When I was with the Eagles and won the Cup, it was the one and only time he made drawings and doodles in the journal. He wrote of his pride and joy and punctuated it with rough sketches of the Eagles’ logo and of my jersey number.
There was a touching entry about his realization that he was gay. He’d suspected as much since he was a young boy, but he chronicled his first kiss with a guy who went to our high school who, in a million years, I never would’ve thought was gay. But then again, I never suspected Brooks either.
That entry was quite detailed, and it moved from a fumbling kiss to roaming hands, and I had to stop reading. I didn’t want or need the details. That was private to Brooks, and I’d no more read his accounting of his first time if it was with a woman than I would with a man.
I can imagine how my brother felt, though. The validation that must have come that he knew who he was. I remember well the intoxication of being with a girl for the first time, and I imagine Brooks reveled in his experience as much as I had.
I skimmed to the last paragraph of that entry.
I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted from my shoulders. Things are clear, and I’m ready for my future.
The experience had brought solace to a young man who was tortured over his sexual orientation and whether his feelings were real.
I was a bit brokenhearted, however, by the very last sentence: I can never let our parents know because I can’t handle their hate.
It was my brother’s first real indication that there was going to be some level of isolation in his life because of who he was. He didn’t mention anything in his pages about whether he would tell me, and I found that troubling.
Despite the good, there was a lot of bad shit that I read too.
My father was relentless in his harassment of Brooks after I left for college. With me no longer around to control, he focused all that extra on Brooks. He also used me as a means to motivate my brother, comparing my greatness with my brother’s weaknesses. I found through numerous entries that if Brooks wasn’t making my father happy between how he performed in school and on the ice, my father would throw me in his face. He would laud me as the successful one in the family and would say, “Why can’t you be as good as your brother?” on almost every occasion where he found fault.
This was abusive. It may not have been delivered with fists or belts, but every word cut deep. I know, because I used to get the same when I lived at home. But Brooks had it worse after I left because there was no one to share the abuse with.
It was, in my opinion, the start of the systemic poisoning that my father insinuated into my brother’s mind and is probably the foundation of all that was bad between us at the time Brooks died.
Other entries were incredibly bittersweet. When I first got injured while playing with the Eagles, Brooks was beside himself with worry. He knew just how catastrophic even a simple injury could be to a hockey career.
I had to step away from my reading after one particular entry Brooks made after I got released from the Eagles and sent down to the minors. Brooks was just starting his career with the Titans, and he was so conflicted over my fall from grace. So much so, he couldn’t even enjoy his fortune because he was far too worried about my misfortune.
During this time, he documented my father’s continued mind games. He was no longer throwing at Brooks how great I was as a means to motivate him to perform better. Instead, it was a lot of shit-talking about my failures to help Brooks shine brighter. My father apparently spoke a lot of crap about me to my little brother and used it as an opportunity to launch from my coattails to his.
God, my dad was such a dick, and Brooks knew what he was doing. He never shared that with me, though, not wanting to cause me pain.
Learning about Brooks’s struggle with alcohol addiction within his writings was very subtle, and I might not have recognized it had I not known now that he was, in fact, an alcoholic. There were lots of entries about parties he attended and good times with friends and teammates. Many of those ended in admitted blackouts.
A lot of his alcohol intake seemed associated with his sexual orientation, or rather, the isolation he had because of it.
He talked about men he would date and how he was only comfortable eating dinner or sitting at a bar with a man if alcohol was involved. It was his way to push past his fears.
He was very strict, though, when in the presence of other men out in public. He allowed absolutely no displays of affection and kept all that within the privacy of his home. He got pressure from the men he dated, most unwilling to live a closeted lifestyle. It tore Brooks between having safety from my father’s wrath and truly being happy with his personal life.
And it wasn’t just my father who made things difficult on Brooks for being gay. It was the league as a whole. Historically, male-dominated sports have a crude culture within the locker room that has kept gay men quiet. The unenlightened behemoths think being homosexual means weakness or frailty, and that leads to inherent bias. I myself have heard so many gay jokes within the locker room, I know that if I were in Brooks’s shoes, I would’ve never come out to my team either.
All those things weighed heavily on him, and I could see chronicled over time when he started needing alcohol to dull the pain. There were times when Brooks would come home after practice or a game or even a trip out shopping, and he’d crack open a fifth of bourbon. He would sit and drink all night until he fell into blessed sleep.
I learned within the journals that the breaking point was when my brother slept through an alarm and missed a practice with the Titans. In the grand scheme of things, not a huge deal. He was fined, which was expected. But it scared him badly to know that he could’ve slept through the alarm to make it to the airport for an away game. He went to his coach and explained he thought he had a problem.
His coach helped him that day find a place to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and that is where he met Harlow.
Not only did I get to learn so many beautiful and awful things about my brother—making me feel closer to him than I ever have despite the fact he is dead—I got to know Harlow Alston through my reading.
Brooks had so much to say about his new friend. Not only the support she gave him to maintain sobriety, but in all other ways outside of their shared alcoholism.
They spent a lot of time together, either at his condo or hers. They often ate dinner together when he wasn’t at games. They vacationed together. She went out on dates with him, playing the wingman so he would feel secure that he wouldn’t be outed.
She was there for him during all his triumphs. She bought a season ticket to cheer him on, and she was always there to make sure he stayed on a sober path.
While he didn’t necessarily say it, I guarantee he helped her stay on that same straight and narrow as well.
I don’t regret reading a single word. Every bit of the information—good and bad—was healing to my soul. It’s a bit devastating to know I could’ve learned this stuff myself had I just made better efforts to repair my relationship with Brooks, but it was enough to know he loved me in the end, so much so that he wanted these journals shared with me.
In addition to being exhausted from taking all this in, I have newfound anger toward my father, so much so I’m now feeling the need to hurt him in some way. Over this past year, things changed between me and my brother, and I can tell that the estrangement was actually manufactured by my father.