by Rob Sedgwick
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Again, I reiterate that by pleading guilty, you waive your right to a fair trial by a jury of your peers. You are aware of this?”
“Yes, I am, Your Honor.”
“Very well, then. Sentencing shall be set at a later date. Good day, gentlemen.”
And out walked the law.
Brad Fine asked about the show, and I told him it was Fine.
After he left, I was alone with Warren and Ron.
“Are you okay?” they asked.
“Yeah. But this is some heavy shit.”
“It’s all right, Rob. There’s nothing you can do about any of this except live your life,” Ron said, trying to cheer me up. “And when the time comes for sentencing, we go in and see what happens. We couldn’t have gotten a better judge, so just relax, keep doing what you’re doing, and try not to think about it.”
I went to meet Jordan at the bar to drop off his money and take the edge off the day. Moss poured me a glass full of Cuervo and a Rolling Rock. The tequila was Clorox going down, but I felt instantly lighter.
Jordan walked in. He seemed wispy, almost floating. I gave him his money.
“Hey, thanks.”
“Of course.”
“You plead today?” he said, ordering a Cuervo as well. “How’d it go?”
“You know, scary. Shades of things to come.”
“Oh, you’ll probably be okay. What do your guys think you’re looking at, tops?”
“With Ashberry, they think a year.”
“Not so bad. You’ll do it standing on your head.”
“I’ll stop drinking, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah, not a bad thing, right?”
“No.”
“Am I right?”
“Yeah.”
“So, remember Jim, the driver? The guy who magically disappeared after we got busted? With the David Cassidy ’do?”
“Yep.”
“Just found out from Diego that he was the one that flipped. DEA tracked him to Missouri and gave him a choice: go to jail for the rest of your life or lead us to the next guy.”
“And we were the next guy?”
“Eggs-actly.” An old Linus-ism, courtesy of R. Crumb.
“Gotcha. What’s that mean? He’s cooperating against us now?”
“I don’t think so. Not unless he can reverse his neck situation.”
“You mean he hurt his neck?”
“Yeah. Diego had it sliced, so I’m sure it’s not in full working order anymore.” Jordan made a slicing motion with his finger from ear to ear and shuffled off into the bathroom.
I banged the rest of my Cuervo, the drink of throat-slitting Mexican assassins, and looked around in panic in case Diego suddenly and magically appeared, which he did not.
When Jordan came out of the bathroom, I went in. There was a clump of toilet paper bunched weird in the wastebasket, one of those deals you want to check out just to make sure what it is. I unwrapped the paper. It was a used syringe. No wonder Jordan was acting so wavy.
I wanted away from heroin, from the bar, from all the forms of awfulness of life outside of the womb. I just wanted to be home with Tybalt. So I said goodbye to Jordan and Moss and went back to Eighty-Fifth Street. I kissed Tybalt momentously, then knelt down to put my face near his mouth so I could smell his breath. It stunk in a heavenly way. It was steaming, melted all my cares away. I put my ear to his chest to hear his heart, which thumped steadily, cleanly, soberly, and then he looked at me straight in the eye.
It couldn’t hold his stare, so I headed for the vodka, poured a nice triple shot, and then he jumped me, knocking the vodka all over the kitchen floor and shattering the glass. I was going to scream “Fuck,” but knowing full well that he did it on purpose and that he was right, I ineptly mopped up the vodka and glass with a gym towel, dumped the towel in the kitchen sink, and then poured another healthy shot, this time in a plastic cup, and held it wobblingly high in the air just in case he was going to jump me again. But he had left the kitchen already, probably fed up with a drunk and the booze he treasured above all else.
I teetered to the living room, fell down into a library chair, and I turned on the TV. Tybalt harrumphed next to the chair. I got up to get another drink—it was getting tough to keep the old balance—and womped back into the deep library chair. Tybalt remained where he was. I was seeing double, had to close one eye so I didn’t see two TVs. What I was watching was just noise and vague images. When I smoked, it felt almost like I was eating something, but I hadn’t eaten much of anything all day.
I needed one more.
I got up, cigarette in hand, swayed gently, and fell fluffily to the carpet. The floor met me halfway. I lay down and rested…
—
I am in Tobago in the West Indies at my grandfather’s compound, the King’s Bay estate. It’s six hundred acres of jungle and crops: cocoa and coconut. I am six and on trial. My grandfather is the judge. Elton, one of the many servants, has tried to stick a pin in my finger for fun. Maybe he’s kidding around, but he terrifies me. He’s enormously strong, a Tobagonian Bubba Smith. After I somehow wriggle out of his steel fingers and run, I hear all the other servants laughing and whooping it up at my expense. I am a cauldron of six-year-old hate. It would be insane to try anything against Elton, so I sneak into the back kitchen and I kick Jane—a younger and newly hired maid who laughed at me—smack in the ass.
I do it to be caught, to make a stand.
My grandfather is severe. It’s his kangaroo court. I don’t have a lawyer. I know I’m fucked; he just wants to turn the screws and make me shit myself. He’s as serious as a brain tumor. The sentence is two hours in my room and to apologize formally to the entire staff in his presence.
Eyes to the ground, I beg their forgiveness.
After my two-hour sentence, I find my grandparents have gone out to dinner and I am left alone with the servants. Elton appears with a book of matches. He takes my hand, lights a match, and puts my finger in the flame. It’s a dull pain, not as horrible as I expect. My grandparents would never believe me if I tell them, so I leave my finger there. I feel Elton’s hot, gamey breath on my face. I make no sound…
—
Tybalt was barking like mad and trying to wake me up, shoving my face with his snout. But I was in a cloud. Tybalt was a blur. What little I could make out of him, he looked at me as if I was lost. Like I was an idiot. Why was he looking at me like that? The cigarette in my fingertips was still lit and was burning both my flesh and the fluffy carpet underneath my head. I rose, not in any rush, to a fairly upright position to the ashtray and stamped out the cigarette. Tybalt started licking my burnt cigarette finger.
I resolved to be more careful with my solitary drinking in the future.
31
Before my first date with Tara, I get good and liquored up with Linus. We do shots of ice-cold Smirnoff Vodka—which Linus says is odorless—and smoke a joint. He says, “Good luck with the bitch. I hope you fuck her good.”
I say, “Please don’t say that about Tara. I’m in love with her.”
Linus says: “Oh, Rob, you’re seventeen, for God’s sake. You don’t know anything.”
I pick her up at her house on Beekman Place. It’s a sweet little divinity of an enclave right by the East River and the United Nations.
I think my outfit is okay. My going-out shirt is blue-checkered flannel with white and grey stripes checking through it. I think it looks pretty good, but I wear it mainly because of the thickness of the fabric. It will sop up nervous sweat so I don’t look as though I have two pools growing under my armpits. I wear my father’s red-checked lumber jacket that he gave me because it finally fits and I’ve always loved it. Then, to look really cool, I wear a Lynyrd Skynyrd hat—which is basically a cowboy hat—with the brim on either side roll
ed up tight.
Tara says I look cute. She looks sexy athletic in her painter’s pants, Frye boots, and a tight brown long john shirt.
I take her to the restaurant where Ned, Linus’s friend who deals coke, works. Nikko, Kyra, and I get our coke from him now. I do this so it looks like I know people in high places, so we can talk to him at some point during dinner, and even though Tara will have no idea about our coke connection, she will know there is something going on between me and Ned. I’m hoping this makes me seem important and mysterious.
I think I’m doing pretty well, and my nerves are okay. I talk and she listens. I talk some more and she listens more. I order a martini. After a couple of slugs, I’m babbling in Technicolor. I’m as free as wavy silk. She asks me why I drink so much. I say I’m just having fun. She says yeah, but you drink a lot and I smell it on you first thing in the morning. I say I just do that sometimes. She says I smell it on you most of the time.
Really?
I thought the parsley—actually Ned’s idea—covered the smell.
She says yes, I smell it on you every day.
She says she doesn’t drink or do drugs.
I order another martini.
“Are you an alcoholic?” she asks.
I remember being at a party with my mother at Ben’s house around the time they first met. I was very young, and very short, and I recall her pointing to some woman and saying, “You see that woman? She is an alcoholic. That means she can never have another drink again for the rest of her life.”
I thought, how could she not possibly live without drinking? Don’t we need water and juice to live? Won’t she die?
Mom said, “No, it’s not regular drinking. She just can’t have alcohol for the rest of her life.”
Mom had been giving me tastes of her Johnny Walker Black for as long as I could remember. I always loved its smell of Black Forest smokiness. Its nighttime loveliness, its wafting essence of money and comfort, its rich vivid amber color that made me dream of cozy wooden cottages deep in the woods with fireplaces stuffed with birch logs and roaring, crackling flames, and of Mom being happy because it was cocktail hour. A time to calm down, relax. To smile, to be careless and free.
The first time I smoked pot, I couldn’t stop laughing. I rolled around on the fifth floor of the semi-castle townhouse with Nikko and Milo and couldn’t believe I could feel this way. There was no pain, no anxiety. This had to be Eden, or what God had intended Eden to be.
But then I had to taper off because I was getting too sluggish and tired all the time. Everything in me dragged. I wasn’t nervous about anything anymore because I never had any energy. I started spitting up thick, black mucousy stuff.
But the booze was a pal. It was social and encouraged erudite conversation. Linus had always insisted that while drinking a martini you had to stick out your pinky.
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh Rob, you’re such a Turk. Because it is simply what one does.”
After thinking over what she said, I look at Tara and think what I’m saying is the truth. “No, I’m not an alcoholic.” But everything is sure better when I drink, and people seem to be impressed, or at least kids my age. I’m funny, happy, and more interesting.
I walk her home. I wonder what it would be like to kiss her. When we get to her block, I make a strong move to the hoop and start to kiss her by running my tongue along her teeth romantically. She tells me that’s fine but maybe to be more gentle and take my time more and maybe not tongue her teeth so much. She says to relax and be with her, that she’s not in a rush.
I try again.
This time it is more like breathing. It is deep and tender. Everything slows down to a slight pulse. Then just a throb. And even though there may be a noisy city around us, within the teeny land of our tight embrace, it is quiet and peaceful. And she is lovely.
She becomes my girlfriend, and I stop drinking so much during the week. I tell my mom, “It’s time for me to settle down and be serious with someone.”
Mom is always amused when I try to act like a grown-up, because she doesn’t really believe I will ever become one.
—
I’m eighteen and about to have my first acid trip. Tara is away for the entire weekend, so I feel free to take this plunge into the exhilarating realm of psychedelics. Nikko and I get the stuff from a preppy guy with the obligatory haircut and attire: long hair chopped to shoulder length, regulation short but still sexy to preppy girls; old Brooks Brothers shirt in shambles; fraying corduroys. The guy seems a little full of himself, but he’s a friend of a friend, and we buy it anyway. My cousin Lucy is in tow. Nikko’s tripped a lot at this point, so he takes a whole hit. I’ve always been reticent about this stuff, so I take a quarter hit. It’s windowpane, apparently the most potent acid you can get. It’s February cold outside, and Nikko, my dear cousin Lucy, and I all head back to the townhouse—Nikko and I anticipating the oncoming effects of the drug, Lucy perfectly happy that she’s abstained.
After about twenty minutes, it starts to kick in and I can’t stop smiling. Everything seems so light and airy; I see the sunny, humorous side to everything. We all three skip and laugh down the streets of the Upper East Side, Lucy more somber in her step,
Nikko and I trippin’, skippin’, floatin’, tap dancin’ our way into your hearts!
It’s very cold out, but I am hot, flushed, not sweating, but effortlessly comfortable in my T-shirt. Everything’s so rich and Nikko and I are so in love with the planet: the trees, the cement sidewalk that is cold to the tongue and tastes like clay but is so symmetrical and square.
Nikko and I are happy, so happy, joyous!
We’re out of breath, have to rest, just slow our skipping to a trot, that’s better, that’s okay, phew, let’s stop for a minute.
PIZZA.
Suddenly we’re starving and need pizza. All three of us walk inside the pizzeria.
I’m a furnace.
The place is packed, hot, and it smells so mozzarella-y. My face is oily, dripping. The tomato sauce is such a vibrant, bloody red. I wonder if the crusts are by Bruegel?
We’re waiting. Everyone is waiting. It’s so slow. Why do we all have to wait? Ohhhhh, the money! Everyone has to pay the money! Why can’t they just share and give it away and be happy? It’s all so silly.
“The pizza guy’s so hairy he looks like a werewolf,” Lucy says.
“Oh my God, he does!”
We can’t stop laughing, and now I’m beginning to sweat because my furnace insides are inside the hot pizzeria, and it’s all warm and gooey and this werewolf pizza guy has to be the hairiest person I have ever seen, and everyone is so warm together, but the pizza isn’t happening and we are all laughing so hard we have to go.
We get back to the house and race upstairs to my room to do I don’t know what, because I have never done this before, and we open the door and there, sitting on my soft, enveloping seventies couch area, are two kids from the prep school that I got kicked out of last year. They’re wearing the same clothes and have the same haircut and are acting just like the guy we bought the acid from.
“Hey, Sedg?”
RESPONSIBILITY flashes like a neon sign in my brain. How did these guys get up here? Do I have to stay with them? I don’t know what to do.
Nikko, Lucy, my sister, and whoever else we met on the way up to my room all shuffle out, and I’m left ALONE WITH THE PREPPIES!
This is awful. I’m not good friends with them; I wasn’t good friends with anybody at that place. A hive of towhead WASPs, everyone so blond it made me embrace my Judaism.
Crater Face: What’s going on, Sedg?
Me: Oh, hey, I’m…right.
Crater Face: About what?
Me: Sorry?
Crater Face: You’re right about what?
Me: Um, nothing.
Large Hon
ker: What?
Me: I’m sorry! I mean I’m okay. I meant, okay, that’s it! That’s what I meant I’m okay. Yeah…
Large Honker: Nice house!
Me: Yes.
Crater Face: Are you all right? You seem kind of out of it. Why are you standing there with your hands in your pockets? Come over here and sit down, let’s hang. We’re free all day. This is your room, isn’t it?
Me: It is.
Crater Face: Size of our living room on the Cape. Do you Cape?
Me: Do I have a cape?
Crater Face: Do you ever go to Cape Cod?
Me: No.
Crater Face: Never? You’ve never been to the Cape? You must.
Large Honker: You simply must.
Me: Well, maybe...
Large Honker: The Vineyard. You must Vineyard. It’s grand. So quaint.
Me: Nope, there’s no Vineyard I can…
Large Honker: But, Sedg, you must.
Crater Face: Simply.
Large Honker: Yes, you simply must.
Me: Maybe one of these days I’ll simply—
Crater Face: Grand! So what’s going on? What’s up your alley these days?
Large Honker: Your hair is long but unruly. Your whole comportment seems off. And why are you wearing a purple velvet shirt?
Me: Okay, I can’t do this anymore. I took acid today, all right?
Crater Face/Large Honker: COOL!
Me: And I’m not doing so—
Large Honker: Can you hook us up?
Me: I don’t—
Crater Face: C’mon, Sedg! We’re your old buds, your chums from Westminster! (He sings) “High on a hill above a stream!” And all that.
Me: I’m having a hard time right now, I can’t…I think you guys should go.
Both: Whoa.
Me: I can’t do this right now. I think I’m having a bad trip. My head feels…I feel very weird now.
Large Honker: It’s pretty weird the way you’re treating us. Frankly, your whole aura seems pretty weird. I think we’re gonna split.
Crater Face: Not very cool of you, Sedg, I must say.
