I Always Hated My Brother—Until I Found His Essay
Turns Out I Knew Him My Whole Life, But He Was Still A Complete Stranger
My brother was always different—but none of us understood why.
He sucked his finger well into his teens.
He sang terrible falsetto opera to annoy me.
And he treated me like dirt.
The finger-sucking habit seems incredulous when I look back and think about it.
He never explained why he liked to do it. But he wanted to do it. And nobody could make him stop. You couldn’t argue with him. You couldn’t reason with him. You couldn’t even bribe him.
My father hated it. “You’re STILL sucking your finger?”
He’d say most incredulously.
“I can’t believe you’re still doing that.”
My aunts would stop on the weekend, and someone would let slip that my brother still sucked his finger.
A dead silence would drop, and Aunty Judy would ask, feeling such confusion and exasperation, “Why is he STILL sucking his finger?”
He might laugh it off -- or not answer at all.
In St. Lucia, there was always the St. Lucian way of handling things. There was a plant-based remedy for absolutely everything, from weaning your child off breast milk to arthritis, constipation, and erectile dysfunction.
It was common for mothers to go to their backyard and cut a piece of aloe vera from their garden.
Or maybe they’d get it from a friend who had it in theirs. They would smear the aloe all over the kid’s thumb to get them to stop. I guess they never tried that with him.
He started playing the piano very young.
And he kept at it to this very day. Today, he can do a mean John Legend cover. He can also play some of the most challenging classical pieces ever. Bach. Beethoven. Mozart.
When I returned to my family as an adult, I was blown away by how far he’d come. But he was always a good pianist in my book. He’d come home from school and go straight to his piano still with his uniform on. There was rarely a silent moment in my home.
But he was a TERRIBLE singer when we were young. That boy just wanted to sing his heart out from the very beginning. He would bust out the most cringe falsetto voice he could… and sing garbled nonsense that he dubbed “opera.” Like his thumb-sucking habit, this was another strange thing he did. He wouldn’t want his friends to know he did these things.
But he loved it.
Each afternoon, he would mouth off the top hits as they played on BET: Toni Braxton, Brandy, Aliyah, you name it. But it was painful to listen to. He would keep singing to annoy me, knowing how much I hated his opera.
My brother loved holding a high note for an extended time.
“Cause I’m saving all my love for youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.”
He’d keep the note until I couldn’t take it anymore and begged him to stop. Then he’d stop. Usually, he has a shit-eating grin on his face.
From the very beginning, he was never nice to me. My mother told me that My brother loved being the firstborn. He was the center of attention at all times. Birthday parties, with my brother blowing out his Batman cake and everyone looking at my brother.
Everybody doted on my brother in an extended family of aunts and grandmothers. And then my sister and I had to be born to fuck all of that up.
Because we were twins, there was something novel about that. Or just having babies who were younger and required more attention. Maybe it was all the crying. But my brother rejected us from the beginning. As far as I can tell, it’s been like that ever since.
He did look forward to having a new sibling when my mother first gave him the news. But, when it turned out that twins came out, he was pissed. And my mother would say, “But I thought you wanted to have a new brother or sister. He’d say, “Yes, but I didn’t say I wanted two.”
He was four years older than us, which, in my household, counted for something significant. He was the first to have his first communion. I can still remember when I wasn’t allowed to get the wafer from the priest. From my five-year-old vantage point, it seemed like such a privilege.
My brother was the first to confirm and sit the Common Entrance exam.
Everyone in the country has to take this scary exam when they reach the Sixth grade, but the island doesn’t have enough high schools to accommodate every child.
That’s right. You sit this exam that decides your entire fate. If you pass, you get to go to high school. Failing the exam was a mark of much shame. You would have to repeat the sixth grade while all your classmates went to high school and left you behind.
They would give you a repeat of the year and put you in a special class with everyone else who had to repeat the year. It’s sort of a public admission that you were dumb.
Those kids would get to sit the exam again, but after that, that was it. If you failed… sorry. No education for you.
You could go to a trade school. Or start working at a relative’s shop. It would be the first day of the rest of your life. Aspiring for absolutely nothing. Most of those kids would be set out onto the street, barely able to read and write.
This wasn’t my brother. My household had high expectations, and my brother lived up to them, scoring near the top. He then got to go to the school of his choice. And there was only one real choice in my house: He’d attend an all-boys Catholic school. I’ll get to them later.
He was naturally the first to get to do everything kids weren’t supposed to do. The first to drive. The first to have a prom. Seeing my brother go out with a girl for the first time was strange. The awkwardness wasn’t just palpable -- it was out of this world.
In a rigid, ultra-Catholic household like mine, where you weren’t supposed to do anything fun, like partying, drinking, smoking, dancing, or having a girlfriend… This pairing seemed so incredibly forced.
As a little brother, I always looked to him as a model for what I could get away with in a few years. So, he’s bringing a female around the family? I’m taking notes. I remember seeing the girl. I’m 12, and he’s 16.
I was no Casanova, but I had no idea what my brother saw in that girl. I wasn’t attracted to her most slightly. I found it very odd that my brother and I had nothing in common whatsoever when it came to the subject of women. I mean.
She just wasn’t even a little bit pretty. She didn’t strike me as having even a passably likable personality. She seemed uninteresting as a human being.
I know this sounds incredibly mean, but I swear, there are people like this in St. Lucia, and they’re familiar. You don’t have to work hard to meet someone like this. Many of them repeated Common Entrance themselves.
Suppose you grow up where kids generally stay at home. There wasn’t even any place for you to go to be around other kids. Sure, you could go to the mall.
Or you might go to the most pathetic excuse for a movie theater you’ve ever seen, with the place having only one screen. And even that was still brand new. I grew up without going to the movies until I was a teenager.
There was no real way to do things because there wasn’t any meaningful bus or public transportation. But even more than that, you, simply as a God-fearing Christian, had almost nowhere you were allowed to go and be unsupervised by adults after school hours. It wasn’t allowed. I didn’t know my neighbors, and we rarely visited.
I had play dates with my cousins, but not anyone outside of that. So what happens when you’re a shut-in for every extra moment outside of school?
You become incredibly dull.
I have a longstanding habit of rummaging through my brother’s things when he isn’t looking. His room was generally off-limits. It’s the type of thing little brothers do.
Go through his drawers and cupboards and look through every shirt. I’d climb over his dresser to look at his closet—one of my brother’s favorite hiding places.
My brother always had some artifacts that a small boy like me would never have. Condoms. Lube. Cologne.
Hopefully, he might not miss some stray money. His Archie comic collection. Maybe that’s why he didn’t want me to ever go into his room. But I had the impression that it was more than just my cleptomania that made my brother forbid me from going into his room.
I felt he didn’t want me there because he didn’t like me. He certainly wasn’t friendly. Once, I was rummaging through one of his draws as I often did, and I found a stack of old-school Kodak pictures. My brother had documented his prom night. I got to see photos of him making out with his prom date. I’d never seen my brother doing such a thing before. (Or since?) ]
I will count one day as the most exhilarating day of my life. My brother had been at that all-boys school for a few years.
The school held a cycling race yearly as part of its overall sports program, usually around early April.
The police would shut down the roads for about 5 miles. St. Lucia, the tiny island, only had one road from north to south. So, this would create a traffic gridlock beyond anything I’d typically see for the hours that the race was happening.
You’d better not try to go anywhere because two lanes were squished into one. Leaving a lane open for the cyclists to whizz by. But that meant you would be crawling at a snail’s pace.
The boys each had their bikes. You could immediately tell who the real competition was based on their equipment and gear. Being the son of a well-known cyclist, my brother was expected to do well in this race. The race happened at about 1 in the afternoon -- with the roading hot sun at its peak.
In the weeks before the race, my brother would train with my father in the early mornings and Sundays. They’d throw their bikes in the back of my father’s white minivan and go for rides to the most obscure places on the island.
Nothing has taught me more about the island’s hidden gems than cycling.
We’d go to the most remote beaches that cars couldn’t reach. Old forgotten places that come right out of a history book.
On an old sugar mill plantation run by enslaved people, you might see the odd iron Calderon or old chains from ancient ships.
An old canon is lying around. It is too dilapidated to work today but too heavy to move elsewhere. Not worth the trouble.
I’d see these items and wonder how many ancestors worked to death handling this ancient equipment. Most of it is still sitting where it lay 200 years ago.
Isolated beaches that were filled with washed-up dead sea life. Crabs. Starfish. Colorful jellyfish that could kill you.
Trash from other countries that washed up on land. Artifacts from boats, like nets and rope, could have been sitting there for 20 or 30 years.
We would travel to the lesser-known Atlantic side of the island. Seas were rough there, so most people never went there. It was too dangerous.
You could get pulled in by a rip tide and drown. Many of these beaches couldn’t be accessed by car. So cycling there would be a good opportunity to get some training while seeing an actual land before time.
Each trip felt like an adventure. On that side of the island, there was a never-ending gust of ocean wind that was so strong it could knock you over if you weren’t careful.
You could feel that fresh, salty air and understand immediately how Europeans could use it to sail across the Atlantic. The trees grew on a slant because the wind was so strong and constant.
I got to know all sorts of unusual places like that. Places that most tourists would never see because it was so far off the beaten path.
It’s race day. It’s 98 degrees outside. My brother is wearing his father’s helmet, yellow jersey, black spandex shorts, and clip-on shoes that click like high heels as they strike the hot pavement.
My father also rode in the race.
I’m not sure why. I guess it was just open to the public, too. A few other old-school cyclists, including a few of my father’s old rivals, were joining the boys for their race.
We have twins—my brother’s classmates and the leading competitors. They are identical twins, and like my brother, they were outfitted in fancy racing gear that most of the other cyclists went without.
Most of the boys were wearing basketball shorts and T-shirts. They weren’t serious. They brought bulky mountain bikes. They didn’t train. They probably picked up a bike to ride this race for the first time in ages.
All of those boys got to the starting line. There were two police officers on motorcycles to lead the race. Everyone prepared themselves. The gun went off. Those boys started peeling down the highway, and within a few moments, they were out of sight.
I kid you not… for all ten years of my life to this point… I’d never experienced such excitement and exhilaration as I did on that day, watching that race.
Romanus drove my father’s white Super Carry minivan while riding together. But I was surprised to discover that my father, about 40 at the time, got smoked entirely. He didn’t even finish the race. And his rivals rubbed it in at the end. He laughed it off, but I knew he was seething on the inside.
It’s no big deal for some. But I grew up on legends of how great a cyclist he was. So, to see that he couldn’t keep up with his son. Or even his buddies who were riding along with him. That was a surprise. He was clearly out of shape—a little dose of reality to disrupt the mythology I had running in my mind about my father.
Growing up in St. Lucia, we spent most of our time trying to avoid the heat and the sun. It never really sinks in how hot it is until a day like this when everyone is on the hot asphalt roads. Traffic is backed up for miles because one of the lanes is shut down.
Most of the time, we’re inside. If we’re out, we’re at least in the shade somewhere. Under a tree somewhere. At the beach in the sea. But not today. The whole point was to break a sweat under the hot Caribbean sun. You were getting your body temperature up at the peak of the day. It was like being inside an oven.
As we passed the cyclists in my father’s minivan, each face told a unique personal story of hell—grimaces and grunts.
Some boys pushed their bikes up the steep hills while others struggled.
Each was entirely wrapped up in the drama of being so hot and uncomfortable, effectively the opposite of what they do for 99% of the year.
We picked up my father on the return trip to the finish line. He was way behind my brother. His buddies were long gone. He decided to throw in the towel and try to catch up with my brother and see how he was doing. He flung his bike into the car. There was an urgency in him that I’d never seen before.
Then, we sped up to find my brother on the race trail. When we finally caught up to him -- which was no easy task in this traffic -- he was in 4th place. All of a sudden, the reality of this race sunk in. It was time for my brother to haul ass.
My father yelled at my brother for the rest of the race, “Ride it! Ride it! Ride it!” He would yell over and over again.
Nobody could envy these cyclists out in the scorching heat, climbing up steep, winding hills littered with potholes. Anyone who didn’t wear sunscreen that day could look forward to their skin peeling off in the coming days. “Ride it! Ride it! Ride it!” he’d go.
My brain had shifted into a mode that I’d never experienced before. This race was the most essential thing in the world at that moment. This was as serious as a heart attack.
All the years of boredom.
Sweltering at home. Watching cartoons.
Sweltering at school and doing math on the chalkboard.
Falling asleep in church.
Always with agonizing boredom and heat.
There was simply nothing in my whole world that was so exciting to me. I felt an adrenaline rush that lasted for weeks.
My brother finished a respectable fourth. The twins came in second and third. I can’t remember who won. After that race, we started planning next year’s victory.
I thought about that race constantly for the next week. I plotted my debut race performance for the following months -- after I passed my Common Entrance exam and could attend that all boys school myself.
I always had the strangest relationship with my brother. If I wanted to watch cartoons and he tried to watch Wrestlemania... He got what he wanted one way or another. He wasn’t above using force.
He was wrassling that remote out of my hands and changing the channel so he could watch the Undertaker and Mankind bludgeon each other.
One time he tried to pull that shit, and I wasn’t having it. I knew I was no match for him physically, so I grabbed a cutlass and told him I’d chop him if he changed the channel.
He did, anyway. I slipped the blade across his middle finger, and he got cut. He was pissed, and perhaps rightfully, in this case, I got some version of a beatdown. And he still changed the channel.
He would fart on me and around me often. One time, sitting on my face, he let it rip with no mercy. Being gross to get a reaction out of me was par for the course.
Sometimes, he’d come home after school with some of his friends. He’d never include me in anything he was doing. And he mostly treated me like a nuisance.
Later on, when I hit puberty and started to grow, that’s when he stopped using force as a weapon to get his way. I didn’t realize it then, but it made perfect sense retrospectively. I was bigger. Stronger. Now, I was a threat.
My brother could try to push me around… But I could strike back. So that’s when much of his nasty treatment stopped.
When he was 20 and a sophomore in college, I visited him once at his tiny liberal arts school in Vermont. I was turning 16, which was part of why I stayed. I didn’t expect him to be nice to me. But now that we were in America, the rules were different. It wasn’t cool to bully your little brother.
He was kind.
It was such a foreign experience to see him generally being kind to me.
He drank with me. He got me drunk. He brought his lady friends around, and twerking was happening. I had a terrible hangover the next day. He helped me. Got me food. No name-calling the whole weekend.
A year later, I’m 17. I’m in St. Lucia on vacation. I’m at the family computer. There’s a USB stick on the computer. It’s my brother’s. My brother had been taking creative writing as his major. There was lots of talk about how good of a writer he was.
But I had never actually read anything he wrote. So, when I saw the thumb drive with my brother’s school essays, I started snooping around to see what he had written.
There was one essay about my father knocking my mother out cold on the floor. She woke up on the cold floor in tears. “Don’t tell anybody.” He says to my little brother.
There is another… I forgot the title. I don’t remember exactly how the essay started…
But this was how I discovered that my brother was gay. He talked about how, growing up in St. Lucia, he treated me like dirt as a way to “effectively feign his heterosexuality.”
I remember those words specifically. It’s funny because he never at any point said he was gay in the paper. But you most certainly knew what he was talking about. St. Lucia was and still is a very homophobic country.
Gays were considered to be outcasts. Being seen as gay would be the worst thing in the world. I had learned to accept gay people a little bit now that I was attending an American high school.
I had hated my brother for so long. But reading that essay, I finally understood.
I saw the boy hiding under all that cruelty for the first time. And in that moment, all the resentment I had carried for years… just melted away.
Until next time,
Anton
Dancer, Writer, Buddhist