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he’d made it all the way to forty-something.
    IN HIGH SCHOOL Scott showed promise as an actor, and perhaps his greatest triumph was his portrayal of the Hare in The Great Cross-Country Race . Grown to his final height of six-two, Scott looked like a lanky, long-eared marionette as he bounced around the stage on his big prosthetic Hare feet, mocking the Tortoise, who was played with a lot of comic lethargia by his best friend, Todd.
    I went to the cast party, I can’t remember why. Todd, who’d made such a lovable, folksy old Tortoise, lay on his back pouring vodka down his throat. Scott sat next to him on the floor, smoking, occasionally taking a swig from one of Todd’s bottles. Suddenly Todd blew puke in the air like a surprising geyser, spattering himself head to foot with half-digested finger food. He went on puking like that for the rest of the night, though never so dramatically as those first bursts. After that night, I rarely saw Todd completely sober outside of school; his eyes had a kind of nonscratch surface, and his mouth always hung open with quiet puzzlement. Tousled hair and all, he reminded me of Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter .
    For Scott’s sixteenth birthday he’d inherited the Porsche 914 from Marlies (who now drove a royal blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville), and one night he was driving with his usual lunatic abandon when he hit a slick spot on a winding road near the golf course and smashed sideways into a tree. My father had the car fixed, at great expense, and insisted my brother get an after-school job to pay for basic maintenance and build his character. So, for the rest of his time in high school, Scott worked as a busboy at one of the better restaurants in town, where a gay friend of the family was chef. Meanwhile he continued to crack up the Porsche every so often, claiming all the while that he was a superlative driver, the victim of rotten luck.
    LIFE WITH MY family was becoming a serious bummer for all concerned. Scott fought constantly with Marlies, who could hardly stand to be home without a cluster of buffering friends, though they too were beginning to pall. She compensated by spending more and more time in Norman, near the university, until finally my father bought her a one-bedroom condo there. For a while she was home maybe four times a week, then three, then for the odd weekend. By then I had a few more friends, and I stayed at their houses as often as possible.
    My brother’s comings and goings, more conspicuous when Marlies was around to wrangle with, became increasingly furtive. Mostly he holed up in his room with a friend or two, their conversation muted by booming music. If Burck knocked on the door—lightly at first, then pounding to be heard—the music would suddenly gulp out and Scott would appear with a look of alert, almost comic solicitude, wide-eyed and nodding, a performance so bizarre that my father began to go his own way too. He and I still played chess now and then, or ate a sad frozen meal together, talking about anything but family.
    Once I snuck into Scott’s room and glanced at his bankbook (he liked to leave this out in the open as a token of his independence): from a peak balance of a thousand dollars or so, his savings had wasted away in increments of thirty or forty a week, and now hovered around two hundred. This in spite of the fact that he never bought anything but records that I could see. Another time I picked up the phone in my room (Scott and I had a common “children’s line”) and overheard him talking to his friend Pat, whom everyone called “Paht” because of the affected way he pronounced his a ’s and because he smoked a lot of pot.
    “And then I stood up and it was like whoa —” Paht was saying. “I got the biggest rush, mahn, like you wouldn’t believe . . .”
    My heart was pounding when I put the phone down. I was still in eighth grade and didn’t know what “rush” meant in the druggy sense, but I could imagine. Another time I