Baked In Seattle Page 12

  Next morning I went to visit Dew, hopeful something had changed overnight, ready to face the challenge of having a grown child go completely insane. We’d make it work. I’d take him home with me to Seattle, it was his second home. I’d find him a good doctor. Or maybe he’d suddenly snap out of it, start back to school, apologize to the frightened girlfriend, buy a new t.v. and we’d all skate away clean. Everything would be alright.

  We were allowed to meet in the dayroom, where Judge Judy was blaring on a ceiling-mount t.v. Another gowned patient sat in a wheelchair, watching the show. I asked if we might go in the lunchroom instead to be able to talk and that was allowed. I still couldn’t go to his room.

  Dew was as crazy as he’d been the day before.

  Everyone hated him, when could he get out of here, what were they giving him, why couldn’t he have a t-shirt, what did he need to do to sign himself out, the food was awful, he couldn’t sleep, no one understands, no one was listening, it was all him, he was the only one who knew anything, he was a dealer, the doctors and patients were all his clients, it was all written down in a New Yorker, where was his magazine, where was his dog? He sobbed, he begged me to get him out, he tore his clothes, he swore he’d escape. He’d written a poem and drawn a picture in art therapy, did I want to see?

  Peanut arrived down from Madison with her boyfriend Chad, both of them deeply concerned. They’d socialized as a couple with Dew many times, and said they’d seen no evidence of any trouble. Chad didn’t feel comfortable going into to see him, so he slouched his six foot frame into a waiting room chair, hunkered down for whatever came next. He wanted to be there for Peanut, supporting Dew’s support system, and said firmly many times through the course of the troubles, “Whatever Penelope wants.”

  Dew was happy to see Peanut. He seemed almost himself for a few minutes before going into an angry tirade about his dog.

  “Amanda had your dog and now he’ll go with me. I’ll take good care of Spot. He has water and food and toys.”

  “He needs me,” Dew wept, banging his fists into the wall.

  “You all need to leave now,” said the nurse who magically appeared when Dew began making noise. “Dupree, let’s go back to your room.”

  “Goodbye, brother-man,” Peanut sadly said, leaping up to hold him around the waist, her head barely reaching his shoulders. He stood motionless, allowing Peanut to touch him but not touching back. Their red hair was exactly the same color. The nurse pried her arms away and led Dew down the hall. He never said a word or even looked back.

  Peanut rubbed my back while I wept outside the secured door, Chad unwinding himself from the orange plastic chair to stand uncomfortably near by, helpless to do anything.

  “You need to let this out, too,” I admonished Peanut through my sniffles, pulling myself together enough to go on.

  “Not in front of other people,” she growled, turning her fear and grief to anger.

  “Then get alone soon.”

  “I will, Mom. Let’s go to Amanda’s and you can rest up.”

  “Can you stay overnight? I know you drove down from Wisconsin in a hurry but do you want to come see him in the morning?”

  Peanut looked at Chad, her eyes imploring him.

  “Whatever Penelope wants,” Chad said to me.

  “Amanda’s got room. She’s Sunshine, it won’t be any problem.”

  There was Dew’s car to deal with, the sunroof bent, the window smashed, shattered glass all over the seats and everything of value stripped away.

  A friend who’d turned on him, from what we could piece together, had his computer and his guitar and refused to give them back. Dew’s passport, license, and sentimental items were also being held by this new enemy, one of the seventeen people who hadn’t listened

  The girlfriend tearfully called, now safely in the suburbs with her parents after Dew had held her down and screamed in her face, she said. She was traumatized, taking a semester off, and told me we had until Friday to withdraw him from next semester’s classes without penalty. If there was anything she could do….

  His apartment involved some mysterious 11th-hour deal he’d made with his old landlord and needed undoing. The landlord was amazed, saying he’d been a great tenant all last year, impeccably clean, responsible, reliable, but if Dupree was unable to sign a new lease, well, this was the busy rental time for him, so would we please make a decision? The next four hours were spent trashing half the apartment’s contents and boxing up what was salvageable with a promise to the landlord to pay for the splintered front door. I told him we’d be out of there if he’d release Dew from any commitment, verbal or written. We shook hands. Two trips to box up and move Dew’s belongings to Amanda’s basement were required, Chad pitching in without a word of protest. Peanut and I worked at a huge wine stain in the carpet, swept and gathered, then carried piles of trash to the alley, stunned into silence over the filthy condition of the apartment.

  Peanut and I went back to the hospital Sunday evening.

  Dew was doped, barely able to hold his head above the table in the lunchroom. Another patient in the room was fiddling with the radio and landed finally on WFMT, Chicago’s Fine Arts Station, which had played in the Fawn Camp when I was growing up. Rossini wafted into the room.

  The gowned white woman yelled out “He’s a good boy, your Dupree. He helped an old man get up today and he gave me his Jello.”

  “Thanks Marcel,” Dew grinned, raising his head. “Hear that, Mom? I’m a good boy. I’m a poet,” he said, the loop going slower now as he put his head back down. “I’m an actor and a writer. No one understands. Marcel understands.”

  “We understand,” Peanut assured him, rubbing his back through the gown. I noticed he needed a man-wax, his back hairy and overgrown, stretching up to his hair line. My metro-sexual child had let himself go.

  “Did you see my bruises? I tried to escape four times,” Dew grinned, the maniacal leer trying now, it seemed, to intentionally frighten me. I stayed unswayed, though that face would haunt my night-sweats for months to come.

  “Yes, you did,” I replied but he showed me again, the purple spots big as my fist all up and down his shoulder, arm and side.

  He showed Peanut again.

  “How’s Spot?” he asked her suddenly, and I was very pleased that he remembered Peanut had his dog.

  “He has plenty of water,” Peanut replied, tapping immediately into Dew’s primal fear. The bony shoulder blades relaxed as his head went down again.

  “I have to go to sleep now,” he announced and stood up, wobbling to his room, now fully acclimated to the zoo.

  “I don’t think he’s going to come back,” I told Amanda into my glass of wine.

  I still couldn’t eat food. Peanut tried to get me to eat anyway and I pushed her away.

  “I thought by today he’d have settled down, 48 hours off the mushrooms and with anti-psychotics in him but he seems exactly the same only slower.”

  “Yes, he will, Mom,” Peanut demanded. “He’ll be fine. He has to be.”

  “He has to be,” Amanda seconded.

  “Ziller wasn’t,” I moaned, laying out my darkest vulnerability. Not my golden boy. Not my Dew. The genius goes mad and never returns.

  “When are you guys going to tell us about Ziller?” Peanut asked, taking more salad with her chopsticks, the black lacquered ones with the mother-of-pearl inlaid roses she always kept in her purse. “Chad doesn’t know what you guys are talking about. You always refer to him but you’ve never explained who is.”

  “A, you tell” I said, passing off to her, my head in my hands. Amanda rubbed my back and said she’d tell the story.

  “Ziller was The Sunshine Tribe’s John Kennedy, man, a tall looker the color of caramel. He had round John Lennon glasses, a little afro and always wore a little cap, like a…what do they call them, Al?”

  “Greek Fisherman’s cap,” I prompted her “And he had an Indian motorcycle.”

  “This guy was the co
olest thing on two wheels and we were all crazy about him. Sorry, poor word choice under these circumstances.”

  “Oh, wait!” I shot up my head. “I have to tell you something before I forget. Can we set your story on the shelf just for a moment?”

  “Sure, Al.”

  “I went to Target today to return all that crap Dew bought in his buying frenzy…well, first I went to Walgreens but they said they can’t take the phone cards back once they’ve been activated at the register. Nine hundred dollars in phone cards, he bought. Jesus. Anyway, I went to Target and I didn’t have the receipt but I had his temporary credit card Peanut found in his trashed apartment. Sure, she could take it back, she told me and then she said, ‘Wow, he really went crazy, huh?’ I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to say ‘yeah, actually, he did.’ I started laughing or else I’d have cried.”

  “That’s awful and hilarious, both,” Peanut said, hiding her chewing mouth with her outstretched delicate, be-ringed fingers. One of those gold bands was the wedding ring her dad had gotten me an eternity ago, another was the diamond from Angel. It all looked better on Peanut, who had her nails decorated every two weeks. Today they were turquoise with silver stars.

  “Yup. Go ahead, Amanda, I’m sorry to interrupt. Tell about George Wilson Ziller.”

  “We worshiped him. He was the son of a Black Panther and a Jewish women’s rights activist and he was raised in France. Just the ultimate cool, you know? Like Hendrix and John Lennon put together but the accent was slightly Parisian. His eyes were hazel. Anyway, he came back to the Sunshine Tribe Council one year and sat with the elders in the ring of fire, you know, presenting himself as a rightful heir and they lapped it up. The power everyone gave him was unbelievable, like a new messiah had arrived. And bear in mind historical perspective,” Amanda added, looking over her square granny glasses at my beautiful daughter and her beau. A’s braids were naturally streaked with gray and she looked fabulous at nearly fifty.

  “What do you mean?” Chad asked, his eyes intent, interest peaked by the story. He was so tall he folded nearly double in the chair to be appropriate table-height for eating, like a cartoon character. His body was rock solid from working out. No wonder Peanut liked this handsome, nice guy.

  “It was the mid-sixties and the swell of cultural shift was enormous. Everywhere was upheaval and change, unforeseen even five years previous.”

  Amanda sounded like her well-worn I Ching.

  “Civil rights protests, civil disobedience, heightened awareness of Viet Nam through first-time-ever grisly, realistic television coverage. Women were beginning to wake up and want more. Young people of color were banding together for all kinds of purposes, which scared the hell out of the old white guard. Others were dropping out of society altogether, going back to the land, like we did. We kept our finger on the pulse of what was happening out there but we preferred organic vegetables and world peace over dinner, on a more local level. The things others protested out there, we quietly re-worked and adapted---integration, mixed marriages, gay freedom, women’s liberation, free health clinics, daycare, pre-school, agriculture and bread-baking seminars. It was an agrarian, equalitarian hideaway, under the radar. Each according to their need.”

  Amanda sighed and took a sip of wine. The younger ones were rapt, waiting for the climax. I knew this story like I knew my own name.

  “Then along came Ziller,” I whispered.

  “Yup. Then along came Ziller. We all adored him, hung on his every word. He spouted European ideas, modernization, global marketing. He had a plan that could move us quietly into the black, buying land in Costa Rica and South America, saving the rainforests and having a good investment at the same time, stuff like that. Way the hell ahead of his time. No one else knew anything about stocks or gold bullion so he was instantly crowned king of the People. The hero worship got really large, and a lot of infighting began, petty jealousies that began to eat away at the foundation. The crowd of worshippers was huge, though, and then there were a few distracters making mayhem, and alliances started forming, for and against. It split the Tribe, and hurt feelings webbed out, poisoning the whole circle. Even the little kids were irritable that winter, remember?”

  “I remember. It was so white, the snow was so deep. Five feet that winter.”

  “We had a tent meeting, with a fire and Smoking of the Drum Pipe, and everyone said Ziller took peyote buttons that night but we never got the story straight. Anyway, Ziller came to the Drum Pipe ceremony and he was kinda off. He was sweating a lot and he kept taking off his clothes and pacing and everyone was on edge anyway. We all thought he was birthing some new concept he was going to lay on us, getting ready, and then he started screaming. He took the firesticks from their poles and started doing this kind of hula dance with them and it was dangerous in the tent. We all started backing away from him with the men eyeballing the exits and the height of the tent, calculating danger if flames took over while the women were herding the children away as fast as they could. Ziller screamed and waved the firesticks around for an hour, yelling incomprehensible stuff, violent, radical damnation stuff, and then all of a sudden he took off into the snow. The quiet was as loud as the screaming had been and even though I was little, I can still hear the dead silence after that wild night. I stood outside hoping he’d come back, be himself, feeling like the Ziller we knew was already dead.”

  “It would have been better if he was,” I sighed and stood to stretch. Was my Dew in for years of similar mania?

  “He sat in the snow all night and he threatened everyone who tried to talk to him with a sword he’d gotten at some surplus store and hidden outside the tent. When he came straggling back next morning, he raved non-stop for three days then was silent and he never spoke another word. Still hasn’t. Magic gone backwards, is what it was. And there went our one leader, down the tubes, eating pudding from a paper cup with a plastic spoon. Even the hospital didn’t know what to do with him, once the Council got him into a car next day. Take care of him, was all the doctors said. Maybe he’ll come out of it, maybe not. He never has.”

  Peanut shifted in her chair, her delicate hands in her lap.

  “But Dew will,” she said. “It wasn’t like that. It was just drugs, not a messianic calling that got him. He’ll be okay.”

  The next day he was more okay, anyway. About an eighth of the time, he seemed to comprehend things, know who I was and why I was worried, know that he was in a “loony bin,” as he called it, and had realized he had fucked something up. The enormity of it still wasn’t anywhere near the surface and Dew’s crazy talk continued, but at a slightly slower pace. He knew he’d spent a lot of money that last day. He knew the girlfriend had thrown him out. That his friend Trent had become his enemy and was holding his important things.

  But the crazy talk still took over.

  “Take my poem home,” Dew whispered, pushing it into my hand, afraid a doctor or nurse might try to stop him.

  My skin is yellow, nobody is listening.

  The blood screams dry! Nobody hears.

  The cup I once drank from has gone from full to null.

  Nobody is there to buy the null.

  Preoccupation, defecation all locked away in solitude,

  When I finally die, they’ll hear my shouting and stammers.

  At rest at last, finally I sleep.

  And everybody feels my disease.

  “Do you want to come back to Seattle with me?” I asked.

  “I signed a lease,” he moaned, coming clearer the last few days. He vaguely recalled negotiating with his old landlord. “Didn’t I?”

  “Taken care of. No, you didn’t. Nothing’s holding you here. You want to take a break from school and come west?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’ll make it happen.”

  “I need to go to sleep now. This drug they give me is awful.”

  “What is the drug he’s on?” I asked the psychiatric nurse assigned to Dew’s corridor.

  �
��What is your relationship to him?” the prissy woman asked.

  “I’m his mother,” I hissed. “Look at his file. I am his emergency contact and I hold his insurance information. Now. Tell me what drug he is on.”

  “Seraquel. It’s an anti-psychotic.”

  Drake was not answering his phone and I wondered if this was the week he was in Mexico. How long had I been in Chicago? It felt like I never had left this enormous slum, as if my Left Coast life was a blur, a dream. I had lost all sense of time, the days now one long stretch of harrowing anxiety and incredibly difficult mundane tasks.

  I withdrew Dew from college, got the landlord’s forwarding address to make Dew send a check later for the bashed in door, visited the hospital at least twice a day, let FedEx know I was going to be delayed, sent emails with updates on his condition.

  My phone remained blessedly silent, all the Sunshine People and my friends acknowledging my firm directive for phone silence. The call of distress went out but everyone respected my grief. Any questions or commentary were to go to Amanda, who’d agreed to field any concern.

  My brain was barely functioning.

  I’d lost my taste for drama completely.

  Relating the horrific details to Dew’s father was enough. My sense of humor was gone, my face set at flat affect, tears sprouting at inopportune times.

  I wished I had Gitta, Malcolm, Drake or Shelly to tell it to.

  Shelly’s phone was now out of service, scaring me, but I had enough on my own plate. I didn’t need to add more worry beads to my invisible rosary of hope that pleaded in a non-stop loop: Please, Universe, I am casting honest bread upon the water, asking for a miracle for my boy, please bring him back, please hear my plea. I didn’t need to add Mishellita on top of that, not now. I’d check on her when I got home.

  Gitta’s voice mail was full, kind of odd for her, but I didn’t have the energy to wonder about that, either.