Their home was heaven to me. I never wanted to leave. Our house was deathly quiet by comparison, my parents often gone to work. (My mother was working the day shift by then.) Though I was a sickly child, I was considered mature for my years and at seven or eight was allowed to stay home by myself. I had a key to the house and would let myself in after school and sit at the green kitchen table and read library books. My father dropped me off at the library most Sundays, and I would stay there reading for the entire day and then bring home as many books as I could carry. My favorites were fantasies by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov.

When I wasn’t reading, I was drawing. By my first year of school it had come to my parents’ notice — and before long everyone else’s — that I had better-than-average drawing ability (and a compulsive need to draw everything and everyone I saw). So it was decided by general consensus that I was to be an artist when I grew up. Though my major concern was fitting in, I suppose I did like the attention, the fawning, the wonder over each new portrait or still life I produced. The best part, though, was that this artistic ability linked me in a way to my Uncle Peter, the only other member of the clan considered to be “naturally gifted.” His talent was music, and though he was unable to read a note, he could play any instrument he touched: guitar, harmonica, fiddle, piano. I even had the same taste in music as he did, or just liked what he liked. Whenever Peter was away from the house, I would go into his room, put on one of his albums and his headphones, and lean against the wall for hours, as I’d seen him do, listening to Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida five times in a row.

Music seemed to be the driving force behind most of the action in that home. Besides the incredibly chaotic kitchen table, where it was every person for him- or herself, the large stereo in the living room was the focal point of the house. My uncles Richard and Walter and I worshiped the Beatles, and we would sit there listening to my older aunts’ and uncles’ albums and watching the green apple on the label spinning around. We memorized the pictures on the album covers and knew every lyric. My Aunt Maggie had actually gone to see the Beatles (my Uncle Peter had taken her when the band had come to Houston), and we would beg Maggie to tell us about the concert. When she consented, it was as though we were in catechism on Sunday, learning about the saints. She spoke of each Beatle with reverence and awe. As if producing a relic from a saint of old — a piece of cloth from his decaying robe, or a chip of sacred bone from the grave — she would show us a small Gerber baby-food jar with its lid screwed tightly shut and nothing inside. Maggie and her friends had taken jars to the concert, opened them, passed them over their heads once, shrieking, “Beatle air!” and then quickly sealed them forever.

Richard and Walter and I appreciated the Beatles on a different level. We weren’t so much concerned with their looks or desirability as with their music. When we would sit in that living room and listen to their albums, we would actually become John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. There were only three of us, of course, so for the most part we left Ringo out, unless a particularly great drum solo came up. My Uncle Walter was George, because he played the best air guitar. Uncle Richard was always Paul, and I was always, always John. Though I admired Paul as much as anyone, John’s songs had a certain melancholy quality that touched me in some unnamable way. I would sit and listen to “Dear Prudence” again and again, strumming my imaginary guitar and singing with what must have been a laughable intensity.

When we weren’t the Beatles, Richard and Walter and I played football in the front yard, or crawled down into the sewer under Hewitt Street on hot summer days and walked in the cool dark, sliding along on the algae that grew in the water, hiding from the world. Or we walked the two blocks down to White Oak Bayou and across a fifty-foot-high railroad trestle over the water, something we had been rightly forbidden to do. On the other side we caught crawdads in muddy creeks with raw bacon on a string; or played in the thick woods beneath tall loblolly pines, pelting each other with green pine cones; or filled a bucket with black dewberries that grew in thorny bushes lining the railroad tracks. Then we watched the trains go by and ate our berries and lay on the ground and talked about nothing.

I suppose I admired Richard more than I did Walter. I was more at ease with Walter, but he was needier and more vulnerable. There were times when he felt like a third wheel, dragging behind Richard and me, lost in his own world. Walter was also accident-prone and often got seriously hurt. There was the time he was hit on the shin by a fastball, which produced giant blood clots that had to be operated on; or the time he took a baseball bat to the head while playing catcher, requiring more operations; or the time he took several bites out of a large, green, poisonous elephant-ear plant in my grandmother’s front yard and had to be rushed to the hospital. Then there was the sledgehammer he dropped, breaking his toes; the broken arm he got jumping off the roof; the syrup of ipecac he drank down straight, mistaking it for the pancake variety.

Whereas Walter was sensitive and clumsy, Richard was tough and cool. The eldest of us three, he had long, straight brown hair and a leather necklace and desert boots. I had to wear penny loafers my mother had bought for me, and my father still cut off most of my hair and combed back what was left with firm strokes and liberal doses of Vitalis, so it was especially impressive to me that Richard could dress in the latest fashions. In fifth grade the girls already liked him and were sending him notes. A few even braved a romantic visit to the Gallagher house. (I say “braved” because any potential suitor — male or female — faced severe scrutiny and often ridicule from the rest of the clan.) Mainly, though, it was Richard’s easy way of gliding through life that appealed to me. Whereas everything in my life scratched at me like an itchy wool sweater, nothing — absolutely nothing — seemed to bother my Uncle Richard. He was scared of no one. If a bully were to pick on Walter or me, Richard was immediately there and, without hesitation, landed several precise, powerful blows. After finishing off his opponent, he’d fling his hair out of his eyes, ask if we were OK, and then hop back on his Huffy Cheater Slick bike and ride off with pretty Susan Sullivan sitting on the handlebars, both of them laughing.

At moments like that, I think I was actually in love with my Uncle Richard. I remember telling my mother once, in all seriousness, that the one thing I wanted to do in life was make Richard laugh. It was hard to do, but if I tried, if I really tried, sometimes I could do it. She gave me a strange look and said, “Your Uncle Richard’s no angel.” I found her statement unfathomable and, since I believed she knew all about angels, disconcerting as well.

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