Proud Pants

A man recalls his life of addiction, abandonment, and anger as he faces death at the age of thirty-four. Told through the voice of one man, but written through the words of his brother – this memoir novelette describes the troubled life who was rejected by one woman at an early age but found solace in another. Author’s Note: When I was nine years old I picked up a lead pipe and prepared to hit my fourteen-year-old half brother in case he did something to my mother. That brother died two hours after my twenty-ninth birthday when he was only thirty-four. Throughout the years, I often thought about how he shaped who I eventually became as a person. I was always the good kid, straight A's, never getting into trouble and very bent on being a productive part of society — the opposite of the older brother I had when most young boys want to try and emulate that older sibling. But later in life I began to think about what life must have been like for him. I had always thought he was offered the same opportunities I had been given from our parents but he still had a very difficult life that I never could fully comprehend as a child. I decided to try and get inside of my brother's skin to write this memoir of his life. My brother’s life was a novelette — too long to be considered a short story and too short to be a novel.