Brian Was a Mistake

You know what they say.

“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

Cute.

In my world, life is what’s happening while you’re duct-taping your sanity together with blind optimism, loose improvisation, and a suspicious stain you’re pretending not to smell.

And if you’re lucky, you make it out the other side with a story.

If you’re really lucky, you live long enough to write a book about it.

This is that book.

It started before I could object.

I was born Brian.

Legally. Officially. For two whole weeks.

My dad picked it. Classic. Safe. A name that pays its taxes and plays church league softball.

My mom hated it.

Not in a casual “eh, we’ll call him B” kind of way. She hated it in the “drove to the courthouse two weeks later and legally changed it without telling a single living soul” kind of way.

So one day my dad walks in from work and asks:

“How’s little Brian?”

And she says, “You mean Brandon?”

I like to think she said it with sunglasses on.

She didn’t just change my name. She gaslit an entire family.

My dad did not take it well. Nobody on his side did, and especially not my grandfather, Richard Losacker the First, a man who looked like Coach Ditka had gotten into amateur boxing and started drinking Schlitz out of a red Solo cup at church picnics. Which he did. That is not a comparison. That is a description.

Cut to my baptism. Catholic, obviously.

The priest says, “We welcome Brandon into the Church.”

And my grandfather leans forward in the second pew and mutters, at a volume he clearly believed was private:

“Why does he keep calling him Brandon? His name is Brian.”

Nobody explained anything. Nobody ever explained anything. Catholicism is eighty percent muttering and twenty percent repressed chaos.

There was a scene at my baptism. A full-on name riot, followed by passive-aggressive potato salad and thirty years of cold, muttered resentment.

I don’t remember it.

I’ve been living it ever since.

Let’s go back a little further, to the day I showed up.

I wasn’t breathing.

My dad wasn’t in the room. My mom’s father was.

The Irish one.

Not “we’re Irish” on St. Patrick’s Day Irish. Actual Irish. Born in it. Raised on it. Still said things like innit and give us a lash, then at a Cincinnati Kroger in 1979.

The Bear.

That’s what they called him. Built like a pub bouncer who played rugby recreationally and knew a guy who could make someone disappear for a fiver and a pint. Former Vegas pit boss. Amateur boxer. Hands like poured concrete. Hair combed back with something flammable. Smelled like Old Spice and unapologetic decisions.

He’d worked the floors at the Flamingo. Dealt cards at Caesars. Later he worked the door at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, back before it burned to the ground.

Some say he saw it coming. Others say he lit the match.

Nobody asked. Ever.

He walked into that delivery room before my father got there, looked down at me, this tiny squishy human potato with a head like a traffic cone, and said, in a growl you could have used to strip paint:

“He looks just like me.”

Then, a tear. An actual tear, from a man who once described a hospital stay as “a bit of a lie-down.”

And then, from the hallway, my grandmother, smoking a Virginia Slim and not missing a beat:

“Oh, Shelly. What happened here? Will his head always be like that? He looks like he’s wearing a party hat. You could’ve done so much better.”

Welcome to Earth, kid.

My middle name is Justin, which only adds to the mystery.

Brian Paul? Sure. Makes sense. Brandon Justin sounds like a backup dancer from a failed boy band who now sells protein powder on TikTok.

But that’s the name I’ve got, and weirdly, it fits. Like everything else in my life, it was an accident, followed by a decision, followed by chaos, some legal paperwork, and mild Catholic guilt.

I didn’t get the first name.

That went to my dad. And my grandfather. And, eventually, my little brother.

Richard. Richard. Richard.

Richard Justin Losacker the First.

Richard Justin Losacker the Second.

Richard Justin Losacker the Third.

I got the Justin. Middle name only. A family heirloom from the clearance bin.

Everything was fine-ish until I turned five and my brother arrived and I stopped being the main character.

Suddenly it was all Rick this and Rick that. And not just Rick. Richard Justin Losacker the Third. The full regnal title, deployed at family gatherings like a proclamation.

Meanwhile I had been secretly renamed and had personally confused the clergy.

But sure. Triple down on Dick Losacker.

From day one, my brother had Final Destination energy. The movie, but with more Flintstones and fewer survivors.

He climbed inside the oven. He napped in the dryer, on purpose, for the acoustics. He scaled the refrigerator like a Sherpa and ate an entire bottle of chewable Flintstones vitamins in the time it takes to answer a phone. He once climbed out his bedroom window at age four and made it three blocks before a high schooler waiting for the bus walked him home holding his hand like a tiny drunk.

That was the morning my parents reversed the doorknob so the lock was on the outside.

Didn’t matter. He still got out. We never learned how. There is a version of my brother, aged four, who understood something about that house that the rest of us did not.

The worst of it had already happened two years earlier.

Turpentine.

My dad kept it in an old glass Coke bottle in the garage, because in 1980 that was considered storage.

And of course my brother drank it.

I was seven. I panicked. I did the only thing my seven-year-old brain could produce, which was to grab the garden hose and try to flush him out, and I slipped on the concrete and dropped him on his head and he went still.

I ran inside screaming for my mother.

And what I got, before the ambulance, before anyone checked whether he was breathing, was this:

“I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY. YOU’VE HATED HIM SINCE HE WAS BORN AND NOW YOU FINALLY KILLED HIM.”

He was fine. He was fine within the hour. He was fine enough by dinner to be annoying about it.

I was not fine.

I stood in that kitchen at seven years old and understood, with total clarity, that in an emergency I would be the suspect. That the fastest available explanation for anything bad was going to be me. That’s not a thing you get told once and shake off. That’s a setting. That’s a factory default.

I have spent forty years trying to get out ahead of that sentence. Every joke I make before somebody else can make it. Every time I confess to something small so nobody goes looking for something bigger. Every apology I’ve issued preemptively, to people who weren’t upset, for things that hadn’t happened.

That’s where it started. A garden hose and a wet concrete floor and a woman who was twenty-six years old and terrified and said the worst possible thing at the worst possible volume.

I don’t blame her. She was a child with two children.

I just never got the sentence back out of my head.

Here’s how my childhood breaks down.

Brandon: wears Mickey Mouse suspenders. Sings “Suspicious Minds.” Performs for attention.

Rick: plays sports. Gets the name. Drinks cleaning supplies like a shot challenge.

Guess who got praise. Guess who got therapy.

And now?

I talk to my brother every single day.

He’ll call three times in a row. I’ll finally answer like something’s wrong, because when a man calls three times in a row something is usually wrong, and he’ll say:

“Hang on, let me call you right back.”

And hang up.

That’s not a bit. That’s just Rick.

He does not call right back. He has never once called right back. “Right back” is not a unit of time where my brother lives.

But he calls again tomorrow.

He always calls again tomorrow.