Today, I got the call.
I vaguely recognized the voice on the other end of the phone, but only the way someone recognizes the sound of traffic around their home. I can’t think of a name that would match the voice or a face to go with it, but it didn’t matter.
“Hello, is this Mason Ellis?” the man asked.
“Yeah, who’s this?” I answered.
“Do you know why I’m calling?” he asked.
It wasn’t until he asked that question that I figured it out.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re first match is in a week, featherweight. We’ll call again with directions to the location. Don’t talk about this to anyone you haven’t seen at a fight,” the man said finally and hung up the phone.
The whole thing seemed really shady. It was pretty cool.
Now, though, I’m tired and I’m sore and I just want to open my front door, walk to my couch, fall down and not move for about a week.
It looks like someone else beat me to it.
My brother, Chris, isn’t so much lying on the couch as he is draped over it. From the smell of him, even standing ten feet away, I’d say he’s more passed out than he is asleep.
I could really do without this right now, but I’m not going to wake him to kick him out. This isn’t the first time he’s shown up inside my home without announcement or invitation.
He does this whenever he gets in trouble, and as sick of it as I am, I’m not going to make any kind of headway with him while he’s still drunk. To that end, I set my things down gently by the door, which I close, being sure to turn the knob before it can latch and possibly wake Chris.
I slip off my shoes and I’m holding my breath as I try to sneak past the couch toward my bedroom door at the far end of the living room.
Behind me, there’s a piercing noise in the form of my phone’s ringtone, and I’m shuffling as fast as my socks will allow back toward my gym bag. I open it and find my phone, quickly muting it.
Ash is calling.
Chris stirs a little, and I’m holding my breath again as I return to my feet to get a better look at him.
He stirred, but he’s still asleep, so I head toward the kitchen and out to the back porch before I look down at my phone again and answer the call.
“Hey, Ash,” I say, closing the back door behind me.
“Hey,” she says. “I had a lot of fun last night. I was wondering if you want to maybe get together and do something.”
“Starbright driving you crazy again?” I ask. I’ve actually been hoping to meet Jana’s mom, mainly due to Ash’s vivid and outlandish descriptions of the woman. Ash, on the other hand, doesn’t think it’s such a great idea.
“Am I that transparent?” she asks.
“I’d love to see you,” I tell her, “but I don’t think tonight’s the best night for it. I just came home and found my brother passed out on the couch. I think he’s going through a bit of a thing right now, and I just need to make sure he’s not in any kind of serious trouble, you know?”
“I didn’t even know you had a brother,” Ash says.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “He’s the older one, I’m the wiser one.”
“What a terrifying proposition,” she says. “You sure you don’t want me to come over? Maybe I can help.”
“That’s sweet of you,” I tell her, but hesitate as I hear the back door opening behind me. I turn to find Chris stumbling out with an already-lit cigarette in his mouth. “But it looks like he’s awake and I’m going to have to let you go.”
“Okay,” she says. “Let me know how it goes.”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Have a good night.”
I hang up the phone.
“Hey, Chris,” I say, taking a step toward my brother. “How are you feeling?”
He responds by pulling his lighter out of his pocket and trying to light his still-lit cigarette and tripping over a lawn chair. I can’t say he catches himself, exactly, but he does a fair job of minimizing the damage of the fall on his way down.
I walk over to him and crouch down beside him.
“You should get back inside,” I tell him. “Sleep it off. We’ll talk in the morning.”
He grunts and gets back to his feet, only to sit on the lawn chair he just fell over.
“Can you hear me?” I ask him.
“Suuure thing, brotha man,” he slurs.
Things weren’t that easy for Chris and me growing up, and we’ve both chosen to deal with it in our own ways. For Chris, it’s coming up with new and ridiculous ways to separate average people from their money.
I get that we’re both on the wrong side of things, legally, but the only people who get hurt because of what I do get hurt because they chose to put themselves in a match. It’s anyone’s guess how long it takes some of the people Chris swindles to figure out what’s happened to them.
I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t be so judgmental. Still, that would be a lot easier if he didn’t keep showing up like this.
“What happened this time?” I ask him. “Nobody followed you here, did they?”
“It was jus’ a biiig mis–misunderstanding,” he says.
Of course it was.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen my brother. I’d even begun to entertain hopes that he’d cleaned up his act, but there he sits, swaying a little in an invisible breeze.
“How long are you here?” I ask.
The question seems to confound Chris in some deep, possibly existential way, and he just stares up at me without answering.
“Whatever,” I tell him. “Let’s get you to bed. We can talk about everything in the morning.”
“Nooo,” Chris says, far too loudly for the time of night. “I wanna stay up and hang out with my little bro—”
There’s no easy way to tell if he was going to say “brother” or leave it at “bro,” as Chris is now leaning over the side of his lawn chair, vomiting.
“That’s just spectacular,” I tell him. “Really, it’s great of you to drop in and make yourself at home.” I sigh. “How many times are we going to do this, huh?” I ask.
Chris looks up at me and opens his mouth, taking a quick breath in as if he’s about to say something, but quickly returns his head over the side of the lawn chair to make sure there isn’t anything left to throw up.
I make my way over to the faucet just outside the back door and I grab the end of the hose attached to it before turning the faucet on.
“You’re probably going to want to move if you don’t want to get soaked and have to sleep outside,” I tell him.
He doesn’t react at first, but after I give him a quick spray with the hose, he moves quickly enough, though he only makes it to the lawn chair I’ve just abandoned to clean up after him. If ever there was a clearer living metaphor for my relationship to my brother than this single moment, I’ve never seen it.
After I get the concrete cleaned, I set the hose back down and turn off the faucet.
“Feeling any better?” I ask him.
“I feeel great,” he tells me. “Hey bro?” he says.