by Chris Rush
Playpen. The word came to me, and, strangely, it hurt. How can a word do that?
Later, Donna told me I babbled about the Devil, and Jesus.
What I remember, most clearly, is my sister telling me, with a look that will haunt me forever: I did this to you.
41.
How Can You Say That?
I REMEMBER A BRIGHT ROOM, a man examining me—a young doctor in a crew cut. He was beautiful, a deep cigarette-commercial voice. Every single touch from him, though, was excruciating. I clenched my fists—remembering Gabriel Green saying that when the ships took me away, there might be tests; the extraterrestrials would want to understand my body.
Between the bursts of pain, the doctor’s huge hands made me tremble with shame. No one had touched me in a long time. When he gently pressed on my lower back, I screamed.
Later, he said, “No doubt, your kidneys failed last night. It’s amazing you didn’t die.” He told me to drink as much water as I could. Looking me in the eye, he added, “If you take drugs again, they’ll probably kill you.”
* * *
NEITHER DONNA NOR I phoned our parents.
Back at the farmhouse, I slept a bit. When I got up, sweat was pouring down my face. Donna wanted to take my temperature, but I was shaking, my teeth chattering so hard my sister was afraid I’d break the thermometer.
I tried to make a joke. “Well, remember what Mom always said about taking our temperature?”
“What’s that?”
“Only the anus is accurate.”
We laughed. We laughed because I wasn’t dead.
Donna turned away, and I could see her back shaking, but she wasn’t laughing anymore.
When Vinnie came in and saw her crying, he sat down next to us and suggested we pray. The three of us held hands but said nothing, nodding our heads over a rosary of tears.
* * *
EVENTUALLY, I ASKED my sister to take me home.
When we arrived, she said she wouldn’t go inside. We sat in the car for a few minutes, full of words we were too inept to say.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll be fine.”
We both knew it was the end of a story we’d started a long time ago.
I kissed her, said goodbye.
* * *
WHEN I WALKED through the back door, I was disoriented. My body was still wrong, still numb. When Mom saw me, her face went pale. She told me to come to her bedroom, and then quietly closed the door.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
“No.”
“Where on earth have you been?”
I shook my head.
“Tell me, Chris. I found my Cadillac in the bushes the other morning. Who drove it home?”
I felt sick again, like I might fall over, but I refused to collapse in front of my mother. Refused to cry.
“Mom, I’m not well. I almost died.” Leaning against her vanity, trembling, I told her I’d overdosed. She was silent for a while, and then I saw her face appear in the mirror.
“How could you let this happen? So—what—you’re an addict now?”
I looked up, told her I needed to rest. “I have nothing,” I said.
“How can you say that? You have me. I’m your mother.”
She was crying now, still facing the mirror. I nodded at her reflection and walked away.
* * *
FOR DAYS I could barely sleep—certain I was dying. Anxiety annihilated rational thought. Only walking made me feel better. Hours at a time, I walked in circles, trying to find relief.
Steven brought me a glass of water—and I apologized for abandoning him in the woods.
“Who were those people?”
“You don’t want to know.”
My mother mostly stayed away. She didn’t suggest another visit to the doctor, or rehab. No one used the word OD. I stayed in the basement, like a punished child.
“Chris, do you want some soup?” It was my father, strangely, who exhibited inexplicable flashes of kindness. No conversation—just soup. My dad had once been a short-order cook and he knew the best meals for a hangover. But I could manage no more than a sip before I felt sick. Often, my father had been in the same boat.
He would hand me a box of crackers, telling me they went down easy.
42.
We Are Gathered Here Today
I HAD ONLY THE FAINTEST hold on Earth. I couldn’t sleep or eat. My legs were numb. I was always shaking and afraid, always close to tears. Donna’s doctor had warned me that my kidneys were barely functioning. He said, darkly, that cocaine had burned my internal organs. My digestion was shot. My father’s crackers did not go down easy. If I ate after three in the afternoon, I couldn’t sleep a wink, tossing all night, moving between pain and panic. It was as if all the smoke and chemicals were still trapped inside me. How many years of poison? I was too exhausted to look back.
* * *
WHEN MY MOTHER announced there was to be a wedding, she did not look happy. It was October, a few weeks after my OD. My brother Michael was going to marry his pregnant girlfriend.
“I can’t go,” I said.
“You’ll go,” my friend Julie said to me later. “I’ll be your date.”
Julie knew what had happened to me, but we never really discussed it. She was still snorting coke—which she was now getting from someone else. During my two days away at Kenny’s trailer, the Dungeon was robbed. All my product was gone. Luckily, the thieves hadn’t found what was left of my cash in the boiler room—maybe ten grand.
* * *
IN A TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR, my brother and his tiny blonde bride ran from the church, dodging rain and rice. The garden reception at her parents’ house was forced onto a big screened-in deck, where her large Catholic family mingled uncomfortably with mine. The girl’s parents were not at all pleased that Michael had knocked up their daughter.
I couldn’t eat anything, of course. I felt rotten. I sipped Perrier while I watched Donna and Vinnie run through the rain to their car with my brother Steven. I knew what they were doing out there. I had no wish to join them.
Dad, of course, got wasted, too—as if to confirm all the stories his new in-laws had no doubt heard about him. Things were not good with my father’s business; recently, there’d been several public, drunken incidents. The church I’d helped him build turned out to be his last project for the Diocese of Trenton. He was deemed unfit for church contracts.
Mom was ashamed. Like me—but unlike herself—she was very quiet at the reception. She wore a purple gown with a green orchid pinned to her chest like some terrible insect. She looked defeated. Maybe she was thinking about her mother’s missing skull. Was it now sitting on someone’s stereo? Recently, she’d had her family’s mausoleum sealed with concrete, so that no thieves could ever get in again. Of course, that meant that it would forever be closed to her, as well.
The bride’s family was more pious than our own—the older brother had recently been ordained, and it was he who’d performed the wedding. At one point, he walked up to me to say he’d heard I’d attended St. John’s School.
“Yes,” I said. “It was the happiest time of my life.”
“Why was that?”
“I was a child. God still existed.”
When the priest asked me if I no longer believed, he looked genuinely concerned. He was only a few years older than me, dapper in black—another version of myself.
I told him, “I’m trying.”
* * *
JULIE, MY DATE, mostly ignored me. I watched her dance with all the cute guys.
But later, as she ate a crumb of wedding cake, she leaned into me and said, “Wow, it’s getting chilly already.”
The rain had cleared and frigid air rose invisibly from the lawn. It was only October, but winter was already on its way. I shivered.
The music got louder.
Play that funky music, white boy … play that funky music till you die.
Michael danced with his pre
gnant wife and Steven with his girlfriend, who would be pregnant before the year was out. In the end, Mike would have six children. Steve would have three.
My parents, the cause of all of us, chose not to dance. I saw them standing by the wedding cake, looking tired.
Julie and I drifted outside. Donna and Vinnie were in the yard, stoned, staring at the trees as if looking for something. Their marriage would hang on for another decade.
“We should go to Tucson,” Julie said. “It’s warm out there, right?”
I tried to smile. The desert had been the testing ground for so much. The Great Experiment.
As I stood beside Julie on the wet lawn, I was stranded in 1976, having no idea what to do next.
“I mean it,” Julie said. “We should go.”
When I asked about her little sister, Julie said her father was getting married again, that her sister would be fine.
“I have some money saved,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Sunshine.” Julie sighed. “I miss it.”
PART VI
ONE HUNDRED PIES
43.
I Wish I Had a River
ONLY MOM AND DANNY CAME to the airport. The day was cold and windy.
Mom kissed Julie goodbye, and then whispered in my ear.
“Take me with you.”
When I searched her face, she smiled, as if joking, but I could see the glimmer of longing. Your father and I used to take such lovely trips.
When I didn’t answer her, she grabbed Danny’s hand and together they headed back to the car. I blew my baby brother a kiss he didn’t catch.
Julie put her arm around me. “We’re fine,” she said. “We’ll be fine.”
* * *
A FEW DAYS before I left, on one of my walks, I went down to the river. It was still the wrong color. At the shore, by some ragged trees, there was trash and discarded clothing. As I approached one of the broken-down docks, I saw two boys huddled by a concrete pillar—twelve or thirteen, skipping school. Each held a plastic bag to his face. They were sniffing glue.
Once, I would have told them, Throw that shit away. I would have offered them sacrament—or some prime Hawaiian bud. I would have been kind to them, generous. I would have done unto them as others had done unto me.
Now I just drifted by, a skinny guy in a black hoodie—son of the grim reaper. I continued along the river, crossed the bridge, walked toward my sister Kathy’s house. When I got there, I didn’t knock, just looked in the window and watched everyone eating dinner. In the late light, I thought they were all so beautiful. In a few years, my sister’s neighborhood would be a Superfund site, a particularly heinous one, requiring long-term vigilance. The report will say, It may be a thousand years before all the poison is gone.
* * *
IN TUCSON, Julie and I rented a small red ranch house not far from the air force base. Walking in, our voices echoed, the place all but empty. The owners had left behind two army cots, a beanbag chair, an old black-and-white TV.
Julie said, “This is not a house. It’s a hut.”
Taking the bus, we bought groceries, cleaning supplies, a vacuum, and a mop. A few days later, a thrift-store truck delivered a couch and a dinette set with four mismatched chairs. This was all Julie’s doing. I watched, amazed, to see someone make a home from nothing. I realized I had no idea how to take care of myself. Julie, for all her struggles, never allowed herself despair. I tried to follow her example. I cleaned the windows with newspaper and vinegar, while Julie, in rubber gloves, scrubbed out the refrigerator, singing as she worked.
Why do birds suddenly appear
Every time you act queer?
I knew she was trying to make me laugh, but I couldn’t quite manage it.
My insides hurt, and I still wasn’t sleeping well. I went to see Dr. Kelly, my sister’s old chiropractor. Having lived among hippies for so long, I never considered seeing an MD. Dr. Kelly agreed I was in bad shape. His advice: distilled water, fresh juice, vitamins, protein powder. I followed all his excellent suggestions, but improvement was slow.
Julie bought me new socks, claiming she’d had a lot of success with them. Sometimes a fresh pair, she said, was all you needed to set you straight.
* * *
LYING AWAKE on my cot, I tried to imagine a life, a future. All my fantasies had vanished. I thought of beautiful Owen Spoon, lying naked in his arms, but even that could not arouse me. Everything felt wrong. Pleasure wasn’t an option.
I had my silver cross, and I wore it, tried to pray again. The words came back effortlessly, but some part of me seemed to have forgotten what it all meant.
The Virgin, the Devil in the glen.
Some days, the sunshine defeated me. I just wanted to hide. On the bus or at the market, I’d see lots of people living without drugs. Geezers and grannies, fathers and sons—what did they do all day? What did they think about? How did they not just run, screaming?
I never thought of getting help or counseling. I could barely talk about what had happened, even to Julie.
She got a lunch shift at a restaurant, and during the day I was often at home by myself. In the neighborhood, I walked in circles, as I’d done the first few weeks right after my OD. Somehow walking was important—but often my circles would turn into a road, and I’d end up in some scene from my childhood. Memory itself seemed a kind of sickness.
* * *
I’M FIFTEEN, on the living room floor, reading a book.
You look like a woman, with your goddamn legs spread, he says.
For the first time, I don’t get up and run. I’ve had enough. I say, Fuck you.
And fuck you, my father replies.
I stand. We stare into each other’s eyes.
I’m stronger than he is, I realize. I consider smashing his face.
Coolly, he says, You hate me, don’t you?
Yeah, and you hate me.
That’s right. I do.
We walk in opposite directions, like cowboys in some heart-smashing western.
* * *
THE FACTS as they existed astounded me, terrified me. Without chemicals, I was unequipped to process everything that had happened. The past was too hard to look at. Sober, one could only see things as they were. A person’s face was a person’s face. You could see it immediately for what it was. My father’s was terrible. Even worse was my own in the bathroom mirror. I had lost two more pounds, weighed an impossible 118 now. I did not want to recognize myself.
* * *
WHEN I RAN into Valentine one day, he was not sympathetic. He scolded me for giving up what he called the Life—something he would never do. He mocked my bad judgment, my use of heroin. He offered me LSD.
As I walked away, I started shaking—a rage so potent it stayed with me for weeks, the anger somehow emptying me out, leaving me exhausted but strangely peaceful.
This emptiness, which previously I would have filled with visions and lies, I simply faced, waiting to see if it had its own message.
* * *
ONE DAY, Julie came home with another waitress. She told me to stay in the kitchen until she called me. I heard the two girls groaning, dragging something across the floor. A few minutes later, Julie led me into a small room we weren’t using at the back of the house. She’d put an old wooden desk in there. On top of it were sketchpads, pens, colored pencils. “Your art studio!” she chirped.
I sat at the desk, thanking her.
After the other waitress was gone, Julie said, “Come on—draw something.”
I considered the blank paper and got up. I had nothing to draw.
* * *
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I crept into the studio and shut the door. Sat down and carefully sharpened a pencil, a decisive 3B. I slid it across the paper and stopped. The mark had no message, no pulse. I tried again and again. Nothing. Without dope, I could not find a face, a cloud, a scrap of light.
On the first few pages of the sketchbook, in lieu of art, I wrote a li
st of all the different drugs I’d taken—at least the ones I could remember.
Two hundred and fifty entries.
I’d once been so proud of my extravagant drug use, my cunning, my crime. Now it was sickening to even consider. I’d been stoned for half my life. Since the age of twelve, drugs had been the only song playing in my head.
Why?
There was never a good answer. It was as pointless as asking why my father drank. There’s a shadow. Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the Devil or something in the human heart. What does it matter? There is a shadow.
* * *
I STARTED TO wonder about Sean, who I heard was still in Tucson. According to his sister, Darla, Sean had had a rough couple of years. Darla said that when he moved out of Rancho del Rey, where I’d holed up in the pool house, Sean had lived in a trailer with an older guy—a man he’d eventually stabbed.
I wasn’t shocked. Kill yourself. Or kill someone else. Sean’s story was just a mirror version of my own. Strangely, the man who Sean stabbed hadn’t pressed charges and had even invited Sean to live with him again. “But he’s on his own now,” Darla said. “I’m sure he’d love to see you.” She gave me his address.
“I don’t know if you should visit him,” Julie said. “After all that stuff.”
But I went anyway.