Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  “He said he was still taking antibiotics for his pneumonia,” said the nurse. “He said he took two on the school bus this morning and they made him sleepy and made him act strangely.” But the nurse’s tone indicated that she did not believe him.

  Carol summoned her courage. Somehow she had always suspected this day would come, and it would do no good to hide from the revelation any longer. “Do you think he was taking something else?” she asked. The nurse nodded.

  “Drugs?” The nurse nodded once more. Probably barbiturates, she guessed.

  It was the first hard information that either Carol or George had received from an adult authority that Richie was using drugs other than marijuana, even though he had been on them for more than eighteen months. The land where Carol lived, bounded by Naïveté on one side and Not Wanting to Know on the other, was suddenly under invasion, by an enemy she could no longer ignore.

  One last embarrassment awaited Carol. When she left the assistant principal’s office and walked over to her waiting son, Richie refused to leave the school. Proclaiming loudly that he had been falsely accused, that he had been but briefly discombobulated by the antibiotics, he threatened and cursed anyone who dared touch him. Despair filled Carol. She did not know how to handle this. Gently she tried to persuade him that he was “tired,” that he should rest at home for the remainder of the day. In answer, Richie glared at his mother with the reddened eyes. But in her eyes, he saw the tears he did not have.

  After she took Richie home and put him to bed, Carol drove back to the cafeteria and en route she made a decision: I’m going back there and tell them the truth; I’m going to make a clean breast of it. They are my friends. They’ll understand.

  Desperately, at this moment, Carol needed a confidant. She yearned for another pair of ears besides her husband’s to accept the turmoil churning within her. From the day two years earlier when the summer camp owner telephoned the Diener home and said Richie was being expelled, throughout the roller coaster that their lives had become, Carol had never told another person of the trouble. Nor had George, save for the caseworker at Family Court and Judge Burstein, but their attention was coolly official and of no comfort to Carol. Neither she nor George ever asked their family doctor what to do, or their minister, or their friends (some of whom were trying to cope with similar difficulties in their own homes), or their families. Carol could no longer count the nights when she sat down at the dining-room table after the house was asleep and began a letter to her parents in North Carolina, fully intending to bare her soul and plead for help. But always she lifted her pen after a sentence or two and crumpled the paper and threw it deep into the trash. It would take a fifty-page letter to tell everything, she rationalized, and it would shatter the peace of their retirement, and even then, no one could understand, no one who is not living through this hell.

  But as she walked into the lunchroom she lost her courage and decided once more not to tell anyone what tormented her. She put on her white apron and began serving the meat loaf she had prepared an hour or two before. “I looked at them all,” she told George that night, “and I just couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. So I made up a story of Richie being sick with the flu.”

  The next morning, Richie was ordered to the principal’s office where he met for the first time John Barbour, a medium-sized man with precise military-cut hair. Barbour had an air of tenseness about him not unlike George Diener’s (curiously the men resembled one another) that manifested itself in his forming and re-forming a fist with his right hand as he spoke. He also prided himself on being an educator accommodating to change. When the student government of East Meadow had petitioned him a few years earlier for more liberties, the notion was “alien” to him. “I’m from the old school,” he told people. “I used to make girls kneel, and if their skirts did not touch the floor, I sent them home. Or I told the boys to take two steps back from my desk, bend over, and take their licks from my paddle—like a man.”

  But the principal considered himself a man of reason and one who could tolerate change even if he did not believe strongly in it. No longer was there a hair or dress code at his school, other than a notation in the student handbook that taps on shoes seriously mar and scuff the floor; therefore they may not be worn in the building at any time; offenders would have the taps immediately removed. No longer was corporal punishment used. Barbour was also growing familiar with the dismaying sight of a young person sitting across from his desk in suspicion of using or selling drugs in the school. Most disciplinary matters were handled routinely by the dean and assistant principal. “But when youngsters become involved with drugs,” he told parent groups, “then I become involved with the youngsters.”

  Barbour elected to move firmly but tactfully with Richie. He did not make a direct accusation of drug use. Instead he warned that Richie’s graduation in June was in jeopardy. Picking up Richie’s academic record, he ticked off the disappointing entries. With the ten-week marking period just completed, Richie was failing every subject. Barbour repeated himself. “Every subject!” His attendance at the pass-fail contemporary music course was so rare that the teacher could not affix a grade other than “incomplete.” He was cutting twice-a-week gym class regularly. Out of fifty class days since school began, he had been absent twenty-two, including his illness. “You have cut some classes more than 50 percent of the time,” said Barbour, “and your citizenship grade is poor.”

  Richie listened to the warning attentively. Barbour noted that throughout the conference the boy’s attitude was “good.” The principal said he was as of that morning dropping Richie from contemporary music altogether and assigning him to a gym class every day, no doubt in the belief that a little sweat, calisthenics, and discipline under a coach would improve any errant young person.

  “Do you want to graduate?” asked Barbour in conclusion.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then your effort and your attendance must improve—fast.”

  Things began to disappear around the Diener house. George had bought a ten-speed bicycle for himself, and Richie had asked to borrow it. When he brought it back, the bike was damaged from a spill. Annoyed, George put it in the tool shed until he could find time to repair it. When that day came, he opened the shed and the bike was gone. “Where did the bike go?” George asked his older son.

  “I dunno.”

  “I think you do. Where did it go?”

  Richie turned to walk away. “I sold it,” he said.

  Anger flooded George. “What makes you think you have the right to take other people’s property and sell it?”

  Richie shrugged. That night, George told Carol that their son had “no guilt” whatsoever. “He just gave me his standard look,” said George, “the look that says I am an old fart butting into something that is simply not my business.”

  An Italian knife that a friend had given George suddenly vanished. Then small sums of money were discovered missing from George’s wallet and Carol’s purse. She began hiding her purse, thinking as she performed the act, “This is incredible, I have to hide my purse from my own son.”

  One afternoon in late 1971 a burglary was committed at the Diener house. One of George’s two guns, a .25 Colt automatic pistol, was taken, along with a small sum of money. Although the intruder(s) rummaged through Richie’s room as well, George could not put it out of his mind that perhaps his own son had been the thief. Other homes in the neighborhood were suffering daytime break-ins. Neighbors stood in their yards, leaning on rakes, discussing crime. The peaceable lanes were, to George’s thinking, as imperiled as the ghettos of New York City. Police had arrested some young people near the Blackstone corner on suspicion of selling narcotics. And, though Richie was not among them, George was irate. “Nothing whatsoever will happen to them,” he predicted. “They’ll be back on the streets in one day pushing their poisons.”

  By late November, 1971, the atmosphere in the Diener house had never been so critical. Carol discovered a sm
all box filled with empty transparent pill capsules on Richie’s desk. She questioned her son.

  “What are these?” she asked.

  “Capsules. You buy ’em at a drugstore.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “I suppose people put medicine in them.”

  “How do kids buy them?” Carol demanded.

  “They’re hard,” Richie admitted. “But if you tell the druggist you need them for a school project, you can get them. I told him I was making a map and needed them to fill with cotton to show industry in the South.”

  Carol weighed the explanation. She decided she did not believe her son.

  “What else do you do with them?” she asked.

  Richie smiled. He seemed to take pleasure in telling his mother exactly what he did with them. “I fill them with sugar and sell them to dumb kids,” he said.

  “That’s wrong,” said Carol. “That’s illegal.”

  Richie began his answer, and Carol could join him in silent unison. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “But I do worry about it,” said Carol. “I worry so much that it seems I have nothing else to do.”

  When Carol told George of the incident, he nodded, as if putting one more piece into a jigsaw puzzle. The same expression had crossed his face when Carol had seen her husband in the kitchen lately eavesdropping on Richie’s telephone conversations.

  One evening Carol prepared dinner and watched in discomfort as her husband and her elder son ate in hurried silence. After the episode at school and the series of thefts in the house, George and Richie were refusing again to speak to one another, passing mutely in the house, heads down, eyes averted as if two ancient enemies were forced to occupy the same living space. If George had anything to say to his son he used Carol as go-between, a role so wearying that she was growing thin from lack of appetite, and wrinkles started to surround her eyes.

  When the meal was done, Carol washed dishes and called out that she was going to the school board meeting. “You’re staying home tonight and studying,” she told Richie. Because a week had passed with no yelling in the house, Carol sensed Richie’s attitude was at least no worse. Moreover, she held one trump card—the boy’s passionate desire to get a driver’s license and use of the family car. Unless his grades rose, unless the atmosphere in her home warmed, Carol made it clear, she would not sign his application and he would wait until he was eighteen the following June.

  When Carol drove away, George settled into his easy chair to read the newspaper. Immediately the rock music from Richie’s room annoyed him. Since Carol was not present to act as his advocate, George strode into the kitchen and shouted down himself. “Would you turn that music down a little?”

  No response. George cried out again, this time sharply. “Richie!”

  Nothing. Furious, George stormed into his son’s room and brusquely snapped off the tape deck. It had been a Christmas gift from Mr. and Mrs. Ring, and Richie treasured it more than the animals of his childhood. With the room suddenly quiet, George took his leave. Richie screamed after him, “If you broke that tape deck, I’ll take care of you. And if I can’t, my friends will.”

  The threat burned into George and he considered whirling and discussing the challenge. But he checked his temper and, with nothing more than a glare, returned to the living room and his newspaper.

  A few minutes later, Richie appeared in a jacket, prepared to go out. Breaking his rule of silence a second time, George said tersely. “You’re not going anywhere. You heard your mother.” Ignoring his father, Richie continued toward the door.

  George stood up and touched his son’s arm. “Did you hear me?” he said.

  Wrenching his arm free, Richie bestowed upon his father an expression that George had never seen. It was not only disobedience, it was hate. Obviously, thought George, he has taken something. The chemicals he put in his mouth make him look at me this way. He could not try to destroy me with his eyes—I gave him his life!—if it were not so.

  George softened his voice. “We’ve got to talk, Richie,” he said. “I know we’ve been over this ground a hundred times before, but …” George stopped. His words were locked inside a vacuum. His son gave no sign that he heard them. Richie was at the door opening it, stepping on to the threshold.

  “If you leave now,” shot out George, “then don’t bother to come back.”

  The door slammed. And Richie was gone.

  When Carol returned from her meeting, George said that Richie had gone out against his will. In his anger, he went around to all the doors, locking them from the inside so that keys would not open them. When they went to bed, George held Carol tightly, as if her body could draw all the ill from within him.

  At two in the morning, when both were at last fitfully asleep, there came a pounding at the door. It would not go away. George lay in the warmth of his bed and listened to it. Carol started to get up, but George threw out his hand to restrain her.

  When the knocking had gone on for a quarter of an hour, when Richie began to cry out, when the neighbors would surely hear, George finally rose and went to the front door. Carol followed him.

  Richie entered in anger. He began to rage at his father’s cruelty.

  George cut into the harangue. “Richie,” he said, “your mother and I love you.”

  Richie considered the extraordinary response from his father, standing before him in pajamas, in the middle of the night. The boy threw it back. “No you don’t!” he said. “The only reason I’m even here is that you had hot pants about seventeen years ago. I’m a mistake. A mistake! I’m the mistake that happened when you and Mama started fooling around.”

  George blew up. He slapped his son hard across the mouth. Richie felt the blood trickle onto his chin. He took his hand, wiped it away, and flung the blood against the living-room wall. Dazed, George watched the few drops slip down the wall of the house that had been his dream. Richie ran wordlessly into the kitchen and down the steps to his room. The last door of the long night slammed.

  Lying awake until almost dawn, Carol and George spoke in terse sentences.

  “What are we going to do?” Carol asked, not so much of her husband, but of herself.

  “I don’t know,” said George. “I honestly don’t know.”

  After a time, Carol spoke again. “We’ve got to get Richard some help.”

  George nodded.

  There was an idea gestating in his head, and as soon as it formed, as soon as he had thought it out, as soon as he could concoct the proper way to let Carol in on it, he would put it into being. Carol would not like it, but it had to be done. George was positive it had to be done.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At seventeen years plus a few months, Richie remained relentlessly boyish-looking. Despite the serious expressions he screwed onto his face, despite the mature swagger he tried to affect, he looked even younger than his years. Some of his friends teased him mildly with a nickname, “the Kid,” which enraged the red-haired boy who wanted to be much bigger than five feet seven and much more important than 140 pounds. His size was a handicap in gaining entrance to Ryan’s, a bar in neighboring Hempstead that was usually crowded with college students from Hofstra University across the road and those of high school age who could slip past the ID check at the door with a forged credential or an adult aura.

  More often than not, Richie was turned away at the door by a bouncer who did not believe he was eighteen, the legal drinking age in New York. But now and then, usually on a weekend when a mob overspilled the popular gathering place, Richie managed to gain entrance. Inside the pseudo-English pub with a Union Jack behind the bar, dark tables carved with initials of lovers from years past, and a jukebox that offered the latest and loudest rock, Richie rendezvoused one early September night in 1971 with a kid named Fritz. Through Brick, Richie learned that Fritz often had large quantities of drugs for sale and specialized in filling orders for whatever a buyer desired.

  On this night, R
ichie came to the point quickly. “I wanna buy a pound of grass,” he said.

  Fritz looked surprised. A full pound? Richie was known to Fritz as an avid user of grass and downs, but his purchases had always been on a small scale—a nickel or dime of pot at the most.

  Richie saw the suspicion in Fritz’s eyes. “I have the bread,” Richie hurriedly said. “I worked most of the summer at Burger King.”

  Fritz nodded. Then it so happened, he said, that he had a good pound of Colombian grass for sale at only $100.

  Richie quickly calculated the economics of the sale. The going price in his community for a full pound was normally between $180 and $250, depending upon market fluctuations. If he broke the pound down into nickel bags—$5 worth, enough to fill a whiskey shot glass—he could make up to $480. Even if he kept a half pound for his own use, and even after deducting the original $100 purchase price, he could anticipate around $100 profit.

  Richie went to the savings bank the next day and withdrew $100. He bought the pound from Fritz, who expressed confidence that his customer would enjoy it, and excitedly took his investment home. But after the would-be entrepreneur rolled the first joint and lit up, when ten minutes passed and there was no rush, no sensation whatsoever, Richie grew alarmed. He finished the joint and rolled a second. Sometimes one joint hits and another does not, he knew. Sometimes your mind is not receptive to turning on.

  But when the second cigarette produced nothing within him, Richie stormed to the telephone and dialed Fritz. No answer. He called Brick and complained. “It’s worthless,” shouted Richie. “Old and weak and totally useless. I couldn’t sell a nickel of this shit to anybody if they asked to try it out first.” It was customary for buyers to sample pot before buying it. Richie had trusted Fritz and now regretted it.