Angelhead Page 2

  That year I shaved my head, wore giant rolled-up jeans, skater garb head to toe, and made straight Cs to prove something after years of nothing but straight As and honors classes. I started living, at twelve, as if yesterday were something I watched on TV. Tomorrow might not even come. This kind of nihilism was the essence of punk as I vaguely understood it, which, in many ways, was my one true, unwavering guide and mentor then, because my parents were always working to keep on top of their barely confinable debt, and when they weren’t, they were dealing with a Michael crisis—a call from the cops or a teacher or a counselor or a parent. There was always something. I was free.

  My father was always working on the house—making a flower bed, painting something, hammering, sawing. It was his pride and joy; he couldn’t believe we actually lived in it.

  My mother and younger brother, Ron, who was seven, hovered in their own little worlds made of clubs, homework, sports, and spelling bees. My mother doted on Ron and me, kissing us, hugging us without warning, telling us at least twice a day, at breakfast and when she got home late from work, how much she loved us, how special we were. But she avoided close contact with Michael even then, because there was something dangerous about the vibrations he seemed to give off, the way he could turn on you and start screaming and cursing without warning.

  We didn’t understand him, had no idea he was getting sick, mentally and spiritually, with a horrible disease. With sympathy, the early stages of schizophrenia are a massive burden; without sympathy and understanding, without love and care even in the face of the strangest of behaviors, schizophrenia is a wrecking ball.

  My father, unlike my mother, almost never gave away his emotions, except for the anger he directed at Michael. He was embarrassed by his feelings. He had grown up in a home without love, filled with petty cruelties and alcoholism and despair, a place where dreams of a better life were absurd and worthy of venomous critique from his own father.

  Once my father and I, about this time, were wrestling in the den and laughing before a Redskins game. My father loved me, I know, but his love was precarious, volatile at times. To express love openly is to leave yourself open to injury, which he could not take, not even slightly. He rubbed his coarse beard on my face. It was a joke, a tiny torment in a game of joking torment—boy play, my mother called it—but it burned my skin and I became angry. Then he laid all his weight on me and I couldn’t breathe. He stayed like that for a minute or more, even though I was panicking. He rolled over and poked me in the side with his finger, a little too hard, breathing heavy and smiling. He didn’t know how strong he was, how he had nearly crushed me, how the lightest brush from his face had nearly ripped my skin. Lying beside me, he looked me in the face and said he loved me. He made as if to hug me.

  I told him I hated him.

  His face blanked with rage, became colored with a whole history of tiny failures and rejections. Something inside him turned. He got to his knees and began smashing his open hands against my face and ears. I curled up in a knot to weather the blows. My mother came into the room screaming. That was enough to stop my father. He stood up, face red, hair a mess, and, pointing down at me on the floor, he said he hated me. Well I hate him too. He spoke like a ten-year-old and it scared me.

  I wasn’t physically hurt, but there was a gaping hole in my chest from having my father tell me he hated me, even after I had told him first. I felt I could say it with impunity, but not him; if he could say he hated me back—and at that moment, looking at him, I knew that he meant it more than I did—then he wasn’t really my father. I went down to a friend’s house—his divorced father was never home—and smoked more dope, ate Oreos, drank a few beers, and watched porno.

  Michael never fully came back after the Ozzy Osbourne concert, the six hits of acid, the seeing God. He was out of sync with the rest of the world, a giggling, scowling acidhead. He pulled strange stunts: setting small fires in surrounding neighborhoods, telling teachers he had testicular cancer, grabbing his crotch, twisting his scrotum up in his hand in front of the class, smirking; shooting BBs at neighborhood kids; tossing me into fresh-cut poison ivy and laughing at the weeping sores I'd have later that night, my swollen eyes and fingers.

  He was famous in our new town of ten thousand white people as the good-looking bad boy. He resembled a muscular Keifer Sutherland (of Young Guns as opposed to Flatliners)—long blond hair, blue eyes, lanky but fit. He would take any drug, drink until he was facedown in some kid’s suburban living room. But he still had one foot in reality at this point. His strangeness was attributed to the drugs my parents knew he did; he was an eccentric from a family tree full of eccentrics, a violent kid from a family in which violence, like alcoholism, ran in our blood, trickled down. Much of my father’s family was famously, tragically damaged, stretching back generations, from the farms of North Carolina and my great-grandfather’s macabre exit, to rural Appalachia, back across the Atlantic to Scotland and Ireland: alcohol, depression, manic-depression, suicide. You had to figure, statistically, that at least one of us would bump up against some dread so great that he'd lose his mind.

  But the suburbs were treating us well at this time, which made our problems—my illicit drug use at twelve, my brother’s rather open drug use and declining mental state—seem distant, not worth dwelling on. Big colonial homes sat on plush green cul-de-sacs. Fog patches floated above us in the morning like fat gray whales. You could smell the salt air of the Chesapeake Bay from our house. Sprinklers. Dogs barking. Neighborhood picnics. Baseball. County fairs. This was the America my father had always yearned for, and on the surface it was as beautiful and peaceful as his dreams of it had been.

  Before we had moved away from our old neighborhood in Hampton, Virginia, my mother had been a school-bus driver in one of the worst sections of the city, Pine Chapel, a HUD housing development of barracklike structures. I remember riding in the seat behind hers, remember the black kids talking about the white bitch and her kid, how she drove and never said anything. Pine Chapel was all black, and the poverty and violence these people lived in was mind-numbing. There were knife fights and muggings and racial beatings and shootings. My father, because of the stories my mother told him, because of her fear, because of where we lived and the public schools we went to, became a secretive racist just as his father had been an open one. So these white suburbs were a symbol of success to him. A grand white success. He cut branches. He burned trash. He swept and edged the sidewalk.

  My parents had new friends now, friends with money, pools, big houses, expensive cars, golf and traveling and drinking habits. They had to adjust their way of thinking, to learn to not let their faces show surprise when a Rolex was worn to a party, or a giant diamond hung around an alabaster neck, or when someone invited them onto a massive luxury fishing boat for the day. They had to learn to be blasé around copious, conspicuous cash, and to act as if they, somehow, had their own large stash.

  My father began wearing khakis and boat shoes and Izod shirts, relegating his uniform of Redskins jerseys, Chuck Taylors, and Levi’s to yard-work status. This was their dream—this place among the marginally wealthy, two-car garage, kids-go-to-college set.

  My father longed to belong in a group of people for whom winning—and that’s what this was, the conventional American definition of winning—was not alien and unattainable. He was embarrassed about where he came from, that he had quit high school and then gone back and barely finished years later, that he had never set foot on a college campus. People could look at my parents, their house, their clothes, and my parents were unashamed, making it by all outward appearances.

  They were happy these days, in love, as long as Michael wasn’t somehow ruining it for them, wasn’t bleeping across a police scanner or getting expelled from school or mildly overdosing in some kid’s upstairs bathroom. They bought a huge Zenith TV, trinkets for the house, flowers that bushed up around our foundation, giving off the fragrance of middle-class normalcy.

  But Michael�
��s state of mind was sinking fast. I can see that, looking back, though at the time none of what makes perfect sense now made any sense at all. We all had our mechanism for pretending otherwise: my modes of escape and general punk attitude; my father’s single-minded quest for conventional success; my mother’s relentlessly positive attitude; my younger brother Ron’s youth and lack of understanding.

  Michael was confused and confined, stuck in murky thoughts of God and demons, already uttering odd fragments of church-speak, dialogue from horror flicks, and lyrics from heavy metal. Every day he seemed more outrageous, more defiant. Mumblings. A vague panic. People plotting against him.

  At first, when he heard the voices after seeing God’s face, it was like everything opened up for him, like the world made sense for the first time. The colors were brighter, the sounds were sharper. Narratives arose, beautiful, intricate narratives, where none had existed before. Everything could be connected. The most trivial things seemed vital. But now things were getting darker.

  All of Michael’s friends were still in Hampton, the next city over, in our old neighborhood. He didn’t like the kids with money, had trouble making new friends with schizophrenia blooming in his brain, with this school full of strangers he was convinced whispered about him behind his back.

  Michael’s world started breaking into tiny pieces. He laughed for no reason, nowhere near a punchline. He said off-color things about death and dying and torture, about corpses and axes and Satan. He would look at a clock to tell the time, but then he'd see the round frame, the glass, the hands red and black, one sweeping, one still, and the actual calculation of time suddenly escaped him, moved just out of reach of his thoughts. Everything was like this. The world was like this.

  At first it was perfect, this breakdown in thinking, this shattering of meaning, the perfect trip, the permanent high, but then he was stuck. He couldn’t get out of his head. He couldn’t say what he meant. Words got jumbled. Meaning was a series of knots. He became angry and depressed, buzzed with a kind of low-wattage rage.

  Many of Michael’s friends, those kids from Hampton who had grown into their teens with police records, had cars—Novas, Mustangs, El Caminos. They drove the thirty minutes to pick him up for the weekend, never getting out of the car, just beeping in the driveway, engine rumbling, windows smoked over, choking gas fumes bellowing out of the rusty exhaust pipe. They listened to Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and Motley Crüe—a particularly delinquent group of kids who were so high all the time they barely noticed any change in my brother.

  My mother would peek out the window as Michael ran out the door saying he was staying with one friend or another. For a while my father tried to stop him. The fights they had over this when Michael would return on Sundays sometimes lasted hours and usually ended up in a house full of tears and overturned furniture, another Sunday night melee. I'd crank up the stereo or the TV or both to drown out the yelling, the crashing.

  My father would use a fat leather belt to beat Michael. The thwacks sounded like the punches and kicks in martial-arts films. I’ve always had an aversion to violence—it can make me physically ill. I’ve thrown maybe three punches in my entire life, which is odd for a boy who ran in the crowds I ran in. I trace my fear, my learned ability for compromise in moments of conflict, my outright—here’s the truth—cowardice in the face of real violence, back to the solid sounds of those blows on my brother’s back and head and legs.

  After the beatings, my father would often go into the backyard and pretend to do yard work. He'd try to talk himself away from the act, from the uncontrollable anger that made him swing and swing. He would sometimes cry if he'd really hurt Michael, if there were bruises, but that wouldn’t stop him the next time, because he didn’t know how else to handle a kid like Michael, a kid, he knew, who was heading straight for prison or the grave. He thought if he'd acted like that, his father would simply have killed him.

  At some point, worn down and worn out, my father gave up on trying to stop Michael from hanging out with kids he knew sold and took drugs, the same kids with whom Michael had taken six hits of acid at one time.

  My father was exhausted when it came to Michael. He had worked so hard to get here, to get to this suburb. He had this new life where everything but his family looked promising.

  SACRIFICE

  The city where my family lived from 1965, five years before I was born, to late 1977 was built around shipbuilding and fishing. Hampton is less than thirty miles from Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg, three of America’s first settlements and beacons of historical tourism. Oddly, everything in Hampton looks as if it were built in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the big business of Military took over, when the Tidewater area was deemed a “strategically sound location.” Since then the military has dwindled, though there are still several bases—army, navy, air force, marine—nearby, and there has always been, at least to me, a transient, characterless feel to the place.

  To the south, across the wide mouth of the James River, where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, is Norfolk and Virginia Beach, bridges and hotels and All-U-Can-Eat seafood buffets and T-shirt outlets and boat shows. To the east is Chesapeake Bay and then the rural, insect-infested Eastern Shore, that thin strip of land with its crab pots and peanut fields, farm equipment, fruit stands, and beautiful old homes. Beyond that, the dark Atlantic.

  They are rebuilding Hampton nowadays, making it into a place for young professionals, with nice restaurants and beachfront properties going up where once only slums were (the slums have moved a few blocks and been condensed and are now more heavily patrolled by city police); nightclubs thrive; the parks are full of couples and families every weekend.

  In 1983, however, when a young boy I will call S was murdered in our old neighborhood, Hampton was a place from which people wanted to move. It had been in steady economic and aesthetic decline since the early sixties. The buildings of downtown went unrented; they had cracked mortar and broken windows and some had begun to lean with their shadows toward the empty, trash-filled streets. The lower-middle-class suburban neighborhoods were racially mixed and volatile. The schools were among the worst in the state.

  Here, just a few miles from where my father had attended high school and quit and attended again, just a few miles from our old house, my brother and his friends had a fort in the thick forest between the Briar Queen public pool and our old neighborhood. The fort sat deep in the guts of these woods, the same woods where I used to play after school when I was six and seven.

  On the edge of the woods, half a mile from my brother’s fort, there was a black man, a Vietnam vet, living on top of the junior high school, a man smelling of urine and feces and garbage, dressed in rags, a hat made of newspaper. His face was covered in fat, light brown scars like slugs. The neighborhood legend was that he had been a POW. He made toy birds out of leaves and pinecones. He spoke a kind of Southern urban gibberish, shouting from the roof to the kids below about the merits of calisthenics, the nutritional value of army rations.

  From 1977 to 1983 my brother went regularly with friends to loiter around the junior high. They got drunk on bag-wrapped quarts of beer and stoned on ditch-weed joints, laughed, threw dirt clods, aiming for faces, for mouths and eyes. Sometimes they slugged it out with rival basketball teams, friend or foe, didn’t matter who, just something to do. They either walked there from their fort or drove a guy named Clyde’s VW bug, all of them packed in like clowns in a clown car, pot smoke billowing out of windows, bass beats bouncing off houses and into the sky.

  They had to jump a high fence to come and go at the school after hours. Graffiti covered the building’s bland concrete walls—gang insignia (B-Section Boys), or terse commands (Suck Me). They shot hoops on the outside courts—steel nets stuck to bent rims—and acted as obnoxious as bullies do anywhere.

  For fun, for something to do, they called the old man on the roof a coon, a jigaboo, a spook, a spear-chucker. They said, nigga pleeze, said, yo, wipe tha
t fuckin slug off yo face, nigga.

  From the roof, the old man, covered in dirt from being recently hit with a dirt clod, told them again, this time with tears in his eyes, to do calisthenics or perish in physical disrepair.

  It was here, on June 10, 1983, just a few hundred yards from Michael and his friends’ fort, just down the road from the junior high and the homeless black veteran on the school roof, that S was murdered. I believe I would have all but forgotten the murder by now, wouldn’t have to imagine and reimagine it, if it hadn’t later become central to the story of my brother.

  I picture a boring late afternoon in our old rundown neighborhood in our old rundown city, picture the small brick homes lined up straight as tombstones.

  All the kids are inside watching TV as usual, Batman and Romper Room. They’re lounging around on the shag carpets of their homes, mothers in kitchens, talking on phones, twisting cords around fingers, smoking cigarettes at kitchen tables, having kicked off one of those furry slippers to scratch their calves absentmindedly with their painted toenails.

  Houses sit quietly. There’s a siesta-like hush. Cars inch by on the streets, rolling through stop signs. Music in the distance. Someone washing a car. The tops of trees in the woods sway softly.

  S—who is thirteen and quiet and a star student at an increasingly dangerous school—is heading to a friend’s house on the other side of the woods, in Powhatan Park. He walks into the woods, shade falling like a curtain, then stops. He starts turning over logs, looking for bugs for a science project that his father, who has high hopes for S, has promised to help him with. He’s wearing shorts and sneakers, thick glasses. He’s skinny, clumsy, and trips over a stump, stumbling forward.