Mom and Doug wear their silver wedding rings proudly, holding hands in public like the couples walking down the hall at my school. She seems happy and I’m glad for her even if I don’t trust Doug with his weird food and weird habits and weird way of talking with all the pauses in it. He’s nicer to me than he used to be. I know Mom told him if he ever beat me up again, she’d leave him but I don’t think that’s it. It’s more like he’s softened, humbled somehow.
At the end of the summer, Mom takes me to the airport in Portland in the red Honda Accord she packed for the weekend because she has a conference for her job at the state mental hospital. She has promised to buy me some new school clothes before I go and instead of taking me to Goodwill, she takes me to J. C. Penney, where she tells me to choose a hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. I try on some shirts and two pairs of pants and decide to blow the whole thing on a pair of expensive dress shoes like Jake, which Mom thinks is wasteful, but when we go to pay she realizes she’s forgotten her wallet so we head back to the house on Windsor Avenue.
When we pull in the driveway, the blinds are drawn. We walk in the house to find all the lights off. It’s dark like a crypt in the middle of the day. “Hello?!” she calls out. The door to the bedroom opens and out walks Doug in his boxer shorts and a brown T-shirt.
He walks up to Mom quickly and gives her a kiss. Taking her by the shoulders and pushing his face into hers. “Hi, sweetheart,” he says. She pulls her head away and looks at him, studying his face, her mouth sideways, her eyes squinting.
“What have you been doing?”
“Just hanging out.” He looks at her, searching her face. I know I’m not wanted. I know I’m seeing something not meant for my eyes. I know this has something to do with the “other addictions” people go to the program for, the one Doug has that they talk about sometimes when he says he’s going to meetings at a place called SA. It’s too much to take in at once because Doug is an adult and we’re not really sure what sex even is and because of the pamphlets they leave around the house, practically the first thing we ever learn about sex is that there are sex addicts.
But he looks so much like a little kid now. And Mom looks so much older, giving him the look she used to give Tony and me when she busted us hiding candy.
“Did you decide not to go?” he asks.
“No, I just forgot my wallet. I think I left it in the bedroom.”
“I’ll get it,” Doug says, turning quickly and nearly jumping down the hall. She pauses for a second then follows him. I go outside and lean against the Honda in the driveway, putting on headphones to listen to Louder Than Bombs one more time.
He was a sweet and tender hooligan, hooligan, and he swore that he’ll never, never do it again.
She’s silent for the drive up I-5 to the airport. She drives fast because we’re late and she doesn’t want me to miss my flight. She puts her hand to her temple, resting her forehead between her thumb and finger as she watches the road.
I wonder what was in the bedroom. I don’t have any words for it. It has a shape and color I can’t fathom.
When Paul would disappear to drink in his truck in the woods, she would cry and cry and we knew why she was sad. It was obvious. He was gone and sick and we needed him to chop wood and warm the house and tend to the rabbits and calm Mom down. But this is different. It’s insidious, hidden as if behind a screen, unnameable and therefore difficult to understand, less like a train wreck and more like a vague sickness that saps your strength. She doesn’t cry or explain. She doesn’t say, “Let go and let God,” or “One day at a time,” or “It’s you and me against the world, kid.” She just stares at the trees and highway signs.
I feel a disorientation, a force pulling me in different directions. I wonder if Doug is the source of this feeling or if Mom is or if I am. Why was the house dark? What was it I saw? What is this black sick feeling I have now? There are different kinds of addictions.
I know she wants me to pretend that I didn’t see what I saw, to simply exclude it from the world that we acknowledge exists, the one where she has finally found an “honest man” who’s going to “take care of her” instead of another addict. Holding the two ideas in my head—the thing that happened and the fact that we are not to acknowledge it—has the strange effect of making me feel numb. This makes it easier to pretend. Anyway, I am the one who left for California, the one who hurt her by leaving, and the least I can do is bury my questions and suspicions of him, the gut feeling that he leads a double life. I owe her that. That’s what it means to be a good son.
She tells me about the time-share property they’re buying into and the great “family trips” we are going to have, all of us, Tony and me and Catherine and Matthew and Doug and her, one big family. I know she believes it, this perfectly adequate dream of a family. I know it’s my job to pretend to believe it too.
The flight can’t come soon enough and I feel a rush of relief when the jet engines shake the plane and I am pinned to the back of my window seat watching Oregon fall away beneath me, the Portland skyline, the mountains, the bridges, the endless silent pines. All those places to hide.
CHAPTER 29
THE PLACE WE MEET A THOUSAND FEET BENEATH THE RACETRACK
Everyone says Tony is going to die. Flesh tells me he saw him tripping acid at a party. While everyone was drinking and dancing in the living room, Tony was in the bedroom screaming because he thought there were bears on the wall that were going to kill him. Eventually, he just climbed out the window and left. I know he’s been doing coke because Duck let it slip at the Bowl one night that he couldn’t even hang out with him anymore. When I asked why, he covered one nostril and took a snort. Everyone’s got something to say about him, like he’s an action hero, a young Marlon Brando in tapered Dickies and karate shoes. “Your brother’s got a death wish, man. But that dude can take more drugs than any three people I know.”
They say it like they are impressed, like he’s a legend, like they respect him for it.
He puts a finger to his lips one afternoon as he walks out the door with the keys to the black Lincoln Continental Dad borrowed from Uncle Wes. “Don’t say shit. I’ll be back.” He gives me a sneaky smile. I look out the window and watch him drive off. He’s only sixteen with no license. He’s still gone when Bonnie gets home. She asks me where the Lincoln is. I tell her I don’t know but she figures it out soon enough. When Dad gets home, there’s a noise on the front porch so Dad goes outside. The keys are sitting on the doormat. There’s no sign of Tony but the Lincoln is parked down the street with the doors open.
We don’t see him for a couple days because he knows he’s in trouble and when he finally comes home, Dad yells at him to “get his shit together.” It’s a familiar fight. Dad is angry with him but also defends him. Bonnie is furious that he would take advantage of this sympathy Dad shows him. We all know he defends him like a wound, the way a boxer guards a broken rib.
“I just want him to see his next birthday.”
Bonnie has a long discussion in the living room with Tony about “his future.” He’s got that wild look as he sits on the couch, breathing hard, rocking back and forth, staring at something on the far side of the room. His hair is dyed black now, his tight surf T-shirts cling to his thin, muscled frame and broad shoulders, his jaw jutting out.
Bonnie lectures him for taking the Lincoln and tells him he’s grounded. He’s twitching, his head bouncing, his eyes going to all corners of the room. He jumps up and says, “Why do you care what I do?” She says she loves him and wants him to be safe and it’s clear he has a problem.
He says, “I just want to be with my friends. Can’t you understand that? I finally have people who care about me and you’re trying to take them away.”
Dad says, “Aren’t you tired of this shit?”
“Tired of what? I just want to be happy. Nobody wants me to be happy.”
Bonnie shows him the note from the guidance counselor at Westchester High that says Tony
hasn’t been to school in three months. “You should see this. They sent it to us. Are you really skipping school every day? Where do you go?”
He stares at the purple slip with his name typed in the corner. “Nowhere. I just need space to think. Can’t anyone around here understand that?” He’s on the brink of tears. “My friends care about me. It’s not like how it is around here.”
Bonnie studies him, tilting her head, and says, “I’m just trying to talk to you.”
Tony has the crazy look and he stands up and screams, “No you’re not! You’re trying to control me!”
He stands over her, all six feet two of his skinny, teenage Dope Fiend frame attached to a handsome face and bloodshot eyes. Dad tells him to calm down but he just keeps shaking. “You don’t understand! Nobody understands!” He tries to walk out the front door but Dad blocks him.
Bonnie calls the police because she thinks there’s going to be a fight. I hear her say, “I don’t know what to do. I think my son is on drugs. Can you send somebody?”
Dad stands in the doorway and yells, “You have to go to school! What the fuck do you think life is?! What, are you going to hang out with your friends for a living?!”
“We’re going to have a big house where everyone can live and we’ll be fine! We don’t need you!” He stomps his feet like the time he broke his leg playing baseball in Oregon. He and Mom got into a fight and he just kept slamming his broken leg into the ground, tearing at the cast, saying, “I hate it here! I hate it here!” like he was holding his own body hostage.
There’s a loud knock when the cops come and as soon as Bonnie says, “The police are here,” Tony runs out the back door and disappears. The cop enters the house, a mass of walkie-talkie, black gun, black baton, and handcuffs. Bonnie says, “Our son is on drugs. He’s getting violent and we don’t know what to do. He just ran out the back.” The cop says he’s not going to go chasing some teenager around the street.
He asks what kinds of drugs Tony’s on, whether he has been violent before, whether he’s ever been arrested, whether he has any weapons and if he’s threatened to use them. He says Tony probably needs to go to drug rehab and there are some good ones around if they’re interested and to call if he tries to steal the car again.
When Tony finally comes home two days later, when he’s crying and says he’s sorry and he looks like he’s been dragged through a hundred miles of dirt and gravel with his hair messed up and his tapered Dickies torn at the knee, a stained Quiksilver T-shirt and a scrape on his forehead that he says is “nothing, don’t worry about it,” and they have a meeting with the guidance counselor at Westchester High who runs the Just Say No program started by the wife of Thatasshole Reagan to keep all us kids off drugs. In the meeting the counselor asked, “Straight up, do you have a drug problem?” Tony said yes.
The next day they pack up a suitcase for him and take him to Santa Monica to live in a drug rehab house called Clare where teen drug addicts live together to help each other get sober which Dad says is the only way to do it “if you’re serious” and anyway it’s a fortunate turn of events because finally Tony will be “somewhere exactly like Synanon.”
* * *
I CAN’T GET the image of Tony’s tear-soaked face out of my head. He looked scared. I was scared for him, to see just how out of control he could get, to watch as the beer became weed became coke became acid became three months straight of ditching school became red eyes and nervous fingers twitching and crying on the couch in the living room.
The guys have always brought flasks to the Bowl, to be sipped in the parking lot in the bushes beneath a car ramp. One night Flesh brings a pistol. It feels heavier than I thought it would be when he hands it to me. I try to play it cool, to point in a corner, squinting my left eye to aim. He drops it into the small of his back under his shirt and we walk back inside the Bowl with cigarettes in our teeth like badges that read, “No Future.”
The parties are meaner and I feel defenseless without Tony. I found Flesh snorting coke in the back of a Honda outside his house. He offered me some and I declined and he said it was no big deal and to go back inside. Duck had a rusty machete and was watching a possum as it waddled down the gutter. He ran up behind it and chopped the machete down onto the possum’s back with an awful crunch. He was bigger so I couldn’t yell at him and tell him it’s bad enough to kill an animal if you’re going to eat it, but to kill it for no reason was just cruel.
“Fucking psycho,” I said, under my breath.
Duck looked at me and said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
I felt a blackness settle into my stomach and I turned to walk home, thinking of my brother’s sad face, how I didn’t want to end up like him, how we just slipped into this moment. I wonder about this path we’re on. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve chosen, more like a ditch I’ve fallen into. But it’s different for Tony. He just kept falling, like the ditch was bottomless and there was no way out. Is this how it was with Dad? With Uncle Pete and Uncle Donnie? Is this what’s waiting for me?
Flesh and I decide to ditch school to go for a motorcycle ride. I’ve got my fake signature down pat for the note. I wait until Bonnie leaves for work and Dad is gone on a job and I sneak my bike out from the garage. I meet Flesh at the apartment. Duck is there with some older guys and a freshly packed bong that they pass around. When it gets to me, I decline, thinking about what Dad says about drunk drivers.
“Can’t smoke and ride,” I say.
“Pussy.”
We start our bikes in the alley and we are off, riding through the streets of Westchester illegally, the way Dad told me I never could. I look out for cops, thinking we’ll be busted at any moment, trying to play it cool as we hop over curbs and spin out on green lawns, letting out a yell of glee, the cry of rebels and outlaws, the black smoke from the bikes filling the quiet air. Flesh leads the pack on the loose sand trail around the Bluffs as we head toward Hamburger Hill, for the turns and the hills, the track and the jump.
When we get to the track, we ride faster, like a pack of jackals, like ditching school to ride has suspended the laws of physics, like we have no future anyway, no rules, nothing but this moment with our bikes like a challenge against God. I lean into a turn in the dirt and feel my tire slip as I ease off the throttle and manage to stay upright. Over the moguls and around the embankment toward the big jump. I crank and shift. Crouch. I gain speed, with my legs bent, leaning forward to prepare for flight.
As I approach the jump, I suddenly see Flesh’s black helmet peak over the crest, his blue flannel flapping in the wind. He’s gone the wrong way over it and is heading directly toward me. He’s high, goddamn it. I swerve to miss him, to miss the jump entirely. There is a low dirt wall to the left and I panic as I reach for the brake. I pull the throttle instead. My feet fall off the pegs and I struggle to hang on at forty miles an hour. There isn’t time to think as the low wall approaches. It’s twenty feet away, then ten, then five, then all at once I slam into it and I am airborne.
There is a brief dream of flight, of weightlessness and escape. There’s no time for a complete thought, just the sense, like in my dreams, that flying is simply a matter of remembering. It’s silent in my helmet, nothing but a quiet whisper of wind as the ground approaches.
I land on the back of my head and double over onto the concrete with a thud.
I blink for a moment, staring at the sky. When I close my eyes and try to breathe, no air comes. I try to stand but fall over and stumble facedown, a sharp pain in my side. I can’t inhale and I can’t walk and I can’t see because everything is rotating and blurry. I try to scream inside my helmet but nothing comes but a sickly wheezing sound.
Duck is a ghostlike figure walking toward me in his red shoulder pads and boots. “Damn, motherfucker. You flew thirty feet.”
“I. Can’t. Breathe.” I mouth the words. He tries to lift me by my shoulders but a sharp pain makes me nauseated and I think I’m going to throw up so I und
o the straps and pull my helmet off to lie down on the concrete.
I stare up at the sky, trying to take tiny breaths, blinking as faces form in a circle over me, framed by the empty blue against white clouds. Flesh looks scared. Someone says, “Holy shit. Go call an ambulance.”
When the paramedics arrive, they cut my shirt off and clap their hands over my face. They ask me my name and what hurts. I let the other boys answer because I can’t think. They’ve got dark blue shirts on and dark blue pants and they roll me on my side, placing a wooden board underneath me. I feel straps over my legs and waist then straps around my head so that I can’t look left or right or sit up and I am frozen rigid to the board. They lift me and Flesh’s face comes into view. His eyes are wide and he’s breathing hard. “Get my bike,” I say as they lift me into the back of the ambulance where it’s quieter and no one watches me and I can close my eyes while the paramedic stands over me. I hear the engine and feel the bumps of the road, lurching left and right as we head to somewhere I can sleep and figure out what’s happened, thinking questions I can’t quite finish in my head. Where did we? Why is it so? How come I can’t?
The paramedic holds my hand hard, squeezing and yelling every time I close my eyes. He puts something into my wrist, something sharp that stings. He keeps asking me questions. What’s my phone number? Who are my parents?
“Jim.”
“Dad.”
“Mechanic.”
“Thirteen.”
“Can I sleep now? My head hurts so bad. I just want to sleep. Where’s my bike? Did someone get my bike?”
I nod out and wake up to see bright lights over me, squinting as I’m rolled down a hallway. Someone shines a flashlight into my eyes and someone else puts a tube on my wrist and I see a clear plastic container fill with dark red blood and I try to lean over to throw up but I can’t move my neck so instead I throw up into my mouth and feel it fall over my face as I try to spit it out to breathe. A nurse grabs my jaw and holds it open while another sticks her hand in my mouth to sweep out what liquid there is and I try to hold in the next heave because I don’t want to throw up on the nurse’s hand. There’s some kind of suction bag making a wheezing sound as it pulls on my tongue and cheek so I try to just close my eyes and pretend I can’t feel my stomach.
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