We Take Care of Our Own

How My High School Friends Saved Me

December 28, 2015

The kids, Eira, and I are visiting my mother in my hometown for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Neither of my children can remember their last visit, back in August 2012, and I’m having great fun showing them the Monterey Peninsula where I grew up.

On our second full day, we go to El Estero Lake to ride the paddleboats. Carrie, who owns the franchise, was my high school classmate. Her family has run the operation here since the 1960s.

I haven’t seen Carrie in two years, and she hugs me tightly, and then embraces the kids. Heloise gives me the assessing look she’s started to give whenever she meets a female friend of mine. “I’ve known Carrie since I wasn’t much older than you,” I explain. That satisfies.

We strap on lifejackets and head out on the water. The kids laugh and try to reach the pedals, but it’s no use. I’m supplying all the power.

We lap the lake twice. We feed some ducks with snacks from Heloise’s bag, and restrain David from launching himself off the back of the paddle boat in pursuit of one particularly loud mallard.

Back at the boathouse, the kids eye the candy for sale. It’s only 11AM, but…

“Would you guys like something? If your dad says it’s okay?” Carrie winks at me.

I am the softest touch this side of a teddy bear factory. “Okay. One candy each.”

David chooses Skittles; Heloise, a Milky Way. I reach for my wallet. Carrie shakes her head.

“You know your money’s never any good here.” Her voice is tender, and it is firm. I hug Carrie tight, and hand my iPhone to one of her deck boys to snap a photo of all of us.

I promise Carrie I’ll see her soon, and the kids and I walk back to the car. Heloise takes my hand. I know what she’s going to ask.

“Why did she say your money’s never good?”

August 2013

I am living in the Days Inn in Monterey, just over the hill from my hometown. I am sleeping 18 hours a day, heavily medicated. I am fresh off the psych ward yet again, and my mother is too exhausted to have me at home. The rest of the family is worried, but also fed up with my antics.

There is nowhere else for me to go but this cheap motel.

My marriage is over. My promising career is shattered. I have fled Pasadena. Friends are backing away, feeling betrayed and lied to as one sordid revelation after another hits the press, usually because I can’t control my compulsion to confess everything I’ve done.

I am almost completely alone.

Almost.

Through the haze of the meds, I see an unlikely army appear, ready to rally around me. To a man and woman, they are my childhood classmates, folks I haven’t seen in decades. While most of us who grew up in Carmel left the county years ago, others stayed to build lives here.

These are the ones who show up.

My plight is all too public. I make some mention on Twitter of being in a motel in Monterey. In a small town, connected people can find information fast. Soon these old acquaintances are blowing up my phone.

Soon they are banging on the door, demanding to be let in.

One, Jennifer, texts. We’ve got you now.

I wake up one hazy afternoon to find groceries on my motel room table, groceries she quietly dropped by while I slept. I haven’t seen Jennifer since our ten-year reunion in 1995. When I text to thank her, she replies, We take care of our own.

Ernie comes by to see me and take me to an AA meeting. I am so drugged from the Zyprexa, Abilify, and Klonopin, I sleep through it. Afterwards, he buys me cigarettes, and tells me stories of his time as an Army Ranger — and later, the episodes that led to a court-martial and a dishonorable discharge.

In his backyard under the stars, Ernie reminds of the fort we built in a drainage ditch when we were in 3rd grade. He reminds me too that he was Lysander to my Demetrius in our 9th grade production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. He recalls that we both had crushes on the same pretty brunette, and this rouses me enough to argue with him whether said girl played Hermia or Helena.

Ernie drives me back to the motel. I fall asleep in his truck, and my classmate carries me to my room and gets me into bed.

Another day, Carrie takes me for a walk around El Estero Lake, her arm linked through mine. I am unsteady, so heavily drugged that I can only walk a few dozen yards without needing to sit down. I cry, pouring out my shame, machine-gunning a cotton-mouthed litany of all my sins.

Carrie listens. She pats my arm.

“Hugo, do you remember in 6th grade, Mr. Young’s class?” I nod.

“Do you remember the day he made fun of you in front of everyone for picking your nose and eating your boogers?”

In spite of myself, I laugh. Truly, it was utterly mortifying at the time. I was “Hugo Booger-Eater” for months.

“I have not forgotten,” I say.

“You probably never will. But you were a kid. We were all kids, good kids, messed up kids. And I’m not impressed by any book you wrote or job you had, and I’m not gonna judge you by the stupid human things you did. You’re just another one of us, no better, no worse. Forever.”

“The Booger Eater.”

“Yeah,” Carrie says. “But in high school, they called me a slut. People were awful.”

“I remember.”

“But you never did, Hugo. You were kind, no matter what anyone says, you were kind.”

I cry more. We hold hands. Carrie buys me lunch, and we eat it watching the paddleboats.

“Get well, and bring your kids here. I want to see them on the water.”

It seems like an impossible dream.

December 28, 2015

“Abba?” Heloise is impatient for an answer.

“Abba, did she say your money’s no good because you’re sick?”

“No, honey. And she doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with my money. She’s just an old, old friend doing something very kind.”

“So old friends give you things for free?”

I hesitate.

“Old friends like that do almost anything for you.”

Heloise considers. “I guess I’d like to be old then.”

I reach for her hand and David’s as well, and we skip back to the car.

June 13, 1985

Won’t be here much longer

But while we’re still alive

No one’s raging stronger

Than the class of ‘85

(My own contribution to poetry, scribbled on a notebook in the fall of 1984.)

On a cool and foggy late afternoon, the 180 or so survivors of Carmel High’s class of 1985 are graduating. This is a minor miracle.

We are a class noteworthy for our bad habits, mostly drinking and drugging. While the classes on either side of ours, 1984 and 1986, had students off to the Ivy League, we are at best a more unconventional, less upwardly mobile bunch.

Car accidents, a suicide, and a couple of overdoses have already diminished our ranks. In the years to come, there will be a feast of similar losses.

And there will be triumphs too, too numerous to count, but most of those will wait years.

I am not a hugger, and I am shy, but my classmates embrace me and wish me well with an intensity I’d never seen before. Carrie, Jennifer, Ernie and so many others, exultant and proud and together.

Claudine, our fiercely ebullient class vice-president, twirls her mortarboard over her head, jumps up and down. “You guys! You guys!” She is determined to hold our attention before we run off for photos with parents.

“You guys! Listen to me! We have to always stay together!”

For a moment, I wonder if she’s trying to turn this into a moment from “Grease,” but Claudine is serious.

“Whatever happens,” she yells, “we’re family, okay? No matter what!”

Jay, the biggest guy in school, left guard on the football team, scoops Claudine up, and from his huge arms, she cries louder still, “No matter what! You guys! You guys! Family!”

On the edge of the group, I wondered if that really means me too.

28 years later, I get my answer.

(The song that goes with this piece is, “I’m Coming Home,” by the legendary Bay Area metal outfit, Y&T. Y&T are still around after nearly half a century, and they were hugely popular when I was in high school. When we weren’t listening to country, we were listening to metal — and Y&T remain one of the most underrated and enduring practioners of that sound.)

I'm coming home
There's nowhere else
I'd rather be now
I'm coming home
Back home where I belong