The Surprising Origin of "Flap"

and Believing One's Own Hype

At dinner Friday night, I mentioned to my youngest (first-) cousin how far back my disillusionment with his brother went. He had already pointed out how, for his siblings and even his mom, it was is if they'd already lost him a decade earlier, when he withdrew from everyone so he could keep spending hours every evening at his favorite bar, drinking and gambling his life away. I could definitely understand how he felt. But when I said that I started feeling distanced from him when he started insisting that he be called Flap, my cousin's eyes lit up.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I'd completely forgotten about that. That came from your father's shirt!" His wife was more confused than I was, so he explained the part of the story that I didn't know. Apparently, after my dad killed himself, my mom passed along some of his clothes to my nephew. I don't know if he was the only one who got them; if so, maybe he was just the one they fit best. At any rate, one of them was a shirt (t-shirt? athletic shirt?) that said FLAP on the front of it. So people started calling him that. "Wow. I never thought about it, but geez, no wonder that would have bothered you," he concluded.

I explained that I was previously unfamiliar with that part of the history of his brother's nickname. I certainly don't remember seeing my dad in that shirt, but then again, if it was something that he wore for athletic events, I wouldn't have necessarily ever seen it. Most of his leagues had been after-work engagements, and we never much attended. By the time he died, his vision problems from his car accident the autumn after I turned 12 had kept him from any further athletic endeavors for a couple years. I think I remember hearing that my cousin's nickname was somehow related to a shirt, but I don't think I ever knew the connection with my dad. How ironic that two tortured souls who ultimately destroyed their own lives in their addiction to alcohol would share the same shirt.

At any rate, when I mentioned that, no, it was just that "Flap" had always struck me as more like a put-on that my cousin engaged in, his baby brother immediately nodded in agreement. "Like a persona that he presented," he completed my thought with precision. What we didn't say was how the distance that this persona unavoidably put between Dave and everyone else in his life was its precise purpose.

Matt went on to mention that he'd always felt a little bad for his oldest brother, who always seemed to be outshined by his next-younger brother's "golden boy" status, using the exact phrase I mentioned in my previous post as being more of a negative influence on Dave's life, a curse rather than a blessing. I think that maybe he shared some of something like that in common with my dad, too, who could never live up to the high expectations set by his youthful athletic success and, I think, became disappointed with the rest of his life.