Chapter 2 ~ Introductions

Photo by
Brendon Stuart


According to the experts, (Aristotle? Aaron Spelling?) there are five stages of plot in every story. The first stage is exposition, when the characters and setting are introduced. Then comes the rising action, when a series of conflicts face the hero, or heroine, as the case may be. During the rising action, which typically begins with an “initial incident,” things usually get worse and worse for our hero, and the dramatic tension gets stronger and stronger for the audience, until we come to the climax, or turning point, in the story, which is followed by the falling action and the resolution, which, if you want to sound sophisticated, you can call by the French term, denouement (day new ma). Plot structure can be visually represented like this:




I suppose I am the hero of this story (I don’t see the point of diminutive feminine suffixes), since I’m telling it from my point of view. I am a 50-year-old woman, mother of three, wife of one. I would like to say “recently-turned” 50, but I don’t think five months ago counts as recent. Still, 50 isn’t what it used to be. “60 is the new 30” was the headline I read on a magazine at the dentist’s office. It had a picture of Lauren Hutton on the cover, focusing on the sexy gap between her front teeth. “If 60 is the new 30,” I thought, “then 50 must be the new 20.” I decided not to calculate what this math would mean for my 20-year-old firstborn, Rose.

My name is Josephine, but my friends call me Jo, and I have been teaching English and Journalism at Santa Inez High School for the past five years, a mid-life career change that makes me both proud and insecure. I am intelligent and attractive, or so I consider myself, which is the principal ingredient of all attractive women, don’t you think? They have a natural self-confidence, a sense of well being, an instinctive belief that all the world welcomes and adores them. I read an online astrologer, Rob Bresny, who advocates fostering an attitude he calls “pronoia”—the opposite of paranoia—in which, when everyone in the office is huddled around the water cooler whispering your name, you don’t imagine they are gossiping about you, but planning a surprise party. Attractive women have that. I may be a bit plumper than is strictly necessary, and my skin may lack that springy resiliency of youth. I may have wrinkles radiating from the corners of my eyes and breasts that slope gently downhill, but I’m still curvaceous, and I still love to have sex with my husband (who worships my voluptuous ass) whenever we can capture time alone or unnoticed by the other members of the household. My hair is long and coppery red, thanks to L’Oreal hair care products, and two years ago I received quite a bit of attention from a lonely and brainy young man—a friend of my children’s—who enjoyed playing the cello for me and taking me to the symphony in San Francisco, but that’s another tale.

My son Eddy is another hero in this story, since much of the action is centered around him. In Eddy’s case, the word anti-hero comes to mind: anti, from the Greek for opposite or against, and hero, from the Greek for protector but also meaning the principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic presentation, according to the New College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. That volume describes “antihero” as “the protagonist in certain forms of modern fiction and drama characterized by a lack of traditional heroic qualities.” And what are traditional heroic qualities? Courage, primarily; also strength, size, and nobility, which took two dictionary hops to arrive at magnanimous, meaning “noble of mind and heart; generous in forgiving; above revenge or resentment; unselfish; gracious.” Magnanimous, in turn, is from the Latin for “great-souled (magnus meaning great and animus meaning soul). At almost 19 years old, Eddy’s certainly not above resentment or generous in forgiving—not of his mother, anyway. But he could be considered “great-souled” in the Jungian sense, meaning he’s lost his individual soul and become part of the collective soul of humankind; meaning he sees and hears things on a universal and archetypal level; meaning, of course, that he’s insane.

Eddy is extraordinarily good looking. I realize that many parents say that about their children, but in Ed’s case, it is true. His father wondered recently if perhaps Ed is suffering from “pretty girl” syndrome, in which no one will take you seriously because you look too good. While Eddy very much wants a serious, romantic relationship, the girls who want him are drawn by his face, not his mind. That could be part of his recent troubles, but it wouldn’t explain everything. Not the delusions. Not the voices. Not the inability to make himself understood.

Besides looks, Eddy also has intelligence. He seems, to most members of our family (me, his father, and his older sister Rose—but not his little brother Henry) to be a near genius. But while he’s very intelligent in some spheres, he’s quite stupid in others, like knowing when to stop, for instance—like knowing when he’s on the brink of getting grounded, or suspended, or arrested, or expelled. Once, for Christmas, when he was maybe 10 years old, he gave me several little slips of paper. This was a popular gift at the time, a notion fostered by one of the teachers at Jefferson Elementary School. His sister Rose also gave me slips of paper, saying things like “good for one breakfast in bed,” or “good for making brownies.” Eddy’s slips all said the same thing: “I will stop.” Eddy has always been unable to correctly calculate the cost-benefit ratio of certain anti-social behaviors such as defying teachers, coaches, policemen, probation officers or other figures of authority; alienating the parents who are feeding, clothing and sheltering you; or putting your fist through a window at a local junior college and then refusing to get into the ambulance the security guards have called.

Finally, no introduction of Eddy’s character would be complete without mentioning his enormous penis. When changing his diapers as a baby, other mothers would turn their heads and gasp. I thought at the time, being unfamiliar with boy children (I have four sisters), that perhaps it was a condition of infancy—that over time the rest of his body would grow to catch up with his equipment. But, in fact, it grew right along with him, a detail which I’ve had the opportunity to verify annually at the clothing optional swimming hole which we frequently hike to with other people from camp. During his particularly hostile years, from age 6 to 16, I often wondered if he suffered from testosterone poisoning. During his recent difficulties, his father faulted him for compromising his natural gifts. “He’s got good looks, brains, and a big cock,” said his father. “I can’t believe he’s going to throw all that down the toilet.” Lawrence seems to think it’s sadder to lose a smart, handsome, well-endowed son to insanity than it would be to lose a dumb, ugly, genitally inadequate one. As a mother, though, I doubt this theory. Whatever bursts out of the womb after nine months of pregnancy and hours of labor and delivery, we’re pretty much predestined to love.

There are other characters in this story, but I’m beginning to tire of introductions. You’ll simply have to meet them as we move along. Instead, let me try to remember the paragraph I read on a piece of paper at Sisters of Mercy Hospital. We were visiting Eddy in the psychiatric ward when he was called out of the room by a member of the staff. Naturally, I walked over to his desk quickly and pawed through a pile of crumpled papers there. On one, a questionnaire put out by the hospital, he had written this description of his family:

My mother is Xena. She’s practically a lesbian, but 20 years of relationship has forged a commitment of sorts with a man known as Mr. Thibedeaux. My father doesn’t like you, or that’s what he’d want me to tell you if you asked. My sister is a scientist, which makes her incredibly happy and knowledgeable and a ball of bliss. My brother is a punk ass, but an adorable one. But sometimes his brain gets paralyzed which makes it difficult to hold a conversation with him.

I was insulted when I read my description. I didn’t mind the lesbian reference so much, but it seemed to discredit my relationship with my husband, as if the only reason we stayed together was because we’d already put in 20 years. But Lawrence only laughed and said it sounded pretty accurate. “At least he’s making an attempt to answer the question,” he philosophized.

As to the setting, we live in Sunnybrae, California, which is 17 miles south of San Francisco on the thin peninsula between San Francisco Bay and the mighty Pacific Ocean. You might think that means we live in a liberal neighborhood, but we don’t. Our block, particularly, is full of conservatives. The people across the street have their own U.S. flag which they fly proudly on patriotic occasions. During the last presidential election, only our lawn and the one at the far corner—where my sometime friend Carla the massage therapist lives—had Kerry/Edwards signs. Despite the war in Iraq, the war on terror, and the astronomical price of gasoline, everyone in this town drives an SUV—except us. One actually ran over my bicycle at a crosswalk one morning as I was on my way to the high school where I work. It was huge, bright white, the size of a condominium, waiting at the corner of Peninsula and Delaware to turn right. I was off my bike, ready to walk it across the crosswalk safely. When I got the green light, I tried to peer up into the massive vehicle to make eye contact with the driver before stepping in front of his two tons of steel, but the windows were tinted black and I couldn’t see in. So I stepped into the crosswalk at the same moment an Indian (dot not feather) named Patrick began to heave his behemoth around the corner, crushing my front wheel under his tire. “It’s a good thing you started screaming,” he said a few moments later, “or I wouldn’t have stopped.” He seemed to think my screaming was a strategy I was cleverly deploying to capture his attention, not an involuntary response to being crushed by a huge physical manifestation of deliberate American ignorance and greed.

When I’m not riding a bike, I drive a little, black, two-door, 15-year-old Nissan. Lawrence decided in the past few months that he never wants to drive a car again. First he sold his Ranchero and bought a used bicycle and an old 50cc Vespa he found on Craigslist. He also bought me a used bicycle and an old Piaggio Bravo moped. Then he bought me a Puch moped. Then another Puch for parts. Then two more bicycles. Then two more. Now we have a veritable fleet of ecologically-correct vehicles which we park in the driveway under a big white plastic tent. When the two of us scoot around town, I feel the exhilaration of a gang member, complete with anti-social attitude. I made mock plans to start a club and embroider jackets to wear as we cruised the streets at 15-25 miles per hour—Eddy’s friend Sonia even came up with a name: the Mo Peddlas. Just to be sure everyone knows where I stand, I affixed a little bumper sticker to the back of my Bravo that says “SUVs Suck Gas.”

“Well, that’s pretty snotty,” my friend Karen said at camp when I told her about the bumper sticker. And I suppose it is. I may live in Sunnybrae, but I don’t fit in here. I’d probably be happier with the radicals in Berkeley, across the Bay.

You might think by this description of our vehicles that my husband is a flexible man who is open to new possibilities, but again, you’d be wrong (that’s twice now). He has acted like an old curmudgeon ever since I made his acquaintance on the school newspaper at San Francisco State University at age 21. (He was 21; I was a more-sophisticated 25.) Yet, inexplicably, he made this major change to his lifestyle at age 46. In a moment of clarity, Eddy asked me, “Do you think I had anything to do with Dad’s decision to give up driving?”

I said I thought that he did.

Read the next chapter HERE, or buy a paperback copy of Count All This HERE.

Chapter 1 ~ July

Photo by
Brendon Stuart



“Personally," he said, "my great ambition is to count all this"
—he waved vaguely at the treasure around him—
"and possibly sort it into piles.”

--The dragon in John Gardner’s Grendel




1. Longing

I’m going to try to set this down faithfully, exactly as she told it to me, without concern about whether her memory is accurate, or if the dangly earring he wore to the fire circle should symbolize mental illness or a mystical connection to the unseen forces that shift beneath our world.

“It all started in April,” Jo began, tilting her head to the ceiling to recall it, “when Eddy instant messaged me that he had just taken psilocybin, methylenedioxy, methamphetamine…and caffeine.”
“Do you mind if I take notes?” I interrupted.
“What for?” she laughed. “Are you going to write a book?’
“Could be.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she countered, fixing me with an impetuous look. She drew a pack out of her purse and began tapping it against the side of her hand.
“Smoke?" I was flummoxed. "But doesn’t your doctor…?”
“Pshst,” she scowled. “What do you think?”
I hesitated for a moment before rummaging around in my desk and locating my old ashtray, putting it down carefully on the table by her chair. "Your wish is my command," I bowed slightly. “As long as we're breaking the rules, I might as well offer you a drink,” I continued, sliding open a paneled door in the side wall to reveal the bar hidden behind it.
“Wow. A wet bar! When was this place built?" She raised her eyebrows. "Do you often drink with your clients?”
“No. But you're special.”
"Yes, I am." She rewarded me with a smile. “But I better not have one now, thank you. Maybe later.” She lit her cigarette deliberately, took a long drag, exhaled it, and picked a stray strand of tobacco off her lip before continuing. I settled back in my chair.
“I remember that he wrote, ‘I’m ecstatic.’ That turned out later to be a pun, because after frantically messaging back and forth, he told me that methylenedioxy and methamphetamine are the ingredients of the drug Ecstasy.” She gave a little huff and tossed her head.
“I expressed alarm, of course, and concern. I asked why he was doing two very powerful drugs at the same time. I warned him about unpredictable interactions. And I think now that if he could have predicted what was going happen next, he wouldn’t have taken Ecstasy and magic mushrooms together, or separately.
“Then again, perhaps he would.
“That’s the source of my anger, the acrid anger that underpins my sadness about my son.”
“Even knowing the path they would set him on, even knowing that he would lose his backpack, his passport, his driver’s license, his cell phone, his money, his place to live, his ability to communicate, his coveted chance to go to UC Berkeley, his personality, and his mind—even knowing all that, he might still have taken those drugs, driven by a deep curiosity, a dissatisfaction with the status quo, and that sense of invulnerability and longing for adventure that impels so many 18-year-old boys.
“But, of course, he couldn’t predict the outcome. He couldn’t even accurately predict my reaction that night. ‘I’m so glad you aren’t like other mothers,’ he typed. ‘My friends wouldn’t dream of telling their parents what we are doing.’” She frowned.
“But as it turned out, I was like other mothers. I scolded. I complained. I was angry and afraid. I criticized him continually until he signed off of Instant Messenger, ending our communication for the night. But I didn’t do anything more. I didn’t rush to his apartment. I didn’t call the police. I didn’t insist he enroll in a drug treatment program, or move back home. I didn’t manage to protect or save him.” She tapped her foot rapidly against the leg of my antique clamshell chair.
“So maybe I wasn't like the other mothers, after all.”

*****

Three months after the phone call, at Mendocino Family Camp⎯a place she'd been bringing her children for 10 years⎯her friend Karen expressed sympathy over events. “I’m so sorry this is happening to you,” Karen said, leaning in close to convey her sincerity, extending a hand to cover Jo’s. “I hope you are getting help for yourself.”
That irked her.
"But why does the notion of getting help upset you?" I interrupted.
"It makes it sound like I'm the one who is ill."
Jo described the camp scene in detail. The dining hall was full of close to 130 dusty and tangled people, talking and laughing over dinner, clattering their plastic plates, eating at heavy, huge wooden picnic tables with bulky benches to match. There were parents with children, single mothers with babies, packs of teenagers, corps of adults, sisters, brothers, lovers, friends. Her small group of women sat together at one end of the table closest to the front door: Her sisters Jean and Jane were there, her friend Karen, and Jen, a camper she’d seen every summer for years, but didn’t still know very well. All eyes were on Jo until Karen’s "camp boyfriend" Steve—who was also the head cook—came over with a plate of food and squeezed in next to her on the bench.
The table was littered with the implements of dinner: white and tan plates of industrial-strength plastic, shiny silverware, little red plastic cups, and big, clear serving bowls full of food. There was beef stew in thick brown gravy, steaming corn bread next to bowls of butter mixed with honey to spread on top, crisp green salad with fresh purple beets. Plastic pitchers of water, cranberry juice and iced tea were scattered about, along with squeeze bottles of three kinds of homemade salad dressing: bleu cheese, ginger sesame, balsamic vinaigrette. Besides all this bounty, vegans and vegetarians could go into the kitchen to get servings of nut loaf and vegetable stew. The camp was renowned for its food.
“Is this your cup?” she asked Karen, indicating a small, red, empty container. “Yes,” Karen nodded. “This one?…This one?” lifting up each of the tiny receptacles arrayed around Karen’s plate like a small brigade. Karen nodded each time, a smile sneaking behind her lips. “She must be planning to drink some of every beverage being served tonight,” Jo thought, “or else she has a case of wine stashed beneath her seat.”
“Well, maybe I can snag this one for myself” Jo said aloud, reaching down the table into another social group to grab a cup when no one was looking. She filled it with water and settled back on the bench.
Jen, a woman who sometimes sat alone in the lodge reading before a small bank of lights aimed at her face in a therapy meant to alleviate depression, resumed the conversation. “I saw Eddy yesterday,” she said with uncharacteristic animation. “I was just relaxing in the lodge, and he approached me. ‘Might I inquire what you are reading?’ he said. Very polite. I told him and we had a conversation of about two or three minutes. Frankly, I was flattered that he wanted to talk to me, since we hadn’t had much interaction in the past. Here was this good looking young man coming over to talk to me. He seemed fine to me,” Jen beamed.
Jo was happy to hear it, but not relieved, because she knew Eddy could seem fine for a few minutes, to strangers, whom he was more interested in talking to lately than friends, since friends were much quicker to notice the empty loop of his language, the strange connections, the pulpy bruise of his brain.
“I saw him in the shower yesterday,” said Steve, who had worked with Eddy in the kitchen every summer since he was 9 years old. “He seemed pretty out of it. I asked whether he was coming to Labor Day Camp and he said he hoped so, if he wasn’t in jail.”
Steve turned to look at Jo with concern, his bright blue eyes peering through thick, wire-rimmed glasses. His eyes were too large, floating behind their thick lenses; the rough folds of his face sprouted white whiskers.
“I told him, ‘We better hope that doesn’t happen,’ Steve continued. ‘What makes you think you might be in jail?’ He was vague and didn’t really have an answer. So I started telling him about some of the horrible things I’ve seen in jail.” Steve worked as a guard at Solano State Prison. “Then he asked me why I didn’t do something about them. But that’s like asking a bank teller to do something about capitalism,” Steve said irritably. “What am I supposed to do?”
Jo shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. There was nothing he could do.
“What drug is Eddy taking?” Steve probed her. “Do you know?”
She took a moment to answer. Everyone looked at her and waited. A red-headed woman who had been aligned with another group towards the center of the table leaned her left ear in closer to hear Jo’s response.
“Well, we don’t know, exactly. He keeps changing his story. But he told us a month ago that he’d been using crystal meth.”
“Oh no,” Steve’s voice dropped. ‘Unfortunately, that’s one of the worst. We get some crystal meth addicts in there, and all we can do is lock them in a cell by themselves. When they go through withdrawal, they defecate over themselves and everything else.”
Jo felt a pain in her tender chest as she thought of Eddy’s lovely 18-year-old body curled up on a cot in a prison cell. Brown eyes with a starburst of green around the pupils. Skin the color of red tea with cream. Slender fingers with wide, spatulate nails like his father’s, adorned near the cuticles with pale white half moons. Hands like that could catch babies in a labor room; fix delicate equipment with fine, shiny tools; or hold her own, when she's afraid.
Eddy wasn’t in the dining hall that night. He hadn’t been coming to meals since day one. He’d told her, the few times she’d run into him since they’d arrived, that he couldn’t handle the crowds. That meant he was outside in the redwood forest, in the dark, barefoot since he’d forgotten to pack his shoes and lost the pair of flipflops she’d gone into town to buy him. (Karen had done the same.) Perhaps he was huddling alone by the hammock he’d strung between two trees above the creek, chasing random thoughts around in his brain. Or perhaps he was sitting near the campfire being stoked for the sweat lodge, deliberately worrying the other teens with his circular, unanswerable questions; or perhaps he was seeking out the company of a stranger, as he had the month before in Santa Cruz, walking up to random dwellings and asking whoever answered the door if he could come in and talk.
“Just remember, in 10 or 20 years he’ll get through it,” Steve brought her attention back to the table. She choked down a laugh. “Was that supposed to reassure me?” she wondered. “Ten or 20 years?” She wasn’t sure she could make it through the next day.
“I did drugs when I was his age,” Steve went on. “I even had to move home with my parents for awhile. And look at me. I made it. Let’s face it, we all did.”
But Eddy hadn’t ‘done’ drugs for weeks, unless you counted the marijuana he was undoubtedly smoking with the cadre of potheads that always came to camp, and still his brain wasn’t working normally. Steve didn’t know that. And Steve didn’t know about her schizophrenic cousin, who had committed suicide by jumping from a water tower at a mental institution when he was 25; about her father, whose crazy bipolar binges sometimes delighted and sometimes terrified her as a child, but always embittered her mother, who died of breast cancer when she was just 55; or even about the way she feels when walking her bike on the Peninsula Avenue overpass in San Mateo—the one with too-narrow sidewalks and unreasonably short railings separating pedestrians from the traffic hurtling past on Highway 101 below⎯how her heart always beats too quickly, and she avoids looking down into the traffic because of a churning in her stomach, a kind of hungry longing.
“It isn’t just that I am afraid of tripping, or being pushed,” she paused in her narrative to address me. “I’m also afraid that I might suddenly be overwhelmed by an irresistible urge to jump.”
“So you have a strong death drive?” I prompted, two fingers resettling my spectacles on my nose.
“Not really. No.”
She turned for a moment to look out the window, tapping her middle knuckle on the wooden arm of the chair.
"After Steve’s description of meth addicts crapping themselves in prison, I didn’t feel hungry anymore," she continued her story, "so I stood up to take my dirty plate to the dishwashing station in the kitchen. Then Karen said it again. 'I’m so sorry this is happening to you.'
“But it wasn't happening to me,” Jo said with annoyance. “It was happening to him.”