Philly
I wrote all about my sister, so it's only fair that I write about my brother too. My brother's real name is Michael. Everyone calls him Michael or Mike, but I usually call him Philly. His middle name is Philip. I think it's only one "l" but to be honest, the spelling of his middle name always tripped me up. Anyway, once when I was being a jerk, i wanted to see if the little kid knew his middle name, so I called him Philly for the hell of it and he answered. Now I just call him Philly and it's stuck, and my mom sort of caught on and calls him that, but really, it's mainly just me. People still ask me all the time why I call him Philly. The truth is, I have no idea. I don't even really like the name, but it's what it is.
My brother is a pretty funny kid, in a different way than my sister. Once, we were talking about a book he was reading in class and he said, "My favorite character is Beat Rice." My sister and I were like, "Beat rice?" and he says, "Yeah, Ramona's sister!" Yeah kid, that's pronounced Be-a-trice. Nice though. I still laugh when I think of my brother and his little weirdness.
When my brother was in the fifth grade, he hated his teacher, Mr. Z. Mr. Z would pick on my brother and my brother wouldn't have any of it. Once, Mr. Z told the class that if they got all their work done, he was going to give them a big surprise. So the class worked really hard and then Mr. Z took them outside for their prize. I don't know why he thought this would be such a great prize, but what Mr. Z did was, he showed them his parents' new car, a PT Cruiser (they were just coming out at the time, but I mean, STILL, who cares?). Well anyway, I guess my brother didn't think much of it, because in front of the whole class, my brother said, "This thing looks like a hearse." So much for the teacher's surprise.
The culmination of my brother's problems with Mr. Z came one afternoon when my brother went over to Mr. Z's desk and saw Mr. Z had a banana - unpeeled - on his desk. (Let me just warn you that if you have a sick mind, this story is just full of possibilities. Just a warning.) My brother poked it and said, "Hey, Mr. Z, your banana's soft." Mr. Z went nuts. "WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING MY BANANA!" was basically what the guy yelled. My brother was in shock, like, why is this such a big deal? "Go get your lunch!" he yelled at my brother. So my brother went and got his lunch and brought it to Mr. Z, who was making a pretty big scene in front of the class. He started going through all the contents - water, sandwich, apple, cookies. He picked up the cookies in their little plastic baggie, and, as my brother puts it, "He squeezed my cookies," so that they crumbled and the cookie crumbs seeped through the bag and went all over the floor. Mr. Z left my brother in the room, as he took all the other kids to lunch, and made him clean up the mess. If you ask my brother about it today, he can still tell it like it just happened to him, and he still acts like it was a horrible offense. "All I did was touch his banana," he says. "And he had to squeeze my cookies!" Man. I'm a sick sick person.
My brother is amazing at impressions too. The kid can sound exactly like Danny from The Shining and say "Redrum" like he's going to come kill you. He's also got a pretty good Bea Arthur from Golden Girls. He does some from Chicken Run, a bunch of other ones. He just picks these random lines from movies and then does them, exactly how they sound in the film. It's uncanny. The other thing, though, is my brother will take a joke and really make you hear it over and over and over again until you want to shoot yourself. Like we were watching the movie Clue, and at the end, we see that a guy who's name was Lee Ving was part of it. So my sister and I thought that was a pretty funny name, like, "Hi, I'm Lee Ving." So we went with it for a few minutes, but then we dropped it. Not my brother. "Hey, what if he went into a grocery store!" my little eight-year-old brother said. "He would be like, Hi, I'm Lee Ving." Ha, Mike, yeah. "What about if he went to a... post office!" And so it continued. He got this huge kick out of it, but we didn't laugh. When we told him that he wasn't really funny, that really busted the kid. I almost feel bad that we didn't laugh just out of pity.
Probably one of the funniest memories I have of my brother is when I babysat him on a Saturday night. I was like twelve, and he was about five or six. Anyway, I started watching one of those insane Lifetime movies. This one was called "Bitter Blood," and if you ask my brother about it, he'll still be shaken up over it. The movie was like a marathon. It went from about six to eleven, a two-parter, about this crazy family. The dad divorces the mom, the mom goes insane and withholds the kids from the dad, she marries her cousin, who's wicked into guns and the army and is just like this complete psycho, and the dad spends the movie trying to get the kids away from their twisted mother and uncle who feed the kids all these weird pills and stuff. Total psycho stuff. Well, I don't know what it was about the movie, but my brother was totally into it. You couldn't pull him away from the TV. We have two couches and a huge chair in the family room, and my brother was sitting on the ottomon, practically on top of the TV, so he would be really close and not miss a thing. Anyway, after all this build up, the final scene in the movie comes, with the dad in a car chasing the kids and the mom and uncle and kids in the car in front of them. And they show it like the dad is going to cut them off and get the kids, because they show the kids peeking out from the back of their army jeep, looking at their dad like he's going to save them. And then bam! The whole car explodes.
For about fifteen minutes after that scene, my brother just sat on that ottomon, completely shellshocked. He was distraught over this movie. My parents were ready to kill me for showing him that. I don't know why it's so funny; I mean the kid was really traumatized, but even while I was watching his reaction, I thought it would be funny someday. Maybe I shouldn't have kids. I don't know.
I guess I really think it's funny when my brother gets traumatized, because I also always laugh when I think about him freaking out when we went to Andy's one afternoon. Andy's used to be this pretty lame-o supermarket in the town next to ours, and we were in the area, so we just went there really quick to get a few things for my mom. Anyway, Andy's used to have this mascot, this elf guy, who saw that my brother was a little freaked out by him. Instead of just kind of going away, the elf just continued to look over at us and come near my brother, totally freaking him out. I swear my brother hated that stupid elf. I have to say, it was a little creepy. But I just keep picturing him completely taken over in shock and this elf basically laughing inside his costume at what a weirdo this little kid was, and then loving that he could make him have such a reaction. I'm not sure who's worse: the guy in the elf suit who clearly wanted to torture my brother, or me, who got such a kick out of watching it happen.
My brother is also like me, in that he's a afraid of birds. Only he's like insanely afraid of them. When he came to visit me in London, he wouldn't go to Trafalgar Square because he had heard of all the pigeons everywhere. We did go to Covent Garden, and we were eating outside on these rickety tables, and there were pigeons all at his feet. You could just tell by looking at him that he was about to have a heart attack. The poor kid kept freaking out and jumping and the table would get all shaky and the people next to us, these proper Londoners, were like, "What the fuck?" when they saw my brother's spasms. Too bad.
My brother would probably disagree, but I've only been really mad at him once in my life. Once, after we had some stupid argument - he probably remembers over what, but I don't - he went to my room and he took my favorite stuffed animal, Pinky. I was like 19 at the time, and I'd had Pinky since I was six. My mom had bought me Pinky in the first grade, when I won the Good Citizen Award. Pinky is a pink (surprise surprise) Gund bear, one of those old ones that is like a hunchback. A totally great bear. I loved that bear, and my brother knew it. So he got pretty riled up at me, and he went and took Pinky and he found this little hole in her butt, which I'd always freaked out about but had stayed very small, and he went in and he started pulling out her stuffing, so that I when I went to find the Pinkster, her butt was like laying out all over my bed. That's when I realized my brother had a pretty good mean streak. I think he still feels bad about what happened, because I made an absolutely huge deal over it and he got in a lot of trouble. In case anybody is wondering about Pinky, I ended up trying to put the stuffing back in her, but I couldn't really do that good a job. So now, she's missing some stuffing and I can just punch her face in and then her butt gets full.
I don't want to leave with a bad impression of my brother. He's a really good kid. Just this past summer, when my friends came to the Cape, he spent a lot of time with us. We were playing Trivial Pursuit one night, and my brother knew all the answers, but he would say them with all this uncertainty and he would never be confident in his answers, so nobody would listen to him. He didn't even mind. And when my friend Amanda yelled at him, "Man up, Michael!" my brother didn't lose his cool or anything. He just said to her, "Woman down, Amanda." I mean, you can't make this stuff up. I wish everyone could meet the kid. It would just make your day. It really would.
My brother is a pretty funny kid, in a different way than my sister. Once, we were talking about a book he was reading in class and he said, "My favorite character is Beat Rice." My sister and I were like, "Beat rice?" and he says, "Yeah, Ramona's sister!" Yeah kid, that's pronounced Be-a-trice. Nice though. I still laugh when I think of my brother and his little weirdness.
When my brother was in the fifth grade, he hated his teacher, Mr. Z. Mr. Z would pick on my brother and my brother wouldn't have any of it. Once, Mr. Z told the class that if they got all their work done, he was going to give them a big surprise. So the class worked really hard and then Mr. Z took them outside for their prize. I don't know why he thought this would be such a great prize, but what Mr. Z did was, he showed them his parents' new car, a PT Cruiser (they were just coming out at the time, but I mean, STILL, who cares?). Well anyway, I guess my brother didn't think much of it, because in front of the whole class, my brother said, "This thing looks like a hearse." So much for the teacher's surprise.
The culmination of my brother's problems with Mr. Z came one afternoon when my brother went over to Mr. Z's desk and saw Mr. Z had a banana - unpeeled - on his desk. (Let me just warn you that if you have a sick mind, this story is just full of possibilities. Just a warning.) My brother poked it and said, "Hey, Mr. Z, your banana's soft." Mr. Z went nuts. "WHY ARE YOU TOUCHING MY BANANA!" was basically what the guy yelled. My brother was in shock, like, why is this such a big deal? "Go get your lunch!" he yelled at my brother. So my brother went and got his lunch and brought it to Mr. Z, who was making a pretty big scene in front of the class. He started going through all the contents - water, sandwich, apple, cookies. He picked up the cookies in their little plastic baggie, and, as my brother puts it, "He squeezed my cookies," so that they crumbled and the cookie crumbs seeped through the bag and went all over the floor. Mr. Z left my brother in the room, as he took all the other kids to lunch, and made him clean up the mess. If you ask my brother about it today, he can still tell it like it just happened to him, and he still acts like it was a horrible offense. "All I did was touch his banana," he says. "And he had to squeeze my cookies!" Man. I'm a sick sick person.
My brother is amazing at impressions too. The kid can sound exactly like Danny from The Shining and say "Redrum" like he's going to come kill you. He's also got a pretty good Bea Arthur from Golden Girls. He does some from Chicken Run, a bunch of other ones. He just picks these random lines from movies and then does them, exactly how they sound in the film. It's uncanny. The other thing, though, is my brother will take a joke and really make you hear it over and over and over again until you want to shoot yourself. Like we were watching the movie Clue, and at the end, we see that a guy who's name was Lee Ving was part of it. So my sister and I thought that was a pretty funny name, like, "Hi, I'm Lee Ving." So we went with it for a few minutes, but then we dropped it. Not my brother. "Hey, what if he went into a grocery store!" my little eight-year-old brother said. "He would be like, Hi, I'm Lee Ving." Ha, Mike, yeah. "What about if he went to a... post office!" And so it continued. He got this huge kick out of it, but we didn't laugh. When we told him that he wasn't really funny, that really busted the kid. I almost feel bad that we didn't laugh just out of pity.
Probably one of the funniest memories I have of my brother is when I babysat him on a Saturday night. I was like twelve, and he was about five or six. Anyway, I started watching one of those insane Lifetime movies. This one was called "Bitter Blood," and if you ask my brother about it, he'll still be shaken up over it. The movie was like a marathon. It went from about six to eleven, a two-parter, about this crazy family. The dad divorces the mom, the mom goes insane and withholds the kids from the dad, she marries her cousin, who's wicked into guns and the army and is just like this complete psycho, and the dad spends the movie trying to get the kids away from their twisted mother and uncle who feed the kids all these weird pills and stuff. Total psycho stuff. Well, I don't know what it was about the movie, but my brother was totally into it. You couldn't pull him away from the TV. We have two couches and a huge chair in the family room, and my brother was sitting on the ottomon, practically on top of the TV, so he would be really close and not miss a thing. Anyway, after all this build up, the final scene in the movie comes, with the dad in a car chasing the kids and the mom and uncle and kids in the car in front of them. And they show it like the dad is going to cut them off and get the kids, because they show the kids peeking out from the back of their army jeep, looking at their dad like he's going to save them. And then bam! The whole car explodes.
For about fifteen minutes after that scene, my brother just sat on that ottomon, completely shellshocked. He was distraught over this movie. My parents were ready to kill me for showing him that. I don't know why it's so funny; I mean the kid was really traumatized, but even while I was watching his reaction, I thought it would be funny someday. Maybe I shouldn't have kids. I don't know.
I guess I really think it's funny when my brother gets traumatized, because I also always laugh when I think about him freaking out when we went to Andy's one afternoon. Andy's used to be this pretty lame-o supermarket in the town next to ours, and we were in the area, so we just went there really quick to get a few things for my mom. Anyway, Andy's used to have this mascot, this elf guy, who saw that my brother was a little freaked out by him. Instead of just kind of going away, the elf just continued to look over at us and come near my brother, totally freaking him out. I swear my brother hated that stupid elf. I have to say, it was a little creepy. But I just keep picturing him completely taken over in shock and this elf basically laughing inside his costume at what a weirdo this little kid was, and then loving that he could make him have such a reaction. I'm not sure who's worse: the guy in the elf suit who clearly wanted to torture my brother, or me, who got such a kick out of watching it happen.
My brother is also like me, in that he's a afraid of birds. Only he's like insanely afraid of them. When he came to visit me in London, he wouldn't go to Trafalgar Square because he had heard of all the pigeons everywhere. We did go to Covent Garden, and we were eating outside on these rickety tables, and there were pigeons all at his feet. You could just tell by looking at him that he was about to have a heart attack. The poor kid kept freaking out and jumping and the table would get all shaky and the people next to us, these proper Londoners, were like, "What the fuck?" when they saw my brother's spasms. Too bad.
My brother would probably disagree, but I've only been really mad at him once in my life. Once, after we had some stupid argument - he probably remembers over what, but I don't - he went to my room and he took my favorite stuffed animal, Pinky. I was like 19 at the time, and I'd had Pinky since I was six. My mom had bought me Pinky in the first grade, when I won the Good Citizen Award. Pinky is a pink (surprise surprise) Gund bear, one of those old ones that is like a hunchback. A totally great bear. I loved that bear, and my brother knew it. So he got pretty riled up at me, and he went and took Pinky and he found this little hole in her butt, which I'd always freaked out about but had stayed very small, and he went in and he started pulling out her stuffing, so that I when I went to find the Pinkster, her butt was like laying out all over my bed. That's when I realized my brother had a pretty good mean streak. I think he still feels bad about what happened, because I made an absolutely huge deal over it and he got in a lot of trouble. In case anybody is wondering about Pinky, I ended up trying to put the stuffing back in her, but I couldn't really do that good a job. So now, she's missing some stuffing and I can just punch her face in and then her butt gets full.
I don't want to leave with a bad impression of my brother. He's a really good kid. Just this past summer, when my friends came to the Cape, he spent a lot of time with us. We were playing Trivial Pursuit one night, and my brother knew all the answers, but he would say them with all this uncertainty and he would never be confident in his answers, so nobody would listen to him. He didn't even mind. And when my friend Amanda yelled at him, "Man up, Michael!" my brother didn't lose his cool or anything. He just said to her, "Woman down, Amanda." I mean, you can't make this stuff up. I wish everyone could meet the kid. It would just make your day. It really would.
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