An Alcoholic Brother

My older brother Richard is a crazy alcoholic. Lately he has been walking around his suburban Houston neighborhood with a bottle of vodka and passing out on various neighbors’ lawns and flower beds.

His wife is divorcing him for the obvious reason. She demands that he walk around with a better brand of vodka than Phillips.

Really, I have to laugh or I surely will go as nuts as Rich and you see, Richard was the model sibling. He studied to be a Jesuit priest for 11 years then left one year before ordination. My parents used to spend hours discussing the first Mass that he would say and what chalice they would buy him to consecrate the sacred wine.

He doesn’t need a chalice now, apparently he doesn’t even need a glass. He just needs a bottle.

He has a PhD in psychology and is 61 years old. None of us know what demons are haunting him. He was always a little weird but nothing like these past few months.

Right now he is in a Dallas jail because of a probation violation for a drunken driving charge.

Thank God my 93 year old Mother has Alzheimer’s or she would surely kill herself if she knew what was going on. Richard, the perfect child, has gone crazier than a shithouse rat.

When he gets out of jail he will be homeless because he has been court ordered out of his home. I am thinking of flying to Houston and trying to find him an apartment.

I doubt if I will.

Rich has not been close to anyone in the family for more than 30 years. He once said that he “divorced his family” when he entered the Jesuits and he has been true to his word. I barely know him anymore and I have absolutely no idea why the hamster fell off of the treadmill in his head.

O.K., I will probably make an attempt to “rescue” him, but I know that I will fail. Rich is pompous and contemptuous of everyone, particularly his little brother whom he always viewed as an annoyance before he ran off to join God when I was 13.

I believe he will be with God shortly, as he quickly and deliberately poisons his body from life.