Billy

The 1990s was a time when recalling formerly- repressed childhood sexual abuse was de rigueur in the 12-step recovery world. Resurfaced memories became answers for past (or present) misconduct and the subsequent self-hatred that drove people to drug and alcohol abuse. Algebraic thinking where childhood sexual abuse on one side of the equation equals alcoholism on the other.

Occasionally an old timer (that’s what we called them) might agree some may have been just “born alcoholic”. Perhaps it is so. But being able to blame something or someone was appealing to me. You see, I was only 26 and didn’t want to be an alcoholic. I also really didn’t like the idea of not being able to drink for the rest of my life. But my life wasn’t heading in such a good direction and alcohol had played a role. So, like anyone facing a tough diagnosis, I sought answers. I hoped, if hope is the right word, that I, too, may unearth some horrible memory. Getting to what my sponsor called my “core issue”, I might find release from the madness of addiction.

The truth is that I was a happy little girl and had a happy childhood filled with happy memories. I came from a big family, a loud family, and I was certainly outnumbered, but I’ll get to that in a minute. I was also a bit dramatic. Today I’d be called “extra”. Extra or not, the truth is that I had been both physically and sexually abused. It happened when I was a teenager. However, I never considered the relationship between those abuses and my alcoholism. Why would I? I was drinking before these things happened and I remembered them, this was not the cliché I was after.

With this mindset I began hunting through childhood photos, scouring the body language of family members, and searching for evidence of guilt. Who’s guilt? Well, one of my brothers of course! Using crack-shot detective work picked up watching 70’s police drama, I rounded up the usual suspects and accused. For surely if someone had wronged me in childhood it was one of them. To begin with, there were just too many of them. Five of them and only one of me; math at work again.

Literal and metaphorical magnifying glass in hand, I sifted through stacks of old family photos hunting for evidence not knowing what I was looking for until I found it. It was a photo taken at Christmastime, circa 1970. I am pictured with my four older brothers dressed in our Sunday best and posed together in front of the Christmas Tree.

In the picture, I am wearing a little, baby blue dress, the kind where the white petticoat sticks out from under the skirt. You know the kind. The kind that itches. And there it is — my brother Billy is standing directly behind me with his hand hung down over my shoulder, falling to where someday I will develop breasts (I suspiciously note). But it’s more than that. It’s the way he is holding me. It’s the look on his face. He has a look of having just been caught doing something bad, a look of guilt mixed with anger.

The fact that I have no memory of my brother Billy ever hurting me is beside the point; this is just the type of memory I was searching for – the kind I would not have remembered. Just look at the way he is sort of manhandling me as I lean on my dolly carriage for support. He is holding me so close – wait. He’s pulling me toward him.

Not only would this explain my alcoholism, but it may also explain a certain intimacy that Billy and I had. With a six-year gap in our ages and so little in common, it seems unusual that we would be so close. Don’t get me wrong, I hate him too -- as much as I do the rest – even more at times. It all pointed in the right direction. As yet discovered abuse would certainly set up this classic relationship dynamic.

It’s true. I hold equal parts, hate, and love for all my brothers. They couldn’t all have molested me. Could they? No, my brothers couldn’t organize a sizable game of kickball without fighting with each other and someone storming off in protest. It's impossible to imagine them capable of organizing and covering up such a thing.

Since I mention both love and hate for them all, why choose Billy? Well, for starters, Michael is the oldest, the chosen, and is never to be blamed. Then what of Jimmy or Steven, those other handsome, funny, smart Moreno boys? No, and no. Jimmy is too smart, Spock in our favorite childhood recreations of Star Trek. To choose Jimmy just isn’t logical. And Steven? No way! Steven was certainly crazy and wild, but not a molester. He’s more the beast we’d find living on a red planet in our Star Trek Game. It falls to Billy, second in line. Besides, I was always Uhura to his Kirk. A role I resented.

But, no. My brother Billy did not molest me. No memory ever surfaced.

It turns out I am an alcoholic because I am an alcoholic. None of my older brothers molested me. They were all too busy living their ridiculously wonderful childhoods too. They were busy being handsome, popular, and smart. They were too busy playing sports and getting girls to molest me. Their torture was more the lock-her-in-the-bathroom type of torture.

Turning to the evidence again I notice Billy is holding me with the same detached arrogance he’d hold a football. He wasn’t the star quarterback, I’ve explained, that was Mike. Billy played one of those positions where you must catch and run with the ball to score the touchdown. When we weren’t playing Star Trek my brothers were playing football, or some other sport, and I was busy trying to avoid learning anything about their stupid sports. But I remembered that Billy was a good football player -- an “All County” or something.

And then I see it!

He’s holding me because he had been told to. After all, I was always running away from the lot of them. And he is probably annoyed because Mike wasn’t told to do it. Though Mike had done his fair share of babysitting me too. In those stories, I wasn’t exactly a joy to watch (think dirty diapers and a lust for exploration).

I guess that Christmas Eve it was Billy’s turn. And I let him hold me. I let him hold me because I loved my brother Billy beyond measure. This is the real reason he is holding me close, if not a little angrily because I let him and because he loves me.

My beloved brother Billy is the one whom I may have been the closest to in many ways. Irresistibly handsome in his army uniform, Billy was the first of the boys to treat me like an equal, taking me out drinking around town and introducing me to my first after-hours bar. He even brought me to one of his hang-outs - The Village Inn. This was a decade or so before our parents bought the bar for him. The owner let us in at 9:00 AM for my first after-hours party. It didn’t get cooler than that.

Billy was a vet. Billy was a Floral Park Legend. Unfortunately, like me, he was an alcoholic too. Today his army picture hangs on a flag that hangs across Tulip Avenue from that bar. The bar he drank into the ashes. When I posted a picture of it on Facebook, hundreds wrote me in awe and admiration for our handsome hometown hero, my brother.

Billy enlisted in the U.S. Army at 21 years old, right after he’d dropped out of college. He was there on a Baseball Scholarship. But because he lost his scholarship, there wasn’t enough money to carry on. He lost his scholarship because he quit the team. And he quit the team because he didn’t make first-string— storming off in anger and arrogance.

That is the look on my brother’s face when he wasn’t smiling ear-to-ear, anger and arrogance. Before Billy got sober the world was always screwing him. Him! Bill Moreno, All County Tackle, FPM Class of 76’. Once he’d got sober, the ear-to-ear smile became permanent, the anger gone.

Billy’s gone too. My brother died of esophageal cancer three years ago. The last happy memory I have of him is from a birthday party we threw for him in October to celebrate the November birthday we didn’t think he’d make.

At the end, after the cake and the candles, and the celebrating a birthday he wasn’t going to have, my brother pushed himself up on his cane and gave a speech. I am standing right behind him, neurotically air holding him up, smiling with love at my family and my big brother.

He spoke of a conversation he’d had with his doctor. The doctor was amazed about his attitude and good cheer and asked him how he’d stayed so positive through everything. Billy told him how. It was my family, he said. He went on,

“Throughout all of this, from the very first diagnosis to today, there hasn’t been one day, one moment where I didn’t feel loved and supported, not one day when one of you wasn’t there for me, letting me know…”

That’s when I interrupt and say, “And she said she wished she could prescribe that!”

Billy turns to me and says, “And I don’t even get to deliver the punch line?” And everyone laughed. I laughed too.

But I didn’t a year later when I watched the video on the anniversary of his death. I thought he sounded angry with me, and I cringed. Because I was heartbroken and missed my brother and was angry that cancer had taken him from our lives, from my life, and because I was looking for someone or something to blame for my brother’s death, all I could see were the flaws. I saw my flaws, my brother’s flaws, and our beautifully flawed and perfectly normal relationship as siblings.

Billy finished, clearly not angry with me. He clearly saw the true nature of our relationship and the nature of family. So, I’ll let him have the last word.

He called it miraculous.