He wanted to go on Prozac. From my random sampling, a good half of his student body was on one antidepressant or another, though he did request Prozac in particular. I’ve always been leery of legal restoratives, and I did worry about the drug’s reputation for flattening; the vision of our son even more dulled to the world boggled the mind. But so rarely out of the States those days, I, too, had acculturated myself to the notion that in a country with more money, greater freedom, bigger houses, better schools, finer health care, and more unfettered opportunity than anywhere else on earth, of course an abundance of its population would be out of their minds with sorrow. So I went along with it, and the psychiatrist we sought seemed as happy to hand out fistfuls of pharmaceuticals as our dentist to issue free lollipops.
Most children are mortified by the prospect of their parents’ divorce, and I don’t deny that the conversation he overheard from the hallway sent Kevin into a tailspin. Nevertheless, I was disconcerted. That boy had been trying to split us up for fifteen years. Why wasn’t he satisfied? And if I really was such a horror, why wouldn’t he gladly jettison his awful mother? In retrospect, I can only assume that it was bad enough living with a woman who was cold, suspicious, resentful, accusatory, and aloof. Only one eventuality must have seemed worse, and that was living with you, Franklin. Getting stuck with Dad.
Getting stuck with Dad the Dupe.
MARCH 25, 2001
Dear Franklin,
I have a confession to make. For all my ragging on you in these days, I’ve become shamefully dependent on television. In fact, as long as I’m baring alclass="underline" One evening last month in the middle of Frasier, the tube winked out cold, and I’m afraid that I rather fell apart—banging the set, plugging and unplugging, wiggling knobs. I’m long past weeping over Thursday on a daily basis, but I go into a frenzy when I can’t find out how Niles takes the news that Daphne’s going to marry Donnie.
Anyway, tonight after the usual chicken breast (a bit overcooked), I was flicking through the channels when the screen suddenly filled with our son’s face. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I’m not. And this wasn’t the ninth-grade school photo all the papers ran—out of date, black-and-white, with its acid grin—but Kevin’s more robust visage at seventeen. I recognized the interviewer’s voice. It was Jack Marlin’s documentary.
Marlin had ditched the dry thriller title “Extracurricular Activities” for the punchier “Bad Boy,” reminding me of you; I’ll finish off that bad boy in a couple of hours, you’d say, about an easy scouting job. You applied the expression to just about everything save our son.
To whom Jack Marlin applied it readily enough. Kevin, you see, was the star. Marlin must have gotten Claverack’s consent, for interspersed with shots of the tearful aftermath—the piles of flowers outside the gym, the memorial service, Never Again town meetings—was an exclusive interview with KK himself. Rattled, I almost switched it off. But after a minute or two, I was riveted. In fact, Kevin’s manner was so arresting that at first I could barely attend to what he said. He was interviewed in his dormitory cubicle—like his room, kept in rigid order and unadorned with posters or knickknacks. Tipping his chair on two legs, hooking an elbow around its back, he looked thoroughly in his element. If anything, he seemed larger, full of himself, bursting from his tiny sweats, and I had never seen him so animated and at his ease. He basked under the camera’s eye as if under a sunlamp.
Marlin was off-screen, and his questions were deferential, almost tender, as if he didn’t want to scare Kevin away. When I tuned in, Marlin was asking delicately whether Kevin still maintained that he was one of the tiny percentage of Prozac patients who had a radical and antipathetic reaction to the drug.
Kevin had learned the importance of sticking by your story by the time he was six. “Well, I definitely started feeling a little weird.”
“But according to both the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, a causal linkage between Prozac and homicidal psychosis is purely speculative. Do you think more research—?”
“Hey,” Kevin raised a palm, “I’m no doctor. That defense was my lawyer’s idea, and he was doing his job. I said I felt a little weird. But I’m not looking for an excuse here. I don’t blame some satanic cult or pissy girlfriend or big bad bully who called me a fag. One of the things I can’t stand about this country is lack of accountability. Everything Americans do that doesn’t work out too great has to be somebody else’s fault. Me, I stand by what I done. It wasn’t anybody’s idea but mine.”
“What about that sexual abuse case? Might that have left you feeling bruised?”
“Sure I was interfered with. But hell,” Kevin added with a confidential leer, “that was nothing compared to what happens here.” (They cut to an interview with Vicki Pagorski, whose denials were apoplectic with methinks-thou-dost-protest-too-much excess. Of course, too feeble an indignation would have seemed equally incriminating, so she couldn’t win. And she really ought to do something about that hair.)
“Can we talk a little about your parents, Kevin?” Marlin resumed.
Hands behind head. “Shoot.”
“Your father—did you get along, or did you fight?”
“Mister Plastic?” Kevin snorted. “I should be so lucky we’d have a fight. No, it was all cheery chirpy, hot dogs and Cheez Whiz. A total fraud, you know? All like, Let’s go to the Natural History Museum, Kev, they have some really neat-o rocks! He was into some Little League fantasy, stuck in the 1950s. I’d get this, I luuuuuuv you, buddy! stuff, and I’d just look at him like, Who are you talking to, guy? What does that mean, your dad ‘loves’ you and hasn’t a [bleep]ing clue who you are? What’s he love, then? Some kid in Happy Days. Not me.”
“What about your mother?”
“What about her?” Kevin snapped, though until now he’d been affable, expansive.
“Well, there was that civil suit brought for parental negligence—”
“Totally bogus,” said Kevin flatly. “Rank opportunism, frankly. More culture of compensation. Next thing you know, geezers’ll be suing the government for getting old and kids’ll be taking their mommies to court because they came out ugly. My view runs, life sucks; tough luck. Fact is, the lawyers knew Mumsey had deep pockets, and that Woolford cow can’t take bad news on the chin.”
Just then the camera angle panned ninety degrees, zooming in on the room’s only decoration that I could see taped over his bed. Badly creased from having been folded small enough to fit in a pocket or wallet, it was a photograph of me. Jesus Christ, it was that head-shot on an Amsterdam houseboat, which disappeared when Celia was born. I was sure he’d torn it to pieces.
“But whether or not your mother was legally remiss,” Marlin proceeded, “maybe she paid you too little attention—?”
“Oh, lay off my mother.” This sharp, menacing voice was alien to me, but it must have been useful inside. “Shrinks here spend all day trying to get me to trash the woman, and I’m getting a little tired of it, if you wanna know the truth.”