The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (20 page)

“That song . . . again,” I said.

“I love it.” She popped another chocolate in her mouth.

“Langford?”

She nodded and plucked another from the bag. With her polished nails she tugged at the little white ribbon—
kisses kisses kisses
—then peeled back the foil.

“Do you want one?” she asked.

“No, thanks. Is she still alive?”

“Who?”

“Frances Langford.”

“I think so.”

“She sounds so sad.”

“I love her voice.”

“I think I need to go to public school.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, with all the busing, the problems, I don’t think that’s an option. Have you mentioned this to your father?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Well, let’s give it some time, some thought.”

I stood, went downstairs to my room, and shut the door.

There were enough of them now. I counted twenty-something pills, piled up and waiting. I stared.

Wait till summer. It’s not so far away. Go to the mountains and do it there, just disappear
.

No, chickenshit. Get it over with. Do it now!

I sat on my bed and struggled to devise a plan. The first thing that occurred to me was that I was scheduled to give a reading at the All-City Youth Mass a week from Sunday at 7:00
pm
. Ten days away. I’d promised, was honored, to do it. (I’d become very involved with the Catholic Youth Organization, one of my extracurricular attempts to shine; to find Jesus.) Wouldn’t that be fittingly dramatic, I thought. Stand before them, the way you like to do, articulate and capable and nice. Greet all your CYO friends. Then go home and die. That’s the bargain. Ten days, no matter what. I put the pills back in their hiding spot.

The next evening, I altered the bargain slightly. It seemed to me that I should at least make a final effort to tell someone what I was planning. Maybe that would change things. At least give it a try, I thought. There was a girl whom I adored. She played guitar at Mass, had the kindest demeanor, the most beautiful soprano voice. For some reason, she was the friend I thought of.
Nancy
, I could hear myself whispering to her,
I think I have to kill myself
. I saw her that weekend in the community room, doughnuts and juice after church. I sat with her and it was
hellos
and
how are yous?
I tried to tell her with my eyes. Didn’t work.

The following week, I remember, I took long walks at night around the neighborhood. Just moving in a depressive trance. A couple of times I stole the car (still had no license) and drove aimlessly around town, lugging with me this ache to connect, this unbearable sorrow. I remember driving the VW in circles under the ghostly street lamps in the parking lot of the bowling-swimming center—Celebrity Lanes—stopping the car in the back by the trash containers to scream at the world, to masturbate. To find reprieve. But nothing seemed to work, to give relief. I was parked there once, done jerking off, my head in my hands, when a Glendale policeman drove up. “What are you doing here? Are you driving?”

“No . . . no. I’m just waiting for my dad.”

He looked at me a long while.

“Why are you sitting in the driver’s seat?

I shrugged.

He finally drove off. I waited a long time before I started the car and made my way home, heart pounding.

When that Sunday arrived, I repeated what I thought was my final bargain:
I’ll go to Mass, I’ll do the first reading, I’ll see everyone, and then I’ll come home. I’ll wait for my sister to get in from her job at Angie’s Pizza Parlor. I’ll try to speak to her. If she stops and talks, I’ll take it as a sign. I’ll tell her what I’m planning
.

I waited at the kitchen table after Mass.

It was well past eleven when Chris flew in the front door, smelling of grease and pizza dough.

“Hey,” I said. I stood and moved toward her, toward the hall, which led to the bedrooms and bathroom.

“Hey,” she said, dropping her backpack and keys on the bench. Her face was stern, her long blond hair a mess. She went straight to the bathroom and shut the door. That was it. A two-second encounter. She was my last chance, my sign from God to go ahead with my plan, and she didn’t even know it. I wanted her to ask me what I was doing up so late, sitting at the table. I wanted her to read my mind, but how could she? She had a job, she had a life, she was coping as best she could. So much fell to her as Mom went to work and Dad moved out—laundry, cooking, babysitting. She was already scheming her way out, saving every dime possible so she could find a place of her own. I didn’t realize any of that then. All I felt as I watched her disappear into the john was that nothing would ever change. That I’d never be able to speak to anyone, really, about anything. Ever. It was too late. I’d never be able to correct what was wrong with me. There was no priest or parent or sister who could possibly hear this story, this shit. I had no choice now; I had to be brave enough to follow through.

It was nearing midnight. I decided to take one more walk. I moved past all the dark houses on our end of Glencoe, then around to Flamingo Street. I walked by George’s old house; I hadn’t seen him in months and months. He’d moved. The one time I did see him we’d smoked a joint and stared at the sky, talked of nothing. Never of Bob.

I walked up the street and sat on someone’s grass. Across the street, in the vacant field near Cherry Creek, I could see the Four Mile House. George and I used to ride our bikes right by it. It was named for its location in relation to the center of downtown Denver. It was where, in the old days, carriages from St. Louis and other parts east stopped to freshen up horses and clothes before making an entrance into town. Now it was abandoned, the white paint peeling from its three fancy stories of slatted wood, tumbleweeds piled in the huge yard. It stood there like a giant Victorian ghost in the moonlight. I stared and wondered how many people had passed this way, by stagecoach. Through time.

I got up and moved under the hum of street lamps, past the quiet houses. I was in a stupor. I remember finding myself back on my own street and just throwing myself down onto the Newcomb’s front lawn. I rolled back and forth, squeezing my rib cage as if to keep my body from flying apart. There was the smell of grass. There were my arms around my chest. I was rolling like a guy who’d been punched in the stomach in a barroom brawl.
Stop it. Stop it
. I remember telling myself:
You’re out of control, losing your grip
. I kept my arms tight around myself as though staving off an explosion. I will be a bomb, I thought, of bone and blood, scattered, splattered against the street and the walls, a message written in red:
Remains of an unspeakable boy
.

I heard a horrendous noise, like a dog, an animal howling or dying and it scared me, made me leap to my feet. I looked around. Everything was quiet and I realized the sounds had come from me and I was afraid that someone had seen or heard. I hurried down the block, back to my house.

I opened the fridge, poured a tall glass of milk (milk!), and went to the basement, to the privacy of my bedroom. (My little brother had long since moved to his own room upstairs.) I sat on the bed and swallowed the pills. It was easier to do than I thought it would be. Once I’d decided, I didn’t hesitate. Pouring the milk. Carrying the glass down the stairs without spilling. Taking the pills out of the baggie. Swallowing down the orange and yellow pile, two or three at a time.

I took off all my clothes and put on my red checkered robe and sat on the edge of my bed. And waited. I wrote part of a note saying goodbye, saying how I just couldn’t bring myself to speak to anyone, that I was sorry, that I’d tried to be a good Christian. That I wished I loved myself. I didn’t finish it. I just wanted the sleep, the rest, to come.

I woke with my head at the foot of the bed. My robe was flung open. I tried to close it, didn’t want to be seen naked. But my arms didn’t work, they were asleep. I scooted around and put my feet, my toes, onto the floor, the orange carpet. The color made me think of the pills and I was hit with the dread of remembering what I’d done.
Oh, shit. I’m going to die
.

I stumbled toward my desk. I didn’t know why I was headed there, something to do with the telephone? An idea of calling for help? I reached toward the phone but, instead, swiped at my clock radio. It crashed onto the floor. It had those large numbers that flip and when the clock landed upside down they tumbled backward, scrambling the time. The numbers were stuck, unable to turn, and the clock wheezed and clicked as the digits tried to flip forward. I remember (the memories so sharp despite the medicated blur) feeling such regret that I might have broken it. I liked that clock. It had fake paper stuck to it that looked like wood. Matched my paneling. It had a radio tuned to a cool talk/jazz station. Big numbers, loud alarm. I broke it, damn. A flash of panic, of terrible sadness, shot through me.
I’ve done it
. I was staring at the upside-down digits, at the crumpled clock, and that’s the last thing I remember before my face fell toward the bright orange carpet.

The next picture stuck in my head is of Mom trying to wake me, panicked:
What have you done?
she was asking.
Are you on drugs?
She was pushing up the sleeve of my robe, examining the veins on my arms. I understood at once that she was looking for needle marks, looking for signs that she was living with an addict. Feeling hurt and disappointed, I thought,
Ah jeez, lady, you’re barking up the wrong tree
. I kept trying to close my robe, cover myself. I didn’t want her to see me this way, my new patch of pubic hair.

I recall then that somehow I’d gotten upstairs. Time was warped—minutes were hours and hours seconds—but I was curled up in the big chair in the living room, vaguely aware that I’d gotten there on my own. My words were thick and slurred as I announced I wasn’t going to school, that I felt very sick.

My mother was standing in the hall, angry, frantic. Getting ready for work. She made some calls. Doctor? Hospital? All was confusion, my sisters and brother gone off to school already. She grabbed her raincoat from the hall closet. I watched all this blurred flurry from the chair. Then, suddenly, my father was there. She must have called for him. She pulled her car keys from her bag. Then she went out the door. I understood that my dad was going to be here, stay home from work. I talked some nonsense to him about a bad flu. I got up, stumbled to the bathroom, and threw up.

I never went to a hospital, never had my stomach pumped. I don’t know how they figured it wasn’t serious enough to call 911. Maybe since I could sort of talk, because I began throwing up. I don’t know. But, as much as that day was a haze, as foggy and thick as the hours were after I took the pills, I remember so clearly Dad standing in the hallway keeping an eye as I came and went, in and out of the john, to get sick. He stood motionless, clueless, the poor guy, hunched near the bathroom, next to the six-inch hole I’d kicked in the hallway wall. He had a cigarette. Swept his hand across his face, over his thinning hair.

“You OK, tiger?”

It was the only, the sweetest, thing he could think to ask this strange boy who’d done such a strange and violent thing. Next time I’d make a more serious attempt. Next time, in fact, I tried to put a .22 rifle to my head, the one Dad left behind when he moved out. Thank God I shot the thing through the paneling of my bedroom wall and the bullet went through the banister of the basement steps and ended up somewhere in the storeroom. But that would be later. Months later. For now there was only this: the two of us alone in a home that was no longer his and a father’s ragged voice gently inquiring—

“You OK, tiger?”

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and nodded toward the man with the cigarette at the end of the hall. The man unable to approach, unable to ask his son what happened. And I was relieved he didn’t, because I wouldn’t have known where in the world to begin.

Book II
    WAKING

H
ENRY AND I
are living now across the street from a New York City public elementary school. We moved in this past winter, in the early days of the new millennium. Nineteen ninety-eight and ninety-nine had been boom years for us, good steady work, good steady life. I turned forty and, after nearly fifteen years together, we’d arrived at the courage and the down payment to become homeowners.

“Steps from the Cloisters,” the
Times
real estate section had said. “A Cabrini Blvd. Junior 4.”
Junior 4
. Somehow that sounded cozy and affordable (somehow, I remarked to Henry, it sounded gay) and just the thing for us. As it turned out, there was an ideal space for Henry’s baby grand piano and a small guestroom off the kitchen. We made an offer on the spot.

During the week, students gather on the playground just opposite us before classes begin. Their chatter builds and rises to bounce against the surrounding apartment buildings. The kid noise mingles with the birdsong that drifts along our tree-lined boulevard. The symphony of it sneaks in bits and pieces through our window, across our bed . . . reveille.

Then a whistle blows. Away go the hula hoops and jump ropes. Away go the basketballs and screaming children. The obedient little bodies line up and disappear inside the old building, and everything (even the birds, it seems) goes silent. It’s eight o’clock.

Sometime later, after coffee, a whistle blows again (it almost always takes me by surprise) and out the children spill like water released from a dam. Colored parkas, pleated skirts, and navy blue pants splash across the tarmac. Watching them take to the slide and swing from the jungle gym, screaming with terror and delight, awakens in me a kind of joy. They land and jump and run to do it all again. It’s a dance wild enough, I think, to wake the dead.

I remembered someone telling me that a famous saint was entombed inside the church that stands a few steps up our street. Shortly after we’d moved in and finished unpacking boxes, I went to investigate.