The bike explodes to life, the big chrome headlight casts its beam across the field, into the hill. They are on the road, Linda hanging on for dear life, stoned but scared shitless by the speed, by Tony’s blasting through corners, charging rises, down dips, she is rigid, epinephrine overpowering alcohol and cannabis, terrified sober.
Then home, in bed, confused, Tony on top of her banging his pelvis angrily against hers, thrusting deep, trying to hurt her, and she, hurt, still stoned, still terrified, refusing him her warmth, punishing him back for being such an asshole, withholding her excitement, her love, nothing more than a limp bimbo.
Ruthie leaves the next morning before Tony emerges from the bedroom. She feels the tension but Linda assures her it is nothing, hangovers, a crazy party. Do I smell like a campfire? Crazy people hanging all over each other. “It’s not me,” Linda says, “but, you know, some were actually very nice.”
Tony sees red. He is in bed, lying on his stomach, a pillow over his head, the blanket pulled up closing off all light. In the blackness he sees red, a triangle warping, stretching, zinging high thin, pulled wide flat, jumping, jerking, drug-induced responses to sharp sounds, bitching.
Linda is bitching, grumbling, sniveling loudly enough for the kitchen noise to pierce the walls, the blanket, the pillow. Pots bang, spoons fall, oatmeal—three spoonfuls, how did she hide it, hold it in her mouth—spurts from Michelle’s mouth. Bitch, bitch, bitch. “I could use a hand out here.”
He doesn’t answer. Problems, he thinks. Always fuckin problems. Always something wrong. Solve the fuckin problem, he screams at her within his head. He grits his teeth. Life is a fuckin problem. Success in life is measured by how you solve the problems that come at you. It is a Marine instructor’s voice from long ago. Still he lies there.
“Dirty dishes,” she moans. “How do we create so many dirty dishes? I’m so tired of doing dishes.”
I’ll do em, to her in his head. Just leave em. Aloud, “I’ll do em when I get up.”
“I’ll do them,” she calls. “I just don’t get a chance to do anything with the girls screaming. And my head’s splitting.”
Tony gets up angry, residual anger from last night, from last year, from last forever. He puts on a pair of u-trau, walks into the living room. There are toys, books, gnawed teething biscuits, scattered all over the floor. Even the milk crate Linda has painted to hold the toys is overturned.
“Look at this mess,” Tony snaps. “This place is a goddamn shithole.” He stands amid the clutter and with a bare heel grinds a plastic boat into the carpet. The toy cracks, splinters, a spring flies out throwing small jagged plastic chips. Shrapnel, he thinks. He stomps a plastic blow-up pink panther. It pops, sighs as the air runs out. “They got too much damn stuff.”
“About time you got up.” Linda comes from the kitchen, stares at him.
“This place is a shithole,” he snaps.
“Then clean it up.” Linda is in no mood. She’s been up with Gina and Michelle, and Ruthie until Ruthie left, trying to keep them all quiet, trying to let her man sleep.
“They’re not so fuckin young that they can’t learn to clean—”
“For Pete’s sakes, they’re only sixteen months.”
Gina and Michelle stand together, behind their mother, under the kitchen arch. They look at Tony without expression. Already, at sixteen months, the pattern has formed, stay away from him when he’s angry.
“What the fuck are you looking at.” Tony leaps at them.
Linda shoves him with the heel of her hand. “Don’t you ever—”
The twins cower. Michelle begins to cry. Her cries make him angrier. He backs from Linda, snarls at the girls.
Linda shakes her hand at him. “Stop that. Leave them alone.”
“You want to cry?” Tony snaps at the girls. They are now both wailing. “I’ll give you something to cry about!”
“Stop that!” Linda shrieks at him. “What’s the matter with you?”
“With me? You goddamn tramp. Were you going to let em go all the way last night?”
“Huh?”
“I’ve got eyes.”
She is furious. “What is this—this monster coming out of you?!”
He growls. He storms back to the bedroom.
“You know,” she screams after him, “you don’t do a goddamned thing around here. I’m sick and tired of it. Not a damn thing. You don’t even work half the time. And what you do bring home, you spend on that goddamned bike. You’re so goddamned selfish.”
He seethes in the bedroom, she in the kitchen. She quiets the girls, hugs them, gives them the big spaghetti pot to play in, goes to the living room to pick up, thinks, I’ll be damned, plunks down on the couch, leans back, closes her eyes. Her head is pounding.
Tony dresses, hunkers down on the floor beside the bed, waits for the attack. Gina and Michelle are banging on the pot. Tony grits his teeth. He can hear the metal ripping, the car impacting, ripping the station wagon to pieces, flipping it, babies flying. He hunkers lower. The door creaks. He leaps, hits it, slams it—the wail is instantaneous, high, painful. Immediately he is back to now, throws the door open. Linda rushes from the living room. Michelle screams, shakes the walls with her scream. He’s slammed the door on her hand.
Linda scoops up the girl, rushes to the kitchen sink, cold water.
“I ... I didn’t mean ...” Tony apologetic.
“You are such a ...” Linda is livid. The words get stuck in her throat.
“I didn’t know ...”
“... such a time bomb. You’re a walking time bomb.”
“I ...”
“Get out of here. Get out of here! You could’ve amputated her hand.”
Tony goes down the back steps. He is shaking, confused. Gotta change, he thinks. Gotta keep changin. Go. Get the fuck out. He gets on the Harley, cranks it up. His mind is cranking, racing. He runs the front wheel straight into the side of the house, revs the 74 CID V-twin engine for all it’s worth, de-clutches, the rear wheel spinning, digging, he thinking, I’m the idiot. I’m a fuckin idiot. I should never have come back. The Harley hopping, trying to break through the wall; Tony snarling, smash you motherfucker, the rear wheel half-buried, fishtail pipes on the ground, chain eating dirt, engine revving, revving as out of control as Tony’s head, then kur-kur-Chunk. The bike dies. Tony’s arms quake, shivers run through his legs, his jaw twitches. He dismounts. Runs.
Through the noise Linda holds Michelle on her lap, rocks her, her little hand wrapped in a washcloth with ice cubes tucked inside. Gina is next to them on the sofa, Linda rocking and holding both girls. Then the noise stops. She sits still, the girls leaning against her too afraid to even lift their heads from their mother’s body. She remains there ten, twelve minutes with her eyes closed, then rises slowly, gently lays the girls down. She grabs the box for the wood blocks, kneels, begins sorting the toys, putting them away. She works steadily, feels a small sense of satisfaction when the room is clean. She picks up every piece of the shattered plastic boat and takes it outside to the garbage. Tony is not there. Linda no longer cares.
New York City, Saturday, 6 November 1971—For two months Tony wandered, slept in doorways, begged for quarters, dimes, drank rotgut wine, ate little, smoked whatever dope he could mooch or steal. He was unshaven, unwashed, living in the clothes he’d worn on the day he left Mill Creek Falls. He’d been in a dozen fights, lost a dozen times, cut, bruised, punks without will, he’d thought, rolling a drunkard, taking his change, but unwilling to put an end to it all for him. He despised them. He withdrew further, became more confused, numbed out but not, to his mind, enough. He was in escape-and-evade mode, attempting to stay one step ahead of his own mind, attempting to kill every thought, afraid he wouldn’t be able to. He was trying to work up enough courage to go into the subway, wait for an uptown express, fall from the platform in time to be crushed.
His existence had been day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour. He had barely spoken in five weeks, ha
d been alone except for the brief plea, “Spare a quarter, Friend,” and the occasional moment, they avoiding his eyes, “Sure,” digging for change, dropping a few coins into his paper cup, careful to avoid touching him. Some nights he sang to himself, using song as a thought depressant. “‘Ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, Babe ...’” He couldn’t continue with that one, it evoked too many images and he wanted to evoke nothing. “Strafe the town and kill the people ...” An old aviator’s song to the tune of “Wake the Town and Tell the People.” It evoked nothing. If he could have concentrated, he might have been able to uncover the enemies who had done this to him. Yet the deepest he dared go was, “I can’t even be a good father, a decent husband.” That evoked self-pity, his new pleasure.
On the night of 6 November Tony was sitting on the curb of West Fifty-fifth Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Across the street, before a cafe, there was commotion, a big fight, people swearing, shouting, screaming from the sidewalk, retorts from the door. It subsided, the people dispersed. Then it erupted again. The bouncer emerged, one man raised his arm. There was a shot. Tony jolted, nearly peed his pants. The bouncer crumbled.
Tony was out of control. He did not evade but ran in paramedic mode, knelt beside the man, rolled him gently. There was blood on the man’s chest, left-center, well placed. People gathered. Tony checked for a pulse. There was nothing. He lifted the man’s head, then his own head snapped up, eyes searching, checking for snipers. He released the head in his hand. It thunked to the sidewalk. People shied back horrified. Tony looked up. Words sputtered from his lips. “He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s—”
“You better come in till the cops come. C’mon, I’ll buy ya a drink.”
Tony was in a fog. They were feeding him drinks. Someone congratulated him, slapped him on the back. Someone swabbed his hands with chemicals to test for nitrates—the Greiss test. If he’d been clear he would have known what was happening but he was not clear. He babbled. “Follows me. Wherever I go. Killings. K-fuckin-IAs.” He drank more, more, was very drunk, was sick, fell flat on his face. The results of the Greiss were negative—no charges, released, drunk. Someone, his arm about Tony’s waist, heard Tony babbling, asking for refuge, asking for Rock Ridge.
Tony did not remember how he got back to Pennsylvania, did not remember being readmitted to Rock Ridge Veterans Medical Center, did not know he’d been admitted into alcohol detox.
“I don’t”—his eyes were red, watery, his voice small, weak—“mean to keep pestering you,” he said to the therapist. “I don’t have—” he couldn’t finish aloud but in his mind said, “a human in the world I can discuss this crap with.”
“Are you familiar with AA?” The therapist, Daniel Holbrook, was in the doctoral program at Penn State. He was a year younger than Tony. Dr. Jonathan Freiburg had been kicked upstairs, replaced by Nelville Chapman, MD, psychiatrist, and by this young man. Policies, programs, procedures and personnel were in flux at the hospital. There were seeds of change, of social recognition, that alcoholism and drug abuse are illnesses, not crimes, and that talk therapy for “psychotic” war veterans might be at least as effective as pharmaceutical therapy; seeds germinating because the number of Viet Nam returnees at veterans medical centers, or in prison, was skyrocketing. But at Rock Ridge these were just seeds. Elavil and Thorazine were still the treatments of choice; and Haldol and diazepam (and Inderal to control the cardial arrhythmias caused by the antidepressants) were still prescribed as quickly as trick-r-treat candy on Halloween; straitjacket cocktails to guarantee institutional efficiency—no muss, no fuss, no flare-ups, no riots—just docile sheep without hard-ons.
Holbrook pitied Tony. He cared. He truly wanted to help. This was his first job. He wanted to be good at it; he dreamed of great breakthroughs. Tony did not answer him. “Do you get drunk all the time?” Holbrook asked. Tony shrugged. He was in the detoxification program, not the psycho-schizo-borderline-personality program. They had given him lithium carbonate, not the strait jacket. His past RRVMC residency record had not yet caught up with his new admission. “Why do you drink?” Holbrook asked.
“I ...” Tony garbled his words, felt isolated, claustrophobic in the tiny office.
“Please. Speak more clearly.”
“I got a case of the ass.”
“Hmm?”
“I get drunk so I can go to sleep.”
“Um-hmm.”
“Go to sleep. I don’t want to be conscious.”
“Go on.”
“That’s all.”
“When you say, ‘a case of the ass,’ that means angry?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you angry?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re angry at somebody?”
“I guess.”
“Um-hmm.” Holbrook paused, wanted Tony to fill in the gap but Tony remained silent. “Who makes you angry?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you angry at your mother?”
“No.”
“Your father?” Tony didn’t answer. Holbrook remained silent. Tony shifted. “Your father?” Holbrook repeated.
“My enemies,” Tony said.
“Who are your enemies?” Holbrook said. He mentally chastized himself, thought he should have simply fed back the words as the question.
“I don’t know.” Tony felt that Holbrook was becoming impatient. “Maybe my father.” For a few minutes he told Holbrook about Aunt Helen, about the suspected affair, about how it seemed it was all a misunderstanding, nothing more than his father’s joy at his return.
“Have you confronted your father with this?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t care anymore. It wasn’t true.”
“Then why be angry about it?”
“I’m not.”
Silence.
“I ... I ... I guess I just said that because I needed to tell you something. I was really hard on him when I thought, you know. He went through shit too but he handled it. I went through shit and I’m fuckin fallin apart. It’s eatin my fuckin mind.”
“Um-hmm.”
“I killed eight motherfuckers with my hands. With machetes. Sometimes I want to kill eight more. Eight more motherfuckers. Ever since I did that it’s been followin me.”
As Tony told Holbrook about Dai Do, the young therapist could feel Tony’s presence in Viet Nam, could vicariously experience the intensity even with Tony being lithium calm. He had never placed himself, mentally, in such an intense, life-death struggle. As Tony talked, Holbrook buzzed the orderly, told him to delay his next appointment. Tony continued. Holbrook tried to remain professional. He listened empathetically, interpreted the story as “an atrocity,” just like the atrocities he’d been reading so much about.
“Now,” Holbrook said in a pause, “you said this place ...”
“Dai Do.”
“... Dai Do, it’s been following you.”
“No. Not Dai Do.” It angered Tony that after all his explanation Holbrook still didn’t understand.
“What’s been following you?”
“Death. Fuckin Death. Last week I saw a guy get greased in New York. Zapped right there on the fuckin street.”
Now Holbrook was lost. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s back up and clarify some things. You said you’re ‘fallin apart and it’s eating your mind.’ What’s eating your mind?”
“You don’t fuckin get it, do ya?” Tony clamped his teeth, twisted away.
“Don’t get what?” Holbrook asked.
Tony sneered at him. “If I don’t drink or smoke a fuckin joint ... Jesus fuckin H. Christ ... I can be so fuckin tired I can’t move but I can’t sleep. If I aint movin, if I aint drinkin, or smokin dope, or poppin that diazepam shit ... that shit’s nowhere near as good as yellowjackets ... I can work on yellowjackets ... if I’m not doin somethin, I can’t sleep. My head’s crankin, you know? Crankin all the fuckin time. I’m fuckin wide fuckin awake, thinki
n. Gotta move. Gotta crack some motherfucker’s head open. Or drink myself to death. Maybe jump in front of a fuckin subway.”
Later that afternoon Holbrook’s report was read by Jonathan Freiburg. “Expressions of suicidal and antisocial ideations. Sociopathic tendencies ...” Freiburg also received Tony’s RRVMC history. In consultation with Nelville Chapman, who had never seen Tony, they merged the reports, did their administrative duty, reassigned Tony, first to be physically stripped and restrained and pumped with Thorazine, then to be moved to Seven-upper, the schizo-psycho ward. Full pharmaceutical therapy was prescribed. On the positive side, Freiburg, now with Tony’s home address and phone number, directed an orderly to type a standard letter to be sent to Mrs. Anthony Pisano. The letter sat for three days.
Tuesday: Tears ran down Linda’s cheeks. “Oh Babe.” She bent to him. “What have you done to yourself?”
Tony was numb, twitching, unable to connect, unable to even think left-right in sequence, or one-two-three, or who the fuck are you? The Elavil-Thorazine-diazepam-Inderal cocktail had been maximum-dosed with the plan to reduce to therapeutic maintenance levels over a period of six to ten weeks.
“I’ve been so frightened for you. We all have. Your folks hired an investigator and Mr. Wapinski went through all the back roads and even searched over by the gap. Father Tom ...” Linda couldn’t continue. Tony showed no response. “What do they have you on, Babe?” No response. “Damn it, I’m going to talk to the orderly. Your folks are down in Admin. They wouldn’t let us come up. Who’s this Dr. Freiburg?”
Linda looked around. The patients in Tony’s ward room, the ones whose dosages had not yet been lowered, who could not yet go to the day room to watch TV, were all zombies. She kissed Tony on the forehead. “I’m going to find somebody. Oh God! Oh God! Look at you.”
“Tony!” It was his father. Tony’s head felt like it was erupting. He knew Linda had been to see him but he wasn’t sure if it was today, yesterday, last week. “Tony, we’re going to get you out of here. It may take a little while but we’re going to find a better place. This is really ...” John Sr. didn’t finish either. Thank the Lord, he thought, Jo didn’t come up. Neither of them would have been allowed had his father not bribed an orderly.
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