“A friend of Frank’s. He’s asleep really. I think this is related to sleepwalking.”
“You’re watching a naked friend of Frank’s?”
“Is Frank homosexual?” Dad said, trying to mask his alarm. “Is that what this is about? I mean it would be okay, but is Frank going to—how do you say that Sylvia—come outward? Is that why he broke up with Ingrid? Jesus Christ, Sylvia—I wasn’t prepared for this now—”
“Come out,” I said with enunciated disgust. “No he’s not a h-oh-moh-sexual, Dad. You’re such fucking worrywarts! You always expand everything. Frank and I were planning a thirtieth anniversary party, if you want to know the truth, with Aunt Virginia. Frank’s always had people he’s met traveling crashing over. This one’s from England, I think—Frank’s been sleeping on the floor. And I’m here for a few minutes, leaving Frank stamps—we were going to surprise you. But Mom, you’re too fucking nosy, huh?”
I did a great job browbeating them—an Academy Award performance. Except for one unforeseen problem: Stuart proceeded to vomit the grains of oatmeal remaining in his stomach a couple of feet from my mother’s smallest suitcase.
“Oh, my,” Mom said, checking her skirt for vomit.
My father had already inched forward to survey the creature more closely.
“Joe, step back,” Mom called. None of us had seen that Stuart was clenching the wooden spiral bedpost Frank had chained him to in our earlier bout of optimism. The carved gargoyle posts were a wedding gift he’d taken from Minnesota after his divorce; his prize because the carver was his friend before Ingrid’s. My father tried to take the post from his hand, but Stuart hurled it at him before Dad could get to it.
“Stuart, no!” I cried out. “Oh, God, that’s my fucking father!”
Fortunately Stuart’s aim was impaired. He hit the sheet instead of Dad’s head.
“Dad!” I called out. “Oh, Christ, you okay? Frank said he super-glued that!”
“Frank—Den—Rachel—I need—I need—”
“I told you we should have spanked them as kids,” Dad said, having picked up the loose post.
“Now tell the fucking truth,” Mom said, mimicking our cinematically stylized sewer accents.
“You have to get that boy into the hospital,” Mom decided, after a quick rehashing of the Eisenberg Tuna Salad Saga.
“Mom! Don’t make this your problem. He doesn’t exist. He doesn’t have insurance. This isn’t your problem.”
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for lying to us?” Dad asked. “You kids are going to kill him with your crazy plans.”
I could hear Frank walking up the stairs. He’d bumped into Janet returning after her nap. We could hear them in the stairwell. “He slipped back,” Janet said in her trademark clipped tone, “but he’s not as bad as the first night—”
“Oh, God,” Frank said, when he stepped through the open door.
“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Ganelli,” Janet said. Her cheeks turned a salmon pink. “I guess I’ll leave the family alone.”
My mother eye-balled her son. “No, Janet—I think you should stay. You should hear what I have to say to my children. We came home to check on Rachel. We heard on the radio that a certain band was in America, and we decided to take a ride over before our plane leaves for France—to insure that Rachel wouldn’t do anything misguided. Turns out we were too late, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Frank said. “What band’s in town?” A pathetic attempt at a deflection, considering Stuart was naked and moaning five feet away.
“Fools!” Dad hissed. My father has a streamlined head. With his pointy nostrils and angular chin, it looked like his reproach was headed to a vanishing point a foot away from his cleft.
Frank gave me a look much easier to decipher than his old walkie-talkie Morse code messages from our bathroom. Your band is here? What have you kept from me, you idiot? How did you fuck this up?
Mom’s voice softened a notch to the same tone she uses whenever there’s a death. (She’s the stoic one who orders the deli platter for the Jewish side’s shivahs or lasagna for the Italian wakes.) “Your cousin Benji is a doctor. Joe, can you get the address book out of that suitcase?—in the front zip pocket—”
“Benji’s a hand surgeon,” Frank said.
“He’s family, and not only that, there’s something in this world called a Hippocratic Oath.”
Stuart looked like a zombie rescued minutes earlier from a cult; he had no idea what the commotion was about. He’d seemed clear-eyed eight hours before, devouring morsels of our childhood. Why was he back to stage one? I couldn’t figure it out. Janet went over to him. My father’s and my eyes followed her. “Stuart, don’t worry, it’s Rachel’s parents.”
“They’re liars! Mum and Pop are dead. Liars. They’re going to kill me!”
My father went over to the bed. Two years had passed since I’d hugged Dad good-bye, but he still had a thick head of hair, though his salt-and-pepper strands were now the distinguished silver of a coffee-machine pitchman’s hair. I tended to picture him in his preretirement suit and tie, yet he was wearing comfy airplane clothes—jeans and the I Slept Through Haley’s Comet sweatshirt I’d bought him during one of my science conferences.
“I’m Joseph Ganelli, Rachel and Frank’s father. That woman is Sylvia, my wife. We are going to get you real help. We are not going to tell the police who you are.”
“This is unreal,” I whined to Frank. “You said we were over the hump.”
“I was helping you out. Don’t pin this on me.”
No, Frank, I’m the ogre trying to save a desperate man’s life. I pleaded with my father to leave Stuart alone, and he crossed past the sheet to a chair near the window, while my mother dialed the hospital.
“Tell him his Aunt Sylvia needs him. He’ll pick up the phone if you tell him that—Benji? Hi, honey—no, your Mom is fine—no I need to talk to you. Rachel and Frank need emergency medical attention for a friend and I don’t know where else to turn—”
I couldn’t listen. Sylvia Levine Ganelli had been in PR before she retired. Even Will, who was in the same profession and a polished speaker, thought my mother unstoppable. She once charmed President Carter into attending a tribute dinner for a client.
“I’ve booked him in,” she said about fifteen minutes later. I pulled my fingers back in fear, hard enough that I almost broke my pinky.
My father addressed us from the window, Moses admonishing the wayward children of Israel: “Your heart was in the right place, but you were misguided. You should have consulted us. We’re your parents. We operate out of love. You act like we’re coming from someplace else.”
When will they stop treating us like infants? Frank offered my Dad water in a struggling artist’s spaghetti-sauce-jar glass.
“Benjamin Levine, you’re a true mensch,” I heard Mom say before she hung up the phone. Then she turned to us. Her naughty children.
“A special fund for young Jewish drug and alcohol addicts without coverage was set up at Beth Israel by a record executive who recovered from a cocaine addiction. Benji plays racquetball with the head of the program. Dr. Mentoff is a very compassionate man. Benji told him it’s a dire emergency. He’s sending over an ambulance.”
“But, Mrs. Ganelli,” Janet said, “I don’t think Stuart is Jewish.”
“He is now, darling. Stuart Lipschitz, of the Melbourne Lipschitzes.”
“Isn’t that Lipschitzi?” Frank cracked. No one smiled.
“Joe,” Mom said, “call Air France and cancel those reservations.”
“So you’re not going to France?” I said, half slumped against the wall. She didn’t hear me. Mom was busy rousing Stuart like he had a 103-degree fever and it was imperative that he take another dosage of St. Joseph’s chewable cherry aspirin for children.
“Mom’s a professional,” Frank said. I nodded.
“You don’t play God, kids,” Dad said, with the final pulse on the situ
ation.
Mom and I rode with Stuart in the ambulance to Beth Israel’s Morris Bernstein Pavilion. The back reeked of Stuart’s diarrhea. Frank, Janet, and Dad took a cab. After Stuart was taken away in a wheelchair, I spoke for forty-five minutes with Dr. Mentoff, Benji’s racquetball partner.
“He lapsed on you because he never really got over the hump—it takes a full seventy-two hours for that stage to pass. To have him functioning and cognitive when you did is most unusual.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“I know of one doctor who would take his rock-star patients to Jamaica, knock them out with sleeping pills, keep them snoring over the hump, and then apply acupressure massage.”
“That’s what you’re going to do?”
“No, that’s what that doctor did. I gave him an injection of clonadine—a cotapressin that regulates blood pressure. I’ll taper him off for four or five days and keep him in detox for a few days more. For that period of time clonadine’s not addictive.”
Give him more drugs? This seemed ridiculous, but he’s the doctor.
“Miss Ganelli, may I ask you a few more questions?”
“Yes?”
“Who’s the patient’s nearest kin?” Mentoff’s lips extended forward too much—from my angle his mouth looked like a beak.
“He’s an orphan.”
“How much heroin was Mr. Lipschitz using?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you his sexual partner?”
“God no.”
“When is the last known time he used heroin?”
Clinton Street. “I don’t know. Not for four days at least. He was chained to the bedpost—”
“Chained?”
“A figure of speech.”
“Did he snort it, smoke it, inject it?”
“As far as I know, he shoots it up—”
“Intravenously or intramuscularly?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Intravenously hits the veins. Intramuscularly he can take it in the buttock, arm, without hitting a vein.”
I felt like I was starring in an educational filmstrip for junior high school students. “I guess he was using it intravenously. He used a dinosaur tie to bulge a vein.”
“You kids would have killed him,” Dad said for the tenth time.
Dr. Mentoff corrected him. “Mr. Ganelli, Stuart would never have died from withdrawal. But he could have physically hurt someone or himself. Punched a hole in the wall. Thrown a glass at your daughter. That’s the main danger of cold turkey.”
“He couldn’t have died?” I asked, wanting to hear those words again.
“He could only die from an overdose. When you’re strung out, buying garbage from someone you don’t know is the real danger. It can be cut with bad stuff to stretch their profit. Battery acid—will kill you. Roach poison—will kill you.”
“My God,” Dad said. “They put roach poison in there?”
Dr. Mentoff should have done voice-overs for horror trailers. “Or sometimes, these young kids aren’t used to better quality. When there’s purer heroin available, the veteran will shoot in smaller doses.”
Benji sat in the corner of the room with a bag of microwaved popcorn, and I could hear him clucking. This is what happens when you intermarry and don’t discipline your kids, he was no doubt thinking.
The last time I’d seen Benji, three years earlier, we’d had a brutal argument at my Aunt Bea and Uncle Eddie’s Passover Seder, over the separation of women and men at the Wailing Wall. My feminism drew from lectures from my rabbi and priest. And especially from Benji, who had met his wife via a proven enthusiasm for Judaism: he’d colead a teen tour to Israel with her in the early eighties. Mom flashed her “Cool it, Rachel” look, but once again the volcano of religious dissent had erupted.
“There’s a place for your type,” Benji had said. “Leningrad.”
Dear Abby would have written, “Acknowledge to yourself that the two of you are at fault, take a breath, politely switch the subject to the hostess’s cooking.” But fuck Dear Abby, I was in a cantankerous, crab apple of a mood. “How can you pay dues to a synagogue that teaches its daughters that they are dirty because they menstruate? Benji, you went to medical school, for Christ’s sake.”
“Don’t say that at the table,” Benji said, disgraced. He covered his eight-year-old daughter’s ears. “Such garbage. Aunt Sylvia, you should reel your daughter in.”
“She’s almost twenty-five,” Mom sighed. “She has her own mouth.”
“She sure does,” Dad said.
Was it Christ or menstruate that got Benji to head for the coats?
Will had said I should write a letter of apology to them as soon as we got home, but I’d stewed in my arrogant juices.
The next morning in the hospital waiting room, I promised my mother that I wouldn’t see the band. Then she wrangled my current work situation out of me.
Mom made me call Temp Solution immediately to cancel my stint with the smut mill. Selena was sick. I didn’t have to cop abuse from her about my lack of professionalism in not completing the job.
“What kind of feminist are you?” Mom asked when I finished lying about “my infected sinus” to Harry, the other job placement counselor. “You should report the agency to the Better Business Bureau for sending you there. Sign up with another agency, and in the interim why don’t you cash in the bond Virginia bought you at your confirmation? You should have considerable interest by now.”
I hadn’t thought of that bond. At least five hundred dollars.
“I’m not going to give you money, but you can eat at our apartment.”
It was their apartment again.
Janet’s vacation was over, and now that Stuart was under medical attention, she’d returned to work.
I called Janet at her cubicle at the Mayor’s Office of Film and Television. “I can’t thank you enough.”
“I’ll need you to help spackle the walls for my paint job next month, don’t you worry. You should be more frightened that Veemah and Frieda are on to us—they’re sure I know what’s going on with you. What can I tell them?”
“Tell them I’m in love.”
My mother was talking to Stuart, who was pale but cognitive again. Through her old PR sonar, she’d tracked down the name and address of his mother’s cousin in Buffalo, who was not to be found when Stuart had arrived after his “murder.” Leigh Ann Harmond. Except Leigh Ann had moved from the address some time in the past two months.
“If anyone can find someone, Stuart honey, it’s me. I should have worked for the FBI.” With this new martyr about, Stuart had reconfessed that he could not read, and Mom had taken a quick cab ride from the hospital to Barnes and Noble’s Textbook Annex, where she’d purchased a few adult literacy picture books to work on with Stuart. I flipped through one of the books on the table-tray. “B is for Bank teller, C is for Construction site.” They sent me deeper into my trough. I excused myself to the waiting area and thumbed through an old issue of Time. Staring at the lithograph of mollusks and sea horses above the corner couch, I couldn’t pair the two Colins I now knew, the unpretentious teddy bear and the callous Machiavelli. I needed him to be there with me. No one else could calm me down. I started talking to myself: I was Colin calling me self-absorbed with a big unthreatening grin. I missed my Colin, who now I saw was an idealized cutout. The Colin who could take the wind out of any crisis by offering me his arms to hide in.
By his fifth day in the hospital, Stuart looked somewhat better. My parents were talking to the nurses down the hall, making plans to take him back to our apartment. Now that his head was clear, I led him through the details of how we’d checked him into a private hospital without insurance.
“How do you say that? Lupschutz?”
“Lip-shits.”
“Thanks for doing this, Rachel.” My whole family was in the room. “You’re all so nice.” My mother and Frank had bought him two pairs of Levis, socks, an
d three different black T-shirts at Canal Jeans. They even bought him a pair of hip-again suede Pumas from Athlete’s Foot. Stuart was seated in one combination on the edge of the bed: Pumas, prefaded jeans, black socks, black T-shirt with pocket.
Frank admired his prodigy. “Flawless, if I may say so myself.”
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Not so good,” Stuart said. “My knees hurt.”
“His knees?” Frank said out loud.
“Obviously not a withdrawal symptom in Super Fly,” I said, half to myself.
“That movie was about coke, not junk,” Stuart said, with a Ganelli-siblings informational lilt.
“Hear that, bitch?” Frank laughed just as Dr. Mentoff entered the room. He looked over at Frank, obviously annoyed. “So are you ready for some more info, Stuart?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Stuart said uncomfortably.
“That’s my man. Now listen hard. There are two of you inside there. The innocent little boy and the addict. We’re going to kill the addict.”
My parents seemed pleased by this tough stance, but personally I found the word kill distasteful. So did Frank, by the look on his face.
“Going cold turkey without knowledgeable assistance is useless. If you can’t make it we’ll have to put you on long-term methadone. Seventy-five percent of methadonians use secondary drugs like pot, or it’s back to the powders—heroin or crack. There’s no easy way out, Stuart. You’ll need at least a month of supervised aftercare. After that, I suggest being an outpatient for six months to two years.”
“I don’t know how I’ll pay for that,” Stuart said, like he’d broken a car window with a baseball.
“I’m processing you for Medicare with your passport. We can do that occasionally. There’s no need to keep up the Stuart Lipschitz charade. We used your given name on your passport, Ian MacKenzie. Stuart’s your middle name?”
I winked at him so he’d say yes. “Yeah,” Stuart said.
“We’ll have you eligible for the aftercare program in about ten days. Rest up at home. Aftercare can be strenuous. It’s a daily supervised program.”
The Unexpected Salami Page 12
