Chapter 87

Even with the pills, Harlan still slept with the bedroom lights on. Sometimes, of course, he didn’t sleep at all, and Emma would lay awake counting his footsteps as he wandered through the house mumbling to himself.

Every morning, she half expected to discover her son dead by his own hands, and every morning that she found Harlan asleep on the sofa or sitting at the kitchen table hunched over a bowl of Cheerios, her knees went weak with relief.

His night terrors came and went with the seasons and thunderstorms left him trembling for days. Emma and Sam did their best to comfort him through those harrowing times, resigned now to the fact that whatever he had suffered over in Germany couldn’t be eradicated with a pill, reefer, Scotch, or a mother’s unrelenting love. The fear and rage living inside of Harlan was a virus, creeping and latent, springing unexpectedly—much like a jack-in-the-box or a stalking cat.

* * *

In ’54, Sam began working as a janitor at the Tilton General Hospital in Fort Dix, New Jersey. He got Harlan hired on as a floater, who sometimes mopped floors, sometimes emptied bedpans, and other times worked as a server in the mess hall.

It was the end of the Korean War, and the three-hundred-bed hospital had become a temporary home for returning veterans.

Harlan felt right at home amongst those limbless, body-ravaged, mentally scarred men. He listened to their stories and shared a few of his own. He treated the patients with the same compassion and empathy that his parents had showed him day in and day out.

At Emma’s prodding, Harlan began bringing his guitar to work. “I hear it’s therapeutic,” she remarked with a sly smile. Harlan knew she was speaking more about his own healing than that of the strangers she would never meet.

After his obligations were done, Harlan often stayed on to jam with those patients who were also musically inclined. They were a comical bunch to watch—blind, bandaged, and amputated—but the music they made consistently belied their physical disabilities.

* * *

It was at Tilton General Hospital that Harlan, quite by accident, made his first narcotics transaction as a dealer.

Every morning before leaving for work, he would slip a joint into his pack of cigarettes. At lunchtime, he’d steal away to the boiler room for a few puffs and then again at quitting time if he’d planned on staying around to jam or play cards with the patients.

One day, a vet who’d had his right cheek and eye blown off by a grenade pointed at the pack of smokes nestled in the breast pocket of Harlan’s shirt. “Can I have one?” he mumbled through his ruined mouth.

At that moment Harlan was chatting up a doe-eyed nurse’s aide and hastily handed the pack of cigarettes to the man. “You can keep it,” he said, unwilling to pull his eyes from the woman’s full lips.

The man tottered off.

Harlan realized much too late exactly what he’d given away. The loss, however, was worth it because he had bedded the pretty aide in an empty room on the floor of the hospital occupied by the mentally unstable.

The next day, the man approached Harlan, his one eye rolling happily in its socket. “That was some good weed,” he whispered.

Concerned about losing his job, Harlan played foolish: “Weed? I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

The vet was persistent: “I let some of the other guys hit it and they want more. So how much you selling it for?”

“Selling?”

“Yeah.”

Although Harlan had been a tried and true customer, it had never crossed his mind to become a dealer. But as he stood there looking at the broken man, it occurred to him that Tilton General Hospital might possibly be his personal gold mine. The realization rose in him like the sun. “Let me get back to you on that.”