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  A Pretty Depressing Time in My Life

  by Steve Nugent

  1.

  How to start.

  Okay. Here it goes.

  Mrs. Leene said I should begin by describing myself.

  So, my name is Steve Nugent. I’m just seventeen. It was my birthday last month, in November. Now it’s the middle of December, and the trees around here are caked in ice and sort of silvery in that creepy, wintry way, so right now seventeen seems like a hundred years off.

  Where I’m from, they call me White Steve because I’m so pale. The ones who call me that are pale too, but not as pale as me. I’m like soap or paper. I’m like Easter candy. I’m like glue or piano keys. If I stay in the sun too long, I turn pink; not red — pink, like Spam.

  In terms of size, I’m six foot three and about 145 pounds, which is way too skinny, I know. I can’t help that right now. The doctors say I’ll fill out in a few years. At this point I would describe myself as being a pretty high-percentage dodge-ball target.

  I guess my hair is brown, but there might be some red in it, which makes me worry about my future pubic situation — as in when I finally get some upholstery down low, what color it will be.

  That might be too much information.

  Sorry.

  I’m also blind in my right eye, which I will tell you more about later.

  I’m from East Foote, which is on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. Foote is on the Iowa side, and it’s about ten times the size of East Foote. To put it in perspective, before I left, most people in East Foote had to go stand on this old livestock promontory just to get cell phone reception.

  So I’m currently in residence at this place in the middle of Michigan called Burnstone Grove. There are about thirty-five kids here. About half of us are drug addicts, and the other half have tried to check out of this world in one way or another. Probably a third of us have dabbled in both pursuits. I don’t entirely fit into either category, so I’m what they call a Gray Grouper. The Red Groupers are the junkies, and the Blue Groupers are the suicide kids. There are only seven Gray Groupers, and we’re generally kept here for a month or two before we’re either shipped back home or sent to another, more affordable, facility. The Red and Blue Groupers can stay here for over a year sometimes. They get to see the seasons change and everything. So far it’s been nothing but snow and ice and frozen trees and this very low-looking iron sky.

  The truth is that I could easily be a Red or Blue Grouper. I’ve done some drugs, and I have to admit that I’ve thought about the other scenario more than once. All of that will come later, though. I don’t want to tell you everything just yet.

  It’s Christmas break, so we don’t have to go to classes. We still have to do group and one-on-one counseling and stuff like that. I have a few weeks off, so I thought this would be a good time to start this thing.

  A girl on the second floor who they call Silent Starla is here because she tried to kill herself with kitchen cleanser. I have no idea how that works exactly, but that’s what they say about her. She wears Chicago Cubs wristbands, but she’s sort of goth and hip-hop at the same time, which is really hard to explain correctly. I can’t really figure her out, but I must confess that she intrigues me.

  There’s this homosexual here from Detroit named Rory Parker. He’s what they call a bug-chaser, which means he only sleeps with men who are infected with AIDS. He stays on the fourth floor, and his parents are said to be the wealthiest family in the state of Michigan. Apparently he’s been trying to get HIV for like three years now. He’s a Blue Grouper and wears so much black eyeliner he looks like he works at a haunted house or something.

  There’s this Red Grouper down the hall from me named Shannon Lynch who can stick $1.87 in change up his nose. It’s pretty amazing. He gets like four quarters, a bunch of dimes, and a few nickels all the way up it. He’s from the western suburbs of Chicago, and he’s been here for three months. He had a pretty bad problem with heroin — he was shooting it and everything. His parents dropped him off three months ago, and he’s been clean ever since. He’s one of four Red Groupers on this new methadone program for teens that they just instituted called Mindful Methadone. He told me that they mix the stuff with Tang and that it has a pretty bitter aftertaste.

  In my opinion, Shannon Lynch is the coolest person at Burnstone Grove. He wears this old jean jacket buttoned all the way up and pretty much keeps to himself. Besides the change-up-the-nose thing, what’s cool about him is that he is a trained cellist — as in he spent a year at this special conservatory in Cleveland and everything — but he listens to punk rock, like old Sex Pistols and Meters. He also knows a lot about Shakespeare and Sam Shepard. He says he wants to be a stage actor. He’s currently reading this book called The Theatre and Its Double, by Antonin Artaud. He nods a little when he reads it. Most people who nod like that when they read can’t pull that kind of thing off. I genuinely hope things work out for Shannon.

  So I’m writing all of this down because Mrs. Leene, my lead counselor, thought it would be good for me. I haven’t been able to say much in group, which is short for group therapy, although I’m sure you already knew that. To be honest, I haven’t said one word in group yet. I pretty much just sit on my hands and listen to everyone else. I guess I’m sort of introverted. Or maybe it’s a combination of shyness and boredom. At my first Gray Group meeting, the seven of us had to pick one other person and use one positive word to describe him or her. This girl named Amanda Pelt said I was “pensive,” which made me try to seem anti-pensive for like three days after that, like I’d walk around trying to not think and constantly de-furrow my brow and that kind of thing. But that just led to a general feeling of anxiety and dried out my eyes for some reason, and then I pretty much felt like holing up in my room and picking my cuticles.

  Amanda Pelt was born in Pacific Palisades, which is in some weird part of Los Angeles, and then moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin, after her dad died in his sleep. She apparently has these really high SAT scores but has a severe problem with feeling anything, so she does things like slam her hand in silverware drawers and stuff like that. She has really pretty blue eyes. One day a few weeks ago, I thought I was in love with her, but when I sat next to her in the cafeteria, she told me to get away from her.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry. Just get the fuck away from me.”

  Yeah, that was pretty harsh.

  I haven’t thought about her in the same way since.

  Mrs. Leene calls this whole writing thing bibliotherapy, which sounds pretty intimidating if you ask me. By the time anyone reads this, hopefully I’ll be out of this place and on to better things.

  So a couple of months ago, my brother, Welton, hanged himself with a necktie.

  I think that’s a good place to begin.

  My mom died just a few weeks before that, and I wasn’t particularly excited about much.

  At the wake they kept his casket open. I know I was probably supposed to be thinking about a lot of important stuff like life and death and the hereafter, but for some reason I was preoccupied by looking for bruises around my brother’s throat. In all honesty there wasn’t much to see because the funeral home did a pretty thorough makeup job.

  When my cousin Grace caught me touching Welton’s Adam’s apple, I got an erection; I’m not sure why. Grace is pretty, but relatives aren’t supposed to be able to have that effect on you. She looked directly at me, and my face got so hot, I thought my eyes would burst. I had to walk back to my seat with my hands clasped in front of my slacks like I was praying.

  For some reason, during the hymns I kept seeing Jesus with an erection, too —
like up there on the cross with all those ribs and his big holy member. That scared me a little.

  Over the St. Rose of East Foote’s confessionals there’s this huge stained-glass window. On the other side looms an ancient maple tree whose shadow trembles on the glass like a witch’s hand. It was like ninety-five degrees that day, and the church fans weren’t doing much more than pushing the hot air around. I was imagining myself up in the crotch of that maple tree, watching everybody looking grave and bereft and holding back the tears, wondering if anyone was curious about where I was. I know that’s selfish, but I couldn’t help it; it’s where my mind goes sometimes.

  After Welton’s funeral, a bunch of my overweight relatives went bowling. My aunt Ricky organized it because she thought it would keep everyone’s spirits up. Aunt Ricky’s really into bowling and bingo and family potlucks and all that. I blew it off and went home and sat on the toilet for a few hours. I guess I wasn’t feeling particularly sporty that day.

  No one knows why Welton did it. Welton’s my older brother, by the way. Or was my older brother.

  When I think about it now, I’m not sure if Welton would have been a Red Grouper or a Blue Grouper. He was sort of both, if you want to know the truth. They would have had to combine colors for him and start a Purple Group.

  I just realized that a grouper is a fish. In the Burnstone Grove library dictionary, it says it’s “any of various often large food and game fishes of the genera Epinephelus.” I wonder if that’s how the faculty here thinks of us all — as a school of oversize, deeply troubled walking fish.

  The weird thing about the library is that the Blue Groupers aren’t allowed to check out hardcover books because it’s supposed to be somehow possible to kill yourself with them. I can’t picture that. Maybe with a corner or something.

  So Welton and my mom weren’t that close.

  My mom my mom my mom my mom my mom . . .

  They actually fought a lot because Welton had problems in school. He cut classes a lot and smoked pot during free periods and got suspended once for turning in an illegal term paper on The Canterbury Tales that he’d purchased off the Internet. Besides basketball, what he was really good at was drawing things. He could pretty much perfectly sketch anything he saw, but he stopped doing it around the age of thirteen after he came home from this art camp in Des Moines with poison ivy and chigger bites.

  My mom always urged him to develop his artistic skill, but all Welton wanted to do was play basketball and run around with his burnout friends at night. I always thought it was strange that he was a jock and a druggie — that’s not your everyday combination. Once my dad caught him huffing model airplane glue, but he sort of turned a blind eye. He walked in on him in the bathroom, and Welton was inhaling the fumes from the bottom of a brown paper bag. I was in the hallway, on my way to the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?” my dad asked him.

  “Nothing,” Welton answered, and crumpled the bag.

  My dad stood there for a moment and said, “Be good, okay, son?”

  “Okay,” Welton said.

  Neither of them knew I saw that.

  Maybe Welton killed himself because he lived in the basement. Who knows what all that damp air and cement will do to a person? Down there there’s nothing but the washer and dryer and unwanted books and Welton’s BMX mag wheels and my old Green Machine and my dad’s kayak that he never uses and a folded-up Ping-Pong table and boxes of Christmas ornaments and photo albums and report cards and ancient, glued-shut Advent calendars and basically all types of other things that are easier to forget about if they’re stuffed away somewhere.

  Maybe he killed himself because for the last year of his life all he did was smoke weed, play Vice City on his PlayStation II, and listen to Bottomside’s “Forty Holes and Forty Goals” on permanent replay.

  As a junior, Welton was the starting small forward on the East Foote varsity basketball team, but he had to quit three-quarters of the way through the season because of a herniated disk. He had this condition called sciatica, which almost crippled him. If he stood for more than two minutes at a time, the backs of his legs would start aching so bad he’d have to sit down. They were going to perform invasive surgery to fuse his vertebrae, but one of my mom’s friends whose husband had suffered from the same condition convinced her to make Welton wait it out, to see if the bulge would somehow go away. Fortunately for Welton, it did — the doctor said it was a small miracle — but my brother never quite made it back onto the basketball court.

  The other day I was reading about these dogs called salukis that have to run or they’ll die of depression. I’m not suggesting that my parents had canine genes or anything, but maybe through some process of karmic evolution, Welton had some saluki in him. Maybe when he stopped playing ball, something shut down and could never get rebooted.

  This Blue Grouper from the second floor told Shannon Lynch that we’ve all been animals in former lives. The guy’s name is Jimmy Smallhorn and he has a permanent facial tick and he’s from the Upper Peninsula — a Uper, they call him. He told Shannon that he was a wolf in his past life and that sometimes he can feel his former wolfness creeping into his thoughts. I try to stay away from that guy.

  And then again, maybe it was some weird noise in my brother’s head, some little digital murmur he never told anyone about. I’ve heard about that — how you wake up one day and there’s like this permanent dial tone droning somewhere behind the meat in your head, a little Dustbuster trapped where the brain saves you from going crazy. After a while you wind up ending it all just to make things quiet again.

  I found Welton in his room in the basement. He’d knotted the necktie around a hook at the top of his door. The hook had broken, but that didn’t stop the asphyxiation. What’s weird is that he was kneeling. It looked like he was praying or pulling up weeds in a garden.

  His TV was blaring applause from The Price Is Right. An old Hispanic woman named Carmelita had just won the Showcase Showdown, and she was so excited she practically body-slammed Bob Barker. Why I can remember that woman’s name, I have no idea. It’s weird how those random details will stick in your head.

  For some reason Welton was nude and half his face was blue. Right now when I close my eyes and try and see the parts of his body, I keep missing stuff, like his arms and his shoulders. I can see his face as clear as day and I could even go into detail about his Adam’s apple or this little blue vein under his right eye or the weird paste that was coming out of his left nostril, but other more obvious things like limbs are lost to me. Limbs and eye color. I can’t place that either. It was like someone had stolen that stuff.

  Once I overheard this old man at the Foote dog track telling someone that when greyhounds die, they ship them off to a special factory in Mexico and grind them up and turn them into model airplane glue. For some reason, for the past week or so I keep imagining Welton as a little tube of glue. Mrs. Leene thinks it’s part of the process of dealing with death, that we have to somehow objectify the ones we lose in order to let go of them. I’m not sure about that. It seems a little easy and logical.

  When my dad saw Welton’s death pose, he just sat on the bed and fluffed a pillow, like he wanted to go to sleep or something.

  I was like, “Dad . . . Dad,” but he just kept fluffing the pillow.

  The EMT guys were as quiet as aliens, and when they pushed the gurney through the living room, I finally reached over and closed Welton’s mouth.

  “Bye,” I said to him as they wheeled him away.

  Just for a second I had the feeling that he might say something back, but he didn’t. He just looked sort of waxy and stunned.

  My dad had to fill out a bunch of forms. He didn’t ask any questions, and when the ambulance pulled away, it was like they were hauling away a piece of furniture, like Welton was a table or a grandfather clock or something. I know my mom would have been making coffee for everyone and trying not to cry — she was strong like that — but she was already dead,
and like so many things in our kitchen, our coffeemaker had lost its purpose.

  The cops were even quieter than the ambulance people. There were two of them and they had identical mustaches and I kept thinking they were lovers. My dad had to fill out yet another report and answer even more questions, and after a few friendly squeezes on my shoulder, they left with such ease it was as if they’d stopped by to drop off a bushel of apples.

  The last thing Welton told me was that Lincoln was a better president than Washington. I have no idea why he said that or what it was supposed to mean. It was the middle of the night and he was standing naked in front of my bedroom door and he was totally wasted.

  “Lincoln was a better president, Steve,” he said. His testicles were dangling all huge and lazy.

  I was like, “Better than who?”

  “Better than Washington.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You can tell ’cause of the pictures,” he added. “His beard and stuff.”

  2.

  My room is colder than usual.

  Last night I had to pull the covers off the other bed. Not that that matters much, seeing as no one is actually sleeping in it. I am currently the only Gray Grouper without a roommate.

  I wonder if the people at Burnstone Grove make it colder on purpose. To somehow regulate us or whatever.

  Don’t get me wrong — I don’t live in a cell. I have a sink with running water and a pretty decent bed and electricity and a closet and this rose-colored carpeting, and the things in my room are made out of real wood — it really isn’t all that bad. And I do have a window, too, which overlooks a stand of fir trees that are currently shaggy with snow.

  So this isn’t some third-world like hovel or whatever; it really isn’t.

  Yesterday Shannon lent me a CD by this band called Interpol. I fell asleep listening to a song called “Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down.” I couldn’t understand all of the lyrics, but it’s a pretty good song.

  I was told earlier today that I might get a roommate within the next week or two. They didn’t tell me anything about him. I hope he’s cool and not some psycho Blue Grouper from like Flint or someplace.