Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  For an hour, George was quiet. He was not as concerned about Richie’s trouble with the counselor as he was about Richie and marijuana. How could he best bring this up? If he wanted to nip it in the bud, it was necessary that his guidance be well thought out. Finally he spoke. But all he could manage was to blurt out, “How can you use this marijuana stuff? I think it would take the worst kind of person in the world to do this.”

  Once more Richie sought safety in numbers. “All the kids” were smoking it, he said. It grew wild in woods about the camp. What Richie did not say was that his knowledge of nature and expertise in plant identification made it easy for him to spot the weed. He also did not reveal that the counselor in question had caught him with a bag of marijuana and demanded that Richie turn it over. When Richie refused, the counselor threatened to turn him in. “Give it to me and I won’t squeal on you,” the counselor said. Richie finally handed over his bag—only to discover that the counselor had appropriated it for his own use. This had been fuel for the fire between them. But Richie could not tell his father that piece of news.

  As they neared East Meadow, George glanced over at his somewhat chastened son. “Well, I tell you what’s what,” he said. “You’re going to have to straighten up. I don’t care what all the other kids are doing. In my house, marijuana is illegal, because the law says it is.”

  Richie nodded.

  “One more thing,” continued George. “You can start shaping up by getting your hair cut. You look like a sheep dog.”

  Probably expecting more severe rebuke, Richie readily agreed. He would have his hair cut the very next day. But when he returned from the “hair stylist,” a new term to George, the father shook his head in disbelief. “That cost $7.50?” he said. “It looks like they combed it, nothing more. You walk outside in the wind and it’ll be like you never even went.”

  That telephone call from Camp Red Cloud Lake in the summer of 1969 and the long drive back from the mountains were the first clues George Diener received that his son was caught up in radical change. But George did not recognize them as such. They came at the crest of Richie’s adolescence—and George could well remember the agony of his own teen-age years. They came at a time when newspapers were commenting on the widespread popularity of marijuana among the young. George gambled that Richie was only going along with the crowd, that the infatuation would be no more lasting than the occasional pimple that erupted and faded on his son’s face. Had marijuana been around twenty-five years ago, George told himself honestly, I might have tried it. Perhaps at that moment there was nothing more than a crack between the father and the son, but over the remaining months of the summer, and in the autumn that followed as Richie began his sophomore year in high school, the crack became a gulf. And George and Richie would stand on opposite sides of a tragic new world.

  Richie’s interest in animals started to wane. He gave away his snakes and hamsters, or let them go. When Boots, the family’s second Boston bull terrier, died, Richie had neither grief, nor attention for the large gray poodle, Bridget, that Carol bought as replacement. The squirrels still waited for Richie to come home and feed them, but more and more he ignored them or told Russell to do it. His room, for so many years a naturalist’s lair, underwent a dramatic change of character.

  The extensive library of nature books went onto the top shelf of his closet and began to gather dust. Once they had been all over his room, open on his desk, on his bed, their pages thumbed and underlined. In their place came the decor of the youth culture: posters of rock stars, ticket stubs from pop concerts, a display of drawings from an underground artist whose work seemed drenched in drug-induced horror. Specializing in monstrous creatures, he drew modern half-man, half-animal grotesqueries with electrified hair, claws for hands, and violence as avocation. One such apparition was drawn seated in a bathtub with daggers and blood about him; the impression was that he had disemboweled himself.

  Richie carefully stapled these drawings on the paneled wall directly in front of his bed. As he lay there, he could look at them without moving his head on his pillow. After attending one of his mother’s charity dances, Richie delightedly collected the white styrofoam balls that had been used for decorations. Splashing them with Day-Glo paints, he hung them from the ceiling of his room. Somehow he found money to buy a black light, which, switched on, transformed his chamber into a sanctum of psychedelia. Everything was precise. The mementos were not thrown helter-skelter on the wall. Richie placed them with almost geometrical care. His decorative labors produced the desired effect. One friend told Richie, “You have the best room of anybody.” They began to come, as Carol always said they would.

  To only a few of these, his new friends, did Richie show the prize attraction of his quarters—a small storage chamber at the back of his closet that he had discovered one day by accident while putting his shoes in a neat row. There was an opening about eighteen inches square covered with a nailed piece of plywood. Removing the plywood, Richie was elated. Within was a small secret area, perhaps an architectural blunder, a place big enough for him to lie in—six feet long by three feet wide by four feet high. To improve it, Richie lined the walls with crinkled aluminum foil. On the ceiling he placed rock posters. On the floor went a cast-off single mattress. The opening to the private place he disguised with his shoe rack.

  He took to entering his hideaway and lying on the mattress, with only an eerie crack of light from the closet and the glow of his pot pipe to illumine him. There he could escape his parents’ calls. Often Carol would announce dinner, knowing that Richie was in the house, hearing the rock music from his room that announced his presence, but puzzled when he did not respond. When she went to his room, he would not be there.

  Finally George discovered the place and dismantled it, annoyed that Richie would crawl inside a wall to hide from his parents. Pulling down the aluminum-foil walls, he found a small cache and, in it, a piece of hardened substance in a plastic sandwich bag.

  “What is this?” George demanded, suspecting it was important because of the elaborate method by which it had been hidden.

  “I don’t know,” the boy replied. “Mud, I guess.”

  “I’d guess it’s more than that,” said George. “Or you wouldn’t take such pains to hide it.”

  “It’s hash.” Richie finally said, explaining that it was hashish he was keeping for a friend. “It isn’t mine,” said Richie, “I swear.”

  Whatever, George angrily threw it out, despite Richie’s protestations that he had no right to destroy someone else’s property. And he nailed up the secret place.

  One autumn afternoon in 1969, Richie and Hammer smoked two joints after school, and they both became hungry. Hammer looked at his watch. If he did not get home and rake leaves, his father had threatened to ground him for a week. Richie shrugged, for he had the same work to do. He went to a Carvel ice-cream stand alone. When he had finished his dish, Richie continued to sit at his table for more than an hour. Finally the owner asked him to leave. Richie refused, announcing that by paying for his ice cream he earned the right to occupy a table for as long as he wanted.

  The owner said that if Richie did not leave immediately, he would be thrown out. “Try it,” said Richie coldly. Two young countermen thereupon seized the red-haired boy and threw him bodily out the door.

  Richie picked himself up, went across the street, found a large rock, and threw it into the eight-foot-wide plateglass window. Enraged, the owner sent his employees after Richie. They chased him for several blocks before one caught him with a flying tackle. Pinned to the ground, Richie spat out his name.

  Later that day, notified by the store owner that the window would cost $250 to replace, George muttered an apology and said his insurance would cover it. But when he sat Richie down that night and received his explanation—Richie contended that he threw the rock because he had been “manhandled”—George was distressed to see his son’s lack of remorse. Richie seemed, in fact, proud of what he had done.
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  The next day, George notified Nassau County Family Court that he had decided not to submit the claim to his insurance company, that he wanted the drama played out before juvenile authorities. “I think Richie needs a hard lesson right here and now,” George told Carol. She agreed.

  The case dragged on for several months, with the store owner filing a “criminal mischief” complaint. But when he failed to appear for three hearings, the charge was dropped.

  Richie was annoyed at his father for making him go to Family Court. “Then don’t throw any more rocks through ice-cream store windows,” suggested Carol, concerned that a coldness was setting in between her husband and her firstborn child. George daily drove his sales route, yet no longer did he look forward to the dinner waiting for him at home. Once it had been the hour of lively talk between him and his sons. Now only Russell piped in with news of his day. Usually Richie ate in silence, shoveling his food in hurriedly, bolting from the table to go to his room, where the door would slam and the music would swell. Once George rose and followed Richie and stood outside his door and started to knock. But he put his hand down and turned away with a look on his face that touched Carol’s heart. Richie had moved into his own world at fifteen, and he was denying his father admission.

  During another dinner, Richie did mention that he had seen a coatimundi in the window of an East Meadow pet store. The animal was so unusual, “so cute,” said Richie, that he stood and watched it for almost an hour.

  The next day George went to the store and priced the foreign animal. Eighty dollars, far more than he could justify. But practicality and parsimony were not in his mind at this moment. All he could think was that if he bought the creature for Richie, perhaps it would rekindle the boy’s enchantment with wildlife, perhaps it would even open the door to his room. Perhaps it would restore his son to what he had so recently been. With a poignancy understood only in America, George reached into his wallet and bought the coatimundi and charged the eighty dollars on his Uni-Card. Where else could a father attempt to stop the clock, to shove back time on a thin strip of plastic credit?

  But in a month or two Richie grew disenchanted with the animal and gave it away to the Staten Island Zoo. “Snoopy” or “Nosey,” as he alternately called the inquisitive creature that crawled along Carol’s drapery rods and hid next to the exercise wheel under the Danish modern couch, held his attention only briefly. Richie had discovered something else to seize his fancy, something that George and Carol would not discern for a long while to come, not until the yellow house on the peaceful street was a battle ground, not until the owner and his son were in open war.

  * A study made by two psychiatrists in 1970 of eighth- and ninth-graders in East Meadow showed that 23 percent were using illegal drugs. Two years later, a survey of New York State indicated that more than 45 percent of young people under the age of eighteen used “psychoactive” drugs, with marijuana included in the category. District Attorney William Cahn of Nassau County was more alarming in his early 1972 estimate. He said that upward of 75 percent of young people in his county had at least tried some form of drugs.

  Chapter Eight

  The political evolution of George Diener ran parallel to the deteriorating relationship between the salesman and his son. As Richie moved into his new territory with lime and fuchsia balls dancing over his head, with rock music shaking the house, George made a hard turn to the ideological right, where the principal colors were black and white, the only factors right and wrong. There was scarcely an issue of the day for which George did not have an opinion, reinforced by those after-dinner coffee hours with neighbors as conservative as he. It was as if the camera of his life saw everything outside his home in sharp focus; only in self and family portrait did it take images blurred around the edges.

  Curiously, there would never be an intellectual clash between man and boy, with Richie participating in the peace movement or voicing militant notions alien to George’s thinking at the dinner table. For Richie had no such commitments. The price of pot was more important to him than the purpose of Vietnam.

  The trouble with his son was but one of the sores festering on George’s back. He needed not only a villain to explain Richie’s shift of life-style and the boy’s puzzling truculence, but one to blame for the taxes on his house, which had tripled in the five years he owned it, from $400 to $1,200, for crime in the streets, for any and all assaults on the country that he had been bred to respect, fight for, and adore. George lumped all the symptoms together in a virus called liberalism.

  “‘Liberal’ to me is a dirty word,” he often said to friends across his table. “I just don’t see how anybody can be liberal. Look what they’ve done to our country with their permissiveness.” Perhaps George could have said, “Look what they’ve done to me,” for that was what he believed.

  It had not always been so. Political thought was late in coming to him. His first presidential votes were cast for Eisenhower, not, certainly, because Ike represented conservative points of view, but because he was a hero, a military leader, and an object of inspiration to one who had embarked on a fruitless pursuit of heroics at the age of sixteen when he left Brooklyn for the sea. Seven years under the regimen and traditions of a ship, preceded by a childhood at the hem of Catholic nuns, had chiseled respect for authority in George.

  In 1960, however, he switched to a Democrat, John F. Kennedy, not because the young Massachusetts senator was young, or possessed of grace, or bent on drastically changing the tone of America. And certainly not because he was liberal, because George lacked the sophistication to place him on the political spectrum. George’s favor was bestowed on Kennedy chiefly because he was Roman Catholic—“one of our boys.” “All my life I’d heard people say, ‘There’ll never be a Catholic President,’ and I wanted to help disprove that,” he often said in explaining a vote that in a few years would become unthinkable to him.

  Because by 1964 George would vote for Barry Goldwater, and in 1968 for George Wallace. From the benign embrace of fatherly Eisenhower to the strident demagoguery of George Wallace was not an uncommon change of direction in George Diener’s world. He had allies up and down his street: a cop next door, a telephone repairman across the way, the butcher a few doors down. Even though he wore a shirt and tie and suit on his daily spice circuit, George dressed figuratively in the blue collar of America’s working class. And the decade of the 1960s traumatized everything he held dear. Harsh criticism of the American way of life set off sparks in his eyes. If a man belongs to Rotary and someone says Rotary is foolish and cruel, then that man is going to be angry. If a man like George belongs only to a nation, then that is his fraternity.

  Though he never joined the John Birch Society, whose name, address, telephone number, and leader’s name are conveniently published each year in the community directory put out by the East Meadow Public Library (the listing is between those of the Auxiliary Police and the Fire Department Ladies Auxiliary), George often said he had a “sympathetic nerve” for what the extreme organization preached.

  By 1970 George had a firm posture for the issues of the day.

  Blacks? “I’m not anti-Negro,” he would say when conversation in his living room turned to rumors that a black family had been seen pricing houses not far away in the community that was 97 percent white, or that more and more black students were coming into the East Meadow school district to take advantage of its very good technical training. “I get accused of that, but I sincerely and genuinely like blacks more than a lot of these liberals who profess so much. But I like only good blacks! I’m talking about a black man who works hard, pays his taxes, obeys the laws, and brings his children up like I try to do.”

  Crime? “No wonder it’s growing. You look at the crime statistics, and you see that murder and rape and drug addiction are going up. The reason is that the liberals don’t want to punish criminals anymore. We pamper them now and forgive them because they had a ‘difficult’ childhood. We turn them loose on society. I
f by some miracle they do go to jail, the Supreme Court turns them loose.”

  Taxes? “Now, legitmate taxes don’t bother me. But what about your waste in welfare, for example? There again, I don’t mean to take welfare away from somebody who really deserves it. But there are too many people who cheat and chisel. And I help pay for it!”

  School taxes? “They keep rising to pay for a school district that has decided to let the kids run wild. Maybe some intellectuals can handle it, but 98 percent of the kids simply cannot. Richie does not have the maturity for his kind of school. The ACLU even comes into the high school and hands out pamphlets telling the kids what their rights are. What right does the ACLU have to do this? No wonder kids act the way they do: they realize nobody can touch them.”

  Integration? “School integration is being jammed down our throats by vote-seeking politicians. I wish integration could come about normally, like in Hawaii where they have four or five different colors that mingle and get along without any trouble. There’s no pushing or rushing over there! But here, we push, and pushing is never for the reason that the liberals profess. Integrating schools to ‘improve education’ is a farce. It’s for politics, for votes, nothing else! I would prefer separate but equal schools for blacks and whites. It’s a shame we have to worry about integration, but we do. It’s a shame we’re not integrated naturally, but we’re not!”

  And, of course, guns. “The gun control laws they’re trying to push are stupid. They’d only hurt the law-abiding citizen. The kind of gun control law I believe in is the kind that should punish people, not guns. In New York City, which already has the toughest gun law in America, the authorities never prosecute the use of a gun in the commission of a crime. They catch somebody like that and right off they drop the gun charge. They let the criminal plead guilty to the lesser charge of burglary. If I had my way, a person caught with a gun while committing a crime should first get twenty years in jail for carrying a deadly weapon. First! Then when that sentence is finished, they should serve time for the crime. A few sentences like that and I think the criminals would think twice about carrying guns. And bleeding hearts would leave the legitimate sportsman or the fellow who needs to defend his home alone.”