Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  “Thanks,” I said, continuing our slow walk.

  When we got to the infirmary, John and Matt were already there with the van. We got in and John took off before the doors were even closed, only to slam on the brakes a moment later. The nurse was chasing after us with more Band-Aids and a bottle of iodine, which she handed to John. Anna, who had maintained incredible composure until this point, screamed at her, “You’re not helping! John, go!” He took off for good this time.

  John was driving as fast as he could, and I finally started feeling the pain as the van started bouncing all over the dirt roads. When I wasn’t wincing in pain from bouncing up and down, I was morbidly reflecting on what I had accomplished in my short time on earth. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old, I thought, but Anna still hadn’t loosened her grip on me, and I could feel her breath on my neck. As much as I was trying not to think about it, I couldn’t get around the fact that I still hadn’t done the one thing I wanted to do more than anything else in the whole world. It seemed totally wrong to be thinking about sex at a time like this, but I wasn’t ready to die. Not yet.

  I even started crying about it, which caused Anna to start whispering to me that everything was going to be all right. “I’ve got you. I’m not letting go,” she said, but this only made my dilemma seem even sadder.

  WHEN I REGAINED consciousness after being sewn back together, I found out that I had cut two tendons and a nerve, had broken my wrist in the same place for the third time, and had an eight-inch open wound on my chest.

  “The bad news is that you’ll be in that cast for the next six months and will most likely permanently lose some of your muscles while the nerve grows back,” the doctor told me after the operation. “The good news is that you’re lucky to be alive. You missed your artery by a centimeter.”

  I WASN’T FEELING too lucky. Everything I did relied on that hand: ceramics, painting, guitar, writing, masturbation. On top of that, my ceramics teacher, Jeff, warned me that Joe was trying to figure out a way to kick me out.

  “For what?” I asked, as if I wasn’t already going through enough hell.

  “He says you were on drugs.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. I was just messing around with Matt.”

  “Don’t tell me. Tell him.”

  It was ludicrous, but sure enough I was called into Joe’s office.

  “So, what happened with Matt? Why don’t you tell me the real story,” Joe said.

  When I told him what happened, he said, “Yeah, I know that part. But before that, you guys were smoking pot, so I have to suspend you. I know you’re going through a lot, so I’m willing to just let you take the rest of the semester off to recover instead of an official suspension.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “First of all, I have no idea what you’re talking about with this pot thing. I was smoking a cigarette, and as far as I know there’s no rule about getting thrown through windows. At least there wasn’t a few days ago.” I had only smoked pot once at the beginning of the year, and there was no way someone could have seen me getting high.

  “Why do you insist on making everything difficult? I’m offering you a reasonable way out of this. Why don’t you take it?”

  “Because I have nothing to get out of. I have no idea where you get your information or whether you’re just assuming I was high, but I wasn’t. How can you suspend me for something you have no proof of?”

  “I know for a fact that you smoke pot, and I can get proof if I need it. But again, it would make things easier if you just went home to recover.”

  All of a sudden my mouth just started stringing words together on its own, like the time I had gotten into it with Mr. Lutkenhouse. As scared as I was, I said, “It was that fucking doctor. What the fuck? He told me that was confidential information. This is total bullshit.” The anesthesiologist had asked me a whole bunch of questions about drugs before he shot me up with Demerol.

  “Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

  “It doesn’t matter where I learned it, unless you’ve got a new rule I don’t know about. I can’t believe that fucking guy. But how can you get proof if it’s confidential?”

  “It’s not. You’re a minor.”

  “Good, then when you get the paperwork you’ll see that I told him the last time I smoked pot was three months ago, which was during summer break.”

  “Really? That’s not what he said.”

  “I don’t care what he said. Look at the file.”

  “Okay, I will. If you’re lying, I’ll do my best to kick you out. If I can’t find proof, you can stay, but we’re going to give you random drug tests. That’s the deal.”

  “No. What happened had nothing to with drugs, and to prove it, I’ll make you a deal. You can test me once. If I was high, it’ll still be in my system. You can’t punish me for something I didn’t do.”

  “Who taught you to talk to authority like this? When I was a kid, I would have been slapped around if I acted this way.”

  “I’m glad I’m not you,” I said, storming out.

  JOE’S TERM AS headmaster was a dark period in the school’s history. He’d kicked so many students out, and enrollment for the next year was only half what it had been when I started. We weren’t told whether he was fired or if he resigned, but we all celebrated when we saw a moving truck in front of Joe’s house. A few days later he drove away without even saying good-bye.

  BACK IN BERKELEY for summer vacation, I was in desperate need of a job. Coffee and cigarettes cost money. Food was also an issue if I didn’t want to eat my mom’s nightly meal of boiled broccoli and zucchini with soy sauce. Not only had she been cooking the same exact thing for as long as I could remember, but she had also recently changed the rules so that if Kyle or I didn’t help her make the weekly batch on Sunday nights, we weren’t allowed to have any the whole week.

  It may have been a valid rule, but the consequences of not helping her outweighed the benefits as long as I had a dollar to go to the Chinese restaurant around the corner. If she had enough broccoli and zucchini left on Friday or Saturday I could usually get some out of her whether I had helped or not, since the shit was so soggy and old by then it was almost inedible. Wednesday and Thursday were out of the question since that was when it had reached her favorite consistency. Other than a bloody rare steak once a year to get her folic acid, she had survived for at least the last fourteen years almost exclusively on zucchini and broccoli.

  I needed money, and getting a job spared me both from having to help her make the same dinner we’d been eating for years and, more important, having to eat it. I went through the want ads calling about any jobs I thought might hire a fourteen-year-old. The only place to call me back was a silk-screen company down in Emeryville who needed someone to fold shirts for ten dollars an hour.

  The manager, Brigitte, showed me around the place and told me that my job was to fold the shirts as they came out of these gigantic heat-setting machines. It seemed easy enough, but I wasn’t aware that I would be working on all three of the heat setters. The machines were fed by a motley-looking cast of punk rockers who were printing the shirts way faster than I was able to fold them. All day long I ran back and forth, folding as many as I could in one area before the boxes that were set out to catch the others overflowed and started spilling onto the floor. The work was great physical therapy for my hand, which was still healing from my accident at school. But, as the doctor warned me, a few of my muscles had atrophied and would never recover.

  Just when I was getting the hang of the job, the company ordered two robotic screen-printing machines, which were able to pump out fifteen shirts a minute each. Once the printers got a handle on how to work the new machines, it was necessary to time my cigarette breaks with the rest of the crew since I could no longer leave my job unattended for more than a minute at a time. Everyone who worked there seemed to be in a band, and I felt left out as they talked about the punk-rock scene.

  “What bands ar
e you guys in?” I asked them in an attempt to be included. These guys did not seem like the friendliest lot, and although I was sure I would hate their music, sitting around in awkward silence was bumming me out.

  “My band is called Neurosis, and Malcome is in Christ On Parade,” this guy Scott said. I’d never heard of Neurosis, but I saw Christ On Parade flyers everywhere I went. Scott seemed like a nice enough guy, but it bothered me that he had S-K-I-N tattooed across his knuckles. I didn’t know much about the punk scene, but I knew that skinheads were violent, nationalistic, racist, evil motherfuckers. He looked menacing, but he just didn’t seem like the type. Plus, he had hair.

  “Neurosis?” I repeated. “Okay. I’ll check it out,” I told him. I was making more money than ever, and most of it went toward records.

  “You don’t have to buy it,” Scott said. “I’ll bring you a tape tomorrow, and you can let me know what you think. By the way, are you available to work nights or weekends? John and I have some big orders coming up, and we can pay you cash.”

  “Sure,” I answered.

  “Cool. We’ll use you tomorrow night.”

  I HAD ALWAYS wondered why I was always the only person to leave at five o’clock while everyone else kept working. After five, Scott and John got to use the place for their own business, and the next night I stayed an extra four hours, folding Operation Ivy and Green Day shirts. When I got home, I listened to Scott’s tape. It was a lot darker and more musical than what I thought of as punk rock. I actually liked it.

  I started staying late with them more often and was psyched when Scott asked me if I wanted to roadie for Neurosis’s next show. It was at the Women’s Building in San Francisco, and I didn’t do much besides carry an amp in. I was supposed to sell merch for them, as well, but only about ten people showed up.

  “What’s up with that tattoo?” I asked Scott while one of the other bands was playing. We were outside smoking.

  “I was a skinhead when I was your age. Proud of America and the Constitution…. I guess I believed in what the flag used to stand for, but now I’m fucking working twelve hours a day and living in a fucking squat. I’m not trying to defend myself. I mean, I was just a teenager…but you should read the Constitution sometime. Those guys were pretty fucking radical at the time and would probably try to start another revolution if they saw the miserable state of this country now.”

  To me the Constitution represented oppression, intolerance, slavery, imperialism, and unbelievable stupidity. Scott was the first person who had ever told me otherwise.

  ON MONDAY SCOTT showed up to work with bruises all over his body and two black eyes. His nose and mouth were swollen.

  “What the fuck happened to you?” I asked him during our cigarette break.

  “I was drunk and started talking shit to a pack of skinheads,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ. What did you say to deserve that?”

  “I called them a bunch of Nazi shitheads. I may have been a skin, but I was never a fucking racist.”

  “Fuck, man. I’m sorry they got you.”

  “This is nothing. They were bound to get me at some point. When I get drunk, I can’t control myself. And anyway, Malcom and I managed to get a few good punches in before they beat the shit out of me. If they didn’t travel in packs, I would be the one beating the shit out of them,” Scott told me. I considered myself a pacifist, but if there was anyone who I fantasized about beating up, it was those guys.

  After that, I looked up to Scott even more and was super excited when he invited me to go see a band called G. G. Allin and the Murder Junkies. That weekend I ended up getting such a bad case of the flu that I couldn’t make it to the show. Nobody showed up to work on Monday but Brigitte and I. Brigitte didn’t have all the details, but Scott and Malcom, along with the rest of the printers, were in the hospital, or at home recovering after the same pack of skinheads forced their way into the G. G. Allin show and started beating everyone up. Meanwhile, G. G. Allin had decided to light himself and the stage on fire. I couldn’t decide whether I had missed out or gotten lucky.

  THE MONOTONY of folding shirts made the summer pass quickly. Right before going back to school, though, I experienced my second psychedelic experience. It was at a reggae festival in Mendocino when I took mushrooms for the first time. Although they were far less intense than the acid, the mushrooms ended up having a much more profound impact on my life. Maybe I was just having a bad trip, but all these free-thinking, nonconformist, mud-covered hippies looked exactly the same as one another. In all but a few instances, the girls twirled around in circles and the guys hopped around on one foot, doing weird shit with their hands. These hippies suddenly looked about as straitlaced to me as a guy in a suit working at the bank.

  When I got home, I threw away my tie-dyed shirts, my Birkenstocks, and my Guatemalan vest and went to the Salvation Army with an overwhelming urge to cover my body in polyester and say good-bye to my hippie roots for good.

  twenty-two

  Is long, but holds the reader’s interest through a series of comical interludes

  JACK PICKED ME up from the hospital.

  “Hi, Jack,” I said, opening the door to his Lexus.

  “Don’t say that in an airplane,” he said with a laugh. “So how are you feeling? All better?”

  “I feel okay,” I said, but I was starting to panic since I had just used the last of my dope earlier in the day. I wasn’t about to tell him I had been shooting up in the bathroom at the detox ward, though.

  “Well, Inga made up a list of twenty-eight-day programs for us to check out when we get home, but I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  “I was thinking. What if I just stay in the barn for a little while, maybe go to a therapist, and see what happens? This rehab thing just isn’t for me,” I said.

  “Okay. You’re welcome to stay in the barn, but you’ve got to come up with something to do with your time. You ever think about getting back into ceramics? I know someone who has a studio you could probably use.”

  “Sure, that sounds like a good idea.” I didn’t care one way or the other about ceramics, but if it kept me out of rehab…

  As far as they knew I was all better, but I started going into withdrawal only a few hours after getting back to his house. That night, after everyone went to sleep, I took my dad’s old minivan and drove all the way to San Francisco to score drugs. Somehow, I made it back before they noticed I was gone, and a few nights later I did it again. My money was coming from the petty-cash box in the office, which always seemed to have a few hundred bucks in it. Although I looked everywhere, I never found where my dad kept the real money. On my third drug run to San Francisco, I got too high to drive back and ended up spending the night at a rest stop. When I got back to Santa Barbara the next afternoon, Inga had already set up an appointment for me to look at a rehab forty-five minutes away, in Oxnard.

  WHILE I TOURED the treatment center, I began to realize that, no matter what it had going for it—success rates, famous clients, volleyball, acupuncture, mud baths—it was still a fucking rehab. At least this place looked like it would be easy to keep to myself and fall through the cracks. I also didn’t fail to notice the one cute girl who seemed to be at all these rehabs. She sat by herself on the smoking patio, dressed all in black. I don’t know how much she influenced my decision, but ten minutes later I was out in the parking lot hugging Jack and Inga good-bye.

  SO TELL ME again how much you’ve been using?” the intake doctor asked me.

  “Well, I was kicking for about six days, and then I’ve been using a bag a day for the past seven or eight,” I answered.

  “Great. So it shouldn’t be too bad. You’ll just be a little uncomfortable for a few days and be through with it.”

  “What do you mean? I feel terrible…can’t sleep—” I cut myself off. My voice was going up in pitch, and I didn’t want to sound too needy. This was known as “drug-seeking behavior” in the rehab world.

  “Lack
of sleep never killed anybody, but don’t worry. We’ll give you something for that. I just think that if you go cold turkey right now, it will be easier in the long run. We want to get you participating as soon as possible.”

  “But if I felt better, I could start participating right away, you know what I mean?” I could hear the whiny tone of my voice.

  “We have found that participation is really only useful when the patient is ‘present,’ so the goal is to get you there as quickly as possible.

  I HID IN MY ROOM until dinner and then sat outside smoking cigarettes. I watched people come and go, some laughing and telling jokes, some on the brink of tears, some with a blank look of shock on their faces. The cute girl came out and sat on the grass next to a volleyball court, which was being used as a giant litter box by three stray cats. She sat by herself, deep in thought about God knows what, and I sat deep in thought about her.

  She was obviously young, obviously fucked up, and, although I didn’t really trust my judgment as I was kicking dope, beautiful. I wasn’t usually into blondes, but she was an exception. I sat out there and chain-smoked until it was time to get in line for my sleeping pills.

  “What’s this?” I asked the nurse, curious about what looked like a little container of pancake syrup from McDonald’s.

  “That’s chloral hydrate. Otherwise known as a Mickey.”

  “A Mickey?”

  “You know in those old movies when they slipped you a Mickey?”

  I had always wondered what a Mickey was. If it could knock out Sam Spade, it must be good enough for me. Except that it wasn’t, and I went to the nurses’ station every hour to prove it. They said they couldn’t do anything about it unless the doctor prescribed more. I tossed and turned all night, unless a nurse came by in the morning and took me to the psychiatrist’s office.

  “Good morning, Mr. Canfield. Have a seat,” the psychiatrist said.