dropout

chapter 24

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When the vacation ended and we went back home, I was surprised to find that Maggie and I were then boyfriend and girlfriend. The Goodspeeds didn’t find it a betrayal, thankfully. In fact, they and Tommy seemed glad for it. Maggie went to a private college in Albany, so it was a bit of a mid-distance relationship. But having a girlfriend was better than having no prospects at all.

Our junior year of college started in this condition and proceeded through the first semester and into the second: Tommy patiently waiting for a reconciliation with Emma that would never arrive, as she spent her time with relatives in California, and he inebriated and numbed himself further into his disillusionment, while I continued in my soulless pursuit of a business degree and spent most of my time visiting Maggie at school in Albany and at her nearby parents’ house.

Tommy and I didn’t see much of each other during school in this arrangement, although we did spend time together over winter break when I wasn’t working at The Big T Grocery. We’d see a movie or go bowling or get ice cream, even in sub-zero weather. There wasn’t much to do other than drive around in my Town and Country van or Tommy’s Impala, get high, and take walks in the Whispering Pines woods with his dog Waldo, who was getting old by then.

One week there was a huge snowstorm, so we took our snowshoes into Whispering Pines to get high and tramp around. We got up to the old birdwatching building when Tommy accidentally stood on something buried beneath the snow. He bent down and retrieved a black spray paint can, the legacy of some fresh graffiti on the brick walls of the building.

“Watch this, Jude-dude,” he said. He sprayed a large, sloppy ‘T’ on an untouched portion of the brick that was somewhere between a capital ‘T’ and lowercase ‘t’ in the positioning of the horizontal line.

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Tommy’s college experience came to an abrupt and premature end. I became involved in the ordeal on one of the many phone calls I had with Maggie as I drove home from her place in Albany back to Veddersburgh. I hated those calls. I had just spent the night at her parents’ place with her, and the entire preceding day as well. What more could there be to talk about? Yet she insisted that we always be in communication, whether text or call, whether driving or in class or at work. I felt like I hadn’t talked to myself in months.

“So, are you going to the dermatologist?” she asked. After vacation, my acne had of course returned with a vengeance. We had discussed the possible solutions already ad nauseum.

“Yes. I will see what they say,” I said.

“And you’ll ask about the Accutane?”

“Like I said, they already offered it, but I’m not sure.”

“Okay, but you’re going to do it, right?” she pressed. I sighed.

“It’s a pain. And it comes with a lot of risks…”

“But it’s worth it, right? You have such a cute face. You really want it covered like it is now?”

Another call came through to my phone, and I seized the opportunity to end the conversation.

I was surprised to see the incoming caller was Mr. Goodspeed.

“Hello, Jude?” his voice boomed through the speakers of my Town and Country van, hooked up to the aux cable of my phone.

“Hey, Mr. Goodspeed, what’s up?” I thought it must have been something I did wrong at Big T Grocery, like when I mispriced the on-sale London broil.

“Hey Jude, it’s Mr. Goodspeed. Look, uh, we’re having a bit of a situation with Tommy. Something happened at school, he needs us to go pick him up and bring him home right away, he’s having some kind of, uh, nervous breakdown, I guess. I’m leaving Mrs. Goodspeed at home, so it’d be nice to have some backup if you could come with me? Plus, he keeps asking for you. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he called you.”

“Now?” I asked. It was already evening, and it was a long ride out to SUNY Otsego.

“Please, Jude, if you could?” Mr. Goodspeed asked. “Don’t worry about the grocery store, I’ll get your shifts covered.”

I’d never heard his voice so cracked and vulnerable, so I knew something bad must have happened.

And what could possibly be going so wrong with Tommy that he wouldn’t have called or texted me about it right away? What mental state could he be in such that he asked for me but never reached out directly? I guessed shame, and I guessed correctly.

I went to the Goodspeeds’ and departed with Mr. Goodspeed, who explained what he knew of the situation so far.

The week before, Tommy had apparently stolen a backpack that got left behind at the school gym, then unwittingly tried to sell it back to its owner in exchange for ketamine and marijuana. Despite the owner’s dealings in contraband, they reported Tommy to the school anyway, and he faced an internal trial and potential expulsion from the school in the next few days.

Mr. Goodspeed had been preparing to take the issue to court when Tommy called him earlier that day in a deranged and incoherent state.

“Raving, totally mad, like his mother. They were always alike, far more alike than he and I. He has the creative side like his mother, that’s where they get it from, all those creatives. They got all the mental issues. His mother, well, she had figured it all out, until whatever happened that day at the lake house, but that’s beside the point. Thing is, Tommy’s on drugs, I know it, just like his mom too, she was an alcoholic and an addict. He’ll figure it out, someday, just like she did,” Mr. Goodspeed told me, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “I’ll get this sorted. Mark my words, I’ll get that kid sober whether he likes it or not.”

When we got to Tommy’s off-campus housing, we found all of its student residents gathered in the parking lot as the fire alarms went off inside. We imagined the worst, but found Tommy milling around the parking lot, wide-eyed and spaced-out, hands in pockets. His head had been shaved of his normally lustrous hair down into an evidently self-performed buzz cut.

“Tell me this wasn’t your doing, Tommy,” I asked when he saw us. He rubbed his scalp, but then realized I meant the fire situation.

“I put a raw chicken in the microwave and set it to cook for forty-five minutes,” he said. “I was hungry.”

With that, he turned to me, not his father, and buried his face in my shoulder and cried.

Eventually, we got him into the car, where he insisted on laying curled up in the backseat without his seatbelt, and that I sit back there with him so he could put his head on my thigh, which clearly made his father uncomfortable and, to be truthful, me as well. But Tommy wasn’t a 21-year-old man in that moment, he was a boy, a boy who was alone and afraid.

“It wasn’t me, that’s what you have to understand. It was the spider people. They crawl around the inside of my skull and they can tug at my neurons like a marionette and make me do stuff. And when I resist, they say things like: ‘You have to do this or we will blow up your world.’ Or, ‘You have to do this or we will kill everyone you know and love.’ And they have the power, they have the power to do this because they are aliens, Jude, literal aliens from outer space,” he sobbed to me on the ride home. His speech was punctuated by raking coughs. He trembled and shivered like he was cold. “They are not of this planet. They have the ability to do whatever they want. And I am their vessel, I am their chosen one, I am the one who has to do battle with them, see? I am the only one who can save us. I can’t question why they ask what they ask, why they command me so, I can only obey, can’t you understand, Jude?”

I stroked his hair. He had a strange scab on his forehead. “Uh-huh,” was all I could say.

“Two crazies,” was all his dad could say from the front. “Now I have two crazies in the family.”

“It was Emma, she was the angel of the blue, the angel of the deep, the only one who could save me, who could save us all,” he continued. “But it wasn’t to be, it just wasn’t, I wasn’t ready yet, how could I be, with the spider aliens in my head? But I’m going to fight them, and I’m going to win, Jude, and I’m going to get her back, I promise.”

“I know you will,” I told him over and over as he rambled. “I know, Big T.”

After a while, he fell asleep, but right before we got home, he opened his eyelids halfway in a dreamlike trance, looked up at me, and said:

“We went fishing, Jude, but we didn’t catch anything.”

He must have said it about ten times.

Instead of taking Tommy home, we took him to St. Anthony’s Hospital in Veddersburgh, where he was sedated and given steroids and antibiotics for what was some kind of bronchial infection. I visited him twice in the next couple days, but both times he was sleeping. On the third day, Mr. Goodspeed brought him home and thanked me for my help, but there was another hurdle that still needed to be cleared.

Mr. Goodspeed and his lawyer had agreed with the school to forgo a criminal trial and expulsion and instead Tommy would drop out of school to receive treatment for drug use and alcoholism. He requested that I journey back to Otsego to help Tommy pack his things to come home, which I of course obliged to and was granted the time off from work.

We spent the two-hour car ride in silence. I put on some Radiohead but not even that could launch him into one of his poetic rants. His forehead remained pressed to the window, shoulders slumped and curled as though caving in on himself.

“I don’t feel good,” he finally said as we got close to the school, and I became anxious, wondering what residual medical issue had flared up and whether I’d have to take him to a hospital. “Can we stop somewhere and get a drink?” he asked.

Something exploded in my chest, a caldera of resentment and anger that was too long held back by loyalty, the tectonics of which had now shifted.

“Are you freakin’ kidding me, Tommy? That’s what you’re thinking about right now? You finally, finally get caught stealing something, and then you’re so strung out on drugs that you end up in the hospital, and you want a drink? You are an alcoholic, and you know what? It’s probably best you and Emma are separated, because you need help. SERIOUS HELP,” I shouted, eyes on the road. I felt his eyes remain out his window.

“That’s a ‘negative’ on the drinks, presumably?” was all he could say.

We got back to his off-campus apartment, and I helped him pack up all his stuff, of which there was surprisingly little besides clothes and a huge number of books with yellowing pages and cracked covers, most of which were obscure poetry volumes, and hadn’t been there when I last visited him on Parade Day. Every surface was stacked three or four high with them, including spare spaces of the floor, where they towered to six or seven high, like little skyscrapers forming along the thoroughfare of a metropolis. Their culmination resulted in a musty smell that permeated into the common room, which was perpetually empty and made me doubt whether Tommy had any roommates at all. If he did, he certainly didn’t have any who were willing to help him.

“Did you read all of these?” I asked him.

“Mostly. There’s a secondhand bookstore in town where you can procure them for like a couple bucks,” he said, and I knew that he had surely stolen most of them.

“I don’t know if we can fit all these,” I pointed out. He shrugged.

“Then we shall leave them,” he said.

It turned out that dropping out of school was a bit more complicated than we thought. According to the school’s online registration service, there were innumerable forms, papers, and procedures one had to complete before doing so, and therefore it was up to me to hold Tommy’s hand through all of it, as he was incapacitated in a way that rendered even the thought of doing any of this bureaucratic nonsense inconceivable.

He followed me around campus like Waldo used to follow us in the Whispering Pines woods, only sadder and with less elegance, as I brought the various forms to the appropriate offices to nullify Tommy’s efforts as a biology student at SUNY Otsego and bring his time there to a close. By the time we had a pizza dinner and got back in the fully packed van to go home to Veddersburgh, it was late, and I was exhausted and annoyed.

Tommy didn’t thank me, not even when I helped unload his stuff back at his house, although Mr. Goodspeed did and he even tried to pay me, which of course I did not accept. When I headed out to the van to go home, Tommy came to my rolled-down driver’s window.

“I’m not an alcoholic,” was all he said. “I just needed to be removed from the Otsego environment. It was toxic for me, biology was not what I was interested in, it drove me mad and brought me to ruin. I promise you, now that I’m out of that place, I’m going to be much better. I’m going to fulfill the promises of our youth.”

I sighed. “Just take care of yourself, please, Tommy.”

“You know I shall, Jude-dude, in whichever way that might be best,” he said as I put the van in drive.

My foot held the brake pedal as I looked at him and said what I knew I needed to say, the only little bit of external motivation I had on offer to try and help him:

“Tommy, if you start up with this drinking and drugs stuff again, count me out. I’m never going to hang out with you again unless it’s going for a run, playing a video game, chilling, whatever. But we aren’t drinking, and we aren’t smoking, or at least you’re not doing it with me. I swear, that’s it. It’s for your own good.”

He thought of a rebuttal but didn’t say it, then nodded as I lifted my foot off the brake and drove away.

That summer, he ended up doing what his father thought was best, which was for him to go on an expensive three-month ‘meditative retreat’ (the Goodspeeds were, for some reason, very specific in not calling it ‘rehab’) in Vermont, where he’d be without his phone or devices of any kind and least of all alcohol or drugs, and be forced into a communion with himself and the natural world at large.

After junior year, for the first summer in a long time, I didn’t have Tommy to run or hang out with. Emma had gone on another trip to Europe. Danveer had a boyfriend whom he visited all the time. All I had was the Big T Grocery store, and it had me, 40 hours a week, every week, and I put the pennies away for something someday I did not yet understand.

Then I went back to school.

I spent most of my senior year driving out to Albany to spend time with my girlfriend, Tommy’s cousin Maggie. She had convinced me to undergo the Accutane treatment, and during that time I couldn’t drink, but that was no problem for me, although it did result in irritable, dry skin, and if I thought running with Tommy was hard before, for some reason my lungs seemed unable to carry me little more than a mile when I was on the stuff.

But it worked. My face cleared up. Tommy returned from his retreat with a vitality and freshness to his skin and eyes again, although he kept his hair buzzed short, as he would from then on, as though it served as a demarcation between one iteration of himself and the next. We ran together again when I came back from school, and our abilities were more equitable than ever before as our lungs both recovered from different ordeals, but as we found mastery of our bodies again, Tommy once more became superior to me in his cardiovascular strength. He remained true to the parameters I laid out for him, and we neither drank nor smoked weed together.

What Tommy was supposed to do with himself in that time and what he ended up doing while I was away at school between our visits was a mystery to me. All our lives, we had been drilled into following a simple schematic: get good grades in high school, go to college, get further good grades, move far from Veddersburgh, get a job, find a significant other, have kids and then, ostensibly, die. Where to go once one of those signposts had been upended was hard to imagine, but that’s where Tommy was: without a degree, back home, and without a job.

Even though I would soon graduate with my unwanted business degree from SUNY Livingston, I too would be stepping into a vortex of comparable unknowingness and uncertainty.

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