Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  Not long ago I asked my mother why she’d stolen. Her eyes were downcast, and she was uncharacteristically quiet. “I had a lot of children and no money,” she said. She was in her late seventies, just retired from forty years of working as a nurse. “That’s sad,” she said. “I was so honest.” My mother told me she regretted using our childhood savings for the pool. “When I saw you all had no money for college, I felt bad.” I told her we loved that pool. That pool was more than a respite on hot summer days. That pool demonstrated to me what a woman not even five feet tall in the world, a single woman with a high school education and seven kids, could accomplish.

  After my parents sold the house in Walpole my mother bought a condominium, which was all she could afford. All the units were exactly alike, except the interior color schemes were either beige or blue. Mikey called the place Beige Number Nine. The first time I visited Beige Number Nine, my mother handed me a manila envelope stuffed with photos she’d divided among all of us. She’d cut up group shots, a weird reenactment of the splintering of my family. My envelope contained mostly pictures of myself, but in each of our packets she included one or two photos of all of us. She must have run out of family shots, so on some photos she taped in whoever was missing, most often my father. In one photo she gave me, the misaligned curtains are a dead giveaway—that, and Patrick’s enormously long arm around the shoulders of Sally and my patched-in father.

  Along with the photos, my mother gave me a single cardboard box, the remains of my childhood, which contained my photo albums, college texts, my high school yearbook, and the walking stick I’d carried home from California, my handwritten note still taped to it a decade later: “Do not ever throw this stick away.” I must have known to guard against loss. The box also contained my diaries, which I’d forgotten about, a yellow five-year diary and the diary from 1975, when I first smoked angel dust. The gilt-edged pages were too small to contain all that happened on some days, so I continued the entry on an earlier page I’d left blank, the diary moving forward in time and then backward. Reading those entries, I had a sense of time unwinding, the future written in the past.

  Of the few things my mother saved from burial in the pool, the diaries are most precious to me, for they returned years of my life I’d mostly forgotten. When I first read the pages from fall 1975 when I began to smoke angel dust, I wept for the loss of myself, pitied myself, was once again self-centered. I thought those events were so far in the past that I would not be affected. But I felt the memories—not body or intellect, but a soul memory, a heart memory. I felt unhinged and weird, like a tormented teenager, flooded with a sense of alienation that left me off-kilter for days, unable to be around people. Reading the diary triggered remnant feelings, flipped on that switch, the current weaker and sputtering but felt.

  In revisiting my adolescence, at first I felt enraged with that fifteen-year-old girl. I wanted to shake her roughly, slap her face, grab her by the collar like my mother did that night when I didn’t come home. I wanted to wake her up, knock some sense into that girl, penetrate that faux-tough veneer. But I recognized that she didn’t need tough love, just love, for someone to speak kindly to her, to help her find her way, to tell her she was smart and strong, remind her she was a good person, or could be, would be, to give her permission to speak up, speak out, speak her mind.

  Recently when I was talking to Patrick about our childhood, he said, “You always stuck up for me.” And in my forties, when I was helping my mother fight for her rights in a lawsuit, when I challenged and wrote letters and spoke on her behalf, she said one day, “All those qualities we punished you for? I’m glad you have them.” Loudmouth. Smart aleck. Back-talker. Fresh.

  Instead of anger, I try to see that girl in the diary with compassion, that self-destructive, lost, misguided girl. I try to understand her, and girls like her, to forgive her.

  Author’s Note

  This story depicts particular events at a particular moment; it is not meant to be representative of the town or people of Walpole. I have used real names for my family, public figures, people I interviewed who gave me permission, and the deceased. To protect the privacy of others, I have changed names, other identifying details, specific locations, and in a few instances I have conflated characters to assure privacy.

  A short section of this memoir draws on material from an essay, “Body Leaping Backward,” published in Fugue Literary Journal.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m enormously grateful to the people who believed in this book, who midwifed it into the world: Rayhané Sanders at Massie & McQuilkin, so sharp and so mighty; Deanne Urmy, the smartest, kindest editor a writer can hope for; and the excellent team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Jenny Xu, Megan Wilson, Liz Anderson, and Lisa Glover.

  I’m grateful to the University of Massachusetts Lowell for time off to write, to my colleagues in the English Department for support and encouragement, and to my fellow creative writers for inspiring me: Maggie Dietz, Andre Dubus III, and Sandra Lim. Thanks to Andre in particular for benediction as I sent this story out into the world.

  George Hart, the director of libraries at UMass Lowell, went above and beyond to provide me with access to research databases. I’m grateful to the Walpole Public Library for its excellent digitized archives; I’m happy to see that my old hometown has a great library.

  Ms. Dorothy Gill generously shared with me her experiences as a social worker in Walpole Prison. I’m ever grateful to Jeff Day for his willingness to share his memories of Walpole in the 1970s, and for being brave, honest, and tenderhearted; rest in peace, my friend.

  Thanks to these dear friends, upon whom I’ve prevailed again and again to read pages, to shore me up, calm me down, egg me on, who listen to my complaints, laugh at my jokes, and tell me the truth. I am a better writer, a better person, for these generous souls: Jason C. Anthony, Jennifer Cognard-Black, Heather Hardy, E. J. Levy, Sandra Miller, and Nancy Sferra.

  My sisters and brothers, to whom I am forever grateful—what can I say. You let me—helped me—write this book, and I can see no other reason why but love. How lucky I am: thank you. Thanks most of all to my mother.

  Sources

  This memoir draws on the following sources (selected):

  Boston Globe archives 1950–1995

  Walpole Times archives 1950–1995

  Agar, Michael H., George M. Beschner, and Harvey W. Feldman. Angel Dust: An Ethnographic Study of PCP Users. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1979.

  Bailey, Beth, and David Farber, eds. America in the Seventies. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

  Baum, Dan. Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and The Politics of Failure. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

  Bernstein, Nell. Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. New York: New Press, 2014.

  Bissonette, Jamie. When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2008.

  Bondi, Vincent. American Decades: 1970–1979. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Research, 1995.

  Borges, Ron, and Paul Solotaroff. “Aaron Hernandez: Inside the Dark, Tragic Life of a Former Patriot Star.” Rolling Stone, August 28, 2013, www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-gangster-in-the-huddle.

  Boston Public Radio. Margery Eagan and Jim Braude, hosts, interview with William Evans, Boston police commissioner, November 27, 2016.

  Burrough, Bryan. Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. New York: Penguin, 2016.

  Carroll, Peter N. It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s. Newark, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982.

  Chesney-Linda, Meda, and Randall G. Sheldon. Girls, Delinquency, and Juvenile Justice. Boston: Wiley Blackwell, 2014.

  Clouet, Doris H. Phencyclidine: An Update. NIDA [National Institute of Drug Abuse/Department of Health and Human Services] Monograph 64, 1986.

  Cohen, Bertram D., Gerald Rosenbaum, Elliot Luby, and Jacques Gottlie
b. “Comparison of Phencyclidine Hydrochloride (Sernyl) with Other Drugs.” Archives of General Psychiatry 6 (1962): 395–401.

  Cosgrove, Judith, and Terry G. Newell. “Recovery of Neuropsychological Functions During Reduction in Use of Phencyclidine.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 47, no. 1 (1991): 159–68.

  Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press, 2010.

  Dellelo, Robert, and Christopher Lordan. The Factory: A Journey Through the Prison Industrial Complex. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.

  Dynda, Russel S., Warren Jamison, and Michael McLaughlin. Screw: The Truth About Walpole State Prison by the Guard Who Lived It. Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon, 1989.

  Edelstein, Andrew J., and Kevin McDonough. The Seventies: From Hot Pants to Hot Tubs. New York: Dutton, 1990.

  Farber, M. A. “Veterans Still Fight Vietnam Drug Habits.” New York Times, June 2, 1974, https://nyti.ms/1ku85LS.

  Finn, Jessica. “Harrowing Final Hours of Morgan Freeman’s Granddaughter’s Life.” Daily Mail [UK], April 12, 2018, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5605623/Morgan-Freemans-daughter-spent-day-granddaughter-fatal-stabbing-boyfriend.html.

  Frank, Gerold. The Boston Strangler. New York: Signet, 1966.

  Frum, David. How We Got Here: The 70s, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life—For Better or Worse. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

  Hamm, Duane C. Manumission: The Liberated Consciousness of a Prison(er) Abolitionist. XLibris, 2012.

  Jaffe, Harry. “The Tumultuous Life and Lonely Death of Marion Barry’s Only Son.” The Washingtonian, January 8, 2017, www.washingtonian.com/2017/01/08/the-tumultuous-life-and-lonely-death-of-marion-barrys-only-son-christopher.

  Janos, Adam. “G.I.s’ Drug Use in Vietnam Soared—with Their Commanders’ Help.” History Channel, “History Stories,” April 18, 2018, www.history.com/news/drug-use-in-vietnam.

  Jenkins, Philip. Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  Jenson, Frances E., and Amy Ellis Nutt. The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults. New York: Harper, 2015.

  Kamienski, Lukasz. “The Drugs That Built a Super Soldier.” The Atlantic, April 8, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/04/the-drugs-that-built-a-super-soldier/477183/.

  Kauffman, Kelsey. Prison Officers and Their World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

  Kelly, Susan. The Boston Stranglers. New York: Pinnacle, 1995.

  Levine, Elana. Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

  Linder, Ronald L., Steve E. Lerner, and R. Stanley Burns. PCP: The Devil’s Dust. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981.

  Malcolm X and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine, 1964.

  Manning, Tom. “Tom Manning, A Short Biography.” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Parliament/3400/tom-bio.htm.

  Miller, Jerome. Last One Over the Wall. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

  Rae, George William. Confessions of the Boston Strangler. New York: Pyramid, 1967.

  Remick, Peter. In Constant Fear: The Brutal, True Story of Life Within the Walls of the Notorious Walpole State Prison. New York: Reader’s Digest, 1975.

  Schulman, Bruce J. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. New York: Da Capo, 2001.

  Sexton, Anne. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Mariner, 2004.

  Shteir, Rachel. The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting. New York: Penguin, 2011.

  Smith, R. Jeffrey. “Congress Considers Bill to Control Angel Dust.” Science 200 (June 30, 1978): 1463–66.

  Strass, Todd. Angel Dust Blues. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979.

  Taylor, Jacob. “PCP in the American Media: The Social Response to a Forgotten Drug.” Master’s thesis, Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal, January 2011.

  Torgoff, Martin. Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

  United States of America v. Garry Jordan. U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit 810 F.2d 262, January 1987.

  U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Abuse of Dangerous Licit and Illicit Drugs—Psychotropics, Phencyclidine (PCP), and Talwin: Hearings. 95th Congress, 2nd sess., August 8 and 10; September 19; and October 6, 1978. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979.

  Walsh, Ryan H. Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. New York: Penguin, 2018.

  Wride, Nancy. “Return to Dust: Bane of the ’70s, PCP Now a Supporting Player in the Saga of Aaron Hernandez.” Elements Behavioral Health, December 7, 2013, www.elementsbehavioralhealth.com/addiction/aaron-hernandez-pcp-making-comeback/.

  Young, Emma. “How Iceland Got Teens to Say No to Drugs.” The Atlantic, January 19, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/01/teens-drugs-iceland/513668/.

  YouthConnect Program, Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston. “Proven Results,” www.bgcb.org/what-we-do/youthconnect/, 3/15/2017.

  Appendix

  Possible charges by legal definition, and penalties, for crimes committed (or accessory to) by me, my family, my friends* (selected)

  Massachusetts Law, Chapter 90

  Section 10—Operate motor vehicle without license [misdemeanor, 1 year]

  Section 24(1)(a)(1)—Operate motor vehicle under influence of liquor/drugs [misdemeanor, max. 2.5 years]

  Section 24(2)(a)—Unauthorized use of motor vehicle [misdemeanor, max. 2 years]

  Section 24(2)(a)—Reckless operation of motor vehicle [misdemeanor, 2 weeks to 2 years]

  Section 24(2)(a)—Leave scene of property damage [misdemeanor, 2 weeks to 2 years]

  Section 24(2)(a)—False statement in application for registration [misdemeanor, 2 weeks to max. 2 years]

  Section 24B—Possess false or stolen, misuse or forge registered motor vehicle document [felony, 2–5 years]

  Section 32A—Falsify title certificate motor vehicle / unlawful possession altered title / false statement in application for title [felony, 2 to 5 years]

  Massachusetts Law, Chapter 94C

  Section 32(a)—Distribute or possess with intent, Class B [felony, 2.5 to 10 years]

  Section 32B(a)—Distribute or possess with intent, Class C [felony, 2.5 to 5 years]

  Section 32C(a)—Distribute or possess with intent, Class D [misdemeanor, 2 years]

  Section 32A(a)—Phencyclidine, distribute or possess with intent [felony, 2.5–10 years, mandatory 1 year]

  Section 32I—Drug paraphernalia, distribute, possess with intent, or possess [misdemeanor, 1–2 years]

  Section 32J—Mfg./Dist./Dispense Class B or C substance with intent to distribute within 1000 ft. of school [felony, 2.5–15 years]

  Section 32K—Drug, induce minor to possess [felony, 5 to 15 years]

  Section 32K—Drug, induce minor to distribute [felony, max. 15 years]

  Section 34—Illegal possession Class B substance [misdemeanor, max. 1 year]

  Section 34—Illegal possession Class C substance [misdemeanor, max. 1 year]

  Section 34—Illegal possession Class D substance [misdemeanor, max. 1 year]

  Section 34—Illegal possession Class E substance [misdemeanor, max. 6 months]

  Massachusetts Law, Chapter 159

  Section 103—Damage railroad car [misdemeanor, max. 2 years]

  Massachusetts Law, Chapter 266

  Section 5A—Attempt to burn motor vehicle [felony, 2.5–10 years]

  Section 7—Woods; wanton or reckless injury or destruction by fire [misdemeanor, 2 years]

  Section 8—Set fire on land [misdemeanor, 2 years]

  Section 9—Failure to extinguish fire on land [misdemeanor, 1 month]

  Section 10—Burning motor vehic
le to defraud insurer, or attempt [felony, 2.5–5 years]

  Section 16—Breaking and entering at night [felony, max. 2.5 years]

  Section 16A—B&E for misdemeanor [misdemeanor, 6 months]

  Section 19—Railroad car; breaking and entering [felony, max. 10 years]

  Section 20—Railroad car; larceny from, under $10,000* [felony, 2–5 years]

  Section 27A—Motor vehicle or trailer; removal or concealment to defraud insurer [felony, 2.5 years]

  Section 28—Larceny, motor vehicle or trailer / receive/buy stolen motor vehicle [felony, 2.5 years]

  Section 28(a)—Motor vehicle, malicious damage [felony, 2.5–15 years]

  Section 28(b)—Conceal theft of motor vehicle [felony, 2.5–10 years]

  Section 30A—Shoplifting by concealing merchandise, over $100 [misdemeanor, max. 2.5 years]

  Section 30(1)—Larceny under $250 [misdemeanor, 1 year]

  Section 30(1)—Larceny over $250 (under $10,000) [felony, 2–5 years]

  Section 30(5)—Larceny from elder, under $250 [misdemeanor 2.5 years]

  Section 60—Receive/aid in concealment of stolen goods under $250 [misdemeanor, 2.5 years]

  Section 60—Receive stolen or false-traded property over $250 (under $10,000) [felony, 2.5–5 years]

  Section 98—Malicious damage, school property / malicious injury school building / vandalize school or church [misdemeanor, 2 years]

  Section 102(c)—Explosives, possess [felony, 10–20 years]