T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

A woman with frosted hair and remodeled hips ducks in late and settles noiselessly into the chair in front of him. “Good evening,” Officer Rudman says, “I’m Officer Rudman,” Someone coughs. Feedback hisses through the speakers.

In the next moment they’re rising clumsily in a cacophony of rustling, stamping and nose blowing, as Officer Rudman leads them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Hands over hearts, a murmur of half-remembered words. He’s conscious of his daughter’s voice beside him, and of his own, and he shifts his eyes to steal a glimpse of her. Her face is serene, shining, hopeful, a recapitulation and refinement of her mother’s, and suddenly it’s too much for him and he has to look down at his feet: “… with liberty and-justice for all.” More coughing. The seats creak. They sit.

Officer Rudman gives the crowd a good long look, and then he begins. “Drugs are dangerous,” he says, “we all know that,” and he pauses while the principal, a thick-ankled woman with feathered hair and a dogged expression, translates in her halting Spanish: “Las drogas son peligrosas.” The man sits there in back, his daughter at his side, tasting wax beans, rushing with weltschmerz and nostalgia.

Eocene: designating or of the earliest epoch of the Tertiary Period in the Cenozoic Era, during which mammals became the dominant animals.

Je romps; tu romps; il rompe; nous rompons; vous rompez; ils rompent.

They didn’t have drugs when he was in elementary school, didn’t have crack and crank, didn’t have ice and heroin and AIDS to go with it. Not in elementary school. Not in the fifties. They didn’t even have pot.

Mary Jane, that’s what they called it in the high school health films, but no one ever called it that. Not on this planet, anyway. It was pot, pure and simple, and he smoked it, like anyone else. He’s remembering his first joint, age seventeen, a walkup on Broome Street, holes in the walls, bottles, rats, padlocks on the doors, one puff and you’re hooked, when Officer Rudman beckons a skinny dark-haired kid to the microphone. Big adult hands choke the neck of the stand and the mike drops a foot. Stretching till his ankles rise up out of his high-tops, the kid clutches at the microphone and recites his pledge to stay off drugs in a piping timbreless voice. “My name is Steven Taylor and I have good feelings of self-esteem about myself,” he says, his superamplified breathing whistling through the interstices, “and I pledge never to take drugs or to put anything bad in my body. If somebody asks me if I want drugs I will just say no, turn my back, change the subject, walk away or just say no.”

Brain-washing , that’s what Linda called it when he phoned to break their date for tonight. Easy for her to say, but then she didn’t have a daughter, didn’t know, couldn’t imagine what it was like to feel the net expand beneath you, high out over that chasm of crashing rock. What good did it do you? she said. Or me? She had a point. Hash, kif, LSD, cocaine, heroin. He’d heard all the warnings, watched all the movies, but how could you take anyone’s word for it? Was it possible, even? He’d sat through driver’s ed, sobering statistics, scare films and all, and then taken his mother’s Ford out on the highway and burned the tires off it. Scotch, gin, whiskey, Boone’s Farm, Night Train, Colt 45, Seconal, Tuinal, Quaalude. He’d heard all the warnings, yes, but when the time came he stuck the needle in his arm and drew back the plunger to watch the clear solution flush with his own smoldering blood. You remember to take your vitamins today?

“My name is Lucy Fadel and I pledge never to abuse drugs, alcohol or tobacco because I like myself and the world and my school and I can get high from just life.”

“My name is Roberto Campos and I don’t want to die from drugs. Peer pressure is what makes kids use drugs and I will just say no, I will walk away and I will change the subject.”

“Voy a decir no—”

Officer Rudman adjusts the microphone, clasps his hands in front of him. The parents lean forward. He holds their eyes. “You’ve all just heard the fifth graders’ pledges,” he says, “and these kids mean it. I’m proud of them. Let’s have a big hand for these kids.”

And there it is, thunderous, all those parents in their suits and sportcoats and skirts, wearing sober, earnest, angry looks, pounding their hands together in relief, as if that could do it, as if the force of their acclamation could drive the gangs from the streets or nullify that infinitely seductive question to which “No” is never the answer. He claps along with them, not daring to glance down at his daughter, picturing the first boy, the skinny dark one, up against the wall with the handcuffs on him, dead in the street, wasting away in some charity ward. And the girl, mother of four, twice divorced, strung out on martinis and diet pills and wielding the Jeep Cherokee like a weapon. That’s what it came down to: that’s what the warnings meant. Agon, agape, Ulysses S. Grant, parthenogenesis, the Monitor and the Merrimack, yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. His daughter takes his hand. “Now there’s a movie,” she whispers.

What happened to finger painting, hearts for Valentine’s Day and bunnies for Easter? Fifth grade, for Christ’s sake. Where was Treasure Island, Little Women, Lassie, Come Home? What had happened? Who was responsible? Where did it go wrong?

He’s on the verge of raising his hand and demanding an answer of Officer Rudman, the nostalgia gone sour in his throat now, but the lights dim and the film begins. A flicker of movement on the screen, bars, a jail cell. He watches a junkie writhe and scream, a demonic sunken-eyed man beating his head against a wall, someone, somewhere, lights flashing, police, handcuffs, more screams. Smoke a joint and you’re hooked: how they’d laughed over that one, he and Tony Gaetti, and laughed again to realize it was true, cooking the dope in a bottle cap, stealing disposable syringes, getting off in the rest room on the train and feeling they’d snowed the world. Things were different then. That was a long time ago.

Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, Homo erectus: his daughter’s hand is crushing him, prim and cool, lying across his palm like a demolished building, a cement truck, glacial moraine. Up on the screen, the junkies are gone, replaced by a sunny schoolyard and a clone of Officer Rudman, statistics now, grim but hopeful. Inspiring music, smiling faces, kids who Just Say No.

When it’s over, he feels dazed, the lights flashing back on to transfix him like some animal startled along a darkened highway. All he wants is to be out of here, no more questions, no more tricks of memory, no more Officer Rudman or the vapid stares of his fellow parents. “Honey,” he whispers, bringing his face down close to his daughter’s, “we’ve got to go.” Officer Rudman’s chin is cocked back, his arms folded across his chest. “Any questions?” he asks.

“But Dad, the cake sale.”

The cake sale.

“We’ll have to miss it this time,” he whispers, and suddenly he’s on his feet, slumping his shoulders in the way people do when they duck out of meetings early or come late to the concert or theater, a gesture of submission and apology. His daughter hangs back — she wants to stay, wants cake, wants to see her friends — but he tugs at her hand and then they’re fighting their way through the gauntlet of concerned parents at the door and out into the night. “Dad!” she cries, tugging back at him, and only then does he realize he’s hurting her, clutching her hand like a lifeline in a swirl of darkening waters.

“I mean, have a cow, why don’t you?” she says, and he drops her hand.