rogue: n. 1. a person who is unscrupulous…
especially someone who is nonetheless likable
He was a great guy, trim and wiry, with reddish hair, freckles, and a smart-aleck grin; there was always a cigarette in his hand, and one eye squinting to keep out the smoke. He was a Wild One, a Rebel. He always greeted me with one hand in a handshake and one hand clapping my back.
He was married once, to a beautiful girl from Colombia; I never really got a clear story of how he met her. She was an Indian, from a small village, and he brought her up here, married her, had a child by her, and was divorced by her. She’d bought into the American thing quickly and wanted it all: the house, the yard, the money, the steady stability which wasn’t in Brian’s nature.
His mother, unwilling to be divorced from her grandson, gave the ex-wife everything she wanted after the split-up — new teeth, a boob-job, a home, a car — under constant threat of the adored child disappearing with his mother back into the jungles of South America. Or, that was the fear anyway; we all knew that this new American had spent too much time in the big city to ever settle for the farm again.
Brian lived on the margins before the marriage and after the divorce, with a feral gift for survival, and the ability to charm you out of your possessions as you thanked him for it. He squatted in houses and buildings, abandoned, but not yet torn down. He fixed cars which he found or bought, then sold them, somehow coming up with titles and papers which must’ve been false, but passed for legit. I don’t think he owned anything but his clothes.
There were drugs, too. And though, between he and me there was never anything more than a joint or two at family occasions, an offer of coke once or twice — when I heard he’d died, that was the first thing Jenn and I thought of. I knew, without any evidence, that there were more drugs there than just for personal comsumption. My sister and my father both said, “I can only guess what caused the heart attack…” I doubt we’ll ever know.
Still, his mother said, “He was cleaning up his act. He’d just gotten a new job. He was looking for an apartment.” You hear that so often.
He finished high school, then went for a while to a car mechanic school. He worked with his hands, like his grandfather who worked as a sanitation man for New York City all his life. They both gambled and cursed and bent the rules and loved their families and made their own way and never asked anyone for anything. Only, his grandfather — my great-uncle — died in his sleep, late in his 80s.
Brian was street-smart and worldly-wise, a maverick in a family of college degrees and professional certificates. A poor romantic figure, a starving artist of existence.
So long, Brian.
