The Boys from Santa Cruz

“Now that that’s behind us-Amy says you have some experience as a bouncer?” Barry was around Pender’s size, but looked taller in his cowboy boots and high-crowned Stetson hat.

“It was a long time ago, but yeah.” Like most of his colleagues in the Cortland County Sheriff’s Department in the late sixties, he’d done his share of moonlighting in bars and at shows.

“’Cause no offense, hoss, but you look a little out of shape to me.”

“Maybe, but I reckon I can still eighty-six a drunk with the best of ’em-hoss.”

The first few hours, there wasn’t much work for the bouncers. Pender helped Barry break up a fight, took the car keys from a falling-down drunk, and called a cab for him. By the end of the band’s second set, when he did have to run a bottle-throwing customer, the come-along hold he’d learned as a young deputy sheriff in Cortland came in handier than anything he’d been taught in the FBI Academy. What you want to do, Sheriff Hartung used to tell his men, is leverage the subject’s wrist up past his shoulder blade, so he’s too busy treading air to put up a fight.

When things heated up during the third set, Pender earned even Barry’s respect by smoothly disarming a drunken patron. “You’ll make a bouncer yet, hoss,” he told Pender later, after closing, when the crew and the band were unwinding with a few drinks, swapping songs and shooting the bull. And with a few slugs of Jim Beam under his belt, Pender discovered, it was almost possible, if not to actually forget the stuff he was trying not to remember, then to pretend to forget, at least for a little while longer.

2

Although I’d figured out the game the first night, it wasn’t until the next morning that Dr. O explained to us what the stakes were. If you played it right, you got to go home (graduate, they called it) and finish your treatment in the bosom of your familial unit. If you played it wrong, you went from there into a residential program. And in case that sounds like bull sessions and pajama pizza parties to you, you should know that in rehab language, residential generally means “locked.”

On the second day’s hike, when we were finally allowed to talk to each other (the counselors sandwiched us in on the trail, two ahead and two behind), I learned that my revelations the night before had earned me some respect from my so-called peers. Brent was practically creaming. “Your own pad, your own gun, all da dope you cou’ smoke, no muhfuggin’ school. Muhfuh, dat musta been sweeeet!”

“Save your breath, wiggah,” I told him, having just caught a glimpse of the next rise in the trail. “You’re gonna need it.”

It wasn’t all work, though. After an especially hairy canyon descent, we broke for lunch at a secret swimming hole Gary claimed to have discovered-Lake Gary, he called it. Everybody changed into bathing suits, even the counselors, and we swam and splashed and frolicked around, happy as a bunch of otters for a couple hours.

The campfire group therapy that night was mostly about Dusty. Her deal was rough sex with older guys, we learned. It had started with her stepfather abusing her, of course, but by the time she was fifteen she had worked her way through a neighbor, two teachers, a minister, and the shrink who was supposed to be helping her with her problem in the first place.

Dr. O kept trying to get her to cop to having low self-esteem. He said that was why she liked it rough, and let the men use her. She made what I thought were a couple of very good arguments, such as that everything he was saying was based on the assumption that sex was bad. And even if that were true, she added, she was using the men as much as they were using her.

But after a while it appeared to me that she was starting to give in to him, to go along with all his bullshit. Dr. O would make some lame observation, and she would give him this wet-lipped, deer-eyed look, and say something like “You know, I never thought of it that way before.”

I was probably the only one who noticed what was going on. “You planning to let Dr. O screw you?” I asked her that night. We’d set up our tents with the back walls touching so we could talk to each other through them.

“If I have to in order to graduate,” she said. “I just can’t face being locked up again.”

They broke us up the third day. The girls hiked with Kara and Diane, the boys with Gary and Dr. O, and we had separate campfires that night. If anything, there was even more bullshit involved in the boys only therapy sessions, with everybody trying to outdo each other in acting tough.

Day four we marched in silence again, and instead of a campfire we had individual sessions, one of us at a time versus all four counselors. Versus is my word, of course, but it definitely describes my session. They started off by asking me to tell them in my own words why I was here, but without blaming anybody else. I said in that case it wouldn’t be my own words, would it? Things went downhill from there.

The fifth day was the hardest climb of all, up a steep mountain trail in the broiling sun. By the time we set up camp in a boulder-strewn meadow with a view of forever, even my blisters had blisters. My feet hurt so bad I finally consented to let Dr. O (who was our medic despite the fact that he wasn’t a real doctor) treat them. By then I hated him with a passion, having had all that time to obsess about him and Dusty having sex. It hadn’t happened yet, but if it did, it would be soon. Tomorrow morning, we were told at campfire, our individual vision quests would begin.

These were to be like our final exams. We would be picking out our own campsites, isolated from each other, and making our own shelters, where we were supposed to spend twenty-four hours without eating or sleeping, and thereby obtain Wisdom with a capital Wiz.

There was more to it than that, of course. Among other things, we were supposed to find out what our so- called totem animal was. There was also this deal where we were each given what Dr. O called a MacGuffin, a single candy bar that was supposed to represent our own particular addiction or barrier, sex in Dusty’s case and drugs in my own. (But what if your addiction was candy bars? I joked to Dusty.) And although nobody came right out and said it, if you had half a brain, it was kind of obvious that you weren’t supposed to actually eat the MacGuffin.

I wasn’t buying any of it. All I could think about, that night before the vision quest, was Dr. O sneaking up to Dusty’s campsite tomorrow night, and the two of them getting it on. Oh, god, how I hated that man. If he hadn’t already been on it, I’d have added him to my fantasy revenge list. Instead I had to settle for mentally underlining his name.

Sleep was impossible. My tent was getting smaller and stuffier by the second. I opened the flap and stuck my head out to look at the stars. On the far side of the meadow, I could see all four counselors sitting around the campfire, having one of their endless gabfests, which meant nobody was watching us.

Figuring this might be my last chance to be alone with Dusty, I crawled around to her tent. She wasn’t there. My first assumption was that she was off screwing somebody. But just before I went ballistic, I saw a small darting figure zigzagging across the meadow from more or less the direction of the campfire. I dove into Dusty’s tent, and a second later she dove in on top of me. We exchanged oofs.

“What are you doing here?” she asked me.

“I was looking for you. Where were you?”

“Eavesdropping on the counselors. And guess what: it’s all bullshit.”

“Congratulations,” I told her. “You just won the Academy Award for Duh!”

“No, I mean the whole graduation, no graduation thing.” She grabbed my hand so tightly it hurt. “They already know who’s going home and who’s not.”

I can’t say I was surprised. “I’m guessing we’re among the nots.”

“We are the nots. Dr. O said I was ‘continually displaying age-inappropriate seductive behavior’ toward him. They’re sending me to a residential in Orange County.”

“What about me?”

“Military school in Arizona. They had a good laugh about that. Voted you most likely to make the Ten Most Wanted someday.”

“Ten Most Unwanted, more likely.”

She grabbed my hand in both of hers and pressed it flat against her chest. “Let’s go, Luke. Let’s run away, just you and me.”

I could feel her heart thumping like a scared rabbit’s through the thin fabric of her T-shirt and was acutely