Monday, January 31, 2011

Flashback: Charles

I have two siblings.  My sister, Casey, is 2 years younger than me, and my brother, Evan, is 5 years younger.  Given those numbers, obviously you have already reached the conclusion that Casey and I used to constantly gang up on Evan.  You are correct.

When Evan was in elementary school, Casey and I invented this game called "Charles."  It consisted of us forcing Evan to be our servant and bring us whatever we demanded.  During the game, we referred to Evan only as "Charles" ... because I guess that sounded like a good servant name to us.

The game started by one of us saying "Evan, be Charles!" and he usually went along with it at first without complaint.  Whenever we wanted Evan to do something for us, we would clap our hands twice and holler "CHARLES" and state whatever we wanted.  Actually, most of the time we didn't really want anything; we just shouted out random objects for him to get simply for the joy of watching him run around obeying us.

After a few minutes of humoring us, Evan would get tired of being Charles and start to protest or threaten to leave if we didn't start being nicer.  Now, Casey and I had no patience for this sort of back talk from the hired help.  When he got like this, we would utter a phrase which made him go absolutely crazy with anger.  The magic phrase was:

"I thought I heard a little voice ... but I guess it was just the wind."

God, that pissed him off.  He would start screaming, refusing to believe that we couldn't hear him, but we would just repeat the phrase over and over each time he said anything.  He would then start shouting insults at us since we "couldn't hear him", but we didn't tolerate that either.  No matter what insults he threw at us, we had one word that would always top them.  That word was: "jerky".

Apparently it wasn't good enough just to call him a "jerk," so we had to put a "y" on the end to give it that little extra flair.  Anyway, we would chant "JERKY, JERKY, JERKY" at Evan until he was about to explode with rage.  Looking back, these were all incredibly mean things to do to a little kid, but whatever, maybe he should have just stayed in character during "Charles" sessions, and he could have avoided all of this.  He brought it on himself.  I'm sure, if faced with a similar situation, anyone would have taken the same disciplinary action on their servant boy.

Once the "jerky" chanting had gotten to be too much for Evan, he would shout something at us like, "THAT'S IT!!!!" and run off to his room.  Casey and I would sit there laughing for a minute ... until Evan reappeared with a baseball bat.  He would then chase us around the house legitimately trying to bash our heads in with it.  I swear I think sometimes Mom and Dad would take their time getting the bat away from Evan because they wanted to teach us a lesson.  Evan never actually caught us, but holy shit did he look terrifying running after us swinging that bat like there was no tomorrow.  Ah, family memories ...

I would like to close by saying that I love Evan a lot, and we now get along splendidly.  Maybe tonight I'll walk by him and say "Charles, get me a sandwich" and see if he turns into the Hulk.

1 comment:

  1. HAHA! That's such a great story. I would do the same to my brother. We called it "Queen Time." I was the Queen and he was my servant. Minus the baseball bat, ours, too, ended in chases around the house.

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