Lin Christie

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have a brother. Leslie Bryan was born when I was just twenty months old. That’s not to say that I don’t have some vague fluttering of memories prior the arrival of this little Reality Check. I call him that because, prior to his invasion of my perfect little world, I was the Center of the Universe. The Queen Bee. The Only Child. Until suddenly, I wasn’t.

And there he is. A Reality Check. I was no longer The Reason the World Turned. I had to learn to Share. I had to Share my toys. I had to Share my grandparents. I had to Share Mommy and Daddy. And according to all reports, I didn’t necessarily want to Share. I certainly seemed to have liked things so much better before this little pee-and-poop machine arrived.

But eventually, I kind of got used to him. I mean, what’s not to like? At first, he was kind of a Mini-Me. If I did something, he wanted to do it, too. Nothing like a little Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery to boost an already over-inflated ego. Gradually, however, Les began to grow a personality of his own and I had an epiphany: as fun as it had been having a Junior Shadow following me around, it was even better to have a cohort. Or as my parents liked to call him, my Co-Conspirator. 

Les became my playmate, my accomplice, my best friend. We were inseparable. Sure, there were two more siblings that arrived in rapid succession. Colleen, however, was a grave disappointment, as she was such a girly-girl and all that. And Vickie — well, Vickie was a baby and we were big kids, all of four and five when she was born. We couldn’t be seen in the company of a baby.

Les and I spent our days in the saddle as we rode in the posse to capture the bad guys who had just robbed the bank, or crawled through the woods on our bellies while searching the skies for German planes which we would then shoot down using our anti-aircraft guns (cleverly disguised as fallen tree branches.) We drove race cars at the Indy 500 and played one-on-one football for Notre Dame — never mind that there were two of us, playing against each other. Or that we weren’t Catholic and would never be able to afford to attend a private university. In our own backyard, we both played football for Notre Dame.

 When I was in the 5th grade, I marched my bossy little 10-year-old butt down to the principal’s office and told her I wanted to stage a production of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” No, I didn’t ask. I told. And she said yes, although it came as no surprise to me. (Jeez. It really is a wonder no one ever told me no.) So I proceeded to direct the theatrical masterpiece, starring Les as the Grinch, Colleen as Max the Dog, and Vickie as Cindy Lou Who. I, of course, was the narrator. Our debut at the all-school assembly was a roaring success. Les’s performance as the Grinch has been matched only by the late, great Boris Karloff.

In some ways, the Grinch was a perfect role for Les. Not the Early in the Story Grinch. Les was the Post-Heart-Growing-Three-Sizes Grinch. Generous almost to a fault, kind beyond reason, considerate without effort. Grace. Grace and style. That’s what he had. He could make a stranger feel like a friend and a friend feel like family. When Les was a freshman in college, we had some friends — fellow students — who couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. Les thought that was a darn shame, damn near criminal. So he bought the guys a tree, lights, and couple boxes of ornaments. He also bought them a half-rick of wood for the fireplace in their apartment and some food for Christmas dinner. Merry Christmas.

Something I didn’t realize until it was too late to prevent it was that Les had been building solid siblingships with both Colleen and Vickie. As much as the two of us hung out, he had apparently found time to be a great big brother to our younger sibs, something I didn’t manage to do awfully well until I was in high school and beyond. But here was Les, my best friend, also being best friends with Colleen, and with Vickie, too. I still don’t know how he did that!

Armed with a wicked sense of humor, my brother also had a bit of a mischievous streak in him. He always seemed to be around when our high school drama teacher’s MG Midget got turned sideways and blocked in between two parked cars or when the youth minister at church had his Midget suddenly parked on the sidewalk. Anyone who owned a Midget was just asking for trouble when Les and his buddies were around. They could carry a small car a number of feet without breaking a sweat.

One of my favorite photographs of him shows Les sitting in a fountain at college, surrounded by a sea of bubbles. No one knows how that fountain got filled with bubbles. And anyway, the statute of limitations has expired. Les, long hair and scraggly beard white with suds, has the biggest, most joyful grin on his face, almost like he might have had information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s) of the fountain soaping. But that’s just conjecture on my part.

More than just a smart-ass, Les was also scary-smart, the kind of smart that was well beyond his years. He was also a voracious reader. I read quite a bit, but that boy devoured books. You never saw him without a book within arm’s length. And he was always trying to get me to read the stuff that he liked: Slaughterhouse-Five. Future Shock. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He was reading those books at fifteen or sixteen. On the other hand, I really had to work at it to understand Vonnegut’s voice when I started reading him in college. My brother was simply a brain with legs.

One of my best memories of Les was from the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. A couple years before, he’d pestered me until I finally acquiesced and read The Hobbit. I loved it, but it wasn’t enough to turn me into the geek you see before you today. From the minute I finished that book, Les had been bugging me to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I thought about it, but it was too long. I wasn’t sure if I could make that kind of time commitment to ONE story. But one day at the beginning of summer, he got tired of trying to cajole me. Instead, that morning he marching into my room, book in hand, parked himself on the throw pillow on the floor and issued the following instruction: “Sit.” He opened his copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, and began reading aloud. Our ritual thus established, we began a three-book reading odyssey lasted nearly all summer.

Les died suddenly, unexpectedly, in January of 1981. He was home for Christmas Break, between semesters at Northeastern Oklahoma State University, where he was a technical theater major, with an emphasis on lighting and light design. He and Colleen had been out that evening with one of her friends to see a play, and he had gone to his room to go to bed. When Mom passed his door, she heard him groaning so she looked in and found him on the floor. Dad called the ambulance and he was transported to the hospital. The next morning–after what was, for me, a sleepless night–my aunt and uncle came out to pick us girls up to take us to see him. Les had two carotid aneurysms which had burst nearly simultaneously. He basically bled to death inside his head. He was 20 years old.

My parents went through the motions and did what had to be done. They made arrangements to bury their only son. They insisted that we go to the funeral home the night before the funeral to view the body so it wouldn’t be a shock to us the next day. I had been preparing myself mentally for the moment all day. I thought I was strong, that I was prepared for anything as I entered the viewing room, but I was wrong. As I stared at the clean-cut, neatly shaven boy in the casket–the boy who was wearing a suit, something my brother never did–I was furious. I was so angry at my parents for cutting Les’s hair. For shaving his beard. For dressing him in a clown suit instead of his jeans and a t-shirt. For having his earring removed. This wasn’t my brother. This was a hollow, empty shell of a person who didn’t exist. A person who had never existed.

It took me a long time to forgive my parents for that. I finally realized that they were simply trying to recapture their little boy. The boy who wore his hair in a military style, parted on the right and slicked back with Brylcreem. The little boy who, when his hair was fixed that way, looked just like his Daddy.

We buried him on January 20th–the first inaugural of Ronald Reagan. It was so cold that day. Snow covered the ground. The roads were icy. And yet, a line of cars over three miles long followed the hearse bearing my brother’s body as it crawled the ten miles from the church to the graveside. He was so well-loved that people were willing to trudge out in miserable weather to tell him good-bye and wish him bon voyage. A fitting tribute to the man he was.

August 27th marks the anniversary of his birth, and I’m remembering my brother–his warmth, his kindness, his goodness. My parents wanted to allow him to be as generous in death as he had been in life. To that end, they intended to donate his organs to help others. However, because of the circumstances of his death, most of his organs were not suitable for transplant. But Les’s eyes were acceptable, and my parents donated them.

Les had the most unusual irises. All of us–Dad and Mom and all four of us kids–had blue eyes. But each of Les’s pupils was a slightly different shade of blue and both were flecked with gold. For years, I looked into the eyes of strangers, hoping to find my brother looking back at me.

He never has.

I miss you, my brother. To this day, I’ve never reread The Lord of the Rings. Those books are in your voice, and I don’t want to risk losing that.