The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  The guy probably missed out on the infomercial for the mineral powder or powder of minerals that a group of suburban housewives had put together, apparently without benefit of professional acting instructions or commercial-making tips. I was tired when I watched it at three A.M., but I thought I heard the women say, “Gimme that,” and, “Lemme see,” as they approached one another, attempting natural-sounding conversation about their product. In another infomercial, the spokeswoman was wearing a giant cross on a chain around her neck while she talked about skin rejuvenation.

  But the boy acted as if we had never stopped our years of long conversations, and we were soon talking about calendula cream. He mentioned that a gardener was planting flowers near his parents’ house. I asked if he’d seen any actual calendula plants growing out there.

  “You can make your own skin lotion,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t need that anymore,” he said. “When I came out here my skin turned perfect. I have a bronzed look.”

  But the all-night conversation was just the warm-up for the next call. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “My parents think I’m on drugs! And that I’ve fallen in with a ‘fast crowd.’ They say I’m a con man and I’ve conned everyone so I can keep doing drugs.”

  The unusual combination of drug addict–Republican conservative must have been what he was alluding to. How could my close friend be a Republican? That had been almost as hard to accept as the drug news. I hoped it was a matter of wardrobe and grooming that he liked and the stage would pass.

  At the time of the drug-denial phone call, he was staying with his parents in Beverly Hills. He said that they had dragged him back there, where he was being kept under surveillance and subjected to indignities involved with drug testing. “They think I’ve tampered with the specimen. Can you believe that?”

  I didn’t know about drug testing. How it’s done, this was news to me. Why did I have to know? The situation had never cropped up with anyone I knew. All those TV programs about watching your children for signs of drug use were shows I could turn off. One reason I had postponed having children was the fear that they would become teenagers and start to smoke cigarettes. I didn’t envision tattoos, piercing, rap music, alcohol, and drugs. Too much thinking didn’t always pan out.

  “Think a million times before giving birth.” I’d read that quote, or something like it, in an article about Louise Nevelson. Even with all the mascara the famous artist was wearing in the photo, I took the idea seriously. She had put her work first and neglected to give her son enough attention. He became embittered, and they were estranged for a long time. Late in life, they had a reconciliation. A stormy and tormented relationship could be read between the lines.

  When I called the boy back the next day, his mother answered. She was cagey in every sentence.

  “We have reason to be suspicious,” she said. “Did he tell you why?”

  I told her that he had mentioned his weight loss and the fast crowd they thought he hung out with. “Everyone in my family’s overweight,” he’d said. “They have no idea of normal weight.”

  “Did he tell you the other part?” she asked.

  “He said he wasn’t using drugs. That’s all.”

  “We have evidence,” she said.

  “What kind of evidence?” I asked. I pictured needles and packets.

  “I can’t speak about it,” she said. “This is a problem within our family. I have to go pick up the dry cleaning,” she added, and hung up.

  The boy called the next day. “What evidence? They found matches and a lighter in my apartment in New York.”

  “What was all that doing there?”

  “Some of my friends smoke,” he said.

  “You allow smoking in your home?” I said.

  “Eighty percent of the kids in New York smoke.” It was a made-up statistic, I could tell.

  “Why don’t you go to some rehab place?” I said. “That will settle the matter, or if you need help, you could get some.”

  “I’m not using drugs!” he said. “It’s ridiculous! I’ve already gone with my parents to a clinic. They did tests and told my parents I’m not addicted. But still, they won’t let me go back to New York. I have nothing productive to do here.”

  The next day he called and said, “Did you tell my parents I should go to rehab? They burst into my room this morning. They woke me up at nine A.M. and said, ‘So you want to go to rehab?’”

  “I suggested it would answer the question,” I said.

  “Don’t mention the word! Did you tell them I had connections in New York?”

  “I said ‘friends and connections’ as your reason for wanting to be there. That’s what you told me.”

  “Don’t say the word ‘connections’ to them!” he said. “My parents are behaving like paranoid imbeciles! I have a plane ticket. I’m going to run away, back to New York. And now I really am going to change my name.”

  Since he was eleven, from time to time he would say, “I’ve always hated my name.” One name he was considering was “Rick Logan.”

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “It sounds like a private detective,” I said.

  “I thought of that, too.”

  “And it’s an airport.”

  “Does that matter? You think it’s not a good association?”

  “Not that good,” I said.

  THE EVIDENCE

  AROUND LABOR DAY weekend, there was a message from his mother on my answering machine. The message concerned the boy’s whereabouts. “We’re on a plane to New York. We were wondering whether you know where he is. We can’t find him.”

  When I called her back on her cell phone, she said, “He’s with us. We’ll talk to you later. We have to go get something at the deli.”

  When I spoke to him a few days later, he told me he’d unplugged his phone so he could get some sleep. Otherwise his parents were calling him every five minutes to check up on him. “They thought I’d run away to stay with you,” he said. “They’re preposterous in every way.”

  I imagined him showing up on the doorstep. It wasn’t even our own doorstep. The step was in between lavender and roses and pots of white flowers. I didn’t see a heroin addict sitting there. Though a man was found drunk and weeping on the curb the year before, while we were in the light pink kitchen cleaning corn.

  The apprentice summer police came on bicycles and questioned the man. He had just flown in from New York, he said. We couldn’t avoid hearing the conversation, with the windows wide open in August. He had been given alcoholic beverages on the plane. He was on his way to a benefit for a disease and his friend had died of the disease. He kept crying.

  I put the corn down as I overheard the man’s story. I stared at the corn silk. It didn’t seem right to sit down and eat corn. But my husband would expect to have dinner no matter what story was being told outside on the curb.

  I HAD invited the boy to visit a few times the summer before he started college, and he pretended he might accept the invitation. When he was living with his parents in Boston, it was so close he could take the fast ferry and come for the day. What else did he have to do? He had no friends. His parents were away. He drove around trying to get his shirts pressed, buying soda, ordering pizza, reading philosophy, history, and the Bible, calling commands to his dog, and talking on the phone to anyone who called. On one occasion he read me an excerpt about Moses. I was so surprised by the subject and his earnest reading of it that I forgot to listen to the content.

  When he was in high school and his parents were away on a trip, he’d been sent to stay with some friends of theirs for a few days.

  “I’m put into a ruffled room,” he’d said. “Everything in the room is Ralph Laurenized. The sheets are new and stiff with a chemical coating. They’re all flowered and matching everything in the room. The husband comes home from work and takes off his jacket and puts on a gray sweatshirt over his starched white shirt and blue striped tie. Does that make sen
se? Shouldn’t he take off the tie? The tie is the uncomfortable part. Then they each have their own TV and lounge chair in different rooms, separated by a hallway. They both sit down and watch different news programs. They call across the hall and tell each other what’s on the program.”

  I asked what he had done while the couple watched their programs.

  “I stayed in the ruffled room,” he said. “There was a TV, but I listened to Mel Tormé on my Walkman and I read.”

  I told him he’d have his own little guest cottage with central air-conditioning and he’d never have to see us in between activities. On second thought, what would the activities be? He didn’t like the outdoors except as a means of getting back indoors someplace else. I never saw or heard about a bicycle. Swimming, sailing, biking, hiking, berry picking—these were alien to him.

  I wouldn’t have any idea of what to do with a recovering drug addict. I could be duped.

  THE MISSED BOAT

  AFTER THE DELI and airplane phone calls, I waited a day or two and called the boy’s parents in California. It was the end of Labor Day weekend.

  “We found him back in his apartment. He was on drugs,” his father said. The phrase “on drugs” had a quaint and dramatic sound.

  They took him somewhere, or to a couple of different somewheres—a hospital, a clinic—he wouldn’t stay, the boy was a legal adult, they couldn’t force him.

  “You missed the boat on this,” his father said to me.

  “I’m the one who said to go to rehab.”

  He ignored that and continued, “A young man you know, and speak to frequently, and consider to be a close friend…”

  I repeated my sentence. The word “rehab” was like a joke, something I’d heard on Hollywood Crime and A&E biographies. I couldn’t believe that was in my vocabulary and that I had to say the word every day.

  BEFORE SEPTEMBER, I still thought the substance in question was cocaine. The boy was awake all night talking, and that was the one sign I knew. An actor I knew told me that he’d tried the drug. He had to stay up all night, he wasn’t hungry, there was nothing to do. Talking was out, since actors don’t have much to talk about other than themselves. When Alfred Hitchcock said actors weren’t intelligent, he must have had this in mind.

  During the night of the all-night call in August, the boy described the newest psychiatrist he’d gone to. He’d wanted to go to a Freudian, but the prominent Freudian he’d been sent to for consultation was one who wouldn’t take on his case.

  It turned out the Freudian was the same one I’d been sent to twenty years before and he didn’t take on any new cases. He was a short, chunky German with a valuable art collection in his ten-room apartment-office on the Upper East Side. He was the kind who was pleased with all this. His racket was: He listened for one appointment; it was a short appointment, too. He said a few sentences in the blunt-style German accent, charged a high fee, and sent the patient on to someone else; he didn’t care what the outcome would be. The boy was sent on.

  He described the next one. “You go in, he doesn’t have a desk, you both sit at a table. The table is high—it comes up to your chest and neck so it’s just these two heads suspended.”

  I started to laugh, I was laughing like a madwoman, but he continued on in a low voice without joining in the laughter.

  He didn’t mind going to any of the appointments. It was an amusing experiment for him no matter what the diagnosis was.

  “According to them I have hypomania,” he said. We both laughed at that. Just the word. It was new.

  “I don’t know any way to find a good psychiatrist,” I said.

  “That’s because most of the population isn’t intelligent,” he said. “And these people are drawn from the same pool.”

  When he said “the same pool,” it made me laugh again. It must have been my desperate state of nothingness that caused me to laugh like that. Maybe I had hypomania, too.

  “I’d ask for a recommendation for you, but the one I know is too out of it to ask anything,” I said.

  “You still go there?” he said with renewed interest. “I can’t believe you would ever go there again.”

  “His grammar is perfect. He doesn’t have a New York accent.”

  “I think you should get a dog. I’ve always told you that,” he said.

  I’d read in one of Andrew Weil’s books that he told his problems to his dogs and this was more helpful than years of psychotherapy. The boy was in agreement without saying so, because he disliked Dr. Weil’s wide white beard.

  “But I like cats,” I said. This was before I’d seen them hunt small birds.

  “What can a cat do?” he’d said the first time this came up, when he was twelve. “A dog, you can have an understanding with. They’re never in a bad mood. They don’t get angry. You can throw a ball”—he stopped when he realized that sounded like a normal human activity in which he wouldn’t want to be seen participating—“Oh, never mind. Get a cat. But it won’t be the same.”

  We had given up the topic, but now it was back. “You’re allergic to cats,” he said. “And I advise you not to go back to this guy. He’s completely unprofessional.”

  “Why don’t you become an analyst?” I said. “You’re so good at it.”

  “I’d like to. How much money do they make?”

  “Not as much as investment bankers,” I said.

  “Do you have to go to medical school?” he asked.

  “No, you can be the other kind.”

  “Which makes the most money?” he asked.

  “It’s all up in the air,” I said. “Anyone can do anything now, as you’ve seen for yourself.”

  “I’d have to have a very select group of patients and see just a few,” he said.

  “But you don’t like people,” I said.

  “You think that would get in the way?” he asked. “Couldn’t I keep it hidden?”

  SKIN TALK

  WITH HIS FIRST girlfriend I knew about, in his last year of high school, the relationship had a lot to do with skin medications. He said they would meet for tea in restaurants in shopping malls around suburbs of Boston and they’d discuss remedies they’d tried. They might have discussed other topics, too, but that was one he told me about. Maybe she introduced him to cocaine—not just skin medication. I read him the quote from Andrew Weil’s book about using calendula lotion made from marigold petals. Later on, when I asked if he’d tried it, he said, “Those petals?”

  “No, the cream manufactured from them,” I said, trying to get him to see it as a scientific product. “You don’t use the petals.” I thought about all the women and girls I knew who would have liked to use flower petals every way possible, but now I was talking to a boy. I wasn’t used to that.

  “I use hydrocortisone for everything,” he said. “It works.”

  I read him another quote from Dr. Weil’s book: “Even topical steroids are dangerous…. All of these products are absorbed through the skin…and can suppress activity of the thymus, the lymph nodes and the white blood cells.” Because he disliked Dr. Weil’s beard he paid no attention.

  THE BOY said the restaurant where they met was in what sounded like “Foucault.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A food court,” he said. He described what it was.

  I asked how he could go to a place called that.

  “Convenience,” he said.

  “Why don’t you go to Cambridge for tea?” I asked.

  “Too grungy, and too far away,” he said.

  I told him about what Cambridge was like when I lived there in the sixties. I asked if the Bick was still in Harvard Square, and he said, “What’s that, the Bick?”

  I said, “The Hayes-Bickford. There was only Lipton tea at the time. Earl Grey was just beginning.” The boy loved Earl Grey tea and asked for it whenever he went out for dinner. “But there were reported sightings of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the Bick,” I said.

  “They both sicken me,�
� the boy said. “Especially him.”

  Since I’d known him, his musical idol had been Mel Tormé. By the summer of the long calls he had stopped talking about Mel Tormé.

  “Well, they’re not hanging out there now,” I said, referring to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

  “Oh, you don’t know what it’s like now,” he said. “It’s like anywhere else.”

  “It was already ruined when I was there in 1976. Harvard Square was getting to be like Washington Square, and Brattle Street was almost like Eighth Street.”

  “Every part is bad now,” he said. “The whole world is ruined.”

  THE YEAR OF REHABILITATION

  DURING THE YEAR, starting from the discovery of the drug addiction, whenever I called him at his parents’ house, his mother would say, “He’s out with friends,” “He’s doing an errand,” “We’re going to a black-tie event.”

  One day she said nothing and called the boy’s father to the phone.

  “He’s in rehab for heroin addiction,” his father said, without any warm-up. It was hard to think of my formerly little friend in connection with the word “heroin.”

  He’d already been in and out of some short programs, his father said, now he’d be in for a week. I knew from the A&E biographies that a month or six months was the rule.

  According to reports, which came every now and then from his father, he’d been rehabilitated. He had a job. He was looking for a job. He was taking a class on this coast or that, or even going to London. I believed all this could be possible.

  I’d had the idea that if he went back to live in New York, he could go out to dinner with my husband during the week. But I knew the boy disapproved of my husband’s shirt-wearing habits. Once he’d come by the apartment and he’d seen some clothing set out on a chair for the next day. The blue oxford shirt was a new one from Brooks Brothers, still in the plastic bag, with pins from the factory, or their own workrooms, as the company’s ads read.