In a few moments, the dog shuddered and, still in Richie’s lap, died. Richie put the animal down on the grass, ran his hand across it one last time, and ran away, running to his home without stopping, running up the stairs and into George.
Seeing that Richie was upset, disheveled, and with blood on his shirt, George wanted to know what had happened.
Richie ignored the question. He continued to his room.
“What happened?” insisted George. “Were you in a fight?”
Richie slammed the door to his room. He screamed through the wood, “Leave me the fuck alone!”
Neither George nor Carol knew why their son returned home with blood on his shirt that day, or why, once more, he turned profane and truculent, or why he began missing meals, or why his eyes were on fire again and again, or why he lay around his room so often sleeping, sometimes as if in a trance. The dog dying in Richie’s arms perhaps meant nothing in the progress of his life. Perhaps more important was the fact that school would begin in a few days, and just as notebooks and pens and sweaters and jeans and laminated book covers filled the shops of East Meadow, there also turned up a fresh supply of barbiturates. Richie had $375 in his savings account with which to buy all his supplies.
Two weeks into the new school year, Brick had a date to meet Richie at an amusement parlor favored by youngsters who played pinball machines and automatic baseball. Heads like the place as well, for the flashing lights of the machines and the clanging of bells entranced those on a drug trip.
When Brick arrived, a few minutes late, Richie was leaning against the outside wall, his body sagging like an accordion. The manager came out and told Brick, “Get this kid out of here or I’m calling the police.” With some difficulty, Brick threw his arms around his friend and half pulled, half pushed him down the street.
“What are you doin’?” asked Brick, meaning what kind of drugs had Richie taken.
“Downs,” murmured Richie.
There had been a fight at the Diener home, Brick learned, between Richie and his father. Richie had run out of the house into the night with George crying after him, “Now don’t come home high on anything!”
“How many’d you do?” asked Brick.
Richie held up several fingers. It took Eddie an astonished moment to count them. Nine!
“You’re crazy, Diener. You’re really flipped out. Nobody takes nine Seconals at once.” Now Richie had a stranglehold on Brick, an old drunk of seventeen trying to pull his Good Samaritan down to the curb so he could sit awhile.
Brick looked at Richie in a new light. It was suddenly apparent that Richie deliberately set out to get as bombed as he possibly could, for little reason other than defiance of his father. Brick was frightened. He had never seen Richie this way before. He was comfortable with the Richie who did downs and glided across patches of winter ice in hilarious imitation of Charlie Chaplin, he knew and liked the Richie who could impersonate any rock star, he relished the Richie who usually had a fast, sardonic comeback in the voice of W. C. Fields while the pills were rushing over them all.
But now it occurred to Brick that Richie might die, here, on the street, in his arms. With a violent shudder, Richie vomited, on his shoes, on Brick’s jacket. With spasms that shook his body, Richie threw up another half-dozen times.
“Jesus, Diener,” said Brick worried, angry, frightened. “You’re absolutely crazy.”
Richie retched one more time before he was able to stagger with Brick’s arm about him, toward his home.
They had not gone very far before Richie stopped and said, in what Brick took to be a sob, “I don’t give a shit, really.”
Chapter Sixteen
But what of the school where Richie Diener passed seven hours of every weekday under what should be, next to home and family, the most formative of adolescent experience? Was East Meadow High a blackboard jungle, with shattered windows and instructors walking in pairs through the gauntlet of student menace?
In fact, homes are overpriced in East Meadow because the public school system is considered so excellent. East Meadow High, where Richie became a senior in September, 1971, was known for its academic excellence, the small size of its classes—an average of twenty-three students per room—its lovely campus with playing fields and expansive grounds that resembled a small college, and its extracurricular achievements—powerful lacrosse teams, a celebrated marching band called The Jets, a jazz ensemble that won the New England Festival two years in a row, a drama department that put on Broadway plays and musicals such as The Miracle Worker and South Pacific with near-professional style.
By coincidence, or the hand of irony, the almost three years that Richie was in attendance there were also marked by massive change at East Meadow High, transformation from a rigidly conservative institution to one of bold and—to some people’s way of thinking—confusing liberties. George Diener, for example, found it not at all unusual that college students at New York City’s Columbia University should seize command of the dean’s office, or that a protest march at Kent State should be bloodied with bullets from the state guard. The blame for student rebellion, George reasoned, rested heavily on the shoulders of high schools that relaxed discipline and encouraged students to assume voluntary responsibilities.
Nor did George have enthusiasm for the newfangled education, such as the learning centers at East Meadow’s elementary schools, where walls were knocked out of classrooms to make large areas, where teachers did not instruct so much as act as “guides” to the resources of the center, where students chose a “learning contract” and fulfilled it by utilizing film strips, audio aids, books, and research materials.
Both George and Carol believed the swift changes in their sons’ schools were due to the liberal politics of the East Meadow school board, the only elected public officials of the town. Carol often attended board meetings as a spectator—“I like to see what they’re doing with our money,” she told George—and came home annoyed at what liberal notions were doing to old-fashioned education, paid for with conservative tax dollars.
The 2,800 students who poured daily into the low-slung, buff-colored East Meadow High School were participants in a learning process radically different from that of the nuns and hard-line educators who molded both George and Carol in Brooklyn. Had he so desired, Richie could have selected from a dazzling array of courses—Russian, or black history, or communism, or contemporary music, or film-making, or a humanities series called “Man Is a Creative Being.”
In Richie’s senior year, the computer that kept watch over everything from daily attendance to student elections to each child’s scholastic progress decreed that he needed but four required courses to graduate—social studies, mathematics, science, and English. In a school day of eight periods, this left four other periods open. Richie filled two of these with “pass-fail” subjects. When Carol wondered what that new term meant, Richie told her. “All you have to do to pass,” he said, “is show up for class. You don’t get a grade.”
“Must be marvelous,” muttered George. “Really makes a fellow want to put his nose to the grindstone.”
The two remaining periods a day Richie chose to use as study halls. Here was an opportunity for abuse, if a youngster wanted to test the new freedoms at East Meadow High. The school set up four separate study hall areas, each of different character. One was held in the library, which, according to Richie, was “where the lames went.” Another was in the cafeteria, where students could drink hot chocolate and munch sweet rolls. A third was called Quiet Study Hall, where no talking was allowed. This was the only one that George could identify with. The fourth was called Social Study Hall and was held in a refurbished area in the basement with students permitted to “rap and move around socially.”
At the beginning of each school year, a student chose his study hall periods and was given a color-coded pass valuable for access to any of the four areas during a given hour—a red pass for period 4, for example. Theoretically, the pass system
would prohibit youngsters from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there was also the danger of youngsters not being anywhere they were supposed to be. It did not take Richie long to discover that only cursory attendance checks were made of study halls. It was easy to claim that he was in the cafeteria throng, say, when in reality he had left the campus altogether to meet Brick and smoke pot. Brick’s jobs did not last very long, a few weeks at best.
The dean of students, Frank Saracino, was a vigorous supporter of the new student freedoms, even though he recognized the abuse factor. “A lot of parents would like for us to go back to the mid-sixties,” he said in explaining the modern turn his school had taken. “They would like for the school to have a tighter rein, a more structured program, less emphasis on student rights. In the old days, the school was a dependable surrogate parent. Since then there has been a transferral from in loco parentis to application of the Fourteenth Amendment for the pupil. But let’s face it, the child from fifteen to eighteen years old has a much different position in life today than he had a decade ago.”
A major reason for the student liberation was to prepare East Meadow’s youngsters for college, since at least 70 percent of them traditionally pursued higher education—well above national average. “We attempt to combat the mortality rate among college freshmen by giving high school seniors more freedom, more responsibility, more permissions,” says Dean Saracino. “We hope this will prepare our kids better for the permissive atmosphere in college.”
Theoretically, a child could leave the East Meadow High campus only during lunch period, and only with a notarized slip from his parent giving permission—the notary seal requirement being to eliminate forgeries of parents’ names. But, as Dean Saracino candidly admits, “There are 2,800 students, and we can’t keep track of all of them all the time.”
Thus it happened that Richie Diener at seventeen began his senior year in a school that invited him to act with maturity and enjoy its rewards. But if George Diener was right about anything, he was right in complaining that his son was not yet ready for such delights. The school became, in George’s eyes, a factor in his son’s decay.
By 1971 drug use at East Meadow High was alarming—but authorities took refuge in the fact that it seemed no more so than at other suburban schools near big cities around the nation. John Barbour, the principal, commented, “Our school has the same problems as any school in Nassau County. We’re not lily-white, but we’re not the worst, either, and we’re working on it.” Barbour embraced the “cyclical” theory of drug-taking and had a “gut feeling,” with nothing tangible to support it, that the problem was easing by the start of school in 1972. He estimated that the number of regular users of drugs—including marijuana—was less than 500 out of a student population of 2,800. Dean Saracino refused to be that specific, saying instead that there were “a few hundred with serious drug problems.”
“Quite frankly,” said Saracino, “who knows? There are groupies who hang together to take drugs and talk about them, but there are countless unknown ‘loners’ who self-medicate themselves. Somebody’s hassling you? You just pop a pill or two and drop out of the world that day.”
To its credit, the school provided extensive drug information to students and enforced state laws against drug use as best it could. “If a student is caught with drugs,” warned Principal Barbour at orientation lectures each September, “we call the police immediately.”
During the school year, students were also exposed to drug education lectures in health classes. Social workers from drug clinics in the area held voluntary rap sessions for students after school. Teachers were encouraged by the administration to be on the alert for suspected drug users. This had not always been the case.
Until 1971 teachers were reluctant to accuse a child as a drug user for fear of retaliation: a civil suit for slander could be filed if the youngster turned out to be ill from a virus or taking prescribed medication. The New York State legislature, however, passed a new law in 1971 that held teachers “safe harmless” from civil suits. A teacher who reported a youngster for possible drug use would be in the same protected situation as a football coach who, while demonstrating how to block, broke a youngster’s leg.
For its faculty the East Meadow school administration established a course on drug abuse and how to spot users. But only some three hundred out of eight hundred high school teachers (East Meadow has two high schools) voluntarily took the course. “We are in a new era of teacher militancy,” says Dean Saracino. “We cannot force teachers to take such courses. It’s voluntary under their contracts.”
If a student was suspected of using drugs at school, technically no law was violated. It is not a crime to be under the influence of drugs, only to possess or sell them. The teacher who spotted a youngster nodding in class, or acting erratically, was instructed to ask the suspect to go to the school nurse. If the student refused, the assistant principal was summoned. If the student was ambulatory, and stoned, the parent was called to take him home. If the student was grossly incoherent, he was taken—forcibly if necessary, with the aid of police—to emergency room facilities directly across the street at Meadowbrook Hospital.
During the first three days of school in September, 1970, there was a severe drug case each day. Three students collapsed and were sent on stretchers across the street to Meadowbrook Hospital. When a child collapsed in the hallway from an overdose, or suddenly attacked a teacher, it was simple to suspect drug use. But many other youngsters were veteran enough at the game, and sophisticated enough in their dosage, to function at what would seem normal to any teacher. “If a kid is stoned every day,” said Saracino, “then that’s the way he is.”
Even more difficult is catching students with drugs in their pocket. “Possession,” said Saracino, “is very hard to prove. Especially with pills. When pot was the drug, it was not brought to school often. If you got caught, you couldn’t get rid of it. If you threw it into your mouth, you were going to cough it right out. Pills, however, are a very convenient item. They are portable and very easy to dispose of in times of crisis. Just swallow the evidence. The worst you can do is become very drowsy if they’re downs, or very skittish if they’re ups.”
George Diener picked up information around town that it was possible to buy or sell any type of drug in the corridors and playgrounds of East Meadow High, that pot-smoking was so routine in the boys’ toilets that teachers were loath to enter. He said to Carol that he didn’t understand why the school did not put a policeman in the hallway to at least inhibit the drug traffic.
Dean Saracino received that suggestion several times a year from parents. To them he replied, “Sure, drugs are available in our schools, they are available in society. If the problem exists in a kid’s life, the problem that induces him to use drugs, then the problem will exist in his school as well. Youngsters spend a major portion of their lives here; it is their principal social contact. We have 2,800 students and there are an estimated one million interactions a day. If I see a group of kids waiting for someone in a certain area of the building on one day, and again the next, and my suspicion is aroused, then on the third day the seller has changed his rendezvous point. You cannot have a fascist, totalitarian system in a school. We cannot have policemen patrolling around. Not only would it intrude on the business of education, it would make kids even more uptight. They would feel they were being hassled.”
George Diener felt a little hassling might not be out of line, for he once heard his son brag on the telephone to an unknown friend, “You can get anything you want at school. You want a hundred dollars’ worth of dope? Give me a shopping list and one hundred dollars, and thirty minutes later I’ll be back with whatever you want.”
On October 19, 1971, Carol received a telephone call from the school office informing her that Richie was “extensively cutting” his pass-fail contemporary music course. This was the first disciplinary entry on his school record. Carol questioned him about it that night, but Richie
answered, “The course is a snap, it doesn’t mean anything.” He was cutting it now and then to use extra time in study hall for more difficult subjects necessary to graduate. This seemed like a good explanation to Carol.
A few days later, Richie came down with a cold and a hacking cough. His mother suspected once again that the cough was aggravated by marijuana. To her there was no other sensible explanation for an otherwise robust seventeen-year-old who went around coughing and clearing his throat so much of the time. When the cold evolved into bronchitis and then pneumonia, Richie was ordered to bed by the family doctor for two weeks and put on antibiotics. On his second day at home, Carol received another call from the school to verify that Richie was really sick. During the conversation Carol further learned, to her astonishment, that Richie had been truant from school fourteen days since classes began two months earlier in September.
Carol demanded an explanation and Richie had a quick one. He often arrived at home room a few minutes late, he said, and was thus counted absent by an errant computer. “It’s no big deal,” he said, throwing in his favorite disclaimer. “Don’t worry about it.” Carol was so worried about her son’s health that she did not seriously examine his story.
When Richie returned to school, Carol was summoned to the telephone on the morning of November 23, 1971, at the junior high school cafeteria where she worked preparing lunches. The assistant principal at East Meadow High was on the line, asking if Carol could hurry over to pick up Richie. That morning Richie had first threatened a woman teacher who was monitoring cafeteria study hall, then tried to attack the school nurse who was trying to question him, finally behaving “abusively” to the assistant principal.
Carol hung up and, never good at lying, mumbled to her superior that Richie had been “taken ill at school” and that she would have to take him home.
At the high school, Carol discovered Richie slumped arrogantly in the nurse’s office. His half-mast eyes, a deep red, welcomed her. He smiled, lopsidedly, sullenly. When he stood up, he swayed gently. While Richie waited outside, the assistant principal took Carol behind closed doors and related in detail the morning’s chain of trouble. The nurse said she had asked Richie if he was “taking medication” and he replied affirmatively.
Richie Page 17