My little 23 year old brother and his wife have been living with my wife and I, and our infant, for a few months now. It has been a good bonding experience for all of us, at least it was on my end.
My little brother is in a band. They travel all around the surrounding areas and play a mix between punk and 60s surf rock. To me they sound good and I enjoy their music. The lifestyle that comes along with my little brother's band is troubling to say the least. He basically is nocturnal now and sleeps in until 2-5 in the afternoon. I don't mind this since his band is much like a night shift positition, except when you "work" you are actually partying like a rockstar.
His other two band mates are two of the most bizarre men I have ever come across. The first is the drummer of the band, we'll call him John. He is an old Witness friend of mine from over 10 years ago. We grew up in the same congregation and when we were 16 I considered him my best friend. He had a car and we would drive around and have good clean Witness fun. Then he moved away to the Virgin Islands, got heavy into drugs, and returned home many years later. He heads for the alcohol cabinet when he awakes each day.
The other guy is what I refer to as my little brother's best friend and band mate, we'll call him Charlie. Charlie often talks about the amount of LSD that he has taken in total. He speaks about taking over 100 hits in the course of his 23 year old life with no plans of slowing down. He's pretty troubled and the stories I hear from my brother are actually quite frightening at times.
Both band members really enjoy me and my family and don't come around very often. I think they respect my family atmosphere and know that when they are around they have the effect of cramping the family style. It's a cool thing I have realized about people. If you go out of your way to treat them like human beings no matter what their lifestyle you have a better chance of them not getting their "gunk" on you.
My brother comes in yesterday after a show of epic prorportions and I am not talking about their music. John got in a fight with some dude, as usual, and when my little brother tried to break it up a huge bouncer slugged him in the neck. This was shortly after he took a fist to the face from some drunk woman who was hassling his wife. So he comes in, limping and haggard, and proceeds to tell me these things.
He was having a hard time talking because his neck was all jacked, but he told me that Charlie also beat the snot out of John. Oh I forgot to mention that John and Charlie live with John's mom, a DF'ed Witness.
My brother tells me that when they got home from the show, to John's mom's house, John was so livid that he was pounded, badly, by Charlie that he took a shotgun and shot an interior wall inside his house. Blew a huge hole in it apparently. The tragic part is that there two small kids, John's mom's grandchildren and her daughter, stay there too sometimes. So the kids, very young maybe 3, were there to witness the whole thing.
What does one do with such information? It doesn't even sound like it's real, does it?
-Sab
