Brian's Smile
by George W. Cordero
Brian once confessed to me that he believed that life was about suffering, and that those few moments of happiness we have, are just accidents. He would often say that the only true happiness a person will experience in his life is at the moment of death, the moment in which one is finally released from so much pain. I sometimes think back on Brian, and I cannot help but feel that his brief life was an indictment on man's capacity for stupidity and inhumanity.
We met as a result of a young girl I was seeing at the time; Brian was her cousin. He had one of those infectious personalities; everyone who came into contact with him could not help but be drawn to him. He was tall, lanky, dressed badly, and had one of those smiles that lit up a room. Intelligent, eccentric, bubbly and enormously friendly, on first impression no one would ever think that beneath it all there was a sorrow of a depth that few people can fathom. We became friends, and within a short time he was part of my clique.
To be honest, he really had no business hanging around with us. At 16 years of age he was 1 to 2 years younger than the rest of us. At that time in my life the crew I ran around with were far from the ‘sensitive’ types. But the crew could tell that I liked Brian, so they let him be, and after a while he was just another one of the guys. Within a short time Brian became our conscience, so to speak. Our activities always walked a thin line between adolescent childishness and adult criminality. Brian’s influence on the crew was of earnest entreaties towards moderation, not because he was more reasonable than us, but because he was scared as hell most of the time. In retrospect I believe that he made a poor choice in friends. He usually stood as the ‘odd man out’ and I believe that he suffered as a result.
As time went on and we got to know Brian better, we learned of Brian’s family life and some of the things he had gone through. As his chosen confidant, he revealed more to me than the others. Now bear in mind that none of us was born into an episode of ‘Leave it to Beaver’; we were all from working class families with their usual share of heartbreak. But Brian was subjected to things that none of us could possibly relate to, even in the worst moments of our lives.
Brian was abused. His father was a ‘pot-head’ who spent more time between jobs than working. His mother was an alcoholic ex-stripper, with a brother who was a hardened criminal. For most of his life, the four of them lived together. Brian related to me a catalogue of mistreatment and beatings that was horrific. On one occasion he told me that his uncle had sexually assaulted him. The bubbly kid with the million-dollar smile ... it was either a façade or the last glimmer of what could have been.
His body bore the marks of the truth of his stories. Burn scars, bruises, and near blindness in one eye—these were the badges that he wore. I can’t be sure, but I suppose that the time he spent with us made up the happiest moments of his life. Time, and my own inability to recall the details to a greater degree, will always leave an incomplete picture. One thing is for sure–knowing Brian left a permanent imprint on my life. You see, on Brian’s 17th birthday, he hanged himself in his parents' bedroom.
So what’s the point of this story, and is there a moral to any of this? To answer this I have to fast forward to March of 2000. It was then, while on trip to my old stomping grounds, I decided to drop in on the old neighborhood and see if any of my old crew was still around. Most of them were gone, but I did run into Freddy, who still lived on the same block. We started talking and reminiscing about old times when he told me something about Brian I had never known before.
It seems that Freddy had learned that Brian’s mother had become pregnant while she was still working as a stripper. The man he had known as his father was not his father at all, but had married his mother a couple of years after Brian was born. The so-called uncle was not his uncle, but a drug dealer who was a friend of his parents. Apparently the abuse that we knew of at the time only scratched the surface. The abuse spanned his entire lifetime, and it was far deeper and sicker than we had imagined.
A few years after Brian’s suicide, his cousin (my old girlfriend) had told Freddy that Brian’s grandparents on his mother side were devout Christians. When their daughter became pregnant they saw it as an opportunity to get her out of her current lifestyle. She wanted to have an abortion, but her parents talked her out of it; they laid a huge guilt trip on her and promised to raise the child themselves if need be. After Brian was born his grandparents reneged on their promise, and this is how it came to be that this trio of monsters raised Brian.
Having known Brian, seen him laugh and seen him during those happy moments that he called, “an accident”, it is hard for me to say—"It would have been better if he had never been born." In the final analysis, within those brief months that we knew Brian, he touched us all, and I’m glad that I can at least say: I saw Brian smile.
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