Eyes Wide Open (3 page)

Chapter Four

T
he three-hour drive up the California coast on 101 to Charlie's the following day gave my mind time to wander to some old things.

It went to my brother as a long-haired eighteen-year-old who had just dropped out of college, his conversation rocketing back and forth between complex string theory, Timothy Leary, and how the Beatles'
Abbey Road
was the new gospel, in what I knew now, but not back then, was one of his uncontrolled, manic rants.

It went to how he had once visited me at Cornell—after he was released from the psychiatric home in Hartford—and how we took a weekend trip to Montreal. I recalled how we had trolled for girls along Sherbrooke Street, near McGill, and how Charlie had ended up screwing our waitress back in the hotel room after he'd convinced her he had taught Eric Clapton all he knew, and air-played her the opening riff from Cream's “Sunshine of Your Love,” while I pounded the pillow over my head in the other bed, alone.

My brother could charm the birds out of the trees.

It's easy,
Charlie always said, with that sly, mischievous grin.
If you ask every chick you run into if they wanna screw, now and then one of them says yes! Even when you look like me!

Eventually, winding through the wooded canyons around Lompoc, my thoughts roamed here:

To the last time he had any kind of relationship with our dad.

It was maybe twenty years ago, Charlie's last chance at a real life before he permanently gave up.

Somehow he had persuaded my father to dispose of his old design samples by sending them down to Miami, where Charlie had set up a rack in a women's hair salon near his mother's dance studio, selling them as one-of-a-kind creations.

It was only a wobbly metal rack in the rear of this cheesy salon, crammed with colorful velour and cotton cashmere sets—my dad's particular genius. But to Charlie, it might as well have been the epicenter of the apparel world. He held court, shuttling back and forth between hair stations, his own hair bound neatly into a ponytail and dressed as cleanly as I'd ever seen him, the blue-haired women eating out of his hand. He'd mesmerize them with stories about his famous father in the rag trade, the glamorous women he screwed while in L.A., celebrity rockers he did coke with, lurid tales of his years on the road, all the while pushing oil stocks on the Canadian stock exchange.

He was turning dozens of sample sets each week at fifty to sixty bucks a pop. Real money in his pocket for the first time in his life. Living in a decent place on Biscayne Bay with Gabby and his infant son. He had an exuberance I'd never seen before—a twinkling in his eyes.

For the first time he was making it—in the real world.

And with his father, who had let him down a hundred times.

Later, he took me back to the storage room where he kept his stock. Charlie's mood shifted. He started ripping open shipping cartons, his voice accusatory and familiar. “Look at the shit he's trying to pawn off on me,” he said, tearing out newly received merchandise still in plastic bags. I could see rips, flaws, mismatched color panels mixed in with legitimate samples. “You see the kind of business I've got going here. These people don't want crap. I'm selling ‘one of a kinds,' not this garbage.
And look
—” He ripped an invoice out of the box. “He's fucking billing me for them! He's not even giving me terms.”

Everything always came back to this: Charlie trusting himself in our father's hands, and Lenny pulling the rug out from under him again. “
I can't sell these, can I?
” He looked at me for confirmation. And, yes, there were a few seconds, the prior season's returns that had probably been in someone's stockroom forever, design prototypes with busted zippers and mismatched panels.

“It would be hard,” I said, agreeing.

“He's trying to screw me again, isn't he?
” Anger rushed into my brother's face. “You know what he did? He had his accountant call me up and demand payment. His accountant!
I'm his son, for Christ's sake.
He just can't stand to see me successful . . . We're selling dozens a week of these, and he doesn't want me to take his luster away from him so he's trying to shut me down.”

To me, it was probably just the shipping manager throwing in the kitchen sink. My father probably didn't even know about it.

But to Charlie it was like he had personally handpicked them to ensure he would fail.

A fight ensued, and weeks later, my dad stopped shipping to him for good. There was a huge battle over payment. My dad called Charlie “an ungrateful sonovabitch.” Charlie threatened to come up north and kill him.

They never spoke again.

He took Gabriella and Evan and moved out to the coast. Ten years later, when my father—drunk and down on his luck—drove his Mercedes into the waters of Shinnecock Bay, he wouldn't even come to the funeral.

I
got off the freeway at Pacific Crest Drive. Pismo Beach was a quaint, sleepy beach town tucked under rolling hills of dazzling gold and green, leading down to rocky bluffs overlooking the Pacific.

Grover Beach, where my brother lived, was its seedier next-door neighbor.

I'd been out there only once before, five years ago, when I brought the family while we were vacationing in San Francisco, four hours to the north. Up to then, my kids hadn't even met my older brother. They'd only met Evan, their cousin, the couple of times we had brought him east.

Their place was a tiny two-bedroom apartment provided by the state with a single bathroom and pictures covering up cracks in the plaster in a downtrodden two-story building across from abandoned railroad tracks.

That visit, we sat around for most of a day, listening to Charlie and Evan banging on their guitars, belting out barely recognizable rock tunes in hoarse off-pitch voices, amid my brother's rants about how his father had ruined his life and how by the time he was Sophie's age, fifteen, he was already whacked out on LSD.

It was scary.

We watched them apportioning their cache of colorful medications on the kitchen counter. Gabby said how she was once a beauty queen back home and had never bargained for this kind of life, and how she might just go back to Colombia, where her family would gladly welcome her.

My kids were a little freaked out. We took them out to lunch, to a café on the main street overlooking the beach, lined with surf shops, tattoo parlors, and oyster bars. Charlie said it was the first time they'd been to a restaurant other than Denny's in years.

We left the next day.

I drove down the long hill toward the ocean and turned on Division Street. I found Charlie's building a half block down, the familiar blue Taurus I had bought for him parked beneath the carport out front. I pulled into the next space and sat for what seemed like a full five minutes.

What could I do for them here?

My mind went back to something.

The day Evan was born. Back in Miami. Kathy and I happened to be in Boca, so we went to see them at the hospital. Charlie was so different from how I'd ever seen him before. Cradling his little Evan in his arms, in his blue blanket, looking like any doting new dad, but with his wild, Jerry Garcia hair and bushy beard. He let Kathy hold the baby for a while, and he and I went down to the cafeteria.

“This is the start of something new for me,” Charlie said. “I can feel it.”

But as he picked up the coffee cup, something changed. “I need you to promise me something, Jay . . .”

“Sure.” I was twenty-eight then, still in med school. Kathy and I weren't even married yet.

“I need you to promise me you'll take care of him. Whatever happens to me, okay? I need to know Evan'll be safe.”

“Nothing's going to happen to you, Charlie. Of course he'll be safe . . .”

“No.” There was something dark and brooding in his eyes, a storm massing. “I need you to promise me, Jay, that whatever happens, you'll be there for him.”

I said, “Of course I'll be there, Charlie.” I met his worried eyes. “You have my word.”

He smiled, relieved. “I knew I could count on you, buddy. I just hope—”

Someone moved behind us on the line and he never finished. But now, all these years later, I thought I knew what he was about to say.

I only hope he doesn't have what I have
.

My son. The demons in his brain.

I only pray his path is easier.

He'd asked me, not Dad. And sitting under his carport, I couldn't help but wonder: If it had all somehow worked out, back in that stupid salon . . .

If they had lived in a place without cracks in the walls . . . If their boy could have grown up proud, instead of filled with shame and anger . . .

Would his fate have been different or the same?

Even if the demons had found him, would my nephew still be alive?

Chapter Five

I
went around the side through a brown, patchy courtyard, past a broken plastic kiddie car on its side. I stopped outside apartment two, wincing at what smelled like dog urine. Lurid, brightly colored graffiti spread all over the asphalt wall.

I knocked on the door.

After a short while I saw the curtains part, and the door opened. Gabriella appeared in a blue terry robe. She was normally a pretty woman with short blond hair, a nice shape, and a deep, throaty laugh, but now her cheeks were sunken and pale, her eyes raw from tears, her hair matted and unkempt. As she let me in she kind of turned away, almost unable to face me. “I'm sorry that you have to see me this way, Jay . . .”

“It's okay, Gabby, it's okay,” I said. We hugged, and I felt her latch on to me. It always made me feel a bit awkward, her gratitude for me for how we helped them get by. “I'm so sorry, Gabriella.”

“Oh, you don't know what it's like.” She moaned, anguish etched into the lines around her eyes. “I never thought I would ever feel something as difficult as this. Never to see my son again. My heart breaks, Jay . . .”

“I know.” I kept hugging her. “I know.”

“Your brother is not so good.” She pulled away, brushing the hair out of her eyes. “I don't know how he's going to make it, Jay. You'll see for yourself. He's old now, and Evan was all we had. I'm glad you're here.”

She led me inside. The place was small. Still, it was neat and tastefully decorated, with floral pillows and pictures of her family in Colombia and even some watercolors done by Charlie's mother.

I heard a familiar voice on the stairs utter quietly, “Hi, Jay.”

My brother came down. He looked grayer, older, hunched a little in the shoulders, a shadow of what I last recalled. His beard was flecked with gray now, his hair straggly and wild. Charlie always had a twinkle in his eyes and an irresistible, wiry grin. It was what always captivated the girls. But nothing seemed to be there now. He wore a pair of ragged sweatpants and a brown flannel shirt. He forced a smile. “I'm glad you came, little brother . . .”

“Of course I came, Charlie.”

“C'mere . . .”
He got to the bottom of the stairs and we hugged. I was surprised how natural it felt. Hugs weren't exactly the norm in our relationship. He placed his face on my shoulder and started to weep. “We're sunk, Jay. It's gone for us. I can't believe Evan is dead.”

“I know. I know . . . ,” I said, squeezing him back and patting his shoulder.

“We failed him, Jay. He was a good kid, in spite of everything. We didn't do right by him.”

“You did your best, Charlie. He wasn't an easy kid.”

We all sat down at the small table in the kitchen. Gabriella poured some coffee. She laid out the long line of medications he was taking: trazodone, Caduet, felodipine, Quapro, Klonopin. Sedatives, blood pressure controllers, mood stabilizers. I didn't really know much about what had happened. Only that Evan had jumped off a rock, but not how he had gotten there or why.

“Can you talk?” I asked him.

Charlie nodded, cupping a few of his pills in his hands and knocking them back. Dully, he looked up at me like,
What is there to say?

I said, “Then tell me what happened.”

Chapter Six

“W
e always took care of our son.” He peeled an orange and put it on a small plate in front of him. “No matter what anyone can say, we tried to do our best. We always kept him safe.”

“I know that, Charlie,” I said, squeezing his arm.

Tears shone in his dark eyes. He shook his head. “I just don't know how he could do that to us . . .”

Gabriella got up and wrapped her arm around him from behind. She picked up for him. “Ten days ago . . . You know for a long time, Jay, our son had been acting really crazy . . .”

Of course I knew. Sitting around in a silent state all day in the house, no job, no school. Usually off his medications.

“Well, he'd gotten worse. He was off his meds. We no longer knew how to handle him. He would just sit there—on that couch—for twenty-four hours straight. Not a single word—just staring. Into space.

“Just a few weeks back we heard noises in the middle of the night, and we came down. He was just sitting there, talking”—Gabby pointed to what looked like a wood-burning heater in the corner—“to the furnace, Jay. My son was talking to the furnace! He told me, ‘I hear voices in there, Mommy . . .' I said to him, ‘Evan, you have to let us help you . . .' We didn't know what to do.”

“He was always so angry at us,” Charlie said. “He wouldn't take his pills. He would just hurl them at us. Then he'd just smile coyly. I couldn't fight him anymore. It was like he was torturing us, trying to make us suffer along with him.”

“Two weeks ago”—Gabby took a breath to steady herself—“we found something . . .”

I took a sip of my coffee. “What?”

“This is so hard for me to tell you, Jay. It really is . . . I went through his things. Because I was scared. I was scared at some of the things he was saying to us. He called me a stupid, uneducated whore . . . a wetback scum. He called your brother a miserable kike who could never get a job. His own father . . . I wanted to see where he was learning this from. What was influencing his crazy mind? And we found something. An application . . .”

“For a job?”

Gabby laughed. “
For a job?
If only for a job! It was an application to buy a gun! A twenty-gauge shotgun. From a gun store in the next town. And for what? To kill someone, Jay. Maybe kill us. You see these stories on the news, about what people like our son can do. We said, this kid can't have a gun . . . He's mentally unstable. He's been diagnosed by the state. He has a record with the police. These people cannot sell him a gun . . .”

I screwed up my eyes in disbelief. “
How?
”

“He lied, Jay. He lied about everything on his application. That he wasn't sick; that he had no record. Maybe they would have caught it, or maybe not—but we went there. To stop them. We told the man at the shop, ‘Are you out of your mind? You can't sell my son a weapon! Do you know what he might do with it?' We threw the application back in his face. We were scared . . .”

I said, “I don't blame you for being scared.” I thought of my troubled nephew with a gun, with the image of Columbine or Virginia Tech vivid in my mind, with all the anger and sociopathic behavior he had shown. “You did the right thing, Gabby.”

“I know we did the right thing. But then we found something else . . .” She looked at me, eyes downcast. “I can hardly even say it, Jay . . .”

“We found a kind of diary Evan was keeping,” Charlie interjected. “These ramblings, crazy things . . .”

“I have to cross myself to even tell you these things,” Gabriella said. “Things like, ‘Better to suck the dick of the devil than to live here with these two dead people one more day . . .' That's
us,
Jay. Our son was talking about us—your brother and me!” She dabbed at her eyes, shame and grief etched deeply there. “But we didn't know what to do . . . We knew he's acting truly crazy now. Off the charts. We can no longer control him. It's clear he hates us . . . That he wants to kill us. And then himself. And who knows, maybe take other people with him . . .”

“So what did you do?”

“We showed it to him.” Gabriella looked at me as if seeking dispensation. “Everything. You know what he did? He takes me by the hair, and twists me, like he wants to kill me right there, and throws me against the wall.
Look!
” She opened the top of her robe and showed me purplish marks covering her shoulder and onto her neck. “He's too big for us to fight now. Look at your brother. He's weak, old. He is no longer able to protect me. We didn't know what to do . . .”

“So what
did
you do?” I asked.

“What did we do?
We called the police,” Gabriella said.

Truth was, I had always pushed them to do exactly that. To put their son in custody when he assaulted them. But they never would. They never once pressed charges.
How could we?
they would say.
On
our own son.
And then the excuses would start.
He's just a boy. He's ashamed of what he's done. He promises to stay on his medication.
I guess I understood. Who wanted to make that kind of choice? But by not getting Evan help, by always protecting him and shielding him from treatment, I saw the events build that could lead nowhere but to catastrophe.

“When the police came”—Gabby rubbed her forehead, shaking her head—“Evan went out of control. He looked at me. ‘You do this to me, Mommy? You called the cops—on your own son!' I saw something in his eyes I had never seen before. Like an animal. I told him, ‘
You're sick, my son
.
You need some help
.' He grabbed me by the hair again and tried to beat the shit out of me. Your brother, he tried to help. But Evan threw him against the wall. He almost broke a rib. The cops saw it all. They finally got Evan in a choke hold. They came and took him away. To the hospital, in San Luis Obispo. To the mental ward. That's when I called you, Jay.”

“They placed him under a suicide watch,” Charlie said. “They took away his belt. And laces. Put him under twenty-four-hour observation. I've been there before. I know the drill. Apparently he told the doctor who first examined him that he wanted to kill himself. That the gun he was trying to buy was intended not for us, but for him.”

He shook his head. “We failed him, Jay. They said they were going to take care of him. Help him.” A mixture of grief and anger hung in his eyes. “We thought maybe we finally did the right thing. That maybe this was the best way. The social worker there told us they were going to keep him safe. That they'd watch him, for as long as they possibly could. Three weeks, they said. Then they'd find somewhere for him. I said, ‘Whatever you do, you can't put this kid back on the street. You see how angry he is? He'll blow people away  . . .' ”

“You know the name of the doctor?” I asked, something starting to tighten in me. They had trusted the authorities to take care of Evan, and they had let them down.

“Derosa. Mitchell Derosa. But we never even spoke to him. No one would speak to us. Only the social worker there. His name was Brian something. We have it written down. And a nurse. They said for us not to worry, they were going to have several doctors observe him, and they would get him into some kind of facility.”

Gabriella chortled cynically. “You know what we were thinking? We're thinking,
Maybe this is a good thing after all
. That's when I called you, Jay. You probably thought it was just for more money, but it was to tell you, maybe Evan is in a good place at last. We felt relieved.”

I nodded.

“But then they call and tell us they're going to release him! This social worker. Brian. After around four days. He says Evan is stable now and they had found a place for him.
Four days?
They said three weeks! I'm telling you this kid was psycho, Jay. I said, ‘Are you sure, so soon . . . ?' But they said, ‘Your son is an adult, Ms. Erlich,' and that they couldn't hold him indefinitely against his will, now that he had calmed down and was no longer a threat to himself. What kind of a crazy thing is this? I said, ‘You can't do that. Maybe he's an adult, but I am his mental guardian. You see the shape he was in.' But they say Evan agreed, and they're gonna put him in a good place.”

“What kind of place?” I asked.

“They didn't tell us shit!” Charlie snorted. “They wouldn't even talk to us. That's what happens when you're poor and on disability in this town.”

“But now they're scared,” Gabby said in a haughty tone. “Now they all see what happened. It was on the TV. On the news. They know they screwed up. They're all running to cover their own asses now.”

Something brushed against my leg. I looked down. A gray and white cat was nuzzling against me.

“That's Juliet,” Gabby said. “Poor baby—she misses Evan too.” She reached down and lifted the cat up, took her to the back door, and put her gently outside. “Get back outside. You can't be bothering us now.”

The cat slinked back to the yard and jumped onto the fence.

“So where did Evan finally end up?” I asked.

“You want to know where they put him?” Gabby replied, her tone hardening. “You want to know where they threw my son, like some sack of garbage? In this unsupervised home in Morro Bay. Completely unrestricted. With a bunch of fucking old people. Alzheimer's patients. Walking around like the living dead. Evan called me. He said, ‘Why did they put me in here? Why did they put me with all these old people, Mommy?'

“The woman who's in charge there said he went to take a walk. She just let him go. Waved him out the door. They don't give a shit. They get their money. Evan was just a voucher to her. A check from the state.
That's all!
They had him on so much medication. Seroquel. Two hundred milligrams. Two hundred milligrams is enough to drop an elephant, Jay. You know this stuff. You know what it does. It makes you act like a zombie. It takes away your will. She didn't care, as long as she got paid. My son went to take a walk and never came back. This woman, Anna, she called us late that night. Two days ago. Evan was missing. Where is he, she asks. She said she thought maybe he came home to us. But you know where he was, my son . . . ? You know where Evan was? He had climbed the fucking rock there, that's where he was. He was probably already dead.”

Anger flared up inside me. This just didn't wash. Every patient had a medical history. Treatment charts. Diagnoses and evaluations. They don't just dump people at will. In a place where they won't be watched.

“She just let him leave?”

“Yes. Walk out. I told you, she don't give a shit, Jay. That's the way it is here. But, believe me—she was scared when she called us. She knew she screwed up. And the next morning, my son, he turns up dead. He was up there on the rock, Jay. The whole stinking night. In the cold. Alone. Without anyone to watch over him.” She started to sob again. “My boy was on the rock. I want to sue that bitch.”

“You want to know what really hurts?” Charlie took her face and brought it against his shoulder. “We were watching the news that morning. Friday, I think. Or Saturday . . . I don't keep track of time so well anymore. They said some kid had jumped off Morro Bay Rock. A John Doe. No ID on him. We go, ‘Thank God that's not Evan. Thank God
he
is in a safe place.' And it's our own son, Jay! They were talking about Evan. We're listening to a report about our own son . . .”

He started to sob, loud choking tremors. Gabriella held his head in her arms. “We just failed you, Evan . . . We let you die.”

It was horrible. I didn't know what to do or feel, other than my hands balling into tight fists. Rich or poor, it didn't matter. There was a complete breakdown. Not only of treatment, but also of responsibility. And Evan was the victim of it. I knew in my world, this could never happen. Not without some kind of response, accountability.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“At the coroner's,” Charlie said. “They're doing their autopsy and tests. We can't even see him.”

Gabriella wiped her eyes. “He called me, you know. The day before. I asked, ‘Are you all right, Evan? You know I love you, don't you, my son?' And you know what he told me? He said, ‘I'm gonna make the best of it, Mommy.'
Make the best
. . . Does that sound like some kid who wanted to kill himself the next day? They say it's a suicide, but it doesn't sound like that to me. You know what I think? I don't think my son would kill himself. It sounds like murder, Jay. By the state. They took my son and screwed his head up on drugs, then dropped him in a place that wasn't right for him.
They murdered him.
”

As a doctor, I was always quick to assume that the system handled things correctly. Sure, mistakes were made, but generally it did things right. But as an uncle, I couldn't disagree.

It was like murder.

We sat around in silence for a while. Charlie and Gabriella just hugged each other, helpless and crying. Then Gabriella got up. She cleared the table, put the coffee mugs in the sink, and ran the water over them. Then she turned and faced me, her palms back against the counter. “At the end, it was very, very bad, Jay. You have no idea. Our son never left the house. He would just sit there, on that couch all day, never even talk, just smile at me. You know that little smile he had, like he had the whole world figured out. Like he knew the truth and no one else did.”

“I know it.” I wasn't sure whether to smile or shake my head in sorrow. I smiled.

“He said to me, just last week, before he did this . . . He said, ‘I think maybe I'd like to be a cop. Or an FBI agent.' He said he was talking to the police and they wanted him.” She cleared her throat derisively. “
A cop?
My son barely left the house. He didn't talk to anyone, Jay. No friends. No girls. Not even us.
Only to the fucking furnace!
He was dreaming. Like he always did, Jay—
dreaming
.” She looked at me. “He might never have gotten better—I understand that. But he didn't deserve to die.”