Basketballs and Brotherhood: Twin Troubles.

I have a great many stories related to being a twin. There’s a long and labor-intensive story written that just hasn’t hit that right spot, hasn’t quite peaked in quality yet directly about being a twin in the works, and so I’ve been focused on this subject for a while, so today I think I’ll take an idea I had related to that and throw it out here, as a stand-alone story. Like stories about my beard, my fraternity, and likely about my experiences working as a camp counselor at delightfully dysfunctional Boy Scout camp in Wisconsin, I have a great number of tales related to this subject, but for now, I’ll start specific, and I’ll start small.

Basically, twins and presents do NOT get along.

Christmas gift-giving is always filled with dangers. Relatives aren’t ever really the best at finding good gifts, especially for young boys. As a kid, I was constantly given the ‘Well, if I can’t figure out what he likes, MORE LEGOS!’ Sure, there’s the great desperation move of a gift card (It’s not always classy, but it beats the hell out of socks). It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, young or old, a twin or not, Christmas presents are already a strange minefield of accidental insults and pretending to be happy, while your inner materialist weeps.

Twins are even more screwed.

“Do I have to say thank you? My twin said thank you, and it’s a single gift between us both…but I should say thanks….OH GOD, DID THAT SOUND AS FAKE AS IT FELT? DAMNIT THOMAS (my twin) WHY DID YOU HAVE TO BE SO CONVINCING IN YOUR FALSE APPRECIATION?”

Plus, you’re constantly given gifts that are strangely paired, or…“creatively” themed. “Brian likes nature, Thomas likes trucks, let’s COMBINE THOSE!”

How? How do you combine gifts or find a unified theme for one kid who grows up to be a biologist-writer-singer dude, and one who grows up to be a West Point graduate, Army Ranger training general badass?
“It’s a toy tank and soldiers…but painted with flowers, so Brian doesn’t feel left out!”
Maybe you try to find common ground, and give us camping gear. “Thomas likes roughing it, Brian camps and stares at trees…let’s get them CAMPING GEAR! Thomas, here’s a survival tent and survival knife, prepare to feel like Rambo. Brian? Here’s…um…well, we got you an axe, but you’re barely mature enough to handle a butter knife, and besides, you don’t want to hurt trees, right? You’re a tiny hippie, or something?”

Even if they decided to give us a general, plain and un-themed gift, it always risked being strange. “We got you matching PJs! See, Thomas has these dark blue PJs that are adult, masculine and fit his demeanor…Brian, I heard SOMEBODY LIKES SPIDERMAN!” (Ok, if I were given Spiderman PJs, I’d wear the HELL out of them, but that’s not the point.)

Being twins means you’re grouped. I’d go on, ranting about the birthday parties I was dragged to because Thomas was invited, and I was too embarrassed to tell my parents, “I wasn’t invited because those kids think I’m weird”, and mention about the sheer number of times that Thomas and I were told by teachers that we had ‘no excuse’ to forget something, since we BOTH should’ve been responsible…but that’ll come in another post, another time.

For now, we’ll just discuss gifts.

Christmas, somehow, wasn’t even the worst of the uncomfortable twin-gifting0-dilemma. The worst….the tragically worst, the most mind-numbingly awkward, uncomfortable and consistently depressing worst, was birthdays.

See, I love my birthday. My parents are actually total badasses, and amazing party planners. Sure, we’ve had a few weeks, months, and even a brief 1-2 year period where we weren’t on the best of terms, but that’s pretty normal, especially when you’ve got to deal with a loud-mouthed and socially awkward son like me. Mom and Dad are REALLY great.

They threw us a birthday themed towards Aladdin, because Thomas and I liked it. It had costumes, and crafts, and it was intense, and cool, and creative.
They took us to cool places, they got us cool gifts. They made sure to allow both Thomas and I to be our own people, and they let us become the strangely opposite adults we are.

However, at a joint party, you can’t control gifts. This struggle was something that year after year disappointed me, enraged my brother, and led to needlessly intense fights.

I’m not talking about the multiple years my TWIN FORGOT MY BIRTHDAY…THINK ABOUT THAT ONE (I’m about 10% kidding. He really seemed to occasionally forget we shared the date. I don’t blame him; we didn’t FEEL like one person, so why share one womb? It’s a confusing concept.)

I’m thinking about 2-3 specific situations, but I’ll stick to one that I’d like to dredge out of the past for your amusement right now.

First, know this: We were sent to a brief basketball camp by my parents. It was awesome. Growing up in the 90’s in Chicago or the suburbs around was AMAZING, since the Bulls were changing the sport, and living in the same town as Michael Jordan meant I didn’t have to LIKE sports to LOVE the Bulls.

Continuing:
It comes to our birthday. A friend knows that we went to basketball camp. He knows that Thomas and I (and our surprisingly good-at-sports older sister) have a basketball hoop in our driveway. So, a basketball is an ‘ideal gift’…a single basketball…to be shared by two VERY COMPETITIVE and HIGHLY SELFISH YOUNG BOYS, who need to endlessly ESTABLISH DOMINANCE TO OVERCOME THEIR IDENTITY CRISES, CAUSED BY TWIN-SHIP.

I’m pretty sure we all know where this went wrong.

Thomas approached the pile of wrapped gifts. He opened one, didn’t enjoy it, gave the dead-eyed empty ‘thank you’ of obligation, and moved on. I opened a gift, I wasn’t sure what it was, (it was a flashlight shaped like a fish, but I didn’t realize it was a light at the time) but I said thanks and moved on.
Then we both see a large gift, a perfect cube, clearly some sort of large box. It says, “To the boys” on it, implying someone’s parents went out and got it…meaning it was selected by a PROFESSIONAL GIFT-GIVER (at least by how I looked at my parents after the whole ‘santa’ thing came out in the open, so all parents became AMAZING at gift-buying from that moment onward).

We were excited.

Thomas ran forward. I ran forward. Thomas was quick. I was…not.

Thomas gets to the box, and begins tearing into the wrapping paper like homeless man finding a gift-wrapped subway sandwich, WITH EXTRA MEAT AND BACON.

He tore the last of the wrapping away, and we beheld something magnificent: a gorgeous, perfect basketball. It was amazing. It was new, and colorful in Bull’s colors. It belonged to us both.

It would drive a wedge between us stronger than any event had at that early point in our lives.

Upon reaching home, we played “H-O-R-S-E” with the basketball. Thomas won, repeatedly. I played “P-I-G”, because the smaller number of letters somehow meant I stood a better chance. When I finally won, ignoring a dozen earlier losses, I declared it time to head inside, and I grabbed the basketball.

Thomas grabbed the basketball.

We refused to make eye contact, and passive-aggressively yanked on the ball, struggling in a dominance display that was at once profoundly childish, and eerily prescient of our teenage years…and eventually, Thomas let go. I took this as victory, unaware that his devious mind was likely years ahead of mine in the deceit and planning areas of development.

I ran to my room (we’d recently moved into separate rooms, after the first decade of our lives sharing a room, and bunk beds).

I went to my closet, found the mostly empty back space, placed the ball down and covered it in poor-fitting clothes I was too attached to give away. I chuckled evilly to myself, and left the room, assured of my success.

Later that evening, I hear a strange sound from outside, almost like…

I dashed to the door, threw it open, to see Thomas and a neighborhood friend playing basketball behind the house, with (what at the time had somehow magically become) MY FREAKIN’ BALL.

I was furious, I stormed outside, I ran to the hoop, I jumped as high as I could, slapped the ball away, launching it over our neighbor’s fence. I demanded Thomas go get it. He surprisingly acquiesced, and hopped the fence, retrieved the ball, climbed back over and….proceeded to keep playing, though now the game wasn’t basketball, but keep-away. I was enraged. My tiny, selfish little mind was unable to express my rage. I screamed, I yelled, I threw a tantrum. I ran back into the house, to see my parents looking dejectedly out the window. I yelled from my room about how Thomas was evil, and no one loved me and stood up for me. I spent the rest of the day, and most of the next convinced that no one in history had suffered an injustice as terrible as my perceived basketball theft.

At dinner, the next evening, when Thomas and I launched into an argument about where he’d hidden the ball (he put it outside, under a bush, knowing that my sleuthing skills wouldn’t consider it could be anywhere but his closet), my mom looked at my dad, and stated, “They need to learn how to share.”

“Yeah,” my father admitted, “But…it’s more than that.”
Thomas and I paused, ready to be told we were going to be given a punishment, or second basketball to either re-establish true peace, or at least force fake-peace upon us.

“They need to start having separate parties.”

My mother nodded. “Yeah. Just imagine if they had something REAL to fight about.” Over the next several years, they would regret tempting fate with this statement.

Thomas and I never had a shared birthday party again.
We still received many shared gifts, and Christmas remained awkward. We didn’t, however, share birthday parties.

That basketball, that black and red, Bulls themed artifact of destruction, led to years of agony, distrust, deception and angst. Not because I enjoyed basketball (I quickly lost interest). Not because Thomas was particularly possessive (he wasn’t interested in basketball much either). It sowed destruction because it, like all troublesome gifts that twins receive, reminded us of a dangerous truth.
When you’re a twin, your birthday isn’t yours…it’s shared. Someone else is stealing half of your birthday. As a child, there appears to be no greater misfortune in all the world.
Nothing could be worse, or more terrible, than receiving only HALF of a gift on your birthday.
And that, my friends, is how a basketball almost ruined my birthday, and drove two twin boys to contemplate murder, on their birthday.