YOU CAN'T KILL THE ROOSTER
HE'LL NEVER HOLD ELECTED OFFICE OR OWN MORE THAN ONE SPORT COAT, BUT YOU WON'T FIND ANYONE MORE LOYAL THAN MY YOUNGER BROTHER
When I was young, my father was transferred, and our family moved from western
New York State to Raleigh, North Carolina. IBM had relocated a great many
northerners, and, together, we made relentless fun of our new neighbors and
their poky, backward way of life. Rumors circulated that locals ran stills out
of their toolsheds and referred to their house cats as "good eatin'." Our
parents coached us never to use the titles ma'am or sir when speaking to a
teacher or shopkeeper. Tobacco was acceptable in the form of a cigarette, but
should any of us experiment with plug or snuff, we would be automatically
disinherited. Mountain Dew was forbidden, and our speech was monitored for the
slightest hint of a Raleigh accent. Use the word y'all and, before you knew it,
you'd find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. Along with
grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of"you all" was a dangerous step
on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church.
We might not have been the wealthiest People in town, but at least we weren't
one of them.
Our family remained free from outside influence until 1968, when my mother gave
birth to my brother, Paul, a North Carolina native who has since grown to
become both my father's best ally and worst nightmare. Here was a child who, by
the time he had reached second grade, spoke much like the toothless fishermen
casting their nets into Albemarle Sound. This is the thirty-year-old son who
now phones his father to say, "Motherfucker, I ain't seen pussy in so long I'd
throw stones at it."
My brother's voice, like my own, is high-pitched and girlish. Telephone
solicitors frequently ask to speak to our husbands, and room-service operators
appease us by saying, "That shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes, Mrs.
Sedaris." The Raleigh accent is soft and beautifully cadenced, but my brother's
is a more complex hybrid, informed by his professional relationships with
marble-mouthed, deep-country laborers and his abiding love of hardcore rap
music. He talks so fast, 'you find yourself concentrating on the gist of his
message rather than trying to decipher the actual words. It's like speaking to
a foreigner and understanding only the terms motherfucker, bitch, and hoss and
the phrase "You can't kill the Rooster."
"The Rooster" is what Paul calls himself when he's feeling threatened. Asked
how he came up with that name, he says only, "Certain motherfuckers think they can
fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up
sometimes, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what
I'm saying?"
It often seems that my brother and I were raised in two completely different
households. He's eleven years younger than I am, and by the time he reached
high school, the rest of us had all left home. When I was young, we weren't
allowed to say "shut up," but by the time Paul reached his teens, it had become
acceptable to shout, "Shut your motherfucking mouth." The drug laws had changed
as well. "No smoking pot" became "No smoking pot in the house," before it
finally petered out to "Please don't smoke any pot in the living room."
My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him
with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a
completely different species. "I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this
vase," she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped
bong my brother had left on the dining-room table. "It's nontraditional, but
that's the Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him."
Like most everyone else in our suburban neighborhood, we were raised to meet a
certain standard. My father had dreams of me becoming a great athlete and
attending an Ivy League college. While I was happy to bottle and diaper my
first football, I had no interest in actually throwing the thing. My grades
were average at best, and eventually I learned to live with my father's
disappointment. Fortunately, there were six of us children, and it was easy to
get lost in the crowd. My sisters and I managed to sneak beneath the wire of
his expectations, but I worried about my brother, who was seen as the family's
last hope.
From the age of ten, Paul was being dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and tiny
red clip-on ties. He endured soccer camps, church-sponsored basketball
tournaments, and after-school sessions with well-meaning tutors who would
politely change the subject when asked about the Rooster's chances of getting
into Yale or Princeton. Fast and well-coordinated, Paul never minded sports
just so long as he was either stoned or winning. School failed to interest him
on any level, and he considered it an accomplishment to receive an occasional
D-minus. His response to my father's impossible and endless demands has, over
time, become something of a mantra. Short and sweet, repeated at a fever pitch,
it goes simply, "Fuck it," or, on one of his more articulate days, "Fuck it,
motherfucker. That shit don't mean fuck to me."
My brother politely ma'ams and sirs all strangers but refers to friends and
family, his father included, as either bitch or motherfucker Friends are
appalled at the way he speaks to his only remaining parent. The two of them
recently visited my sister Amy and me in New York City, and we celebrated with
a dinner party. When my father complained about his aching feet, the Rooster
set down his two-liter Mountain Dew and removed a fistful of prime rib from his
mouth, saying, "Bitch, you need to have them ugly-ass bunions shaved down is
what you need to do. But you can't do shit about it tonight, so lighten up,
motherfucker."
All eyes went to my father, who chuckled, saying only, "I guess you have a
point."
A stranger might reasonably interpret my brother's language as a lack of
respect and view my father's response as a kind of shameful surrender. This, though,
would be missing the subtle beauty of their relationship.
My father is the type who will recite a bawdy limerick by saying, "A woman I
know who's quite blunt / Had a bear trap installed in her...' oh, you know.
It's a base, vernacular term for the female genitalia." He can absolutely kill
a joke. When pushed to his limit, this is a man who shouts, "Fudge!" and
sometimes follows it with a shake of his fist and a hearty "G. D. you!" I've
never heard him curse, yet he and my brother seem to have found a common
language that eludes the rest of us.
My father likes to talk about money. Spending doesn't interest him, especially
when it comes to tipping. He prefers money as a concept, something that, if
invested with care, will mature at a 6.5 percent inoculated rate of
fiduciary-based annuity. Something like that. I can drink eighteen cups of
coffee and still collapse into sleep at first mention of the word dividend.
Still, though, I make an effort to listen to him, if only because it seems like
the polite thing to do. When my father talks finance to my brother, Paul says,
"Fuck the stock talk, hoss, you're wearing me out." This rarely ends the
scheduled lecture, but my brother wins bonus points for boldly voicing his
disinterest, just as my father would do were someone to corner him to talk
about Buddhism or the return of the dog. The two of them are unapologetically
blunt. It's a quality my father admires so much, he's able to ignore the foul
language completely. "That Paul," he says. "Now there's a guy who knows how to
get his point across."
When words fall him, the Rooster has been known to communicate with his fists,
which, though quick and solid, are no larger than a couple of tangerines. At
five foot four, he's shorter than I am, stocky, but not exactly intimidating. I
last saw my brother at Christmas, when he arrived at my older sister's house
with a black eye. There had been some encounter at a bar, but the details were
sketchy.
"Some motherfucker told me to get the fuck out of his motherfucking face, so I
said, 'Chill, motherfucker.'"
"Then what?"
"Then he turned away, and I reached up and punched him in the back of his
motherfucking neck."
"What happened next?"
"What the fuck you think happened, bitch? I ran like hell, and the motherfucker
caught up with me in the parking lot. He was all beefy and shit. The
motherfucker had a taste for blood, and he just pummeled my ass."
"When did he stop?"
My brother drummed his fingers on the tabletop for a few moments before saying,
"I'm guessing he stopped when he was fucking finished."
The physical pain had passed, but it bothered Paul that his face was "all
lopsided and shit for the licking holidays." That said, he retreated to the
bathroom with my sister Amy's makeup kit and returned to the table with two
black eyes, the second drawn on with mascara. This seemed to please him, and he
wore his matching bruises for the rest of the evening.
"Did you get a load of that fake black eye?" my father asked, struggling for a
positive spin. "That guy ought to do makeup for the movies. I'm telling you,
the kid's a real artist!"
Unlike the rest of us, the Rooster has always enjoyed my father's support and
encouragement. With the dreams of Princeton officially dead and buried, he sent
my brother to technical school, hoping he might express an interest in
computers. Three weeks into the semester, Paul dropped out, and my father,
convinced that his lawn-mowing skills bordered on genius, set him up in the
landscaping business. "I've seen him in action, and what he does is establish a
pattern and really tackle it!"
When the landscaping business failed, my father suggested careers in television
repair, stand-up comedy, and, eventually, professional tennis. "I taped that
Wimbledon match, and I think that once you put a racket in that kid's hands,
the guy will go absolutely bananas. He's got the temperament for it. Now all he
needs are a couple of lessons."
Eventually, my brother fell into the floor-sanding business. It's hard work,
but he enjoys the gratification that comes with a well-finished rec room. He
thoughtfully named his company Silly P's Hardwood Floors. When my father
suggested that the word silly might frighten away the upper-tier customers,
Paul thought of changing the name to "Silly Fucking P's Hardwood Floors." The
work puts him in contact with plumbers and drywallers from such towns as Bunn
and Clayton, men who offer dating advice such as "If she's old enough to bleed,
she's old enough to breed" and "If there's grass on the field, I say it's time
to play ball."
"Oh, Paul," my father says. "Those aren't the sort of people you need to be
associating with. If you want to better yourself, you need to spend more time
with someone who can read or at least get through a single sentence without
spitting."
After all these years, our father has never understood that we, his children,
tend to gravitate toward the very people he's spent his life warning us about.
Most of us have left town, but my brother remains in Raleigh. He was there when
my mother died and, six years later, continues to help my father grieve: "The
past is gone, hoss. What you need now is some motherfucking pussy." While my
sisters and I offer our sympathy long-distance, Paul is the one who arrives at
our father's home on Thanksgiving Day, offering to prepare traditional Greek
dishes to the best of his ability. It is a fact that he once made a tray of
spanakopita using Pam rather than melted butter. Still, though, at least he
tries.
When a recent hurricane damaged my father's house, my brother rushed over with
A gas grill, three coolers full of beer, and a traditional "Fuck-It Bucket"--a
plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-sized candy bars. ("When shit
brings you down, just say, 'Fuck it' and eat yourself some motherfucking
candy.") There was no electricity for close to a week. The yard was practically
cleared of trees, and rain fell through the dozens of holes torn into the roof.
"Shitting in the woods gets old pretty fucking fast," Paul said. "We're living
like pioneers-all crusty and shit." It was a difficult time, but the two of
them stuck it out, my brother placing his small, scarred hand on my father's
shoulder to say, "Bitch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right.
We'll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait."
~~~~~~~~
BY DAVID SEDARIS
We hit the beach hard the first day. On the way to the beach, Rader invited us on a booze cruise in the afternoon. Plans were falling into place. Got to the beach, and the girls were looking GOOD son! We were doing our thing, not attracting women, soaking up the sun, preparing for our booze cruise. Some of us were getting more sun than others, notably Newman, but he didn't have much of a base to begin with. By the time we left, he was already a deep red/purple color. We approached Rader's grandparents house, and the 15 of us headed straight for the pontoon, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. As I boarded the vessel, I faintly heard some elderly person mention a "small craft advisory", but assumed they must be joking. Phil piloted the vessel, with a towel wrapped around his neck. A group was also out in the water in a speed boat, and for some reason they were bringing us Knoll's car keys. It must have been decided that a toss would be easier than a hand-off, so they threw the keys to Knoll. 25 sets of eyes watched as the keys hit the water, and quickly sunk to the bottom. This left Knoll in a tough situation, but we had bigger problems. The wind was blowing hard and Phil had somehow put us in a position where our pontoon was taking on water at an alarming pace.....and we were in the center of the lake. At one point the entire front was capsized...we had people running from the front to the back of the boat....ON PHIL'S COMMAND?!?! Finally, TOR (110 lbs) and Radar (90 lbs) decided their combined weigh was too much for our ship and moreover they would rather take their chances swimming in than leave their lives in Phil's hands. Fools....as fate would have it Phil had everything under control.
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