The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (5 page)

“And then I stood up and it was like
whoa
—” Paht was saying. “I got the biggest rush, mahn, like you wouldn’t believe . . .”

My heart was pounding when I put the phone down. I was still in eighth grade and didn’t know what “rush” meant in the druggy sense, but I could imagine. Another time I walked home late from a friend’s house and saw the light on in my brother’s window, which fronted a fairly busy street in our genteel neighborhood. I leaned over a hedge and looked inside: Scott was sprawled naked on the bed, alone, staring through slitted eyes at the ceiling, slowly plucking at his pubic hair.

That year was the first and last time we were photographed as a family for our Christmas card, something my parents had always considered bourgeois. Perhaps they thought if we perpetuated an illusion of domestic serenity it would come true to some extent. Perhaps, too, there was a kind of curatorial impulse to preserve our little unit for posterity before the final wave broke and dispersed us. The photographer posed us under a tree in our backyard. I remember poring over the contact sheets a week or so later and finding something wrong with almost every shot: our two Saint Bernards, Gretchen and Bruno, kept lurching to their feet and turning their heads the wrong way; Scott couldn’t help but look moody and unpleasant, while I looked like a grinning idiot. Happily, a single photo was all but perfect: my parents were both beaming—aging well in spite of everything—the dogs were just so, Scott looked handsome and sane, and I looked as though I were caught in the midst of an orgasm, such was my almost frantic attempt to seem happy. The dogs too were smiling gamely, though Bruno was already suffering from the heart disease that would kill him within a month or so, and Gretchen followed close behind, and we didn’t have any more dogs after that.

ONE DAY THAT
spring I was sitting in my room with a few friends when I heard—when everybody heard—my mother weeping with perfect abandon in the adjacent master bedroom. We stopped whatever we were doing (some sort of board game) and looked at each other. I can imagine my thoughts at that moment: first, I made a mental note never to have friends at my house en masse again, and then it occurred to me, as I looked at their stunned and staring faces, that everyone but me came from a conventional middle-class home where the worst disasters were kept under wraps, and finally I decided I’d better go see what the deal was. I asked my friends to let themselves out, and they were happy to oblige.

Marlies was prostrate on the bed, though I noticed with annoyance that she kept her head averted so that her awful noises were unmuffled by the pillow. I’d seen her cry maybe five times before, but never like this. Something terrible had happened, all right. I sat beside her, patting her back, and warily asked what was the matter. Amid harrowing glottal sobs she told me:

“Scott’s on d-
drugs
. . . long time now . . . everything . . .”

“Who told you this?” I asked.

“Everybody knows. Everybody at the GBR”—Grand Boulevard Restaurant, where Scott was a busboy—“t-talks about it . . . I don’t know what to
do
. He doesn’t listen to—to . . . I can’t tell P-papa . . .”

Scott appeared in the doorway. He looked apprehensive in a vaguely amused way, as though he knew what was happening and found it absurd like everything else.

“What’s going on?”

“She says you’re taking
drugs
.” I tried to make my voice sound a little weepy too, but it didn’t come off. With a resigned smirk, my brother took my place on the bed and made to comfort my mother. For a minute or so I stood glowering at him, but I got the impression they wanted to be alone.

MY BROTHER CONCEDED
his pot smoking but said that the other rumors (PCP, THC, various pills and powders) were fucking lies. He also made it clear that pot was no big deal and he had no intention of quitting. In fact he became a lot less furtive after that. He openly subscribed to
High Times
and kept elaborate paraphernalia in his room; I remember a two-foot bong called “the Skydiver” that involved pulling a ripcord to uncork the stop and release a massive hit of smoke. There was always a fresh “lid” of pot in the top right-hand drawer of his desk, along with cigarette papers and a nifty rolling device that produced joints as taut as Marlboros. All this was probably to the good—he didn’t have to pretend anymore in that creepy wide-eyed way of his—but he also insisted on talking about it. On the rare occasions that the four of us still had dinner together, my brother would proselytize about how cool it was to watch this or that movie, or listen to this or that record, while stoned. Marlies tended to be mildly deploring in a this-too-shall-pass sort of way, but Burck’s lips would thin and he’d chew his food with a kind of haggard bitterness.

Now that my friends and I were freshmen in high school, we’d decided to smoke marijuana too, or at least try it. I didn’t tell Scott: now that he was a known stoner with a couple of car wrecks under his belt, I was indisputably the Good Son and wanted to keep it that way. The problem was getting the stuff. The three or four big dealers in school were all friends of my brother, and the whole crowd spent every spare moment on the “smoking porch” talking about getting high. Finally we bought a few joints for fifty cents apiece from one of the more peripheral friends, who called the stuff “killer Okie weed” and tried to entice us to buy a whole lid for ten dollars. We smoked the joints during halftime of a high school football game, sitting on the grass behind an unmanned concession stand.

The next morning my brother stood in the bathroom door with a gloomy, browbeating look.

“Don’t you start getting into this,” he said.

“What’re you talking about?”

“You know.”

So the pot dealer had told my brother. I went back to brushing my teeth, while my brother stood there watching me.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, and spat. “I didn’t even get off. I have no idea what the big deal is.”

This was true. And who was my brother to say no? Who indeed. A few days later—perhaps that same day—he reversed himself, insisting that I make an “informed decision” about smoking pot.

“I already have,” I said. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“Just a few more times.”

“No, thanks.”

The following Monday, Scott pulled his Porsche into a little park on our way to school and began loading his bong. He made the thing hiss and gurgle and then passed it over. I took a hit and coughed explosively, soaking my lap with bong water. The stains didn’t show on my navy corduroys, but all the potheads at school observed that I “reeked,” while my sexy English teacher gave me a look of knowing admonishment. And I wasn’t even stoned.

THAT FALL MY
brother and I were in the high school play,
Death Takes a Holiday
. Scott had the lead as the dashing, vaguely foreign Prince Sirki (a.k.a. Death), and I was the sybaritic old Baron who engages the Prince in philosophical colloquies about a Life Well Spent. A few years back I’d been enrolled in the Children’s Theater Workshop at Oklahoma City University, and was deemed good enough to be picked out of a class of fifteen or so to play the juvenile role in a college production of
Ah, Wilderness!
Scott was contemptuous: “Acting is more than just memorizing lines,” he sneered, when he caught me practicing in front of a mirror. He thought I was copying him again. Around that time he’d been reading a lot of Salinger and hence wrote a short story about an impossibly precocious toddler who kills himself because the adult world is a terrible place. Inspired by his example, I began a story titled “Don’t Go into the Basement” about a monster in a basement. I was in the home stretch—the heroine was descending the steps, rather foolishly under the circumstances—when my brother, peeking over my shoulder, began reading aloud with leering disdain. Neither of our fiction-writing careers progressed much further.

But we made a good team as actors, or rather we enjoyed working together. My brother was one of the few seniors in the cast of
Death Takes a Holiday
, and he comported himself like Brando on the set of
The Godfather
—like a zany paterfamilias, mooning the other actors, obscenely improvising, cutting up a lot in general. Of course he was stoned most of the time. Our drama teacher was a clueless woman who wanted to be called by her first name; she was fired after that first year on the job. I can’t remember her ever reproaching my brother.

Scott seemed to think his talent had outgrown our provincial high school, or at least this particular production. The day before dress rehearsal he asked me to run lines with him, whereupon the worst was revealed: he could only recite odds and ends that he’d soaked up through repetition, and there were quite a few longer speeches that he hadn’t even begun to memorize. I was appalled; I was going down with the same ship after all.

“What the hell have you been
doing
these past two months?” I said with sincere amazement.

His reaction was curious. Without a word or change of expression he yanked me to my feet and punched me in the chest as hard as he could. I managed to gasp some sort of protest, and he shoved me over a table in our living room and began kicking me there on the floor. Anything I said or did seemed to provoke him, so I stopped struggling and simply grunted with what I hoped was a kind of poignant agony. If anything, this had the opposite effect: when one of his kicks made my head crack against a doorjamb, I affected a semiconscious daze (“
Unnnh
”) and my brother began taunting me. “ ‘
Unnnh
’—! ‘
Unnnh
’—!” he mimicked, kicking. The size difference between us was greater than ever (I was maybe five-five, the victim of a late puberty), and so he went on kicking and hitting me from room to room, careful not to mark my face lest our parents find out how bad the beating was. Toward the end he began to accompany his blows with a histrionic monologue about how everyone was
against
him (kick), how no one would
help
him (kick), and so on. We ended up in our father’s study. I cringed on the sofa while my brother stood over me ranting and waving his fist. Then he fell to his knees and threw his head in my lap. He was crying or pretending to cry. The idea was that
I
should feel sorry for
him
.

I didn’t feel sorry for him. He’d just beaten the shit out of me because he felt like blowing off steam, and now he was pretending to be in the midst of a terrible strain—because nobody would
help
him. I resolved to bide my time until this crazy bastard was out of the house, to be careful above all, and to make him pay for this little episode somewhere down the road.

I told nobody. Too humiliating. On the opening night of the play I was joking around in the dressing room—I’d flung off my shirt and begun flexing my spindly chest—and a girl in the cast, for whose benefit I flexed, said “Oh my
God
” and covered her mouth. My chest was an ugly mass of bruises, as though I’d been trampled by something large and hoofed. I can’t remember what excuse I made.

One benefit of my brother’s cathartic outburst was that it sobered him into memorizing his lines somewhat. Every time he was about to speak onstage there was a fraught little pause, as though he were pondering the world and its sorrows, but I knew the truth. “Come come, your Highness!” I couldn’t resist ad-libbing in my role as the bluff old Baron. “Life is short! Out with it!”

A WEEK OR
so later, when it was clear I wasn’t going to rat him out to our parents, my brother gave me a peace offering: several fluffy buds of high-grade marijuana, stuffed in one of those plastic 35-millimeter film containers. I’d noticed in my brother’s bankbook a recent lavish withdrawal of eighty-five dollars (leaving the total balance in two figures), and I assumed this was part of that purchase. He’d handed it to me with some brusque remark as we drove to school one day. I didn’t bother telling him I didn’t want it, as he’d only become abusive and perhaps contrive to beat the shit out of me again. When I got home that afternoon I tossed the little canister into some bushes under my bedroom window, which made me feel virtuous, or anyway better than my brother.

I retrieved it the following weekend, when my friend Matt (“Yo soy Mateo”) and I went to the French Market Mall to see
Saturday Night Fever
. That afternoon he’d ridden his bike to a head shop in a distant neighborhood, where he bought a pipe that appeared to be cobbled together from bits of cast-off plumbing. Matt proposed to smoke some ridiculous amount of dirt weed—neither of us had really gotten high yet, but Matt was enamored with the whole hobbyist side of pot smoking and determined to persevere—so I told him about the better stuff I’d tossed in the hedge. We smoked two fat buds of it in a field beyond the parking lot and then hurried to get in line for the movie. The mall’s Vieux Carré facade seemed not only kitschy but surreal and faintly menacing; the shortest kid in our class, Phil Philbin, came up to us in line and said hello; for some reason I felt a sudden, immense pity for Phil and began patting his head. Then I was watching the movie and then the movie was over. I remembered exactly this much: Travolta’s feet gliding along the sidewalk during the opening credits, his father hitting his hair at the dinner table, and Donna Pescow pulling a train in the car and crying about it afterward. I had no idea what Travolta was doing with that other, skinnier woman at the end of the movie, or why the movie had ended at all. Years later, when I watched it again, I was struck by how it all fit together.

From then on I never failed to get high when I smoked, no matter what the quality of the dope. That would have been fine, except I didn’t much like being stoned and still don’t; it was a phase that pretty much ended after my freshman year—to be exact, after a “Youth Group” session at the parish house in our neighborhood, where we’d gather once a week to play Ping-Pong and Foosball and the like, or so the alibi went. I spent one of these nights smoking a bong in Paht’s car with a group of people I hardly knew. The whole scene depressed me: I knew Paht would brag to my brother about how wasted he’d gotten me, that he and the others would still be getting stoned and talking about it for many dreary, dreary years to come. But the worst part was when my father stopped in my room afterward to say good night; he smelled smoke in my hair and asked me about it. I mumbled something about how a lot of people smoked at these Youth Group things, that the place was just really smoky, and he seemed to accept this and went away. My heart was banging so hard the blanket trembled.