The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  ONE DAY THAT spring I was sitting in my room with a few friends when I heard—when everybody heard—my mother weeping with perfect abandon in the adjacent master bedroom. We stopped whatever we were doing (some sort of board game) and looked at each other. I can imagine my thoughts at that moment: first, I made a mental note never to have friends at my house en masse again, and then it occurred to me, as I looked at their stunned and staring faces, that everyone but me came from a conventional middle-class home where the worst disasters were kept under wraps, and finally I decided I’d better go see what the deal was. I asked my friends to let themselves out, and they were happy to oblige.

  Marlies was prostrate on the bed, though I noticed with annoyance that she kept her head averted so that her awful noises were unmuffled by the pillow. I’d seen her cry maybe five times before, but never like this. Something terrible had happened, all right. I sat beside her, patting her back, and warily asked what was the matter. Amid harrowing glottal sobs she told me:

  “Scott’s on d-drugs . . . long time now . . . everything . . .”

  “Who told you this?” I asked.

  “Everybody knows. Everybody at the GBR”—Grand Boulevard Restaurant, where Scott was a busboy—“t-talks about it . . . I don’t know what to do. He doesn’t listen to—to . . . I can’t tell P-papa . . .”

  Scott appeared in the doorway. He looked apprehensive in a vaguely amused way, as though he knew what was happening and found it absurd like everything else.

  “What’s going on?”

  “She says you’re taking drugs.” I tried to make my voice sound a little weepy too, but it didn’t come off. With a resigned smirk, my brother took my place on the bed and made to comfort my mother. For a minute or so I stood glowering at him, but I got the impression they wanted to be alone.

  MY BROTHER CONCEDED his pot smoking but said that the other rumors (PCP, THC, various pills and powders) were fucking lies. He also made it clear that pot was no big deal and he had no intention of quitting. In fact he became a lot less furtive after that. He openly subscribed to High Times and kept elaborate paraphernalia in his room; I remember a two-foot bong called “the Skydiver” that involved pulling a ripcord to uncork the stop and release a massive hit of smoke. There was always a fresh “lid” of pot in the top right-hand drawer of his desk, along with cigarette papers and a nifty rolling device that produced joints as taut as Marlboros. All this was probably to the good—he didn’t have to pretend anymore in that creepy wide-eyed way of his—but he also insisted on talking about it. On the rare occasions that the four of us still had dinner together, my brother would proselytize about how cool it was to watch this or that movie, or listen to this or that record, while stoned. Marlies tended to be mildly deploring in a this-too-shall-pass sort of way, but Burck’s lips would thin and he’d chew his food with a kind of haggard bitterness.

  Now that my friends and I were freshmen in high school, we’d decided to smoke marijuana too, or at least try it. I didn’t tell Scott: now that he was a known stoner with a couple of car wrecks under his belt, I was indisputably the Good Son and wanted to keep it that way. The problem was getting the stuff. The three or four big dealers in school were all friends of my brother, and the whole crowd spent every spare moment on the “smoking porch” talking about getting high. Finally we bought a few joints for fifty cents apiece from one of the more peripheral friends, who called the stuff “killer Okie weed” and tried to entice us to buy a whole lid for ten dollars. We smoked the joints during halftime of a high school football game, sitting on the grass behind an unmanned concession stand.

  The next morning my brother stood in the bathroom door with a gloomy, browbeating look.

  “Don’t you start getting into this,” he said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “You know.”

  So the pot dealer had told my brother. I went back to brushing my teeth, while my brother stood there watching me.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, and spat. “I didn’t even get off. I have no idea what the big deal is.”

  This was true. And who was my brother to say no? Who indeed. A few days later—perhaps that same day—he reversed himself, insisting that I make an “informed decision” about smoking pot.

  “I already have,” I said. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “Just a few more times.”

  “No, thanks.”

  The following Monday, Scott pulled his Porsche into a little park on our way to school and began loading his bong. He made the thing hiss and gurgle and then passed it over. I took a hit and coughed explosively, soaking my lap with bong water. The stains didn’t show on my navy corduroys, but all the potheads at school observed that I “reeked,” while my sexy English teacher gave me a look of knowing admonishment. And I wasn’t even stoned.

  THAT FALL MY brother and I were in the high school play, Death Takes a Holiday. Scott had the lead as the dashing, vaguely foreign Prince Sirki (a.k.a. Death), and I was the sybaritic old Baron who engages the Prince in philosophical colloquies about a Life Well Spent. A few years back I’d been enrolled in the Children’s Theater Workshop at Oklahoma City University, and was deemed good enough to be picked out of a class of fifteen or so to play the juvenile role in a college production of Ah, Wilderness! Scott was contemptuous: “Acting is more than just memorizing lines,” he sneered, when he caught me practicing in front of a mirror. He thought I was copying him again. Around that time he’d been reading a lot of Salinger and hence wrote a short story about an impossibly precocious toddler who kills himself because the adult world is a terrible place. Inspired by his example, I began a story titled “Don’t Go into the Basement” about a monster in a basement. I was in the home stretch—the heroine was descending the steps, rather foolishly under the circumstances—when my brother, peeking over my shoulder, began reading aloud with leering disdain. Neither of our fiction-writing careers progressed much further.

  But we made a good team as actors, or rather we enjoyed working together. My brother was one of the few seniors in the cast of Death Takes a Holiday, and he comported himself like Brando on the set of The Godfather—like a zany paterfamilias, mooning the other actors, obscenely improvising, cutting up a lot in general. Of course he was stoned most of the time. Our drama teacher was a clueless woman who wanted to be called by her first name; she was fired after that first year on the job. I can’t remember her ever reproaching my brother.

  Scott seemed to think his talent had outgrown our provincial high school, or at least this particular production. The day before dress rehearsal he asked me to run lines with him, whereupon the worst was revealed: he could only recite odds and ends that he’d soaked up through repetition, and there were quite a few longer speeches that he hadn’t even begun to memorize. I was appalled; I was going down with the same ship after all.

  “What the hell have you been doing these past two months?” I said with sincere amazement.

  His reaction was curious. Without a word or change of expression he yanked me to my feet and punched me in the chest as hard as he could. I managed to gasp some sort of protest, and he shoved me over a table in our living room and began kicking me there on the floor. Anything I said or did seemed to provoke him, so I stopped struggling and simply grunted with what I hoped was a kind of poignant agony. If anything, this had the opposite effect: when one of his kicks made my head crack against a doorjamb, I affected a semiconscious daze (“Unnnh”) and my brother began taunting me. “ ‘Unnnh’—! ‘Unnnh’—!” he mimicked, kicking. The size difference between us was greater than ever (I was maybe five-five, the victim of a late puberty), and so he went on kicking and hitting me from room to room, careful not to mark my face lest our parents find out how bad the beating was. Toward the end he began to accompany his blows with a histrionic monologue about how everyone was against him (kick), how no one would help him (kick), and so on. We ended up in our father’s study. I cringed on the sofa while my
brother stood over me ranting and waving his fist. Then he fell to his knees and threw his head in my lap. He was crying or pretending to cry. The idea was that I should feel sorry for him.

  I didn’t feel sorry for him. He’d just beaten the shit out of me because he felt like blowing off steam, and now he was pretending to be in the midst of a terrible strain—because nobody would help him. I resolved to bide my time until this crazy bastard was out of the house, to be careful above all, and to make him pay for this little episode somewhere down the road.

  I told nobody. Too humiliating. On the opening night of the play I was joking around in the dressing room—I’d flung off my shirt and begun flexing my spindly chest—and a girl in the cast, for whose benefit I flexed, said “Oh my God” and covered her mouth. My chest was an ugly mass of bruises, as though I’d been trampled by something large and hoofed. I can’t remember what excuse I made.

  One benefit of my brother’s cathartic outburst was that it sobered him into memorizing his lines somewhat. Every time he was about to speak onstage there was a fraught little pause, as though he were pondering the world and its sorrows, but I knew the truth. “Come come, your Highness!” I couldn’t resist ad-libbing in my role as the bluff old Baron. “Life is short! Out with it!”

  A WEEK OR so later, when it was clear I wasn’t going to rat him out to our parents, my brother gave me a peace offering: several fluffy buds of high-grade marijuana, stuffed in one of those plastic 35-millimeter film containers. I’d noticed in my brother’s bankbook a recent lavish withdrawal of eighty-five dollars (leaving the total balance in two figures), and I assumed this was part of that purchase. He’d handed it to me with some brusque remark as we drove to school one day. I didn’t bother telling him I didn’t want it, as he’d only become abusive and perhaps contrive to beat the shit out of me again. When I got home that afternoon I tossed the little canister into some bushes under my bedroom window, which made me feel virtuous, or anyway better than my brother.

  I retrieved it the following weekend, when my friend Matt (“Yo soy Mateo”) and I went to the French Market Mall to see Saturday Night Fever. That afternoon he’d ridden his bike to a head shop in a distant neighborhood, where he bought a pipe that appeared to be cobbled together from bits of cast-off plumbing. Matt proposed to smoke some ridiculous amount of dirt weed—neither of us had really gotten high yet, but Matt was enamored with the whole hobbyist side of pot smoking and determined to persevere—so I told him about the better stuff I’d tossed in the hedge. We smoked two fat buds of it in a field beyond the parking lot and then hurried to get in line for the movie. The mall’s Vieux Carré facade seemed not only kitschy but surreal and faintly menacing; the shortest kid in our class, Phil Philbin, came up to us in line and said hello; for some reason I felt a sudden, immense pity for Phil and began patting his head. Then I was watching the movie and then the movie was over. I remembered exactly this much: Travolta’s feet gliding along the sidewalk during the opening credits, his father hitting his hair at the dinner table, and Donna Pescow pulling a train in the car and crying about it afterward. I had no idea what Travolta was doing with that other, skinnier woman at the end of the movie, or why the movie had ended at all. Years later, when I watched it again, I was struck by how it all fit together.

  From then on I never failed to get high when I smoked, no matter what the quality of the dope. That would have been fine, except I didn’t much like being stoned and still don’t; it was a phase that pretty much ended after my freshman year—to be exact, after a “Youth Group” session at the parish house in our neighborhood, where we’d gather once a week to play Ping-Pong and Foosball and the like, or so the alibi went. I spent one of these nights smoking a bong in Paht’s car with a group of people I hardly knew. The whole scene depressed me: I knew Paht would brag to my brother about how wasted he’d gotten me, that he and the others would still be getting stoned and talking about it for many dreary, dreary years to come. But the worst part was when my father stopped in my room afterward to say good night; he smelled smoke in my hair and asked me about it. I mumbled something about how a lot of people smoked at these Youth Group things, that the place was just really smoky, and he seemed to accept this and went away. My heart was banging so hard the blanket trembled.

  SCOTT’S LOOKS BEGAN to fade toward the end of high school. As he lost the last of his baby fat, his face became narrow and angular, and its rather strange shape was accentuated by the way he wore his hair, long and lank, parted precisely down the middle like the later John Lennon’s. The main problem was acne. I used to have a photo of Scott from this time, thrusting his cheek toward the camera to show off his many pimples.

  My face was still perfectly clear at age fourteen—that is, during Scott’s last months in high school, when I became the better-looking one. I knew this because my mother’s gay friends began to make a bigger fuss over me, and one of them actually told my brother (because he’d asked) that I was the “tastier” of the two. This made me smug, and I wasn’t averse to playing the flirt, at least for a while. The fat chef at the GBR, for example, had an obvious crush on me; an amateur magician, he’d regale me with gadgety little tricks in his office that resulted in elaborate desserts that I was then welcome to eat. Another old friend of my mother, a tall guy with a comb-over named Roger, began to draw me out on the phone when my mother wasn’t home to take his calls. With a kind of weary petulance he’d insist that his IQ was over 160, that I should listen to him and take him more seriously. Roger had a responsible job in public relations (at night he danced with a tambourine at the Free Spirit) and my parents trusted him once to house-sit while they were out of town, lest Scott trash the place in their absence. As it happened, Scott was elsewhere and I was left alone most of the time with Roger, who sat around the house in bikini underwear and one night offered me a Quaalude.

  Marlies was in a ticklish position. Her own conduct was hardly beyond reproach, as she was still in the midst of a hedonistic phase (though this was on the wane), and moreover she felt somewhat justified in making up for lost time: growing up in a burgherish German home had been stifling, whereas her subsequent emancipation in Manhattan was rudely interrupted by pregnancy and marriage. “Do as I say, not as I do” was the unspoken mantra of her parenting style. She was a great believer in temperate habits for children, the idea being that one becomes jaded if given the chance to indulge too soon in pleasures of the flesh.

  That said, Marlies was the opposite of a conscious hypocrite and refused to act shocked about things that didn’t shock her. She was less and less shocked by my brother’s vagaries, and less inclined to express whatever shock she felt. For his part Scott never hesitated to point out her own dissipation when she tried to remonstrate about his; it was the burden of their many squabbles. Also, my mother was trying hard to understand Scott, a long process of self-hypnosis that would ultimately turn her into his foremost apologist. At the time it made her less than objective. When, for example, we found him straddling the roof of our garage in the nude—he was, of course, stoned out of his gourd—Marlies good-naturedly tossed him a pair of pajama bottoms, which he proceeded to wrap around his pelvis like a loincloth. A photo of this episode appears in one of my mother’s albums over the twinkly caption “My nutty first-born!”

  One night we sat at the dinner table, the four of us, discussing Scott’s plans for his senior prom. By then he was dating a girl named Kara, who was always smirking about something, a smirk that became vague and almost vanished into politeness (ironical) when she spoke to adults. I never heard her say anything clever, so I suppose she was just zonked most of the time, a sphinx without a secret.

  Scott went over his prom agenda, smiling at the subtext of how wasted he’d be, and finally announced that he and Kara had reserved a hotel room for the night. My father’s chewing slowed and he narrowed his eyes at my brother. It might have ended there, but my mother was in a provocative mood.

  “What?” she said to my father. “You think
he’s a virgin at his age?”

  My father’s lips thinned.

  “You think other kids won’t be doing the same thing? That they’re not having sex at that age?”

  And so on, and on. I suppose she meant to model a liberal tolerance of Scott’s lesser peccadilloes, or perhaps she felt piqued by my father’s rectitude, by what she liked to think at such moments was his underlying provincialism. Mostly, though, I think they were just fed up, both of them, that each blamed the other for any number of things. I looked at Marlies’s bright eyes as she baited Burck, looked at Scott’s besotted little grin, and I alone seemed to know that Burck was about to blow. I asked to be excused. My father gave me a quick nod, a flick of his chin, eager to get rid of me.

  I’d just closed the door to my room when I heard the crash. I rushed back to the kitchen and saw my father standing over my mother, her raised arms trembling slightly; otherwise neither moved nor spoke. My brother was on his feet. I fled.