White Out (9 page)

“Well,” she said, “people often seek treatment due to some traumatic event. Did anything bad happen recently?”

“No,” I said. “I’m more concerned with what hasn’t happened recently. Being clean, for instance,” I joked.

“Think,” she pressed me. “Are you sure nothing bad has happened? Something that really might motivate you? Trouble with the law? Eviction? You discovered you have AIDS?”

What the hell was up with this lady?

“No, absolutely nothing bad has happened to me,” I said firmly. “I have decided to quit because of my future. My bright future motivates me.”

She smiled sadly and gave me my shot.

I lasted three days that time. It happened on the afternoon of the third day. I was going up the elevator to my apartment when I suddenly remembered what white tops look like. The doors opened at my floor. I quickly pressed the “close door” button with one finger and the button for the ground floor with the other. I tried not to think about what I was doing.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry,” I said.

The doors closed. The elevator started to descend. Between the third and second floors the elevator clanged to a stop. I was the only one on it. It was the middle of an October weekday. Most of the other residents would be at work, in the library, or in class. I was stuck.

This is a sign
, I thought.
This is obviously a sign. The world is telling me that I have a choice. That I can make it. I can make it without dope. Remember my future.

I banged on the elevator door. I pressed the emergency call button.

“Hello?” A heavily accented voice answered through the staticky elevator speaker.

“Ah, yes, I’m stuck up here in the elevator, between the third and second floors, I think. Could you come get me now?”

“You want to make order?”

“What? No. I’m…look, I’m stuck on this elevator!”

“Say more slowly please again,” the voice said.

I suddenly recognized the voice. I broke into a cold sweat. It was the proprietor of the shitty Chinese restaurant on the ground floor of my building. Somehow the call box line was connected to his restaurant.

“Um, look I think there may be a mis-”

The line went dead. I began to wonder if the world was telling me to get high. I pressed the call button again.

“Hello?”

“Um, look. I know this seems weird, but I really am stuck in the elevator in this building. 3400 North Charles. Two-and-a-half floors above you. If you could just call the management company right away and—”

“If you no want order Chinese food no call Chinese restaurant!”

The line went dead. I slumped against the elevator wall. I closed my eyes and imagined a white top’s cold head and beautiful glass throat. It was singing a little song. I jabbed the call button frantically.

“Do not hang up! This is not a joke. This is a serious emergency. There is a pregnant woman here in this elevator and—”

The line went dead. I remembered how fresh dope sometimes smells like new paint. My nose watered.

“What about my bright future?” I asked myself.

“The future lasts forever,” I answered.

I banged fast and slow on the metal elevator door.

Twenty minutes later someone heard me banging and called the apartment people. They let me out and I ran down to my car and sped off to Pulaski Street.

The next day I wrote a threatening letter to the management accusing them of “false imprisonment.” Plus I told them about how the elevator call box was connected to the Chinese restaurant. That was a serious conflict of interest.

In the letter they wrote back, they were careful not to admit any wrongdoing. The specter of their legal liability did not, however, entirely escape them. They offered me three months of free rent. That came in handy. Three months lasts a long time when you’re a junkie. But the future lasts forever.

CHAPTER 4

W
here did the white tops get in? There are white doors and windows all through my life, but I remember a couple early ones.

For a long time, I would go to bed early. In summer, my bedtime came when it was still light out. There was a tree outside my window. Once it had two main branches. But by the time my memory starts it was Henry-shaped; its missing branch, lost in a storm, anchored it in the ocean of time before memory.

“Time for bed, Michael; give your father a hug.”

“Yes, Dad.”

With the lights out it was still light in my room. Sometimes my parents would be sitting out in the yard and their laughter would come in through the half-open window. A fan would be on, slowly mixing sleep into the heavy light. I’d fall asleep with one sticky eye on the tree. All those summer evenings, and eventually the one-armed tree got caught in me. Twelve years later, I recognized Henry the first time I saw him. Memory is like that.

My first word was
clock.
It’s an unusual first word, spoken with unusual clarity, and my mother reports being startled, thinking someone else was in the room. My best friend was Dan Rest. I met him the week we arrived from Ireland. His last name is one of those deceptively simple German words, like
thing
, that obviously mean something else. Clock. Dan was completely American. I still had a strong Irish accent, and came equipped with all kinds of outlandish Irish things. Like a red leather satchel my mother gave me to take to first grade. Everyone else had backpacks made of some thin light material. I wanted a backpack like that. I quickly became an expert in these American things. I carefully studied backpacks, lunch boxes with cartoon characters on the outside, shiny Capri Sun juice pouches, Big Wheels, G.I. Joe action figures.

I knew the soft plastic hand strap of the lunch boxes better than the machine that made them, and could distinguish it from the slightly harder plastic of the cartoon thermos top, and the still harder plastic of the thermos body. I soon grew so proficient I could make these things out of my body. At night, lying in bed, my body was a factory for Big Wheels and blue nylon backpacks.

I had to make them, since my parents didn’t have very much money at this time, and my mother was determined to exhaust the stock of Irish things before buying anything new. Of course, most of the things I made were invisible and didn’t do me any good at school. But some did. My version of the movie
Gremlins
for example.
Gremlins
was the hottest movie at school, in the parks, on the block for a whole season. Some parents, including my own, wouldn’t let their children see it, so those who did had a certain special grandeur.

I soon realized I had to see
Gremlins
, but since I couldn’t see the one in the theater, I had to make it myself. I got a workable script from Dan, whose enlightened parents had taken him to it. It went like this: A father gets an unusual pet for his son, a Mogwai, a kind of small cute white furry animal. His delighted son names it “Gizmo.” The guy the father purchases it from tells him not to get it wet and not to feed it after midnight. When the kid gets it wet, Gizmo multiplies. When the new Mogwais get food after midnight, they turn into terrifying monsters: gremlins. The worst gremlin is Stripe. He attacks people with a chainsaw. He drives a car. He throws lots of Mogwais into a big swimming pool.

I made the film that night before I fell asleep, and I was ready during recess at school the next day. The way this worked is that the kids who had seen the new cool movie would stand in the center of a semicircle of other kids, and trade reminiscences about it.

“Do you remember when Stripe gets that chainsaw? That was awesome!”

“What about when that tractor crashes through the window in the living room? Awesome!”

I stepped into the circle, “How about the part where he spills that glass of water on Gizmo?”

They looked at me. “
You
saw
Gremlins
?” I replayed the scene in my mind. The water blots out Gizmo’s dog shape, leaving the thick body dough curling on the floor. Little stalks shoot up. Some thicken into dog shapes. Some turn into trees. One becomes a book. “Sure. He spills water on Gizmo and then there are all these other Mogwais. It’s awesome!”

My conviction and intensity were not faked, and they saw and believed. I’d lain awake all the last night playing the movie in my mind. Standing in that circle, I saw every scene in color. My movie had grown far beyond the bounds of Dan’s skimpy script, but I kept those rich scenes secret. The scene in my movie showing how Stripe actually gets the chainsaw remained secret. Other things about Stripe remained secret. The special secret of Stripe’s birth remained secret.

You see, to me, this movie was more than just a way of increasing my status with my little friends. I really wanted to see
Gremlins
, but my parents wouldn’t let me see the one in the theaters, so I had to make my own. In order for my
Gremlins
to be real, I needed that circle of kids. I didn’t need the movie to be cool with them. I needed them in order to see the movie. That circle of kids was the projector that played the film I’d made. Focused by that semicircle, the watery images I’d made up in bed the previous night took on vivid colors, became real.

The others’ presence was what allowed me to see something I couldn’t see in any other way. Not just Stripe holding the chainsaw, but Stripe the master of water, Stripe born inside his enemies, born
of
his enemies. My
Gremlins
was real. In this movie made in my body and projected on that school recess semicircle, everyone and me dissolved. I didn’t do it just to make friends. No one just wants that. People want something real from people. We want some thing. Relations between people are a means to an end, like ladders and cranes and movie projectors. People get together to bring new things into the world.

Another incident illustrates this principle. (Or is it an illness?) This was even earlier, touching that region of deep memory where my way of walking, the way I tie my shoes originates. There was a children’s game called Candy Land and everyone had it, even me. Candy Land was beautiful. It was a board game, like Monopoly, and you moved your little piece around the board based on the cards you drew. I think it was one of those games without winners or losers, like life.

The board was a triumph of Art: It showed inherently beautiful things in a realistic way. Gumdrop mountains, a molasses swamp, candy canes a thousand feet tall. Like all great artworks, it was also a map, a map that showed new things in the little town we lived in. One afternoon on the swings I announced that Candy Land was a real place six blocks away from my house.

I continued to announce it to anyone who would listen.

“I know where Candy Land is. It’s about six blocks away from here.” Almost nothing lasts for a week in childhood. Wait a week, and if it’s still there, it’s real. The majority of the things that actually lasted tended to be dull things like chairs and people, so a certain disillusion, a certain suspicion of joy, already had a hold on even the youngest children of my block.

“Candy Land isn’t real,” my little sister, Jenny, said doubtfully.

But after a week I was still saying, “I know where Candy Land is.” We were gathered by the Henry tree in my backyard, about eight of us, all little, except two monstrous eight-year-olds lurking in the background.

“Candy Land isn’t real,” Dan said doubtfully. The two older kids laughed, but they waited to hear what I’d say next.

“Yes it is, it’s six blocks away from here.”

“How do you know?” Marc asked.

“Because I heard the mailman talking about it. He didn’t know I was there. He was talking to my mom. ‘I have to go deliver my mail to Candy Land now, Mrs. Clune, so I can’t talk to you anymore.’ I was hiding. Then I came out and he gave me a Tootsie Pop.”

This story, so weighted with real things, such as the mailman’s known habit of distributing Tootsie Pops to children, was practically impossible for anyone to deny. Would saying my story wasn’t true involve saying that it wasn’t true that the mailman gave out Tootsie Pops? But we had all tasted those Tootsie Pops. We loved Tootsie Pops!

“Then how do you get there?” Dan asked. This was the great turning point. It was at moments like this I realized the magic fact that the inside of my body is bigger than the outside. My heart expanded. I could see the sun, blinding white on the candy canes.

“I told you and told you. It’s six blocks away. I’m going to go there tomorrow after breakfast. I’m going to go on my tricycle. Jenny, you can bring the wagon.”

“Can I bring my soccer ball?”

“Yes.”

“Me too,” Dan said. I nodded.

“Everyone can come, if you aren’t scared.”

But it
was
something to be scared of, since none of us were allowed beyond the block we lived on. Marc and Eric lived just one block away, and they required special permission to visit my house. When it was time for them to leave, my mother had to go with them and watch them cross the dangerous intersection of Kedzie and Michigan. There was so much traffic at that intersection there was a traffic light. If you stood out there, you didn’t have wait too many minutes before a car or even a bus drove through.

So the idea of us traveling six blocks on our own was just as difficult to believe as the idea of Candy Land. Marc and Eric, made acutely sensitive by their neurotic mother of the dangers of getting run over when crossing just
one
street, looked frankly stunned. The other kids shifted uncomfortably. The idea that we could cross six blocks on our own was turning out to be much more difficult to believe than the existence of Candy Land itself. In fact, it was impossible for anyone but Jenny to believe it. One of the eight-year-olds snorted. “You kids can’t go six blocks!”

Perhaps originally I had put Candy Land at such a vast distance because if no one could go there, no one could prove it wasn’t real. But now I wanted to go to Candy Land so badly that no obstacle would stop me. I paused. I thought. Yes.

“Candy Land is really only two blocks away.”