The Truth

(Mom: if you're reading this, this is how it really happened.)

It all started at our neighbor Paul's bulk garbage pile. Yes, that's right. Foraging for cool stuff to use for our "secret club," my brothers, twins circa four years old in 1996, and me, eight-ish, inspected our mystery neighbor's useless crap. (Mystery neighbor was enigmatic because to this day, NO ONE in my family knows what he did for a living, despite the fact that we all spied on him. Unfortunately, his blinds were usually closed). Good and buried under crates of junk was our shining prize: a computer. Looking back, this computer probably couldn't have even done division; it was one of those desktops that had the processor built into the monitor. But we didn't care. We could use it. For club records, taking over satellites, that sort of thing.

We carried it back to our treetop fortress. Now, I use the term "treetop fortress" quite liberally; in reality, it was a rope
tied with a half hitch onto a thick tree branch that led to... nothing.We just hung out in a tree. BUT, we did hang out in a tree with a computer monitor (which was not secured whatsoever). We decided that if we were going to hack the planet, we'd need our keyboard and mouse up there as well. Boss handed them to me, I tied the cords to a thinner tree branch—after all, every one knows that trees transmit input signals better through electrostatic conduction.

Before continuing, it is important to note that in a family with six (or possibly seven, I can’t remember if Kaggle was born yet or not) children aged between 2 and 10, there are bound to be conflicts. For us kids, these conflicts got so intense that we would even resort to the feudal system; the older kids chose sides, and made the younger ones lesser nobles (if they previously did something nice for the elder) or serfs (obligating them to do the elder's bidding in the near future). Either way, sides were chosen on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And Chief and Boss were almost always split up.

Another sidebar: Being the oldest male, I was the martial law among my siblings. I took karate for a few years (because Dad thought it’d be a good way to deal with my aggression), until I wrote the letters F-u-K on the bare sheetrock wall in the stairwell in 5 different places. Needless to say, after that incident my karate days were over—I was banned from using karate on my siblings as well.

Anyway, once we had established our lair, it was now time to choose our allegiances. To us, what that meant was, "who are we going to exclude from our fun today?" Earlier in the week, Chief blamed our mutual idea to ride down the stairs in a laundry bucket on me. Since I could no longer use force to show him the error of his ways, I had
asked Boss to push him down the stairs. That day, he did my bidding; thus, he was to be chosen for the secret club on the day that we found the computer.

Boss climbed up, and Chief whined like a little bitch. He was right to be angry—first he told the truth to Mom and got pushed down the stairs, then he was excluded from the club. Well, guess what, Chief? Life isn't fair, you fucking rat bastard.

So with the lowest branch at six feet above the ground and our rope pulled up, he had no way of getting into our treetop fortress. Chief didn't leave though; he kept moping and whining at the base of the tree like a little dog. I turned and yelled for him to get away, he was "stoopid" and we didn't want "stoopid" people in our club. In the course of belittling him, the computer's keyboard slid off my lap and swung down under the branch that it was tied to, hanging by its cord. It dangled about a foot above Chief's head. Now was his chance! He could climb up the keyboard into the tree and get into the club!

He grabbed for the keyboard and missed. Frantic, I tried to pull the hardware up by its cord, but I was too late. His second effort was successful - he latched onto the keyboard and pulled as hard as he could. He was practically hanging on it, like a nervous kid on a rope swing for the first time.

All of a sudden, the cord started to lengthen. The tan sheathing had separated from the wires where they met the keyboard. Quicker than I could react, the wires snapped and the keyboard dropped like a stack of bricks. Chief was immediately under it. The corner of the keyboard clocked him in the back of the head - I blinked once and he was on the ground, screaming in pain and clutching his bleeding skull. I couldn't see the gash, but I knew it was bad. Real bad. He was at the pitch that you only use when see lots of blood on your hands and can't see the damage, but it hurts like hell.

Instinctively, we bolted for the back door. He knew that Mom was inside, and so did we. Not even considering our fates as instigators, Boss and I followed Chief inside to our loving, enduring nurse of a mother. But today was Sunday, and on Sundays Mom slept all day because she worked the night shift the night before.

Waking Mom up to a bleeding four-year-old a full five hours before she wanted to get up was like punching a sleeping dragon in the ear, dumping ice water all over him, then calling his sister a nappy-headed ho. Furious doesn't describe my mom at that point in time; she was more along the lines of that "question mark territory," like when people respond to a 10-scale question with "I'm a 12!" That's where my mom was on the 10-scale of anger—my best guess is genocidal.

As soon as she saw blood, Boss and I were Mom-arm-barred into a wall. Chief tried to run behind her, but the fact that her fist clutched his arm during her adrenaline-fueled sprint to the kitchen made him look like a rag doll being dragged behind a wagon.

Boss and I sat at the kitchen table as she cleaned Chief's gash. And oh, what a gash it was! Chief, it's a good thing you have a fat fucking head, otherwise that San Andreas fault on the back of your dome might have cracked your big dumb skull open.

There's one thing that's very important to note about our mother. At this point, she had been called in to the emergency room in the middle of the night for years to see car accident victims on her table, which has made her harder than a coffin nail. This might as well be a skinned knee, compared with what she's fixed before. But being cool under pressure was not good in this case. It just meant that while her hands were cleaning the gaping hole in the back of Chief's head, she could look at Boss and I and scream for 10 minutes solid without looking back at Chief

When she was done with us almost an hour later, I wasn't even angry with Chief anymore. She screamed at us so much, I even thought that the entire thing was my fault. It was like Gestapo coercion, mind-fuck stuff—where the interrogator forces false confessions and makes the innocent absolutely certain that they are guilty, all through words. Yeah, it really does work, especially on eight-year-olds.

Long story short, mom procured a body staple gun from the hospital and stapled the back of Chief's head shut without anesthesia. Read it over for effect if you have to.

Chief had a concussion. For those who don't know the medical side of that, it means that you get to miss school for however long you want, and people bring you really cool gifts because they feel bad for you. Like the 12-inch-tall Mr. Freeze action figure that Dad got Chief from Canal Street. Leave it to Chief to milk people for everything they're worth. Fucking con man.

No, I'm not bitter. ^^

[Alternate ending—the editor remembers Mom being at work, and surprisingly, she was not shocked when Dad called on the way to the hospital to tell her that her son had a concussion, which was actually a smarter decision on his part, since he couldn’t get reamed out while she was at work.]