by Chris Rush
“Your leg! Your leg!”
I looked down and saw the outrage of red. Blood was pouring from my shin—a deep, vivid slash from heel to calf. Peaking on LSD, we all gaped at the magnificent wound—and then Michael tore off his shirt and dressed my leg as best he could.
Steven was ready to cry. “Chris, why do you always do this?”
* * *
THE SKY WENT black. Hailstones rattled on rock—then came sleet. Through an opera of rain and clouds, my brothers helped me down the mountain. Slipping back into the forest, I could hear them breathing, one on either side.
At the truck, I pulled off my boot and poured out a cup of blood.
Steven barfed.
Michael said, “We better get going, it’s late.”
At Jackson Lake, we stopped the truck, just as the setting sun passed under the storm. For an instant, the clouds were as transparent as paper, fluttering in the sky like a book of gold. When I asked my brothers if they could see it, they ignored me. They were whispering in the front seat.
I started to sweat; maybe I had a fever.
“We’re going home,” Michael finally announced. “We’re taking you home.”
I stared at the metal roof of the camper as the miles passed beneath us.
I remember Steven touching my forehead, singing to me.
She wore blue velvet
Bluer than velvet was the night …
When I saw the sign, WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY, I could feel the pain in my leg for the first time and started to cry.
I couldn’t stop.
PART V
THE REAL DEAL
35.
New Religion
WHAT DID I WANT? Did I want to die? Or did I want to try to live among the humanoids again? My parents seemed to have no preference as to my decision, but my brothers had shown some interest. They’d dragged me home, dressed my wounds, led me down to the cool and dark basement. I was tired, jangled. My mother brought me milk, made minimal eye contact.
It was a new version of Mom, sporty and bronzed. Her hair was short, boyish, the color somewhere between ash and blush. She wore a pale pastel sweater and stretch pants—a new diamond ring the only sign of excess. I commented on her tan.
“We’ve been down in Florida a lot, Danny and I. I’m on the courts every day.” Her gaze fell on my bare arms. “You’ve got quite a tan yourself.”
We avoided the difficult question of my long absence, turning it into a story of separate vacations.
I knew that, in many ways, I was still camping out—that everything was provisional here, this comfortable house simply the edge of another cliff. I could be blown off or pushed at any moment. I barely unpacked.
When my baby brother first saw me, he smiled but didn’t say a word. Danny was my mother’s late child, her last child, and now—in a way—her only child. At nine, he was lashed to her; the two of them went everywhere together. Having once been in a similar position, I didn’t envy the kid’s complicated luck. When, finally, he was comfortable enough to talk to me, he asked if I liked Tucson.
“Yes,” I said. “Do you like Florida?”
“It’s okay. I have a tutor. But I miss Jamie and my other friends. Florida is mostly old people. Chris, did you run away because Dad hates you?”
We were in the backyard. I could see the clothes on the line, flapping like flags.
“I moved to Tucson to be in the mountains,” I said. “Nature is important to me.”
“Mom says the most important thing is money. I already have around three thousand.”
When I picked up a fallen blossom and tried to put it behind his ear, he said, “Please don’t do that.”
* * *
MY FIRST CONVERSATION with my father happened by the pool, where I was sitting on a chair, trying to get warm after a swim. It was morning, and when Dad came outside he had a scotch, the first of the day—his happy drink, as Michael called it.
“So you’re back,” he said. “What are your plans?”
I found myself stuttering. “I-I’ve been thinking maybe art school or—”
With a flick of his hand, he dismissed the notion. “No more school. I meant, what do you plan to do for money? If you have no prospects, you’ll work for me.”
An attempt at kindness?
He finished his drink, threw the ice onto the lawn, and walked off—his limp worse than I’d ever seen it.
* * *
SIX THIRTY in the morning—a slate-gray sky, unbroken. Every day that fall seemed the same—my brothers heading off to school, and me to work, all of us on our ten-speeds, even in the rain. I liked listening to my wheels hissing against the wet blacktop. After a few weeks of cold, Dad invited me to drive with him.
We didn’t chat. When the air got too thick, he turned on the radio.
Strangely, as soon as we arrived at the jobsite, my father became cheerful. To hear him laughing with his men at 6:45 a.m. seemed bizarre. When had I last heard him laugh at home? I must have been eleven or twelve.
Early, the ground was often covered with frost. Retrieving a worn red shovel from the bed of the truck, I carried it on my shoulder like a gun. I tried to walk squarely, tried to mimic the rest of the crew, who were rough and sun-wrecked. Many had worked for my father since the fifties, and they knew who I was—the boss’s sissy son. I hid my ponytail like a shameful pet inside my shirt.
My job was to help my father build a church.
I was often cold, my teeth chattering. My tasks were simple: dig holes, make mud, fetch coffee and Danish.
Most mornings, my father simply inspected the site, gave orders, and then left—sometimes returning after lunch with an architect, or some mincing priest afraid to get his shoes wet. He rarely talked to me. I assumed his silence was anger or embarrassment—never imagining that, like my own, it might have been the result of sadness.
But his face was so hard, I never knew.
I wanted to hate him—I did hate him—but the real problem was far worse: I wanted him to love me. In the early part of the day, before he was drunk, he seemed so knowledgeable, so capable. Even when the building was no more than a scratch in the dirt, I’d see him pointing upward, directing the workers’ gaze. He could see a church in the empty air.
That year, humbled, I was almost ready to listen to him, to learn something. There were clearly things he knew, things he could teach me. I wanted him to reveal himself—show me his world.
But nothing.
* * *
AS THE CHURCH ROSE, I was given another menial assignment, though one of the most dangerous—a job the foreman called walking the plank. On a scaffold thirty feet in the air, I had the unpleasant task of distributing block and concrete to masons. There were no guardrails and I worked in a constant state of fear. It was nothing like the mountain.
One blustery day, my father showed up in a beautiful blue suit. The wind caught his thinning hair, now more gray than blond. From high above, I noticed, as if for the first time, how much smaller he was than the other men. My father was almost as slender as I was—nothing like the pictures I’d seen of his mysterious, athletic-looking brothers. I almost felt sympathy for him.
I wanted to study him longer, but he walked under the scaffold. Three stories up, I had to be very careful. I was carrying shovels of gray goo back and forth across a wet scaffold, trying not to slip on what I’d already spilled. Suddenly, a great gob slid off my shovel, missing the tub and splashing down directly onto my father’s head.
Dad cursed, blobs of concrete dripping down his face. The men were in hysterics. One of them yelled, “Hey, Charlie, don’t think your son likes you so much.”
* * *
DURING THE TIME I was away, my mother remained very involved with my father’s business—and his money. If she could not have his love, then she would control his assets. And even if my father continued to have mistresses, my mother could at least starve those women of gifts and travel.
Mom did the books, the banking, put her
name on everything she could manage. Despite my parents’ antagonisms, the company hummed. At home, the adding machine clicked under her red nails. This arrangement had become central to their marriage.
Cash had replaced romance. It was the new religion.
* * *
ON FRIDAY MORNINGS, when the crew was paid, Dad was usually nowhere to be found. The cash was delivered by Mom—fresh like pizza. Just before lunch, her Cadillac, gleaming like a white boat, rolled through the jobsite mud. When the front door swung open, everything stopped, as we all waited for my mother’s heels to reach the precarious earth. Standing next to the car, she played the damsel in distress, looking around as if trapped on a mountain ledge. Before she could hazard a single step, the foreman always rushed over to take her hand.
Then she smiled—and it was dazzling.
Everyone stared, even me. She often wore a tight skirt and tailored blouse—fresh lipstick, coat unbuttoned in the breeze. After whispering a few words into the foreman’s ear, she placed the yellow payroll envelopes in his hand. From the scaffold, I could smell her perfume, but Mom never gave me a glance. In two minutes, the handoff was complete—and after a vague wave to the cheap seats, she slipped into her white barge and sailed away.
The pay envelope for my forty-hour week was always the same, penned in Mother’s loopy script: Christopher Rush, laborer: $52.50. The two quarters were always ice cold, as if they’d been stored in a freezer.
* * *
IT WASN’T ENOUGH. I’d never be able to save money for art school, or to get my own place. I didn’t understand if my parents were trying to protect me or humiliate me.
I decided to call Flow Bear, acquire some product. It wasn’t just about making money. Like my father, I knew there was no reason to remain sober.
My first impulse, of course, was to work with Valentine—he was often in New Jersey, but I couldn’t stomach his sermons about sacrament, enlightenment. Something about watching my father’s church being constructed—how brick by brick it had become something brutal and prisonlike, a warehouse for souls—I realized that I needed to be a pragmatist, like my mom.
I knew how to sell drugs. Other than art, it was my only skill—a trade taught to me since the age of twelve. And if drugs were merely product and not some dance with God, then I could finally get serious, become a real dealer and make my way.
On a Saturday morning, in one of my father’s fast cars, I drove a couple of hours to Flow Bear’s new place in Philadelphia. Somehow, he was living in a mansion on the Main Line. He came to the door barefoot, in paisley pajama bottoms, no underwear. He blinked for a few seconds, as if I’d just woken him up. Then he said, “We have to stop meeting like this.” He smiled and pulled me into an embrace. His skin smelled sharp, like metal.
When he asked where I’d disappeared to, I said I’d recently returned from the Grand Tetons—trying to adopt the same measured tone I used with my mother, in an attempt to turn homelessness into some kind of grand tour.
But Flow Bear didn’t buy it.
“Cut the bullshit, Chris. They fucked you up, man.” Strange, how his terrible assessment made me feel a kind of relief—the honesty of it.
Flow Bear looked good. He hadn’t reverted back into the hairy beast he’d once been. His curly locks were short and his body as fit as when I’d last seen him in Tucson, though perhaps a bit thinner. I asked about Laney, the pretty hippie girl he’d married.
He lowered his eyes. “Long gone.”
I asked no more as I followed him through various empty rooms, past fireplaces and mad chandeliers. There was no art on the walls, no carpets, not a stick of furniture, only a phone on the parquet, beside a pencil and pad. Another stash house.
We ascended a wide staircase to a bedroom stacked with suitcases. On a table stood a triple beam scale and the ubiquitous box of Ziplocs. Flow Bear opened a satchel and pulled out a bag of enormous green buds, each spear a foot long.
“Just got back from Hawaii,” he said. “Take a whiff, man. Maui Wowie.”
He held the bag to my nose. Sweet and jungly, with something rank about it—shit and flowers. I’d bought something similar once from Valentine—though I sensed this was much better. And after Flow Bear offered me a hit, I knew it for a fact.
“So what does it cost?”
“Three thousand a pound.”
Ten times the going rate for normal weed—and ten times stronger. I wasn’t sure I could sell it. I tried to be a businessman. “Valentine sells it for cheaper.”
“Not this stuff.”
I nodded thoughtfully, wondering what I was getting into.
“Chris, you’ll make a killing on this. I’ll front it to you. And, listen”—he reached back into the trunk—“I have product Valentine will never have. Take a look at this.” He pulled out a rock of palest pink, the size of a small plum.
It was beautiful. It looked like a jewel, sparkling as Flow Bear turned it in his hand. “The finest cocaine you’ll ever see. Peruvian rock. Pharmaceutically pure.” On a tray, he shaved it with a razor blade and pulled the powder into a line. “Here, taste it.”
Handing me the straw, he leaned in close enough to kiss me—and as the first burst unclouded my brain, Flow Bear whispered, “This is the future.”
36.
St. Granola
IN A SMALL TOWN, Maui Wowie was big news. Soon, no one wanted to smoke anything else. In the corner of the basement sat my mother’s long-unused sewing room. I set up shop there—bought a scale and a decent stereo.
Weekends and after work, I sold Hawaiian from where my mother had once made dresses. My brothers’ friends, rich kids from St. Ignatius, bought everything I had. My brothers became a crucial part of the business. Michael reminded me of the plans we’d made around a campfire in Idaho: Rush Brothers Construction.
For luck, I kept the gold nugget we’d found next to the scale.
A shoebox quickly filled with twenties. In just under a month, I moved three pounds of Hawaiian—fifty ounces, fifty Ziploc bags, all of them stuck in the shirts and underwear of kids who would not be doing their homework anytime soon. My customers were polite young men who said good night to my mother as they ran out the door.
My profit was nearly nine thousand dollars. Staring at the money, I recalled a day when I was eight years old and drove with my father to his bank, to deposit fifty grand in cash. In the car, he’d opened the bag and shown me the loot, a big grin on his face. I was in awe of him. Now I wanted to show him my own loot and say, Look, Dad—I am your son.
I paid Flow Bear and bought three more pounds of Maui. I bought cocaine, too.
The coke was slow to catch on; I sold some to one of Dad’s younger masons, but mostly I just did it myself, or shared it with Julie. The mess in Idaho forgotten, Julie and I became friends again—no romance.
After high school, she’d moved to the Poconos and waited tables, but now she was back in New Jersey at her dad’s. Both of us were vaguely embarrassed to be living with our tormentors again. The cocaine helped.
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON, after snorting for hours, I drove to visit Donna. She was living on a dairy farm now, where Vinnie milked cows. They stayed in one of the old outbuildings, at the edge of a swamp.
When I arrived, my sister hugged me, but I could tell she was distracted—both kids pulling at her dress. After Jelissa had come Claire. I raspberry-kissed the girls, making them giggle, and then immediately started a rant about the old days in Tucson. I couldn’t stop talking. Donna eyed me suspiciously. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. Hey,” I said, “I brought you a present.” I handed her an ounce of Hawaiian. She opened the bag and sniffed.
She smiled. “Thanks.” She didn’t ask where I got it.
We smoked a doob. Maybe it was the weed or the housework, but Donna had become strangely incurious, not unlike our mother. We sat there in silence, watching the girls play.
Finally: “Listen, Chris, maybe you can do us a favo
r?”
From the fridge, she brought out ten plastic vials in a Ziploc bag. They looked just like the bottles of Lourdes water sold in the St. Ignatius gift shop.
“Holy water?” I said.
“What? Don’t be stupid. It’s liquid LSD. From Valentine. We thought we could move it, but we don’t get out that much, and the people who live around here aren’t really ready for this. Do you want to take some and sell it for us?”
The room was dark and cold. A votive candle flickered before an old portrait of Jesus. He looked sadder than I remembered. Suddenly his misery seemed to be infecting me—or maybe I was crashing.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll take it off your hands.”
We settled on a price. Donna was a little surprised I had the cash in my pocket.
“Thank God,” she said. “I’m buying heating oil with this.”
I asked her if she missed Tennessee. During the time I was homeless, Donna and Vinnie had made one last attempt at hippie life—living on a big Christian commune in the South.
“Are you kidding me?” Donna said. “The food was gross and we had to use a latrine in the woods. Every morning, there’d be a pack of dogs waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Shit—they wanted our shit. To eat it.” My sister was suddenly red-faced and practically shouting. “How was I supposed to toilet train a child in a situation like that?”
I looked at my sister, in pigtails and a Mennonite dress. How had our glorious experiment failed so miserably?
She put the money I’d given her in a little bowl at the back of a cupboard. Still agitated, she said, “You know, Chris, I heard what’s going on. I know you’re working with Flow.”
“I thought you liked him.”