The Book of Drugs Read Free Page A

actually found my angsty intensity—I shot them murderous glares over the top of my glasses when they mocked me—fascinating, and frightening.
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    Years later, a girl from a high school French class found me online. I quipped about my outcastness.
    â€œI always thought you were one of the popular kids,” she typed back.
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    I met Chad Ficus in the West Point cemetery, where General Custer, General Westmoreland, and General Daniel Butterfield, the composer of “Taps,” are buried. We leaned on the mausoleum of Egbert Ludovicus Viele: a twelve-foot pyramid. Behind a barred door were the sarcophagi of Viele and his wife, and something on the back wall that looked like a light switch. It was said to be a buzzer, so that if Egbert were buried alive he could ring for help.
    Chad was beloved by the girls on the first tier of cuteness. He was on the cross-country team and had fantastic grades. Like I said, I thought the world saw me as a peculiar no-hoper, and I was defiantly unathletic: when the gym teacher made us run 200 yards, I walked—leisurely, sullenly—I would’ve done it while smoking if I could.
    We drank a mixture of spirits—two inches’ worth of alcohol from each bottle in his dad’s liquor cabinet—from a green plastic 7-Up bottle. I had a stillborn sister buried in the cemetery, a few yards from the pyramid. When I was a child, and my mom came to visit the grave, I climbed the sphinxes and tried to run up the pyramid’s sheer walls. I had no idea what was going on. I showed Chad Ficus the grave of Catherine Georgia Doughty and told an
elaborate lie that my sister was a teenager who killed herself, and that she’d owned all the Led Zeppelin and Van Halen records.
    We walked down the road, passing the 7-Up bottle between us. We met up with a bunch of kids and became a procession. A girl had a boom box and a cassette with Madonna’s first album on one side and Prince’s Purple Rain on the other. We acted conspicuously stupid: the alcohol let us. The idea was to go to a public pool up in the hills, climb the chain-link fence, and set off fireworks from the high-dive platform.
    My dad suddenly drove up in his white Volkswagen Rabbit, opened the door, and told me to get inside. I did a decent job of pretending not to be drunk. I talked him into letting me walk home.
    My dad drove off. I started following our parade up the hill. They were moving faster than before. “Go home, Doughty,” said Chad Ficus. “Your dad told you to go home. You have to go.”
    If I didn’t, my dad would somehow intuit that I was up at the pool, and their party would get busted.
    Chad ran away towards the pack, already getting smaller. He turned around, jogging backwards. “Go home! Go home!”
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    Some parents at West Point pressured their kids into going there for college. My dad wasn’t one of them. I suspect that if he had the option as a kid, he wouldn’t have gone, and without Vietnam, which I think made him need a structure in which to live, he wouldn’t have stayed in the army.
    Chad Ficus’s dad did want him to go to West Point—he was one of the rare officers there who hadn’t gone there himself, and he seethed with resentment about it. He told Chad that once he graduated, he’d buy him a Porsche.
    Chad’s dad owned a lot of guns. (Everybody’s dad at West Point owned some guns—my dad had two hunting rifles and a double-barreled
shotgun handed down from my great-grandfather, a knife-fighting youth who, upon getting a bullet lodged an inch from his heart, repented and became a pastor. Perhaps not incidentally, I look exactly like him.) Chad’s dad actually made his own ammunition as a hobby; there were drums of gunpowder in the basement.
    Chad showed his friends his dad’s porn collection. It was a notebook into which his dad had pasted a profusion of box shots; that is, he cut out pictures of