Wishful Thinking: Tales of the Addicted Brain

The first time I got drunk was with Whitney Talcott. It was a March night and freezing cold. I had been at Tabor less than six months, and depression was now a palpable daily companion, a disease to be managed. There were good days and bad days, but the good days were just tolerable and the bad days nearly did me in. I hated this school. It was bigger than me, it was stronger than me, and it seemed as natural a part of the New England landscape as the rocky coves and stands of maple. I didn’t belong here. I had got here by mistake. My first two years of high school had been at a nice, normal suburban Toronto school a few blocks from my home. I might not have been the most popular kid in class, but nobody seemed to actively dislike me. I had a few friends. I got invited to a few parties. I had a girlfriend for a couple of months. And I could go home at night. That was the main thing. Here at Tabor, there was no home to return to at the end of the day—except the dorm. And I hated the dorm. I hated every whitewashed board, every hissing radiator, every creak in the polished hardwood floors. I hated my room, I hated my roommate. I hated the guy next door. And I hated my proctors, the senior boys whose job it was to supervise us and care for us while helping induct us into this bizarre paramilitary culture.
 
Para-naval, actually. Tabor was a para-naval academy, but that didn’t mean much to me at the time. The naval terminology seemed a bad joke, an effort to reenact the Hollywood heroism of World War II. We would sometimes see men who looked like admirals strolling the pathways with the headmaster. Gold stripes on dark blue cuffs. There were special prayers at vespers, navy uniforms to be ironed and worn a few weeks a year, drill sessions with guns and a marching band. And yes, we were located on a body of water and there were a lot of boats: sailboats, rowboats, crew boats, a schooner out in the harbour. It was the boats that had attracted me in the first place, the previous spring in Toronto.
 
“Marc, we’d like to talk to you about your options for next year,” my mother had said in her frank, slightly invasive tone.
 
“What options?” I was beckoned to the kitchen table, where I sat down with both parents. The table was covered with pamphlets from different private schools, most of them in New England. “You seem a little bored with school,” Mom continued. “And maybe a bit discontent overall?” Those penetrating eyes—hazel and clear with mildly arched brows—scanned me for an accuracy reading. They gazed at me steadily from her pretty, mid-thirtyish face—a face surrounded by sprayed-in-place hair that became increasingly blonde as the sixties wore on. My mother seemed to wield her own sixth sense. She could look into me and find things. As usual, I soon felt I must be hiding whatever it was she was looking for.
 
“I’m fine, Mom. Everything’s okay.” My dad sat beside her, hunched over and uncomfortable. His pleasant features, thin black hair, and solemn brown eyes would have been more at home at a meeting of the family-run leather business. Dad didn’t usually get involved in family discussions with an emotional theme, if that’s what this was. Maybe he was in the dark as much as I was. His half-smile tried to make light of things. But this was sounding ominous.
 
“I know everything’s fine,” she said. “But remember we talked about boarding schools? And you said you might be interested?
 
Remember, we’ll be moving to San Francisco in two years’ time. Going to an American school would save you a year of high school. You’d be able to go straight to college the year we arrive. So . . .” she smiled encouragingly, “I’ve done my homework and gotten these pamphlets from some very fine schools. And we thought,” with a glance at my dad, “that you might want to look at them.”
 
It all seemed exciting, though too far off to think about. So I looked at the pamphlets piled up in front of me. We looked together, and my parents pointed out this and that feature of this and that school. I tried to pay attention, but my thoughts wandered like stray cats. I was preoccupied—some sort of creeping disorientation at the very prospect of leaving home. And beneath that, intangible but potent, a sense of dread. Were they trying to get rid of me? Had I done something wrong?
 
Now Tabor was my world: there was nothing left to decide. Every morning I joined four hundred other teenage boys tramping along a wooden walkway between brick buildings in a cold mist, breakfast settling, the assembly hall looming, thinking about ways to avoid attention. Our headmaster, Mr. Witherstein, looked as though he’d stepped out of an old movie. He parted his hair almost dead centre, and he was grey and crusty like a venerable admiral himself. He waited for us at the lectern, beaming with unnatural enthusiasm. He delighted in the series of routine announcements that he would soon recite with such gravity. I took my assigned seat. Each seat back held a short wire rack containing a hymnal. I reached toward mine automatically, on cue. We opened our hymnals together, the rustle of pages filling the hall, and we began to sing.
 
A mighty fortress is our God! A bulwark never failing. God had never appeared to me as a fort or a bulwark. Maybe that was because I was Jewish. Yet I didn’t mind the singing. It numbed me. There was a comforting anonymity in being a part of this mass, this sea of boys packed row after row in a heated auditorium. I was safe for now. Back at my dorm, it was survival of the fittest, and I wasn’t all that fit. A pecking order had consolidated in the early months, and I was pretty close to the bottom. At first my roommate, Todd, was the victim of some pretty vicious teasing by just about everyone, but especially Bill Reed, the handsome giant who lived in the room next door. Reed was a front-line football player, though still a junior, and for that alone he was universally admired. Todd put some sort of lotion on his face at night, giving it an awful vampiric whiteness, all the more disturbing with his black stubble poking through. He was soon known to one and all as Madame Butterfly. I was sympathetic at first, but I didn’t like him much. He was caustic, whiny, and sour. I tried to like him. I tried to be nice to him. But I secretly hoped that his victimization would keep me safe, give me some breathing space.
 
Meanwhile, Reed had risen rapidly to power. His own roommate, Randy, was an absurd-looking, gangly outcast, with protruding ears, perfectly designed by nature for the role of village idiot. And he was Reed’s roommate! I felt sorry for Randy. What torments must he suffer? But I was relieved that Reed was surrounded by victim material. Although I knew that was selfish, I needed it to be so. I needed the playing field tilted in my favour.
 
And then, to my horror, it tilted the other way. The dominance hierarchy heaved a final time and Randy and Todd ended up Reed’s lieutenants, his slaves. Randy brought him anything he asked for. He literally stood around, waiting for orders. Todd found his niche fawning over Reed from the sidelines, grinning at his savage jokes and heaping ridicule on his victims.
 
I was next in line.
 
“Hey Lewis!” Reed smiled at me almost warmly from the doorway connecting our rooms. His broad, manly features beamed with good humour.
 
“Yes?”
 
“Come on in. Join the party.”
 
“Okay.” I couldn’t refuse.
 
“Did you see what happened to my dresser?”
 
“No . . .”
 
“Take a look.”
 
“I don’t see anything.”
 
“Come closer.” He seemed so inviting. I wanted to believe that I was really being included. But I didn’t see anything unusual.
 
“Closer!”
 
“I don’t see . . .”
 
“Bring your head right up to the edge here, ya dummy. You have to look at it from just the right angle.” I did as I was told, moving my face to within inches of the dresser surface. There seemed to be a pool of water there.
 
“I see some water. How did that happen?”
 
Then smash! His palm came down hard on the little puddle; my face was soaked. And whatever was running down my cheeks stung my eyes, which started instantly to tear. Aftershave? Hydrochloric acid? Liquid shame? My tears were the worst part.
 
“How did that happen?” Reed echoed in mincing tones. “How did that happen?” His voice rose with incredulity while he danced around the room. “Did it make you cry, Lewis? Poor baby, we’d better call your Mama,” and they all erupted into laughter, Reed, Randy, Todd, and another guy. I looked through tears at Reed’s grinning hyena mask, curling now with contempt, and I wanted to slip through the floor. What was wrong with me?!
 
I began to avoid my dorm whenever I could, to synchronize my comings and goings with those of the other boys, so Reed couldn’t get me alone. I made a couple of friends and that helped. There were other misfits who had no interest—and generally no place—in the jock-dominated hierarchy. By Christmas I spent a lot of time with Schwartz and Burton. Joe Schwartz was a junior like me, but he was leather-tough in some unique way. Self-sufficient and really smart. Burton was just a big teddy bear, gruff and mischievous, whom nobody could dislike. I got to know their friends, Gelsthorpe, Perry, and Norris, all seniors. These were the guys who would graduate at the end of the year, and they all lived in another dorm, Pond House. I spent a lot of time at Pond House, and I wished I ...