after your twin had cleaned his plate would your father wipe his mouth, put down his napkin, and announce in a stentorian voice: Now I’m going to tell you what was in it. He would proceed to inventory ingredients appalling enough to send George rushing off to the restroom to vomit.
GEORGE’S ADVENTUROUSNESS GOT him into all kinds of trouble. At fourteen, he took a diver certification course at the local YMCA. The diving instructor would throw a regulator into the bottom of the pool, then make students dive for it, put the hose in their mouth, and breathe from it. There was no excuse for not breathing from the hose. One day, unaware that his oxygen tank was empty, the instructor held George’s head under the water and forced him to breath. He nearly suffocated.
George was smarter than you. On his Scholastic Aptitude Test he scored in the high 700s, verbal and math. Your scores were considerably lower. He never studied for exams. He got A’s anyway. Instead of studying, he’d go to the local ice cream parlor for a hot fudge sundae. Better return for the effort, he reasoned.
With few exceptions (the new teacher among them), he found his teachers lazy and incompetent, and suffered fits of boredom in their classrooms that he went to extremes to alleviate. In Mr. Milne’s chemistry class George rigged up a Bunsen burner so when the team working at that lab table turned it on it shot a resplendent fountain of water to the ceiling. In introductory French class, Madame Griswald would leave her students with headsets and tape recorders repeating Nous allons a la gare and other lame French phrases for the duration of the class, which was held on the ground floor. One morning, George took off his headset, opened the window, jumped out, and started walking. He walked a straight line through lawns, parking lots, abandoned hat factory yards, and an apple orchard. He just kept walking. He got two days’ detention.11
Today they’d call it ADHD.
Another of your brother’s teachers, Mrs. Wilcox (Advanced Science) was in his view so incompetent he led a protest against her. He arranged for all of her students to stalk out of her class, but when the moment came George alone walked out. Mrs. Wilcox was so upset she wrote a letter to the Vice Principal:
Since the beginning of the course George has done his best to disrupt the class, talking and throwing papers around and bothering those around him by taking things off their desks. He claims he’s the victim of circumstances, but whenever he has been absent there has been no disturbance.
In the laboratory twice, due to his carelessness, he endangered the safety of others, first by opening a gas jet and setting it on fire and second by almost hitting someone in the eye with a sharp crystal of copper sulfate which he had no reason to be around.
During a meeting held with a group of students to discuss class concerns, George called his classmates hypocrites and told me I was being close-minded. He went on to say that he was being persecuted by the administration.
More recently when we met to discuss a test grade I’d given him George informed me that I was “crazy.” When told to report to your office he said he would take his time and left the room only after several minutes.
It should be noted that George’s behavior has been the subject of numerous complaints made by other students.
The following year, George signed up for an advanced placement course at Sacred Heart University, a community college.22 Having gone twice to the class and found it no less boring than his regular high school classes, he stopped going. Instead he’d drive to nearby Westport in his Barracuda and cruise up and down its streets before stopping at another ice cream parlor there, an old-fashioned one with an antique soda fountain and marble tables. When Mr. Pearlman, the teacher in charge of the program, found out, he told your brother, “You’re in deep doo-doo,” and sent him to Mr. Forster, who told him that to make up the credits he’d have to take a calculus class.
The same community college in Bridgeport from which, according to his obituary notice, the teacher earned his associate’s degree.
If it’s just a matter of credits, your brother reasoned, why can’t I just take another course for three credits?
Against this the Vice Principal had no argument. Your brother went down the hall, signed up for Male Chorus and earned his three credits singing “John Brown’s Body.”
GEORGE WAS THE first to draw caricatures – a skill that, years later, you would parlay into something of a career. He sketched all of his teachers and classmates, including Harvey Keebler, the new kid in town, with his freckles and Dudley Do-Right chin. Harvey had been the one friend George didn’t share with you, until he phoned Harvey one morning and his mother – who sounded a lot like him, but with a much higher voice, like a man impersonating a woman – answered the phone.
This isn’t Harvey, Harvey’s mother said. It’s Mrs. Keebler, his mother.
Come off it, Harvey, said your brother. I know it’s you.
This is not Harvey, the voice at the other end of the line insisted. This is Mrs. Keebler, his mother.
Yeah, right! your brother said. Come off it, Harvey, quit foolin’ around!
This is not Harvey, this is Mrs. Keebler.
And so on.
The more the voice at the other end of the line insisted that he/she was Mrs. Keebler, the more convinced your brother became that his best friend was pulling his leg.
Finally your brother blurted, Well, if you’re going to be that way about it, tell Mrs. Keebler to go fuck herself!
Only after the line went dead did he realize his terrible blunder. From then on he was forbidden to have anything to do with Harvey Keebler.
GEORGE WAS THE first to get a part-time job (First National, dairy section), the first to get his driver’s license, the first to buy a used car (’65 Plymouth Barracuda, slant six, make-out window, bronze), the first to dress formally (white tie and tails), the first to lose his virginity (backseat, ’65 Barracuda).
Unlike you, George went straight to college, but his career path was neither straight nor smooth. While an undergraduate studying oceanography at Drew University in New Jersey, he became an avid cyclist, a passion that had him competing in races long before Breaking Away and Lance Armstrong. From Drew he went to Auburn, and from there to the marine lab at Duke University, where he turned in his master’s thesis (“Sewage Mitigation via Ocean Outfalls”) a month ahead of schedule. From Duke he transferred to the University of Rhode Island to study marine biology.
While at URI, prompted by a knee injury sustained on a bicycling trip that forced him to pedal twenty-five miles home on one leg, he swam in Long Island Sound every day, often for miles against rip tides and stinging jellyfish. Once, he swam so far it took him three hours to walk home along the beach. (You, too, would become an inveterate swimmer, but it would take you a dozen more years.)
From marine biology your brother’s interests turned to aquaculture, and from there to agribusiness, and from there to economics.33
It was our father who urged George to turn to economics – having assumed, wrongly, that George would embrace and carry forward his socialistic views. Instead – and to our father’s combined horror and disgust – my brother embraced libertarianism.
At twenty-five, while you were bumming
