Pharmakon (48 page)

Soccer was a distraction. Except for having to cut off the shoulder-length hair I’d spent the last two years growing, I liked being a goalie. Within the confines of the net, there are no mysteries. Happiness for a goalie is simply keeping the ball out of the net. And a fourth-string goalie, who knows he is never going to get in the game, doesn’t even have to worry about that.

But as seemed to be my fate, a series of catastrophes changed the course of my life in the week prior to the first game of the season. The starting goalie broke his collarbone. The day after that, the number-two man came down with mono. On Thursday, the third-stringer got kicked out of St. Luke’s for cheating on a French test. Which left them with me.

The opening match was the next day at 3:30. It was a home game. After lunch, there was a pep rally in the cafeteria. The soccer coach and the captain of the team gave speeches. Then I ran out with the starting lineup as five hundred–odd boys screamed and shouted,
“Beat Lawrenceville!”
Even though I liked the boisterous teenage camaraderie of it all, relished the wholesome normalcy of the moment, as I stood, hands clasped behind my back, macho prep, I felt as if it were not happening to me, but rather, to someone who looked like me but I knew was an impostor.

If I had been high, I would have thought of team spirit as an out-of-body experience—sober, I just felt like a fake. The feeling persisted and grew as game time approached. As I suited up in the locker room with the rest of the team, stepped into my steel-cup jock, pulled on my red-and-white shorts and jersey, adjusted my knee pads, it felt as if I were dressing somebody else for the game.

My mind was disconnected from my body and the moment in my life it occupied. So much so that looking down to lace my cleats gave me a stomach-churning rush of vertigo. The locker room and my teammates began to spin around me. And even though I was sitting down, I felt like I was falling within myself from a great height. I wasn’t just dizzy; it was F-16-dropping-from-the-sky-about-to-crash-and-burn-in-enemy-territory falling.

I bolted out of the locker room and ran to a lavatory at the end of the hall. I was in a cold, bilious sweat, pulling toilet paper from the roll by my head to wipe the vomit from the white letters that spelled “St.” on my chest, and an echoey voice told me, “You’re gonna get creamed.” I looked up. Chas Ortley was staring down at me in the neighboring stall. If his hair had been straight, it would have been down to his shoulders. But red and kinky, it formed a Celtic afro worthy of the Jackson 5.

“Creamed? He’s gonna get killed.” Peter Ortley peered over the other wall of my stall. “Lawrenceville has this kid from Gambia, who’s like six foot six, kicks the ball ninety-three miles an hour.”

“He killed a goalie in Botswana.”

“I thought he was from Gambia.”

“Whatever, you’re dead meat.”

“Fuck you.” The worst part was, I knew Lawrenceville did in fact have a forward who had played on the Gambian junior national team. And though I doubted he had killed an opponent with his shot, I believed he had the power to break ribs.

“You figured out your strategy?”

“Survival.” I flushed the toilet and got up off my knees.

A gift of a field house had gotten the Ortleys a second chance at St. Luke’s. They had made the most of it, and become the school’s drug dealers. We’d renewed our friendship. The Ortleys spoke to me in stereo: “You’re a slow, uncoordinated white kid; he’s a fast, shifty Zulu.”

“Zulus aren’t from Gambia.”

“You’ve got to level the playing field. Speed up your reflexes.”

The game hadn’t even begun. My hands and feet felt leaden. “How the fuck am I going to do that?” Chas opened his hand. There were a hundred tiny, multicolored beads of chemistry in his palm.

“Speed: pharmaceutical.”

“Just like the East Germans take in the Olympics. We stole it from our mom.” I had to take the offer seriously. Mrs. Ortley’s family owned a pharmaceutical company.

“Each color goes off at a different time. Next two hours, you’re rocket man.”

“It’ll give you the reflexes of a cat.” He poured a tiny mountain of granules into my hand.

Knowing we were going to lose the game, I thought I had nothing to lose. I licked the beads of medication off my palm with the tip of my tongue.

By the time we hit the field, I was as fidgety and twitchy as a dog with distemper. The bleachers were packed. My parents had brought Alfie. My mouth was dry and spitless, and my socks refused to stay up. Even in the half speed of warm-up drills, the soccer ball was a blur. The Gambian dribbled it like a yo-yo, with his lethal feet. He wasn’t six foot six, he was six foot four. He kept it popping in the air in front of him. First kicking the ball with his left, then twice with his right, then kneeing it up high in the air, he bounced it off his head, then cartwheeled his legs backward and nailed it with a bicycle kick over his right shoulder. You would have thought it was shot from a cannon.

When the whistle blew, something strange happened to my neurotransmitters. Though I felt like I was moving in slow motion, as I positioned myself to cut off the angle of the shot that was a few strides away, the speed combusted with the adrenaline of my pounding heart, and the force of the silent explosion within me spread out across the field in shock waves I could almost see. Suddenly, the Gambian and the ball and everyone and everything else on the field seemed to slow down as well. It was my time.

As the ball left the Gambian’s foot, I could see the black-and-white hexagons that made up its surface not as the usual gray swish sailing past me, but as a sphere, moving as slowly and spacey as a blob in a lava lamp. I could see the seams of the ball, and I had all the time in the world to reach out and grab it. And best of all, when my arms closed round it and brought it to my chest, my ribs did not crack. My heart did not stop.

Though I didn’t do a very good job of booting back to my teammates (my kick barely reached the midfield line), I had made a save. Having made one, I was able to make another, and another. And suddenly, playing goalie seemed as simple as playing catch with someone who doesn’t want you to catch the ball.

I wondered why they called it speed. For the next ninety minutes, the soccer ball and the action on the field and the very spin of the planet slowed down enough for me to step back into the body that had seemed to belong to a clumsy stranger when I was suiting up.

When the final whistle blew, the score was 0-0. Though it went down in the record book as a tie, it was a victory. My teammates hugged me. The coach patted me on the back so hard it hurt, and told me, “Whatever the hell got into you today, Z, I want you to bottle it and bring it to the next game.”

As I looked over his shoulder, the Ortley twins were giving me the thumbs-up sign. I ran to the red-haired pharmacists. “The speed’s fantastic.”

“We got you good, didn’t we?”

“I’ll buy as much as you can steal from your mother.” The twins staggered with laughter. Chas pulled a packet of capsules out of his pocket. “Not here,” I whispered. My parents were walking over; Alfie was barking.

He tossed me the packet right in front of everyone. As I grabbed it, I saw it was Contac. The cold medicine.

Now, if my life were a Disney movie, the idea that I had done it without drugs, on my own, would have made it all the sweeter. But I was depressed. For ninety minutes I’d actually thought I had found a cure for being me.

We lost the next game 5-0. But we won the following two. The coach said I had potential. I wasn’t sure for what, but by the time the season was half over I was getting used to being the person I felt myself becoming. I was not sure who he was. But I had stopped reading the
DSM
and no longer looked for myself in the faces of the crazies Gunderfeldt had photographed.

St. Luke’s had a sister school, the Essex Academy for Girls. On the second Saturday of October, they held a fair with booths and carnival games of chance and skill, ring throws, and guessing the number of jelly beans in a five-gallon water bottle, all to raise money for the scholarship fund. And because it was for a good cause, the seniors on the St. Luke’s sports teams were encouraged to lend a hand.

It wasn’t my idea to spike a bowl of punch solely reserved for Essex girls with grain alcohol. But I knew about it. The prospect of getting bombed with a bunch of girls on the sly in front of everyone appealed to me. Since the Contac incident, I hadn’t stopped smoking pot, but at least I had realized that toking up the night before the game wasn’t going to help me keep the ball out of the net.

You could say I was on the road to recovery. And most definitely, we would have gotten away with it if one of the girls hadn’t started the rumor that the punch was laced with acid. Which prompted another girl who was merely three glasses tipsy to convince herself the headmistress had horns, and to shriek, “I’m having a bad trip!”

To get out of being arrested we had to show them the bottle of grain alcohol, which in fact is as colorless and tasteless as acid. And though the police weren’t called in, we were in the kind of trouble that gets you kicked out of a school like St. Luke’s.

The honor society was convened. Our parents were told. If the entire starting lineup hadn’t been involved, we would have all been kicked out, tuition not refunded. To avoid the embarrassment of having to cancel the rest of the soccer season, and thereby advertise our collective lack of character to the other prep schools in the state, it was decided that we would be allowed to stay in school and, if we kept our noses clean, graduate.

The punishment was nonetheless severe. In addition to losing all senior privileges and having to wait on the underclassmen’s tables at lunch, each and every college and university we were applying to would be informed, in detail, of our shameless behavior, i.e., none of us had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting into any college that was any good. Or that our grades and ambitions had been pointing us toward.

My father, displaying the snobbery of a person who has been excluded from a club he both loathes and envies, had only been half joking when he told me on one occasion, “If you don’t get into an Ivy League college, you might as well go to Vietnam.” But he was dead serious about wanting me to go to Yale.

What had been a long shot, even with my bogus trophy for antidrug journalism, had become an impossibility, now that my résumé was rounded out with varsity goalie who spiked the punch with grain alcohol. In my father’s narcissism, he was convinced I had done it to spite him. Willy had said no to my father for years. But my no came as a shock and a personal insult.

He picked me up after school the day the headmaster had passed judgment (my driving privileges had already been revoked). Dad was alone. He never went anywhere without my mother.

As soon as I closed the car door, he tore in. “What in God’s name were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t thinking, I was just trying to have fun.”

“Fun . . . Do you know what your fun has cost you? Do you realize what you have done to yourself?”

“I’ll still get in somewhere.”

“I didn’t bust my ass to get to this point in life for you to end up ‘somewhere.’ ”

“I’m the one who has to go to a shit college, not you.”

“I’ve had to pay for it in more goddamn ways than you can imagine, sonny boy.” My dad took it as an insult when his mother called him “sonny boy.” So did I.

“I’ve had to pay, too.”

My father’s head slumped forward and swiveled toward me, like a water buffalo who’s just been shot. “Is that what this is all about?”

“You’re the psychologist. You tell me.”

His tone of voice changed. “I just don’t want you to look at yourself in the mirror at forty and say, ‘You bastard, you. Look what you’ve done to me.’ ” I wasn’t sure whether the antecedent of “me” was my father or myself. He said it like our fate had already been prescribed.

“I did it to me, not you.”

“You’re my son.” I liked hearing that. “You’re an extension of me . . . of my DNA.”

“Jesus Christ, Dad, why’d you even have me?”

“What?”

“I know how it happened. Jack died, Mom was depressed, you just wanted to have another kid to take his place, get her back.”

My father looked at me as if I had just hit him. A car honked as he swerved over to the side of the road. “That’s what you think?”

“I’ve known it forever.”

“We didn’t have you to take Jack’s place. I wanted another child because I was lonely. And somebody I tried to help wanted me dead. Me and my whole family, erased. And I thought to myself, you bastard, you want to deny my life. And I’m by God not gonna let you do it. I was not going to be denied. I was alive. And I was going to have another child to prove it. Having you kept me going, made it all right. Better than all right.”

My father sat in silence, looking out at the horizon, nodding every so often as if he were carrying on the rest of the conversation inside his head. As if I could read his mind, I watched him look back at the dark days of Casper. Finally, my father sighed, like he’d made everything perfectly clear by osmosis. “Do you understand?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

I owed that to Casper, too.

That night, I stayed up until the sun rose, rewriting the essays I had been working on for my college applications. I didn’t understand my father, but he had given me an idea. It wasn’t the one he had been trying to convey.