“We’re not going to leave because we all care about you, and we can’t just stand by and watch you do this to yourself. We’re here to help.” It sounded like he had listened to a do-it-yourself intervention audiobook on his way up from Santa Barbara.
“If you really wanted to help, you would all get the fuck out of here so I can get some sleep. I’m fucking serious.”
“We can’t watch you do this to yourself,” he repeated.
“Watch me do what? Sleep? Because that’s what I’m doing,” I said, lying back down.
“Okay. I don’t have anywhere to be. I can wait here for as long as it takes,” he said.
“Um…actually, I have to go to work,” Jake said under his breath.
“Oran,” my mom said. “This is ludicrous. We’re not here to judge you. Jack flew out here because he’s concerned. We all are. We’ll sit here and wait around if we have to, but…. Jack, you tell him.”
“I called Betty Ford, and unfortunately they’re full, but they highly recommended a place out in Redwood City. And here’s the deal: we’re not going to leave you alone until you agree to come with us.”
“How is that a deal? A deal would be that if I agree to go look at this place and I don’t like it, you’ll all leave me the fuck alone.”
“Fine. Just look at the place. Okay?”
I thought about it for a little while and decided that the easiest way out of this mess was to go along with it. If I said yes, I could be back home in three hours, and it would give me some time to talk my way out of all this bullshit. If I said no, who knew how long they’d be hanging around.
“Okay. If you guys will just leave for a minute so I can put on some clothes, I’ll go look at this fucking place with you.”
They shuffled out and even closed the door behind them. I got out of bed already fully clothed and took a hit off the tinfoil I had hidden in my desk drawer. I was careful to take a small one since I was planning on being back in a few hours anyway and didn’t have a dollar to my name.
THE ONLY RECOLLECTION I had of being in a car as a family was one time when we went to Disneyland. Jack had recently moved to L.A. from Massachusetts and agreed to meet us in Anaheim to celebrate Kyle’s eighth birthday. We could not have picked a worse day. It was both Christmas break and the grand opening of Michael Jackson’s Captain EO. The place was teeming with insane kids and annoyed parents. We waited on line for at least two and a half hours to see the fifteen-minute Michael Jackson movie where he turns all these mean and ugly space people into beautiful synchronized dancers by zapping them with some dance moves of his own.
I was pretty psyched after seeing that, but Jack, who had mostly been quiet all day, said, “Holy shit, I’m getting a vasectomy when I get home.”
Maybe he thought we didn’t know what he was talking about, but I couldn’t believe he would say that after spending one day with us. One fucking day in the last three years. Happy birthday, Kyle.
Thinking about it now, I realized he may have been on to something. Not that I wanted to kill myself, but at that particular moment, in that car, driving to a fucking rehab with my mom, my dad, and my brother, it would have been nice to just not exist for a little while.
PULLING UP TO the rehab, they assured me repeatedly that they would be outside waiting in the car for me. I went in and talked to the intake counselor just to make it look as if I was giving it some consideration. I didn’t even listen, but I nodded my head a few times to give her the impression that I was. She had all kinds of AA shit hanging on the walls, including a framed poster of the twelve steps, which I had never actually seen before. I couldn’t help but notice the word God used throughout.
Fuck this. What did God have to do with me using heroin? I thanked the woman for her time, but told her I couldn’t see this type of thing working for me.
Finding the car door locked, I knocked on the window. Kyle kind of jumped when he heard me, but he made no move to let me in.
“What the fuck? Open the door!” I continued to knock. Mom and I noticed at the same time that her door was unlocked. I made a grab for the handle but missed it as Jack, who had started the car, took off in a panic. They tried not to look at me as I ran after them for three blocks screaming profanity, except for Kyle who took a few quick glances out of the rear window until they finally lost me.
I sat down on the curb for a while, seething and trying to catch my breath while I tried to figure out what the fuck I was going to do. One thing was for sure—I was never going to talk to those motherfuckers again. Any of them. Fuming, I picked a direction and started walking, pretty sure I would find a Caltrans station sooner or later. I found one just as the last train was pulling up, and I got on and hid in the bathroom all the way back to San Francisco. From the train station, it was another two-mile walk back to my house. I was so pissed off that I was actually happy to see Jack’s rental car parked back in front of the place. I had just spent two hours thinking about what I was going to tell those fuckers and had decided that short and sweet would be the best approach. Jack was a professional speaker, after all, and I didn’t want to risk giving him the chance of saying anything that might trip me up in my attempt to let them have it.
They were sitting with my roommates in the living room.
“Fuck you, you, and you!” I screamed, pointing at Jack, my mom, and Kyle. “If you don’t pay rent here, get the fuck out!”
“Hey, Oran, we’re really—” Jack started to say, but I was prepared.
“Get the fuck out of my house. Now!” I screamed, before storming to my room. It was way too late for him to start in with this dad shit. It had been too late for twenty-four fucking years.
thirteen
In which the boy finds himself in trouble with both sides of the law
I WAS ALMOST HOME from school when I saw Mr. Lutkenhouse step onto the corner with a bloody bandage taped to his face. I wanted to turn around…run…hide in a doorway, but I couldn’t move. Luckily he turned right and kept walking without seeing me.
Mom was on the porch staring intently at a piece of paper she was holding. As I got closer I could hear her saying “What?” over and over again.
“Oh, Ory. I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you this morning,” she said as I walked up the stairs. I don’t think I had ever heard her say that in my life. I assumed she was admitting some responsibility for what had happened at school. “A lawyer just dropped this off for you,” she said, handing me the paper. “It’s a subpoena. You and Kyle are being sued for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? For what?”
“Battery and assault,” she explained.
“That can’t be right,” I said, looking at the paper. “First of all, he beat the shit out of me. Second of all, that was only two hours ago.”
“Well…that’s what it says.”
“Did this lawyer have a goatee, a black suit, red tie, a bandage on his face?”
“Yeah, something was very weird about him. How did you know? Did he question you?”
“That wasn’t a lawyer! That was the fucking guy! The teacher! Mr. Lutkenhouse!” I said, getting excited. “I told you he was an asshole, and you didn’t fucking listen to me. He beats the shit out of me and now I’m getting sued? Jesus Christ, there were thirty…sixty fucking witnesses…what the fuck?” I was alternately crying, yelling, whining, and laughing, all of which seemed entirely appropriate.
We were still on the porch when another lawyer showed up to take a statement for the school district. I repeated my story for him, and my mom, who hadn’t heard it yet, and we showed him the subpoena. The lawyer looked it over and told us we had nothing to worry about, that the school district would handle everything. Mom was well aware that we could have sued the shit out of them and won, but she was adamantly opposed to the legal system, though she never had a problem threatening people with it. For a few months the school district bent over backward to accommodate us; the sup
erintendent even took me on private walks, and I found out he had been a professional magician for many years before he went into education. He divulged the secrets behind cutting people in half, making people float, and even told me some stories about the Magic Castle, a club shrouded in secrecy that only the best magicians in the world belonged to. He had a membership and invited me to go there with him, but once they realized we weren’t going to sue, I never saw him again.
The day after the incident, my classmates treated me like a celebrity.
“Goddamn nigga. You fucked that teacher up. You see that motherfucker’s face when he came back up here to get his shit? Blood dripping everywhere. I was like, ‘Oh my God. My nigga Oran gave you a beat-down, bitch. Motherfucker deserved it, too. That was some insane shit, blood,” Akbar said.
“Thanks, cuz,” I said.
“What’d I say about calling me cuz?” he said after all that. “Nah. I’m just playin’ wich you, nigga.” It was the highest compliment I could have received.
I was let back into the basketball games, and even some of the junior high kids befriended me. Considering I hadn’t suffered any serious damage, the whole thing seemed to have worked in my favor.
Almost all the kids came by my desk to shake my hand, and Carol came over and gave me a big hug. “I’m sorry” is all she said, but it meant a lot.
LIFE RETURNED to normal fairly quickly. Well, normal for me. Although I hadn’t made it to that Coca-Cola audition, there were a zillion other auditions going on all the time. It seemed as if I went to every single one of them, but I never got a callback, probably because I was so stiff and awkward at these things.
My acting career wasn’t panning out too well, so I decided to shift my attention back to juggling in order to enter the International Juggling Competitions, which were taking place in San Jose the next year. In preparation for that, I decided to enter a local competition that was held in Southern California. Every year on April Fools’ Day, a few thousand jugglers would converge on Isla Vista, a little town next to Santa Barbara. This regional convention was started mainly in reaction to the stuffier, more corporate vibe of the international convention, which, to my knowledge, had never been held outside of the United States.
The one in Santa Barbara was started by a group called the Renegade Jugglers, which was a fitting name. They were a group of crazy pot-smoking, beer-drinking, womanizing (no small feat for a juggler), long-haired weirdos, who supported themselves by making juggling equipment. It was such a decadent environment that only two other kids signed up for the juniors competition. Convinced I had nothing to worry about, I didn’t even bother practicing for it. Unfortunately it didn’t go that well, but I tried to sound excited when I called Mom and told her I got the bronze medal.
“Wow, third place? That’s wonderful, honey.”
“Yeah, it was great.”
“Good, because Judy Finelli has agreed to choreograph your routine for the international competition. Isn’t that amazing?”
“Uh…Yeah. Cool,” I said, but I wasn’t looking forward to it. The other two kids were also competing in San Jose. Even if I had practiced, I still would have probably come in last.
Judy Finelli was the director of the Pickle Family Circus, another San Francisco one-ring circus, which had received a tremendous amount of respect for being one of the first circuses to trade in flashy tricks for a more artistic, political, and theatrical experience. We were hoping that getting her to choreograph my piece would provide an in for joining up with them.
ALONG WITH ALL my after-school activities, I had also taken a job as a paperboy. I had to be up by 6:00 a.m., and in true Berkeley fashion, I delivered my papers riding a unicycle rather than a bike. Throwing newspapers was an easy job, plus it was great cover for writing graffiti. Nobody was out that early in the morning. Collecting money at the end of the month, however, was impossible. No one wanted to pay me for waking up at 6:00 a.m. to bring them the news. Mostly people just refused to answer the door, but if I happened to catch them mowing their lawn, or arriving home from work, they would tell me that they had canceled months ago or never ordered it to begin with.
I knocked on one door and was greeted by a juggler named Scott who was actually very successful.
“Oran? What are you doing here?” It was a shock to see him, as I didn’t even know he lived in Berkeley.
“Scott? Hey, man, you owe sixteen dollars for your Chronicle subscription.”
“You’re kidding me, right? You’re delivering papers? I’m sorry, but I can’t pay you for that.”
“Should I come back tomorrow?” I asked, disappointed he was giving me the same brush-off as everyone else. I had seen that guy collect a thousand dollars for one show at Pier 39.
“No. You shouldn’t come back at all. You’re too talented to be delivering papers; you could actually be making real money performing.”
“Come on, man. I wake up at six in the morning to get you your paper, and you’re not going to pay me?”
“How much do you make doing this?”
“I’ve only collected sixty bucks. Nobody, including you, wants to pay for their paper.”
“Okay. I’ll give you four times that if you stop doing this. It’s depressing.”
I should have taken the money, but who the fuck was he to tell me what I should do? I scratched Scott off my route. That motherfucker could go get his own paper.
The next house told me they would give me the money once I returned the Cadillac medallion I had stolen off their car.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I answered, trying to cover up the Mercedes-Benz medallion I was wearing around my neck. I didn’t even bother trying to collect from the house with the Rolls-Royce. They had already called the police to complain about their missing hood ornament.
I KEPT MY PAPER ROUTE, but that summer I dropped everything else to focus on the upcoming competition. I had come up with the clever idea of working my paperboy job into the routine when I heard a song by Midnight Star called “Headlines.” It was a hip-hop song, with a robot singing the chorus: Extra, extra, read all about it. Judy Finelli choreographed the performance, with the help of Larry Dilahante, my jazz-, modern-, and interpretational-dance teacher. When the big day finally came, I could not believe that Scott, the bastard who wouldn’t pay me for delivering his newspapers, was one of the judges. I could see him chuckling when I rode out on my unicycle wearing my San Francisco Chronicle bag. I rode around the stage juggling newspapers, which I then threw out to the audience.
I ended up doing much better this time, coming in second place after the older kid who had won in Santa Barbara. Although I thought his routine was terrible, I was content with my silver medal, until Scott found me backstage. “Hey, Oran, you were unbelievable. I take back everything I said about your paperboy job. Here…” he said, handing me sixteen dollars. “I’m sorry, but we had to give Robbie the gold.”
I didn’t understand what he was getting at. I just said, “That’s okay. Thanks.”
“What I’m trying to say is that this was his last year to compete in the juniors. You’ve got five more years. We just didn’t have a choice.”
What was wrong with this guy? I’m sure he thought he was giving me a compliment—just like when he had said I was too good to be delivering papers—but he may as well have punched me in the gut. I didn’t give a fuck if it was Robbie’s last year to compete. If I deserved the gold, I wanted the fucking gold. I had to endure people complimenting me for the rest of the night, many of them echoing what Scott had said. I tried to smile and say thanks, but I was pissed off.
I CONTINUED JUGGLING, but after that experience, I was disillusioned with the whole scene. Graffiti and shoplifting were taking over as my main interests, and I tried getting into drugs as well. The problem was that they didn’t really agree with me—not the drugs that were available anyway.
Pot was really the only thing twelve-year-olds had access to. The first time I tried it, m
y friend Tony had stolen some from his dad, who was studying at the seminary to become a pastor. We hid in his basement and smoked the stuff. We sat there, waiting, but nothing happened. The second time was the same scenario, but that time I did feel it. It was the opposite of the cool, mellow vibe I had been expecting. Instead, I got paranoid and self-obsessed and decided I hated Tony. I was supposed to spend the night, but I couldn’t handle being around him or his dad, who came down to the basement to hang out with us for a while. His dad was kind enough not to bring up Jesus or anything, but the pot was making me hate him too. After Tony’s dad went to sleep, I decided I had to get the fuck out of there.
Sneaking into my own house made me so paranoid, it took me close to twenty minutes to get to my room. Whenever the stairs creaked or I made any noise, I would stand stock-still for a while, hoping it would sound as though the house had just creaked on its own, which it often did. When I finally made it to my bed and was just about to fall asleep, I heard a noise downstairs and spent the rest of the night wide-awake, terrified that stoned people were walking around the house.
I resolved to never do that shit again…until a week later when I hung out in Tony’s basement and apparently forgot about the last time.
I WAS STILL HOPING to join the Pickle Family Circus, but instead of having me do a formal audition, they wanted me to hang around their compound in San Francisco to see if I would fit in. I started spending a few nights a week at the old Victorian mansion they had gutted and turned into their rehearsal space. There were two other kids around my age, Lorenzo and Gypsy Pickle, who were born into the circus. Although I got along with them well, I quickly became much better friends with a nineteen-year-old juggler named Andrew. Meeting him was like meeting a myth. I had never seen him juggle before, but everyone had been talking about him. Andrew had appeared out of nowhere a few years earlier and shocked the juggling community with a style no one had ever seen before. Not only did he live up to my expectations, he exceeded them. His arms moved at lightning-fast speeds around the three balls that appeared to hover amid the blur of his hands. Seeing him juggle didn’t shed any light on what it was he was doing, but, unlike other jugglers who had developed their own styles, Andrew didn’t mind being copied and would even show me what he was doing in slow motion.
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