Lost In Place (22 page)

I climbed into the passenger side and took a whiff. It was dope, of course. He’d put a huge water pipe in the glove compartment and rigged four tubes along the inside of the roof so the driver and each passenger had his own private mouthpiece. I turned around and waved the smoke a bit to have a look at the passengers in the backseat. There were Scott and Michael.

I was mighty surprised to see Michael in there, and he looked surprised to see me. We didn’t say a thing to each other. There was a certain tension in the air when Lenny told us to get the water pipe going because neither Michael nor I wanted to be the one seen by the other smoking pot. Finally he shrugged, took a drag off the pipe and the tension was broken.

Someone ought to do a survey someday to find out if the Laserium show has ever actually been witnessed by a sober person. You wouldn’t think so from the look, sound and smell of the audience I saw it with. Halfway through the show one guy started bellowing out, “I SEE GOD! I SEE HIM! THERE HE IS! THERE HE IS!” and
had to be led out by two ushers. I wasn’t impressed by the show, to be honest. A couple of little dots going in circles to lame songs like “Dreamweaver”—Scott and I had done that with penlights in his room a hundred times already, and we used better music. All four of us were disappointed. We started walking back to the car, then stopped at a coffee shop for a snack before the long drive back to Connecticut. Michael and I still hadn’t said anything to each other.

Full of doughnuts and coffee, we went back out to find our car, but after going up and down streets for half an hour, we realized that not one of us had been paying attention when we parked it. We had no idea where it was, and within a short amount of time we had no idea where Laserium had been either. We wandered for a long time. Michael complained that he had to go to the bathroom. After a fruitless search for a public bathroom he unzipped his pants in front of a fire hydrant and let loose. It was the longest piss I’ve ever heard; I was sure the NYPD would catch us.

By the time we found the car all of us had come down and were in a terrible mood. We lit up the pipe once we got onto the interstate and started to feel better when all of a sudden the car started to slow down, then stopped.

“This is so fucked up,” Lenny said. “I forgot to put gas in it this morning.”

We were on a dark stretch of I-95 just outside of Rye, New York.

“We’ll have to push it,” Michael said, even though we were at least thirty miles from home.

“Oh, man, this is so fucked up,” Lenny kept saying.

Scott pushed on the passenger-side door while Michael and I put our shoulders against the trunk and dug in for
the long haul. It was a light car, three of us were pushing, and we must have been on a slight downward slope, because in no time at all we were really moving.

“Push harder, candy-ass!” Michael yelled at me, starting to laugh. “You’re not pushing at all!”

“What are you talking about? You’re the one not pushing! I see you resting your head on the trunk!”

“Resting, my ass! I’m having to make up for the fact that you’ve got nothing in your legs anymore! Look at you! You’re already out of breath!”

“And you’re not breathing hard at all, no!”

We were talking at last. As badly as I wanted to get home and get to bed, I was glad we were friends again.

“Look! An exit!” Scott yelled. We pushed the car off the ramp, then all jumped on top of it as it picked up speed and coasted to the bottom, where an all-night Exxon station was waiting for us. The car rolled right up to the pump.

We filled the tank, but when the time came to pay we all started fumbling around in our pockets and realized that none of us had a cent. We’d spent it all on that stupid laser show and doughnuts.

“This is so fucked up,” Lenny kept saying.

“What are we gonna do now?” Scott asked.

Michael smiled and said, “You can all relax. I’ve been in a situation like this once before, and let me tell you that we are lucky men tonight because we have in our midst the perfect man to get us on our way. Gentlemen,” he said, gesturing toward me with a vaguely Arabian, spiral flourish of his hand, “meet Barabbas, the Christian Thief.”

“How am I gonna get us out of this?” I asked.

“Remember the drive-in movie? You go in there and do your magic. Confess, and free us all!”

I walked into the station, where an unhappy guy in his late thirties was shivering and watching a portable black-and-white television set. It was 4:00
A.M
.

“You guys better have money,” he said.

“Um … here’s what happened. We went down to New York to see Laserium, we lost our car, and it’s been the worst night of any of our lives. If I give you my driver’s license, can I come back in a couple of hours and pay you back?”

He squinted at me and then at the car. “Did you say Laserium?” he asked.

“Yeah, have you seen it?”

“Yep. You guys got any dope?”

I hesitated.

“You give me a couple joints, I’ll take care of the gas.”

When I came back to the car the guys were looking at me expectantly. I simply smiled, got into the car and said, “We’re cool. Let’s go.”

Michael gave me a friendly slap across the back. “What’d I tell you guys?” he roared. “We weren’t the judo-jitsi brothers for nothing.”

I was glad to have seen Michael that night, but couldn’t bring myself to call him after that, and he didn’t call me. I wasn’t all that comfortable with the sight of him, once so pure but now smoking pot and pissing on fire hydrants in Manhattan, and I’m sure he felt the same way about me. We didn’t renew our friendship.

Not long after Laserium I made a truly glaring error of judgment—the sort of error that only someone stoned
most of the day could make, and that everyone who is stoned most of the day eventually does make—and that was deciding to grow my own dope in my parents’ house. I started a dozen seedlings in an egg carton on the windowsill of my room, but then I thought, Sooner or later, Mom or Dad is going to wonder what these plants are. So I decided that, since my dad enjoyed houseplants and had them growing all over the house, I would put one seedling in each of his pots and that way, spread around like that, my plants would blend in and no one would notice them. This would also save me the trouble of remembering to water them; given my permanent citizenship in the State of Whoa, remembering anything was a real challenge.

The plants got about six inches high when one evening after dinner but before dessert, my brother, Erich, wandered up to the table with the
World Book
—Volume “M”—under his arm. He plunked it down on the table and opened it to “Marijuana.” Innocently pointing to the large photo of a typical cannabis leaf, he said, “Isn’t this weird? This picture looks just like the little plants that have been coming up in a bunch of Dad’s pots.”

Mom was in the kitchen, out of earshot. Dad looked at the photo, then got up quietly and examined his little pots. I sat paralyzed with horror at the dinner table. It had honestly never occurred to me that he might recognize them, or that any of the parents of Mom’s thirty music students who sat next to the plants for half an hour at a time each week might recognize them. Now that this had happened, I felt as if my entire soul were imploding. I felt
really, really stupid
.

Dad didn’t say a word. Part of his self-control, I believe, came from the fact that my mother had an important concert to give the next day and he didn’t want her to know
about this until after her concert. He came back to the table and looked at me in a way that said, “You are not the person I thought you were. I’m not sure I even know you. All I know is, I want those plants out of my house
right now
.”

I got the message. I got up and one by one pulled my plants up and threw them out into the woods. I didn’t dare go back into the house until after nightfall, and even then I slinked down to my room without talking to anyone.

The next day my father and I had to move the harpsichord to the concert hall together. It was a heavy and somewhat delicate job, and took lots of teamwork; usually I enjoyed doing it with him, but this time it was hell. I felt nauseated and had a splitting headache, both from being tense and having not slept at all the night before. Neither of us said a word.

We delivered the harpsichord and Mom gave her concert. Dad didn’t sit in the hall. He stayed outside, and I wasn’t about to go looking for him. After the concert we dismantled the harpsichord and carried it into the van. He was ashen-faced and never once looked me in the eye. Halfway home Dad said the only thing he was ever to say about The Incident: “I hope you don’t ruin your life.” Something about the way he said the words “your life” made me think, He doesn’t just mean my life this week or this month—he means my whole life, forever, eternity, until I die. Until I die in that damp alley in New York City, just like the elementary school drug film said I would.

When we got home I went out to the woods behind the house and threw up. That was when I began to lose interest in smoking dope.

15
 

T
wo days after The Incident I sneaked out to the woods where I had thrown the little marijuana seedlings and tried to recover them in case they were good for smoking. As I crawled around miserably in the bushes it occurred to me how pathetic I must look, and that was when I hit my low point. Just as the policeman who visited our sixth-grade class had warned us after letting us all touch his pistol, I had let myself slip—a tiny bit at first, but sure enough, I had set the wheels of self-destruction in motion. I had started down that infamous road to ruin as sure as if I had set fire to the Town Hall, thrown a rock through the plate-glass window at Woolworth’s or stuffed rags up the sheriff’s exhaust pipe. I had become a Bad Kid. I had ruined my relationship with my parents forever. I had wasted half a year celebrating banal insights and playing the same stolen electric-bass riffs over and over without actually learning any of the essentials of real
improvisation, and I couldn’t even do full splits anymore. After all the opportunities I’d been handed, what had I made of it all? Where had I ended up? Scrounging around in the woods for a couple of limp hallucinogenic twigs. I was ashamed of myself, and convinced that my dad needn’t have bothered to worry; I had already ruined my life.

I looked over to the driveway and saw the inert hulk of the TR4. I couldn’t even buy a car that worked! A feeling of rage came over me with such force that I charged at the stupid Triumph, picked up a cinder block and before I knew it I had completely demolished the car. When my arms were too tired to lift the cinder block anymore I aimed a series of hopping side kicks at the doors and fenders, and found that, Michael’s comment to the contrary, I still had enough in my legs to dent metal pretty good. My mother was in the house while I was having my little temper tantrum, and she must have heard it all, but when I went back indoors an hour or so later she didn’t say anything. She hated the Triumph too, so maybe she sensed I was heading in a good direction.

When Dad came home from work and saw the car, however, he had quite a bit to say about it. He looked at me hard across the table and said, “I thought you were supposed to be working to save money for college this year. What happened to that, huh?”

I knew this wasn’t one of those questions I was supposed to answer.

“I’ll tell you what happened. You’ve done a couple of odd jobs, and then you’ve gone out and wasted the money on two fancy-looking pieces of crap that anybody with half a brain could have told you wouldn’t run. You could have bought yourself a reliable car easily, but no, you had
to be special. You weren’t going to drive some ordinary car that an ordinary kid would drive. You’re so smart and talented that you had to have a snazzy convertible so everybody would know how different you were from the pack. Then, when they don’t run, you sulk, push them five feet down the driveway and let them rust on my lawn. Now you decide to destroy one. That’s just great, Mark; that’s so smart I don’t know what to say.”

The most terrifying part about this speech was not that he was angry; I expected at least that. The scary thing was that he was being sarcastic. He had never made bitter, sarcastic remarks about any of us kids, ever. It was uncharacteristic of him.

“Now,” Dad continued, “I have a beat-up rusted-out car in my yard, broken glass all over the driveway, and the front hood, I notice, is ten yards away in a drainage ditch. Thanks so much for the landscaping touches. Now, what I want to know is, what’s going to happen when at the end of this year you don’t have enough money to go to Yale? You want to spend another year sitting around on your ass playing that … that
bullshit
? I certainly hope not, because your mother and I both are getting real sick of hearing those same, repetitive, twiddly-diddly-dwee dee-dwee dee-dwee songs over and over again, and having to climb over you when you’re asleep until noon, and then having to go to bed every night wondering if you’ve crashed the car. Enough is enough. I’ve got news for you, pal, you’re getting a job, and you’re getting it tomorrow. A woman where I work has a husband who’s a lawyer, and his building needs someone in the mail room. You are going to get a haircut first thing tomorrow morning; then you are going to drive Mom’s car to Greenwich and have an interview with that lawyer at three o’clock. Here’s the
address.” He handed me a slip of paper, got up and went into the living room to watch the news.