“If every kid in East Meadow who smokes grass had to go to Drug Abuse,” said Richie, “they’d have to hold the meetings in Shea Stadium.”
Soon afterward Carol read in a local newspaper that Burger King was opening a new hamburger restaurant in nearby Bethpage. She suggested that Richie put in an application for work. He readily agreed and came back with the happy news that he had been accepted. He would start work in early May. This meant that Carol would have to drive her son to work and pick him up, but she held hope that he could be transferred to the East Meadow store if his work was satisfactory.
In late April, George took his son to Family Court for the preliminary talks. There Richie was informed that, in the opinion of his father, he was “so deporting himself to willfully injure or endanger the morals or health of himself.” Caseworker Ozur talked first to Richie alone, then with George. He suggested, not decreed, that both parents and son should go to the Nassau County Drug Abuse Council for counseling before the court took further action.
A full hearing was set for May 17, 1971, before a Family Court judge who would, said the caseworker, be interested to know if the family was indeed going to the Drug Abuse Council.
At home that evening, Richie once again refused. “I’m starting work after school and nights,” he said. “I won’t have time to go to any meetings, and besides, I don’t think I need it.”
George bided his time. He did not relish attending meetings with a psychologist any more than his son. But, of course, he did not say so.
On the day of the hearing, George went alone to Family Court and found himself standing in front of a formidable woman judge named Beatrice Burstein. A woman in her late fifties with several children of her own, with a deeply tanned face and dark pouches of overwork beneath her eyes, she spoke with a husky voice. Judge Burstein had a weary air about her, as if she had heard every tale of human despair to be told—she took the waters at Vichy, France, each summer to cleanse her head—but there remained a deep compassion for children. She was known as a judge who took any possible step to avoid sending a child to a state institution. For most of them, she charged openly, were “horrors.” Often she would dip into her purse and find ten dollars for a boy who needed a bed for the night, or interrupt court to go to her chambers and make furious telephone calls trying to find a job for some youthful defendant.
Judge Burstein called George’s name, and he appeared before her with erect military posture. He had rehearsed his speech.
“I wish to withdraw the charge I filed against my son,” he said. “Richie is working at Burger King and things are going better at home.”
Noting that the complaint had been filed less than a month before, Judge Burstein quickly read over the caseworker’s information. She peered at George and spoke sharply.
“You mean that your son has made a miraculous recovery?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Then you want to give him another chance?”
“If he had acted like this before, I would never have brought charges against him.”
“I accept the withdrawal,” said Judge Burstein, scribbling something rapidly on the case file. “The court is pleased when problems can be worked out at home.”
As George left the chambers, anxious to be in his old Chevrolet and about his sales work, anxious to be gone from the haunting faces in the corridors of the court, Judge Burstein called after him, “I still think it would be beneficial for you and your son to go to the Drug Abuse Council.”
George nodded, but he did not obey the judge. Nor did Richie. It is a fair question to wonder why George Diener would wash his family linen in public waters, even though the proceedings were confidential, yet would not seek the professional counseling recommended over and over again for himself and his son. Money could not have been the issue here, because therapy at Drug Abuse was free to residents of Nassau County. Even had George decided that a private psychiatrist could best sort out the problems, Carol could have borrowed the money from her parents. Certainly she did not want them to know what was going on in her house, but there was no doubt in her mind that any sum she asked, they would grant. For that matter, if a man can borrow $800 to pay for summer camp, he can find money for a doctor.
Once again, there were two levels to George’s action. On the surface, on the level of conversation with Carol, George pronounced psychiatry to be of a slightly liberal taint, a spoiled fruit not to be partaken of by a good conservative. “I just don’t have much faith in that sort of thing,” he told Carol, his tone indicating he placed psychiatry on a level with voodoo. “And besides, the only time those shrinks can accomplish anything is when the person in question wants help—and Richie doesn’t want help. Every time I mention it, he is vehemently against it.” But on that deeper plane, where the truth lodged in private recesses, George did not want anyone tampering with his head, violating his privacy, questioning his way of life. I am forty-two years old, George was saying to himself, and I am halfway through my life. I do not need a left-wing psychiatrist to tell me what’s wrong with me. My ego is as fragile as one of Carol’s china cups, anyway.
The job at Burger King lasted little more than two months. At first Richie had enjoyed counter work, stuffing hamburgers into slip sacks, filling cups with root beer, serving them to customers with a quip or a flip remark. With his bright red hair and cheery face, he was a good man to have in front of the public. He took his first paycheck, for $32.78, showed it to his mother, and opened a savings account, proudly vowing that he was going to hoard every available dollar to buy a car.
From mid-May to mid-July, 1971, Carol basked in one of the most pleasant periods in her home and family for two years. She did not say to George, “I told you so,” but this nonetheless was how she felt. She knew, she always knew that one day Richie would get a job and dress overnight in the garment of maturity. Work was giving her son responsibility. He was certainly learning about the value of money. Every time he showed his mother his growing passbook, she exulted in his thrift. The Brick-Mark-Peanuts clique seemed less important to Richie, for they were rarely around anymore. Brick had telephoned a couple of times, but Carol recognized his deep, dark voice and hung up on him, even when he used a code name.
George was not yet ready to proclaim a miracle, but even he was impressed. It was obvious to him that the reason Richie was so improved could be found in his dash to Family Court.
But one night in July Richie came home from work early. The first thing Carol noticed was that he walked a little unsteadily. The second was that his eyes were a vivid red. Richie explained it all by saying that he was tired. Moreoever, he was depressed. He had quit his job, he said, just a jump ahead of being laid off. There were several reasons, the principal one being that he had been unfairly given “all the dirty work.” His assignment was to clean up after closing, which meant carrying out dozen of sacks of garbage and mopping floors. Moreover, the store had hired too many people for the grand opening weeks, and several would be let go. He decided to beat his boss to it.
Carol was disappointed, but she comforted her son. Perhaps with his experience he could find another job. Now that he had gone through the trauma of a job interview, he could certainly do so again with ease.
Richie did not tell his mother the real story. He was fired, not for any of the reasons he mentioned, but because the restaurant manager found him “sneaky, often late for work, undependable, usually cutting up with some other kids, and talking about pot.” Except for the reference to marijuana, it could have been the remarks of his elementary school teacher.
Nor did Richie tell his mother that there had been no barbiturates around East Meadow for several weeks. Brick speculated that the feds were cracking down. But on this night he had bought a dozen, and three were working with him and coloring his eyes and shaking his steps as he entered his home.
There were signs, some clearly visible to George and Carol, others known only to himself, that Richie wrestled with his soul in the
remaining summer months of 1971. The evidence was that he was not entirely happy with the direction of his life and with the friends he had chosen. On his wall, amid the vivid displays of rock and psychedelia, near a game he had stapled up called “Feds ’n Heads” (sample instructions: “The judge has been paid off, move three steps”), Richie pasted up a strip poster reading: MARIJUANA KILLS. By itself, the legend would have been facetious. But next to this he placed another warning: LSD IS A BAD TRIP, and next to this, almost in exclamation point, he pinned up the red cover logo from the magazine Life.
While cleaning the room one day, Carol discovered a card from Topic House, a drug therapy clinic in Nassau County. Was he saving it for future reference, wondered Carol? Or was he actually going there? She wanted to ask her son, but she was afraid of interrupting a private mission or of tampering with an idea that was rolling around in his head. Now and then Richie pulled down one of the forgotten nature books and fell asleep reading. This excited Carol most of all. She elected not to mention this either, for fear she might extinguish the rekindled flame, if one was burning at all.
Always careful about his appearance, Richie became fastidious, dressing only in neatly ironed shirts and pants—thereby increasing Carol’s work load—and in highly polished shoes, with such overall care that he seemed to be rebelling against the celebrated slovenliness of the blue-jean generation. He spent hours in front of the bathroom mirror, attacking the tight red curls of his hair and trying to shape them into the smooth length of young fashion. Finally he went to Carol and asked for fifteen dollars, necessary to have his hair professionally straightened. The passion seemed so important that Carol agreed, but when the work was done, Richie professed even greater unhappiness. “Now,” he said morosely, “it looks like a Brillo soap pad.”
His room and his closet were kept militarily neat, unlike the rooms of the other teen-age boys he knew. Had Richie gone to that psychiatrist, it might have been learned that because he so cluttered one corner of his psyche with drug-taking, it was important that he keep the place in which he lived as orderly as possible.
He did things, “square” things, “lame” things that his head friends found puzzling. The retarded children’s charity of which Carol was president scheduled a gala dinner dance at the New York Hilton in New York. Members were asked to sell raffle tickets for an automobile—five chances for a dollar—and if a hundred dollars’ worth was sold, the seller would get a free admission to the ball. Carol mentioned the plan to Richie, and much to her surprise, he wanted to go. Father and eldest son spent weekends at shopping centers, pushing raffle tickets, until enough were sold to grant Richie and Sheila free entrance to the Hilton ball.
The accomplishment and Richie’s interest so elated Carol that she let him buy a new suit for the occasion. Richie selected a gray, conservatively cut Edwardian model, hardly the kind worn to Fillmore East. On the gala evening, Carol’s eyes grew misty as she watched her son dance across the glittering ballroom with Sheila in his arms. Everyone complimented Carol on having such a handsome, well-mannered son. She held tightly to George as they danced, seeing in his eyes a glow of pride as well. If there can be laughter and music and warmth on this special night, thought Carol, surely there can be more.
The fact of the matter was that Richie impressed most adults with whom he came in contact. Brick Pavall’s mother often called her son’s best friend “that redheaded angel with the halo that tilts a little now and then.” Your only problem, Mrs. Pavall told Richie when he sat in her living room waiting for Brick to come down the stairs, is that “you talk too much.”
“Whatta you mean?” asked Richie, the first time she made the charge, knowing full well her answer.
“Because you’ve always got to have the last word,” said Mrs. Pavall. “Usually it’s funny, sometimes it’s fresh mouth.”
Richie’s aunt, June Marck, made the mistake of commenting on Richie’s heft when he was plump. Years later, as if he had stored up the grievance and was waiting for an opportunity to get back, he began calling her “Aunt Totie,” after the corpulent comedienne. Aunt June had put on a few pounds. “Nobody ever scores one on you, do they, Richie?” she said. “Touché.”
Another neighborhood woman, Mrs. O’Hara, whose son Sean maintained an on-again, off-again friendship with Richie, found him to be “the most personable kid ever to come to my house.” During the late-summer months of 1971, Richie almost clung to Sean O’Hara and Bob Simmons, both “straight,” both good students, both dedicated to eventual college, both tolerant of the drug culture but participants only as occasional pot smokers. Both worked delicately on Richie to turn him away from downs.
Mrs. O’Hara knew nothing of her son’s missionary work in this field, only that Richie was a polite and cheerful guest in her house. “His personality was vibrant,” she would later say. “I was always glad to have him come to family parties—we have six children and our house is a stomping ground. I don’t know what I’d do if there weren’t at least twenty kids here on a summer weekend.
“Richie never came in my house without first going out to the den and saying hello to my husband and my eighty-year-old uncle. He usually had a joke or something funny to tell them. Then he’d help cook and serve drinks and clean the dining-room table—without being asked. That’s unusual to say the least for a teen-age boy. Usually they’re so worried about people looking at them and judging them and thinking bad of them. I always thought Richie seemed hungry for family life.”
On one of the last summer weekends, Richie called around one Saturday morning looking for a way to pass the afternoon. Bob Simmons was working, Sean O’Hara was out on errands. George had taken Russell to baseball practice at the Little League field, Carol was visiting her sister, June. The yellow house was quiet, wrapped in summer languor. Bridget, the poodle, was asleep in a living-room chair as she usually was. Then Brick’s call broke the loneliness.
“Whatta you doin’, Diener?”
“Nothin’.”
“Wanna drive around? Maybe go to the beach?”
Richie quickly agreed. He had not seen Brick for more than two weeks, having been in one of his “straight periods” in which he preferred the company of Sean or Bob. But he had no desire to hang around an empty house all day.
“Meet me on the corner,” said Brick routinely, for he always picked up Richie there, realizing he was not welcome in the Diener house.
Richie slipped into a pair of bathing trunks and pulled his jeans over them.
On the way to the beach, Brick drove unsteadily. “You off on something?” asked Richie.
“From last night,” answered Brick. “I did four downs.”
“How much’d you pay?”
“Two for a dollar. Pharmaceuticals. Fantastic stuff. Mark got ’em from Cantrell.”
They picked up two of Brick’s friends, boys that Richie knew only slightly. Both were already high on grass. They also had bottles of strawberry wine, which, at eighty-nine cents, was fast growing in popularity among pot smokers. They are always thirsty.
At Jones Beach, Brick and his two friends ran immediately to the surf and watched the cold waves break about their bare feet. Richie held back. When the others settled down on a blanket and turned up the radio to WABC, Richie moved to join them. But suddenly he heard his name being called.
Looking down the beach a hundred yards, he saw a gang of straight kids, including one student leader at East Meadow, and a girl named Melissa, a redhead like him, whom he had met at Ryan’s bar. With a smile and a wave, he headed toward them. But halfway there he stopped, as if he had reached the end of the rope that restrained him. He looked back at Brick and his entourage, who were paying no attention. He looked ahead at the others. For several moments he stood suspended between the two sets of his friends that he so carefully kept apart. He seemed unable to commit to either side. Finally he sat down on a sand dune almost equidistant between the two walls of his life. Alone, the sun reddening his fair shoulders, he looked out
at the sea.
Finally, a decision apparently made, he walked back to Brick. A joint had been freshly lit and he accepted it. There was a quarter bottle of the sweet wine left, which he drained in one swallow. Then he stretched out and listened to the music and did not look down the beach again.
On the way home, Brick’s car went dead at a traffic light several blocks from Richie’s neighborhood. In the back seat, his belly warm from the sun, from the strawberry wine and the marijuana, Richie grew impatient. He jumped out and left Brick, in a similar condition, trying to get the belligerent machine started.
Richie found it difficult to walk. At first the pavement felt like marshmallows under his feet, springing him softly along his way. Then, as he told Brick later that night, the texture turned coarse and hard, pricking his feet through the soles of his tennis shoes as if he were an Indian fakir walking on a bed of nails. He said the journey felt like “a thousand miles across East Meadow.”
He saw a bunch of little boys ahead, gathered around something. He entered the gathering and saw a mongrel dog lying near the curb. Blood dribbled from the black and white spotted animal. He had been crushed by a hit-run car. A child of six or seven was loudly crying. Somebody had gone to a nearby house to call a veterinarian, but neither the messenger nor the doctor had returned. Richie knelt beside the dog and touched it gently, the dying creature breathing in gasps and rattles. In a gentle voice, Richie comforted it. One of the little kids cautioned, “Better watch out, kid, he’ll bite you.” Richie shook his head. With tender hands, he lifted the dog and held it in his lap. A neighbor woman came upon the scene and saw the older, red-haired boy softly crying. She assumed it was his dog that was hurt.
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