Invisible Fences Read Free

don’t fear addiction (they don’t have much control over anything to begin with). Better for them to visualize some tangible bogeyman, like the monster under the bed or evil trolls who live beneath storybook bridges. 
    “I know you kids would never be foolish enough to try drugs,” my mother continued. “But if you run across a group of dope fiends, they may force their drugs on you. Chase you down, and whoosh!” She jabbed her pencil in the air towards Pam for emphasis, then towards me; I jumped back in nervous reaction.  
    “The police haven’t caught any of the dope fiends yet, so they’re still out there.” She pointed at her main sources of information: the television, in its rare moment of flickering silence; disorganized towers of newsprint; and the end table telephone, her daily link in epic half-hour conversations with her two remaining friends, Mrs. Lieberman and my Aunt Lora. “If I hear anything more, I’ll let you know. Until then, I want you both to stay out of those woods.” 
    I nodded first, without waiting to see Pam’s response.  
    This was before a president’s wife told us to “Just Say ‘No’,” before “Your Brain” sizzled sunny-side-up in an MTV frying pan. But even then, in the post-hippie 1970s, drugs were dialed pretty high on a kid’s panic-meter. I was too young to grasp the concept fully, of course, and stirred my own fears into the mixture. When my mother mentioned the “paraphernalia” found in the woods—hypodermic syringes, rubber tubes, empty glass vials of medicine—she may have said something about medicine caps. Or maybe the “dope” idea was suggestive enough. My third grade mind somehow latched onto caps, conflated it with the image of a cartoon child in the corner of a schoolroom, a pointed dunce or dope cap rising from his head. I imagined predatory older boys donning these caps as the proud symbol of their gang. They patrolled the woods behind our house, seeking new initiates—would toss syringes like darts at your exposed arms or neck, then would force you to the ground and press their ignorance into you, lowering it like a shameful cap onto your struggling head. 
    Ignorance was even more terrifying to me than needles. I was a slightly overweight boy, uncoordinated at sports and generally unpopular at school. To be stupid—to be unattractive and awkward and picked-on and stupid—was the worst fate I could imagine. Smart was all I had. 
     
    • • • 
     
    And yet I was stupid enough, later that summer, to let Aaron Lieberman and my sister talk me into visiting those woods to search for abandoned needles. 
     

 
     
    Sunday Morning 
     
     
    The agonizing stretch between 10 a.m and noon every Sunday morning was without doubt the most mind-numbingly boring interval of my childhood.
    Dad preferred not to go to church alone. With Mom’s stubborn agoraphobia, that left me and Pam as potential company. Neither of us liked church: the wooden pews were uncomfortable, and the monotonous Catholic mass lacked for us the religious significance our father so evidently derived from it. Worst of all, the final service of the day was a 12:15 “folk mass” at Saint Catherine’s, that church’s desperate attempt at “hip”—as if bad singing and silly acoustic guitar arrangements were enough to spark young people’s faith. The folk mass was the one Pam and I usually got stuck with, if we ended up going at all. 
    Here was the odd thing about Dad and church: he wouldn’t drag us out of bed and make us go. I guess he thought we should practice religion willingly, or it wouldn’t be meaningful. If we were up and around, though, he’d ask us to get ready for the next scheduled mass, and in that trapped interchange, neither Pam nor I would have the heart to say we’d rather stay home. The only sure church-avoidance strategy, which Pam and I developed independently and practiced with varying success, was to make yourself sleep past noon.  
    Seemed