I’ve always operated as if I was an only child and, in any way practical, that’s exactly what I’ve been. But I do have half-siblings, by-products of my biological father’s (father #1) breezy dabble into parenthood.

I have 2 half brothers and a half sister, none of whom I really know that well except Harry. Harry was the youngest of the three and the most connected to my mother (his step-mother) after our father took off, once again, to find his sanity, that elusive comfort he probably couldn’t identify if he tripped over it. He’d just procreate, move on and repeat. Sort of like washing your hair; shampoo, rinse and repeat. Same deal, but with the latter at least you get clean hair.

Harry loved my mother because when he was younger and sent to visit his dad, she gave him a lot of the attention that he didn’t seem to be getting otherwise, especially from his dad. I really never knew Harry’s own mother, much like I really didn’t know my own father (other than he was an alcoholic), but when I got into my pre-teen years, Harry reconnected with my mom and started coming over to our house and hanging out and, as an added perk, started spending time with me.

I bonded with Harry pretty quickly, not only because it was rather revelatory to have a big brother but because he was a really sweet guy. I could see the warm spot he had for my mother and he and I were, after all, brothers, even if it was only the ‘half’ variety. I looked forward to him coming over for a game of Monopoly or some such time filler, but I just liked being around him because I felt a part of something that was bigger than me.

Probably like a lot of only children I felt somewhat isolated but when Harry came around I suddenly had an extension of myself, a real brother by blood, a piece of my elusive father, if you will. I liked that because I didn’t know much about our mutually mysterious sperm donor and, ‘hey, look, here’s another one just like me’ and he doesn’t know a whole lot more than I do. Misery was a little more blissful when there was company to share it with.

Like me, Harry wanted to know his father, spend some time with him, have a relationship with him, make that ghost come alive but our father didn’t want the same thing and was secretly living in another state, married once again and denying the existence of all the children he had helped to create. That did not stop Harry and through various means discovered our father’s whereabouts and set out to pay him a visit.

Father #1 caught wind of this somehow and was ready when Harry, who had crossed several states to get to our dad, wound up never even getting in the front door. Father’s wife met him in the yard, told him that our dad wouldn’t be seeing him, handed him $10 and told Harry he should turn around and go home.

Harry left, devastated, with the frustration of knowing now there would never be anything he could do to bridge this gap in his life. It would just be left empty. It was the same for me only I never had the guts to try what Harry did, although I considered it over and over, up until the day we had found out he died. Harry and I were partners in parental loss, knowing there was this man out there whose DNA we shared but who wanted nothing to do with us for reasons we couldn’t fathom.

For Harry and I, this incomprehensible rejection followed us around like a wounded animal crying for help. We looked at ourselves wondering what it was that a father would be repelled by and since we couldn’t even have a conversation with him about it, the mystery would never be solved in our heads. I know that this tortured Harry and maybe that’s why he turned to alcohol in such a ferocious way, or maybe that was only part of many other reasons. I’ll never know because we were a little afraid to talk to each other about it.

We stayed connected throughout my high school years, playing a little pick-up hockey in a night league and occasionally getting together with his family at our house; he’d married and was raising a couple of kids. We eventually lost contact altogether as I went to college on the other side of the state and finally moved across the country but many years later, after I had come back to Michigan, I got a phone call out of the blue from Harry.

Actually it was Harry’s wife who reintroduced herself and announced that Harry would like to talk to me. “Sure”, I said, wondering why Harry didn’t call me himself but, whatever, it was nice to hear from him. We talked a little and I started to get excited about seeing him again as we made plans to meet at a tavern right next to the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit, a renown player’s hangout, and then we’d go to the game right after having something to eat.

All of a sudden, during the phone call, Harry wasn’t there and the line went dead. I didn’t know what had happened but about 10 minutes later the phone rings again and it’s Harry’s wife, giving some cryptic explanation for the hang up and, “here’s Harry again”. I thought, ‘What the hell was that? She had to dial the phone number back and reintroduce my half-brother to me? Was that his wife or his secretary?’ But I just ignored it during our call and we finalized our plans. I had a source for the tickets and me and a friend would meet him at the bar on the designated day and time.

My friend and I got there on the day of the game, found a table and ordered some snacks and a couple of beers. Harry wasn’t there yet and so I kept looking around for him, thinking that he’d pop in at any minute and I was anxious to introduce my real-life brother to my friend. We eventually finished dinner and it was close to game time and he still hadn’t showed so we had no choice but to leave. I didn’t have Harry’s phone number and who knows how long we might have sat there waiting for no one.

I was pissed because this was more of that lost potential I had grown so weary of. Again, I was caught waiting around, like an excited puppy, for something that was never going to happen. Now my half-brother was just as invisible as my father and just as unreliable, and all that nonsense during that initial phone call suddenly made sense. If he couldn’t dial the phone on his own, how was he ever going to navigate his way to Tiger Stadium?

My suspicions were confirmed when my mother talked to his wife a few days later and she explained that he’d forgotten the details of the call and blah, blah, blah, maybe a tad too much booze at the time? So, what she was saying, in effect, was that my half-brother had become as big a boozer/loser as his/our father.

“Well, congratulations and thanks for playing our game.”

I made the decision right away that I would have none of that craziness, not because I didn’t have a place for him in my heart, but because I didn’t have the stomach to watch him turn to ineffectual mush like my father.

Harry chased the ghost, did not survive the challenge, and then became the ghost.

That was about 15 years ago and I’ve never seen him since and I probably never will. You might think me cold and unsympathetic but it’s more complicated than that. I truly miss him, or at least the ‘him’ that I knew as a kid but somewhere along the line this kind and good person surrendered to complete hopelessness and self-punishment.

It’s wonderful to have family but it’s healthier not to be swallowed into the undertow.

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I was 16 when I started working at Jack’s music store and there’s plenty surrounding that employ but one terribly distracting feature of the job was Pam.

Pam was the store manager and was in charge of phone calls, ordering instruments and keeping track of student appointments for the teachers. I started guitar lessons at Jack’s store when I was 13 and 3 years later I was working for him as a general gopher…and then there was Pam.

Pam was about 21 or 22 and I had the most magnificent crush on her that was legally allowable by a 16 year-old in the state of Michigan. I don’t know if there’s an actual statute like that on the books but, considering the meandering thoughts of a 16 year-old, there should be.

I wasn’t always engaged in a work activity at Jack’s store since a gopher’s work load sort of ebbs and flows but when there was a slow down it was full speed ahead on the Pam Front, which meant talking to Pam, looking at Pam from a distance, looking at Pam from close up, walking anywhere that came within a reasonable radius of Pam and, in essence, all things Pam.

She was a smart, pretty, petite brunette with a figure like an hourglass and just the slightest of overbites and I was smitten in a way that had me somehow convinced that I had a shot with this girl. That opinion was formed by the deranged crush I was lugging around but, in reality, it was ridiculous because I would never be able to leap over the barrier that was my being a high schooler.

I used to flirt with her incessantly, in that playful, just kidding way that if a licensed therapist were watching closely, he/she would have to conclude that my love-bug was leaking out the sides of my playfulness.

The thing was I knew she liked me. Probably not in the way I had in mind but she liked me and was playful in return and that got the next phase of my mindless plan in motion. I had to find an activity outside of Jack’s store that I could invite her to and then she would eventually ignore the fact that I was 16.

I had pretty much nothing for a long time and then one day during the winter we were talking and I mentioned how much I liked hockey and that I skated, which prompted her to talk about how she loved to skate when she was younger but hadn’t the occasion to do it in a very long time and felt a little unsure of herself on the ice.

And there it was…the skate-date.

I went on and on about how much fun it would be and I’d help her stay upright and any other assurances I could come up with until she said ‘yes’. We agreed that I would pick her up at her house (she was, interestingly, still living with her mother…hey, me too!!) and we’d head off to the local pond.

The following Saturday I drove to her house, met her mother and we took off. She knew a place nearby and to my complete thrill, there was hardly anyone on the ice. Oh, thank you ice skating gods! We could fly around the pond and not have to dodge kids and other bodies and I would have a Pamtastic time without interruption.

I had gotten good enough as a hockey player that I could skate backward with some confidence so I took her hands (gloves, as it were) and pulled her slowly out onto the ice and we did a leisurely turn or two and then, noticing that she was still a little unsteady, I made the ‘teaching move’. This move is as old as dating itself and if the situation presents itself and you don’t use it, you’re a moron. I mean, there’s a reason it’s an old move…because it still works and always will. You usually see it in movies when somebody’s instructing their date in either bowling or golf. In this ice skating case, the form is exactly what the pairs figure skaters do, so I went for it.

The ‘teaching move’, while giving support and instruction to the partner, is a surreptitious attempt at intimate contact and, in this case, I put my right arm around her waist and held her left hand and we skated in unison. I will not deny this was a hokey, transparent, bullshit ploy to put my arm around her but I think a 16 year-old with no chance in hell deserves a little kudos for boldness and ingenuity.

After awhile, and a few crazy moments of sling shotting her across the ice for sheer excitement, we decided to pack it in and I took her home and that was pretty much that. No transcendent ‘Summer of ‘42‘ moment where she realized that 16 didn’t matter after all, sealed with a simple ‘thanks for a great time’ kiss that blossomed into an intense ongoing affair. No, none of that happened and whatever dreamy thoughts I might have had during the time we were skating dissipated quickly as cruel reality took over again.

I dropped her off and she thanked me for a fun time and I drove home. True enough, it was fun, but I so hoped for more even though I was smart enough to know it was never going to happen. Even so, try telling that to the smitten part of my brain (wherever that might be located).

But because our skate-date didn’t turn into a full fledged romance wasn’t the cruelest reality of all because that event was yet to happen a few days later.

Mike was an organist (and approximate in age to Pam), a friend of Jack’s, who came by the store every so often for whatever and I could see quickly that he had designs on Pam. This sent all sorts of sirens and distress signals to my heart of mush but the whole deal was out of my control and I had to just sit there and watch. But even this wasn’t the worst moment of it all.

One night when Mike came to hang out during closing time and we were leaving I asked if I could bum a ride from anybody (I was desperately hoping it would be Pam), and to my dismay it was Mike who offered the lift so I politely took it though something told me not to. I did it anyway, which is the way I always face impending disaster; like some crazy kook who refuses to leave his seaside home in Boca Ratan when a category 5 hurricane is barreling down on him. Run, you bastard, run!

As we were driving to my house Mike began to ask me about Pam. Did she ever mention him and what did she say and, blah, blah, blah. What did he think we were that night, girlfriends? Then, instead of just hitting me over the head with a shovel and burying my remains along the side of the road, the agony continued when he asked me if I thought she liked him.

Now I’m keenly aware that Mike doesn’t see that I’m mad about Pam and if he does see it, he’s probably discounting it because I’m, again, 16, but this was the worst question that suitorboy could ask hang-dogboy and I was only coming back with one acceptable answer: “I don’t know”.

Translation: ‘I hope not’.

In the end, I don’t know what happened with their dating because I stopped looking. I just had to stop looking, listening, knowing. I thought Mike was kind of a squirrel but, hey, at that moment in time I was surely not giving Mike any grace because I was temporarily Pamatized.

Not too long after, Jack died unexpectedly and the store vanished along with my ill-fated Pam-plan, and with college on the horizon I lost track of her totally.

When you’re young everything looks, tastes and feels different; some of it you’re experiencing for the first time and it’s exciting in a way that will never quite be duplicated. I guess that’s what teenage crushes are for; to clear out some of the fantasy and make way for the real deal that is yet to come.

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