Semester Off
The rescue tones went off sometime in the middle of the night. I rolled out of my bunk, stuffed my feet in my shoes and stumbled down the stairs to the ambulance. I got in back. Chary got in after me.
“Everybody in?” The driver asked. We–Chary, the Crew Chief and I–were all in.
The bay doors opened and the sirens went on. We rolled into the dark.
Chary leaned into the front seat, “What are we dispatched to?”
An assault with some kind of head wound came the answer. Chary always liked to go over possible issues and treatments on the ride to the scene. This was frustrating, because the dispatches were always vague. In this case, all I could say was common sense: if the patient was cut we should bandage him, if he was broken we should splint him, and if there was any danger that he did something to his spine, we should backboard him. Luckily the ride wasn’t very long.
The police were already there. It was a trailer park. You could smell the poverty in their mobile. Like B.O. We went inside and found the patient sitting at a kitchen table, with blood from his forehead going down his face. He looked about fifty five. We’d later find out he was convicted murderer. He’d killed some guy who he’d accused of sexually harassing him.
When we asked how this happened, he was vague. He had been “beaten up” by “some guys”. He hurt all over he said. He’d been drinking. I got the impression it was a bar fight.
I had to hold his head, in case he had fallen and done something to his neck. Our crew chief asked him to stand up. When he did, something must have hurt, because he lunged over shreaking. He had a crazy look on his face, and I thought he was coming at me. I flinched a bit, but kept head stabilization.
He said somebody had kicked his ribs in.
As all this was happening those who looked to be his parents sat calmly watching TV a few feet away. The cops refferred to him by his first name. Evidently this wasn’t very uncommon with him.
As the crew chief kept on asking questions, Chary did a trauma assessment. The patient kept on grumbling about how he hadn’t wanted anybody to call “no cops or no ambulance”. When Chary lifted up his shirt, to check out his ribs, he had what looked like a bullet scar on his belly. Chary asked him about it, but the patient just sort of grumbled angrily. I cut some tape and Chary bandaged the man’s forehead.
We lowered him onto a backboard, and the was a lot more grumbling and groaning. He said he could have walked to the ambulance, and he probably could have in a lot of pain. But our crew chief was a substitute from another district, so he was cautious.
We brought him out to the ambulance and put him on the stretcher. We drove off. All along the way he kept repeating how he hadn’t want his mother to call “no cops, and no ambulance.” At some point he must have agreed, because we couldn’t transport unwilling patients. It seemed like he didn’t want to be taken as a narc or something.
When we measured his blood sugar, it was pretty low. This led to the confrontation on whether he’d swallow oral glucose. He refused, but the crew chief insisted. They’d have to give it to him at the hospital anyway.
He was a very angry man. Finally he resigned himself to eat it. Oral glucose is a gewey, sugar substance and it tastes disgusting. I had to feed it to him.
When we wheeled him into the hospital on a stretcher, he started raising his voice, saying that he didn’t want us to put him in one of “those rooms.” I didn’t know what he meant, but I was again getting the impression this wasn’t very uncommon for him. I wondered how much longer he’d be living.
Evidently we put him in one of those rooms. I asked Chary later, and he said the room we put the dude in was a Psych room with a one way observation mirror. The cops told us later that he probably hadn’t gotten the shit kicked out of him. That he fell on some steps and was embarrassed about it.
It was late, and we were dispatched to a car accident. On the way there, Chary went over possible scenarios and treatments. As we got closer to the accident, the traffic on the lane highway was slowed to a standstill. As our siren approached, the cars in both lanes pulled to the sides. We drove right down the middle.
“I’m Moses!” Shouted our driver, Bryan, accelerating down the highway. It was. I looked out of the tinted side windows and the back. As cars flew behind us. The snow was coming down.
Eventually we could see the accident ahead of us. The police were already there and the fire department would arrive in a bit. on car was actually spun around so it was facing incoming traffic. The driver’s side of the hood was crushed. A large truck was pulled to the side of the road.
We got out and put on our bunker coats because it was fucking cold. Snow was coming down. I took the oxygen and trauma bag and followed Chary. From the talk of the cops, it seemed the car had clipped another car and crashed into the side of the truck. The other car drove off. No insurance probably.
After a bit of confusion, we startd getting the woman out of her car. She was crying. Chary took notes dispattionately, “Patient complains of back pain.” The firemen stabilized the car, and wanted us to know if we wanted her to cut her out. Firemen like to do this all the time, even when it’s not necessarily. Probably fun. The crew chief said we didn’t need it.
I got in the backseat and stabilized her head. We then carefully slid her out onto a backboard. She screamed on every move. We threw her into the back of the ambulance and headed to the hospital.
Chary and Beth kept on assessing her on the way. The girl kept on crying and told us she was crying. She didn’t want to miscarry.
Meg kicked a crumpled beer can off the sidewalk. I was with a group of me, Nick, Meg and Chris. And some other people I didn’t know. We were walking through the “townhouse” complex, where mostly seniors lived. They weren’t really townhouses at all since they were on Saint Mike’s campus, but that’s where they were called. That or the 300’s.
Anyway, that’s where the best parties generally were. We had two back packs filled with beer between the four of us. Rival stereoes blasted out of each townhouse door, all of which were open. Lots of people mingled on the lawns in the snow, and red solo cups were littered all over. It wasn’t much of a winter so far. It was late november and there were still only patches of melting snow amid patches of grass. Global warming I guess.
Meg was Chris’ off and on girlfriend. They were constantly fighting, but I couldn’t really picture them with anybody else. Meg was adopted from Guatemala via New Jersey. She was adopted. One time Chris jokingly pointed out that her shirt said “Made in Guatemala” and “Preshrunk”. She feigned offense at the second one, cupping her smallish breasts. When she got angry with him like a week later she jokingly pointed out her shirt also said “Do Not Mix Colors”. And held out sex from him for a week.
They didn’t have to use condoms, because when she was little she had fallen on a can of nails and messed stuff up down there. I knew this, because one night when she was drunk she told me she’d never be able to have kids. She cried. It was sad.
She was pretty. We had hooked up at the beginning of my freshman year. She had a video on her phone of me zombie drunk trying to pull her toward me in an embarrassingly needy way. I had only recently gotten her to delete it. Chris laughed about it, but seemed secretly suspicious whenever the two of us got too close. Meg and I kept a sibling type relationship going.
Meg broke away from the other girls who were with us, and skipped toward the townhouse in front of us.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” She said over her shoulder, her black hair flipping behind her. She went inside. A couple of us followed her, everybody else stayed chatting with a group of Rugby players on the sidewalk.
It was an all black party. There were about twenty five black people in Vermont, and they seemed to all be here. I tried not to notice, but I felt pretty self concious. I put it out of my mind, thinking this must be how they felt whenever they walked into a Saint Mike’s classroom.
A big black kid next to me asked if I wanted a shot.
“Ummm….sure.” I said.
I recognized him from my Latin American Studies seminar. One of the Rugby players had referred to him as African American and he’d gone off. He was Haitian. Not African-American.
He looked at me. “You wrote that crazy charity article, didn’t you?”
I kind of waved it off. At that point I was conciously trying to distance myself from the rigid, judgemental kind of person I was before. I didn’t want to get into it.
He was talking about an article I wrote for the school newspaper, that recieved a number of angry, defensive letters to the editor from liberals surprisingly. In the article, I publically criticized a trip to Africa the school was sponsoring. About twenty kids were going to Kenya to help build huts and stuff. My argument was that it would be more efficient to just take the money they would have spent on airfaire, skip the self-righteous trip all together, and give the money to UNICEF or OXFAM. This was true, but the kids’ motivation for going on this trip was good and genuine. While mine for writing the article was not. It was bitter.
I went on in the article to say that students had a moral imperitive to donate everything they had beyond that which covered their basic needs. To third world chairty. No beer money, no money for extra clothes. With thousands of people dying every day of malnutrition, anything less was murder. Misery loves company.
He shook his head, and in a caribbean accent said, “No I was just going to say I liked it. I agree with it. I’m just not a good enough person to do it.”
I threw back a shot.
“Neither am I.” I said.
We stood there, with Tupac blaring in the background and the sound of stray ping pong balls bouncing on the beirut table beside us.
I feel like I always dissapointed people. Someone who did these things out of genuine sympathy must be a pretty amazing guy. But they saw that I was fake. My own realization that I was fake had before pushed me to dedicate myself more and more. Now I was just trying to accept it and be honest with myself.
He smiled, gap toothed.
“You see that bottle there.” He said, pointing to a half empty Jack Daniel’s handle.
“Last night we had a black light party, so we filled it up with laundry detergent. So it would glow in the dark.”
I nodded.
He continued, “This morning when I woke up it was half drank.”
“Wow.” I said. “I hope nobody died.” Not that I really cared.
Meg came out of the bathroom, and pushed her way through the crowd.
“You ready to go?” She asked, pushing her hair behind her ear.
“Yup.” I turned to the big Haitian. “Thanks for the shot.”
“No problem.” He said, before offering his hand. “Andre.”
I shook it. “Jon.”
“See you around.” He said.
Meg and I stumbled down the steps, and walked up to the rest of our group.
“What took you so long?” Asked Chris.
“Long line.” Meg said.
They broke off from the Rugby players they had been talking to, and we walked as a group to the townhouse where we were invited.
Five minutes later we got to the house. A group of people were standing above a girl who was vomiting on the ground. We walked inside.
I didn’t know many people there, so I mostly just stood behind Chris’ shoulder. Listening. Or trying to. The party was pretty wild.
We were there for about five minutes when they stopped playing beirut. Two guys dragged the table to their kitchen table, facing the windows.
A hot blonde next to me rolled her eyes. “They do this all the time.”
The two guys were wasted. They were tripping over little indents in the carpet that weren’t even there. All of a sudden they both started stripping off their clothes. They were naked in a second.
I turned away, toward Chris and Nick. What the fuck. They had similairly confused faces.
The two naked seniors took a beer and poured it over the two connected tables. One of their friends opened the kitchen windows. One of the naked dudes started jogging in place and in an instant dove onto the tables like a slip and slide, and flew over the two tables out the window. He missed the snowbank, and landed on the wet grass. When he came back inside shivering, he was covered in grass.
The other naked guy quickly followed suit and dove out the window.
When he came back inside a timid freshman girl by the door was staring at his croch with a terrified expression. He pointed a finger straight in her face and slurred, “Don’t jude me. It’s cold outside!”
The girls upstairs got out a big bucket, and we made jungle juice. Jungle juice is cranberry juice, beer, vodka and whatever was handy all mixed together. Jungle juice is the devil. That and vodka soaked watermelon.
The girl and I stumbled into my room laughing loudly. Bill sat there on his computer.
“Oh sorry.” The girl by my side said. Giggling.
He was looking at me impassively. Recently, he’d gotten really passive agressive with me since I’d started drinking more. I’d come in late at night and accidentally make some noise and wake him up. When he woke up early he’d make the exact same noise on purpose.
Less than a minute later, the girl pushed me in the empty guy’s bathroom into a stall. Onto the toilet seat. She straddled me. Gripped my neck and we kissed sloppily, her mouth curling up at the edges near laughter.
She wasn’t that great looking, but I didn’t care at that point. She was the North Campus slut.
The door to the bathroom swung open loudly, and we broke off. A pair of feet shuffled into view. The girl reached behind her and locked our stall. She had her mouth open mid laugh, trying not to breath. Straddling me, she lifted her feet up so they weren’t visible.
Whoever was outside shuffled into the stall beside us. Without bothering to shut the door, they unzipped their pants and started pissing.
The girl and I looked each other eye to eye. Trying not to laugh.
The guy in the stall next to us, kept on pissing. He was clearly drunk, as he was swaying a bit. And you could hear the piss go back and forth from cgetting in the bowl to hitting the seat and back. Eventually he finished up. Zipped up. Walked out.
The girl kissed me again, before she–smiling mischeviously–unizpped my pants.
It was like the Godfather. I woke up slowly, pushing the naked girl beside me for more covers. Eventually it was time to get up, so I reluctantly rubbed the sleep out of my eyes. That’s when I realized I was wet. I threw the sheets off myself and saw I was covered in blood. From my chest to my dick. I started looking for some kind of mortal wound, but couldn’t find anything. So finally, I looked down at Amanda and she was covered in it too. And it dawned on me. Menstrual blood.
We had gotten pretty drunk the previous night, but she couldn’t have forgot….I mean, fuck. Disgusting.
Five minutes later, I got out of the shower. Amanda was in tears clumping up the bloody sheets. I felt bad but didn’t know what to say.
“Amanda?”
She didn’t look up.
“Amanda? I have to go to work.”
I hopped in my station wagon and popped in Biggie Small’s “Ready to Die”. Sometimes my friends asked me why I listened to rap music. I mean I couldn’t relate to the black experience. I couldn’t relate to the urban poverty experience. But as ridiculous as it might sound, I could relate to the desperation and hopelessness.
It took me a long time to admit to myself that I was depressed. I was like that guy in the Da Vinci code with the spike leg bracelet. I worked on the college ambulance squad, wrote hardcore marxist columns for the school paper, worked a dead end job only to give my entire paycheck to UNICEF, and ate nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches three meals a day because I was trying my best to be a vegan. I was involved in everything political. When I had free time, the most relaxation I allowed myself was to sit down with a 1,000 page tome on CIA intervention in Latin America, dilligentally taking notes. I mean, I tried to remove myself from my own thought process. To analyze it for ethnic, classist, and finally when that wasn’t radical enough, ’speciest’ biases.
I did do some good stuff. But the reasons I was doing it for were bullshit. When you do the right thing for the right reasons, it should make you feel happy or empowered. Deep down you’re defending yourself. But when I did this stuff it made me feel worse and worse, more bitter, and more like I was literally losing my mind.
It was all my high school senior English teacher’s fault. He started me on the existentialists, Robert Penn Warren and all that. Started me on that anorexic search for moral perfection that starved the real me into, whatever. Because it wasn’t really about doing good so much as forming this lonely ideological club of one. I mean if I had shown up at college with an Animal House t-shirt and a thirty rack instead of a hammer and a sickle it would just have been so much more honest. One of my college proffessors made a joke saying I should have been born in the 60’s. I laughed. But if I was honest with myself I knew that if I lived in the 60’s I would have been closer to the Velvet Underground then the Weather Underground. Telling the hippies to fuck off. Because that’s what it really was about. I wanted to be superior. It was a way to distance myself from people to protect me from whatever. And looking back, I felt like I’d done this same sort of thing in a million times before. How I became just a caricature of one aspect of myself. How it was only when I was about to leave a place that I was able to fully be myself, live in the moment and do what made me happy.
I pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine.
At Pricechopper you weren’t an employee, you were an associate. We were all associates. Never mind that Neil Golub owned the company and I was working $6.15 an hour no benefits….we were all in this together. No war but the class war the Marxists said. But I couldn’t get started on that shit. Didn’t want to relapse.
You punched in with a time card to start. You stood there like a fucking zombie, pushing shit through the scanner all day. Waiting for the little beep, then the next one. All you thought about, or all I could think about was fucking the company that was fucking me. Pricechopper had a 200% return policy. Like, if I bought a $100 dollar slab of meat, I could come back, at night with the guys who didn’t know me and say it was rotten. They’d give me my money back plus another $100. Or the bottle slips. They were printed on plain black and white paper. I could put those in a photocopy machine as many times as I wanted.
A guy with a big mustache wheeled his cart into my express line, before dumping his groceries on the belt. He easily had fifty items or so.
“Sir, this line is for people with 15 items or less.”
The man considered this for a moment before dividing his groceries roughly in half.
“I have two orders.” He said.
We had a Leone-esque stare down for a good ten seconds or so, before I caved. I didn’t know what to say.
Ten hours later I punched out, and pulled off my Pricechopper apron. My supervisor Chris stood in the way. He was a nice guy, but he was my supervisor.
“Jon, I’d like to talk to you.” He said.
“Yeah?”
“In my office?”
I was too tired, “Sure.”
I followed him into his little office, and took a seat. He picked up a clipboard, and there was a silence before he started.
“You’ve recieved a number of customer complaints recently. Most of them I haven’t written down. Now it’s company policy that after three documented customer complaints I have to fire you. Right now you have two.”
He handed me the clipboard.
“So this is a written warning….one more and you’re done.”
He pointed to a line on the clipboard.
“So you have to sign right there.”
I thought about it, and the way things had been going lately…I’d been having enough trouble plastering on the fake smile that the job required..that it just felt inevitable that I’d get fired. In the movies I’d seen, quitting a job was always this like liberating experience. It didn’t feel like that.
“You know what, forget it. I quit.”
Driving home, I hit the steering wheel a couple times. I was angry.
Now before I say this, let me say I knew it was stupid, immature, whatever. But I didn’t think it was really a big deal. There was this state trooper that sat by the ski jumps all day. Like a speed trap. I rolled down my window and flipped him off on impulse as I went by. He immediately pulled out and started following me. I dropped down to forty-five miles an hour so he didn’t have an excuse to pull me over. It was stupid but it was the most fun I’d had in months.
I was about halfway home when I flipped him off again. This time he put on his lights. For a fleeting second I thought about just going. I mean if I couldn’t be Clark Kent gone revolutionary….if I was a fuck up, part of me wanted to be a big fuck up. A James Dean level, death in a ball of flames fuck up. But I pulled over and turned off the engine. I watched the cop in his squad car in my rearview mirror. I started to feel oddly nervous, so I reached over for my pack of Marbloro’s and lit one.
Fuck the police. Where was my NWA cd when I needed it?
Eventually the statie found his hat, and stepped out of the car. He walked up my driver side, with his hand on his holster. I rolled down the window.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?”
“No, ” I said, but then reconsidered, “Well actually, I think I do.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I flipped you off.” I said, trying my best to sound defiant.
“That’s right.”
“But that’s bullshit. It’s freedom of speech.” I knew it was true too, I’d taken Con Law 101.
“I pulled you over for improper use of a hand signal. You indicated you were making a left hand turn, and failed to make one.”
“What the fuck. You’re kidding me.”
He went on, “Now, I can either write you a ticket, or–”
“Or what. You’re throwing the book at me, it’s bullshit.”
“–Or you can tell me what’s going on. Why are you doing this? What’s the matter?”
My anger melted. He sounded concerned.
I wanted to tell him that I felt sad all the time for no reason. That I was on medication but it wasn’t working. That I felt like crying when I saw pictures of washed up movie actors. That it was like I wasn’t there. That it was like watching a surreal movie of myself. That pot made me curl up in the fetal position in my room for hours and question my sexual orientation. That I was losing my mind. That there were so many levels to my self conciousness that I couldn’t even recognize them. That I’d somehow lost the real me and I was afraid I’d never get it back. That I wanted my parents to still yell at me when I smelled like cigarrettes because it showed they cared. That I hadn’t had real friends since high school. That I made jokes about my depression because of some kind of macho bullshit I had going on. That I couldn’t cry. That I was afraid I could hurt someone. That sometimes I thought the greatest difference between people wasn’t race, religion, or class but whatever the psychological difference was between the kind of people who seemed to live life to the fullest so easily and those who couldn’t. That I hated myself because my depression was so spoiled coming from an upper middle class, white American male, it was absurd. But I couldn’t say any of that. So I didn’t.
Eventually I got the impression the cop just wanted me to ‘yess boss’ him. So I did it. And he drove off. And I had another cigarrette, and watched the filter turn brown. There was something about that.
I got there at 8:00 like Tony said. Yawning. Tony Corwin owned a bed and breakfast across the street. They had a maple sugary on the side. The sap was flowing and for two weeks Tony needed all hands on deck to get the sugaring done. I looked around at the rest of the group. Most looked in their late forties, bearded and dirty. Except for Tony’s son in law who was thirty or so.
Tony and the rest of the Corwin’s had always struck me as sort of slimey. When I was in high school, Tony’s son Tim owed me two hundred dollars for poker. I’d call their house and Tony would pick up the phone and tell me Tim wasn’t there. Instead of saying Tim couldn’t pay, or they didn’t support gambling. That’s probably not a great example, but they were kind of slimey.
Tim and I went way back. Both of our parents worked at the school my Dad would eventually become the head of. It was a small junior boarding school, trying to create this Pete Seeger, hippie organic experience.
Tim wasn’t very good socially. Ever. In playgroup he would slap my friend Tucker and I all the time. As we got older, we were terrible to him. Everybody was. We called him blueberry because he was fat and wore these blue shirts.
He was now in prison on statutory rape charges. I didn’t really know the details, but from what I heard the girl was fifteen and willing. Kind of a fucked up thing to go to jail for three years for in my opinion.
Tim wrote me and I decided to write back. He was lonely and I was lonely. And we both had fallen off the beaten college track in our different ways around the same time. I sent him cigarrettes like he asked, but decided against the “pussy books” because my mom said it might effect whether he got sex offender status or not.
I mean, I’d recently dated a 17 year old. Not the Godfather girl. I was twenty. In abstract, I’d say that was kind of sketchy. I met her in my shrink’s office, and probably wouldn’t have began dating her if I wasn’t so lonely (just because she was so young). But this girl was more mature than me mentally and sexually. She was smart, beautiful, and kind of understood what I was going through. I really liked her. That said, I wouldn’t have wanted people to know about it because they automatically would have made assumptions. Like I was taking advantage of her, or that was such a loser that I couldn’t get somebody my own age. But she had to go back to her arty boarding school in Vermont, while I stuck around in Lake Placid .
Tony looked around to see that everybody who was supposed to be there was there.
My mom had gotten me the job. For the past few weeks I’d barely left the house…moving from my bed to the T.V. My only real interaction was with TV shows on DVD. It was like this was my TV girlfriend, my TV friend, my TV parents. Of course, the only downside of that is they don’t interact back. I slowly stopped really talking at all. Even to my parents. I felt like I was going to have like a panic attack every time I opened my mouth. Weepy romantic comedies were the only thing I could stomach. In a way it was nice to make myself this cocoon life. It felt natural. But in another way I was getting worse, and sinking deeper.
“Everybody have extra drill baterries?” Tony asked.
Yes.
“Everybody have 400 taps?”
Yes.
He flashed an unintentially creepy smile at me.
“Jonny you have everything?”
I nodded, forcing a smile.
“You have your lunch?”
The day before I had forgotten my lunch and had to mooch half a BLT sandwich off of him.
“Yes”.
“You have water?”
“Yup.”
The more I hung out with Tony, the more I was able to humanize him. I began to like him actually. The way he talked to me probably would have sounded condescending to someone else, but I didn’t care. I liked how he called me “Jonny” even though no one had called me that in years. It sounded affectionate.
“Okay then, ” he said, shutting the back of the pick up, “Let’s go.”
We shuffled duck style with our snow shoes up the two miles to the sugar shack.
Since this was my first season, they partnered me with Jim, an old hand. We went up and down the lines together, him taking the top half and me taking the bottom half, to cut down on the need to walk up and down the steep hill unneccesarily. Our feet crushed the top crust of snow.
I was trudging through it waist deep in snowshoes that were perpetually falling off. With a power drill strapped to my waist and a back pack filled with extra batteries, taps, water, food and clothes. The biggest issue though were the snowshoes. I had an old lace up pair that had been sitting in our basement for years. They fell off on average every five minutes, and I’d have to take off my gloves and fumble in the cold to tie them back up. Over and over.
First you had to drill a hole. It had to go two inches horizontally and six inches away vertically from holes from previous years, because the wood there was dead and dry. Then you stuck the sanitary tap in and connected it to the suction tube, which brought it a mile down the sugar shack.
Eventually it was time for lunch. Jim sat down on a log. I didn’t want to sit right next to him, so I collapsed on a snowbank. As I sat there, the snow melted through my snow pants. I reached for a cigarrette and offered one to Jim as an after thought. He took it.
“Thanks,” he said, adding, “My wife would kill me.”
I forced a laugh, and unwrapped a mushy peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
We sat in silence for awhile, smoking cigarrettes and enjoying our tired feet.
“I didn’t know anybody from your generation smoked.” He said offhand.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the health risks are such public knowledge.”
I thought about that.
“Oh come on you aren’t that old.”
He laughed.
“I mean, they knew what it was about when you were my age.”
We sat there in the snow for a little bit before I added, “I’m more of a Vonnegut smoker anyway.” I laughed to myself, not actually thinking it was very funny.
“Classy form of suicide?”
I was pretty surprised he got the reference. For all my so called working class politics, I had a pretty condescending attitude toward working class people. They were like sheep. Religion is the opium of the masses type thing. Assuming they voted Republican, loved Christian conservatives, and loved Nascar.
I mean this guy wasn’t really that at all. He’d been to college. I think he had some kind of environmental PHD actually. But it still surprised me.
Jim worked a variety of temporary jobs all year. Winter was week to week, but summer was a little more steady. He worked as a climbing and fishing guide. Maybe that’s what he wanted to do. Maybe he liked the outdoors, physically working, whatever. More power to him. He probably did. But it got me thinking that if I didn’t go back to college, I’d be like one of those old hands. Working at a gas station. Or something. Maybe it had a kind of romantic appeal. The gypsy lifestyle. But that was the kind of thing that would only occur to someone who wasn’t living it.
Lately I had been thinking a lot about my financial future. The idea of having to spend my paychecks on stuff like toothpaste and toilet paper was kind of scary. With the way the economy was going, I couldn’t imagine I’d have the same standard of living my parents did.
My shrink had to be one of the hippest 50 year olds I’d ever met. She looked like one of those people who you could tell was beautiful when they were younger. We talked about music, movies and all that. She was a Seattle girl. Knew the real punk scene. She had actually met Kurt Cobain, through the Make a Wish Foundation when her Nephew was sick. Kurt hadn’t really paid them much attention, but Dave and Krist did. But she didn’t hold that against him. Kurt’s was a “tragic” story.
I called her my shrink instead of a psychologist in a joking, condescending way. To indicate that I knew therapy was bogus and all that. I held out from therapy for a while, when my mom was saying I should go. Even though deep down I knew inevitably I would need to go. That it would be good for me. But it was a macho thing. For me, white people from the first world weren’t allowed to have problems. Charity wasn’t charity for me then. It was the minimum. With tens of thousands of people starving to death or dying of easily preventable diseases every day, anything else was no better than murder.
Everyone said pitying yourself doesn’t do anything. But I thought if I could pity myself it would be a step in the right direction. Because before, emotional problems weren’t allowed to exist in my mind. Real working class people didn’t have time for them. There were only material problems.
For the first week or so, Bobbi had started us with a family history. I told her my Mom had tried to commit suicide a couple times when she was my age. I had depression on both sides of the family I guess. My Dad’s side was more into self medicating.
Bobbi quickly started operating on the assumption that I had father issues. I don’t know why. But I was so lonely I indulged her. I was afraid that if I made things too complicated she might give up. Or she might not understand. Besides my parents she was the only person I saw all week. And it was the highlight of my week.
I told her how my grandfather stopped giving my Dad hugs when he was four years old. Because he didn’t want him to “turn into a homosexual.” So my Dad wasn’t very touchy feely physically or emotionally really. My Dad was the classic result of alcoholic parents. Disciplined, ordered, and controlled emotionally. It was a joke at home and in his office that he was like a robot.
I told her how it had always been a family joke that Dad had never wanted kids. I told her how recently I’d thought about it, and decided it wasn’t too funny.
I told her how my Dad signed his contracts for three years, and that’s how long I kept my friends. Lake Placid, Connecticut, D.C., San Francisco and back to Lake Placid . Every three years was like a midlife crisis and a chance to become something new. There was Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, then Jon Hochschartner. When I couldn’t admit I was acting even to myself, I was the greatest method actor the world had ever seen.
I told her how growing up, I was the designated one in the family to humour my Dad’s interest in rock climbing and mountaineering. I was afraid of heights. I told her how one time when I was eight, I was about eighty feet up on a crag, and wanted to come down, to stop. But I couldn’t just say that. So I knocked my glasses off of my face ‘accidentally’ when reaching for a hold. They fell eighty feet to the ground where they shattered. He must have known I did it on purpose. Pretty spoiled, but I was eight. And that was the end of the rock climbing for that day.
I told her how I accidentally stabbed myself in the leg when I was twelve. That my mom had my Dad meet us at the hospital. Not for his consolement, but because she knew I wouldn’t cry or freak out in front of him.
I told her how to be close to him you always had to bend to his interests, whether they were athletic or academic. He never bent to yours. Even when I was a little boy.
I was sitting in the chair opposite Bobbi. There was always an awkward silence as I squirmed about in my seat. Not knowing how to just jump in and start.
“So. I talked to your mom. Obviously, didn’t tell her anything we talked about.”
“I wouldn’t care.”
“You hadn’t really told me was how sick your Dad was. You didn’t tell me he had prostate cancer. I was wondering if this made you reluctant to…”
“Kick him while he’s down?”
She smiled, “Yeah.”
“No, I have no qualms about kicking people while they’re down. I just don’t know what to say.”
There was a silence.
She broke it, “I don’t want to be pushing this theory on you…If you feel it doesn’t have any resonance in your life, let me know.”
Silence.
She continued, “You’ve got to understand, I’m not saying he doesn’t love you. or you don’t love him. I’m just saying on some level you think maybe incorrectly that you’re not good enough just as you are. That maybe all these phases you’re talking about are attempts to impress him.”
Silence.
“I just don’t want to be one of those stereotypical, whiney people who comes to therapy and cries about their distant parents or whatever,” I said.
“Just because it’s stereotypical, doesn’t mean it’s not true. Does it?”
It was like when I caught one of my ex-girlfriends faking an orgasm. She said faking it helped her lessen the self conciousness, so the real thing could happen. I was making goofy squinting faces and making animal choking noises.
I was trying to cry. I wanted to scream. I mean I physically could, but I couldn’t really let go and get the release it was all about.
I had been waking my Mom up a lot lately in the night. Just because I couldn’t sleep, and was afraid that I could hurt myself. Lose control.
Eventually it happened. I genuinely started to cry, and cry and clutch my mom and make ridiculous gurgling noises. It was great.
“I’m going to wake up Dad.” My mom said matter of factly.
“Why?”
But she was already gone.
My Dad stumbled out a few minutes later after using the bathroom. Yawning and confused.
I continued to cry hysterically. The minutes passed.
Eventually, my Dad said, “Wow.”
He said it in an oddly clinical way. Like he was watching an interesting science experiment. Not his son blowing his noise on his shirt.
Bobbi smiled. “So how are you?”
She knew better than to ask what was new. I was terrified I was boring her to death. Nothing was new. I watched TV and slept all day. I’d watched every movie ever made in the past two months.
“All right.” I said.
“Really?”
I shrugged.
“Do you still have thoughts of suicide?”
I exhaled and forced a laugh. “Sometimes it gets stuck in my head, but I wouldn’t do it.”
She nodded. “And how’s the removed feeling?”
I had only recently told her this. Just because it was so strange. Sometimes it felt like a buffer between me and my anxiety and sadness. Other times I could feel them both at the same time.
It felt like I was on this separate mental plane or dimension trying to interact with the real world. It felt like being trapped in a bad high twenty four hours a day. From driving a car ninety miles an hour to having sex, it was just this general blanket of surreality and distance thrown over my mind.
It was all in my head, so nobody probably even noticed it. In some ways, I wished it was physical, just so I could point to something like a CAT scan and say “That’s what’s wrong with me. It’s real.” I was constantly worrying that I was doing something strange, since I felt like I’d lost contact with the rules of reality.
At the same time, when I was in my full blown Marxist phase, distancing myself from myself and my own thought process allowed me to do stuff I wouldn’t be able to do normally. Like public speaking. Like being super confident in my politics. Like being so obnoxiously assertive about my radical views all the time.
I tried my best to transform myself from a left brain person to a right brain person by sheer force of will. Writing, drawing and other creative passions of mine became elitist pursuits.
I had been forcing myself to view the world in this totally theoretical marxist and animal liberation way, every second of every day. It shouldn’t have been surprising to me that the world itself started to feel strangely theoretical.
She called it depersonalization disorder. Whether it was accurate or not, it was a relief that there was a term for it. Relief in that I wasn’t the only sane person who felt that way in the history of the world. Because that’s what it felt like.
When she’d read the DSM’s definition, it sounded exactly like me. I forced a laugh.
“What?” She asked.
“It just sounds like the epitome of psychobabble. I mean that’s what I would think if I hadn’t experienced it.”
“I mean I can’t say that to my Dad…’Dad I’m suffering from depersonalization disorder.’ ” I said in a pretentiously whiney voice.
She looked at me suggestively.
The father thing again. I rolled my eyes.
I sat in Bobbi’s office.
David Gilbert. He was locked up not too far from me.
I wrote him I said out of purely historical interest. That mugshot of him from his capture in 1981, bearded, defiant and clearly beaten was so hardcore. It was like the epitome of what my definition of a man was at the time. It gave me the chills like reading a Eugene Debs speech, or Emma Goldman’s words used to.
David Gilbert was a member of the Weather Underground in the late 60’s and 70’s. He was arrested in 1981 for the robbery of a Brinks truck in which a couple of police officers were killed. He was miles away in a getaway car, unarmed, but he still got life in prison.
If you had caught me a year or so earlier I would have said that the Weather Underground’s Leninism was authoritarian and that the WU’s violent actions solely alienated working class people from “the struggle.” All of which is probably true…but for me it was kind of a way to isolate myself from an already isolated socialist group.
Bobbi read the letter I got back from him to herself.
“Dear Jon,
Adirondack greetings to you. Sorry to read that you’ve been a bit depressed, and I hope that the spring sunshine and bloom are helping you get out of that funk. Hey, I know that upper middle class blues and college age alienation can be real and can hurt–so I won’t “judge too harshly.” What I will do is just add my voice to your inner drive to be self motivated and engaged. The world is really teaming with fascinating and exciting phenomena from politics to natural life. Why don’t you design a study for yourself, say focusing on a particular period of history? Or take advantage of being in the Adirondacks and get deeply into the interrelationships and changes of a particular ecological niche up here? Or one of a million other things in the rich tapestry of arts, sciences, and life? The world is too vibrant, the need for social change too pressing, and you are too creative to remain stuck in such a funk.”
The rest of the letter was answers to my questions about the Weather Underground, what he thought of Bush, and obscure groups from the history of the radical labor movement.
“I can’t believe he’s saying this from prison. It’s incredible.”
“Yeah.” I said, immediately feeling like I should have been feeling guilty.
“I can’t believe he’s in prison. What a waste.” She said.
My mom and I had been fighting a lot recently about stupid stuff. Like putting away towels, and putting dishes in the dishwasher. Stupid stuff that was really about other stuff. I just didn’t have any energy and I’d forget.
Whenever we got in the littlest fight or I’d say something the least bit negative, the first thing she’d go to was saying I should move out, or threatening to kick me out.
My Dad sat watching the Newshour in what my mom called the “Alpha Chair”. He was signing thank you letters to the board of trustees. Writing sweet little nothings at the bottom of each typed letter like, “Thank you for your continued support, your dedication to the institution will not be forgotten.”
We were talking–or more accurately–I was talking about an earlier fight that day I had with my mother.
“I’m tired of feeling like a tolerated guest in this house ever since I went to college.” I had told my mom the same thing earlier, and she said that’s what I was.
He nodded every few moments to indicate he was listening, but they often didn’t make sense in terms of the conversation.
I went on, “This is my home. And it always should be open to me when I need it. Do you think the Clarks would kick Brenden or Stephen out when there was something wrong with them?”
My Dad was reading over a letter as I spoke. He never listened to me. I was still mad from my earlier fight with my mom. Finally I got fed up with it. I stood up, and took the top letter off his lap.
He was surprised for a moment, before immediately turning stern. “Give me that back.”
“Listen to me.” I said shrilly.
He stood up. “Give me that back.”
I just stood there. It was strange, my Dad never lost his temper.
I’d felt disconnected from everyone for a long time. But all of a sudden it was like my Dad was gone, and I didn’t know him at all.
“Give that back.” He said looking strange.
In an instant, he pushed me onto the sofa. He had been an athlete all of his life and easily overpowered me. He put his knee on my neck and had his fist raised like he was about to hit me.
I was stunned. He sat there poised on top of me, frozen.
Finally I got my breath.
“Get the fuck off of me.”
I had to yell it a couple more times before he rolled off. He picked up his letters and walked to his room.
I sat there for a second before I got up and walked into the kitchen. My mom had heard the shouts and stopped me.
“What’s wrong?” She asked anxiously.
At that point I felt distinctly like I could go backward or forward. I could keep on holding my anger and sadness whatever in, or I could let it out. Like the air in some tires. So I punched a hole in the wall and walked out. I hitchhiked into town and watched the 9:00 movie.
Tim Santos started knocking on my door at like 8:00. Eventually I came out in my boxers and opened the door, rubbing my eyes.
“Well good morning princess.” He said in his booze and cigarrettes voice. His accent was from Rhode Island . It sounded like Brooklyn and Boston got together and had babies.
“Let me just put some pants on.”
Tim was there to help me fix the hole I made in the wall. He worked maintenance at NCS.
I’m not sure why he liked me, but he did. Maybe he just faked it because I was his bosses son. But I don’t think so. I think he saw a younger version of himself in me a little bit, despite our obvious class difference and all that.
Either way, I liked him a lot. He was one of those rough tough guys with a heart of gold. When I worked building a greenhouse with him the previous summer, he’d hinted at a criminal past. And when I’d asked him about the brass knuckles in his glove compartment he’d just smiled, saying “You never know.” I was surprised he’d lasted as long as he’d had at NCS, given his character. But he was a hard worker.
“All right.” I said, back and fully dressed.
He was measuring the hole, which was right by the door. Flicking little indented pieces out of it.
“You have little hands.” He said mockingly.
“I guess.” I said.
“A little bit further and you would have hit the electrical box,” he said to himself.
He pretended to look around. “Are your parents here?”
I laughed. “No.”
“Okay, if this hole was a little bigger or if it was in a different spot, we’d have to replace this whole sheet,” he said, pointing to the wall, “And I don’t think you want to do that.”
“No.”
“Good, because it would be a bitch.”
He had me cut a little rectangle about the size of the hole with an exacto blade on the floor.Tim was working at the same time.
“Newspaper?” He asked in that accent.
I pointed to a rack of old New York Times by the recycling bin. He crumpled some up and and put them in the hole in the wall, pressing them in like a spring.
“You done with that yet?”
“Yeah.” I said, standing up with my little cut out sheet.
He pointed to the hole, “Now put it in there tight like a virgin’s pussy.”
I laughed. Sometimes I couldn’t believe the shit that came out of his mouth.
I got it in.
He turned to me, “All right, do you have any ajax ?”
“Umm…” I had no idea. “Let me look.”
I disapeared into the kitchen.
“Ajax , or any kind of dish soap would do it.”
I came back with a bottle.
“Perfect.” He said.
He popped the top off the bucket and scraped a little of the drywall into a smaller container.
“The ajax thing was something I learned from an old contractor I worked with. It makes the drywall spread thinner, and easier.”
“Oh.” I said, not really understanding.
I sat in Bobbi’s office.
“I mean he has prostate cancer. That’s got to be stressing him out. He’s facing the possibility of being impotent for the rest of his life.” I said.
She nodded.
“But the thing that pissed me off the most was that afterwards, he wasn’t even apologetic about it. He said something about me maybe needing to learn from the school of hard knocks or something.”
I continued, “I feel like everybody is washing their hands of me. Like they’re giving up.”
She looked at me, “I know this sounds cheesy, but I won’t give up on you. Ever.”
I forced a laugh, and wiped the moisture out of my eyes.
“That’s good to hear.”
My mom and I sat in the hospital waiting room. My mom thought it was a good idea to up my dosage. I did too I guess.
I hated hospitals. Just the antiseptic smell could start my heart going. When I was six, it took five nurses to hold me down for my booster shots.
Some Judge Judy knock off was playing in the background. My mom rolled her eyes. Pretty soon she’d launch her self righteous monologue onto the guy sitting next to us on how she hadn’t watched TV in twenty years.
An elderly nurse came out of the swinging doors. “Jon Hochschartner?”
They measured my height, and weight and all that. I’d gained twenty five pounds since my last visit. It wasn’t really surprising since all I did those days was eat and watch television.
They led me and my Mom to a room where I sat on the edge of that elevated bed with the crinkly paper.
“I don’t feel like proving to someone I’m depressed.”
“I know,” My Mom said, “It’ll only take a minute.”
Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Woods Mcahill walked in, smiling.
“So how you guys doing?” He asked rhetorically.
“Good,” we said.
“Good.” He said. He sat down on a stool and took his stethoscope off. He started looking through a folder. I went to High school with his son, Dave. He was a year older than me. Dave was the kind of kid my Dad would have wanted. He was going to Harvard, was a star on the ski team and all that. He was just as popular with adults as he was with people my age.
It was always an awkward transition from Woods asking, how’s my Davey doing, to let me grab your balls turn and cough.
About a minute later, he looked up at me.
“So what’s up?” He asked.
I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sad I guess?”
He nodded, expecting more. There was about fifteen seconds of dead air time, before my Mom looked at me and jumped in. She launched into her history with depression, and how I’d been getting all A’s my first year of college, and doing different things, and then how the next semester I wasn’t.
I interrupted. “She only sees the outside.” As I started to get momentum, I raised my voice in a way that was probably out of place. It felt good, “I’ve told her this a hundred times. She doesn’t understand that all that time I was getting good grades, and doing extracurriclar stuff, it was worse then now when I’ve allowed myself to fall apart a little bit. In the right direction.”
Ten minutes later, when we were all talked out, my Mom asked Dr. Mcahill what he thought we should do.
“Frankly,” he looked at me, “I think you should be hospitalized immediately. I think you are a danger, to others and yourself.”
“Fuck that.” I croaked.
“It’s not normal for a boy your age to being yelling and…crying like this.”
“Fuck you…’normal.’ “
I stood up. “I’m leaving.”
He stood up too, blocking my path. He was an athlete, but I was pretty sure I could bowl through him.
“Legally, we have the right to restrain you. We will call the police and…”
I walked past him and he didn’t stop me.
“Fuck you,” I said, adding ridiculously, “Nurse Ratchet.”
I walked out.
I pushed open the swinging double doors and felt like everyone was staring at me. They probably were. I had tears streaming down my face. How did I get here? It felt so surreal.
Out in the parking lot, I looked around. Considering running, and if so, which direction. But I didn’t, and just stood there, by our car.
My mom walked out.
“I did the same thing as you when I was your age. The police had to drag me out in handcuffs from Grandma’s house. And believe me, a 28 rehabilitation facility is not what you want.”
I didn’t say anything.
She continued, “Or maybe it is. Maybe you need it. I don’t know.”
A state trooper van pulled up. The statie got out and walked into the hospital, unaware that I was the person he was looking for.
My mom looked at me, “Come on inside Jonny.”
I sighed.
I sat outside, on my parents deck in the sun. Wearing big aviators like that dude in Cool Hand Luke. It felt good.
My mom asked me why I was reading this biography of Kurt Cobain I’d picked up at the public library. Because it was a depressing subject. For me, it was just a relief after two years of reading about perfect people like Gandhi and Malcolm X to reading about people I could relate to. I liked later fat Elvis, dying on the toilet with a stomach filled with barbituates. And later Jim Morrison, except switch the toilet for a bath tub.
As ridiculous as it might sound, I felt like summer had saved my life. In Lake Placid , cabin fever was for real. For months you didn’t see the sun and the thermostat never broke into positive numbers. Snow was everywhere and some winters over ten feet deep.
Some of my friends were already home for summer.
My long time friends, didn’t go to the same high school I did. Our parents had all worked at the school I lived at and had kids at the same time.
In the summer, the school became a camp. They were working at the camp I lived at. But I chose not to work there because I felt like emotionally I wasn’t in a good place to be working with kids and two, all the old counselors and the then head of camp had these wild child associations of me from when I was thirteen.
We had just moved from San Francisco , I had done my first year at NCS and was dealing with all the issues of being the headmasters son and all the assumptions that went along with it. Proving myself as not just a goody two shoes in the way a thirteen year old, spoiled white boy does. I had already done five years of camp, and sadly I didn’t realize it–but I was too old for it. So I got in trouble–silly camp stuff–but I wasn’t invited back. The head of camp told my parents that NCS had ruined me.
From that point on, I was blamed for everything when that group of friends got in trouble. When Tucker puked all over his parents couch, or the Clarks were caught growing pot in their closet, it was always assumed I was the guiding influence.
But I didn’t really want them to see me like I was. I wanted them to remember me as I was when I left high school, strong and confident.
My mom plopped the newspaper on the table in front of my bowl of cheerios.
“You hear about this?” She asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you know either of them?” She asked, sounding concerned.
I scanned the front page of the paper. I’d actually heard about it the previous night before on the internet.
“One of them.” I said, munching my cheerios.
“It’s horrible.”
“Yeah.”
Kory Hosler and Bryce Stanton were driving drunk. Kory was my age, and we went to high school together. We were sort of friends, but more part of the same clique. Bryce was a couple of years older, and was Kory’s life model in a way. In terms of his attitude and lifestyle. Bryce sold most of the pot in town. He sold it to Kory who sold it at our high school.
I remember driving out with Kory at night to abandoned parking lots to meet Bryce. Bryce would roll down his window and toss a baggie into my lap. Bryce had recently been busted with eight and a half pounds in his trunk. It could have sold for 25 grand plus probably. He was facing charges, but there was some kind of question as to whether it was an illegal search and seizure. I didn’t know the details. But the weed supply had mostly dried up.
I was like in psychological slavery to Kory until my senior year of high school. Constantly trying to impress him. THat’s when as I felt time running out, I was able to become more three dimensional as a person, but then as I went into college, I took one aspect of that–speaking my mind about politics and morals and ran it into the ground, until it was all I was. My extreme politics were in a way a reaction to that. I went from one wannabe apatheic teenager to the complete opposite. It was like how they say the Defense Department is always gearing up for the last generation’s war.
Kory and Bryce had hit the side of a bridge at 110 miles an hour. It launched them like a ramp into the woods, clipping the tops of trees. Their bodies had lain there for three days before a biker passing by had noticed the wreckage.
Honestly I didn’t feel that bad…
I felt different every day–sometimes minute to minute–sometimes nostalgic and sentimental, sometimes far off, sometimes I just felt like hiding in my room. But today I guess I felt particularly in need of human contact.
“Did you know him well?” She asked.
“I guess I did in high school.”
“I’m so sorry, Jonny.”
My mom didn’t really understand my emotional situation. Maybe this was horrible, but this didn’t really effect me. I was sad or felt crazy, but never really for a reason I could articulate.
“Maybe you should go the viewing.”
“I think I might.” I said noncommitantly.
I got out of my station wagon in the cemetary.
I hadn’t made it to the viewing, but I’d gone to the funeral. It seemed like the whole town was there. Which wasn’t necesarilly saying much, but I guess it was kind of moving.
I walked hands stuffed in my pockets to the crowd in black huddled around the gravesite.
Brennan stepped out of the crowd, recognizing me. “Jon Hoch!” He practically shouted, before checking his decibel level. “I thought I saw you back there,” meaning the Church.
“What’s it been, two years?” He continued.
I nodded, not sure what to say.
We turned back toward the crowd, trying to get a view of what was going on. It was hard to see.
He whispered, “We’re having a party tomorrow night in his honor. You should come.”
The family was throwing dirt on the coffin. Kory’s mom was balling. Her makeup was running.
Kory’s father’s hair was whiter than I remembered it. He looked impassive, with his chin jutting out. He swayed imperceptablly in a nonexistant wind.
Brennan continued, “If he was cremated, we could have smoked his ashes.”
I suppressed a smile, “I think Keith Richards already did that.”
Another familiar face turned out of the crowd.
“Jon Hoch….Holy shit.” Said Chris.
I smiled.
With Kory gone, it was like they didn’t know how to interact with each other. Like a power vaccum.
It was a smaller party. Just the people who knew Kory pretty well I guess. I hadn’t drank that much since I’d dropped out of college, and I was kind of wary of drinking too much on the antidepressants. You weren’t really supposed to drink at all on them. It hurt your liver, got you drunker, and apparently cancelled out the effect of the medication.
Verner was crunching up a baggie of shrooms on the table into smaller, edible chunks. A glass of OJ sat next to him to mask their taste.
“You want some?” He asked.
“No thanks.”
“Oh man, what happend to ‘I’m going to do this every day.’ ” Brennan said.
“On your birthday and my birthday…” Chris added.
I said that the first time I did shrooms in high school. Half of my friends had put it in as a qoute for our yearbook, so I had to explain it awkwardly to my mom. She thought it was about weed though.
“I forgot, you changed.” Said Chris, putting a mocking emphasis on changed.
I laughed, “No, I just don’t want any.”
Since then, they’d moved on to harder drugs by Lake Placid standards. Coke, LSD and shrooms in addition to their regular diet of marijuana.
Frankly, I was scared of what kind of effect the psychedelics in particular would have on my fragile mind state. Even weed made me freak out. It never really did in high school.
The last time I smoked pot, it was at the height of my depression. I essentially was having a nervous breakdown and felt like I was losing my mind. I tried to sleep it off and woke up three hours later with my pockets filled with gibberish notes of things I just had to remember to stay sane. I had written all over my chest things like:
“If you’re going to be gay, don’t be one of those weak, effeminate, petty, lispy fashion obsessed fags…be strong…be militant.” Once you go Marxist, you never go back I guess.
But I wasn’t gay. It was like this inner homophobia that the weed and my mindset at the time brought. It was because my idea of masculinity at the time was wrapped up in this grim faced commitment to social change. And the superficial, flamboyant gay stereotype was the exact opposite of that. It scared the shit out of me, but I ‘came out’ to my parents. Still sort of high probably. I just didn’t want to be “one of those pussy gays” who hid in the closet. I wanted to be political in whatever I was. I was losing my mind, what can I say.
Bobbi sat reading the letter my Dad had written to me for my Birthday. He was away on a business trip in Washington D.C. . He had asked if I wanted to with him, and attend a labor conference on one of his days off. But I decided against it.
“Dear Jon,
Happy 20th birthday! I wish I were there to celebrate it with you, but I also wish you had joined me down here in D.C. I know that the current level of anger you harbor toward me does not allow you to do that, which makes me sad. I can only hope that you will either forgive me for my past — and present — inadequacies, or that you will move beyond them to some new status quo.
However, I have always loved you, and will continue to do so. I have always been proud of you, even today when you struggle so mightily. It takes courage to face things. I have great pride in your abilities, and in your potentialities. Of course, it also is true that I am a flawed human being, and so I have not always expressed myself in a way that was — or is — appreciated by you. I am sorry for that. I know that you have vast reservoirs of emotion (mostly anger) about me … too few hugs and kisses, too many sports, too few kudos, and too much pressure perhaps as well. Certainly none of those were my intention.
Every parent tries to pass along things that they like, in the hope that their child may like them too. Sports because I enjoy them but also because there was a time when you tried to fit in with a crowd of kids who liked sports, and I wanted to help you fit in. In hindsight maybe that was negative, but it seemed sensible when you were hanging out with Galen-Mario-Brett-Luis. Hopefully I didn’t wreck your childhood. You have much to offer, many talents, and a good head on your shoulders. I can’t make you feel better about yourself. I wish I could. It certainly hurts both of your parents to see you in such pain.
Without being defensive I would also ask that you search your memory and think of some other things, some good times … the times your dad took you to dinner theater in DC or to see Billy in some production in SF. The times I took you to sporting events because you wanted to go (Panthers), and the times we stayed until ungodly hours so you could get autographs. Talking about books or listening to tapes driving to PHS. Going to Take Back America . And yes, of course I took you hiking and skiing — which now you hate — but that was not always how you viewed it, and just possibly there were some good times … in Peru, skiing hut to the hut in the Sierras, maybe on an Adirondack peak, or even a session at the rock gym in Corte Madera or Mission Cliffs that brought a smile to your face.
I miss you, love you, and hope I can make things better, even while knowing that only you can get over (or not) the anger you feel. But don’t ever forget that even if I don’t show it very well, I will always love you.
Love, Dad”
Bobbi was tearing up by the end of it.
“I’m sorry.” She said.
“He should have written it to you.” I said, forcing a laugh.
“You didn’t think it was heartfelt, or moving?”
“I did. I think my Mom helped him write it.”
Bobbi sniffled.
I continued, “It just makes me feel guilty. It’s so over the top. I’m not really angry at him. I just told my Mom some of the stuff we had been talking about, and I think she passed it on.”
We all tried to hide our disapointment that the strip clubs had closed. It was me, Brennan, Jack and Chris. We were still barely under 21, so coming up to Canada and drinking in bars instead of hiding in our parent’s basements still had a certain allure. It was early in the morning and I was starting to sober up. Stumbling down downtown Montreal , we were confronted by a single store open across the street.
“Harry Potter!” Jack squealled. Trying to sound ironic.
“I forgot this was the night it came out.” I mumbled.
Piled pyramid stile under a big flourescent light in the store window were hundreds of copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The final book in the series, it had a first printing of 12 million copies. Books had been delivered for the 12:01 release across the country under armed guard. The ending was internationally a closely protected secret.
“Let’s check it out.” I said.
We crossed the street, awkwardly stopping traffic. A few people honked their horns. I waved apologetically.
We stood in front of the stoor window. It was about three in the morning so the lines had already died down. Jack was practically salivating. Chris ditched his empty forty in a nearby trash can and we went inside.
At my high school there were essentially two groups. The hockey players and the druggies. I wasn’t into sports, so I hung out with the so called “bad kids”. The stuff they were into was pretty innocent, but for a small sheltered town it got them a bad reputation. While I might not have had so much in common intellectually or whatever with many of them, we were real friends. I mean we joked around, called each other “fags” and all that, but by the end of my three years there, they would have done anything for me. And I’d have done the same for them. But as I anticipated the big to jump to college I drifted away from them. Beginning my transformation into the uber wannabe college revolutionary.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, Brennan and Chris were in town most of the last semester I had been. Brennan had gotten kicked out of a local SUNY college for partying too hard, and Chris was expelled for dealing hash at UVM. Chris had been busted with a little under a thousand dollars worth near the beginning of his second year but had dragged the expulsion process out for a full semester simply by not showing up to judicial meetings. Jack, was my best friend in high school. He went to college in Florida, and was doing pretty well. He was adopted from Korea when he was a baby, and had grown up with these guys. For Brennan, it was an endless source of amusement that Jack’s given name was Choi Dong Chang.
As if in a daze, Jack walked past the Potter memorabilia lining the walls to the nearest pile of the book. He picked it up and rubbed his hand along the cover.
“Don’t cum in your pants Jack-o.” Chris said.
I had read most of the Harry Potter series too, so I picked up a copy. There had been so much hype.
“Can we go?” Asked Brennan.
Jack pulled out his wallet and said despondently, “I don’t have enough money.”
Realizing we weren’t going soon, Brennan walked up to the table and picked up his own copy.
“I wonder how it ends.” Brennan said, eyeing Jack.
Jack didn’t hear him.
“I wonder how it ends.” Brennan repeated.
“I’d kill you.” Said Jack.
“No seriously…” Brennan said flipping towards the end.
“Don’t.”
“Is this the last page?” Brennan continued, licking his finger melodramatically to turn the page.
“Fuck you Brennan.”
“Don’t…” Chris tried to interject.
But Brennan began to read it aloud.
“…The train began to move, and Harry walked alongside it, watching his son’s thin face, already ablaze with excitement….”
Jack was already cupping his ears and humming like an eight year old.
Brennan raised his voice, “…Harry kept smiling and waving even though it was like a little bereavement, watching his son glide away from him…”
Chris tried to quiet him, a crowd had turned toward us.
“…The last trace of steam evaporated in the autumn air. The train turned a corner…”
Some of the people began yelling at Brennan, half of the shrill voices speaking in French.
But Brennan was completely in the moment and continued reading. I don’t think he even noticed the crowd, he was reading simply for Jack’s sake.
“…he lowered his hand absentmentmindedly and touched the lightning scar…”
A store clerk and a few customers began to approach us, yelling.
“Stop man.” Chris said.
“…The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was–”
Right then a red faced fatherly type pushed Brennan to the floor.
Jack hit the man in the jaw unhesitantly.
When I was feeling really depressed, my favorite show to watch was the Sopranos. I loved it. Maybe you haven’t seen it. But the point is, that these mobsters pretended that they were just cold killers, but you knew that these guys would do anything for each other. Right or wrong, they cared for each other. It was unreasonably selfish but I felt like I had nobody in my life who would just say fuck everything else, all I care about is your welfare because I love you that much. I didn’t really feel at that moment that there was anyone in my life would do that. Even my parents.
The security guard was coming toward Verner. I took a deep breath, met him halfway and put my shoulder into him.
He crumpled onto a smaller display, knocking over a tower of books.
A crowd had gathered around us. Verner pulled Brennan to his feet, and we quickly made our way to the door.
“Lets get the fuck out of here.”
We stumbled out of the street and into the night.
It started essentially with Verner saying he was broke. I joked that we should rob some rich family’s summer home. And it escalated pretty quickly from there.
Verner and some of my other friends had robbed cars and other stuff in high school. But I never had. Half the time, they wouldn’t even have to break in. A lot of people in town just left their doors unlocked.
The house we had our eyes on was owned by a rich family called the Colby’s. They called it a summer house, but for them it wasn’t even that. It was more like a two week a year home. I could just imagine the Colby’s from European villa to European villa, to private beach front property to beach front property. Since it was on the lake, the house was instantly over the million dollar mark.
Besides those two weeks, they had a full time live in caretaker. We watched the house casually for a couple days, and he spent most of the time in a hammock in the yard. Every once and a while he’d mow the lawn or something, but he usually left for the bars around ten.
It was nine forty-five. We sat in Verner’s minivan across the street from the house. Verner was smoking a bowl, and we were singing along to girly 80’s pop songs we were both embarrassed to know the lyrics to.
I didn’t feel like I was getting any better. And it felt like everyone was watching me with stopwatch in hand, tapping their feet, waiting for me to get back to normal.
I just didn’t care anymore. Not in a glamorous, “Rebel Without a Cause” way. I just didn’t really care. Besides, being the dark, troubled guy might be cool in high school, but after that it’s just pathetic.
The caretaker’s car pulled out of the Colby’s driveway. Verner flashed a high, goofily conspiratorial smile at me. We waited a few minutes before we backed in. Verner had taken the rear seat out so we could fill the car up.
We got out and looked around. We weren’t dressed as stealth ninjas or anything, but we had looked up a variety of ways to break in on the internet. The print outs were in the glove compartment of the minivan if we needed them. The plan was to wait a few months then sell everything we got on Ebay.
We went up to the door, and Verner tried the handle. It was open.
“Well that makes it easy.” He said.
We walked into the foyer. The ceiling was about twenty feet up.
The house was surprisingly empty. I guess we shouldn’t have been that surprised since it was a summer home.
We took two TV’s, a subwoofer, some left behind jewelry, and some antique junk we thought might be worth something. Verner wanted to take an old vase, because he thought it looked old, but he was surprised by the weight of it when he picked it up, and dropped it on the floor. A grey mist exploded onto the carpet. Who kept an urn in a summer home? Could not have been a very popular relative.
Verner wanted to take a bike and a case of CD’s, but they looked like they were the caretaker’s, so I told him not to. Then I realized I didn’t care, so we took them.
We had packed up the last of the stuff, and we pulled out. We drove the minivan too an abandoned parking lot, and parked it.
We started walking toward the local Ice cream parlor, Cutt and Mutt’s to celebrate.
“Dude it’s the cops.”
I laughed. When we went for smoking cruises in high school in between classes, that was Chris’ favorite way of tormenting me in my paranoid state.
“Just keep walking.” He said.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
I saw them, they were coming right for us. They stopped the car. They got out of the car and shone the light in our eyes. I blinked in the glare.
“Where you headed boys.” In that mock jocular tone cops use.
“Home.” Verner said.
“Where’s that?” He said.
” Peninsula .” Verner said.
He looked at me.
I fumbled, “Past the ski jumps.”
“You been drinking tonight?”
“A little bit.” Verner said.
I nodded.
“All right let me see your hands.”
“What?”
“I’m not going to arrest you, show me your hands.”
Verner offered his, and the police office put the flashlight over them, looking at both side.
I offerred mine and he repeated the process.
“You’re free to go.”
Apparently there had been a fight at a townie party, and a kid’s jaw had been broken. He was airlifted to Burlington . They were checking everybody’s knuckles to find out who hit him.
I stumbled out of Verner’s house, my sneakers slipping on the wet steps. If Jack was still there, he wouldn’t have let me drive.
I opened the door to my station wagon and got in. I looked around in the dark for where the steering wheel was, but I couldn’t find it. I tried drunkenly to find a place to insert the key. Trying to force it into a crack on the dashboard. But it kept on slipping out of the groove.
I was on the wrong side. The passenger side. I rested my head on the dashboard, frustrated. But closing my eyes gave me the spins. I thought I was going to throw up.
So I got out of the car and walked around to the other side. The correct side. I opened the door and slumped down into the seat. I had a little trouble getting the keys in the ignition. But eventually I got it and turned on the ignition. I backed out.
When I had driven drunk in high school I thought I was safer driver then when I was sober. I drove thirty miles an hour the whole way home, hugging the right side of the road opposite the incoming cars.
And that was my game plan for the night. Maybe driving even slower because I was pretty drunk.
With one hand on the steering wheel, I flipped on the radio. 99.9 the Buzz, 103.7, 105.5, 106.7….I flipped back to 105.5. Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” was playing. I loved that song.
I started singing along.
“People, don’t you understand
the child needs a helping hand
or he’ll grow to be an angry young man some day
Take a look at you and me,
are we too blind to see,
do we simply turn our heads
and look the other way
Well the world turns
and a hungry little boy with a runny nose
plays in the street as the cold wind blows
In the ghetto
And his hunger burns
so he starts to roam the streets at night
and he learns how to steal
and he learns how to fight
In the ghetto
Then one night in desperation
a young man breaks away
He buys a gun, steals a car,
tries to run, but he don’t get far
And his mama cries
As a crowd gathers ’round an angry young man
face down on the street with a gun in his hand
In the ghetto
As her young man dies,
on a cold and gray Chicago mornin’,
another little baby child is born
In the ghetto.”
I tried to cry, but I couldn’t. Too self concious.
Behind me, a cops lights flash on briefly. I pull over. He comes over and tells me my taillight. He takes the drivers license I handed to him.
I lit a cigarrette. I lit the wrong end. It didn’t burn properly and I realized I had lit the filter. I dropped it on the floor of the car and pawed for another. I lit it sucessfully. And started to doze off, my head drooping before snapping back up.
I woke up with a jolt when a bit of ash that had fallen on my lap burned through my pants. And burned my skin. I brushed it off frantically. I slapped myself to keep awake.
A couple of minutes later the police officer returned with my license. He tapped on my window and I rolled it down all the way.
He handed me a ticket. He told me to get my tail light fixed.
He looked me in the eyes suspiciously. I looked at him. He kind of looked like my Dad. Blue eyes and thinning hair. Muscular.
“You okay?” He asked.
“Yeah.” I said, too quickly.
He kept on looking at me, trying to figure something out. I met his gaze. Five seconds or so passed.
Reluctantly he said, “Okay, you’re free to go.”
And he walked away from me.
I was taking the tour of the local community college. I had to get 12 credits to stay on my parents insurance.
“We’ve got every major local industry represented here. Hotel management, Culinary arts, Forestry…well all except for the correctional system I guess.” The tour guide said laughing.
It was true. Working for the state as a correctional officer was probably one of the biggest single sources of employment in the Adirondacks . Ray Brook, Clinton County and on and on. Tupac Shakur served time in the Clinton Correctional facility not very far from my home. They actually had to ship in black CO’s so it wasn’t just the white people locking up the black people.
I didn’t want to sound elitist, but none of these things were really what I wanted to be doing in ten years. At all. I mean, I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn’t any of those.
The tour guide turned to me. “So what do you want to major in?”
