The Third Time, or: My Brother Houdini

I've posted before about how when we were kids we almost killed some people, but up until now these stories have never involved members of my own family. The story I am about to tell you centers around my youngest brother, Houdini. Yes, this is the same brother who, on orders from my mother, violated a Sears mannequin at the tender age of 12. This is a story of mystery, danger, intrigue and raw, unadulterated stupidity (mine).

The mystery: How my brother ever survived.

The danger: Getting caught by my mother while in the act of torturing him.

The intrigue: Convincing my other brother (via various methods including, but not limited to, cash, material goods, and promises of extreme bodily harm) not to snitch.

The stupidity: Actually using electricity (both AC and DC) as one method of said torture.

My brother was a tough kid, and during his terrible twos, had so many accidents that -- had he been born in this day and age -- my father surely would have been arrested on child abuse charges.

In the space of one year, he was rushed to the emergency room no less than 5 times, and the doctors had started giving my father funny looks. The inventory is as follows: A gash in his head from running full speed under a kitchen counter overhang and not quite making it, a burnt and cauterized lip injury from sticking an unfolded paperclip in his mouth and subsequently into a live electrical socket, third degree burns on his hands from grabbing a hot lawnmower muffler, another head injury from getting beaned by a fly ball at a neighbor's little league baseball game...the list goes on.

Needless to say, by the time he was 6 or so, I don't think he could actually feel pain. He was invincible, and he said so. You could not hurt him unless you punched him in what he called his 'mortal weak spot,' which was generally any part of his body hit hard enough to actually make him cry. This was a hard thing to do, and quite frankly if there wasn't at least some blood, he usually didn't shed a tear.

As his older brothers, The Snitch and I felt it was our duty to torture him. We would do the normal things when he was being a pain in the ass, like hold him down and tickle him until he couldn't breathe, give him wedgies, noogies, Indian burns, pink bellies and on rare occasions --- mostly when we had hot dogs for dinner --- we would sit on him and make him smell our farts.

I'm not proud.

By chance, that all changed one Spring day. The Snitch and I were watching television and Houdini was, as usual, bugging us. There happened to be a blanket on the floor, and I had an idea. I conferred with the Snitch, and we asked Houdini if he wanted to play "mummy." When we had finally convinced him that it would be a blast, we rolled him up in the blanket and once he couldn't move, we tickled him until he couldn't breathe. This was much easier, since we didn't get kicked.

This was also the start of a series of what I like to refer to as Very Dangerous Situations.

It just so happened that this blanket discovery was right around the time that Houdini learned about escape artists, and earned the nickname I subsequently gave him for this story. To this day I am not sure what the fascination was, but he would brag to us that there was nothing we could put him in, tie him up with, or bury him under that he couldn't escape from.

We, of course, were happy to test this theory of his on a regular basis. We would only favor his requests if he agreed that no matter what we did to him, he wouldn't tell, and if he didn't get free within a predetermined amount of time, he would have to do our chores for a week. As a result, we used to torture him regularly, because one, it was really, really fun, and two, we hated our chores.

We started him off easy, although we didn't know this at the time. We rolled him up in the blanket again, and then tied rope around it, and left him in his bedroom. Somehow, 20 minutes later, he burst triumphantly into the TV room, sweating like a pig, with rope burns over 80% of his entire body. He had escaped.

This would not do.

The next time, since we weren't really all that original with this game yet, we wrapped him in the blanket again, only this time we made a few changes. First, we gagged him, and then when we wrapped him up, we made sure his head was tucked in the blanket as well. That way he couldn't see what we tied him up with, or even where he was. We then dragged him into the laundry room, stuck him in the little space between the washer and dryer, and went back to watch TV. Every once in a while, over the laugh track of 'Bewitched,' we would hear a series of low grunts and straining noises very similar to those made by someone passing a kidney stone, or giving birth. Soon, these grunting noises were followed by a rhythmic, metallic thumping that sounded exactly like a washing machine spinning an uneven load -- right before it walks itself across the laundry room floor.

Needless to say, we were extremely surprised when about half way through the Munsters, out popped Houdini. He was no longer wearing a shirt, and I am pretty sure there was a large patch of hair missing from the side of his head.

This was truly amazing to us. He had done it again. We didn't want to admit it, but we were beginning to be impressed, and I have to say that we were starting to believe his hype.

This is where thing escalated out of control. We needed to win this contest of wills.

So did he.

The next time, The Snitch and I decided to forgo the blanket altogether, and we simply hog-tied him. We tied his hands behind his back, then tied his ankles together, and then connected them both.

We weren't done yet.

We gagged him, and finished it off with a backwards ski mask. Then we hauled him outside, and dumped him on the floor in the backseat of the station wagon.

You know, that one over there sitting in the driveway in the sun.

In late July.

We left him there. To this day, I cannot believe that he did not die. We didn't even think of that possibility. If you ever wonder how kids get locked in the trunks of abandoned cars and suffocate, well, it happens just like this.

A few hours later, my mother called us up from the basement and said, "Have either of you seen your brother? I've been calling him for 20 minutes and I can't find him anywhere."

"Not really," we said, panicking, and trying like hell not to show it. "But we think we know where he is. We'll go get him."

We ran outside to the car, and opened it up. Houdini was still where we had left him, but he didn't have much fight left. We took off the ski mask, and ungagged him. He was pretty out of it, and consequently pretty pliable, and we had a hard time getting him to stand up once we had hauled him out of the car and untied him.

I'll give him credit though. Once he found out that our mother was looking for him, he shook it off and put on his game face, even though he was barely conscious. After he told her that he had been out in the woods running around (and we were all off the hook), he admitted to us that he thought we had probably won that round. He did say, however, that he totally would have gotten free if he had been able to breathe.

After that little scare, we backed off on the gagging thing. We figured it would be a good idea to allow him to yell for help.

His next great escape was from the pole in the basement, where we fastened him by tightly winding a few 60-minute cassette tapes around him, head to toe. I think his hands and feet went numb on that one, but he did get free eventually. He was truly a force to be reckoned with.

A year or so later, things changed again. Not the basic relationship -- that was still kill or be killed. This was more in the nature of the contest. I had discovered electricity, and Houdini had discovered money. He would do anything for a couple of quarters. I could get him to clean my room, do my paper route and all my chores for a week if I paid him 50 cents.

I had developed a fascination with electronics. I was taking apart radios and electronic equipment of all kinds at this point, and even though stuff generally never got fixed or put back together again, I learned a lot.

One of the things I took apart was an electronic camera flash. If you don't know what's inside one of those bad boys, it's basically a huge capacitor. That whine you hear when you turn one on is the capacitor charging up.

You know where this is going, right? Depending on the size of the flash, the capacitor can discharge tens of thousands of volts. In other words, this is essentially the same circuit that powers a stun gun or Taser, except it normally puts the electricity to a xenon flashtube instead of a pair of electrodes. I took the flash tube off, and soldered in a couple of long wires instead. I would routinely weld pennies together with this thing. Charge it up, touch the two wires to the edges of a couple of stacked pennies and WHACK! You would see a spark that would leave spots in front of your eyes for 20 minutes, and when you could see again, you looked down and the pennies would be melted together.

This device, coupled with my brother's newfound greediness, was an instant recipe for disaster.

As usual, this part of our story starts with a spectacularly bad idea.

Using the electronic flash guts, a couple of quarters, some solder and a shoebox, it took me about 20 minutes to build something that looked like this:



I called him into the room. He eyes were instantly drawn to the two quarters sitting on top of the shoebox.

"What's that?" he asked, eyeing me suspiciously, and eyeing the money greedily.

"Magic quarters," I replied.

"What makes 'em magic?" he asked.

"Well, you can't touch them both at the same time. They won't allow it. In fact, even though they are close enough to touch with two fingers on one hand, you can't do it," I said.

"What if I do?" he asked.

"Well, if you do, they'll be yours. They will have accepted you as their new master."

This was the part I was waiting for. He reached out two fingers of his left hand, and hovered over the quarters. He brought his index finger down slowly. It touched the first quarter. He did the same with his middle finger, lowering it slowly toward the second coin. It was millimeters away and then....

He touched it.

He arm was thrown violently into the wall, and he started bawling instantly. I felt bad because I had really hurt him, but I was also scared shitless. He never cried before. He was the toughest kid I knew. This must have hurt like a motherfucker.

I calmed him down a bit, and we assessed the damage. He couldn't feel his hand. The fingers were numb. I was shitting my pants thinking that I had just paralyzed my little brother, and goddammit I was going to be in Big Trouble.

I begged him not to tell. I told him it was only temporary, and that the feeling would come back in no time. Lucky for me, this turned out to be true, and a few minutes later he could move his fingers again. He had two small burn marks, one on each fingertip, and I was pretty sure his fingernails would never grow the same way again, but he was going to be ok.

After about another half hour, I had finally negotiated him down to ten bucks and a radio. I considered myself very lucky. It was an old radio.

You would think this would have taught me a lesson, but you would be wrong. I was loathe to give up on the electricity entirely. Its siren song was too much for me to resist.

A little while later, I found a transformer in someone's garbage. This transformer stepped down the 120volts AC house current to about 40 volts. Not enough to really hurt you, but enough to give you a decent shock.

I wanted -- no, I needed -- to apply this current to Houdini. I don't know why. It was just something that had to be done.

I shared my transformer discovery with The Snitch under not-so-veiled threats of death.

The Snitch and I then came up with a plan. We would tie Houdini up and throw him in the closet to attempt an escape, which he would think of as unworthy of his talents. He'd done it before, and he'd do it again, in no time flat. Not even a challenge.

This time, however, there would be a twist.

I took the transformer, some rubber cement, some bare copper wire and some insulated copper wire, and went to work on the closet doorknob. After a bit, I had this:



The Snitch and I figured it would be dark in the closet, and when Houdini finally threw off his shackles, he would triumphantly grab the doorknob and hilarity would ensue -- for us, at least.

We hung a shirt over the doorknob to disguise it, and went to work on convincing Houdini to give the closet escape a shot. He agreed to try to escape for the paltry sum of 3 dollars, and the game was on. We tied him up -- loosely, to assure his quick success -- and tossed him in the back of the closet, yanking the shirt off the knob as we did so. I think the loose rope may have tipped him off, since we usually made sure it was brutally tight. We waited outside the door, the stereo on to mask the sounds of struggle. A few minutes later the closet went completely silent. He was waiting. Trying to figure out what was next. It had been too easy.

We heard the knob rattle and then:

"OW!"

A pause.

"OW!!!"

One more time.

"OWWWW!"

A shuffling sound, another rattle, then the door opened. We were impressed. At first we thought he just toughed it out and turned the knob through the pain, but he was smarter than that. He had grabbed a shirt off one of the hangers and used it to open the door.

He stepped out of the closet and glared at us.

"Gimme my money." he said.

Goddammit he was the best brother in the universe.

After we got a bit older, we actually became friends in addition to being brothers. Turns out we had a lot in common, my fascination with electricity not withstanding. When I was in high school, we would hang out and listen to my records, something that we do to this day. We live in different states now, but when we get together it somehow always gets down to music, and what's new, and what we've both been listening to lately.

The stuff I was listening to in the 80's was before my time -- mostly 70's British Invasion rock and progressive rock. As a result, he cut his teeth on bands like Genesis, Zeppelin, The Stones and the Kinks. Not too shabby for a 13 year old kid.

Later on when I had a band, he used to hang out and listen to us practice. I am actually surprised he's not deaf. The reason I say this is not because we played particularly loud, although we did OK and I have the hearing loss to prove it, but because of his chosen method of listening.

At any given practice, you could usually find him like this:



I shit you not. He used to lie there for hours. I mean, seriously, that had to do some damage.

Anyway, that's the story of my brother Houdini, and the third time we almost killed a guy. We had some good times, and will hopefully have many more.

I got him drunk once on New Year's Eve when I was 19. I had just broken up with my girlfriend, and we sat around commiserating on life, the universe and why women are such pains in the asses. Trust me, it's no fun sitting at the breakfast table the next morning trying to explain to your mother how your 15 year-old brother got a hangover straight from hell.

Dead brain cells from the NYE drinking binge notwithstanding, he turned into one of the coolest and smartest guys I know. He obviously had more braincells to spare than I did, because he's got a PhD in molecular biology or some such that he uses to conduct genome research (which I think has to do with those little ceramic people with pointy hats that you put in your garden).

He has a black belt in Karate. He takes some of the best photos I've ever seen. He has an amazing sense of wonder about the world around us.

He also has the biggest heart of anyone I know.

I miss having him around, even though he's only three hours and a phone call away. He is truly a great friend and brother, even if he does have an irrational fear of electricity.

What a wuss.