Good Behavior Page 12

  “Jesus Christ, Dad, just unplug the damn camera and let us open our fucking gifts!”

  This was the end of it. Dad flew into a rage. They screamed at each other, and Mom tried to intervene. Christmas was in shambles. It was chaos. I pulled my jacket on and walked out the door, saying, “Call me when you want to have Christmas. I’m going to Philip’s.” They didn’t even notice.

  It was eight o’clock in the morning and the streets were deserted. There wasn’t anyone in sight. There was a bit of snow on the ground, but not much, just enough to crunch under my feet. I walked slowly because my boots were slick. My spurs clanked in the quiet. I made my way down the street, smoking, unable to think much of anything.

  Charlie Bender’s older brother—I can’t remember his name—drove by and stopped his car. He backed up and rolled his window down. “Nate, what’s up?” he said.

  “Just walking, man.”

  “I heard you were locked up in some mental hospital.” He scratched his goatee and tipped his baseball hat back a bit.

  “I am.” I lit a cigarette and leaned against the car. “I’m out for today. Christmas.”

  He nodded. “You need a ride?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get in.” And he gave me a ride out to Philip’s house.

  I knocked on Philip’s door and he opened it. “Nate!” He was genuinely happy to see me. He hugged me. I wasn’t exactly happy to see him. I wasn’t unhappy about it. I just didn’t feel anything. The house was strangely empty.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “Mom made everybody go to church.”

  “How’d you get out of it?”

  He shrugged and gave a mischievous grin. Philip and I sat on the front porch and talked. I told him about Cody and Lynelle.

  “But,” I said, “dude, for some reason I can’t even get hard most of the time. And, listen, when I did get hard the other day, I jerked off, but when I came, nothing came out.”

  “What the fuck?” He was horrified.

  “I know.”

  About a half an hour later my dad pulled into the driveway and came to the porch. He said merry Christmas to Philip, and we left.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as we drove.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’m really glad you’re here,” he said. “I just thought it’d be nice to get it on video. I didn’t mean for it to turn out this way.”

  “It’s fine.” And I meant it. I wasn’t really upset about any of it. I hadn’t even been all that upset when I left. I just didn’t feel like being around for a fight.

  Christmas was all right after that. I got home and Jim apologized, and Mom said she loved me and everything was fine. We had a great time. Dad put the camera away. We laughed about the whole gift-opening fiasco, we joked about how I was now classifiable as a mental defective, and finally we ate canned ham and mashed potatoes. Then I went back to the lunatic asylum, was strip-searched, and put to bed.

  [ THIRTY-NINE ]

  I was left in P-21 for a month. Like I said, there was no window. It was cold. I never knew whether it was day or night.

  I read.

  It came to me that I wanted to be a holy man of some kind. I wanted to be a monk. I wanted to pursue the truth, some kind of truth, at all costs. I didn’t know how this might be done. There was the witchcraft of course, but I’d gotten a lot of witchcraft books from the library cart and it had all begun to look very childish. It became pretty clear to me there was nothing scientific about it, that there was no good reason to believe that it worked. I thought about studying my Bible—and I tried. I started to think about getting out and being a holy man in the world, and what that might be like. Travel from one Christian revival to another, spreading the Word. Be like those oily preachers or, at best, like some slick phony in a Lincoln laying down a routine for country rubes. What a nightmare. I thought about going up into the mountains and meditating, about becoming a Zen master.

  I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or what I wanted to be. I wondered how one ever knows what one wants, or what one should be. I wondered if there was a difference between naturally becoming something and wanting to become something. I had wanted to be a criminal, and I became one. I had wanted to be a hoodlum—I’d worked hard at that—and I succeeded. Now I wanted to be an artist, or a holy man, a holy artist maybe. Again, is there a difference between wanting and being?

  Is it worth being if I have to want to be it? I asked myself. What is the difference between natural and artificial when it comes to motivation and interest, desire? This question began to obsess me. What’s phony and what’s not? What is an identity? What’s beneath it all?

  I couldn’t say. But I needed to know.

  I couldn’t let go of it. The question wrapped itself around my brain and constricted. I locked up. I couldn’t think about anything else. This went on for days and days. I woke up to the question, and I wrestled sleep from the question. It was the strangest obsession that I had ever experienced.

  I had been reading Tristessa, by Jack Kerouac, and Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice. Heroin addiction in Mexico City and immortal vampires roaming the earth for centuries without a trace of the divine. There is no God. This is what these books said to me. There is no devil, no demons or omens. You might be wrong about everything.

  I was working my way into the first real depression of my fully conscious adult life. This was a crisis, and I could find no solution. The question eventually broadened to include all questions, and no questions. It became this general sense of being bound up by uncertainty, and beneath the uncertainty, terror—a feeling that I absolutely had to come to some kind of conclusion about everything, I had to set everything right and know something about myself in the world for certain, or it would all fall out from underneath me, and I didn’t know how I could live after that.

  The agony of having a mind in a rock-solid knot reached an intolerable point—I don’t remember the date, or what time it was, or what was going on aside from those books I was reading—but at a certain point, when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, when I paced my cell feverishly and would have looked to any observer like a total madman, I somehow stopped, and the knot broke, it thawed, and I just gave up. I let go. I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t sustain the tension.

  I stopped thinking and I fell asleep, and when I woke up, something truly amazing had happened. I looked at the world as if I were seeing it for the first time. I had new eyes. Not just that. The world was new. It was a solid place, vivid, more real than it had ever seemed. And it all made perfect sense. It was … just what it was, without explanation, without theory. It needed nothing. It was perfect.

  There were no ghosts in this world. There was no magic. There was life, and the Earth, and the Universe. Electrons, protons, and dark matter. There were human beings, and their experiences, and their inventions. There were thoughts, and things. And it was all Reality, a solid thing, an obvious thing, more obvious than I could ever have imagined, trapped as I’d been playing childish games. In Reality, thought was thought, movement was movement, and matter was matter. In Reality, there was no need for questions of identity. I was what I was, always.

  After this I began to call civilization—everything about it, all its ideas, all its constructions, clothes, houses, morals, bibles, literature, poetry, jails—the Grand Human Invention. I imagined it springing naturally from the Earth, as natural as trees, or groundhogs, or the planet itself. I imagined myself springing naturally from the Earth, and imagined all my imaginations springing naturally from me.

  The difference between natural and artificial? Phony and genuine? Real and unreal? What was beneath identity? It was all natural, all necessary, all the same thing. And it was all perfect.

  [ FORTY ]

  When I got out of rehab at the Charinton Institute for Behavioral Health, I was committed to a better life. I really was. It wasn’t that they had reprogrammed me. It was that the counselors had mediated a truce between
my parents and me.

  Several weeks before the issue of the hospital ever came up, I had approached my parents with a list of liberties that I thought it appropriate that I enjoy. They included the liberty to visit the pizza shop or to visit friends, provided I do some chores around the house. This was a huge issue of contention. When I first got to Charinton and one of the counselors asked my mom what kind of kids I ran with, she responded smugly, “We don’t allow him to run.”

  The counselor said, “You do realize it’s good for kids to be around people their own age, right?”

  By the time I left Charinton, I had everything on that list, provided I got good grades and did some chores. I was fine with this. I was intent on a new lifestyle. Give and take. Compromise. It’s the only way things get done.

  Life had potential, it had meaning, there was a logic to it, and I had my part—and I felt great about this—but within two months I’d be losing my mind and setting the principal’s office on fire, then lying on a concrete bunk in juvie wondering what the fuck had gone wrong.

  I left the hospital on New Year’s Day with a two-month supply of bupropion and Mellaril. Mellaril is a powerful sedative like thorazine, and bupropion is a heavy-duty antidepressant. They didn’t tell my parents or me what these drugs were and they didn’t tell us that I shouldn’t stop taking them abruptly. They didn’t tell us to continue with the prescriptions. They just gave us the pills and sent me on my way. As far as we knew, they could have been antibiotics. They may have told us to follow up with our family doctor, but it doesn’t seem like they did—either way, our confusion about the meds was a disaster waiting to happen.

  There is a whole series of interesting events that I have always thought were disconnected. Only years later would it become clear to me that all of them were directly related to the drugs. I’ve tried bupropion since and had a horrible experience. Granted, I’ve done a lot of other drugs that have primed me for psychosis, namely methamphetamine, the most evil shit on earth, but the bupropion brought on a full-blown break with reality. I took it for a week and had to stop, or I would’ve lost my mind. They did not tell us at the hospital that I couldn’t stop cold turkey. It’ll bring on psychosis.

  So I took that month’s worth of pills and that was it. By the end of February, I had set a fire in my school, gone to jail, and been placed under house arrest.

  For that first medicated month, things went well. I did my homework, got As and Bs, hung out at the pizza shop, and generally enjoyed life. I drank some beers with Philip one night and got considerably drunk on just two beers. Of course it was the pills. Even Philip said at the time, “Man, you shouldn’t be this drunk on two beers.”

  Then Philip and I are out in the driveway. I’m leaning against the station wagon. Philip hands me the gas can and I inhale quickly a dozen times, hold my breath, and pass the can to Philip. I’m enveloped in a warm, disorienting narcotic swoon, and there’s an intense rhythmic chiming inside my head. I lose all feeling in my body, slide down the fender of the car, and hit the gravel. Everything happens three times. I slide away from the car three times, hit the ground three times, and Philip asks if I’m all right three times. Strangest experience of my life—it’s never happened again on any other drug. This, too, was probably because of the pills. Gas never did anything like this to me before. Nothing has.

  Around then was the first time I got laid. This was sometime in early February. I always thought the more embarrassing aspects of the experience were a matter of inadequacy, but they weren’t. It was probably the pills too.

  One Saturday afternoon Philip and I were walking around and saw Heidi, a girl I knew from school, and two girls we didn’t recognize sitting out in front of Heidi’s house on lawn chairs. We stopped and sat down. Heidi introduced the girls and said they were from Beckettstown, another town about a half an hour away, much larger, practically a city. One girl was called Patty. She said she was a madam and the other girl was one of her whores. The other girl didn’t seem to mind. It might have been true. Patty talked about making good money giving blowjobs at the bars in Beckettstown—she said she knew exactly how to get a guy off quick. “You suck like hell and jack the balls while you’re doing it,” she said. “Makes them come in two minutes.”

  I said, “I’ve never had a blowjob.” I don’t know why I said this. It’s an incredibly uncool thing to say.

  “You want one?” she asked. “I’ll take you around to the back porch and suck you off right now.”

  I think my heart stopped. I blushed. I said, “Maybe later.”

  Philip and I left soon after.

  Philip said, “What the hell’s wrong with you, man?”

  I played it off like I thought she was ugly, but honestly I couldn’t answer his question. Next day at school, I asked Heidi for Patty’s number. I had pumped myself up, argued with myself, reasoned it through, and knew that I couldn’t miss this opportunity. That night I called her, and she invited me to her house that weekend.

  Patty lived with her great-aunt in a dumpy little trailer in a trailer park crammed with dumpy little trailers that stank like cat piss and was full of squawking caged birds. My mom and dad dropped me off and went back into town to do some shopping. They thought I was taking Patty to a movie. I hoped we would stay home instead. I went inside and Patty introduced me to her great-aunt, who was an invalid—terribly skinny, practically skeletal, so fragile she couldn’t get out of the chair and, judging by the debris around the chair and the close proximity of the TV (within arms’ reach), looked like she hadn’t gotten out of the chair in ten years. There was probably a bedpan nearby.

  Patty took me to her room and handed me something.

  “My aunt wants you to have this,” she said.

  I looked at it. It was a walnut that had been partially cracked open and stuffed with a condom. It was the most absurd thing I’d ever seen. I shoved it in my pocket and took my jacket off, sat down beside Patty on the bed. She put on some music. The other girl from Heidi’s house was there; she was apparently her sister, and they shared the same room. Her sister lay on her bed reading a magazine, listening to music through headphones.

  I didn’t know what the hell to do. We sat and smoked for a long time. When she realized that I wasn’t about to make a move, she kissed me. This was my second kiss. My first kiss, with Amy, the crazy girl, blew my brains out. This one was disappointing, to say the least. She did strange things with her teeth. She took her T-shirt off and lay back, unfastening her bra. She had giant tits with red marks on them from the bra and big brown nipples. I moved on top of her, and started licking and sucking. I did this for forever, half an hour, an hour. I would have gone on sucking her tits for the rest of my life. Not because I enjoyed it so much but because I didn’t know what else to do. She finally said something and I looked up.

  “I’m going to take my pants off,” she said. I stood up. “Turn around and look the other way,” she said. “I’m self-conscious about my body.”

  I did as I was told.

  I stood there staring in the opposite direction, my heart pounding and my hands shaking. Sex, at this moment, was the absolute last thing on my mind. I was terrified. She said okay, and when I turned around, she was under the blanket.

  She said, “Take your pants off and climb under here with me.” I did it, trembling. Sliding under the blanket and lying on top of her, I wondered if everyone was this terrified the first time. They didn’t seem to be in the movies. I went back to licking her tits and she played with me. But nothing happened. She continued to play with me, to rub me around on her pussy, but still nothing happened. She said, “It’s okay, this is normal.” We went on like this for another half hour.

  “Is this still normal?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  Finally she got me hard enough to enter, and I did. I didn’t feel anything. I started moving my hips rhythmically, but still didn’t feel anything. She moved around, she moaned, I moved, and finally I stopped.

&n
bsp; She said, “Did you come?”

  “I think so.” To be honest, I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything except her pubic hair prickling my balls. This I do remember feeling, but nothing else.

  So that was my first experience with sex. Regardless of how disastrous or disappointing it was, I strutted around the next day like a stud with genuine pussy juice on my dick, and I didn’t wash all day. I told Philip that it had been amazing and that I was now addicted to pussy. I’d occasionally go into the bathroom just to feel myself, to make sure it had really happened.

  [ FORTY-ONE ]

  I talked to Philip a few times on the phone while I was in jail. It always felt strange. I normally felt that the outside world was somehow put on hold, that everything had somehow frozen and would be waiting for me just the way it had been when I went into jail. Hearing his voice sucked me back out into reality.

  Philip said, “Joan’s been back around here.”

  Shit, Joan. I could suddenly see her face very clearly. She had a small birthmark on her neck. I had forgotten about the birthmark.

  “I don’t give a shit,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re going to.”

  “Why?”

  “I heard she’s got a kid,” he said quickly. He waited for me to reply.

  I didn’t. I just sat on my bunk and stared at the floor, trying to imagine what it could mean.

  Philip continued, “I keep hearing it’s yours.”

  I still didn’t say anything. A couple of months before Joan had left me, we thought she might have been pregnant. She got a test and she said it was negative. Nobody ever saw the test but her. She could have been pregnant, she could have been lying, she could’ve gotten pregnant right after she left. How could I know?

  “You there?” he asked, after a few seconds of silence.