Brothers of the Four Corners

By Elias Sassoon

This is a very traditional/untraditional novel. On the surface,it follows the lives of two brothers, close in age, who are bitter rivals in the end. We have the biblical Cain and Able reborn in the bodies of Billy and Bruce Aben. Bruce is the good brother. Single, middle class, with a white collar job, he leads a perfectly contented life in New York City. He takes two vacations a year, has his patented circle of friends and treasures playing the classical guitar. He prides himself on being the most decent person he knows. Billy on the other hand is the ultimate rebel. He hates middle class values; he abhors surrounding himself with comfort. The world to him is one big sham. Morality is for morons like his brother Bruce. The only thing that matters is making a quick buck any way you can; commodity trading, stock manipulation, outright theft are all permissible in Billys world. So there you have the brothers. One can only imagine their interaction. Brothers Of The Four Corners is a serious book with comedic overtones. There are elements of insanity combined with rivetting action/adventure sequences. The novel juggles a variety of issues simultaneously like: a family gone wrong; mans loneliness and alienation; religious intolerance; financial charlatanism and racketeering; racism in the guise of humanitarianism; and international espionage. In the end, these elements intertwine toward a twisted end. This makes for a really good read that will take you on a journey thats never boring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 22, 2000
• ISBN: 9781465321558

Elias Sassoon

Elias Sassoon is the author of approximately, roughly, terminally twenty-five works that include short story collections, novels, poetry collections and non-fiction, essay collections. While producing his writing by night, he has earned his daily wage in honest labor that ranges from professions like teacher/bathroom attendant to a door-to-door bible salesman/fish cleaner and everything in between. Elias continues to work hard, grinding out the words and turning them into literary gems, or if you prefer, literary pearls of wisdom. He lives with his wife, two children and a dog-named Brandon in a suburban area in the vicinity of the great Metropolis known as New York City. There he prepares barbecue dinners for neighbors and friends, roams the area for yard sales, watches flies and other moving insect life die in his backward where he also sits on a metal beach chair deciding on the future of the world as we know it.

Book preview

Copyright © 2000 by Elias Sassoon.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-7-XLIBRIS

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Chapter 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I dedicate this to an ex-friend,

but not ex-in-my mind.

To describe him, he was and is a lunatic,

a seer, a person with feelings everywhere

and a simpleton with the tendency to be a genius.

He is many things, this ex-friend,

and inspiring is one of them.

Thank you, thank you, thank you,

and may your luck suddenly turn upwards.

CHAPTER ONE

LIVES IN PICTURES

Its scary looking around and seeing only the lack of meaning. Depressing. Why go on? Does anybody care? You answer: Nobody. Think again: Perhaps mother for daughter, father for son, parents in general for their children! But when the parents die what’s left? We drift without hope of land.

Depressing thoughts. You are a son trying to examine a father’s impact. You realize your knowledge of life is borrowed from him but it’s just a loan. He’s provided the engraved outline to life’s triumphs and tragedies. The father’s paramount in all you say and do, love and hate. It took almost twenty years to realize this.

Your name is Mark, the one with the brutal, the all powerful, out-of-control father. You’re obsessed with thoughts of him and draw close to others sharing the feelings like Bruce, Bruce Aben who now has become your best friend. You are two men who’ve come together to overcome childhood. Success will not come easy and may not come at all.

Contemplating A Life With A Friend

You sit alone with Bruce Aben one cold Saturday afternoon in his kitchen, both drinking ginseng flavored tea. You and he both live as single white males in inconspicuous bachelor apartments on the outskirts of New York City which is somewhere in these greater United States of America. The apartments lack aesthetic beauty; they are colorless, cheerless, and bland, mere temporary rented shelters lacking that certain human touch.

Bruce and I share things. We’re nearing forty, hold office jobs in the bowels of the polluted city, lack hope of a better future, are insecure, neurotic, and sometimes pompously stupid. We occasionally date (women we don’t care about), and occasionally take vacations to nowhere at expensive prices. Neither of us believe in anything in particular except that we don’t deserve better in life. Dogs we are and dogs we’ll stay!

We met years ago working as third rate copy editors for a publishing company soon to cease operation. We were bored with our jobs and so began to talk and never stopped. Over the years we’ve shared that same isolation and loneliness and drew comfort from that. It’s been a great learning experience for me. I’ve recorded his insecurities and feelings of regret and I’ve come to know mine.

Bruce is always talking to me about his parents who died young. Bruce now seeks to understand who they were and why they were long after the fact. Tracing the motivations of the dead, an impossible task but the middle aged man does try. His questions: Did my parents love me and my brother? Why weren’t they better parents? Why? Why? Why? No answers but always there are more questions.

While we drink tea, Bruce pulls out an old photo album with pictures of his deceased parents and still living sons. Acrylic pages are turned. Bruce focuses in on a particular page.

These shots were taken while the folks were vacationing in LA. They almost look happy here! I don’t remember my parents ever that happy.

Your folks look very young.

The pictures were taken about a year before my brother was born. It was the last trip they ever took. After that, mom only left the house to go around the corner for groceries or to pick up the dry cleaning. Mom was always so afraid something terrible was going to happen. I think that’s where I got a lot of my fears from! It couldn’t have been easy for dad. Mom became dependent on him for everything.

Another page is turned. Pictures now portray Bruce’s father as a large, heavy set, swaggering man in his late fifties with a smile like corroded metal, and who possesses slicked back gray hair reminiscent of a fallen union czar. He wears a green corduroy jacket and holds a cigar. The mother is middle aged and emaciated. The eyes show the fear clearly and tears can be seen forming in the distance. The long and thick black hair though is vibrant. She holds a cigarette.

Any impressions? Bruce asks.

The reply consists of a conglomeration of generalities that ring hollow. Better answers are demanded. Another album is opened and I view shots of Bruce as a boy at his Bar Mitzvah wearing a blue suit three sizes too big and a bright plaid bow-tie. Enormous black framed glasses fall off the bridge of the nose; the ears are enormous while the head is small. Bruce is flanked by his father and older brother Billy.

Any more impressions? There must be something!

One thing, but maybe I shouldn’t say …

Tell me!

Your brother, he looks like a wise guy.

Billy always was but I’ve only realized it recently. Looking back I guess Billy was never a nice person or much of a brother. Now I remember how he always liked to tease me and sometimes give me a beating. He enjoyed when I cried. Sadistic even back then. Despite that I looked up to him, maybe because he was older.

How many years difference between you?

Three years, but it seemed like more. Billy was always so mature, so sure of himself. He knew how to deal with people and situations. He wasn’t afraid.

Bruce shows other pictures and reminisces while I sit. There is little for me to do except feel sad for my friend. All these fading images do little to help him gain understanding. Instead they just confirm the agony.

Contemplating The Source of Sadness

Fathers, the topic of talk among young men. Interesting worlds fathers present though few realize it. The father is invisible but instrumental in the sane operation of society. I’ve observed this with myself, my friend and with the members of my support group, young men who gather to thrash out memories of their fathers. We sit, discuss our feelings and try to find solutions and occasionally we’re successful. I’ve tried to get Bruce to come but he refuses on the grounds he already is seeing a psychiatrist. I’m always telling him stories about our members.

There’s Andy Ardswell, a sprouting thin stalk of corn with burning blue eyes, a pained look on his kisser blotched by thousands of tiny brown dots and bony shoulders bunched up around the sides of his face. Andy fears people don’t like him or will dislike him once they get to know him. That’s why he talks in whispers. Andy believes people have unlimited potential and that’s why he joined the Peace Corps and worked as a teacher in a small impoverished village in Africa. Now he organizes events for kids for the parks department and on the side writes happy novels of hope.

My father died when I was three but I remember him, he tells the support group. I can still see him kissing me and feel his arms around me. I miss him. Things would have been different if he hadn’t died.

How did he die?

Shot to death during a supermarket robbery while he was buying baby food for me or at least that’s what my mom told me. I don’t believe her. You can’t believe her. Likes to place the guilt so she can have the upper hand.

Your mother raised you!

The tragedy of Andy. Father gone, he and his brother raised by a possessive mother and by a distant stepfather in the sterile suburbs somewhere. Held captive is what Andy calls his upbringing, the kids treated like intruders in the house.

Andy breaks down as he remembers.

My brother couldn’t take it. He died during his junior year in high school.

How?

Andy cannot say, won’t say much of anything about himself though he hints about therapy sessions, nervous break-downs, drug and alcohol abuse. But who and what is unclear. No matter what Andy says, there’s always the anguished look revealing the loss of father years before. It’s a terrible thing to view up close.

James Breach is another favorite member of the group. James is this side of goofy, that side of eccentric. He’s the son of a famous cartoonist, lives alone in the middle of a dirty, drug infested part of the city, is isolated, bewildered, lost, and bedazzled.

I hate where I live, he tell us, I don’t know how I got to live where I live, but I can’t get out of where I live, because I hate where I live and its too expensive to get out of my where I live, because it’s too expensive to move to another place to live, and you know why, because I’ve been living in my area, in my apartment for fourteen years, so I can’t get out where I live and where I live is too cheap and every other place is too expensive, so I can’t move out of my place but I have to move out of my place where I live.

James is a comic book/trading card vendor who opens his tables for business on the streets of Manhattan. This brings in a steady income but he doesn’t really like it although he doesn’t dislike it, though he’d like to get out of it, or not get into it if he can get out of it. James spends time writing fiction and thinking about thinking.

If I finish one of my books, what will I do then? he questions us. If I finish how can I be sure that isn’t the last thing I’ll do and then what will happen? Maybe I should finish so that I can see that I can finish. I’m not sure, I don’t know. Why is it that I can never can see the end in anything? I just see the pieces and they’re all a puzzle to me to somehow be pieced together. I wish I could be like my father. He finishes things. Look at all he’s accomplished.

James speaks coherently only when discussing his famous father.

My father started as a cartoonist when comics were in their infancy in the thirties. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. He and his partner Felix Cocum created Captain Scarlet and NatFace and they made a lot of money for those days, though later on they sold the rights to most of their characters. Dad’s still well known in the field. He’s made appearances on television and he’s been interviewed for the newspapers. And …

James can go on like that.

If it wasn’t for mom, I don’t know where me and my sisters would have been. Mom was the normal one, the one who took us to little league, drove us to our friends, did the cooking and handled the finances, even took us to the movies and to Scouts. Dad stayed mostly in the attic where he had his studio; he drew at night and slept during the day. But I don’t think dad was that strange. I always loved him and didn’t care that he was a little wacky. I’d go up to the attic at night and he’d joke with me and let me watch him work and sometimes his cartoonist friends were over and they’d sit around and talk about their creations like they were real and I’d listen and really get a kick out of it. But I guess when I think back dad was more like another kid than a father. I always wondered why he ever got married.

The man tells of his mother’s early death and his father’s complete disappearance from the family. He is left to help raise his three younger sisters by himself in the suburbs. He says he didn’t mind. But there are the scars caused by the lack of a responsible role model. Now, in the present, the man has no direction. Life is just an endless series of dark tunnels leading back to the same old place.

The members of the support group talk and talk and talk and try to figure and talk some more and console and dream and cry but it makes no difference. You can’t take it back, you can’t recover the lost ideals or the lost values. But we try, I try. I’m one of the best talkers in the group.

"My father, what was he except an abusive alcoholic whore lover who never held down a job and was at the mercy of a domineering wife. He was an idiot who never:

HAD HIS OWN BANK ACCOUNT; WROTE A CHECK; DROVE A CAR;

COOKED A MEAL;

BOUGHT CLOTHES;

WASHED CLOTHES;

SHOPPED AT A SUPERMARKET;

MADE HIS OWN DECISIONS.

What he did do was yell, rant, rave, and ridicule loved ones. Called me the dummy, the moron, the fool. Never played with me, or talked to me except to ask me to fetch him a soda or something from the kitchen. Thought about getting the kitchen knife and slitting his throat many times but never did.

I tell the group the consequences of being my father’s son, the feelings of inadequacy and anger and the struggle to discover how to act as a man should in the world.

Sometimes all I want to do is forget. It seems my whole life is being spent fighting his image in my brain. But the more I fight, the more I become him. It’s not easy.

If only childhood didn’t carry over to adulthood. It’s okay when it’s a good one, but when its not, we and those around us pay for it dearly. Fathers, a focal point for what is good and bad. If only they could all stand unbent!

How did Bruce’s father effect Bruce and for that matter his brother Billy and the type of men they are today? My suspicions are the father’s influence lurks everywhere. But who am I to say. You should judge for yourself if possible.

Henceforth, I will fade into the background except for a brief appearance here and there while. This is my friend Bruce’s story, not mine. Maybe one day I’ll write about myself. Who knows?

CHAPTER TWO

PSYCHIATRIC BLUES

The Psychiatrist As One Young Man’s Savior

It was nice having tea with Mark. He’s a good friend and a nice fellow who hasn’t had it easy. Grew up with a deranged father. Considering that he’s done okay; he’s got a pretty good job and travels by himself and goes out and tries to meet women. I admire that. Look at me, I’m a mess. I grew up in a dysfunctional family and I’m still showing the effects. Maybe if my father had taken an interest instead of remaining distant, maybe if he’d tried to teach me and my brother about the world, maybe things would have turned out differently. Mother didn’t help any. She babied us boys. My brother Billy rebelled while I submitted. We both paid the price though. Billy and I are both jackasses in our own right.

I’m glad I have Mark to talk to. He understands. Sometimes though, he even can’t help, that’s how screwed up I am. But I think finally I’ve begun to make some progress thanks to my psychiatrist, Dr. Yolander, who I’ve been seeing for about twenty years. I was recommended to him by my screwed-up cousin Lenny. I was back in college then. Dr. Yolander’s has been wonderful. For a famous man who has published books on the breakdown of the nuclear family, who has spoken regularly at psychiatric conferences, he’s always made time for me.

I think over the years, my doctor has come to think of me as more than just a patient, though lately I wonder. Like last week when he told me he’d be raising his fees because of increased overhead.

What overhead! His office is in the Brooklyn brownstone he owns and he’s already rich—owns three homes and vacations in Spain and the Riviera a couple times a year. Where do I live, where do I go? I’m just a middle class slob who gets up at 5:30 every morning to rush into a dirty city to sit in front of a computer terminal for eight hours and get paid nothing for it. But here I am being judgmental. My doctor has been trying to get me to work on that. You see he’s a good doctor.

BIOGRAPHY OF DR. ADRIAN YOLANDER:

Born: 1928. Death: NOTYET. Birthplace:

Onefar corner of greater Montana.

Family:

Stinking rich.

Family Business:

Sheep herding, oil exploration and development, real estate speculation. Family Failings:

Greedy, selfish, lack ofrespectfor common man. Family Strength:

Solidarity and feelings of superiority.

Family Likes:

Money.

Family Dislikes: Anything money can’t buy. Adrian Yolander Background:

Attended bestprivate schools; provided with music lessons, French lessons, fencing lessons, lessons on being a gentleman; attended Stanford University as an undergraduate and later Columbia University. Family Expectations of Adrian: Expected to be next generation leader ofthe family.

Rebellion & Maturity:

Adrian Yolander rebels against the family. Consequently, he gets into bitter disputes with father. After graduation, Adrian refuses to take rightful place in the family power structure. It comes to a head during the formal dinner the Yolander’s give at their Billings, Montana mansion for their influential friends, including high-flying politicos.

I can’t condone this family’s activities anymore! Adrian suddenly announces to the gathered. Land grabbers, that’s what we are.

Father eyes son but son continues anyway.

"Petty little land grabbers, that’s what the name Yolander stands for. We buy up God’s magnificent country, kill offall vegetation and wildlife, pour concrete over everything, and then sell the sterility that’s left to

John Q. Public at exorbitant prices. I, for one, won’t be a part ofit »

anymore.

This is the final break between a family and one of its components.

Biography continuing:

Adrian leaves hearth and home to join the army and is sent to fight in Korea where he sustains an injury to a portion of his genitalia causing permanent impotence. Months of recuperation follow in a VA hospital in Boston. Adrian grows bitter, falls into fits of uncontrolled violence and is transferred to a government-run mental institution in upstate New York where he receives electric shock and drug therapy. After many months the crisis is past.

Biography continuing again:

Adrian decides he likes mental illness so much he decides to become a doctor ofit and begins studies at Columbia University for a Doctorate in Psychotherapy. There tragedy strikes. While renting a room off campus with the Druckman family—the Druckmans consist offa-ther (aforeman in a factory making garden hoses), mother (a laborer in the assembly line ofa chewing gum factory), two sons and daughter who live in a small house with a tiny plot ofland where they grow roses and petunias-there transpires an event so stunning that it will shape Adrian Yolander’s young life.

Adrian comes home very late one nightfrom the University library and is surprised to see the house lights still on and the front door ajar.

Adrian enters and discovers every member ofthe Druckman family slumped over the living room couch and all dead; the bodies are riddled with bullet holes. The subsequent investigation shows the father had gone nuts, shot his wife, each of kids and then himselfin the mouth. The police never came up with much motive. Adrian becomesfixated on the murders. How could this have occurred? From what he saw, the Druckmans werepleasantpeople who never fought or used abusive language. The father was always playing with his kids and they were always laughing and then this. Inexplicable! Biography Concluding:

Adrian is inspired by the tragedy. He writes his doctoral thesis on the Druckman murders and family violence in general. Adrian now has found his specialty, family therapy and will devote his life to the field. Within a matter of twenty years, he builds one of the more thrivingpractices in New York City. Biographical Side Note

To this day Adrian Yolander remains estranged from his family in Montana. The Yolander clan continues to prosper. They now make their money in Third World land development projects sponsored by the government ofthe United States of America. Adrian’s father died a few years back without ever seeing his son again. That is a tragedy that can never be repaired.

—Biography at an end—

Bruce Remembers Dr. Yolander In The Beginning

Just finished eating dinner, the miso soup and eggplant casserole I prepared this morning; cooking and baking give me a warm feeling. But nothing can lift the depression I’m in right now. It’s Saturday night and I’m in my apartment in this middle class neighborhood populated by tall cooperative apartment buildings, elegant homes with perfectly landscaped properties and tennis courts, wide boulevards and expensive department stores and restaurants. But what good does that do me! I’m still terribly alone.

I should be out trying to meet a woman. Mark is. But for some reason I have a hard time with that. I think it goes back to the way I was babied growing up. I do want to go out. I’m single and forty and time is running out, but I’m paralyzed to act. I can only sit and brood about the injustice of life. I feel angry and betrayed followed by guilt for feeling angry. What’s wrong with me?

Saturday night, vivid recollections of the pain of growing up. I’m the immature little fool hiding under my mother’s skirts as I’m teased and bullied by my big brother and ignored by my father who has more important things to do. Still the world views me as a normal little boy who gets the good grades at school, who plays punch ball and flies his kites outside with his few friends. It’s a sham. I have big problems. It’s just nobody cares to notice.

The thoughts won’t disappear of my father not loving me and my mother and her smothering and of my terrible adolescence when I’m cut off from the world and friendless, humorless and with a feeling of dread; I’m too afraid to go out, learn to drive, go out with a girl, even to take a walk. I imagine there’d be somebody waiting to harm me. I can’t even sleep because I fear not waking up and then being placed in a grave and being forgotten. I grow more and more depressed. It gets worse in college and I finally drop out and seek the help of Dr. Yolander. Even that was difficult. I had to get the money from my mother who cries and feels guilt. She’s so ashamed, she doesn’t tell my father. I remember my first visit to the doctor now as I sit in my own isolation.

So Bruce tell me a little about yourself.

I mumble.

You have any hobbies?

I’m too ashamed to answer so I continue to mumble.

The doctor asks some more friendly questions and gets the same results.

Tell me why you’re here? Dr. Yolander finally demands.

Don’t know!

Don’t you?

I guess.

I begin to cry.

Talk to me Bruce. You’re obviously frustrated. I promise I won’t judge you.

Something’s wrong. I’m out of touch, can’t deal with school, lost all my friends, never had a girlfriend, never had anything of my own, not even a part-time job. My mother wouldn’t let me have one. I just don’t know. I feel like I have no future.

Okay. Let’s try to deal with one issue at a time?

There’s nothing really to deal with. It’s just that I’m stupid, maybe even retarded. I should be more like my older brother Billy. Billy is really smart and knows about the world. He’s at Berkeley right now studying for his Masters. You know his hobby is studying languages! He’s fluent in Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Russian, French, Japanese, Urdu and Hindi and I don’t know what else and most of them he learned on his own!

Your brother sounds unusual. But don’t you think you have any talents.

Being a perfect fool.

The doctor changes the direction of the questioning. Tell me about your parents Bruce?

I refuse. He probes. I go into a shell. He backs off. He returns to a previous topic.

Maybe you could tell me a little more about your brother.

I do and for the next half hour until the session ends. Thereafter, I meet with Dr. Yolander every week for the next number of months but with little progress.

I’d like to meet your parents, the doctor says to me one day. Could you have them come with you on your next visit.

I panic. I explain my father doesn’t know I’m seeing him and that it’s impossible, but my doctor persists and I relent. Father explodes when mom reveals the truth.

My money is going to that, dad yells. Don’t you know that once those quacks get their hands on you, they bilk you for life. Now he probably wants to meet us to get more customers. Well not me!

My folks argue. Mother defends my right to see the doctor and demands that father goes with her to see him.

Not me, I won’t. It’s completely ridiculous. How could Bruce embarrass us by going to a quack, complains Dad, stomping back and forth across the living room. Now the whole world is going to think we’re responsible. What the boy needs is a kick in the ass. That’ll make him better fast.

Mother does not back down. She whines, cries, waves her finger and verbally assaults father below the belt. I should have know this is how you’d react. You’ve never done anything for your children. I’m the one who has always been there, the one who has had to discipline them, take them to the park, to Little League, even to the Boy Scouts. You’ve done nothing! Now all I’m asking is to do this one thing, come with me to your son’s doctor.

Father is vanquished. You can see it in his face.

The following week, the three of us go to Dr. Yolander’s office early one morning. After the meeting, father will be rushing off to work.

Nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs Aben, my doctor begins.

I sit on the sofa between my parents. Mother looks dreary; she squeezes a wilting tissue in a trembling hand and every so often applies it to her teary eyes. She wears a washed-out blue house dress with frayed shoulder straps that keep slipping down and green slippers. Her long black hair is held in a bun on top of her head by netting. She pulls out a cigarette and a lighter from the pocket of her house dress and smokes. Mother looks like a scared bird hiding in a tree from the neighborhood cat.

Nice to meet somebody who’s been so good to my Bruce, mother talks first. Bruce’s a good boy you know. Everybody likes him. So helpful to everyone. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that.

You’re right, Bruce is a good young man, confirms the doctor earnestly. He’s just a little troubled right now.

Troubled doctor, troubled! mother exclaims. Oh yes, we are aware of some of the difficulties. Bruce’s dropped out of college and that gives us cause of much worry. Yet we know many boys who have done this. Our neighbors, the Zachary’s, have a boy, Luke, my son’s age, who not only dropped out of school, but also began to take drugs. Terrible. My Bruce would never take drugs. He’s just a little confused, but he’ll get over that.

Mother eyes father, who’s oblivious. Aren’t you going to say something Sam?

He looks disgusted. I suppose it’s good to meet you doctor. I suppose.

Father wears a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and red tie. He is chewing on the tip of an unlit green cigar and is tapping his foot against the floor.

What do you make of all this, Mr. Aben? the doctor asks.

Make of what?

Your son’s difficulties!

Father shakes his head. Who has time? Difficulties, my son has enough to eat and has a bed to sleep in. I don’t see any difficulties.

Do you think Bruce is happy?

Father huffs and puffs. Happy, not happy, what’s the difference? You live, you work, you die. So what?

But don’t you think there are other things in life?

"Look, I have an important meeting this afternoon and I need a couple of hours prep time. Can’t we get on with this. Why’d you want

V to see me?

I just thought we could talk so I could get a better picture of Bruce. I think it’d be helpful if you could both tell me a little about yourselves. You go first Mr. Aben.

Sure, that’s right. I’m the one whose caused this, sure, father barks.

No, I’m not saying that at all, nobody is laying blame. Blame doesn’t accomplish anything.

Cut the baloney, snipes father shaking his head. Let’s get down to it.

Mother’s face reddens.

Well, I’ve asked you to come because I feel any solution to Bruce’s troubles involve both his parents.

We’ve been good parents to Bruce and his brother, mother defends the family honor while grasping my hand. We’ve always tried to give the children everything, mother continues. We love the children very much."

Don’t you see, he’s blaming us, father growls. He thinks we’re bad parents, that’s what he thinks. Bruce has filled his head with nonsense about us."

Dr. Yolander tries to smooth out the situation. Please, you’re jumping to conclusions. Bruce hasn’t said anything bad at all. He’s only said good things about his parents.

Mother smiles for the first time.

That, however, doesn’t mean Bruce doesn’t have problems. But I think though that with your assistance, these problems can be worked out in therapy."

Mother’s face falls. It sounds like you’re talking about a long time. But my Bruce won’t be needing you much longer. My boy is just going through a phase. Believe me, I know my Bruce better than anybody.

His problems, I’m afraid are a little more complex.

Father kicks at the floor. Problems, nothing that a little backbone wouldn’t cure!

I’m afraid this has nothing to do with any inherent personality traits. There are very deep psychological and emotional issues that we will have to deal with here.

That’s what you think, my father barks. Enough of this crap. Why don’t you really admit what’s going on here, I’m on trial here. Blame the father, go ahead. But I don’t think my son needs any of this. The only thing wrong with him is his hormones are changing. Let him work for a living like I had to do when I was his age and we won’t be hearing of this.

Father storms out of the office and pulls mother behind him. If my son wants to see you fine, he yells back. "Just send me the bills.

You’ll get your blood money. But as for my wife and I, don’t expect

_ »

our support.

I remain behind.

They may change their minds, my doctor comforts.

But my parents never did.

I sit on the couch this Saturday night and remember so clearly. Dr. Yolander always tells me not to dwell on things, but how can I help it. I’m angry at my parents and they’re not even on this earth for me to tell them. What have they left me of themselves except my no good brother who lives like a pig in Florida and who is bound and determined to ruin my life. That’s what they left me.

It’s Saturday night and I can’t stop thinking!

CHAPTER THREE

MEETING THE FATHER FIGURE A SECOND TIME

Billy Aben Driving, Thinking, Cursing

The car creeps along a desolate stretch of highway. It’s hot but this is Florida and it’s June, so what do you expect. The land is parched and so am I as I drive through a remote stretch that borders fly-infested swamps. I’m tired so I stop for a while. I’ve been going for hours and I’m beginning to hallucinate. I swear my brother Bruce is sitting next to me and that he’s being a pest as usual. He can’t be here, I know that, he’s in New York. But I hear him going on about dad, whose been dead for years; he’s getting on my nerves. Why do you think dad never could relax? I pretend I don’t hear the idiot. Do you think dad loved us?