Nathe can be so exasperating. You never do know when he is telling you something true or lying for his own amusement. By this late stage in our siblinghood you would think I’d have a clue.
Truths I know about Nathe:
— For a short time in the sixties, Nathe was an altar boy.
— Nathe retired from the Navy after twenty years service at a rank barely higher than the rank at which he enlisted.
— Nathe travelled all over the world - Europe, Asia, the Pacific islands, the Middle East…
— Nathe takes great pride in gaming every system. He has never worked for anyone he ever considered smarter than himself and his succession of firings he explains as his bosses, each and every, felt threatened by his obvious superior intelligence.
— When Nathe had milked the G.I. educational bill for all he could get from it (he once told me his ambition was to be a permanent student at the government’s expense), he decided to use all his accumulated credits toward a Ph,D. This ambition was thwarted a few years and thousands of dollars in student loans later by the head of his department, a woman he called a femiNazi who he said had issues with his (wait for it) superior intelligence.
— Bankrupt, unemployed and pretty much unemployable, Nathe was a man without options. Nathe, however, is a smart man (though not as smart as he thinks he is) and so he researched mental health laws in all 50 states. That’s how he ended up on a 30 day hold in a Las Vegas mental hospital (a locale where debtors cannot be pursued while in such facilities). After his 30 day stint was over, Nathe reluctantly left the hospital. A few days after that, Nathe was found in his car in the parking lot of the hospital he’d just left, having taken an overdose of his discharge prescriptions. He was readmitted for another 30 days.
Knowing what I know of Nathe, I have a hard time accepting some of the things he says at face value:
— When Nathe tells me he was really trying to kill himself in Vegas - taking pills in a highly visible area of the parking lot of the hospital that had just released him, a place where he would be and was discovered and saved by people who knew exactly how to do it - I tend to disbelieve. I classify him psuedocidal - someone who only threatens to kill himself to manipulate others. (Since my ex-husband Ian is still alive twenty years later, after threatening suicide many times to keep me with him, I can say that I have some experience with pseudocidal personalities.)
— When Nathe says he can’t tell me about what he did in the service because he was in intelligence, what am I to say? Any question I might have cannot be answered - “It’s classified,” he grins. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” He pretends he’s serious.
— When Nathe says he was at the tearing down of the Berlin wall, I say, “That’s really interesting,” and sort of accept it. Why not? Then, of course, he has to go and elaborate that he would have been kicked out of the service or worse if his superiors had known. Apparently he wasn’t allowed anywhere near the Wall at the time due to the amount of classified information that could have been extracted from him. Okay then.
— Oh, and that Lockerbie plane bombing. Nathe says he had a ticket on that flight. If his cab hadn’t been in a traffic accident on the way to the airport he wouldn’t have missed that plane. Wow, close call.
— And I sigh tonight when, in response to story on the news, Nathe hints that something happened when he was a fresh-faced young lad in cassock and surplice, that the altar wine was not the only thing tasted by the parish priests he assisted in Mass. Where do I go with that?
I let him hint around this mysterious event that maybe happened (or maybe didn’t) and listen as he insinuates that the truth is too painful to talk about. My listening and sympathetic head shaking seems enough to content him. He doesn’t require I make a more affirming response.
(But how, really, can I believe him? Wouldn’t my system gamer of a brother sue the Catholic church for all it’s worth if he really had a case?)
On the complete other hand, my younger brother Rory and I once talked about his days as an altar boy. He was absolutely outraged by the behavior of the priests he assisted.
“They didn’t touch me, the bastards, not a single one of them!
And I was cute, I tell you, I was FREAKING PRECIOUS!!!”
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