Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  But here was another Arnie before me now, the man telling the reporter about the search party’s door-to-door campaign. I pictured the long-haired college students walking up to houses around town, houses decorated with pumpkins and witches for Halloween. In a dark twist, the search was called off that night to, as the paper put it, “avoid confusion with Halloween festivities.” Mitch, for one, was wearing down. “I never worked so hard and felt so useless,” he told a reporter.

  By the next day, November 1, the door-to-door search, which had covered thirty square miles but failed to turn up evidence, was called off. However, Mitch told reporters that they were not giving up. This was a grassroots effort, the kind of which the city hadn’t been seen before. Over five thousand posters were being passed out to over forty businesses and government offices, and they were now being distributed as far as a hundred miles away, and soon made it as far as the borders of Georgia and Alabama. Volunteers raised $5,000 to offer as a reward for clues to Jon’s whereabouts. The FBI was now on the case as well. The US Air Force dispatched planes with heat seeking equipment to scan the area.

  On November 4, a week after Jon went missing, and still with no apparent leads, a Tribune reporter came to our house to interview my parents. The story ran with the headline “Missing Boy’s Parents Keep Their Hope Alive.” As I sat there in the school library looking at the page, numbness washed over me. There before me were pictures of my parents, pictures I’d never seen taken in the moment, grainy shots of black and white, showing them in our house, waiting. The photos made everything seem so real.

  There was my mother: nine years younger, her dark hair a bit longer, her face slack, her eyes a bit puffy from what must have been a lack of sleep, or just the strain. “Every Day Is a New Day,” read a quote from her underneath. Below it to the left was a close-up of my dad: tired eyes behind his glasses, curly, dark hair twisting above the frames, puffing a cigarette as a long ash hung. “Kushner Shows Tension of Waiting for Word from Son,” this caption read. To the right was another shot of him, sitting on our striped recliner, the one that was still in our house all these years later, his hands crossed as he looked down at some papers, including a child’s drawing of a smiley face, on the floor—papers identified in the caption as the letters of support from students at the Boys Academy.

  The question the reporter and readers had then was almost certainly the same question I had now as I read the story: How could my parents survive this horror, this interminable wait, this nightmare? I had my own suppositions at thirteen, just from having grown up around them. In the years after Jon’s death, I knew that they remained sensitive and open to life, that they cultivated a large support network of friends, family, and colleagues. I knew how much they loved to laugh and eat and celebrate the good times, how passionate they were about their work and the community around them. But even so, I had no idea how much of this was in place at the time Jon disappeared or, perhaps, how much of it had come as a result of that tragedy. I just knew that as much as I was searching for clues to my own story, one mystery seemed unfathomable: how they got through that week.

  The reporter gave one account of my dad’s answer during that interminable week. “ ‘We’ve been surviving on chemistry,’ Kushner said, referring to the number of tranquilizers, stimulants, and coffee they’ve taken to hold up under the pressure. ‘We get along, alone together,’ Kushner said, ‘and you cry and then you go back.’ ”

  But that was just a part it. In the story, my dad went to great lengths to talk about the incredible support that came from the most disparate places. “The one colossal good is that there has been a tremendous coming together, that lumps together the cleavages that separate each other,” he said. He spoke of the university crowd coming together with the police, the Jewish community with the non-Jews, the rich with the poor. My dad also spoke of the motorcycle biker who came to our house to help. The biker told my dad that he had his newly tuned cycle outside and wanted some “rough ground” to search. Later that day, the man returned, covered in mud, and told my dad, “Give me rougher ground.”

  My dad was not just a father who was missing a son. He was an anthropologist, filtering this experience through his trained eyes and mind. “I have come to realize fully,” my dad went on to the reporter, “if we adults present [people with] alternative ways of being human and applying their humanity, then they’ll use it.”

  The entire time I was reading the microfilm at the library, I knew what was coming. I didn’t know all the details, but I knew how this story ended: with Jon’s murder. But seeing the oversize headline on the front page of the Tampa Tribune from November 6, 1973, felt like a shock. “Body of Kushner Youth Found in Lonely Grave,” it read.

  I recoiled at the sight of the photos: the shot of the shrouded stretcher being carried into an ambulance, the photo of one of the two suspects being led somewhere in cuffs by the police. I absorbed enough of the story to confirm the few horrible details I knew, and perhaps, wanted to know: that Jon had suffocated on a gag and had been mutilated after he was dead. But I was too repulsed by the images of the killers to keep my eyes on the pages for very long.

  Instead, I quickly twisted the black knob of the microfilm machine, blurring the subsequent days of headlines and pictures as they scrolled by. At one point, I passed a photo that caused me to stop and rewind. The headline of the story was “Jonathan Is Laid to Rest.” It was a picture of my dad in his suit walking into our synagogue for the memorial service. I was walking beside him in my brown vest, slacks, and a checkered long-sleeve shirt that I recalled feeling like satin. I seemed to be looking up at my dad toward his downcast face, a face that I might have been scanning for clues. I was holding my father’s hand.

  21

  THE NEWSPAPER stories confirmed at least some of my haziest recollections: that Jon had, in fact, gone to the store for candy, and that he had promised to call home if it rained. I returned to that last memory I had of my brother: the two of us on the sidewalk. I remembered how I made him promise not only to call if it rained, but also to call so that I could remind him to get me the candy. Because he never phoned, I had always assumed that he never made it to the 7-Eleven at all, and that the killers had gotten him on his way in. Knowing that my memories were grounded in some truth, as awful as the truth was, helped me feel more connected to Jon.

  But all the new details, the descriptions and scenes that I read in the paper, stirred up another familiar emotion too: guilt. I couldn’t help imagining what might have happened had I not pressed him so hard to get me the gum. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone. Or maybe if I had protested more loudly, complaining that he wasn’t going to let me go, he would have given in and stayed home. This game of what-if was easy and addictive to play, and I twisted every possibility around in my head like a Rubik’s Cube. What if Jon had agreed to let me go with him? What if they wouldn’t have attacked had they seen two of us? What if they’d gotten us both? What if, somehow, I could have saved him?

  I felt guilty about feeling guilty, ashamed to draw attention to my feelings even if they were just inside my head. We spoke a lot about guilt in my house, but not related to Jon. Guilt was something that we joked about as a trait of being Jewish, how parents and grandparents would lament “You don’t call, you don’t write!” and so on. We had a gag gift in our living room: a small can of aerosol labeled Mrs. Rubenstein’s Guilt-Remover Spray. It smelled like roses.

  Beyond stirring up my guilt and confirming some of my vague memories, the articles had an unexpected effect too: creating even more mystery for me. Now that I knew some details surrounding Jon’s disappearance, the empty pages of my book seemed even more barren. What exactly did these guys do to Jon? Who were they? How’d they get caught? Where were they now? I did gather, either from the stories or from my parents, that the killers were in prison, and that the older one, Witt, had been sentenced to death. But rather than upset myself or my parents by asking more questions, I left that alone.

 
The mystery didn’t grow just over Jon’s death. My questions concerned his short but full life. Ordinarily after someone dies, you talk about him or her eventually, sharing stories, laughs, memories, feelings that keep the person alive in your heart and mind. But because of the horror of Jon’s death, that ability was almost completely erased in my family. The pain was too great for idle memories. Instead, the silence prevailed. I felt doubly challenged, however, because I didn’t have the well of memories to dip into myself. I envied Andy and my parents for the memories of Jon that they had in their heads. I wanted those for myself. I wanted to know him. To feel him. I wanted to know who he was when he was alive. But I resigned myself to, at least for the time being, not knowing more at all.

  At thirteen, I was now older than Jon had been, a bizarre concept to me that seemed almost like something out of one of my comic books: how a little brother is transformed into a big brother. And because I was thirteen, I was becoming a bar mitzvah. As I stood on the bimah giving my bar mitzvah speech, looking out on the room full of friends and family, the memorial banners for Jon hanging in the lobby, I knew that many of them might be thinking the same thing as me when I thanked Jon for inspiring me with his memory: that I was becoming a man, while Jon would remain, forever, a boy.

  22

  THE DISTANCE between our sliding glass doors and the garbage cans outside around the corner of the house was maybe fifteen feet. But those fifteen feet I had to walk every night when taking out the kitchen trash felt like an eternity.

  Despite my burgeoning sense of freedom and adventure, I felt plagued by the dark side of possibility: the fact that while anything could happen in the best possible sense, terrible things could happen too—like getting attacked and killed by a stranger while I was taking out the trash. The usual reassurances—say, the rarity of someone getting hit by lightning, the unlikelihood of dying in a car crash—were easy for me to dismiss. As wildly unusual as it was for Jon to die the way he did, the fact was that it had happened. And if something like that could happen to him, why couldn’t something equally terrible, no matter how unlikely, happen to me?

  My fear of getting murdered while taking out the trash was the most frequent reminder of this trauma. The paranoia became so intense that I began asking my dad or mom to wait for me by the sliding doors while I completed my chore outside. This went on long past the point of embarrassment, long after I began feeling that I was too old for such behavior. I never recalled them trying to talk me out of this or convince me that everything was going to be okay. Instead, what I felt from them was perhaps quiet compassion, an understanding that, as well as we were all getting along in our lives, we were still wounded, still raw, still feeling our way through the dark.

  I began to think of this fear as the bogeyman. The bogeyman was bad. He had gotten my brother, and he was coming for me. He was this shadowy presence in the world, an evil, a chaos, something lurking in the woods, a phantom spirit able to move easily between the physical and spiritual realms. Maybe he was hiding behind the trash can, or maybe he had miniaturized and traveled into my brain, a little Darth Vader flying into my head like the crew from the sixties sci-fi flick Fantastic Voyage. But the bogeyman was always there waiting, and he had a way of coming at the most inopportune times.

  I developed strange fears, fears even of myself. As a kid, I had the incredibly nerdy hobby of collecting magnets and ball bearings. I kept my three largest ball bearings in a medicine bottle in a drawer. But slowly I became fixated on them. I began getting consumed by an uncontrollable urge to swallow the ball bearings and choke myself. I had never felt suicidal before, and didn’t understand if this was some such impulse now. The weird fear became so bad that I considered throwing out the ball bearings but couldn’t bear to part with them. Instead, I handed them to my mom one day and asked her to keep them in her room. I’m sure she had no idea what I was talking about or why I was behaving so urgently, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed the fear away from me.

  I was also afraid for my parents. Once, I was at school when I saw an ambulance race down the street. As the sirens faded, I felt an icy wave of fear pass through my body: a conviction that the ambulance was carrying one of my parents; that something horrible had happened, and they were dead or dying. The fear became so intense that it ceased to be fear at all. It was reality. My reality. My parents. They had died. They were dying. I knew it. And there was nothing I could do but sit there in class and pretend like I was paying attention to whatever the teacher was saying. But nothing could distract my belief that something terrible was happening.

  In these moments, the pot didn’t help. One night when I was fifteen, something darker rose from the smoke. It happened when my parents were out for the evening, and I was home alone. The minute they walked out the door, I headed urgently for my room. By now I had Rush posters completely covering my walls, along with a giant light blue satin Rush banner—of the man-in-the-red-star logo—that I had bought at the Wooden Nickel head shop. My prized possession—my stereo components (tape deck, turntable, speakers)—shimmered on my chest of drawers, underneath my shelf of Mad magazines and Tolkien books.

  I opened my closet and fished out the tennis ball can in which I stashed my pot. As I opened the lid, the gust of sweet herbal stickiness hit my nose. I had plenty of options for how to get high. The water pipe was my favorite, able to cool the smoke and not require heavy cleanup. I also had a little gold serpentine pipe, one that, I discovered, could be used to smoke pot underwater, almost like a periscope, in our redwood hot tub out back. In my closet, I’d also stashed away a bong, a once-translucent cylinder with twisty green plastic tubes and a sticky film of resin on the bottom. I also had plenty of joints: tightly wound numbers that I had learned to roll from watching a Cheech and Chong movie.

  Grabbing a joint, I went out back and sucked down a few hits as my cat watched me without judgment. Then I sucked down a few more hits for good measure. I could smoke a lot—maybe because I had built up a tolerance. Smoking thirteen bong hits was my record. By the time I walked back into my room to put away my paraphernalia, the air was thicker, slower, groovier around me, and the familiar fuzzy goodness was enveloping me again.

  High and relaxed, I settled in alone for a night of TV, enduring The Love Boat to get to Fantasy Island and hoping to stay up late enough for Saturday Night Live. But as I lay on the couch munching on mini egg rolls, the doorbell rang. This rarely happened at night, and it sent a shiver through my body, pumping up my heart with blood and sending it off to the races. Who the fuck would be ringing at eleven o’clock on Saturday night? I thought. It rang again. Then came a knock.

  Killing the lights, I went into stealth mode, tiptoeing across the shag carpet for the door in paranoia. I could hear muffled voices of men outside, and more loud knocks. Fuck the peephole, I thought, this was bad. I slithered past the nearby windows, beelining through the kitchen into a bedroom down the hall. Who are these men? What do they want? Why aren’t they leaving? The questions raced through my mind uncontrollably, looping around and around as the fear spread, filling me, pooling from the edge of my toes up to the top of my skull.

  Then I heard them talking. I pressed my ear close to the window, and could make out a few scattered words here and there: “What are we going to do?” one said. “He’s going to see it when he gets back.” See it? See what? I wondered. And then the bogeyman in my head conjured the answer, letting the film play before me. I saw a dark patch in the woods outside our house, and my parents were dead there. These men had killed them, buried them in a shallow grave, and now they were coming for me. They wanted no witnesses, no evidence. And they were worried about me or someone else seeing what they had done. I was sure of it.

  It seemed like the knocking went on forever, unrelenting, increasingly urgent. And I couldn’t take it anymore. I marched into the back of the house, grabbed the phone, and called my friend Dave. “Dude!” I whispered breathlessly into the mouthpiece, “I need you to come over!”
/>   “Why?” Dave asked.

  “I don’t know, man,” I said. “There are these guys outside my house, and they won’t leave. They keep knocking and ringing the doorbell.”

  “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know!” I said louder, and then quieted myself back down. “That’s the whole thing, I don’t know what’s going on, and I’m freaking out.” I paused. “And I’m really stoned.” Too stoned, I suppose in hindsight, to worry too much about my friend’s safety, and how maybe I had just called him over to confront a bunch of murderous thugs. Or so stoned, I guess, that my friend realized I was just deep into a psychosomatic bender.

  “I’ll be right over,” Dave said.

  Minutes later, I heard the doorbell ring again. Then I could hear Dave’s voice outside, talking to the men. “No, someone is home,” he told them. Taking a deep breath, I straightened my hair and opened the door casually as if—despite the fact that they had been knocking for over a half hour—I had just heard the knock for the first time. Outside, I saw Dave with two clean-cut middle-aged guys. “We didn’t think anyone was home,” one of them said pleasantly.

  “Oh no,” I lied, forcing a smile. “I had my headphones on.” My eyes darted around the yard behind them, looking for signs of their crime. But there was nothing.

  “Is that your car parked out front?” one of them asked.

  I looked in the distance and saw my dad’s orange Ford Mustang. “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  “We were driving by and didn’t see it, and clipped the side of it,” one of the guys said apologetically. “It’s dented pretty bad.”

  A wave of relief passed over me. My parents were alive! These guys weren’t murderers! They were just friendly neighbors coming clean about their accident. I was so elated by the news that my parents hadn’t been murdered that I must have seemed insanely happy to hear that our car had just been smashed. “Oh!” I said gingerly. “That’s fine! No problem!” I might have even said that it was great.