Cherry (18 page)

That was one message—Drugs will kill you. On the other hand, lots of parents stayed medicated out of their gourds on perfectly legal substances. Maybe the county’s few martini mixers and country-club pill heads could blame stock prices or work stress. But such luxurious complaints were denied the average refinery worker, who also couldn’t let slip the soul-nagging brutalities he brought back from World War II or Korea. Nor did these guys often bitch about the innate hideousness of their jobs—waiting at the massive gate in a long line of more or less identically chugging trucks to reach the time clock’s vacant face—punch in, punch out. It was a life of meat sandwiches, and the shift whistle screamed to end it.

The long repetitive hours were punctuated by panicked frenzies of back-wrenching labor that could turn lethal. There was a famous anecdote about a pit of waste chemicals somebody forgot to fence off and into which a new guy fell, only to be fished out a skeleton. Maybe true, maybe not. Still, somebody’s dad or uncle or cousin was always falling off a tower or getting scalded by pressurized steam. Most people had a grisly story about visiting a neighbor or relative in Galveston’s famous burn unit. Or every few years, some guy would wrench open the wrong valve and blammo. Vapor. Him and everybody in the vicinity. The paper once ran a photo of a metal ladder that had been welded to a tank that blew. On rungs going down, at exact intervals, four pairs of steel-toed work shoes were melted in place. These facts told a man exactly what his life was worth.

Such earnings were sufficiently high to make a man of your dad’s generation and social stripe talk big in a bar. His father had been a logger who trucked very little in hard currency, with earnings that mostly vanished into script at the company store. Other locals were born to hardscrabble sharecroppers or shrimpers or seamen. A union salary paid a mortgage and doctored the kids and kept two cars mostly running. If you chipped in with buddies, you could buy a place down on Village Creek, or a fishing trailer, or a bass boat with an Evinrude motor. For your dad’s generation, these undreamed of luxuries doomed them to don hard hats. Day in, day out, as your daddy used to say. No time off for good behavior. (His gold retirement pin would document forty-two years’ service: four diamond chips and two ruby—none bigger than a roach’s eye.)

Result? Step into the VFW at eight in the morning, and there on the red diner stools were dads stopping off after graveyard to throw back a quick bourbon. Or two or four. (Not all of them, of course. It was a dry county, and there were loads of teetotalers.) Drinking a few bumps could ease a fellow to sleep even with the goddamn ingrate kids slamming doors and blaring the TV to bust your ears.

Plus the average home medicine cabinet held a virtual army of pills, a wanna-be drug addict’s cornucopia. Valium was common, at least one type of sleeping pill. (Your mother had two or three varieties
and in variable strengths.) Diet pills could perk up the basic hungover or low-level-miserable housewife, then power her through the daylight jitters till she could mix a blender drink at five. Speed didn’t hurt a guy pulling a double shift either. The milder doses of Ritalin snitched from various hyperactive little brothers were the first tablets you saw crushed up with a hammer and snorted.

If your dad had a bad back or your brother played football, faux opiates could be pilfered—the fat white pills with numbers carved in the chalky surface—one through four. Refills aplenty.

Small irony that many of your friends’ names would someday be carved in almost the same blocky typeface on a whole scattered flock of tombstones in Greenlawn Cemetery. But all that came later.

That fall, you enter the glossy halls of high school unsullied by any chemical other than the fluoride everybody guzzled with the drinking water. You’re not yet looking to drugs for rescue. You’re still expecting to transform magically into one of those chipper, well dressed girls whose name-box on student ballots is automatically checked, to open the yearbook and find your tiara-wearing self in full-page color next to John Cleary. But the instructions for such exalted status are vague and seem only to drift to you in negative form—things NOT to do. Some linger in fragments for years. DON’T:

But first and foremost you have to restrain yourself from displaying the reckless ardor of the unloved toward those strongly disinclined to love you back. These standards seem virtually ingrained into the exalted few, but demand conscious effort and attention from your ilk.

Basically, you’re hoping to manufacture a whole new bearing or being, some method of maneuvering along the hallways that will result in less vigorous psycho-social butt-whippings than those endured in junior high.

Every morning, the rubber-edged bus doors slap together in a kind of hermetic seal that undoes itself at school, unveiling without ceremony whatever persona you’ve cobbled together for the moment (or day, or week—some lasted longer than others). One day you wear burgundy velvet, try a stripe of liner along your lids, and seek to project the deeply tranquilized mystery of
Vogue
models. Their disaffection seems the ultimate armor for their frail, praying-mantis bodies. Another day, you try to master the head-ducking shyness of those clean-faced, freckle-spattered blonds in the Clearasil ads, those whom boys patiently leave messages for or wait for answers from. (At college you actually meet one of these models, who suffers a psychotic break sophomore year, thus proving to you the strain of bearing such scrubbed innocence through the world each day.) People who knew you translated this pose as sulled up or pouting rather than shy.

Still, a few triumphs start to ease you into social slots that just didn’t exist in junior high. You win a district journalism prize for a piece in the school paper. You run track, albeit too slowly for varsity, but you’re coming along.

That spring, you “try out” for—and win a slot in—the exclusive drill team famous for high kicks, a tight clique few sophomores (especially from your neighborhood) ever “made” and whose membership could have hoisted your narrow-assed self high up in the football-crazed
hierarchy of that school. Clarice, who was a better dancer and a higher kicker, never got in but had tears of something like victory in her eyes when she congratulated you as if you’d done it for the whole block. (At some point, the two of you got friendly again without actually hanging out. You still seemed to occupy different realms.)

You manage to doubt you’d won the drill-team spot justly. In a bizarre twist, Lecia, who was a senior, had made away with the ex-boyfriend of the gym teacher supervising the drill team. This former Miss Texas contender was rightly known for sweetness and integrity, and you always sensed she picked you so she wouldn’t seem indirectly spiteful toward Lecia.

So these minor victories left a sour aftertaste. They’d come too late or been too hard won. Once you’d made your way inside the circle of weeping drill team members, who swayed side to side with arms around each other’s waists to sing their theme song (“My Best to You”), you felt like a fool. You’d spent so much time telling yourself how false such circles were in junior high, to keep the acid drip of disappointment from eating out your liver, that the music was now far too sweet. When the girls sang those cornball lyrics in harmony (“May your dreams come true/ May old Father Time/ Never be unkind…”), some snide falsetto repeating the words in your head kept you from feeling particularly tearful. The other girls, so moist-eyed and sweet-faced, belonged here. But you had to disguise your own sense of irony inside these ranks. Already you were scanning for an orange exit sign.