Cherry

by Mary Karr

  Before long, you and Doonie strike up a friendship without which your life in Leechfield would prove duller than a rubber knife. He belongs to the underworld of surfers and beach bums you instantly meld into. That’s how you wind up traveling to the Gulf on weekends in all weathers. You pass the unspoken entrance exam to this fraternity (it was mostly guys) by displaying savvy about a wide array of chemicals, for every substance carries its own voodoo ritual or ceremony. In little over a year, you’d mastered most. You could clean bricks of pot or peyote buttons, roll a joint while driving, drive while tripping, and talk down the average acid-raging screamer. If a guy at the surf festival nodded off after smoking a tarry ball of opium, you’d walk him up and down the beach, all night if need be, pouring jugs of distilled water into his mouth and keeping him alert to stave off coma.

  The exception was smack, which was both pricey and scarce in those days. (Junkies speak with nearly childlike glee about cooking stuff up in a black-bottomed spoon, tying off, etc. But the one time you blammed heroin, you puked your way into nod-off, waking up astonished that guys would steal TVs for that stuff.) So aside from Doonie’s hilarity, the promise of narcotic anesthesia drew you to the shore, where it was all take a toke, sister, slap five. Plus there’s a powerful romance to surfing.

  A surfer catches a wave for the same reason a rodeo cowboy throws his leg over a barbarous horse: to break the wild thing for personal use, to bend the brute will, or to be carried inside that rush of blind power for a fleet instant.

  That’s partly why you’re enticed to the beach where few girls go. Not that anybody would hassle a girl (shouting as they will a few years from now in California, Chick in the water, when you dare to paddle out, thus exiling you to beach-bunnyhood). Girls just don’t come here unless brought by boyfriends. Eventually you’ll choose or be chosen by a sweet and sinewy blond boy in his twenties back from California, and you’ll go in his blue truck when the tidal charts and surf reports dictate, sleeping in the back or under the pier and waking soaked by fog for the first high tide.

  Till you meet that boy, you come for a zillion reasons. Because the college Adorees have vanished. Because it’s the electrified Doonie who asks. Because Meredith’s ever-present new sweetheart captures all her attention with whispers and hand-holding on her mother’s sofa—all of which seems to spike in you a mean-spirited jealousy. The same holds true for Elizabeth Louise Deets whose beau likewise occupies most of her free hours. You go to do drugs and to flee the doldrums of Leechfield and the airless state that composing letters alone for days can leave you in.

  Plus it’s about the only beauty spot within striking distance of the blighted Leechfield, and it’s easy to reach. You only need drive thirty minutes past refineries and along the intercoastal canal to hit the beach road.

  Start at the Breeze Inn where you used to go as a kid. Stay on that road, and your right window will show slopey barbed wire marking off oil rigs and a sparse herd of blotchy Brahma cattle somebody’s trying to make a go of. On the left, a low break of grass separates you from a shallow, flat beach and waves. An hour past that first stop is a burg called (no shit, check the map) High Island. On that beach there’s a bait shop (or was till summer 1998) called Meekham’s on a fishing pier, the narrow slats of which offer partial shelter from rain. There the water turns jade and smoothes out to offer the cleanest break east of Galveston.

  You’d learned to surf in a halfhearted way (as most boys and at least a few girls did in that region) about age thirteen. Since the choppy Texas waves lack the integrity and vehemence of California surf—only gaining truly righteous formidability during hurricane season—even candy-asses give surfing the occasional go. But that chop also makes it harder to catch a wave, much less to wring out a ride of any force. Come summer you’ll body-surf with some ease. But that first winter you come to the beach with Doonie and his posse as an affable observer, one who lacks both the heart and the body fat to bear the cold wind. (Though the Gulf Stream keeps the water fairly tepid, the wind cuts straight to your bones.) The few times you borrow a wet suit from some guy, you feel straitjacketed by the black rubber, and the foam you stride into is ankle-breaking cold. It’ll turn your lips popsicle blue, and set you ashiver.

  So you don’t go—contrary to what you tell those who bother to ask—to surf. Mostly you read on the beach bundled in sweats or wrapped in a scratchy blanket, or you gather shells. Once you find a massive clam half and spend the better part of one stoned-out day shoveling up wet sand and using sticks and yards of kelp in the assemblage of a castle-like structure that dissolves by evening when the moon’s lure tugs the water over it.

  In truth, you’re so bored and stalled and lonely, you would have gone anywhere to escape your own house and the cramped parameters of your own skull.

  You also love to watch surfing, since those who brave all waters and weathers have a conviction and zeal most blank-eyed citizens of Leechfield lack. A guy paddles out, digging hard before an oncoming swell because he has to match its speed to drop in—catch it, have it pick him up like a hitchhiker. Then he rises with some exquisite mix of wonder and tentative triumph and jags slantwise up the wave’s face. In rare winds, when the swells break smooth and wide outside the far sandbar, a wave can curl over a surfer and hold him soaring inside this translucent aqua tube, making a phantom of him from the beach.

  Surfers talk little enough, but for Doonie. This lets you invent wisdom to overlay that taciturnity—like your daddy, you’ll think decades later, for like him their silence rarely contradicts your private fabrication of what they’re thinking.

  On days a tropical storm warning shuts down schools, you drive with wipers fighting rain while high-pitched winds scream through the faulty seals around the glass. The few times an actual storm hauls the waves up past the tide line and over the beach grass and dunes to swamp the road, you move the state highway patrol’s sawhorses to plow through shorebreak where you can only guess the road might be, and from your tires wings of seawater flare up so the wet brakes barely catch.

  Doonie likes to say that all the loose marbles roll downhill, and it’s true that the beach serves as both a geographical and social low. It’s a kind of hideout for the disenfranchised where questions of one’s future or origins never come up. In fact, there are dozens of pier rats whose family names you’ll never even learn, using just their assigned tribal monikers: Critter, Maddog, Easy, Murph the Surf, Captain Flash (aka Flash), Skeeter, Melonhead. Only Doonie’s best pal, Gary, goes by his last name, Forsythe (which in the tragic future will echo foresight).

  The beach at night with its bonfire ringed by a strung-out company of sun-weary surfers passing around a joint under far flung stars feels like the ancestral village you never had. You’re all sipping V-8 juice from the same triangular hole in the same ritual can, also passing tapwater brought in washed out orange juice jugs, for the salt and wind parch you, and local water’s brackish. Not that there’s a house with a sink spigot into which you’d be invited. This crowd around the snapping fire substitutes, in most of your cases, for hearth and home, for actual kin.

  People back in town are referred to—if at all—as straights or civilians, as if you’re soldiers in some covert war. Against what enemy it’s hard to say. Tedium. Life by rote. Simpleminded adherence to refinery routine. And you’re also in a series of undeclared domestic wars. In retrospect, it seems that in every single home, at least one parent is flat-out drunk or pilled-up or heading that way or hungover or otherwise absent.

  Beyond earshot, somebody might say, Poor Critter, his mother’s such a souse. Or, Maddog’s daddy beats the shit out of him when he’s loaded. Or so-and-so has to sleep in the garage when his mother’s boyfriends come in blasted. Odder than the taboo against discussing your liquor-related miseries is the piety with which you all return to separate homes stoned out of your minds on other substances, as if illegal chemicals constitute magisterial progress over being a drunk. As if the mind were a rabbit hole you could each v
anish down into (like in the Jefferson Airplane song). As if this vanishing were progress.

  That’s the year Doonie somehow acquires nine ounces (oh-zees, in his parlance) of psilocybin. You help him to load gel caps in trade for the two-dollar per hit fee. While Doonie cheerfully chops mushroom powder, he chants: Who will help the little red hen/ to cap the dope/ to stash in the pants/ to take past the pigs/ to eat on the beach/ to trip through the night…

  So spring of 1971 starts to vaporize on the beach alongside Meekham’s pier with Doonie’s hallucinogens. The days on the calendar lose their solid boundaries, and the nature of time alters, swinging one way then another. Sometimes whole weekends evaporate beneath your feet, but time can also need to be done, like in prison. Maybe to honor those mythic creatures like Hogan, who’s graduated from kid prison to what Doonie calls the Big House, you actually etch off the days you have left till college on your bedroom doorjamb as onto a cell wall. You’re just trying to get a grip.

  In the stories you pass around the fire about various freaks and heads, less and less hyperbole is needed to spice up the telling. Tragedy is edging in. There are actual prison terms and car wrecks to recount, parole officers and freak outs to keep up with. Once two boys might have fought over a girl. Now so-and-so’s cousin has vanished into a Mexican jail.

  In one dope deal gone sour, Jerry McCoy ties your pal Skeeter to a chair in front of his girlfriend to pistol-whip him (her witnessing this being the greater insult than the subsequent broken jaw and smashed ribs). And when Jerry is later stabbed to death under the stands at a football game, Skeeter recruits Flash—who’s telling the story—to travel to the cemetery blazing on LSD with a truckload of others who hold grudges against the foul-tempered, well armed, and always overmuscled McCoy. Flash even claims his mother went along. She allegedly cheered while those guys stood on the grave to empty their bladders into the fresh-dug earth.

  Even this atrocity doesn’t strike anyone as beyond the realm of civility. You’ve logged some mileage since your first hesitant sojourns into smoking pot, your legs dangling from a kid’s swing in the public park while talk veered to Simone de Beauvoir or the budding ecology movement. Some unforeseen darkness has been slinking into your circle. The old flower-child pose of gentleness has decayed into cynicism. The bumper-sticker slogan Make Love Not War has been usurped by Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. People in your midst are changing in ways you can neither control nor predict.

  It never once occurs to you that the chemicals that have so efficiently soothed and amused could—in certain quantities, over time—change a person. And not just in degrees either, not just cranking you up or down to intensify or dilute you according to the evening’s whim—that was the myth. We’re talking qualitative upheavals, all out mutations, the way yeast alters beer. Or the way a single grain of arsenic in one’s morning coffee every day will—if unjudiciously increased—too quickly saturate one’s system, until after much mouth-frothing and stomach agony, death ensues.

  Who saw it coming?

  You’re standing around a campfire tripping your brains out on psilocybin while hoping the pipe full of hash somebody passes around will take the spangled edges off the ongoing high and permit sleep’s approximation if not its actuality.

  The pipe has come around again, and you ask if it’s primo hash or keef, or that blond hash from Afghanistan?

  Flash says, When did you get so effing persnickety about other people’s hashish?

  Every toke inflates some balloon in your skull another quarter inch to nudge out more racing thought. Taking any substance poses this kind of constant quest for the perfect combination, the “right” high. You think how you’d explain the variables to Miss Gacy, and suddenly there she sits in phantom form outside the circle, on the driftwood log, holding her purse in her lap as if waiting for a train. Miss Gacy, we need x caps of psilocybin with y tokes on the pipe, and if we only had z glasses of Boonsfarm apple wine, I’d be perfectly leveled out.

  Doonie says, Wanna see something freak you out?

  Somebody says, Long as it’s not your dick. Which there’s no real danger of Doonie actually showing. That’s just a long-running joke to laugh at on cue. In the background the waves go hush, hush every time one collapses.

  Doonie pulls a photograph from the kangaroo pocket of his hooded sweatshirt.

  You say, Or a picture of your dick. So laughter surges up again.

  Doonie hands you a creased snapshot he claims is Mike Hogan, but it’s no Hogan you remember, though certainly this guy’s the right height, and there’s some snide familiarity in the badass curl of his mouth, like he’s laughing at whoever holds the camera. This guy is beefed up like a Charles Atlas ad, striking a weight lifter’s pose next to a bench whose barbell must hold plates in excess of three hundred pounds. This guy’s lats rip out behind him like great wings he’s forcing to sprout through sheer psychic will.

  This is Hogan? you say, Holy shit. And you feel the picture slip from your fingers, leaving you to stare at the blank smoky place it used to be for several beats before you turn and see that Forsythe’s holding it. You peer back into the chilly dark for Miss Gacy to comment on Hogan’s transformation, but the log she sat on is bare, as if her train came and went the second you looked away.

  Forsythe’s wrapped in what looks like a horse blanket with his girlfriend, Bianca—a shy Chicana so demure and straight-looking that if you’re high enough, you expect some country club patio to assemble around her. In eighth grade, you angled unsuccessfully for an invite to her slumber party. Now her genteel awkwardness in this company stirs something like a dim worry both for her comfort and for how you specifically might look to someone so (quote unquote) normal. So you find yourself smoothing her passage in this strange world when possible. This morning, she worried that eggs cooked in the skillet you’d only scrubbed with sand would give her salmonella, so you double washed it with bar soap even though you knew it’d make the eggs stick. When she borrowed some toilet paper to carry into the beach grass, you went before her with a flashlight, shouting and beating the fluent sedge with a stick to scare off any reptiles or rodents.

  While Bianca’s cupid’s bow mouth draws on the clay pipe as if sipping from a soda straw, some neckless homunculus of Hogan shapes itself from wood smoke like a genie. His head’s shaved. Six-pack abs. Biceps what you call swole up. The fire hisses and pops. An ashen log caves in on itself.

  Hogan’s looking a lot like Bluto, you say—mostly to hear the orienting sound of your own voice. Wind blows him away. More laughs. The hand Bianca passes the hash pipe with has an actual tennis bracelet on it.

  Forsythe asks where’d he get the fucked-up looking tattoo.

  That’s a jailhouse tat, Doonie says. Do it yourself. Poke yourself with some pins and some hardass shit. I ask what it is, and he says it’s Bazooka Joe.

  There are more laughs.

  I’m sure, Doonie says. Remember those smeary old tats we used to get wrapped up with that Bazooka Joe gum? That hard pink stuff? Little line down the middle like a butt crack. Nasty.

  He takes his place in the shadows just on the edge of the firelight and raves out Hogan’s prison exploits while the picture goes around. Hogan shoots up typewriter fluid and has to have the veins in his arms stripped out and replaced by plastic ones. Extended sentence. Hogan organizes the largest prison break in Texas penal history. He’s first one out, third one caught.

  Found him up a tree, Doonie says. Dead dogs on the ground all around him.

  How’d he manage to get a gun in there? Bianca says. And again you think she should be in town folding crepe paper streamers for some dance.

  That’s the sick part, man. He hung them, Doonie says. Using his belt. Is that coldhearted or what? One of those baying bloodhounds leaps up, and Hogan lassos it around the neck and yanks up and snap—breaks its neck. That’s why they sent him to Huntsville finally. The dogs bummed them out too bad.

  Easy says, People get attached to dogs pretty good, wor
king with them. His clear blue eyes seem to have miniature clouds drifting across the massively dilated pupils.

  You think how fast Hogan transformed. The last time you saw him, he was a gangly boy on a banana-seat bike who didn’t even need to shave. This guy looks like he could rip the door off a Volkswagen. With his teeth.

  You ask for the picture again, stare through its window as if to peer past Hogan’s armor of ripped flesh and find the stark skeleton boy who pedaled around the Deets’s driveway that day. For an instant, it’s like x-ray vision kicks in, and you can see him there, a thin blond boy in cutoffs, held captive inside this other massive body. Then the light shifts, and it’s the big dude in the picture again, and he’s laughing his ass off at you.

  (Later, Hogan’s metamorphosis seemed not that far from what some parents underwent when drinking—they could vanish entirely, or go roaring through their houses in the masks of monsters.)

  Damn, you say and hand the picture off again. The hash is making your head feel injected with molten lead. You’re fighting the urge just to nod off in the wet sand. But you know you’ll wake up all crooked up and achey. You say, I gotta go somewhere and lie down.

  Under the pier in your sleeping bag the waves aren’t saying hush anymore, they’re receding like so many sighs. You marvel at how Hogan hardened up, and did he know beforehand the darkness was about to rise inside him? Could he feel that internal tideline climbing?

  Suddenly you know that the boyfriend you’ve been longing for wouldn’t solve anying. No one could stave off the bad feeling that wells up inside you lately. Something is going wrong, but you can’t get any kind of bead on it, much less name it. You look at the surfboards scarred with sand and wax and tilted against the pier until they become great shields the longbowmen hauled back from some battle in the King Arthur book. The black wet suits peeled off and draped over them are the flayed skins of vanquished heroes. You’re thinking it’s been a while since you wanted to be Queen Guinevere, and will you ever again wait for some knight to gallop up and sweep you away? In the new fairy tale you’re concocting for yourself, the armored chevalier as rescuer holds negligible value. But you’d damn sure like your own horse, some glossy animal tethered loosely to that piling over there. Anything to ride the fuck out of here.