2009-06-27
I was a very young boy when I
realized that my life's purpose — the reason I'd
been put on this earth — was to torment my
sister Amy.
Amy basically had only
two emotional states: She was either in a
frenzy, screaming and sobbing and shouting, or
she was really
upset. Anything I
did to irritate or anger her would set off such
a horrifyingly cataclysmic reaction that I
couldn't wait to do it again.
When Amy became a teenager
and her unstable condition was enhanced by
hormones, it was like going from tornado to
hurricane. Like many girls her age, she became
weepy and moody, torn apart by foolish romantic
crushes, betrayed by shifting alliances among
friends, distraught over the slightest insult.
My parents warned me that she needed to be left
alone, which sounded to my young ears like, "You
thought antagonizing her was fun before, try it
now!"
Amy turned to writing poetry
in a top-secret journal that she'd been keeping
since she was 10, which was the same year I
started reading it. Pink ink flowed across the
page in swollen rivers of angst-saturated dreck,
each period a meticulously drawn heart, each 'i'
dotted with a sunflower.
We owned a tape recorder, and
Amy read some of this stuff into the microphone,
her voice quavering with emotion. Listening to
it, I concluded that she was going through a
tough time and had turned to making the tape as
a way of amusing me.
At this point, Amy had never
had a boy call her at the house, so when my
mother announced that there was a "Neal" on the
phone for her, Amy reacted as if she'd just been
hit with a defibrillator. "Nobody say anything!"
she screamed, terrified that Neal might hear us
talking in the background and conclude that Amy
lived with her family and not in a penthouse
apartment with some other Playboy bunnies.
Everybody froze, listening to a phone call that
on Amy's end went like this:
"Hi, Neal, ha ha ha ha ha,
you're funny, ha ha ha ha, you're funny, ha ha
ha ha."
I did the only thing I could
do, under the circumstances: I snuck down to the
basement, where I had recently located a hidden
phone jack by the furnace, plugged in a phone,
picked up the extension and flipped on the tape
recorder. Amy's dramatic, whispery voice wafted
out of the tiny speaker:
You stretch my heart like a
rubber band
That snaps back into place
when you smile
And though I can see me doing
many things
I can see me combing the hair
of angels
I can see me riding a purple
cow
But I can't see me not loving
you
At the words "purple cow,"
Amy came out of her stunned silence and screamed
so loudly my skin crawled with goose bumps of
joy. She said nothing to Neal, no, "Can you hold
while I go stab my brother?" Instead, she
stomped through the house in a homicidal fury,
raging from one phone extension to another. My
mother and sister fled to the grocery store; my
father hid under his bed.
Neal remained on the line,
respectfully listening to the things Amy could
see herself doing, which included living in a
kangaroo's pouch and more purple cow rides but
never not loving him. I could hear him breathing
while Amy kicked in the door to my bedroom and,
from the sound of it, pulverized all my
belongings.
The poem didn't so much end
as run out of drivel. I put the phone to my ear.
"Hey, Neal, are you there?" I
whispered.
"Yeah. Who's this?"
"This is Amy's brother. They
keep me in the basement. They won't let me out."
"Huh," Neal replied,
accepting it.
After an hour or so I left
the basement and Amy charged me like an angry
bull. No, wait — like an angry purple cow. I
bravely hid behind my mother.
Because of the structural
damage done to the house, my father sternly
ordered me never to do anything like that again.
And I didn't.
At least, not more than a
dozen times.
To write Bruce Cameron, visit his Website at
www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about
Bruce Cameron and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists,
visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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