One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you Don’t do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall.
White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane
Charisse never could hold her liquor or her grass, not like me. I’d always had an uncan- ny ability to become instantly straight, sober-acting in extreme situations, so much so in those situations, like around family or at school, people rarely noticed I was stoned.
For her, maybe it was because once she started drinking, she wouldn’t or maybe could- n’t stop, especially with sweet wine. That must have been why she didn’t think before she picked up an open gallon of Bali Hai at a party one night and guzzled quite a bit before she finally put it down. Somebody must have warned her it was electric, spiked with acid, or maybe they didn’t. Things like that happened at parties, somebody thinking it would be funny to get the whole world stoned. But maybe even if they had told her, it was likely she didn’t realize the implications. She tended to follow, a habit she got into from being my little sister.
I wasn’t there that night. Though we sometimes got stoned together, I had Kenny and she had her own friends now, friends she managed to spend week-ends with while our mother thought she was at supervised slumber parties.
She stumbled into our bedroom at dawn one Sunday, after being out all week-end, her hair a wild matted mess, her eyes as big as moons. She stood in the doorway, looking at me for a few moments, her body trembling. Then she fell into a heap on the floor sobbing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked startled especially by the tears. In between sobs, she gave dis- jointed pieces of the story. She was still tripping and had been all week-end. She didn’t know how much acid she had taken. She looked at me with eyes full of tears, her pupils so big they made her look like those sad little girl caricatures in go-go boots and mini skirts that I used tape to my walls when I was thirteen.
I didn’t know what to do. Whenever I felt out of control when I was high, I had always been able to get back into control. What was the antidote for a bad trip? Then I was worried our father would hear her and then it could get much worse.
And then there were the tears. Tears were never shared between us. I guess that was why I didn’t get out of bed, hold her, stroke her hair and help her get undressed and into her bed. I just watched her shivering as she pulled off her clothes, her skinny, pale body with her bent back, glowing from the sunrise filtering in the window. She lay in her bed stiffly, staring at the ceiling, eyes so wide open they refused to shut, probably watching the orange and yellow flowered wallpaper garden grow.
I don’t know when she finally fell asleep, but she was still in bed that evening and when I left for school the next morning, she told me to tell our mother on the way out the door she was sick.
I asked her later what had happened, on her bad trip, but the look of terror that passed over her face made it a subject we never again spoke of.
She was different after that, her eyes a cavern, her face pale and distant. My parents barely noticed the change probably because she stayed out of the way as much as possible— attaining, she would later explain, the final stages of her “invisibility.”
That didn’t help her though the day she fell off a westbound Milwaukee Road freight. The railroad bull (cop) saw her plain as day running with a bunch of scraggly dressed long hairs
as they all scrambled alongside the train as it was picking up speed in the train yard. They were on their way to an outdoor rock concert in Idaho.
They had all managed to hop on and tuck themselves safely onto the floor of an open box car, except for Charisse. The railroad bull reported that she hung on for awhile and then her hands slipped, luckily, her body falling into the gravel instead of under the train wheels.
I still try to picture the scene, her skinny fingers holding the rusty rung of the ladder, trying to pull herself up, her long blond hair that she kept in tiny braids at night, unbound now, a glorious, golden mane, swinging, her head swinging, her body swinging with the pitch of the boxcar, going faster and faster, her little dainty hands slipping, her boots running on air, a wild smile on her face. There is no fear on her face. She isn’t scared, no, not a bit. She’s loving it, every second of it because she’s really thinking that she’s getting away. Away...forever...away.
I can imagine her suddenly caught by gravity and slamming into the gravel while her friends wave gaily from the door of the boxcar as it disappears down the tracks.
When the cop got to her, she had stood up unhurt, swinging her fists at him. He soon contained her and had the police haul her off to jail, while she slung foul language at them from the back seat of the squad car she later told me.
Once there, she got her one phone call. My mother answered and when she told my father, “Charisse is in jail,” he scowled and said, “Well she can just God damn well stay there.”
And she did until they let her out after the week-end. She walked home by herself. I remember she was fourteen that month, going on fifteen. I remember she was never really the same after that. But a lot of things were coming undone, so I don’t think anyone really noticed.