Strangers Waiting...

    The only one who will tell you that an older brother has the absolute right to drive his younger sister nuts is the brother. There has never been, to my knowledge, a Million Younger Sisters March agitating under a banner reading, “Yes--Prank Us Some More, Please!”

   My adolescent antics toward my long-suffering sister, Anne, ranged from the benign (short-sheeting the bed) to the grotesquely baroque (peeing on the toilet seat just before she used the bathroom; I chortle to this day to recall the way she shrieked my name).

   I’d like to tell you that the behavior vanished in adulthood. I’d also like to tell you that I frolic with unicorns in the land of perfect bliss. Sadly, by which I mean happily, neither is true.

   En route home from a Hawaiian family vacation a few years ago, we flew on one of those massive jets with three seats on one side, four in the middle, and three on the other side. Anne and her husband sat in one window row. I sat opposite them, across the middle seats.

   At one point, I snuck through the rear galley and crept up behind Anne’s aisle chair. Leaning down just behind her ear, I loudly yelped her name. She jumped roughly four feet off the seat--or would have, had she not been belted in.

   Anne is no slouch. Growing up with three brothers steeled her, and she’s never been shy about giving as good as she got. (I’ll leave her to tell you about the high school bra-in-the-ice-tray trick she and a friend used to play on the friend’s mom.)

   Later in the flight, she snuck up behind me. When she barked my name, I started and shouted, “Oh!” She got me. As it turned out, she also got the woman next to me, a stranger, who, severely startled, screamed and spilled her drink.

   So, you know--I won, ha ha.

   I take quite seriously my brief to drive Anne berserk, even at this late date. This summer, we met in Boston and drove to Maine, where our family co-owns a summer home on an island off the coast. Along the way we sang silly made-up songs and spoke goofy-voiced nonsense, as is our wont.

   The harbor town where we catch the ferry to the island, in winter a sleepy place, swells with summer tourists. Cozy main-street shops sell kitschy little knick-knacks. Some stores attract shoppers by playing music from outdoor speakers. This inevitably leads to finding yourself humming some terrible song you haven’t thought about in thirty years, wondering how it got into your head, and tracing it back--as you gnash your teeth and tear out your hair--to one of those shops’ turgid playlists. 

   One such song was the execrable 1981 Journey masterpiece “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Somehow, the song’s hook burrowed into my brain like a porcupine and stabbed my psyche with is horrid lyric quills. I soon saw I had two choices: kill myself to stop the pain, or infect Anne.

   As we sat among others atop the island-bound ferry (which also attracts visitors with its “Harbor Tours”), I hummed the “DSB” hook a few times to subliminally implant it in Anne’s mind. Then, just a little too loudly not to be heard by others, I barked, “DON’T! Stop! Beleeeeeeeeevin-yah!-Yaaaaah!! Da-da-da-da-DA-da-da-da-da!!”  

   To say that Anne was nonplussed would be like saying the sky is the sky.

   Still, just to drive home the point, I pulled out my iPhone and found the song on YouTube. I topped-out the volume, hoping to infect everyone on the boat’s upper deck.

   Then, transfixed, I looked up the words to the song. I read them to Anne in a creepy, bad-actor rasp, loud enough for others to hear. The lyrics are too long--well, and too monstrous--to quote here in full, so I’ll just include what Anne and I subsequently decided were the apotheosis of poetic horrors:

Strangers waiting

Up and down the boulevard

Their shadows searching

In the night

Streetlight people

Livin’ just to find emotion

Hidin’ somewhere in the night

      By merely excerpting lyrics I don’t mean to slight such genius couplets, elsewhere in the song, as, “Workin’ hard to get my fill/Everybody wants a thrill” and, "A singer in a smoky room/The smell of wine and cheap perfume." And I do want to point out the brilliance, in this quoted segment, of rhyming “in the night” with “in the night.” Plus, it is my fervent hope one day to grow up to become a “streetlight people.”

   Anyway, you know that thing where something is so truly appalling that you know you’re going to fall in love with it? (Raise your hand if this describes your marriage.) There are four stages to this phenomenon:

   1.  A pure, white-hot hatred of the offending item.

   2.  Aesthetic disgust, but of the sort that dismisses the item even as it disdains it.

   3.  A reassessment, as you suddenly see quasi-likable aspects you’ve heretofore overlooked.

   4.  A pure, white-hot, fist-pumping embrace of the offending item.

   This is precisely what happened to Anne and me during our week in Maine. I might be splayed on a sofa, reading a trashy novel, when it would occur to me to sing out, “Don’t stop believin’!” Presently, Anne’s voice would answer from another room: “Hold on to that feelin’!”

   In this way, neither I pranked her nor she me. Instead, Journey, that bloated eighties power-ballad band, pranked us both.
   No matter what else I recall of our summer 2016 Maine week--elms and poplars waving in a wind-driven rain, the sea's susurration as it lapped the shoreline rocks, fresh blueberry muffin breakfasts and fresh-caught lobster dinners--I shall first and foremost hear "Don't Stop Believing," bombastic karmic retribution for a life of unwelcome if lovingly tolerated brotherly stunts.