After Gus dropped off Nicky and Vince, he raced across town as if worried he’d be caught giving me a ride, as if it were not his job to prevent a crime that might happen to a drugged-out girl hitchhiking alone. A half mile from my house I said, “This is good.” I appreciated the ride, but I wanted out of that cop car.
Good Goin’ Gus peeled away and I started to run. I took huge leaps across driveways as if I were wearing PF Flyers, which as a kid I had to have because the commercial promised you’d “run your fastest and jump your highest” in PF Flyers’ vulcanized rubber soles. Even Jonny Quest rescued Race Bannon from burning lava, running like the wind in his PF Flyers. That night I was convinced I was leaping ten feet with each step, like when I won the long jump at the Lions Club track meet in fourth grade, 10'7" penciled on the back of the blue ribbon. I ran and leaped, bounding like a superhero, airborne: Velocigirl.
Someone looking out his window that winter night would have seen a skinny girl running along the sidewalk in an awkward gait, passing quickly through pools of light from streetlamps, through shadows, past the cemetery, past the projects, then Barnes’s store and Delluci’s field, where I used to hunt for snails on the underside of milkweed pods, past the dead-end sign at the top of my street, past the darkened houses of my neighbors sleeping their sound or troubled sleep.
In my room I fell into bed, and as happened often after I smoked dust, my mattress spun and lifted off its frame and flew right out of my bedroom window and I whizzed around in black space on my flying-carpet mattress like in that kid’s book The Magic Bed. But I couldn’t land, couldn’t come down, and so I floated through the night until somehow I fell asleep.
The next day was a Thursday, and my diary began, “Got dusted with those guys again this morning.” Dust in the morning, dust at night, dust at school. We smoked dust in the girls’ rooms, in the school parking lot, in class. It was easy to smoke angel dust in the back of Mr. Hood’s chemistry class, the irony lost on me—angel dust the product of an amateur chemist in some home lab. Hiding in the back row at the waist-high lab tables, I’d put a few flakes of angel dust in a small pipe. When Mr. Hood turned to write on the chalkboard, I’d light the pipe with a Bic lighter. A match would have released sulfur, but the lighter was odorless. I’d inhale deeply, sucking the pipe until there was nothing left on the screen but white ash. Angel dust was not oily like marijuana, so there was no cloud of smoke.
One day Vince Gentile walked into our social studies class, “America in the Twentieth Century,” fifteen minutes late, high on angel dust. He banged open the door to the classroom and the conversation stopped as everyone watched him blunder in, bumping into desks, staggering to his seat. Miss Geoghegan stared through her huge owlish glasses as Vince dragged his desk 180 degrees around to face me, his back to her. “What’s up?” he slurred, as if we were outside in the parking lot. I tried to shush Vince, signal him to look up front. Miss Geoghegan called his name several times, but he didn’t see or hear her. He had no idea where he was, what the context was: a class in high school. Earlier that term Miss Geoghegan had taught us that the average number of kids in the American family was 2.2. “How can you have a point-two kid?” I’d said. The class laughed and Miss Geoghegan smiled. “Oh, you!” When Vince Gentile stumbled into class fucked up on angel dust that day, he was a point-two kid—a kid not all there.
After failing to get Vince’s attention, Miss Geoghegan walked over to his desk and ordered him to leave. Somehow Vince understood. He pushed his desk back, swiped the hair off his sweaty forehead, and walked into the hall and then I don’t know where. This was Walpole High School in the mid-1970s; this was America in the twentieth century.
As if to presage my own year ahead, President Ford in his 1975 State of the Union address told the country, “We face troubled times.” By the time 1975 was spent, instead of recording in my diary a list of presents I received for Christmas, as I had in prior years (“I got 3 shirts and 2 socks and 1 pants”), my diary entries became litanies of drugs I consumed. Christmas used to be a day of opening gifts, trying on new clothes, eating too much chocolate, and visiting my grandparents, who presented us with our annual $10 bill in a money-holder envelope. Instead, Christmas Day became this:
December 25, 1975—Me, Paula, Alison, Adrian and Carl went over Nicky’s house. Got dusted and fried.
My friend Terry Littlefield and I went to gymnastics practice dusted one day, before I quit the team later in my sophomore year. I hadn’t smoked enough dust to be incapacitated, just to feel hollow-boned, light and bouncy as I leapt around the mat pretending to flip and twirl, turning in my airy weightless body made only of dust, floating like an angel. I was not actually performing gymnastics, just spinning and jumping like a deranged ballerina. It was dark outside, so I couldn’t see Nicky watching me through the window. He called me later, said I was “nutty,” which I took as a compliment.
Dust took me out of 1975 and followed me into the next year, 1976. My last diary entry in 1975 was a sad one:
Dec. 29, 1975—I got my back handspring by myself. Met Nicky downtown. Got dusted and blown away.
Where were my siblings that winter when I started smoking angel dust heavily? Joanne, a year younger than I, tried dust once but never again for the fright she got from seeing people transformed, their faces slack, eyes vacant. One night when I was dusted, Joanne and her friend Maggie, who were straight, urged me to drive faster. I felt like I was speeding, but when I looked at the speedometer, I saw I was driving 10 mph in a 45 mph zone. Neither Joanne nor Maggie had her license, so they couldn’t take the wheel.
My sister Sally, a year older than me, was a gifted artist, winning prestigious state awards in high school. Perhaps because she spent hours lost in the dream state of drawing and painting, she liked being dusted at first, the “singe” in her mind, she called it, when her head “leaped over from being normal into that weird other-person-ness and everything glowed and hummed.” Once when Sally was dusted, the other-person-ness was an other-thing-ness, when she thought that her head had turned into a head of lettuce. Another time when Sally and her friend were dusted, it took them two hours to cross a street.
Sue smoked angel dust, too, with her boyfriend, Jeff, who distributed grams for the big-time dealers in his neighborhood—Billy Lightner, Wayne Kosinski—just enough to support his habit. That Sue smoked angel dust might have surprised some of her classmates, and certainly her teachers. In her senior year she was the president of the student council, a homecoming queen candidate, an honor roll student.
December 28, 1975—Sue picked up Jeff and took me and Nicky on dust runs. Me and Nicky went in on a $10 gram. Got stuck in a snow bank. Drove around getting blown away until midnight, then Sue dropped off me and Nicky.
I remember that night driving around with Sue and Jeff, scrunched with Nicky in the backseat, feeling so cool hanging out with them. Jeff was like a part of our family, an older brother, giving us rides, babysitting Mikey if Sue was working. He was lantern-jawed, with a wide smile and soft blue eyes, a long dishwater-blond ponytail. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a regal bearing, though I sensed a woundedness about him. He was a talented musician with plans to enroll in Berklee College of Music in Boston, saving money by working full-time in the kitchen at Walpole Prison. One day a prisoner asked Jeff to smuggle angel dust inside, but Jeff declined. “You’re in here, and I’m out there, so why would I do that?” The inmate looked at Jeff menacingly after that, and, fearing for his safety, Jeff quit.
That night Jeff drove Sue’s car, a green Ford Maverick, which she’d purchased with the insurance payout from the car we’d torched. On Route 1A, the main drag, the car spun out of control on the slippery road, everything in slow motion as we pirouetted, lodging in a snowbank facing oncoming traffic. Red lights flashed outside the window, which I thought were for us, but the police cruiser whizzed past. Jeff shifted the car into reverse and somehow maneuvered it back onto the road in the right direction, and we drove away.
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Were my youngest siblings aware that I was smoking angel dust? Mikey was just five that year; he would still have believed in Santa Claus. My father slept over on Christmas Eve for many years, stretched out in the living room couch so he could be with us in the morning to open presents. That year, instead of going to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, as I’d told my mother, Sally and I smoked angel dust, sitting in Timmy Carroll’s truck outside Blessed Sacrament Church, where I’d made my first confession, my first communion, my confirmation at fourteen. When Sally and I arrived home at 2 a.m., my mother was “rippin’,” I wrote in my diary.
Barbie was eleven, and if she knew about dust, it was from observing her older sisters, learning what not to do. Barbie was nine the night Sally came home drunk and collapsed on the kitchen floor. Barbie overheard my mother say, “I hope she’s not pregnant,” and for a while Barbie thought that you got pregnant from drinking alcohol. Barbie had a seemingly innate sense of self-discipline. In the noise and confusion of our house, every night Barbie sat at the dining room table diligently finishing her homework, and then promptly at nine she went to bed, the same steady determination she’d applied to painting the pool posts with that nasty epoxy when she was eight.
Patrick, at twelve, was running wild with his friends, smoking pot and drinking before he hit seventh grade, later thrown out of eighth grade, probably for destroying seats on a bus with a kid from the Farm. I didn’t think Patrick smoked dust, though I assumed he knew I did. One weekend my father took Patrick and me skiing in New Hampshire—my father had taken up the sport at thirty-eight—and I asked if I could bring Nicky. I borrowed Sue’s car and gave the keys to Nicky, who didn’t have his license yet, but he wanted to drive and I didn’t. At some point we hit a snow squall, large fat flakes colliding with our windshield, Nicky and I encapsulated, snow swirling like we were inside a snow globe. We managed to find the motel with no cell phone, no GPS, just a map and some directions from my father. We all shared a room, Patrick and Nicky in one double bed, me in another, my father on a fold-out couch.
That night in the basement rec room of the motel, Nicky and I smoked angel dust, finishing just as Patrick came down, the acrid smell lingering. We shot pool, the balls cracking sharply in the quiet basement. When we walked back to our room, Nicky whispered, “Sleep on the edge of the bed.” I looked at him, puzzled. “So we can hold hands,” he said, but sleep relaxed our arms and we floated into separate dream worlds. The next day skiing, flying down slopes, Nicky had a grin plastered on his face. That was his first time skiing and he was flushed with cold and thrilling speed.
I didn’t know that Patrick had found Nicky’s pipe, shaped like an eight ball, in the cushions of the couch in the Orange Room, had scraped out the gunge and smoked it with his friends, tripping wildly. Gunge was the tarry black residue that accumulated in our pipes, a potent concentration of marijuana, angel dust, and hash. With a penknife or paper clip, you scraped the black tar that collected in the screw threads, then smeared this goo on a piece of tinfoil—it looked like hash oil, only blacker—and held a lit match underneath the foil until the gunge bubbled and smoked. With a straw or plastic pen casing, you inhaled the smoke.
I didn’t know that Patrick and his friend Zach got so dusted once that, with hallucinatory, superhuman strength, they pushed the football sled at the junior high all the way down the field, across the gravel track, and into a swamp. What type of role model had I been for Patrick, smoking dust on that ski trip, Patrick walking into the room that still reeked, leaving drug paraphernalia in the Orange Room?
One night a few weeks after Nicky and I started going out, we were down cellar in the Orange Room, which was always cool and damp like a cave. We locked the door with the eye hook, and on the narrow couch we explored each other’s bodies like little kids turning over rocks in the woods, Nicky asking if he could see what I looked like down there, the moment tender, with the innocence of children playing doctor, our exploring healthy because we were falling in love. We exchanged Christmas gifts that night, a brown flannel shirt for him, which would wear out, and for me a gift that wouldn’t fade, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush. Nicky watched for my reaction as I placed the record on the turntable, lowered the needle. Music brought out a serious, soulful side of him. He was teaching himself to play guitar; a poster of his idol, Jimi Hendrix, hung on his bedroom wall.
You can only hear Neil Young for the first time once, like your first time getting high, or sex for the first time, your hand down a boy’s pants, the heat and surprising metamorphosis, flesh filling your palm, silky and smooth. Senses dilated, you stand on a threshold (or precipice), and the world beckons, everything new for the last time. Neil Young beckoned with his strained raw falsetto: I am lonely but you can free me / all in the way that you smile. That album was the first I owned, not borrowed from my older sisters, and I attended to it as if it were poetry. Nicky inspired in me the habit of listening, of getting out of my head for a change. It’s only castles burning / find someone who’s turning / and you will come around. I was turning, like the wooden bowl I lathed in shop class in ninth grade, spinning into shape but shapeless still, not yet come around. Often I sat in the Orange Room by myself, lifting the needle after the last track on that album and setting it on the first again and again: When you were young and on your own / how did it feel to be alone?
If there were guidance counselors at Walpole High School who might have noticed a kid sinking, I never saw them. But there were over a thousand students in the school, and in those peak-drug-use years too many kids were sinking. A couple of teachers tried to help me. Coach Brainard asked Sue to convince me to try out for the basketball team. We played pickup games in gym, so Brainard must have seen that I could play. And Miss West, my algebra teacher, a soft-spoken, pale-faced woman who wore ballet flats, said to Sue one day, “What’s happening to your sister Maureen? She’s smart. Didn’t she used to do gymnastics? What can we do to help?”
One afternoon Mr. Gurkin, my Spanish teacher, pulled me out of detention and led me into an empty classroom down the hall. Detention was the only time I did homework, held captive for an hour, a tiny sentence. The punishment was academically helpful, though I didn’t earn enough detentions to keep up with schoolwork. Mr. Gurkin gestured for me to sit. He asked how I was doing, and then he launched into his speech. He told me I was hanging around with the wrong kids: Nicky, Paula, Alison. “They’re lowlifes,” he said. I was wasting my time with them.
This was not a good opening. Paula was my best friend. I saw her every day, called her every day. Why was Mr. Gurkin picking on her? She was quiet in our Spanish class, not a back-talker like me. And Nicky was my boyfriend. I loved him. How did Mr. Gurkin even know Nicky, who didn’t take Spanish? Nicky was not one of the troublemakers summoned over the PA every morning to the vice principal’s office—Fitzgerald, Giancarlo, Miller.
Mr. Gurkin was the cool teacher, young and long-haired, rumored to be dating a cheerleader (she was eighteen). I had him for homeroom, too, which is how he knew I came to school stoned most mornings, sliding into my seat just as the bell rang. Mr. Gurkin continued in this vein of hanging around with “losers,” his voice earnest, his effort sincere, but he must have seen that he wasn’t convincing me, wasn’t penetrating my tough exterior. “I know you come from a broken home,” he said. That was the first time I’d heard those words to describe my family: broken. That phrase always meant someone else, some family from the “inner city,” poor, with an alcoholic father or a drug addict mother, parents who beat their children. “Broken home,” when it was first used in the mid-nineteenth century, meant a parent had been lost to death. By the 1950s, a broken home was associated with divorce, and in the 1970s it was frequently cited as the cause of juvenile delinquency.
I didn’t see my family as broken, but it was true. Broken was the perfect word to describe what happened to my family when my parents separated; we splintered like a mirror dropped to the floor, the whole broken into individu
al units. Mr. Gurkin’s statement was accurate, but it felt like an accusation. It was impolite of him to notice, and it was none of his business anyway. How did he know? The rough edge of the consonants in that word cut into me—broke, broken down, broken home. “It’s not broken,” I said. I was affronted that he both knew and used that private information against me, that it meant something to him that it didn’t mean to me. I was broken and needed fixing; he was going to help glue me together like Humpty Dumpty. I don’t remember how the conversation went after that, only that anger clotted my throat. I seethed as he lectured. At some point I said, “Fuck you,” my big-girl version of “Shut up.” I pushed my chair back and walked out.
There was great power in refusing the help of others—the power of believing that you didn’t need help, that everything was fine, the power of believing that you were powerful enough to solve your own problems, to navigate the world, to take care of yourself. Fight your own battles. I resented Mr. Gurkin for trying to save me (as if I needed saving), but I resented him, too, for giving up so easily, for being put off by my anger, which was a bluff, a front for hurt and sadness.
Body Leaping Backward Page 11