A Tribute To My Late Brother Leo, Who Was Kind Of A Mean S.O.B.

I never did discover the exact name of my brother's lifelong illness. Given his physical condition as years progressed I suspect it was something like Muscular Dystrophy, but even to this day, several years after his death, I still don't know for sure.

When I was very young I would ask my mom. But she would always turn away and cry.

Whatever, it was one of those cruel diseases that robbed him slowly of muscle mass in his legs, allowing him a progressively shaky walk until just barely into young adulthood. When it at last sucked him down helplessly, turned his lower extremities finally into pulpy mush, and put him for the rest of his life into in a bulky wheelchair.

When he was young and could still get about somewhat under his own power, Leo steadfastly refused to admit or accept the oncoming inevitable. At ten years old he traded a couple of his old Christmas cap guns for a used bike and did his best to ride it.

Learning to ride wasn't really the problem. Leo could usually conquer most of what he put his mind to.

The difficulty arose when a short way into the ride his legs would start to tremble involuntarily so that he would sometimes take a terrible spill. His anguished and angry screams with each painful fall would often fill our country surroundings with an unnatural and terrible sound, like a wild animal that has been badly and surprisingly wounded.

The lot life had dealt him made Leo furious and filled him with an ever increasing and ongoing black and terrible rage. That rage made him mean. Mean and determined.

At sixteen he decided he was going to learn to drive, despite everyone's objections. My two older sisters had plunked together to buy a used beat-up car that would sufficiently get them back and forth to their factory jobs. It was this vehicle that Leo started to eye.

He did ask at first, but my sisters refused. You couldn't blame them. Leo was apt to be wild with anything he tried and my sisters needed that old automobile, a transport that they sometimes had to literally pray into life during foggy and cold winter mornings. They did their best to avoid Leo's increasingly demanding requests, but their efforts were proven futile in the end.

Leo one Saturday morning covertly swiped one of the car's keys. When everyone was asleep late that night he stole into the driver's side and off he went down our long winding graveled dirt road. The ensuing crash woke us. He barely got halfway down the road, not even anywhere near the highway, before he swerved into a large tree and crashed one side of the car's front end against the tall and massive oak's trunk.

My sisters, forced to drive the car then with a single headlight dangling until they could find the money to get it fixed, started hiding the two car keys. Leo, though, repeatedly found them, And tried to drive, again and again, attaining more success and skill with each terrifying attempt. Finally, my sisters started stowing the keys on their persons during the day and under their pillows at night.

It was weeks afterward when we all went to church with a neighbor, who came by to pick us up each Sunday, that Leo started to take the old auto out for longer drives. He learned quickly to make it safely down the dirt road to the highway and then onto isolated country roads.

This practice evolved, undetected, into a ritual that lasted a few months before anyone ever realized that Leo had figured out how to hotwire a car.

The discovery of this put an end to Leo's attempts to master driving. We thought.

By the time he was caught, though, Leo understood enough of the mechanical movements to try for his official driver's license. My uncle took him to the small state patrol station, where they denied Leo this privilege by stating that his handicap would make him a menace on the roads. This was around early to mid 1960's, long before laws to protect the disabled had come into play. And the hard fact was that yes, Leo could drive, but not well.

Leo, though, wouldn't give up. Until one day a new trooper came on board, a man from out of state who decided Leo could drive well enough at least to pass the test.

He issued Leo an official driver's license. Leo by then was eighteen and never prouder.

And, in fact, it wasn't his driving skills that lost Leo that license. By that time Leo, worsening physically with each day and filled with more and more fury at his deteriorating body, had started to drink beer, a lot of beer.

So that he wasn't able to stop while going through our small town that one day. Instead, he smashed the old used car he had managed to repair into a parked car's brand new open door just as the driver was getting out, taking off the door and very nearly taking out the driver at the same time.

Driving while "above the legal limit" was what actually got Leo's license revoked. Of course, that didn't stop him from driving. He didn't actually quit, furiously dodging the law on frequent outings from then on, until his legs finally and totally gave out when he was around twenty-two.

As time progressed and Leo's body grew weaker and weaker while confined to that wheelchair, he began to slowly accept his lot and mellow a bit. His rage over time started to decrease but his spirit of needing some adventure did not.

By the time I was eighteen I was living on my own in an apartment in a large city nearby. Leo decided to come and stay with me for a while.

He had ideas originally of us hitting the clubs, but I refused. Leo's rage had subsided somewhat as he grew older but it wasn't entirely gone. And alcohol only fueled that insane fury.

Leo's legs might have grown weaker and more and more useless, but he had spent many younger years building his upper body. So that his hands were like steel and his arms were muscled and like iron. Leo could do some major physical damage, even in his condition, with those iron arms and steel fists when he was mad. And Leo was a mean drunk.

Still, a big part of me understood and even shared his inner yearning for something, something else, something indefinable and just out of reach. I was young and poor and frustrated and overworked and I wanted fun. I wanted excitement. I longed myself to be wild. And free.

On weekends I would sometimes manage to scrape together enough money for us to go see this city sight or that one. Our favorite thing to do was drive for a couple of hours until we hit more rural surroundings where they had built an amusement park that was basically an urban safari.

As you drove through, wild animals, mostly emus and zebras and sometimes an aged tiger or lion, would wander near and even up to your car. We both loved the lion. We loved to simply sit and hear him roar. Hearing that lion roar, even once, would make the whole trip worthwhile for both of us.

When I was broke on other weekends and if the weather was pretty I would push and push, grunting and sweating and usually swearing, until I had Leo in his bulky old wheelchair at the top of a very steep grassy hill that was behind my apartment complex. Once there and in position, Leo would release the wheelchair brake he had just set and I would give his chair a big push from the back.

Then, as his chair started picking up momentum, I would jump on the back and hold on for dear life. We would go flying, screaming and laughing against the wind, our mouths wide open and hair blowing back, down down down the hill, until one or usually both of us would go tumbling "arse over teakettle." Then, both of us laughing so hard it hurt, we would struggle upward until, between the two of us, we would somehow manage to get Leo upright and into his chair again.

I once overheard the statement, "God always takes care of little children and fools." I guess that's right, because I still don't know how we didn't get hurt with such foolish fun. But neither one of us ever got any more than a few scrapes or bruises, which seemed a small price to pay for a little bit of over the top excitement then.

One Sunday some neighbors who had been spying called the police, telling them I was endangering a disabled man. One young cop came and when he discovered that we were both of age, Leo in fact being several years older than myself, he decided there was no law being broken.

Plus, he understood. Both Leo and I were living mundane, hard and rather boring lives, Leo more so than myself. If we had to manufacture our own thrills by literally throwing ourselves occasionally, life over limb, down a steep grassy slope then so be it.

Time went on. Leo moved back eventually to the farmhouse where my aging parents cared for him while I married a sailor, who I followed to ports unknown. Years passed, on and on, until my dad died in late age, leaving just my mom and Leo at last to live in that sprawling and aging mountain home. Leo and my mom soon became like an old married couple themselves, their daily routine etched in stone.

Each day my mom would rise at nine, would cook and clean. Then, in the evenings, she and Leo would fire up the VCR and watch movies. My mom loved animal flicks, they both never tired of John Wayne westerns, but somewhere in each night's fare, each and every night, there would always be a showing of the movie Crocodile Dundee. When I would manage to visit on weekends we all would watch it together.

I understood. As time progressed both Leo and my mom were growing older and sicker. And there was nothing either could do to fight the oncoming ravages of age.

So each night they managed to put these thoughts aside for a little while, an hour or so at least, as they lived vicariously through the swashbuckling antics of Crocodile Dundee. He was a larger-than-life character who was strong and tall and brave and who easily protected the pretty girl while at the same time, with the assistance of a comic sidekick, subdued crocs and tricked and laughingly beat all the bad guys.

Several years ago my mom died after a prolonged illness. Leo, more disabled than ever and so not able to manage on his own, went to live in a nursing home. Where, from his bed, he watched his movies on DVDs on a newer television.

Until that year when he himself willingly signed a Do Not Resuscitate order, had a stroke and died. The childhood disease that he had grabbled with finally took its ultimate toil. At 60 he passed from this world as an old and crippled man.

"I hope he's at peace," my uncle said at Leo's funeral.

I didn't say anything then. But you know what?
I hope he's not at peace.

I hope wherever he's at right now that he's swinging through trees and jumping easily into and over beat up old safari trucks. I hope he has a large knife between his teeth and that he's sneaking and trekking through some wild and bushy and severely dangerous Australian outback .

I hope wherever he's at right now that, with the assistance of a comic sidekick, he is good-naturedly tricking and beating all the bad guys, all while holding the pretty girl protectively to his strong and muscled side.

I hope wherever he's at right now that he's laughing while wrestling with some sharp-toothed and rugged wild beast that could easily take his head off with one large bite

I hope wherever he's at right now that he's not at peace.

I hope wherever he's at right now that he's Crocodile Dundee