The Man Who Cancelled Himself

by David Handler

  “Exactly where did Herb and Aileen send you?” I asked him, as we ate.

  “Place called the Allen School on the north shore of the island,” he replied, his mouth and both cheeks full of pasta. Oil and tomato sauce flew, splattering the white table cloth, his arms, gloves. “It was this humongous Locust Valley estate that had been converted into a ‘special’ school for ‘special’ kids. Had a red brick manor house with something like thirty-seven bedrooms. Stables, tennis courts, pool, twenty acres of grounds. Like a fucking country club. Some rich dead guy left it to ’em. The kids were ages twelve to seventeen. Me, I’d just turned eleven, but they let me in anyway. A lot of ’em were rich kids from Manhattan. But they were all rockheads just like me. Kids who didn’t fit in. Kids whose parents had decided they were bad news and needed to be stuck somewhere. The headmaster, Mr. Mitchell, was a shrink. So was his wife. They ran it together. Actually, I dug it there, if you can believe that. The Mitchells were totally righteous people. Their attitude was, hey, there’s nothing wrong with you. Be yourself. It was nice to hear that for once. I never had before. They taught us how to express ourselves, instead of shutting it all inside. Not a lot of that boring classroom shit either. At Allen, I learned about photography by developing pictures in a darkroom. I learned about music by playing the drums. I loved banging on them drums. A few of us even used to jam together. Of course, they kept us real busy. We all had to pitch in. Do the dishes, clean the stables, make the beds. Plus we had therapy, individual and group. But I never felt any desire to run away from Allen. I never felt trapped. I guess because I was finally someplace where people weren’t coming down on me just because they were too narrow-minded to hear where I was coming from. I didn’t feel strange or wrong. None of us did. The teachers understood us. And we all understood each other. And that was really cool. First time I made friends, really. No, we were more than friends. We were brothers and sisters. We watched out for each other. We were there for each other. Because, hey, our parents sure as hell weren’t.”

  A young couple all dressed in black stopped by our table to thank Lyle for the wine and get his autograph. They lingered a bit too long, but he was extremely gracious about it. His recollections of Allen seemed to have put him in a jovial mood. Or maybe he just got contented when he was fed.

  “Tell me about your friends,” I said.

  He wiped his pasta bowls clean with the heel of our second loaf of bread, then stuffed that in his mouth and pushed the bowls away. “I made ’em for life,” he said, sitting back from the splattered table. It looked like it was left over from a mob rubout in Ozone Park. “There was Erin Sudbury, who was my first fuck. Her mother had committed suicide and her stepmother hated her. Erin was sixteen. I was fourteen. She was the one who taught me how to laugh. Had a totally twisted sense of humor. Ended up marrying an ear, nose, and throat man out in Northern California. We’re still in touch. Then there was Trevor Bernstein. Trev was a great, great sculptor. Gay, which his parents couldn’t deal with. I have a couple of his pieces at the beach. He died of AIDS three years ago. I guess he and Erin were the best friends I’ve ever had. I named the Uncle Chubby munchkins after them. I mean, we were close. Holidays, I’d have to go home to Herb and Aileen, but I’d feel trapped the second I walked in the door. I couldn’t wait to leave. Allen was home now, and Erin and Trevor were my family. Herb and Aileen never gave me what I got from them. I was happy there. The happiest I’d ever been.” He cackled. “Especially after Trev’s older brother, Joel, started sending him grass and hash from the city. This was, what, maybe ‘66, ‘67. The three of us would sit up all night getting stoned and rapping on the true meaning of life.”

  “And what did you decide it was?”

  “Be yourself,” Lyle replied. “No matter what other people think. No matter if it puts you against the flow. Be who you wanna be. I still believe that,” he declared, punctuating it with a loud fart. “Ahh … that was a good one.”

  Lulu let out a low, unhappy moan of dissent from under the table.

  “Allen was the best four years of my life. I was totally bummed when I had to leave. Man, that was hard.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Because I was ready to start high school, and they decided I was ‘well’ enough to go to my regular high school back home in Bay Shore. Time to plug me back into their repressive system. Time for me to be Herb and Aileen’s good little boy.”

  “And were you?”

  He guffawed hugely, turning heads at neighboring tables. “No way, pal. Once a rockhead, always a rockhead.” He gulped down some water. “They were scared of me, Herb and Aileen. Physically scared. Because I was a big fucker now. Much bigger than they were. And they were just really afraid to piss me off. So they kind of tiptoed around me, avoiding confrontations. Which was cool. And I had to admit the setup was cool. Herb had redone part of the garage as a bedroom for me, so I could come and go as I pleased. He soundproofed it, bought me a drum set. He wanted me to feel like my own man, he said. They steered clear of me, pretty much. They were at the store all day, and in the house at night. I went to school when I felt like it. Saw a therapist three afternoons a week—another geek without a clue. Mostly, I hung out. Banged my drums half the night. Played my stereo ultraloud. I loved Jimi Hendrix.” He was growing more animated. “I was a major Grateful Deadhead, too. The early shit-kicker stuff, when they were still a Hell’s Angels biker band. My idol in life was Pigpen. Had posters of that ugly dude plastered all over the garage. I even dressed like him—black leather jacket, black T-shirt and jeans, steel-toed jackboots, bandanna over my head … Couldn’t wait until I turned eighteen so I could get a chopper. My favorite movie was Easy Rider. Saw it two hundred times. That was me, man. An outlaw.”

  “How did you get along at school?”

  “The coaches wanted me to go out for football, because I was so big. But I wasn’t having any of that. What I got into was drama. They had this really cool drama teacher, Mr. Schoen, who was into expressing yourself, like the teachers at Allen had been. Improv was his thing. First day, he says to me, okay, you’re an ape. And to this girl, he says, you’re a lion, and you two are in a cage together. Get it on. Right away I start sniffing her bum, like I figure an ape would, right? And the kids in class totally lose it. That’s when I discovered that performing for people, making them laugh, was a real high for me. It was a license for me to be me and get away with it … The whole atmosphere around school was different. I mean, I hadn’t changed, but the times had. It was ’68. Revolution was in the air. Being a rockhead like me, anti-everything, was now considered okay. Hip, even. I mean, I wasn’t alone anymore. There were other kids around who were like me. Antiwar people, flower people, stoners, greasers. My garage, it became the neighborhood place to hang out, get stoned, fuck your girlfriend. Especially over the summer. Couple of guys started bringing guitars by. We’d play “Louie, Louie,” shit like that. Called ourselves the World’s Worst Garage Band, because we were. We didn’t care. We were stoned all the time. I was still getting dope from Trevor’s brother, Joel, in New York. Pounds of grass, chunks of hash. He mailed it to me disguised as books—he worked in the mailroom at one of the big publishing houses. Runs the whole company now. I dealt around the neighborhood. Not to make a fortune. Just enough to break even on what I smoked with a little money left over for records and concerts. The most amazing thing was when the straight kids started knocking on my garage door, wanting to buy weed for the prom. I thought that was really cool.” He crackled. “I know Herb and Aileen were pleased to see how well I was starting to fit in.”

  “Did they have any idea what was going on back there?”

  “None,” he recalled gleefully. “Joel sent me sheets of windowpane acid, too, but I took most of that myself. I really got into dropping acid. I’d put on my headphones and trip my brains out. A bunch of times I even went to school on acid. Just sat there in class all day, quietly tripping away behind my shades like the Frito Bandito. I was feeling really
good about things. Good enough to skip therapy even, which pissed off the parents. But I didn’t give a fuck. My head was together. Life was beautiful.” Lyle broke off, his face darkening. “Until I got busted.”

  Our waiter came by to clear the table. I ordered a profiterole and a double espresso. Lyle asked only for more mineral water. Most of the tables around us were empty now. Lulu was asleep under me with her head on my foot, snoring softly.

  “What happened, Lyle?” I asked, after the waiter had gone.

  “Nothing,” Lyle grunted, sticking his chin out. “Some teacher caught me junior year selling a gram of hash to a kid in the boys’ room. Big fucking deal, right? But the principal freaked and called the police. They dragged me down to the station. Major, major shame for Herb and Aileen, getting that call from the law. I’m talking disgrace. The look on their faces when they came to get me, man, I’ll never forget it. It was hate, Hoagy. Total hate.” Lyle sat there in hurt silence a moment. He ran a hand over his face. “It was a lousy gram of hash, Hoagy. No big deal. The law was willing to put me on probation, since it was my first offense and I was supposedly seeing a shrink and all. The high school was willing to take me back after a one-week suspension. It was no big deal. Everybody was cool about it. Everybody except for Herb and Aileen. They weren’t about to forgive me. No way. I was a bad boy and bad boys get punished. I shamed them, Hoagy. So they came down on me. They buried me. They … They …” His eyes filled with tears. He choked them back and began to shake all over, as if he were going to explode.

  “They what, Lyle?”

  He couldn’t answer me. A huge sob came out of him. Tears streamed down his face.

  “What did they do?” I pressed.

  Quietly, he said, “They had me jumped, Hoagy.”

  “Jumped?” I leaned forward. “Jumped how?”

  “Like a car battery, that’s how,” he cried. “They had the doctors give me shock treatments, man. They hooked me up and they zapped me, okay? You got it?” He was sweating heavily, now, greatly agitated. “My own parents had it done to me. To their son. Like I was a fucking rat in a lab.”

  My profiterole came. I pushed it away. “Tell me what you remember, Lyle,” I said.

  He snorted. “Not much. That’s one of the things about it. There’s shit you don’t ever remember. It’s gone. I know they checked me back into the psychiatric hospital. Beyond that, I remember very little. They knock you out when they’re doing it to you. It’s not like they wanna give you a chance to just say no or nuttin’. So I was unconscious a lot of the time. I think they did it to me every day for a week. But I ain’t sure.”

  “And how did you feel when it was all over?” I asked, sipping my espresso.

  “Blank,” he replied woodenly.

  “That’s not a good enough answer.”

  “Look, it’s supposed to chill you out, okay?” he elaborated, impatiently. “Turn you into a nice, docile little boy. That’s why they do it. What it did … It made me somebody who got shook easily. I wasn’t before. I was cocky. You couldn’t touch me. But once somebody’s done something like that to you, you lose your nerve, your cool. It took me a long, long time to get that back. Maybe I never have. Not all of it. Part of me … Part of me felt brand-new, like I was tasting everything for the first time. A simple glass of water was the best glass of water I’d ever had in my life. I’d never been so thirsty. Or so grateful for the chance to drink that water. One thing didn’t change though. The hate didn’t go away. I still hated Herb and Aileen—more, in fact.” He paused, weighing his words carefully. “This is something that’s never come out before. I’ve never told anyone. Just Fiona. And she’s never betrayed my confidence. And I ain’t looking for sympathy now. Or excuses. I’m bringing it up because I wanna be understood, okay? As somebody who’d had some weird, strange shit done to him.” He glanced hungrily at my uneaten dessert, licking his lips. “I think the treatment also gave me this incredible need to be in control of my life. Because they took it from me. I need to be in control. And I am.”

  “That’s an illusion—no one is.”

  “I am,” he insisted, stabbing the table with a fat index finger.

  “Bullshit. A car could crash into this building right now and kill all of us.” At my feet, Lulu began to tremble. She’s always been rather literal. “Just an example, girl,” I assured her.

  “Okay, okay,” Lyle conceded. “I need to control what I can control.”

  “And who you can control?”

  The Scowl. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “What happened when you went home?”

  “I went back to school after a few weeks. And it was totally weird. Kids would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Lyle, what’s happening?!’ And I wouldn’t quite remember who they were. I’d start talking about some album I liked, only I couldn’t think of the name of the band. Or who was in it. I couldn’t remember which classes I was in, or where the rooms were. I didn’t feel like I was totally, one-hundred-percent me, which shook me. It also made me want to get away. Start over someplace where no one remembered something that I didn’t remember. More than anything, I wanted to get away from Herb and Aileen, and the hate I felt for them morning, noon, and night. Because they did it to me, Hoagy. Their own son. They fucked with my head. Nobody has a right to do that to somebody else. Especially their own child. There should be laws. Who knows how I would have turned out if only they’d let me be? Maybe I’d have been a great writer like you.”

  “Now there’s a truly horrifying thought. Did you get away?”

  His eyes were on my dessert again. “The day I graduated from high school—and I did graduate. I’m very proud of that, considering my fucking brains had been rearranged. I took off. Caught a train for New York. Got a room at the Chelsea Hotel. And I started over. I was seventeen years old.” He shifted his bulk in the chair. He seemed drained by our session. “What the fuck, now you know my deep, dark secret. And why I haven’t spoken to the parents in over twenty years, and never will. I don’t hold a grudge. Ask anyone. But that’s one grudge I’ll hold until the day I die. So how is that?” He meant the profiterole.

  I tasted it. “Not terrible.”

  “Gonna finish it?”

  “Help yourself.”

  He devoured it in great, starved mouthfuls. “Man, I love chocolate,” he exclaimed, as some of it dribbled down his chin. “It’s my favorite thing in the whole world to eat—except for pussy.”

  “You’re all class, Lyle.”

  “Class is strictly for phonies,” he snarled. “And if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a phony. I am who I am. The real me. And proud of it.” He sneered at me across the table. “Besides, you got no class either. Know why?”

  “Do tell.”

  “Because if you were as classy as you think you are you wouldn’t be working for me.” He smirked at me. “Would ya, Hoagster?!”

  I had to hand it to Lyle Hudnut. He knew which buttons to push. This was a singular gift he had. I told him so. I also suggested he get fucked. I said it in a classy way, of course. Then I walked out of the restaurant.

  Papa Bear was sitting in my chair.

  He was drinking my Bass Ale and leafing through an old volume of newspaper columns by Jimmy Cannon, which is something I read every couple of years just to remind myself what good writing is. I didn’t bother to ask him how he got in. Vic Early was always good with locks. He was a balding, sandy-haired giant in a knit shirt and slacks, six feet six, about two hundred fifty pounds and quite mild-mannered, provided you didn’t get him mad. Once, he had anchored the offensive line for the UCLA Bruins. Would have been a first-round NFL draft pick, too, if he hadn’t come back from Vietnam with a steel plate in his head. By trade he was a celebrity bodyguard. I brought him to New York to protect Cameron Sheffield Noyes, the best-selling novelist. Maybe you read about that one. Lately, he’d been keeping an eye on Merilee and her farm in Connecticut. Lulu whooped and jumped into his lap, happy to see him. Me, I wondered what the h
ell he wanted. I didn’t bother to ask him that either. He would tell me.

  The air conditioner was wheezing away in the window, but the living room was still stuffy and smelled more than faintly of Nine Lives canned mackerel for cats and very strange dogs. I stripped off my jacket and went to the refrigerator for a beer. There was none left. I poured myself two fingers of twelve-year-old Macallan instead. My sofa was buried under a pile of newspapers and unpaid bills and chew toys. Those were Lulu’s. I sat. I waited.

  “She has a favor to ask of you, Hoag.”

  I waited some more.

  “She’s having a pretty rough time of it, emotionally,” Vic went on, in his droning monotone. “And she could really stand to spend some time around someone who loves her.”

  “Why doesn’t she try calling the father of her child?” I suggested, trying to sound casual about it.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Hurt?”

  “No, it’s not Bill Hurt,” I snapped. “Or John Hurt. Or John Heard. Or Garfield Heard. Or—”

  “I meant, does it hurt?”

  “Oh.” I sipped my drink.

  “I don’t know who it is, Hoag. Honest, I don’t. Neither does Pam.” Vic was referring to Merilee’s elderly British housekeeper. Another of my choice finds. “Merilee won’t say a word to either one of us. We’re baffled. Nobody, but nobody’s been around. She’s had no dates. No phone calls from men. No messages.”

  “Flowers?”

  “The occasional bouquet. I figured those were from her agent.”

  “You ever know an agent to send flowers?”

  “I never had an agent,” Vic replied gravely. “This one guy was maybe going to represent me when I turned pro, only he sent me a Pontiac Firebird and two tickets to the Hula Bowl.”