The Stardust Lounge (10 page)

But the dog won't let us for long. He's panting, huffing. Stephen breaks character as he suggests that maybe G.Q. needs some water. I fill the paper cup the therapist offers us.

The therapist gestures at the kids playing Nintendo. “Why don't you let these guys watch the dog and we go
throw some knives and talk,” Dr. Eduardo Bustamante greets us.

“Throw knives?” Stephen and I are baffled.

Dr. Bustamante doesn't look like the other therapists we've known. For one thing he is young—I imagine he is younger than I—and quite handsome. He speaks with a slight Spanish accent.

“Ya, throw knives—not
at
anyone.” Eduardo laughs. “Well, not really. Come on in here, I'll show you.” Eduardo leads us to the room from which I'd heard shouting.

“See you later, Isaiah,” he says to a boy putting on his coat. “Here's the keys.” Ed hands car keys and a ten-dollar bill to the kid. “I'll take the Super Chicken Burrito and a milk. You get what you want.”

“Sure, Ed.” The kid grins.

“Don't steal
this
car.” Ed laughs as the boy heads out the door. “Little joke between me and Isaiah,” he says to us. “Ever stolen a car, Steve?”

“No,” Steve answers.

“Well, I mighta been known to,” Ed says, laughing.

Ed offers Stephen and me a box open to knives of different sizes and lengths.

“These are just throwing knives,” he reassures me. “See?” He runs his index finger against the blade. “Dull. Now, what you do is choose a knife.”

Stephen and I look at each other. “Don't worry,” says Ed. “It's fun. Go ahead. Choose a knife. Good.” Ed beams as Stephen and I select a knife. “Now, throw the knife at the box.”

Stephen and I look down to the end of the room to an enormous cardboard box—maybe a refrigerator or piano
box—with crude faces like a lineup drawn with a marker across the top.

“Why?” asks Stephen, suspicious of being made a fool of.

“Because it's fun,” says Ed. “Because you can get real good at it, use your lizard brain.”

“Lizard brain?” I ask. I'm thinking that we need to get out of here. We won't be rude, but in a moment I will say that we have to go. We'll get the dog and proceed out the suite door and down the corridor …

“Never mind,” says Ed. “We'll talk about that later. Steve, throw the knife. Let's see what you can do.”

Stephen self-consciously aims and throws. His knife hits the board bluntly and falls clanging to the floor. Stephen folds his arms.

“Not bad,” Ed comments. “First time and all.” Ed fires a knife into the cardboard.

“Love that sound,” he says. “You know that
thwaktssst…
try again.” He offers Stephen another knife from the box. Stephen makes another attempt.

“Now you,” Ed says to me.

“Oh, I can't,” I say.

“Go on, try, Mom,” Stephen says.

“You guys keep practicing,” Ed offers. “I've got to make a phone call. Be right back.”

“But what about our session?” I say. “I mean, shouldn't we talk?”

“Sure, what do you want to talk about?”

“Well, this recent trouble … our lives …”

“Okay, if you want to. Steve, you want to talk about the past?”

“Not really.” Stephen breaks into a grin.

“You know,” Ed considers, “neither do I. The past is the past, right?”

“Maybe we need to be going,” I say. “Stephen should be in school now …”

“Whatever you like. But why don't you throw some knives first. I'll just be a minute.”

“We'll wait,” Stephen answers for us. He would do anything to keep from having to go back to school.

“Good.” Ed pats Stephen on the shoulder. “Good man. Help your mother,” he adds.

“This is crazy,” I whisper to Stephen when Ed leaves us alone.

“I know!” Stephen laughs, his face opening a bit, his eyes tentative.

“Crazy!” I repeat, grinning.

“I know!”

“We agree on that, do we?”

“Maybe.”

“What are we doing here?”

“Dunno.”

“In Amherst, Massachusetts …”

“Dunno.”

“With our dog …”

“With our dog named GQ…”

“In the middle of the school day …

“In the middle of math class …”

“Next to the fire station…”

“While the dog pees on the floor …”

“And you clean it up …”

“Because I'm used to it …”

“And carry paper towels in your pocket…”

“With kids playing Nintendo …”

“Instead of going to school…”

“And taking this guy's car to buy lunch …”

“We're assuming he's a car thief?”

“We're assuming they
both
are?”

“He said, ‘Don't steal
this
car’!”

Now we're doubled over in laughter.

“And throwing knives …,” I say hardly able to talk.

“Knives!”

“Yes, knives!”

“Using our lizard brains.”

“Our lizard brains?”

“Our lizard brains!” Stephen stands poised. Between bouts of laughter, he aims and throws. “Here, lizzy lizzy lizzy!” he shouts. The knife hits the box and goes all the way through.

“Throw it, Mom!”

“Me?”

“Yes, you! Throw it! Keep your eye on the target. Okay! Ready! Aim! Throw!”

Mike's rise to the number one or top-ranking position in the chimpanzee community was both interesting and spectacular… . Mike had ranked almost at the bottom in the adult male dominance hierarchy. He had been last to gain access to bananas, and had been threatened and actually attacked by almost every other adult male. At one time he had appeared almost bald from losing so many handfuls of hair during aggressive incidents with his fellow apes

All at once Mike calmly walked over to our tent and took hold of an empty kerosene can by the handle. Then he picked up a second can and, walking upright, returned to the place where he had been sitting. Armed with his two cans Mike continued to stare toward the other males. After a few minutes he began to rock from side to side
Gradually he rocked more vigorously, his hair began to slowly stand erect, and then, softly at first, he began a series of pant-hoots. As he called, Mike got to his feet and suddenly
he was off, charging toward the group of males, hitting the two cans ahead of him. The cans, together with Mike's crescendo of hooting made the most appalling racket; no wonder the erstwhile peaceful males rushed out of the way… .

Eventually Mike's use of kerosene cans became dangerous
—
he learned to hurl them ahead of him at the close of a charge
…
We decided to remove all the cans, and went through a nightmare period while Mike tried to drag about all manner of other objects. Once he got hold of Hugo's tripod … and once he managed to grab and pull down a large cupboard… . The noise and trail of destruction was unbelievable. Finally, however, we managed to dig things into the ground or hide them away, and like his companions, Mike had to resort to branches and rocks.

By that time, however, his top-ranking status was assured… .

School photo

To walk into our house this morning is to enter a war zone. The awful aluminum doors have been kicked in. They hang from their hinges, the scalloped frames busted out, gouging the torn screens. The doors below the sink are likewise kicked in, and the door leading to the basement. Here and there is evidence of Stephen's attempts to assuage the damage, attempts at what Ed calls “reparation.” Broken glass and Grape-Nuts have been swept into a milky pile. A brick props a cabinet partially torn from the wall.

It's spring in Massachusetts. Stephen is God knows where. Sometime in the night the car screeched out of the driveway and I understood that Stephen, his license suspended, must have secretly had a key made. Or maybe he hot-wired the car.

Our initial work with Ed seemed to create an iota of harmony between us, but the months since have proven that the problems we face, separately and in relationship
to each other, are no easy fix. With Stan gone—no weekend visits, no calls to either of us—I suspect that Stephen feels a great deal like I do, hurt, confused, and abandoned.

And I imagine that from Stephen's point of view, he feels suddenly stuck, locked in this life with his mother. Apparently not the old scared mother, either, whom he could easily manipulate, but some emerging animal of a mother who attends parent-training sessions where she learns “techniques” like refusing to listen to him until he lowers his voice, playing dumb a lot to trick him into solving his own problems, and walking away when he kicks out a door. He is locked in with this infuriating mother and the only thing to do is up the ante.

But what
is
the ante, and why must it go up? Ed warns against it, but I still cull the past looking for reasons, in the end unable to come to terms with Ed's idea that for some children, indeed for Stephen, adolescence is simply a nightmare, a terrible, seemingly unending nightmare in which he is at risk, at one moment being chased down, in the next doing the chasing. He is paranoid, besieged, his hormones are raging. He is truant, destructive. I'm afraid he will kill himself or someone else with that car.

And there has been another incident at school involving a gun. Granted, it was not Stephen but a friend of his who brought it onto school grounds. The gun was brandished at a group of kids “in fun,” Stephen explained to the principal as we sat with police in the office. Who had pointed the gun? Stephen refused to give names. Had Stephen taken possession of the gun? He insisted no. He only held it for a moment.

During the interview Stephen remained calm; the mess in the kitchen is the aftermath of his rage at police
and school officials, and at me for attempting to question him further about the affair. He is suspended from school pending more investigation. In the meantime his license has been revoked for too many speeding tickets.

Driving through town one evening, I was pulled over by the police. When the cop came to my window he apologized.

“Whoops!” he said. “I thought you were Steve. I know the car, you see …”

The car, the car, the car. The gun, the car, the gun, the car. Where is Stephen at this moment? What speeds did he drive to get there? I'm remembering along Route 2 the makeshift shrine—a cross, some teddy bears—erected at the spot where a teen collided head-on, killing himself and the driver of the other car.

The car, the other car, the car, the tree,
he lost control of the car… trying to pass on a hill… a high-speed chase ending in disaster…
The car, by now full of dents, scrapes, hardly recognizable from just six months ago.

“Is that the same car?” a friend asked me recently. “Christ, it's taken a beating.”

“What are you waiting for?” I ask myself. “What?”

“I hadn't figured on the car,” I answer. “It hadn't occurred to me. I don't know why. I should have been more prepared. I should have anticipated this better …”

Looking out over the yard, the first green dusting the woods beyond the fence, I'm numb at the center. There are mothers rising this Saturday morning to fix breakfast for their children, or packing the car for some outing with them—a game, a hike, a shopping trip. These mothers do not jump every time they hear a siren.

And there are mothers who are preparing to drive to some prison or other to visit their sons, sons who have
committed crimes that have landed them behind bars for a year, for five, for life.

There are mothers, too, who wake to a day that includes the knowledge of the death of one of their children, the knowledge simply of one of them gone, pictures around the house, memories, but the child—that one there—dead and gone. Was there any rescue possible, any postponement that might have derailed tragedy? No doubt they ask themselves this from time to time. And what advice might they have for me this morning? What would they tell me?

Moving through the kitchen, I head down the basement steps and open the storage room door. By the light of a weak bulb, among old mops and brooms, boxes of childhood toys and baby clothes saved through our many moves, I survey a steamer trunk I have secretly packed with new clothes for Stephen, soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, one pair of dress pants, one white shirt, and tie, the kind of trunk we might have packed once for summer camp.

Stephen's father has found a residential treatment center to which we plan, at last, to send Stephen. Of course, he would never agree to this solution. But the center we have in mind will actually send people,
heavies,
as I think of them, who come to town, then wait for the best opportunity to take him away—late at night or early in the morning. They spirit him away to the center where under close supervision he will go to school, work, attend therapy sessions, play mandatory team sports, etc.

If, after a year, he is
fit to reenter the community
—he'll be sent home. If not, he is
detained another year…
It's up to me to make the call.

Baba Yaga's house sits on chicken legs, walks by itself, and twirls around from time to time like a dancer. Baba Yaga does not welcome the initiate who has come to ask her help: The fire has gone out at home. Could she please borrow some fire? No, answers Baba Yaga, not until Vasalisa has completed a number of difficult tasks.