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in the top right-hand drawer of his desk, along with cigarette papers and a nifty rolling device that produced joints as taut as Marlboros. All this was probably to the good—he didn’t have to pretend anymore in that creepy wide-eyed way of his—but he also insisted on talking about it. On the rare occasions that the four of us still had dinner together, my brother would proselytize about how cool it was to watch this or that movie, or listen to this or that record, while stoned. Marlies tended to be mildly deploring in a this-too-shall-pass sort of way, but Burck’s lips would thin and he’d chew his food with a kind of haggard bitterness.
    Now that my friends and I were freshmen in high school, we’d decided to smoke marijuana too, or at least try it. I didn’t tell Scott: now that he was a known stoner with a couple of car wrecks under his belt, I was indisputably the Good Son and wanted to keep it that way. The problem was getting the stuff. The three or four big dealers in school were all friends of my brother, and the whole crowd spent every spare moment on the “smoking porch” talking about getting high. Finally we bought a few joints for fifty cents apiece from one of the more peripheral friends, who called the stuff “killer Okie weed” and tried to entice us to buy a whole lid for ten dollars. We smoked the joints during halftime of a high school football game, sitting on the grass behind an unmanned concession stand.
    The next morning my brother stood in the bathroom door with a gloomy, browbeating look.
    “Don’t you start getting into this,” he said.
    “What’re you talking about?”
    “You know.”
    So the pot dealer had told my brother. I went back to brushing my teeth, while my brother stood there watching me.
    “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, and spat. “I didn’t even get off. I have no idea what the big deal is.”
    This was true. And who was my brother to say no? Who indeed. A few days later—perhaps that same day—he reversed himself, insisting that I make an “informed decision” about smoking pot.
    “I already have,” I said. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”
    “Just a few more times.”
    “No, thanks.”
    The following Monday, Scott pulled his Porsche into a little park on our way to school and began loading his bong. He made the thing hiss and gurgle and then passed it over. I took a hit and coughed explosively, soaking my lap with bong water. The stains didn’t show on my navy corduroys, but all the potheads at school observed that I “reeked,” while my sexy English teacher gave me a look of knowing admonishment. And I wasn’t even stoned.
    THAT FALL MY brother and I were in the high school play, Death Takes a Holiday . Scott had the lead as the dashing, vaguely foreign Prince Sirki (a.k.a. Death), and I was the sybaritic old Baron who engages the Prince in philosophical colloquies about a Life Well Spent. A few years back I’d been enrolled in the Children’s Theater Workshop at Oklahoma City University, and was deemed good enough to be picked out of a class of fifteen or so to play the juvenile role in a college production of Ah, Wilderness! Scott was contemptuous: “Acting is more than just memorizing lines,” he sneered, when he caught me practicing in front of a mirror. He thought I was copying him again. Around that time he’d been reading a lot of Salinger and hence wrote a short story about an impossibly precocious toddler who kills himself because the adult world is a terrible place. Inspired by his example, I began a story titled “Don’t Go into the Basement” about a monster in a basement. I was in the home stretch—the heroine was descending the steps, rather foolishly under the circumstances—when my brother, peeking over my shoulder, began reading aloud with leering disdain. Neither of our fiction-writing careers progressed much further.
    But we made a good team as actors, or rather we enjoyed working together. My brother was