I have hope again.
4
vampire dreams
1993–2001
One warm, sunny day in the spring of Ben’s seventh-grade year, I pick him up at school after tennis practice, as I always do. He walks to the car with his head down and gets in the back seat. I wonder why he doesn’t sit in the front seat as he always does. I look at him in the rearview mirror. He’s crying.
“What’s wrong, Ben?” My heart feels tight and squished in my chest.
He hunches over, his head close to his knees, and starts sobbing.
“Benny, tell me, please, what’s wrong?”
He can’t stop crying. I drive home, my hands tight on the wheel. Ten minutes later, we are sitting on the sofa. I put my arm around him, and he leans into me. The story comes out slowly, unevenly, in bits and pieces.
“They took my backpack. Tripped me. Hit me.”
“They?”
“The baseball kids.”
“The kids who play baseball?” Good athletes, I think. Good kids. “They pick on the tennis kids?”
He shakes his head.
“Just you? They just pick on you? Why you? Didn’t anyone notice, didn’t anyone do anything? Where were the coaches?”
He keeps shaking his head, as if to say, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
“But these are your good friends—you grew up with them; you’ve known them for years.” I’m suddenly, furiously angry. “You have the right to protect yourself, Ben. I know we taught you to be kind, not to hurt others, to talk things through, but if someone hurts you, you have the right to defend yourself.”
He looks at me, and in his eyes, I see confusion and despair. The question he asks has no answer: “Why would one human being inflict harm on another?”
That conversation embarrasses Ben now when I remember it. He thinks it puffs him up too much, makes him seem kinder or wiser than he really is. But he said those words, and they struck me with such force that I wrote them down in my journal: Why would one human being inflict harm on another?
The bullying didn’t start in seventh grade. A boy with red hair and freckles who refuses to fight back and is quickly moved to tears is a vulnerable target. In second grade, we moved him out of Mrs. Locati’s class, where four of his good friends, the “popular” kids destined to be great athletes and magnets for the pretty girls, teased and taunted him. They liked Ben, they invited him to overnights and birthday parties, he played soccer and YMCA basketball with them, but he never quite fit in. He wanted so badly to be part of the popular group, and the wanting to be something he was not tore him apart.
Many years later, he told me about a recurring dream he had over the years. He called them “vampire dreams.” The details are striking, the colors vivid, as he described being on a field trip with his first-grade class. They stopped at museum after museum, and Ben was always a few steps behind the crowd, afraid to be left behind, hurrying to catch up.
At the last stop, the students gathered in a dark room lit only by a red glow. Coffins lined the walls. The teachers wore Dracula capes, billowing robes lined with red satin with crisp, wide collars. All the popular boys stood in a single file. Ben joined them at the very end of the line. As he watched, each boy would step forward, like a robot, turning their heads to expose their necks and allowing the teachers to bite them. No one flinched or yelped. As each boy stepped forward and the line shortened, Ben’s heart beat faster and faster.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Mrs. Dutton, his first-grade teacher, with a beckoning look in her eyes. “It won’t hurt, and soon you’ll be like everyone else.”
He bared his neck, she leaned forward with her mouth wide open, and at that point in the dream, he always woke up.
Ben knew what the dreams meant. “Although I didn’t realize it until many years later, baring my neck and becoming a vampire in the dream was the first step to admitting that I didn’t want to be myself,” he told me. “I didn’t want to stand out. I didn’t want fucking red hair or freckles. I didn’t want to be the kid who couldn’t help crying when he got hurt or worked up emotionally. I wanted to be a robot vampire like everyone else.”
When we switched Ben to a multi-age classroom, he thrived and quickly became a member of the “Midget Patrol,” a group of fun-loving, not-particularly-athletic-just-shy-of-popular kids with lively imaginations who thought up all sorts of adventures, including sneaking out at night to the graveyard a mile from our house. Their plan was to meet at 11:00 p.m., just an hour before midnight, at a particularly gnarly grave that was haunted, they’d been told, by a witch. They never did make it to the graveyard, but just thinking about the escapade thrilled them as they imagined what it would be like, with the owls perched on the headstones, the moon making shadow pathways between the stones, and the specter of a real live witch hiding high up in the trees, perhaps knowing they were coming, waiting for them.
Multi-age was all about imagination and creativity. First-, second-, and third-graders worked and played together in project-based learning, including units on rain forests, medieval times, and ancient Egypt. In the ancient Egypt section, the students mummified a chicken, which they called King Chickakufu, and buried it in their teacher Mr. Wood’s yard, setting a date to come back in eighth grade to dig it up. Mr. Wood introduced Ben to the Goosebumps books, which Ben read nonstop. We filled an entire bookshelf with Goosebumps books (Monster Blood, Night of the Living Dummy, Say Cheese and Die!). It was right about then that Ben discovered Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—the “cool nerds.” They became the great passion of his life for years to come, as he collected dozens of the toy figures and staged momentous battles. Raphael, the “hotheaded” member of the group gifted with “berserker strength,” was his favorite.
One day, Mr. Wood sent home a note, letting me know that Ben had been unkind to his friend Andy, a first-grader. Ben adored Andy—our families were close friends, we celebrated holidays with them (the “ugly cookie” contest, birthday celebrations, Fourth of July swimming parties), and even vacationed with them at Priest Lake in northern Idaho. I couldn’t imagine that he would be mean to his good friend, so I wrote a long letter to Mr. Wood, defending Ben, even expressing some indignation that he would accuse Ben of picking on anyone, especially Andy.
I feel such shame now about that letter and my refusal to acknowledge that Ben might bully other children, just as he had been bullied. I just couldn’t imagine that sweet, sensitive Ben would mistreat another child. I wish I could find Mr. Wood—he moved a long time ago—and apologize to him. If I could go back—if, if, if—I would listen carefully and respectfully to the teacher and use that incident as a teaching moment, both for myself and for Ben. I would be certain to hear both sides, and I would refuse to take one side over the other, because the truth is always somewhere in between. But whatever the facts might be, I would insist that Ben apologize to Andy. And I would let Ben know, no matter what happened between him and Andy, that as much as it hurts to be tormented, over time, it hurts even more to be the tormenter.
I failed Ben in that moment. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last.
In fourth grade, Ben became good friends with John Quaresma, a quiet, handsome kid with a goofy sideways smile. Ben idolized John, in part, I think, because they were complete opposites—John was everything Ben wanted to be. Where Ben was impulsive and hotheaded, John was calm and cool. Ben loved to talk and make people laugh, while John was the quiet observer. Ben yearned to be accepted by the popular kids, while John couldn’t have cared less. Ben wore “preppy” clothes, while John had holes in his jeans and kept his shirt untucked. John was a great athlete, excelling at every sport, while Ben, in those early years, was awkward and self-conscious.
I remember a middle school football game when John zigzagged down the entire length of the field, avoiding every tackle, to score a touchdown. He did it again. And again. “That kid is going to be an All-American,” Pat said
with a touch of awe in his voice. In that same game, Ben stood awkwardly at the defensive line, unsure what to do with himself. When he finally landed a tackle, he looked at us on the sidelines as if to ask whether he did the right thing. We watched as he extended a hand to the player, helping him up and patting him on the back. “I didn’t like that feeling of knocking someone down,” he told us after the game.
I wonder how life might have turned out for Ben if John hadn’t continued to play football in high school. I wish . . . but I try to stop myself right here, with those two words, for that is magical thinking, an attempt to control what cannot be altered. Still, I can’t help myself. I look at the past and imagine I can manipulate it, in the same way I might shift the trajectory of a story in a book. A moment here or there, a right turn instead of a left turn—how different our lives might be.
My best friend from elementary and middle school, Judy Crum, told me a story that has stayed with me all these years. Her father was walking down a New York City street on his way to work when a sudden blast of wind blew his hat off his head. He went back to retrieve it, and seconds later, right where he had been walking, a huge plate glass window crashed down from a high-rise building under construction.
A moment here or there. A right turn instead of a left turn. A gust of wind. Thousands of tiny moments, most unrecognized and uncounted, and in each one, our lives may hang in the balance.
“What am I going to do if all my good kids are using drugs?”
Ben’s middle school principal, a good friend of mine, is close to tears. I can hear the strain in his voice as he clears his throat and tries to control his emotions. Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about “the drug problem” in our community and how so many kids are starting to use at such early ages. We struggle to understand the reasons kids use drugs. Boredom? Anxiety? Depression? Peer pressure? Gangs? Family problems? We brainstorm ways to help them. But this time, it’s Ben.
I hold the phone to my ear, but I feel as if I am standing outside myself, listening to the conversation, thinking, Is this really happening?
As the story unravels, we learn that Ben and three of his friends—all “good” kids from “good” families (that word good always made us believe we were inoculated somehow)—bought a forty-dollar bag of marijuana. One of the boys brought the marijuana to school (“to be cool,” Ben says later), and one friend told another friend, who told somebody else, and eventually word got around to a teacher who took the news to the principal. Called into the principal’s office, the boy folded under pressure and, as Ben told the story with not a little disgust, “ratted everyone out.”
Something about that phrase—“ratted everyone out”—bothers me, but I ignore it for now. We talk. We listen. We try to listen more than we talk, but I’m not sure we do such a great job. We’re sort of shell-shocked. I try to keep in mind the advice I’ve heard from the kids at Juvie. Every so often in group, I ask them, “What suggestions do you have for parents raising kids these days?” They’re taken aback, confused, for they’re accustomed to taking advice from older folks, not giving it. So they sit for a while, thinking. Then, tentatively, one person offers an insight from his or her own experience, and then another builds on those words. Then, as so often happens in these detention groups, suddenly everyone has something to say.
“Try to talk to your kids more.”
“Yeah, express yourself to your kids as a human being. You can yell at them, or you can talk to them. It’s much better just to talk to them.”
“Listen to what we have to say. Don’t assume you always know what’s going on.”
I think that last bit of advice may be the smartest of all—don’t always assume you know what’s going on.
“We were just trying to be cool,” Ben says, teary-eyed. The tears seem genuine. We ask him where he got the money, and he answers, truthfully we are sure, that he took ten dollars’ worth of quarters from the change jar on the upper shelf of my closet. Pat and I exchange a look—time to get rid of the change jar. We ask if this was the first time, and Ben swears it was. He also promises he will never, ever use drugs again. “Definitely not worth it,” he says miserably.
Ben and his friends are charged with an MIP (minor-in-possession) charge, which goes on their juvenile criminal record to be expunged with good behavior when they turn eighteen. They are all required to go through the diversion program at the Juvenile Justice Center. There, they participate in education classes; complete written assignments, including apology letters; attend the DUI Victim’s Panel, required by the State of Washington; and act appropriately ashamed of themselves.
Pat and I organize a parent meeting. It’s my idea, and we host it at our house. Eight parents, four boys. Firmly but not unkindly, we set down the rules, creating a home contract that each boy signs.
I think that we did a good job and that the whole thing turned out pretty well. The boys are remorseful and willingly accept the consequences, which are significant (especially that MIP charge on their juvenile record), and the parents are united not only in their opposition to marijuana use but also in closer monitoring of their children’s activities. We all figure the kids were just experimenting and posturing, showing off for their friends, having fun smoking a little weed, and probably coughing their lungs out. They got caught, they were forced to face the consequences of their actions, and they have learned a lesson.
I actually feel grateful for the whole experience and wonder what might have happened if Ben hadn’t been caught. Would he have bought another bag of weed and another? But I quickly backtrack from that thought. Not our Ben.
But why not our Ben? That question nags at me. Once again, I hear the Juvie kids talking.
“Parents are so stupid; they believe anything you tell them.”
“If parents would just open their eyes, they’d see what’s right in front of them, but they don’t want to see.”
“When your kid has red eyes, leaves empty Visine bottles lying around in his room, laughs or gets mad at the stupidest things—what do you think is going on?”
Ben has the genetic predisposition. He’s a passionate boy prone to emotional outbursts. He hates his red hair and freckles. He can be impulsive, hypersensitive, anxious, moody. He wants to fit in with the “in crowd,” to “be cool.” Aren’t those warning signs?
I look back through my books, all in a row in my office—all those books I wrote before I started working at the Juvenile Justice Center, when Ben was a little boy, even before Ben was born. The word families in the subtitle of one of my books draws my attention: Living on the Edge: A Guide to Intervention for Families with Drug and Alcohol Problems. I pull the book off the shelf and look at the publication date—April 1989. When I started working on the book with coauthor Ginny Gustafson, Ben was ten months old. I was thirty-seven.
I open the book and am surprised to find the pages are yellowing and stiff; as I turn them, searching for passages that might be useful, they start to pull away from the binding. That’s weird, I think. This book is only eleven years old, and I’ve hardly looked at it since I wrote it. I put my nose to the pages, an old habit from the days when I read every one of my mother’s Nancy Drew books, kept in a box stored in our attic for decades. I expect to drink in the smell of an old book, that sweet, musky smell—similar to the vanilla-y smell you get when you scratch in the thinning places between the bark of a Ponderosa pine. But this book has no odor—except, perhaps, of neglect.
I turn the pages slowly, searching. On page 22, I find this passage:
Families are fooled by addiction, in part because society misunderstands and misdiagnoses it. It takes years, we think, to become a real drunk or a real addict; if we watch carefully, it won’t happen in our family.
But it doesn’t take years to become a “real” addict, I know that even better now from my time with the kids in detention. Still, with Ben, we’re not talking about addiction—he’s only used once. Kathy. I hear the warning voice. Don’t be stupid. You kno
w that for every time someone is caught with drugs they’ve probably used dozens of times. Just like drunk drivers—how many times does someone drive drunk before they are finally caught?
On pages 51–54, I find some interesting—aw shit, be honest, Kathy—disturbing information:
“How could this have happened without warning?” parents and relatives wonder when their children are suddenly in big trouble with drugs. It seems that the drug problem appears—massive, overwhelming, terrifying—out of thin air. But drug problems don’t happen overnight. If we look back and think clearly, there were warning signs. There are always warning signs, if we know how to recognize them.
And then this:
Many adolescent drug users express amazement at how deaf, dumb, and blind their parents are to the drug use going on right in their own homes. . . . Too often, an adolescent’s drug problem is ignored or mishandled because the family members have come to blame themselves. The adolescent’s problems are perceived not as a progressive, insidious physical disease but as a statement of parental failure. The early symptoms of trouble are pushed away, excused, rationalized, and covered up because most of us have been taught that addiction is a disease of unhappy, psychologically maladjusted adults that takes years to develop. We just can’t believe it could happen to a thirteen-, fourteen-, or fifteen-year-old.
Ben is not addicted, I keep reminding myself. I would be able to see it, even in its early stages. I know what addiction looks like. Still, I turn with shaky hands to the pages where Ginny and I include an A-to-Z list of symptoms with one-paragraph descriptions, intended to help parents in their efforts to assess their child’s drug problems. I go through the list and try to honestly check off those symptoms that might—just might—indicate that something worse than experimentation is going on. I put a little arrow next to Ben’s symptoms.
The Only Life I Could Save Page 6
