There really is pain that extends beyond your own body.  I promise.

My baby brother was literally my best friend.  He knew things about me that nobody else knew.  Not even secret things, just the things you know about someone when you’ve lived your entire life in arms’ reach.  We grew up in 1500 square feet of suburban ranch house.  Not quite on top of each other, the way he was with Paul – they shared a bedroom.  But down the hall.  I guess I should give an example.

A couple of summers ago while Rob was clean for awhile, somehow we ended up in my Jeep, headed south on Dixie Highway.  One genuine sign that Robby wasn’t doing dope was that he wanted to do athletic things.  Robby was an amazing athlete – a right-handed pitcher with a wild, flattened three-quarters delivery like a Randy Johnson slider, and a vicious line-drive hitter; a six-foot-five guard with handles who could slap the backboard over the square, and he could throw a football 75 yards in the air.  He had a 300 ring he earned at Ken-Bowl, which is just plain nuts.  He could golf, he was nuts on the volleyball court, he could shoot pool – he could beat you at your favorite game, and not just once or twice.  And when he was clean, he wanted to play at all times.

So he wanted to stop at Batt & Putt.  And I would never have admitted this to him, but I would have paid to watch him play.  So we stopped, and we got into a batting cage.  Rob walked off the street and climbed into a 93 MPH cage and started ripping line drives as if he took batting practice every day.  Seriously.  Thirty-four years old and ten years into a drug habit, he was probably a AAA-level hitter, swinging one of the old junk bats they keep in the barrels between the cages.  I was never that talented, so I climbed into a slow-pitch softball cage.  And I couldn’t hit to save my life.  I was making contact but I couldn’t drive the ball.  Rob had gone to get more change, and when he came back, I didn’t even have to look.  I could hear the scorn in his voice.

“That’s not your batting stance.  What is that?”

Of course, he was right.  As soon as he said it, I dropped into my old crouch.  My knees flexed, ass-out, I closed my left foot and pivoted my hips, and immediately started tearing the cover off the ball.  My body remembered, just at the sound of his voice.  My baby brother knew me better than I knew myself.

He had an infectious personality.  I don’t even know how to describe it.  He was my baby brother, but I often found myself following him.  People wanted to be like him.  He was loud and funny and he had a way of busting your balls that still made you laugh.  You didn’t mind his criticism and no matter how bad he rode your ass for never being able to beat him at anything, he didn’t make you feel bad for it.  And if he was having fun, the entire room was having fun.

We used to build things together.  He was so smart and so good with his hands.  We renovated kitchens and bathrooms, built sheds and workshops, painted houses, didn’t matter what it was, we’d figure out how to do it and we always left with a pile of cash and very happy customers.  The best one was probably the workshop we built for my father-in-law.  My in-laws bought a small farm as a quiet retirement spot, one that featured a large steel building that had once housed an electrical contractor – not enormous, but quite large for a retired guy.  Probably big enough for six cars.  Dad has a lot of hobbies, and among his favorites is woodworking, so he started drawing plans to build a workshop in a back corner of the building, just enough to contain his tools and keep the sawdust off the cars.

 

I enlisted Robby to help, and we got to work.  We built that shop in a day, but what I really remember is the Fein Tool.  It’s a reciprocating saw, and it’s about the handiest thing you can own – it solves all sorts of difficult building and woodworking problems, and it’s incredibly powerful.  And all day long, it kept coming in handy, fixing things in minutes that could have taken hours to work around.  So good, in fact, that Robby nicknamed it “The World’s Greatest Tool,” and in usual Robby fashion, started making up mock lyrics to the songs on the radio, paying tribute to the tool that was making for an easy day.  Of course, this began a game of can-you-top-this, where he and I would make up more and more ridiculous parody lyrics, and an easy day turned into a really fun day.  Then it happened – my strait-laced, serious, sober father-in-law’s voice, the man who spent forty years in the pulpit, started singing behind me, very quietly..  “she’s real fine, my tool by Fein..  she’s real fine, my tool by Fein, my tooooool byyyyyyy Fein…”

Robby could make anybody sing.  His joy was irrepressible.

He woke my father up on the day my daughter was born and made dad take him to his GED test.  Caitlyn came a month early, unexpectedly, and I called him on the way to the hospital to tell him that his niece was on the way, and his reaction was to immediately get online and look for a GED testing site.  He found that he could register for that day’s test, and he did.  He woke dad up, and he told him, “Dad, I can’t be an uncle without a high school diploma.  What kind of role model would I be for her?”  And he walked into a testing center and passed the test, cold-turkey, no study.  Picked up his diploma, and came straight to the hospital in time for her birth.

I’m not sure I was ever prouder of him.

I got the call on Sunday morning, and typically my phone was on vibrate.  It was 6:30 am and I was still asleep.  So Paul came and beat on my door, and we rushed to the hospital.  His body was still alive, but his brain had been dead on arrival, since the night before when he was found unconscious and not breathing.  No brain can survive hypoxia for very long, and nobody had any idea how long his breathing had stopped.  A few very close family and friends were allowed to come and see him before he passed, and in the end, I sat in a chair by his bed, the last to leave, holding his hand.  I just wanted to see him through the shift change, meet his new nurse before I left for the night.

Typically, she was smoking hot.  That’s just Robby for you.  He needed a haircut, but I couldn’t help that.  I put my Yankees hat on him so she couldn’t see his hair, because he’d have been mortified if he knew his fade was shaggy in front of a hot girl.  And when I arrived the next morning, the man doing his final EEG was taking it off his head.  I’ll treasure that hat forever.

My father, my brother and I made the decision at 11am to withdraw treatment, after consultation with the neurologist and his medical team.  They were in complete agreement.  Paul and I held his hands and knelt at his bedside as they removed his breathing tube, and in a moment of terrible, sweet synchronicity, the man who was born at 11:11 am on 2-11-82 coasted to a stop at 11:22 am, as I held his left hand and felt his pulse stop under my fingers.

Robert Edward Druck was thirty-six years old, and he was so much more than an addict.  He was an athlete, a maker of things, and a joyful soul.  He had beautiful blue eyes and the longest arms I’ve ever seen on a man.  He looked just like my dad.  He was the best video-game player I ever saw, and he was the kind of guy who adopted stray dogs and made you take them home because he couldn’t keep them.  He desperately wanted to be a good father but his daughter’s mother did the right thing in keeping him away while he did drugs.  He never stopped trying to get back into her life.  He was named after my mom’s two favorites among my dad’s uncles, Tiny and Bubby, Robert and Edward.

He is survived by his parents, Ron and Suzan, his two brothers, Tim and Paul, who loved him very much, his sister Capucine, and his daughter, Adriana, as well as Caitlyn, Joshua, Lakreshia, Tony, and Shamar, his nieces and nephews.  There will be no service, and his remains will be cremated. Everybody who loved him was by his side, and there will be no spectacle of a visitation and/or funeral for those who pretended to do so while using him and using drugs with him.  In lieu of flowers, you may shoot your local heroin dealer.