My Heartaches Begin
When I was four, I killed my twin.
Everyone said so.
It wasn’t murder. Not like with a gun or a knife. But my brother is dead just the same.
You never forget something like that.
Except, I recalled none of it. Not one lousy memory of the single worst night of my life. Unless you count the visions.
A living, breathing, guilty conscience of a nightmare, those visions shadowed me for decades. Spiking my brain on the playground, on the soccer field. Stabbing my dreams, waking me screaming into the darkness. Mother, bless her heart, spared few words of comfort, only an admonition to stop disturbing everyone’s sleep.
When I departed for college, leaving the scene of my crime behind, I pursued journalism. Maybe if I got a job in news, I could lose myself in other people’s misery, bury mine. But those soul-sucking visions stalked me from TV station to TV station, town to godawful town, trailing in my wake like a satanic U-Haul.
A freakin’ sob story is what it is.
And if that’s all there was to it, a damn tragedy, too. Mind you, it’s still a tragedy, but that isn’t all there is to the story. Because of Elvis.
I was just twenty-nine and in the midst of my stint as a reporter in Memphis, Tennessee when we crossed paths. This was ten years after Presley had the heart attack that nearly did him in. Long after he’d hung up his music career and started tagging along with the cops. The newspapers pronounced him pretty much done. Chewed up, spit out, stepped on. Drifting, doin’ squat. But once he welcomed you into his world, you didn’t give a hoot about all that. He had a magnetic effect. He got under your skin. He stuck on you.
“Everyone’s entitled to one stupid-ass move, son,” he used to say. It made a lot of sense, especially since I’d made more than one stupid-ass move myself.
Mostly, he made sense. Like the time he observed, “Are you sure your balls are screwed on right, Thomas? I could swear them balls ain’t screwed on right.”
He wasn’t wrong. But when Elvis did what he did—after he committed his own altruistic stupid-ass move—I screwed my balls on right. I let go of all the stupid in my life.
Yep, I let go. It’s what they all professed I should have done to begin with.
Which brings us back to the freakin’ tragic childhood sob story.
How many times since I became twinless at four had the folks drummed their noxious refrain into my head? If you would have just let go. If only I’d let go of his goddamn hand, my brother would still be here and maybe I wouldn’t. Wouldn’t be who I was.
Not a murderer. But ... a killer.
And here I stood, a quarter century later, about to do it again.
