Pharmakon (43 page)

My days were hell, and my nights feverish. After the last list was made, I would pull Gunderfeldt from beneath my bed and ogle the snapshots of looniness with the same look I saw on my brother’s face when I had caught him beating his meat: repulsed, and yet attracted. By now my readings had extended beyond Gunderfeldt and the
DSM.
But I still could not decide which particular from of mental disorder I suffered from, since the symptoms of all the bad ones included phrases that applied to me: “has difficulty making friends”; “spends inordinate amounts of time doing repetitive and pointless actions” (casting, fly-fishing); “obsessive and compulsive behavior” (my mother had passed that one on to me); “violent fantasies of inflicting harm to himself and others” (every time my brother smirked a no on the drive to school, I thought about grabbing the steering wheel and driving us both into a ditch, just to wipe the smile off his face).

By the spring of eighth grade I didn’t know what ailed me, but I knew I was not well. Desperate to lose at least one of these symptoms, I sought out the friendship of the two most unpopular boys in my class—the Ortley twins. This pair of massive eighth-graders had already had to stay back, and would have been kicked out of school on numerous occasions if their mother had not been related to an aspirin fortune. Flakey with eczema, aggressively fearful due to lethal peanut allergies, I had nothing in common with the identically unpleasant brothers Chas and Peter except that I had a river and they liked to fish.

They had all the right gear: Orvis fly rods, Medalist reels, waders perfect for drowning. I wanted it to go well. Recognizing that I needed to make an effort if I wanted to feel less crazy, I even pretended I thought it was okay that they fished with live bait: eight-inch worms, live grasshoppers attached to hooks with model airplane glue. They even told me a story about plugging for bass with live mice. Still, I could not help but admire their results.

I watched in horror as their bloodworms pulled more trout from that creek than I had seen, much less caught, all year, with my father’s sportsmanship and wet flies. With each Ortley outing I grew sulkier and more resentful of the ungentlemanly tactics they used to spell success. Frustrated and embarrassed that my inability to fit in at St. Luke’s had reduced me to this level of low, I did not tell my father that I, too, had resorted to fishing with live bait.

On the second to last weekend of the school year, as the Ortleys and I stood midstream in adolescence, Chas suddenly asked, “Wanna see something wicked cool?”

Lacking my brother’s strength of character, I said, “Yeah, I guess.” Before I knew what I had agreed to, Chas’s twin, Peter, pulled a Zippo lighter and a bright red cherry bomb out of his pocket.

Firecrackers in general, and cherry bombs in particular, in my father’s cautionary dinner table tales were “invitations to losing a few fingers or an eye.” The excitement of the forbidden distracted me. The cherry bomb was being tied to a rock. I didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. Rock, with cherry bomb attached, was heaved into the pool I had been fishing. A moment later, a soggy “boom” erupted from the spring-fed depths, followed by a whoosh of muddy water and smoke-filled bubbles, followed by dead trout. The only symptom the
Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual: Mental Disorders
said I lacked, I had now acquired: “tortures animals.”

“Stop!” I shouted, but these friends I no longer wanted to have didn’t hear me. “I fucking mean it.”

“Don’t be a wuss.” Two cherry bombs were now being strung to a second rock.

“Put it down.” The lighter was aflame. What lit my fuse was that when I started to cry, they laughed. Feeling sorry for myself and the fish, mad at myself, angry about the fish, I swung wild. My new Shakespeare fly rod snapped clean just above the cork handle and broke across the bridge of Chas’s pug nose.

I didn’t see the blood. The bomb was lit. Peter Ortley was running toward my father’s favorite trout pool. The twin fuses sparkled in midair. It was a mistake to kick him in the balls. Rock and cherry-bombs bola’ed toward my head. I held up my hand to keep it from hitting me in the face. Reflex action kept it from blowing out my eye. I felt the heat of the explosion spread up my arm as the blast deafened me to the white noise of the river and Peter Ortley’s cries for help.

My hand was bloody and numb. His waders were filled with water. Both things happened just the way my father had said they would. Peter nearly drowned, and I lost the tip of my left index finger.

All three of us had to go to the hospital. I told my father everything that had happened. I was surprised he wasn’t more angry with me. I knew he hadn’t really listened to what I said when I overheard him tell my mother, “If nothing else, it shows he has a strong sense of self.” My father stuck up for his children just often enough to make it seem like it was your fault when he didn’t.

The Ortleys were expelled. The headmaster, being a fly-fisherman and a member of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, let me off with a warning. Now, in addition to all the other things I still wasn’t at St. Luke’s, I was now the new boy suck-up crazy enough to lose the end of a finger trying to save the lives of a bunch of fish he spent every weekend trying to kill.

I wasn’t the only one who was out of his mind. The night after I had my stitches taken out, we stayed up late watching TV. We cheered as Bobby Kennedy won the California primary. He’d just finished his acceptance speech, promised to see everybody in Chicago, and then he was dead.

By the start of my freshman year in high school, I was so desperate to be well, I resolved to be more like my brother, to say no to craziness. As we drove off down the drive for the first day of my second year at St. Luke’s in September 1968, I asked Willy, “What do you think my biggest flaw is?” I knew I was taking a risk.

“You’re not me.” Willy smirked, but at least he didn’t turn on the radio.

“I know, I’m me. But what I mean is, what could someone who’s in the position of being me do to make you, for instance, like me . . . more . . . a little.”

“Did Dad tell you to ask me this?”

“No.” He looked at me suspiciously, like he thought I had a tape recorder hidden in my briefcase.

“Because, Zach, I don’t dislike you, I feel sorry for you.”

“Why?” It was like getting someone else to pick my scab.

“Because you think Mom and Dad know everything.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then why do you say yes to everything they ask you?”

“It’s easier.” I felt stupid saying I wanted them to be happy.

“You’ve got to think for yourself. You’re almost fourteen years old. Grow up. Your problem is basically . . .”—Willy thought for a moment—“. . . a fundamental lack of character.”

“How do I get that?”

“You don’t get it, you earn it.”

“What would you do if I said I was ready to earn it, to work for it.”

“I’d say, as usual, you’re just telling somebody what they want to hear.”

“Hypothetically . . .”—I did my best imitation of my father— “theoretically, for the sake of argument, what could I do that would make you want me to sit down and hang out with you and your friends at lunch. And not just so one of them could pull the chair out from under me.”

Willy laughed and squeezed the hard, dirty rubber ball he kept in the front seat to strengthen his finger muscles while he was driving. “Get me a date with Constance Murdoch.”

“Who’s she?”

“A girl.”

“I figured that much.” I never heard my brother mention her before. Willy kept his interests in that department to himself. “What’s so special about her?”

“All the guys on the track team say she’s the best-looking girl in town. Shot every one of them down. If she’s the best, then why settle for less?” He was talking to himself. Still, it was the longest conversation we’d had in a number of years.

“Why don’t you ask her out yourself?”

“She goes to boarding school in Rhode Island.” My brother was still squeezing the rubber ball.

“Look, how am I going to introduce you to someone who doesn’t even go to school here? Give me something I have a chance at.”

“Do five miles under thirty.”

“What?”

“Run five miles in under half an hour.”

My brother was surprised when he saw me that afternoon at the tail end of a line of twenty-odd freshmen and sophomore boys signing up for the junior varsity cross-country team. He was even more surprised when I put on my sneakers and followed in his footsteps and began to run. We started out with a three-mile jog. I walked the second mile and limped the third.

That night, every muscle in my body screamed in protest. I felt like I had been disassembled and put back together incorrectly. After my mother helped me rub Ben-Gay on my legs, I got into bed stinking of menthol and reexamined what the
DSM
had to say about sadomasochism.

Much to my amazement, after two weeks of cross-country, my lungs ceased to burn, my legs stopped feeling like they were being flayed, and I was finally able to complete the three-mile course Coach Wyler called a “stroll” without becoming separated from my lunch. My father was so hopeful of a long-distance rapprochement between his sons, he bought me a pair of the same expensive kangaroo-hide running shoes Willy wore in his victories. They made me feel like I was running faster, even though I still came in last.

Mind, body, or heart. I’m still not sure which part of me was most ill suited to long-distance running. If the sun was shining and the sky blue and there was the slightest breeze at my back, I could not resist the urge to start off faster than was wise. And when it was cold and drizzly, I lagged behind right from the start, as if I were waiting for a change in the weather to inspire me.

On those rare occasions when I found myself in the lead and actually had a chance to beat someone, I would suddenly feel so unfamiliarly good about myself, my mind would wander off course. The sight of a pond, its surface glimmery with thin ice, would make me wonder how many snapping turtles were sleeping in the mud of its bottom. The vapor trail of a jet passing overhead at thirty thousand feet would prompt fantasies of myself not as I was but as the first-class passenger I would become once I had character.

Once I let one kid pass me in a track meet, I’d be so busy convincing myself that coming in second wouldn’t be so bad, my pace would slow even further, and then another boy would overtake me. And then as I struggled to lower my sights to third, another one would pass me. The worst thing was seeing my father clap when I came in last.

The final meet of the fall, I made my best showing, thirteenth out of twenty-six, the middle of the pack. Coach Wyler said, “Nice try.”

My mother said, “You’re getting better.”

My father waited until I caught my breath to ask me, “What are you thinking about out there?”

“Running.” I wasn’t about to tell my father the truth, and he knew it.

“You’re soft. Soft mentally and physically.”

“What?”

All the other dads were patting their sons on the back, giving them cups of cocoa. “I could take you right now. In street shoes. And I’m fifty years old.” He was fifty-one.

“No, you couldn’t.” Willy’s voice was cold and matter-of-fact. He didn’t like either one of us, but if he had to choose . . .

When I went out to put my book bag in the back of my parents’ Volvo, I heard my parents talking in the parking lot. My mother was mad at my father. “You shouldn’t have said that to Zach.”