The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir Page 12

  I made my way across the crowded beach and when I didn’t see Tommy or any of the old Refuge gang, I decided to head back to the drug bridge for one last pass. I was lingering in the middle of the bridge— chocolate acid, blotter acid, rainbow acid—when I noticed a large covered maintenance truck rumble up to one entrance of the bridge, then a second identical truck pull to the other end. I was marveling at how tightly synchronized the trash pickups were when the canvas flaps flew back and from each truck streamed a dozen armed and helmeted riot police, wielding wooden batons. They sealed off the bridge, and suddenly dozens of plastic bags and pill bottles were flying through the air and raining down into the water. It was like the Bible story, except it wasn’t manna falling from heaven but marijuana and mescaline.

  The cops were pointing and shouting, and one was taking photographs. It was clear they had been watching the dealings for some time and knew who they were after. I fought my way through the pandemonium and tried to squeeze my way off the bridge. “No one on or off,” a cop barked, pushing his baton into my chest. I turned and made my way to the other end where I met the same blue wall. “I was just on my way to the snack shack,” I pleaded to an officer, so scared my voice quavered. “I got caught in the middle.” The cop looked at me, this cloddish kid in glasses and a Catholic-school haircut. “Go on, get out of here,” he said and pushed me past.

  I was off the bridge, but I was on the island side, separated

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  from my boat by the murky green canal. Besides, now that I wasn’t in danger of arrest, I wanted to stick around and watch the drama unfold. A huge throng of kids began to crowd around the bridge. They were pouring off the beaches, surging forward.

  Soon a few started shouting, hurling insults and swear words.

  “Fuck you, pig!” someone shouted. The crowd began to oink and snort. The cops pushed forward with their batons.

  “Back! Back!” they shouted.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  “Oink! Oink! Oink! Oink!”

  From behind me, a bottle flew through the sky, smashing on the pavement among the police officers. Then a second bottle.

  Then a fusillade of bottles. Soon everything that could fly flew: cans, cups, tubes of suntan oil, half-eaten hot dogs. Some of the officers had moved onto the bridge and were handcuffing and hauling off the drug suspects. The others turned their backs to us, and when they turned back, they were wearing gas masks. A few seconds later, the first canister came lobbing into our midst, sending up a plume of thick smoke. A boy ran forward, holding his shirt over his face, and heaved it back. More canisters arrived to replace it.

  The standoff lasted for the better part of two hours before the police arrested everyone they planned to arrest and slowly extricated themselves. The crowd began to dissipate. I knew I had been on the island way too long. I needed to get back across the lake. I crossed the bridge, found the boat undisturbed, raised the sails, and set off.

  The local paper was the Oakland Press, which my father had hand-delivered as a boy back when it was the Pontiac Press. Back when Pontiac was something other than a dying factory town no one wanted their business named after. It was an afternoon paper, arriving on front stoops by 4 P.M.

  I was home only a half hour when the phone rang. It was Rock, and he was breathless.

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  “Jesus Christ! Do you know about the paper?”

  “Know what about it?”

  “You’re on the front page! Your photo. On the front fucking page! Right next to some kid throwing a bottle.”

  “Hold on,” I said and ran to the front porch where the paper lay. I unrolled it, and there, filling the top half of page one, was a photo of a teenager with an angry sneer on his face and his arm cocked back ready to launch a one-quart beer bottle. Several feet behind the youth was a gaggle of other kids. And off to the side of them, standing alone, was a pudgy kid in black-rimmed glasses and baggy shorts. “Holy shit,” I cried. “It’s me.” In the photo, my eyes were on the boy with the bottle and my mouth hung open in sheer dumbfounded amazement. I looked like I had just been delivered to the drug bust by turnip truck.

  “Holy shit!” I said again. It was time for evasive action.

  I hung up on Rock, made sure Mom was nowhere in sight, and carried the front section of the paper under my T-shirt upstairs, where I stashed it between my mattress and box spring. I raced back downstairs and scattered the other sections of the paper around on the table in what I thought would appear a natural way.

  Then I summoned Tim and Michael upstairs to our bedroom.

  “This better be good,” Tim said impatiently. I pulled out the newspaper and handed it to him.

  “Holy shit!” Tim said.

  “Your ass is grass,” Michael said.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked.

  “We can’t let Dad see it,” Tim said.

  “Must keep it hidden at all costs,” Michael said.

  “You guys have to cover for me,” I begged. “Dad always reads the paper when he gets home.” They agreed they would do what they could.

  Sure enough, right after dinner, as was his routine, Dad settled into his favorite chair in the living room with the paper. I sat

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  upstairs, silently counting the seconds. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand . . .

  “Who’s got the front page?” his voice boomed out.

  No answer.

  “Has anyone seen the front page?” Silence. “Tim? Mike?” he shouted up the stairs.

  “Haven’t seen it, Dad,” they called back in unison.

  “John? Are you up there? Did you take the front page?”

  “Not me, Dad,” I said.

  “Doggone it all, anyway. Who’s always taking the paper before I’ve had a chance to read it?” It was a pet peeve of his.

  “Ruth!” he yelled into the kitchen. “Did you throw out the front page already?”

  “No, dear,” she called back.

  I lay on my bed, holding my breath, praying he’d let it go.

  He huffed around a little while longer, threw around some doggones and son-of-a-guns, and then settled for the latest issue of National Geographic. “Doggone it,” I heard him mumble to himself. “I pay for a subscription to the paper and then it disappears before I can even see it.”

  I looked over at my brothers and held up both thumbs. “Close one,” I mouthed silently.

  The next morning I lay awake in bed, my brothers asleep beside me, thinking about the previous day’s events. What was the chance, I thought, that of all those people at the park, I’d be one of a handful to end up on the front page? At least I wasn’t the kid throwing the bottle, I thought. Think of the trouble he’s in. I began to grin. Now that it was over, it was pretty funny. And what a great story I’d have to tell the old gang. This would show them that a year at an all-boys Catholic school hadn’t whipped me. I wouldn’t even have to embellish; I had photographic proof of my

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  role, front and center in the bust and subsequent riot. It even involved tear gas. Did it get any better than that? No one could deny me my glory. It was a new day, and Dad would be on to the next edition of the paper when he got home. The matter, as far as I was concerned, was officially closed.

  As I lay there congratulating myself, the doorbell rang. I heard my mother’s voice, “Oh, Father Dan! So nice to see you.

  Come in, please. How about a cup of coffee?” It was Father Dan O’Sullivan, a young assistant pastor who had joined the parish several years earlier and who oversaw my duties as office boy at the rectory. He was also the priest who, shortly after arriving at the parish, had put an end to the altar-boy wine-pilfering scam once and for all.

  Father Dan had become a family friend, and it wasn’t unusual for him to stop in unannounced, coincidentally usually at mealtime. Mom would always
offer to set another place at the table, and he would always accept. His mooching tactics were transparent, but Mom didn’t mind. To have a priest at her table was a great honor, and she was proud that her meals seemed the most mooch-worthy of any in the parish. But on this day, Father Dan wasn’t there to eat.

  “Did you see yesterday’s paper?” he asked. “Did you see John?”

  His voice was positively buoyant, like he had just discovered I’d made valedictorian.

  “John? My John?” Mom said, sounding a bit awestruck herself. “In the paper?”

  “Right on the front page!” Father Dan boasted. “Look at this!”

  He had brought his copy along just in case we wanted an extra.

  Oh God.

  Tim looked over at me with one of those you-poor-sorry-bas-tard looks on his face. I began to count again. One thousand one.

  One thous—

  “John Joseph Grogan, you get down here right this instant.”

  I climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts. “I mean

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  now!” she shouted. Mom stood only five feet even, but when she wanted to, she could be pretty intimidating. Behind her back, my brothers and I had nicknamed her Little Napoleon.

  Downstairs, she laid into me. What was I thinking, and who gave me the right, and didn’t I know better, and hadn’t they raised me to be smarter than that? Even after Father Dan excused himself, she wouldn’t let it go. Why did I do these things, and wasn’t it a shame, and oh, mother of mercy, and glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and how does this reflect on the family, did I ever stop to consider that, and won’t everyone be talking about the Grogans now? She was like a boxer with her opponent on the ropes, and she just kept pummeling. “I knew we should never have let you switch to West Bloomfield,” she said.

  “I knew it was a mistake. Should we march you straight back to Brother Rice? Is that what you want, mister?”

  I spent the whole day in my room, and when Dad got home that evening, I got it even worse. He was the angriest I had ever seen him. So angry I half expected him to strike me across the face, which is saying a lot, because my father, the man who captured houseflies in his hand like a kung-fu master and released them outdoors unhurt, never hit anyone. All the spanking was left up to Mom.

  Not only had I disobeyed him, but I had willingly mingled with drug users and dealers. Worse, I had joined the crowd of rioters instead of retreating. By my very presence, I had fueled a mob and had disrespected and endangered the police officers whose job it was to uphold the laws of this country. Dad was big on respecting authority.

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Shut up,” he snapped. Dad never said “shut up.” “I don’t want your excuses. You listen to me. If I ever— ever! —catch you being disrespectful to a police officer, I will kick your ass from one end of this house to the other,” he yelled. “Do you understand me?”

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  It was the first time I had ever heard him use the A-word, and the last time, too. I knew he meant business.

  “Yes, Dad,” I said and slunk off to begin a long grounding that kept me chained to our yard or my job at the rectory for a good portion of the summer.

  On the bright side, I knew every kid at West Bloomfield High would learn, in advance of my arrival, all about the new kid who had ended up on the front page, caught in the middle of the infa-mous Dodge Park drug riot. Being grounded was no fun, and I felt bad about upsetting Mom and Dad, but it seemed a modest price to pay for such notoriety. Life, I was learning, was full of trade-offs.

  Chapter 13

  o

  As the days of summer whiled by, Mom and Dad gradu-

  ally calmed down. They stopped threatening to send

  me back to Brother Rice and stopped wondering aloud

  where they had gone wrong. By degrees, they loosened the grip on my grounding until I was at last fully free again to sail and swim and hang out at the beach trying, mostly in vain, to catch the attention of the golden, leggy girls stretched out on their terry-cloth towels. I stayed away from Dodge Park; after the bust, I heard it wasn’t the same anyway.

  Five nights a week I worked until 9:00 at the rectory. Summer nights were deathly quiet there, and some would pass without a single phone call or doorbell ring. The priests were rarely there, and I would pass my three hours reading J. R. R. Tolkien and shooting pool down in the basement. By 9:03 I would be home and back in cutoffs and a T-shirt. Often by 9:10 a knock would come at the door and there would be Tommy, usually with Rock and Sack in tow, asking if I wanted to “take a walk around the neighborhood.” A walk around the neighborhood was code for coming out

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  to smoke a joint and then head to the party store for munchies.

  By the summer before tenth grade, Tommy had established himself as an enthusiastic devotee of marijuana. He was the hardest worker of all of us, cutting lawns all over the neighborhood, and much of his earnings went to keep him stocked in pot. He always carried a bag, and his generosity was legendary. Tommy didn’t care if the rest of us seldom reciprocated. To him, pot smoking was an inherently social act, never meant to be enjoyed alone. He was always happy to share his stash.

  Tommy’s love of cannabis sativa was obvious on first sight.

  His eyes seemed to have grown permanently bloodshot and his eyelids took on a perpetual droop. To better see, he would tilt his head back to peer through his slits, often with his mouth slightly open in a congenial half grin. He adopted a word that summer that he found fitting for nearly all occasions: dubious. In Tommy’s hands, the word had multiple meanings, ranging from doubtful to excellent. Often it was simply a statement of agreement.

  “Dubious, man,” he would say, nodding. “Definitely dubious.”

  Or sometimes: “Indubitably. Most indubitably.” In the hierarchy of high-school cliques, Tommy was a poster boy for the one known as the Stoners.

  Rock and Sack were less enthusiastic. They would never refuse the pass of a joint, but they seldom bought pot of their own. I was even more ambivalent, and I still tried to fake the deep inhales, worried about getting too high and waking up one day a desperate heroin addict. That’s not to say I did not enjoy the effects of marijuana. We would pass a joint and suddenly everything about this world and our place in it seemed hilarious.

  Simple observations became impossibly profound. Indubitably so. One night we talked at length about the poses in Playboy, and Tommy made an impassioned case against rear shots. They were simply, he argued, a waste of ink. “If I want to see a butt, I’ll look in the mirror,” he said, and I remember thinking, Wow, exactly, man. It was a moment of insight like few I’d ever had.

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  After each one of our late-night “walks,” I’d parade back into the house and promptly set about making myself a snack of immense proportions, usually involving multiple pieces of toast plastered in swaths of peanut butter and jelly. Mom and Dad often commented on my late-night cravings.

  “Good Lord, John,” Dad would say. “Didn’t anyone feed you today?”

  Mom would add, “I swear that boy has a hollow leg.”

  But if they ever tied my munchies to marijuana, they never let on. Slightly stoned and happily full, I’d say good night, give Dad the Grogan handshake, and stumble off to bed.

  I had inherited my parents’ frugality, and I was way too cheap to spend ten hard-earned dollars on a small packet of marijuana, what was known as a dime bag. At my meager pay scale, that was more than three nights of work. Besides, there was little motivation to buy my own when Tommy was constantly offering to share his. I had, however, inherited Dad’s passion for plants, and the previous summer I had tended a small vegetable garden in the backyard, raising tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and green beans.

  That summer after ninth grade, I added one more crop to my plot: a singl
e bushy marijuana plant.

  My fascination with cultivating cannabis had begun a few months earlier, before school let out, when Tommy complained about the large number of seeds in his latest purchase. I was serious enough about my gardening that I started my vegetable plants from seed indoors to get a jump on the growing season. At that very moment, my bedroom windowsills were lined with seedlings, which I nurtured with loving attention. Suddenly I had one of those lightbulb-over-the-head bursts of brilliance: Tommy had extra seeds; I had extra windowsill space. Eureka! Just like Jesus with the miracle of the loaves and fishes, I would transform those tiny, unwanted seeds into a bounty of homegrown marijuana. I

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  picked out a handful of the plumpest seeds and germinated them in paper cups of peat moss. Mixed in with the tomatoes and marigolds, the baby marijuana plants were inconspicuous. Besides, my parents knew next to nothing about illicit substances, despite Dad’s recent purchase of a book called something like Knowing What Your Children Know about Drugs. I was convinced they wouldn’t recognize a marijuana plant if it knocked on the door and introduced itself.

  The plants were still quite tiny when Dad came into my bedroom one day and paused to admire my sturdy seedlings. The classic notched five-leaf clusters of the cannabis family smiled up at him. I remained calm. Dad wouldn’t know a marijuana leaf if it bit him in the ass.

  “What are these here?” he asked.

  “Those?” I said. “What, the marigolds?”

  “No, not the marigolds,” he said. “These right here.”

  “Oh, the eggplants.”

  “No, not the eggplants. These.”

  “Oh, those, ” I exclaimed, as if finally clearing up some lifelong misunderstanding. “Those. Um, those were from a project for science class. We, um, had to grow examples of monocotyledons and dicotyledons. Brother Fallon told us we could take them home if we wanted.” Dad stared at me with a look of deep skepticism.

  “Those are the dicotyledons,” I added.

  “Dicotyledons?” he asked.