Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  After that night, what I recorded in my diary nearly every day was what drugs I took and with whom, the beginning of a long, slow project of erasing myself, or trying to. There were moments when my two worlds mingled, when I wrote that I’d landed my backflip in gymnastics, then got wasted on angel dust that night, or that I bought angel dust with money I earned babysitting. In Mr. Hubbard’s English class, I’d sit in the back row, stoned or dusted, and stare out the window at the kids in the parking lot. I stopped doing my homework, and when Mr. Hubbard looked to me for an answer, I was silent. I’d lost all clarity, all logic.

  In Walpole in the mid-1970s there was a dry spell for marijuana, which was likely a consequence of the war on drugs launched by Nixon, and continued by President Ford; during this campaign, the U.S.-Mexico border was tightened and U.S. helicopters sprayed the herbicide paraquat on Mexico’s marijuana fields. In that window of time—after the crackdown on Mexican marijuana but before enterprising Americans cultivated high-quality pot and it was easily available again—angel dust, a made-in-America drug, flowed into Walpole. That year, 1975, was on the steep incline of high school kids using illicit drugs, which peaked in 1979 and then fell dramatically, remaining lower since then.

  Angel dust is phencyclidine (PCP), synthesized by Parke-Davis in 1956 as a surgical anesthetic. PCP was first tested on monkeys, who were so serene on the drug that Parke-Davis named it Sernyl. In later studies, though, monkeys quickly developed a tolerance for PCP, self-administering higher and higher doses, sacrificing food in favor of the drug. Over a period of several weeks the monkeys took such high doses that they were “frequently found lying on the floor of the cage in awkward positions, briefly raising themselves to press the lever only to fall back down to the floor.” In one experiment, by the end of the trial period the monkeys were using four times the original amounts of PCP.

  In spite of these alarming results, drug trials progressed from monkeys to humans, at first a few dozen patients at Detroit Receiving Hospital, many of whom woke from surgeries unable to feel their limbs or wondering where their heads were or why the surgeon had turned into “a vampire bat with a ten-foot wingspan and four-inch claws.” Patients with strong religious beliefs thought that they were being “carried up into the clouds” by God.

  For two more years Parke-Davis experimented on humans, mostly hundreds of prisoners in Jackson, Michigan, the largest prison in the world then, with some five thousand inmates; Parke-Davis built a lab inside the prison. People continued to experience bizarre, near-psychotic reactions to PCP, so finally, in 1965, Parke-Davis abandoned its plan to market the drug for people. The FDA approved PCP for veterinary use, mainly to tranquilize large animals. Phencyclidine, renamed Sernylan, was used to stun horses and cows weighing a thousand pounds to a ton. That was the drug that I was putting into my one-hundred-pound body.

  In Walpole I’d seen angel dust only as dried parsley onto which PCP had been sprayed or baked. We smoked dust in a pipe or rolled it in a skinny joint with Zig-Zag papers, tissue-thin like the shed skin of a snake. No one I knew referred to PCP as anything other than angel dust, or dust, or killer D for an extra-strong batch. Angel dust highs felt pleasant and dreamy at first. Driving around that first night I smoked dust, Duane’s car seemed to glide into the parking lot at Friendly’s, where we stopped to use the bathroom. Inside, kids from school were lined up on stools at the counter, eating ice cream: my former friends. When I walked over to say hello, the linoleum floor turned spongy, as if I were in that commercial for Hush Puppies shoes, a man walking along a springy sidewalk. When I was a kid, that commercial had made me desperate for a pair of Hush Puppies so that I, too, could bounce on foam rubber sidewalks.

  Angel dust made you feel spacey and untethered, like Major Tom, floating in a most peculiar way. We called dustheads “space cadets” or “space shots.” On angel dust you lose proprioceptivity, your sense of your body in space. Angel dust causes ataxia, a neurological disorder in which people lose balance, depth perception, and coordination of bodily movements. In Walpole center you’d see kids doing the dust-walk down Main Street: a stilted, jerky high-step, like a marionette, as if they were lifting their foot over a curb with each step, like in Fly, a game my siblings and I played as kids. We’d take the mirrors from the walls in our bedrooms and hold them perpendicular to our chests like trays—just below our chins, so that the floor was blocked from view and the ceiling reflected in the mirror—and we walked around the house like flies walking on the ceiling, high-stepping over doorframes, careful not to trample light fixtures, moving across a stark white landscape like the astronauts on the moon.

  Angel dust causes confusion, agitation, euphoria, and difficulties in abstract reasoning, attention, and concentration. Dust causes “autistic dreamy states” and “cloudy delirium” and, at high enough doses, catatonia. Psychologically, angel dust causes feelings of apathy or estrangement, feelings of nothingness, or a preoccupation with death (meditatio mortis). A friend of Duane’s swore he was going to quit dust after he thought he was dead for three days.

  Dust distorts the size and shape of your body. Paula and Alison and I smoked angel dust one Saturday before going to the high school football game. We walked along the chain-link fence near where it abutted woods, on the far side of the field, where someone had cut a hole to sneak in without paying. The angel dust transformed us into midgets, like Alice with her mushroom or Alice with her pills—one that makes you small. We were suddenly tiny, like in that Arabian Knights cartoon I loved as a kid, in which a turban-wearing man clapped his hands and said, “Size of a mouse.” Dusted, we shapeshifted to dwarves, but we couldn’t figure out how to climb through the hole in the fence. We couldn’t think. The fence puzzled us, and we walked back and forth along a section of the chain link, like a neurotic polar bear I saw once at Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, missing one eye, lumbering senselessly.

  Early in the phencyclidine tests on humans, a group of psychiatrists compared the reactions of people on PCP to those of four other groups: people who’d taken LSD (legal until 1967), people who’d taken amobarbital (a barbiturate, basically a sedative), schizophrenics, and a control group. The researchers looked at how the drugs affected two specific functions, sequential thinking and symbolic reasoning. For the sequential thinking test, the subjects had to count backward from 100 by multiples of 7. The average score for the control group was about 90 percent correct. People on LSD scored slightly lower, 78 percent correct, while those on the amobarbital scored slightly higher, 91 percent. The score for people on PCP was 32 percent accurate, close to the scores of the schizophrenics. PCP, the researchers wrote, was “psychotic-mimetic”—it mimicked responses of people suffering from psychoses.

  To test symbolic reasoning, the subjects were asked to interpret the meaning of five proverbs:

  The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

  A rolling stone gathers no moss.

  A drowning man will clutch at a straw.

  One swallow doesn’t make a summer.

  Great bodies move slowly.

  The average correct score for the control group was 5.1 out of a possible 10. PCP subjects scored less than 1.0. Even schizophrenics beat the PCP group, scoring 1.5. The people on PCP were utterly confounded by the proverbs. Trying to explain the meaning of “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” one subject said, “Good food is worth eating,” while another said, “The eating of the pudding will prove itself.” One subject’s response epitomizes the PCP befuddlement that I remember. When asked, “What does this proverb mean?” the subject said, “What does mean mean?”

  Angel dust was not a drug that increased sensory experience or made the world seem funny, like pot or acid. Angel dust killed desire for food or sex, bodily hungers. Dust incapacitated thought and speech; your brain no longer functioned, and sometimes you couldn’t form basic words. Cognitive processes shut down, a torpor of the brain. PCP was a dissociative anesthetic, a new category created just for this drug. A
ngel dust was the perfect drug for me; I wanted to anesthetize myself from pain, from sorrow; to dissociate myself from myself. Detached from my body on angel dust, I erased myself. I was no-body.

  One of the clinical symptoms of angel dust is depersonalization, as if you are in the process of unbecoming, becoming not a person. If the drugs of the 1960s—marijuana, LSD, even heroin—were about tuning in, about pleasure and euphoria, angel dust in the 1970s was about zoning out, reflected in the music of the decade, like Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” the twanging guitar notes bent by the wa-wa bar—Been dazed and confused for so long, it’s not true. The song is about love, but it meant something different to us. Or Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”—There is no pain you are receding.

  When I was very small, if I fell off my bike or knocked my funny bone and it tingled with pain, I’d cry to my father, who always said, “Rub it off, it’s all right now, just rub it off.” He’d place his big warm hands on my elbow and rub my skin, and then I’d continue to rub the spot with my hand, and somehow after a few minutes my arm no longer hurt. It was just that easy to rub away pain. As a teenager, my pain was inside, a twisting feeling behind my sternum some days, a knot of anxiety in my stomach. I was always a nervous kid, so worried about being late for school that I’d cry if my mother delayed me to sew a loose button on my blouse, then I’d race out of the house, my chest numb with panic, certain that I’d missed the bus, especially when I didn’t see any kids at the bus stop, only to realize that I was the first one there.

  I smoked angel dust to rub off psychic pain—anxiousness, self-consciousness, alienation, confusion—in that simple way that had worked when I was kid with a bruise or a bump. At the time I didn’t understand my motivations for taking a drug that was literally an anesthetic. I thought I was just experimenting, exploring the world as I had in childhood, pushing boundaries further and further, like the time I was nine and I rode my bike along the tracks so far one day, curious about what was ahead, what lay just beyond, so I pedaled and pedaled, stopping abruptly when I saw the sign that announced I was entering Medfield, a whole other town, feeling a bit scared then by how far I’d gone, how easy it had been. With angel dust, I’d be too far gone before I realized I’d gone too far.

  I smoked angel dust with Nicky Osborne, my new boyfriend in tenth grade. He wasn’t in any of my classes, but I always picked him out of the landscape, which seemed uncanny. Slender and slight, with thick, curly, wheat-blond hair, he seemed to glow, with his pale skin and blushed cheeks. I loved him from afar, noting in my diary how beautiful he was. As if willing it, I’d find myself standing in the same circle of kids passing a pipe, the proximity to Nicky sparking an electric hum in my body, like the time I’d stuck a knife in the toaster when it was plugged in. He was quiet, not rowdy like many boys; he had a gravitas to his presence that belied his slight physique. I thought he was too beautiful for me, the delicate oval of his face, his hazel eyes. I was shy around him, as I hadn’t been before with boys. I didn’t dare speak, worried I’d say something uncool. There was a high school dance at Blackburn Hall one Friday night. I drank some beers and smoked some pot but “didn’t get very buzzed,” I wrote, though Paula was “really blown.” I took Paula outside for air, holding her long hair away from her face as she vomited in the bushes and, unfortunately, all over her coat. I saw Nicky outside, wearing work boots that looked too big and powder-blue thin-wale corduroys, which everyone wore, boys and girls. He wore a puffy down jacket and a wool hat that brought his head to a point, loose curls bunched around his collar. I saw him, but he didn’t see me. “Nicky was so fucked up he couldn’t walk or see where he was going. He didn’t even know where he was.” Nicky being so fucked up did not deter me from liking him; getting wasted was the norm. Getting high was what all the cool kids did, all the beautiful cool kids living on the edge.

  In high school the division between jocks and freaks was like a partition in a country. It began in junior high, when tough girls kicked the shins of cheerleaders walking down the halls and then the conflicts escalated into fistfights after school. This was the age of equal opportunity, girls acting like boys. Nancy Morris versus Debbie Drake. Karen Hoover against Sandy Bartko. “Brenda Stokes and Janet Ballard had a fist-fight after school today. I think that’s sick,” I wrote. I called the fighting sick probably because I felt queasy whenever I saw someone strike someone else. In ninth grade I straddled both camps, walking the line between jocks and freaks like walking the balance beam in gymnastics.

  The jock-versus-freak fights between girls continued in high school, at least until my sister Sue, who was president of the student council, negotiated peace, or détente, between the camps, sitting down with representatives from both factions. The violence stopped, but the divide was still palpable. There were territories in the back parking lot behind the school, on the far end the freaks and nearer to the school entrance the jocks, if they dared stand outside at all. Mostly they stayed in the cafeteria before school or at lunch. The boundary line seemed impenetrable; you had to choose, and there was no crossing back. Stepping off the bus into the high school parking lot felt like passing through a squeeze chute, self-sorting by turning right or left, taking a stand by where you stood. I turned right, choosing to stand on the freak side, the wild side, outside.

  One day at school Nicky saw me at my locker and said, “How ya doin’, Maureen?” I turned to see him walking backward in the hall, wearing his ubiquitous hat, carrying no books, grinning a wide grin, his perfect smile. He turned before I could reply. I was “so shocked,” I wrote in my diary. He called me that night, and we planned to meet that weekend. “How unreal,” I wrote, my dream coming true. That Saturday night, Paula, Loretta Petty, and I walked down Robbins Road toward the junior high, always deserted after school hours. We spied two figures and walked toward them, then stood in an awkward circle with Nicky and his friend Vince Gentile, a handsome Italian boy with tea-saucer brown eyes. I saw right away how dusted they were; neither spoke. Every few minutes Nicky or Vince said, “Whoa,” as if they were on some wild ride, as if they could feel the planet spinning beneath their feet. Their minds were blown, like a circuit, a bulb burned out. That’s what we called druggies who hung around downtown: burnouts. Wayne Kosinski, Rod Tyler, Billy Lightner.

  After a while Vince smiled lopsidedly. “Say a few syllables,” he slurred, a line from The Three Stooges, the episode in which the Stooges were prisoners in jailbird garb, numbers emblazoned across their chests like on my mother’s Halloween costumes. The warden was unconscious. “Speak to me, warden,” Moe said. “Say a few syllables. Utter a few adjectives.” Loretta whispered loudly to me or to Paula, talking about Nicky and Vince right in front of them, giggling, crunching Doritos, leaning in to gossip with her sharp Dorito breath. I found her irksome, the impolite, immature whispering, the annoying crackle and crunch, her suffocating cheese breath in my face. I recorded the sentiment: “Loretta was really bugging the shit out of me and Paula last night, trying to act cool. She’s a fucking asshole.” I’m sure I meant that Loretta was trying to act cool, but I can read the subtext—that it was Paula and I who were trying to act cool, Loretta foiling our efforts. I worried about appearing cool to a boy who’d lost his capacity for speech. I considered Loretta impolite, not the boy who showed up wasted on our first date.

  When I stepped off the bus at school the next day, Loretta and Chrissy Mayer and Lisa Summers and Laura Pagano surrounded me like a posse, whispering, too eager. What happened with Nicky? Tell us, tell us. Nicky was standing twenty feet away with Vince, smoking a cigarette. I was embarrassed by my friends acting girlish, these friends I’d soon abandon, with their schoolbooks clutched to their chests, their feathered haircuts, their fear. I didn’t want to tell them anything. What could I say? That Nicky was so dusted he couldn’t speak? I brushed past them. “Leave me alone,” I said.

  The next Saturday night Nicky and I sat on the bleachers behind the town pool, where kids were partying, where
the year before I’d practiced with the swim team, riding my bike at 7:30 every morning for an hour of laps, then an hour of junior lifesaving. In the lifesaving course I’d aced the written tests, but during the final practical exam the 175-pound lifeguard wriggled free from my cross-chest carry and I failed the class. I cried all the way home on my bike. I could save someone only in theory.

  Nicky’s sister, Andrea, a year older than Nicky and pretty, as he was, walked over to us and asked to borrow a few bucks to pay someone back, she said. Nicky and I scrounged up the money, but after she left he worried. “She’ll probably buy dust,” he said, concerned for his sister, though not for himself. Nicky apologized for being so dusted that first night we met, said he’d been “psyched” to see me but that he’d ruined it. “That’s okay,” I said. At times I’d been so dusted, too. Nicky’s friend Tracey walked by and said she had an ounce of dust, twenty-eight grams, enough to keep several people dusted for a couple weeks. “I’m quitting,” Nicky told her. Tracey looked skeptical when Nicky turned down her offer, and based on how often I’d seen Nicky dusted, I was, too. When Tracey left I said, “When you go home tonight, I bet you’ll smoke dust.”

  “All I’ll do is think about you like I did last night,” Nicky said, and my heart tumbled a bit. He asked me if I wanted to go out with him “for as long as it lasts”—a curious proposition, agnostic but honest. Shivering in the sharp November air on the cold aluminum bleachers, I said yes, and then there was nothing but Nicky and me kissing.

  Most often Nicky thumbed a ride or walked the few miles to my house or we met in the town center, which was halfway. One night Nicky and I and Vince smoked dust and wandered around downtown for a while and then hitchhiked home. The boys both lived in the opposite direction from me, so they waited on one corner while I stood on the perpendicular corner. A police car stopped and I watched Nicky and Vince climb in the cruiser and drive away. I was alone now at the stoplight, my thumb out. A few seconds later the cop car pulled up in front of me, and Nicky opened the back door, grinning. “Get in.” He’d cadged a ride for me, too, from Good Goin’ Gus, a cop sympathetic to teenagers. When dozens of kids gathered at Friendly’s on summer nights, Gus would screech into the parking lot in his cruiser, roll down his window, and yell, “Get out of here, the cops are coming,” as if he were not one of them. By the time the next cruisers arrived, everyone was gone or leaving.