Our older brother Charlie was a man of few words, until he opened his mouth. The worst thing about telling Charlie something is that he’d repeat it to damn near anybody that would be willing to hang around and listen.
Not that Michael and I cared too much since the people Charlie spoke to were strangers to Mike and I.
But at that same token if Charlie were to run into Chris again (or any of the old crew for that matter) and start blabbing about our business to them it would soon be one the knowledge of the whole syndicate.
The flip side of this was that we could ask Charlie for information about anyone and most likely get a semi sufficient answer.
The reason for this was that Charlie was on a spectrum. Whether that spectrum was depression or mental health or straight up Autism;. The psychologists were unsure.
So in turn they’d just chucked a whole laundry list of ailments on his wrap sheet before discharging him from the psych ward seven years ago.
Michael, Myself and Egypt visited Charlie very rarely. Although to the last of my knowledge our Dad still visited him every other weekend.
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Charlie had developed a severe synthetic weed addiction about 12 years ago. He began stealing money from Egypts OE fund to fuel his habits.
At first it was the aggression, random outburst that seemed to trail off into nonsense. Then eventually he stopped sleeping and started chain smoking for days on end.
His friend Chris had found himself a sheet of double dipped acid and the two of them had a bender for a couple weeks.
Eventually things got to the point where Charlie refused to sleep in his bed and would instead sit in the lounge watching YouTube documentaries in the lounge.
One day we woke up to a commotion in the middle of the night. Something happening on the street.
We all came rushing out in our pyjamas and found Charlie standing stark naked in the middle of the street yelling obscenities at the gangsters that lived across the street.
Egypt grabbed him and pleaded with the gangsters that he was going through a mental breakdown and that we were all immensely sorry.
Surprisingly they weren’t too fussed.
A damned miracle.
We had him admitted the next morning.
He was put on psychiatric medication, but the pills didn’t really improve anything.
He gained a lot of weight and if anything his mind had seemed to have splintered into more pieces on the medication than off it.
I know Dad feels guilty about it.
And that’s the reason none of us visit Charlie. And also why Dad still does.
This is perhaps the only scarring event that I’ve witnessed that I have not yet written a poem about. Maybe one day.