Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  When he delivered himself of such opinions, and when he allowed that his favorite film star was John Wayne and his favorite television program was All in the Family, a visitor newly in earshot might brand George a right-wing extremist, Archie Bunker defending the Alamo, one of those peculiars who stayed up nights telephoning talk shows, or leading parades against sex education in schools, or indoctrinating his children with hatred of Earl Warren and love of J. Edgar Hoover.

  Such, however, was not the case. In the cloth of America, George was not the fringe, but the middle of the bolt. In the anatomy of America, he was not the brains, but the bone. There was no poetry in his life, no classic literature, no bookshelves in his house except for those that once held Richie’s nature books, not even great ambition, for he had long since accommodated himself to the fact that he would always labor for the Friday paycheck from some other man. But there were values, ideas to which he clung tenaciously. He could not have articulated them to a Gallup polltaker, but they were his bedrock. They had brought his ancestors from Germany to Brooklyn, and they brought him from the malt and hops store of his birth to the expansive home with trees on Longfellow Avenue. And he would not relinquish them, even in the hurricane of social change.

  He believed in hard work—eighteen hours a day did not tire him during those holiday seasons when stores sold extra spices to housewives baking pies and preparing special feasts; in love and respect for woman—a small elbow-digging remark of sexual innuendo was allowed, but no profanity in front of a lady, ever; in honor for the law—men smarter than he wrote laws, and he was taught to obey authority; and in the likelihood that his children would be better off—he expected no financial tribute from his sons when they were grown, but the rays of their success could warm the dark corners of his life.

  Herman Kahn, the think-tank oracle, said in the early 1970s that “67 per cent of America is square and getting squarer.” Although George had never heard of Herman Kahn, he would have agreed with the man, quickly positioning himself in the comfort of that vast majority. His hair remained short, his ties stayed narrow, his pants—with cuffs—tended to bag and the pleats went to the waist. A man’s business, reasoned George, was neatness, not fashion. He had no interest, not even the secret prurience of salesmen with nothing better to do on a fruitless afternoon, in the new morality. Once he had liked movies, but they had become, in his fifth decade, either too expensive—or too dirty. The only film that George and Carol went out to see over a two-year period was The Sound of Music. Once he had enjoyed taking his pretty wife out to a romantic Italian restaurant, where he could watch her red hair glow in candlelight and take public pride in having won her. But now, more often than not, all he could manage was hamburgers for four at McDonald’s.

  Once he had been able to throw his arms about his oldest son and embrace him. But now, even though his heart yearned to do it again, to tear down somehow the barrier suddenly erected between them, something held him in check. The monstrous creatures stapled on Richie’s wall were symbols of the dangerous forces trying to change his America. Already they had come into his house and captured his son. The only plan available to George was to harden his stance. He was too set in his ways to try and understand Richie.

  And he was too old to cry.

  Chapter Nine

  “My main problem,” Richie told Brick Pavall one autumn afternoon in 1969, “is finding a place to hide my pot.” At first he kept his marijuana, carefully wrapped inside a sandwich bag, at the bottom of his desk drawer. But fearing that his mother would find it when she cleaned up his room, or his father on one of his dismantling expeditions, Richie began shifting the bag to random hiding places—under his mattress, behind his school books, in an old jacket pocket. “One night I was stoned and I wanted to roll a new joint, and I couldn’t even remember where I’d hid my stash,” complained Richie.

  “Don’t be so paranoid,” suggested Brick. “People are always paranoid when they first start smoking. You see shadows and you think the cops are coming into your room to bust you.”

  Brick suggested a hiding place outside the house, not frequented by Richie’s parents. Elated at the idea, Richie found a loose plank in the tool shed, and there, for several months, he kept his paraphernalia.

  During this autumn of 1969 there developed a shortage of marijuana not only in East Meadow, but in much of America. It was probably due to Operation Intercept, the attempt by President Nixon to close the Mexican border to marijuana smuggling. With a flurry of headlines, television lights, and regular press releases, the project promised—with the cooperation of the Mexican government—to seal off the principal avenue of marijuana into the United States. While Nixon earned the politically attractive reputation of a foe to marijuana—a few arrests were indeed made and several thousand kilos of grass discovered and confiscated—an ironical development occured.

  During the brief American marijuana famine—it would take two or three months before illegal traffickers could develop alternate lines of supply from Colombia, Jamaica, several African countries, and by new routes from Mexico—some of the drug’s regular users looked for a substitute. This flies in the face of those advocates who contend that using marijuana absolutely does not lead to the desire for something else, something more potent. In the majority of cases, this is no doubt true. In Richie’s case it was not.*

  Brick encountered the grass shortage of 1969 when he met with his regular dealer, a youth named Corley who worked now and then as a roofer. Later Corley would become a heroin addict and, while trying to work with a head full of the narcotic, would fall off a house and land squarely on his head, causing permanent brain damage. After that the kids called him Zombie.

  At the time of their meeting, Corley had no marijuana to sell.

  “Wanna try some ups instead?” suggested Corley.

  Brick shook his head. He had bought some amphetamines a few months earlier and they had done nothing for him. “I can’t get off on ups,” he said.

  “You can on these,” said Corley. “These are Dexedrines, real pharmaceuticals.” He showed Brick the capsules, brown on one end, clear on the other. “You know they’re real when they have SKF printed on them.”

  Brick bought twenty. At the time they cost five for one dollar. On his way home, he popped five into his mouth and, when no more than ten minutes had passed, was startled at how rapidly the rush had come. “It’s far out,” he told Richie that night. “Faster than grass and a helluva lot better.”

  But Richie declined to take any. It was the pattern of his drug experimentation that he always declined, vigorously, any new plateau.

  However, as his pattern also went, a few days later he weakened under Brick’s salesmanship. The two boys were at the home of a girl Brick knew, sitting on stools in her kitchen.

  While the girl watched with interest, Brick pulled five Dexedrines from his jeans and ate them with ceremony. Then he offered three to Richie. His outstretched palm was clearly a dare.

  Brick later related the story to a friend:

  “Richie grabs the ups and eats them quick. Then we sat there looking at each other. The chick was waiting for something to happen, like maybe our hair was supposed to stand on end, or our eyes would turn red and spin like a merry-go-round. Pretty soon the chick’s mother comes into the kitchen, and, about that time, Richie and me got off. Pow! We were getting paranoid quick. I could see Richie was scared, but I couldn’t stop talking. About everything and nothing. You do that on ups. You rattle on like crazy. This old mother was staring at us, like she knew something was happening. Something was, man. We were in outer space.

  “Richie flashes me a signal he wants to get out of there fast. We go over to my house, and my mother insists on both of us having dinner. She always fixes a big meal. Richie stares at this heaping plate, and he gets one tiny piece of lettuce and a little bit of meat down when he pulls his chair back and runs out of the room. I follow him, and he’s upstairs white as a sheet. He’s trembling. He throws up al
l over my room. Jeez, he’d only taken three. Then he starts crying and I don’t know what to do.”

  Richie was frightened. The next day he told Brick he did not like “the feeling of ups” and that he would never take them again. “I don’t dig being hyperactive and paranoid,” he said. “Grass is better.”

  His attitude toward ups was reinforced when Brick, unaffected by Richie’s disavowal, went on a two-week binge. Taking an astonishing fifty amphetamines a day, Brick whipped about the neighborhood as if shot from a cannon. He told Richie he felt like a rubber band stretched so tightly it might break. “When it breaks,” Brick said, “I’ll come down.” But deep into his two-week trip, Brick began to hallucinate. After forty-eight hours of no sleep, he telephoned Richie in panic. “I get in bed,” he said, “and I turn off the lights, and I close my eyes, and I try to push out all my thoughts to get my mind totally blank—only then I suddenly think to myself, ‘I’d like to see a monster,’ and I think on this, and, sure enough, the monster appears on my wall. In color, too!”

  At the end of the binge, during which he lost thirty pounds (amphetamines are sometimes used as diet pills), Brick swore off them. But a few weeks later, Corley the roofer offered his good client some “downs,” street slang for barbiturates. Other names are “reds,” “rainbows,” “blue devils,” “peanuts,” “yellow jackets,” “goofballs,” “double trouble,” and “nimbies.”

  “These are Seconals,” said Corley proudly. “The best.” He pointed out the tiny word Lilly printed on the bright red, bullet-shaped capsules. Seconals, a brand name for secobarbital, are made by Eli Lilly & Co. They are powerful pills with various reputable medical uses, chiefly to induce sleep. One can usually not only knock out an adult for a full night of hard, deep slumber, but give him a slightly groggy head the next morning. In the late 1960s the drug culture discovered that a unique, albeit frightening alteration of the mental state could be obtained from using secobarbitals, often heightened by washing them down with whiskey or wine. But the rite was perilous; one too many of the capsules and the celebrant could sleep forever. The combination of barbs and alcohol could also be fatal.

  “You must be lame,” said Richie, when once again tempted by Brick. The two were walking from Richie’s house to an enormous discount house in a shopping center one mile away.

  “You’re the one who’s lame if you don’t try these,” said Brick. He walked over to an ice-water fountain at a service station, filled his mouth with water, and waited until he was a block away to take five Seconals. He had three left, but Richie remained adamant.

  “I’m scared of downs,” he said frankly. “I don’t wanna OD or something.”

  “You’re not gonna OD, dummy,” said Brick. “I’m with you. You’d have to take twenty to OD, anyway.”

  Richie shook his head once more. “I’ll stick to grass.”

  “Grass is good,” Brick agreed. “Great grass is fantastic. But you can’t always depend on it. You can always get downs. They’re around. And there’s less hassle. You told me yourself you still hate the smoke when you do grass. Downs are cool. You see a cop walking toward us and you’ve got a joint in your pocket, what are you gonna do? Eat it? You’d vomit. But you got downs on you and you can eat ’em. Fast. If the cop saw you, he couldn’t prove anything. You could say they were M&M’s.”

  Brick’s proselytizing was typical. He was not trying to seduce his friend into becoming addicted to pills and thus dependent on him for supply. He was not a pusher in the classic sense, for the sallow man in the overcoat lurking outside school fences had disappeared, if indeed he ever existed. Kids turned one another on in East Meadow in 1969, for little reason other than social reinforcement. Brick needed an ally for his adventure, as any man does when venturing into an unknown.

  A Nassau County narcotics officer once said that the thing that puzzled him most about the drug culture was “the glamour attached to it.” How, wondered the cop, did drug-taking cease being a dark affair and suddenly transform into “a phenomenon of teen-age status”?*

  Brick Pavall’s testimonial and the dare contained in it were effective, as they always were with Richie. The younger boy suddenly stopped on the road and faced his friend. “Gimme those mothers,” he said. He put the three red capsules into his mouth, one by one, swallowing them without water.

  Twenty minutes later, Richie and Brick were, to use their favorite word of behavioral description, “wasted.” The two staggered down the street in swerves and arcs. Later that night Brick telephoned Richie to see if the downs had worn off. Richie said they had, but not before he had difficulty getting through dinner with his parents. “They kept looking at me like I was a freak show,” said Richie. “All the time I was afraid my head would fall in my plate.”

  “They shoulda seen you on Hempstead Turnpike about four o’clock,” said Brick. “You couldn’t walk, much less talk good. You were like some old drunk. Doing downs is the same as being drunk, you know. You either get in a rowdy mood, or a nice, mellow mood. Me, I get courage and I can talk to any chick in Ryan’s bar and try to make it with her.”

  Richie yawned. It was only a few minutes past nine, but, he said, he could hardly keep his eyes open.

  “You’ll sleep well tonight, that’s for sure,” said Brick. “Me, I’m gonna take some more downs. I like to take about five around this time and stay up till one. I’ll wake up tomorrow morning early and take two more—only I get off better and quicker the next morning on only two than on five the night before.”

  “It was really a weird thing that happened this afternoon,” said Richie. He started to begin another sentence, but he yawned once more, said good-bye, and hung up. Barbs are, after all, sleeping pills.

  Brick, buying more downs from Corley in a few weeks, told him about Richie. “Some people like ups, some people like downs,” Brick said. “Richie likes downs. They seem to hit him quicker and deeper than most people. The only trouble is, he gets sort of smartaleck and wise-ass. Instead of dropping out, like most people do with downs, Richie gets all fired up. He’s king of the mountain, or he thinks he is. If Richie was doing downs and a dog ten feet tall came into the room, Richie would say, ‘I’m gonna kick shit out of that dog,’ and he’d go over and do it. He ain’t afraid of anything.”

  Richie’s reputation as eccentric and unpredictable grew in the late months of 1969 and early 1970. His classmates at East Meadow High passed around tales of his antics. Such as falling asleep in the middle of the Pledge of Allegiance during home room. Or walking in a neighborhood near his home and suddenly picking up an operative water sprinkler and tossing it through an open living-room window. Or the sandwich caper. After buying overstuffed turkey sandwiches at a delicatessen near his home, Richie and a friend strolled along Newbridge Avenue eating them. Abruptly Richie decided to enter a large catering restaurant, a vast, ornate place of stone, glass, and neon that specialized in wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs. Strolling into the lushly carpeted lobby, Richie stood defiantly among the mirrors and gilt. An employee in decorous suit and manner approached him. “May I help you?” he asked.

  “Fuck you,” said Richie, throwing the turkey sandwich in the man’s face. The two boys ran out, Richie fleeing across a nearby yard. As he approached a fence to scale, Richie stopped long enough to kick an aroused, barking German shepherd.

  Psychiatrists believe that in most human beings there is a repository of violence and aggressive behavior, but the brain throws up a barrier, a fence, to keep such in check under normal conditions. Secobarbital acts quickly upon the central nervous system to depress it. The drug will, of course, induce drowsiness and finally sleep. But it can also, through overdosage, rip down this mental fence and permit hostility, even violence to rush forth. In hospital operating rooms, personnel often must cope with the patient who, having received sedation for surgery, suddenly rouses from his half-sleep and tries to attack a nurse, or climb off the table with a torrent of curses. In his normal life, the patient could not conceive
of such behavior.

  In the first few months he used downs, Richie rarely took them before occasions when he would have to face his parents. Usually it was before going out with Brick, or on the rare evening when Carol and George were out. Thus the parents did not witness the sudden flames that leaped up within their son. Richie used barbiturates for more than a year before George and Carol became aware of them. There were no needle marks on his arms for a mother to spot, only troubling changes in his attitude and behavior. But were these different from any adolescent’s? wondered the parents. That communication with Richie was becoming more and more difficult George passed off as the generation gap he read about and saw dramatized so often on his color TV.

  During the year that Richie took barbiturates without his parents’ knowledge, there were ample clues, but perhaps valuable only in retrospect. One came on a warm spring day in 1970. Richie and two friends were hitch-hiking on an East Meadow boulevard. Thumbing was and is a common method of transport among the young of the town, particularly for those not yet old enough to own a car. East Meadow has only one bus line, which runs infrequently and covers but a minor portion of the sprawling area. But hitchhiking is illegal, and a passing patrol car stopped to so inform the three youths. They were instructed to get in the back seat of the car for a small lecture.

  As the officer spoke, Richie suddenly flung open the door and ran away, across a nearby field. Annoyed, the policeman elicited Richie’s name from his friends. They said he frequently hung out at a drive-in grocery where kids gathered around a cold-drink machine in the afternoon.

  The policeman went later to the drive-in and saw Richie immediately. He was easy to spot with his shock of red hair. Richie also saw the police car. For a moment, he endured panic. In his pocket were four downs, purchased fifteen minutes earlier.