I want to tell you about my brother, Juan Carlos, aka my Superman.
If you’ve read my writing, you know stories about him, and you know that he’s gone now… Today marks eleven years since his death.
Lately I’ve been thinking about who he was in life.
My mother told me stories about our mischief. I spent much of my first year in the hospital. (That’s a story for another time). Ma said that as soon as I was well, I was off and running with Carlos. Carlos who always believed in me. Who didn’t treat me like I was fragile or different because I was sickly or because I had a vagina.
When I told Carlos my memory of breaking my arm when I was two, he was shocked that 1.) I remembered so much detail—the flowered, burgundy comforter; the cherry wood bedroom set with the matching mirrored bureau, & 2.) that I didn’t remember he was there jumping up and down on the bed with me, both of us trying to hit the ceiling with our toes. When he told me, exasperated and gagging, I believed him. Of course he was there. We were always together. Carlos was my first best friend.
Truth is, Carlos isn’t clear in many of my childhood memories. He’s like a ghost, obscure, but I know he’s there. It’s the feeling that’s most distinct—I felt loved, supported, safe.
One of my most vivid memories with Carlos is so sharp and clear, I can feel the chill in the air, can hear the snow crunch under my feet, and I feel his hand on my waist, holding me, keeping me steady.
It’s winter in early 1980s Brooklyn after a snowstorm that dropped several inches of snow. We have to get to school, but the sidewalks aren’t shoveled yet and the streets aren’t plowed (even now, the hood is plowed last), so Carlos led me into the street and instructed me to walk in the path made by cars.
I look down and see that Carlos’s pants are soaked to his knees and snow covers his shoes. I imagine now how cold his feet must have been. He had to stay like that, cold and wet, in class for hours until he dried up.
This is how much my brother loved me.
Carlos was always left in charge when Ma and Millie went out, and sometimes we ended up playing house while they were gone. Carlos was always the mother—he put on one of ma’s dresses & her heels (he strutted effortlessly in them), & he put a stocking over his afro to imitate long hair. I still remember the moment I saw him flick his neck so the hose came cascading over his shoulder. That’s when I knew. I didn’t have the language yet for what I knew but I knew my brother was different and I knew I adored him.
As adults, when he confessed that he was gay, I laughed and told him this story. He laughed hard, said: “Werk, bitch. I always been a big ol’ fag.”
Once, in my early 20s, I told him I needed a pair of knee high boots. “Say no more,” he said, and dragged me to 5th Avenue—Gucci, Prada, Dior, Louis Vuitton—where he showed me boots that cost 6, 7, 800 dollars. I laughed and said no as I walked towards the exit. I was barely making $30k a year and wasn’t about to spend my rent money on a pair of boots.
He showed me a pair he swore were a steal at $400. They were those made for petite, dainty feet shoes with a shaft that could only fit skinny minnie legs not batata calves like mine. I laughed as I pointed at my feet that earned me the moniker “fat feet, chubby hands” when we were kids. Seriously, my made for hiking campo and finca feet are the stuff of legend—years ago a lover left me a voicemail whistling the entire Flintstone song. Yes, that too was a moniker for a while: Flintstone feet.
I went home sans boots, but got something even better—one of the funniest memories of us and who we were. He was impractical with big fashion dreams. I was his sister who would follow him anywhere.
I remember it as a short reel. Carlos and I sitting on a small patch of dirt under a tree on a street in Brooklyn. I am talking to him, animated with my hands and body like I still talk now, more than 40 years later. He is looking at me, a small smile on his face. I am three. He is seven. He is already a giant to me.
In October of 2019, six years after my brother’s death, my mother gave me the story behind this image I’ve held for so long. She was shocked I remembered it…
Carlos was angry about something so he packed his things and said he was leaving. Said he didn’t want to be in that house. My mother, a woman of hard lessons, said “Oh yeah? You think you’re a man? Then go.”
He left. Parked himself a few steps away from the building, under a tree.
I saw him from our second floor window. Cried that I wanted to go with my brother. I packed a shopping bag of things. My mother said: “You wanna leave too? Then go.” She said I skipped out joyfully.
I parked myself right next to him, on that patch of soil under the tree. Mom watched us from the window. She couldn’t hear what we were saying but we were chatting the whole time, giggling, me talking excitedly with my whole body.
Hours later we showed up at ma’s door, pleading to be let in. We’d never made it past that little patch of dirt under the tree.
I sobbed when my mother gave me a story to go along with this memory, because it reminded me of who we were, me and my brother—inseparable. I would have followed him anywhere. Sometimes I still do, in my stories and in my memory, where we’re still runaways sitting under that tree.
I always thought my fascination with trees and nature started up in the plum tree in the backyard of our apartment building in Bushwick.
But maybe it started with my brother, on that patch of land under the tree that day he ran away, and I ran away with him.
In an essay in The Atlantic titled “The Longest Relationship of Our Lives,” Angela Chen writes:
…for a lot of people, sibling bonds are the longest relationships of our lives. We know siblings before we meet our partners (and before we have our own kids), and we’ll know them after our parents die. “I tell my students this all the time,” said Van Volkom, the Monmouth psychologist. “There’s only one person who’s been there from the beginning. Not my friends, not my spouse, not anybody but my sibling.” Siblings are a living part of someone’s history and a form of memory that lives outside of ourselves. And because every enduring relationship can be frustrating, layered with decades of misunderstandings and baggage, sibling bonds have their own complexity. But the longevity and changing nature of the relationship offer siblings a choice: to let that history define the bond or to use the past as a foundation from which a new way of relating can grow.
I have a sister who I haven’t spoken to in years. We were never close. We never got along. She’s only a sister because we shared the same womb. Otherwise, we’re strangers who don’t particularly like each other. I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about how the relationships with my siblings, my brother and sister, shaped my adult relationships.
What I know today is this: on June 24th, 2013, I lost my first best friend, the person who loved me and believed in me like no one else did. When we found out that he wasn’t going to make it, I planned on canceling an upcoming trip to a writing workshop in California. When I told him, Carlos shook his head, annoyed. He looked at mom, who was across the hospital room, “Can you believe…” I didn’t let him finish. I grabbed his chin softly and turned his face so he could look at me. “This is and me and you, pa.” He nodded, my hand still on his chin, and said: “You have to go write our stories, sis.” He died days later, while I was away at that workshop.
It’s been 11 years and I’m still not over it. I will never get over losing him, my brother, my Superman… His memory inspires today’s prompt.
The Prompt
Write about someone who was this to you—loving, supportive, safe—who you lost, but write about them in life. Who were they? What did they love? What did they fear? Show me in vivid scenes. Show me who you were together.
The Pearl
I had a student once who wrote about her mother a lot. Her mother who’d died a few years before. This student is what I call a repeat offender—she’s taken numerous classes and workshops with me. One day, she revealed something about her mother’s life that she’d never told me or written about in any of the stories she shared.
I said: “You’ve written about your mother in death. Now you have to write about your mother in life.”
I’ll give you the same advice: When writing about someone who is gone, write about them in life, who they were, what they loved, what they wanted, what they longed for, what they regretted.
The page doesn’t have to be another coffin.
RIP Superman. I will miss you forever.
This story has me filled with sadness for what was, but you are so fortunate to have had a love like that in your life. Thank you for sharing this story. What a blessing for all of us.
Thinking of you. xoxo