My Buddy

I was seven years old when my brother came home from the war. That was a long time ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. Life is funny like that. You have to shake yourself up to remember something that happened last week, but something that happened decades ago, well, that’s something else.

My brother was called “Buddy” back then, but that wasn’t his real name. His real name was Elliot, like the kid in “ET”; but no one ever called him that, not even my mother. Sometimes we called him “Bud”, but most of the time it was just “Buddy”. My mother liked that better than Bud because it reminded her of the old Gus Kahn song, “My Buddy”:

Nights are long since you went away

I think about you all through the day

My buddy, my buddy

My mother often played that song on the piano, especially when Buddy was in the service. She couldn’t wait for him to come home. My mother always said she loved all her children equally, but you could tell Buddy was her favorite. It was always, “Buddy this” or “Buddy that”. In her eyes he could do no wrong.

I idolized Bud when I was a kid and I couldn’t wait for him to come home either. He was gone for two years, and when he returned it was like he never left. Buddy bought me my first bicycle, my first electric train set, my first microscope. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me.

Not long after Buddy returned home, there was talk about something called a goiter. I didn’t know what a goiter was except that it wasn’t good. For a while, Buddy was away at the VA hospital where he had surgery to remove the goiter. When he came home. he had a scar that went half way around his neck.

After the surgery, Buddy was never the same. I mean, we still called him Buddy, but something was different; something in his personality had changed. He stayed away from home a lot more, and he stopped painting, which was something he always did in his spare time. I remember once he painted a mural that covered an entire wall in the living room of our tiny three-room apartment. All the furniture had to be moved while he did his painting. It was a winter scene with a big red barn and a sleigh being pulled through the snow by a team of horses. I don’t know where he got the idea for the mural, since we lived in the city and I don’t ever remember us ever going to the country. He probably saw the scene in a book. Another time, he designed and built a model of a futuristic house that he assembled on a table in the bedroom.

In the pre-goiter days, Buddy encouraged my sister to paint, so in addition to all his paints and construction materials, her supplies were everywhere, too. At the time, five of us and a large German Shepherd dog were crowded into the apartment, so you can imagine how cramped it was. But since Buddy was our mother’s favorite, she pretty much let him do whatever he wanted, even if it involved my sister or me.

Once Buddy moved away, there was a lot more room in the apartment, but I missed all the activity. That was also about the time Buddy decided to change the spelling of his surname because he didn’t want people to know he was Jewish. (You may ask how did people know he was Jewish, but they did, because Erdrich in German is Erdreich, meaning rich earth, the type of compound name often assigned to Jews.) Also, he said he didn’t want to be called Buddy anymore. From now on he was Elliot. And he stopped painting. He said he wasn’t good enough to make a living at it, so he went into advertising and got a job in Milwaukee, which, according to my mother, was in another state about a thousand miles away called Wisconsin. According to my mother, the only thing you needed to know about Wisconsin was that it had a lot of Lutheran churches?

We didn’t see Bud/Elliot again for a couple of years, but one day we got a long-distance phone call and it was him saying he got a new job on Long Island—­which at the time seemed about as foreign as Wisconsin to a kid from the Bronx—and he was coming home. The next time I saw him he was wearing expensive suits and he looked like a businessman. He said his new job was with some engineers he met who were on the verge of some great discoveries and he was going to be their advertising manager and he was on his way to making $30,000 by the time he was 30. That was 1960 and I was seventeen. He didn’t talk about painting at all, and he said he was a “pragmatic liberal” now. From then on, whenever he visited us, he brought along his young blonde secretary who he eventually married. Soon, he said, he would be rich.

Along with the expensive clothes and his pretty young wife, Bud/Elliot, now Elliot/Bud, started drinking, because that’s what you did when you were in advertising and becoming rich. He traveled a lot too, especially with his new children. Pretty soon, he had his own advertising company in New York City and was making lots of money, but he wasn’t as much fun as he was when he was just plain Bud. His pragmatic liberalism didn’t jibe with my non-specific liberalism, and pretty soon we drifted apart. We still saw each other at family functions and sometimes I would stop by his office and we would go out for a drink, or I would do an occasional job for one of his clients, but most of the time we disagreed about one thing or another and got into loud arguments. It hurt my mother to hear us argue, because I was the baby and he was her favorite and she just wanted us to get along.

Eventually, our father died and Elliot/Bud and his wife took our mother in to live with them. She didn’t want to move, but Elliot/Bud thought it would be better for her, since by now he had lots of money and figured he could use it to buy his and her happiness. You could tell my mother wasn’t very happy living with him and his wife, but she would never say anything because Elliot/Bud was still her favorite and she would never think of hurting his feelings.

One day, Elliot/Bud decided to quit the advertising business and take all his savings and buy an inn in New Hampshire. He went to a Belgian cooking school to become a chef and invested everything in the new venture. The first time I went to visit, I was surprised to hear the guests at the bar calling my brother “Bud”.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“What’s with the ‘Bud’?”

“That’s who I am here,” he said. “Some people call me Bud and some people call me Elliot.” So that’s when Elliot/Bud went back to being Bud/Elliot.

After they left New York, my mother moved to New Hampshire with them. My wife and I didn’t think it was a good idea to take her away from all her friends, and we (my sisters and I) thought we could chip in to find her an apartment closer to her roots, but Elliot/Bud wouldn’t hear of it. (Sometimes the new Bud/Elliot reverted to the old Elliot/Bud, especially when it involved money: his.) He said she would have a great life at the inn, playing piano and entertaining the guests.

My mother never did entertain the guests. She hated them. She said they were “old” (she was in her 80s). She wouldn’t go near the piano, and eventually she took to her bed and rarely left her room. My wife and I visited occasionally (it was a five-hour drive), only to find her becoming more and more reclusive. Meanwhile, the inn faltered and after a few years Bud/Elliot (Eliot/Bud) went bankrupt. It was amazing really. His fall, that is. We wondered what happened to all the money. His partners in the advertising business had retired and were living the high life while Bud/Elliot seemed to have squandered it all. He was beside himself. For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for him.

One day, Bud/Elliot was discussing his situation with the lawyer who was handling the foreclosure on the inn. The lawyer told him he should think about moving to Belize. Desperate as he was, Bud/Elliot took the lawyer’s suggestion seriously and after all the loose ends were tied, he and his wife moved to Belize. They left my mother in a nursing home in New Hampshire where she died a few months later.

About a year after they moved, I went to visit Bud/Elliot and his wife in Belize. I took a plane from JFK to Belize City, then a small four-passenger puddle jumper to Placencia, where they lived. They didn’t know I was coming, so when I got off the plane, I had to ask around to find out where they were. At that time, the terminal was just a grass shack at the end of the runway, close to the sea, where some people were hanging out. I described my brother and his wife and someone said, “Oh, you mean Bud.”

“Yes, Bud,” I said, condescendingly. “Do you know where I can find him?” They told me to follow the road into the village and I wouldn’t have any trouble finding him.

Their house was a small wooden box on stilts not too far from the sea. It had a tiny verandah with a view towards the ocean, a small living room with a kitchen at the rear, a tiny bedroom, and a bath with indoor plumbing. The house was owned by a chiropractor from the States who lived on and off in a similar structure next door to theirs. Bud was barefoot and shirtless when I arrived. He had grown a beard and didn’t look anything like the Bud/Elliot I remembered. He was happy to see me.

In 1990, Placencia was just a tiny little village to nowhere at the end of a long, narrow peninsula with the ocean on one side and a river to the mainland on the other. Back then, there were a few tourists, but mostly it was a mix of indigenous peoples with a smattering of expats like Bud and his wife. They seemed happy living on their social security paychecks, despite the prevalence of scorpions everywhere. I stayed for a few days and met their new friends at the local rum shop where they spent their evenings drinking. It was funny to see my brother go native, but I was glad for him. He seemed to really enjoy his new life. I stayed for about a week, until we got into an argument about Vietnam. Some things never change.

About a year later, Bud wrote to say that he was starting a restaurant on the deck of their house. I couldn’t imagine what kind of restaurant he meant, since there wasn’t room for more than two tables and the kitchen was tiny, but hey, why not?

About six months later, I read about the restaurant in “The New York Times”. It gave the restaurant good reviews, despite the prices, high by Belizean standards. Then, a few months after that, I got a call from my sister, who lived in Florida. She said my brother’s wife had contracted tuberculosis and needed treatment and they were coming to stay with her. My sister spent the next several months helping to care for Bud’s wife, transporting her and my brother to and from the hospital in Tampa, and seeing to her needs when she was at home. After a while, her condition started to improve and she was eventually declared free of the disease. They were about to return to Placencia, when my brother developed a bad cough. At first the doctors thought Bud had developed TB, but it wasn’t TB, it was lung cancer. He died three months later. Bud never made it back to Placencia. His wife returned to Belize and lived there for three more years before she left and went to live near her children in Virginia. I wonder what my mother would have thought.