Scotty Doesn't Know

 *Originally seen in The Filth issue 3*

I’m going to start this off by just letting you know that my brother, Scotty, is a total bumblefuck.

In a world where bumblefuckness runs rampant, he could be their president. Now, it’s not really all his fault. Right before he was born my mother’s placenta removed itself from her uterine wall, thus cutting off his oxygen supply for hours. We never really thought anything would come of it after he was born, but it apparently made a huge impact on him in ways we couldn’t determine until he was around four years old.

Four years old was the age he was when he brushed his teeth with my mom’s Monistat 7 cream. Yes, in a moment of epic decision-making, he chose the yeast infection cream instead of the toothpaste that he used every single day. “Tina, this toothpaste tastes funny.” He said to me, Monistat 7 running down the corners of his mouth while he kept brushing. This was also the age that he decided he couldn’t take a shit unless his entire ass was in the toilet and in the toilet water, to boot.

By the time he was eight years old he had already been held back in school once. By the time he was nine he told my mom and me out of the blue “I put Scotch Tape on my balls and then ripped it off…just to see what it felt like.” To say he was an average kid was to stretch the truth a little too far. There was always something slightly off about him.

At age eleven he got busted (and suspended) at school for handing out URL’s to porn sites to his friends. This was also right about the time that he started getting really sticky-fingered. Anything that wasn’t bolted down ended up in his room. This is including, but not limited to, road turtles (you know the bumps in the middle of the road? Yeah, he’d pry them off the street), paper towel and toilet paper rolls, and those little pencils they give you at the Lottery stands in grocery stores. To this day I still have to do a sweep of his room every few months or so. About a year ago when I did this after being lax about for the few years before I came out with every single lighter I had ever lost in those few years. They were stuffed into old diaper wipe boxes and the grand total was around 150. It was insane and made me really start questioning his sanity.

I wish it were only the things he did that smacked of ridiculousness, but alas, it isn’t. It’s also what he says that makes him seem like a total weirdo. He’ll routinely try to pick up phrases or sayings and make them his own, flubbing the words to the point where it makes no sense at all whatsoever. “You’re the vein of my existence” or “HELLO GOVENOR” meant to be said in a British accent but said plainly and over-enunciated, or just completely mispronounce simple words. “You ‘serf that” instead of “you deserved that” is a common one. There are so many more examples I could give here but the sad fact of reality is that I honestly have flushed them out of my brain. It makes for a good snicker but it’s just so weird that you have to flush it from your mind before you start to incorporate it into your daily language yourself.

When the movie Euro Trip came out a few years back they had a song in it called “Scotty Doesn’t Know”. When Scotty was going to school people would sing that to him all the time. He also got it pretty bad at home from me and my dad, too. To be fair, it just fit too perfectly and I couldn’t help myself. I usually try to keep from insulting him or breaking him down too much, but sometimes I just can’t hold back. I mean, he’s Scotty. And he really doesn’t know.

In high school he got held back again in the 9^th grade, at which point he decided to just stop going. But instead of staying home and just telling my dad face to face that he wasn’t going to go anymore, he elected to walk over to my mom’s apartment and fall asleep in her corvette every day during school hours. When he finally got busted for it, he blamed it on me. It was my fault that he failed high school because I made him stay home to take care of my kids. Um, excuse me, what? Of course, that never happened ONCE in the one year that he went to high school, but it didn’t stop everyone from believing that I did it. Oh, that’s right. I almost forgot to mention. My brother is also a pathological liar. He lies about everything there is to lie about. I’m sure that this isn’t just because of low oxygen levels in his brain during birth, but just from shitty parenting on my parent’s part. 

“Scotty! Why did you eat all of the cereal?” I’ll ask him after finding out that three boxes have vanished overnight.

“I didn’t do it.” He’ll reply, even though the kids are gone to their grandparent’s house and my husband and I didn’t do it. Even when he knows that WE know he’s lying, he still lies. Like, what the hell is the point of that? It happens on a near daily basis about everything you can imagine. 

He still lives with me even though he’s almost 21 years old. He’s never had an actual job, doesn’t have a license, doesn’t have a GED or diploma, and refuses to go back to school. He sits like a lump on a log all day and eats me out of house and home at night while we’re sleeping. It’s ridiculous, but honestly I don’t think he’d survive if I kicked him out. He has no friends (other than the weird girls that send pictures of their vaginas to him via text message) and no family that can afford the space to accommodate him. He’s been living with me for almost the entirety of my life and I can’t seem to get rid of him. It seems as though it’s my duty to take care of him until he’s capable of taking care of himself. My fear is that he’s never going to reach that point. I’m almost resigned to the fact that he’ll probably be living with me for the rest of my life, as my role of caregiver to him when I was nine and he was a baby has just carried on and never ended. I do love him dearly. I mean, after all…he’s my brother.

But in the meantime, has anyone seen my lighter?