Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

I wonder now if my father recognized this fact.

Tapington was a small town, with almost nothing to recommend it except a few churches, low real-estate prices, a women’s college, and quiet. Still, I discovered a whole menu of choices: Pot. Speed. Meth. Coke. Crack. MDA. Whippets. Not to mention every manner of downer (in a county that didn’t need any more downers: we already had a closed polymer plant, a closed aerospace plant, and a closed Ford plant). I didn’t try coke or speed. I smoked a little pot with another kid from the math team; then I went straight to MDA.

The Mellow Drug of America.

That’s what my friends called it, anyway; or, sometimes, for reasons I never understood, Mr. Dowater Agrees . (Ecstasy, by the way, MDA’s more beguiling cousin, hadn’t yet appeared in Tapington, or at least not yet at Tapington North — a fact that actually might have saved my life.) When the dealers saw who was waiting out back for them between the bleachers and the cafeteria dumpster, they made easy work of me. They roughed me up. From having skipped all those grades, I was already on everybody’s list; and, of course, I was small for my cohort. When I came back, they roughed me up again, a little harder. But ever since my father’s stay at Southern Ohio Lutheran — the first one, now more than a year before — there had been a disquiet inside me: part anger, part sorrow, part bewilderment. For some reason it was relieved, at least temporarily, by being pushed around; and then, later, by the drugs. I came back a third time.

Never give up.

Finally, on a warm Friday afternoon just a few minutes after the three o’clock bell, one of them sold me a couple of tabs: one green; one yellow. The silhouette of a butterfly stamped across the face of each. It was a new world. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know, for example, if the different colors meant different drugs. Or different doses. Obviously, I didn’t ask the kid who was selling it. Instead, I pretended at both nonchalance and skepticism. I remember making a snide comment about the butterfly design — I was afraid he was selling me children’s vitamins — but he just said, “See you next time.”

As soon as I got home, I took the first one. In the seed-headed grass behind the dilapidated toolshed in our overgrown backyard, looking out over our foamy creek, I lay down alone, while not thirty feet away from me, in our chipmunk-ravaged garden, my mother and Paulie bent to their weeding. My father was upstairs napping. Several days before, he’d ruefully enjoyed the last afternoon drink he’d ever allow himself to indulge in. Now, it seemed, I was taking over for him. Our lives were perched on a fulcrum. I’d intended to try the green pill on Friday and the yellow pill on Saturday; but as it turned out, I tried the green pill on Friday and the yellow pill two hours later. Some people don’t like drugs. Some people don’t like giving up control.

Well, I wasn’t one of those people.

The whole experience felt primordial to me, as though, until that moment, Hans Euler Andret had existed only inside of an egg — a rich, nutritionally fortified yolk insulated by a cushioning white — and now he was finally pecking his way out into the world. And I’m here to report that the world, as first seen by an organism emerging from a shell, appears astoundingly bright.

It also appears astoundingly meaningful, like a slideshow of your own life. My father, stepping tentatively onto the porch after his nap, lifting his frail hand against the sun. My mother, slapping the broom on the garage steps until a cloud of dust rises up around her. My sister, leaning down to count the wisps on a dandelion without picking it. It was all there in pictures. My extravagantly sad family.

Before long, I was buying seven hits a week.

At the outset, I got the money from my mother, leveraging her reliable kindness. Soon I began stealing from her purse. When she caught me at it (I should have known that she would know the total in her billfold), I turned to stealing from my new buddies (also MDA heads, it goes without saying), although stealing from thieves wasn’t as easy. Before long, we were stealing from the lockers at school. Then from the coach’s office, where the concessions lockbox was kept between games: I was the one who figured out the combination, of course.

Looking back, I see that this period was the only one in my life in which I had a good number of friends. (Nothing I pity myself for — I’ve never particularly wanted friends.) We MDA users were an emotional bunch, coaxing brotherhood from our methylated oxyamphetamines. April and May of that year, my pals and I spent every free period under the bleachers at the far end of the football field, observing the behavior of the newly fertilized grass. Sometimes it grew into whispering green towers, or herds of grazing green caterpillars, or stalks of swaying, green aluminum. My companions were dead-end kids, every single one of them, and they treated me like a dignitary who’d crash-landed in their midst. Their planet was a ravaged one. They roamed it, looking for yellow and green. I followed, doing the same. Nothing was beyond my desire. I did their homework for them; I laughed at their jokes and shared in their bitter asides about the teachers (whom I invariably still respected and in a few cases still loved). I wrote a college essay for the daughter of my honors English teacher. I wrote a term paper on Puritan ethics for the son of the town’s Methodist minister. Everything in return for tabs, naturally.

All the while, I should add, I knew almost nothing of my father’s history.

Most of Dad’s early life — which would obviously bear on what I was doing — was only revealed to me later; and everything that was happening to him now, though it couldn’t have been a more dire warning or a more minatory clue, seemed to be of no relevance.

On top of which, I couldn’t have cared less.

In the afternoons, Dad and I had ceased studying mathematics altogether. The first time I told him I wasn’t going to sit with him and review the day’s requisite theorems, he merely shrugged and wandered off toward the kitchen. He was back at work now and seemed in no mood to waste any more time. Later that afternoon, I finished the homework for my class in Fourier analysis; but the next morning, I failed to mail it in to my professor at OSU. The same thing happened the following day. All five afternoons that week, in fact, I did my homework but then failed to mail it in, and all five afternoons I went instead with my newly made friends to a freshly built house at the south end of town. I don’t blame my father for ignoring my descent — he had his own ruin to think about.

The house belonged to the parents of one of the dealers, actually. Suburban-style construction was new to Tapington, and the empty two-car garage and the refrigerator’s built-in water dispenser were objects of amazement. That part of Tapington looked over the shut truck plant, whose burglar-proof windows had been attacked so many times over the years by crowbars and baseball bats that they were held together now only by the remains of their reinforcing wires, which glinted defiantly back at the town. A decade of winters had pierced the tar roof in a hundred places, and the brick walls of the assembly line were studded with holes where the pipes had been hacked away by salvagers. The entire building looked as though it had been the target of a sustained bombardment. That Friday afternoon, just before I swallowed my pill, I imagined my father looking out at the mulberry to see whether his son the prodigy had experienced a change of heart.

There was a shadow city living inside the Ford plant, stooped men who went out late in the afternoon as though leaving for the swing shift but returned an hour later to resume their vigils under the eaves. They slumped like rag dolls with brown paper bags in their hands. One of them, a skeletal figure with an amputated arm, looked a lot like Dad — the same startled brow, the same peculiarly fixed look of hope — and under the influence of the pills, I began, without warning, to feel sorry for him. For my father, I mean.