My Darling Boy

For twenty-­six years and five months, Olney Kartheizer worked as a staff writer and copy editor at the Anastasia, Florida, Daily Sun. He wrote book reviews until the publisher killed the Book Page. He’d been able to feature local writers who would otherwise have been ignored, like Pen Beeman, whose first book of poems, My Sudden Angel, won the Gold Medal in the Florida Book Awards, and Monty Driver, whose Mosquito County Confidential became a local bestseller. He wrote travel essays about hidden Florida until the Travel Page folded. He edited Magnolia, the Sunday magazine supplement, until the publishers decided that Parade would be a better fit for the residents of the Lost Coast. For his last seven years at the paper, Olney wrote obituaries, his favorite assignment, and the occasional human—interest feature. He learned what every necrologist knows—­that in the end we’re all just stories. A year ago, having no mortgage, no car payments, no outstanding debts, he took a generous buyout from the diminishing daily and retired.

These days he works nine-­to-­three Monday through Friday at Anastasia Miniature Golf near the Intracoastal. He doesn’t need the money; he wants to get out of the house and talk to someone other than himself. Besides his having to capture the occasional rattlesnake in the fountain grass by the water hazard (Veronica Lake), the job’s pretty easy, giving him time to write his observations and stories in his notebook: Yolanda Martini finds a positive pregnancy test on a damp sidewalk on the street where she lives.

For twenty-­nine years and three months, Olney lived as a devoted husband to Kat (née Harvey) and doting dad to Cully. A loving family in a cozy home, all smiles and comfort. Olney told Cully bedtime stories every night, those he made up about the monkey family (the Lemons, Lewis, Victoria, and their boy Spanky) that lived down the block and worked for the circus, and those that he read, like The Hobbit and Fudge-­a-­Mania. Cully could juggle three balls by the time he was nine and could do a handful of magic tricks when he was ten: spoon bending, cup through the table, coin levitation, like that. He told jokes like “Q: If you’re from England and you’re in the bathroom but you’re not pooping, what are you? A: European.” Cully had a handful of friends from school who dropped by for playdates and went to each other’s birthday parties. Cully loved the park, the beach, the mini-­golf course. He loved to snuggle on the couch with Mom and Dad and watch cartoons.

He was born with a faint pink birthmark on his left cheek in the shape of a horse’s head. His pals at school called him “Pony.” The mark faded over the years until it was barely visible by the time Cully was thirteen. He missed it. A friend’s older brother worked at Inkslinger’s and tattooed a thin black line around Cully’s pony. Free for nothing. You could see it then. You can see it now.

Cully’s ambidextrous, can write with both hands and at the same time, English with his left hand and Spanish with his right. He never liked Olney calling this ability a gift. He called it a skill. He put his skill to further use on the baseball diamond as a switch-­pitcher for the Splendora High Airedales. He pitched righty to right-­hand batters and lefty to lefties. Wore a funny-­looking ambidextrous glove. He had a seventy-­five-­mile-­an-­hour fastball and an erratic knuckleball that no hitter could hit, but no catcher could catch. He pitched the team to the state 5A championship against the Bob Town Burrowing Owls. A no-­hitter. Cully was a hero, a local celebrity, picture on the front page of the paper and all that. He was a freshman. He never pitched again. Go out at the top, he said. That made some people angry. Full of himself, they said. Selfish.

He switched to basketball. Played point guard for the Airedales, who had their first winning season in a decade. He ran track, the longer distances, and tried tennis. No backhand needed. Switched hands with the racket as the ball cleared the net. He was singles champ in the districts. So Olney was surprised when his star athlete called it quits. He had other things to do, he told his dad. Olney said, “Weren’t you having fun?”

“A blast.”

“So?”

“Fun will only get you so far.”

When he was fifteen, Cully withdrew from his parents, stayed in his room watching videos on his computer. He slept a lot, skipped meals, nodded out on the La-­Z-­Boy. He’d get angry when Olney asked about his health and state of mind, offered to take him to a doctor or a therapist, so Olney stopped asking, and maybe that was his first mistake. When Cully was sixteen, Olney caught him smoking pot in the backyard. Cully said it was his first time, but no one gets caught their first time. Olney said he was disappointed. Cully apologized. It was normal enough behavior, Olney figured.

Cully got himself a weekend job working in the kitchen at Jack’s Diner scrambling eggs and slinging hash. The breakfast shift. He settled into a quiet routine of school, homework, and flipping pancakes. One Sunday morning Cully scalded his arm when he somehow spilled a pot of nearly boiling grits on it and ended up in the ER. Olney picked him up. Cully’s eyes were squeezed shut and the wound was covered with cling wrap. He’d been given Tylenol and a prescription for something stronger if it was needed. It was. A week later he sliced deeply into his index finger while dicing onions. Back to the ER. And not too long after that, he took a tumble on the stairs at school. Nothing broken, but a drilling pain in his head and a nasty bruise over his left eye.

Kat suspected that these “accidents,” if that’s what they were, could be attributed to Cully’s continued surreptitious drug use. Olney chose not to believe that, saying that Cully was just clumsy like his old man. And then Cully discovered a pain clinic on Blake Street. One-­stop shopping. Stand in line at the clinic door, walk in, speak with Dr. Feelgood about the crushing pain in your back (mention the staircase), get your prescription for OxyContin, get it filled on the spot, swallow the tablets whole, do not chew, crush, dissolve, or break, and walk out the door. And then Kat discovered the cache of pills in the empty battery compartment of a flashlight beside Cully’s bed and brought them to Olney, who could no longer honestly believe that the injuries were not deliberate and not self-­inflicted.

When Cully was eighteen, he and a friend made a suicide pact to die while they were high. They parked the car in the elementary school parking lot, took their pills, drank their vodka, put on a Green Day CD, closed the car windows, turned on the engine, and went to sleep. That was the night Olney realized that Cully had lost control of his drug use and that Olney’s failure to insist on a choice of either rehab or the streets had been a profound disservice to his son. That night Olney got a call from another of Cully’s pals, Dermid, telling him what was going on. Dermid said he was supposed to be with them but chickened out at the last minute. He cried. Olney called the cops and drove to the school. He found the boys unconscious. He broke the passenger window with a crowbar and dragged Cully out and tried to revive him, only he didn’t know what he was doing. Mostly he screamed Cully’s name and shook him. Green Day sang something about walking alone. The cops and paramedics arrived. The other boy, Orson, was dead. When Olney called Orson’s parents, the Blairs, with the heartbreaking news, Steve Blair choked back tears and said, “At least it’s finally over.” When Olney took Cully home from the hospital, Cully told his dad he should not have interfered. When Cully fell asleep that night, Kat told Olney, “I can’t live like this anymore.” When Cully awoke the next afternoon and learned from his dad that Orson had died, he said, “Orson who?” and then he remembered. “How?”

“The car.”

“He did?”

“I’m sorry.”

Cully closed his eyes and saw Orson as he had seen him last and as he would see him evermore. Orson the outrageous, voted “most likely to exceed” in high school, who could sing like an angel and dance like a dervish, whose dream in life was to be a private investigator because he loved uncovering secrets and wearing a shoulder holster, is sitting behind the wheel of his Celica, pouring vodka on his head and face, lighting a match, and touching the match to his skin when it went out. Cully said, What’s the hurry? Several minutes later, Orson’s forehead slammed into the steering wheel, and that may have been the second that Orson died. Does it happen in a second?

Cully refused to attend Orson’s wake or funeral. Shame, perhaps, Olney thought. Didn’t want to face his friends or classmates or Orson’s parents. Or guilt, maybe. Olney hoped that this tragedy would scare Cully straight—­not everyone gets a second chance. Go ask Orson.

When Olney spoke with friends about Cully’s difficulties and wondered out loud what he had done wrong as a dad, the commiserators would respond with comments like: It’s a phase he’s going through; He’ll grow out of it; Boys take longer to mature than girls; My kid was the same as Cully, a real hot mess, and now he’s produce manager at Publix. Olney asked Anne Matthews, a neurologist at Anastasia College, for her opinion. How do you go from the happiest child in town to the saddest? She said the teenage brain is like a minefield. All the underused gray matter is being pruned away and sometimes too much of the pruning happens in the prefrontal cortex. Then she said a lot of other things about the remodeling of the brain and how the rewire can go haywire, and so on, leaving the impulsive amygdala in charge of decision making. She said, At least Cully’s not schizophrenic. Seen that happen too often. Olney said, “One thing I worry about is that Cully’s story won’t have a happy ending.”

Before he went off to college, Cully appeared out of nowhere at his parents’ house. He’d been staying with friends in Palatka. Kat was at her volunteer docent job at the art museum. He and Olney sat at the kitchen table. Olney put out a plate of sourdough crispbread and Brie, a bowl of spicy, brine-­cured olives, and a ramekin of fish dip. Cully tried the dip and made a face, said he liked his cheese sliced and his olives green and pitted. He told Olney he needed money for a car.

Olney said, “I’m not giving you cash. We’ve been through this.”

“With a car, I can get a decent job.”

“Like what?”

“Drive for Uber.” Cully wrote a figure down on a piece of notebook paper and slid it over to Olney.

“If I give you money, you’ll buy dope. Earn your money like the rest of us. You can work for me.”

“Doing what?”

“Research.”

“A hundred a day plus expenses.”

“Be serious,” Olney said. “Ten bucks an hour. I’ll have to talk to your mother, of course. She’ll be home in an hour.”

“I’m on a tight schedule.”

“How are you feeling these days?”

“I feel like I’m taking control of my life,” Cully said, his convenient optimism surfacing.

“Are you high right now?”

Cully shook his head.

Olney said, “I don’t approve of self-­medication.”

“I didn’t ask for your approval.”

“You asked for two thousand dollars. What’s happening to you, Cully?”

Cully pointed to his head. “Look, you have no idea what’s going on up here. You don’t have to live in my head. You don’t know the pain. I’m so sad. I’ve got no one. Nothing. I took the pills the shrinks gave me, all of them, Zoloft, Ativan, Wellbutrin, Zyprexa, Paxil, blah, blah, blah. They made me ill or impotent or confused or anxious or suicidal or restless, but not better. How would you like that? When I’m promised that meds will make the pain stop, and it doesn’t, only gets worse.”

Cully stared at his hands, the hands he clenched and unclenched. “The pain makes me act in ways I’m not proud of. It keeps me inside my miserable self, fighting it off. Look, when I take oxy, I feel euphoric. I have such good intentions and confidence, and superpowers. If I could stay high, I could get somewhere in life. It just doesn’t last very long.”

“Which superpowers?”

“I can do without food or water or sleep. I can hear sounds only dogs can hear. I can read another person’s thoughts sometimes. I can tame wild creatures, slow my metabolism, shut out the world. Things like that. Why would I give it up?”

Olney apologized to Cully for blowing up at him, said he hated to see him waste his talents and wanted him healthy again. Cully asked again for the money. Olney said if Kat agreed, he’d buy the car for him if he had a license. Cully said he needed to leave.

“Cully, please.” Olney reached across the table and took Cully’s hand. Cully took offense and jerked his hand away like it’d been scalded, stood, punched a hole in the drywall over the counter, and said maybe he should just kill himself. “Why can’t you just help me out? You’re my father. Who else will?”

“What happened to the voice recorder I loaned you when you were doing the interview with the philosopher for your podcast?”

“I have it.”

“I need it for work.”

“I have it.”

“On you?”

“In Palatka.”

“Let’s go get it.”

“Why are you being such an asshole?”

“Maybe you should leave.”

“No. I won’t.”

Olney wondered if this could really be happening.

Cully smiled and said, “Why don’t you call the cops, big man.”

*

These days Cully lives a nomadic life. One day he’s in, say, Seminole Pines, sleeping off a dose of oxycodone in the park; the next day he’s in Cypress Springs, then Tampa, then he’ll call Olney from Nokomis, saying he needs a loan to get him to Dolphin Island, and from there it’s a straight shot to Melancholy, and Melancholy is where he can get back on his feet. Besides his having to sleep under the occasional picnic table and do some dumpster dining, the life’s pretty easy, giving him time to contemplate the big questions, like, Who am I? and Who are these other people? and What are we all doing here?