by Julie Hecht
“Does he wear the shirt right out of the bag?” the boy had asked. “He doesn’t have it washed and ironed first?”
“Is that what you do?” I asked.
“Yes. They’re all creased in there,” he said, trying to make sense of the sight. “I can’t believe he goes to work at an architecture firm in New York in that.”
WHEN HE was in L.A., it seemed that the boy had no life other than proving he wasn’t an addict. He would be set free to resume his life in New York after he’d proved this. He did imitations of his parents’ discussions about him. In the past, his foreign accents—French, Swedish, Pakistani—were among his many talents.
He said that his mother had found a vitamin pill on the kitchen floor in his apartment in New York and whispered to his father, “We don’t know what this is.” The boy said the sentence in the voice of Rick Moranis as Merv Griffin on SCTV. “It’s a vitamin B complex. My father, being a doctor in the medical establishment, doesn’t believe in vitamins. They’re having it tested to see what it is. Can you believe that? Then, at dinner, they’re always watching every move I make. I’m under constant observation—my father looked at my eyes last night and asked my mother, ‘Have his eyes always been so squinty?’”
In the past, the boy had attributed his eye shape and bone structure to a Mongolian ancestor and this didn’t bother him.
When he was twelve and I’d mentioned that Senator Joseph Lieberman resembled Alfred E. Neuman, he said without any expression, “I’ve been told that I look like Alfred E. Neuman.” He didn’t seem to mind. Maybe he was already cut off from normal human emotions.
When he outgrew the Alfred E. Neuman stage, he began to look like the actor Jeff Chandler. Gradually it came to me: everyone in the family looked like Jeff Chandler—these were his mother’s genes—or a chubby version of Lyle Lovett—his father’s genes. The offspring had the combination of Jeff Chandler and Lyle Lovett—the mixing up of the chromosomes and coming up with something in between. I asked the boy’s father what the word was for that. He said the word was “syngamy.” I told him my reasoning.
“Jeff Chandler and Lyle Lovett!” he said. He wasn’t at all insulted.
“What makes them suspicious about your eyes?” I asked the boy.
“Who knows? I can’t help my eye shape,” he said. “Then they want to know why they never meet my friends. Why I don’t have girlfriends to the house. It’s because I don’t want my friends to know my family background and behavior. It would hinder my social progress.”
BACK TO NEW YORK
SOMEHOW, SOMETIME in September, they let him go back to New York. But his mother went with him—it was a foible of their distorted thinking he had to tolerate, he said. He was forced to move to a different apartment, and his mother had set herself the job of organizing his possessions.
When he called me, always in secret from his cell phone, he said he was trying to escape the clatter of pots and pans she was unpacking in the small kitchen, the kind of kitchen kids in his generation were cursed with at the time. I knew of one student on the Lower East Side who had a bathtub in his kitchen. But that was considered good, not bad. Most kids were living in tiny dungeons without any tubs at all.
My friend, this boy, now lived in something that had once been a building.
He had moved out of his college apartment into a better apartment for graduate school but ended up going to rehab instead. After that, he had no choice other than to move into a small apartment his parents kept in New York.
I had walked him back to this place when he was staying there, his first semester of college, the night he viewed my husband’s shirt. The apartments, as well as the whole interior of the building, had been ripped out and a warren of cells had been put in—constructed or something less than constructed—and rented as apartments. The lobby—I couldn’t describe that, or the elevator, because it was dark gray and lumpy, with mirrors everywhere, and I had to wear tinted glasses and keep my eyes on something else in order to avoid seeing it too clearly.
The elevator in our old building—yes, graffiti on the walls, including the f-word and a series of swastikas, but at least the elevator walls were wood and the halls were plaster. I didn’t recognize the building materials used in the boy’s unfortunate new dwelling. They were all fake something, I couldn’t tell what—maybe cement or concrete. And the narrow, dark hallways, with everything painted dark gray—it looked like a prison I’d seen in a documentary about prisons in countries I’d never heard of.
“What’s your mother doing there?” I asked.
“Who knows. They think I can’t do anything for myself anymore.”
“But you lived alone those four years in college. You graduated and were accepted into graduate school.”
“It’s unbelievable,” he said.
Then I asked, as I’d done many times before, “Have you read the book A Mother’s Kisses?” I thought I’d sent it to him a couple of times by then, until it was out of print for a while and then reissued as a paperback with an especially bad and unrelated cover. When I saw the cover, I sent the book back to the bookstore with instructions to notify the publisher that the cover was the reason for the return.
The important part was that he hadn’t read the book, or any book I’d recommended. And he’d tricked me into thinking his mother was just like that other boy’s mother. I wanted to know why our conversations were secret. If his mother answered the phone, she’d tell me about how she was unpacking.
“She’s reorganizing my medicine chest in a way I can’t find anything,” he said. I figured he meant things like shaving cream and toothpaste.
I didn’t know that people in that condition were organized by parents, as if starting college or camp, and then left alone to fend for themselves. Alone in New York, no school, no job, friends all dispersed to graduate school elsewhere.
“When is she leaving?” I’d ask him. No one mentioned that he was a heroin-wrecked invalid.
“Any day now, I hope,” he’d say, always sotto voce. Then sometimes a sentence would be called into the other room, or roomette, as the apartment didn’t have rooms as we know them to be. “Mom, where’d you put that razor Dad gave me?” or “Where’s the cereal box from Healthy Pleasures?”
THEN SHE was gone, but in a few days she was back. Still, no one told me what was happening. What is the life of a recovering addict? I should have read up on it, but it was too sordid to think about the boy in this way.
From September through October, I had a sick feeling. I was naturally sickened by the thought of New York City, especially in the permanently hot fall weather. Then there was the thought of a new generation of young people trying to live there—this young person in particular in that dank cell block without any life structure.
TEA PARTY
AFTER HIS MOTHER left, he settled into some form of life. He’d sound tired or sleepy, or way up, as on the night his close friend came to call. It was eleven-thirty or so. His phone had been busy the whole hour before. He had on his happiest voice and tone. This must be the origin of the word “up” when used in drug parlance.
“I can’t talk because a friend is coming over. She’ll be here any minute,” he said.
In my naïve manner, I assumed it was a friend or a girlfriend. Underneath, I may have known that wasn’t likely.
He asked, “What’s happening?” I gave a brief run-through of my condition of emptiness.
“My friend who’s coming over has the same kind of problems as you do,” he said.
“How could a friend of yours have the same kind of problems I have?” I asked. “How old is she?”
“Forty-nine,” he said.
That made me laugh. Then I said, “How could a forty-nine-year-old woman be coming over at midnight?”
“We have tea and we talk,” he said. “We discuss her problems.”
“For how long?”
“Sometimes all night,” he said.
“Is she married, or what?” I aske
d.
“She lives with a guy who’s mean to her. Sometimes he comes over, too. Then he leaves and she and I talk. She never sleeps at night. They’re free to call me at any hour, and I, them.” The construction “I, them” startled me.
“What does she do in the daytime?”
“Nothing. She used to be in the film business in L.A.,” he said.
That was a tip-off. But it didn’t tip me off.
When I thought about the visit from the forty-nine-year-old friend, the visit didn’t seem right. Her name sounded like a made-up name. The boy sounded too happy when I heard him greet the forty-nine-year-old guest and her fifty-five-year-old boyfriend while he was still talking to me on the cordless phone.
What could be so exciting about such a visit? I knew how much fun it was to talk to this boy, and I figured these could be two more similar cases, like the guy who set his chest on fire, and me—this was the most fun in their lives, or our lives, but what about the boy, what was he doing with these people?
The next time we spoke I asked him. He said that the man was in the building-contracting business—a bad sign, I thought. He’d escorted the woman to the boy’s apartment and soon left. In retrospect, a drug scenario was the only one that made sense. They were hands-on dealers. Maybe the boyfriend obtained the drugs, then this forty-nine-year-old woman stayed with the customer and they used some drugs together. This made me remember a similar story in the Enquirer about John Belushi’s drug dealer.
When I mentioned John Belushi’s case to the boy later on, after his situation was out in the open, I asked, “Didn’t you think it was dangerous?”
“I had a reliable source,” he said.
Then I said, “If John Belushi and Janis Joplin didn’t have a reliable source, how could you?” I knew he didn’t like, or detested, Jimi Hendrix, so I left him out. When he didn’t have an answer, I said, “If you’re thinking of doing this again, you should go to England, where it’s legal and safely administered. That’s what Marianne Faithfull did.”
“Who’s Marianne Faithfull?” he said without interest. “Some ex-hippie?”
BUT AT the time, that fall, I could feel only envy at the thought of what the boy had me believe was an all-night tea party. I could always drum up a feeling of inferiority to his new friend. He said that she looked like she came from Connecticut, whatever he thought that meant. It wasn’t the looks I felt inferior about. It was the admiration in his voice when he talked about her.
He liked everyone to look like the models I remembered in the Rheingold girls contest from the 1950s. Six models who looked almost exactly alike were photographed for a small, standing cardboard poster, and customers at grocery stores could vote for whichever one they chose. When I asked my mother which one she would vote for, she said, “None. They all have a flat look.”
I reminded the boy that the 1950s were over and all kinds of people lived in Connecticut now, even New Canaan. “David Letterman lives in New Canaan,” I said.
I reminded him that he himself was from Massachusetts, equal or superior as a state, and had lived there his whole life until he went to college in New York.
“But she’s from Fairfield or Darien,” he said. “Where we lived was near Cambridge. It was different. Professors, doctors, Jews, Indians, everything.”
“That sounds better to me,” I said.
“People from her background have a smoother path in life,” he said.
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“It seems less comical.”
I’d call every few days, then give up for a while. It was easier to imagine he had the friends than to think he was smoking heroin from a pipe. I didn’t even know it could be smoked. Later, when his father told me about the boy’s smoking of heroin, I could only picture a small black licorice pipe that children play with and then eat.
THE BLANK SPACE
AFTER A FEW WEEKS I called his father, or mother—whoever answered the phone. He was back with them in Los Angeles. Something had happened. They didn’t say what. They summed it up—he couldn’t take care of himself, get it together to have meals, and go to a job or to school. He had to live with them for a while.
The period of blank space began—the space of not knowing. He was going to take some classes or he was getting a job. But somehow as the time passed, he never took the classes or started any job.
One day when I called, his father said, “He bought some cocaine in Santa Monica.”
It turned out that the boy didn’t want to go to the most highly recommended rehab place, in Arizona. He wouldn’t say why. When I’d told him about it before, he’d said, “They give everyone a horse.”
“How do you mean, to take care of?” I said.
“Right, to take care of,” he said.
“I’m sure they don’t force you to have a horse,” I said. “You could have a dog instead.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve met kids at other rehabs who’ve been there,” he said. “It has to be a horse.”
He was permitted to choose the place he wanted to attend. When I heard the name of the place, in or near Los Angeles, it sounded like a TV show, a Hollywood movie, or a deodorant.
“That’s what he wanted, so that’s where he is,” his father told me.
“Can they get phone calls from the outside?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll ask him,” his father said. I knew that meant I’d never hear the answer. “I’ll ask” was a technique the busy dean of the medical school had learned in order to get rid of people and their questions.
“You must feel relieved,” I said. I assumed in my ignorant way that the addict goes to the place, the addict is safe, worries are over for a time.
“Yes, relieved that we don’t have to be watching him,” his father said.
Later on, I found out that some recovering addicts don’t even like the rehabs and even commit suicide while in these places. But back in my ignorant state, I was relieved, too. I pictured the boy in groups where he was given substitute drugs.
When I asked his father how the stay was going, he said, “Good. He asked for some things—books, a shirt.”
“Which books?” I asked. I didn’t ask about the shirt. The boy who’d been so fastidious about shirt pressing was now in a place where he had to ask for clothes from home. Probably the other inmates wore T-shirts, T-shirts with writing and names of things on them.
The boy and I had discussed how much we couldn’t stand that. I had to turn off the David Letterman show when he sent the camera outside to film the people on the streets, people with T-shirts hanging out of shorts—overweight big-legged people in sneakers—all this in color. The Groucho Marx audience of my childhood in black and white was so much more pleasant to see. Polite, repressed grown-ups in suits, hats, gloves—everything I disliked at the time.
I pictured my friend in a circle of addicts dressed in those kinds of T-shirts. I thought that it must be like a prison where the inmates exchange and share bad new habits.
I hoped he had a private room, although he’d started out well in college, tolerating strange dormitory living conditions during orientation, where students of all ages, from many different departments, were thrown together haphazardly as roommates. His temporary college roommate was a forty-four-year-old Swedish photographer who dressed all in black—black turtleneck, jacket, chinos, shoes, and socks. The roommate would come back to the room late at night with noisy parcels crunching into one another. The boy told me, “He apologizes and says, ‘Presents for the wife.’” This was the first time I heard the boy do his Swedish accent.
When he returned home and I asked about the rehab place, he said, “Oh, I don’t want to talk about that.” It was the first time I’d heard him speak in a new, dark voice.
In the next conversation, I asked, “Did you at least meet anyone interesting there?”
“A few,” he said. He met some movie stars I’d never heard of. He named their movies and TV programs. I’d never heard of thos
e, either. He named a girl who was the daughter of some singer I’d never heard of. I asked what her addiction was and he said, “Marijuana.” She’d already been to that place in Arizona, he said, but I was unable to keep my mind on all these different addicts, their drug habits, and their rehab experiences.
I SETTLED into accepting that I couldn’t know what the boy’s life really was. Boys’ Life, I remembered, was the name of an antique magazine or a book. Those boys, Boy Scouts and such, were shown in the book or magazine rubbing sticks together to build campfires outdoors. The boys participated in every kind of wholesome outdoor activity, unlike the boy I knew, whose favorite outdoor activity was driving.
When he’d gotten his driver’s license in high school, he was as happy as possible—for him. He described going for a “nice crisp drive” in his father’s car around the Wellesley suburbs. I said that the word “crisp” referred to walking—a walk on a crisp fall day. His reply: He kept the sunroof open, or the windows open an inch or two, before he got up to the main road.
WHEN HE was twelve or thirteen, his parents had insisted he do something for the summer with other kids his age. “They’re making me have a part in Brigadoon,” he said. It was an amateur production in a kind of theater camp. I didn’t know Brigadoon and lumped it in with other musicals I didn’t care about.
The production was going on right near New Haven, and on his lunch hour he’d walk into New Haven and go to a used-book store. “The owner is an ex-hippie,” he said. “The kind with a gray ponytail.”
“I can’t stand that,” I said.
“Me neither. But he’s not the worst of that ilk, he’s not as slovenly as some. He’s suspicious of me, he watches me the whole time. He’s in love with every book in the store. He doesn’t want to sell any of them. He comes over and asks what I’m looking for and then he tells me the history of it and the love story he has with each book and how he got it.”
