One's Two

...in which Ashley recalls dynamic duos

Mrs. Morris, my first-grade teacher, was for some reason addressing us on the topic of twins, and she asked her little assembly of birdbrains if any of us had twin brothers or sisters at home. We, being children, were all habitual liars, and so every hand in the classroom raised in the affirmative, including mine. Mrs. Morris, who lived right around the corner from me and knew there were no twins in the neighborhood, much less in my house, singled me out to elaborate.

“You have twin brothers or sisters at home?”

“Yes.”

“How old are they?”

“One’s two and one’s three.”

I’m not sure when I would have first encountered twins, with or without an age gap, but there was probably an evil one. TV plot twists often revealed that a pouty-faced version of the chief suspect was the real killer, treating us to an unconvincing split-screen of two George Hamiltons in the police station, stepping over each other’s lines. There was The Patty Duke Show, but I’m not sure I even noticed that she was supposed to be two different people. Both Starsky and Hutch had evil twins, who drove an evil version of their bitchin’ Gran Torino in a climactic car chase. Beat that with your Peaky Blinders, you little streamers.

The first notable, real-life, same-age, identical twins I remember were my high school classmates, Doug and Darryl Smith, or as we called them, the Smittys. Because the boys were what was respectfully known in those days as “slow,” and because we were unfathomable in our teenage cruelty, our fascination with Doug and Darryl attained near-religious intensity. Among my demonic brethren, we sanctified the dimwitted Smittys in comics form, filling notebooks with their imagined adventures. Their speech patterns and mangled grammar* formed the basis of a secret language between us. Tom Haggerty, who lived in their neighborhood, provided cherished details of their home life. Their potato-eating dog, Oscar. Their maladjusted parents, Burton and Sal. Their household chores, for which they were paid in bananas and Cokes. These were all included in Smitty scripture.

Ultimately, our fabulism was far more exotic than the boys themselves, who were simply shy, slow-talking dullards. But they were twins! And two identical anybodys are going to infatuate bored public school inmates. So alike, yet different – Darryl was “the smart one.” Clearly, though our ridiculing of the Smits stopped short of physical abuse, we were complete dicks, making the challenges of their lives infinitely more difficult. But if you asked any of us, even today, we’d tell you that our obsession with the Smittys constituted a form of worship. We didn’t hate them; we were in awe. There were two of them!

The following year, having been politely asked to vacate that particular facility (a whole ‘nother story), I found myself attending a different high school with, miraculously, a brand new set of enchanting twins. Barry and Norbert Anders looked like identical Arnold Stangs, hopelessly ectomorphic and small, with aggressively melvin manners and interests. In this social order, it was they who had the secret language and private mythology; the lads had jointly constructed a science fiction universe of their own imagining, complete with alien jargon, which they documented in the heavy binders they lugged into gym class. A world-building work-in-progress, soon to be major motion picture, they hoped. They were smarter than us, but full-contact Urkel in appearance, acned with thick spectacles, jutting teeth, and unibrows. And there were two of them! They didn’t stand a chance.

I’d matured beyond Smitty-style glorification of the ostracized – and really, no one could ever replace the Smittys in my heart – but I studied these poindexter twins with great interest. So alike, yet different. Norbert kept to himself, kept quiet, and seemed to avoid trouble. Barry flailed and wailed when teased, squawking like Gene Wilder, the entertainment value of which only invited further wedgies. To my recollection, it was the girls who were most brutal, pretending to flirt with the little Horshacks to amuse their jock boyfriends, who then administered headlocks and noogies. In our high school annual, the Anders boys wrote their “senior quotes” using the sci-fi lingo only they understood. Something about the cybernetic warlords of Gylaxia Seven and their Zylgoxian disintegration silos on the third moon of Ringdorn. I think it translated as, “Someday soon, we will kill you all.”

Fascination with my classmates took another form in college, where I fell deeply and consistently in love with every black-clad, daddy-issued, voices-hearing art school girl who ever painted with her own menstruation. True to form, I fell hardest for the nerdiest, Laura Rothschild, long-necked and willowy, sad-eyed and sweet, terminally dorky. Also true to form, I barely spoke to her, maintaining a long-distance crush, based mostly on her haircut, with no hope of fulfillment. I was in the campus bookstore one day, staring at her across the room with the painful longing I’d perfected when suddenly, Laura’s sister was standing by her side. There were two of them! I was thunderstruck. This was akin to a faithful theologian, consumed with the agonies of Calvary, suddenly finding out there’s an extra Christ.

So alike, yet different. I had instinctively fallen for the good twin, the one hoping to someday operate an inner-city art clinic for special needs children. The one who blushed scarlet and spoke in a stage whisper when noting that a recent film featured a sex scene. Sister Pamela was the party girl, a leather-clad, foul-mouthed schnapps jockey who was pregnant by the end of freshman year with God-knows-who’s. The scowling doppelganger revealed as the culprit in Act Three. The contrast deepened my obsession. When I later asked Laura the Golden Girl how things were going with her sister’s new baby, she brightened and glowed dreamily, as if filled with the Holy Spirit. “Oh, he’s the most wonderful thing in the world!”

The good twin, sweet and pure. Stayed quiet and out of trouble. Stayed away from me. The smart one.

My brother and I were not twins, though there was disagreement between us as to who was the evil one. He confessed that he described me to his friends as being “a lot like me, except he’s a real asshole,” which was, naturally, the same way I described him.

Had he actually been my twin, had there been two of us, two of me, I wonder how that might have played out. Would that have made us extra repellent or strangely alluring? Would I be the loudmouthed one who invites trouble and ends up pregnant? Would we have developed a mono-mind, sci-fi language with affiliated transporter ray blueprints? Received an allowance in bananas and Cokes?

Frankly, I think I dodged a bullet when the zygote stayed whole, sending me into my lifespan alone. Twindom seems like a hard way to go. You have a close companion, sure, but you invite the gawking of life’s sideshow patrons, and you wind up getting blamed for the murder the other Martin Landau committed. Every year in every school, there’s your identical sibling, his locker next to yours, wearing the same brand of underwear, your schoolmates and teachers getting you mixed up and making the same tired jokes, this other half of you an inescapable mark on your public persona.

Or maybe you get lucky and your brother fails a grade. Better that identical twins should be at least a year apart.

-A.H.

*Doug and Daryl spoke like Mister Spock having a mind-meld with the Horta (to use a comparison the Anders boys would understand).

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)