Five-to-Seven to Life

by Lloyd B. Abrams

You could never tell my fuckin brother nothin.

If we were tied in the ninth with a runner on third, all Bobby had to do was hit a sacrifice fly to score the runner. But he’d strike out swinging for the fences – and did this over and over.

If we were running from the cops all he had to do was toss his backpack off into the woods. And then he could outrun them. Instead he got nabbed. Lucky for me he kept his mouth shut.

If he was still banging his lowlife skank from the Hillcrest Mobile Village, a.k.a. the white trash trailer park, all he had to do was keep it loose, keep it safe, keep it contained. Instead, he got picked up holding weight – it wasn’t his, he claimed – of course it never is – and he ended up facing five-to-seven in our three-strikes-you’re-out state.

Fuckin dumb ass.

You tried talking sense to Bobby, it was like talking to the wall. Our father, the esteemed associate justice of the state supreme court, couldn’t get through to him, and now couldn’t use his pull to do anything else for him.

Our mom, the recovering alcoholic with an advanced degree in psych, turned him off with her psychobabble bullshit. I could smell her disappointment and her desperation and I could sense his disdain and disgust. Once she started in on him, he clicked her off, like bad Top-40 on a car radio.

All along, I kept on insisting to my parents that although I loved my brother, and although he was a royal fuck-up, they weren’t doing him any good by letting him slide. Letting him get over until his next run-in. Letting him getting away with shit time after time. They didn’t want to hear it. “What do you want from us, Danny? For us to give up on him?”

I understood. What the hell else is a parent to do?

Time after time he promised to stay away from bad influences – like that skank girlfriend who used drugs and used him like she used everything else. Right. He’d swear that he’d stay off of the stuff, stay sober, stay in rehab. Go to NA, AA. Right. He cried and whimpered like a bitch at all the right moments. Good going Bobby. You’re playing them like the puppet fools they are.

Everyone knew best. He knew best. No one knew nothing.

But five-to-seven was hard time. Prison time. Not like some hokey pokey municipal jail where Dad could stride in and sweet-talk some magistrate into letting him off on his own recognizance.

And when he got sick inside, when his kidneys and liver and then everything else started breaking down, shutting down, he was given the ultimate sentence.

Thanks Mom. Thanks Dad. And fuck me.

We all did a great job.

— Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 52, November 2019

Rev 4 / September 15, 2017

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September 2017…Copyright © 2017, Lloyd B. Abrams