The Book of Drugs Read Free

like I did. I saw TV shows with teenaged kids who behaved affectionately, and thought: How weird that our society feels compelled to pretend that children love their parents.
In the 2000s, after being demolished by a pitiless rant from my mom about what my brother was doing, I removed myself from my family. I told them not to call unless somebody was ill. My mom called anyway, and again yelled about something going on in somebody else’s life. I changed my number.
    My mom found me on Facebook seven years later. My parents have unquestionably changed. There’s compassion there. My mom used to yell at me—as a man in his thirties!—about failing Algebra in the seventh grade, like it happened last week. In seven years, she learned how to live in the present. My parents love each other now, which is strange, nearly implausible. I have empathy for them. I know their brains a little, because I know how my brain is like theirs. We had a long talk about the grief and rage of my teenage years. “But did you know we loved you, Mike?” my mom asked, pleadingly.
    Yes, I said.
    I lied. I didn’t want to hurt her. I saw on her face that, despite her cruelty to me as a teenager, what she remembered was loving me.
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    I remember my dad fixing my guitar after I dropped it on the kitchen floor and broke the headstock off. I was despondent, thinking my only hope of ever being a musician had perished. My dad meticulously applied wood glue and fashioned a brass plate to reinforce the crack. Days before, there had been some event of screaming and threatened violence and abrading blame for my nonfulfillment, but now I stood there, watching him in this very practical demonstration of love. I couldn’t make my hate and fear go away, but how could I not be grateful? I stood there, bewildered at life inside and outside of me, watching him mend the guitar neck.

    I can think of my parents as loving or I can think of them as crazy people. If I try to see the duality, I get disconcerted, disoriented.
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    There was a girl named Meredith whom Luke had a crush on; she was olive-skinned and beautiful; she wore prim pink sweaters and a tiny gold cross. He schemed up a pickup line for her that he never used; he would say, “How are you?” and she would say “Fine.” He would say, “I know you’re fine , but how are you?” Meredith asked me to dance at the Sadie Hawkins Dance; she came to visit me when I was in the hospital recovering from an appendectomy and happened to walk in just as I was getting a shot of morphine in my ass. Years later, Luke and I were looking through a photocopied yearbook. “Jesus, there’s, like, a picture of you on every page,” he said. “Who took these pictures?” He flipped to the last page. “Meredith Peterson. Wow, she was in love with you.”
    How many signals did I miss? Maybe if Meredith Peterson had sat me down and told me, my life would have been different. It would have shaved just a little bit off the corner of my self-loathing, maybe enough that I’d have had something to live for other than the despair of my obsession.
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    Self-loathing freed me to be weird. Outlandish smarts weren’t a liability. I took tremendous pleasure in big fat words. At recess, I tried following the ebb and flow of a wall-ball game for a week, not actually playing, just running back and forth with the herd, trying to look like I was supposed to be there, but I gave it up, and from then on sat on the blacktop with my back to a brick wall reading books. I declared myself a Communist in the seventh grade—at West Point!—after reading a comic book about Mao. I wrote stories plagiarizing famous science-fiction movies that I was confident no one else had seen, and was praised for them.

    I hung out with heavy metal kids, the younger brothers of the high school burners on skateboards. Some of them threw contemptuous jeers, but I think they