Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  Angel dust is back. Or, more accurately, it never left. The drug moved into predominantly urban areas with mostly minority populations and now gets little media attention, not the way it did in the 1970s and early 1980s when it invaded white suburbs. PCP garners only local headlines, which are frequent, though they represent only arrests associated with the drug, not its pervasive use. In the hundreds of articles I reviewed over three years, about 90 percent showed mug shots of African Americans; the remainder were Hispanics or an occasional white person.

  PCP is now called “wet” and is sold as a tincture, a more potent form of the drug, into which people dip cigarettes or pot. The Drug Abuse Warning Network reported a “sharp spike” in PCP use, with PCP-related emergency room visits rising 400 percent between 2005 and 2011. In 2012, Los Angeles police made the largest bust of PCP in history, seizing $100 million worth. They confiscated 130 gallons of finished PCP and another 1,000 gallons of precursor chemicals to manufacture the drug.

  Even when PCP ruins the lives of famous people, its use barely registers against the larger tragedy of the opioid crisis. In August 2016, E’Dena Hines, the thirty-three-year-old granddaughter of actor Morgan Freeman, was stabbed to death by her boyfriend, Lamar Davenport, while he was high on a “bad batch” of PCP. Three months later, in November 2016, Christopher Barry, the thirty-four-year-old son of former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry, died of “acute phencyclidine toxicity,” after struggling for years with PCP addiction.

  Perhaps the best-known case was Aaron Hernandez, former tight end for the New England Patriots. In 2013, not long after Hernandez signed a $40 million contract with the team, he shot to death his friend Odin Lloyd. A family friend told Rolling Stone magazine that Hernandez had been “twisted on dust now for more than a year.” Another acquaintance said Hernandez “was regularly high or out of his mind on angel dust.” He called Hernandez a “d-head.”

  Hernandez played football at the Patriots’ home field, Gillette Stadium, where in ninth grade, when it was called Schaefer Stadium, I sold hot dogs in the concession stands, where one Sunday I lingered after a game ended to meet players as they strolled out of the locker room, excitedly collecting autographs from the young quarterback, Jim Plunkett, and the wide receiver, Randy Vataha. From his glory on the grid, like in a Greek tragedy, Hernandez landed in Walpole Prison, two miles from the stadium, where he served the first few months of a life sentence before he was transferred to Souza-Baranowski, a newer maximum-security prison, in Shirley, Massachusetts. In 2017, Hernandez hanged himself in his prison cell.

  10

  Body Leaping Backward

  Ten years after I graduated from high school, I traveled home to Walpole from Michigan, where I’d moved after college, to visit my family for the holidays. That Christmas we were all grown up. Sue was twenty-nine, Sally twenty-eight, I was twenty-seven, Joanne twenty-six, Patrick twenty-four, Barbie twenty-three, and Mikey seventeen. My mother was still with Ed, my father in a serious relationship, his first since he’d separated from my mother fifteen years earlier.

  Like me, Sue and Joanne had graduated from UMass—the three of us were there together one year, meeting at Sue’s apartment for Sunday dinners. Sue was married and had given birth to her first child a few days after finishing her MBA. Joanne was engaged, working in human resources, and I worked for an environmental nonprofit, a job I loved. After living in a tent on Cape Cod and cooking in a four-star restaurant, Chillingsworth, Sally moved to Michigan near me, finished her degree in art, met her future husband, Terry, then moved back East. Patrick went west, pushing farther each time, to Nevada, Oregon, California, finally Hawaii, where he earned his degree in criminal justice and started a Roller blading league for four hundred kids in Honolulu. Barbie had just graduated with honors from Boston College, and Mike was in his last year of high school. He worked part-time at a gas station on Route 1A, fielding questions on weekends as I had a decade earlier, drivers asking, “How do you get to Walpole Prison?” even though it wasn’t called Walpole Prison anymore.

  After the tumultuous 1970s, when the prison made the daily news, in the early 1980s a group of Walpole residents campaigned to separate the town from the prison. They were tired of the town being “tainted” by “rapists, murderers, and hatchet killers” sent to “Walpole,” annoyed by newspaper headlines like “Child Molester Sent to Walpole.” One idea was to print bumper stickers: Yes. You Can Leave Walpole. In the end they decided to rename the prison. The town’s representative got a bill passed in the legislature, and the group held a “Name the Prison” contest in town, which drew some six hundred entries, including Massachusetts School for the Misguided, Inmate Inn, House of Hope, the Zoo. The winner was Cedar Junction, after a defunct railroad station near the prison. Cedar Junction, as if it were one of the condo complexes springing up in Walpole during the 1980s development boom.

  The prison name was changed, a supermax unit was added in the 1990s, and then the prison itself was slowly hidden from view. A new, longer, winding driveway was cut through the woods, and trees and vegetation grew to obscure the old entrance, where we used to park for the Hobby Shop. Driving along Route 1A, you can no longer see the imposing white walls, as if by hiding the prison you hide the problem of crime and incarceration. Across from the prison, surrounded by weeds, is the small brick shelter where visitors or newly released ex-cons waited for the Greyhound to take them out of Walpole.

  On Christmas Eve that year, we gathered in the living room, my father, too, and told stories of embarrassing moments, family lore—how Joanne nearly crashed into our house when she was learning to drive; the time Patrick threw a dart at me in the Orange Room and it stuck in my thigh and we doubled over laughing; the time when Sue was drunk and put Cheez Doodles in her ears; the time my mother charged into the Orange Room and yanked the record off the stereo because she thought Joanne and Barbie were playing Charles Manson music, “Helter Skelter,” when it was Neil Young singing, Helpless helpless he-elpless, my mother and father so helpless to help us back then.

  We laughed at these hilarious moments, the wild years. We thought the pain of our past was behind us, that we’d outgrown our youthful troubles. Then Barbie shared a story about me, one I hadn’t remembered until she jarred it from the dusty archives of my mind. My friend Alison and I were sitting on our screened-in porch rocking back and forth, rocking and rocking. We’d just smoked angel dust and we couldn’t stop rocking, but we weren’t sitting in rocking chairs. Alison and I sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, rhythmically rocking. Barbie, who was eleven, was unnerved by our repetitive, nonsensical, metronomic, idiotic motion. She told us to stop, but we couldn’t hear her, so we rocked and rocked, and Barbie became so disturbed that she left the room.

  After Barbie told this story, nobody laughed. My father said, “Jesus,” then there was an uncomfortable silence. This was not a funny sowing-wild-oats story. This was a story of two fifteen-year-old girls incapacitated by a drug that rendered them unable to think or function. After that the party broke up and we all went to bed. I felt sick with embarrassment and shame that I’d been rocking like the kids I used to see when I swam at the Wrentham State School—the girl who’d bragged about her straight A report card, who’d scored in the high-90s percentiles in the Iowa Tests, that promising girl with the smart mouth.

  Upstairs in my old childhood bedroom, lying on that single bed that used to fly out the window when I came home dusted, I sobbed, a pillow stuffed in my mouth so no one could hear me, the walls thin in that small house.

  The following year my parents listed our house in Walpole for sale. Mikey had turned eighteen, and so, according to my parents’ divorce decree, the house could be sold. My father wanted his half of the money for a new house with his soon-to-be new wife. Years earlier the DEAD END sign at the top of our street had been changed to NOT A THROUGH WAY, which someone graffitied to read NOT A T OUGH WAY, and now it was changed again to CUL-DE-SAC, a fancier term reflecting the town’s rising real e
state values. I saw the FOR SALE sign staked in our front yard, but I didn’t believe the house I grew up in would be sold. I thought one of my siblings would buy it, or that we’d band together to save the house.

  While I was a thousand miles away in Michigan, my mother began to deaccession the museum of my childhood. She donated a dozen boxes of books to the Walpole library, furniture to charity, twenty bags of clothes to Wrentham State School. She held a yard sale but neglected to tell my siblings in Massachusetts. Sue, who lived an hour away, learned of the sale at the last minute. “By the time I got there almost everything was gone, so I quickly grabbed the fondue pot,” she said. We laughed. She never uses the pot, but she keeps it all the same.

  That fondue pot, like a magic genie lamp, summons a vision: our dining room table laden with dips and sauces and cubes of meat we skewered and plunged into boiling oil. When I was a girl, a fondue for dinner was adventure enough to make the whole day juicy with anticipation, was all it took for happiness. When my mother went back to work, there wasn’t time for such frivolity. By the time Mikey was eight, often alone after school, he’d cook himself cans of Campbell’s soup for dinner, thick and pasty. Nobody told him he was supposed to add water.

  After most of my siblings moved away, the pool was neglected. The water turned green, then brown, the lining sagged and slipped bottomward. After the yard sale, my mother and Mikey rented a Bobcat front-end loader and plowed everything that remained into the hopper of the pool, including the pool itself—the wobbly aluminum walls, the filter, the liner, the rotting deck—my mother undoing in a single day what we’d built that long, hot, chain-gang summer. They filled that huge grave with loam, smoothed topsoil over it, and sprinkled grass seed. It seemed fitting that our swimming pool, constructed against all good professional advice, paid for with “a wing and a prayer,” as my mother said, built of our sweat and muscle and desire, and the temporal marker of the departure of my father from my daily life, was collapsed.

  In August my mother and father met at the house for the closing. I imagine my mother that day looking out the window at the Gibsons’ lawn, which was still patchy and bald. Every Easter and Thanksgiving as we sat around the dining room table, my mother, with a view out the window, would say, “There’s Arthur Gibson mowing his lawn.” She’d shake her head, because who mows his lawn on a holiday? “Something is not right in that house,” she’d say, but all along something had been not right in our house. Standing in the driveway after the closing, my mother and father hugged each other and cried.

  As children, we want to believe that our parents created us out of love, that love existed, at least for a while. One night nearly twenty years after my parents split, we watched family movies in my father’s new house, the super-8 films he transferred to video. As I watched them for the first time as an adult, I saw something that surprised me—my mother and father in their early years, fond and affectionate. In one shaky silent clip my mother stands on a ladder to paint the trim on our first house, in East Walpole. She’s wearing Bermuda shorts, one knee jauntily lifted as she reaches with her brush, my father slowly panning, caressing my mother with the camera until she turns and smiles, catches him in the act, which we all see now, his appreciating eye surveying her form, her beauty. She dabs the paintbrush in the air toward him, winks.

  Later in the clip, my father is on the ladder as my mother films. He turns to smile at her. I can see what was characteristic of him, what I came to know—that he was ineffectual at any type of home repair, ill-suited for ladder work, out of his element, in spite of his athleticism (a college football injury kept him out of the Korean War). But he is smiling and young and handsome and happy.

  In another snippet that lasts no longer than fifteen seconds there’s a crowd at an ice rink, the camera jerky and rapid and then a brief clear focus as skaters glide toward and past the camera in carousel fashion. Soon from the crowd I pick out two slender, graceful skaters, a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty in stirrup pants tucked into white figure skates, the white short-waist leather jacket that hung in our closet when I was a child but that I never saw my mother wear; her tall, handsome, black-haired partner holding her hand as they effortlessly glide toward us, my mother and father now recognizable but also not recognizable as the parents I knew, holding hands, smiling, in sync with each other, here in front of me, now rounding the corner, gone.

  After the meeting when my parents told us that they were separating, nobody in my family mentioned it again. “The kids will bounce back,” my parents’ marriage counselor assured them, the conventional wisdom of the day, but to bounce back, you must hit bottom first. I never knew the point at which my parents’ separation became final. They never announced that the “trial” had failed and they were divorcing, not the way they’d sat us down to announce the separation. I never heard about my parents going to court, signing papers. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I learned that my parents had tried to reunite a third time (they’d tried right after the separation), a decade later, when I was in college. They must have realized they’d lost something special. But they couldn’t go back; you can’t go back and fix things, only go back to understand them.

  I didn’t know for years that my father was offered a huge promotion to head the London office of his company, but he turned it down because he didn’t want to be far away from his kids. I didn’t know that the bout of drinking and womanizing after the divorce was his way of escaping loneliness and sorrow; to me it looked like he was just having a good time. Years and years after my father left, Sue told me that he’d been suicidal, that one day he found himself driving faster and faster, wishing, willing, to end his life in a car accident. It took decades—when my father was in his sixties and I was in my forties—for him to tell me how he struggled back then, how one afternoon when he tried to run a meeting, his boss recognized that my father was a wreck, was coming undone. Go home, his boss kindly said, take the day off.

  Only then did I begin to comprehend my father’s loss, imagine the silence that greeted him when he came home from work, no gaggle of children racing up to him and clinging to his legs, no piano to play, no scent of roasting chicken, no noisy kids dancing around the living room or playing games in the yard. Just the bare wood floors of the Savin Hill flat, the dingy secondhand day bed, the spare cupboards, stray condiments in the refrigerator, the empty hours each night after work, the paralyzing quiet.

  After my father moved out, Joanne recorded a greeting for him on his answering machine, which he kept until he remarried, at fifty-six. I asked him once why he didn’t update his answering machine greeting. He said he loved to hear Joanne’s voice when it played, couldn’t bear to erase it. When he was eighty and in the hospital dying of cancer, dehydrated, as I brought my father a glass of water I reminded him of our chants for cold, cold, cold water each night when he tucked us into bed. “That was the joy of my life,” he said. I felt then, as I never fully had, how painful it must have been for him to lose those bonds with his children—that he enjoyed being a father and was a good father until our family fell apart and he didn’t know anymore how to be a father.

  For years after my mother buried everything in the pool, I had dreams of digging in the side yard as if it were an archeological site. In the dreams it was always nighttime, as if I were a grave robber, the dream always interrupted by a light that flashes on, or by someone calling my name, as if I were trespassing on someone else’s property. For years I wondered what my mother had plowed into the hole. My love letter from Ian O’Shaughnessy in sixth grade that began, “I’m sorry I threw the football at you”? My black patent-leather Mary Janes from fourth grade, with the square toe and oversized buckle that made me feel like a pilgrim? I loved those shoes so much that I cried when I left one at my grandmother’s in New York. “Mom, please. Make Nanny send it.” A year later my grandmother mailed the shoe. When I opened the box, I couldn’t imagine why I’d been so attached to those stupid loafers, but I kept it. I wanted that shoe to te
ach me something, to remind me how to be excited about a thing as simple and inconsequential as a shoe—how to be happy, really.

  What else went into that hole, that hopper that was filled with clear, cold water that I smashed into, water that broke the fall of my body leaping backward? Gifts we made for Mother’s or Father’s Day: rock paperweights, ceramic pencil holders? An entire set of Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias—Aardvark to Zululand? Sally’s Visible Woman set? My ESP cards with the shapes and lines you were supposed to guess through concentrating, proving you could read minds? Patrick’s Batman lamp from the prison Hobby Shop—is that in the hole? What about stuff we had when we were teenagers: my brown-and-orange cheerleading skirt from West Junior High, clogs, the psychedelic go-go girl lamp from the Orange Room? My single swimming trophy? That must be in the hole; otherwise, where is it?

  One day years after the house was sold, Joanne and Barbie ran into each other in front of it. Neither lived in Walpole anymore; both had detoured from wherever they were going at the same moment to drive by the house. I didn’t visit the house for nearly thirty years. I didn’t want to see the weeping willow, no taller than my mother when she planted it, now grown above the roofline, or the side yard where no space-picket fence guarded no wobbly aluminum pool. I didn’t want to see the clapboards painted pumpkin or sage by the new owners, rooms added on like bastards.

  In college, when my conscience returned from its period of absentia in high school, I dreamed of paying back Mr. Barnes the few hundred dollars Paula and I had stolen. But I never did, perhaps for the same reason I rarely went back to Walpole once I’d moved away at twenty: there was too much to forget and avoid. Making one small reparation meant thinking about or acting on so many others that I could not correct; I could not possibly repair all that I’d stolen, damaged, hurt.