Alligator Candy (11 page)

At thirteen, I was now older than Jon had been, a bizarre concept to me that seemed almost like something out of one of my comic books: how a little brother is transformed into a big brother. And because I was thirteen, I was becoming a bar mitzvah. As I stood on the bimah giving my bar mitzvah speech, looking out on the room full of friends and family, the memorial banners for Jon hanging in the lobby, I knew that many of them might be thinking the same thing as me when I thanked Jon for inspiring me with his memory: that I was becoming a man, while Jon would remain, forever, a boy.

T
HE DISTANCE
between our sliding glass doors and the garbage cans outside around the corner of the house was maybe fifteen feet. But those fifteen feet I had to walk every night when taking out the kitchen trash felt like an eternity.

Despite my burgeoning sense of freedom and adventure, I felt plagued by the dark side of possibility: the fact that while anything could happen in the best possible sense, terrible things could happen too—like getting attacked and killed by a stranger while I was taking out the trash. The usual reassurances—say, the rarity of someone getting hit by lightning, the unlikelihood of dying in a car crash—were easy for me to dismiss. As wildly unusual as it was for Jon to die the way he did, the fact was that it had happened. And if something like that could happen to him, why couldn't something equally terrible, no matter how unlikely, happen to me?

My fear of getting murdered while taking out the trash was the most frequent reminder of this trauma. The paranoia became so intense that I began asking my dad or mom to wait for me by the sliding doors while I completed my chore outside. This went on long past the point of embarrassment, long after I began feeling that I was too old for such behavior. I never recalled them trying to talk me out of this or convince me that everything was going to be okay. Instead, what I felt from them was perhaps quiet compassion, an understanding that, as well as we were all getting along in our lives, we were still wounded, still raw, still feeling our way through the dark.

I began to think of this fear as the bogeyman. The bogeyman was bad. He had gotten my brother, and he was coming for me. He was this shadowy presence in the world, an evil, a chaos, something lurking in the woods, a phantom spirit able to move easily between the physical and spiritual realms. Maybe he was hiding behind the trash can, or maybe he had miniaturized and traveled into my brain, a little Darth Vader flying into my head like the crew from the sixties sci-fi flick
Fantastic Voyage
. But the bogeyman was always there waiting, and he had a way of coming at the most inopportune times.

I developed strange fears, fears even of myself. As a kid, I had the incredibly nerdy hobby of collecting magnets and ball bearings. I kept my three largest ball bearings in a medicine bottle in a drawer. But slowly I became fixated on them. I began getting consumed by an uncontrollable urge to swallow the ball bearings and choke myself. I had never felt suicidal before, and didn't understand if this was some such impulse now. The weird fear became so bad that I considered throwing out the ball bearings but couldn't bear to part with them. Instead, I handed them to my mom one day and asked her to keep them in her room. I'm sure she had no idea what I was talking about or why I was behaving so urgently, but I couldn't help myself. I needed the fear away from me.

I was also afraid for my parents. Once, I was at school when I saw an ambulance race down the street. As the sirens faded, I felt an icy wave of fear pass through my body: a conviction that the ambulance was carrying one of my parents; that something horrible had happened, and they were dead or dying. The fear became so intense that it ceased to be fear at all. It was reality. My reality. My parents. They had died. They were dying. I knew it. And there was nothing I could do but sit there in class and pretend like I was paying attention to whatever the teacher was saying. But nothing could distract my belief that something terrible was happening.

In these moments, the pot didn't help. One night when I was fifteen, something darker rose from the smoke. It happened when my parents were out for the evening, and I was home alone. The minute they walked out the door, I headed urgently for my room. By now I had Rush posters completely covering my walls, along with a giant light blue satin Rush banner—of the man-in-the-red-star logo—that I had bought at the Wooden Nickel head shop. My prized possession—my stereo components (tape deck, turntable, speakers)—shimmered on my chest of drawers, underneath my shelf of Mad magazines and Tolkien books.

I opened my closet and fished out the tennis ball can in which I stashed my pot. As I opened the lid, the gust of sweet herbal stickiness hit my nose. I had plenty of options for how to get high. The water pipe was my favorite, able to cool the smoke and not require heavy cleanup. I also had a little gold serpentine pipe, one that, I discovered, could be used to smoke pot underwater, almost like a periscope, in our redwood hot tub out back. In my closet, I'd also stashed away a bong, a once-translucent cylinder with twisty green plastic tubes and a sticky film of resin on the bottom. I also had plenty of joints: tightly wound numbers that I had learned to roll from watching a Cheech and Chong movie.

Grabbing a joint, I went out back and sucked down a few hits as my cat watched me without judgment. Then I sucked down a few more hits for good measure. I could smoke a lot—maybe because I had built up a tolerance. Smoking thirteen bong hits was my record. By the time I walked back into my room to put away my paraphernalia, the air was thicker, slower, groovier around me, and the familiar fuzzy goodness was enveloping me again.

High and relaxed, I settled in alone for a night of TV, enduring
The Love Boat
to get to
Fantasy Island
and hoping to stay up late enough for
Saturday Night Live.
But as I lay on the couch munching on mini egg rolls, the doorbell rang. This rarely happened at night, and it sent a shiver through my body, pumping up my heart with blood and sending it off to the races.
Who the fuck would be ringing at eleven o'clock on Saturday night?
I thought. It rang again. Then came a knock.

Killing the lights, I went into stealth mode, tiptoeing across the shag carpet for the door in paranoia. I could hear muffled voices of men outside, and more loud knocks. Fuck the peephole, I thought, this was bad. I slithered past the nearby windows, beelining through the kitchen into a bedroom down the hall.
Who are these men? What do they want? Why aren't they leaving?
The questions raced through my mind uncontrollably, looping around and around as the fear spread, filling me, pooling from the edge of my toes up to the top of my skull.

Then I heard them talking. I pressed my ear close to the window, and could make out a few scattered words here and there: “What are we going to do?” one said. “He's going to see it when he gets back.”
See it? See what?
I wondered. And then the bogeyman in my head conjured the answer, letting the film play before me. I saw a dark patch in the woods outside our house, and my parents were dead there. These men had killed them, buried them in a shallow grave, and now they were coming for me. They wanted no witnesses, no evidence. And they were worried about me or someone else seeing what they had done. I was sure of it.

It seemed like the knocking went on forever, unrelenting, increasingly urgent. And I couldn't take it anymore. I marched into the back of the house, grabbed the phone, and called my friend Dave. “Dude!” I whispered breathlessly into the mouthpiece, “I need you to come over!”

“Why?” Dave asked.

“I don't know, man,” I said. “There are these guys outside my house, and they won't leave. They keep knocking and ringing the doorbell.”

“What do they want?”

“I don't know!” I said louder, and then quieted myself back down. “That's the whole thing, I don't know what's going on, and I'm freaking out.” I paused. “And I'm really stoned.” Too stoned, I suppose in hindsight, to worry too much about my friend's safety, and how maybe I had just called him over to confront a bunch of murderous thugs. Or so stoned, I guess, that my friend realized I was just deep into a psychosomatic bender.

“I'll be right over,” Dave said.

Minutes later, I heard the doorbell ring again. Then I could hear Dave's voice outside, talking to the men. “No, someone is home,” he told them. Taking a deep breath, I straightened my hair and opened the door casually as if—despite the fact that they had been knocking for over a half hour—I had just heard the knock for the first time. Outside, I saw Dave with two clean-cut middle-aged guys. “We didn't think anyone was home,” one of them said pleasantly.

“Oh no,” I lied, forcing a smile. “I had my headphones on.” My eyes darted around the yard behind them, looking for signs of their crime. But there was nothing.

“Is that your car parked out front?” one of them asked.

I looked in the distance and saw my dad's orange Ford Mustang. “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“We were driving by and didn't see it, and clipped the side of it,” one of the guys said apologetically. “It's dented pretty bad.”

A wave of relief passed over me. My parents were alive! These guys weren't murderers! They were just friendly neighbors coming clean about their accident. I was so elated by the news that my parents hadn't been murdered that I must have seemed insanely happy to hear that our car had just been smashed. “Oh!” I said gingerly. “That's fine! No problem!” I might have even said that it was great.

After they gave me their insurance details and left, I invited Dave inside. I told him everything, how I had gotten high and my imagination had run away with me. Then my voice kind of trailed off. Despite the fact that my family's story was so well known in Tampa, I rarely, if ever, discussed it with my friends. It was just too personal, too intense, and I just didn't want to call attention to our history—perhaps thinking that if I didn't, I could be as “normal” as anyone else. But by the way Dave reacted, by his patience, his understanding, by the fact that he didn't make fun of me, as boys often do with each other—all that told me that he probably knew what was going on after all. This gave me an incredible sense of comfort. Even in my craziest moments, I realized, I didn't have to be alone.

But I never considered myself religious. How could there be a God who would let a child be murdered? Reluctantly, I accompanied my parents to the synagogue's annual cemetery service. We stood outside with a few dozen other congregants under a tent that barely kept out the heat and humidity. It brought back a lot of old feelings standing there, feeling like an open wound, some hideous gash of a person being picked at by everyone around me. They all knew our story. Generations knew our story. And I hated the attention—everyone loses someone—we just lost someone in a particularly brutal and sensational way. Death is death.

I half listened to the rabbi's sermon until something he said caught my attention. He kept mentioning the word
remembrance
. This was a memorial service, a service about remembering. “We consecrate this hour the memory of our departed” . . . “We recall” . . . “We remember” . . . “May their memories endure among us as a lasting benediction” . . . “In tribute to their memory, I pledge to perform acts of charity and goodness.” The name of this service in Hebrew was Yizkor—it meant “remember.” Remembering was divine. We were there to participate in that divine act.

But I felt like an amnesiac. The few memories I had of Jon, particularly my most vivid and meaningful one on the sidewalk, were suspect. All I really had were memories of his death: the newspaper articles, the fear, the silence, the crying, the tranquilizers, the screams, the needing my parents to wait for me at the sliding glass door while I took out the garbage at night, the little brown box of his possessions high up on the shelf in his old room, the conviction that I or someone close to me would die a gruesome and horrible death, that we wouldn't live long, that something always had to go wrong, that though one killer was sentenced to die and the other to life behind bars, their rampage would continue. So much was missing.

The service ended. My parents and I made our way over to Jon's headstone. It was a small grave beneath a tree—one of the few shaded spots in the cemetery. The Jewish custom is to put a small rock on a headstone to show that you've been there. I fumbled around for just the right rock, as if there were just the right one. We came to the site and set the rocks on the headstone. My mom and dad cried. But I never cried at this spot. I never felt anything. Jon was cremated after he died—a decision made with the help of the rabbi, because my parents couldn't fathom the pain of burying him—and his ashes were spread over Tampa Bay by a family friend in a helicopter. My family erected this headstone in Jon's honor. But when I looked down at the grave, I saw nothing. I could get down on my knees, claw through the dirt, the rocks, the roots, but he wouldn't be there. No matter how hard I tried, I would not find a trace of my brother.

O
NE DAY
in March 1985, I got caught at high school forging guidance office passes. I was a senior, and had used a fake pass to pull a girl out of class and ask her to the prom. I thought it was a clever way to ask her out, but it backfired. Not only did she turn me down because she already had a date, but she also told her teacher what I had done, and I got busted. The school suspended me for a day—the same day, it turned out, that Johnny Paul Witt, the older of the two men who'd killed my brother, was scheduled to be executed.

Witt's execution had become politically charged, a national story and a precedent-setting case in the burgeoning debate over capital punishment. Two years earlier, his sentence had been overturned by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit after it was revealed that a prospective juror was dismissed for failing to reveal her opposition to the death penalty. Later, following a debate at the US Supreme Court, the court reinstated the sentence with a historic vote that made it easier to remove such jurors from capital punishment cases. The night before Witt's trip to the electric chair, nicknamed “Big Sparky,” Thurgood Marshall and two other justices lost their bid to postpone it. Witt would become just the twelfth person executed in Florida since the state reinstituted the death penalty in the 1970s.