Linwood Barclay: A Tap on the Window

The mayor, a guy by the name of Bert Sanders, had made bringing the cops in line his number one issue, but he wasn’t getting much support from the rest of the council, or the good people of Griffon, who didn’t care how many teeth out-of-town troublemakers lost so long as this town didn’t turn into Buffalo.

That city was less than an hour away, but it was another planet compared to Griffon, a town of some eight thousand that ballooned to three or four times that in the summer when tourists came here to launch their boats and fish in the Niagara River, attend the various weekend festivals like that jazz event, or shop in the quaint gift shops downtown that struggled to hold on to customers who were being lured away to the Costcos and Walmarts and Targets of western New York.

It was late October now, so Griffon was back to its generally sleepy self. There wasn’t that much crime to worry about here. People locked their doors — we weren’t stupid — but there were no parts of town you feared going into after dark. Shopkeepers didn’t draw metal doors down over their storefronts at the close of business. We didn’t have helicopters with searchlights hovering over the neighborhood at three in the morning. But there remained a sense of unease, given our proximity to Buffalo, where the violent crime rate was roughly three times the national average, a city that regularly placed in the top twenty most dangerous American cities. There was a fear that at any moment, unruly hordes would surge northward like marauding zombies, putting an end to our more or less tranquil lifestyle.

So folks in Griffon gave their police some leeway. The head of the business association was encouraging everyone to sign their names to a pledge of support for the local police force. Downtown shops were urged to carry a form headlined OUR GRIFFON COPS ARE TOPS! and all who put their names to it would not only feel good about themselves but get a five percent discount on their purchases. A little way to say thank you for keeping our town safe.

Not that bad things didn’t happen in Griffon. We had our share of problems. Griffon wasn’t Mayberry.

There were no Mayberrys anymore.

I looked at a framed photo on the bookshelf across the room. Donna and me, Scott in the middle. Taken when he was thirteen. About the time he was entering high school.

Before the storm.

Smiling, but careful not to show his teeth, since he’d had braces put on only a couple of weeks earlier and was feeling self-conscious. Looking awkward, embarrassed maybe, trapped in his parents’ arms. The thing was, at that age, what didn’t make you feel uncomfortable? Parents, school, girls. The need to belong, to fit in, was a much greater driving force than the desire to ace a math test.

He’d always been looking for a way to fit in, yet couldn’t turn himself into somebody he wasn’t to do it.

He was an eccentric kid, more likely to have Beethoven than Bieber on his iPod. Loved almost anything that was deemed classic, in music, in movies, even cars. That aforementioned Maltese Falcon was a poster on his wall, and there was a model of a ’57 Chevy on his bookshelf. He drew the line at classics of literature. He wasn’t one to stick his nose into a four-hundred-page novel, a trait the doctors had said might be linked to attention deficit disorder — a more clinical diagnosis than the one I’d assigned to myself — although I was never sure I bought any of that stuff. But he did have all the graphic novel classics. Black Hole, Waltz with Bashir, The Dark Knight Returns, Maus, Watchmen.

With the possible exception of those graphic novels, he shared few interests with other kids his age. He didn’t care about the Bills — something of a religion in these parts — and he’d rather put sticks in his eyes than watch the adventures of Jersey Shore nitwits, spoiled housewives, mentally disturbed hoarders, or any of the other reality shows his friends were addicted to. He did like that comedy about the four nerdy young scientists — even took some comfort in it, I think. It gave him hope that you could be uncool, and cool, at the same time.

So as much as he wanted friends, he wasn’t about to feign interest in things he cared nothing about to acquire them. But then, summer before last, at another Griffon concert, this one featuring several alternative bands, Scott connected with a couple of Cleveland-area kids, vacationing here for the summer, whose contempt for much of popular culture provided an initial bond. These new friends found that mocking the world around them was easier when you softened the edges of it, and they accomplished that with booze and marijuana. They weren’t exactly the first.

No question, Scott’d had opportunities before to try alcohol and drugs — show me a parent who thinks his kid lives in a neighborhood where this stuff isn’t available and I’ll show you a parent with his head up his ass — but up to now he had, as best we could tell, given them a wave. He’d been at that age where pleasing his parents was important, but now was moving out of it. Having friends trumped making Mommy and Daddy happy.

Not exactly an unfamiliar tale.

There were changes in his behavior. Small things at first. An increased fondness for secrecy, but hey, what kid, moving further into his teens, didn’t want privacy? But then came trust issues. We’d give him cash to pick up a few items at Walgreens, and he’d return home with only half the items but no money. He forgot things. His grades started to slip. He’d claim to have no homework, but then we’d get notices from the school that he wasn’t turning in assignments. Or that he’d skipped classes altogether. Values he once held dear — being straight with us, keeping his word, honoring his curfew — no longer seemed to matter.

I never blamed drinking and pot for all of this. I didn’t have a Reefer Madness moment, convinced that marijuana had warped our son’s mind, turned him against us. Part of it was his age. Part of it was wanting to belong. Scott had bonded with the kids who made getting drunk and high part of his life, and when they went back to Ohio at the end of that summer, our boy’s new habits were well established.

We prayed it was a phase. All kids experimented, right? Who didn’t have a few too many beers, smoke a few too many joints? Still, we had the talk — lots of them — about making smart choices . Jesus, what a load of bullshit. What the kid could have used was a swift kick in the ass, and to be locked in his room till he was twenty.

Maybe, if we’d been smart enough to figure out that he would move on to something stronger, that’s what we would have done.

Because it wasn’t beer and pot they found in his bloodstream when they did the autopsy.

Donna and I talked — endlessly — about getting help for him. Counseling. Enrollment in a program. We sat up nights, searching for answers on the Internet, reading other parents’ stories, finding out we weren’t alone, but taking little comfort in that fact. We still didn’t know the best course to follow. We tried the usual things, to varying degrees, but with a consistent lack of success. Yelling. Grounding. Emotional blackmail. Rewards for improved behavior. “Pass that math test and I’ll get you a new iPod.” Instilling guilt. I told him what he was doing was killing his mother. Donna told him what he was doing was killing his father.

But there must have been part of us that thought — I know this was true of myself — that while things were bad, they weren’t that bad. Millions of kids got into trouble in their teenage years and came out the other side. I wasn’t high much when I was in my teens, but getting shit-faced was a weekly ambition. Somehow I’d survived.

We deluded ourselves.