Trying to Live with Mikey

Nearing the end of my senior year of high school, my family suffered one of the most traumatic events we would ever experience. I was at my friend Stephen’s house, practicing with our band for our upcoming talent show performance when I got an unexpected call from my mom. Just seeing her name on the screen of my phone gave me concern. There were already several missed calls from her, all from the last few minutes. She knew I was at band practice, so for her to be trying to get a hold of me it had to have been something urgent.

            I answered my phone and heard my mom speaking panicked and out of breath.

            “Max, where are you?!”

            “I told you already mom, I’m practicing at Stephen’s house.”

            “I need you to get home right now, something happened to Mikey and he’s dying in the hospital. Just get home as fast as you can so I can pick you up.”

            I started to panic too. “What’s wrong with him?”

            “They’re not sure, but they said he dialed 911 while me and your dad were at work. They found him unconscious and now he’s at the Kettering hospital on dialysis.”

            “They have no idea what happened?”

            “That’s why I need you to go home, apparently he and “Tall” Bob drank bad moonshine last night. I need you to go to the basement and pour out that moonshine as fast as possible. I’ll call you back as soon as I can, I have to talk to the doctors.”

            Fucking “Tall” Bob. That lanky piece of shit was a cancer to everyone around him. Over the course of my time in high school, he had managed to introduce my friends and I to Xanax, cocaine, and all sorts of other destructive things. He was a loser looking to make money off ignorant kids who didn’t know any better. It all started because he had reformed his friendship with my brother after Mikey returned home from Bowling Green. Ever since Mikey had been hanging out with Bob again, it seemed like hard drugs were around me almost every day.

            My bandmates could tell from my side of the conversation and by the look on my face that something was very wrong. I told them what I knew and that I needed to get home. My friend Stephen was one of my lucky friends who hadn’t been turned on to hard drugs by Bob or Mikey. His main memory of my brother was when Mikey pointed an AK-47 at him last year at 4/20. Stephen was smart enough not to hang out with my brother after that.

            We ended band practice and Stephen asked his mom if she could give me a ride home because I didn’t have a car. She said “of course”, and I spent a few minutes telling her the situation before we got in their minivan.

            Stephen’s mom truly was an angel. I had known her since I was in elementary school, and she always seemed so calm whenever I saw her around town or when I was at their house. I felt dirty talking about Mikey in her idyllic kitchen. Even though her children all seemed like they didn’t have any problems, she seemed to understand Mikey’s situation and wasn’t judgmental in the slightest.

            On the drive back to my house, we barely exchanged words. I was more confused, scared, and depressed than I had ever been in my life up to that point. I walked into my empty house and felt more alone than ever. Our dog had died the year earlier, and we had yet to get a new one. I walked into Mikey’s bedroom, and it smelled like cigarettes and stale death.

            Immediately, I saw the mason jar. It was sitting on the filthy coffee table 1/8th of the way full of a murky mixture. There was a shaft of sunlight cast on it from the basement window that made it look like an ironically picturesque still-life. When I brought it upstairs into the kitchen, I noticed the layer of brown sediment on the bottom. At first, I thought it might be cinnamon. It was common to make “apple-pie” moonshine by adding spices and apples, but this didn’t smell like cinnamon at all. I had never seen heroin at that point in my life, but I had an idea that’s what this might be.      I thought about my mom’s panicked instructions for me to pour it out. Was she scared I would drink it? Why did she want to get rid of it so badly? I ignored these thoughts and poured it out into the sink before throwing the jar in the trash. I wish I hadn’t, though. For years, my family would debate on what exactly was wrong with the moonshine.

            To this day, my dad will still tell you the moonshine was laced with bleach. I know for certain that was heroin at the bottom of that jar, and if my family had believed that back then, the future might have played out differently for all of us in the end.

            On the way to the hospital, my mom had more information on what happened to Mikey. Apparently, he and Bob had picked up some moonshine after being at the bar last night and had been drinking it until the early morning. After Bob left, Mikey fell asleep and had slid down to between the couch and the coffee table. He pinned himself there, and because he was so intoxicated, he didn’t wake up when the blood flow was cut off to his left arm and his hip. He was now suffering from compartment syndrome and his arm along with parts of the whole left side of his body were filled with dead flesh that was poisoning him from the inside.

            The doctors would try to scrape out as much of the necrotic flesh as they could, which was an extremely painful procedure. Right now, it looked like they would probably have to amputate his left arm. Selfishly, I thought about how embarrassing it would be to have an older brother with a missing arm. How would I explain it to my friends? Would the prosthetic serve as a constant reminder of this horrific event for the rest of Mikey’s life?

            We went to Mikey’s room in the hospital, and I was hit with another wave of that same rotting stench that was lingering in the basement, but now it was mixed with that strange sterile smell that fills all hospitals.

            Mikey looked more machine than man on the hospital bed. There were tubes attached to him everywhere, and his mouth was plugged with a rough-looking tube to help him breathe. I remember being nervous to touch anything in the room, scared to disrupt whatever precious balance of medical science was keeping him alive. His left forearm was huge and bloated. His Japanese coy fish tattooed there looked dead like someone had poisoned their pond. Before the accident, Mikey had always kept himself athletic and strong, despite the drugs. He embodied the “tough-guy” persona, and his muscles and tattoos were his most prideful possessions. Now he looked like a frail memory of himself, emaciated and dehydrated after only being in the hospital for a few hours. I remember thinking that if this had happened to me, I’d rather be dead than wake up to see this nightmare version of myself.

            Those first few visits to the hospital were confusing. I didn’t know why I was there. I couldn’t help the doctors do their jobs. Were we hoping that Mikey would wake up while we were visiting him? I didn’t want to be around for that. I couldn’t imagine how irrational or angry he would be about the accident. The doctors had managed to avoid amputation but had removed most of the muscle from his forearm. The coy fish were all chopped up and stitched together now and his skin sagged loosely around the thin bone. I remember asking Mikey why he got a coy fish sleeve when the rest of his body was covered in hardcore punk and metal looking tattoos. He said he got it for free because his friend was still practicing on being a licensed tattoo artist. I guess he was lucky in that way at least, the one tattoo the doctors ruined was free of charge.

            Eventually, Mikey woke up and the hospital visits got that much harder. Now instead of sitting there in awkward silence like we were at a funeral, it was like the body in the casket had reanimated and my family was talking to an opium-dazed ghoul of their child. What Mikey said made little sense, and when it did make sense, it was mean. He was mad at everyone except for himself for what had happened. He blamed my parents for not checking on him before they left for work, and he blamed me for not visiting him more often.

            I eventually stopped visiting him at all. Seeing him like that and knowing why it had happened was overwhelming for me as an eighteen-year-old. Mikey had always treated my friends and I like trash, and now I was supposed to be there for him after he caused this mess all by himself? I was mad at him. I was mad because he had ruined his body, and in the process had ruined our family. Relaxing back home felt impossible. Taking pleasure in anything made us feel guilty, and we were constantly the topics of pity for our friends and extended family.

            Mikey was in the hospital for what seemed like forever, but eventually, he was back home. Immediately, I was confronted with his anger for not visiting him more. I told him I had moved all his stuff upstairs because of his bad hip and that we had switched bedrooms. Mikey knew he couldn’t climb stairs with his injuries, but he was still upset with me.

            “You’re probably happy this happened to me, so now you get to live in my room.”

            “Mikey, how could I possibly be happy about what happened?”

            “Because you’re a piece of shit.”

            “Fuck you, Mikey.”

            I stopped having friends over now that Mikey was back home. Before this, my basement had been the go-to spot for our group to hang out. The seclusion of the basement and my parent’s preoccupation with work made it the perfect place to escape from supervision and do whatever we wanted after school. When Mikey started living down there, it opened a whole new world of drugs for us as long as we could tolerate his manic ramblings.

            After his accident, though, Mikey was harder than ever to be around. He was constantly under the influence of OxyContin to manage his massive amounts of nerve pain and the opiates made him act more irrationally than ever before. There was one time where Mikey had invited one of his old girlfriends over and he needed me to trim his nails. I was minding my own business when I heard him struggling down the stairs into the basement.

            “MAX!”

            “What’s up?”

            “Trim my nails for me.” He had the clippers held out towards me.

            “Alright, I got you.” The fingers on his left hand were stiff and frail, like those on a dead woman. The nails had grown out long and were pristine from not being used in weeks.

            “Not like that, bitch!”

            “What do you mean?”

            “You gotta cut them smoothe! You ever try to finger a girl with pointy nails? No, I forgot. You don’t get pussy. You just sit down here all day and play videogames because you’re a fucking nerd.”

            “Chill out, man. I’ve just never cut anyone else’s nails before. I’m doing my best.”

            Mikey stormed away without a word of thanks after I carefully cut his last nail.

            My brother had also taken up drinking with zero delay after getting out of the hospital. He had been put into this horrific state by mixing opiates and booze, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to let it make him quit. He started snorting his OxyContin pills like an abuser, saying it “worked better” than swallowing them. Almost every night, Mikey would drink himself into oblivion, nodding off and breaking things around the house because he could barely walk from his combination of injuries and intoxication.

            After a few months of physical therapy, Mikey finally moved out of the house. Life started to return to some kind of normal and I went off to Ohio University to study music. I successfully went to parties almost every day of my studies there and followed the tradition of dropping out after one year. Maybe I was coping with the trauma of living with my brother, or maybe I was just young and dumb. More than likely, it was a little bit of both.

            I figured if I joined the Navy, it would make up for the embarrassment of dropping out of college. So, after a long six months of waiting, I shipped off to boot camp and began a new chapter of my life that would last the next four years.

            In January 2016, after being in the Navy for only a year and barely spending any time at home I got an unexpected call from Mikey. He told me I owed him sixty dollars because the Christmas gift I had shipped to him was broken. It was some stupid magnetic phone charger that I thought would help him because of his disability. I told him I would buy him something else, but I wouldn’t send him money.

            “Why can’t you just send me $60?! I know they pay you good in the military!”

            “Because I don’t owe you anything, Mikey. It was a gift in the first place.”

            “Oh, so you can’t help out you’re only brother?”

            “I don’t think it would help you.”

            “What?”

            “You’re probably going to spend it on cocaine.”

            “I promise it’s not for cocaine.” He wasn’t lying.

            The argument went on and snowballed into a confrontation about all the toxic and abusive behavior Mikey had put me through my entire time growing up. I told him that the happiest times in my life where when he wasn’t living at our house. I told him never to ask me for anything ever again. I told him if when I was older, and he ever contacted my wife and kids I would have him arrested. I told him that if he went home this year for Christmas, I wouldn’t be there. That was the last time I ever talked to Mikey. Seven months later, two days before his 28th birthday, Mikey died of an overdose from fentanyl laced heroin.

Writer’s Statement

            It might be shocking to some people that I can write about my late brother in such a bad light. To me, this was the only way to stay true to my story. Mikey was a horrible person for years before his accident and being disabled changed none of that. Six years after his death, I can look back with clarity and see the full scope of the damage he caused to those around him.

            Writing about a person with a disability should be just like writing about anyone else: an author must strive for authenticity, especially when writing non-fiction. Lennard J. Davis writes,

“If disability appears in a novel, it is rarely centrally represented. It is unusual for a main character to be a person with disabilities, although minor characters, like Tiny Tim, can be deformed in ways that arouse pity. In the case of Esther Summerson, who is scarred by smallpox, her scars are made virtually to disappear through the agency of love. Dinah Craik’s Olive is one of the few nineteenth-centuy novels in which the main character has a disability (a slight spinal deformity), but even with her the emphasis on the deform­ity diminishes over the course of the novel so by then end it is no longer an issue. On the other hand, as sufficient research has shown, more often than not villains tend to be physically abnormal; scarred, deformed, or mutilated."

Was Mikey a villain in this story? No. He was a victim of his own mistakes. Rarely, if ever, do we encounter “villains” in real life. Mikey’s disability did serve as a reminder and as a symbol for the many problems he faced in life. Everyone who encountered him could tell something was “wrong” with his body. Those who knew him, knew that his injuries were a direct result of his reckless lifestyle. Those who were cautious to form friendships with him had their concerns confirmed by the visible damage his behavior had done to his body.

            Long before Mikey went down the path of hard drugs, he struggled with mental health. Anti-social outbursts and sadistic behavior were common with him as a teenager, and my parents considered sending him to an institution several times. Luckily, for all of this though, they always considered the inhuman treatment of mental patients and the costs of healthcare to outweigh the mental burden of having an unstable child at home. Had Mikey been institutionalized, I doubt it would have been much help. My brother was not built to live in this world and changing him to conform to its boundaries would have destroyed his soul.

            Disability comes in a wide variety of forms, and at any time in our lives we can find ourselves inhabiting a disabled body. Mikey’s lifelong struggle with mental health was dwarfed by his struggles with opiate addiction after his accident. His unstable and reckless behavior suddenly had a physical “excuse” paired along with it. It’s impossible to know how many years Mikey’s accident cut off from the end of his life, but I am certain that his time in the hospital was the beginning of the end for him.

            Mikey’s death took a huge emotional burden off the shoulders of me and my family, and I used to feel guilt for feeling that way. When Mikey passed away, the only time I cried was when my mom called me on the phone to tell me the bad news. I think the only reason I cried was because I knew how painful this would be for my parents. After that, even at Mikey’s funeral, I never cried and rarely felt grief. I loved Mikey for being my brother and I still do, but this love did not blind me from the ripples of damage he brought into the world.

Work Cited:

Normality, Power, and Culture by Lennard J. Davis