Chapter 9 - Robert

Felicity was the first child, me, Zoe, the second, Tyler, the third, and Gertie the fourth. Robert was #5. Before puberty Robert was a victim to Tyler, and a baby doll to Felicity, Gertie and me. We felt bad when Tyler tortured him with the old “smotheration” routine. At first we told mom, who did the “wait until your father comes home” bit. Dad always did his duty in these situations, but his heart wasn’t in it. And afterwards Tyler might torture Robert even more with psychological insults against his courage or his gender. Tyler didn’t torture Robert everyday anyway. There were lots of days when they got along great, but because of the age difference Robert would always be the follower and Tyler the reluctant and twisted mentor.
Felicity and Gertie and I just loved Robert. He was our first baby. He came along when we were old enough to do some nurturing, holding a bottle, watching Mommie change his diaper, or finding “blankie” (Robert rubbed the satin on a certain blankie until he was about five and it consisted of only a few threads, crisscrossed and fuzzy). Next thing you know he was a toddler waddling along behind us with blankie, and so cute. He had a little tough face and a blond crew cut, and he smiled with his whole face. He would do anything we asked, even be the groom when we played wedding with the youngest of the three sisters from across the street. He was our pet. Tyler had Pete, the dog, but we had our cat Bootsy and we had Robert.
After puberty Robert was never a victim again. He discovered beer early and was addicted early. He had an informal posse of cohorts, all boys, who also pledged allegiance to beer and to feats of drunken courage. Most of Robert’s friends were nice boys from around Smithvale, who appreciated his creativity and Bobby was truly inspired, leading his merry band from one humorous and borderline illegal adventure to the next. Their deeds were legendary and sometimes noisy. Robert had a whole room to himself by his teenage years because the rest of us older siblings were no longer in the house. I was still in college and came home for weekends and school breaks and summers.
Robert’s room in our house was called the “Sin Den”. If you opened the door, which you did only after gaining clearance, clouds of cigarette smoke would greet you, along with crashing music, beery exhalations and an explosion dirty underwear. State your business and go. But Robert also had a roguish charm that allowed him to pass all this off as just testosterone, high spirits, and boyish humor.
Robert also had a corner of the basement for his drum set, which was the height of generosity and parental love on the part of my mother. She had never appreciated music of any kind, to her it was all noise, and the drums were parked right next to her escape hatch, her laundry area. The boys knew how to get around Augusta though. They flattered her and teased her, made her laugh, and flirted with her. It wasn’t even just a strategy to get away with things. Those boys truly loved her, sort of adopted her. They often stayed to dinner; they ran away to our house, slept off drunks at our house and hardly ever went home as far as I could see. Sometimes their moms were jealous but they certainly knew my mom wasn’t trying to steal their children.
Robert and his “posse” did things like sneak into the E. J. Strodel Warehouse, take cases of beer out into the woods behind the warehouse, and get someone to take them back later to load up the beer and take it to wherever they hid it. After I got my car, I did a couple of beer runs when I was home from school, but I had no guts for this kind of caper at all.
A few times I accompanied the boys to Scruples Bridge, a tall truss bridge over a local river. They would climb to the very top, bolstered by alcohol and jump into the river. After I heard that, historically, boys had died when they hit rocks hidden under the water, I didn’t take them anymore. I’m sure they just found another ride.
Robert was the first Taylor to attract the attention of the police. This is the only thing that he did that really devastated mom. The idea of having a police car parked in our driveway for the whole world to see was more than she could bear. I guess Bobby had been talked into being lookout for a new friend whose misdeeds went well beyond those of Robert and his friends. He got off with a warning, went back to his old friends, and was never in trouble with the police again.
Bobbie was elected president of ZEUS fraternity in high school and the rumors of their exploits made him the darling of the high school for at least his senior year. One exploit apparently involved no pants and a snow bank. These same exploits were probably to blame for the demise of sororities and fraternities at our high school. Robert was extremely shy about girls, but my younger sisters reported that girls were forever trying to catch his attention at school, waving coy “hi, Bobbie’s” in his directions.
The dark side of Robert, however, was the way he passed on the Taylor male tradition of torture to my younger sisters. He and his boys would often fill up the living room and my sisters, who arrived home later, had to run the gauntlet in order to enter the house. The guys had long derogatory nicknames for each of my sisters. Emily, Rebecca, and Morgan still remember these long chains of derision and can recite them to this day. For the boys, the entire object of the exercise was to entertain themselves and to force the girls from the living room so the guys could have it. Although my sisters tried to hang tough, eventually someone would run crying or in anger from the room and the rest would follow to give comfort. Emily was the one most frequently reduced to tears.
My younger sisters did many of the same fun things the rest of us had done in their early childhood years, and they got to go places with my parents more often, because there were no more babies, but their youthful pleasures were marred by the torment they had to endure to get through the living room each day, or anytime the guys wanted to evict them from any space, or anytime those bozos wanted to boost their egos with a little bullying. To realize that some of this was payback for the times Robert was tortured by Tyler would not exactly require the services of a psychotherapist.
I witnessed several examples of the dreaded “dinner table torture”. My dad was working nights at this time. He went off to work before dinner. My brother hoarded all the food and would not pass it until you either asked for the item in Spanish with an accent that perfectly matched his original pronunciation, as in '?Pase me le leche por favor', or sometimes he made up an arcane enunciation that had to be duplicated, like gra-VEE for gravy. My mother tried to control him, but he would turn on his charm (he could be very funny) until he made her laugh, or they would get into a mock slapping fight and mom would eventually crack up and retreat. Dad would hear about an incident, but it just sounded like horseplay to him. Robert never did any of this when dad was home.
Once Emily, Rebecca, and Megan hit high school age, the boys did not tease them as much and some of them started flirting with the girls, especially Becky, who was our family’s only long-legged blonde. But it was too late. My sisters despised Robert’s friends, although later, as adults, they forgave them.
I think you can guess that Robert smoked, a lot. He smoked until his late twenties or early thirties. When he started to cough up blood, he stopped. He had to choose between the beer and the cigarettes. His beer addiction won out over his cigarette addiction