That night Sally and I asked my father if we could walk to Venice Beach, which was two miles from Stern’s Motel. My father consulted the proprietor, Mr. Stern, who seemed to embody his name, with glasses, thinning gray hair, square shoulders, bolo tie. The beach was safe, he said, if we avoided the seedy section to the left of the pier. Off we went, Sally and I, in our jean jackets and dungarees, walking along five-lane Washington Boulevard, the sky blushing pink, streaked with brown smog, the air stale and hot and smelling of exhaust from muscle cars rasping into the night.
At the end of the boulevard we saw the long cement pier and immediately walked to the left, the seedy section, where a few people circled a conga player, his beat dampered by the crash of waves. At the end of the pier, past dried fish guts, a lone fisherman casting, in the public bathroom Sally and I smoked angel dust that we’d smuggled in our luggage, along with shorts and bathing suits. We hitchhiked back to the motel and locked ourselves in the bathroom and smoked more dust, making faces in the mirror, everything distorted. After a while my father knocked on the door and nervously asked, “Have you been taking grass?” We denied it, and he let it go, probably thinking that like many kids, we were experimenting with marijuana.
In the photo of my sisters and me standing in front of the CITY OF STANTON sign, a town north of Anaheim, I look tough in my dungaree jacket. Joanne in her striped tank top looks happy. Sally looks stoned. Barbie was just eleven; her arms are twisted in an anxious pose, even though she’s smiling. She must have been worried that entire trip that Sally and I would get caught, her stomach churning with fear, and when at Disneyland the teacup ride was closed, Barbie, with my father, walked as slowly as she could back to where we were waiting, knowing I’d be smoking, and there I was, leaning against a wall, Marlboro in hand, blowing smoke rings. My father walked past, barely glancing my way. “That looks dumb,” he said. With three words he reduced me, like in that cartoon—size of a mouse.
My mother worked the night shift at Pondville Hospital so she could get the younger kids off to school; Patrick, Barbie, and Mikey were twelve, eleven, and five the year I began my descent. And she picked up float shifts at Medfield State and elsewhere for extra money. How could she keep track of us all? In ninth grade Patrick skipped school for a full month before my mother caught him. He’d don his uniform for Bishop Feehan Catholic school—white shirt, forest-green sweater with a shamrock logo; he’d been kicked out of West Junior High. He’d say goodbye to my mother, then stroll out the side door as if to catch the bus at the top of the street, but instead he’d make a U-turn and like a burglar slip into the basement through the bulkhead. He stowed away in the Orange Room, behind the bar that Ed built, reading Conan the Barbarian paperbacks and peeing in a bottle, my mother upstairs cleaning before she left for work, until one day she found a bottle of urine and figured things out.
Like my father, my mother knew nothing about angel dust. She was a teetotaler; how could she conceive of the drugs easily available to us, drugs that hadn’t existed in her youth? One night Paula, Alison, Nicky, and I were in the Orange Room smoking angel dust. No one was talking, because you don’t, or can’t, talk much when you are dusted. There must have been an album slowly, lopsidedly spinning on the turntable, Neil Young or Pink Floyd or Robin Trower or Lou Reed. My mother knocked on the door, so I opened it a crack, and she tried to hand me a plate of nicely arranged slices of pound cake sprinkled with powdered sugar and some napkins. “We’re not hungry,” I said. Angel dust was not like marijuana or hash. We had no enhancement of the senses, no cravings. Dusted, I was repulsed by food. I weighed eighty-nine pounds then, anorectically thin from smoking angel dust. The smell of angel dust nauseated me, an acrid chemical odor, the sickening stench of charred leaves, like the smell of burning hair.
My mother pushed the plate into the gap. “I’m sure your friends will like it,” she said. I opened the door just wide enough to take the plate, which I set on the floor in the middle of the room, but no one touched it. I suspected Paula and Alison were suppressing laughter about my 1950s-style Ozzie and Harriet mom who thoughtfully provided snacks to the teens in the rec room. I was embarrassed by my mother’s kindness, a measure of how far removed I was from normalcy. I wrapped a piece of cake in a napkin and threw it in the wastebasket to make it look like we’d eaten some. Somehow in my stoned-out spaciness I was concerned about my mother’s feelings; she would be hurt if we didn’t eat her cake. At least I was thinking of someone else’s feelings and not solely my own.
Where were my parents when I was destroying myself, I’ve wondered. I see now—like a split screen on television—that my mother, at least, was upstairs baking cake.
On the weekends my mother went to New York to see Ed, we were left alone. Our house earned a reputation as a party house. Nearly every weekend cars cruised down our street, townies and druggies staring out their windows, wondering if the three or four junker cars in our driveway signaled the start of a party. Sometimes the parties grew out of control and our house filled with kids who were not our friends, burnouts like Dan Valerio, Wayne Kosinski, Rod Tyler, and sometimes older and more hardcore townies and dealers, Lighty and his sidekick Woody, news of the party spreading like a contagion, our house jammed, people spilling into the yard, the street. Worse was when kids from Norwood showed up, from the Flats, the tough section. Then we knew we had to call the police on ourselves before a fight broke out, or something worse.
Joanne was fourteen then, and probably with her friends, sleeping at their houses. Patrick, who was twelve, was out with his troublemaking posse of boys, running wild in the projects, the cemetery, the tracks. Barbie, eleven, was upstairs in her bedroom with her door closed, unable to sleep through the noise, anxious because she heard her doorknob turning, someone’s hand on it, the crack of light from the hall when the door opened, a drunk stranger stumbling into her bedroom, fumbling around before realizing that she was in there.
On Saturday mornings my father dropped Mikey back home, and we babysat him on Saturday nights. One time Sue had a few friends over while babysitting, and the party grew with Sally’s friends and my friends, and then the cars lining the street attracted more people until our house was crowded. One of Sue’s drunk friends, a jock with platinum-blond hair, picked up Mikey’s small plastic tank of sea monkeys. She couldn’t see them, so she didn’t believe they existed. Sea monkeys were ubiquitously advertised in comic books or Mad Magazine. As a kid, you had to have them, because they grew from nothing, like magic, and in the egregiously deceptive ads, the sea monkeys seemed huge, with tiny cute faces; it was like growing your own family of teensy underwater people.
I had them as a kid and now, years later, Mikey had sent away for sea monkeys, had dissolved in water the dry eggs that looked like powder, had waited weeks, and even though they were just specks, the sea monkeys were visible now through the magnified circles on the clear plastic tank. But Sue’s drunk friend couldn’t see them, so she held the tank up to her face and stared into the water, then shrieked because now she saw the wriggling creatures, but the tank slipped from her hand and the sea monkeys spilled all over the kitchen floor. I hated her for killing Mikey’s sea monkeys.
Some of the kids were drinking vodka and lemonade, so there were half-full plastic cups on tables and counters. Mikey wandered through the rooms, the cutest towheaded boy with big brown eyes—everyone loved him. From across the dining room I spotted him guzzling from a plastic cup that someone had abandoned, a drink that tasted like lemonade, the cup empty before I could stop him. Soon he became wild. The rooms connected around the staircase, and Mikey lapped this circle, zooming around the house like the boy chased by the tigers, like a puppy that raced maniacally when let off its leash. Finally he stopped, and Sue or someone said he should get to bed.
The next morning Mikey walked down the stairs in his underwear and sat on the bottom step and hung his head. “I don’t feel good,” he said, and cried. He had a hangover—my baby brother, age five. We gave him
our cure for hangovers, a big glass of Coca-Cola with ice. I felt sick with shame and guilt. What if he’d found another glass of vodka and lemonade, or a third, and drunk those, too?
Even now I have a sense of worry and guilt about exposing my younger siblings to the parties filled with drunk and stoned and fucked-up kids, kids breaking things, spilling beer and drinks on rugs and furniture, leaving burn marks from cigarettes and joints, throwing up in the bathroom or not making it there in time, kids pairing off to various rooms to have sex, kids wandering around our house and opening doors, twisting the knob on Barbie’s bedroom door.
November 29, 1975—Me and Paula and Alison split a gram of dust, then went home and I got really cocked. When I woke up, Wayne Kosinski and Dan Valerio were in the house. Made raviolis at 5:00 a.m. and cooked them eggs. It was a totally weird night.
I was fifteen the night Wayne Kosinski and Dan Valerio found their way into my house while I was passed out. My memory of that night is olfactory, the smell in the Orange Room: rank body odor, punky socks, the sweet cloying scent of spilled alcohol seeped into the carpet, the upholstery saturated with pot stink, the air stagnant in the musty windowless room. Wayne, who was twenty, was one of the biggest angel dust dealers in town. In three years he’d be charged with intent to distribute PCP, and a couple years after that arrested again for dealing angel dust. Dan was nineteen. Years after he spent that night in the Orange Room, after I cooked him ravioli and eggs at dawn, he was convicted of indecent assault and battery on a child under fourteen.
There were summer nights in downtown Walpole that defined being a teenager in the 1970s, nights when thirty or forty kids milled around Friendly’s parking lot, the sun setting late, heated air rising off baked asphalt into the cool night, our own weather zone; kids in idling cars, kids on ten-speed bikes, kids on foot, boys leaning into car windows, T-shirts slung over bare shoulders, girls in halter tops, backs bare and breasts loose, hip-hugger pants with three buttons to the bikini line, midriff shirts exposing skin, boys with red bandannas taming long wild hair, everyone waiting, someone’s tape deck blasting rock music—and the radio played that forgotten song—the thick scent of pot, a Frisbee scraping the pavement, glancing off a car, the air electrified with a restlessness born from the slow-burning fuses of youth and boredom, a thrumming energy latent with expectancy, as if we were waiting for something to happen, a spark to ignite, whispers of a rumble with our rival town, Norwood, everything vibrating at a higher tension, excitement gathering until inevitably the cops pulled into the parking lot and broke up the crowd.
We’d disperse, only to collect again like minnows schooling, migrating to hidden places as darkness fell to drink and get high, behind Center Pool or United Church or Giantland, a grassy clearing behind Giant’s department store, one ancient sprawling oak in the middle of the field. Often we partied at Bird Park, the grand vision of Walpole’s most famous industrialist, Charles Sumner Bird, heir to the Bird & Son shingle factory, one of the oldest factories in the country, established as a paper mill in 1795. The park had eighty-nine acres of lawn and woods enclosed by a wrought iron fence, with a stone path winding through like a yellow brick road. There was an open-air amphitheater—I remember as a kid sitting on a stone bench watching actors at dusk—and a creek that fed a swimming pool that was more like an oval pond. In the middle of the pond/pool was a statue of frogs on a lily pad. In summers when we were young my mother packed lunch and my siblings and I spent the afternoon swimming, diving from the frog statue into the greenish water.
At Bird Park my father taught me to play tennis with my new racket signed by Pancho Gonzales, the Mexican American champion, whom I conflated with Speedy Gonzales, the cartoon mouse who was so fast he played tennis against himself, whizzing from one end of the court to the other, faster than the ball. ¡Arriba, arriba! ¡Ándele, ándele! In fall we picked chestnuts there, the seed casings like green apples with spiky shells, which we squished open beneath our sneakers to reveal shiny smooth dark-brown chestnuts, or occasionally the thrill of a pure white one, or a “doubler.” The chestnuts had an oily sheen that made them sensual to hold. We collected dozens and at home bored holes in the chestnuts with crochet needles to string enormously heavy and absurdly ugly necklaces.
By the time I was in high school, the pool had been drained because of biohazards and weeds sprouted through cracks in the cement. The amphitheater was burned, its remaining stone walls graffitied. The tennis nets sagged; the spinning octagon ride in the playground tilted on its rusted center pole. Few of the lanterns along the paths worked, so there were dark recesses where we could drink and get high. There was a thrill to roaming around these hidden places, like being invisible in public, lurking in the shadows behind United Church under the noses of the cops, their station a block away, like a map that only we could see with our night vision. We were always looking for a party, though once we found one, the scene was the same, kids drinking and getting high, the faces and places almost interchangeable, even when we crashed a party in another town, like the night in Plainville, which began like any other summer night in Friendly’s parking lot.
I was with Nicky when his sister, Andrea, and her boyfriend, Chucky, with a nimbus of fire-colored hair, pulled up to us. They offered us some crossroads amphetamines, little white pills with an X incised into them. I’d taken speed before: black beauties, shiny capsules of biphetamine (similar to Adderall today), one of the amphetamines the military freely gave to soldiers in Vietnam for pep, 225 million tablets distributed in just three years of the war; and crystal meth, a $10 tinfoil packet filled with granular white powder that we snorted, drinking beer to temper the jittery amped-up buzz. When a batch of crystal meth came into Walpole, parties were filled with kids grinding their jaws, a twisting motion like ungulates chewing. Monica Lande, a cool older girl who rarely deigned to speak to me, cornered me one night after she’d snorted crystal meth, her pupils dilated as she talked and talked, her jaw sliding sideways.
Nicky and I swallowed the speed, and then Chucky said he knew of a party in Plainville, so he drove us there. I don’t remember much about the party, just kids I didn’t know sitting around drinking, smoking pot, getting wasted, rock music so loud you couldn’t hear anyone talk. Nicky sat in an easy chair and I curled on his lap, my cheek against the soft skin of his neck, breathing in the clean talcum scent of him. Later we walked upstairs to a bedroom and crawled into a bed. We took off our pants and shirts, and in some stranger’s bed beneath some stranger’s sheets we kissed and touched, but soon we fell asleep. Probably our drug and alcohol habit prevented me from being a pregnant teenager.
The next morning was bright and sunny and we woke up surprised but happy to find ourselves in that bed in that room, fuzzy with sleep and cotton-mouthed. Downstairs I could see now that the house was contemporary, with huge picture windows overlooking a yard with jack pines, a sand driveway—a landscape I’d seen only on Cape Cod. I drank a glass of water, but there was nothing to eat. I couldn’t eat anyway. Sometimes with Nicky I felt so in love that I became nauseated, an overwhelming physical sense of desire that resembled anxiety, like an overdose of hormones and emotion. One night earlier that summer we swam in the pool after midnight, everyone else out or asleep, moonlight glinting off the water as we pulled off our bathing suits, the water cool and almost oily as we drifted toward each other and I wrapped my legs around his waist, our skin slick and warm as we pressed together, floating, as weightless as our consciences.
Nicky and I were alone in the house. Even Andrea and Chucky were gone, but surely they’d be back to pick us up. The living room was cluttered with empty beer cans and bottles from the night before, ashtrays overflowing with stubbed-out cigarettes. I hunted in ashtrays for snipes, cigarette butts with a bit of tobacco left. Nicky explored the house, opened cabinets. We had no idea who owned this house or where we were exactly, just: Plainville.
I followed him down to the basement, to a workbench cluttered with materials to make rifle cartri
dges, like the spent shells I collected in the woods behind my house, red and green plastic tubes the size of a Bic lighter, with brass caps. There was a tin of gunpowder and—as if the owner had been called away in the middle of his work—a pile of black powder on the table. As kids we played with gunpowder in the form of caps, a half-inch-wide ticker tape of red paper pocked with freckle-sized blisters of black powder. We’d lay the strip of paper flat on the sidewalk and smash a rock onto each blister until it exploded. Over and over we smashed, thrilled by the tiny crack of the explosion, the puff of smoke, the strangely appealing whiff of sulfur like rotten eggs, the small white star-shaped scar on the asphalt from each bang. We’d buy a box of five rolls, 250 caps, and we’d bang and bang. There were guns into which you could load the caps, but I didn’t have one. Guns were for boys, not girls. We graduated from caps to cherry bombs, bottle rockets, firecrackers, M-80s.
Nicky poured some of the gunpowder into a baggie and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.
“Make a bomb,” he said. “Put it in the school.” He laughed and I laughed with him, and we walked upstairs.
I didn’t think Nicky would make a bomb; I doubted that he knew how. Occasionally kids called bomb scares into school to try to get classes canceled. How did kids even know to call in bomb scares? The 1970s was a bomby decade. In 1972 alone there were over 1,900 bombings by radical activist groups—the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the Chicano Liberation Front, Americans for Justice, the FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group, the Jewish Defense League, anti-Castro Cubans, Croatian separatists. During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly five per day. At the height of the domestic terrorism in the country in the 1970s, there were a thousand bombings a year.
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