14. Dream Police

BOOM, BAM, KABOOM! DRUMS blasted in Terry’s blanket-darkened room. The dream police live inside my head… come to me in bed. Coming to arrest me!

“What’s the music all about?” I asked my son.

He grinned, proudly handing me his new album. “It’s Dream Police by Cheap Trick!”

Emblazoned on the cover, rockers wearing white police uniforms wielded billy clubs and handguns. The guitarist, ghoulish trickster in rhombus-patterned leotards, dangled a cigarette.

Refusing a haircut, my once well-groomed tennis star looked like a shaggy-haired band member. “I was born in the wrong generation,” he said on his sixteenth birthday. “I wish I’d been around in the sixties.

I’d turned sixteen in 1960. The tumultuous era conjured fond memories of Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Joan Baez singing We Shall Overcome and Simon and Garfunkel’s duet, Sound of Silence in Central Park, but I suspected Terry meant, The Grateful Dead, strobe lights, LSD’s “surrealistic fragmenting,” and psychedelic rock enhancing the use of perception-altering hallucinogenic drugs.

Did he identify with drug users chanting death and despair or did my creative child consider Dream Police poetic expression? After all, driving me insane …the men inside my brain…had rhythm and rhyme like Edgar Allen Poe’s, His eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming.

 

Our journey to hell departed from Disneyland early last summer when the park police caught Terry and his friend David, both fifteen, smoking marijuana. Days later, I discovered a bag of pot in his room. “It’s not mine,” he said. “It belongs to my friend, Bobby, down the street.” I wanted to believe him, but when I found him smoking his father’s Camels and empty vodka bottles under his bed, I expanded my search and seizure missions.

“You’re spying on me!” he said. “You’re looking through my bedroom walls.”

 

The week after Christmas and months of broken promises, tearful threats, and failed attempts to stop the flow of drugs and blatant lies, Melissa and I went to the mall with Terry to buy him a pair of Jordache jeans. Shopping at JC Penny’s, he darted out of the men’s dressing room clutching a pair of jeans against his stomach. Sweat beaded on his handsome brow.

“Are you sick, Terry?”  

“Na, Ma,” he said, slurring words like a drunk. “I jus’ wan’ pants that fit.”

His sister motioned to the pair he held. “What about those?”

He shoved the blue jeans in her arms. “They’re too small!”

“No wonder, Terry. These are girl’s jeans!”

He turned and vanished into a sea of life-like mannequins and racks of clothes hung too close together. I spotted him wandering the aisles like a besieged sleepwalker. Wild-eyed, as if reliving his childhood nightmare of being sucked into a whirlpool, his eyes open but not seeing.

Since the age of ten, buying tricks at the Temple City Magic Shop, he’d known what he wanted. We’d shared joyful hours buying magic props, Adidas sweatsuits, sports equipment, and designer jeans. I gently touched his arm. “What’s wrong, Terry?”

“I can’t find what I’m looking for.”

“What are you looking for son?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

 

Last spring, soothed by the cooing of Terry’s magic doves outside the kitchen window, Melissa and I sat at the Formica table strewn with honey jars, rolled oats, sunflower seeds, coconut, and cookie sheets. Focused on filling Tupperware tubs with our homemade granola, Terry surprised us stumbling into the kitchen mumbling senseless sounds.

“Speak up!” Melissa said. 

Swaying, he leaned against the counter to steady himself. A handful of black pills slipped from his grasp; his eyeballs rolled back. Like a felled tree, he crashed on the floor.

 “Terry, Terry!” Jumping up, knocking a cookie sheet off the table, I kneeled by his motionless body, my hand on his chest. His heart still thumping, I cried tears of relief.

 He opened his eyes and like a baby, he crawled to the counter, pulled himself up and he went to his room. Melissa picked up the scattered pills. “They’re black beauties!”

“What’s that?”

“Everyone knows, Mom. They’re uppers.”

The following day, Stuart confronted Terry. “Why in God’s name would you take an illegal, dangerous drug?”

“I wanted to know what it felt like. It won’t happen again, I promise!” He said he was going to the park to play tennis and left the house hugging his racquet.

 

A week later Terry ran into the living room, screaming, “The police! They’re coming to arrest me!” He pointed at the whirling dervish hovering over the ghosts of the thirteen eucalyptus we’d chopped down for firewood. Police helicopters often flew over our neighborhood searching for robbers and lost children. For a moment, I believed him. Maybe he got caught with the black beauties. I reached to comfort my frightened man-child. He pulled away.

Sleepy-eyed, hung over, Stuart came out of the bedroom. “What’s all the commotion?”

“Oh! No, the police!” Terry recoiled as if his father was about to handcuff him. He bolted past us and disappeared out the front door. My husband stood staring at the silent sky.

 “Stuart, we have to get help for Terry!”

“Maybe the police can help us,” he said.

I appreciated his willingness to find a solution and for once agreed with him. He’d befriended the local officers who sponsored his Sultan’s Car Club in high school and only kept him in jail one night for drunk driving when Terry was six months old.

 

At the police station, Stuart told the officer we needed help with our son.

“What’s going on?”

“Everything was fine until last summer.” Without warning, words gushed out of my mouth like water from a broken dam. I told him about Terry smoking marijuana at Disneyland, the hidden vodka bottles, his obsession with rock bands, Cheap Trick and Black Sabbath’s sinister lyrics, his long hair, overdosing on black beauties when I thought he was dead. “This morning he thought a police helicopter was coming to arrest him.”

“He used to be a good kid, a magician, a talented athlete,” Stuart said. “But now he lies to us, sneaks out at night. I can’t control him.”

The officer’s willingness to hear our story brought tears to my eyes. He assured us he’d heard stories like ours before. “Don’t worry, often such uncontrollable boys outgrow their teenage rebellion.”

We left the station without a solution but relieved to know we weren’t alone. Since we caught Terry smoking in the fourth grade, I’d anticipated his adolescence and resistance to authority in his quest for identity, but since smoking his father’s cigarettes, drinking, and taking drugs, his whole personality had changed. Defiance and dishonesty didn’t seem like a normal part of growing up at all, but an uprising, an insurrection. Unless Terry soon outgrew his teenage rebellion, I didn’t see how our talk with the policeman made things better.

I detected a predictable pattern to Terry’s behavior and ours. After every self-made crisis he said, “I’m sorry. I promise it won’t happen again.” In remorse, he laid low returning to a somewhat normal routine of school, USTA tennis matches, and long-distance bike rides. In these brief sober periods, we believed or wanted to believe, the problem had gone away and were surprised by the next inevitable crisis.

Weeks after talking to the policeman, Terry’s tennis racquet went missing. Next, he said his expensive Schwinn Racer was stolen.

I mourned Terry’s lost, sold, or stolen life. As long as he played tennis and rode his bike long distances, things seemed somewhat normal, kept us in denial and connected to our promise-filled past.

A reliable source in the neighborhood told Melissa Terry had traded his bike and tennis racquet for drugs. Crying, I said, “This is the worst thing that could ever happen.” But it wasn’t.

 

 

Terry, pastel from life, (18X24) Eva Margueriette

15. Black Sabbath

The Trickster appears when a way of thinking becomes outmoded, needs to be torn down, and built anew.

TERRY SNATCHED A SIX-PACK of tall Coors from the refrigerator. Extending my arm like a traffic cop, I yelled, “Stop! You’re too young!”

“It’s hot as hell! And Dad said I could have a beer now and then.” He stormed past me, slipping out the sliding glass door. Hitting the hot cement, his tennis shoes smelled like rubber on fire. Black Sabbath recording wailed from his bedroom. It’s too late…Misery, it’s come to drag me away.

Downing a tall Coors, Terry stood on the edge of the patio where he’d practiced pitching before Little League games. As if warming up for a big event, he chugged another beer, crushed the empty can and hurled it at the faded target on the wall, piercing the heart of the bullseye.

Bent-up beer cans, Coors six-packs, and hundred-degree heat ignited memories of a family outing to Aunt Mona’s desert cabin. Stuart brought his twelve-gauge, double-barreled shotgun he kept hidden in his closet and the box of Dragon’s Breath shells buried in his sock drawer. He lined up empty beer cans on a rock and taught Terry how to load the gun and brace the stock against his shoulder. They laughed when the blast knocked him off his feet the first time he pulled the trigger. That afternoon, father and son kept making jokes and shooting beer cans until they ran out of ammunition.

 

“What’s all the racket, Terry?” Melissa said, leaning out the sliding glass door as another crushed beer can hit the mark.

“Shut up bitch!”

Tears welled in his sister’s gentle brown eyes. Minutes later, I caught him peeing against the wall. Not wanting Melissa subjected to more of his outrageous behavior, we escaped to the air-conditioned mall. I can still see Terry holding a can of beer, standing on the patio no longer shaded by the eucalyptus he’d climbed as a young boy.

 

“Why are all the lights turned on?” I said, pulling into the driveway after dark. “The windows look like Jack-o-Lantern eyes.” The twisted bougainvillea hovered like a ghost outside Terry’s too bright window. Black Sabbath blasted its clarion call from his record player, telling you my state, enjoy life. I wish I could but it’s too late…Misery’s come to drag me away. Get ready for judgement day.

Two holly bushes stood sentinel beneath our bedroom window blazing like a beacon warning ships of danger in the night. Months before, wielding a hedge trimmer, sculpting their limbs into works of art, I told Stuart I dream of having a Japanese gardener. He said they were too expensive and the sprinklers I’d asked for cost too much to install. So, I’d hand-watered the lawn for the eleven years we’d lived in the house. Dead patches cropped up in the corners. Ragweed, stinging nettle, and Godzilla thrived in our bone-dry southern California summers, overwhelming the planter. I’ll pull those weeds tomorrow, I thought.

Without warning, an explosion louder than Black Sabbath’s deafening drums, rocked the foundation beneath our feet.

“Sounds like Terry’s setting off M80 firecrackers in the house!” Melissa yelled above the rocker chanting…It’s too late! You must let me go…when the candle fades, say it was a joke you played. Crossing the threshold, we inhaled the scent of burning wax.

Below Saint George Slaying the Dragon, white candles lined the oak mantle, some snuffed out, others still burning, melting in translucent puddles. Melissa clung to my side. “It smells like church on Christmas eve,” she said.

Kaboom! My heart pounded in sync with the beat of the drum in the punishing heat, Black Sabbath wailed, No one hears you. It’s too late for tears!

I opened my bedroom door. Splintered wood, slivered glass, and fragments of fabric littered the olive-green shag carpet. Tiny holes pierced the curtains I’d sewn from sheets bought at JC Penny’s white sale in January.

Like spotlighting the star in a staged performance, the ceiling bulb shined on Terry’s long, lanky body sprawled diagonally across our queen-sized bed holding his father’s twelve-gauge, double-barreled shotgun, not moving.

Melissa leaned against the wall and slid to the floor. My heart stopped. The cheap mirror glued inside the opened closet door shattered. My thrift-store wardrobe and faded, blue velour robe, riddled with buckshot. Splintered glass crunching beneath my shoes, I approached the bed.

He hadn’t played tennis in months but wore an Adidas shirt and shorts, and clean white socks. His overgrown hair spilled across the wrinkled sheet. Clinging to the bed, I collapsed on my knees. A high-pitched keening sound escaped my innermost being. “Oh God! Noooooo!”

 

 

 

16. The Aftermath

 

THE SCENT OF ORANGE blossoms drifted through shredded curtains. I leaned in. Terry’s finger rested on the trigger; a strand of shaggy hair spilled across his brow onto the bloodless sheet. I sensed a stir, a quivered limb, an eyelash flicker. Suddenly, as if resurrected from the dead, my son rose from the bed and threw a lamp. Shattering glass on my cedar-lined hope chest, he screamed, “God help us!”

I echoed his prayer, “God help us.”

Like a bit-part actor in the wings awaiting his cue, Stuart appeared in the doorway trembling and recited his line. “He called me at the shop, he said the gun’s loaded, Dad. I’m going to kill himself.”

“I said don’t do it, Terry. I’m coming home!”

Eying our boy slumped on the bed; my husband’s terror turned to rage. He stomped past me, snatched Terry’s collar, dragged him out, and walked him up and down the dark cul-de-sac as if sobering up a drinking buddy.

Amongst the ruins, I understood why my son did not die. Instead of shooting himself as he’d threatened, he shot his own reflection in my bedroom closet mirror.

 

That night Stuart hid the gun. Afraid to leave him alone, he slept on the floor by Terry’s bed.  Melissa and I locked ourselves in her bedroom secured with a deadbolt installed six months before, after her piggy bank went missing. We’d suspected Terry. Drug addicts resorted to stealing, even from their families, but lacking evidence accusing him led to more lies.

Moonlight caressed my daughter’s gentle face in sleep. Lying beside her, I struggled to unravel the web we’d weaved in the seven years since Terry’s teacher caught him smoking in the fourth grade. How had such wretchedness befallen us? Night after night, one nightmare after another, our family had been sucked into the whirlpool Terry painted in words and circular hand gestures, swirling around and around, sinking deeper, and deeper until we couldn’t get out. Locked down, prisoners in our own house and so isolated, no one thought to call for help. “We can handle this!” had been my battle cry, until tonight.

Terry spoke for all of us when he cried, “God help us!”

 

The next morning, I unbolted Melissa’s door. Light flooded the living room, bent-up beer cans littered the Bermuda grass beneath the cinder block wall and burnt offerings lined the oak mantle beneath Saint George. High off the ground, safe from predators, Terry’s doves cooed their soothing song. The gun had disappeared, but the shot-up mirror and our shattered lives had not. “The thing I feared the most has come upon me,” I said aloud, but no one heard me.

I smelled burnt toast. Like mannequins in a surrealistic Salvatore Dali painting, father and son sat opposite each other at the kitchen table eating fried eggs sunny side up. Terry’s face a mask, I reached out to comfort him but pulled away, afraid to touch my own child.

“Stuart, we’ve got to stop pretending everything’s normal.” He shrugged. Terry kept smearing eggs on his toast.

Recalling their TV commercial showing park-like grounds, smiling doctors in long white coats, happy-looking sober patients hugging family members on the patio surrounded by purple hydrangea in earthenware pots, I said I wanted to take Terry to Raleigh Hills Hospital right away.

“Fine,” Stuart said.

I called the hospital on my amplifier phone and told the man who answered our sixteen-year-old son was drinking beer when he shot a gun off in our bedroom. “Can we bring him in?”

“We don’t take children. He must be at least eighteen.”

 “We can’t wait two more years!”

“I’m sorry.” He sounded sympathetic. “But there’s a young man named Tim Hoover over at the Pasadena Alcoholism Council. Maybe he can help you.”

I called. An hour later Mr. Hoover met us in his office. Terry and Melissa stared at the wall while Stuart and I told our horror story ending with last night.

“It often takes seven years for a family to seek help,” the counselor said. “Once they suspect a problem.” Seven years?

Oh, God, it had been seven years since Terry’s fourth-grade teacher suggested we get help and denying we had a problem, I’d rejected her advice, but deep down I suspected she was right.

Tim Hoover gave each of us a list of yes-or-no questions. Has your life been affected by someone else’s drinking? Checking yes, I pictured my mother downing yet another Jack Daniel’s bourbon and Coke and my fourteen-year-old self, yelling, “You’re killing yourself!” For years, I’d hurled those words at Stuart when he came home drunk, but I never thought of Terry killing himself–-until last night.

My husband checked yes to: 1. Has your drinking affected your family relationships? 2. Have you ever been arrested for drunk driving? After completing our tests, Tim said my husband needed to seek recovery for alcoholism, Melissa needed a group for teenagers, and scheduled a psychiatric evaluation for Terry.

He handed me a directory listing support group meetings for families of alcoholics in the San Gabriel Valley. “They’ll teach you how to let go of your son, to Let go and let God.”

“Let go?” I envisioned Terry sprawled across our bed last night holding the gun. How can he say such a thing? “I don’t understand. How can you let go of a child who is threatening to kill himself?”

“He’s God’s child, too,” he said.

Promising Tim we’d continue getting help, we piled back into the woody wagon and drove fifteen miles to Azusa for Terry’s psychiatric appointment. After the doctor talked to him alone for half an hour, the rest of our band of battle-weary soldiers filed into his air-conditioned office.

Terry’s suicide attempt might have only been a suicide threat. “A dramatic cry for help,” he said. “A way of calling attention to his sick family.”

“Sick family?” I grabbed my stomach as if I’d been stabbed.

 He aimed his beady eyes on me. “Do either of your families have a history of mental illness?”

“It’s her alright!” Stuart piped up. “Her and her mother are both crazy.”

“That’s not true!” I shot back. “There’s no insanity in my family.”

The psychiatrist made notes documenting our defective genealogy and said we could bring Terry back next week—if we had insurance.

Next week? My son almost killed himself the night before. I’d expected the doctor to get him hospitalized immediately but got a dose of guilt instead.

We took Terry back home. Checking the directory Tim gave me, I found a nearby support group meeting and told my husband we had to go. Twenty-four hours after the gun went off in my bedroom our foursome huddled in a Covina church courtyard at the foot of the stairs looking up the open door. Light and happy chatter poured out of the meeting room. I wanted to climb up to the light and laughter calling me. Instead, I stood in the dark with my family, waiting. “Let’s go in,” I said. “We promised Tim we’d get help.”

“We already got help today,” Terry said. “From the psychiatrist.” As if reaching a consensus, we turned away from the light and drove back home.

 

As soon as we got home, I found another meeting in the directory and left Stuart in the bedroom sweeping up splintered glass. I arrived late to my first family support group located in a craftsman house on Marengo Avenue in Pasadena, but a gray-haired woman smiled and made room for me on the sofa.

For an hour, I listened to stories like mine. At thirty-seven years old, for the first time, I learned my mother, husband, and son all suffered from the disease of alcoholism and my guilt, anger, and need to control, all classic, co-dependent symptoms of the child, the wife, and mother of an alcoholic. It meant I could no longer justify blaming myself or anyone else.

“But I still blame myself,” I confided in the kind woman after the meeting.

“I feel guilty for causing my son’s illness.”

“Remember the three C’s,” she said in a warm-hearted voice. “You didn’t cause it. You can’t control it and you can’t cure it.”

That night, thirty-six hours after his suicide attempt or threat, Terry slept in his bedroom, alone, Melissa again barricaded behind her dead-bolted door, and I collapsed on our queen-sized bed. My body crying out for attention, sounding an alarm, I’m curled in a fetal position holding my stomach throbbing with pain.

The psychiatrist’s inquisition pinpointing genetic causes for Terry’s behavior magnified my guilt. I’d gone back and forth between blaming myself and blaming Stuart for our son’s addiction and broken spirit, but the kind woman said, no one caused it and there was no one to blame. It seemed impossible to forgive myself and everyone else.

Since declaring a state of emergency seven years before, when I quit painting to save my family, I’d been stacking sandbags on the banks of a raging river in my insane attempt to control the uncontrollable. Perhaps, the time had come, as Tim said, to Let go and let God.

 

17. The Seige

THE NEXT DAY, ELSA, a well-coiffed woman in her late seventies, a member of the support group for families of alcoholics for forty years, shared her story. When I told her about Terry, she gave me her phone number. “I understand,” she said. “Call me anytime.”

I phoned Elsa the next day, crying and she calmed me with her kind words and wisdom. I mentioned searching for a hospital for Terry. She offered to make some calls.

Between cleaning my client’s houses and attending support groups to calm me, I researched hospitals, begging for advice from anyone who’d listen. My anxiety lessened in the company of the women sharing stories motivating me to drive to support groups within a thirty-mile radius of home once or twice a day. Everyone I confided in looked me in the eye and said, “Take care of yourself!”

 Terry disappeared almost every night and I thanked God when I found him alive in his bed the next morning. I lay on my bed holding my knotted stomach whimpering like a shell-shocked soldier, unable to eat, sleep, or concentrate and losing weight without trying for the first time in my life.

On the fifth day of the siege, because my fear had manifested into chronic anxiety and physical pain, one of my new friends suggested, I too might need medical attention.

“It’s Terry’s life in danger,” I snapped. “Not mine!”

 She told me caretakers could become sicker than the patient. I needed to learn to take care of myself because codependency was a serious disorder and could be fatal if not treated. I wore sacrifice like a badge of honor. Self-care sounded selfish.

No, self-care meant self-love, she said. Caring for yourself in little ways, a pedicure, or a massage, which I’d never had. Perhaps a bubble bath with lit candles. She must be kidding. A bubble bath at a time like this? “A drowning mother can’t rescue her drowning child,” she said. “You must love yourself before you can love anyone else.”

 

On the seventh night of the siege, driving home from a meeting in Claremont, tired and hungry, I spotted an In-N-Out drive-thru, made a U-turn, got in line, and read the menu on the outdoor sign: Hamburger $1, Cheeseburger $1.10.

Terry and Melissa often ordered cheeseburgers at the popular Southern California hamburger stand but I’d always denied myself the thin slice of cheese calling it a frivolous expense. A waste of money. Suddenly, I understood what the women meant when they said, take care of yourself.

 “I’m going to buy a cheeseburger. I’m worth it!”

 

On day nine, at the Jackie Robinson Center in Pasadena, waiting to see Mr. Edwards, a young man known for getting teenage addicts into recovery, I picked up, I Never Saw the Sunrise, written by a recovered teen addict. I knew Terry had his own compelling story to tell once he got well.

 Settling into an overstuffed armchair, I recounted last week’s suicide attempt or call for help, we didn’t know which. Mr. Edwards asked if there was any family history of alcohol or drug abuse.

“Yes, I’m afraid of Terry becoming a drug addict like his real father.”

 “His real father?”

I’d just turned twenty when I met his biological father, a fellow art student’s brother recently released from prison. He wanted a platonic relationship which appealed to me since I’d sworn off sex at the time. The counselor said it sounded like it became more than platonic. I rattled off the abridged version of my long story. I’d quit art school to work to pay rent but had been laid off with way too much time to hang out with the handsome young addict. Weeks later, he convinced me to share his codeine cough syrup, changed his mind about sex, stole my diet pills, and vanished.

Days after discovering I was pregnant, Uncle Wendell, my mother’s brother, the black sheep of the family flew the red eye to Los Angeles to attend my sister’s high school graduation. When I confided in my uncle, he said he had connections. He’d take care of my little problem if I drove him back to Beaumont, Texas in my 1953 Chevy. He sweetened the deal, promising to take me to New Orleans to hunt down my missing father, and to New York City to finish art school. It sounded like a good solution, but Uncle Wendell turned out not to be my savior, but a pimp who planned to get me an illegal abortion and put me to work with his wife in the Beaumont, Texas brothel.

Two months later, failing to find a willing doctor or my missing father, my uncle was arrested on the Mann Act for bringing me, a minor, across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. I called Stuart, my former high school sweetheart. He flew to Texas, and drove me and my Chevy back to LA. Four months later he asked me to marry him, two weeks before Terry was born.

“Uh, that’s a lot!” Mr. Edwards said. He wanted to know if I was still married to Stuart, and I said yes for sixteen years but it hadn’t been easy. “Does your son know about this?”

Outside the office window, teenage boys sat drinking Coke and laughing. I’d not heard laughter in a long time “No, Stuart insists we keep it a secret. He considers himself Terry’s only father.”

“Terry’s sixteen years old,” the counselor said. “He has a right to know.”

“Not now. He’s too vulnerable. It would push him over the edge.”

“Don’t you think he’s already–over the edge?”

 

On day eleven of the two-week siege, wearing my shot-up, still-wearable, blue-velour robe, I stood in the laundry room loading the washing machine. Terry appeared in the doorway shoving his Jordache jeans at me. “Here, wash my pants!”

I dared not react. I’d just learned how he manipulated me through my anger and anxiety. Giving in to his unreasonable demands enabled his verbal abuse and I assumed the role of injured victim. Wanting to appear firm and kind, not anxious, I smiled and handed him his jeans. “No, but you can wash them yourself.”

He glared. “I wish you’d been wearing that robe when I shot it with the gun!”

I’d worried about Terry killing himself. Now worried about him killing me, I recalled a news story about a boy who murdered his mother, father, and sister before committing suicide.

Hiding knives, scissors, fireplace pokers, weapons of mass destruction, I thought about families like mine hiding guns and sharp objects, dealing the best they could with what they did not understand. G

For eleven days, since Tim said he was God’s child too, I’d kneeled with arms outstretched begging Him to take care of Terry. Now, I prayed for protection.