Pharmakon (46 page)

Too high to grasp what had been momentarily illuminated, I let go of my father and the past when she took my hands in hers and peered at my flattened palm. “You have a cool life line.”

“How come?”

“It’s really short.” When she finished predicting the future, she didn’t let go of my hand. “Once I had this bad trip where I was suddenly sure I killed my parents but had forgotten about it. And then remembered it, like it was just, ‘Oh gee, I killed my parents.’ You know, like I’d left my purse in your car.”

“I don’t have a car.” As I said, I was high.

“That’s not the point of my bad trip. The point is, it really, really freaked me out that I killed them and forgot it and left them in the kitchen, like leftovers.” She started off like she was telling a funny story. Now she was crying.

“Everyone has crazy thoughts.” At that moment I was thinking about what it would be like to get naked with her in the shower.

“I think I’m having one now.”

“You mean, like an acid flashback?”

“No, just a crazy thought.”

“What is it?”

“That you tell girls about Casper just to get into their pants.” She smiled with tears on her cheeks. Then she pushed me back on the couch and began to tickle my stomach.

“You’re the first girl I ever told.” She liked hearing that. Pinning my arms back behind my head, she kissed me on the mouth, her tongue licking unseen wounds.

As she took my hands and guided them up under her sweater, I knew it was Casper who made it possible for me to touch her nipple with the fingertip I’d lost to a cherry bomb. It was Casper’s gravity that drew her close.

As we pulled off each other’s clothes, I saw him on the small screen in the back of my brain. I heard him say, “Don’t worry. I’ll be around.”

I was down to my underpants—she didn’t wear any—when we heard a knock on the door. “Constance, are you in there?”

I was so high, I didn’t recognize the voice until the door opened and I saw my brother standing there.

That night, my brother and Emory drove into New York City and got so blind drunk on the way home, the Skylark jumped the divider on Route 22. Emory ended up with a concussion. My brother broke his leg in two places—compound fracture. The police said they were lucky to be alive. When my father asked my brother why he did it, all Willy had to say was, “I wanted to see what I was missing.”

My brother never said a word to me about Constance. My father thought I quit the track team because Willy couldn’t run that spring. My mother thought it was for the best. “Zach likes to play games with other people” was how she put it.

Once word reached St. Luke’s that I was going out with Constance, aka Sunshine, my status rose. More titillating to my classmates than her lack of underwear or the fact that she had gotten kicked out of boarding school for drugs was the story that had won her heart (Sunshine even told her mother about it). Over hand-rolled joints and purloined beers, kids would ask me to tell them about my bogeyman. Having Casper in my life gave me far more character in the eyes of my peers than all my brother’s track trophies combined. I got good at telling the story, dropping it into conversations, using it to answer questions before they were asked. I kept Casper alive, for he had given me an identity and made me cool.

My popularity was a relief to my parents. Now that my head was screwed on straight, they felt it was safe to leave me home alone. They were wrong.

Teddy Kennedy gets so bombed he drives off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard and leaves his date to drown. The Manson family dines on acid, then eviscerates a pregnant movie star in the Hollywood Hills. A man takes a walk on the bright side of the moon, then a couple hundred thousand kids, stoned on peace, love, and (most of all) each other shut down the New York Thruway on the way to Woodstock. And then we find out about this army lieutenant who herded three hundred women and children into a ditch in a place called My Lai and shot ’em all. He said he was acting under orders. They say everybody in Vietnam smokes dope. It’s the only way they can get through it. If they weren’t high before they pulled the trigger, they were afterward. It seemed like everybody was operating under the influence of something in 1969.

Sunshine called it a contact high. She swore that if you’re just near someone who was really fucked up, you’d get fucked up on whatever they were fucked up on.

I never ran five miles in thirty minutes, and though I failed to earn my brother’s friendship in high school, I was compensated by the loss of my virginity—a fair bargain. I was sure as only a teenager can be that I had found something that would last forever. At night we would sneak out and meet at our river and slip into the water naked as the trout I no longer tried to catch.

Halfway through the summer, Sunshine stopped answering my calls. I figured she’d found someone older and cooler to swim with. Hoping I was wrong, needing to hear something that would make me understand, make me feel less guilty for bragging about our intimacy, I pounded on her parents’ door.

They told me Sunshine had been arrested for buying two pounds of Acapulco gold from an undercover agent in Washington Square Park. My father’s inquiries on the subject revealed that her parents had kept her out of jail by committing her to a private mental hospital called Payne Whitney. Dad told me it’d probably be six months before they let her write me a letter. I was surprised at how sorry he felt—for both of us.

Late at night, sleepless and hungry for dreams, I would think about how sometimes, after we’d gone skinny-dipping, we’d lie naked on flat river rocks warmed by the sun, and she’d take the damp end of her braid in her hand like it was a paintbrush and write messages down the length of my spine. I could never tell what she was spelling out. But sometimes, in the darkness just before sleep, when I’d be thinking of her, my brain would suddenly change channels, and I’d see Casper looking out at me from the video monitor of a security system that watched him sleep.

You might have thought that Sunshine’s fate would have scared me straight. My brain didn’t work that way. It seemed to me that drugs, like being sent to the loony bin, were part of the risk one took in being young.

If drugs weren’t part of your problem, they were part of your answer. At least, that’s how it was at St. Luke’s. Pot, mescaline, vodka: Rarely did I imbibe all three at the same time, but at least one figured in the equation of my idea of weekend fun. I knew I was burning brain cells, but thanks to my father, I knew I had over a hundred billion to blow. Like the Stones sang, time was on my side.

My dad helped make drugs, I took them. In the stoned logic of my teenage mind, my self-medication seemed like I was carrying on his work. Like the starship
Enterprise,
I was determined to go where, if not no man had, at least my father had not gone before.

By 1970, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I did my homework with my head between hundred-watt speakers that blasted the joys of sex and drugs. Since my father was, according to
Who’s Who,
one of the world’s leading authorities on memory, learning, and drugs, one might be tempted to criticize Dad for not suspecting I was conducting a drug study of my own. But in all fairness, my parents were not entirely to blame for not noticing my chemical drift.

Besides being a first-rate people pleaser, I was also an excellent liar. I loved my parents, but, like all children, I had reached that point where I no longer believed in them. My questions were varied, my suspicions vague. Had my father dosed Casper with something that had done him irreparable harm? Had Casper killed Jack? And if my father was responsible for Casper, and Casper was responsible for Jack, did that mean my father had a hand in Jack’s death? Was that why my mother had stopped sleeping in his bed? Why did Casper’s recapture make everything right again between them?

And was this nagging sense that I was not being told the whole truth the reason I felt free to keep them misinformed about my own state of mind? It wasn’t that my parents didn’t deserve the truth; it was just that in my heart, I did not believe they wanted it, at least not when it involved drugs. Mine or theirs.

The compulsive list-making my mother had taught me kept my head on straight enough for me to keep my grades up, but at night I had to write more and more reminders to myself. It wasn’t just schoolbooks and papers I had to remember; my lists now included notations such as “Find new hiding place for pot, buy air fresheners, remember to bring breath mints, use eyedrops, flush all roaches.”

By Christmas of ’70, five kids at St. Luke’s had been kicked out of school for drugs. The headmaster had a list, and I was on it. Whether I was a hypocrite or just a foot soldier in the assault on ethics, I realized that drugs weren’t a problem unless you got caught doing them. Since I was on the headmaster’s list, the only way to avoid getting caught, disappointing my parents, and still be able to get high was to tell a lie so large and preemptive, no one would suspect I had the balls to be so shameless.

When I told my father I wanted him to help me write an article for the school newspaper about the dangers of recreational drugs (working title: “What Comes Up Must Come Down”), he got that same dreamy smile that had appeared on his face when he caught me consulting the
DSM
to find out how crazy I was.

As it turned out, the research part of the article was fun for both of us. He took me to the headquarters of one of the big pharmaceutical companies, and we watched a 16 mm film of lab monkeys getting addicted to cocaine. They were hooked up to a drip, and all they had to do to get another hit of coke was push a button. After a couple of weeks they got so high that they began to eat their own fingers. Having not yet done cocaine, I was glad I wasn’t a lab monkey in a drug test.

I guess it was the animals being locked up alone in the cages with nothing to keep them company but the whirr of the camera and the buzz of cocaine that made me think of Casper. On the drive home, we stopped at a Stewart’s and had root-beer floats. My father said that that had been his and my mother’s idea of a big treat when they first met over the Bunsen burner. When I asked my father if I could look over any of the videos they took of drugs being tested on Casper, he winced and rubbed his forehead.

“That would be impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s unethical.”

My antidrug article appeared on the front page of the school newspaper. Letters an inch high: W
HAT
C
OMES
U
P
M
UST
C
OME
D
OWN
, subheading: “The Hidden Menace of Recreational Drugs.”

Everybody I smoked pot with at school thought I was a complete asshole, phonier than phony, right up there with Richard Nixon. One kid actually spit on me. Since I didn’t like to get high alone, I probably would have quit drugs now that I didn’t have anyone to do them with, if only the headmaster hadn’t decided to read the article out loud in chapel. When he got to the last paragraph, his voice cracked as he quoted me. “Why has our generation turned to drugs? Why do we want an imitation of life, rather than the real thing? I don’t have the answer to these questions, but St. Luke’s has taught me this much: If you don’t like your world, change it. Don’t run away from it.”

When he’d finished, the headmaster took out his handkerchief. Some say he blew his nose; others swear he wiped away a tear. Whatever, he announced, “Thank you, Zach Friedrich.” Slowly, he began to clap and motioned for me to stand up. Two by two, other hands began to join in. The applause built. Those who didn’t know me clapped because they thought I was someone else, someone even worthier than my brother had been, and those I had gotten high with, even the kid who spit on me, smirked as they mistook my hypocrisy for high irony. They thought I had deliberately made the headmaster look like a fool; they believed they were privy to another one of my secrets. Casper, drugs, school . . . I inadvertently turned them all into one huge joke.