Jim Goad - The Bomb Inside My Brain

My oldest brother was twenty-five when he had the life stabbed out of him, but I was only eight. Ive always known that he was murdered in Paris in 1969. What I didnt learn until recently was that his whole life was only a dress rehearsal for that ugly final act.

My other brother Johnny, whos thirteen years older than me and knew my oldest brother far better than I did, has helped me fill in a lot of the blank, bleak details.

Dad met mom at a USO Dance in Philly, accidentally knocked her up, and was in Europe fighting the Nazis when informed that hed gotten her pregnant. Their first baby was born out of wedlock.

His legal name was Alton Howard Goad, Jr., but all we ever called him was Bucky.

Bucky was different from 99 percent of us because he couldnt hear or talk. My mother insisted that he was born deaf, but Johnny now tells me she was lying. While dad was off dropping bombs on the Krauts, the infant Bucky came down with scarlet fever, which can begin to cause hearing damage if left untreated more than 18 days. Eighteen days is a long time to passively watch ones infant suffer. My mother, not God, slammed the doors shut on Buckys ears and then blamed it on God.

Back then, the disabled werent given government checks and awarded luxury box seats in the coliseum of public respect. They were treated more like freaksopenly mocked and even abused while the crowd laughed and cheered. Johnny says that while Bucky was friendly to everyone, society mostly kept its distance.

His looks didnt help. Whereas Johnny was an athletic, cliff-diving, hot-rodding greaser, Bucky was shy, runty, and withdrawn. In the hippie-dippy multicolored DayGlo flower-power year of 1969, Bucky still looked like a quaint black-and-white photo from 1949tightly barbered hair slicked down with a smear of VO5, black-rimmed Coke-bottle glasses, and a black undertakers suit with a white shirt and skinny black tie. If youre old enough to remember Wally Cox, the original Mister Peepers, he looked almost identical to Wally Cox. Or picture a much meeker Elvis Costello with a faint, pathetic mustache. He was not an alpha male or even a beta. He was full-blooded omega.

Johnny says that my father treated Bucky like a disappointment. An embarrassment. A burden. A marriage trap. A prison sentence. Things often came to blows. Objects were smashed into faces. Stitches were required. Johnny found himself having to pounce on my father to stop him from pounding on Bucky.

The outside world was no kinder. During his teens in our bricks-and-cement all-Catholic Mick-and-Dago neighborhood, rumor had it that a quartet of guys Buckys age would habitually beat him up or force him to blow them to spare him from yet another thrashing. He was their little deaf-and-dumb punching bag and plaything.

Johnny says that with the way Bucky was treated, its a miracle he never became a serial killer. But he says Bucky never acted bitter, mean, or violent. Time and time again after being tricked, robbed, shit on, and abused, he merely dusted himself off and came back naively seeking kindness.

He never had friends or girlfriends. His few acquaintances always turned out to be people who were trying to squeeze him for a favor. Mostly he lived absolutely alone and in total silence.

Bucky started drifting around the country. Maybe he thought hed find some kindness somewhere out there. I remember seeing one Polaroid self-portrait after the next of him sitting sullenly and slump-shouldered in some lonely motel room, the cameras lens the only thing looking back at him.

Florida police were called to one of those motel rooms after witnesses heard a gunshot. The cops found Bucky alive and another man dead. They also found a revolver legally registered to Bucky. Although he vainly screamed through his sign-language fingers that his new friend had been playing with his gun when it accidentally fired, they hauled his deaf-and-dumb ass straight to jail.

Hed send letters from jail that he was having nightmares about demons slipping in through his cell bars to attack him. He also wrote that while awake, real living humans would come into his cell to either beat him down or rape him. And even though the passages about dream-demons and the paragraphs about real-life human assailants were on separate pages or sometimes in different letters entirely, my mother pretended it was all dreams. She never could bring herself to admit what was happening to him.

After eighteen months, investigators concluded that Buckys alibi was truethe stranger hed met on the road had shot himself. So after Bucky endured an eighteen-month marathon of beatings and rapes and nightmares, they threw Bucky back onto the street, no apologies.

Another death came quickly.

Shortly after returning to Pennsylvania, he accidentally drove into a pedestrian and killed him. The cops believed his story that time, and he wasnt arrested.

And then came the final act.

The night before he left for his Paris vacation, my mother wrote a warning to Bucky on the back of an envelope: DONT TRUST ANYONE! Underneath that, Bucky wrote back in jest: OVER 30! At the time, Dont trust anyone over 30 was a popular hippie slogan.

Whoever killed him was never caught, so I dont know if they were over thirty. But he obviously trusted them.

His corpse, pecked apart with over thirty knife wounds, was found the morning after the night he arrived in Paris about a hundred yards from his rent-a-car. A French trucker spotted his bloody body in a ditch along the River Seine. Bucky had also been strangled with his own belt. His face had been bashed beyond recognition.

A diamond ring was missing from his finger. His cameras were retrieved along the river bank, their casings open and with the film removed. Earlier in the evening, he apparently had photographed whoever wound up killing him.

We got a telegram from French authorities on a Friday threatening that if we didnt wire them fifteen hundred dollars by Monday, theyd toss his carcass in the trash. We appealed to our local Catholic parish for the fifteen hundred, which, through inflations magic, translates to over ten thousand dollars today.

On September 26th, two weeks after Buckys murder, we got a postcard hed sent from Paris. Ill see you on the twenty-seventh, he promised.

On the 27th, he arrived in a wooden box. Air France honored his return ticket and flew his cadaver back in their cargo section at no charge. French authorities sent documents claiming theyd autopsied and embalmed his body. They were lying. He showed up at Philly International still wearing the bloody shirt in which hed been murdered. His corpse was already decaying. The sight was so ghastly, the family mortician wouldnt let us see him. It was a closed-casket wake. The French had extorted ten grand from us merely for cramming Bucky in a box and shoving him on a plane. There was to be no resting in peace for him or us.

Buckys murder was the day all the kiddie cartoons ended for me. It punched a radioactive black hole through my young mind. Both my grandmothers died around the same time, so at eight, my brain was being punctured and re-punctured with death. I put down the toys and realized that none of our stories has a happy ending.