Tibby Fielding
How To Be A Good Brother
Going home at end of the school day meant chaos in all forms, and I never knew what to
expect. One day on my way home from school, my brothers zoomed past the school bus riding
our living room couch down the street. The other kids were pointing and laughing and shocked;
it was just another day at the Fielding’s, I thought. I could see my brothers were having a blast;
even my golden retriever Janie loved the wind whipping through her hair. My brothers and all
their friends had attached skateboard trucks to the bottom of our living room couch. My mother
was thrilled. My two older brothers, Eliot (six years older) and Gus (three years older) were my
“guardians,” although you could hardly call them that; nonetheless they were deemed
responsible until Mom came home from work. I grew up in a typical neighborhood with houses
stuffed one next to the other. My home was located at the bottom of a very large hill, which
aided in plenty of our adventures. As I stepped off the school bus, my struggle to survive began.
I cannot recall a day that I wasn’t either ransacked with paintball guns or tied up to a tree, a
chair, a basketball pole, etc. I had been locked in our basement and our filthy crawlspace located
underneath the house for hours on end to suffer and scream like a caged pterodactyl until I was
reluctantly released. Well I must say, after being treated like a wild beast, I sort of became one.
Growing into my beastly form, I acted more like a boy. I was beaten around by my
brothers and therefore learned how to fight back. Gus, the youngest of two my brothers, and I
would skateboard around the neighborhood beating up boys that made fun of me at school. And I
loved it. Eliot and Gus were both wrestlers and football players so they knew exactly how to tie
me up into knots with my feet behind my head until I begged for mercy-- or my mom came to
the rescue. I was power-bombed in the couch on a daily basis and tossed around like a hacky-
sack. I could never just walk into the kitchen for a snack without epic warfare. Eliot and I
practiced fake kung fu while I struggled to squirm past him and gain access to the fridge for a
glass of his worshiped pink Kool-Aid. Even when I snagged a glass of his strawberry-kiwi KoolAid without confrontation, Eliot chased me around the house whipping wet sponges and kitchen
towels at me, screaming, “Gimme my pink Kool-Aid!” On several occasions, I was forced to
play food-critic for Gus-- the aspiring young chef. I had no choice but to knock back blended
concoctions with Gus’s choice of delightful ingredients such as dog biscuits, toothpaste,
mayonnaise, relish, rotten bananas, graham crackers, Cheetos, and basically anything that didn’t
go together, I had to drink it.
Eliot and Gus liked firecrackers, knives and duct tape, just like any other teenaged boys.
The number of times I could have had my body parts blown off from firecracker sneak attacks
was quite possibly endless. I am lucky to have survived without permanent physical damage.
One evening, I was being the typical annoying little “shitster”(as my brothers referred to me). I
was bugging my brothers, when all of a sudden; they tackled me from both sides and held me
down to the floor. Eliot and Gus each pulled out a huge roll of duct tape and they managed to
literally tape me to the floor. I was stuck there while they videotaped me suffering like an insect
stuck in a spider’s web. If they weren’t torturing me physically, they were mentally tormenting
me. On several accounts I was chased around the house with butcher knives and tube socks
stuffed to make a perfect weapon for beating up little sisters. “Homie don’t play that game,”
Eliot would yell as he taunted me. When I was too freaked out, I would escape and hide in my
sanctuary, the far right corner of my mother’s closet behind her old hideous 80’s bridesmaids
dresses and her plaid wool skirts that looked like she had come from a convent. However, while
terrified and hiding I was always plotting my revenge.
As a child, I was very good at planning mischievous schemes, but they usually involved
the help of one brother, whichever I wasn’t currently at war with. When Gus hit middle school,
he was usually the last one home everyday, giving me time to arrange my next counter attack.
On one particular sunny spring day, Eliot (my elder brother) and I decided to gang up on Gus
and carry out one of my master plans. We ran around the house locking all the doors except the
front, and we quickly rummaged through the cabinets and found the biggest cooking pot in the
house. Next, we removed the window screen in my parent’s bathroom, which was located
directly above the front door to my house. We had to act quickly before Gus came home. Eliot
and I filled the cooking pot to the brim with toilet water-- from Dad’s toilet. The school bus
pulled away as Gus walked up the driveway; the anticipation was killing us. Just as he stepped
on to the front porch, we whipped open the blinds and SPLASHED all the toilet water on Gus.
We couldn’t contain our laughter or the fact that we had just poured gallons of stagnant toilet
water him; “priceless revenge,” I snickered.
Of course the torture from my brothers went on for years. By age fifteen I had been
subjected to riding at speeds far over one hundred miles per hour in Eliot’s car, while screaming
and crying and begging him to stop. I had also been shot with a bb gun (which is very painful),
and drowned more than once in the swimming pool while Gus and his friends played “Tibby
Tipping,” which was just a fancy name for immersing me under water. Gus had also pushed me
in a frozen lake in the middle of winter and I thought I was going to die of hypothermia. I am
surprised that my face is not covered in lumps and scars. I have been “accidentally” kicked in the
face, punched in the face, Nintendo-64 controllered in the face, and whacked with a whiffle ball
bat several times in the head. But it’s okay, they were “just accidents,” right?
Although my brothers tortured me throughout my childhood, they always took care of me
when I needed it. When I broke my arm in kindergarten, which surprisingly was not their fault,
Gus slept on my bedroom floor for a month so that if I needed anything at all he was my personal
slave. My brothers taught me how to stand up for myself, how to beat up mean boys, and to
always fight back. I was never really thankful for the way we grew up constantly fighting until I
realized that it made us who we are. I can’t believe I can actually say that Eliot is a father and
Gus finally moved out of the house. Now that we are older, I have a close and different bond
with each of my brothers, and I love them very much. They would do absolutely anything for me
and because of them: I don’t take shit from anybody.