Prison Attire

My brother, Ben, turned his fingers into miniature guns.  I ran around and let him chase me.  “Run!  Run!” he screamed.  “I’m going to get you and kill you!” he yelled, gleefully.

“No!  You’ll never get me…” I said unenthusiastically running in circles around the living room. 

I discreetly looked at my watch.  11:00am. If I ended the game now, I’d have time to get ready to meet my friend at the mall at noon.  I collapsed on the couch wondering why I had a five year old brother who was obsessed with O.J. Simpson and felt a need to bombard me with attacks three or four times a day.

“I got you!  I’m going to shoot you in the head!” he said, as he happily bounced on the couch.

“No…no…don’t shoot me in the head.” I pretended to be scared, hoping he would hurry up and shoot me in the head so that this seemingly never ending game would be over.

“Bang!  Bang! Bang!” he yelled, shooting his pretend gun with his trigger thumb.

I closed my eyes and made my hands limp and said, “I’m dead,” before getting up to go get ready.

Ben followed me upstairs.  “Do you think O.J. really did it?”

“Yes,” I answered, as I tried to brush my hair back into place.

“Do you think he’s going to go to jail?”

“Yes.  Probably for a very long time,” I replied, looking for a barrette after deciding that my hair was not going to recover from the recent ambush from a five year old white, Jewish, O.J. Simpson.

“I hope I never go to jail,” Ben said sitting down on the floor in my room.

“You won’t.  Only people who do really bad things go to jail.” I couldn’t help but think that despite his annoying habit of trying to murder me, my little brother really was somewhat adorable.

“What if I do really bad things by accident?”

I ruffled his hair as I told him, “The kinds of things you do to end up in jail aren’t things you can do by accident.”

Fifteen years later I sat in the courtroom next to my sister, Emily, and my parents, anxiously tapping my foot as my brother approached the bench with his lawyer.  I watched my father clench his fists and my mother set her jaw to avoid letting herself fall apart as she waited to find out her youngest child’s fate.  I turned to Emily and asked, “What do we wear when we go visit him in prison?”

She laughed. “I don’t know what appropriate prison attire is.”

We smiled bitterly as we rolled our eyes in a manner reminiscent of the way we had when we were teenagers.  In truth, we had had this conversation many times before.  We had the “What do you wear to rehab?” conversation.  We had the “What do you wear to therapeutic boarding school graduation?” conversation.  We had the “What do you wear to a halfway house?” conversation and now, we were having the “What do you wear to prison?” conversation.

As Ben and his lawyer came walking towards us, Emily leaned over to me.  “Is it bad if I hope he goes to prison?”

I shook my head.  “Is it bad if I hope he goes to prison really far away so we never have to see him?”

“See you in hell,” she replied with a smile.

As my parents and the lawyer gloated over the fact that they had gotten Ben off with a year of probation, Emily and I rolled our eyes at each other. 

“Is everyone forgetting that probation means he has to stay off drugs for a year?” I whispered.

“All this does is postpone our shopping spree for the prison visiting attire.”

Two months later, after breaking probation, Ben was sentenced to a 12-18 months in a lockdown facility.  I spoke to him briefly on the phone, as my father drove him out to the place, which ironically, was only twenty minutes from my house.  I supposed this was karma for my fervent wishes that he be sent as far away from my otherwise wholesome life.

“Hey Ben.”

“Hey,” he replied in the same dull tone that he used every time he was coming off drugs.

“So, are you nervous?”

“Nah…I’m just going to make the best of it and do my time…ya know?”

No.  I didn’t know.  I didn’t know how a boy from a good family could destroy his life this way.  I didn’t know how he could stand to see my mother and father age as rapidly as they had in the last eight years, and know that it was because of his actions.  I didn’t know how a person could steal from their family to obtain drugs.  No. I did not know. 

But I said none of that.  Instead, I said, “Good luck.”

“Thanks.  And I’m sorry for all this crap.  I’m gonna fix things this time.  When I come home, I’m gonna hang out with you and your kids.  I’m gonna be a really cool uncle.” He paused before adding a new line to his very familiar speech. “ And don’t worry…I won’t teach them the O.J. game,” he said, and I could hear a smile through his usual dull affect.

As I listened to this addition to his usual empty promises, I was assaulted by the memory of Ben running through the house with unbridled enthusiasm for our twisted O.J. Simpson game. 

"The kinds of things you do to end up in jail aren’t things you can do by accident."

I was overcome with a rare moment of sympathy and in place of my usual clichéd speech telling him that actions speak louder than words I blurted out, “I love you kiddo.”

“Love you too,” he replied.  The smile was already gone.

I knew they were just words.  He had no idea what I love you meant and he certainly wasn’t going to learn in the next twelve to eighteen months. 

When I hung up the phone, I called Emily. 

“I spoke to him,” I said, when she answered the phone.

“What did he say?”

I reviewed the conversation in my head before answering.  “Same old stuff.” I paused for a moment before adding, “So, what do we wear to a lockdown facility?”