I Had a Brother Once is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2021 by Giants of Science, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mansbach, Adam, author.
Title: I had a brother once : a poem, a memoir / Adam Mansbach.
Description: New York : One World, [2021]
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031115 (print) | LCCN 2020031116 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593134795 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593134801 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Grief—Poetry. | LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A57 I3 2021 (print) | LCC PS3613.A57 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031115
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031116
Ebook ISBN 9780593134801
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Cover design: Ella Laytham
Cover art: © José Parlá
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
I Had a Brother Once
Acknowledgments
About the Author
first of all i never
usually stayed out past
midnight or even ten,
but i was feeling
myself that night.
something was ending
& it was time to celebrate.
my friend emery had
reserved the back room
of a center city lounge
so we could spin some
records for the first &
final time before i
packed up the rented
carriage house &
u-hauled out of town.
one year in philly had
sprawled into two &
i’d been digging weekly
that whole time
at this spot called beautiful
world & another called
milkcrate, plus mark’s
spot, which didn’t have
a name, & then there was
another out past bryn mawr
that i found by accident,
a place the local deejays
had long written off
as trash, except i happened
to fall through just as
a new collection came up
from the basement, had not
even been filed yet, all
holy grail joints—the del
jones record, a mint
original headless heroes
of the apocalypse lp,
the bo diddley with the
break, the rhetta hughes,
the johnny houston, some
forty pieces & nothing
stickered past eight bucks.
it’s bound to happen if
you dig long & doggedly
enough, but only about
once per decade. my last two
had been waterville maine
in ninety-six & the jamaican
lady i met outside academy
records in manhattan double
parked on twelfth street,
truck sagging with roots
reggae. there were two guys
working that day, a bald
headed whiteboy & a dread,
& the wrong one jogged out.
he took a quick flip through
& passed. i slid up & i asked
if i could look, ended up
jumping in the shotgun seat
& driving back up to the bronx
to see what she had left at home.
that was two thousand two
or possibly oh-three
& now it was may twenty-eight
two thousand eleven. i’d
amassed two crates, one for
each year of my expiring
university appointment, &
barely listened to a lot of it
myself; all i had at the house
was a portable turntable emery
had let me hold, & all my
three year old wanted to hear
about their trip to the chapel
of love, maybe because her
mother & i were not
married ourselves.
i had not spun out
since leaving california, &
music always sounds different
when you are rocking for
a room, studying the way
each song hits. deejaying
is the art of making people
hear what you do. each
record transforms the crowd
& each crowd the record.
i invited my grad students
& most of them came. it
was a small mfa program,
tightknit, with little of the
pettiness or gamesmanship
i recalled from my own.
after workshop we often
went for drinks, a motorcade
of hatchbacks & tin cans
cruising four blocks to the
tavern near campus because
walking even that far was
considered foolhardy in
camden at night. one bar
for an entire university was
one too few, meant i risked
seeing my undergrads
drunk, but it was no worse
than running into them while
i was lifting weights at the
school gym, & for the most
part we were all adept at
not getting in each other’s
way, like housemates sharing
a kitchen.
somebody took a flick
of me behind the wheels
that night, probably leslie.
my left hand is pressed
to the wax, fingertips
backcuing the funky
little drumfill at the top
of hit or miss, right hand
a jutting peace sign,
elbow cocked, arms tan,
emery grinning beside me.
that was one of the last
records i played, which
means it was about twelve
thirty & might even be after
the first call from my father,
the one i ignored, straight
cognitive dissonance, there
was no earthly reason
he would call that late &
i was in the middle of
my set, no one was sick
or frail, my last living
grandparent was already
dead. i told myself
he must have dialed by
mistake in his car, home
bound from the newspaper
after writing the first headline
the greater boston area would
see tomorrow when they freed
the globe from its plastic
sheath, tipped their coffee
mugs mouthward, destroyed
the symmetry of their donuts.
but five minutes later
he called again & this time i
picked up, cupping a palm
over my open ear to blunt
the funk booming behind.
i still didn’t think anything
was wrong. in fact, i remember
or think i remember being
slightly annoyed, in the belief
that this call was a frivolous
intrusion, which makes
so little sense that perhaps
i knew better & was frightened
enough to erect this cardboard
buttress.
my father said
i’ve put this off as
long as possible
that’s not what he said.
i mean me. i would live
here in this preamble
forever. rework it. fold in
new ingredients. knead it
till the gluten breaks. yammer
on about records. tell some
jokes. have i mentioned
that on this night & for
the six weeks beforehand
did not yet technically exist,
could not be held in hands till
june, was somehow outselling
every other book in the world?
there was almost certainly
a split second when i
convinced myself my father
was calling about that,
jubilant with some new
tidbit that had dropped into his
newsroom off the a.p.
wire, additional victims
claimed by this viral sensation
of mine. we could talk about
the book. i could tell you
a few stories about stories,
flip a little wordplay, we could
warm up with some improv
games. it has been eight
fucking years & i have written
everything but this.
my father said
david has taken his own life
& i answered as if i didn’t
understand or hadn’t heard.
my reply was what? & he
repeated it. there is plenty
to regret & perhaps this
is insignificant but i wish
i had not made him
say it to me twice.
the second time i was in
motion, walking through the
back room, the front room,
out into the heatwave night.
i wasn’t crying yet but i also
couldn’t speak or think.
my father’s sentence was
unrecognizable, a cluster of
words spinning in a void.
the notion that it was all
a mistake flashed through me
& fell instantly to ash.
no parent would say such
a thing about his child
to his child if there was any
hope. & here begins a different
kind of struggle, on this
page, akin to keeping the
steering wheel perfectly
straight, a struggle not
to crane out of this shot, not
to add voiceover, not
to do the one thing i am
trained to, which is make
things legible, impose
structure & plot, motivation,
a frame, a double helix of
narrative to snake through
the spine, to be the spine.
here i am, here we are,
not fifty feet from the news
of my brother’s suicide &
already i can feel a tug at
the reins. i don’t know if
naming these things can
sap their power or if it
constitutes a sacrifice
at their altar, an invitation
to the impulse i am trying
to disperse. what are
the rules of this endeavor,
am i supposed to unfold
the moments of this night
like an origami crane,
crease by crease, is that
the penance or the healing,
the ritual, a march toward
or away from what? penance
for what? if you are making
up the ritual as you go,
is it a ritual? if the loss is
a hole that cannot be filled,
is the remainder of your
life the ritual? are rituals
supposed to fill the hole or
deepen it until you can
crawl out the other side,
& who am i that i have
to ask? my mother’s mother’s
father’s parents were the
children of famed rabbis,
they came here & founded
a jewish community
in burlington vermont by
paying other jews to keep
the sabbath, making them whole
& a minyan by handing out
the wages they would have
lost in observing the holy day,
& here i am not even a hundred
& fifty years later, acting as if
the books my people carried
& died for are unknown to me.
here i am freighted by nothing,
reinventing the wheel, reinventing
the rack. daring to believe
that perhaps you only realize
a ritual was one after
you complete it, inscribe the
final character. a tear falls
on the page, becomes
the final period or some
stupid maudlin shit like that.
i don’t know what more
my father said right then. i
hung up, walked back inside
somehow, told emery i had
to go, told him my brother
was dead, felt something
of the horror come into focus
when i read it on his face.
he asked me what i needed,
offered to drive me home, but
i said no, just, i don’t know,
take my shit when you leave,
& i walked out through the
front door again & called
my father back, but not right
away, i think. first i stood
talking to my brother.
david, what did you do?
david, what have you done?
i haven’t gotten past that, have
received no answer, have not
felt him lingering, not even
then, not like when my grandfather
died & the thunderstorm came or
my grandmother died &
a month of nightmares
about her staggeri
ng vacant
& drooling through the halls of
her summer house followed.
no, my brother had chosen
to go & was gone, utterly
gone, was not nearby, was not
available in any way i could discern,
& i was crying too hard to see now,
walking through badly blurred
streets toward my car. i called
my father back. he was with
my mother, of course, they
were at david’s apartment
with his wife. widow.
david had been missing
all day & they had feared that
he would not come back,
but only just now had his body
been discovered, in his car,
he was a scientist, had done it
by mixing two chemicals
into a gas that killed him
painlessly, with a single
breath. he’d left a note
on his windshield warning
of the toxic fumes inside so
no one else would die, but
i did not learn that until later.
what i learned then was that
there was, had been, a secret
& that secret was death, the
want of death. his wife had
kept it for him, fasted, prayed,
she was catholic, from a catholic
country, she placed her faith
in self-denial & fervent whispered
words, believed they held
the power to restore him
to himself, or maybe she just
didn’t know what else to do.
david forbade her to tell
anyone that he cried in dark rooms,
held his head between his hands,
his hands between his knees,
did not want children, refused
to put another person through
that, that being childhood,
that being life. i could not
even conceive of a word like
forbade describing david.
he was too gentle, his hands
were large & powerful but
looked most natural holding
puny things, gripping a carrot
& a peeler or splaying an
eyelid & squeezing a dropper
from above. but no one is
gentle with the things they
fear or the people who
discover them unmade.
she kept his secrets until
she could not, then told
my parents, who did not