Eight Is Enough

by Tom Braden

  It began with innocence. I went upstairs one evening in the fall of 1967, and passing by my son’s room, I heard low voices. Thinking to exchange a pleasantry or two, I knocked twice and entered. A remarkable scene confronted me. In a circle on the floor, their legs folded beneath them, their eyes, I later reflected, looking up at me with startled awareness of intrusion, was a group of boys, my son among them, engaged in what appeared to be some form of worship.

  On the floor in the center of the circle was a tall candle. In the center of the circle also was a candlestick containing incense, and on two side tables outside the circle, incense also burned.

  “What in the world,” I asked, “are you doing?” Ah, the age of innocence. To think that only a few years ago, I could, upon witnessing such a scene, ask such a question.

  “Just burning a little incense, Dad,” David answered, and I find it almost unbelievable now to think that, while I wasn’t quite satisfied with the answer, I did not thunder nor accuse.

  Nor know. A group of fifteen-year-old boys engaged in some strange rite—was it an initiation ceremony for some neighborhood or high-school secret society? I remembered that at about the same age, my friends and I were signing secret pacts of alliance with blood drawn from each other’s arms.

  I mentioned the ceremony to Joan that evening. “What do you suppose was going on?” She was as innocent as I.

  Our awakening did not come for several years, and when it came, it was rude. I try to take telephone calls in the middle of the night because they are never pleasant calls and taking them seems a father’s rather than a mother’s role. But this call was more than unpleasant.

  “Dad,” David said, “I’m in jail.”

  I tried to be calm and to get all the details and at the end of the conversation, I recovered sufficiently to say something cheerful. “Well, other people have spent a night in jail and recovered and you can recover too. So buck up, and I’ll get right on this in the morning.” Something like that.

  But it was a shock, a serious physical shock. Anybody who tells you that you can take a call from a son who is in jail and not hurt for weeks afterward is a person who doesn’t care about his children.

  Also, it posed a moral issue. A father likes to think of himself as both the protector of his children and defender of the upright. A son who is in jail for violating the law is a problem in allegiance.

  Allegiance once determined, the cost of it must be borne. David had been driving down Highway 101 in Orange County, California, in an old Volkswagen, accompanied by a friend. The Volkswagen had a defective taillight, and the California Highway Patrol had stopped the boys, searched their pockets and the car’s floor, and finally found a few grains of marijuana in the car’s ashtray. The problem, a lawyer friend in Los Angeles explained, was to convince the prosecuting attorney that his duty might be fulfilled by permitting David to plead guilty to the crime for which he had been stopped, i.e., the defective taillight. My friend knew a good man, but the fee would be high: about fifteen hundred dollars.

  Looking back, I’m not absolutely sure that what I did was the right thing to do. As I did it, I felt sad. All that money David had saved since he was a little boy: allowance money, Christmas gift money, jackpot money for catching the biggest fish on the Oceanside fishing boat—it came altogether to about fifteen hundred dollars. I drew it out of David’s savings account and sent it off to the lawyer.

  Was I wrong? I said to myself at the time, “He’ll have to grow up someday, and the quickest way to help him grow up is to make him understand that he is responsible for his own errors. But three months in jail? I couldn’t stand it, even if he could. If I ever have a spare fifteen hundred dollars, I shall give it to David.

  The lawyer earned his fee. David was sentenced to serve three successive weekends in the Orange County jail. His friend, who didn’t have fifteen hundred dollars, served the mandatory term. David was embarrassed and angry, partly at the loss of his fifteen hundred dollars, but mostly because I had arranged for him to be treated differently.

  So that was my awakening. What did it teach me? I am sorry to say that I was left with ambivalence. In the first place, I think the experience probably persuaded the two boys that they ought to take a whisk broom to the car before they set out on a highway. But will it teach them not to smoke marijuana? No more than the Reverend Wayne B. Wheeler or the eighteenth amendment to the Constitution persuaded my mother to “give up rum.”

  And in the second place, the more I looked into the mores of marijuana and the laws against it, the more I became convinced that the legal penalty for breaking the law is far worse than the crime. Not only that, but it seems to me that there is justice in the prevalent view of the young that they are the victims of bad law and of policemen who enforce bad law selectively.

  Marijuana has become a generational symbol. In 1973, more than three hundred thousand Americans were arrested for possessing it and eighty-six percent of them, according to the FBI, were under the age of twenty-six.

  “The only way we can get rid of longhaired kids on the upper peninsula,” a police chief in Michigan told me, “is to let the word get around that we’ll follow them until we spot a traffic violation and throw them into jail after we find the stuff.” This is not a drug abatement program; it is a youth abatement program and I am against it.

  What we have done is to create a scapegoat minority, consisting of young people with long hair and old cars. Few experts hold that moderate use of marijuana is any more dangerous to the human body than moderate use of alcohol or tobacco. Yet the sixty million Americans who smoke cigarettes and the one hundred million who use alcohol can do so with impunity. In every state in the union except Oregon, those who are caught with marijuana risk a jail sentence.

  Thus my ambivalence. I felt it most strongly on the day in 1969 when some of my children marched in the Great Moratorium. It was said to be the largest crowd in American history, though the television cameras, awed, it is hard to believe now, by Spiro Agnew, ignored it. The marchers were mostly young, assembled in generational protest and many of those who witnessed it will bear testimony that the symbol of protest was marijuana. The air reeked of the stuff. A great sickly sweet cloud hung over the Washington Mall.

  “The march itself was like a river,” Joannie told me, “and we were all just drops in the river. All those people caring; we will have an effect.” Joannie had carried a flower for a dead soldier and marched all day to toss it against a wall. She was wearing blue jeans with red hearts sewn around the ankles and a blue workshirt and boots, and her curly hair was too long and she seemed to me infinitely good and trusting and believing, like most of the people in her river.

  I had gone down to watch her river run and spread itself out around the Washington Monument when it had finished running. The drops in Joannie’s river were lying on blankets, smoking marijuana.

  And then I had walked over to the Justice Department building where a small band of the unruly were trying to plant a Viet Cong flag on Mr. Mitchell’s building, and I had seen another river, this one of Washington police, wearing gas masks and advancing, rubber truncheoned in solid phalanx.

  It seemed to me there was not much doubt about which was the more powerful group. Ambivalence bothered me again. On the one side were my children, wearing blue jeans and boots and workshirts and long hair, protesting the laws and breaking them by smoking marijuana.

  On the other side were those policemen in gas masks and behind them, the authority of Mr. Nixon’s White House.

  They were good-looking, short-haired, blue-suited, striped-tied, flag-lapeled, those people in the White House, and they weren’t wasting their time reading Herman Hesse’s novels, or smoking pot or marching in a parade. Jeb Stuart Magruder, Dwight Chapin, Bob Haldeman. When were my children going to start looking and behaving like them?

  And if they didn’t start pretty soon to look and behave like them, would they ever grow up to be really successful and respected and substantial—
like John Mitchell or Maurice Stans?

  The two rivers couldn’t meet. Joannie learned some months later, at the time of the Cambodian invasion, that Mr. Nixon had himself gone to talk to students at the Lincoln Memorial—had slipped out in the middle of the night to do so—had run across a boy from Syracuse University, and had asked about the football team, in sports-page language: “How are the Orangemen?” She reacted in disbelief. “Was he spaced out?” she wanted to know.

  Later, of course, I realized my mistake. I had mistaken the style of the White House—the business suits, the haircuts, the abstention from drugs, the earnest straight looks—for virtue.

  My children smoked dope and dressed badly by White House standards. But they believed in their country just as much as the men in the White House, and I think it’s fair to say they were more honest.

  I say to my children, “You may not smoke marijuana in this house because it is against the law.” But I am not a true believer. I cannot bring myself to plead with them as the Reverend Wheeler pled with me. And though they have respected my wishes and commands and do not smoke marijuana in the house, I would not be surprised to learn that from time to time they smoke it elsewhere. The whole thing is unsatisfactory. I don’t like not knowing where I stand.

  And I blame my ambivalence on marijuana for the fact that I did not go on full alert against other and more dangerous experiments. After David’s arrest, I should have become a narrow-eyed, suspicious, case-hardened parent. But I didn’t. Not until Elizabeth’s birthday party.

  I remember Elizabeth’s birthday party very well because it caught me by such surprise. Suddenly the house was filled with people, people upstairs and downstairs and in the kitchen and the basement, people of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, of both sexes, consuming quantities of Coke, behaving, as far as I could see, perfectly well. It was just that there were so many of them. And every time the door opened, more of them poured in.

  I spoke sharply to Joan, who spoke sharply in return. “I didn’t know you were going to have the whole school here,” I said.

  “You knew perfectly well,” she answered, “because I told you that Elizabeth wanted to invite her class, and you agreed.”

  I made a mental note never again to permit a child to invite a “class.” The child may think it democratic but a child doesn’t know the difference between democracy and mob rule. And just as I was reflecting on this minor lesson, I noticed that some members of the “class” were behaving oddly.

  I looked again. They were behaving oddly. They were drunk, or they seemed to be drunk. That boy over there by the fireplace, for example, talking very slowly, lurching a little; he was sleepy drunk; the kind of drunk one remembers from all-night parties at college fraternity houses.

  There was no liquor. I had taken that precaution. All securely locked in the basement. Then what hadn’t I done? Suddenly the truth dawned. Sleepy drunk. I bolted up the stairs to the bathroom and went straight to the medicine chest. The sleeping pills were gone.

  I went through everything—bottles of tetra-this and chlory-that, anti-bug bite pills, pills to dry up colds. “Joan,” I said, returning to the foot of the stairs, “weren’t there some sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet? Because if there were, there aren’t now.”

  Joan was not absolutely sure. But she was pretty sure. So was I. Questioned, the “drunken” members of the class denied knowledge. I called parents, rounded up cars and drivers and got them home. The experience frightened me more than I have ever been frightened before or since and humbled me and made me resolve.

  There are not, in our medicine chest now, any pills at all. No penicillin; nothing left over from the last prescription for the last complaint. I threw them all away that evening and as fast as any member of the family recovers from whatever illness has caused us to purchase pills, I throw out what’s left in the bottle.

  Why, after LSD and after speed and after all those other abominations which David’s age group tried and eventually rejected, why should Elizabeth’s age group try sleeping pills? There was that brief respite in-between, that time when drugs were out, and only marijuana was in, and then just as we began to let our guard down, we have fifteen-year-old children going around talking about “reds.”

  I have no ambivalence whatever about where I stand. I have gone the whole way. I will thunder more loudly than the Reverend Wheeler thundered at me and I have become not only narrow-eyed but hard-nosed. “Let me see what’s in your pockets” is a legitimate demand at our house, and must be honored by anyone below the age of eighteen.

  In fact, I have become so suspicious of the possibility that one of my children might sneak pills into the house, or that the latest fad at the school will turn up some other killer I haven’t yet learned about that I tend, on the subject of more common evils, to be rather tolerant.

  Alcohol, for example. We all know the Reverend Wheeler was partly right. We know it can be an abomination. But we also know that some of us at least have learned to handle it so that it is a pleasure and we live in hope that our children will learn too. “Nancy,” Joan remarked on a recent evening, “came home from work this afternoon, went straight to the liquor closet and poured herself a huge glass of wine. I think you should speak to her.”

  A banality began to form itself upon my lips and then I suddenly realized that I enjoyed giving voice to it. “A glass of wine,” I said, “won’t kill her.” I said it with feeling.

  Unpoor and Unrich

  On the desk in front of me as I write these lines is a long thin slip of paper marked at the top in attention-contriving open-spaced lettering, “Notice of Insufficient Funds.” Down below are printed demarcations with computer-typed details: “Number of Checks Presented, (1); Amount of Checks presented (2.50); Amount of Insufficient Balance (98.27).

  The slip of paper was not on my desk when I left this morning. Moreover, it is not my slip of paper. It must have been neatly propped against the little oriental box on my desk by the addressee. The addressee is Mary Braden, my oldest daughter. She has performed what I am certain she regards as her exact duty.

  There is no accompanying note, no instruction, no apology. The piece of paper speaks for itself. It says, first of all, “Dad, please pay up.” But it says a lot of other things too, and as I look at it, my mind goes back to a lifetime of overdrafts and worry and borrowing and having eight children. It’s not the ninety-eight twenty-seven I mind so much. Ninety-eight twenty-seven is a possible sum, and doubtless some oversight on my part has given Mary the right to remind her father, in the famous words of Daniel Webster, “to replenish my account.” Mary is an honest girl and also a thrifty one. Nevertheless, something about this reminder tells me what my children think of me, and perhaps, of what all children think of all fathers.

  A checkwriter, that’s what I have become; a tall figure, aging slightly, sometimes ill-tempered; no longer fast at touch football; somewhat of an embarrassment at singles tennis and now, at long last, easy to pass and defeat in the mile run. But despite these deficiencies, possessed of money. “Dad, I need five dollars.” “Dad, there’s a note from my college; I put it on your desk.” “Dad, can I have my allowance?” “Dad, Joannie and I want to go to the movies.” “Dad …” Sometimes I could shout and sometimes I do. Sometimes I could cry though I have not done that, but all the time, I worry. Joan says, “Don’t worry,” and I do.

  I have a cataract on my right eye. It must be removed and when the doctor tells me about it, I am dumfounded. I thought cataracts in eyes were for people who are eighty. “Why?” I demand. “What causes this?” He explains that even children can have cataracts and that anyone who lives long enough will eventually have one. But he admits that most people who have cataracts are considerably older than I.

  Diabetes, he tells me, or a tendency thereto, is one possible cause. I tell him I have never had a trace of it. “Another,” he says, “and quite apart from natural aging, is stress. Do you feel any stress?” “Yes,” I said. “I need money.
”

  And why not? The one thing that a father of eight children must somehow manage to find; the one thing he cannot possibly do without, and which love and affection, care and patience, attention, kindness, interest and ability to help with arithmetic cannot possibly replace is money. “Put money in thy purse,” said Iago in his famous speech to Roderigo. I first read that line when I was fifteen. But I must have supposed that what it meant was “Get some money from Dad.” My children suppose the same.

  On a rough calculation, I have taken in during a working life which began the moment the war ended in 1945, about a million, five hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It comes out to an average of about fifty thousand dollars per year, and I ought to feel proud of myself that it’s far more than the average of lifetime earnings. According to the Census Bureau, the average income for all persons in the United States from the age of twenty-five until death is $347,859. Those who have had four years of college, as I did, average $580,000. So, I’ve done well, even perhaps very well.

  But I don’t tell myself that. I am broke, and I am nearly always broke. Moreover, I have absolutely nothing to show for that million and a half dollars, except the partly paid for house I live in, a car, and such items as books, clothes, furniture—things which even the poor can boast of. Except for one thing—I have eight children. And that, of course, is where the money went.

  It went first of all on food. I can remember when the grocery bill was $100 a month, and then $200, and now I try to think we manage on $600, but we really don’t because I have ceased to include the milk bill, which is separate and comes to about $100 per month. “Drink water,” I keep saying to Tommy and Nicky and their friends who come home with them after school. “Water is very good for you.” And Tommy looks up from the sideboard where he is spreading something very thick and gooey, and says, “Dad, have you ever tried a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of nice thick water?”