Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  But there had been other dreams early in George’s nights, and none had lasted until dawn. A year or two before, during what he referred to as “one of my disaster periods, a time when I was depressed about my lack of success,” George secretly signed up for a home study course in forest ranger work and conservation. When the books arrived, Carol grew irritated. She discovered that he had paid sixty dollars for them. “You threw sixty dollars away!” she accused.

  George tried to explain. “Some days I feel I am growing old and life is passing me by,” he said. “I’ve always had this real Walter Mitty thing about sitting on top of a mountain all by myself and watching the trees grow. I guess I thought I’d take this course and get a job and go to a forest somewhere and then send for you and the boys. And you would fall instantly in love with it, like me.”

  Carol was not excited by the explanation. “This will probably turn out like that book I bought you,” she said. “Remember? ‘Six Weeks to a Better Memory’ and you forgot to read it.”

  George smiled ruefully. That was true. But the reason, he insisted, was not his lack of interest, only his difficulty in reading. He still pronounced words silently as he read. Mainly, his reading consisted of the New York Daily News, whose short, racy items and conservative editorial page he liked. He also enjoyed the Reader’s Digest and Plain Truth, a conservative religious publication. Once, in an attempt to improve his reading ability, he enrolled in a speed-reading course at an East Meadow adult education program. But that project failed, too. “I just can’t understand what’s going on,” he told Carol. “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  But it did not hurt to float dreams, George told himself. They kept men going. Off and on during his life he had made little notes to himself, thoughts and fragments that he wanted to write down. They were private and no one ever saw them. At forty, George wrote:

  Each decade is a disaster area. You worry that life is passing you by. I try to realize that I’m far better off than 80 percent of the world. But that’s little solace when you realize that the world is slipping out of your grasp, that you’re getting old, there’s so little time left, and so many things are going wrong.

  When I was young, I figured it was just a matter of time until I made it big. Then the realization sets in that life consists of work, boring work, work to pay the bills. You face reality. That’s what it is. You work to keep up with the bills.

  I always thought I would have my own business someday. My father told me to get a civil service job, one that would be security when I was 40. I couldn’t imagine being 40! How could anyone live that long? How does everybody else make it this far? How do you go further?

  Just before he went to sleep that night of his fortieth birthday, George considered the other entries on his list of assets, the human ones. Beside him stirred Carol, a woman still as slim, as attractive, as fragile as the day they had married. But George knew there was steel beneath the fragility. Her good humor, her patience, her hard work were cement that bound the family together. She was working now as a lunchroom attendant in the junior high school cafeteria, not very glamorous work, helping prepare and serve lunches for a thousand kids, but work she did willingly because the budget needed more than George could bring in alone. Somehow she managed to do this, be home by midafternoon to greet the boys when they arrived, fix a tasty dinner, keep her red hair teased and coiffed, make her own clothes, and still keep up with her retarded children’s charity. The wall of the living room contained a new bronze plaque that attested to Carol’s unprecedented five-year term as president of the group. It annoyed George now and then that his wife was not firmer with the boys, that either of them could get around her and escape chores and discipline. But that was Carol’s way.

  The marriage—almost sixteen years now—was a good one. Only a few times over the years had there even been quarrels, “spirited discussions,” Carol called them in recollection. And only once had there been the danger of divorce. That had come a few years earlier when Carol had fallen ill. For a time she had grown gradually tired, more and more, until she dragged about the house pale and weak. Listless and unresponsive, she had no interest in George’s advances. For a time he wondered if she was having an affair, or, worse, had abruptly turned frigid in her middle thirties. When Carol finally went to the doctor and was put into the hospital for tests, George went out his first night alone looking for companionship. He considered it a “celebration,” in fact. But when the doctor diagnosed in his wife a serious blood infection, probably related to her childhood rheumatic fever and heart damage, George was consumed with guilt. Carol stayed in the hospital several weeks and in bed at home for many more. She would have to take penicillin every day for years thereafter.

  When she was able to get out of bed and resume her role as wife and mother, Carol discovered a pair of women’s gloves in the family car. They were not hers. George made earnest confession and promised it would never happen again. It had not. Nor would it, he told himself. He could listen to the “Lothario tales” of his fellow salesmen and companions on the firing range with ease now.

  Above all the assets, there were his sons. They were the riches of his life. There is joy in a daughter, but there is power in a son. They were the mirror that reflected the image he most wanted to see. Russell, often rowdy, always rambunctious, possessed zest for each day that was difficult to penalize. He was, moreover, an extraordinarily handsome youngster with thick brown hair, a strong physique (like his father!), and friends who crowded the house with their laughter and pranks. So different from his older brother, Russell adored sports and was almost a social lion among the young of Longfellow Avenue.

  Richie? Richie was improving. No doubt about it. Signs of maturity were present, beyond his deepening voice and the faint line of hair on his upper lip. He would never be a scholar, but his junior high school grades were solidly average, with those high marks in science that had become routine. He ranked in the top 10 percent for reading ability in a nationwide test of ninth-graders. The natural intelligence was obviously there. He, was not following his father in that department. Richie knew who he was. He knew what he would become. He was giant steps ahead of George, who had never known, who wondered even now.

  Even Richie’s social difficulties seemed to be easing, as Carol had so hoped they would. He had met a girl named Sheila whom he seemed to be interested in; at least, they talked on the telephone for hours at a time. Sheila was a pretty little thing, skinny as a board, but with long black hair she kept clean and straight.

  Moreover, Richie seemed to have a new pal, a neighborhood boy named Brick he had met at a Methodist church outing. For a few months Richie had attended services, long enough to be confirmed, which satisfied Carol and both sets of grandparents. George had not yet met Brick, but Richie talked about him often. He lived a few blocks away and he had decent, hardworking parents who lived in their own home.

  All in all, George thought to himself as he drifted off, things aren’t going too badly. A neighbor child even chose George as the subject of his school English theme: “The Adult I Would Most Like to Be.”

  Chapter Seven

  With a pierced heart dripping blood tattooed on one arm and a coiled serpent on the other, and with a scraggly beard under cultivation, Broderick (Brick) Pavall looked, at first sight, totally villainous. It was an image he carefully nursed. When Richie first saw him close up at the church retreat, he was startled. What was Brick doing in a place like this? His milieu was the street, where he walked with a swagger, where he drove an ancient Plymouth with pocks in fender and doors but the carefully tuned roar of chariots from the exhaust. During a lengthy prayer, Richie glanced at Brick and saw that he was pantomiming a cigarette at his lips, one that made his eyes roll and his shoulders quiver. Richie knew what kind of cigarette Brick was dramatizing. By the time a boy reached fourteen in East Meadow, in the late 1960s, he would have been unusual if he did not know what marijuana was, what it smelled like as it burned, what it cost,
and where to get it.*

  Richie had been offered puffs on the playground and after class in junior high but he had not been interested. He was not offended, just not interested.

  Richie had often seen Brick in the neighborhood; he lived three streets away. Richie further knew, since Brick was talked about in the area, that he had dropped out of high school, that he was working as a gas station attendant, and that he had a pack of kids glued to him.

  What Richie did not know was that behind the tattoos, beard, and swagger was a desperately immature youngster who told his mother more than once, in moments of agonizing self-honesty, “I’m nothing. I’m shit. I’ll never amount to anything.” Mrs. Pavall, a strong-willed, effusive woman who worked part-time as a bookkeeper for mom-and-pop stores in East Meadow, embraced her son on those pained occasions and always reassured him, in uncertain tone, “No you’re not! You’re a good kid. You’ll find your way. You just need a little confidence.”

  Brick’s mother would descend into hell to help her son. During one of his many encounters with the law, she pathetically searched the halls of the courthouse, trying to borrow the extra fifteen dollars she needed to bail him out. The sum was fifty dollars; she had but thirty-five dollars in her purse, and that had been intended for Friday night groceries. In another, she stood ashamed while a judge scolded her boy. “I hope you come back before me,” the judge said in granting Brick probation on a minor drug matter. “I want the opportunity to put you away for a long time. I feel sorry for the girl who marries you. I feel sorry for your parents. I feel sorry for anybody who comes in contact with you.”

  One spring evening in 1969, when Carol and George were down the street having coffee after dinner, Richie sat on the deck of his home with Brick and a rail-thin kid named Hammer. Warm, with thunder rumbling in from the nearby sea, the night promised an April downpour. When Richie felt the first drop of rain fall on his face, he suggested they move to his room. Brick refused. He was enthusiastic about the thunder. So was Hammer, a boy of fifteen who would two years later, being involved in cocaine selling, vanish from East Meadow.

  “I wanna keep this going,” said Brick, looking at the troubled sky and reaching into his windbreaker. He produced a joint of marijuana, lit it, pulled in a deep drag, and handed it to Hammer, who enthusiastically followed him.

  Brick routinely handed it to Richie, who looked at the fast-burning cigarette and shook his head.

  “Why not?” said Brick.

  “I don’t wanna get started,” said Richie.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” said Brick. “Right, Hammer?” Hammer nodded with gusto. “I never heard thunder quite this way,” said Brick, lifting his face to the darkening sky and closing his eyes.

  Midway through his second joint, Brick again handed it to Richie. “Come on, Richie, take a few puffs,” he said. “You’re not going to turn into a dope addict.”

  Abruptly Richie seized the cigarette and puffed it. Instantly he choked and his eyes began to water and turn red. Brick laughed. “Take a little at a time, the first time,” he instructed. “Here.” Richie watched and then took a few more discomforting drags.

  Finally he shook his head. “It doesn’t do anything for me,” he said.

  “You’re fighting it,” said Brick. He offered what was now a quarter-inch butt to Richie with a strip of matchbook cover wrapped around it as a holder. Richie shook his head. He was firm.

  But a few days later, this time when Brick’s parents were away, Richie accepted another joint. More than likely, he had no real interest in what the grass would do for him, only a desire to prove to his new friend that he could behave maturely. This time he tried to keep from coughing, even when the acrid smoke burned his mouth and throat and made his eyes water. But he kept the smoke down. He held his breath tightly to keep from exploding. He fell silent after a time. Then he giggled, over nothing.

  “You know what, Diener?” said Brick, with a knowing grin. “You’re stoned.”

  Richie shook his head to deny the surprising pronouncement. But in a few moments he leaped up and circled the room. “I’m high,” he said, “I’m really high!” A few nights later Richie asked Brick for a joint, rather than wait for an invitation, and within a month was routinely using pot once or twice a week. He was fourteen years old. Brick congratulated Richie and wondered why he had waited so long. “I started when I was twelve,” bragged the older boy with the scraggly beard. “And even then I was late. I know kids eleven, ten years old who use grass. I heard of one kid in the second grade who comes to school stoned.”

  From the beginning, Carol did not approve of Brick, though she had no idea what had transpired on the deck outside her dining room the night of the spring thunder. Chiefly she objected to Brick because he was almost three years older than Richie. Moreover, she did not like the fact that he had dropped out of school, nor did she relish the hoody aura about him, despite his politeness and good manners when he came to her home.

  The Brick relationship and the vague malaise it stirred within were but one reason Carol brought up the subject of summer camp for Richie as June neared in 1969. She handed George a folder advertising Camp Red Cloud Lake in the Adirondacks. Her sister planned to send her daugher, Susan, there, and from all reports it was an excellent place for youngsters.

  George examined the folder and seemed responsive until he came to the price.

  “Eight hundred dollars!” he said, shaking his head. Need he remind his wife that the sum was more than he made in six weeks’ hard work?

  Carol pressed her point. The previous summer had been difficult not only for Richie, she said, but for her. While George was at work all day, she had to stay at home and cope with two boys who either said there was nothing to do and moped around sulking because Carol would not chauffeur them at every whim, or, often worse, would so fill her backyard with noisy friends that her head throbbed. She made a poignant commentary on suburban life. “You move to the suburbs for your kids,” she told George, “and then you find out that nobody wants them on their lawn. They might spoil the rosebushes and the grass. There’s no place for them to play, so they end up over here. I’m the neighborhood softie.”

  “I can sympathize with that,” said George. “And the camp looks like a beautiful place. You don’t have to sell me on the advantage of spending eight weeks in the mountains. I’d like to spend the rest of my life there. But where do we get eight hundred dollars?”

  Part of it could be borrowed from her parents, Carol suggested tactfully. Mr. and Mrs. Ring had often come to the aid of their daughter and son-in-law in times of financial emergency. The rest could be found by saving, sacrificing, eliminating a planned family vacation, she would even cut down smoking if necessary.

  George fell silent. Carol saw that he was weakening. What better place could there be for Richie she said, almost pleading, than the mountains and forests he had so long adored?

  “Is it that important?” George asked.

  Carol nodded.

  George borrowed eight hundred dollars from his bank as a personal-signature loan to pay for Richie’s stay at Camp Red Cloud Lake. It was the second largest expenditure of his life, after the mortgage on his house. When George sprang the exciting news on Richie, the boy was receptive, but not overly so. “Why doesn’t Russell have to go, too?” he wondered. The second Diener son, now eight, refused even to entertain the idea of camp, which was just as well, because George could not have found another eight hundred dollars.

  As Carol launched enthusiastically into the motherly ordeal of assembling camp clothes, sewing in name tags, and packing a trunk, George received a disturbing telephone call exactly one week before Richie was due to leave. The Juvenile Aid Bureau of the Nassau County Police Department was on the line. A bicycle had been stolen from the home of an East Meadow policeman, and Richie Diener was suspected of the small crime.

  Two juvenile officers stopped by the Diener house late that afternoon to talk to Richie. Almost indign
antly he denied knowledge of the theft, as he had done when George questioned him.

  “If I was going to steal a bicycle, which I wouldn’t,” he said, “I sure wouldn’t pick a cop’s house.”

  Because there was no evidence to connect Richie with the theft, the investigation was dropped. A folder, however, bearing the name of George Richard Diener was opened in the Juvenile Aid Bureau. It did not contain the news that Richie had indeed stolen the bicycle and had sold it to Hammer for five dollars’ worth of marijuana.

  A little more than one week after Richie had gone away to the Adirondacks, George received a second startling telephone call. This time it was the owner of the camp, an East Meadow woman, whose voice was distraught. She came straight to the point. Richie was abusive, disruptive, and interfering with the order of her camp. Moreover, he had threatened a counselor with physical assault. And he had been caught smoking marijuana. Could George come immediately and fetch Richie? Most of the tuition would be refunded.

  Stunned by the indictment of his son’s behavior, George made the long drive to upstate New York alone. Richie greeted his father with no sign of embarrassment. But George, humiliated and very angry, made a hurried apology to the camp owner. He watched as Richie said goodbye to his friends.

  On the day-long drive back to East Meadow, Richie was eager to defend himself. The counselor with whom he had feuded, Richie said, was disliked by all the kids. He had teased Richie and accused him falsely of putting holes in the wall beside his bunk. “They were already there from last year,” Richie insisted. “And when he said I cussed him, well, all the kids cussed him.”

  “But you were the only one who threatened to get him at night when he was sleeping,” said George, who had spent a private hour with the camp owner. “And you were the only one who threatened to tear up his car. I think you’re a little too quick with your big threats of vengeance and retaliation and getting even. I’ve seen this before in you.”