Angelhead (2 page)

MIDDLE-CLASS

I was a kid petrified of my odd and delinquent brother. I avoided him as much as possible. By all outward appearances, though, I was following in his footsteps. When I was twelve, I started growing up in wrong directions, creating my version of a punk artifice of nihilism to protect myself from the world. I wanted to hate things, but I didn't. I just pretended to. I was baffled by my life and home, baffled by my violent brother, unable to articulate, even to myself, why I was angry, why I was sad.

Once, when I was sent to the principal's office in the seventh grade for wearing a sleeveless T-shirt with a Heineken beer logo on the front, the vice-principal, an aging hippie who knew about my brother's drug problems and all the fights he'd been in over the last few years and his several brushes with the local police, asked me if I was worried about nuclear war.

No, I said.

Is your family okay?

Yeah.

How about your brother Michael? Is he okay?

He's
great
.

You get along okay, then?

Sure, I said, we're close. I crossed my fingers to show how close.

He paused. Does he ever . . . hurt you?

Nope.

Are you sure?

Yes
.

Do you drink Heineken?

What?

But your brother does?

You're losing me now. I don't know what you're talking about.

What kinds of music do you like?

I thought, Oh wow, you're really probing my mind now. Stuff you can square dance to, I said.

Don't fuck with me, Greg.

I thought his saying “don't fuck with me” was amazingly cool, so I told him the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, Minor Threat, DRI, the Drunk Engines, Fear, the Germs, the Mekons—some of whom I had only heard mentioned by older skater kids I thought were far cooler than me.

Angry stuff, he said, that punk rock.

I guess.

Are you angry? he said. Are you scared of something? What worries you the most? Are you afraid . . . afraid that . . . you won't do well in life? Tell me about your family. I really want to know about you and your brother Michael.

Are we back to that? I said. I would rather have detention than talk about this shit again.

Don't use that language, he said.

You said “fuck.”

You're
twelve.

Detention it was. This was the drill: him pretending to be someone I should trust. I told him nothing but the name of a few bands. I would say anything to avoid talking about my brother. Truth is, I
wanted
detention. I wanted to tell my friends about my conversation with fuckwad the counselor. I
wanted
a
conflict
with
authority
. Thus a Heineken shirt without sleeves when I knew you had to have sleeves and could not wear beer or cigarette shirts or shirts with profanity or inappropriate messages to school. The shirt was my father's. He wore it to cut branches from trees and burn trash. It had stains all over it. Very punk. I had snuck back into my house to put it on when my mother thought I had gone to the bus stop that morning. My mother would never have let me wear that at twelve. I wanted a reason, even one I essentially created, to say fuck off to everything, my entire life and everybody in it. I used to get high and watch the punk classics
The Fall of Western Civilization
and
Rude Boy
over at my friend's house every weekend (Betamax tapes), and I wanted to be as careless and glamorously ruined as the people in those films.

There was an old woman in our neighborhood, a woman whom I referred to simply as “massive green hemorrhoid,” for some reason, whose bright green yard I would often cut through. She told me one day as I jumped her fence, probably right into her beautiful hydrangea bushes, that I'd end up in prison just like my brother would. My English teacher that year told me I should take shop and learn a skill so I could make a living when I was older. That same teacher tried to have me expelled later when I wrote an A paper, insisting that I could not have done it, that I was not this smart, that I had actually copied the entire essay, word for word, out of a book. She knew of my family—especially knew of my brother—and it was impossible that I, this little punk asshole in the back of the class, could say anything of consequence about Stephen Crane. I found the whole thing flattering, and she ended up giving me an F on the paper and forgetting about the expulsion, which solidified my new punk philosophy perfectly because it made my underlying point about life: Do something the right way and still get the shaft.

I had already developed a taste for pot upon my introduction to it in the fifth grade. I liked the
easiness
of it when a friend of mine and I smoked some of his father's buds for the first time and watched one of his many pornos. We both sat, stoned out of our minds, with hard-ons and distressing looks on our faces and Oreo crumbs on our chins, unable to process the images on the screen. That year I started taking speed and diet pills. I drank alcohol, whenever I could get it, and Robitussin, which gives you a boozy, sleepy drunk. I skateboarded with my friends on ramps and on the road around gas stations and shopping centers and in empty pools. I stayed up all night watching endless hours of bad movies, stoned, until my memories, my life, started to feel like a pastiche of filmed clichés in which Michael occasionally made a cameo as the monster.

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.