Suspended Sentence

by Janice Morgan

  The upshot was that Mike worked out with his partner that he would live separately with Dylan during his high school years. The two of them would relocate to a suburb of Cleveland with a good school system; they would rent a house. It would be a fresh start in a new community for both of them. They would be a team. It was a tremendously generous and bold move on Mike’s part. One day in July, he pulled up in his blue van, and we all loaded it up with Dylan’s things. By now, he was used to the idea. He had visited his dad, seen the new school, realized that this would be his (and his dad’s) next challenge. He wasn’t overly emotional at leaving. He seemed in a good mood, ready for adventure. They both did.

  By the time the van slowly pulled away, loaded to the brim, and I waved goodbye to both of them, I felt my brave front start to slip away. As I sat in my newly empty house, I was barely able to take stock of what had just happened, the implications of it all. An overwhelming sadness and defeat threatened. Two important people in my life had said goodbye to me in this very place. But behind this, there was also the hope that things would somehow get better. Deeper, yet sheer relief! I was truly on my own now. It was scary but exhilarating. I was free!

  I didn’t sit there for long. I’d made a plan in advance for how I was going to spend the weekend so that I wouldn’t feel completely devastated. I packed up my own bags in twenty minutes and drove two and a half hours to the big city, got the hell out of Dodge. I had signed up for ballroom dance lessons. As frivolous as it may sound, dance was a lifesaver for me at that point. It was expressive, fun, and challenging to learn. Of course, this could have been sheer escapism. Or maybe it was my chance to capture lost Cinderella-at-the-ball moments from years earlier.

  I knew I had to do something to fill the void in my life. At least it wasn’t drugs or alcohol. The only contact I had with police now was for my own occasional speeding tickets, miles out of Croftburg.

  CHAPTER 15: ROAD WARRIOR

  However impressed I might have been by the vision of bonding and solidarity I witnessed at the Drug Court gathering on the snowy lawn, I began to sense that for Dylan, the whole experience of recovery felt like an ongoing battle. There were daily skirmishes with such topics as surrender and resistance, ones that challenged his concept of who he had been, who he was, and who he could become. A sign of Dylan’s internal struggle were the comments he made to me that winter about the AA classes he had to attend as part of Drug Court. Dylan was ambivalent about these. “So many personal stories you hear,” he said. The confessional aspect of the meetings was riveting for him. So many falls, then so many rescues and turnarounds at the brink of disaster! He could relate to that. Each one was a testimony of having surmounted long odds, of surviving.

  On the other hand, he was militantly against what he saw as a defeatist attitude at those same meetings. A lot of what folks called “recovery” sounded to him like surrender. “I hate how you have to wallow in this philosophy of ‘I am nothing’ or ‘I’m a weak, stupid nobody who needs help,’” Dylan said. “People at these meetings are always saying stuff like ‘I have to rely on God or a Higher Power to get me through life’s tribulations,’” he complained. “Why does a state-run program push this kind of fundamentalism? I really don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe all this stuff that people say. I’ve tried to go along for a while, and when I start to believe like they do, it messes me up. I don’t think I got into the trouble I did because I’m stupid. I think it’s because I couldn’t handle my emotions. I just let myself make some bad decisions. Or maybe I made those decisions for the wrong reasons. But I don’t accept that I’m a poor, dumb person.”

  I took this in, later realizing that his struggle wasn’t just with some type of local fundamentalism; it was about spiritual surrender itself. I could understand why this would be so difficult for him. He had always, always sought to control his external world, and that’s probably because he felt he had so little control over his own internal world. I didn’t know exactly how that worked, but I sensed it was true.

  And then I puzzled over the irony of his attitude. “I’m not a poor, dumb person,” he’d said, when not more than a few weeks ago he had so fitfully proclaimed to John and me: “I’m not like John’s sons; I’m a screw-up. I can’t take the stress, I can’t do everything perfectly, I have anxiety—it’s hard for me to do what is easy for them.” I wanted to ask him, “OK, Dylan, do you not see there is a contradiction here in how you see yourself?”

  In early February Dylan began to get seriously interested in bodybuilding. This became clear the time he and I went out to dinner at a sports bar to celebrate the restitution money paying off his court fees and his re-entry into college life. Dylan was talkative; he’d earlier told me that he was hoping to approach the trainer of the body-sculpting class at the gym about getting a construction job during the summer. The trainer happened to be a contractor as well. Dylan had always been an active, physical person. Over the previous fall, I waved at him when I occasionally saw him whisking by on his Kona bike to the fitness center in early evening. But now, he was avid about getting himself in super-shape, not only through exercise but through protein supplements. As he talked, I must have expressed some misgivings about his “bulking up”—not getting fit, but turning into a Mr. Johnny Atlas mountain muscle man. My son never did anything by halves: it was all or nothing.

  Well, this set him off; I could see it wouldn’t take too long for the fuse to detonate. Right on cue, the blast occurred. “What’s wrong with bulking up and getting muscles?” Dylan asked with raised voice. “I’m not like you and Dad. I have a muscular build, I’m athletic, and this is something I can do that’s good for me. Other guys at the gym are impressed when they see me work out. They say, ‘you could really get strong’ and I know that’s true.” His main critique of my remark: “You and Dad are always trying to get me to be like you; well, it’s not going to happen. I’m completely different. Let me be who I am.”

  I felt wronged by this statement but decided to back off. Might as well try to cut off a Mack truck doing 80 mph. So I kept quiet, my eyes leaving his to scan the six or seven TV sports channel screens around the room while Dylan, in turn, checked his smart phone. What I saw were torpedo-like hockey players slashing across the ice, all trying to slam a small, round puck into a net, when they weren’t smashing into each other. On other screens, impossibly tall, limber athletes were bobbing, dribbling, ducking, and shooting a basketball through a hoop. The sheer fluidity of the moves was dazzling. Didn’t all these sports screens prove how important it was for men to focus on improving their strength, speed, and performance? The whole world was watching them. Sure, sure, it’s all true. But, what about the inner life? What makes a person strong on the inside?

  Since then, I’ve reflected on something Oliver Sacks, the beloved British neurologist, said about his own Muscle Beach phase of young manhood in his book, On the Move. Writing about his training days in California, he says, “I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting … I became strong—very strong—with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same.”

  So, what does it take to build your inner strength and flexibility? That sounds at least as useful over the long haul. Many would say it takes cultivating a spiritual life, and there are many shapes that can take. According to Brené Brown, a professor of social work who has studied the problem, what it takes to weather the storms of life is paradoxical: it’s the courage to be open and vulnerable. The author of Rising Strong tells us that, according to her research, the most resilient life practitioners were those who were courageous in making themselves open to change and learning. That’s how they found creative solutions. To describe how this courage works, she uses the word “rumble”—as in, you get down and rumble emotionally with the dilemma you’re facing. This word feels more active than the older word “surrender”: for many, that sounds too much like giving up. When you rumble, it involves roll
ing around, tussling—getting pushed and pushing back. It’s more along the lines of wrestling with some kind of force, and the opposing forces are usually within yourself.

  Ah, rumbling with vulnerability. Just try to sell that to any young person, especially a young man! But at the same time, I knew my son was intent on building physical strength precisely because he felt so vulnerable—and he wanted to flee as far as possible from that. My thoughts turned to a story Dylan had told me just recently. When flying along on his scooter, he frequently felt so exposed, whereas everyone else was enclosed in their comfortable metal capsules, behind dark glass. “There’s no margin for error on a scooter,” he told me. “One moment of inattention, and you’ve had it.” An incident had occurred where he’d had to stop suddenly, and he’d been concerned the car behind him wasn’t going to stop soon enough. He’d had to shoot ahead on the soft, roadside shoulder and, as a result, got thrown unceremoniously to the ground. It was either that or risk taking a serious hit. Not a great experience for his shoulder, or his pride.

  So yes, I could see why muscle building was important to him. He loved the exertion of it, the way it relieved stress. But more important, it was a way to put on armor. Dylan actually used the term once. “I feel like I need armor out there.” Vulnerability? No way! Not persuasive when he was at risk of getting run over because he didn’t have enough metal around him.

  And internal issues? Look what happened to Fred, the moped salesman. About a month or so after I’d seen him in the yard before the Drug Court meeting, Dylan told me that Fred was getting expelled from DC. And that was after he’d been in the group for three years; in fact, he was in what they call “After Care.” Who knows why it happened? Maybe Fred had come under some kind of stress, then started drinking again and tried to cover it up. Addiction sneaks up on people in different ways. And while you could have a relapse in DC, you couldn’t lie about it. Dylan shook his head as he told me. “It was horrible,” he said. “Fred broke down; he cried; and then he told us all he loved us, and he was so sorry. We couldn’t believe it; it was like he was just standing there, naked.”

  I was sad, too. What would Fred do now? Would he have to serve time? I imagined that being dismissed from Drug Court was like falling off the planet into outer darkness. My son must have been shaken, too, for a man who had helped him, someone who had come so far down the road with the group but now had to leave on his own. It was a hard lesson in what could happen. Small wonder Dylan felt he needed internal armor, too.

  By the time our food arrived, we both abandoned our screen thoughts and resumed our conversation. The steamy cloud of conflict had dissipated. I decided to take a strategic detour and ask more about the gym, ask Dylan’s advice on what clothing would be good for somebody like me to work out in. Other topics might get us out of bounds, but we were usually game, both of us, for a conversation about clothing styles. My thirty-six feet of over-stuffed closets more than qualified me as an expert in that category.

  “We all go to Fitness Forever gym club. Even Darlene trains there. You need spandex capris and then two or three layers of tops you can take off when you overheat,” Dylan advised me.

  I smiled at that one. Even though I was quick enough to overheat, somehow I didn’t see myself becoming the Queen of Spandex anytime soon.

  All this talk about armor and bodybuilding wasn’t going to slow down, as I soon found out. Dylan was pulling out all the stops when it came to vitamins and supplements. He said he couldn’t afford to buy what he needed, so would I help him out? Guess he knew how, as his mom, I would be supportive of whatever came under the rubric “Health and Human Happiness.” So, on occasion, I’d spring for large bottles of fish oil capsules, de-mercurized and loaded with omega-3s, reputed to help with brain health and any metabolic problems. Of course, vitamins were necessary—even if he was eating right, there would always be something lacking that could use a boost. Then, before long, came the biggest booster of all. Dylan showed me the much-needed item as he led me one day into the supplements aisle at Walgreens: two humongous canisters of protein powder.

  From the size of the packaging, it looked like something you’d pour into a diesel engine with a funnel.

  “What?! You expect me to pay for THAT? How do you even know what all is in that stuff? There could be whole dissolved cow bones in there with some concrete dust.”

  “No, it’s not calcium. It’s Isotone Zero Carb. No bones, Mom, but it is made from cow’s milk,” he said. “Look at the ingredients: it’s protein derived from whey.”

  He started reading off the list of ingredients, then gave a mini-lecture right then and there on protein supplements and why they were necessary, how no one looking to build muscle could hope to do it on regular food alone. Instead of building up, you’d be tearing down.

  “But I’ve seen plenty of people out there who are strong and who don’t use any powders. My dad and your own dad were very strong in their younger years, and they never took supplements. You get strong by doing exercise.”

  Dylan waved my comment aside as completely antiquated and inconsequential.

  “I’ve done lots of exercise in my life. But you’ll remember when I did a workout routine to get strong last year, I was always tired out afterward. I couldn’t keep up. But just recently, someone loaned me some of this. It did wonders! Everyone serious about working out and getting strong takes a good product,” he said.

  It was Fate. Despite my best intentions, I was witnessing a live commercial by an ace salesman. Of course, I had to be bowled over by the sheer velocity of it. All common sense had to be scattered like ten pins. Besides, this was for my only son’s health and wellbeing. How could I go against that?

  The results didn’t go unnoticed by John. He probably got a glimpse of the dollars flying out of my bank account, even as I was complaining about Mountain Man going overboard.

  “Look, you can buy him all the supplements you want,” he said. “And he can lift all the weights in the gym trying to turn himself into Spider Man, the strongest guy on the block. But how will that help him deal with his Peter Parker frailties?”

  I wasn’t too sure about that.

  Later, I was reminded of Darlene’s assessment during one of our meetings together. Joking with Dylan, she’d said, “You know what I’ve told you before. You have the demeanor of a sophisticated thirty-year-old, but inside on the emotional level, you’re about ten years old still. All those teen years of escaping into marijuana clouds, that was a way for you to deal with the confusion of your feelings. But now, as an adult, you get to start figuring them out and finding other ways—more productive ways—of dealing with them.”

  The director of Drug Court knew how to say these things to him.

  “Darlene’s tough,” Dylan remarked to me sometimes, shaking his head. But I could tell by the way he said it that he admired her for it. As if he knew that’s exactly what he needed to hear, even if he didn’t always like it.

  CHAPTER 16: A NEW START WITH DAD

  When Mike and fourteen-year-old Dylan started living together in Berea, Ohio, an older suburb of Cleveland, Dylan had to adjust to going to a new school. The phone calls and reports I received from that time indicated that Dylan was busy, involved in a number of activities, many of them with his dad. His physical skills were in demand for odd jobs, and his computer skills, too. He helped an older couple living downstairs set up their e-mail accounts and sort through technical glitches. He accompanied his dad on tree and bush pruning jobs. Growing tall and capable during these years, he helped his dad with major garden-design jobs in other states during the summer. Parts of that were fun for him, like getting to drive a small front-end loader around to deliver rocks and soil. But other parts required careful planning and skillful negotiating with clients, qualities Dylan didn’t exactly have in spades—not yet, anyway. I always hoped that he would one day use his strength and artistic skills to make gardens himself, but—like most other things I suggested to him—he pushed that one
away.

  I later found out that other things were happening behind the scenes. For one, Dylan had thoroughly researched marijuana on the internet and had decided this was just the right calming drug for him. In fact, it wasn’t really a drug, he told himself. No, cannabis was a plant, a very special plant that had been bred by people all over the planet for years, so that it would contain the right combination of cannabinoids to smooth out unsettled minds. Smoking it could help keep anxiety at bay, and Dylan felt he had plenty of that to deal with. Of course, he tried regular smokes as well, but cigarettes didn’t have nearly the same therapeutic effect. As if he said to himself, “Can’t trust anyone else to help me deal with my problems, so I’ll find my own way.”

  Then, too, he was living in a postindustrial metropolis near the great, northern expanse of Lake Erie. I tended to play down the fact that this would be such an enormous change for him. After all, we’d spent plenty of time there visiting Grandma Louise and the rest of Mike’s family, especially in the summer. But to actually live there, go to school there, that was like being relocated to a whole different universe. For sure, it was one that had a much wider variety of citizens in it. The old social rules and divides of a small town gave way to a much larger playing field. But you had to figure out where you fit in.

  I later found out that here, too, Dylan had made his own arrangements. For guy friends, he was interested in types who’d had a rougher kind of life, who were street-smart. He described one friend to me years later who, apart from being a high school student, worked at the zoo, smoked pot, knew guys who had been in jail. No doubt, they discussed rap music. Dylan probably burned CDs for his friends there like he did here. The urban scene only reinforced his attraction to street rap: a huge poster of Tupac went up on his bedroom wall. The rapper’s lyrics, the titles, became his mantras to live by: “Only God Can Judge Me,” “All Eyez on Me,” “Keep Ya’ Head Up.” Neither Mike nor I saw this clearly at the time, but Dylan was taking up his stand. Deciding he could never be one of the mainstream guys, he chose to identify with the rebels.