(Editor’s Note: Greg Bean is taking a temporary sabbatical from writing his column due to the death of his son. This column was originally printed April 26, 2008).
Istopped at the pharmacy the day before Easter, and among the customers at the register was a mom and three kids — a couple of boys maybe 8 and 9, and a girl, 2 or 3.
The boys had the look of mischief in their eyes, but their little sister was interested in candy. And like most kids waiting at checkout counters with their moms, she was pestering hers for sweets. The mom finally put her foot down. “You don’t need candy today,” she said. “The Easter Bunny will bring you plenty of candy tomorrow.”
At which point, the little girl balled up her fists and wailed, “I DON’T WANT THE BEASTER BUNNY!”
Bemused, the mom took the little girl in her arms. “It’s not the Beaster Bunny, sweetheart. It’s the Easter Bunny.”
“No, it isn’t!” the little girl cried. “Robbie says it’s the Beaster Bunny, and it will EAT ME!”
Robbie, meanwhile, jammed his hands into his pockets and looked guilty.
“Outside,” said the mom to Robbie. “You, too,” she said to the other brother, who punched Robbie’s shoulder before he left.
“Way to go, jerkwad,” he said to Robbie. “Now we won’t get any candy, either.”
•••
I related that story while our family was enjoying Easter dinner as a sort of parable on the unnecessary torture older brothers often perpetrate on their younger siblings, but it didn’t get the reaction I anticipated from my three sons. Instead of evoking pity for the little girl, they thought the whole situation was hysterical. And then the older ones started telling stories about the torture they’d inflicted on their younger brothers when they were growing up, and each story was worse than the last.
I don’t know what their mom and I thought they were doing in the hours between the time they got out of school in the afternoon and the time we got home from work, but it apparently wasn’t collecting canned goods for the homeless. The whirl of stories was the stuff of every parent’s nightmare:
• Nerf arrows soaked in alcohol, lighted and shot from the upstairs windows at a brother running around the yard.
• Entire legions of action figures dismembered by various power tools and weapons. “He beheaded my whole GI Joe collection,” the youngest remembered of one of his elder brothers.
• “He duct-taped me to a chair, put me and the chair in the shower and turned the cold water on,” he remembered of another.
• “He (one of his older brothers) locked me and the dog in the upstairs bedroom, and the only way we could escape was to crawl out the window onto the roof and jump,” one brother recalled fondly.
… Suddenly, I was remembering my own childhood as the eldest brother, and the mayhem I inflicted on my little brothers:
• Giving them a big wad of chewing tobacco, telling them it was bigboy gum and to “make sure to swallow the juice.”
• Forcing one of my younger brothers to swim back and forth, underwater, in the small swimming pool my father put together in our driveway, while my friends and I — standing on chairs hijacked from the kitchen — ringed the pool and shot him with toy, suction-cup arrows. That night, all the red welts on his back and legs made him look like he’d been attacked by a giant squid.
“What happened to you?” my mother asked when she got home from work.
“Greg and his friends taught me how to play Shark Hunt,” he told her happily. “I was the shark.”
• Telling one of my younger brothers a dirty joke with a disgusting punch line he did not understand, with the caveat “You have to make sure you tell that joke Sunday when Grandma and Grandpa come to dinner.” He told it, and it was a showstopper. Grandma was so shocked she spit out a whole mouthful of broccoli. My mother was horrified, my father embarrassed. Grandpa turned red and swore. And even after my little brother got sent to his room without dessert, I didn’t confess responsibility for the crime.
• Convincing a younger brother to take off all his clothes and “surprise” the grownups who were playing bridge in the living room.
• Convincing them that India ink, rubbed generously on the face, hands and other exposed body parts, was the perfect camouflage for a night-time game of Manhunt. “It’ll wash right off,” I assured them.
In years to come, I soared to even greater heights of diabolical whimsy. I’d share some of them, but I don’t want to give younger readers any more ideas.
The next day, however, consumed with retroactive guilt, I called one of my younger brothers to apologize.
“What do you have to apologize for?” he asked. “You were only doing what big brothers do, toughening us up for the real world. I ought to thank you.”
“You don’t hold any grudges?” I asked.
“Of course not,” he said. “All those things you did to me? I turned right around and did them to my younger brother. You remember that time I had him and his friends mix three boxes of baking soda and a quart of vinegar in a big circus balloon? Man, I can still see their faces.”
“Mom blamed me for that,” I told him. “It ruined the wallpaper.”
“I know,” he said. “That was the best part of the whole thing. What goes around comes around, bro. It’s the circle of life.”
And so it is. Someday, if my little brother’s theory is correct, Robbie will pay dearly for that Beaster Bunny stunt. I wish I could be around to see it.
Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.