Tyrant in Training

Before my little brother learned to speak, he learned to tape.

Armed with fresh rolls of duct, Scotch, and masking tape, my little brother used to tape up everything in the house. He taped stuffed animals together so that they looked like they were holding hands, he taped the eraser tips of pencils, and, his most favorite of all, he loved taping over door handles.

Little did I know that within this wordless, relentless, obsessive-compulsive exterior there lurked a crazy mad scientist, an evil genius who would one day aid me in my pursuit to take over the world.

As soon as I get home from school, I begin instructing my little brother in Global Domination for Future Tyrants 101.

"Dude, Rory, you need to, like, shower," I'll say, standing in the doorway of his room, cringing from the mountains of funky-smelling dirty laundry.

"God!" he says, groaning. "Just go away, Rob." He spends most of his non-Genghis Kahn hours sleeping with the side of his mouth open so that he drools all over the pillow.

"Rory, can we please, please, please hack the mainframe today?" I say, glancing at his disgustingly long toenails and size-13 feet. "What mainframe?" he says. "I dunno," I say, "the main one?" "Out!" he says.

You'd never guess that when my little brother was in grade school, the doctors said he would never read past a second-grade level or do mathematics beyond two-plus-two-equals-five. The school administrators put him in a classroom for people that were extremely developmentally disabled. And he never had any friends. Not one. But the kids at school used to throw rocks at him.

"Rob! Out!" he says again.

My eyes glance over to the huge, glowing monitor on his computer desk. This computer is his sanctuary. With this machine my little brother has taught himself how to assemble an entire computer from scratch, how to run Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X all on the same hard drive; he can download any program, song, or movie. He can create webpages using PHP, Notepad, and SQL.

More than anything else, my brother has taught me that intelligence comes in all different shapes and sizes. Like the time right before my family went on a 600-mile road trip from San Diego to Yosemite. My dad had been complaining about "needing to fill the tank." Through the eyes of my five-year-old brother, "filling the tank" is an easy fix: You take the hose, you put it in the hole, and you hit the valve so the liquid flows into the car. So my little brother did just that: He took our garden hose, put the nozzle in the hole, and filled up the car-with water.

Or the time when he broke the piggy bank mom had gotten him for Christmas and decided to improvise by putting all his quarters and nickels into our VCR. He didn't mean for the VCR to sound like a homeless person's spare change cup every time our family sat down to watch a movie. He was just trying to help.

On another occasion, he tripped over a Nintendo controller wire. Concerned for family safety, he proceeded to cut up all the cords and wires in the house.

My personal favorite, however, was the time when he wanted to go camping but couldn't because dad was still sore about water in the gas tank. He went up into the room above our garage and started camping by himself. He even started a campfire so that he could roast marshmallows. Quickly thereafter the carpet ignited and the whole room caught on fire.

"Mamma! Mamma!" he said, running to our mother. "It's burning! It's burning!"

"What is?" she said. "Everything!" Luckily my mom was able to grab the garden hose and put out my little brother's fire.

If there's an upside to getting treated like a freak show his whole life, it's that my little brother is one of the nicest, sweetest people I know. With a warm, easy smile and an awkward hug, he is the Big Friendly Giant in my life-which means I've got my work cut out for me, because he is also my partner in global domination, my backup in Halo 3, and my conductor in this symphony of life.

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