The Unprofessionals (9 page)

S
OMEHOW, SOMETIME
in September, they let him go back to New York. But his mother went with him—it was a foible of their distorted thinking he had to tolerate, he said. He was forced to move to a different apartment, and his mother had set herself the job of organizing his possessions.

When he called me, always in secret from his cell phone, he said he was trying to escape the clatter of pots and pans she was unpacking in the small kitchen, the kind of kitchen kids in his generation were cursed with at the time. I knew of one student on the Lower East Side who had a bathtub in his kitchen. But that was considered good, not bad. Most kids were living in tiny dungeons without any tubs at all.

My friend, this boy, now lived in something that had once been a building.

He had moved out of his college apartment into a better apartment for graduate school but ended up going to rehab instead. After that, he had no choice other than to move into a small apartment his parents kept in New York.

I had walked him back to this place when he was staying there, his first semester of college, the night he viewed my husband's shirt. The apartments, as well as the whole interior of the building, had been ripped out and a warren of cells had been put in—constructed or something less than constructed—and rented as apartments. The lobby—I couldn't describe that, or the elevator, because it was dark gray and lumpy, with mirrors everywhere, and I had to wear tinted glasses and keep my eyes on something else in order to avoid seeing it too clearly.

The elevator in our old building—yes, graffiti on the walls, including the f-word and a series of swastikas, but at least the elevator walls were wood and the halls were plaster. I didn't recognize the building materials used in the boy's unfortunate new dwelling. They were all fake something, I couldn't tell what—maybe cement or concrete. And the narrow, dark hallways, with everything painted dark gray—it looked like a prison I'd seen in a documentary about prisons in countries I'd never heard of.

“What's your mother doing there?” I asked.

“Who knows. They think I can't do anything for myself anymore.”

“But you lived alone those four years in college. You graduated and were accepted into graduate school.”

“It's unbelievable,” he said.

Then I asked, as I'd done many times before, “Have you read the book
A Mother's Kisses
?” I thought I'd sent it to him a couple of times by then, until it was out of print for a while and then reissued as a paperback with an especially bad and unrelated cover. When I saw the cover, I sent the book back to the bookstore with instructions to notify the publisher that the cover was the reason for the return.

The important part was that he hadn't read the book, or any book I'd recommended. And he'd tricked me into thinking his mother was just like that other boy's mother. I wanted to know why our conversations were secret. If his mother answered the phone, she'd tell me about how she was unpacking.

“She's reorganizing my medicine chest in a way I can't find anything,” he said. I figured he meant things like shaving cream and toothpaste.

I didn't know that people in that condition were organized by parents, as if starting college or camp, and then left alone to fend for themselves. Alone in New York, no school, no job, friends all dispersed to graduate school elsewhere.

“When is she leaving?” I'd ask him. No one mentioned that he was a heroin-wrecked invalid.

“Any day now, I hope,” he'd say, always sotto voce. Then sometimes a sentence would be called into the other room, or roomette, as the apartment didn't have rooms as we know them to be. “Mom, where'd you put that razor Dad gave me?” or “Where's the cereal box from Healthy Pleasures?”

 

THEN SHE
was gone, but in a few days she was back. Still, no one told me what was happening. What is the life of a recovering addict? I should have read up on it, but it was too sordid to think about the boy in this way.

From September through October, I had a sick feeling. I was naturally sickened by the thought of New York City, especially in the permanently hot fall weather. Then there was the thought of a new generation of young people trying to live there—this young person in particular in that dank cell block without any life structure.

A
FTER HIS MOTHER
left, he settled into some form of life. He'd sound tired or sleepy, or way up, as on the night his close friend came to call. It was eleven-thirty or so. His phone had been busy the whole hour before. He had on his happiest voice and tone. This must be the origin of the word “up” when used in drug parlance.

“I can't talk because a friend is coming over. She'll be here any minute,” he said.

In my naïve manner, I assumed it was a friend or a girlfriend. Underneath, I may have known that wasn't likely.

He asked, “What's happening?” I gave a brief run-through of my condition of emptiness.

“My friend who's coming over has the same kind of problems as you do,” he said.

“How could a friend of yours have the same kind of problems I have?” I asked. “How old is she?”

“Forty-nine,” he said.

That made me laugh. Then I said, “How could a forty-nine-year-old woman be coming over at midnight?”

“We have tea and we talk,” he said. “We discuss her problems.”

“For how long?”

“Sometimes all night,” he said.

“Is she married, or what?” I asked.

“She lives with a guy who's mean to her. Sometimes he comes over, too. Then he leaves and she and I talk. She never sleeps at night. They're free to call me at any hour, and I, them.” The construction “I, them” startled me.

“What does she do in the daytime?”

“Nothing. She used to be in the film business in L.A.,” he said.

That was a tip-off. But it didn't tip me off.

When I thought about the visit from the forty-nine-year-old friend, the visit didn't seem right. Her name sounded like a made-up name. The boy sounded too happy when I heard him greet the forty-nine-year-old guest and her fifty-five-year-old boyfriend while he was still talking to me on the cordless phone.

What could be so exciting about such a visit? I knew how much fun it was to talk to this boy, and I figured these could be two more similar cases, like the guy who set his chest on fire, and me—this was the most fun in their lives, or our lives, but what about the boy, what was he doing with these people?

The next time we spoke I asked him. He said that the man was in the building-contracting business—a bad sign, I thought. He'd escorted the woman to the boy's apartment and soon left. In retrospect, a drug scenario was the only one that made sense. They were hands-on dealers. Maybe the boyfriend obtained the drugs, then this forty-nine-year-old woman stayed with the customer and they used some drugs together. This made me remember a similar story in the
Enquirer
about John Belushi's drug dealer.

When I mentioned John Belushi's case to the boy later on, after his situation was out in the open, I asked, “Didn't you think it was dangerous?”

“I had a reliable source,” he said.

Then I said, “If John Belushi and Janis Joplin didn't have a reliable source, how could you?” I knew he didn't like, or detested, Jimi Hendrix, so I left him out. When he didn't have an answer, I said, “If you're thinking of doing this again, you should go to England, where it's legal and safely administered. That's what Marianne Faithfull did.”

“Who's Marianne Faithfull?” he said without interest. “Some ex-hippie?”

 

BUT AT
the time, that fall, I could feel only envy at the thought of what the boy had me believe was an all-night tea party. I could always drum up a feeling of inferiority to his new friend. He said that she looked like she came from Connecticut, whatever he thought that meant. It wasn't the looks I felt inferior about. It was the admiration in his voice when he talked about her.

He liked everyone to look like the models I remembered in the Rheingold girls contest from the 1950s. Six models who looked almost exactly alike were photographed for a small, standing cardboard poster, and customers at grocery stores could vote for whichever one they chose. When I asked my mother which one she would vote for, she said, “None. They all have a flat look.”

I reminded the boy that the 1950s were over and all kinds of people lived in Connecticut now, even New Canaan. “David Letterman lives in New Canaan,” I said.

I reminded him that he himself was from Massachusetts, equal or superior as a state, and had lived there his whole life until he went to college in New York.

“But she's from Fairfield or Darien,” he said. “Where we lived was near Cambridge. It was different. Professors, doctors, Jews, Indians, everything.”

“That sounds better to me,” I said.

“People from her background have a smoother path in life,” he said.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“It seems less comical.”

I'd call every few days, then give up for a while. It was easier to imagine he had the friends than to think he was smoking heroin from a pipe. I didn't even know it could be smoked. Later, when his father told me about the boy's smoking of heroin, I could only picture a small black licorice pipe that children play with and then eat.

A
FTER A FEW WEEKS
I called his father, or mother—whoever answered the phone. He was back with them in Los Angeles. Something had happened. They didn't say what. They summed it up—he couldn't take care of himself, get it together to have meals, and go to a job or to school. He had to live with them for a while.

The period of blank space began—the space of not knowing. He was going to take some classes or he was getting a job. But somehow as the time passed, he never took the classes or started any job.

One day when I called, his father said, “He bought some cocaine in Santa Monica.”

It turned out that the boy didn't want to go to the most highly recommended rehab place, in Arizona. He wouldn't say why. When I'd told him about it before, he'd said, “They give everyone a horse.”

“How do you mean, to take care of?” I said.

“Right, to take care of,” he said.

“I'm sure they don't force you to have a horse,” I said. “You could have a dog instead.”

“I don't think so. I've met kids at other rehabs who've been there,” he said. “It has to be a horse.”

He was permitted to choose the place he wanted to attend. When I heard the name of the place, in or near Los Angeles, it sounded like a TV show, a Hollywood movie, or a deodorant.

“That's what he wanted, so that's where he is,” his father told me.

“Can they get phone calls from the outside?” I asked.

“I don't know. I'll ask him,” his father said. I knew that meant I'd never hear the answer. “I'll ask” was a technique the busy dean of the medical school had learned in order to get rid of people and their questions.

“You must feel relieved,” I said. I assumed in my ignorant way that the addict goes to the place, the addict is safe, worries are over for a time.

“Yes, relieved that we don't have to be watching him,” his father said.

Later on, I found out that some recovering addicts don't even like the rehabs and even commit suicide while in these places. But back in my ignorant state, I was relieved, too. I pictured the boy in groups where he was given substitute drugs.

When I asked his father how the stay was going, he said, “Good. He asked for some things—books, a shirt.”

“Which books?” I asked. I didn't ask about the shirt. The boy who'd been so fastidious about shirt pressing was now in a place where he had to ask for clothes from home. Probably the other inmates wore T-shirts, T-shirts with writing and names of things on them.

The boy and I had discussed how much we couldn't stand that. I had to turn off the David Letterman show when he sent the camera outside to film the people on the streets, people with T-shirts hanging out of shorts—overweight big-legged people in sneakers—all this in color. The Groucho Marx audience of my childhood in black and white was so much more pleasant to see. Polite, repressed grown-ups in suits, hats, gloves—everything I disliked at the time.

I pictured my friend in a circle of addicts dressed in those kinds of T-shirts. I thought that it must be like a prison where the inmates exchange and share bad new habits.

I hoped he had a private room, although he'd started out well in college, tolerating strange dormitory living conditions during orientation, where students of all ages, from many different departments, were thrown together haphazardly as roommates. His temporary college roommate was a forty-four-year-old Swedish photographer who dressed all in black—black turtleneck, jacket, chinos, shoes, and socks. The roommate would come back to the room late at night with noisy parcels crunching into one another. The boy told me, “He apologizes and says, ‘Presents for the wife.'” This was the first time I heard the boy do his Swedish accent.

When he returned home and I asked about the rehab place, he said, “Oh, I don't want to talk about that.” It was the first time I'd heard him speak in a new, dark voice.

In the next conversation, I asked, “Did you at least meet anyone interesting there?”

“A few,” he said. He met some movie stars I'd never heard of. He named their movies and TV programs. I'd never heard of those, either. He named a girl who was the daughter of some singer I'd never heard of. I asked what her addiction was and he said, “Marijuana.” She'd already been to that place in Arizona, he said, but I was unable to keep my mind on all these different addicts, their drug habits, and their rehab experiences.

 

I SETTLED
into accepting that I couldn't know what the boy's life really was.
Boys' Life,
I remembered, was the name of an antique magazine or a book. Those boys, Boy Scouts and such, were shown in the book or magazine rubbing sticks together to build campfires outdoors. The boys participated in every kind of wholesome outdoor activity, unlike the boy I knew, whose favorite outdoor activity was driving.

When he'd gotten his driver's license in high school, he was as happy as possible—for him. He described going for a “nice crisp drive” in his father's car around the Wellesley suburbs. I said that the word “crisp” referred to walking—a walk on a crisp fall day. His reply: He kept the sunroof open, or the windows open an inch or two, before he got up to the main road.

 

WHEN HE
was twelve or thirteen, his parents had insisted he do something for the summer with other kids his age. “They're making me have a part in
Brigadoon,
” he said. It was an amateur production in a kind of theater camp. I didn't know
Brigadoon
and lumped it in with other musicals I didn't care about.

The production was going on right near New Haven, and on his lunch hour he'd walk into New Haven and go to a used-book store. “The owner is an ex-hippie,” he said. “The kind with a gray ponytail.”

“I can't stand that,” I said.

“Me neither. But he's not the worst of that ilk, he's not as slovenly as some. He's suspicious of me, he watches me the whole time. He's in love with every book in the store. He doesn't want to sell any of them. He comes over and asks what I'm looking for and then he tells me the history of it and the love story he has with each book and how he got it.”

The thought of the boy, forced into
Brigadoon,
walking alone in the hot New Haven summer to the old bookstore, was too sad. The walk, the weather, the desire to look at old books in summer rather than play a sport outside or even go kayaking alone, the suspicions of the ponytailed old hippie owner—it added up to a picture of unbearable sadness.

“I told him I was looking for Alan Sherman's biography. He had no respect for the book and said it would be hard to find, and expensive.”

“I think I can find it for you,” I said.

“I'll pay any price,” he said. “Up to a hundred dollars.”

The book was located immediately at Powell's in Oregon. The price was five dollars. When I mailed it to him and his mother got him to call to say thank you, he started guessing the price, and as I had to say lower with each guess, he became more interested. He liked a bargain as well as the idea of having big bucks. When he was sixteen he'd spent the day in Venice on a school trip to Slovenia and bought a counterfeit Rolex watch for five dollars by walking away from the vendor's best offer. He'd always taken pride in the transaction.

 

I FELL
into an anxious acceptance of not knowing about the boy's life.

The summer of the yoga ball, one of the last normal summers for the world, he told me that he was going to a woman psychiatrist. He said he called her by her first name. “She's Persian,” he said, telling me her name as a punch line. He loved to say foreign names, and had kept his childhood amusement at hearing anything that wasn't American. He said he believed the psychiatrist had started to dress better because of his influence. First she wore plain suits; after a few visits, she began to wear silk shirts and slacks, or dresses.

“I think she's changed her style for me,” he said seriously. I knew that with psychotherapists anything was possible, but it sounded ridiculous. I myself had gotten a psychiatrist to switch from black oxfords to sneakers. “Only nuns and priests wear black shoes in summer,” I had told him. Fear of association with that group must have propelled him into action.

The night of the all-night call was the time we discussed his psychiatrist's wardrobe—one of our many topics. Later, when I looked back I tried to figure out which drug he had been using. When he described his doctor, he sounded as if the whole thing was another adventure in which he was the audience for the antics of the human race.

He said he had decided to stop seeing friends who used him as their entertainment. He'd realized that most people said their dull ordinary sentences and waited for him to speak so they could laugh.

I told the boy that I knew what he meant and I had given up socializing with the dull, and then had to give up socializing altogether. I gave a few examples of the things people spoke about, how they all said the same thing. “Usually a thing they've read in a magazine or heard someone else say on television,” he said before I could say it.

“The majority of people have no original thoughts,” the boy said.

 

WHERE WE
lived in the winter, some alumnae of various junior colleges had formed a “book club.” The two ringleaders of the club had even graduated from real colleges, so the job fell to them to lead the club. From what they said when I met any of them on the street, the book was always the one that everyone in America had heard of that day. One word the junior-college graduates had learned in the book club was “accessible.” I always changed the subject.

The boy understood when I described the women in the book club. He knew their type, he said, and their nail polish, from his parents' circle of the bourgeoisie, as he liked to call them.

When he was eleven or twelve, he used to describe their situations in the suburbs of Boston. He told the story of one woman: “Her marriage is unraveling.” Her husband had an apartment in London and a mistress. He'd given up his science professorship at the university to pursue a career in art. His art was making mandolins out of tinfoil. Their cat had drunk some antifreeze and almost died, or did die. The boy couldn't be sure.

“How do you know that?” I'd asked him.

“Well, she comes over to have coffee with my mother and they're in the kitchen talking and I go in on the pretext of boiling water for tea.”

I asked what the woman would do if they split up. “She has her cat—I think she has the cat, it might be dead—and her garden…and her job as a part-time cake baker,” he said.

 

THAT NIGHT
of the yoga-ball call he'd mentioned that he had started to go to psychotherapy in high school and he said that he liked the doctor because he wore Turnbull & Asser shirts. I saw that he was on the path of liking psychotherapists for the wrong reasons, but I didn't get into the subject. He was a novice. He'd learn.

“Oh, the shirts,” I said. I told him that I had seen a psychiatrist for a year because of his shirts.

“What kind were they?” the boy asked.

“Tattered old Brooks Brothers. And he had corduroy slacks that had no corduroy lines left. The legs looked like cardboard.”

“That can be an affectation, too,” the boy said.

“Yes, but I figured it out too late,” I said. “I'd seen ones wearing so many worse shirts—big stripes with starched white collars and cuffs, for example—I was desperate.”

“I can understand that,” he said.