6

Hello World

In our junior year Paula began to deal angel dust for Duane, which meant that we had a seemingly endless free supply of dust. At Fernandes, Duane or Wayne Kosinski or Rod Tyler passed through Sue’s checkout lane with jars of parsley flakes, which they soaked or sprayed with liquid PCP. Maybe they picked Sue’s lane because Jeff, her boyfriend, was dealing for them. But even if a store manager noticed, it wasn’t illegal to stock up on dried parsley.

Angel dust was fairly easy to produce and enormously profitable. A $100 investment in the precursor chemicals could yield $100,000 worth of angel dust on the street. The main ingredient, piperidine hydrochloride, was available for purchase without identification, sold by companies that supplied university and research labs. Around Los Angeles in 1977, police were destroying PCP labs at the rate of about one per week. Smaller home labs were run by amateurs mixing PCP in pots and pans in their kitchens, which was, according to the Boston Police Drug Control Unit, “a terribly easy thing to do.” In the early 1980s in South Boston, two brothers were producing $15,000 of angel dust weekly out of their mother’s apartment before they were busted.

We heard occasionally that there was a bad batch of dust, to watch out because someone had made angel dust with Raid or embalming fluid. There was a rumor that formaldehyde was stolen from the high school biology lab, from those gallon glass jars of clear liquid with pale pink pig fetuses floating inside. One night outside a Fleetwood Mac concert at the Patriots’ stadium in Foxborough, where I’d sold hot dogs when I was fourteen, Nicky’s sister, Andrea, and I bought a joint of dust from a stranger for $2. The joint smelled rancid—not the usual stale dried-herb smell—but we smoked it anyway.

We joined a knot of kids outside the chain-link fence in a poorly lit corner of the stadium, where some guy with wire cutters was patiently clipping a hole link by link. Thirty or forty people shook the fence until it collapsed and kids spilled onto the concrete promenade inside, tumbling over each other and running off. The last stragglers—me included—were sprayed with tear gas by the security guards. For hours I was stuck on the stadium lawn in a grip of bodies, my head pounding from smoking that greasy joint, my ears ringing from the too-loud concert, my eyes boiling from tear gas.

 

Duane gave Paula a stack of small square manila envelopes, big enough to fit a silver dollar, filled with a gram of angel dust that he’d carefully weighed on the four-beam scales Paula had stolen from the chemistry lab. As compensation for her distributing dust to kids in school, Duane gave Paula free grams. We smoked dust every day, often twice. When we ran out of the free grams from Duane, we’d buy a gram, if either of us had money, or we pinched from each envelope, not enough for anyone to notice that the packet was light but enough to get us dusted.

When Paula started dealing, she had instant cachet. People sought her, needed her, or needed what she had, which seemed like needing her. She seemed to embody her new stature: a certain looseness to her gait, her neck held a bit straighter, shoulders back; she looked taller. She walked with her hips thrust forward, wearing Frye boots and a leather coat, dangly earrings, her thick reddish brown hair rippling down her back. She developed a slight slur to her speech, s sliding into z, as if it were too much effort to articulate.

 

There was a party in someone’s house on the west side of town, near the prison. I don’t remember how I got there, or with whom, only that I was wasted on angel dust and alcohol, a lethal mix—my mind erased and my body incapacitated. I could barely stand and I was seeing double. The kitchen was packed, people pressing around me, closing in on me. I need air. I had just enough animal sense to stumble outside, puke on the lawn. The rest of the night was blacked out, at least until the next day when I was walking downtown. An older boy I passed on the sidewalk grinned at me. “Do you know where you live?” I expected a punch line, but there wasn’t one. I walked away puzzled, but ruminating on his odd comment triggered a memory from the previous night.

After I staggered out of the house, I crawled into the backseat of some car and passed out. The car belonged to Chucky Hickman; his passenger was the kid who’d made the remark. They cruised around without knowing I was in back until they heard a moan. Chucky Hickman drove me to my house and woke me. In a stupor I opened the car door and lurched across the lawn to the house, except I was walking toward the Gibsons’ house across the street. I was nearly to the front door of the Gibsons’ when my mother saw me and called out, before someone—maybe Chucky Hickman—chased after me and turned me around. I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home, Eric Clapton sang on his album released the year before. Was that the night that my mother dragged me by the collar to the bathroom mirror? “Look at yourself. Just look at yourself,” she said. “I can’t see,” I replied, though I could see my blurry reflection, my stupid smirk.

 

One night when I was hitchhiking alone, dusted and drunk again, that annihilating combination, a young man in a pickup truck pulled over. When I struggled onto the running board and into the passenger seat, he said, “You shouldn’t be hitchhiking.” I didn’t know him, but he was older, maybe in his twenties. “I don’t have any other way to get home,” I slurred. I remember I could barely talk. “It’s dangerous,” he said, pulling away. “You could get picked up by some crazy.”

What if instead of being a Good Samaritan, the man who picked me up had been “some crazy,” someone like Tony Costa, a clean-cut, good-looking man in his early twenties who resembled a killer as much as any boy I knew, which was not at all. Costa had worked as a carpenter in Walpole for Starline Structures, a home-improvement company, the same year he killed three young women. The next year on Cape Cod he murdered, then raped, then dismembered four other young women. Tony Costa was already dead that night I hitched a ride; he had hanged himself in his cell in Walpole Prison the year before.

What if the man who picked me up had been just an ordinary guy who saw an opportunity to take advantage of a girl so out of it that she’d never be able to defend herself, never be able to identify him? Nobody saw him pick me up at that desolate hour on the lonely streets of downtown Walpole. Nobody knew where I was. My friends could have stated only where they’d left me. She was last seen at the corner of East and Main.

 

Sometimes I wonder how I was not raped or killed or both, why was I not brain-damaged, ruined, sent away, locked up. I could have disappeared like some girls did, runaways, or girls abducted and never found, or found in a ditch somewhere. Disappeared girls were the ones who sought adventure, excitement, who rode on the back of motorcycles, like Dawn Shaheen, Miss Walpole of 1974. She represented all of us then, the aspirations of girls to be beautiful, to wear that crown. I remember the front-page article in the Walpole Times, Dawn Shaheen, winner of the Miss Walpole pageant for the town’s two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary. I was fourteen when I stared at her beautiful smiling face in the black-and-white photo, her big doe eyes. I didn’t know her, but she belonged to all of us, the whole town, Miss Walpole—she was our beautiful beauty queen. She’d just graduated from high school, had been Miss Walpole for two months, when one day she rode on the back of some boy’s motorcycle and when they crashed she lost her life. Everyone said her face was unmarked, not a scratch on it; they said this in a hushed way, as if this proved something, that some force of fate had spared her lovely face.

The next year, 1975, Karen Quinlan’s name was on everyone’s tongue, this girl from New Jersey in a coma from drinking too much, mixing alcohol with pills, her story the cautionary tale—“You’ll end up like Karen Quinlan,” forever asleep, like Sleeping Beauty. Disappeared girls were the ones who smoked and drank, who took drugs, who opened the door to strangers, who got in strangers’ cars. Careless girls, wild reckless girls, girls who courted thrills, girls like me, a “girl by the side of the road,” like in Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker, a 1970s TV movie about a girl who got into the wrong car. The ad for the movie asked, “Where is your daughter tonight?”

The bogeyman of my childhood was a kidnapper, an escaped prisoner, the Boston Strangler. Never take a ride from a stranger. I knew the warnings, but I failed to heed them—too lazy, too careless, too naive, too arrogant, considering myself immune from those abstract perils. Too young. One day in tenth grade I missed the bus after school and was walking home when a man in a two-toned sedan, rusty in spots, pulled alongside and asked for directions, then asked if I wanted a ride. I was the perfect target, in my burgundy corduroy skirt and knee socks. I knew I shouldn’t accept, but the man—froglike, balding, with bulging eyes, a potbelly—didn’t look dangerous the way Charles Manson or the Boston Strangler looked deranged and menacing, with wild eyes. This man was out of shape, toady, like Mr. Klein, my ninth-grade civics teacher, a short, thick man with bristly hair who kept candy in his desk at West Junior High, which he gave to girls when we visited him after school. Or Mr. Hood, the chemistry teacher, with his oversized head like Fred Flintstone. Mr. Hood let me do anything I wanted. Get a bathroom pass? No problem. I knew he favored me, but I didn’t know why. These men seemed harmless, these paunchy, baggy-eyed, middle-aged men.

I was tired and hot and still had two miles to walk, including up long, steep Pemberton Hill. “Okay,” I said, and slid onto the vinyl front seat. The man, who wore a suit coat and shirt but no tie, chatted as he drove away. How do you like school? What’s your favorite subject? Do you have a boyfriend? We crested the rise near the Boston Edison station, near the turn that brought me to the final mile of my journey. His question about a boyfriend was a segue to prurient interest. Do you have sex? What do you do with him? He saw that I was put off, alerted, and so he spoke faster, his questions increasingly graphic. Do you give him blow jobs?

At the bottom of Pemberton Hill, I said, “This is fine. I’ll get out here.” He said, “I can take you all the way home.” I said firmly—or with alarm—“Let me out right here.” He pulled over and I got out, and I didn’t say thank you for the ride. That was my response to his lewdness—I was impolite. I walked the last mile home, Pemberton Hill like penance for my stupidity. I felt relieved, then angry, then embarrassed and ashamed, finally frightened. How could I have been so stupid?

How could I have been so stupid again? One night Nicky’s sister, Andrea, and I hitched to the Flats in Norwood looking for a boy she liked. The Flats were the working-class section of Norwood, dense with flat-roofed triple-decker houses jammed close. There was a feeling of crowdedness in the Flats, like a tenement. We were picked up by a lone man in a car, someone a year or two older than us. We closed the door and he pulled away before we realized how fucked up he was. He weaved all over the road, partly because he was so drunk, but also because he wanted to kill himself, he told us.

He veered purposely into the opposite lane and we screamed. The roads weren’t busy—it was a weeknight—but the few cars that swerved out of his way blasted their horns. The rest of the people in town were home, with work or school the next day, in bed or getting ready. Andrea and I begged the man to let us out, but he refused. He’d kidnapped us. Yelling seemed to encourage him, so we began to sweet-talk him, to cajole. I crouched on the floor in the backseat, braced for the collision I expected any moment.

Finally Andrea convinced him to pull over, and we jumped out in the middle of nowhere, or somewhere we didn’t recognize. We had no choice but to stick out our thumbs again. This time two other Norwood boys picked us up, nice boys, and they invited us out for Chinese food, and we told them the story of the crazy suicidal kid. We ordered drinks with tiny umbrellas and the boys paid for our dinner, and they did not rape or kill us but drove us home to Walpole.

 

As a teenager I was fascinated by stories of runaways, hitchhikers, the wild girl a collective fear/fantasy in the 1970s, an archetype of the decade. First there was Go Ask Alice, which sold four million copies, a runaway bestseller about a runaway girl. The book was purportedly the true diary of a girl who got involved with drugs, written by Anonymous, which made the story seem more real. Alice, the diarist, died at the end, death being the punishment for girls who strayed.

Maybe I’ll Come Home in the Spring, a made-for-TV movie, starred Sally Field, who’d played a nun before that, innocent and uncorrupted, now a druggie runaway. Even Eve Plumb, who’d played Jan on The Brady Bunch—my TV proxy, the middle daughter, a little whiny, a little misunderstood—became a delinquent in Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. The film’s theme song, “Cherry Bomb,” was sung by the Runaways, an all-girl band—Can’t stay at home, can’t stay at school . . . Hello world! I’m your wild girl.

How powerfully I was drawn to these girls in pulp paperbacks and TV specials, girls who’d crossed the tracks. “Sally made spaghetti. Paula came over. Watched Sarah T., a movie about a teenage alcoholic,” I wrote in my diary. Sarah T., Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, about a girl from a broken home, starred Linda Blair. It wasn’t all fiction. In 1976, Mary Anissa Jones, who’d played Buffy on Family Affair, died of a drug overdose at eighteen. A toxicology test found high levels of PCP and other drugs in her system. Lovable freckle-faced Buffy, America’s girl in the fifth-ranked show from 1967 to 1970; six years later the actress who played her dead from drugs, angel dust among them.

Why did these girls leave home? What were they looking for? I sensed there was something out there that they were running to, some ideal place, like California. Nicky and I dreamed of running away to California, that great escape, the antithesis of Massachusetts, big and sunny, not small and cold, as far away as you could get from Walpole without taking a boat across an ocean. We were not like Dorothy, who wanted to leave the glittering surreal city on the hill and get home. We wanted to find the glitter, the glamour, the grit. We wanted flying monkeys and smoking caterpillars and Big Sur and Haight-Ashbury and communes and love and everything from the sixties that we didn’t know was already gone. What we yearned for was someplace bigger and more thrilling than suffocating suburbia, something compelling to which we could belong, a movement, a purpose, a point to our lives.

In ninth grade, Cathy Byrnes, a girl I knew from smoking cigarettes in the girls’ room, ran away from her overbearing military father. She hitchhiked, caught a ride with a truck driver, and made it to California in three days, we heard, but then she was caught shoplifting and shipped back to Walpole. Her father sent her away to some strict academy and we never saw her again. There was something in her desperate run that I admired—the sheer audacity, the blank stupidity, the blindness to possible consequences. She seemed brave.

December 20, 1975—Marco, Dan Valerio and Rod Tyler drove Alison and me on a couple dust runs, then had to go home. Wish I didn’t have to come home at all.

Why did I wish I didn’t have to come home? Where did I imagine living, changing clothes, sleeping? What would I eat? But I didn’t need to run away. There was nothing oppressive about my home life; the opposite—nobody was paying much attention.

 

My father lived somewhere else, his visiting hours restricted. He wasn’t around often enough to know what was happening. Even when my father visited, there weren’t private moments between us. I remember just one day in my childhood when I had my father to myself, on my tenth birthday, when he took me to a Celtics game to see my hero, John Havlicek. On the way to Boston, we ate at a diner, which wasn’t fancy—brick facade and glass-block windows—but they served my favorite food, steamed clams. After I ate an enormous mound of clams, a midden of shells left on my plate, my father asked, “Had enough?” I nodded, knowing it was piggy to want another whole plate, but I was still hungry. I wanted to sit in that restaurant eating steamed clams dipped in butter and talking to my father for the rest of my life.

One night when I was sixteen I was supposed to meet my father for dinner. I don’t know how this plan came about; it was odd. Maybe he felt the need to spend time with his troubled middle daughter, or more likely my mother suggested it. That night he called me from a bar—I could hear the background noise—and said he couldn’t make it. I suspected from his slurred voice that he was a little drunk, which surprised me. I’d never seen my father drunk, or even sloppy from a few drinks. He drank a beer or two sometimes on weekends, let us sip from his can when we were little, amused at our sour expressions.

On rare occasions after work my father would mix a caramel-colored drink called a highball in a short heavy glass with ice cubes clinking. The liquor cabinet held a couple of half-full bottles of alcohol, a copper shaker with the strainer top, and a weighty metal canister with a trigger you pressed to carbonate drinks, an accoutrement that we sometimes played with as if it were a toy and which my parents used only for the occasional New Year’s Eve party or summer barbecue they hosted. There wasn’t even enough alcohol in that cabinet to steal and water down the bottle.

My father didn’t give an excuse for canceling our plans that night; there wasn’t one. But I knew why he canceled. He was having too much fun at some happy hour and didn’t want to drive out to Walpole to dutifully spend time with his dour teenage daughter, one who’d become a stranger to him.

“We’ll do it another time,” he said. I could hear the guilt in his voice.

“Okay, no problem,” I said.

Just before he hung up, he mumbled, “Love you,” and then I knew for sure he’d been drinking. Maybe he muttered those words hurriedly, just before the phone hit the cradle, because he didn’t want to leave time for me to respond; maybe he feared I wouldn’t say it back.

It was not our family ethos to declare our love for one another. My parents didn’t say “I love you” as we walked out the door or hung up the phone or at night before bed, or even as words of comfort when one of us was crying or hurt. It’s almost as if those words were too intimate, too private, embarrassing. My mother always reprimanded me when I said I hated anyone; hate is too strong a word, she’d say. Maybe love was, too.

 

My father wasn’t aware of angel dust, but he wasn’t entirely clueless about our drug use. When I was fifteen, he flew Sally, Joanne, Barbie, and me to California for a week; he’d amassed frequent-flyer miles working for a client there. We stayed in Culver City, east of Los Angeles, at the Stern’s Motel, a mom-and-pop place, all of us in one efficiency with a rollaway cot and a foldout couch.

The first day we ate lunch at Venice Beach, which epitomized the California of my imagination, the California that Nicky and I had dreamed about—balletic roller skaters weaving along the boardwalk in white tie-up skates, the kind we rented in seventh grade at Rollerland with the rubber toe brake, skating outside in the sunshine as if they’d rolled right out of the contained loop of a rink; sun-bleached, long-haired teenage boys, tanned and beautiful, and girls in macramé bikinis or cut-off jeans; and bikers in black leather vests, chains hanging from their back pockets; and stoned-out druggies with dirty feet leaning against walls painted with psychedelic murals or trompe l’oeil. Bicycle cops in shorts laced through the crowd, kids on skateboards, buskers strumming, gay men in flamboyant clothes like I’d seen in Provincetown on Cape Cod, where my friends and I rented mopeds and buzzed along dune roads, the sheen of brown and black and bronzed skin, a stream of humanity pulsing with energy, scented with sweet musky marijuana and coconut oil.

That night Sally and I asked my father if we could walk to Venice Beach, which was two miles from Stern’s Motel. My father consulted the proprietor, Mr. Stern, who seemed to embody his name, with glasses, thinning gray hair, square shoulders, bolo tie. The beach was safe, he said, if we avoided the seedy section to the left of the pier. Off we went, Sally and I, in our jean jackets and dungarees, walking along five-lane Washington Boulevard, the sky blushing pink, streaked with brown smog, the air stale and hot and smelling of exhaust from muscle cars rasping into the night.

At the end of the boulevard we saw the long cement pier and immediately walked to the left, the seedy section, where a few people circled a conga player, his beat dampered by the crash of waves. At the end of the pier, past dried fish guts, a lone fisherman casting, in the public bathroom Sally and I smoked angel dust that we’d smuggled in our luggage, along with shorts and bathing suits. We hitchhiked back to the motel and locked ourselves in the bathroom and smoked more dust, making faces in the mirror, everything distorted. After a while my father knocked on the door and nervously asked, “Have you been taking grass?” We denied it, and he let it go, probably thinking that like many kids, we were experimenting with marijuana.

In the photo of my sisters and me standing in front of the CITY OF STANTON sign, a town north of Anaheim, I look tough in my dungaree jacket. Joanne in her striped tank top looks happy. Sally looks stoned. Barbie was just eleven; her arms are twisted in an anxious pose, even though she’s smiling. She must have been worried that entire trip that Sally and I would get caught, her stomach churning with fear, and when at Disneyland the teacup ride was closed, Barbie, with my father, walked as slowly as she could back to where we were waiting, knowing I’d be smoking, and there I was, leaning against a wall, Marlboro in hand, blowing smoke rings. My father walked past, barely glancing my way. “That looks dumb,” he said. With three words he reduced me, like in that cartoon—size of a mouse.

 

My mother worked the night shift at Pondville Hospital so she could get the younger kids off to school; Patrick, Barbie, and Mikey were twelve, eleven, and five the year I began my descent. And she picked up float shifts at Medfield State and elsewhere for extra money. How could she keep track of us all? In ninth grade Patrick skipped school for a full month before my mother caught him. He’d don his uniform for Bishop Feehan Catholic school—white shirt, forest-green sweater with a shamrock logo; he’d been kicked out of West Junior High. He’d say goodbye to my mother, then stroll out the side door as if to catch the bus at the top of the street, but instead he’d make a U-turn and like a burglar slip into the basement through the bulkhead. He stowed away in the Orange Room, behind the bar that Ed built, reading Conan the Barbarian paperbacks and peeing in a bottle, my mother upstairs cleaning before she left for work, until one day she found a bottle of urine and figured things out.

Like my father, my mother knew nothing about angel dust. She was a teetotaler; how could she conceive of the drugs easily available to us, drugs that hadn’t existed in her youth? One night Paula, Alison, Nicky, and I were in the Orange Room smoking angel dust. No one was talking, because you don’t, or can’t, talk much when you are dusted. There must have been an album slowly, lopsidedly spinning on the turntable, Neil Young or Pink Floyd or Robin Trower or Lou Reed. My mother knocked on the door, so I opened it a crack, and she tried to hand me a plate of nicely arranged slices of pound cake sprinkled with powdered sugar and some napkins. “We’re not hungry,” I said. Angel dust was not like marijuana or hash. We had no enhancement of the senses, no cravings. Dusted, I was repulsed by food. I weighed eighty-nine pounds then, anorectically thin from smoking angel dust. The smell of angel dust nauseated me, an acrid chemical odor, the sickening stench of charred leaves, like the smell of burning hair.

My mother pushed the plate into the gap. “I’m sure your friends will like it,” she said. I opened the door just wide enough to take the plate, which I set on the floor in the middle of the room, but no one touched it. I suspected Paula and Alison were suppressing laughter about my 1950s-style Ozzie and Harriet mom who thoughtfully provided snacks to the teens in the rec room. I was embarrassed by my mother’s kindness, a measure of how far removed I was from normalcy. I wrapped a piece of cake in a napkin and threw it in the wastebasket to make it look like we’d eaten some. Somehow in my stoned-out spaciness I was concerned about my mother’s feelings; she would be hurt if we didn’t eat her cake. At least I was thinking of someone else’s feelings and not solely my own.

Where were my parents when I was destroying myself, I’ve wondered. I see now—like a split screen on television—that my mother, at least, was upstairs baking cake.

 

On the weekends my mother went to New York to see Ed, we were left alone. Our house earned a reputation as a party house. Nearly every weekend cars cruised down our street, townies and druggies staring out their windows, wondering if the three or four junker cars in our driveway signaled the start of a party. Sometimes the parties grew out of control and our house filled with kids who were not our friends, burnouts like Dan Valerio, Wayne Kosinski, Rod Tyler, and sometimes older and more hardcore townies and dealers, Lighty and his sidekick Woody, news of the party spreading like a contagion, our house jammed, people spilling into the yard, the street. Worse was when kids from Norwood showed up, from the Flats, the tough section. Then we knew we had to call the police on ourselves before a fight broke out, or something worse.

Joanne was fourteen then, and probably with her friends, sleeping at their houses. Patrick, who was twelve, was out with his troublemaking posse of boys, running wild in the projects, the cemetery, the tracks. Barbie, eleven, was upstairs in her bedroom with her door closed, unable to sleep through the noise, anxious because she heard her doorknob turning, someone’s hand on it, the crack of light from the hall when the door opened, a drunk stranger stumbling into her bedroom, fumbling around before realizing that she was in there.

 

On Saturday mornings my father dropped Mikey back home, and we babysat him on Saturday nights. One time Sue had a few friends over while babysitting, and the party grew with Sally’s friends and my friends, and then the cars lining the street attracted more people until our house was crowded. One of Sue’s drunk friends, a jock with platinum-blond hair, picked up Mikey’s small plastic tank of sea monkeys. She couldn’t see them, so she didn’t believe they existed. Sea monkeys were ubiquitously advertised in comic books or Mad Magazine. As a kid, you had to have them, because they grew from nothing, like magic, and in the egregiously deceptive ads, the sea monkeys seemed huge, with tiny cute faces; it was like growing your own family of teensy underwater people.

I had them as a kid and now, years later, Mikey had sent away for sea monkeys, had dissolved in water the dry eggs that looked like powder, had waited weeks, and even though they were just specks, the sea monkeys were visible now through the magnified circles on the clear plastic tank. But Sue’s drunk friend couldn’t see them, so she held the tank up to her face and stared into the water, then shrieked because now she saw the wriggling creatures, but the tank slipped from her hand and the sea monkeys spilled all over the kitchen floor. I hated her for killing Mikey’s sea monkeys.

Some of the kids were drinking vodka and lemonade, so there were half-full plastic cups on tables and counters. Mikey wandered through the rooms, the cutest towheaded boy with big brown eyes—everyone loved him. From across the dining room I spotted him guzzling from a plastic cup that someone had abandoned, a drink that tasted like lemonade, the cup empty before I could stop him. Soon he became wild. The rooms connected around the staircase, and Mikey lapped this circle, zooming around the house like the boy chased by the tigers, like a puppy that raced maniacally when let off its leash. Finally he stopped, and Sue or someone said he should get to bed.

The next morning Mikey walked down the stairs in his underwear and sat on the bottom step and hung his head. “I don’t feel good,” he said, and cried. He had a hangover—my baby brother, age five. We gave him our cure for hangovers, a big glass of Coca-Cola with ice. I felt sick with shame and guilt. What if he’d found another glass of vodka and lemonade, or a third, and drunk those, too?

Even now I have a sense of worry and guilt about exposing my younger siblings to the parties filled with drunk and stoned and fucked-up kids, kids breaking things, spilling beer and drinks on rugs and furniture, leaving burn marks from cigarettes and joints, throwing up in the bathroom or not making it there in time, kids pairing off to various rooms to have sex, kids wandering around our house and opening doors, twisting the knob on Barbie’s bedroom door.

November 29, 1975—Me and Paula and Alison split a gram of dust, then went home and I got really cocked. When I woke up, Wayne Kosinski and Dan Valerio were in the house. Made raviolis at 5:00 a.m. and cooked them eggs. It was a totally weird night.

I was fifteen the night Wayne Kosinski and Dan Valerio found their way into my house while I was passed out. My memory of that night is olfactory, the smell in the Orange Room: rank body odor, punky socks, the sweet cloying scent of spilled alcohol seeped into the carpet, the upholstery saturated with pot stink, the air stagnant in the musty windowless room. Wayne, who was twenty, was one of the biggest angel dust dealers in town. In three years he’d be charged with intent to distribute PCP, and a couple years after that arrested again for dealing angel dust. Dan was nineteen. Years after he spent that night in the Orange Room, after I cooked him ravioli and eggs at dawn, he was convicted of indecent assault and battery on a child under fourteen.

 

There were summer nights in downtown Walpole that defined being a teenager in the 1970s, nights when thirty or forty kids milled around Friendly’s parking lot, the sun setting late, heated air rising off baked asphalt into the cool night, our own weather zone; kids in idling cars, kids on ten-speed bikes, kids on foot, boys leaning into car windows, T-shirts slung over bare shoulders, girls in halter tops, backs bare and breasts loose, hip-hugger pants with three buttons to the bikini line, midriff shirts exposing skin, boys with red bandannas taming long wild hair, everyone waiting, someone’s tape deck blasting rock music—and the radio played that forgotten song—the thick scent of pot, a Frisbee scraping the pavement, glancing off a car, the air electrified with a restlessness born from the slow-burning fuses of youth and boredom, a thrumming energy latent with expectancy, as if we were waiting for something to happen, a spark to ignite, whispers of a rumble with our rival town, Norwood, everything vibrating at a higher tension, excitement gathering until inevitably the cops pulled into the parking lot and broke up the crowd.

We’d disperse, only to collect again like minnows schooling, migrating to hidden places as darkness fell to drink and get high, behind Center Pool or United Church or Giantland, a grassy clearing behind Giant’s department store, one ancient sprawling oak in the middle of the field. Often we partied at Bird Park, the grand vision of Walpole’s most famous industrialist, Charles Sumner Bird, heir to the Bird & Son shingle factory, one of the oldest factories in the country, established as a paper mill in 1795. The park had eighty-nine acres of lawn and woods enclosed by a wrought iron fence, with a stone path winding through like a yellow brick road. There was an open-air amphitheater—I remember as a kid sitting on a stone bench watching actors at dusk—and a creek that fed a swimming pool that was more like an oval pond. In the middle of the pond/pool was a statue of frogs on a lily pad. In summers when we were young my mother packed lunch and my siblings and I spent the afternoon swimming, diving from the frog statue into the greenish water.

At Bird Park my father taught me to play tennis with my new racket signed by Pancho Gonzales, the Mexican American champion, whom I conflated with Speedy Gonzales, the cartoon mouse who was so fast he played tennis against himself, whizzing from one end of the court to the other, faster than the ball. ¡Arriba, arriba! ¡Ándele, ándele! In fall we picked chestnuts there, the seed casings like green apples with spiky shells, which we squished open beneath our sneakers to reveal shiny smooth dark-brown chestnuts, or occasionally the thrill of a pure white one, or a “doubler.” The chestnuts had an oily sheen that made them sensual to hold. We collected dozens and at home bored holes in the chestnuts with crochet needles to string enormously heavy and absurdly ugly necklaces.

By the time I was in high school, the pool had been drained because of biohazards and weeds sprouted through cracks in the cement. The amphitheater was burned, its remaining stone walls graffitied. The tennis nets sagged; the spinning octagon ride in the playground tilted on its rusted center pole. Few of the lanterns along the paths worked, so there were dark recesses where we could drink and get high. There was a thrill to roaming around these hidden places, like being invisible in public, lurking in the shadows behind United Church under the noses of the cops, their station a block away, like a map that only we could see with our night vision. We were always looking for a party, though once we found one, the scene was the same, kids drinking and getting high, the faces and places almost interchangeable, even when we crashed a party in another town, like the night in Plainville, which began like any other summer night in Friendly’s parking lot.

I was with Nicky when his sister, Andrea, and her boyfriend, Chucky, with a nimbus of fire-colored hair, pulled up to us. They offered us some crossroads amphetamines, little white pills with an X incised into them. I’d taken speed before: black beauties, shiny capsules of biphetamine (similar to Adderall today), one of the amphetamines the military freely gave to soldiers in Vietnam for pep, 225 million tablets distributed in just three years of the war; and crystal meth, a $10 tinfoil packet filled with granular white powder that we snorted, drinking beer to temper the jittery amped-up buzz. When a batch of crystal meth came into Walpole, parties were filled with kids grinding their jaws, a twisting motion like ungulates chewing. Monica Lande, a cool older girl who rarely deigned to speak to me, cornered me one night after she’d snorted crystal meth, her pupils dilated as she talked and talked, her jaw sliding sideways.

Nicky and I swallowed the speed, and then Chucky said he knew of a party in Plainville, so he drove us there. I don’t remember much about the party, just kids I didn’t know sitting around drinking, smoking pot, getting wasted, rock music so loud you couldn’t hear anyone talk. Nicky sat in an easy chair and I curled on his lap, my cheek against the soft skin of his neck, breathing in the clean talcum scent of him. Later we walked upstairs to a bedroom and crawled into a bed. We took off our pants and shirts, and in some stranger’s bed beneath some stranger’s sheets we kissed and touched, but soon we fell asleep. Probably our drug and alcohol habit prevented me from being a pregnant teenager.

The next morning was bright and sunny and we woke up surprised but happy to find ourselves in that bed in that room, fuzzy with sleep and cotton-mouthed. Downstairs I could see now that the house was contemporary, with huge picture windows overlooking a yard with jack pines, a sand driveway—a landscape I’d seen only on Cape Cod. I drank a glass of water, but there was nothing to eat. I couldn’t eat anyway. Sometimes with Nicky I felt so in love that I became nauseated, an overwhelming physical sense of desire that resembled anxiety, like an overdose of hormones and emotion. One night earlier that summer we swam in the pool after midnight, everyone else out or asleep, moonlight glinting off the water as we pulled off our bathing suits, the water cool and almost oily as we drifted toward each other and I wrapped my legs around his waist, our skin slick and warm as we pressed together, floating, as weightless as our consciences.

 

Nicky and I were alone in the house. Even Andrea and Chucky were gone, but surely they’d be back to pick us up. The living room was cluttered with empty beer cans and bottles from the night before, ashtrays overflowing with stubbed-out cigarettes. I hunted in ashtrays for snipes, cigarette butts with a bit of tobacco left. Nicky explored the house, opened cabinets. We had no idea who owned this house or where we were exactly, just: Plainville.

I followed him down to the basement, to a workbench cluttered with materials to make rifle cartridges, like the spent shells I collected in the woods behind my house, red and green plastic tubes the size of a Bic lighter, with brass caps. There was a tin of gunpowder and—as if the owner had been called away in the middle of his work—a pile of black powder on the table. As kids we played with gunpowder in the form of caps, a half-inch-wide ticker tape of red paper pocked with freckle-sized blisters of black powder. We’d lay the strip of paper flat on the sidewalk and smash a rock onto each blister until it exploded. Over and over we smashed, thrilled by the tiny crack of the explosion, the puff of smoke, the strangely appealing whiff of sulfur like rotten eggs, the small white star-shaped scar on the asphalt from each bang. We’d buy a box of five rolls, 250 caps, and we’d bang and bang. There were guns into which you could load the caps, but I didn’t have one. Guns were for boys, not girls. We graduated from caps to cherry bombs, bottle rockets, firecrackers, M-80s.

Nicky poured some of the gunpowder into a baggie and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

“Make a bomb,” he said. “Put it in the school.” He laughed and I laughed with him, and we walked upstairs.

 

I didn’t think Nicky would make a bomb; I doubted that he knew how. Occasionally kids called bomb scares into school to try to get classes canceled. How did kids even know to call in bomb scares? The 1970s was a bomby decade. In 1972 alone there were over 1,900 bombings by radical activist groups—the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the Chicano Liberation Front, Americans for Justice, the FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group, the Jewish Defense League, anti-Castro Cubans, Croatian separatists. During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly five per day. At the height of the domestic terrorism in the country in the 1970s, there were a thousand bombings a year.

I didn’t learn about the radical underground movement in “America in the Twentieth Century,” at least not in the classes I managed to attend. But the blasts rippled into our psyches. I didn’t learn of the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers, but I absorbed that angry energy, glimpsed it on television and in magazines, that unforgettable powerful image of Patty Hearst wielding a machine gun, a girl who’d joined an underground army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which I thought was trying to liberate some desperate people in a foreign country—the Symbionese, like Lebanese or Sudanese, the underground army’s headquarters actually underground, I imagined, like the Batcave, which was why they were hard to catch. That’s what I gleaned from headlines.

Two months before Nicky took the gunpowder, in April 1976, a bomb exploded in the Suffolk County Courthouse in Boston, injuring twenty-two people. The bomb was planted by the United Freedom Front, which aimed to obliterate the parole office and its records tracking thousands of ex-cons. The United Freedom Front was birthed from the prison rights movement, spearheaded by Raymond Levasseur from Maine, a Vietnam veteran who’d been sent to a maximum-security prison on a minor marijuana charge, and Tom Manning, also a Vietnam vet, from a working-class Boston Irish family. After returning from Vietnam, Manning robbed a liquor store and was sent to Walpole Prison for five years, where he was stabbed by another inmate and nearly died. “I spent my last fourteen months in Walpole’s 10 Block, where I read Che, and where all the prisoners—black and brown and white—were united out of necessity,” he wrote. In a letter about the bombing addressed to the Real Paper, Boston’s alternative weekly, the United Freedom Front wrote, “This is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.” They demanded prison reforms, including an “immediate end” to “the 23½ hour a day lockup” at Walpole, enforced on some inmates for nearly two years.

 

Bombs exploded inside Walpole Prison, too. In 1972, Stanley Bond, a member of the Weather Underground incarcerated in Walpole for robbing a bank, was killed when a bomb he was making in the prison foundry detonated. And in April 1975 another homemade bomb exploded in the prison, also killing the inmate who’d been holding it.

Bomb scares weren’t abstract or in cities or behind cement walls. In the town of Walpole, forty-two bomb scares were reported in the local paper in 1976, almost one weekly. (There were only two in 1977, and none for the rest of the decade.) To ring in 1976, on New Year’s Eve three bomb scares were called in to Walpole police, one for the police station itself, two for restaurants downtown. Two weeks later, “an unidentified caller” told police a bomb would go off in Papa Gino’s pizzeria, where I ate twenty-five-cent slices. In February five bomb scares were called in to the police within ten minutes, one for Friendly’s restaurant, the others threatening local factories.

In the following weeks there were bomb threats to On Luck Chinese restaurant, a mile from my house, and Walpole Bottling Company, where as a kid I went with my father to fill a twenty-four-quart case of soda, picking flavors from the warehouse floor, cream soda and sarsaparilla and lemon-lime. There were so many hoax bomb threats that the police reaction was blasé. There were “no major crises” over the bicentennial weekend in July 1976, according to the police log, just “summer mischief”—a streaker in Bird Park, a sighting of a large red UFO, and two bomb scares, one at Almy’s department store, a favorite shoplifting haunt, and one man warning that a bomb would go off in the town hall. Streakers, UFOs, and bomb threats—strange days.

The bomb scares in Walpole over the bicentennial were hoaxes, but real bombs exploded that weekend elsewhere in Massachusetts, set by the United Freedom Front, again demanding prison reforms. They detonated bombs at a National Guard armory south of Boston, the Essex County Superior Courthouse north of Boston, under an Eastern Airlines prop jet at Logan Airport, and outside a First National Bank on the North Shore. The plane and buildings were damaged, but nobody was hurt.

The United Freedom Front, “the last revolutionaries,” continued bombing throughout the decade and into the 1980s, mostly in Massachusetts and New York, until they were caught in April 1985. Then the men who’d been radicalized in prison, who exploded bombs to demand prisoners’ rights, wound up back in prison.

 

I didn’t worry about Nicky using the gunpowder for a bomb. He wasn’t violent or aggressive, and I never heard him express political views. He was looking for thrills, rebellious but not angry. He was at heart a nice boy. (He told me once that I should be kinder to my mother; he was close to his.) The gunpowder in someone else’s possession might have been dangerous, but the appeal for Nicky, I imagine, was to hold in his hands the potential for explosive power, like a kid smashing caps on the sidewalk.

 

Chucky and Andrea returned to the house in Plainville; they’d just gone to the store for smokes. “Let’s get out of here,” Nicky said. He didn’t want to get caught with the gunpowder. All day Saturday we drove around getting high, Nicky and I leaning into each other in the backseat. Maybe we took a second hit of speed; I don’t remember stopping for food, or eating. Maybe that’s why we couldn’t seem to stop driving and going nowhere, driving and circling and getting high and listening to the car stereo. By the time it grew dark Saturday night, we’d been out for more than twenty-four hours and we were running out of gas and money and drugs. My mother was at work, so we planned to drive to my house, where I had a few dollars and some pot stashed, but first we needed gas.

Chucky had siphoning equipment in his trunk. He drove down a dark rural road until he saw an unlit house with a car in the driveway close to the road. He gave Nicky instructions, and Nicky disappeared down the street carrying a red jerry can and tubing. He returned five minutes later, gagging and spitting but with a gallon of gasoline, minus the mouthful he’d swallowed, and we drove away in Chucky’s Pinto, the Ford model that tended to ignite when rear-ended, Nicky and me in the backseat, he with gasoline in his mouth, gunpowder in his pocket.

 

As we cruised through the center of town, Paula flagged us down. She poked her face in the window. “Where the fuck have you been?” she said. “Everybody is looking for you. You’re screwed.” She nodded at Nicky and me in the backseat. “There’s an APB out for this car.” All points bulletin. How did she know this? Maybe Good Goin’ Gus, the friendly cop, told her. We’d been reported missing, as runaways, by Nicky’s mother when he and Andrea hadn’t come home Friday night. With the stolen gas, we drove to my house and I ran in for the $3 and the pot. On my way out, as I bolted down the stairs, I bumped into Sue in the kitchen. “You’d better stay in,” she said. “Mom knows you didn’t come home last night. She knows you weren’t at Alison’s.” My mother would be home from work soon. I walked past Sue. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. I walked out the door.

In the car, I told everyone we were in trouble. Nicky vowed never to go home, and I was with him. That option seemed easier—not having a place to live, no money or food or clothes—than facing parents. We’d just do this forever, drive around getting stoned, driving and driving and never arriving. It’s all the same fucking day, man, as Janis Joplin said. She was my hero, the voice of pure anger, desire, defiance. Like Janis, I was hardened, tough—you can’t hurt me because I have nothing left to lose. Bent on self-destruction, I didn’t care about my future because tomorrow never comes.

 

We bought gas and smoked the pot and soon again we had an empty tank and an empty pipe. Chucky said he was taking us home. He was Sue’s age, seventeen. He stood to get in more trouble than Nicky or me; maybe he realized this, or maybe he realized that there was nowhere to go, no choices left. When I walked into my house after midnight, my mother was waiting for me, still wearing her nurse’s uniform, pacing in the kitchen. She was angrier than I’d ever seen her. I tried to brush by her, but she grabbed me by the collar and pushed me against the dining room wall. I don’t remember what she said. What could she say? “Let go of me,” I said. She gripped my shirt, her face an inch from mine, though she was shorter by three inches. “Let go or I’ll walk back out and never come home.”

“If you do that, you will never step foot in this house again.” We both threatened the thing we didn’t want to happen.

“You wouldn’t have missed me if Nicky’s mother didn’t call,” I said.

This bothered my mother, this accusation of lax parenting. I just wanted to go up to my bedroom and sleep. She probably just wanted that, too. But it was like the Bay of Pigs. She had to assert her power and authority over me, and I couldn’t let her, so instead we threatened annihilation. Finally she released me and I walked upstairs.

The next day she told me I was grounded. I laughed. She’d lost me; she must have known already. I’d lost myself. I just didn’t know it yet.

 

Another Saturday night, another party at my house, though by 4 a.m. most of the people had crashed or left. Alison and Nicky and I were still awake, so we decided to take Sue’s car for a spin. None of us had our licenses, but there wouldn’t be many cars on the roads. Nicky drove, steering us along back roads where cops were less likely to lurk, and we found ourselves at the golf course where he caddied. The entrance was a narrow road between hedges, like driving through a tunnel, but then the hedgerow opened to moonlit swells of lawn, a parking lot, and in the distance the darkened clubhouse. The place was silent, inert. Nicky knew the landscape from hauling golf bags across eighteen holes, knew that when he suddenly swerved left and gunned the engine that we’d careen over manicured lawn, knew that when he yanked the steering wheel hard to the right that he was routing the fairway, the tires spinning and ripping up turf, gouging the delicate putting green, revenge against the wealthy men whose heavy clubs he lugged for hours on hot days, like a servant, a footman, but who failed to tip him.

Nicky spun the car, laughing and whooping as he struggled free from ruts, clumps of turf spraying off the back tires. Alison and I were tossed across the vinyl seats as if we’d taken a wave across the bow, Alison in front, me sliding around the back, which might have symbolized my ambivalence about this plan—I was a participant in adventures, a sidekick, not the driver but along for the ride. At least I remember sitting in back, but that could be a trick of memory to assuage my guilt. After all, I’d found the keys, I’d given them to Nicky, I was there. Nicky spun another doughnut, then sped across the lawn. I saw a glow on the horizon like waking from a dream. “Nicky, we have to get out of here. Now!” Employees and caddies and early-bird golfers would arrive soon—any minute, it seemed. Nicky aimed the car out the narrow driveway and we sped away, exhilarated, horrified.

A couple miles down the road, the engine quit. Nicky coasted to the shoulder and tried to start the car, but the key yielded an unpromising click click click. We realized how close we’d come to the car stalling on the golf course amid our wreckage, how narrow our escape, and Nicky still on probation from the B&E. It must have been 5 a.m. We knocked on the front door of a house and a woman let us inside to call a tow truck. We thanked her, and outside Nicky tried one more time to start the car, and miraculously the engine turned over, so we drove off quickly, passing the wrecker in the opposite lane a half mile down the road. We pulled into my driveway, chunks of sod hanging from the front bumper, a faint burnt odor, the overheated engine ticking.

 

Destructive urges in little kids are tests of power—pulling wings off insects or stepping on ants, sweeping a mighty arm across a game board, scattering pieces in a fit of frustration. As teenagers with no direction or oversight, no toys, our destructive urges arose out of malaise, unfettered time, boredom, and no connection to anything—not to school or family, not to the town or clubs or sports, no purpose or aim, just pent-up energy, the need to release that energy, to smash and burn.

Nov. 10, 1975—Nobody can party up the cemetery anymore. Someone broke the tombstones.

In 1975, Walpole police were “besieged” with vandalism and a “major rampage of window smashing.” Over four days, more than sixty windows were broken at schools and stores. One quiet night as a group of eight or so kids walked through the deserted center of town, Derek Lowery spontaneously karate-kicked the plate-glass display window of Betro Pharmacy and it shattered, raining glass on the sidewalk, surprising even Derek. We dispersed like startled birds, fleeing to the tracks behind the block of stores, seeking each other afterward, dark figures stepping over railroad ties—Is that you?

Alarmed by the rise in crime in town, which paralleled a national trend, Walpole hired six more police officers, bought two new cruisers, and deployed an armed security guard with a patrol dog to schools, a favorite target of vandals. The town imposed a curfew on the commons to prevent “rowdyism”—anyone seen in the town center past 9 p.m. was fined. The curfew lasted all summer, though it only drove kids into the shadows, to congregate in woods and abandoned lots, gravel pits.

If 1975 was the year of smashing windows in Walpole, 1976 was the year of setting fires. In the first three months there were 500 fire alarms, more than typical for an entire year, with “vandals responsible for most of them.” In just one week in April there were 122 fire alarms and 90 fires “of suspicious origin.”

The fire my friends set one day was suspicious, but more accident than arson. Six of us sat in the woods adjacent to the train tracks on a Sunday afternoon, just beyond the town center, three boys and three girls. As we passed bowls of pot, the boys idly tossed lit matches into the dry pine needles. They made a game of it, allowing the two-inch-high ring of flames to eat away at the duff, the patch of scorched earth spreading before they raced to extinguish the fire, until one time they waited too long and the fire caught a breeze and surrounded us, and then we all stomped madly, half panicked, half thrilled, an acrid smell of melting rubber from my work boots, the hem of my jeans singed, the smoke thickening and rising above the trees, prompting someone to call the fire department, the sirens growing closer, louder, as we ran down the tracks, the soles of my shoes smoldering.

 

I never tossed a lit match into the dry tinder of a field or woods or weighed the heft of a rock before pitching it at a window, even though I was present with boys who did. Like most teenage girls, my destructive tendencies were aimed inward; we were capable of destroying ourselves. You can’t hurt me, world, because I will hurt myself first and best. Alison scraped lines on the inside of her forearm, in the soft pale flesh that never tanned. In the bathroom or in her bedroom she toyed with razor blades, etching her flesh, summoning pearls of blood, blood turned from blue to red, freed to flow outside instead of in the crazy endless loop in her body. Maybe the cutting was to scarify, to break open a surface, like a medieval bleeding to release bad spirits, a letting to relieve pressure. I tried cutting once to see what it felt like, to understand why she did this, scraping the point of a safety pin along my wrist. I wasn’t serious—I’d used a safety pin. The act felt melodramatic and conspicuous.

I wanted to not feel, so I smoked angel dust. Alison’s and my behaviors were two sides of the same coin. My self-destruction was less deliberate: not caring about myself, my health, my safety, leaving my fate to others, drinking and taking drugs and riding in cars with people who were so fucked up they could barely walk, let alone drive, getting behind the wheel of a car myself in that condition, tempting fate. Alison was interested in thanatology, she said, the study of death. She wanted to be a thanatologist, if one could be such a thing. I wasn’t sure she knew what a thanatologist did, but it was a defiant word: I am not afraid of death; I will study death; I will master it. It was like when I announced to my friends in junior high that I was an atheist—like saying fuck you to the most powerful entity imaginable then. I don’t believe in you, Mr. God. I don’t need you. Put that in your fucking pipe and smoke it.

Maybe Alison and I and any of us didn’t know what to do with our energy, our power, the exuberant adolescent rush of hormones, thrill the most alluring drug. Or what to do with our engulfing sadness, our confusion, our anger. I was filling up with rage then, though I barely knew it. Maybe coming close to death was a way to excite life, to live on the edge, to literalize that edge, cut with an edge, to see your own blood and ask, Am I alive?

 

One spring night Alison and I and a few other kids sat behind United Church smoking pot, drinking. The church lawn was encircled by evergreens, and though the police station was just beyond the trees, cops never checked the field. That night after the sun set, Alison whispered that she had to go to the bathroom. She walked toward the middle of the field until blackness swallowed her. She was gone a long while, and we began to wonder. “Maybe she went home,” someone said. Then I heard her call my name, weakly: “Maureen.” Everyone laughed. They thought she was summoning me to help her pee. I stumbled through the darkness and nearly tripped over her lying on the grass.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, crouching beside her.

She clutched her stomach, rolled to her side. “I’m think I’m dying,” she said.

My heart pounded. “What did you take?” She’d tried this before, which was why I knew to ask. Pills, she said, stolen from Betro Pharmacy.

“How many?” I must have been trying to decide if she was just going to throw up, or maybe something worse, but how would I know?

“The whole bottle.”

Jesus Christ. I shouted for the others, and when they reached us, someone said, “We better call the police.”

“No,” Alison moaned. “Please don’t call the police. I can’t let my parents know.”

We promised Alison we wouldn’t call the police. There were no cell phones; the 911 system was years away. Two of us ran the couple of blocks to a phone booth on Main Street to call Project Face; their flyers offering counseling for teenagers were plastered around town. Someone on the other end of the line told us to call an ambulance. But we can’t let the police know, or Alison will be in trouble. The person said to get Alison to a hospital right away.

When I think of the time we wasted—running to the phone booth, finding coins to make a call, dialing the excruciatingly slow rotary phone, the line ringing, then the click of someone picking up, explaining to the counselor, time passing in the watery slow motion of a nightmare while the pills, whatever they were, dissolved in Alison’s bloodstream—I feel sick with the possibility that we might have cost Alison her life; it scares me still.

We flagged down Spider D’Amico cruising along in his mother’s station wagon, and he drove behind United Church and we laid Alison in the backseat, moaning and clutching her stomach. We jumped in and Spider sped down Route 1A, all of us urging him to hurry, to run the red lights, because Alison was eerily silent now. She didn’t respond when we lightly slapped her cheeks. Her eyes were closed, her eyelashes dark and thick against her smooth skin, jaundiced under the car’s dome light, her mouth slightly open, her lips like she’d eaten a cherry Popsicle. It was strange to see Alison so slack, contrary to her usual vitality, her raucous laugh, that determined way she walked, with quick short steps. In ninth grade she’d been voted most popular, a charmer whom boys dreamed of, girls imitated, envied, but now she was slumped in Spider’s car, listless.

Spider swerved into the emergency entrance of Norwood Hospital and two men in scrubs lifted Alison and rolled her down the hall on a gurney. In the waiting area, a doctor approached us and said they needed to pump Alison’s stomach but they couldn’t without permission from her parents, so we must tell them Alison’s name. We’d promised Alison, so nobody spoke. The doctor looked at one of the boys. “Come with me,” he said. When the boy returned a few minutes later, we asked him if he’d told, and he nodded. “She’s screwed now,” someone said. The doctors said that Alison would die if her stomach wasn’t pumped, but they couldn’t proceed without her name. We quieted then, all of us falling for the doctor’s ruse, relieved that Alison would be okay.

 

Alison was admitted to Westwood Lodge, a private psychiatric hospital five miles from my house. Westwood Lodge was where the poet Anne Sexton had stayed after her suicide attempts. In October 1963, Sexton wrote to her husband from Rome: “Darling, I need therapy . . . Need even (god forbid) Westwood.” In Westwood Lodge, that “sealed hotel,” Sexton wrote poems for her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. There had been many unfamous residents of Westwood Lodge, like my aunt, who had what was called in the 1970s a nervous breakdown, as had the mother of a friend of Patrick’s, and kids from Walpole who’d smoked too much dust.

Every once in a while you’d hear of someone “freaking out” and then that person disappeared for a week or two, or a month, often to Westwood Lodge: Michelle Laski, Tammy Hurley, Gary Gravino. One day I stopped to talk to Gary in the parking lot after he returned to school from Westwood. He smiled, but his speech was thick, his eyes glassy. I noticed cookie crumbs around his mouth, caught in the fine hairs above his lip, but he seemed unaware of the crumbs. His vacant eyes, the sad crumbs on his face as if he were a child, broke my heart.

Walter Slater freaked out and disappeared for a while to Westwood. He’d crashed in the Orange Room one night after a party, so high and drunk he fell asleep with his arms around his Frye boots, those clunky, round-toed quasi–cowboy boots that were part of a leather fad in the 1970s—leather coats, leather boots, leather vests, leather satchels for your pot that cinched closed and hung from your leather belt. “I love my boots,” Walter mumbled that night. Walter Slater was a dust-head, a small-time dealer, but he got clean at Westwood and was working as a drug counselor. Later, when I saw him smoking angel dust again, I said, “I thought you quit.” He did, he told me, but he felt like a hypocrite. Every minute he was telling some kid not to take drugs, he felt an intense urge to get high. So he did.

 

Paula and I visited Alison in Westwood Lodge, driving slowly past the manicured grounds to a manor-like house built in the 1920s, with ivy creeping up stucco walls. There was a newer, clinical-looking building as well, but the facility as a whole was small—ninety beds. I don’t recall having to sign in, but surely there must have been some way to register visitors, or a house phone on which we called for Alison. I remember the old-fashioned parlor where we sat, large, with ornate trim and high ceilings, arrangements of wing chairs and settees, end tables with lamps that shed amber light. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a lush lawn and beyond that a thicket of trees. The kitchen had a butcher-block island, stainless-steel counters, an industrial-sized refrigerator. Alison stood in front of the refrigerator as if this were her home, grabbed a drink, took an apple from a bowl. “Have one,” she said, sharing her bounty, but I didn’t want to eat an apple from that place.

In spite of the plush chairs and couches in the sitting room, the only other person there was a tall, thin, stupefied boy with messy blond hair and glasses, who followed Alison around, who loved her, it seemed, as did so many boys. Alison spoke directly to him—“Ted, go watch television”—sometimes rudely—“Ted, go play with yourself.” At least she spoke to him, and that seemed to please him. I sensed that Alison enjoyed—at least a little—her stature in that milieu, “queen of this summer hotel,” as Sexton had called herself at Westwood. There was a certain exotic glamour to being sent away to an institution, to being incorrigible.

Incorrigible means “beyond correction”—broken, unfixable, a hopeless case, recalcitrant, intractable, obstreperous, truculent, insubordinate, defiant, rebellious, willful, wayward, difficult, troubled, delinquent, deviant, miscreant, stubborn. “Stubborn” was a diagnosis in Massachusetts until the early 1970s, and boys and girls as young as seven were sent to reform schools for being stubborn children. Nonpejorative words to describe such kids might be spirited, unconventional, bold, assertive, extroverted, adventurous, risk-taking, daring, verbal, sensitive, artistic. Or words that describe moods or stages of adolescence, temporary—sad, angry, insecure, confused, depressed, fearful, bored, frustrated, anxious, alienated, lonely.

I didn’t see any orderlies or nurses at Westwood that day, as if there were no supervision, as if the place truly were a lodge and Alison there on vacation. Because of the lax security, we took Alison out for a drive, though we were not supposed to leave the grounds; there was a sense of breaking her out. We drove aimlessly along the country roads surrounding the lodge, smoking pot and probably angel dust—I recall Alison wanting to get dusted. We had no qualms about getting high with Alison, because she seemed normal, not perturbed. We never cautioned each other about the dangers of smoking dust, about excess or self-destruction, though we were aware of some risks; we’d heard the lore of kids drowning while dusted, that in water you became disoriented, lost the ability to distinguish up from down. But we didn’t apply the risks to ourselves. We had a sense of time unending.

Nobody talked about that night behind United Church, the pills Alison took.

 

Alison was admitted to Westwood Lodge again, but the next time she was housed in the newer building in a locked room. We had to ask a nurse for access. In that room with a single bed, a Judas window in the door, Alison was lethargic. She spoke slowly, deliberately, her actions halting. She’d been dosed heavily with Thorazine, an antipsychotic, and Stelazine, an antianxiety medication. Outwardly the drugs had a similar stupefying effect to angel dust’s, but it was disturbing to see Alison in that condition, because the drugs were imposed on her. On that second visit, it was clear that Alison wanted to get out of there; that time, institutionalization was not like a stay in a dormitory. But there was no escape from this unit. We could do nothing to get Alison out, and soon a nurse told us we had to leave.

Tranquilized, Alison was fundamentally changed, her energy drained, her speech sluggish. What was the logic in giving incapacitating drugs to cure a girl of her drug problem? Of depression? Alison moved from self-medicating with street drugs to sanctioned “therapeutic” drugs, but either way she was stoned out of her mind. When she returned to school, with scars like vapor trails on her arms, people were shy with her, acted awkward around her, as if she were a ghost or a movie star.