If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir (20 page)

By the time I pulled into my mother’s driveway I’d forgotten how I got there. Suddenly I was in her living room drinking coffee. The police were gone. After the accident, miraculously, Eric had only damaged his hand with all the wailing and flinging of his body against walls, the punched holes in his closet door, and the lines of Percocet snorted off an old Fleetwood Mac CD case. He slept and his women drank coffee, called insurance companies, and made plans for the next rehab. He slept and we waited. He slept and we watched.

The fever will soon break, I can tell. I am slick and swollen as a jellyfish, the one Eric sliced open as a kid on the beach with
his brand-new Swiss Army knife, tearing through his finger in the process. I saw it happen, all that young blood spilling onto the cool sand. He ran back to our mother, who was sitting in her chair with a book, smoking peacefully. She was the color of cinnamon then, her chest still the palest pink from the blood vessels rupturing there, in slow motion and over time, like exploding stars. As she ages, her chest will turn deep red, a road map of every soothing cigarette. Eric’s reaction to his misadventure with the jellyfish was quick, impulsive, and childlike. He buried his knife in the sand and cried out, “The jellyfish bit me! The jellyfish bit me!” My mother sighed and put out her cigarette in the sand and kissed his bleeding pinky. All of that was fine, normal, healthy then. But over the years, Eric’s default response to his own behavior remains the same.
It wasn’t my fault!
And the lies, so many lies—he believes his own bullshit. Really believes it.
That’s the disease talking
, they say, and I try to believe that, too.

For years I believed, but all I see, finally, is my brother’s hard familiar face and the illness that my mother continues to try and kiss away with love and money and blunt maternal strength until she, we, are all as sick as Eric—the dead father’s legacy, this disease. For a while, I’d felt responsible for Eric’s addiction because I handed him pot for the first time, but I realized it would have happened anyway. My brother was born with a homing device for drugs. Self-medicating is only one symptom of his bipolar disorder. There’s an old joke in AA:
The difference between an alcoholic and a drug addict is that an alcoholic will steal your wallet, while the drug addict will steal your
wallet and help you look for it later
. In this way, the lies become the truth. They
are
his truth, the facts having crumbled to ash.

In Florida, it is morning and the three of us are weary. We must walk. We walk and hold hands on the beach. We look like the album cover for a family folk band. We meet a guy named Jeff. He lives “where the wind blows him, man.” Says, “Woah, what’s wrong with you, man?” I tell him I am sick. Jeff has a ponytail and bums a cigarette. We watch the ocean and smoke. We don’t talk. Eric puts a towel over my shoulders. I think of the footage of a tsunami I watched recently. It was difficult not to sense some malevolent deity here, rising up and mouth agape, ready to swallow us for our sins.

Here we’d sit, waiting.

It is overcast today and the ocean wind blows back at us a warning. Palm trees shudder, a hint of sex, a flash of Mother Nature’s fleshy thigh. In this light, I see now that Eric is going bald, fallibility rising to the surface. He digs his heels into the sand until his toes find water.
I can see it, Little Brother; almost there—China
. I watch desire working on his jaw, appetite gnawing every joint. He cannot sit still.
Here
, I want to scream,
is my surgeon’s blade. Hold still and I’ll cut the sickness out of every bone and suck them clean. Yours, mine. Here it is; here, I have it
.

Run.

Finally, Jeff gets up and says he has to get back to work. He washes dishes at a nearby restaurant. “My son needs a job,” my mother blurts out. “Could you find him a job?” She is pleading, though I know it had not been her intention. Eric looks away, embarrassed.

“Sorry, man,” Jeff says, and we can see that he is. “I’m lucky I got myself a job.” He picks up his duffel bag and slings it over a broad, tanned shoulder. He looks over at me, slumping under the towel, staring and vacant. A job. Don’t I have one of those somewhere? My own little plot to tend? His expression changes as he realizes what’s really going on here, that this isn’t just some half-baked family reunion, some pleasure cruise through the tropics, the three of us squatting on this beach, sans bathing suits and suntan lotion,
mid-August in Florida, for God’s sake
, shivering in our sweat, bug-eyed from exhaustion.

This is not where we ought to be, beating our brains against the rocks on this shore and then standing back to survey the wreckage, wondering dumbly where we went wrong.
We are not helping him, are we?
Free dinners and a new pair of jeans won’t do the trick. There is no reviving this horse, no A for effort, no stopping the ocean—be it so inclined—from reaching out right now and breaking our scrawny necks in two.

“You should get that fever checked out,” Jeff says to me, turning to walk back up the beach. And then I, too, almost beg him to stay.

Later, we walk back to the motel, Eric leading us through the pearlescent, shrink-wrapped streets of Delray Beach, past the spit-shined bistros and fusion taquerias, feathery sago palms wrapped in hot white lights and poised, sentry-like, on every patio. Waiters stand in air-conditioned entranceways, pressed and tucked, surveying orders and women’s formidable pumps. These women, I notice, totter, too.

And then on into the pink slums, where everything is shredded, jacked, and naked, and we feel free to come undone.

Another year passes—August to August—a year of rehabs, relapses, and incarcerations. A year of purgatory, a year of waiting for the death that never quite comes, but comes close so many times I nearly go mad. Our mother wears her grief like a slit gown. August 26, 2011. One last visit before I move to Vermont. She and I walk side by side on the New Jersey coastline, listening to the alarms howling in the distance, demanding our immediate departure in the days before what is supposed to be a devastating hurricane. Irene, they call her, and we hum her tune.
Come on, Irene
. We want to stay on, but evacuation orders eventually drive us from the tiny barrier island and back to our own homes, hundreds of miles apart. We have been living so long under the threat of disaster that its physical manifestation would be a relief, I think. We might welcome the winds and stand open-armed and knock-kneed while she weeps at our feet and shoves glass down our throats. Why the cutters cut and the jumpers jump and the junkies drive needles through their hearts, and why, one night in early August, I drink every drop of alcohol I can find in my cupboards and then vomit violently—that we might find a pain we can name and point to and say,
This
is it.

Irene comes and goes.

We wake. My mother, my brother, and me. We wake and wake and wake.
Give it to God
, they say,
that the curtains might close
.

OCTOBER 10, 2011.

My mother picks Eric up from the halfway house in Northeast Philly where he’s been staying. It is 10
AM
. The halfway house is the right side of a narrow duplex. Houses brick and broken. Next to the halfway house is the crack house. Next to the crack house is the whorehouse. Next to the whorehouse is a family with two adorable little girls. There is a picnic table beside the halfway house with a single clematis vine wrapped around its base. The second- and third-floor windows have bars. It is not a boisterous block. People don’t gather on stoops or around the open doors of parked cars. Music isn’t coming from windows or boom boxes; women aren’t shouting. With the exception of the men from the halfway house, who sit on top of the picnic table and smoke, the few people on the street move quickly and deliberately.

You go about your business and you get gone.

As my mother idles out front, men wander in and out of the screen door, letting it slam against the doorframe every time. She watches for her son’s face somewhere in this procession of baggy clothes and hunched shoulders. These are men from everywhere, of all ages. Men with dirty fingernails, mostly, and scraggly facial hair, and receding hairlines. Men with a sense of humor. Men without jobs. Men who make each other spaghetti at night. Men who watch movies in groups of ten, sitting on a sofa, stretched out on the floor. Fat men and very skinny men. Levi’s and baseball caps. Transient men without lovers. Or men with ex-wives and children far away. They are as familiar to her as her ex-husband, and now, as her own child. She grew up with these men and these men stuck around. She thinks she knows these men well, how they think and why they do what they do.

It is tempting to put all of these men into a box and watch them not even try to get out. It is tempting to impose your expectations on them and watch them not care. It is tempting not to look at your own failures, which are often so fucking ordinary.

Eric plans to stay for a few days. Though he claims to be sober, he is not well. He is having trouble sleeping. He is depressed and lonely. He’d called our mother in hysterics last night and she agreed to pick him up, though she’s nervous about it. He
tends to unravel when he is with her. There is always the possibility of a scene or a relapse or that he will steal something of hers and use the money for drugs. Still, why should she not pick up her child in his time of need?

Wouldn’t she do the same for Jess?
he’d argued.

She would.

And wouldn’t she do whatever it took to help her child? Her
child
?

Yes.

And without evidence he’s been using, has she any right to accuse him?

She does not.

She takes Eric to the psychiatrist so that he might get some medication to help with his unbearable anxiety and depression, to a doctor who has treated our whole family at one time or another, a man well into his eighties and unprepared to deal with the history of an addict and a convict. It is one o’clock in the afternoon. He knew our father. He knows our grandfather. He’s met us both before.

The doctor is wearing two different shoes today, Eric tells her later in the car—one black, one brown.

These details, all of these details—this is what I do not want to know anymore. Every story about Eric has an arc that threatens to catapult me into oblivion. I have to get off the ride. I watch the way these years have laid into my mother’s body like an abusive lover; the ecstatic highs of his wellness and the crashing
lows of his relapses. Who can stand this shit? Who would lie down only to be bullwhipped across the heart? Do it enough and you’re apt to forget how else to be. That’s you, the woman on the floor. There, still red from prayer.

I miss my brother. I love my brother, but I can’t be near him. I pack my bags and keep my eyes on the ground, only glancing back.