Carl Radke is sharing a heart-wrenching story about his adolescence growing up with his brother who battled addiction and how that sibling’s death brought his family closer together.
The Summer House star appeared on This Old House Radio Hour on Monday for the “My Old House” segment, where guests speak about the home or apartment that heavily influenced them. Radke shared a story about his home in Pittsburgh where he lived with his mother, father and brother, Curtis.
On the radio show, he explained that “it was a very small home,” but prior to Pittsburgh they lived in Chicago, and their home was foreclosed because “our parents’ financial situation was not in a great place.”
“Depending on how you frame it, there’s a lot of good memories. There’s a lot of tough memories, and a lot of our family ups and downs were captured in that house,” he said. “I don’t think I realized the financial insecurity until later on [at] 12 or 13. You’d get a call from a bank, you’d get multiple calls from credit collectors. That’s when I started to piece together, Maybe this isn’t what I thought it was.”
“Your parents do a lot to try and protect you from the world and do whatever they can to support you and give you every opportunity to succeed in life. And my parents did that. What I noticed is we didn’t have what other people had,” he said, explaining that children he went to school with would make jokes that they couldn’t “go to Carl’s ’cause it’s too small.”
Radke has opened up about his brother’s substance abuse problems, and he grappled with Curtis’ death in season five of Summer House. On the radio show, he noted that their Pittsburgh home was in a safe neighborhood, though “We didn’t start locking our house until my brother started getting in trouble, because he was the one breaking back into the house.”
“I lived in a house with my brother, who I adored and looked up to, but he struggled with addiction and mental illness, and anybody who’s ever lived with someone with addiction issues, it’s not easy,” he said, recounting a story from his memoir, Cake Eater, about a time when he had a few friends over and the police came to arrest his brother.
“We were watching playoff NFL football, and I had a few of my guy friends over, and I didn’t always host people because our house was small, but my close friends would come over occasionally,” he began. “And that particular afternoon, my dad got a knock at our front door, and opened the door and I look out, and there’s police officers and five police cars parked out on the street in front of our house.”
Radke, who was 12 at the time, said they were “all kind of panicked” when the police arrested his brother “and handcuffed him right in the living room” in front of his friends.
“My dad called the parents of my friends and said, ‘Can you come pick up your boy?’” Radke said. “That was definitely a traumatic experience that I didn’t really talk about, even among my guy friends who were there that day. I don’t know if we’ve ever really talked about it ever again. That was one instance of police activity over the course of many years of his ups and downs.”
The reality star noted that his mother and father ended up divorcing, but his mom went on to remarry his stepfather, with their wedding day scheduled for Aug. 1, 2020. However, tragedy ensued.
“Ten days after my mom got married, my brother passed away from a drug overdose,” he said. “I drove back to Pittsburgh from New York City for the funeral. I went to the house that I grew up in, and I hadn’t been there for quite some time, and my mom and my dad were standing in the front yard waiting for me.”
Curtis’ death was devastating for his family, though when he, his mother and father were together back at their Pittsburgh home, it became “a really beautiful moment ’cause my parents came together for my brother.”
“We came together as a family, but there was closure because my mom moved out of that house right after my brother’s funeral. The chapter closed at that house,” Radke said. “And what’s really beautiful is my last day ever at that house, I was with my mom and my dad, and we were hugging in my brother’s memory.”
Radke said the moment was “kind of surreal,” but that he is “proud that we could come together that day [and also] have some closure with my childhood house.”
“I’ve got homes in different places, different histories, but I think that’s what makes humans so dynamic and interesting is we may have been born in one city, raised in another city, we may have lived in multiple houses or multiple apartments, but it’s all these things that have shaped who I am and what I desire for my life moving forward,” he concluded.
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