At the Speed of Stupid

I've been too lazy this past week to post anything, so I'll go ahead and post something that was already written. This was a story that I wrote in my Personal Narrative class during my senior year at James Madison. The instructions were to write a narrative about family. Here it is:

                                             At the Speed of Stupid

Older brothers don’t have good ideas. Consequently, little brothers are stupid for going along with said ideas, despite the fact that they’re bad ones. But there’s something inherently half-baked about any idea stumbled upon by brothers. For simply being a construct of their fucked-up brotherly minds, the idea will fail. Always. No questions asked. Unless that question is “What in God’s name were you thinking?” which normally comes before “Go to your room.”

I was 13 years-old the first time my brother tried to murder me. Now, as a 13 year-old boy in the suburbs of western Pennsylvania, summer is everything. It is everything in the way that it is nothing at all. Obligations will disappear for a glorious three months of sun and sleep. I will accomplish nothing of value. I will sit inside and complain about boredom then go outside and complain about heat. The afternoon of my impending doom, however, was one of the few summer days that I actually had something planned to do. Before departing on vacation, my neighbors told my family to feel free to use their pool. Finally, a sign of life! There will be no sweat on my back today. It will be water. Beautiful, cool, chlorine-filled water. For at least two hours on this day, I will not be consumed by summer boredom. My mother, free from work, will accompany me to the neighbor’s pool with – gasp – my older brother.

I’m already convinced that this will lead to my end. My brother will have an awful idea, I will die, and he will survive to laugh at me. It will be the perfect ending. My mother will cry out to God, wondering how she could raise such a stupid son, and my brother will retort “It should have been me,” or something equally heartbreaking that will render him my mother’s little angel for the rest of his dumb life. If only I had been born first, I could kill my brother. I’m pretty sure it’s allowed. The older can kill the younger. It’s not illegal, just frowned upon.

You’d think I would have learned from our home videos. There’s a particularly appropriate one where my brother and I are doing simultaneous leaping somersaults from the floor onto our bed. How could this accident have been prevented? The ending to this is painfully obvious (pun intended). My brother lands on my head and, because of this, my future wife will now have the pleasure of watching me cry on home video. Our relationship will sour after her viewing of this unfortunate piece of family history. Every ensuing fight we have will end in some sort of off-hand remark that calls into question my manhood and four year-old tears. Insulted, I will say something unnecessary about her mother’s weight, or bodily appearance in general, and then I will sleep on the couch. As I stare at our unpainted ceiling, which she will probably nag me about tomorrow, I will curse my brother’s name under my breath. It’s your fucking fault I won’t get sex for a week, Anthony.

We have been swimming for nearly two hours and I have not drowned at the hands of my brother. Success. But as my mother declares that we have to leave to start making dinner, the brotherly dumb-tuition kicks in. Anthony and I collaborate on our newest effort, which, to my mother, probably sounds like a suicide pact.

“Okay, Vincent. Let’s do one more jump.”

“Yay! One more jump!”

“Let’s make the biggest splash possible.”

“Yay! Biggest splash possible!”

“Stop saying yay.”

“Sorry.”

My brother and I decide that, to make the biggest splash possible, we will probably have to start on opposite sides of the pool. I’m not sure why. But brother ideas normally formulate in this absurd manner. What’s the one thing we could do that would put our immediate lives in the most possible danger? In this case, it is to start on opposite sides of the pool, run across the deck as fast as possible, and cannonball into the center of the water. At the age of thirteen, there is no such thing as flawed logic. It’s like the brother code – the worse the idea is, the better the idea is. Or something like that.
I take a look at our surroundings. A giant wooden deck surrounds the pool. After two hours of incessantly flailing our thirteen and fifteen year-old bodies into the water, the wood has been soaked. As my brother and I survey this scene before our final jump, we decide that conditions for immediate life danger are perfect. With mom’s head buried in her latest Danielle Steele novel, there is no third party to intervene.

My brother and I take off at the speed of stupid, giggling like brothers do when their genius plans are coming to fruition. It starts off fine. The cannonball is in sight. The world’s biggest splash is about to rain down on the neighborhood. I can see the headline in tomorrow’s paper: “Totally awesome local boys flood neighborhood with totally awesome cannonball”. When all the girls at school hear about how much of a badass I am, they will invite me to their place when their parents are out of town. I can see myself on Leno. They will set up a replica pool and make me and my brother perform our death-defying stunt on national television. I start racking my brain to figure out a catchy name for the new clothing line that will inevitably be granted to us during our ascent into fame. How should I wear my hair? I need a gimmick.

At this precise moment, two things happen. First, my feet slip on the water-soaked wooden deck and I feel a strange scratching sensation on the bottom of my left foot. Second, I forget to cannonball. As I fall into the water, hardly on purpose, I know that something is very wrong. Nothing hurts. I just feel odd. I pull myself up out of the water as quickly as possible and lift my left foot to inspect the damage. As soon as my eyes meet the gash, the blood begins to seep out slowly like toothpaste from a tube. For the first few desperate seconds, I am torn between bleeding to death and giving my mother a heart attack. The severity of the gash makes the decision for my thirteen year-old self. Shit, I’m not invincible after all.

    “Um, Mom?”

    “…” (head buried in the Danielle Steele novel).

    “Uh, Mom? Look at my foot.”

    The words are torturous, I know. It seems odd that if I were playing a practical joke on my mother, I would probably use the same phrase. Look at my foot! Covered in ketchup, of course. But this is not ketchup. This is crimson death spilling from one of my extremities. My mother looks up from her novel and panics with the token panic of ten thousand mothers, reciting my first and middle names in succession, meaning “You will be the death of me” in mom-speak.

    “Vincent Andrew!”

It has never occurred to me until now that the infamous “No Running” rule may not have been crafted for my safety, but rather the sanity of pool-going parents.

    “I think I slipped on something.”

    “Oh my gosh, Vincent!”

    She grabs a towel in mid-panic, sits me down in a plastic deck chair, and applies pressure to the bottom of my left foot. I sit staring at that Danielle Steel novel. How many books has this woman written? What does she write about? Why does my mom own four thousand Danielle Steele novels? My mother’s shaky voice interrupts my curiosity as my brother stands idly by, probably disappointed that I have ruined the world’s biggest splash with such a trivial wound.

    “Does it hurt?”

    “No, actually.”

    This is absolutely true. If I did not see the blood, I would not even know that I was bleeding. I feel nothing. My brother is incredulous.
   
    “What?!”

    “Dude, I’m bleeding.”

    “But it doesn’t hurt?”

    “No.”

    “Cool.”

    It should be noted that brothers never acknowledge when their brilliant ideas fail. It’s always someone or something else’s fault. The plan was never fucked from the start, even when it obviously was. And this time, it most definitely was. I am dying, but too pissed off at my brother to care. As I go toward the light, I fully intend on explaining to God why he must take my brother next. After my mother helps me limp across the street, I rehearse my persuasive argument for the death of my brother. I cryptically plan his future as I am driven to the emergency room where seventeen stitches seal what will become a beautiful scar.

I wish I had a justifying end to the story – like my brother becomes my slave while I sit crippled on the couch and eat fudgesicles for the duration of the summer – but I don’t. I do, however, thank God that I had slipped on the pool deck that summer day, because I know what would have happened if I hadn’t. My brother and I would have collided in mid-air and died on impact. At the Pearly Gates, St. Peter would say something of consolation like “valiant effort” and then usher us into heaven. Once inside, he would introduce us to Cain and Abel, and we would all share a hearty chuckle about brothers and how fucking awful their ideas are. Then my brother would inevitably say “Hey, I’ve got an idea” and we would be cast out of heaven, plummeting to hell at the speed of stupid.