When I think of the time we wasted—running to the phone booth, finding coins to make a call, dialing the excruciatingly slow rotary phone, the line ringing, then the click of someone picking up, explaining to the counselor, time passing in the watery slow motion of a nightmare while the pills, whatever they were, dissolved in Alison’s bloodstream—I feel sick with the possibility that we might have cost Alison her life; it scares me still.
We flagged down Spider D’Amico cruising along in his mother’s station wagon, and he drove behind United Church and we laid Alison in the backseat, moaning and clutching her stomach. We jumped in and Spider sped down Route 1A, all of us urging him to hurry, to run the red lights, because Alison was eerily silent now. She didn’t respond when we lightly slapped her cheeks. Her eyes were closed, her eyelashes dark and thick against her smooth skin, jaundiced under the car’s dome light, her mouth slightly open, her lips like she’d eaten a cherry Popsicle. It was strange to see Alison so slack, contrary to her usual vitality, her raucous laugh, that determined way she walked, with quick short steps. In ninth grade she’d been voted most popular, a charmer whom boys dreamed of, girls imitated, envied, but now she was slumped in Spider’s car, listless.
Spider swerved into the emergency entrance of Norwood Hospital and two men in scrubs lifted Alison and rolled her down the hall on a gurney. In the waiting area, a doctor approached us and said they needed to pump Alison’s stomach but they couldn’t without permission from her parents, so we must tell them Alison’s name. We’d promised Alison, so nobody spoke. The doctor looked at one of the boys. “Come with me,” he said. When the boy returned a few minutes later, we asked him if he’d told, and he nodded. “She’s screwed now,” someone said. The doctors said that Alison would die if her stomach wasn’t pumped, but they couldn’t proceed without her name. We quieted then, all of us falling for the doctor’s ruse, relieved that Alison would be okay.
Alison was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital five miles from my house. Westwood Lodge was where the poet Anne Sexton had stayed after her suicide attempts. In October 1963, Sexton wrote to her husband from Rome: “Darling, I need therapy . . . Need even (god forbid) Westwood.” In Westwood Lodge, that “sealed hotel,” Sexton wrote poems for her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. There had been many unfamous residents of Westwood Lodge, like my aunt, who had what was called in the 1970s a nervous breakdown, as had the mother of a friend of Patrick’s, and kids from Walpole who’d smoked too much dust.
Every once in a while you’d hear of someone “freaking out” and then that person disappeared for a week or two, or a month, often to Westwood Lodge: Michelle Laski, Tammy Hurley, Gary Gravino. One day I stopped to talk to Gary in the parking lot after he returned to school from Westwood. He smiled, but his speech was thick, his eyes glassy. I noticed cookie crumbs around his mouth, caught in the fine hairs above his lip, but he seemed unaware of the crumbs. His vacant eyes, the sad crumbs on his face as if he were a child, broke my heart.
Walter Slater freaked out and disappeared for a while to Westwood. He’d crashed in the Orange Room one night after a party, so high and drunk he fell asleep with his arms around his Frye boots, those clunky, round-toed quasi–cowboy boots that were part of a leather fad in the 1970s—leather coats, leather boots, leather vests, leather satchels for your pot that cinched closed and hung from your leather belt. “I love my boots,” Walter mumbled that night. Walter Slater was a dust-head, a small-time dealer, but he got clean at Westwood and was working as a drug counselor. Later, when I saw him smoking angel dust again, I said, “I thought you quit.” He did, he told me, but he felt like a hypocrite. Every minute he was telling some kid not to take drugs, he felt an intense urge to get high. So he did.
Paula and I visited Alison in Westwood Lodge, driving slowly past the manicured grounds to a manor-like house built in the 1920s, with ivy creeping up stucco walls. There was a newer, clinical-looking building as well, but the facility as a whole was small—ninety beds. I don’t recall having to sign in, but surely there must have been some way to register visitors, or a house phone on which we called for Alison. I remember the old-fashioned parlor where we sat, large, with ornate trim and high ceilings, arrangements of wing chairs and settees, end tables with lamps that shed amber light. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a lush lawn and beyond that a thicket of trees. The kitchen had a butcher-block island, stainless-steel counters, an industrial-sized refrigerator. Alison stood in front of the refrigerator as if this were her home, grabbed a drink, took an apple from a bowl. “Have one,” she said, sharing her bounty, but I didn’t want to eat an apple from that place.
In spite of the plush chairs and couches in the sitting room, the only other person there was a tall, thin, stupefied boy with messy blond hair and glasses, who followed Alison around, who loved her, it seemed, as did so many boys. Alison spoke directly to him—“Ted, go watch television”—sometimes rudely—“Ted, go play with yourself.” At least she spoke to him, and that seemed to please him. I sensed that Alison enjoyed—at least a little—her stature in that milieu, “queen of this summer hotel,” as Sexton had called herself at Westwood. There was a certain exotic glamour to being sent away to an institution, to being incorrigible.
Incorrigible means “beyond correction”—broken, unfixable, a hopeless case, recalcitrant, intractable, obstreperous, truculent, insubordinate, defiant, rebellious, willful, wayward, difficult, troubled, delinquent, deviant, miscreant, stubborn. “Stubborn” was a diagnosis in Massachusetts until the early 1970s, and boys and girls as young as seven were sent to reform schools for being stubborn children. Nonpejorative words to describe such kids might be spirited, unconventional, bold, assertive, extroverted, adventurous, risk-taking, daring, verbal, sensitive, artistic. Or words that describe moods or stages of adolescence, temporary—sad, angry, insecure, confused, depressed, fearful, bored, frustrated, anxious, alienated, lonely.
I didn’t see any orderlies or nurses at Westwood that day, as if there were no supervision, as if the place truly were a lodge and Alison there on vacation. Because of the lax security, we took Alison out for a drive, though we were not supposed to leave the grounds; there was a sense of breaking her out. We drove aimlessly along the country roads surrounding the lodge, smoking pot and probably angel dust—I recall Alison wanting to get dusted. We had no qualms about getting high with Alison, because she seemed normal, not perturbed. We never cautioned each other about the dangers of smoking dust, about excess or self-destruction, though we were aware of some risks; we’d heard the lore of kids drowning while dusted, that in water you became disoriented, lost the ability to distinguish up from down. But we didn’t apply the risks to ourselves. We had a sense of time unending.
Nobody talked about that night behind United Church, the pills Alison took.
Alison was admitted to Westwood Lodge again, but the next time she was housed in the newer building in a locked room. We had to ask a nurse for access. In that room with a single bed, a Judas window in the door, Alison was lethargic. She spoke slowly, deliberately, her actions halting. She’d been dosed heavily with Thorazine, an antipsychotic, and Stelazine, an antianxiety medication. Outwardly the drugs had a similar stupefying effect to angel dust’s, but it was disturbing to see Alison in that condition, because the drugs were imposed on her. On that second visit, it was clear that Alison wanted to get out of there; that time, institutionalization was not like a stay in a dormitory. But there was no escape from this unit. We could do nothing to get Alison out, and soon a nurse told us we had to leave.
Tranquilized, Alison was fundamentally changed, her energy drained, her speech sluggish. What was the logic in giving incapacitating drugs to cure a girl of her drug problem? Of depression? Alison moved from self-medicating with street drugs to sanctioned “therapeutic” drugs, but either way she was stoned out of her mind. When she returned to school, with scars like vapor trails on her arms, people were shy with her, acted awkward around he
r, as if she were a ghost or a movie star.
7
Work-Study
A year or so after Nicky asked me to go out with him “for as long as it lasts,” we exchanged Christmas gifts on our second Christmas together, sitting in Sue’s car parked in the driveway, a quiet place where we could be alone. Nicky gave me a ring he’d bought at Zales jewelry store at the mall, a diamond chip set in a gold band, a heart cut into the bezel, and a plush sweater, soft as rabbit fur, which I never wore because it was too nice; I didn’t want to ruin it. After I slipped the ring on my finger, I started to cry. “What’s the matter?” Nicky asked. I was embarrassed by my paltry gift for him, all I could afford without a job. He laughed, then kissed me. “Goofball.” He opened his gift from me, a braided leather belt, which he proclaimed to love and wore faithfully every day thereafter.
Later, entwined on the couch in the Orange Room, we decided that the ring should mark our pre-engagement, like a category we invented, the ring symbolizing more than friendship, less than a vow. We set a date two years after we graduated from high school—we were practical dreamers—which I wrote on the wall in my bedroom: August 1980, four years away. We were confident that we’d love each other in four years as we did in that moment, that nothing would change, not even ourselves, that in four years we would still be madly in love and want to spend the rest of our lives together. The tentativeness of our plan—four years away, a pre-engagement—might have told us something.
One day in Fields Hosiery at the mall, I stepped up to the counter to pay for a pair of socks. The saleswoman rang them up and then said, with a look of disgust, “What else do you have?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“I saw you put them in your jacket,” she said.
In that moment I had to decide whether I should continue denying the theft, which might inspire her to call security, or own up to it. I pulled three pairs of socks from inside my coat, threw them on the counter, and walked out of the store, indignant (as if she had infringed on me), a cover for my embarrassment. Still, I’d gotten away with one pair of green-striped knee socks stuck up my sleeve. I wore them to school, though each time I tugged them on I felt a flash of shame, remembering the cashier’s contempt.
Maybe because there weren’t consequences that first time I was caught, I didn’t stop shoplifting until Paula and I were nabbed stealing a $2 box of clay from a discount store. We didn’t want to spend $2 on something we had to buy for school. The store detective marched us into a small office and threatened to call the police. Should I be sent up for a $2 box of clay, petit larceny? He called our parents instead. My mother was upset, at me and at herself, it seemed. How could she teach me a moral lesson about stealing? She and Ed had been caught earlier that year in Roxbury, a high-crime neighborhood of Boston, where they went expressly to shoplift. They must have thought Roxbury would be a good place to steal, a place where crime was normal, but if crime was higher there, the store owners were aware, equipped. My mother and Ed were thrown out of the store, lucky to avoid arrest.
My mother, Ed, Paula, me—we were four of four million shoplifters caught in 1975. After my mother graduated from the nursing program that year and began to work full-time, she stopped shoplifting. I stopped, too, in December of my junior year. After passing my driver’s license exam, I set out to find a job. I applied at Betro Pharmacy downtown, but the old man at the counter said he wasn’t hiring. I asked if I could fill out an application, just in case. “We only hire pretty girls,” he said. I walked out feeling awful, but then I thought about his employees—what was he talking about? Fuck him. Maybe he’d seen me hanging around Mimi’s Variety or Friendly’s, which bespoke a reputation: troublemaker, drug user, delinquent. He would have been right.
I drove to the mall and applied at nearly every store: Foxmoor Casuals, India Imports, Bradlees department store—my former shoplifting targets. I walked into every pizza joint and restaurant along Route 1, but nobody was hiring, at least not hiring me. On a whim, I pulled into a gas station where I’d once seen a girl pumping gas and asked the proprietor, Henry Delaney, if he was hiring. Henry was a short man with light-brown eyes that fixed on my chest as he handed me an application. He wasn’t hiring, he said, but just in case, he had my number.
A week later Henry called to offer me a job. No interview, no questions; I was hired over the phone to work 3 p.m. until 10 p.m. Monday through Friday, thirty-five hours a week, with some Saturdays and the occasional Sunday, for $2.50 an hour, twenty-five cents over the minimum wage. I hit the jackpot, I thought.
The gas station was situated at a busy intersection, with two service islands on either side. Junked and crushed cars were stacked behind the building, and along the front was a triangle of grass where on weekends a man sold velvet art paintings—Elvis, Jesus, dogs smoking cigars—none of which I ever witnessed anyone buying. The station had a glassed-in lobby with a dirty tile floor, a cigarette machine, a row of orange vinyl seats welded together like bus station seats. Behind the service window was Henry’s tiny office, just big enough for a desk and a swivel chair, and then a three-bay garage.
I wore jeans and a hooded sweatshirt beneath a puffy goose-down jacket to my new job that winter, pumping gas, checking oil, measuring tire pressure with my handy gauge, squeegeeing windows, checking brake and transmission fluid. Often men pulled up to the pumps and said, “Honey, would you get one of the boys to check my oil?” When I wore a hat, customers said, “Son, can you clean my windows?” or “Fill it up, son.” I didn’t bother to correct them.
The old man from the pharmacy, who hired only pretty girls, was a regular. The first time he pulled in, he looked at me with a haughty grin. “I see you found a job,” he said, as if I’d gotten the job I deserved, not in the bright clean pharmacy with all the pretty girls but outside pumping gas, hands stained with oil, smelling of petroleum, dirty. Pump jockey. Grease monkey, people called me, but I was proud. Girls didn’t do that kind of job. After that the old man seemed to take a perverse delight in tormenting me, writing as slowly as possible on the credit card slip, especially on rainy days as I got drenched waiting for him. I grew bold and retaliatory. When I saw his car pull up, I’d finish my cigarette, luxuriously blowing smoke rings, staring out the lobby window at him staring at me. I’d stroll leisurely to his car, where he’d act annoyed at my poor customer service even as he relished my servitude.
In the photo Sue shot of me at work, I see the beginning of a vertical crease between my eyes that already marked my expression as serious, tough—a protective veneer. My hair is parted in the middle, as was the style (or lack of it) in the 1970s, and pulled into a ponytail to straighten the curls. There’s a bleached orange patch in my hair from dousing my head with Sun In, a blotch of burnt copper instead of highlights. I look thin, my face drawn. I’d been smoking angel dust for more than a year; I weighed just ninety pounds.
In warm weather I rode my bike three miles to work, then home at 10 p.m., the streets empty and peaceful. I’d zoom through the intersection downtown and coast down the middle of wide, smooth Robbins Road with no hands. I was never late or absent from work as I was at school; I’d been warned that if I missed one more day of school in my junior year, I’d be held back. The threat was effective, not because I worried about my academic performance but because I’d be mortified to be in the same class as my younger sister Joanne.
What’s surprising is not the number of days of school I missed but that I managed to attend the rest of the days, though often I was present in body only. Sometimes I’d drive to school and in the parking lot, where kids hung out between classes, I’d crawl into the backseat of my car to sleep. Later I’d forge my mother’s signature on a note. One day I woke up to faces smushed against my windows, kids laughing and staring at me curled up in the backseat as if I were one of Mikey’s sea monkeys in that plastic tank.
In the small hierarchy of the gas station, below Henry were the mechanics, who drove souped-up cars with dual exhausts and rai
sed rear suspension. They wore leather bomber jackets or jean jackets stitched with emblems—STP oil, Champion spark plugs. They never came clean, no matter how hard they scrubbed their hands with the slimy goo at the basin. Their fingernails retained grease, and the webbing between their thumbs and index fingers was grayish; I know because my hands never came clean either.
My mother bought Sally and me a 1968 two-door Opel Kadett, which we called the Egg for its oval shape and off-white exterior. The car was so small and lightweight that while I was in class one afternoon, some boys lifted the car and turned it sideways in its parking space. One night at work the tow-truck driver installed a cassette deck in my car and shorted the electrical system. The next morning the mechanics stood around the Egg stuck in the bay with its hood open. “I’ve seen bigger engines on a sewing machine,” one said. “What is it, a two-cylinder?” They chuckled at my weird little foreign car before fixing it for free.
Below the mechanics were the tow-truck drivers. Fast Freddie, the daytime driver, was tall and ovoid, shaped like one of those blow-up clowns weighted at the bottom that bobbed upright after you punched it. Fast Freddie moved at one pace, like a three-toed sloth. His very slowness made him cool; nothing ruffled him. Tom Parisi, who drove the wrecker at night, was the opposite of Fast Freddie. Tom was tall and ropy, with nervous energy. He had a slight—and I thought sexy—lisp when he talked. He had deep-set brown eyes and a curved honk of a nose. His face looked chiseled from rock, with sharp angles and hollows. In the lobby while we waited for someone out there on the humming highways to break down, run out of gas, or crash, waited for someone’s luck to run out, Tom detailed moneymaking schemes, his eyes wide with the thrill of his plots. One involved changing his license plate numbers with black tape, filling his tank at an outlying self-service gas station, and then speeding off without paying.
Body Leaping Backward Page 17