My Misspent Youth (16 page)

Brian is someone who accomplished nothing in his life other than his death. This is an ugly admission, a brutal interpretation of facts I have not been able to process any other way. He died at twenty-two. Very few people came to his funeral. There were only a handful of friends to call, vague acquaintances who had faded into the murk of adulthood, who had disappeared down roads of maturity that always appeared to Brian as hazy and not worth the trip. His life had been a string of failures: an unremarkable education in suburban public schools, an abandoned college career, a less than half-hearted attempt to become a writer. He was an only child, spoiled by parents who had no friends and furnished him with an expensive car and expensive clothes that he drove and wore no particular place. His audience was himself, a reflexive relationship that resulted in unbearably empty spaces for both parties. This was a life bereft of even tragedy, until he finally fixed that. He let death come to him—although that, of course, is a matter of interpretation, as is every component of the existence and lack of existence of Brian Peterson.

I liked Brian because he liked me, because he laughed at my jokes, let me drive his car, and complimented my appearance even when I’d done something atrocious to my hair. I liked him because he didn’t hold me in contempt for refusing to reciprocate the romantic aspects of his affection for me. He let me talk about other men. He let me watch whatever I wanted on his TV, even if it was
National Geographic
specials about the spotted leopard of Ghana. I liked Brian because he had nothing to do with the passage of time. He was immune to maturity, resistant to forward motion. He existed the way childhood homes are supposed to and never do, as a foundation that never shifts, a household that never gets new wallpaper, or turns your bedroom into a study, or is sold in exchange for a condo in Florida.

When he left this planet, he left me and very few others, and if those Christian alternatives to life really exist, then he must know by now that we will never be reunited. If those opposable H’s are true, then he is in Heaven for never committing any crime, and I’ll find myself in Hell one day for the spin that I have put on his death. My spin is this: I believe that he couldn’t do anything other than die. None of us who grew up with him could imagine an alternative. And the fact that he didn’t officially kill himself was enough to make all of us believe in the supernatural, or at least some kind of devilish warden hovering over our lives, whispering in our waxy ears, “Do something, or die.”

Some specifics: Over the New Year’s weekend of 1993, Brian came down with the flu. He called in some antibiotics and took a few. Then he left the cigarettes on the kitchen table, lay down in bed, and never got up. Also on the table was the December 22 edition of the
New York Post,
the January issue of
Esquire,
and a copy of
TV Guide
already cracked at the spine. He was a person who planned his television watching as if the programs were activities written in a Filofax, as if they were the contents of his life, which they, in fact, were. They were standing appointments, not even penciled in.

On January 4, Brian’s mother called me. I was eating a bagel. I answered on the third ring; somehow I remember this. She told me he was in the hospital, that he had lain in bed in his apartment for six days until she and his father had come in from New Jersey to see what was wrong. She said something about shallow breathing. There were some words to the effect of calling a private ambulance service, of Brian being too weak to move from his bedroom to the elevator, then the intensive care unit, some diagnosis of atypical pneumonia, some negative HIV test, some reversal of the pneumonia diagnosis, some rapid deterioration of lung tissue, doctors “in a quandary,” relatives flying up from Florida. Apparently there was a priest involved; things were that bad. Brian’s mother spoke in simple, even words. I debated in my mind whether I should call her Mrs. Peterson or Jan, her first name. If I called her Mrs. Peterson, as I probably had in the past, would that mean that things were normal, that I was acting “normal” about it? She told me not to come to the hospital, that Brian didn’t want people to see him as he looked very bad. I wrote a card and sent it by messenger from my office the next day. I had one of those jobs which allowed for such things. I worked at a magazine about beauty. I had an office and a computer and a phone with many lines. I had swank health insurance, a gym membership, all the things Brian never got around to acquiring because he never got off the frozen plateau I’d long considered to be nothing more than his pathetic ass.

This is about death. Although for Brian, death seemed to be there from the beginning. It seemed to have settled, seed-like, into his pores from the time he was small. For Brian, there was something about life that he just couldn’t do. And what was amazing was the unusual way in which he chose not to do it. Nothing about him was morbid. His world was clean and high in quality. He took hour-long showers. He wore Armani jackets. He drove his very expensive car to New Orleans for the hell of it. He dropped out of two colleges because he wasn’t enjoying them. He refused to get a job because he didn’t want one. His parents paid his rent on a huge apartment in SoHo, which he decorated with the obvious accessories of one who sees life through fashion magazines and Williams-Sonoma catalogs. On the walls, he had the Ansel Adams photograph, the Van Gogh print. Brian was the owner of six separate remote controls. There was the television, the VCR, the cassette player, the compact disc player, the other cassette player, the cable box. As with his magazines, he often spread the remote controls out into a fan-like shape on the chrome coffee table. He dusted and vacuumed every day. He talked about his life as being “very good.”

Brian was a firm believer in not spending time doing anything that wasn’t enjoyable. The result is that he did very little; there was never much to enjoy. I say this as a person who only really knew him from the beginning of adolescence to the end of it, a time when pleasure comes in tiny spurts, when happiness presents itself in bursts at the ends of long, painful confusion. He had absolutely no concept of work, of the notion of reward following sacrifice, of dark preceding dawn and all of that. It seems unlikely that he really ever knew how to study, that he understood what it meant to make a phone call in order to find a job or make a professional connection or even arrange for anything other than Chinese food delivery or a haircut, the latter of which he obtained at Bergdorf Goodman’s for eighty-five dollars. I have never in my life witnessed a person like Brian, a person who never witnessed life. I have never in my life allowed a person to cater to my whims the way he did, believing, as he did, that I had a life, albeit a cheap and filthy life, full of low-paying jobs, too much homework, and a college dorm room that smelled—as he declared the one time he visited—like “urine.” Maybe this is what I liked about him, that he could so easily turn me into a working-class heroine, that even in my saddest moments of friendlessness and directionlessness, I had ten times the life that he had. And I never even had to feel guilty; he still thought his life was great, an empty space of leisure and blank pleasure that I too could obtain if I had fewer of what he termed “hang-ups.”

This is about death and it is about blame. I blame Brian’s parents for everything. The thing I say to no one is that they killed him. By paying his rent, by not making him study trigonometry or stay in college, by not saying no to the car or the apartment, or the gas money for solitary trips to nowhere, or the racks and racks of Paul Stewart shirts, Howard and Jan Peterson caused the death of their son.

The moment I declared this in my mind is the moment I became despicable. The emotions that surround my experience of Brian’s death are by far the ugliest and most unforgiving sentiments I have bestowed on any event of my life. I chose, perhaps for my own sanity, more likely because I was too afraid to choose anything else, to feel as if his death at twenty-two had been imminent from the day he was born. Because Brian died of no defined cause, because the diagnosis was inconclusive, because his parents allowed no autopsy, because he simply
died,
I chose to believe it happened on purpose. I chose to feel as if death for him was an achievement, a blessing, a trophy honoring all that he never bothered to complete. I chose to take his death as a cautionary tale, a message that, if one did not
do,
one would die. So I did quite a bit. I worked long hours. I swam at 5:30 in the morning. I told myself that I was going places, that I was a “comer.” Brian, of course, was a “goner.” Like the unearned Armani jackets, death became him. The turns of phrase went on and on.

Brian’s death took less than three weeks to complete. He was in the hospital for seventeen days. The day he went in was the day most of our mutual friends from childhood had flown back from Christmas vacation to the homes that were constituting the early part of their adulthoods. This meant California, Ohio, Massachusetts. I lived directly across the park from Mount Sinai Hospital, where Brian lay bloated from virus-fighting steroids and motionless from paralytic drugs. Any movement, the doctors said, would have stressed his lungs. When he lost consciousness, his parents asked me to start coming over; they believed he’d hear my voice and “wake up.” I took the bus to the hospital every third night. This was what I had promised myself: That even though his father called me twice a day to give me a “report”—“They still don’t know;” “Things are better;” “No, they’re worse;” “The numbers on the machine are up today;” “I was thinking about that time on Nantucket, did Brian ever mention it?”—I would not wreck my life by living, as they did, in the visitors’ lounge of the Intensive Care Unit on the fourth floor of the Guggenheim Pavilion.

This is also about lying.

The Peterson family unit was a tiny thing—mom, dad, kid. There were no other siblings, only a handful of relatives. No neighbors. No friends. I believe Howard Peterson received a visit at the hospital from his boss. After a few trips to the fourth-floor lounge, after a few times of seeing these parents who couldn’t speak, who couldn’t bathe, who had lost all sense of time, after a few times of seeing the faces of the nurses and medical students and even the relatives of patients who had been merely shot in the cranium or shattered on motorcycles, I realized that the only way to handle the situation was to tell lies. Though it was plain that death was something already occurring, that this hospital stay was no longer about healing but about the slow submergence of a doomed ocean liner, the game to play seemed to be a game of denial. Jan and Howard Peterson were interested in everything that was not reality. They were interested in all that their son was not. They wanted to know about his friends and what movies he liked and, as they put it, “his art.” They wanted to know who had left the pack of Lucky Strikes on his kitchen table and should that person be called regarding “the situation.”

I told them yes and yes and yes. I scrounged for morsels of truth and expanded them into benign, purposeful lies. I told them Brian liked Fellini—it was true, I believed, that he had once rented
8 1/2
from the video store. I told them he was devoted to his writing, that he planned to arrive at a masterpiece one day and buy them a house in Nantucket. To their delight, I spoke about him in the present tense. I pontificated about all that I planned to do with him when he, as they kept putting it, “got out.” I surmised that Brian would someday write a lovely prose poem about his stay in the hospital. They ate this up, “more, more” they said without speaking, though Howard spoke a lot, “needed to keep talking,” he said, whereas his wife lay on the plastic couch in the lounge and looked at the ceiling.

I came to know Howard Peterson better than I’d ever known a friend’s parent. Though I hated him for the delusional, sugar-coated approach he had taken to parenting, and obsessed as I was at the time with what I defined as
reality,
with the cold, hard truths of the corporate working-world, and rent-paying, and late-night subway rides taken because a cab would cost too much, I wasn’t outwardly cruel enough to express any inkling of opinion. I hated him for denying his son the postmodern rites of passage, for never arguing with Brian, for never hesitating to write the checks, for perpetually neglecting to crack the whip. Even now, it is a mystery to me who Jan and Howard Peterson are. For twenty years they lived in a small and badly decorated house in New Jersey. They drove a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Howard worked as a bond trader. Jan did nothing. They became rich in the 1980s and spent it all on Brian, invested it all in the enterprise that seemed an experiment in passivity, as if lack of movement was the ultimate freedom, as if people who say “I’m going to win the lottery and spend the rest of my life doing nothing” really know what they’re talking about.

But my relationship to Howard during these days in the visitors’ lounge presented me with an interesting set of rules, a subtle opportunity for mind manipulation. Since Jan wouldn’t speak, and talking to Howard terrified me in that he broke down in tears after just a few sentences, my decision to “think positively” about the situation, to be optimistic and cheerful and phrase things in precisely the opposite way than I normally do, served the function of putting myself at a remove from the whole thing. As actors say, I made a choice. I made a decision to cross to upstage left, to tell them that Brian was working on a screenplay, to refrain from getting upset because, as I said, “There’s nothing to be upset about because he’s going to pull through.” My best line was this: “Brian will not die because people our age can’t conceive of death in relation to ourselves. It’s not in his vocabulary, therefore it’s impossible.”

It was for this sort of language that Howard called me one night to come visit him in his hotel room. He and Jan were staying a few blocks from the hospital at a place called the Hotel Wales. Howard said he wanted to talk about Brian. He said he “wanted to gain greater insight” into his son. I was sitting in my room drinking wine from a plastic tumbler when he called. My bedroom window was open, and flecks of snow were floating in. A news report emitted from the clock radio, something about George Bush, who was technically still in office, although the inauguration was days away. I had been engrossed in the election, smitten by James Carville, newly invigorated by politics—the campaign buses and falling-down balloons of it all. Brian had taken little interest, though he’d appeared bemused by my chattering.