Eyes Wide Open (aka Killing Hour)

by Andrew Gross

  Kathy gave me a look-not far from the one in the car twenty years ago-one that I thought at any second might turn into, Oh, pleeze, Jay, gimme a break .

  Until I saw her little smile.

  “Well, you have, ” she said, touching her glass against mine. “Taken care of me, Jay. All of us.”

  I winked at her. “Now, can we eat?”

  I think we both knew we would stay together from the first time we met. We were undergrads back at Cornell, and I had long, curly brown hair in those days and broad shoulders. Played midfield on the lacrosse team. We even went to the Final Four my junior year. Kathy was in veterinary science. I still kept my hair kind of long, but I’d added tortoiseshell glasses now, along with a slightly thicker waist. These days, it took a hundred sit-ups and a half hour on the treadmill every couple of days to keep me in some kind of shape.

  “Yes.” She started to spoon out the salad. “Now we can eat.”

  My cell phone sounded.

  I groaned. I hadn’t even realized I’d had it on me. Habit, I guess. After twenty years of being on call, the ring of the phone intruding on a potential Cialis moment was the ultimate deflating sound.

  Kathy sighed. “Probably the kids. You know how they like to bust a good mood.”

  I looked at the screen. It wasn’t the kids at all.

  “It’s Charlie.”

  My brother. Eight years older. He and his wife, Gabby, both bipolar, each with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, lived in California as wards of the state, along with Evan, their twenty-one-year-old son. We helped out with their rent, pitched in financially when they got in over their heads. Which was often. They always seemed to need something. A call from them was rarely good news.

  Kathy exhaled at me. “It’s our anniversary, Jay…”

  My first thought was to let it go to voice mail, but I picked up.

  “Hi, Charlie…, ” I answered, some irritation coming through.

  It wasn’t him. It was Gabriella. “I’m sorry to bother you, Jay…,” she began, like she always began, in her gravelly, deep-throated voice and still-heavy Colombian accent. “Something terrible has happened here.” Her voice was shaky and distressed. “Evan is dead.”

  “Dead? ” My eyes immediately shot wide, finding Kathy’s. Evan was their only child. He had always been troubled; he’d been diagnosed as bipolar as well. Out of school. Not working. In and out of trouble with the law. But dead? “ How? ”

  “He jumped off the rock. In Morro Bay.” Then she choked back a sob, any attempt at control completely unraveling. “Evan is gone, Jay. He killed himself. My son is no more.”

  Chapter Three

  I turned to Kathy, the bottom falling out of my stomach. “Evan’s dead.”

  She looked back at me, tears forming immediately. “Oh my God, Jay, how …?”

  “He killed himself. He jumped off a cliff.”

  Like everything with Charlie and Gabriella-every monthly call on how they were, how Evan was doing, every veiled plea for money or to be bailed out-it spun your head.

  Just a week ago we’d gotten a call that Evan was improving. That he was back on his meds. He was even thinking about going back to school. I brought my nephew’s cherub-like face to mind, freckles dotting his cheekbones. That smug Don’t worry, I got it all figured out smirk he always wore.

  “Oh, Gabby, I’m so sorry. I thought he was doing well.”

  “Well, you know we haven’t been telling you everything, Jay. It’s not so easy to have to talk about your son that way.”

  “I know,” I said, bludgeoned. “I know.”

  I was a surgeon. I dealt with life and death every day. But when it’s someone close to you, your own… everything changed. They’d never had jobs or money. Or even friends that I knew. They lived on welfare, totally under the radar. Evan was their only hope. The only thing good in their own failed lives.

  Now that was gone…

  When he was younger, my nephew had shown a lot of promise. His early report cards were always A’s. He was kind of a basketball whiz, his room lined with trophies. I remembered how brightly Charlie and Gabby spoke of him back then.

  “How’s Charlie holding up?” I asked. “Let me talk with him.” Kathy inched closer and took my hand. I shook my head grimly.

  “Your brother cannot come to the phone,” Gabriella said. “He’s a mess, Jay. He can’t stop crying. He’s blaming himself for the whole thing. He can’t even speak.”

  Blame… My brother’s life was a monument to blame. I could think of a million reasons he might be feeling that.

  Charlie was my half brother, from my dad’s first marriage. Eight years older than I was; I barely knew him growing up. He was raised in Miami, in the sixties, brilliant in many ways-a math whiz, early into quantum physics and Eastern religions-but just as wild. My dad’s marriage to his mother had only lasted a year and a half; then he made his way up to New York; started his business, a women’s apparel firm; and married my mom. He barely even acknowledged he already had a son.

  Charlie was smoking pot by the time most kids were hiding beers. Then he went upward from there: speed, mushrooms, LSD. He grew his hair out, totaled his Corvette. A ranked junior in tennis, he flung his racket into the stands at the state high school championships and never went back. He always had this dream of becoming a big-time rock star. And he even produced a record once, in L.A.-the only real accomplishment in his life.

  Then there were a lot of dark years…

  First, when he was twenty-three, it was the Hartford House of the Living, where he spent three months after the cops picked him up on the streets raving that he was Jesus Christ.

  Then the street scene in New Orleans, with this ragged band of drugged-out bikers and felons known as the STPs-the Stinky Toilet People-who slept on the floors in abandoned buildings, whacked out of their minds. Charlie once told me that you could wake up with a knife stuck in your chest if you simply rolled up against one of their girlfriends wrong.

  And finally that commune up near Big Sur, where I’d heard about this cult of stoned-out musicians and drifters, several of whom were later convicted of a string of horrible murders, though Charlie always claimed he was hanging around there only for the chicks and the drugs.

  For years, he bounced in and out of hospitals and jails. Schizophrenic and bipolar, he’d been on lithium for thirty years, not to mention his own private pharmacy of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers. He always battled with our father, right up to the day he died.

  Ultimately, he did settle down. He met Gabriella in a recovery clinic back in Miami. Together, they moved out west and lived this quiet, codependent life in a coastal California town, granted disability by the state, just enough to squeak by.

  They had Evan, and they tried their best to raise him. We always pitched in, anteing up for a car when theirs broke down or paying off their debts. Charlie once said to me, “You know how ashamed it makes me, Jay, to have to take money from my little brother just to get by.”

  But of course they always took it. We were all that kept them from living under a bridge somewhere.

  Now Evan…

  My nephew’s life was a perfect storm of things that had gone wrong. Mental instability. No money. Violence and fighting in the house. At first, everything seemed on the right track; then it all changed. Scrapes at school became brushes with the law. He started taking drugs-speed, ecstasy, OxyContin. He and my brother began to clash-just as Charlie and our father used to clash-furniture tossed, punches thrown, the police called. Evan’s behavior grew increasingly erratic and withdrawn. He started hearing voices. He was placed on a daily diet of the same pills his father took-lithium, Klonopin, Thorazine-but he always seemed to be more off them than on. Finally he dropped out of school, got himself fired from a series of menial jobs. I tried my best to get him private counseling, to lure him away from their house. Once, I even begged him to come live with us and go to a junior college back east. But Charlie and Gabby never seemed prepare
d to let him go.

  Only months ago, they’d told us that Evan had turned around. They’d said he was back on his meds, being helpful around the house. Even thinking of going back to college. Then only last week they’d left a message: He’d been taken away. He was in a state hospital. They were talking about finding him some kind of a halfway facility where they could place him under supervision. Force him to stay on his meds. We thought this was good. For the first time in years, we thought maybe there was a reason to hope.

  Now this…

  “Your brother needs you, Jay,” Gabriella said. She choked back a sob. “I’m afraid for what he might do. You know we don’t have anywhere else to turn.”

  They had no money. No jobs to focus on. No friends to help soften the pain. All they ever had was this kid. And now he was gone.

  I gave her over to Kathy, who tried to comfort her, but what was there to say? In a couple of minutes she put down the phone.

  “I have to go out there,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I scrolled through my commitments for the following week-mostly things I could pass off on my partners, other than a procedure I had to perform on Friday on the teenage daughter of a friend.

  “I’ll go Monday. I’ll only stay a couple of days.”

  Kathy shook her head. “You can’t wait until Monday, Jay. These people need you. You’re all they have.” She took my hand in hers. “You have to go tomorrow, Jay.”

  My gaze drifted to the meal spread out on the blanket, now cold. The glasses of champagne. Our little celebration. It all seemed pointless now.

  I realized I hadn’t seen my brother in more than five years.

  “I’ll go with you, you know,” Kathy said, moving next to me. “I will.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled and drew her next to me. “But this is something I ought to do alone.”

  “You’re a good brother, Jay.”

  She handed me my glass. Then she took hers and we touched them lightly together. “Here’s to Evan,” Kathy said.

  “To Evan.”

  We took a sip and sat, knees up, watching the waves against the shore. Then she leaned over and re-pressed the play button on the iPod.

  “Like the man says…” She put down her drink. “We’ve still got tonight.”

  Chapter Four

  The three-hour drive up the California coast on 101 to Charlie’s the following day gave my mind time to wander to some old things.

  It went to my brother as a long-haired eighteen-year-old who had just dropped out of college, his conversation rocketing back and forth between complex string theory, Timothy Leary, and how the Beatles’ Abbey Road was the new gospel, in what I knew now, but not back then, was one of his uncontrolled, manic rants.

  It went to how he had once visited me at Cornell-after he was released from the psychiatric home in Hartford-and how we took a weekend trip to Montreal. I recalled how we had trolled for girls along Sherbrooke Street, near McGill, and how Charlie had ended up screwing our waitress back in the hotel room after he’d convinced her he had taught Eric Clapton all he knew, and air-played her the opening riff from Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” while I pounded the pillow over my head in the other bed, alone.

  My brother could charm the birds out of the trees.

  It’s easy, Charlie always said, with that sly, mischievous grin. If you ask every chick you run into if they wanna screw, now and then one of them says yes! Even when you look like me!

  Eventually, winding through the wooded canyons around Lompoc, my thoughts roamed here:

  To the last time he had any kind of relationship with our dad.

  It was maybe twenty years ago, Charlie’s last chance at a real life before he permanently gave up.

  Somehow he had persuaded my father to dispose of his old design samples by sending them down to Miami, where Charlie had set up a rack in a women’s hair salon near his mother’s dance studio, selling them as one-of-a-kind creations.

  It was only a wobbly metal rack in the rear of this cheesy salon, crammed with colorful velour and cotton cashmere sets-my dad’s particular genius. But to Charlie, it might as well have been the epicenter of the apparel world. He held court, shuttling back and forth between hair stations, his own hair bound neatly into a ponytail and dressed as cleanly as I’d ever seen him, the blue-haired women eating out of his hand. He’d mesmerize them with stories about his famous father in the rag trade, the glamorous women he screwed while in L.A., celebrity rockers he did coke with, lurid tales of his years on the road, all the while pushing oil stocks on the Canadian stock exchange.

  He was turning dozens of sample sets each week at fifty to sixty bucks a pop. Real money in his pocket for the first time in his life. Living in a decent place on Biscayne Bay with Gabby and his infant son. He had an exuberance I’d never seen before-a twinkling in his eyes.

  For the first time he was making it-in the real world.

  And with his father, who had let him down a hundred times.

  Later, he took me back to the storage room where he kept his stock. Charlie’s mood shifted. He started ripping open shipping cartons, his voice accusatory and familiar. “Look at the shit he’s trying to pawn off on me,” he said, tearing out newly received merchandise still in plastic bags. I could see rips, flaws, mismatched color panels mixed in with legitimate samples. “You see the kind of business I’ve got going here. These people don’t want crap. I’m selling ‘one of a kinds,’ not this garbage. And look -” He ripped an invoice out of the box. “He’s fucking billing me for them! He’s not even giving me terms.”

  Everything always came back to this: Charlie trusting himself in our father’s hands, and Lenny pulling the rug out from under him again. “ I can’t sell these, can I? ” He looked at me for confirmation. And, yes, there were a few seconds, the prior season’s returns that had probably been in someone’s stockroom forever, design prototypes with busted zippers and mismatched panels.

  “It would be hard,” I said, agreeing.

  “He’s trying to screw me again, isn’t he? ” Anger rushed into my brother’s face. “You know what he did? He had his accountant call me up and demand payment. His accountant! I’m his son, for Christ’s sake. He just can’t stand to see me successful… We’re selling dozens a week of these, and he doesn’t want me to take his luster away from him so he’s trying to shut me down.”

  To me, it was probably just the shipping manager throwing in the kitchen sink. My father probably didn’t even know about it.

  But to Charlie it was like he had personally handpicked them to ensure he would fail.

  A fight ensued, and weeks later, my dad stopped shipping to him for good. There was a huge battle over payment. My dad called Charlie “an ungrateful sonovabitch.” Charlie threatened to come up north and kill him.

  They never spoke again.

  He took Gabriella and Evan and moved out to the coast. Ten years later, when my father-drunk and down on his luck-drove his Mercedes into the waters of Shinnecock Bay, he wouldn’t even come to the funeral.

  I got off the freeway at Pacific Crest Drive. Pismo Beach was a quaint, sleepy beach town tucked under rolling hills of dazzling gold and green, leading down to rocky bluffs overlooking the Pacific.

  Grover Beach, where my brother lived, was its seedier next-door neighbor.

  I’d been out there only once before, five years ago, when I brought the family while we were vacationing in San Francisco, four hours to the north. Up to then, my kids hadn’t even met my older brother. They’d only met Evan, their cousin, the couple of times we had brought him east.

  Their place was a tiny two-bedroom apartment provided by the state with a single bathroom and pictures covering up cracks in the plaster in a downtrodden two-story building across from abandoned railroad tracks.

  That visit, we sat around for most of a day, listening to Charlie and Evan banging on their guitars, belting out barely recognizable rock tunes in hoarse off-pitch voices, amid my brother’s
rants about how his father had ruined his life and how by the time he was Sophie’s age, fifteen, he was already whacked out on LSD.

  It was scary.

  We watched them apportioning their cache of colorful medications on the kitchen counter. Gabby said how she was once a beauty queen back home and had never bargained for this kind of life, and how she might just go back to Colombia, where her family would gladly welcome her.

  My kids were a little freaked out. We took them out to lunch, to a café on the main street overlooking the beach, lined with surf shops, tattoo parlors, and oyster bars. Charlie said it was the first time they’d been to a restaurant other than Denny’s in years.

  We left the next day.

  I drove down the long hill toward the ocean and turned on Division Street. I found Charlie’s building a half block down, the familiar blue Taurus I had bought for him parked beneath the carport out front. I pulled into the next space and sat for what seemed like a full five minutes.

  What could I do for them here?

  My mind went back to something.

  The day Evan was born. Back in Miami. Kathy and I happened to be in Boca, so we went to see them at the hospital. Charlie was so different from how I’d ever seen him before. Cradling his little Evan in his arms, in his blue blanket, looking like any doting new dad, but with his wild, Jerry Garcia hair and bushy beard. He let Kathy hold the baby for a while, and he and I went down to the cafeteria.

  “This is the start of something new for me,” Charlie said. “I can feel it.”

  But as he picked up the coffee cup, something changed. “I need you to promise me something, Jay…”

  “Sure.” I was twenty-eight then, still in med school. Kathy and I weren’t even married yet.

  “I need you to promise me you’ll take care of him. Whatever happens to me, okay? I need to know Evan’ll be safe.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Charlie. Of course he’ll be safe…”

  “No.” There was something dark and brooding in his eyes, a storm massing. “I need you to promise me, Jay, that whatever happens, you’ll be there for him.”