Brian Was a Mistake

I was born Brian.

Legally. Officially.

For two whole weeks.

My dad picked it. Classic. Safe. A name that pays its taxes and plays church-league softball.

My mom hated it.

Not “eh, maybe we call him B” hated it.

Courthouse hated it.

Two weeks after giving birth, she drove downtown and legally changed my name without telling my father.

My first rebrand happened before I could focus my eyes.

So one day Dad comes home from work and asks:

“How’s little Brian?”

And she says:

“You mean Brandon?”

I like to picture her wearing sunglasses when she said it.

Inside.

At night.

She didn’t just change my name.

She gaslit an entire family.

And this was apparently not considered an emergency.

Nobody called anybody.

There was no family meeting.

My mother simply updated a human being and waited for everyone else to discover the new version organically.

Which is how you patch software. Not a son.

Before all that paperwork, though, there was the original product launch.

I was not breathing.

I want to be clear that this was not a medical situation. I had simply not started yet. That is the standard arrangement for people who have not been born. I bring it up only because it is the last time in my life I was quiet in a room and nobody had a note about it.

According to everyone who was there, I came out looking like I had been vacuum-sealed through a traffic cone.

My mother’s father was in the room.

The Bear.

That’s what everybody called him.

Not the other bear. We’ll get to the other bear.

He’d been a pit boss in Vegas and later worked the door at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, before it burned down, which is enough backstory for now. I am an infant.

He looked down at me, started crying, and said:

“He looks just like me.”

Which, given the traffic cone, was not the compliment he intended.

From the hallway, my grandmother took a more clinical position.

“Oh, Shelly. What happened here? Will his head always be like that? He looks like he’s wearing a party hat. You could’ve done so much better.”

Two reviews.

Both from blood relatives.

Neither one about whether I was okay.

Welcome to Earth, kid.

The head eventually rounded out.

The name situation got worse.

Cut to my baptism.

Catholic, obviously.

The priest says:

“We welcome Brandon into the Church.”

And my grandfather on my dad’s side, Richard Losacker the First, leans forward in the second pew and mutters, at a volume he clearly believed was private:

“Why does he keep calling him Brandon? His name is Brian.”

It was not.

Nobody had told him.

Nobody explained anything. Nobody ever explained anything.

Catholicism is eighty percent muttering and twenty percent repressed dysfunction.

There was a scene at my baptism. A full-on name riot, followed by passive-aggressive potato salad and thirty years of cold, muttered resentment.

I don’t remember it.

I’ve been living it ever since.

My middle name is Justin, which only adds to the mystery.

Brian Paul?

Sure.

That sounds like a person.

Brandon Justin sounds like a backup dancer from a failed boy band who now sells protein powder online.

But that’s the name I’ve got.

And weirdly, it fits.

Accident.

Decision.

Bad judgment.

Paperwork.

Mild Catholic guilt.

I didn’t get the first name.

That went to my dad.

And my grandfather.

And eventually, my little brother.

Richard Justin Losacker the First.

Richard Justin Losacker the Second.

Richard Justin Losacker the Third.

I got the Justin.

Middle name only.

A family heirloom from the clearance bin.

Five years later, Rick arrived and I stopped being the main character.

Suddenly it was Rick this and Rick that.

And not just Rick.

Richard Justin Losacker the Third.

The full regnal title, deployed at family gatherings like somebody had died and the throne was now his.

Meanwhile I had been secretly renamed and personally confused the clergy.

But sure.

Triple down on Dick Losacker.

From day one, my brother had Final Destination energy.

The movie, but with more Flintstones and fewer survivors.

He climbed inside the oven.

He napped in the dryer.

He scaled the refrigerator and ate an entire bottle of chewable Flintstones vitamins in the time it takes to answer a phone.

At four, he climbed out his bedroom window and made it three blocks before a high-school kid waiting for the bus walked him home holding his hand like a tiny drunk.

That was the morning my parents reversed the doorknob so the lock was on the outside.

Didn’t matter.

He still got out.

We never learned how.

I want to stress that. We never learned how. Not a theory, not a guess, not a leading suspect. Four years old, one exit, and a house full of adults who eventually filed it under Rick.

There is a version of my brother at four who understood something about confinement that would become relevant to me much later.

The worst one had already happened two years earlier.

Turpentine.

My dad kept it in an old glass Coke bottle in the garage, because in 1980 childproofing was apparently considered government overreach.

And of course Rick drank it.

I was seven.

I panicked.

I grabbed the garden hose and tried to flush him out, because my emergency medical training at seven consisted mostly of cartoons and confidence.

I slipped on the concrete.

Dropped him.

He went still.

I ran inside screaming for my mother.

And before the ambulance, before anyone knew whether he was breathing, before anything else, I got this:

“I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY. YOU’VE HATED HIM SINCE HE WAS BORN AND NOW YOU FINALLY KILLED HIM.”

He was fine.

Fine within the hour.

Fine enough by dinner to resume being Rick.

I was not fine.

I stood in that kitchen at seven years old and understood something with total clarity:

When something goes wrong, there may already be a version of you in the room.

The jealous one.

The difficult one.

The kid who did it.

So get there first.

Make the joke first.

Confess first.

Apologize before anybody asks.

Explain yourself before anybody has decided what needs explaining.

That’s not something you hear once and shake off.

That’s a setting.

Factory default.

My mother was twenty-six years old with two children and one of them had just drunk turpentine out of a Coke bottle.

She was terrified.

She said the worst possible thing at the worst possible volume.

I don’t blame her.

I just never got the sentence back out of my head.

Here’s how my childhood breaks down.

Brandon: wears Mickey Mouse suspenders. Sings “Suspicious Minds.” Performs for attention.

Rick: plays sports. Gets the name. Drinks cleaning supplies like a shot challenge.

Guess who got praise.

Guess who got therapy.

And now?

I talk to my brother every single day.

He’ll call three times in a row. I’ll finally answer like something’s wrong, because when a grown man calls three times in a row something is usually wrong.

And he’ll say:

“Hang on, let me call you right back.”

And hang up.

That’s not a bit.

That’s just Rick.

He does not call right back.

He has never once called right back.

“Right back” is not a unit of time where my brother lives.

But he calls again tomorrow.

He always calls again tomorrow.