On one black-comically terrible Christmas
It's painful, but it's not lacking in its humorous elements. Scott had just gotten out of a three-year stint in prison for various drug offenses, and my mother — though I had warned her repeatedly — took him into her house, and I went home for Christmas. And, well, I was about to say that everything that could have gone wrong did, but it was pretty predictable: He wrecked his car ... on the way back from the liquor store, so he had a pretty healthy cache of liquor. The police obligingly drove him back to us. He got drunk, he terrorized my mother, the next day I took my mother to the police station, and we arranged to have Scott removed as a trespasser.
But what people may not know if they don't have a, you know, psychotic drunken brother, is it's very hard to get a restraining order. So all we could do was have the police remove him. He could come back. So as soon as the police removed him — and that was an interesting scene — we went and bought a gun, and stopped to have a martini at a Chinese restaurant, and I coached my mother: Tell him to sit down, and if he doesn't sit down, you're going to have to shoot him.
Author Interviews
Revisiting John Cheever's Suburban Unrest