Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  “At first,” noted Frank Saracino, dean of students at East Meadow High, “pot use was of the ‘weekend warrior’ type. It was unthinkable to bring it into schools.”

  Saracino heard stories of a few youngsters “getting high” on weekends, but their attendance and behavior at school during the week was normal. By 1965, however, grass was as much a part of middle- and late-teen culture as a clandestine beer had been thirty years earlier.

  “Kids are very fad-conscious,” says Saracino. “They struggle to be identified with peer groups. They may mouth around that they want no part of the masses, that they want to be individuals and do their own thing, but they can’t deny the comfort of the group.

  “Suddenly out here it wasn’t the bad guy using drugs, the hood, the wasted kid. It was youngsters with status in the youth community. It was kids who could influence others, kids who had direction, who were college-bound, whose prognosis was success in life.”

  In 1966 there was a brief infatuation with drinking codeine cough syrup and glue-sniffing, followed by a two-year season of LSD. Amphetamines, or “ups” as they were known, rushed into favor in 1969-70, only to be replaced by barbiturates.

  “Where we are now,” said Dr. Victoria Sears of the Nassau County Drug Abuse Council, “is, quite frankly, a horror.” She was speaking in 1972, which, by early autumn, was scarred by not only the same national outburst of barbiturate abuse, but by alarming increases in favor for cocaine, and, surprisingly, alcohol. “I’m seeing kids who are turning from barbiturate users to acute alcoholics in less than six months.”

  East Meadow does not have an independent police force, nor do any of the some seventy villages and towns wedged together in the huge county. They depend upon the Nassau County Police Department for law enforcement. Before 1963 there was no separate division to deal with drug offenses. Such investigation was under the arm of ordinary detective work. Only fifty-odd arrests were made in the drug category that year. It was considered less of a community problem than shoplifting.

  When police noted a disquieting increase in both using and selling drugs, a separate Narcotics Bureau was established. Growth of this bureau is the most graphic testimony to drug activity in the county where all the George and Carol Dieners had put down new roots.

  By 1971 the Narcotics Bureau of the Nassau County Police Department was the largest single agency of the force, its personnel far outnumbering those in homicide or robbery or even traffic, astonishing in one of America’s wealthiest counties, where there seem to be more automobiles than humans. The number of drug-related arrests rose from less than 50, in 1963, to 3,257 in 1971, and even that latest figure was down from the year before because the Narcotics Bureau shifted its arrest emphasis from the individual user to the bigger fish of the trade.

  A cop named Jim Henderson bossed the bureau during the years it swelled with men and arrests. A tough-looking man with a bristling crew cut, a ruddy face, and a brusque voice whose tone was that of a police report, he kept a large map of Nassau County behind his desk, with colored pins clustered together to mark scenes of narcotics arrests. Some of the villages were completely covered by purple-headed pins, indicating one kind of drug, or pink or green for others. East Meadow was heavily pinned, but by no means more so than a dozen other towns within a few miles of its borders.

  When a visitor to his office in the winter of 1972 commented on the map, Chief Henderson thumped his fist against the wall. A shower of pins fell out and onto the floor. “It’s not current anymore,” he said as he leaned over to pick up the pins. “We’ve simply run out of space.” He juggled a handful of pins. Each perhaps was a memory for him, for he looked at them as a man browses through a family album. “Right now the kids favor pills,” he said. “Barbs, chiefly. Pill-taking is so widespread, I sometimes think we’re only scratching the surface no matter how many arrests we make. We don’t know what’s out there. You’d need a crystal ball.”

  When Richie Diener first began using secobarbitals in 1970, he was not among the avant-garde of his community. For almost a year before, Henderson and his squad had been encountering puzzling popularity for both ups and downs. One November, four high schools reported OD’s in the same week. One child was carried out of school on a stretcher. Such events came in rashes, noted Henderson. When a big shipment of illegal pills hit his community, he could expect overdoses for weeks thereafter.

  During one such siege, Henderson was annoyed to hear that a high school principal had gotten on the public address system of his building and announced to the student body that “adulterated and contaminated” pills were being sold on the street and it would not be a good idea either to buy or to use them. “This seems like strange psychology to me,” barked Henderson to the officers who brought in the report. “Why the hell didn’t he get on his PA and tell those kids that barbs are dangerous and potentially deadly?”

  When Henderson addressed civic groups or student organizations, he had a catalog of horror to relate. He did not believe that youngsters could be frightened out of drug use, but he did feel justified in letting people know a few of the tragedies going on around them.

  Two youngsters burglarized a drugstore near East Meadow and stole 250 barbiturates. They decided to get high. They sat down in front of the living-room television set, turned it on, and took two pills each. Checking their watches, they waited fifteen minutes. When that time had passed, they took two more because nothing interesting had happened. And, fifteen minutes after that, two more. So on and on until each had swallowed twelve. Suddenly one of the boys said, “I feel chilly.” He was chilly. He was dead. The other, discovered and rushed to a hospital where his stomach was pumped out, survived.

  Another teen-age boy, known as a “garbage head” because he would take anything to get high, popped barbiturates and went into his mother’s kitchen seeking something else to extend his high. He drank half a bottle of lye. The autopsy was particularly grim. One detective on Henderson’s squad attended and reported back that the boy’s esophagus looked as if moths had been eating at it.

  In Roslyn, one of Nassau County’s wealthiest towns, Henderson kept his eye on a poignant case. A father there was afraid to go home. His son, a pill freak, waited each night and tried to throw the older man down the stairs.

  Occasionally a parent would ask Henderson how the pills get around and why youngsters take them. For the first part of the question, he had a detailed answer. “Just a few days ago” he recounted in early 1972, “we caught up with one local kid, nice boy around fifteen, who had phonied up a federal drug license and somehow obtained a pharmacist’s number and began ordering large quantities of pills from drug houses. The day we arrested him, he had just received 15,000 pills in the U.S. mail. His total investment had been around seventy-five dollars. At three for a dollar on the school playground, you figure out his profit.

  “He wouldn’t have had difficulty in selling them, because the marketplace is any school, public or parochial, in Nassau County—or any other metropolitan area in the U.S. for that matter. It’s also neighborhood street corner, the baseball diamond, the parking lot of the hamburger stand where kids hang out.

  “So far the dealers in pills around here seem to be mainly kids or young adults, with no big guys from the city moving in—yet. We have no evidence that organized crime is involved. The main reason, I suppose, is that the profit margin is smaller than with heroin.

  “Another source is the family medicine cabinet. If a kid gets into using barbs, a lot of them start their habit at home. All these mamas out here in suburbia who can’t sleep have no trouble getting a bottle of secobarbital from the family doctor. And with a hundred pills in the jar, is she going to miss the ten or twelve her kid steals?

  “Then there are forged prescriptions. A kid visits his doctor on a sham, and when the doctor turns his back, the kid grabs a pad of prescription blanks. He can read The World Almanac in his school library, to learn medical abbreviations in a prescription. We have kids going into
hospitals and stealing prescription pads from nursing stations. We have burglaries of hospitals and drugstores and pharmaceutical houses. One drug manufacturer in Plainview came to work one morning and discovered he had been hit bad. There was even a trail of pills leading out into the parking lot.”

  After hearing Henderson rummage mentally through the colored pins on his map, one parent asked the second part of the question. Why?

  Henderson shook his head. A tiredness always then swept his face. “I’ve talked to thousands of these kids,” he answered. “None of them feel they’re going to get hooked. All of them feel they’re smarter than the drug. I’ve heard the story so many times. ‘I took it first on a Saturday night and planned never to do it again.’ Only by the next Wednesday, he’s feeling a little low and tries it again.”

  But these are logistics and statistics. Why do the children put, not beans in their nose, but pills in their mouth?

  “Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “Ask them. Ask a psychiatrist.”

  Dr. Victoria Sears never saw Richie Diener around the Nassau County Drug Abuse Council, although his friend Brick Pavall and parents attended group therapy sessions for more than a year. She never met George Diener, either, or Carol, but she counseled daily with their counterparts. Always their questions, those troubling ones, were “Why?” and “Why here?”

  To answer, the brunet psychiatrist had numerous options. She could have quoted from the Second Interim Report of the Nassau County Probation Department’s Continuing Research Study of Drug Abuse, a thick green report full of statistics. It held that drug use stemmed from three factors: (1) environmental and cultural change rapidly altering the face of suburbia and causing social pathology, social instability, normlessness; (2) the “vicious circle” concept, in which users need more drugs, and when more drugs come into the community, more users are created; or (3) the law of probability or chance, meaning that the mere fact of drugs being in the culture creates a risk situation for many nonusers, with certain individuals being more vulnerable than others.

  More specifically, Dr. Sears could have drawn on any of the hundreds of case histories poured out in stops and starts and silences across her desk since she began drug work in 1966. At the very moment George Diener tossed in his bed and murmured bewilderment to Carol, Dr. Sears was counseling a twelve-year-old girl who was the adoration of an affluent, high-powered family. “She was a big hit in elementary school,” said Dr. Sears, “a leader, popular, a good student. But when she got to jurior high, she wasn’t that much of a hit. She struggled awhile before she found ‘popularity’ and ‘acceptance’ through pills. She found that getting stoned won her a place in at least one circle of friends.”

  But that was only one child and one set of circumstances. When Dr. Sears drove her car through the gentle, groomed neighborhoods of the community where she both lived and worked, she noticed more universal reasons. These gave her cause to drop the clinical demeanor of a professional and speak more as a troubled resident and parent when she discussed them:

  “In a healthy society, people don’t use drugs. People have an identity, a purpose. People are too valuable! Fifty or a hundred years ago in America, kids would have been called upon to work for the family, to bring money to the house, to contribute someway, or—if they felt like it—to ship out on a whaling boat or look for gold or find something to do with excitement and dignity. There isn’t that anymore. Kids feel that nobody needs them, nobody really wants them, that they are just another possession. There’s nothing important for them to do!

  “After the war, young couples flocked to East Meadow and its equivalents, full of dreams and bursting with enthusiasm. Everything was going to be great. A philosophy developed here—Achieve! Progress! Win! The pressure for achievement and the parental anxiety for their children to achieve became so great that many kids began to believe, ‘I’ll never please anybody. I’m bad. I’ll get stoned.’ They walked round East Meadow and they saw houses just alike, block after block, and there was nothing to do, no place to go.

  “I’ve had kids say to me, ‘If I don’t do drugs, I’ll be nothing. I’d rather be a dope fiend than be nothing.’

  “I’ve had parents say to me, ‘I wish my kid was dead.’ Parents see their kids as extensions of themselves, and when the kid acts bad, they would destroy him.

  “I’ve seen kids on barbiturates go into a ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ state—attacking people twice as big as they are.”

  When the Diener case broke that February of 1972, Dr. Sears was saddened. But not shocked. She was, in fact, privately surprised that such a tragedy did not occur more often in the little villages that nudged one another in Nassau County. “Richie Diener,” she said, “was unconsciously demonstrating to his father, ‘Here’s what you are! A failure!’ It must have been an awful time for them both.”

  PART THREE

  George and Richie

  Chapter Twelve

  On a hot summer night in 1970, the front screen door of the Diener home flew open and Richie burst forth, leaping the concrete steps, bolting across the freshly mown lawn, his face consumed with anger. Seconds later, George erupted in pursuit. In his right hand he held a threatening small piece of rubber hose. For a moment he debated whether to chase his son to the corner, where Richie was racing to be swallowed up by the mob of kids hanging out there, draping themselves across lawns and car hoods, tape recorders shattering the languid July heat.

  But he stopped. There were neighbors outside, this early evening, people leading normal lives, mowing lawns and sipping drinks. He did not want them to witness the spectacle of him sprinting down a sidewalk in pursuit of his son, who by now was surrounded by allies. Wearily, George turned and went back into the house where, once again, Carol’s dinner had been ruined.

  She was sitting alone at the remains of her half-eaten food, staring at the row of family pictures on the wall beside the dining-room table. The one common denominator in all the faces framed in gilt and fine woods, thought George, is a smile. Richie is smiling. I am smiling. Carol is smiling. If I came into this house and saw this gallery, I would envy the people who smile in these photographs. Where have they gone?

  Carol quickly rose and started clearing the dishes. George knew that she did not want him to see the sadness that welled in her eyes after the last moments of this latest quarrel.

  As he walked to the bedroom to put away the piece of rubber hose, George muttered to no one, “I told him he couldn’t leave the house.” George dropped the hose into a drawer; he had cut it a few weeks earlier during another confrontation and brought it out now and then as an exclamation point. Thus far he had only brandished it. Often he wondered if he could actually crash it down on the body of his own son.

  George sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. They come regularly now, he thought to himself. Almost like some grotesque play with performances scheduled regularly in the theater of my living room. I cannot even remember the opening scene anymore, only that they commence from nothing, build to something, building, every one of them, building to the conclusion of yelling and slammed doors and disobeyed orders.

  Joining Carol in the living room, he could hear the noise from the corner. Perhaps he would call the police again and beseech them once more to break up the teen-age congregation that gathered each summer evening a hundred feet from his home. The first time he had called police headquarters to complain about the mob of fifty kids tearing up the sanctity of his neighborhood, dancing, taunting passing motorists, wrestling on the grass, the officer who took the call said that there had been other complaints, and that the nightly occurrence was being watched. A police car moseyed about the neighborhood, and a few youngsters scattered, but the next night they were back.

  “Brick Pavall is the pack leader down there,” said Carol. She gestured with her head toward the sounds, strong enough now to come through the closed front door and interfere with the television dialogue.

  “I saw him,” said George, grimacin
g.

  Carol said that neighborhood rumor had it Brick threatened his parents, and that the bearded boy, now eighteen, was hiding out in somebody’s garage. “He sent some little kid over to his mother’s house for some clothes with the message that if she didn’t do as she was told, Brick would burn the house down.” Carol related the story dryly. She added, almost hesitantly, the information that Russell was swiping apples and cookies from the pantry and taking them down to feed Brick.

  “Well, he doesn’t stay holed up in any garage very long,” said George, “because he’s down there right now throwing eggs at cars and shouting profanity at anybody who is unlucky enough to drive by.”

  Pretending to become absorbed in television, George watched the program. But Carol, crocheting, knew that he had no interest this night in anything but the spectacle so close to his home.

  At that moment, Richie was telling Brick of the fight he had had just to get out of the house. “Did you see my father chase me into the yard with the rubber hose in his hand?” said Richie loudly. “He stopped because there were neighbors around and he didn’t want them to see him take after me with a hose.”

  Brick wanted to know what had caused the blowup.

  “He said he didn’t like you,” answered Richie informatively. “But don’t feel bad. He doesn’t like Mark or Peanuts, either. Or me, for that matter.”

  “We all got hassles,” said Brick.

  “But not on Blackstone Avenue in the summertime, right?” put in the boyish soprano voice of Mark Epstein, who with Peanuts Coleson had formed an inseparable quartet with Richie and Brick.

  The “Blackstone Summer,” as it came to be known, was a phenomenon that lasted only a few weeks, but one that tore at George for months afterward. It seemed to symbolize to him the rot setting in, growing within his son and his community. So abhorrent did George find the gatherings that Richie for the most part obeyed his father’s order to stay clear of the corner. Only rarely did Richie go there, and then by a circuitous route that he followed for several blocks, slipping carefully into the rear of the group, keeping an eye and an ear open for his father’s house, so very near.