Although Mom had never had a boyfriend to my knowledge, she had a habit of renting out our extra room to younger men who could change lightbulbs and be positive influences on Kyle and me. The last guy, Reggie, was a third-degree black belt in kung fu and had been our camp counselor for the last four years. She had to kick him out when it became evident he had no interest whatsoever in changing lightbulbs or acting as a positive male role model. Instead he hid in his room listening to Bob Marley while he smoked unbelievable amounts of pot.
Andrew ended up taking the extra room and had no issue with helping out around the house and mentoring me. At thirteen years old, he had run away from home and taught himself how to juggle to make a living. By sixteen, he had traveled all over the world as a juggler and learned seven languages, using a method of syllable association he had come up with himself. He claimed to have learned fluent Cantonese in four months. By nineteen, he spoke eleven languages, had written a book, and was reading Beowulf in Old English. He hadn’t been to school since the sixth grade.
Juggling was just a means to an end for him, a way to support himself, travel the world, and learn more languages. Aside from that, he didn’t seem to care much about it.
I didn’t quite understand why he took such an interest in my life, until one day when he confessed his love for me.
“You can’t repeat this to anyone. I have only told this to one other person, but the reason I ran away from home was that my sisters were molesting me. Because of that…well…I’m not attracted to women,” he said. This was the first time I had heard of anyone being turned gay, but I didn’t bring that up.
“What about Sky?” I asked, referring to his girlfriend, who was an amazingly beautiful trapeze artist.
“That whole thing is just a front. I mean, she doesn’t know any of this, but it’s an act.” I didn’t understand why he didn’t just come out of the closet. A lot of the male figures in my life were gay—partly from growing up in the Bay Area and being involved in the performing arts, and partly because my mom still held a grudge against all straight men since one of them had left her with two kids.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why not just tell the truth? I mean, why are you telling me?” I must have sensed what was coming next because I felt a little uncomfortable.
“Because I’m in love with you—have been since we met, and I needed to say something about it,” he answered.
I just stared at the floor for a while, trying to figure out what to say.
“Honestly, I haven’t figured it out yet. If I’m straight or gay, I mean. I don’t know what I want,” I lied. Even as I was saying it, I couldn’t figure why I didn’t just tell him I liked girls. It seemed to work, though, since he never brought it up again.
Rather than putting a strain on our relationship, Andrew’s confession seemed to put him in better spirits. He still gave me advice on everything from juggling to personal grooming. He even showed me how to shave for the first time, and I was long overdue. I had been bleaching my mustache since I was eleven because Mom thought that once I started shaving it would grow even faster and there would be no stopping it. At thirteen, I had two years’ worth of facial hair, and was finding it harder and harder to explain to people why I had black hair but a blond mustache.
Andrew continued to act like an older brother until Kyle and I got arrested for stealing tapes at Tower Records.
I don’t know if the security guard gave everyone the same lecture, but it was pretty effective. “When you guys walked in, I said to myself, ‘now there’s a couple of good kids.’ I don’t have children myself, but I was thinking what it would be like if I had a couple of good kids like that. That’s what I was thinking about when you guys came in, because in this job I don’t see too many good kids.”
I was sufficiently humiliated by the whole thing.
Mom absolutely refused to come get us, and because it was a Friday night, we would have to spend the whole weekend in juvenile hall. The security guard decided he would keep us at the record store until they closed, just in case Mom changed her mind and picked us up. We sat with him for three hours behind the two-way mirror, watching for other shoplifters and praying to see Mom walk in. She never came, even after two more calls from the security guard, who kept telling her what a couple of good kids we were.
“I’m really not sure that juvenile hall is the right place for them,” I heard him say.
Ten minutes before midnight, Andrew showed up with a note from our mom, asking the store to release custody of us to him. The guard took a couple of Polaroids, which he tacked to a wall next to hundreds of other pictures, and told us we were never allowed back. Andrew sent Kyle home in a cab and decided that he and I would walk. He lectured me for another hour about how, even when he was broke and homeless before he learned how to juggle, he had never stolen a thing from anyone. Stealing was the lowest thing a human being could do, and he wasn’t even sure if he could be my friend anymore. Andrew was so disillusioned with me, he was going to have to think very hard about whether he could even stay in the same house with a thief. It was the worst walk home ever.
I was totally pissed off when I tried to steal a candy bar a few days later and wasn’t able to go through with it. It had nothing to do with wanting to be a good kid, or realizing that stealing was bad; I was just too scared and nervous about getting caught. I was never able to shoplift again, which was all the more frustrating because I was always broke.
TO MAKE MATTERS worse, Mr. Lutkenhouse took his story to a journalism student at UC Berkeley, who wrote an article about it. I read the Daily Cal in order to keep up with what was becoming an increasingly nasty fight between the citizens of Berkeley and the university over the school’s involvement with South Africa. I was stunned to come across an article about a poor teacher who had not only been beaten up by two malicious brothers but had also lost his job and was now working as a nude model in the university art department. This teacher’s only aim in life was to help the kids, and we had destroyed his dream.
Our age didn’t permit the journalism student to use our names, but she did mention that I could often be seen on campus doing my juggling act or on my unicycle delivering newspapers. She neglected to mention, however, that the only reason he became a teacher in the first place was that, after completing law school, he had repeatedly failed his bar exams. This had come to light during a cross-examination at one of the many depositions Kyle and I had attended.
I gave up performing at the university when a few people started heckling Kyle and me for being the kids who had attacked our teacher. A few days later, I was forced to give up my paper route, after being chased by four high school kids holding baseball bats. I recognized them as graffiti writers who had already come looking for me at my elementary school. When I heard someone yell, “There he is,” and saw them heading toward me, I hopped off my unicycle and ran away as fast as I could. An older kid at school had warned me that they thought my tag was similar in style to their terminally ill friend’s graffiti, but I didn’t see any similarity. I used entirely different letters, for fuck’s sake. Nonetheless, I started taking a different route to school and learned how to play foursquare instead of basketball as it offered a quicker escape route out of the schoolyard.
When I found myself with no income, an inability to steal, and a very real fear of leaving the house, Mom started looking into boarding schools.
fourteen
Sees our protagonist stand his ground against a pack of fanatical well-wishers
OTHER THAN BETSY installing a padlock on her door, my trip to the hospital and subsequent family drama didn’t seem to have a visible effect on my roommates. We all just did our best to pretend that nothing had happened. I still rehearsed with my bands and tinkered around in the recording studio, but I didn’t have any money or work so I had to start selling shit. I never knew how much money my grandmother’s trust was going to generate, but this month I had received only thirty-seven dollars. The first things
to go were a whole bunch of old Schwinn cruisers I had bought at flea markets and fixed up over the years. Then it was records, and eventually I started selling off some of my nonessential recording gear.
I tried my best not to use, but I had horrible back pain from the fall, and my chest had been making a clicking sound like a grandfather clock ever since my trip to the hospital. The heroin didn’t quiet the sound coming from my heart, but it took my mind off it.
A week later my definition of “nonessential” started to include some of my nicer microphones and other gear that had been off-limits only a few days earlier. Owning a recording studio had been my dream for a while, and I really didn’t want to lose it.
I just needed to get a good week or so clean. Mom and I had started talking again only a few days after I had kicked her out of my place, and she agreed to let me try to kick at her house. I only lasted one day before sneaking out to get high. In a rare moment of clarity, I told her about it and asked her to drive me back to the rehab. I wasn’t going to fall for all that God shit, but a few weeks away from everything would do me some good.
I filled out the paperwork, gave them my insurance info, and then went to meet with the head doctor, who interviewed me about my drug history. I didn’t get very far into the interview when he got up and put his ear to the wall clock.
“Are you wearing a watch?” he asked me, looking confused.
“Yeah,” I said, showing him my ten-dollar holographic Jesus watch, which I had bought in the Mission.
“Let me hear it,” he said. I reached across the desk to hold it up to his ear. “No, that’s not it. What’s that ticking?”
“Shit, you can hear that? My chest has been making that sound since I fell from my loft.”
“What? It’s been making that sound for a week? We got to get you to the hospital now. That’s your fucking heart, man.”
He didn’t need to talk like that for me to figure out that he was perhaps a bit unorthodox as far as doctors went. His name was Barry, and he had long curly hair tied up in a ponytail. Instead of medical texts and anatomy charts, his office was filled with Buddhist art, and the bookshelves mostly contained texts on yoga, Eastern philosophy, and spirituality.
“Nah. It’s fine. I’m sure it’ll go away,” I told him.
He stared at me as if I were crazy.
“Un-fucking-believable. I can hear your heart clicking from across the room and you’re telling me—a trained doctor—that it’s no big deal? Have you been to medical school?” he asked.
“No,” I said, having a pretty good idea about what was coming next.
“Well, I have, and I am telling you that the sound coming from your heart—you know, the organ that keeps you alive by pumping blood through your system?—is in fact a very big deal.”
Had we met under different circumstances I might have thought he was a pretty cool guy, but right then I decided he was a patronizing asshole and I didn’t like him at all.
I WAS RIGHT ABOUT my heart. The specialist at the hospital told me I had a contusion—whatever that was—but that there was nothing to do about it except wait.
Barry had sent me to the hospital before finishing my intake evaluation, but decided that I should detox cold turkey in the hopes that it might scare me into staying clean.
“But I’ve kicked cold turkey before,” I told him. What was my fucking insurance company paying these people for?
“Great. So you know exactly what to expect,” he responded.
I DIDN’T NEED to look at the Feelings Chart they handed out at group therapy to know that I was fucking miserable. There were only about twenty patients, and in the morning we were divided into four groups for two hours. I sat hunched over, and rocked back and forth, shivering in silence, until the counselor, Jan (pronounced “yon”), asked, “So how are you feeling, Oran?” Despite the fact that Jan was clean and sober, he always looked as though he was about to nod off.
“Shitty,” I answered.
Jan also had a habit of peppering his conversations with incredibly long pauses. Just when it seemed as if he’d forgotten all about me, he continued. “Shitty could mean a lot of things. Can you look at the chart and find a more accurate ‘feeling’ word?” he asked.
I looked at the Xerox of emoticons with different facial expressions and the feeling words underneath.
“I feel anxious, apologetic, bored, cautious, cold, frustra—” I was picking out the list of negative feelings alphabetically before Jan cut me off.
“Let’s just start with the first one. Why do you feel anxious?”
“Maybe it’s because I ended up in a fucking rehab, kicking heroin, and it’s the last place I want to be right now. How the fuck am I supposed to feel?”
“I think that what you’re feeling is absolutely appropriate. Have you ever heard of the disease model of addiction?”
I shook my head, bracing myself for what I was sure was going to be a load of bullshit.
“Would someone like to explain it to him?” he asked the group.
“The disease model,” a middle-aged man in a suit and tie started, “is that addiction—just like cancer—is in fact an incurable terminal disease that wants us dead. Unlike cancer, though, the disease of addiction is in our mind, and it tells us to do things that will keep the disease active rather than in remission.”
“Did you follow that?” Jan asked.
I nodded, but in fact I had become distracted, trying to figure out why this guy had dressed up in a suit and tie for group therapy.
“Sure, that sounds like a nice little theory,” I said as flippantly as possible, “but what would that have to do with anxiety?”
“Well, one way of looking at it is that your anxiety could be the disease talking to you, trying to make you uncomfortable, to get you to go back out there. Any junkie knows the best way to get rid of anxiety is heroin.”
I nodded in agreement at that.
“Part of why we want you to identify your feelings is that, with practice, we can begin to differentiate our real feelings from the disease.”
“Hmm. Have you ever kicked heroin?” I asked him, trying out Barry’s technique.
“Many times,” he answered.
“Then don’t you think it’s possible I could be feeling this way because I’m going through fucking opiate withdrawal?” I said as nastily as I could muster.
I didn’t feel like talking anymore. Jan got the picture and moved on to the next patient, while I went back to rocking back and forth while I stared at the carpet.
I did feel some temporary relief whenever I defended myself against this AA shit. I hadn’t even opened my little blue AA book yet, and already there was enough evidence to see that the whole thing was based on nonsense. Disease model, my ass. How come I had managed to do heroin in the past and not get addicted? Was it contagious? How does it spread? Can they find it in a blood test? I didn’t buy it. I was just going through a rough spot.
The more I rocked back and forth thinking about it all, the more it became apparent that rehabs were the perfect setup to recruit people into what was clearly a cult. No one is more destitute than someone who has lost everything, and these suckers would believe anything if it promised them a way out. Too bad for them, because once I start feeling better I’m getting the fuck out of here, I decided.
THAT AFTERNOON I finished my intake session with Barry. “So, do you think you might be an addict?” he asked me when I was done telling him my drug history.
“I don’t think so,” I answered him honestly.
“Let’s see,” he said, looking at his notes. “A bottle of wine when you were seven, beer and pot at eleven. Mushrooms, acid, alcohol, pot, and speed, from thirteen to seventeen, then cocaine, speed, alcohol, and heroin from eighteen to twenty-four. Am I missing something? You came an inch away from losing your life to heroin last week,” he said with that patronizing voice.
“That’s absolute bullshit,” I said. “You’ve taken what I said totally out of
context. How does two beers when I was eleven constitute alcoholism? I told you I’ve tried mushrooms once, speed two or three times, I fucking hate pot, and aside from trying heroin a few times when I was younger, I’ve only been using it for about a year.” I was pissed. “And I didn’t almost lose my life to heroin. I fell off my fucking loft because of the Klonopin I took when I was trying to kick. You manipulated everything I told you.”
“Are you crazy? What I have in front of me here is a clear progression into addiction, and you seem to have no appreciation for the fact that you almost died as a direct result of your using.”
“I didn’t almost die!” I said, noticing my voice increase in volume. “I fell six fucking feet. That hardly seems like a near-death experience.”
Once again, Barry was looking at me as if I were an alien.
“You contused your heart, man. Do you hear me?” His voice was almost a whisper. “I’m a doctor, and I’m telling you it doesn’t matter if you fell six inches. You are fucking lucky to be alive.”
There was no use talking about it anymore. He was obviously being overdramatic just to scare me.
“I’ll bring this to the staff meeting on Wednesday,” he said, holding up his clipboard, “and we’ll come up with a treatment plan for you.”
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