Sibling Rivals

I wish I could say that all my brothers and sisters got along just fine, but that's not the case. It rarely is, I guess. In my family there are six kids spread apart 18 years from oldest to best...I mean, youngest (that would be me). As the best or youngest or whatever you might want to label me, I have the fewest problems because everyone looks to me as too young to be responsible for anything. Of course, others who are the youngest know that this has its drawbacks. Like, we're never really trusted by the older ones and our opinions don't have any force - or at least the force that the oldest usually has.
I say "usually" because my oldest sister - let's call her Gertrude or Gerty for short - is one of those classic mental-case older sisters who is bitterly frustrated by her lack of influence on the family. The reasons why she lacks influence (read: trust) will become painfully but humorously clear in my coming posts.
Let's start with the origins of why Gerty was not too big an influence on my life or my way of thinking. (I must mention, however, that her utterly insane persona has made an indelible mark on my psyche just based on it's entertainment value. She's almost created a need in me to know about her nutty meanderings.)
So, basically, Gerty was busy when I was a kid. When I was first born, she was 18 and just about to break out of prison/Catholic high school. She has never been one to change diapers or feed the babies in the family and back then she was no different, I assume. So basically, I don't remember her even existing before I was about five when I accidentally ran into her jungle-themed bedroom to see if I could hug the giant Lion doll that she kept. I'm not sure where she got that thing, but I remember really wanting to hug it all the time. Now a sweet 23-year-old sister would probably have given the thing to her five-year-old brother, but Gerty wasn't sweet. At least not then. Oh, I didn't really want it anyway. Who am I kidding. I was afraid of the damn thing. It was bigger than me and it had black beady eyes. Anyway, I still hold it against her. That and the fact that she was, at that time, a very active swimmer, coach and lifeguard and she never took the time to teach me how to swim. Now I'm a grown man with swim-related issues - but that's a book I might write when I'm older and more bitter. Right now I just want to remember the funny stuff.
Okay, so she was living in that jungle room and almost never home and I barely knew her, but then she came home one day with bleached hair and a huge L'eggs truck. This would mean nothing except that this was the 70's and Charlies Angels was the number one show on TV and Farah Fawcett was THE shit. Gerty just happened to be a near-ringer for Farah with the bleached hair. So, naturally, all my friends were in awe of her. "You're sister looks just like Farah", they used to tell me. I was still annoyed that she wasn't teaching me to swim, so I was always kind of brushing off their comments and saying, "my other two sisters are even better". I still wasn't a Gerty fan. But the L'eggs truck was something to see. This - OK, I will admit Gerty was kind of hot - blond girly-girl driving a huge delivery truck was very interesting to most of the people who saw it. I thought it was moderatly cool until Gerty picked me up at school one day. I suddenly became the most popular kid in my 2nd-grade class at St. Mary's. It wasn't enough to make me most popular in the whole school, but it was a step in the right direction.
Suddenly, everyone was asking me if Farah was going to come pick me up again. I never knew if or when she was coming. It was pot luck with my family. One day I had a ride from who-know's who and the next day I was wating by the bus stop and then walking my eight-year-old ass home from the subway station.
The school was a pain in the ass to get to because it was on City Island - a godforsaken lump of land about three miles from my house on the main land of the Boogey-Down Bronx. (Of course, it wasn't AKA the Boogey Down then, but I had a feeling it was coming, so I'm using it here.) There was no subway there; just a bus. One bus. One slow-ass bus with the same sex-deprived driver day in and day out. In that move, "A Bronx Tale", Robert DeNiro's character is a busdriver to City Island and he's so warm and fuzzy. I guess that guy was dead by the time I was going to school there. My bus driver used to kick me off the bus when I forgot my school bus pass after waiting for an hour for him to come. I mean, I knew it was my fault for forgetting things, but that's who I am. I always forget things. I have always forgotten things and I always will forget things. That's just who the hell I am! He wasn't teaching me a lesson, he was harassing me, as I saw it. I still hold ill will toward that sonofbeach! Yes! I fargin do! I mean, I was wearing a friggin' Catholic school uniform, I was eight, I was waiting in the freezing cold - obviously I was supposed to have a bus pass! But that asshole thought he was teaching me not to forget things by abandoning me and torturing me. OH! Why did I start thinking about that jerk! I'm so mad now.
Let me go back to Gerty! She ended up moving to City Island when I was nine and that's when we had a relationship. Since she worked funny hours as a L'eggs delivery girl, I could go to her house after school, whenever I'd forgotten my bus pass and couldn't get home for free, and she would drive me home. But the best part was that before driving me home, I got to raid her fridge. Since I ate almost nothing at school because I was convinced the lunch ladies were a bunch of macbethian witches trying to poison us kids with hardboiled eggs and chocolate pudding (the smell was hideous in combination), I was always starving when I got to Gerty's place. The best part is she had NOTHING but junk food in her fridge. She had Duncan-Heins yellow cake with chocolate icing, strawberry-banana Jello, Pillsbury Ready-to-Bake chocolate chip cookies and for dessert: Hershey's chocolate kisses! I never got sick from eating all the crap in her house. I was just in heaven and whenever I went to her place and she wasn't home it was so disappointing. The fact that she lived on top of a cemetary didn't bother me at all. I thought it was cool and now looking back I guess she needed all that sugar to get happy, so it was good luck for me.
Basically, I had no time for chit-chat with Gerty. I was too busy stuffing my face with perservative-laden crapfood. But eventually, I started observing Gerty and I realized she wasn't so bad. She was just not interested in being a motherly type like my other two sisters were or in being an entertainer like my brothers. She was having her own fun extending her childhood into adulthood the way I do now. I guess she was more of an influence on me than I thought.