The Splendid Things We Planned A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

Author:Blake Bailey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

I ONLY HAVE a few fleeting impressions of Scott from the mid-eighties, though we didn’t entirely lose touch. I saw him over the holidays, or got the odd letter. Soon after our fight in the parking lot, he lost his job at the restaurant and couldn’t find another for a long while. The word was out. In the meantime he sponged off our mother and pursued an interest in petty larceny. When hungry he’d sometimes skulk around the suburbs until he found a backyard barbecue in progress; timing, he told me, was everything. He liked his meat at least medium rare, so he’d have to wait three or four minutes after the steaks or chickens or burgers were flipped, before bolting out of nowhere and fleeing with his dinner impaled on a stick. More serious burglaries had an ulterior motive—that is, Scott liked being in other people’s houses: he was curious to see how they lived, what sort of pictures they hung on their walls, what their family photos revealed (was there a daughter?). He’d sneak into a given house around 2:00 A.M., and if there weren’t any immediate alarums, he’d often stay most of the night. He also liked stealing from hospitals—pharmaceuticals, of course, but also mundane supplies such as bandages and surgical tubing. Marlies still has a wholesaler’s box of petroleum jelly that he gave her once for her birthday: “This stuff really works,” he remarked, “and keeps forever.” For a while he was able to curb his thievery after he won a $20,000 settlement from a punk rock club, where the bouncer had broken his jaw in what Scott’s lawyer insisted was an act of unwarranted aggression. The money, however, was squandered on vices that left him somewhat worse for wear.

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