Sibling rivalry. Toys, games, grades, sports, popularity, attention, romantic success, money, status, a parent’s love: There are plenty of reasons to fight with your brothers and sisters, and they evolve over time just like you do. It’s hard to imagine now, as a father and stepfather myself, but time was me and my brother would go at it hard, physically, rumbling around in our basement after some dispute or other. Someone would want to play with something the other one had, or was using, or wasn’t using, or some dumb nonsense. I didn’t like how he’d make fun of me sometimes, and I assume the feeling was mutual. We made up mean nicknames for each other. We’d get each other in headlocks and someone would cry and our mom would tell us to knock it off. During any kind of tussle with my siblings—we have a sister too and if she’d join in with my brother I’d like physically back her away by putting my head against hers, which I did to my brother all the time too, like I was moving them with my mind—I’d kind of stick my tongue out of my mouth and bite down on it in determination, which they referred to mockingly as “tongue power!”, which I absolutely hated. It’s wild, that we fought, partially because I’d flip the fuck out if my kids started laying hands on one another, and partially because we always got along. When I think back on my relationships with my siblings (I am the oldest of three) I can’t think of a single time any of us argued or fought about anything in any serious way. The physical spats had no meaning. I think in my last fight with my brother he bloodied my nose, and after that we both realized without saying so that physically fighting each other was a bad idea.

Family relationships take very sharp turns sometimes. Certainly ours has, both within our original unit and in our own lives with our own families. Time and circumstance have shown me, though I didn’t consciously realize it at the time, that I would I would die without hesitation for these people whom I love so much, without any hesitation at all. I’d imagine they’d say the same if I asked them, which I won’t. I’d rather them never need to know.

Anyway, here are two grown men in denim, throwing haymakers and decking each other onto and off of a pool table in the middle of a crowded bar. Who knows why. Who knows why anyone in the Double Deuce during its Mos Eisley Cantina phase does absolutely anything, or why they choose to do it there of all places. “Fuck ’em,” says Horny Steve the bouncer when Hank interrupts his crude attempt to pick up a teenager to point out the altercation. “They’re brothers.” Once they were children who played together, like my brother and I did. Maybe they fought occasionally like we did. Maybe they spent the preponderance of their time, like the vast overwhelming majority of it, playing whatever the period-appropriate equivalent of He-Man and G.I. Joe was, or watching Star Wars or wrestling or The Goonies or Clue, like my brother and I did. And then they grew up and assaulted each other in the worst bar in Missouri. I know roads like that exist for people. I never ever want to go down one.