go have a couple of beers.
Atty drove us to the top of Memorial Park, the hill where I'd first learned to ski. We got out of the car and sat on the grass. After one beer, he pulled out a joint. I stiffened. I'd never smoked pot in my life and until then had never even been in its proximity. I almost believed a joint was the beginning of an inevitable path to heroin addiction. They both knew I didn't smoke, and I chattered worriedly about how it might make me feel. I had the sense to stop short of mentioning the road to heroin. They laughed and mocked me as they passed the joint.
The pot smelled sweet and inviting. I'm still drawn to the odor if not the substance itself; perhaps it reminds me of incense. While we sat around and talked, I didn't notice the smoke transforming them into raving lunatics. They only seemed to be laughing more. That didn't seem so bad, so I took a toke. Like every neophyte smoker you've ever seen, and to the amusement of Casey and Atty, I began hacking like my lungs were in danger of falling out. But they were willing teachers, and it didn't take long before I could successfully inhale, hold in the smoke, and not erupt.
Just as I was proclaiming that I didn't feel a thing, the night seemed richer and the air velvety. The stars shone more brightly and looked magical in the sky. Casey and Atty were simply hilarious, two of the funniest people I'd ever heard in my life. We were brilliant, fantastically attractive, and life was wonderful and full of adventure! Right then and there, Casey and I decided we absolutely had to go to the Newport Jazz Festival. We weren't into jazz, but in ‘69 the festival was going to be a fusion of jazz and rock, and the bands were ones we wanted to hear.
The plan was to borrow my dad's station wagon so we could sleep in the back. We'd take off early Friday and spend the long Fourth of July weekend there. When I talked to my dad about it, I made the festival sound as innocuous as possible, and it was easy to get the car. The truth of the matter is that my parents remained pathetic at saying no, my father in particular. In a typical parent-child scenario, he said yes if Mom agreed. Mom agreed because I told her Dad had already said yes. Mary Beth heard it all, and suddenly we were a trio. Casey, my sister, and I packed up the car and roared off to Newport.
It was one hell of a weekend. It wasn't the first concert I'd heard, but Newport was the first weekend-long music festival any of us had been to. Some of the jazz greats played, such as Miles Davis, but we were there for the rock and roll: Jethro Tull; Johnny Winter; Blood, Sweat and Tears; and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, capped off by Led Zeppelin. None of us can remember if we were still there for that closing act. In any case, the band that brought down my house was Sly and the Family Stone. They took us “high-igh-er. Baby, baby, baby light my fi-re. High-igh-igh-igh-higher!”
Maybe we slept in the back of the station wagon; Casey and Mary Beth insist we slept on the side of a hill. But sleeping didn't matter. It was the thousands of people, tens of thousands of people. It was the bands and the music. It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius! You didn't have to have pot, the air was pot. We left Newport committed to going to every music event we could possibly get to. For the rest of our lives. Watch out, Woodstock, here we come!
I have no idea what we looked like when we pulled into Brattleboro, but whatever it was did not impress my parents. No to our using the car. No to our commitment to music. And most definitely no to Woodstock. It proved to be one of the few times when my parents held firm to “no.” We couldn't even make an attempt to sneak off in the Corvair, because somehow I'd managed to render it inoperable by the end of the school year. Something my father never let me forget.
But if my parents thought they would stave off my transformation to college hippie by making Woodstock off-limits, they were wrong. Eventually.
· · ·
Although I'd started my college career while pining away for Claude and most of the family, Steve wasn't one I missed. He'd made it through high school at Austine but just barely. After that, he had only two different jobs, neither of which lasted for more than a couple of weeks.
First, he went to Poultney and stayed with my grandparents while Grampa tried to teach him to run the big presses at his printing business. The horrible noise they generated wouldn't bother Steve, but routine did. He couldn't or wouldn't focus, and he never made it to work on time or stayed there until the end of the workday. Quickly, he ended up back at home with my parents. He fared just as badly in the second job and has never worked since.
My brother's pleasures in life have been few. In addition to smoking cigarettes, he has watched endless hours of television, often way into the night, while eating nonstop. His rhythm was often out of synch with the family's, which in many ways was a blessing. He'd sleep all day and be up all night. He'd take the car and drive endlessly. My parents worried he'd get into a serious accident somewhere and it would take forever to find him. There were times we all hoped that, if he did crash, he'd never see it coming, that it would be blessedly painless and instantly fatal.
As Steve's physical violence toward Mom had accelerated, Dad began to say that if he ever knew he was terminally ill, he'd take Steve with him before he died so Mom wouldn't have to face him alone. I think my father believed he meant it. We all knew he'd never be able to do such a thing. And of course Mom already had to face Steve alone whenever my father was working. My brother's tirades grew, and the tense calm between them shrank.
Not long before I was to go back to UVM for my sophomore year, Steve completely lost control, with no perceptible provocation. Had he seen a picture of Castro somewhere? Had Elizabeth Taylor's lusty life set him off again? Maybe, maybe not.
Mom and I were in the kitchen with Steve, who was showing signs of going off, and as usual she was trying to calm him down. I, on the other hand, was fairly certain I knew all things in the world better than anyone else, and I had little tolerance for her feeble attempts at soothing him. I believed it was way past time to tell him to fuck off and to approach him head-on.
Steve was working himself into a lather, and he was in Mom's face. But this time he raised a hand toward her. I threw myself at him, not only to get him away from my mother, but also because I wanted to smash him one for myself. It became generalized chaos. Mom managed to break through to me, and we started backing away from the scuffle through the kitchen door into the dining room. Suddenly Steve grabbed a butcher knife and was coming our way.
We scrambled out the front door and locked ourselves in her car in the driveway. It was blisteringly hot, one of the few times in a Vermont summer back then when it got really hot. Mom and I sat sweating in the car, too scared to roll down the windows and get some air, even though he'd not followed us out.
Steve appeared in one of the dining room windows overlooking the driveway. He stood there flailing about with the knife and yelling, yelling, yelling. Then he turned the knife toward his chest, indicating he was going to kill himself. Mom might have been crying, but I lifted my arms to make sure he could see them and began to clap. I was egging him on, hoping he might actually do it and give us all some relief.
But we all knew he'd never kill himself. It was so much more satisfying to torture the entire family. Besides, suicide was a mortal sin, and he'd go straight to hell and never achieve his dream of being like everyone else. How come the world got Helen Keller and we got Stephen John Williams? It's a question that still crosses my mind.
A couple of days later, he went after Mom again. This time I wasn't home. She ran upstairs to her bedroom, closed the door, and locked it with the chain lock Dad had installed. As she was calling my father, Steve threw himself against the door and crashed through, splitting one of the door panels in the process and ripping the lock out of the wood. He looked ready to strangle her.
This time it was Mark who jumped in. Mark was a little over fifteen, still short and slight and no match for Steve. But the fact that his little brother was standing up to him stopped Steve that day.
