and learned from them timeless ideals - “make love, not war.”
Like my brother, I am also left-handed and like baseball. I have his stamina and intensity, but lack his skill. I was skinnier and a bit taller. My grandmother insisted I adapt to a right-handed world and taught me to throw with my right hand. Whereas my brother was excellent in his left-handedness, I am ambidextrous and mediocre with both.
Despite these differences, there were some extraordinary moments in my life in which my brother’s shadow washed over me like a protective shield, a magical cloak of misdirection and misidentification. When I look at the photo albums, I don’t see the similarity that most people do, but I am told the resemblance was uncanny. But don’t just believe what I say. Let us go, then, and see.
At parties, my parents’ friends would come and go.
“Gee Barbara, Lee sure does look like Lynnie”.
“He sure does,” she would say, smiling and tousling my hair.
When I got a little older, more obnoxious, I might roll my eyes and say, “I’m right here.”
The adults would laugh, smoke their cigarettes, drink their never-ending cups of coffee, the women leaving red lip prints on coffee cups and cigarette butts.
Relatives from Ohio and Arizona whom I didn’t know would call me “Lynn.” When I corrected them, they’d shake their heads and say, “You sure do look like your brother. Do you know that?” It was impossible not to know that.
They’d say, “Lynn, come over here and let me see you.”
“I’m Lee,” I’d say to the ground as I walked over. Inside, it was a badge of honor to be confused with my brother. He was everything to me, everything I wanted to be. Outside, I became inured to the repetition.
2018. I moved East to New Haven, Connecticut. I visited Ohio relatives I barely knew for Thanksgiving. During casual conversation, my mother’s 80-year-old cousin, Jerry, called me “Lynn.” The name pricked my ears. Jerry didn’t even register the mistake. It had been twenty-five years since I had seen Jerry, two marriages and five relationships ago. My brother had been dead for fourteen years. I didn’t bother to correct the mistake.
1971. I was eight years old, a latchkey kid checking in with neighbors after school and calling my mom at work. I called every day after school to let her know I had arrived home safely.
“Is Barbara there?” I asked the receptionist.
“Hold on a second, hon.”
“Hello, how are you, honey?”
“I’m home.”
“Lynn, could you help by running the vacuum and doing some dishes and some chores?”
“Mom, it’s me, Lee.”
“Lee! Goodness, I thought you were Lynn. You sound so much like your brother.”
“So I’ve heard. Sure mom.”
I called. Every day. For years.
Even my own mother couldn’t tell my voice from my brother’s.
By age 10, I lived alone with my parents. To my parents, I was “Lyn-, L---, Lis-, (dammit), Lee! Sheesh! Honey, could you please take out the trash?
2002. My parents filled me in about my brother’s progress. Many years into his illness, Lynn left Portland to stay with my parents for a year in Los Angeles to give Jody a break from the daily trauma of dealing with a mentally ill husband. He did well with them, lost weight, socialized with the family, bonded with my aunt while watching basketball, but he wasn’t well. He was not able to work. He no longer wrote letters.
As my brother improved, I occasionally talked with him on the phone. He was a reluctant conversationalist, but he talked about the Lakers and NBA basketball and his family and how much he missed his wife. He tired on the phone, and I heard his heavy sighs. He often excused himself to take naps. His frame, our frame, once an athletic 190, was now over 300 pounds.
Now that we had something in common again, he wouldn’t talk.
In his illness, he had taken to reading Shakespeare, had asked me what edition to buy. His favorite play was Hamlet, “to be, or not to be” and all that. Of course, it was. The irony loomed large in my mind. What would a seriously depressed, suicidal man want to read? Styron’s memoir. Shakespeare’s Hamlet. To thine own self be true. Hamlet’s impotent rage has manifest outward object. My brother’s existential crisis proved solipsistic. All he saw, all he wanted to see and study, was the blackness of his own mind.
He suggested that I read Styron’s Darkness Visible, which I devoured, trying to understand what my brother was going through. I was both horrified and oddly comforted. Hang on long enough and “this too shall pass.”
In his convalescence, Lynn took up birding. We spoke infrequently and hadn’t seen each other for 15 years. It stuck in my craw when I looked at the bird book and binoculars on the small table by my living room windows. I noticed a slight tremor when I held the binoculars. If I turned them around and looked inward, would I see fear in a handful of dust.
We were very different by this time, not close, had drifted apart for years, especially after he joined the church, more so when he got sick. My life was thriving, on the upward swing of the wheel of fortune. My brother was in a holding pattern, which was better than the dark alternative.
Though separated by years and miles, Lynn and I sought out the same interests -- what covalent bonds govern these otherwise opposite natures: a happy, well-adjusted, childless, atheist academic and a former hippie turned conservative evangelical preacher/husband/father, ballooned by psychiatric drugs and scarred by years of major depressive disorder.
I kept that onyx chess set well into adulthood, occasionally fingering the well-worn pieces on my dusty bookshelf. We stopped playing long ago, when he joined the church. God filled his life so much that he didn’t have time for much else. But I knew that in addition to the outward appearance, inside he would always be a part of me. Before and after his death, my brother shone in the periphery, a ghostly shadow that peeked out, a reminder of his presence.
Life events often conjured my brother like a séance pulling his shadow up from his watery grave.
Who is that still walking always beside me?
I hope you enjoyed the beginning of Part II - A Game of Chess. This is a short section, 5 short chapters.
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I write about:
writing, literature, and the writing life
writing process
memoir craft
mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
sailing
alternative lifestyles - polyamory and kink
Until next time, I’ll . . ..
Just keep writing!
As always, thank you for reading. Comments are appreciated. Let me know what you think. Let’s get to know each other. All the best!