The Book of Drugs (2 page)

I picked up simple chords and coarse riffs here and there, and watched the British New Wave how-to show
Rockschool
on PBS. I invented a song every time I learned something new.

 

The army sent my dad to UCLA—also paying to send my mom and my infant self to California with him—after he came back from Vietnam, so he'd get a degree and return to West Point as a professor. He lived in L.A. when Joan Didion was writing screenplays there, when John Phillips and David Crosby were up in the hills chuffing mounds of cocaine. He went on to get a Ph.D. and became an authority on French history, particularly the period between World Wars I and II, and France's failure to stop the invading Germans. He's written books, including one called
The Seeds of Disaster,
which sounds to me sometimes like a dark joke about his sons.

He taught at West Point for a few years, was sent to Germany, where American tank divisions prowled moodily up and down the Iron Curtain, worked for a year as a speechwriter for a NATO general in Belgium, then came back to West Point and was made head of the History Department.

West Point was so orderly, it was in a chokehold: an enforced family atmosphere. Divorce was a scandalous rarity. Neighborhoods were segregated by rank, each subdivision of identical houses having its own strange name: lieutenants and their families lived in Grey Ghost, captains in New Brick, majors in Stony Lonesome, lieutenant colonels in Lee Area, colonels in Lusk. There was a tiny crescent of houses for members of the military band called Band.

This was the early '80s. Most of the adult men had been to Vietnam; essentially, everybody's dad. There was an undercurrent of stress and rage—sometimes barely controlled panic—which I thought was the nature of adulthood. Most of them joined the army in an America still in the glow of World War II's victories; many of them had themselves gone to the military academy, were inculcated in West Point's resonant motto, Duty, Honor, Country, and a host of other sacred words chiseled into the arches of the castle-like barracks and academic buildings. They came back, carrying the horrifying things they saw—having killed other people—to a country that disdained them. I subbed on a friend's paper route and was screamed at by a man in a baby blue bathrobe for being a half hour late; I was raking the yard and a man walked by, barking, as if it were my fault, “The leaves will always win! You try, but the leaves will always win!”

There were plaques on the steps of each house with movable letters telling the name of the officer within. Most of the nameplates said something like “LTC Matthew J. Jones,” or “MAJ Simmons and Family,” or sometimes “The MacDonald Family,” which to me seemed manic in its profession of familial unity. I had a friend named Luke, whose dad was Mexican and taught Spanish to the cadets, a civilian; this gave him a certain liminal status, an
outsider's authority. Luke and I would sneak out at night and change the movable letters in the nameplates around, so they said “Captain Shit” or “Fuck My Ass.” Military police cars, painted pale green, cruised by every few minutes. We dove into bushes and behind cars, breathing fast, eyes bulging with delight at the danger.

 

I went to summer camp. There was an ostracized kid in my cabin called Jumpin' Josh MacIntosh. He wanted to be a comedian, and he told weirdly pointless stories meant to be jokes: his sister's bike hit a twig and she fell over the handlebars; one time he was walking to school and he was late; one time his cable TV went out. No punch lines. A cruel prank was started: whenever he told one, everybody in the cabin would burst out in fake laughter.

Jumpin' Josh exulted.

The ruse spread. Even the first-graders were in on it. At the camp talent show, Jumpin' Josh MacIntosh stood in front of the bonfire and told this joke:

A hundred kids broke out in fake hysterics. The camp director stood horrified. Jumpin' Josh MacIntosh walked off, and we chanted, JUMPIN' JOSH! JUMPIN' JOSH! He came back and told another. The fake laughter doubled in intensity. The camp director walked up as Jumpin' Josh started another, turned to us with a glare and said, “That's enough!” He put his arm around Josh and
said, “Let's go; come on, Josh, let's go.” Jumpin' Josh MacIntosh burst into tears in front of the entire camp, struggling to pull away from the camp director, squawking, “But they want me!”

 

My parents expressed vicious grudges against each other openly, daily. We listened to them yowl at each other, and as years of shrieking fights passed, my terror that they'd divorce turned into
Will you please, please just get divorced?

Much of the terror and the anger was focused on me. I was a fuckup for sure, but that's not why. It was because the awfulness needed a place to go.

My mom screamed at me until I broke down in tears. My dad would pass by, get a beer from the fridge, glare at me, and then walk back to his TV. I made a couple of pitiable suicide attempts. I tied a guitar cable to a shower curtain rod and jumped off the side of the tub, bringing the shower curtain crashing down; I chugged a bottle of completely benign medication. Instead of taking me to the hospital, my dad made me stick my fingers down my throat to puke it up. He didn't want to become the officer whose kid tried to kill himself.

He took me to a military shrink—all of our doctors were military, free to us because we were an army family—and loudly filled out my questionnaire at the nurse's desk. “Drug use? No. Homosexual behavior? No.”

The military shrink told me my problem was that my parents were pushing my buttons.

I thought this was how it was everywhere. I thought everyone feared and hated their parents like I did. I saw TV shows with teenaged kids who behaved affectionately, and thought:
How weird that our society feels compelled to pretend that children love their parents.
In the 2000s, after being demolished by a pitiless rant from my mom about what my brother was doing, I removed myself from my family. I told them not to call unless somebody was ill. My mom called anyway, and again yelled about something going on in somebody else's life. I changed my number.

My mom found me on Facebook seven years later. My parents have unquestionably changed. There's compassion there. My mom used to yell at me—as a man in his thirties!—about failing Algebra in the seventh grade, like it happened last week. In seven years, she learned how to live in the present. My parents love each other now, which is strange, nearly implausible. I have empathy for them. I know their brains a little, because I know how my brain is like theirs. We had a long talk about the grief and rage of my teenage years. “But did you know we loved you, Mike?” my mom asked, pleadingly.

Yes, I said.

I lied. I didn't want to hurt her. I saw on her face that, despite her cruelty to me as a teenager, what she remembered was loving me.

 

I remember my dad fixing my guitar after I dropped it on the kitchen floor and broke the headstock off. I was despondent, thinking my only hope of ever being a musician had perished. My dad meticulously applied wood glue and fashioned a brass plate to reinforce the crack. Days before, there had been some event of screaming and threatened violence and abrading blame for my nonfulfillment, but now I stood there, watching him in this very practical demonstration of love. I couldn't make my hate and fear go away, but how could I not be grateful? I stood there, bewildered at life inside and outside of me, watching him mend the guitar neck.

I can think of my parents as loving or I can think of them as crazy people. If I try to see the duality, I get disconcerted, disoriented.

 

There was a girl named Meredith whom Luke had a crush on; she was olive-skinned and beautiful; she wore prim pink sweaters and a tiny gold cross. He schemed up a pickup line for her that he never used; he would say, “How are you?” and she would say “Fine.” He would say, “I know you're
fine
, but how
are
you?” Meredith asked me to dance at the Sadie Hawkins Dance; she came to visit me when I was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy and happened to walk in just as I was getting a shot of morphine in my ass. Years later, Luke and I were looking through a photocopied yearbook. “Jesus, there's, like, a picture of you on every page,” he said. “Who took these pictures?” He flipped to the last page. “Meredith Peterson. Wow, she was in love with you.”

How many signals did I miss? Maybe if Meredith Peterson had sat me down and told me, my life would have been different. It would have shaved just a little bit off the corner of my self-loathing, maybe enough that I'd have had something to live for other than the despair of my obsession.

 

Self-loathing freed me to be weird. Outlandish smarts weren't a liability. I took tremendous pleasure in big fat words. At recess, I tried following the ebb and flow of a wall-ball game for a week, not actually playing, just running back and forth with the herd, trying to look like I was supposed to be there, but I gave it up, and from then on sat on the blacktop with my back to a brick wall reading books. I declared myself a Communist in the seventh grade—at West Point!—after reading a comic book about Mao. I wrote stories plagiarizing famous science-fiction movies that I was confident no one else had seen, and was praised for them.

I hung out with heavy metal kids, the younger brothers of the high school burners on skateboards. Some of them threw contemptuous jeers, but I think they actually found my angsty intensity—I shot them murderous glares over the top of my glasses when they mocked me—fascinating, and frightening.

 

Years later, a girl from a high school French class found me online. I quipped about my outcastness.

“I always thought you were one of the popular kids,” she typed back.

 

I met Chad Ficus in the West Point cemetery, where General Custer, General Westmoreland, and General Daniel Butterfield, the composer of “Taps,” are buried. We leaned on the mausoleum of Egbert Ludovicus Viele: a twelve-foot pyramid. Behind a barred door were the sarcophagi of Viele and his wife, and something on the back wall that looked like a light switch. It was said to be a buzzer, so that if Egbert were buried alive he could ring for help.

Chad was beloved by the girls on the first tier of cuteness. He was on the cross-country team and had fantastic grades. Like I said, I thought the world saw me as a peculiar no-hoper, and I was defiantly unathletic: when the gym teacher made us run 200 yards, I walked—leisurely, sullenly—I would've done it while smoking if I could.

We drank a mixture of spirits—two inches' worth of alcohol from each bottle in his dad's liquor cabinet—from a green plastic 7-Up bottle. I had a stillborn sister buried in the cemetery, a few yards from the pyramid. When I was a child, and my mom came to visit the grave, I climbed the sphinxes and tried to run up the pyramid's sheer walls. I had no idea what was going on. I showed Chad Ficus the grave of Catherine Georgia Doughty and told an
elaborate lie that my sister was a teenager who killed herself, and that she'd owned all the Led Zeppelin and Van Halen records.

We walked down the road, passing the 7-Up bottle between us. We met up with a bunch of kids and became a procession. A girl had a boom box and a cassette with Madonna's first album on one side and Prince's
Purple Rain
on the other. We acted conspicuously stupid: the alcohol let us. The idea was to go to a public pool up in the hills, climb the chain-link fence, and set off fireworks from the high-dive platform.

My dad suddenly drove up in his white Volkswagen Rabbit, opened the door, and told me to get inside. I did a decent job of pretending not to be drunk. I talked him into letting me walk home.

My dad drove off. I started following our parade up the hill. They were moving faster than before. “Go home, Doughty,” said Chad Ficus. “Your dad told you to go home. You have to go.”

If I didn't, my dad would somehow intuit that I was up at the pool, and their party would get busted.

Chad ran away towards the pack, already getting smaller. He turned around, jogging backwards. “Go home! Go home!”

 

Some parents at West Point pressured their kids into going there for college. My dad wasn't one of them. I suspect that if he had the option as a kid, he wouldn't have gone, and without Vietnam, which I think made him need a structure in which to live, he wouldn't have stayed in the army.

Chad Ficus's dad did want him to go to West Point—he was one of the rare officers there who hadn't gone there himself, and he seethed with resentment about it. He told Chad that once he graduated, he'd buy him a Porsche.

Chad's dad owned a lot of guns. (Everybody's dad at West Point owned some guns—my dad had two hunting rifles and a double-barreled
shotgun handed down from my great-grandfather, a knife-fighting youth who, upon getting a bullet lodged an inch from his heart, repented and became a pastor. Perhaps not incidentally, I look exactly like him.) Chad's dad actually made his own ammunition as a hobby; there were drums of gunpowder in the basement.

Chad showed his friends his dad's porn collection. It was a notebook into which his dad had pasted a profusion of box shots; that is, he cut out pictures of vaginas from porn magazines and made himself a disembodied vagina portfolio. Page after page of them.

Chad did end up going to West Point. I saw him the summer before he entered, and he was cynically blithe; he said he didn't care about serving his country, he was going for the prestige (it's roughly as difficult to get into Harvard, but at West Point you also need a congressional recommendation to go with your grades and athletic bona fides). He was going to parlay it into a Wall Street job. Not to mention the Porsche.