As she took my hands and guided them up under her sweater, I knew it was Casper who made it possible for me to touch her nipple with the fingertip I’d lost to a cherry bomb. It was Casper’s gravity that drew her close.
As we pulled off each other’s clothes, I saw him on the small screen in the back of my brain. I heard him say, “Don’t worry. I’ll be around.”
I was down to my underpants—she didn’t wear any—when we heard a knock on the door. “Constance, are you in there?”
I was so high, I didn’t recognize the voice until the door opened and I saw my brother standing there.
That night, my brother and Emory drove into New York City and got so blind drunk on the way home, the Skylark jumped the divider on Route 22. Emory ended up with a concussion. My brother broke his leg in two places—compound fracture. The police said they were lucky to be alive. When my father asked my brother why he did it, all Willy had to say was, “I wanted to see what I was missing.”
My brother never said a word to me about Constance. My father thought I quit the track team because Willy couldn’t run that spring. My mother thought it was for the best. “Zach likes to play games with other people” was how she put it.
Once word reached St. Luke’s that I was going out with Constance, aka Sunshine, my status rose. More titillating to my classmates than her lack of underwear or the fact that she had gotten kicked out of boarding school for drugs was the story that had won her heart (Sunshine even told her mother about it). Over hand-rolled joints and purloined beers, kids would ask me to tell them about my bogeyman. Having Casper in my life gave me far more character in the eyes of my peers than all my brother’s track trophies combined. I got good at telling the story, dropping it into conversations, using it to answer questions before they were asked. I kept Casper alive, for he had given me an identity and made me cool.
My popularity was a relief to my parents. Now that my head was screwed on straight, they felt it was safe to leave me home alone. They were wrong.
Teddy Kennedy gets so bombed he drives off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard and leaves his date to drown. The Manson family dines on acid, then eviscerates a pregnant movie star in the Hollywood Hills. A man takes a walk on the bright side of the moon, then a couple hundred thousand kids, stoned on peace, love, and (most of all) each other shut down the New York Thruway on the way to Woodstock. And then we find out about this army lieutenant who herded three hundred women and children into a ditch in a place called My Lai and shot ’em all. He said he was acting under orders. They say everybody in Vietnam smokes dope. It’s the only way they can get through it. If they weren’t high before they pulled the trigger, they were afterward. It seemed like everybody was operating under the influence of something in 1969.
Sunshine called it a contact high. She swore that if you’re just near someone who was really fucked up, you’d get fucked up on whatever they were fucked up on.
I never ran five miles in thirty minutes, and though I failed to earn my brother’s friendship in high school, I was compensated by the loss of my virginity—a fair bargain. I was sure as only a teenager can be that I had found something that would last forever. At night we would sneak out and meet at our river and slip into the water naked as the trout I no longer tried to catch.
Halfway through the summer, Sunshine stopped answering my calls. I figured she’d found someone older and cooler to swim with. Hoping I was wrong, needing to hear something that would make me understand, make me feel less guilty for bragging about our intimacy, I pounded on her parents’ door.
They told me Sunshine had been arrested for buying two pounds of Acapulco gold from an undercover agent in Washington Square Park. My father’s inquiries on the subject revealed that her parents had kept her out of jail by committing her to a private mental hospital called Payne Whitney. Dad told me it’d probably be six months before they let her write me a letter. I was surprised at how sorry he felt—for both of us.
Late at night, sleepless and hungry for dreams, I would think about how sometimes, after we’d gone skinny-dipping, we’d lie naked on flat river rocks warmed by the sun, and she’d take the damp end of her braid in her hand like it was a paintbrush and write messages down the length of my spine. I could never tell what she was spelling out. But sometimes, in the darkness just before sleep, when I’d be thinking of her, my brain would suddenly change channels, and I’d see Casper looking out at me from the video monitor of a security system that watched him sleep.
You might have thought that Sunshine’s fate would have scared me straight. My brain didn’t work that way. It seemed to me that drugs, like being sent to the loony bin, were part of the risk one took in being young.
If drugs weren’t part of your problem, they were part of your answer. At least, that’s how it was at St. Luke’s. Pot, mescaline, vodka: Rarely did I imbibe all three at the same time, but at least one figured in the equation of my idea of weekend fun. I knew I was burning brain cells, but thanks to my father, I knew I had over a hundred billion to blow. Like the Stones sang, time was on my side.
My dad helped make drugs, I took them. In the stoned logic of my teenage mind, my self-medication seemed like I was carrying on his work. Like the starship Enterprise, I was determined to go where, if not no man had, at least my father had not gone before.
By 1970, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I did my homework with my head between hundred-watt speakers that blasted the joys of sex and drugs. Since my father was, according to Who’s Who, one of the world’s leading authorities on memory, learning, and drugs, one might be tempted to criticize Dad for not suspecting I was conducting a drug study of my own. But in all fairness, my parents were not entirely to blame for not noticing my chemical drift.
Besides being a first-rate people pleaser, I was also an excellent liar. I loved my parents, but, like all children, I had reached that point where I no longer believed in them. My questions were varied, my suspicions vague. Had my father dosed Casper with something that had done him irreparable harm? Had Casper killed Jack? And if my father was responsible for Casper, and Casper was responsible for Jack, did that mean my father had a hand in Jack’s death? Was that why my mother had stopped sleeping in his bed? Why did Casper’s recapture make everything right again between them?
And was this nagging sense that I was not being told the whole truth the reason I felt free to keep them misinformed about my own state of mind? It wasn’t that my parents didn’t deserve the truth; it was just that in my heart, I did not believe they wanted it, at least not when it involved drugs. Mine or theirs.
The compulsive list-making my mother had taught me kept my head on straight enough for me to keep my grades up, but at night I had to write more and more reminders to myself. It wasn’t just schoolbooks and papers I had to remember; my lists now included notations such as “Find new hiding place for pot, buy air fresheners, remember to bring breath mints, use eyedrops, flush all roaches.”
By Christmas of ’70, five kids at St. Luke’s had been kicked out of school for drugs. The headmaster had a list, and I was on it. Whether I was a hypocrite or just a foot soldier in the assault on ethics, I realized that drugs weren’t a problem unless you got caught doing them. Since I was on the headmaster’s list, the only way to avoid getting caught, disappointing my parents, and still be able to get high was to tell a lie so large and preemptive, no one would suspect I had the balls to be so shameless.
When I told my father I wanted him to help me write an article for the school newspaper about the dangers of recreational drugs (working title: “What Comes Up Must Come Down”), he got that same dreamy smile that had appeared on his face when he caught me consulting the DSM to find out how crazy I was.
As it turned out, the research part of the article was fun for both of us. He took me to the headquarters of one of the big pharmaceutical companies, and we watched a 16 mm film of lab monkeys getting addicted to cocaine. They were hooked up to a drip, and all they had to do to get ano
ther hit of coke was push a button. After a couple of weeks they got so high that they began to eat their own fingers. Having not yet done cocaine, I was glad I wasn’t a lab monkey in a drug test.
I guess it was the animals being locked up alone in the cages with nothing to keep them company but the whirr of the camera and the buzz of cocaine that made me think of Casper. On the drive home, we stopped at a Stewart’s and had root-beer floats. My father said that that had been his and my mother’s idea of a big treat when they first met over the Bunsen burner. When I asked my father if I could look over any of the videos they took of drugs being tested on Casper, he winced and rubbed his forehead.
“That would be impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s unethical.”
My antidrug article appeared on the front page of the school newspaper. Letters an inch high: WHAT COMES UP MUST COME DOWN, subheading: “The Hidden Menace of Recreational Drugs.”
Everybody I smoked pot with at school thought I was a complete asshole, phonier than phony, right up there with Richard Nixon. One kid actually spit on me. Since I didn’t like to get high alone, I probably would have quit drugs now that I didn’t have anyone to do them with, if only the headmaster hadn’t decided to read the article out loud in chapel. When he got to the last paragraph, his voice cracked as he quoted me. “Why has our generation turned to drugs? Why do we want an imitation of life, rather than the real thing? I don’t have the answer to these questions, but St. Luke’s has taught me this much: If you don’t like your world, change it. Don’t run away from it.”
When he’d finished, the headmaster took out his handkerchief. Some say he blew his nose; others swear he wiped away a tear. Whatever, he announced, “Thank you, Zach Friedrich.” Slowly, he began to clap and motioned for me to stand up. Two by two, other hands began to join in. The applause built. Those who didn’t know me clapped because they thought I was someone else, someone even worthier than my brother had been, and those I had gotten high with, even the kid who spit on me, smirked as they mistook my hypocrisy for high irony. They thought I had deliberately made the headmaster look like a fool; they believed they were privy to another one of my secrets. Casper, drugs, school . . . I inadvertently turned them all into one huge joke.
The stoners joined the jocks, the applause echoed as they began to stamp their feet, whistle, and hiss “Zeeeeeeeeee.” Everyone believed what they wanted to believe, including me.
The headmaster entered “What Goes Up Must Come Down” in the state high school journalism contest. Worse, it won first prize. My self-loathing peaked when my father put the trophy I received on the same mantle that held all the cups and bowls Willy had won for running. My father, being an academic, took more pride in mine than he did in all Willy’s combined. For I had won not with heart or body but with mind.
A psychiatrist I went to once years later told me that writing that article was an incredibly hostile act. And though she pretended not to judge, I could tell she loathed me. As she pulled cat hairs off her skirt and dropped them in an ashtray one by one, she told me it was hostile to my father, and to my friends, and to the headmaster who had given me a break and not expelled me for the cherry bomb incident, and, most of all, it was an act of aggression toward, and showed profound disrespect for, myself.
I told her, “You’re missing the point. I wanted to get caught.”
“Did you think you needed to be punished?”
“No. I just wanted to start fresh. Confess.”
“Did you make any attempt to tell your father the truth about your drug problems?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
I didn’t mind her sitting in judgment of me, but I could not bear to have her pass psychological sentence on my father. “Dad was preoccupied.”
“You sound angry.”
“That’s the sort of thing my dad used to say.”
“What was your father preoccupied with?”
“Let’s get into that next session.” Our time actually was almost up. She gave me a prescription for Paxil, even though I didn’t ask for it.
After a week or so, my journalism trophy began to mock me from its sterling position of honor on my parents’ mantle. I could almost hear it whisper to me as my breath tarnished its glow, “None of it’s true.”
I was high that Saturday morning when it all became too much, and I suddenly willed up enough shame and courage to shout out, “Mom, Dad, I’ve got to tell you something you’re not going to want to hear.” My parents knew I only used that expression when I had fucked up big time.
I braced myself to be echoed back with shouts of “what’s wrong, what have you done now?” Until I realized there was nobody home but me.
Looking beyond the trophy through the big picture window that faced west, I could see them in the distance, walking with Alfie. Alfie was a giant poodle with caramel-colored hair and a long, undocked tail that curled up behind him. My sister said my mother got him because she missed Willy now that he’d left home to go to Princeton.
I knew if I waited for them to finish their walk, I wouldn’t go through with my confession. The lie had me feeling sick to my stomach. I felt like it was poisoning me.
It was May outside, the sky was a surreal blue like a Magritte, except the clouds were as big and white and airy as loaves of Wonder Bread. Morning hadn’t yet burned off the dew, and my sneakers were soaked through before I had crossed the lawn. I followed the path my parents had taken with Alfie through our old apple orchard in bloom, with the song of golden finches and the buzz of worker bees.
Mother, father, and dog were on their way to the river as I cut across a field fallow with lavender and did not stop to pick the wild strawberries that passed beneath my feet. My father had put down his fly rod and stopped to fix a gate that wouldn’t stay closed. He grimaced as he struggled to bend a length of barbed wire into a latch. My mother was up ahead of him, walking the edge of three acres thigh-high with feed corn, throwing a red rubber ball for the dog. The corn was just high enough so that the poodle’s head appeared and then disappeared with each stride he took after the ball.
I called out to my father, “I need to tell you something.”
“I’m here.”
“I need to say it to both of you.”
My tone distracted him. The barb of the wire cut his knuckle. He cursed softly, licked away the blood. “Well, then, I guess you’d better go get your mother.”
She was a hundred yards away, holding the ball up over her head. The poodle was balanced on his hind legs, tongue lolling, jaws snapping, as she held the ball just out of reach. She talked to Alfie with the same voice she had used when I was a little kid. “How’s my big boy . . . ? Oh, yes, you are a ferocious thing.”
“Mom,” I shouted, “I need you.”
She waved and threw the ball back toward us, and Alfie sprang after it like the beast he was. My father and I were walking toward her and she toward us. She was looking at me and smiling, pushing her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand because her fingers were muddy from holding the ball. She was about to say something when her expression suddenly changed. She saw something that jerked her head around and drained the color from her face. As the wind gusted across the feed corn, rippling its surface like water, we saw it, too.
There, standing at the edge of the field, still as stone, was a deer. Tan, sleek, and female, its nose and eyes and hooves dark as the shadows cast from the overhang of dogwood that grew up out of the stone hedgerow, it was hard to see her. Life was so cleverly camouflaged, it was a long moment before our retinas could sort out the puzzle enough to see that a few feet away was her fawn, dappled with white and flecks of darker brown, two days old at most.
The dog was running straight toward them, cutting diagonally across the rows of corn like a shark. My mother shouted his name, “Alfie! Come here! Alfie!” The dog did not listen. The fawn was oblivious to the danger. Its mother was paralyzed by it.
> My own mother was running now. She had her leash out and was angling into the field, trying to distract Alfie, shouting and waving her arms. “Alfie, don’t you dare!”
Alfie was downwind from the pair. His head disappeared in the corn. He growled and shook something. I thought the worst until he came up with the ball, wet and red in his jaws. He was running back to my mother. I looked over at my father. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head with relief. We’d lucked out, it was going to be okay.
But just as my mother was reaching out to grab hold of our family beast, the wind changed, the poodle’s head turned back, and his eyes rolled. Nostrils flaring, the ball fell from his mouth as he spun away from her. The deer and her fawn thought the danger had passed, that they were safe if they just stood still. But my mother knew that didn’t work.
As Alfie ran, so did my mother. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of the fur on his back as if she wanted to rip his hide from the bone. Alfie felt the sharpness of her nails, felt attacked. He did not understand. The princes of France had bred poodles to run down deer in fields on clear May mornings. The dog had his own chemical memories to listen to.
Feeling my mother clawing at his withers, Alfie yelped, arched his head back, and snapped at her with a growl. My mother called him a bastard as his teeth bit into the flesh of her right hand. My father and I were running to help.
“Stop him!” she shouted.
We were too far away. She was the only one close enough to catch the dog before it reached them. Alfie had lost sight of the deer for a moment. My mother was running right behind him. It all happened within a matter of seconds. And yet, the trajectory of animal instincts that were about to collide were so hopelessly out of our hands, close at hand and yet beyond our reach, it felt like time slowed, like God put it in slomo, as if there was a lesson to be learned from what we were watching.
My mother’s hand was just closing on Alfie’s collar when the fawn moved. She was still holding on as Alfie’s jaws bit down on the baby’s neck. Dog, fawn, and my mother tumbled through the grass. Teeth flashed, and tiny hooves flailed between the sounds of growls and screams.
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