Fifty in Reverse Page 2

  The lie worked as a dispensation. Peter was still viewed with suspicion but was officially accepted back into the student body. The price he paid was to be paraded in front of all the school health classes to tell his story.

  Lynch’s Variety Store suffered condemnation from angry parents for harboring drug-dealing riffraff and was subjected to surprise police inspections for a while, which amounted to officers coming in and having coffee and sniffing through the magazines for subversive material. Lynch’s stopped carrying Ramparts, and the riffraff moved elsewhere.

  THREE

  For Peter’s second session, Dr. Terry rode his motorcycle to the Wyatt family’s home in Bethlehem, Rhode Island, one hour south of Lexington. The seacoast town was being swallowed up by housing developments and fast-food franchises, but the Wyatts had money. They lived on a farm on a hill overlooking the original Yankee village that spawned the suburb. Coming up the long driveway, Terry rode through an open gate and past a horse grazing in a paddock.

  The boy’s father came out of the house and down the steps, and met Dr. Terry as he got off his Triumph.

  “I’m Howard Wyatt, Dr. Canyon. Thank you so much for coming all this way to see Peter.”

  Dr. Terry took the father’s hand. “No trouble at all, Judge Wyatt. This is a beautiful spot you have here.”

  “Pete’s never been in trouble, you know. He’s a sweetheart. Late baby, doted on by his mother and older sisters. He’s been a little moody the last year or two, but I wrote that off to adolescence and Cathy and Sally being gone. He spends a lot of time in his room playing the guitar. Seems to have lost interest in sports.”

  Dr. Terry asked Judge Wyatt what he made of Peter’s story of being spiked with LSD.

  The judge measured the psychiatrist before he answered. “I think we know that was an improvisation. Peter had been acting strangely before the day of the incident.”

  Judge Wyatt was anxious to learn how he could help. Sensing his concern, the doctor said, “Most times stuff like this is just a phase. No long-term issues. Pete probably just got walloped by puberty. The hair starts springing out all over and the disposition goes to hell, right? Once he gets a girlfriend he’ll find his balance again.”

  The father put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder and drew close. “Monday of last week he came to breakfast speaking like a different person. He was… bemused. He asked me questions about my job, my life, what car I was driving. He stood over his mother and watched her cook. I thought he was going to weep. Then he gathered himself and sat down.”

  “Did he say he was from the future?”

  “Not until the next day. He asked me to drive him to school, and he explained that he was an old man from the next century who had somehow been—he said ‘rewound’—to his childhood and wanted me to know how much he loved seeing me again.”

  “And that day he took his clothes off in school?”

  “The day after that.”

  The door to the house opened and Peter and his mother stepped out to greet their guest.

  “Hey, Pete!” Dr. Terry said warmly.

  “Hello, Doctor,” the boy said. “Welcome to our 1970 house. No Wi-Fi, no cable, no Cialis. We live the primitive life of the frontier.”

  They all went inside. The father said quietly to the doctor, “These things he says—there’s a kind of poetry to them.”

  “He’s a very bright boy,” Dr. Terry said. “That will be a big help. He’s smart enough to navigate his way through.”

  With forced cheer the parents left Peter and his therapist in the library and closed the door. Dr. Terry could smell cookies baking.

  He said, “How was the first day back?”

  “Not as tough as I expected,” Peter said. “A certain interest in the crazy kid. They all loved the acid story. Only the ones who’ve actually taken acid suspect it’s bullshit. Here’s the good thing—adolescents are supernaturally self-centered. Most of them have reverted to studying their reflections. My hallucinogen-fueled exhibitionism will certainly be what they think of when they think of me, but they won’t spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about me. That’s my guess.”

  “You got a way with words, dude,” the doctor said.

  Peter looked at him curiously. “I didn’t think people said dude in 1970. I would have guessed that came in a few years later.”

  Dr. Terry took out one of his little cigars. “I’m ahead of the pack.”

  Peter looked vulnerable. “I’m watching for anachronisms. Anything to suggest this is all a fantasy. At first I figured I was dreaming. Two days in I decided I was in a coma. If something doesn’t open up soon, I’m going to start believing I’ve died and what I’m experiencing is the last flicker of a decaying consciousness.”

  “That’s a very negative way of looking at it.”

  “I mean, bear with me. I’ve considered the metaphysical option too. Wake up in your own childhood and everything is on the table. Am I in heaven? You’d think someone would tell you. Hell? Come on—smell those cookies.”

  “Purgatory?” the doctor asked.

  “Is purgatory like The Twilight Zone? That’s what I really feel. I keep expecting Rod Serling to step out from behind the fern.”

  The doctor wanted to steer the conversation from the abstract to the concrete. “What happened in school yesterday, Pete? What stands out?”

  Peter looked like he was annoyed for a moment and then settled.

  “Daphne Burrows,” he said. “Girl in my class. My madness appeals to her. She slit her finger open to get my attention.”

  Concern crossed Dr. Terry’s face. Pete said, “Nothing serious. Just a prick to make a point.”

  “Daphne a friend of yours?”

  “Not at all. She’s out of my league, and that’s a good thing. Right now she’s a precocious little troublemaker, but I remember what’s ahead for her. Every year of high school Daphne got more beautiful, and every year she got wilder. She was very thin, and by junior year she was five ten. High cheekbones, full lips, a spray of freckles across her nose, and long, straight red hair that she parted in the center.”

  Dr. Terry said, “You’re talking about her in the past tense.”

  “I have to distinguish the Daphne I saw yesterday from what I remember of her over the next few years.”

  “Future Daphne.”

  “Future to you, Doctor. Almost fifty years ago to me. As high school progressed Daphne experimented with opium, had an affair with a thirty-year-old music teacher, and dated a succession of rebels and troublemakers. Sophomore year she was with the radical leftist who wanted to form a high school chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. She dumped him for a knife-fighting juvenile delinquent. When we were seniors she was going steady with the school amphetamine addict. She broke each of their hearts in turn. In ninth grade she was just getting started.”

  The doctor asked what became of her after graduation.

  “She might have grown up to be a brain surgeon,” the boy said, “or she might have become an assassin. She vanished after high school, and no one I knew ever heard anything about her again. She’s one of the great What-Ifs.”

  “Sounds like she made a big impression on you.”

  “Sucking her bloody finger at me got my attention, all right.”

  Peter rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the therapist with concentration.

  “She obviously made an impression on me when I was a kid. You think that’s why I’ve given her a prominent role in this, uh, this delusion?”

  Dr. Terry considered three or four conversational paths before choosing, “For the sake of clarity we have to consider the ‘delusion’ to be your memories of being a sixtysomething-year-old man from 2020.”

  “Sixty-five.”

  “Okay. I’m not making a value judgment here. I’m just trying to agree on a shared vocabulary. The delusion is the time travel stuff. You going to high school yesterday in 1970 and seeing this girl Daphne—we have to
refer to that as reality.”

  “My shrink in 2020 isn’t going to go for that,” Peter said.

  “Well, fuck him, dude, he’s not even born yet.”

  Peter laughed. The doctor decided he was going to have to pull over and write all this down as soon as he got out of the driveway.

  “It’s nice being here, Dr. Canyon,” Peter said. “In a lot of ways it feels more real than my real life did. But I gotta get home.”

  “You sure you’re not home already, Pete?”

  “I miss my wife, Terry. I miss my children. If they don’t exist, I’m going to crack up for real.”

  FOUR

  Moe Mosspaw got to school before dawn. He arrived at 5:15, ran the track for half an hour, showered in the boys’ locker room, and took a coffee and newspaper into his office. It was a little after 6:00 a.m. He was surprised to find Mrs. Wyatt waiting for him. He figured she wanted to talk to him at a time when not many people would see her. How she had known he would be in his office so early, he had no idea.

  “I appreciate your support during Peter’s difficulties, Mr. Mosspaw,” she told him.

  “He seems to be getting back into the swing of things,” the guidance counselor said. He felt embarrassed as soon as he said it. It sounded like boilerplate parent-teacher talk.

  She said, “Children can be cruel. If Peter is picked on or mocked, I need you to let me know. His father and I are still unsure that his returning to this school is the right choice for him.”

  It occurred to Moe Mosspaw that it might make his own life easier if Peter Wyatt were to switch to another school, but he was bound to tell the mother the truth.

  “I think he’s doing okay, really. The kids understand someone slipped him something and he had a bad trip. It’s scary, but it wasn’t his fault.”

  Joanne Wyatt did not reply. She nodded. She seemed on the verge of saying something and then reconsidered. Finally, she asked what she could do to help Mr. Mosspaw help her son.

  “He’s seeing the psychiatrist? The fella from Harvard?”

  “Dr. Canyon, yes. Twice a week.”

  Moe said, “Would it be okay if I sat down with Dr. Canyon at some point?”

  Mrs. Wyatt was surprised. She asked what Mosspaw thought that would accomplish.

  “Oh, you know… just to compare notes. The day shift talking to the night shift. I mean, if you don’t think it’s a good idea…”

  “I think it’s fine. Let’s all get on the same wavelength. Shall I have Dr. Canyon reach out to you?”

  “Or I could call him.”

  “I don’t know if he will have any objection. Better if he calls you, I think.”

  “Sure.”

  A bell rang. The first bus was pulling up outside. Joanne Wyatt stood and thanked the guidance counselor for taking the time and for protecting Peter’s interests.

  She drove out of the parking lot before her son’s school bus pulled in.

  Peter had gym first period. In the showers afterward a loudmouth announced to the entire naked class, “Look out, everybody! Wyatt’s got his wiener out again!”

  The other students waited for his reaction. Peter laughed, disappointing them.

  He was late to biology. He told the teacher he wasn’t used to showering, toweling off, and getting dressed in the five minutes allotted. The teacher was a sleepy-eyed man named Houlihan whose gravy-stained necktie made it halfway down his enormous belly. He would not have accepted that excuse from most kids, but he understood that Wyatt was nuts.

  Houlihan stood before a large pull-down rendering of the periodic table from the chemistry class he taught the period before. He read aloud from the textbook in a monotone. The boy looked at the clock and tried to comprehend that he was an hour and twenty minutes into a six-hour school day. It was like swimming through pancake batter.

  There was a knock at the classroom door. A tall girl with short, curly hair entered. She carried a spiral notebook and a knapsack pimpled with little smile buttons.

  “Mr. Houlihan,” she said, “I’m Delores Marx from the student council. I’m here to make the announcement?”

  The science teacher was not a man who read the daily notices in the teachers’ lounge except when they pertained to a meatloaf supper.

  “The Ecology Club,” Delores told him in a stage whisper.

  Houlihan grunted and gave her the floor. Delores addressed the class while referring to a handful of lined note cards.

  “A lot of you have heard the word ecology lately. You may ask what it means. Ecology is the system of life itself. It is the study of the intricate web of nature, from plants and animals to the animal known as man. Us. President Nixon has called on high school and college students to protect the precious environment and become active in cleaning up pollution and keeping our school, our town, and our nation beautiful.”

  A sleepy voice from the back of the room murmured, “And to make us forget about the war.”

  Delores pressed on: “Answering the president’s challenge, West Beth Vets is starting its own ecology club. The first meeting will be tomorrow, right after school in the caf.”

  The sleepy voice came again: “Yeah, let’s pick up our trash and burn it in a big incinerator. That’ll help the environment.”

  Houlihan roused himself, climbed to his feet, and glared at the heckler.

  “You got something to say to the class, DeVille? That’s a first.”

  Ricky DeVille was slouched so far down in his chair he was almost underneath the lab table. Greasy hair fell across his tinted aviator glasses. He wore a long black leather coat over a black shirt, black jeans, and pointed black Mondo boots.

  “Earth Day is a scam,” DeVille said. He was looking at his desk but had raised his mumble loud enough that everyone could hear him. “The government wants kids to stop protesting the war so they figure they can divert our energy to picking up litter. It’s all bullshit.”

  Mr. Houlihan came alive. He slammed his meaty fist on his desk and shouted, “You don’t use profanity in my class, DeVille! Go to Vice Principal Lockwood’s office right now!”

  Ricky DeVille shrugged, gathered his books, and shambled out of the room.

  Houlihan told Delores to go ahead.

  She recited, “Please consider coming to the cafeteria immediately after school tomorrow to hear about the exciting plans of the West Beth Vets Ecology Club.” She smiled, nodded, and left. She had many more classrooms to hit before the bell.

  Houlihan went back to reading from the textbook. He was talking about ablation.

  * * *

  At his next session with Dr. Canyon, Peter was anxious to recount DeVille’s rebellion.

  “Ricky DeVille spoke in class,” Peter said. “My hallucination has departed from reality. I expect to see leprechauns emerging from Pepsi cans and orangutans aloft on silver wings. It’s all wide open now.”

  Dr. Terry asked Peter to tell him about Ricky DeVille.

  “I was in school with Ricky for six years, and I never heard him speak to a teacher. He was the last of three DeVille brothers. The older two had caused plenty of trouble, and by the time Ricky came along there was a mutual nonaggression pact between the family and the faculty. The teachers would never call on Ricky, and he wouldn’t cause any trouble.”

  “He was a pal of yours?”

  “No. Only time I remember talking with him was when he found out I played guitar. We spent a gym class discussing Johnny Winter behind the bleachers when we were supposed to be running track. He smoked Winstons. Funny, the things you remember.”

  Dr. Terry asked what else Peter recalled about the DeVilles.

  “Ricky’s older brothers were health class legends! Man, I had forgotten about Health until I landed here. Four semesters of Scared Straight tales of teenagers who ruined their lives with unplanned pregnancies, shotgun marriages, and venereal diseases. Occasionally a local policeman would visit to give eyewitness accounts of early death and imprisonment brought on by glue sniffing, pot smoking
, and pill popping among the adolescents of Bethlehem. We were regularly warned that even one toke of a marijuana cigarette could send us flying off the roof like Art Linkletter’s daughter.”

  Dr. Terry considered that he should not have told his patient that he knew Timothy Leary.

  Peter went on: “The policeman always reminded us that the town had set up a telephone number where you could anonymously give the cops information on drug dealers for a hundred-dollar reward. It was called the TIP Line—TIP stood for Turn In a Pusher. Here’s where the DeVilles come in. Before the cops set up the TIP Line, a group of concerned students, parents, and guidance counselors had organized a different anonymous phone line to talk down kids who were having bad trips, were victims of abuse, or had other problems they couldn’t bring to their parents or teachers. This service was called People in Trouble, or PIT. Delores Marx came up with the slogan ‘Bad trip? Make a PIT Stop!’ ”

  Peter looked at the therapist and said, “You see where this is going?”

  Dr. Terry said, “No idea.”

  “The potential for confusion between the TIP Line and the PIT Line was obvious. Which is how Barry DeVille, Ricky’s brother, ended up in Socko.”

  Dr. Terry’s eyebrows rose.

  “Sockanosset,” Peter explained. “The state reformatory. One night before I got to high school, Barry DeVille ingested a bad shish kebab of PCP, STP, and horse tranquilizer. He crawled to the phone and asked the operator to connect him to the TIP Line for help. He meant to ask for the PIT Line. Or maybe, as Barry always contended, the operator misunderstood him. He wasn’t at his most articulate. Barry was put through to a Bethlehem narcotics officer who took down all his information, including what he had taken, where he got it, how much more he had access to, where that was deposited, and at which address they could come and collect him. This was deemed in court to be a voluntary confession and admissible evidence.”

  Peter was on his feet. Terry Canyon was wishing he used a tape recorder in therapy sessions. There was no way he was going to remember all this.