Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

But along this narrow strip of trendy whale’s tail, there are also hamlets called Tuckahoe and North Sea and Noyack and Deerfield. And there are people who neither know nor care that the copper beech is the Tree of Choice and the Japanese maple is Almost Out, or that duck is a passé poultry.

There are people who are here not to vacation but to live lives: farmers, supermarket cashiers, dentists, welfare recipi-ents, librarians, truckdrivers, short-order cooks, lawyers, housewives, carpenters, lobstermen, hospital orderlies. Oh, yes—and cops.

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My name is Stephen Edward Brady. I was born in Southampton Hospital. A few days later, I went home with my mother to Brady Farm in Bridgehampton. It’s still there.

Not the farm, of course. My father sold everything but the farmhouse and two acres in 1955, a little more than a decade before the big land boom that would have made them rich, the only thing my mother had ever wanted to be.

I was born on May 17, 1949, to Kevin Francis Brady, farmer and (in the great South Fork tradition) drunk, and to Charlotte Easton (of the Sag Harbor Eastons) Brady, housewife and social climber. In 1951, my brother Easton was born.

I went to Sagaponack Elementary School, a one-room schoolhouse. (The summer people say: “I love it! It’s so real.”

So okay, A for ambience. C–for education. B for freezing dampness that makes your fingers throb in the winter. And A+ for smells from decomposing rodents under the foundation in late spring.) Then I went to Bridgehampton High.

And then the State University of New York at Albany.

It wasn’t that I’d been such a saint in high school, but at least I’d known who I was and that I’d belonged. Sure, I was a bad boy in Bridgehampton—a little driving while intoxicated, a little breaking and entering. In my heart I knew it was a phase, that someday I would become a solid citizen, buy back my father’s farm, sit on the school board.

But I picked the wrong generation, and the wrong genes.

Up at Albany, I became just another whacked-out asshole with sideburns. I embraced my generation’s holy trinity: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I was a true believer. I screwed and drank and drugged along with Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. I didn’t die, though. I flunked out.

So I enlisted in the United States Army. Why? To this day, I have no idea. I can’t re-create the boy I MAGIC HOUR / 19

was, the boy who could do something that dumb and self-destructive.

On my first day of basic, they clipped my hair with a machine that left it less than a quarter inch long. I remember standing at attention and having a five-foot-three Filipino drill sergeant reach up and grab those hairs between his thumb and index finger, pull at them, and scream up into my face, “Fucking hippie!” All I wanted to do was go home.

I knew I wasn’t man enough to take it. Except I had to take it. In those eight weeks, the army’s goal is to break you down, then build you up again into a machine that obeys all commands without thought or argument. Well, they broke me down. I cried myself to sleep every night. There I was, a big guy, a soldier, boo-hooing into my pillow so that no one, especially all the other crybabies, could hear me.

But I went off to war an infantryman, a master of the M79

grenade launcher. I fought for God and America and the honor of the Brady bunch. No. Actually, I just fought to stay alive. I fought even harder not to feel alive. Feeling dead was a major asset in Vietnam. I moved on from hash and pot to smoking opium joints. And after about a month, skag.

Skag is heroin. Five or ten percent pure on the streets in the States. Ninety-six percent pure in Vietnam. No needles: cigarettes. You just had to inhale, so you weren’t a junkie.

We were all very clear on that. We were just a bunch of grunts sitting around smoking at night after a hard day’s work in the jungle: a little patrolling, a little shooting, and then stacking up stinking dink corpses so we could get our body count and move on for more.

Skag was cheap: three bucks a hit. Skag was good for us grown-up G.I. Joes, better than pot, because pot makes time go very, very slow. Heroin lifts you out of your body, takes you out of time. It got me

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through those three hundred and sixty-five days in hell. No, I wasn’t caught. If you had brains and a little foresight, you could get a buddy to pee for you and were home free. (Ha.) I was discharged, honorably.

I hadn’t been doing skag every day. Just almost every day.

I said to myself: You’re not addicted. But when I landed back in the States after the eighteen-hour flight, I was sick—leg pains when we refueled in Guam, stomach cramps, the sweats in Hawaii. Terrible diarrhea the whole time, banging on the door of the airplane bathroom, doubled over, screaming at the top of my lungs: Please, oh God, let me in!

In San Francisco I had to buy heroin on the street. Three days, five hundred bucks. I couldn’t handle a needle. The dealer had me wait in the basement of a burned-out grocery store; after the high started to wear off, I’d stand there shivering in the dark, my head twitching. I could smell the wet, charred wood and the decay, hear the deranged scurrying of rats. When there was a lull in his action, the dealer would clomp downstairs, hold a flashlight in his mouth and shoot me up. He had hunched shoulders and a thrust-forward turtle head, like Nixon. His damp, hot finger-tips probed for a vein; there were crescents of green-black dirt under his nails. He told me: Don’t expect me to keep doing this. This is a