The Dangerous Animals Club Read online

  My pal Joe, who put the acid in the coffee, told me I should calm down and “go with the flow,” otherwise, my negative emotions could make the next few hours unpleasant. This pep talk spawned a truckload of negative emotions. It was way too much flow. That was about the time I realized that my brain was too big for my skull and my eyes could pop out of the front of my face.

  I mentioned this to our hostess, who was staring at a row of jelly jars in her kitchen. She stopped and turned to me and said, “Cool. You’re starting to rush.”

  “Rush?”

  “Yeah. The blood really starts flowing. It can get pretty intense.”

  “Intense?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that intense good, like sex, or intense bad, like stepping on a tack?”

  She pondered the question, weighing many unseen variables. “It’s, just, well . . . it’s just . . . intense.”

  Rule Number Two of taking drugs: There is no utterance pointless or meaningless enough that it cannot be construed as folk wisdom.

  I was “rushing.” It was intense. And in this case it was intense bad. My skin was on fire. I thought I was going to have a stroke. My hostess advised that I needed to get in a cool, dark place for a while—like I was a jar of jam—or a crock of pickles. Act like a salamander.

  That sounded good to me. I told her I always liked salamanders. They came in a variety of colors and had cool toes. I could do that. I started crawling on the floor on my hands and knees.

  My hostess left her jars long enough to lead me down the hallway to the guest bathroom at the back of her house. This bathroom had ceramic tiles. It would be cool and dark. She told me I should lie down in the coolest and darkest place in the room, which was around the base of the toilet.

  She soaked a blue towel in cold water and wrapped it around my head like a turban. I curled around the base of the toilet looking like Sabu, the Indian boy. She turned out the lights and told me to rest for a few minutes. She closed the door.

  Utter and complete blackness.

  If Einstein ever wanted a real-world scenario to prove his theory of relativity, I would offer this premise: take a man, wrap his head in a wet, blue towel, and have him hug the base of a stranger’s toilet in the dark. I promise you: for him, Time. Will. Stop. The only way I knew I was still alive was that I had a reenergized sense of self-hatred.

  I don’t know how long I was in the bathroom. I crawled out, eventually. The rushes were gone, and I needed some fresh air. Turban still in place, I crawled back down the hallway. I hung a right at the kitchen, bypassed the laughter coming from the living room, and headed for the back porch.

  I opened the screen door and crawled outside. I sat next to the dog of the house. His name was Manny More. He was one of those shepherd-mix dogs that wore a red bandana and rode in the backs of pickup trucks. In his younger days he probably chased Frisbees on the beach. Now he was content to do what most country dogs end up doing—panting and scratching.

  I didn’t know this dog well. A couple of pats here and there and maybe a potato chip passed to him under the table. I felt like there was no time like the present to bridge the gap. I began talking to him. I said, “Manny, you are so wise. So noble. We haven’t spent a lot of time together. I just wanted to take this opportunity to change that, here, on this beautiful night. I envy your tranquility, your peace of mind.”

  Manny turned toward me and said, “Stephen, I have no peace of mind. You have no idea what you’re talking about. We both look out into the night but from different perspectives. I have keener senses than you do. With my sense of smell and my hearing, I know, for example, that there is a coyote right behind that clump of trees, just waiting for me to go too far from the house. These mountains are filled with predatory birds. Hawks, owls. There’s danger everywhere in the dark that I can sense, but you have no idea is even there. That’s why you romanticize the night. I don’t. I know the night for what it is. But you humans—all of your poetry, your art, your music arise from your weaknesses: your desire to romanticize the night.”

  “Wow. Manny, you’re right.”

  Here I recalled Rule Number Three of using drugs: If the dog talks to you, listen. Always listen to the dog.

  Another wave of laughter from inside the house interrupted my moment with Manny More. I stood up for the first time in what seemed like hours and walked back to see what I was missing. And I had missed a lot. Someone had set the house on fire.

  There was a line of all my friends laughing uproariously as they shook their beers and tried to “squirt” the fire out. Our host and hostess threw pans of water on the wall leaving a smoldering, wet, black mess.

  Here, Rule Number Four of using drugs came into play. It is perhaps the most important rule of all: No one is to blame. For anything. Ever. It is a world without consequences.

  This rule, I believe, is the key to all addiction. Physical dependence can be overcome through abstinence. But drugs create a more enticing arena where we can become addicted to the drama of our own bad choices.

  I wandered away from the group and into the deserted living room. I sat on the floor and watched my friends, the Christmas tree, the smoke. I looked at the ornaments, some handmade. I thought about Christmas and what a special time of year it is. I thought about how far we had come since that first Christmas so long ago in Bethlehem. But then I thought, maybe not. Maybe we haven’t traveled that far at all. Jesus was born in a stable—not unlike Topanga—sort of. Animals figured prominently in that story, too. And in most Renaissance paintings, Joseph is alone, wearing a blue turban, with a confused look on his face.

  The first rays of the sun came up over the Santa Monica Mountains. Night was over. The Fifth Rule of doing drugs: The sun will eventually rise. The party will eventually end.

  Return to the world of consequences and regret is inevitable. And inevitability, after all, was the bottom line. For the person who doesn’t believe in God, for the person who has no faith, the handiest substitute for the eternal is the inevitable. And for that, the sun will do as well as any deity.

  I staggered out to my car. My thighs ached. My hostess explained that was caused by the strychnine used in the making of LSD. It would make my legs sore for the next two or three days, a small price to pay for an evening that set a new benchmark for terror and personal shame.

  I took a deep breath. It was Christmas morning. The road would be empty. The highway would belong to me. In the quiet of the car I recalled the final rule of using drugs: Conserve your strength. You’ll need all of your energy to try to forget what just happened.

  I backed out of the dirt driveway and, as I headed for the main road, through my rearview mirror, I saw a patch of red moving through the tall brush. It was a bandana. I stopped and turned to look. Through the rising dust, I saw Manny More. He was wandering off into the foothills. Off to explore by light of day the dangers that we could only romanticize at night.

  12.

  MISS HARD TO GET

  WHEN YOU ARE young, the biggest event in your life is school, and at school there is hardly anything more newsworthy than “new kids.” I was in second grade when we merged classes. The kids from the other first-grade class were now a part of my world.

  Mrs. Cooper was our teacher. She had a system to keep everything in order. We kids were organized alphabetically and by height. I was always tall for my age. The practical application of the Cooper System meant that I was surrounded by tall girls whose name began with letters at the end of the alphabet: Reynolds, Rice, Richards, Sims, Simmons.

  I probably should have been seatmates with Sylvia Sims or Phyllis Simmons, but they were too short. Part two of the Cooper System—the height variable—paired me with Claire Richards.

  Being almost as tall as I, Claire always sat right in front of me. She was always standing ahead of me in line. I would like to say that I was fond of her smile—which was sunny—or thrilled by her laugh and her conversation—except she didn’t talk to me. She was from the other
class, and I was a boy. But because of our relative positions in life, I became enchanted with the back of her head.

  She had honey-brown hair. Shoulder-length. When we walked down the hallway, it swayed in front of me. I started feeling like our cat, Tom, eyeing a piece of string, wanting to paw at it. This was the extent of our relationship for the first few weeks at school. One day everything changed.

  That day was Uniform Day. It was ordained that if you were in the Cub Scouts or Girl Scouts, or Brownies, one day a week you could wear your outfits. Claire, I discovered, was a Bluebird. She showed up at school in her red and blue Bluebird outfit and cap.

  On Uniform Day, Claire wore her hair in a ponytail that she pulled out a hole cut in the back of her Bluebird cap. When she walked down the hallway, her ponytail swung back and forth. I noticed a funny something happen in my stomach. I got a nervous feeling when I watched that ponytail swing through that Bluebird cap. A little voice inside me was saying, “Man, I don’t know what that is—but I like it.”

  The next big change in our relationship happened in music class. Fridays were talent days. People could get up and play a piece, usually on the piano. Claire got up and started playing a version of “Pickin’ Up Paw Paws” that was so rousing the class started clapping and stomping in time. The music teacher applauded at its conclusion and demanded that she play it again. To this day it was one of the greatest performances I have seen, just for the moving effect the music had on its audience.

  I was a goner. I was smitten, not just by Claire, but by music. I dreamed about music. I pretended I was a pianist in class and played “Pickin’ Up Paw Paws” on my desk. Mrs. Cooper scolded me and told me not to thump. I couldn’t help it. Not only was I not going to stop, my repertoire was expanding. I started including wild pianistic works that only existed in my brain, played on my desk for the back of Claire’s head.

  Mrs. Cooper reached the breaking point. She chastised me in front of the class for “being disruptive.” She made me stand at the front of the room with my nose in a chalk circle she drew on the blackboard. But I didn’t care. I knew what I was going to do the rest of my life. I would play the piano and marry Claire. It felt good getting those big decisions out of the way.

  After Sunday school our family would occasionally go over to my Uncle Hymie’s house. He had the greatest treasure of all, a grand piano. The house would fill with all my relatives eating brisket and sweet potatoes and talking. I would come in and sit down at that huge, beautiful piano and start playing. I didn’t know how to play. I would just hit notes and try to tell a story with the sounds. I would hit a mass of bass notes and stomp on the pedal and in my head there were roars of something dangerous coming. Then, I would touch the treble keys, and I would see a girl running up the stairs for protection and shouting from a tower for help.

  My improvisations drove all the grown-ups out of the room grumbling, except for my Aunt Hermine. She would move closer. She sat on the couch and listened. When I finished she applauded and asked me what I was playing. I told her the story. She nodded and said, “That’s really quite good.”

  My Aunt Hermine was always a hero of mine. She was a smart, no-nonsense woman. I learned she wrote and worked to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the Texas Constitution. Later she coauthored the National Equal Rights Amendment that failed to get passage. I had no idea when I was eight that she had been threatened and shot at because of her causes. She always stood up for the underdog. As far as I was concerned, her main achievement was being my musical patron.

  She talked to Mom and Dad about having a budding pianist in their midst. After what seemed like months of requests, Mom and Dad agreed to let me take piano lessons. They bought an Acrosonic piano, which was as small and inexpensive a piano as could be had back then. Mom set up lessons with Miss Hamby, a gentle older woman who lived with her sister. My mother would drive me to Miss Hamby’s house once a week. There wasn’t enough time for her to drive home and drive all the way back again, so Mom would sit in her car and read until I was done. She never complained.

  When you start taking piano lessons, you realize the distance between dreams and reality. Not just for the young pianist, but for the parents. For the child, he or she discovers they may be years away from a hands-together version of “Silent Night,” decades away from “Pickin’ Up Paw Paws.” As for Mozart or Beethoven, well, that was witchcraft.

  For the parents, you would think the biggest nightmare would be buying a piano and paying for lessons, and then having the child protest that they wanted to go outside and play and not practice, making the enterprise a waste of money. Right? But in reality the bigger problem is when the child does practice and he’s terrible and he’s loud and you’ve been working all day at the office and you want to just sit and relax and watch television and the child slogs away at “Big Chief Wahoo” for the twentieth time in a row. I’m sure it can make someone homicidal. That was me.

  I practiced for the next two years. Not only did Dad have to endure the noise at home, it was now his parental duty to go to the recitals. He got to hear twenty other children who didn’t know how to play, banging and stumbling through terrible pieces.

  I would like to say that I was faithful to my talent or lack of it. But I wasn’t. In fourth grade I started getting the idea that maybe the piano was not my instrument. Maybe I should allow myself to branch out. At one school talent show I saw sixth-grader Bobby Caldwell pull out a clarinet. Again I was swept away by the magic of the notes falling on top of one another in such a clever way. Perhaps the clarinet was the instrument for me.

  Through the school, I signed up to rent a clarinet for six weeks. When Mom saw the bill she asked me why I was getting a clarinet and what about my piano lessons? I assured her that I would continue with Miss Hamby, but I just might be a double threat. And I was.

  I showed up to band practice in the morning with my new clarinet. It was a foregone conclusion that I couldn’t play the thing. I had never held one. When I opened the case I was shocked when I saw that it came in pieces. I had no idea how to put one together. Bobby Caldwell graciously showed me how to assemble it. And then I started playing. Like my piano playing at Uncle Hymie’s, I just blew and moved my fingers. Instead of music a horrific series of shrieks and squeaks tore through the room. I sounded like a parrot being run over by a lawnmower.

  In the band room I had no Aunt Hermine to protect me. I had Mr. Graham, the bandleader. He quieted everyone and looked at me with absolute mystification.

  “Stephen, what are you doing?”

  “I’m playing.”

  “Do you know how to play a clarinet?”

  “No, sir. Not yet.”

  “Well, I think you should come back after you’ve had some lessons. Then you can play with us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I was back at band practice the next morning. Everyone looked at me. I sat down, put my clarinet together, and started playing. Mr. Graham heard the shrieks and squeaks and stared at me.

  “Stephen, you’re back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I thought you were going to learn how to play first.”

  “Yes, sir. I thought Bobby could teach me something.”

  Mr. Graham nodded and said, “Bobby, why don’t you take Stephen over to the other side of the room and show him how to hold a clarinet.”

  Bobby smiled and said, “Sure.”

  Bobby Caldwell was the best player in the band and an expert at the clarinet. He not only showed me how to hold a clarinet but that morning he taught me how to play “This Old Man.” I was playing music! I rushed home from school that day and gave Mom a private concert. She laughed and clapped. My rapid progress impressed her. One day, one recognizable song.

  I showed up the next morning. Mr. Graham looked exasperated. He said stoically, “Stephen, the band has to practice today, so it would help us out if you just pretend to play.”

  I nodded. I sat next to Bobby Caldwell. I put my clarinet together and s
miled. The band started a song. I pretended to blow in the clarinet and move my fingers like Bobby’s. After a moment or two, it was too much. The music was overwhelming and I had to play. I just tried to play softly and mimic Bobby’s finger placements. At the end of the song I was so excited. I had played it! Without being able to read a note of music I played it and it sounded good. I turned to Bobby and said, “I did it. I did it, Bobby. I played the song.” Bobby smiled and shook his head. “No, you didn’t.”

  Mr. Graham said I had to leave the band room. I was disrupting the practice. There was a school concert coming up at the end of the week. It was unfair to the rest of the band. I felt like I was standing in Mrs. Cooper’s room again with my nose in a chalk circle. Mr. Graham told me to leave and learn to play the clarinet. I could audition for the band next year. I nodded.

  The next morning I showed up at band practice and started putting together my clarinet. When Mr. Graham walked in and saw me, he changed colors from normal to red to white and to red again. I realize in hindsight, that morning I probably got the benefit of Mr. Graham being a good Christian man. He asked me once again to step into the hallway. “Stephen, this has got to stop. What are you doing here?”

  “I just enjoy the practice.”

  “Stephen, you are not in the band. You won’t be in the band until you know how to play a musical instrument. Go home. Take lessons. Come back in a year. If you can play then, you can come to practice.”

  “What are you going to work on today?”

  “We’re working on songs for the concert. We’ll be arranging where everyone is sitting and the order of the show.”

  “Where do you want me to sit?”

  Mr. Graham took a beat of silence, then a moment of prayer, then a pause for reflection, and just said quietly, “In the audience. I want you to sit in the audience.” I didn’t go back to band practice for the rest of the week.

  The day of the concert when our class marched into the auditorium, I brought my clarinet. Mark Wright asked me what was in the case. I told him it was a clarinet. Mr. Graham wanted me in the audience. We sat down, and I started assembling my clarinet. I ran my fingers over the stops readying myself for whatever Mr. Graham would ask me to do.