Bob Has a Job:

  farm-raised essays

      in a story about home

            (from 2004, reviewed Summer 2005)

May 13

"You need to start a Roth IRA. Those things are totally schweet," says my younger brother, Bob. He's 20, a farmer, Catholic, and a Republican.

"You're an Independent? Yeah... those are the guys who are Democrats, but won't admit it."

He's also smarter than I had remembered.

"Ol' Gung-Ho, that's what I call him" my dad says proudly.

Bob's inherited my father's work ethic, which is roughly - "Work sucks. Work is an awful, horrible pain you must endure, everyday, for the entire day, in order to have money, which is worth it, because money is what makes the world go 'round." He'll also inherit the family farm.

As Dad recently fell off a truck and ripped his right leg noticeably out of its socket, we're all starting to find out what it'll be like when he does.

My prediction - my quiet brother becomes my father becomes my talkative grandfather will eventually become dead. However, there are two personal, proportional changes I've noticed in the kid this year - he's both fairing better with the stress and is fairly pissed off.

Now, what you need to know is that my brother's long shared with me a more psychosomatic version of the stomach-twisting personality cocktail that mixes our father's ambition and our mother's neuroses, to the extent where, for him, breakfast before school consisted consistently of nothing but a dry waffle and double-dose of Tums. The rest of the day, he mainly ate stick butter, grilled chicken, and sliced cheese. Then there was the summer before high school he lost sixty pounds, including muscle mass, on his two bowls of Total-a-day, then pedaling an exercise bike for two sweat-drenched hours.

Mom worried, “I can just imagine what kind of job the pediatrician’s gonna say I’m doing.” She did buy him a multi-vitamin, which he refused to take, as he had already planned well to provide himself his essential vitamins and minerals with the Total. (He did soon start weight-lifting and now he's only a couple cold ones away from having a six-pack.) She tried to buy him a variety of health products from her favorite channel, QVC, that she watches for hours when not cooking or reading romance novels but he’d have none of that either. To give you a better sense of my mother, years ago she received cow slippers, then a cow ice-cream scoop, and soon a great bounty of cow-themed gifts not against or for her wishes, until she gradually seemed to feel she must’ve wanted them.

Anyway. When Bob got stressed, his body suffered, which he mentioned as much as any sixty-year-old. His personal list of unconfirmed ailments, at their peak last summer:

-Sore throat

-Dry mouth

-Acid reflux

-Stiffness in joints

-Thinning blood

-Smelly pee

-Discolored mole

-Swollen lymph nodes

-Constipation

-Lump in breast

But now that he has Dad's old job of actually planting the beans, in a tractor he never let be steered by any hired hand, a job requiring stressful precision in getting those bean-rows straight and parallel and most growth-encouraging, his body seems to be faring much better though his speech is increasingly sailorish. Because when the walkie-talkie starts advising and talking around in his boss's great Circles of Everything, he's barely retaining his desire to break my father's other leg. Teeth are gritted and curses mumbled... though in the end he always continue doing his job in Dad's way.

As children, Bob and I never wanted to farm. He didn't know what he wanted, or wanted to want, and I just wanted to escape feeling “something is wrong.” We were never pressured into a career, but avoiding the work was an inconceivable ingratitude; we might as well spit back our blood in their faces. “We’ll help you get started,” my father says, “each generation tries to make it better for the next. You know, that’s our job. That’s what my father did for me.” And I remember my grandfather’s funeral, when my father said nearly the same thing, but choked up.

But Bob never looked up to Dad or his work; in fact, he looked up to me, but I only looked up to the stars. Still I helped him with his math and English homework each night; Dad stomped in during Saturday morning cartoons to tell us to sweep the mouse shit out his grain bins. I was the kid everyone said could do "anything he put his mind to" and Bob was "Jim's younger brother." So I went to U of I as an honors student and physics major, then walked away from it all, then all around campus, all the way to Bloomington, a psych ward, occasionally high blood-alcohol levels...; he pushed through high school, finally matching my career run of straight A’s his final semester, then the local community college and an associate arts degree in agri-business management.

I became Jim Trapp, nearly a one-word name: by day, smaller-than-life, uncomfortably untethered slouching through class, by night megalomaniac and occasional provocateur - all trenchcoated in up to seventy-two-degree weather. Aside from the occasional temp work at bookstores or costume and novelty shops, I am at median unemployed.

While he grows into the other shape he knows, and becomes my father, Jr., but smarter at business, with more energy, even more ambition than the original, who's not at all to be sneezed at, certainly not without asking a blessing. Bob took out a super-low-rate loan for young farmers and bought hundreds more acres on his own, then pushed his boss to rent even more for the glory and profit of Trapp Farms, Inc.; so suddenly the two of them nearly doubled their acreage, still only them handling it all, with Mom who can provide only meals and pick-ups. With sometimes me, prodigal and alienated, coming to the farm I haven’t been able to call home for years to help on breaks and summer, then watching my right hand hold steady on the accelerator, while the left almost manages to steer out of the way, ramming my tractor's discing implement straight into electrical poles with a gorgeously satisfying, bursting display of sparks and small forest fire.

He was less happy about that than Dad was. Dad, at least, seemed glad no one got hurt.

We do have insurance. Too much insurance, I think; when we were each born, my father bought $50,000 life insurance policies on us both. That is, if either my brother or I died, my father would collect $50,000. I remind you that farming is among the most dangerous occupations in America. (See: http://money.msn.com/content/invest/extra/P63405.asp) Admittedly, they've got nothing on the timber cutters, farmers still beat out construction workers and truck drivers and I recall with great fondness the plethora of mangled stick figures warning of the fate to befall anyone who allowed their pant to be caught in an auger. But aside from Dad’s leg, and mishaps with grinders to befall the tips of both Dad’s and Bob’s index finger, the only casualties we’ve suffered was when the old hired man shot himself when his wife left.

Mind you not that Bob’s so much misery and festering rage. He says he loves running the combine, puffs up when he shows the fields he's planted... He'll be the first to tell you he gets up at 5AM, before Dad now, tuning equipment or how he easily rose to the top of his welding class, and talked Dad into buying a new welder, a plasma cutter, and the extra-nice protective helmet, with the auto-tinting goggles and flames painted along the sides.

"I like it when I'm going," he says when the weather turns bad, "I hate it when I'm sitting around."

Still, my brother's primary, and primarily materialistic, joy in life is his Dodge pick-up, bought using what had once been college savings. When not farming, or indulging his secondary love of repetitive-action-kill-everything video games, he is spending whatever other time or money he has on pimpin' it out, most noticeably in his monthly stack of magazines on pick-up pimpin', the covers of each with their own scantily clad centerfold leaning her cleavage against nearly as provocative paint jobs, with titles such as "Street Trucks", "Low-Rider", or the simple, enthusiastic "Trucks!"

Talk to him and he can tell you all about the dual exhaust he installed, the... whatever it was... he primed, and the rims he's waiting to buy (after Dad gives him the okay to spend his salary) - all I could tell you about it is that 1) it's black and 2) has a bitchin' stereo, which 3) he never turns to a volume above his own soft-spoken voice.

Though he doesn't spend much time listening, anyway. Once a week, he'll back his spotless pride out of its garage spot next to my parent's dusty, dinged SUV, wax it a few loving hours, then pull back inside. Aside from this, and quick round-trips to his local community college or the parts-supply store, it never leaves.

Bob did have a girlfriend for awhile in high school, said they were in love, but she moved his senior year and touch slipped away as soon as their words did, and now he doesn't even know any girls his age. But this isn't a problem, he says, 'cause Dad didn't get married until he was 31...

My brother is handsome. Fit and tanned with curly hair. Combine that with his strong, silent type and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt/property getting a date shouldn't be a problem.

I tell him, "Drive to a movie. Call up some guys from your ag classes. They know people, like women-people. Take a vacation; you need one; come to Champaign; sleep on my couch for awhile..."

"Can't," he says, "Gotta work."

"Not all the time..."

But he's too smart now; no one in my family says much of anything, but I know he knows what's happened. So he'll always shrug his way out of the conversation, going out to the workshop alone to plasma cut, hammer, and sand something else down.

May 16th

I was in the back of the living room, downloading the security patches and anti-virus software Bob hadn’t bothered with for his now severely suffering computer, when I saw him stroll for the first time, over to me where he said with a slight smile and his increasingly less than slight southern Illinois drawl that he’d taken my advice and “finally told Dad off.”

I was thrilled for him, and curious.

“Well… I was playing basketball, and he came over and said he was ‘gonna let me move those anhydrous tanks over to the other barn.’ But that’s stupid, they aren’t in the way where they are, there’s no need to do that right this minute. So what I said was, “I don’t think we need to move those right now.” And he said let’s move them. So I said, ‘You know, this is bean planting season, and if we weren’t rained out I’d be out there planting beans now and I’ll be out there planting beans tomorrow. But those anhydrous tanks are no hurry, not like beans, and if you want to move them, that’s your business. You can get Jim to help you if you want, but I worked hard all week and I’m taking the day off.’ That’s what I said, and then he just kind of went off moping.”

Then he sat on his ass, in Dad’s recliner, hands behind his head and watched movies all afternoon.

Also, after spending my college vacancies telling me it’s just too much trouble to move all his Micro-Machines, Bob says after I head back to Chambana for the last time he’ll finally be moving from his room (downstairs, adjacent to the bath and our parent’s rooms) to my thrice-the-size upstairs bachelor’s pad. He says he’ll come to visit me.

My father, aside from the added bruise to his ego, is healing up – he’s hobbling around all over the place now, climbing up into trucks even – there’s been more than a few times when I’ve had to chase after him with his walker and remind him of how awfully handy such a deceptively simple invention can be. On the recuperation timeline, the doc says he’s about two weeks ahead of schedule, and still loves telling every single person he sees the story about the falling, and the hurting, and the ambulance, and the morphine, and the suddenly-not-hurting-why,-no,-not-hurting-at-all, and the annoying guy in the bed next to his, and the will-I-have-a-limp?, and that lingering mystery pain in his scrotum.

My prediction now, like my father recreated his father’s dairy and scattered acres into Trapp Farms, inherited something that he made his own, if he keeps it up, my brother will do the same.

August 15th

I went back to Champaign for summer classes and one bad date, then back to the farm to visit before fall classes and generally refresh my farmer’s tan. They have their usual passive-aggressive stance towards the increasingly shagginess of my hair, but things are otherwise pleasant and trite. Sometimes I think the real strength of a family bond is its undeniable fact - no matter if we loved or hated each other, we’re technically, eternally, related. We all tried to see a movie, Starsky and Hutch, but certain what you might call generational gaps kept us bonding.

“Now, Huggy Bear, he was Boss Hogg back when that was a TV series.”

“Ah… that was the Dukes of Hazard.”

“Yeah… but they all had the same kind of car, red and white.”

“Yeah… though the Dukes’ car had a Confederate flag on it.”

“Yeah. But it was the same make.”

“Well… they both pealed out and jumped over hills a lot.”

“Right.”

I’ve tried, you’ll have to trust me that I’ve tried, to introduce other, potentially mutually interesting topics. But every conversation I’ve had involving my father either ends abruptly (with neither of us knowing where to go from or having any idea of what else to talk about) or degenerates into him giving a lecture, to help us.Meanwhile, my mother’s closet is increasingly full of QVC jewelry and novelty products. “I just like watching them. They talk to you like they’re your friends.”

I wish I could reach her. I’ve tried to get her on-line, join a bookclub somewhere, but she won’t turn on a computer: “That’s too advanced for me.” But she has her mother and sister and circle of relatives and acquaintances but, most of all, my father’s mother. They talk every day, but Grandma’s days are shortening, as she herself reminds us to the family’s chagrin, while I worry about the graves they’ve both dug for themselves. My mother was considering outloud of having a cow engraved on her gravestone someday.

The only notable change here has been architectural - as part of the expansion plans my father and brother cooked up, they're putting in another grain leg (a tower to transfer grain from truck to bin) and a larger grain dryer that looks and sounds like a wind tunnel . As I told Bob, I wouldn't be a writer if I couldn't see symbolism in how he's installed a slightly taller, shinier phallic to stand next to the first one.

He showed me how he’s settled into my old roomier room (replete with a new TV that gets three stations and covered with ripped-out magazine ads for truck-tire rims, featuring the young women who love them), he and I went bowling with his new girlfriend and her ten-year-old sister.

I'd never pictured the perfect girl for my brother, but if I had, and done so correctly, it'd be her. Sweet, down-to-earth, solid set of knockers... They look and act like a matched mating pair. He got in touch with one of his old friends from high school, an Iraq veteran now, who introduced them last month and suddenly that truck of his isn't sitting around much. My brother’s girlfriend already has a tangible presence in the house; even when she’s not over, there are notes she’s left- teasing Bob, belittling Bob’s manhood (general manhood, not the penis - it’s PG-rated flirting), finding great fault with Bob, encouraging readers to disparage Bob and his Bob-ness.

I was thrilled again - for about fifteen minutes. Then the hand-holding, backrubs, and constant teasing got to me, especially as I realized brother is close to existing within an adorable family-friendly sitcom. There is the requisite spunky ten-year-sister-in-pigtails also in love with Bob. There are the foreign exchange students from the community college including the usually token large, and yes, -sassy- South African girl. There is the dog, Goliath, who surprisingly often attempts to make the evolutionary leap to bipedalism and is then taller than me. Especially especially when the spunky-ten-year-old-year-sister-in-pigtails beat me bowling, by one pin.

Bob is still “Ol’ Gung Ho,” but comes in at night to go out again to play board games with her family or video games in his room and consume the popular culture (he’ll even ask off from work); his biggest issue is how he needs his own place. The room is covered with pictures of them and they keep taking more; on one he has taped a fortune from their favorite Chinese place, “Do not let the troubles of today stand in the way of your dreams for tomorrow.” He admits sometimes he feels like he's living in a prison, but with "awfully nice cell, plus conjugal visits,” sounding to me like anyone who works for their living and stays in one place.

He still says he’ll come visit me someday, though at this point I'm the one who wants a visitor.