My brother's keeper

I have saved him all my life, but now there are too many miles between me and the paraded condoms, the muffled awe.

By Chris Colin

Mar 10, 2000 | Back East, high school students have sex on the back-seat leather of my parents' new Honda. The driver, my younger brother, delivers the news with manufactured disgust, guarded pride.

"They held up the condom," he whispers on our weekly phone call. I hear the preparation of dinner in the background.

Kevin is a senior in high school. Kevin is not his real name -- the pseudonym is but one of many extravagant protections I confer upon my brother. In fact, I have saved him all my life. As a child, I held watch for bullies, placed my body between his head and kitchen counters. Summers at the neighborhood pool, I kept one eye on him, long after he was the better swimmer. Even in our backyard tussles, I'd make a preliminary sweep for rocks or sticks before bending his arms behind his back and buckling his knees to the dirt.

Now he chauffeurs the sexually active. Now I need to perform a new kind of rescue. The sex happened on homecoming night, I'm told, a car full of drunk seniors skidding from dance to party. Kevin did not drink, though maybe he was tempted -- these friends of his are new and new friends are often the ones who get people to drink or smoke or jump off the wrong things.

On the big night, as neckties were pulled from teenage collars, I sipped a sipping drink on the other coast. While the young exhibitionists fiddled with buttons, I chatted with a friend about the fact that it was raining. It was fine, but we did not disrobe. By the time the East Coast condom had been flung against the curb in front of the party, my friend and I had waved and said we should do this more often.

I live helplessly in the West. I take the news of Kevin's exploits like a tied man, held hostage by the intervening miles. I'm the one who's supposed to be intervening. I should be over his shoulder, at his doorway, in front of his eyes. I should be keeping back the back-seat drunken overstated solecism that has no business, yet, among his unruined affairs.

In the past, these responsibilities left me triumphantly spent. Picture Atlas, hoisting a seeing-eye dog that is leading a guardian angel who is whispering into the ear of a bodyguard. I am these and more, and yet, these days, the net result of my brilliant guidance is attended by a sense of falling short: The paraded condom, and Kevin's subsequent muffled awe, worry me.

In my weaker moments, I'm a dick. The words for what I am take the wind out of me: meddling, protective, scared. "How often do you get high?" I heard myself ask recently. I tried to make it sound like idle chatter, like I wanted to know his taste in tennis shoes. He won't ever be fooled by these ploys, but with any luck they'll work on me. I will believe that I am not an uptight, overprotective, busybody asshole. Goodness. I need to mellow out. I should probably smoke more pot.

The appropriate metaphor here is that of a coin: On one side is the debauchery encroaching on Kevin's universe. On the other is just me, aging me, increasingly boring me, civilized me. Is the world getting hotter and heavier or am I becoming a sissy? "Wherein lies the true problem?" the coin asks in that stuffy way coins talk. The problem with the coin metaphor is that it's just a metaphor, and metaphors don't stop people from stripping in my family's car.

Next Page: Also, no holding up of condoms

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