Almost Lost

by Beatrice Sparks

  “When?”

  “I dunno…maybe I don’t really need you…I’m just being…”

  “What about early tomorrow morning before anyone else gets up?”

  “How come you’re so good to me?”

  “’Cause, believe me, YOU’RE WORTH IT!”

  “Thanks much. See ya in the A.M.”

  PHONE CALL SUMMARY

  Sammy phoned Wednesday night, September 21, at 9:00 P.M.

  His father, Lance, insists on seeing him. We made an appointment for tomorrow morning at 7:00 A.M.

  Samuel Gordon Chart

  Thursday, September 22, 7 A.M.

  Tenth Visit

  SAMUEL (SAMMY) GORDON, 15 years old

  “Hi, Sammy.”

  “Hi.” He was so intense he appeared almost ready to fragment.

  “You look like you need a friend to vent on.”

  “You mean dump on?”

  “I mean dump on.”

  Sammy cringed. His pain seemed excruciating, physically as well as mentally. “I’ve got to do something! That loser Lance is trying to stir up the whole hellhole of my past. I don’t need that! Every bad thing that’s ever happened since creation has come flooding back, overwhelming me, undermining me. He’s opened up the Pandora’s box that I swore I’d never let be reopened.” Sammy sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his hand. “Why doesn’t the bastard sadist just leave us alone? He’s already dumped us…started my life on the road to ruination.”

  I gripped his shaking hands tightly. “No, he hasn’t. He can’t! Because you won’t let him! We won’t let him!”

  Sammy seemed to have drifted out to another time, another dimension. “It wasn’t just him—it was—oh how I hate that asshole’s guts. I’ll never forgive him for worlds without end. He’s beaming up hate at me from Hell every minute of every day and I’m beaming hate down to him in Hell.”

  “Hey. Wait a minute, Sammy. You can’t control what others do with their energy even if they waste it on something as detrimental as hate. I thought you were going for more positive things now.”

  “I wish I could, but I can’t, and I can’t run away anymore, either.” He curled up into a pathetic ball in the corner of his chair.

  “I think you can face anything now, Sammy. In fact, maybe now is the time when you’ve got to face it. I’ll help you. Promise, I’ll help you! You simply cannot run from him anymore.”

  “I guess it has been pretty damn stupid of me to think I could make something that bad go away by itself, hasn’t it?”

  “Maybe, but it’s more than pretty bright for you to now decide to do what you ought to do.”

  “Okay. Ready…set…go.”

  “First, I should know for sure who he is so that we can better treat all your hostility and negative feelings in a get-rid-of, get-better way.

  “It was…it was the male who…fertilized my mom’s egg they called Eggbert.”

  “You mean your father?”

  “I have a nightmare almost every night about that lunatic degenerate. I want to vomit up all his genes that are in my body and throw them on the highway with the rest of the rotten roadkill.”

  “I know it’s not easy or pleasant, Sammy, but it would help me and make the solution to your dilemma simpler if you could tell me the details.”

  He looked desperate.

  “Would it make it easier if you held your nose, like I’m sure you did when you were a little kid and had to swallow some kind of medicine that you didn’t think could be swallowed?”

  The desperate look dissipated. It was replaced with a forced, mean, little boy grin. “Okay, stand back while I puke it up.”

  “Standing back, sir.”

  Sammy started talking. He spoke like someone reading a script. “Well, the first two days of Christmas vacation when I was with…Lance.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah. Everything seemed cool as usual. Then one night I couldn’t sleep, and I crept downstairs to see what was in the fridge…”

  “And?”

  “I could hear Lance and a couple of the guys from the office in the den. I didn’t want to disturb them, so I started to turn back but something sounded…or felt…I dunno, kind of funny, so I stopped and peeked through a plant that stands in the hall.” Sammy gasped and blew his nose vigorously. “They were getting ready to snort cocaine. I’d never seen anyone doing it for real but, of course, I’d seen it done on TV and in the movies.” Sammy’s voice started shaking, and he held onto his chair as though it were a lifeline of some sort.

  “I couldn’t move. I just crouched there, watching them acting and talking stupid. Mom had always taught me about bad consequences for bad actions and terrible consequences for terrible actions. I was thoroughly confused. Could this be my old man? I’d experimented, but basically my four close friends and I had tried very hard to think seriously about drugs, alcohol, and sex. Now these crazy, depraved old men were glorifying all three. It was sick! Sick and sickening! In their stupid, stoned condition they weren’t even men anymore. They were mindless, slippery, slimy, drooling nonhumanoid animals slumped on the couch. I wanted to throw up or disintegrate or something. I couldn’t stand it. It was like physical pain, only worse, because it was inside my head and heart and soul, too.”

  I rolled my chair close to Sammy’s and clasped his hands empathetically. He squeezed back so hard I winced.

  He continued, “Can you imagine what that did to a kid who had committed to stay straight? Well, kind of straight. It really about did me in right there. Anyway, after a few minutes I got my gonzos together and crept back upstairs, but I could have stomped up or fallen down and broken my neck, and they wouldn’t have noticed or cared.”

  “That must have been a horrifying and hurtful experience, Sammy.”

  “It was, and it seemed like at that very moment all the lights in my mind turned off. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what really happened. I’ve lived in a gray cold world every moment since, a grey cold world with no music and no sunshine. It’s depressing and demented…and I’m soooo alone. Even in the middle of a crowd of people I’m…like alone on an always-dark, always-will-be-dark, island.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Sammy. Most people who are carrying heavy negative burdens feel that their lights have gone out, or at least dimmed perceptibly.”

  “Yeah, we’ve talked about how defeat and negativism drowns out sunshine, and I believe it…I know it! But I’m still all covered with dark inside.”

  “Does that mean you’ve absolutely got to expel every bit of the darkness you’ve been hoarding?”

  “For sure.”

  “So? Do you feel like going on?”

  “Yeah, I guess. It might feel good to dump it once and for all, to get the taste of it out of my mouth and the stench and pain of it out of my all-over-body-and-soul! Well…I honestly don’t know how this next stuff happened. I was repulsed and disgusted by watching Lance get stoned, and yet after he’d gone to the office the next day to pick up some things, I carefully pulled out his stash from the secret place among his books, actually a hollow block which looked like a shelf support. My hands were trembling so hard I could hardly get the block out and slide down the dummy back. As I started to put a little line of the white stuff on the coffee table, I dropped the box. Slowly the powder disappeared into the plush white carpeting. At that point I didn’t care! I wanted to hurt him. He’d have to rush me off to the hospital, crying and sobbing and begging for my forgiveness and swearing he’d get his life cleaned up.”

  Sammy closed down and sat in a catatonic state until I began gently rubbing his shoulders, arms, and neck. Within a short time he had loosened up, so I whispered, “You can tell me the rest now, Sammy, if you’d like to. Don’t you think it will be a great relief to you both mentally and physically when you regurgitate every bit of the fetid garbage you’ve been carrying around for so long?”

  He nodded slightly and started talking again in the same low, lifeless mon
otone. “While I was still stoned out of my box, Lance came home and caught me. He beat on me and screamed at me and cursed me. In between bouts, he tried to brush up what seemed to be his most precious possession in the world from the carpet. It didn’t work. The shit just sank deeper and deeper into the fibers, and Dad got crazy madder and madder. Finally he dragged me to my feet and yanked me up the stairs to my room, not really my room, his study. Nothing was mine in that mental and physical torture chamber, certainly not his caring concern or love.

  “I kept slipping in and out of reality and consciousness. For one second I was afraid I was going to die, then I didn’t care because it wasn’t like in the movies, where the good guy helps the dumb guy and walks him around and puts cold towels on his head and begs him to come back and stuff. I remember trying to say, ‘Just leave me alone. I’ll die and get out of your way like you want me to, like you’ve probably always wanted me to,’ but the words came out garbled and meaningless, and Lance kept on screaming and roaring and condemning.

  “In some ways it was like an old black-and-white horror movie happening to someone else, actually a strange, mutant, ugly, burdensome kid who wasn’t worth spit, to say nothing of shit. I’d been afraid I wasn’t going to live, then I started becoming afraid I would! His hammering went on and on and on as he did and said everything odious that could be said or done to a helpless kid, and I cared less and less and less.

  “I don’t know how much later my mind started working again. Slowly I figured out what had happened, how much the evil person who was supposed to be my father had dehumanized me, degraded me, demoralized me. What a depraved degenerate he was, and I’d probably grow up to be just like him. I vowed to fool fate. I’d snuff myself! It seemed the only way out! I hurt so much that I remember looking down at my crumpled body and thinking I must be either broken or bleeding in every bone and molecule. I was surprised that I wasn’t. I kept asking myself over and over what kind of a degenerate in the whole world would or could love his shit more than he loved his own son?

  “As soon as I was able to I found my wallet and sneaked out the fire escape. My only wish was to go home. Home to my mom, who cared about me and loved me. Or did she really? Did anybody? Could they? I probably had all my dad’s dud genes, and I’d turn out exactly like him, but at least, I promised myself, I wouldn’t have any kids to pass the degenerate crap on to.” Sammy suddenly stopped talking. He looked both physically and emotionally exhausted.

  “Want to take time out for a drink?”

  “I need something. The more caffeine in it the better.” He wheezed. “I thought you said puking up the gut-and-brain-and-heart-rot would make me feel better.”

  “I promise you it will! As soon as you get all the bad and sad garbage out of your body, you can replace the black haunting negatives with bright, wholesome, peace and happiness-giving positives.”

  He took a deep, noisy swig of Pepsi. “I hope you’re right. I gotta count on your being right! It seems there’s no other out for me. I wanted to dump everything, and yet, like I said before, I didn’t want to. Either way it’s painful.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be a kind, gentle, slower, easier, way.”

  “I remember once when I broke a couple of ribs skiing, and after they healed the nurse started taking off the heavy tape inch by inch until I just screamed at her to take the damn thing off in one horrible yank instead of slowly and forever torturing me.”

  “Sometimes that’s best.”

  “Well, in the weeks after the ‘Lance thing’ it wasn’t a matter of whether I wanted to commit suicide, it was just a matter of how I was going to do it. In fact it was exciting in a way, imagining myself pulled down slowly under the black soft water after I’d jumped off the bridge, or just drifting off peacefully into eternal nothingness after I’d overdosed on something, or watching my family lower the casket into the ground with everybody, including the kids at school, crying and feeling sorry for me and ashamed of how they’d treated me.”

  “Had the kids at school and your family, excluding your father, really treated you that badly?”

  “No, but at that time, in my black rage, I thought they had, which hurt just as much as if they really had.”

  “Oh, Sammy, you’re so wise to understand now the concept that sometimes when we’re being sucked down into a cold dark funk we see everything in relation to how we see ourselves at that particular moment.”

  “That’s strange and true, isn’t it? Actually, I hadn’t really thought about it before, but the concept is scary, probably dangerous.”

  “More potentially dangerous and “self-destructive” than most people realize, except you, smart kid.”

  “Next time something like that happens, if there ever is a next time, and I pray there never will be, I’ll talk to someone before I let it take over my whole existence—definitely before I accept suicide as ‘the only way out.’”

  “Will that be easy or pleasant?”

  “Probably not, but I don’t want the whatever it is to grow like Jack’s bean stalk either. Do you remember that story?”

  “Of course I do. It was one of my favorites, except for the big, scary giant at the top.”

  “You know that’s kind of like this whole ‘Lance thing.’ It started, and I let it grow. I actually knew how poisonous it was, still I nourished it by transferring how I felt about it, to how I felt about everything else! I can’t believe I let him poison everything in my whole world.”

  “Oh, Sammy boy, you amaze me with your understanding. And you are so, so right and sooo, so bright! You are going to make a marvelous…whatever you decide to go for.”

  “I didn’t make it so great the first time I saw you.”

  “That time doesn’t count. You were hurting so much then that your cognitive ability was off its cogs completely.”

  “Now that I think back on that black, deep, no daylight, sewage tunnel I wandered through for so long, I’m amazed. I could have gotten out at any time! Nothing held me hostage down there!”

  “Yes, something did! Your Neg ’Tudes! By then you had given them complete authority, jurisdiction, and prerogative over every aspect of your life, physical, mental, and spiritual, and they were expanding and multiplying and taking over your complete existence like—”

  “Like weeds,” Sammy interrupted. He was beginning to come out of his deep funk. “I remember Uncle Gordo Gordon once telling me about weeds when I was vacationing on his farm. He’d given me a little plot to grow radishes and a couple of other things that grew fast, so that when Mom and the girls and…he…came, they’d see what a good farmer I was. Anyway, it was fun till the weeds started to take over. They grew so fast, and the other stuff grew so slow, that it took almost all the fun out of gardening. Uncle Gordo kept telling me that life was like that, and that I was getting a great learning experience early that would stand me in good stead. How stupid I was not to have understood that lesson. He and Aunt Marian came out and helped me pull the weeds or I never would have even made it through the project with its sweet returns. Later we all sat on the ground around my garden with a pan of water and washed my spinach and lettuce and radishes and ate them straight out of the ground.

  “Why couldn’t I have remembered that lesson when I needed it? Why didn’t I look for support and reinforcement from someone? Probably because I didn’t know I could or should then.”

  “That’s too bad, for there are times when all of us, no matter who we are or where we are, need a support system to keep us from getting down below a five-out-of-ten in our lives. All of us should think of someone, while we’re feeling good, to whom we could go if something horrific happened to us or even if we had a series of smaller problems, which when added together become a weight too heavy to carry comfortably. I’m sure you can think of someone now.”

  “Yeah, now I can think of lots of someones: Mom, or (my new principal,) Dr. Davidson, or Mr. Driggs, my school counselor, or Josh, my old tennis teacher, or Uncle Gordo or Aunt Marian
or Grandma Gordon, or the preacher at the church where I used to go, if he’s still there, or the new preacher if he isn’t! Actually I could even call the help line that’s advertised on our school bulletin board. I never thought I would before, but any of those things could help nip a problem in the bud couldn’t they? Or help a person get turned around?”

  “They certainly would help if you would let them!”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet any of them could have and would have helped me see that because one apple on the tree goes rotten, it doesn’t mean that none of the rest of the apples are fit to eat.”

  “Sammy, you ought to write a book with all your profound sayings in it.”

  “Oh yeah, about as likely as my laying eggs.”

  “Dare I bring up the fact that you have laid a couple?”

  We tried to playfully laugh, and he slapped me on the shoulder. “Leave it to you, my mentor and my confidant, to bring that up.”

  “I couldn’t resist.”

  We stopped to stretch, then I said seriously, “I can’t understand why it’s so hard for people, including myself, to say to someone they trust, ‘I am in need of reinforcement now, my comfort and self-esteem gauge level is getting close to empty, or please just be there for me till I get things together, or listen to me for a while.’ It could be as simple as saying to your mom, ‘I need to talk,’ or ‘I need a hug, a big-long-I-love-you hug, a I’m-glad-you’re-part-of-me-and-I’m-part-of-you hug.’”

  “Even the bad part?”

  “Cut that out, kid. If you’re willing to sell yourself for a nickel, the world will buy you for a nickel. Putting a five-cent price tag on yourself is as foolish and foolhardy as giving a five-cent problem five-hundred-dollars’ worth of energy and time. Now, tell me honestly how much are you worth?”

  “A million? A billion? A zillion? My mom used to read me bedtime stories and tell me I was worthless”—he laughed—“I mean priceless.”

  “Now tell me another good remembrance, and don’t you forget it! That is the PRICELESS part!”