Top Three Atrocities, Chronologically #3: The Unthinkable

        My mother’s death cut one of the great cables anchoring me to the world, and I’ve been tipping off kilter ever since. 

        At the time I felt nothing. I didn’t answer condolence letters. I didn’t visit the grave. I didn’t cry at her funeral. I didn’t deliver the eulogy. I never talked about her at all, except to Lonnie. He was the only one who understood. Sometimes I think she meant more to him than she did to me. They say however bad things are one adult who understands you can make all the difference. My mother, Janice Mohler, was that one adult for Lonnie.

            

        For me she was everything. For him she was everything else.

Their friendship began after late summer baseball game, soon after we arrived back on island from California.

            This is how Lonnie told me the story. His team had just lost after a crushing strike-out by the enthusiastic but comically inept David Trezize. “Learn how to play ball, faggot,” Lonnie had sneered.

            Mom took him aside after the game. “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “Insulting that boy. It’s mean and sort of … paltry? Plus I really don’t think you’re fooling anyone. And you shouldn’t have to.”

            Lonnie looked around for me, but I was gathering up the bats and balls, stowing them in Jack Henderson’s Suburban.

            “What are you talking about?”

            She put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

            “Yeah? Well when you really have nothing to be ashamed of, people don’t say shit like that. Okay? They say ‘Come to my party Saturday night’, and ‘Where did you get those shoes?’ They ask your advice about stuff. They don’t give pep talks.”

            Janice sighed. “No one will accept you for who you are until you do.”

            “What does that even mean?”

            “It’s time to come out, Lonnie.”

            “What?”

            “Or go much deeper in. I suppose that’s an option.”

            Lonnie stared at her. “I don’t get this.”

            “I’m saying … stop spending your money on clothes and expensive hair-cuts, stop wearing those V-neck t-shirts, and give up on the self-tanning lotion. For a start. The faux homophobia has to go, also. You have to work on a little straight guy performance art. Live the part! Or stop acting -- and tell the world you’re gay.”

            “I’m not gay!”

            A sad smile. “I know. That would be so much easier. Believe me, I’ve been there. I tried so hard for so long. So many awful boys. I didn’t just sleep around, though -- I had a kid! I got married. You have to give me credit. No half measures for Janice Mohler! But it felt so good to stop, Lonnie. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It was like – taking off tight shoes and walking on the sand, the hard-packed sand, where you let the water kiss your toes. It was such a huge relief.”

            Silence rolled between them, like one of those costume racks they used in the theater. Would he have to give up theater, too? That – or audition for The Boys in the Band.  He almost laughed, then felt tears coming on. He clamped down. No crying, not here, not in the middle of the Delta fields on a Saturday afternoon. No way.

A crowd of team-mates pushed by, with shoves and arm punches and “Good game!” and “See ya tomorrow.” and “Burgers at Stubbys!”

How long would that camaraderie last if he took this woman’s advice?

When they were alone again he said, “I’m scared.”

She pulled him into a quick hug, whispered in her ear. “Of course you are. How could you not be scared? But it’s okay. All the really important things are scary.”

Lonnie didn’t act on Mom’s guidance, not for a while anyway, but he began spending time with her. She bought him a push rake and took him scalloping in Madaket Harbor when family season began, and taught him to open the little bi-valve mollusks in the make-shift shanty behind our house. I wasn’t interested, so it was just the two of them. Sometimes Haden Krakauer joined them, revealing secret spots where they could take their limit in less than an hour, and identifying coastal waterbirds – oystercatchers and red knots, sanderlings and whimbrels -- heading south for their fall migration.

Mom took Lonnie to concerts at the Congregational church and ‘shoulder season’ Theater Lab plays in the Methodist church basement, encouraged him to try out for the big winter production of A Christmas Carol. She cooked dinners for the gang, introducing Lonnie and Sippy to exotic vegetables like arugula, Kohl Rabi and Bok Choi. She let them drink wine at the table and taught them the difference between a fifteen dollar plonk merlot and a forty dollar Willamette Valley Pinot Noir. She gave him reading lists: Sappho, Jean Genet, and Ronald Firbank; Whitman, Collette, and Woolf. James Baldwin and Larry Kramer.

She also gave him a lot of good advice – bullshit other people if you have to, but never bullshit yourself. Never ask permission, people love to say no. You can never go wrong by keeping your mouth shut. Fat is good for you. Keep your vinyl. Unfortunately she also gave him one piece of catastrophically bad advice.

She told him to come out to Mark Toland.

She had sensed Mark knew Lonnie pretty well. She had seen Mark’s feminine side. He could sing all of “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy –“Why did I do it? What did it get me? Scrapbooks full of me in  the background” – he was a wit (He had complained to her that daylight savings time was “jet lag without travel”) He was a sharp dresser with a knack for physical intimacy, hugging and touching both boys and girls in an easy way that made them feel comfortable and included. Of course, he wasn’t openly gay but might be bi-sexual, and he was certainly open minded.

It was worth a try.

Lonnie found Mark Toland the next day, in the AV room, cutting some footage for his on-going semi documentary about high school life. By some miracle there was no one else around, not even the film geek sycophants or a supervising teacher. Normally students weren’t allowed to use the Avid digital editing equipment, but Mark’s family had donated it to the school (largely to get him out of the house), so as usual he got a pass from the rules that everyone else had to follow.

Lonnie stepped inside. The conversational opening seemed obvious.

“What’s this movie about, anyway?”

Mark swiveled around in the chair. “Well … it was going to be, like, a documentary about the school? But then Jane Stiles saw the raw footage and she showed me how we would could put a story into it. A little mystery – what happened to Mr. Hilzenrath?”

“Hilzy? Something happened to Hilzy?”

Bob Hilzenrath was Lonnie’s favorite teacher, an affable historian who transformed droning lists of dates and battles into scandal and gossip. He fleshed out book-plate kings and presidents with bizarre details – Henry VIII’s “grooms of the stool” who were responsible for cleaning him up after he used the toilet, Abraham Lincoln’s enshrinement in the wrestling Hall of Fame. He turned ancient uprisings into cliff-hanging stories. George Washington’s troops almost starved to death in the brutal winter of 1777 – what saved them? How did Napoleon escape from Elba?

The thought of Hilzy disappearing – or even quitting to write that big historical novel about the fall of Pompeii he was always talking about – made Lonnie nervous.

But there nothing to worry about. “Hilzy’s fine. He’s helping us with the film. He told us to make his character a secret millionaire, working at the school on a bet. The kidnappers figure him out because of his shoes. That was Jane’s idea. The shoes look normal but if you really look at them you can see they’re three hundred dollar Testoni brogues.”

            So now they were talking about secrets! It was fate. Somehow this random conversation about Mark Toland’s movie had opened a door for him – maybe only a crack, but he could push through, if he was brave enough. The blood was shrilling in Lonnie’s head like a tea kettle on a high flame. This was his chance.

            He took it. “So the theme of your movie is ... secrets are bad?”

            Mark craned around in his chair to look up at Lonnie. “The theme of my movie is secrets are fun.”

            “I think they’re poison. They poison you. Like – eating something bad and getting sick, and you have to puke and you really really don’t want to but you know you have to so you sit still and maybe sip some water and hope the feeling goes away but it doesn’t, it just gets worse.”

            Mark stood up, stepped away from the desk. He rested his hands on Lonnie’s shoulders. “Do you have something to tell me, kiddo?”

            Maybe it was that one affectionate word, or the electric charge of those big hands touching him, but Lonnie found himself in motion, lunging in for a kiss – a bizarre echo of Todd’s catastrophic dive at Jane Stiles.

Mark’s reaction was different, though. He effortlessly sidestepped the lunge, though Lonnie’s lips did manage to brush the stubble on his cheeks. He laughed as Lonnie stumbled toward the industrial shelving that lined the far wall.

            “Oy my God, this is great. I can’t believe --” He pulled back another guffaw, into a gasp, caught his breath. “How could I not see that one coming? We have to do it again? The camera was sitting at a weird angle. I mean … I got the shot but you’re barely in the frame --”

            “Wait, you what?”

            “My camera? On the tripod over there? I wanted some footage of me editing footage. Very meta. And I wound up getting this! The solution to the crime! The crazy homo kidnapped Hilzy and has tied him up in the basement! Wait, listen, let me set up the retake. You can even kiss me for a second if we get the shot. How’s that for a deal? Of course, I might have to knee you in the groin or something. I don’t know, it’ll happen in the moment. Tonight we improvise! Hold on, let me get this organized …”

            But Lonnie had already fled. Running down the deserted corridor he could hear the fading sound of Mark Toland’s blithe charming voice. “Wait! Where are you going? I’m going to make you a star! The villain always gets the good lines! Like Hannibal Lecter. You can even be a cannibal if you want …”

            Well, that was Lonnie’s nightmare. My mom had her own nightmare, and Mark Toland was slouching with his sly little smile at the spot where the two nightmares met, though none of us knew it at the time. The breakup with Ronni started my mom on the drugs. And mark Toland had the supply. He even gave her the “friend price” for the oxy-codone, because of Lonnie. He even offered friendly advice: “Take as much as you want! It’s safe. This isn’t ‘hillbilly heroin’ Heroin is hillbilly heroin.” But Mom She would never have started with the drugs, if not for her broken heart. I know the whole story. She told it to me.

            Mom had come out five years before, but it was difficult being a lesbian – she tended to misread the signals and approach straight women. Apps like Grindr were a decade away and not really designed for gay women; more appropriate ones like Wing Ma’m and Mesh weren’t even a glint in some programmer’s eye. But Ronni Hall had approached her, at the first NHS parents’ night.

            Shuttling down the hall between classrooms  after hearing an absurdly young math teacher confess that he had “never taught in a classroom environment before” and an alarmingly old English teacher boast that she was planning to reinstate sentence diagramming and text memorization, Ronni took her hand. Janice looked up into a mischievous smile. “It gets worse,” Ronni said. “Wait until you hear the gym teacher talking about teaching writing across the curriculum." 

“I would have liked that,” Mom said, easing into the banter. “Essays on why I hate dodgeball.”

When the ordeal was finished, Ronni followed her to her car, leaned her back against the driver’s side door and kissed her.

When they came up for air, Mom was laughing. “That was easy!”

Ronni shrugged. “Hard is over-rated.”

“Any gay woman who’s been married to a man would agree to that one.”

They both laughed, and dove in again and by the time they drove home to their separate, very different houses they were a couple.

Looking back on it, Mom should have known it wouldn’t last. Ronni was everything she wasn’t – successful (one third of the architectural firm Steadman, Hall & DeMarco), beautiful (she had actually modelled, for Teen and Seventeen when she was in high school), athletic (she coached  NHS girls’ hockey and had just missed the US Olympic Equestrian team), intellectual (she had read Proust – in French) and blissfully extroverted. She had dozens of friends, gay and straight, loved striking up conversations with strangers on the boat to Hyannis or wandering around the MFA in Boston. All three of her kids were adopted when she and her “‘first wife’? ‘childhood sweetheart’? We need our own terminology!” had lived in San Diego – triplets from an immigrant family whose mother and father had been deported. She came to Nantucket to design an Orange County pharmaceutical CEO’s second (or was it third) home, and like so many people who brushed against the island’s easy living and natural beauty in those days, she never left. Ronni’s wife, the mysterious “Trudy”, a pediatric anesthesiologist, hated the island and wound up traveling the world working for Doctors Without Borders.

It was all a little too much for Mom, an undistinguished plain clumsy and mostly uneducated introvert. All they really had in common was the time they had both spent in California, though the states they inhabited were as different and Compton and Bel Air. For Ronni, Inglewood was what you drove through at high speed on the way to the airport. When she said that, Mom had shrugged in defeat. “That’s probably the best way to see it.”

She had always denied the class system in America, scoffing at the barriers other people feared. She couldn’t imagine that calling a sofa a couch or eating her main course with her salad fork could really make any difference to a serious person. And money? It was just a tool, a neutral technology of barter. Who had more and how they chose to spend it were as insignificant as their hair styles. In the utopian vision Mom cultivated, the only thing that nattered was who you were, not who you knew, or what you owned, or where you lived.

Even I knew that was crazy.

But Mom had to learn it the hard way.

Her time with Ronni Hall was a full course of study, from the house in Polpis where she was afraid to touch anything -- from the ten-thousand dollar Picasso pottery jugs casually arrayed on the living room table to the slip-cased first edition of the Rockwell Kent Moby Dick on the shelf, propped up by a Lalique crystal rooster.

Mom drank wine out of jelly jars. Ronni used stemless glasses so thin they broke if they touched the side of the sink when you rinsed them. Mom would never get the decades of grime out of her kitchen linoleum; no one was allowed into Ronni’s house until they took off their shoes. The rugs and the upholstery were all white. The house reminded Mom of the world after a fresh snowfall – pristine, lovely and cold. But mostly just cold.

It went on and on – Mom thought live music meant a reggae band at the Box. Ronni had season tickets for the Boston Symphony and an extensive collection of 1920s jazz.

They got along, though. The desire sparked between them, they made each other laugh. Mom allowed herself to hope that she might one day learn the abstruse language of wealth at least well enough to fake it. But she was always waiting for the other shoe to drop – in her case, she would say with a rueful smile, a Christian Louboutin sequined canvas pump.

And eventually it did. Ronni met someone at The Amfar Seasons of Hope Gala in Boston, danced all night and didn’t to come back to Nantucket for a week. The woman’s name was Anastasia Tabouillot – how could Janice Mohler compete with that?

She knew it was hopeless when she found Ronni’s diary, in which she referred to Mom as her “summer project” -- a Pygmalion exercise in the very type of class deconstruction that Mom wanted to believe was a relic of the past. But no: the class war was on-going, at least on Nantucket, and certainly, undeniably in her personal life.

 And she had lost it.

Ronni was gone and she was never coming back.

That was how the drugs started. I found her cache, a plain bottle in the medicine chest, no label, no prescription -- and we all thought Ed Delavane was the dealer. I confronted him and got beaten up for my trouble. But it wasn’t him.

It was Mark Toland.

Lonnie almost caught him once, a couple of weeks before the incident in the AV room. But had Toland talked his way out of it. Lonnie had come to my house for a round of Grand Theft Auto 2 when he saw Mark Toland coming out the back door. Or more accurately – the door. No one on Nantucket ever uses their front doors. This handsome poster boy for the high school hierarchy of cool was quite literally the last person on earth Lonnie would have expected to find at my crumby house on crumby First Way in the heart of Townie-ville.

But Toland had a ready explanation. It had to do with the Sony handycam dangling by a strap from his left wrist. “It’s for the movie,” he said.

“What is?”

Toland embraced the house with a sweep of his right arm, as if presenting it to an eager buyer. “Your … humble chapeau,” he grinned, quoting a movie from the early eighties that must have assumed Lonnie had never seen.

“Lainie Kazan,” Lonnie said, without missing a beat. “My Favorite Year.”

“Good one!” Toland seemed authentically pleased that the dweeb with the thick glasses and gay crush had caught his film reference. Against his will – you might as well try keeping your eyes open when you sneezed – Lonnie found himself basking in Mark Toland’s momentary approval. “I need a place like this for a location for the movie. And I wanted to check with Toddie’s mom to make sure it was okay.”

“So the poor kids are going to be in your movie?”

            Toland shrugged and brushed a dense mass of brown hair off his forehead. “Everyone’s going to be in my movie. Even you!”

            Then he was gone, and Lonnie was too dazzled and star-struck to think about anything but the unexpected rise in his social status.

            Until my mom’s overdose.

            I found her when I came home from school, and called 911 and Lonnie and I spent seven hours in the hospital. They gave her Narcan but she had already gone into cardiac arrest. I was traumatized, zoned out, oblivious. But Lonnie couldn’t sit still. He went out for some air and saw Mark Toland in the hospital parking lot, talking to Dr, Field, otherwise known as Dr. Feelgood, because of his easy hand with the prescription drugs. But this wasn’t just a few Tylenol codeine or Percocets for a broken finger – Toland slipped him a wad of bills and he gave Toland a big package wrapped in brown paper from the trunk of his Audi.

            That was when Lonnie understood. My Mom died that afternoon, and Toland sold my mom the drugs that killed her.

            Sippy Bascombe was in the hospital too. He almost died from an asthma attack. He was okay though. His parents said he was awake and could have visitors. We went to his room and told him what happened. He never told us what happened to him, though. Sippy was private. Sippy didn’t want sympathy. When he was hurt he hid in his burrow and licked his wounds. 

            But he was angry. We could see that much.

            And he had a plan.