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237 THE FAMOUS FINAL SCENE 6 The addict loves drama. “I’ll show them,” thinks the drunk as he leans over the bridge and looks into the swirling waters below. In the movie playing in his head, he writes the Famous Final Scene. It will be a scene so touching, audiences everywhere will weep and as they cry, they’ll blame themselves. “How could we not have known?” An usher comes down the aisle handing out packs of Kleenex and still the people keen, “Oh, Tortured Arteest! Please come back. Come back and explain again how your burdens were heavier than ours, your sadness deeper. We’ll mix your favorite drink . . . and we’ll really listen this time.” The addict loves drama. His whole life has been drama. Did he not have the Hardest Job in the World? Did he not have the Meanest Boss Ever? And so at last he comes to the Famous Final Scene and it too must be the Most Dramatic Ever. Let the camera pull wide, let the music swell, and let our hero fall nobly into the swirling waters below. But there is no bridge; no camera pulling wide; no music. And if there are swirling waters here at the end, it is a flushing toilet. The metaphor, though unpleasant, better captures the final horrible weeks of June 1966—a toilet— where the swirling waters go round and round in ever smaller circles, and in them all the sordid horrible stinking crap that floats in the wake of every narcissist and addict—the emotional debris of broken promises, of neediness , of poor-me poor-me—all of it orbiting the empty void at the middle of the craving heart, and in its final hour all the careless words and selfish acts of the reckless life take their last lap, going round and round pulled into the addict’s dark star and his life ends not in the hoped-for bang, not even a whimper, but in a gurgle of plumbing. THE FAMOUS FINAL SCENE 238 Mom, writing eight days after my father’s death, July 11, 1966 Roger did not come directly home. . . . He went to St. Paul and was there nearly a week. There he stayed, doing nothing, calling many times a day. . . . When he did come back, he spent most of the day in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, sleeping most of the time because of the drugs and the liquor. On June 1, Kip flew in to Rochester’s tiny airport, having completed his freshman year at Pomona. It felt good to have our top lieutenant back in the trenches with us, and before he could even set foot in the Millstone, Kip was neck-deep in the same insanity of the summer before. “The minute I got inside [the] car,” he wrote in his diary, “all the brothers hit me with bad news. Mom says dad hadn’t resigned—more like fired. So we may not be able to afford Pomona next year. Family’s gonna have to move out of Millstone . Shit!!” The summer of ’66 was all set to outcrazy the fist-fighting summer of ’65. Where we once lived with the proverbial Elephant in the Room that no one talked about, now we had the Retarded Zombie in the Room who did stuff so crazy there was nothing to do but talk about it. One of these scenes was reported to us by a neighbor, Mrs. Hallenbeck. She told us she’d come by the Millstone to see Mom and lend what support she could. We were all out at the time and she found herself standing in the doorway of the master bedroom . Roger was sitting at the end of the bed, disheveled and insane. “He was talking just pure nonsense and then he started to curse at me,” she told brother Jeff. “He actually thought I was Myra and continued to curse me. I tried to orient him, to tell him who I was, but I gave up and left feeling very scared.” It was as if the teeth had been removed from the monster. He still prowled the hallways, still growled, but his ability to truly frighten was gone. We gathered nightly to snicker at Dad’s latest stunts and marvel at how far from reality he had meandered. Noted Kip in his diary, “He denied drinking even when I showed him the Coke bottle he came in with had the smell of...

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