Читать книгу One by One - Nicholas Bush - Страница 10

Sitting in my aunt’s living room in a house atop a beautiful bluff overlooking the water, I begin to shiver while waiting for someone to bring me a towel. No one brings one. I’m fourteen and begging God, in whom I suddenly believe, to let my back be okay. I rock back and forth, trying to comfort myself, and then let out a deep guttural moan, like a woman in labor.

Aunt Tracey calls to me, “Your mother wants you to walk home, so it’s time for you to go.” Her son, my cousin Jay, six years older than me, looks at me and I realize I’m no longer welcome. His piercing eyes say, Get lost. There isn’t much to do in the remote place where we summer and Jay is the only person ever available to me, but he’s clearly reached his limit with me. He warns me that I better stop coming over and says he doesn’t want me playing his drum set anymore. It’s hot and sticky outside, a typical Wisconsin summer day, and no one is in a good mood. In fact, just a little while earlier, Jay and his friends had decided to do whatever it took to get rid of me.

A few years earlier, while staying at my parents’ beach house, I had learned how to wakeboard with Jay and his buddies, and earlier today I’d wandered over to see what they were up to and spend some time on the water with them. Except for the outdoors, Jay’s house seemed the only place to go to in the remote area my parents dragged us out to each summer, Shore Acres, near Dyckesville, Wisconsin, less than an hour outside our hometown of Green Bay.

Out on the water, with the rope coiling around me like a snake, I had the eerie, panicked feeling that some sort of immense, deep-sea, slithering, sharp-toothed creature was lurking just beneath me. Still, I hurriedly grasped the triangular rubber-gripped handle as the boat rounded me and the instant the rope was taut, I bellowed, “Hit it!” Jay rammed the throttle forward with such fist-pounding force that the gas throttle on the 240-horsepower V6 engine of the bombardier jet boat jerked wide open. The craft pulled me forward with such force that I was thrust up and out on top of the water and then flung vertically into the air. Somehow I managed to flex my abdomen muscles tightly and pull my legs and the wakeboard back underneath my feet before I rebounded down into the water.

Landing about ten feet in front of where I was launched, I struggled to maintain my balance and control my hyper-light wakeboard as I accelerated at full throttle behind the high-powered jet boat. Jay wouldn’t . . . was all I managed to think before my board caught a diagonal front-right edge on a rift in the water at high speed, separating me from my board and careening my body like a flying superman headlong into an approaching wave at about 45 miles per hour. I felt my spine crunch so violently that I could actually hear it snapping in my eardrums as I plunged and folded in half, face first into the water.

After the initial shock, I turned around and floated on my back, slowly letting out gasps of air as the cool water and wind stroked my face with soft comfort. I tried but failed to move my legs, which had gone completely numb. Panicked yet frozen, helpless after having had the wind knocked out of me, I looked up at the sky and focused on keeping calm. I don’t remember it, but I was pulled into the boat by Jay’s friend Keth, who closely resembled a miniature Arnold Schwarzenegger, was a certified lifeguard, and always had to correct people on his name, “Keth, not Keith, you runt.” I also don’t remember being sped to shore and carried in the sitting position, with Jay and Keth supporting my legs and back on both sides. They took me up the beach steps and into my aunt’s house.

Your mother wants you to walk home. I replay the words in my mind as I slowly balance the weight of my body on my tingling legs. Letting out a deep breath, I put one foot forward and painfully start the mile-long journey up the beach to my parents’ summerhouse, regaining my full range of movement by the time I walk through the front door. I decide not to tell anyone what happened. I know why Jay did what he did, and I know what he would do if I told anyone the truth about what happened, so I keep my mouth shut. Among us kids, both on the street and at home, there is a code of silence intended to keep adults at a distance. My parents wouldn’t be helpful anyway. When they pay attention to us, it’s geared toward taking things away or making snide remarks. I can already hear it, Well, what did you expect?

The lesson I return to with increasing frequency in the coming years is that no one is looking out for you but yourself, nobody. I have to be someone who can hold his own in any situation. Besides, all that matters to me is that I haven’t hurt my back so badly that I won’t be able to play football in the coming season.

When I get home, I search around for Tylenol or something that will numb the pain. In the medicine cabinet is a bottle of Vicodin. I’ve never taken a prescription painkiller before, but I decide to give it a shot. It works, and over the next week, I finish the bottle. Each of my parents has a prescription for the drug, so a bottle or two is usually floating around their bathroom, inside a cabinet or sink drawer; they don’t even notice it’s gone.

I’m not much of an academic; sports, drums, and getting the hell out of my house and away from my parents are all that matter. My mom is a stay-at-home mom and my dad is a struggling small business owner, but he is the eldest son of a wealthy businessman, so we get by just fine.

Home is very strict. My parents act as if we kids, Lindsay and Allison, my older sisters; me (all spaced three years apart); and my five years younger brother, Austin, have to be perfect: perfect manners, perfect speech, perfect attire, the list goes on and on. We are also often forced to go to church. “We are going to instill religion into you,” they say.

Breaking the rules means facing dire consequences, with privileges taken away and sometimes physical punishment. If I give my dad an answer he doesn’t like or don’t respond quickly enough, he grabs my chin, holding it and looking at me with blazing eyes until I respond with a “Yes, sir.” I’ve harbored an almost incomprehensible rage directed at the man from as far back as I can remember. And my mother isn’t much better. She’ll look at me, screaming, “This is totally unacceptable behavior” or “I’m very disappointed in you!” so often that she actually has me thinking, I’m an unacceptable disappointment.

Mealtimes provide a perfect paradigm for illustrating home life. If my elbows are on the table, my father stabs them with a fork or knife. If we don’t eat all the food on our plate, we are not allowed to leave the table. As a kid, I’d refuse food for so long that I’d fall asleep at the table, exhausted and bored. Sometimes I tried to fill my napkin with food so I could secretly throw it away later. I’ve always hated asparagus and once, when forced to eat it, I vomited it on my plate. Rather than comforting me, my mother force-fed it to me right in front of the rest of the family. Another time, I stole a cookie from the baking sheet on the oven just before dinner and was caught running around the house laughing and wolfing it down in a hysterical frenzy. My mom grabbed me and stuck her finger down my throat, gagging me until I threw it up.

I’ve learned over the years to be secretive and never share my cares and desires, or prized possessions, with anyone in the family, so that they can’t be scoffed at, laughed at, or taken away. I’m convinced my parents are utterly obsessed, to the point of paranoia, with how their children’s behavior reflects on them. The best way to get what I want is to lie low and cater to their beck and call, always asking, “Is there anything I can do for you?” It’s as if they’re only satisfied when being worshiped or something. As long as I do these things and stay out of trouble, I’m a free man.

I can go on and on about the abuse that occurred in my family, but you get the picture. Plus, one day the better half of my siblings will be dead and my parents still living, so it seems counterproductive for me to do so. I like to think that with retrospect, seeing how things unfold, my parents will wish they had raised us differently, in order to preserve our relationships—and our lives. But of course at this stage, they don’t know what is still to come.

Since there will be ridicule and abuse whether I behave or not, my childhood perception of right and wrong has become severely obscured. I will lie, cheat, and steal if it benefits me in any way. At home, I do my best to stay quiet and out of sight. Away from home, I intimidate, connive, sweet-talk, or cajole my way into getting what I want.

To deal with the abuse, my siblings and I (except for my brother, Austin) do our best to keep as busy as possible through whatever means available. I like to call this happiness through distraction. Whether it is horseback riding for my eldest sister, Lindsay, modeling for Allison, or hockey for me, we don’t idle at home.

To my parents’ credit, they enrolled me in youth hockey when I was six years old, a year-round activity that I excelled in, so I learned early on that I’m a pretty good athlete. Everyone needs something they’re good at. I remember my coach saying early on, “Bush, if I had a bunch of you, we’d never lose a game.” In recent years, I switched from hockey to football and that has also become huge for me. I will later take up rugby and boxing.

I found my calling in sports; so just two weeks after the wakeboarding incident, in early August, I start the eighth grade football season despite my sore back. I am a defensive end, offensive right tackle, kickoff returner, punt returner, punter, and kicker.

Two full teams are formed due to the high number of prospects who try out and the high quality of talent. Each defense has three squads and I am placed on all three. Offense has a permanent roster, with myself shifting to wingback for trick plays such as reverses and the Statue of Liberty play, where I swing around and become the ball carrier, taking the ball from the quarterback as he positioned himself to throw a pass. Both teams are supposedly evenly split in terms of talent, but my team is always the victorious one. Such a stark contrast in performance leaves the other squad grumbling among themselves, and there is some jealousy among our crew of warriors.

Make no mistake: I am an athlete who has played for keeps from day one. Since I was six years old, I have always been out for blood—in the rink or on the field. (Checking in hockey wasn’t allowed at such a young age, but that didn’t stop me.) I play sports to stay out of trouble in school, stay out of my house, and stay off the streets, not to play by the rules. There are no laws in collision sports, only rules, and the punishments for breaking them are less severe than they are out of the rink and off the field.

I can vividly recall the first time I thought I killed someone. It was in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 2002, and I was twelve years old. My team was in the state hockey tournament, playing for the championship. I was right defenseman and nothing short of a goon who had a great shot and was a good passer. I could skate faster backward than anyone on the other team could skate forward, which is partially what led to the incident. As the other team broke away, three of their forwards came barreling toward me. I was alone when it happened and I knew I had to try and keep all three of them in front of me. I crossed over between the puck carrier and his closest teammate. The center had possession and I faked as though I was going to charge into him in order to get him to pass, which he did. I timed it perfectly. Just one little shift of weight caught his eye, enough to cause him to skirt the puck over to his wingman. The moment the puck left the center’s stick, I rapidly carved my way toward the wingman and barreled into him. The hit was timed so perfectly that it barely felt as though I’d made any physical contact. As I made the move to hit him and as the moment of collision came, I clenched every muscle in my body, bringing my arms in close and crossing them around my abdomen. I lowered my head at the last possible moment. I was a human bullet at that point. With a loud grunt, I crashed into the forward with such force that I heard the wind get knocked out of him. At the moment of contact, his head was facing downward, his eyes looking at his feet where the puck met his skates instead of the tape on his stick. The top of my helmet hit just under his chin as I knocked him into another galaxy. He careened backward, hitting the boards and then the ice, his head whiplashing violently each time. I had effectively hit him in the head and caused him to hit it twice more. Without a helmet, his brains would have been all over the place.

The player lay unconscious on the cold rink floor for thirty minutes. There was a long, awkward silence in the arena and I began to get cold as I sat on the bench looking at the scoreboard, which read 2 to 0. We were losing even though the board showed that our team had thirty-eight shots on net and the other only two. In a hockey game, fourteen shots on net is a pretty average game, anything more than that shows a great offensive game. Anything less than ten for the other team shows you’re playing a great defensive game. The fact that they had just two shots on net showed that I was killing it on defense.

I couldn’t have played better! Our offense was doing well too, with over twice the average amount of shots on net, but there were no goals to show for it and that’s really all that matters. I kept asking myself, How could we not have the lead? It was because they’d scored on their lone two shots. I was so angry that they were about to win the championship, with barely three minutes left in the third period, that, well, I took out my frustrations on that kid. I didn’t want them making any brave moves toward our zone ever again.

Ever again, I remember thinking to myself, then, Where is that kid? Was he still lying there? When I peeked out from inside our bench, looking at the place where I hit him, I could see he was still there, and the coaches were now kneeling beside him. Finally, an ambulance came onto the ice; it was then that I realized that it was very serious and got a little scared. Well, serves him right . . . I’d tried to rationalize to myself. That’s what happens when you come at me, motherfucker.

I remember cursing aloud, and when the referee, who happened to be in the scoring booth adjacent to our bench, heard me, he threw me out of the game. I made my way to the locker-room and was informed immediately that I had a two-game suspension for hitting the kid, but it didn’t matter, our season was over. My dad came into the locker-room just as I began to cry. I had been sitting in there waiting for the game to end. He told me not to worry about the suspension or losing the state title. He assured me I couldn’t have played any better and that the suspension wouldn’t carry over to the next season. He didn’t know I was worried that I had just killed another kid.

My dad actually loves to see me hurt other kids. Sadistic, I know, but I seldom disappoint. My coach actually got me a T-shirt that had a picture of a phone on it with a line that read, “Forward all my calls to the penalty box.” I was responsible for an ambulance making its way onto the ice and being ejected from the game more times than I can count. When this happened, my dad would whistle at me and make a flexing pose.

When I gave up hockey for football it wasn’t because of my run-­ins in the rink, but because football offers greater glory than hockey. If you want to know the truth, there ya go. This includes the ability to get girls and also some notoriety. I love making enemies with teams from other neighborhoods, even the guys on our opposite squad. This aggression rubs off on my teammates and it helps us win.

Before each game my dad says, “Be indestructible, be versatile, and give ’em hell.” If I crush it, he says, “I really like watching you play.” These are the only times my father seems pleased with me, and I am proud when he is proud. So I like to brag about how many kids I’ve hurt without once being injured in return. I’m not even in eighth grade, but I’m six feet tall and 165 pounds. Later I’ll realize I was just a kid with a big mouth, and the guy everybody loved to hate, but right now I feel indestructible.

When I was younger, I tried to invite other kids over so they would return the favor and help me stay the hell out of my house, but they would steer clear of me after they saw what kind of atmosphere awaited them there. When I realized this, I quit giving invites and instead only sought invites. I’d pack a backpack and stay at other people’s houses for as long as I could. If someone stopped inviting me, I’d move on to the next. As I got older, I learned to form alliances and loyalties with different groups of kids by any means possible. I decided that I had to be popular to make this work. One of the best ways I found to do this was by offering to solve other kids’ problems. If anybody was getting bullied, I thoroughly enjoyed taking care of it. Then in middle school came a distraction: girls. Girls are the one thing that conflicts with my busy sports schedule.

At fourteen, I happily become sexually active. On weekends, I orchestrate time alone with several different girls, usually high school girls, at their houses, sometimes even more than one in a single night. As an eighth grader, I mostly hook up with ninth grade girls and a few girls in my own grade. A couple times, though, I’m lucky enough to get with one of my sister Allison’s friends, who are in eleventh or twelfth grade. On Fridays after the school bus stops up the street from my house, I head directly to see a girl. I can get around well enough on foot and they are all in walking distance.

You could say I’m someone whose priorities revolve around physical gratification. Whether it was hitting and hurting people in hockey when I was a kid, my aggression on the football field today, or the joy of sneaking over to an older girl’s house at night. I like to think I live in the fast lane, playing by my own rules. My siblings do their own thing too, because who would want to be in the Bush household by choice? Lindsay is always at the house of one of her many boyfriends or at the barn with her stable full of quarter horses; she even owns one of them, purchased for her by my dad. Allison is so popular that it seems like she’s a celebrity known throughout Green Bay. Sometimes she lets me party with her and I flirt with her pretty friends. At one party, unbeknownst to her, I lost my virginity to one of them.

Meanwhile, I’m basically failing school. Homework doesn’t seem like a good use of my time and the detentions just keep coming, usually for cheating on a test or homework, or stealing from the locker-room or the school store. There are many therapists my parents force me to see who work to diagnose me and give a reason why I’m such an academic disaster. The whole thing is idiotic. I hate seeing them. I hate being told something is wrong with me.

The sessions are always skewed anyway. My parents manipulate the therapists so they don’t know what’s going on at home. They even turn into different people when we attend a family session. Everything is always made out to be my fault. I guess it’s not my behavior that’s the problem; I am the problem. The truth is that if my parents would just change, maybe offer me a few nice words here and there, everything could be so much better.

By the end of eighth grade I have a handful of very close friends with whom I spend most of my free time. Looking back, I will think that bouncing around from friend’s house to friend’s house wasn’t a normal or healthy way for a kid to live, but right now it seems like a good idea.

One day, Jake, Erik, Kieran, Gavin—guys who live on my block—and I decide to get some weed, some beer, and some girls, and go far out into the country, to Gav’s grandparents’ farm. Gavin has been drinking and partying with his cousin Tyler, and recently smoked some weed for the first time. Erik is a year older and has recently become a full-fledged stoner, wearing Pink Floyd shirts and stuff. I’ve been drinking, but I haven’t smoked weed before and I’m down to try it. Getting high with friends seems so simple and innocent, so freeing and fun. I get Kieran to put up $20 by having Gav tell him it’s for the beer, which is actually free from Gav’s dad, and I give the money to Erik who gives me a bag of weed on the bus to school the very next day. Gav, Jake, and Kieran decide I should invite some girls I know from the next school district, Bay Port, to go “camping” with us and Gav’s dad even speaks with some of the girls’ parents, telling them whatever they need to hear to convince them to allow their daughters to go. And so it is that on a warm, windy Friday night in late March, I find myself pitching a tent and having the time of my life on a farm in the middle of nowhere.

While Gavin is hooking up with one girl around the corner of our huge L-shaped tent, and then hooking up with another, the rest of us tear up some low-grade weed and pack a small metal pipe that Erik made for us on a lathe machine in his shop class. We pass it around something like seventeen times before anyone starts to feel the effects. The whole thing is so slow that we even pause to call Erik on his cell phone and ask why it’s taking so long to feel anything. He assures us that it’s real weed, but that since it’s our first time it will take a while to feel high, and to just keep smoking it. After about thirty minutes, we all sort of look at one another and smile broadly at the exact same time. Kieran bellows, “This shit is like Viagra!” and we all burst out laughing. What a goofy thing to say.

While we’re smoking, one of the girls comes around the corner of the tent and then climbs onto me, but I’m laughing so hard with Jake and Kieran that nothing sexual happens between her and me. Instead I spend the night laughing and doing ridiculous stuff with the guys, things like tearing the clothes off Kieran, throwing him outside the tent, and then zipping it shut. It’s one of the most fun nights of my life.

By the time we return to school the following week, a rumor has spread that us “bad boys” are severely out of control and have gotten into drugs. After this, everything seems to change overnight. I love the image of myself as a party boy and run with it. It seems, however, to elicit some serious hostility from teachers and girlfriends. Many of them act as if I’ve crossed a line by smoking weed. I don’t agree with this judgment, and something about it gives me a weird, palpable feeling of impending doom, like a storm is rapidly approaching, like I’m in the thick of the calm before it will hit, but this doesn’t affect my behavior. Over the next ten years my instincts now will prove to be correct; this is the time my life starts to spin out of control and then heads straight downward, like a dive-bomb, into the desolate, derelict pits of hell itself.

But right now I don’t know what’s to come. In fact, I’m pretty convinced that any condemnation of drug use is utterly baseless, and that drugs are meant to be enjoyed by the user at his or her discretion. Just say no? Try just say yes. Besides, the DARE officer told us point blank that weed won’t kill you.

So now I’m off and running. Usually when I go out to party, I get a cup for free because I’m with my sister, and I fill it once or maybe twice from the keg to look older. All the girls ask how old I am, and I tell them, “Old enough,” or “Find out.” From there, I usually just try and get laid, you know? I never really get drunk because I’ll have to drive my sister home. But after my experience smoking weed at the farm, something is different. All I really want to do is get high. I don’t care about looking cool or saying the right things to get with girls, like I used to. That takes effort and time and there’s no guarantee that it will go well.

My parents know that I party, and although they’ve always been strict with us, my father encourages it to a degree. I think they like the idea of having a popular kid and are okay with whatever I need to do to make that happen. On a few occasions they ask me what I did last night at “a friend’s house” and I tell them I just made out with some girls. They don’t press for more info. Whenever Allison and I head from one place to another, we’re supposed to call my parents so they know what we’re up to, but she’s not always in the best state to talk to them. Sometimes she even accidentally drunk dials our house. Without them ever implicitly saying it, I just know they know, you know? They do, however, make one thing perfectly clear: if I get a girl pregnant, my life is over, and they mean this in the fullest extent of the word over. In bed I think, I better pull out or start using condoms because my life is on the line. I could die. But while it seems like a good idea, in the moment, my body always prefers to go in a different direction. Something in me puts the threat of death on the back burner in favor of instant physical satisfaction and release. This theme will stick with me into adulthood.