8

If God wanted a world filled with saints, He never would have created adolescence.

—SUSAN BETH PFEFFER

Something in me broke in the seventh grade. The boy who celebrated the Mass alone on a crude altar in the woods, the kid whose heart was inclined toward wonder, didn’t gently fade away as so often happens in the dark passage from childhood to adolescence; he vanished in the blink of an eye.

This is not the well-rehearsed story of the once-adorable child who temporarily goes through the pouty-lipped, surly adolescent phase, only to re-emerge at eighteen with a new perspective on life and a scholarship to Princeton. The conviction that I was an unlovable freak had metastasized in my heart so that I curved in on myself. I was beginning to make private everything that was good about me.

One of my favorite stores in Greenwich was Gene’s Bicycle Shop. New and used bikes hung from hooks on the ceilings like sides of beef in a butcher shop. As you walked through the store, you had to dodge and weave to avoid hitting your head on handlebars and spiked pedals. The old oak floor was covered in dust and cloud-shaped 3-in-One oil stains, and the never-ending sound of clicking gears played like Muzak in the background. I once went to Gene’s to get my orange ten-speed Raleigh fixed, and he said that my front tire was “out of true.” I had never heard the expression before. When a tire rim is bent or one of its spokes is missing or damaged, the wheel no longer spins straight, or true. It goes cockeyed and wobbly, and if it’s bad enough, riding on it becomes impossible.

That was it. I felt out of true.

I was sure there was some indefinable darkness in me that I needed to make reparation to God for, a shameful defect far more serious than the pedestrian inner flaws of my peers. I subconsciously decided I could either win my father’s love, restore my family’s former glory, and assuage the anguish I was experiencing at home by becoming the “good boy” who excelled at everything, or become a “bad boy” and gain my father’s attention that way.

It’s strange the way people trawl for love.

In the first two weeks of junior high school, something occurred that I couldn’t have anticipated: I became popular. I discovered that if I titrated my overdeveloped vocabulary with just the right amount of sarcasm, my peers thought it was funny, not to mention impressive. Teachers call this kind of student a precocious pain in the butt. In Washington I’m told they call them press secretaries.

Not all the popular kids at my junior high were model students; some were miscreants. I learned from this period in my life that if you put a hundred people in the same room, in less than two minutes the sociopaths will find each other and begin terrorizing the rest. The same thing happens on playgrounds and in prison yards. It also happens at the United Nations, but that’s a different conversation.

It was a criminally cold January afternoon and we had been given a day off from school because of a snow-and-ice storm. That’s how five seventh graders, whose IQ in the aggregate was nineteen, found themselves hanging out in a house with no adult supervision. It would have been safer to send a seven-year-old with a pack of matches into a garage filled with accelerants. I don’t remember everything that happened on this particular snow day, which ironically proves that I was there. I know that it was the beginning of a journey that would mark me forever.

The five of us ended up at my friend Grant Dixon’s house. Grant was physically more advanced than the rest of us. His upper lip was lightly feathered with black hair, and his voice had completely changed. This seemed unfair since he wasn’t even Italian. Despite the icy roads and schools being closed, Mr. and Mrs. Dixon still had to report to work, leaving Grant on his own for the day. If I were Grant’s mother, I would have called in sick or even quit my job and stayed home. Grant made Bernie Madoff look guileless. He required twenty-four-hour surveillance.

The five of us met up at Angie’s—our favorite hangout. Angie’s was a tiny general store whose management and product line were something straight out of Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter series. Angie sold everything from penny candy to Copenhagen snuff. In 1972, the FDA didn’t require “sell by” dates, which was probably what saved Angie’s business. There were food products on the shelves that had been there when JFK was president. Angie was around fifty but looked much older. A chain smoker, she had a voice deeper than Johnny Cash’s. Nor was Angie discriminating about what she sold to whom. In the same transaction, she would sell a bag of gummy worms and a pack of Marlboro Reds to a twelve-year old. She didn’t ask who the cigarettes were for.

Angie’s had a back room with an antique Coke machine. Its seams were rusting and its white paint peeling. Boxes of leftover inventory—Hormel’s Corned Beef Hash, Claussen Pickles, boxes of Brillo Pads, and stacks of old issues of the Greenwich Times—lined the dusty, wainscoted walls. We would sit on top of the old soda cooler, smoke butts, drink orange Fantas, and talk for hours, until Angie got tired of us and threw us out. This is what happened on the fateful snow day and what led to our going over to Grant’s house to play air hockey.

Most seventh graders don’t set out to make trouble. They are like puppies with impulse-control disorders. Opportunities for mischief arise, and they can’t stop themselves. This is why they should be crate-trained. Grant, Jim, Daniel, Wiley, and I were in Grant’s basement, watching reruns of Scooby-Doo, when Jim made the fateful discovery.

“Hey, come look at this,” he called from the top of the stairs.

Jim had been looking for Froot Loops in one of the cupboards in the pantry and discovered a cabinet filled with every intoxicant imaginable. The only thing missing was an IV drip bag of propofol and Michael Jackson’s personal physician.

“Jeez, Grant, your parents are boozers,” Daniel said.

“Shut up, you idiot,” Grant said, nearly shoving Daniel down the staircase.

A group of children not suffering from oppositional defiant disorder would have closed the cabinet door and taken advantage of their snow day to get a head start on a science project or an English essay. We were not in this category. In terms of moral development, we were late bloomers.

Grant’s face lit up. “My parents make this drink with orange juice called a ‘screwdriver.’ Want to try and make one?” he asked.

We were gripped by indecision. We knew that this act represented a quick and significant step forward on the evolutionary ladder of deviance. Our hesitancy was short-lived.

“Let’s just have one,” we said, pleased with ourselves for being so temperate. A few of us would say these words a million times in the next twenty years, to diminishing effect.

“First, we need orange juice,” Grant said, rubbing his hands together and opening the refrigerator. Grant moved every item on every shelf, trying to locate the Tropicana while we anxiously peered over his shoulders. “Shoot, I don’t think we have any.”

“How about we use this?” Daniel said, holding up a jar of Tang powdered orange drink mix he had found on the lazy Susan on the kitchen table.

At one time Tang could be found in just about every home in America, but it’s hard to find in supermarkets anymore. The good people at Kraft Foods offer an interesting statement on their website:

We have heard that some consumers have used TANG Drink Mix to clean their dishwashers. TANG does contain citric acid, which can act as a cleaning agent.

TANG Drink mix is intended to be a food product and Kraft Foods does not advocate its use for any other purpose.

This disclaimer goes a long way toward explaining why it’s not always easy to find Tang anymore. People don’t drink detergent if they have other alternatives.

But I digress.

We knew how to make Tang, but we were uncertain about the correct ratio of Tang to vodka for the perfect screwdriver. Half a glass of Tang and half a glass of vodka? One-third vodka to two-thirds Tang? Vice versa? I have no memory of what we decided. From this I infer that we erred on the side of more vodka than Tang.

“This tastes great,” Daniel said, making a controlled flop onto the couch so as not to spill his drink.

“It sure does,” everyone agreed.

I had a different reaction to the Tang screwdrivers. The other guys were intrigued by them. At our age, sneaking a drink out of the liquor cabinet was a novelty. None of them drank enough of it to get drunk—maybe giggly, but not loaded. In me, the drink opened up a place that I had forgotten about, a feeling that until that instant I didn’t know I grieved not experiencing anymore: it gave me something close to the joy and wonder I had felt alone in the woods with God.

The more I drank, the more intense this euphoria became. I was more at home in my own skin. My apartness disappeared.

I didn’t feel out of true.

“Whoa, Ian—slow down or you’ll puke.” Jim laughed.

I would have listened to Jim except I was busy downing more and more Todka (the name we adopted for our new cocktail) and fantasizing about all the other cool ingredients vodka might taste good with, like furniture polish or weed killer. I drank it like I was a dehydrated athlete. I’m surprised I didn’t pour it over my head like an overheated marathoner.

The Greenwich Times did not print my name or the details surrounding my need to be transported to the hospital by ambulance for suspected alcohol poisoning. Nor did they report that my bloodstream was so full of Todka that it could have caught fire like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

My first experience of drinking was a harbinger of things to come.

One of the most painful moments in my life was looking up at my mother from a hospital gurney in the emergency room. Her expression cycled from irate to sad to tired, then started again. She had rushed to the hospital with a coworker named Mark for support.

While my mom spoke to the doctor, Mark looked down on me and shook his head. “Doesn’t your mom have enough on her plate right now?” he whispered. “This is the last thing she needs.” If sympathy were a religion, Mark would’ve been an atheist.

The emergency room doctor pulled back the curtain and gave me a stern lecture about how hospitals are for sick people, not for seventh graders who OD on Smirnoff’s. He jabbed his finger a few inches from my face. “You show up here for this again and I’ll let you die,” he said.

This wasn’t true, but his point was well taken.

On the way home from the hospital, my mother said, “First, you’re done hanging around with those kids. Do you understand me? You’re making all new friends.”

I looked down at the car floor mats. “Okay,” I replied.

“Second, you’re grounded. Your grades are atrocious.” That was inarguable. Had anyone else ever failed wood shop? “You will come directly home every day after school and do your homework. And you will stay home on weekends until I say otherwise.”

That sounded a bit over-the-top. First I have to give up my friends, and now I’m under house arrest. I crossed my arms and looked out my side window. “How long am I grounded for?”

In the long silence that followed, I realized that I had just made an egregious tactical error. This wasn’t the time to ask my mother to calculate my sentence. She reminded me for the third time that I would have been charged with being drunk and disorderly if she hadn’t persuaded the policeman that the criminal justice system didn’t have the will, the means, or the constitutional latitude to inflict the kind of punishment waiting at home for me.

“A year,” she said, slapping the steering wheel.

I whipped around. “A year? Ron Decker ran over a cat with a lawn mower and didn’t get grounded for a year.” I didn’t mention that Ron went to a special school now.

My mother took one of those swats at me that moms do when they’re driving but want to beat their children at the same time. “Don’t talk back to me,” she said. “From now on, it’s a new program.”

The glands behind my ears felt tingly and hard. “Pull over,” I said.

“What for?” my mother asked.

Cold sweat poured down my back. “Just pull over,” I said louder, clawing at the door lock button with one hand and the door handle with the other.

It was too late. I threw up all over my jeans and the car floor. I laid my head back on the headrest.

“Good Lord,” my mother said. “Roll down the window.”

She reached into her purse and handed me a travel-sized Kleenex. I took the five-inch-by-two-inch piece of tissue between my thumb and index finger, dangled it in front of my eyes, and squinted at it, then at the car floor and my drenched pants. “And you think this will be helpful because . . . ?” I said.

She took another swing, this time connecting with the side of my head. I rubbed the spot where one of her rings had dug into my temple.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you. You were such a nice boy,” she said.

Mr. Lippmann, the social worker at my school, called me into his office two days after the Todka incident. “Ian, doctors think alcoholism is a disease passed down from one generation to the next. It troubles me that the first time you tried alcohol, you had trouble stopping. For some people, the disease kicks in the first time they pick up a drink. Given your family history, you’re statistically likelier to become an alcoholic than other people. You might want to think about staying away from alcohol in the future.”

I liked Mr. Lippmann and knew his concern was real, but I knew I would never become what my father was. I knew firsthand what that hellhole looked like, and there wasn’t a chance I’d fall into it.

Several weeks after our conversation, Mr. Lippmann pulled me aside in an empty stairwell. “So have you thought any more about what we talked about?”

I stood tall and looked him straight in the eye. “Mr. Lippmann, I’ve decided drinking isn’t for me,” I said. Ferris Bueller would have been proud.

His face softened, and he patted my shoulder. “That’s a mature decision, Ian. I’m proud of you.” He turned to walk down the stairs.

I felt a twinge in my gut that felt like guilt. What I couldn’t tell Mr. Lippmann was that since our meeting I’d found something that made abstaining from alcohol easier.

There was a boy in the ninth grade named Leonard. He was tall and gangly, with long, greasy blond hair and a jaundiced complexion. It’s only a matter of time before researchers determine that Leonard was Patient Zero for attention deficit disorder. Kids nicknamed him Ricochet after the cartoon character Ricochet Rabbit, who bounced off things to the sound-effect ping, ping, ping. Leonard had trouble focusing or staying on topic. You could tell him that you had just been shot and needed immediate medical assistance or you would die, and for a few seconds he would look sincerely alarmed, followed by a gradually increasing glassy stare, and finally he’d say something like, “Have you seen my math homework?” He and I were more acquaintances than friends, but we shared a gym locker and from time to time smoked cigarettes in the loft above the woodshop.

One afternoon during lunch, Leonard waved me over to the window where the dirty dishes and silverware were tossed.

He put his mouth next to my ear. “You want to get stoned?” he whispered.

“You mean like, smoke pot?” I asked.

His eyes darted side to side. “Be quiet, you moron. You want someone to hear you?”

This was unlikely. We were in a room with a hundred sugar-jacked junior high kids, chucking Ring Dings at each other and stuffing the socially vulnerable into the gray garbage cans on wheels that the janitors pushed around. You could stand next to a shuttle launch and hear the person next to you more clearly.

He looked around again. “I got a joint from my older brother,” he said, opening his hand just enough for me to see the twisted white paper stick cradled in his soiled palm. I’d never seen a joint before. This was a watershed moment.

My heart raced. “Have you tried it before?” I asked.

“Lots of times,” he said, smirking. “My brother showed me how.”

This was a big decision. I wanted more time to think about it, but I could tell Leonard wouldn’t wait all day for me to make up my mind.

“Where would we do it?” I asked.

Leonard’s eyes lit up. He knew I was almost on the hook. “I’ll meet you in the boys’ room, the one near the science lab on the second floor. Be there at two o’clock.”

My eyes widened. “In school? You’re kidding. We’ll get busted,” I said, struggling to keep my voice down.

He sniggered. “Trust me,” he said. “I’ve been doing it there for weeks.”

For the next two hours I wavered back and forth about whether smoking pot in a school bathroom with Leonard was a good idea. If we got caught I would have to make a run for an embassy and beg for asylum on humanitarian grounds to escape my mother getting her hands on me. But I decided that if getting high made that out-of-true feeling go away without involving a near-death experience like the one I’d gone through the first time I drank, then I was up for it. Besides, Rolling Stone magazine said Eric Clapton smoked pot, so how bad could it be?

It wasn’t bad at all.

Leonard was so grateful to have an accomplice that he wanted to get high all the time. I was glad to oblige, since he scored the joints from his brother and I didn’t pay a dime for them. We not only agreed to smoke pot daily, but we smoked it in the same place at precisely the same time. Every day at exactly 2 p.m. I asked my science teacher if I could go to the bathroom, and then returned fifteen minutes later looking and talking like James Franco’s character in the movie Pineapple Express. It makes one wonder what educators in the 1970s learned at those in-service teacher training days. The drug-awareness class must have been a woefully undersubscribed elective.

One day Leonard brought a kid named Bruce to our bathroom rendezvous. His contribution was Valium, stolen from his mother’s medicine cabinet. We’d smoke a joint, then take the Valium right before the last bell. The full rush would roll over me as I was walking home. My perception of reality would shift. The light became lemony, and the world became shimmery and new. For the first time, I was convinced I was seeing things as they really were. How else could I explain the tremulous radiance that emanated from everything my eyes fell upon? For a few hours I was relieved of the unrelenting self-consciousness that dogged me. For once I wasn’t a problem that needed to be solved or fixed. I was Adam strolling in the garden of Eden.

After coming back to earth, I would vaguely remember having felt the same way before, but I couldn’t remember where, and it all seemed like such a long, long time ago.

Never doubt the resolve of an angry mother, born of Celtic stock. When she said I was grounded for a year, she meant it like God meant the Ten Commandments. A few months into my house arrest, I was lying on the floor of my bedroom, eyes closed, listening on headphones to Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon with Waldo’s head resting on my stomach, when my mother came in and placed a black guitar case, a small amplifier, and a book filled with diagrammed chords next to me and left. The volume in my phones was cranked so high that I didn’t hear her.

What inspired this strange purchase? Had she been driving by a music store when the voice of God came over the car radio, telling her that an electric guitar would rescue her son from certain self-destruction? I don’t know. But when I opened my eyes and saw that gear, I felt what St. Simeon must have when he cradled the infant Jesus in his arms on the steps of the temple: “Lord, you now have set your servant free . . . For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior.”

The guitar was a black Les Paul knockoff with white trim and the brand name Explorer written at an angle on the head-stock. The amp was a used Fender Bronco with one eight-inch speaker and four watts of raw power. There was a short in the wiring that turned the tremolo on and off randomly, and the cabinet was riddled with chips and dents, but I was blind to its shortcomings because that’s what love does. I needed something to be good at. I was pathetic at sports, parents wouldn’t let their children hang out with me because I had earned a sketchy reputation, and although my grades had come up, I was still just a C student. But guitarists and songwriters are grown in the soil of adolescent angst, and that’s what I became.

I already played guitar a little. Years earlier, Nanny had given me a cheap, nylon-string model and sent me to the local YMCA for group guitar lessons. It was 1969. The first day, I walked into a steamy room stuffed with pudgy sixteen-year-old girls with acne who wanted to be Joni Mitchell, crying while they sang and plinked out “Both Sides Now.” I was nine and physically smaller than the guitar I had brought to the class. I only went twice, but in that brief time I was given the keys to the kingdom, namely the ability to play G, C, and D chords. Those three triads are all it takes to change a life. I might have disintegrated without them.

Every day, stoned or straight, I would come home from school, charge down to the basement, pull out my guitar, sit cross-legged on the cold, tiled floor with my Mel Bay guitar chord book open on my lap, and jam until my fingers bled, my butt fell asleep, or I couldn’t stave off the munchies any longer. Then I’d make a beeline to the kitchen, where I’d scarf down two sleeves of Fig Newtons and half a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes without coming up for air. For years Nanny would hug me and brag to people about how much I ate when I was a teenager. I would just nod and smile.

For the next two years, if I wasn’t actually playing music, I was lying on the floor, wearing headphones and listening to it. My brother Connor had a huge music collection, and I consumed it all. Eyes closed, I would imagine headlining at Madison Square Garden, fronting whatever band I was listening to, frenzied fans cheering me with unrestrained adoration.

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t learned how to play guitar and write songs. God provided me with music as a spiritual foster home until I could find a permanent place to live. I no longer thought much about God, and when I did my thoughts turned dark. My life was one long, unanswered prayer. If there was a God, he was just like my father, a drunk who forgot to keep his promises to his children. It was up to me to make life work.

In tenth grade, I decided that playing the “bad boy” role had failed to get the attention I wanted from my father. It was time to give the “good boy” role a try. Leonard was sent to boarding school, so giving up pot wasn’t hard. I became a self-righteous teetotaler. I started showing up for classes, doing my homework, and getting decent grades. I put together a killer band that played at parties and dances, and lectured my friends on the evils of partying. I became good in the worst sense of the word.

My father’s life changed at the same time. By some miracle of God, he developed the ability to hold off from drinking during the day. His health improved enough so he could hold down a steady job again. Through connections, he became a stockbroker at a financial services firm. I’m sure there were days when he didn’t make it back to the office from a lunch that was more liquid than solid, but he pulled a fragile life together.

With our financial situation improving, mostly because of my mother’s success, my father and I began shooting trap and skeet at Greenwich Country Club or Riverside Yacht Club on Saturday mornings. He joined the exclusive Campfire Club in Chappaqua, New York, where we’d shoot sporting clays. The exclusively male Campfire Club, founded by Teddy Roosevelt, was filled with powerbrokers from around the world. My father began buying his clothes at Paul Stuart, wearing watches from Tiffany’s, and taking expensive trips with my mother. One day he pulled in the driveway with a new convertible British sports car.

“It’s an anniversary gift for your mother,” he said. I never once remember my mother driving that car.

I suspect this is also when he returned to working for the CIA. It’s difficult to explain my shock when I came across some Polaroids of my father on a golf outing with President Ford in what looks like Vail, Colorado. My father is in the foreground, dressed in a tie and cardigan sweater. In the distance, the president was putting while a few other men watched. I feel certain that the expressionless, thin-lipped men surrounding the area weren’t caddies. I didn’t even know my father played golf, much less that he played golf with the president.

I showed the photos to my mother. “What is Dad doing playing golf with President Ford?” I asked like a bullying prosecutor trying to intimidate his witness.

My mother held the pictures at a distance, scrunching her nose as if she needed reading glasses, which she didn’t.

“I don’t know,” she said breezily, handing the pictures back to me and returning to her work. “Your father has so many interesting acquaintances. Now please put these back where you found them.”

I tossed one of them on top of her work so she couldn’t avoid it. “Mom, that’s not just some ‘interesting acquaintance.’ That’s the president,” I said, pointing at the picture.

She picked it up and handed it back to me without taking her eyes off what she was doing. “Maybe, maybe not,” she replied. My mother could be brilliantly vague.