Dad says he’s just trying to keep him alive, just trying to get him to his next birthday before he kills himself. He says this like he’s been there before. He kicked heroin himself. He dealt with endless Dope Fiends in Synanon. “There’s no easy fix here,” he says. “Maybe he will die. I don’t know. It’s his choice.”
He says this like he doesn’t care, with a shrug of his shoulders, snarling his lips into a scowl, but afterward, as the words settle over the room, as they fill up a corner and grow monstrous in size, his face changes and he only looks scared. Tony will apologize and Dad will forgive him immediately. Bonnie wants to ground him but Dad says he doesn’t want to be “too hard on him. That he needs to stay connected.”
Bonnie calls him an enabler and Dad says, “What do you want me to do? Let him die?” She shakes her head and goes into the bedroom, and when he walks out in the morning to go to the track, she tells me that he just sees too much of himself in Tony.
One night there’s a call at the house saying Tony’s been arrested for possession of marijuana. He’s in jail somewhere in the valley. “What did you say?” Bonnie asks Dad when he hangs up the phone.
“I said, ‘Good.’”
“So we’re not going to pick him up?”
“No. Let him figure out his own way home. He needs some tough love.” At the Al-Anon meetings in Salem everyone said alcoholics need “tough love,” which means you don’t just “enable their addiction by bailing them out of all their bullshit.” Dad is an expert on this. Until he isn’t.
Tony arrives at the house five hours later. He walks in the door and screams, “You were just going to let me stay there?” Bonnie won’t even look at him. She says she’s glad he made it home and it was his father’s decision and if he’d like to talk about it that’s fine but she will not be yelled at.
Dad walks into the room and screams, “You need to change your tone, my friend!”
Tony gets up in his face and says, “Or else what? I had to beg people for money and take four buses to get here, so don’t you fucking tell me sh——”
Dad yells, “You need a fucking attitude adjustment! You hear me?! A fucking attitude adjustment! You think you can just do anything you want! You’re gonna fucking kill yourself!” Dad walks up to him.
Tony screams at the top of his lungs, “What, are you gonna fuckin’ hit me?! You can’t do anything to me, you burnout piece of shit! I don’t need to be here if you don’t want me here!”
Dad is standing right in front of him, face-to-face. His face looks sad, scared. Tony is breathing hard, tears falling down his cheeks. Just as I think maybe Dad is going to let loose or sock him one in the jaw, he puts his arms around Tony and hugs him. I see Tony resist for a second, his black karate shoes shuffling on the carpet. But then he gives in and lays his head on Dad’s shoulder and starts sobbing.
Bonnie raises an eyebrow and looks at me. Soon they’re talking in the bedroom, all three of them. I can hear Tony pleading something over and over again. “But they’re my friends. They’re my friends…” Eventually, he walks out of the room and straight out the front door.
He doesn’t call or come back home that night.
The next night I leave the Bowl with some of the older kids and walk to the Bluffs. I’ve been hanging out with Tony’s friends after school since the day Ryan Church’s mom saw me smoking on a corner with my skateboard. Word got around to the other PTA moms and now none of the kids from my classes are allowed to hang out with me after school because I’m officially a bad “influence.” So even though I hang out with Ryan and Drew at school every day, after school I’m always with Tony’s friends.
I’m wearing my green basketball jersey because I have a game in the morning at the park league I joined with some of the kids from my classes. When we get to the top of the hill, we see a group of boys standing in a circle holding drinks in brown paper bags. I see Tony in the circle with them.
“Heeeeey, little bro,” he says and punches me in the shoulder. “You want a sip?” He hands me his forty of Olde English. I take a drink. It tastes like kerosene mixed with beer. After a few minutes, I feel lighter, that warm embrace, that relief, like maybe all this fighting is just a joke and Tony doesn’t need a home and neither do I. We are pirates at sea and besides we’re on the same team, so I’m just glad I’m not the one he’s mad at.
“Are they pissed?”
“I think so. Where have you been?”
“Just crashing with Duck and Flesh on their floor.” Duck and Flesh are Donald and David Fleishman, two brothers who live in an apartment down by the gas company in Playa del Rey. Duck is thin with the face of a forty-year-old man, even though he’s Tony’s age. Flesh is his younger brother who is only a year older than I am. At fourteen, he’s the only one close to my age. Because their mother is gone so much, their place is the go-to crash pad for Tony and his friends. They both have motorcycles, so some days they ride with us, with their full body gear, their matching shoulder pads and shin guards and kidney belts.
“Oh, cool.”
“I never thought Dad would get in my face like that.” Tony stares at the ground, kicking the dirt with his karate shoes. “Like maybe Paul or Doug or something but not Dad.” He lights a Marlboro Menthol and takes a drag. I can’t keep up with his brands anymore.
“Yeah, he was really pissed. I think he’s worried about you, though. He keeps saying how he’s just trying to keep you alive.” Tony nods his head and spits with his eyes closed as if to say, Well, yeah.
To be a drunk is to be a hero in a sad story.
Someone gives me a can of beer. We drink a few and a neighborhood security car arrives. The lights go off and a young man with a goatee in a thick brown jacket gets out, opening a door that says “Security Patrol.” They all yell, “Rent a cop!” as he walks down to the circle and bumps fists. Someone hands him a pipe packed with weed. The security patrolman takes a hit. Everyone laughs.
After a few beers, someone suggests maybe it’s time for a little destruction. They throw their arms around each other’s shoulders and form a circle around the pile of empty beer cans. Someone grabs me, pulling me into the circle as we sing:
This is a world destruction. Your life ain’t nothing!
The human race is becoming a disgrace!
We hop into Duck’s VW beast and head to the apartment by the gas company where we finish a case of beer then run out into the alley. “We’re just gonna do a little minor damage,” Duck says to me as we run out the door. I don’t know what to expect. I’ve seen them write graffiti on walls with big industrial pens or cans of spray paint. But this is different. It’s wild bodies fanning out into the street like those old zombie movies, mindless and aimless.
I see Duck knock over a mailbox with his skinny arms and kick some potted plants on a white corner house, getting potted soil on the beige bottom of his black karate shoes. Flesh pulls a stream of Christmas lights off a roof as we watch the red and green glass bulbs explode in the street. When they hear the noise, the popping from the lights, they scatter, laughing and running in all directions like a game. I catch up at the next block and see Tony stomping sprinkler heads so I grab a trash can and dump it out, watching the contents spill onto the pristine sidewalk, covering it with leftover bottles and boxes of cereal, envelopes, catalogs, rotting fruit, coffee grinds.
I don’t know why we’re doing it, only that it’s exciting to be here, outside the polite rules of this polite neighborhood as if the order itself demands chaos, and tonight we are its messenger. It’s a black eye to the beautiful face of this upright neighborhood near the airport.
Fuck you and your cars and houses and 2.2 kids. Fuck you and your job at Hughes Aircraft building bombs for the government. Fuck your tie. Fuck your condescending smile. Fuck your garden trolls, your birdhouses, your wind chimes, your seasonal decorations hung on the veranda of your perfectly landscaped front yard. We are proof of your mistakes.
I climb a concrete wall and sit on top to t
oss a brick into a backyard pool. Duck tips over a black crotch rocket. We scatter when it hits the pavement and the gasoline begins to spill onto the driveway. Flesh and I split off from the group, down an alley at the bottom of a hill next to the Bowl. He picks up a two-by-four leaning against a garbage can and knocks a rearview mirror off a blue Chrysler sedan. I spit on its rear window. He says, “That’s some pussy shit,” so I fish a beer bottle out of a trash can and hold it like a football, aiming it at a corner house with a large picture window. He looks at me, “Don’t act like you would.”
I throw the bottle as hard as I can and hear it break through the living room window with a crash. A dog barks and lights go on in the house and without a word Flesh and I turn and run up the block at a full sprint. There’s a mist that hangs around the streetlights, a light fog from the ocean two miles away, so that each one glows for five or ten feet creating hazy orbs that float above our heads like alien spacecraft. Every few seconds I look back thinking, We are getting away with it. How are we getting away with it?
We run all the way back to the apartment, where the crew is sitting on couches, drinking and eating chips. I start with a beer, then another, then another. We are laughing, everyone bragging about the destruction they wrought. Someone has weed and someone else has some pills. I know they’ve been taking LSD and PCP because Tony once told me he discovered the secret to the universe while “tripping balls” at the top of the Hollywood Bowl. It was the middle of the night and they were all looking at the stars on acid when he realized it. “What was it?” I asked him.
He cocked his head sideways, thought for a second, and said, “I forgot.”
I swallow something small and oval and white and when the little wooden pipe is passed around, I take a couple hits and lean back. Soon the world is pushed to the end of a long, dark tunnel. I hear voices like echoes off the walls and suddenly feel very sober in the middle of my head. I watch the room as if on a TV set a hundred feet away from me in my tunnel. The chip in Duck’s front tooth when he laughs. The way he raises his eyebrows at attention when people speak. Flesh sitting across from me in the overstuffed chair in his green flannel shirt, a beer in his lap, trying to get along with the older kids, saying, “Yeah, man,” “Holy shit,” “Fuckin’ cops, right?”
Someone says, “Your little brother is fuuuucked-up,” and Tony lays me on my side because the world is spinning now.
“You look pretty wasted, brother.”
“I think he’s gonna puke. Dude, do not let your little brother OD on my couch.” I feel hands on my shoulders pushing me down on my side. A warm sticky liquid comes out of my mouth. It drips down my neck, over my hands, under my jersey, onto my chest. Someone yells, “Fuck that’s nasty! Get a towel.”
I look down, trying to hold my head in place, to focus my eyes. The puke is a chunky yellow and green. It smells of stale beer, Cool Ranch Doritos and something like vinegar mixed with sourdough bread. I close my eyes. Just for a second. Just to stop the room from spinning. I’m standing in the tunnel in the darkness by myself and I feel an urge to scream but I can’t make my voice work. Is this what happened to Dad when he OD’d? Is this what it felt like to be Billy at the end? Is he here somewhere? Is someone gonna pick me up and take me somewhere?
I wish the ground would stop moving and I don’t care about the guys or how I look because there’s a feeling like a light being extinguished, like I’m reaching for it but it’s getting dimmer and dimmer until there is only darkness and the room is still and I put my arms around myself and rock back and forth. I see Paul and I see Dad and I wonder if it’s my turn now. I feel so sick, sleepy as I stand three inches tall in my head. How could I forget? I’m so stupid. I’m so fucking stupid.
When I wake up, the living room is empty. My head is heavy. My stomach queasy. The sunlight penetrates the vertical blinds that have been left open. It’s silent except for the sound of bodies breathing on the floor and a noise like a dial tone that seems to get louder with each throb of my skull. My basketball jersey is wet with beer and covered in yellow puke. I go into the kitchen as quietly as possible and take it off to wash it, squeezing the water out, hitting it against the side of the sink to get all the bits of Dorito and vomit. When I put it on again, it’s still clammy and smells of beer. It smells that way as I walk slowly in a haze to the gym at Westchester Park, where I see Ryan Church and my other teammates from school, the ones from the honors classes I’m failing, the ones who are not allowed to invite me to their birthday parties because everyone knows I am a burnout, a bad kid. They’re running in their clean jerseys, practically leaping as they jog laps to warm up for the game.
It’s strange to feel so lonely. The point was to not feel lonely, to be among the men. But I am queasy and tired with a headache, trapped in my mind, sad and apart from my smiling teammates with their clean uniforms, their morning-bright eyes, their futures.
CHAPTER 28
IS THERE LIFE ON MARS?
Mom calls and says she has big news. She’s nearly out of breath. “Are you ready? You ready?” Nothing good ever comes from these moods. “Hold on. I’ll let Doug tell you.”
“Hey, pal.”
“Oh, hey.”
“Well … um … so I’ve decided your mom is a real classy lady and I asked her to marry me.”
“Oh.”
I hear Mom hoot in the background then rush up to the phone and say, “Isn’t that great?”
“Wow.”
She grabs the phone. “We’re just going to do it at the courthouse since we’ve both been married before. I’m so excited to have someone to grow old with! We’re going to be a family. All of us. You and Doug and me and Tony and Doug’s kids. They’re going to be your brother and sister! Isn’t that great?”
“What are their names again?”
“Matthew and Catherine.”
Instant family. Just add water.
“Oh yeah. Well, that’s, um, that’s, that’s, that’s great, Mom.”
The engagement doesn’t feel real because Doug has already left her four times. Four different times he packed up his belongings and disappeared without a word. Four different times she took him back when he showed up again like a lost alley cat. Each time she explained why this time was different, why Doug was truly sorry and a changed man. After a while it seemed like a sketch traced on paper over and over again in which the outlines of the traced object become blurrier and blurrier until the final image is so disfigured, you don’t even know what it is anymore.
I say, “I’m very happy for you.”
Tony doesn’t think they’ll make it to the wedding day. “He’s got to stick around for like three months straight which would be some kind of record.”
In the pictures Mom sends us from the ceremony, she wears flowers in her hair and a simple dress. Doug doesn’t even bother to wear a suit to the courthouse, just his same gray tweed jacket with the blue elbow patches. He has a blank expression, staring forward while she smiles, wide-eyed and hopeful, holding her bouquet.
* * *
JAKE IS OBSESSED with David Bowie. When I get to Oregon for the summer, Bowie is all he’ll talk about. He shows me pictures in a magazine from the Glass Spider Tour, which, according to Jake, is the largest rock-and-roll production ever attempted. There’s Bowie with his sprayed mullet blond hair standing on a platform in a glittering gold suit, electric-blue angel wings lit up behind him as he sings. He seems like the coolest man on earth, his voice crackling through the speakers in Jake’s musty garage, where we sleep while the warm rain soaks the broken-down Salem streets.
And if you say run, I’ll run with you.
There’s a huge electric spider covering the stage onto which Bowie is lowered in a golden chair. Jake knows Bowie’s story by heart, the hippie art student who became an androgynous bisexual space alien named Ziggy Stardust who eventually morphed into the full-grown adult man who travels the world in the belly of a spider the size of a building.
The tour is coming to
Portland, Oregon, at the end of the summer. It doesn’t occur to us that we could go, that we could save bottles or mow lawns and maybe get a ride from someone. It’s more like we’re honored he would grace the Pacific Northwest with his presence. We didn’t know he knew we existed.
All summer we try to imagine what Bowie might think of us. He is the standard by which everything is measured. Jake gets a pair of thick sunglasses with red shades like the ones Bowie wears in a poster he sees at Rising Sun Records downtown, where we go to browse the vinyl. We both hitch our pants a little higher. We buy hair gel, slicking our blond locks back, wishing we had the money to buy everything in the store.
“I don’t think Bowie would play cribbage. He’s more of a gin rummy man.”
“How could you know? He probably plays some kind of card game he invented.”
“Okay, so who’s cooler, James Bond or David Bowie?”
“Bowie, for sure.”
“Bond has a gun and makes out with models.”
“Bowie could get any model he wants.”
Jake has completed his transformation into stylish mod giant, wearing clothes strictly from the mall, cardigans and collared shirts and the expensive shoes he buys with money from his paper route. We make a striking pair. Me, short, knobby kneed, a mouth full of the braces Dad and Bonnie paid for so I wouldn’t be so weird looking anymore and a general style that can best be described as a walking disaster of halfhearted gestures: a vintage collared shirt with a stain worn with beach shorts and a pair of old man shoes, puffing on a cigarette I’m clearly too young to smoke. And Jake, like some kind of British Paul Bunyan, six feet six in a trench coat and red glasses, hair slicked back in high-water pants inquiring about the new Smiths compilation and an import copy of Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols.
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