My Brother The Asshole, Cory Hunt [the ebook reader .txt] 📗

My Brother The Asshole

At four years old, I had all of the qualities that mothers dream about in their daughters. I was sensitive, I loved picking flowers, and cats were my favorite animals. Unfortunately, I was a boy and, despite the haircut my mom had given me, I wasn’t even gay.

The first couple of years of my life, I spent my afternoons doing somersaults in the front yard and pondering the shapes of clouds. Most boys my age were playing with army men and fighting their friends, but I’d cry at the thought of a scraped knee. Then Chris was born. Ironically, my younger brother was the first person to force me to man up.

Chris was a turd of a kid. He was fat, mean and threw temper tantrums like they were baseballs. When you’re one year old, you aren’t too concerned with your blubber, so he ate like it was going out of style. His face was constantly covered in snot and pieces of food. As time went on, my parents grew increasingly impressed with Chris’s ability to ingest cuisine. As a result, they began holding regular hard-boiled egg eating contests (Chris vs. his previous record). He was disgusting.

From the very first time we met, it was clear that he did not like me. When my parents brought him home from the hospital, I was eager to hold my new little brother. My mom directed me,

“Sit down on the couch and we’ll let you meet him.”

I scrambled up onto the brown corduroy couch and tried to contain my excitement. When Mom placed him into my arms, I stared at his dark hair, big blue eyes and pale skin and told him that I loved him. He threw up on me. At first, I thought it was an accident. Then I got to know him.

By the time Chris was two, he was kicking my ass left and right. He’d hit me, pull my hair and was just a prick in general. I was still a pussy, so when he’d attack me, I’d start crying and run to my mom. This happened several times a day. Trouble really started when Chris entered his biting phase. Before that, my parents shrugged off the toddler punches and hair pulling I was forced to endure, but when he was leaving teeth marks on me, it became a different story.

Chris bit everything: people, animals, tables and other furniture. If something was nearby, he was going to bite it. Unfortunately for me, I was nearby a lot. I was still a pretty big wiener, so I never stood up for myself. It turned into a rather predictable routine: Chris would bite me, I’d start crying, I’d run to my mom and tell on him, and then she’d try to discipline him, but it wouldn’t work.

One day, I was having the time of my life watching Inspector Gadget

. Given my sensitive nature, I identified most closely with Penny. Chris was probably more along the lines of Dr. Claw. For the first ten minutes of the episode, I was by myself and marveled at Penny’s skills and the inspector’s gadgets. Then my mom came in.

“Cory, I’m going to make some dinner, so your brother is going to watch some television with you.”

I scooted over the cords on the couch to allow her enough room to place Chris down between the armrest and me. She set him down and made her way into the kitchen. I moved closer to him and put my arm around him to let him know that I loved him. Chris sank his teeth into my arm to let me know that he hated me.

I immediately ripped my arm away, started bawling, jumped off the couch and burst into the kitchen to tell on him.

“Mommy, Chris bit me! It hurts!”

She was tired of running through this everyday event. She grabbed me by my arm and dragged me back into the living room. Through gritted teeth, she said,

“Alright, we are not going to do this anymore. We’re going to take care of this once and for all!”

As she dragged me, I tried to keep up, but it was useless. My feet came out from under me and I began crying harder. When she made it to the couch, she slung me by my arm onto the couch next to Chris. She gave us both hard looks, then focused her attention on Chris.

“I have had enough of this. Chris, you need to stop biting people and, maybe if you know what it feels like, you’ll stop.”

She slid her gaze over to me. For some reason, I felt like I was in trouble, even though I’d just been attacked like I was a hard-boiled egg caught in the middle of one of his eating contests.

“Cory, you need to start standing up for yourself. You are going to bite Chris on the arm, just like he did to you.”

Momentarily, I stopped my crying. I was overcome with confusion. I was just the victim of an attack, now I was going to be forced to be involved in the punishment. It was like forcing a burglary victim to break into someone else’s house and steal their stuff back. I now safely assume that my mom didn’t get this idea from any parenting book.

Since I was naturally a sensitive kid, the thought of exacting physical retribution on another made me far more upset than the act of me being physically harmed, so I resumed my bawling even harder than before. With tears streaming down my face, I forced out,

“But I don’t want to bite Chris! He’s my brother!”

My mom saw the turmoil she was putting me through and she lost it. She began sobbing. I finally understood where I got my pussy ass attitude. She collected herself long enough to threaten me.

“You have to bite him or I am going to give you a spanking.”

I was even more surprised. This wasn’t something that even came close to resembling justice. I had just been attacked, and I was going to be attacked again if I refused to attack my attacker. It made no sense that me, as the victim of the crime, was going to be punished. While I was too stupid to explain what was wrong with this, I expressed it in the best way I knew how.

“But that’s not fair!”

My mom tried her best to explain to me why it was fair, but she was unsuccessful. Ultimately, my decision came down to whether or not I wanted to get spanked. Not surprisingly, I decided that not being spanked was better than being spanked, so I agreed to make Chris pay. I nodded at her to let her know I was ready.

As she faced us, Chris sat against the armrest to her left with me directly next to him on her right. She grabbed his left arm and motioned for me to bite it. I wiped away my tears and began leaning in, slowly opening my mouth, then I stopped. My natural instincts to care for my brother (even if he was a shithead) took over. I looked up at Mom,

“I don’t want to bite him.”

She did her best to look stern, but it was pretty pathetic with the tears streaming down her cheeks. Between sobs, she forced out,

“Do you…want…a spanking?”

As stated previously, I did not want a spanking. A bite on the arm was enough physical punishment for me in one day. Again, I leaned in to bite Chris as my mom held his left arm stretched out for me to bite. Somehow, we had both forgotten that Chris was a sneaky little bastard. In the time we’d spent arguing, he’d discovered a tape measure and hidden it between his right hand and the couch.

Just as my teeth were about to make contact with his skin, Chris brought out his secret weapon. With all the force he could muster, he swung his right hand, holding the tape measure, directly into my forehead. The force of the tape measure against my skull knocked me senseless. I flopped off of the couch and crumbled onto the floor. I bawled like a four-year old who’s just been clocked in the face with a tape measure. Chris peered his head off the edge of the couch and, for the first time all day, smiled at me.

Something changed in me that day. Chris was rubbing off on me. It was something he would live to regret. It wasn’t long before I was peeing in squirt guns and shooting him, tripping him for no reason and playing the stereotypical role of the asshole older brother. Sadly for me, Chris wasn’t one to give up.

I made it to six and he made it to four without either of us dying, but it wasn’t for lack of effort on either side. He was about to step up the war a notch. We were over at my great grandmother’s house for dinner when we decided to into the backyard for a game of tag with some of the neighbor kids.

The backyard was exactly what I picture when I think of an old person’s backyard. The lawn was small, covered in various garden sculptures, pots and a miniature greenhouse. The center of the lawn had a large cement birdbath that looked like something you’d buy on Ebay as a joke gift. The edge of the yard was covered in all kinds of plants, brown and orange lawn chairs, and a cathouse for an extremely overweight cat named Bootsy.

Chris was the youngest, the fattest and the slowest, so it should come as no surprise that he was “it” most of the time. The more he ran and missed tagging anyone, the more he frowned and bit down on his lower lip. The frustration on his face grew increasingly obvious and, as the older brother, I felt it was my duty to push him to his breaking point.

I ran near him, turned around, and then began running backwards to mock his weight problem,

“Hey Fatso! Can’t catch me!”

Given that I was only six, I kind of sucked at running backwards, so he quickly gained on me. By the time I had gotten back to running forwards, he had caught up to me. I’d successfully pushed him to his breaking point, but it didn’t work out quite as I had planned. I had hoped that his overwhelming aggravation, hatred of fat jokes and increasing dislike of me would cause him to crumble into tears. Unfortunately, his anger manifested in another way.

When he caught up to me, he decided that, rather than simply tagging me, he would take another route. He mustered up all of his strength and shoved me, as hard as he could, in the