Carrick Doesn't Come Home

I'd slept fitfully for an hour or two at most. At 6 a.m., I shook my wife, Deirdre.

“We've got to get rolling,” I said.

Deirdre asked what I intended to do. I said that I was going to New York City to look for Carrick, our seventeen-year-old daughter, who had not returned home the night before. About midnight, we had called Carrick's friend Vanessa and learned that they'd gone down to the East Village the previous afternoon, a Sunday, against our wishes. Vanessa had last seen Carrick about 9 P.M. at Grand Central Terminal, when she had boarded a train home to Bronxville. The small village where we'd lived for fourteen years, Hastings-on-Hudson, is on a different line than Bronxville and the train departs twenty minutes later.

“Carrick seemed fine,” Vanessa told us. “I thought she was getting the next train home.”

Deirdre said that she would call some of Carrick's other friends as I headed downtown. This was not the first time Carrick had disappeared. I tried to sound confident as I told Deirdre that wherever she was, I was sure nothing bad had happened to her. The words just hung in the air as I kissed her and walked out the door.

It was Nov. 5, 2001. At 10 a.m., Carrick was due at the headquarters for the Students for a Free Tibet on East Ninth St. between Avenues B and C in Manhattan, where she had been volunteering for the past month. Community service is a part of the curriculum at Walkabout Program, an alternative public high school for seniors who, like Carrick, have had difficulties in traditional settings. Since she was in eighth grade, Carrick had attended several programs for kids who have educational, emotional, psychological, or substance-abuse problems, all of which had afflicted our daughter.

I got the 7:49 express train that arrived at Grand Central terminal thirty-five minutes later. Positioning myself in front of the gate from which the next train to Hastings, the 9:20, would depart, I tried to convince myself that after a night of carousing, Carrick would stride up and say something blithe: “Hey, Pops, whazzup?” We'd board the train and return to Hastings, another misadventure navigated. We'd trudge up the steep hill from the station, I'd press the unlocked latch on the front door, and Deirdre and the dog and a cat or two would scurry to greet us. After some hugs and tears, we'd try to figure out, once more, what was going on in Carrick's life.

Heading Downtown

In my heart, I knew my wait at the gate was futile, but I really didn't know what else to do. Should we notify the police? File a missing person report? Call all the numbers she'd dialed on the cell phone we'd lent her a few days before?

I called Deirdre. She said she had talked to Megan, a girl who was interning with Carrick at Students for a Free Tibet. Carrick had become friendly with someone who called himself Chaos, Megan told Deirdre, and she might be with him. He hung out in Tompkins Square Park. She described him as pierced and heavily tattooed. Megan told Deirdre she would arrive at Students for a Free Tibet's offices a little after 10, and told her she'd meet me there.

“Tell your husband not to look for Carrick himself,” she said, “He might scare her away.”

I watched a few laggards trot toward the departing train, then headed to the IRT local subway to go downtown. The irony of Carrick becoming attached to someone who called himself Chaos was too perfect to contemplate.

I got off the subway at Astor Place and walked a few blocks east on Ninth St. which, at Avenue A, intersects with the entrance to Tompkins Square Park. The park, ten acres that had been the property of Daniel D. Tompkins, James Monroe's vice president, was first enclosed in a wrought-iron fence and opened to the public in 1834. It has been a locus of dissent and disaffection for a long time. In 1874, more than 7,000 workers demanding relief during an economic depression were routed by police wielding billy clubs. In 1967, as the center of the East Village hippie scene, it was the venue for The Grateful Dead's inaugural East Coast tour. Deirdre would go there in high school, hoping to see Allen Ginsberg or the Lovin' Spooonful's John Sebastian, who lived nearby. In August 1988, the supporters of squatters living in shacks in the park hurled firecrackers and bottles at the police, who swept through the park, again swinging nightsticks, to evict them.

Despite the gentrification of the neighborhood, it remained a popular hangout for drug dealers, users and the homeless. It also was a magnet for young people like my daughter who, bored by the suburbs, are drawn by its ability to absorb, without judgement, any predilection that comes its way. Stan Mack once drew a facetious map of the different groups that hung out in Tompkins Square Park for the Village Voice newspaper. Latino and black chess players had an area in the northeast; Ukrainians and Poles played in the southeast (“don't mess with 'em, may be ex-freedom fighters,” read a parenthetical aside). “ 'Burb brats in for thrills” congregated just inside the southern Avenue A entrance. Carrick recently had told Deirdre she had met some interesting characters in Tompkins, and that she wanted to move to the neighborhood some day.

Making fleeting eye contact with the few people I saw sitting on benches, I walked the paths that crisscross the park. Seeing no sign of Carrick, I eventually took the east exit at Avenue B and continued along Ninth St. to walk to Students for a Free Tibet. I had been on that block nearly nineteen years before, when I covered a fatal shooting in a social club as a reporter for the New York Daily News. I remembered the incident well because the residents of the block seemed so shocked that the social club manager had fired two shotgun blasts into the back of a patron despite the reality that, as I pointed out with a tabloid cliché, “random violence is no stranger to the Lower East Side.” A school custodian who lived there told me: “It's a beautiful block. Black and white, we all correspond together. I want to have it renamed E. Nice St.” Another resident said: “There's never any fights, no shootings, no drugs. It's just working folks.” That may have been so back then, and it may still be so today, but I didn't feel entirely comfortable there either time.

Students for a Free Tibet

Students for a Free Tibet headquarters were on the ground floor of a decrepit factory building on the north side of East Ninth St., closer to Avenue C. Inside, it looked like a time warp of '60s activism - cast-off furniture, posters on the wall, beer cans strewn about, squished chips on the floors, ashtrays overflowing. My first reaction was that it did not seem to be an ideal environment for a seventeen-year-old in recovery. The organization's soft-spoken executive director apologized for the mess when I arrived. He said there had been a staff party for Halloween. I told him why I had come. He had not heard from Carrick, he said.

Soon after, Carrick's direct supervisor arrived. I repeated my story; she was visibly upset. She told me Carrick had done a good job when she was around, but that she frequently had been absent, or often had not returned from lunch at Tompkins Square Park, where she had taken to hanging out. She also said that she thought she'd smelled alcohol one day when Carrick and Megan had returned from lunch and had challenged the girls. It turned out that Megan had just applied an alcohol-based perfume, she said, and she had apologized for questioning them. I thanked her for her diligence, and was reminded of the many times I'd thought I detected something suspicious but talked myself out of it, or let one of Carrick's convoluted explanations sway my common sense.

I sat down on a squishy couch, exhausted, as a couple of other staff members arrived. In a hushed voice, the supervisor filled them in on why I was there. Megan finally came through the door, later than I'd expected her. I introduced myself. She said she thought she knew where Carrick was, but she had to go to get her alone. About forty-five minutes later, she returned. She had not found Carrick, she said, but she told me there was someone who wanted to talk to me. He knew where Carrick was, but he was nervous. Would I meet him outside?

“Of course,” I said. “Is it Chaos?”

“No. His name is Champ,” she said.

Champ the Boxer

Champ was wearing a green army jacket. His curly, sandy hair was disheveled. His craggy face looked a good ten years older than the thirty-five he later claimed to be. He was about six feet tall, and stocky. He had a light touch as we shook hands, but I could sense that he held strength in reserve.

Inexplicably, he started by telling me he was a boxer. Trying to build a rapport, I told him my father had run the Golden Gloves boxing tournament in New York. He claimed he had an incredible record as an amateur - seventy-two and three, or something - and said he'd fought as a pro, too. Champ said that he'd met Carrick when he saw a group of men circle her in the park. He thought their teasing was going too far. He intervened, and had given Carrick lessons in basic self-defense.

“She confided in me,” he said. “She's upset about things.”

Sometime after midnight, he said, he had gotten word that Carrick was looking for him, and he went to her.

“I talked to her like a brother,” he said. “For hours, like a brother.”

Then he found a place for her and someone else, whom he would not identify, to crash until the morning, he said. There had been a dispute that he couldn't talk about, however, and they had to leave the apartment. He didn't know where Carrick was now, but he was sure he could find her. He just had one condition. Wary, I asked him what it was.

“You have to promise that you're not going to hurt her,” he said.

I assured Champ that I had never hit or hurt Carrick in my life.

“All I want to do is bring her back safely home,” I said.

'She's afraid you'll lock her up,” he said.

I said that I could not guarantee that we wouldn't seek treatment for Carrick that might result in her being sent to a drub rehab program. I said that it was not a given, just an option that we had to leave open, depending on Carrick's health.

How ridiculous is this? I was thinking to myself. Why am I justifying our decisions about our daughter to a guy on the street? But I felt that I had no choice if I wanted any help in finding Carrick. I knew from experience that the police have no legal authority to pick up a child older than sixteen unless she has broken the law, and the East Village streets were filled with runaways.

Champ changed the subject. He told me that he had been living on the streets since the terrorist attacks of September 11. He was from Pennsylvania, where he was a licensed plumber. He had gotten a job helping to renovate a building near the World Trade Center. He had been staying at a hotel in the neighborhood and was walking to work when he saw the first plane hit the tower. Not only did his job disappear, the plumbing company that employed him went out of business, he said. He'd been looking for a job ever since. We bantered a bit more, as if I was being coyly qualified by a social worker. Finally, Champ said he help me find Carrick. He'd walk the streets and ask questions. He asked for my cell phone number and promised to call me when he got a lead. I gave him my Sprint phone card to use.

I let Champ disappear down Ninth St. before heading in that direction myself. I didn't want him to think I was tailing him, but felt Carrick was somewhere around Tompkins Square Park. It was about 11:30. I spent the next hour and a half walking up and down the streets, in and out of the park. The cell phone finally rang about an hour later. Champ told me to meet him at the Odessa coffee shop on Avenue A. He knew where Carrick was, he said.

"She's Hooked"

Holding an unlighted cigarette and looking like a beneficent padrone, Champ sat in a booth sipping coffee I later paid for. The word on the street, he said, was that Carrick and Chaos were hiding out in an abandoned theater. He asked me if I knew where that might be because he didn't really know the area. I said no, but it could be the huge abandoned building on the corner of Eighth St. that was covered with signs protesting an impending eviction. He said we'd have to get them out ourselves, and that he needed my word that I would not get the cops involved. I said okay, although I dreaded entering what I envisioned to be a nest of rooms filled with crackheads.

“I gotta tell you something you don't wanna hear,” he said.

I looked at him and nodded. Nothing he could say was worse than what I'd imagined.

“She's using heroin, Tommy,” he said.

“How much and for how long?” I'm sure my voice that sounded much calmer than I felt. “Is she shooting or snorting?”

“It's bad, Tommy,” he said. “She's hooked.”

He didn't know how long she'd been using, though, or whether she was shooting it or not. He told me that getting her back would be complicated by the fact that Chaos, the guy she was with, owed somebody some money for some dope they'd scored that morning. I was suspicious, which must have showed. I asked Champ if he meant that I'd have to pay somebody off, and he said we'd have to wait and see. He suggested we try to get more information from the people in the park. I gave him $60 for his help so far. I wanted him to know that I was prepared to reward him if we found Carrick, and that I'd pay others if I had to. We left the coffee shop.

“Tommy, I want to make sure we're clear on one thing,” Champ said as we crossed Avenue A. “No cops.”

I took a deep breath.

“I've heard a lot of stories and I think I've got a pretty good sense when somebody's conning me,” I replied. “I don't think you are.”

I said that partly because I wanted to hear in my own voice whether I believed it or not; I sounded like someone trying to convince himself that he's doing the right thing. It had reached the point where I was just reacting to circumstances. My only goal was to take Carrick home. And I knew that, in reality, I was easily conned. Carrick herself had proven that to me time and again.

Buying Information

Inside the park, Champ approached a group of people sitting on a bench. I kept walking on the path to the left. At best, I looked like a reporter, if not a cop. Champ came over and told me he would have to give them some money. He pulled out the $60 I'd given him. I thought he wanted to pay off the dealer that Chaos had supposedly beat that morning, and told him that I didn't think it was a good idea. Champ said that wasn't the case.

“Nobody gives up anything on the street for nothing,” he said. “Listen, they say that Chaos and your daughter are sleeping in the band shell near the bridge. Do you know where that is?”

Offhand, I didn't. He suggested that I walk back to the group with him. He took aside a wiry young man with closely cropped hair, handed him $20, and introduced me as someone who was looking for Chaos because I wanted to buy some crack. Sizing me up through squinting eyes, the guy asked how much I wanted and why I wanted to buy it from Chaos. I told him I didn't want any crack; I was a father looking for his 17-year-old daughter, who was with Chaos.

“That your daughter?” he said, with a slight Spanish accent. “She's a beautiful girl. Shit. I wished someone was looking for me.”

He said that Chaos and Carrick and another guy were in the old band shell in the park by the Williamsburg Bridge and told me how to get there. After I thanked him, he asked me if I was sure I didn't want some of his crack.

“Chaos isn't a good source, man. Not for crack. Dope, yes. Not crack.”

I shook my head.

A Walk in the Park

Champ and I walked through the park and across Ninth St. toward the river. I told him that I wanted to stop at Students for a Free Tibet to let them know what was going on. He was leery. He told me that he'd level with me. He had an outstanding violation for jumping a turnstile and that if the cops got involved, they'd take him in. As suspicious as I was that Champ had done more than beat the subway fare, I assured him again that I was not calling the cops. I did call Deirdre, though. I wanted her to know where we were heading. I wasn't sure it was the right decision, I said, but I saw no alternative.

Champ and I discussed a lot of things as we headed toward the river. He did most of the talking. He told me that he had been in the army. He said he'd come from a large family, and his father would beat the shit off out the boys when they did something wrong. His twin sister was a junkie who was always stealing from him until she had overdosed and died. He thought we should drop a nuclear bomb on Afghanistan to wipe out El Qaeda. What did I think?

We crossed the footbridge over the FDR Drive and walked south along the park path. Few people were out. It was a blustery day, the wind swooping in from the river. The longer we walked, the more I began to question what we were doing. I had played softball in the park ten years before, but my memory of a band shell was vague. I checked a pocket street atlas I'd brought from home, but it only showed swings, baseball diamonds and a tennis court. I told Champ that I hoped we weren't being set up. He resented this. I assured him that I wasn't suggesting that he was setting me up. Of course, I wasn't sure of that either.

I was walking even faster than my normal quick pace. Champ kept up, wheezing from the cigarettes he seemed to light continually. He talked more about his past. He had owned his own plumbing business in New Jersey, he said. His partner, who was a crack addict, had cheated him out of it by failing to keep appointments while Champ had been in prison. When he got out, there were no customers left. He also mentioned his wife, Maria, who was strung out on drugs, he said. They were divorced. They had two kids, an eight-year-old boy who looked just like him, and a younger girl. Champ said he had given Maria everything - a house in Pennsylvania, a good TV, and all the appliances she could ever want. When he'd come home after a full day of work trying to build his business, followed by a night of moonlighting, he expected her to at least serve him a cup of coffee. Even that simple task seemed to be too much for her, Champ said. Then she'd get out of bed in the middle of the night and start cleaning everything obsessively, he said, because of the drugs she took.

I asked him about his jail time. It was a bad rap, he said. He'd been minding his own business when he saw a guy beating up a woman outside a bar in New Jersey. He told the guy to stop. They got into a fight. He punched the guy in the ribs. The ribs cracked and punctured his lung and he died. Because he had been a boxer, Champ's hands were considered a lethal weapon, and he had been convicted of manslaughter. Then he almost got killed in jail when a black guy stabbed him in the neck with a shiv — he stopped to show me the wound — while he was playing poker. The motivation had something to do with cigarettes. He also told me that his partner had shot him several times. He wanted to show me these wounds, too, but I was beginning to feel numb to his tales of woe and just kept walking.

We passed two Latino youths who looked to be about twenty. One was pushing a stroller. I assumed a baby was in it but didn't look. As soon as they went by, Champ asked me if I had another $20. He wanted to ask them if they'd seen Chaos and Carrick. I pulled a bill out of my pocket. He called after them. At first, they were suspicious. Then Champ told them that I was the father of a seventeen-year-old girl who had run away from home and that I just wanted to get her back. This seemed to click with the one not pushing the stroller, a tall young man with smooth skin and a sweet face. He said that two guys and a girl who fit my description were sleeping in the back of the band shell. He'd seen Carrick around, he said. He had no idea how young she was, and said he understood why I was doing what I was. He said his name was Danny. He offered to come with us. We tried to figure out what to do about the $20. The guy with the stroller wanted a cut of it even though he wasn't accompanying us, but Danny didn't seem to trust him to split the money later. I was reluctant to pull my wallet out of a concealed pocket of my jacket, but I did. I gave the guy with the stroller $10, and Champ told Danny he'd get the other $10 after we were sure that Carrick really was where he said she was. That seemed to be okay with him.

We got to a wire fence on the north side of the band shell, which was in terrible shape. Champ suggested that he and Danny look inside the structure, and that I wait by the fence alone. They were afraid Carrick would take off if she saw me coming. They went through a rip on the river side of the fence, and stopped at the wall of the structure for a few seconds. As they walked back, I could not discern from their expressions what they'd seen.

“She's there,” Champ said, his voice trailing off, as if there was a hitch. My heart raced - part joy, part anxiety. Then, like a soldier who'd been behind the enemy lines, Champ described the scene. He said the three of them were asleep under some blankets on a raised platform.

“It's not stable, Tommy,” he said. “It could collapse at any time.”

Champ then turned to Danny and told him he could go, handing him a $10 bill from the money I'd given him earlier.

Danny shook his head.

“I want to make sure this man gets his daughter back,” he said.

Champ started to get agitated. He asked me what I wanted to do. I didn't really trust anybody at this point. But I figured having two people around was better than one, so I said Danny should stay.

“I think it's better if I go in alone, though,” I said. “I'm going to make it clear to everybody that I don't want any trouble. I just want Carrick to come home with me.”

I felt like I was in an outtake from the movie Traffic, which I'd seen recently. The protagonist, played by Michael Douglas, discovers his addicted teenage daughter turning tricks in a squalid hotel room to support her habit. I hoped that it would not come to a fight, as it had with Douglas's character, or that I'd face a weapon. But I also felt a foolish confidence, as if the righteousness of my mission would protect me.

"I Don't Want Any Trouble"

I slipped through the fence. Champ and Danny remained at the opening, presumably ready to back me up. I walked quickly across the vaulted chamber, which was filled with debris and trash. A makeshift ladder leaned against what looked like a sleeping loft about eight feet off the ground in the southwest corner. I climbed it. Carrick was in the middle of two lumps under blankets, cuddled against a figure in the far corner. I leaned across a completely submerged body and shook her. I wondered what to say. Should I be firm, or conciliatory? Should I ask, or demand?

“I'm here to take you home, Carrick,” I said. “I don't want any trouble.”

It took a couple of shakes before Carrick open her eyes and looked at me.

“I don't want any trouble,” I repeated.

She said nothing; closed her eyes. The young man in the foreground sat up and stretched, but seemed oblivious to me.

“C'mon, Carrick,” I said.

“Give me a couple of minutes,” she muttered, as if I was rousting her for school. Her face was dirty; her hair matted. She looked stoned. She shook the body in the corner, and started to whisper in his ear. I heard her say, “baby.” He lifted his head, which was swathed in a bandana. I saw a crescent tattoo on his temple. He glanced at me through dazed eyes, and looked away.

I climbed down from the ladder to allow them to, I hoped, say goodbye to each other. I walked to the middle of the bandshell so I ostensibly was out of earshot but could still see them. I worried they would take the opportunity to hatch some escape plan. Carrick lay down. I gave her a minute or so.

“C'mon, Carrick,” I said, “time to go,” again assuring everyone that I wanted no trouble.

She sat up, slowly gathered some loose gear, stuffed it into her leather backpack and pecked on the cheek the man who I assumed was Chaos. She said goodbye to the other figure, who was heavily pierced, and crawled over him. She would not take the hand I offered to assist her as she came down the ladder. At the bottom, I hugged her. She responded hollowly. She did not seem to be there. She greeted Champ warmly, though, and they immediately started talking.

Danny Believes in God

Danny and I led the way on the walk back up the park path. Carrick asked Champ for a cigarette. They stopped, so I did, too. Champ shook the pack until a few butts protruded, and silently offered them to Danny and me. Danny took one. I shook my head. The three of them shared a match that Champ cupped against the wind. Carrick told me later that she was sure I was going to take a cigarette. I had quit smoking, for the last time, about ten years before. I'd told Carrick several times that it was even harder for me to quit using nicotine than alcohol. For the last five years of my addiction, I smoked a pipe, but inhaled. On one of my birthdays, I gathered Carrick and her brother Duncan, who is five years younger, in front of our wood stove and ceremoniously tossed my half-dozen briars in the flames. I probably did entertain the idea of lighting up when Champ extended the pack to me. Maybe there was a tinge of hesitation in my voice that Carrick picked up on. My lungs often jump at a whiff of cigarette smoke. Carrick later told me that she was very relieved I said no.

“I would have lost my respect for you if you'd taken the cigarette,” she said.

Danny and I talked. He asked me if I believed in God. I said not in the sense that most people do, but that I respected many religions and thought that anything that helped people was good. I was spiritual, I said, but not religious. He said he couldn't imagine that there was not a God. He said he was in recovery himself, from drinking and drugging. He was going to meetings again after having slacked off. The streets were tough, he said. A popular kid in the neighborhood had died a few weeks before when he shot up some dope laced with rat poison. Everyone knew the pusher responsible, but he'd disappeared.

“When we find him,” Danny said, “he's dead.”

Danny told me that he'd seen Carrick snorting heroin in East River Park the night before with the girl she was with, whom he had not seen before. I was surprised - not by the fact that she had taken heroin, which I'd already become resigned to, but because it was evident that, like a small village, everybody seemed to know what was happening to everybody else in Losaida, as the neighborhood is known.

Danny said he'd had a tough life himself, but he wasn't complaining. His father had owned several nightclubs and was prosperous, but he got into drugs and lost everything. Danny used to fish with his father, he said, and they loved each other, but he died several years before. His mother drank, he said, and beat him. She had thrown him out of her apartment in the Jacob Riis public housing project, but he was on his way to see if she'd take him back because he couldn't stay with his girlfriend any longer. We shook hands at the corner of Ave. D and East Tenth St. I gave Danny a twenty and wished him luck. He said that if I ever wanted to know more about the neighborhood, just ask for Danny. Everybody knew where to find him.

"I'm Gonna Pay You Back"

After Danny left, I watched Champ and Carrick prattle like drinking buddies. I wasn't entirely sure that that they weren't in cahoots. Maybe Carrick had convinced Champ I was an evil dad and she'd tear down the street while he restrained me. I broke into their conversation, telling Champ that I'd seen a jogger that morning throwing jabs and repeating loudly, “keep dancing, keep dancing.” He agreed that boxing was all about where you put your feet, and started to give us a demonstration on the sidewalk. A woman with a stroller nervously swerved around us.

Carrick said she was hungry and suggested that we eat at an Indian restaurant. I asked Champ if that was okay with him, and he said that he'd never had Indian food. I saw a couple of other ethnic restaurants on the street; Champ said he was basically a meat and potatoes guy. We wound up at a Polish restaurant, where he ordered a hamburger. I devoured my kielbasa; Carrick didn't finish her meal. Neither, to my surprise, did Champ. Junkies don't seem to have much appetite, I learned later, except for crap like sugary cereal and ice cream.

Back on the sidewalk, Champ asked for directions to Tompkins Square Park, which was only a couple of blocks away. It struck me that, despite his swagger, he was a rube who had not ventured far from familiar quarters. He took me aside, whispering conspiratorially.

“Listen, would it be okay if I called Carrick to see how she's doing?” he asked. “Maybe I could even come and visit her sometime. She says she'd like to take some more boxing lessons.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why don't you keep the calling card.”

“Really? Hey, thanks, man. I could use it to find a job.”

I looked into his eyes and gripped his hand as firmly as I could.

“I want to thank you for saving Carrick's life,” I said. I did not think I was exaggerating. I slipped him another $20.

“I really mean that,” I said.

“It was nothing, man, nothing. Soon as I get on my feet, I'm gonna pay you back.”

Carrick and I headed to the station for the No. 5 train. When it came, she took a seat, and I stood over her. Her eyes closed and her head slumped.

I was reminded of a subway ride I had taken with Duncan to Yankee Stadium about six weeks earlier to see Cal Ripkin, Jr. in his final appearance there. We sat across from two black girls. They looked to be even younger than Carrick. I couldn't help but feel that their lives were destined for misery. Their eyelids seemed weighted down, their heads swayed lightly like one of those plaster bobbing-head dolls, their hands were suspended in front of their face, shielding them from anything external, fingers occasionally flicking. They were deeply stoned.

Carrick was not nodding, but she had the same look of detachment as I looked down at her.

We got off at Grand Central.

Two Questions

As soon as we boarded the Metro North train to return to Hastings-on-Hudson, Carrick slouched in the seat and shut her eyes. I told her she had to answer two questions before I'd let her sleep.

“I want honest answers because we can't help you to help yourself otherwise,” I said. “How long have you been using heroin? And are you shooting it as well as snorting?”

“I've never touched that shit,” she said. “Whoever told you otherwise doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about.”

I knew she was lying, but what could we do except wait for the results of a drug test? And then what? We'd have her tested for the HIV virus, too, for sure. And hepatitis. But what beyond that? Should we force her to go to another rehab? Using what reward as bait? What punishment as a threat?

I felt I'd accomplished nothing. On the surface, I had dragged my daughter out of the belly of the beast. But deep down I knew it was illusory. When I saw her lying between two scuzzy junkies in that crumbling band shell, I knew how low she was prepared to sink to in order to use drugs. Like a pipe to the head, it struck me that Deirdre and I had little, if any, control over our 17-year-old daughter's fate.

Next: Runaway

Retching in the Night

When we got home from the city, Deirdre and Carrick tearfully embraced. Then Carrick went to bed. Deirdre and I talked about our options. We agreed that unless Carrick wanted to get and stay clean, there was little hope that she would. We could make the offer to help in any way we could, but it would be fruitless unless she had the desire, herself, to stop using drugs. Since she had denied using heroin, and seemed to be tired and dirty but physically okay, we decided to have her tested before bringing up the subject of a detox program.

I heard Carrick retching during the night but did not get up. The bathroom smelled of vomit in the morning.

Carrick's relationship with Deirdre and me during the next few days was an emotional seesaw. We were never quite sure which way she would tip — contrite or demanding; demure or combative. After a few days, Deirdre took her to our family doctor for a drug test. Several weeks later, we were told the test was useless because there had been excessive water in her urine.

Carrick had gained two practical skills from WestPrep, one of the several drug rehabilitation programs she attended: She learned where to get more potent drugs, and she had become an expert at doctoring tests (although this particular job was so amateurish that it suggested she just didn't care).

Champ called a couple of times during the week. We'd discuss job possibilities for him, and then I'd put Carrick on the phone. She'd take the cordless and drift off to another room, where I'd hear her laugh from time to time. We tried to figure out a day when Champ could come up and visit. He said he'd give Carrick boxing lessons, as he had in Tompkins Square Park, and she seemed enthused. We finally settled on Sunday. It was Deirdre's and my twenty-fourth wedding anniversary but we didn't want to go out and leave Carrick alone anyway. I gave Champ explicit directions: Get the No. 6 train at Astor Place, transfer to the No. 4 at Grand Central Station, and get off at Bedford Park Blvd. in the Bronx, where I'd pick him up at 3 p.m. I told him to count on dinner, too.

Back To School

Carrick returned to the Walkabout School on Wednesday. The academic portion of her program was about to kick into gear. I'm sure this frightened her. She talked to the social worker at Walkabout, Jeannie. We had informed her of everything that had happened, even of our suspicion that Carrick had snorted heroin. Evidently Carrick and Jeannie had a good, open conversation. On Wednesday night about 10 p.m., Carrick finished up some homework that was overdue and asked me to help her attach it to an e-mail message to her teacher. I did not check her work that night — those days were long gone; I was just happy to see her so eager to finish something. I've looked at it since, though. It's titled “Journal: Finished Piece.” In it, Carrick wrote that she had found the perfect place to people watch on the Lower East Side, right above a subway station.

“Old men come here to drink beer while I come here to smoke weed, and we stay as far away as possible from each other on opposite benches, respecting each other's recreational boundaries,” she wrote.

The next morning, it became clear why Carrick had been so intent on e-mailing the assignment to her teacher. She cut school. We learned that she had posed as Deirdre and called both the bus company and the school office to report that she was sick.

In the early afternoon, we got a call from Jeannie asking how Carrick was feeling. It was then that we discovered she was absent. I was sure she'd taken off again, but Jeannie was sanguine. She suggested that we wait until the time Carrick was due home before worrying. Sure enough, Carrick sauntered in right on schedule. I trapped her with one of those ungratifying questions like, “So, how did school go today?” She concocted a story that revolved around how boring the day had been. When I told her that I knew she hadn't gone to class, she cooked up another tale about visiting her friend Vanessa in Bronxville. I believed that she'd really gone down to see Chaos, but she denied it. Our conversation was civil.

Later, Carrick told me that the day before she had bared her soul to Jeannie, who told Carrick that she should be as straightforward with us as she had been with her.

“So,” Carrick told me, “I'm going to be honest even if you don't like what I have to say.”

A Diatribe Against Suburbia

What followed was a diatribe against suburbia, phoniness, fashion, make-up, keeping up appearances and related Holden Caulfieldesque themes. I recalled delivering a very similar speech to my parents about 30 years before. I particularly remember keying in on Westchester County, where our home is situated, as the ground zero of everything that was plastic in American society. I swore I'd never live there.

Carrick then said some sweet things about us. She appreciated, in particular, that we were "open-minded."

“But,” she continued, “Monday [the day I'd gone downtown to find her] did something we could not ignore.”

She told me that the people she learned the most from didn't fit the status quo. She admitted that she was addicted to weed but said she did not want to change. She did not have any desire to use any other drug than marijuana. She did not agree with the precepts of Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. She understood, however, that as long as she lived under our roof she would have to respect our rules about using drugs. A curfew, though, was something else. She simply was not going to be “grounded” anymore.

I pointed out that while we had been keeping very close tabs on whom she went out with and when she returned, we had not turned down any request to go anywhere or do anything since she'd come home from her last residential treatment program several months before. She had managed to do things within the parameters that we felt were safe for her, and that's the only concern we had.

Our conversation got heated. By the end, Carrick was yelling at me. I don't know if I was physically yelling back, but I'm sure I was psychically. She stormed off. Later, we reconciled when she came down from her room and agreed to the two things I insisted upon, even though she did not see anything wrong with smoking marijuana:

- that she stay sober

- that she get involved with a 12-step program of her choice

The change of heart had come all too easily, it seemed to me, but I was getting used to Carrick's running hot one minute, cold the next. I was also suspicious that she might have something up her sleeve. I asked her to write down what we agreed upon. I actually have a collection of similar “contracts,” which therapists suggest are a good way to clarify expectations and goals. They are no doubt correct. In our experience, though, they have literally not been worth the paper they are written on, however sincere the intent. On a piece of loose-leaf paper, with the holes on the right (a classic ADD mistake of hers), Carrick wrote:

“I promise that I will make time to go to meetings every day (at least for my first 90), get a sponsor I can work with, and work the program.

P.S. And I will not lie. I am definitely an addict and not feeling too honky dorie about getting sober.

That night at an AA meeting in Hastings, Carrick met two women in their twenties with whom she professed she felt a bond. Both were primarily drug users, liker her, and not drinkers. They told stories similar to Carrick's, she reported. They were closer in age than most of the other participants at the local meetings. One of them mentioned a NA meeting in White Plains, which was 20 minutes away by car, and offered to drive Carrick there the next night, Friday. When Carrick came back from that Friday meeting, she burst into tears in our living room. She had met yet another young woman whose story was very much like her own, she said. She had felt at home with the group. For the first time, she was among people who could understand what she was going through.

Saturday evening, Deirdre and I had a longstanding dinner engagement with a couple of friends at the Manhattan apartment of one of them. All week long we'd told Carrick that she had to come with us, and she'd not put up a fuss. Both women had known Carrick since she was an infant. The one whose apartment we were going to had been like an aunt to her, always giving her a well-considered gift at Christmas, always asking about her interests. On Saturday afternoon, Carrick threw a temper tantrum about accompanying us. It was if she were five years old. As had become usual, however, she calmed down and we all had a pleasant evening. When we returned home that night, there was a message on the answering machine that was indecipherable to us, although we later listened to it at least a dozen times. It was Chaos.

The next morning, I awoke about 9 to see Carrick standing in the doorway of our bedroom. She had a coat on. I asked her where she was going.

“Out for a walk,” she said, “I love you.”

She turned and left. When Deirdre and I got out of bed later than morning, we could feel Carrick's absence. Instinctively, we knew she'd taken off again.

"I'm Afraid of Champ"

Later that day, among the dirty clothes in a laundry basket that I guess she knew I'd look through, I found a note written on a page torn out from a stenographer's pad.

First of all, don't worry. I am not running away. I'll be home soon.

I don't want him in our lives & I am sorry for bringing him into ours.

Down and Out in Philadelphia

Carrick had, in fact, run away with Chaos. We did not hear from her for more than a week, although she sent an e-mail to Vanessa asking her to let us know she was okay. Slowly, Deirdre built up an e-mail correspondence with Carrick, who used our AOL account at public libraries. Then Carrick started calling collect. We gave her a phone card number, and began to hear from her every few days.

She and Chaos were living in an abandoned veteran's facility in Philadelphia, panhandling and scrounging through garbage pails and dumpsters to eat. They also worked a scam at department stores where Carrick or accomplices would boost some items and then take it back to the returns department. After doing this a few times, they could only get store credit, which they'd sell at a steep discount to passers-by. We knew this only because we knew her password and were able to monitor her e-mails to Vanessa and other friends. She also e-mailed her brother from time to time, telling him that she had learned a lot about people.

People are afraid of me - now I am the kind of person that people cross the street to avoid,” she wrote to Duncan at the end of November. “Probably the kind of person that you are afraid to see when you go into the city, and it's not because I am mean or evil. I don't do drugs. I am always (still) polite to people but people look at me like I am less than they are - YOUR OWN SISTER! And you know why, Duncan? Because I don't have the money in my pocket - and bad people (the real Grinches) can smell that and they look down on me for it.”

I avoided talking to Carrick myself when she called home because I did not feel I could believe anything she told me. For one thing, I did not believe she was not using drugs. She, in turn, told Deirdre that she didn't trust me; she was afraid that I'd come looking for her if she gave us any more details about where she was staying. Indeed, there were times when my inclination was to have her arrested because I felt she'd be safer in jail, and perhaps would get some help. My cousin was a congressman at the time, and I considered calling him to intervene with federal authorities but I was reluctant to pull strings, particularly since I felt she'd just run again at the first opportunity.

Deirdre was more tolerant. She was firm about our expectations, but more flexible emotionally than I could be. If she said something that upset Carrick, she'd apologize. She kept a sense of humor, too, telling Carrick she had given her the earth name, “Running Daughter.” I admired Deirdre's capacity to bend, but could not do it myself. I was afraid that if Carrick said something provocative, I would answer harshly, and perhaps loose the connection Deirdre was forming.

One day in early December, I answered the phone when Carrick called. Our cautious greetings to each other soon degraded into a diatribe about how hard it was to make money on the street.

“I hate people. Everybody has a fucking attitude,” she said. “They don't understand how evil they are; how fucked up. They won't acknowledge me. They think I'm doing this for fun. I'm making nothing. They don't realize I don't have a choice?”

“But you do have a choice,” I said.

“I'm not coming home, if that's what you mean,” she said, and hung up.

In reaction to that call, I wrote a note to myself that I carried in my wallet for more than a year:

“You lie, steal, cheat and hurt other people without a thought. Why wouldn't people be smart to stay clear of you? I'd love to talk with you, but only when I'm reasonably certain I can believe what you say.”

On December 18, I talked to her again.

It was a dismal Christmas. Carrick didn't call. We ate in a deserted Turkish restaurant on the West Side and went to see the first Lord of the Rings movie.

Return

Carrick did come home in the middle of January after two months on the streets. Chaos, who followed her to New York City, lived under the Williamsburg Bridge and visited her at our home a few times. We learned that his real name was Sean Courtney, that he was 30 years old, an ardent Irish republican, had been a guitarist and singer for a punk rock band, had grown up in Akron, and had two children with two different women. He also played the bagpipes and flute, we were told, and wanted to teach music to kids.

On the occasions that he came up to our home, Chaos seemed like a dark shadow, a ninja who skittered about and murmured gutterally more than spoke. His life story seemed unfathomable, filled with dangling aspirations and claims, and I didn't even attempt to nail it down.

Before long, Chaos was arrested in Jersey City, N.J., for possession of stolen property. There was a convoluted story about his accompanying a friend to Jersey under some other pretense and getting stuck on a sidewalk holding a TV that the guy boosted from an apartment.

I wanted to believe him. In fact, I always wanted to believe the best possible scenario in any given situation involving Carrick, despite the strong lunar pull of facts or common sense in the other direction.

Chaos called collect from the Hudson County Correctional Center for several weeks, but we cut his calls off after a $280 bill, at nearly $1.50 a minute, arrived. I thought it was outrageous that the New Jersey prision system did not allow convicts to use phone cards, and had contracted with a service provider that charged such an outrageous rate. Who, I wondered, was getting paid off? I contacted a friend of mine who edited a paper in Jersey, but the story didn't go anywhere. Of course it didn't. Who wants to read about convicts getting ripped off?

After I cut off the costly phone conversations, Chaos wrote Carrick several letters. She would read them and leave them open in places like the kitchen table, as if she wanted us to read them. I did, attracted by his childlike enthusiams, and his affection for Carrick.

"Carrick hey love," he started a letter in early March 2002. "So it's another day of nothing. i hope you can read this. i have been learning how to write in script. im getting better at it but it still needs a lot of work..."

Chaos said that he'd been doing a lot of writing in jail but he'd probably burn most of it when he got out. He asked if Carrick had gotten in touch with his dad to get pictures of his daughter. He talked about taking Carrick to San Francisco. Then he mused about going camping somewhere with her when he got out. He said he missed being able to built a fire whenever he felt like it. He claimed that a producer in Ireland had called his brother to see if Chaos' band, Rum Rebellion, would play in a Celtic music festival in homage to one Paddy West, evidently the deceased leader of the group. He wasn't sure if he should do it, and wanted Carrick's advice. He recommended that Carrick read Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow and Ayn Rand's Anthem. And in the most bizarre passage, he wrote about having nightmares about when he was "still a soldier back home." He said he knew he was fighting for the right things, but sometimes he felt that he was "little more than a glorified killer."

In a subsequent letter, Chaos told Carrick he would do anything for her, and talked about the two of them getting an apartment with puppies and opening a café/bookstore together. He also urged her to “be careful.”

“You know what I mean,” he wrote. “I've lost so much because of that shit. Most of my friends are dead, or close to it.”

These words prompted us to order a drug-testing kit over the Internet. Before it arrived at the end of March, Deirdre awoke one morning to find a cloth pouch on the kitchen counter. It contained a glass tube with screens, two hypodermic needles, an empty glassine envelope, a bottle cap and a clothespin.

--

Next: Lies

Chapter in Progress

I think Carrick has stolen $120 from me on Mother's Day. She denies it, and demands that I tell her where I'd hidden it. She says she only took $20. She accuses Vanessa (the girl from Bronxville), who stayed here the night before , of taking it. General mayhem. I later discover the $100 in my pocket. She's right. She only took $20 from me. My bad.

Carrick writes Chaos that she has a five-bag-a-day habit but swears to me that she's not using at all; she is just bullshitting Chaos because she wants to dump him and he doesn't want to go out with a junkie.

Like a true junkie, she's now lying about lying. Or is she lying about lying about lying? It still makes my head hurt trying to figure it out.

Meanwhile, Carrick has become friendly with Jason Tyler, a clean-cut, 34-year-old ex-junkie who has returned to Hastings to live in his mother's house after losing his job and getting divorced. He is engaging, and seems sincere. He takes Carrick to some twelve-step meetings, and our hopes soar.

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Mind of a Poet

The mind of a Poet, as I see it, is a mind that colors life with imagination based on necessarily bitter experience, a mind that has survived the squalor of small humiliations and the melancholy of great disillusions, and remains unerring in the perception of beauty in the human heart.

-Noel Coward's Preface to William Bolitho's Camera Obscura

When she was a little girl, long before I was aware that she'd experienced squalor and the melancholy of great disillusions, I would tell people that Carrick had the mind and soul of a poet. I cannot say that she always perceives beauty in the human heart, but I believe she is capable of seeing it more intensely than most of us. I believe she experiences many emotions more intensely than most of us.

It's simple to deduce that the union of Deirdre's and my gene pools would stand a very good chance of producing alcoholic progeny. In fact, though, our one child by birth (we adopted Duncan) has never been much of a drinker.

Carrick, who was born on August 4, 1984, doesn't like the taste of alcohol, nor is its high very satisfying to her. Since she was twelve, however, she has ingested marijuana, hashish, amphetamines, pseudoephedrine, ecstasy, LSD, cocaine, crack, heroin, speedballs and any other substance that promises a few moments relief from what undoubtedly has been a tormented psyche. At the same time, she usually refused to take the Ritalin and various antidepressants that medical doctors prescribed for her Attention Deficit Disorder and clinical depression (or, as the latest diagnosis would have it, bipolar disorder) because “I don't want to be dependent on them.”

If I pray for anything, I pray for this: I pray that Carrick will not only continually rediscover the beauty in the human heart that she is capable of seeing so well, but also reveal its radiance to others who are trapped in their own bitter experiences.

Music and Leverage

One time when Carrick misbehaved as an young adolescent, even before she was into drugs, I took away the boom box on which she incessantly listened to the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana and Marilyn Manson. She threw a fit.

“Music is my life,” she cried. “You can't do this to me. Music is my life. I have nothing else.'

I realized how important music was to her. That's why I'd taken it away. Nothing else did much matter to her at that time, and we seemed to have lost all other leverage over her behavior. I eventually broke down and gave the boom box back, however, fearful that she might harm herself if I didn't.

A few years later, I realized how far she had fallen into drug abuse when I noticed that a more expensive stereo system we had given her was missing. When I asked her about it, she told to me that the guy who had been supplying her heroin, who had been living in our attic, had hocked it to buy dope for the two of them.

Carrick doesn't listen to music much anymore. She seems to prefer Howard Stern. I think I'll give her an iPod for her 21st birthday.

RedCliff Ascent

Carrick attended the RedCliff Ascent wilderness therapy program, which is located in the high desert of southwestern Utah, from November 2000 through March 2001.

My First Drugs

My Last Smoke

I tried to stop smoking many times before I eventually did. The first time that I recall was in the spring of 1971. My buddy Mark and I took a two-week camping trip in New England and Canada. On the way back, we stopped at Baxter State Park, which is a huge green inset smack dab in the middle of any map of Maine. It contains the 5,200-foot-high Mount Katahdin, which is also the beginning (or end) of the Appalachian Trail, depending on where you're coming from.

Mark and I camped at the foot of North Traveler Mountain, a 3,174-foot peak. We did not know it at the time, but over the years, quite a few hikers have lost their lives climbing in Baxter. For one very long night, I thought I was destined to be one of them. I described what happened to me in a letter I wrote to Carrick a few days after she entered the Red Cliff Ascent Wilderness Therapy program in Utah.

The emotions that I did not write to Carrick about were sheer exhilaration and abject fear. At one point, I was climbing up a cliff. I reached a plateau and peeked over. My head panned up until I was looking straight into the eyes of a bull moose munching on grass just a few yards away. It seemed unreal, perhaps a hallucination. In any event, it was too much for me to handle, so I ducked down on the ledge I was standing on and waited a few minutes. When I looked again, the moose was gone. I think there's a metaphor for the way we sometimes lead our lives in that scene: I had a glimpse of absolute majesty but turned away out of fear and ignorance.

That evening, a plane circled overhead in the twilight. I tried to start a fire to signal my whereabouts, but my lighter was soaked from the rain showers that had punctuated the day, and the brush was wet, too. The plane took one last loop and disappeared. Dark descended, and an incessant drizzle began. I dug a cubbyhole in the snow at the base of a pine tree. The branches provided a flimsy canopy. As the night progressed, I felt like the rain was penetrating my marrow. I shivered mostly, but dozed off from time to time. Mostly, I lamented all the things I wanted to do but had not done. I don't remember what they were exactly, but I suspect that they were not much different from what they would be today. Yes, I have loved and I have been loved. But what have I done to truly make an impact on the world I'd leave behind? Back then, I probably would wished I'd written a searing piece of fiction, filled with inventive language and insights into the nature of adolescent existence. I'm not sure what I'd aspire to now, except to leave this work in readable form. I was twenty then, a year older than Carrick's age as I write. I am 53 now, three years older than the age George Morris Forbes, the great grandfather with whom I've always felt a particular bond, was when walked in front of a trolley car while on assignment for a newspaper in New Jersey. He was bitter, broke, ill, perhaps suicidal and, if not inebriated at the time of the fatal accident, an inebriate of long standing.

I'm not exactly sure when I finally stopped smoking cigarettes because I'd tried so many times and failed that I stopped keeping score. It was sometime in the late '80s. I smoked a pipe for several years after that. Again, I'm not sure what year I stopped but I do remember the moment because I made sure that it was dramatic in a way that would make me look foolish if I were to retreat.

It was around the holiday season. I gathered all five or six of my pipes, opened the door to the wood stove in the family room we had added onto the kitchen of our century-old house a few years before, gathered my two kids as witnesses, tossed in the whole heap, and watched the fire slowly eat away at the crooked stems and bulbous ends.

My lungs eventually got better. My hack dissolved. I didn't wake up in the middle of the night in a coughing fit. My asthma disappeared (except, for some strange reason, when I laugh a lot). I even took up running for a while — a sport I'd hated since boyhood in any distance over 220 yards — and would routinely jog 20 to 25 miles a week until it began to bother my knees. Nowadays, my aerobic exercise is mostly confined to racquetball — I've played up to ten games without feeling winded — and occasional runs. I still wonder, though, if someday all that crap I inhaled won't crystalize into a cancer.

Twenty years ago, when I first read some of the magazine exposes of the patent medicine industry that ran a century ago, I was struck by the similarities of those hucksters to the tobacco industry. But despite similar exposes, profits at tobacco companies are surging to record levels.

I watched my mother die from lung cancer. My father developed emphysema and, despite a few other ailments, in the end it was his lungs that failed him. Every time my daughter goes to the back porch and lights up, I cringe. I know how hard it is to stop smoking once you start. I know how easy it is to think that you've got plenty of time. All I have to say is know is what I saw on the deathbeds of my parents. Both of them would have liked a little more time.

My Last Drinks

I was born early in the morning after Christmas in 1952. From about 1968 to 1985, or ages 16 to 33, I often drank alcohol more than I should have, and occasionally took drugs that altered the way I felt in ways I regretted. My daughter, Carrick, was born at a time when I was using mind-altering substances more freely than ever. The night she was conceived in December 1983, I believe I was high on cocaine, which was a rare indulgence, and alcohol, which was not. I had probably smoked some pot, too. My wife, Deirdre, had no doubt taken what I had, though she would make the case that she was more out of control when she dropped acid for thirty straight days during college.

One evening when Carrick was fourteen months old, I made my usual stop in The Bailey, a bar on East 45th in Manhattan, for a few quick Jack Daniel's on the rocks, then drank a couple of sixteen-ounce cans of beer during the half-hour ride home on the commuter train. I'd probably had a few whiskeys at lunch, too. I was an editor at Adweek, a trade magazine, and drinking was very much a part of the cultures of both journalism and advertising. By the time I walked up the steep hill from the rail station and opened my door, I was looking forward to another night of low-key boozing. Deirdre was in the kitchen making dinner. Carrick was crying, as she so often seemed to be. I went to the kitchen to pour a glass of Popov vodka. I wasn't too fond of vodka, which didn't radiate inside me like a good sour mash. Deirdre felt the same way. That's precisely why we had been buying it. If we didn't like it, we figured we wouldn't drink so much of it. To my dismay, Deirdre had polished off the half-gallon bottle.

“How could you let the liquor run out?” I seethed.

“You were supposed to bring some home,” Deirdre fired back.

Carrick, tugging at my leg and hearing the anger in our voices, cried harder. She wanted to be held, played with. I picked her up and kissed her and told her to calm down.

“I have to go somewhere,” I said.

As I waited for the elevator on my way to the liquor store, I could hear Carrick wailing. I realized that I had inextricably crossed a line. Drinking had long been getting in the way of who I was and what I wanted to become. But how pathetic was it that I had to go buy a bottle of booze before I could properly comfort my daughter? It took a week to wean myself; I've not had a drink of alcohol since October 30, 1986. But substance abuse, as it always has and perhaps always will, still gets in the way of who I am and what I want to become.

My Father

The Family Trade

Lake Uncas

The location in my dream about Carrick drowning was Lake Uncas in Livingston Manor, New York. Part of a gorgeous property of more than 1,000 acres owned by the Archdiocese of New York, it is presently inhabited by a group of cloistered nuns. People from around the world go there for retreats in rustic sheds. From 1907 until 1986, however, Lake Uncas was the heart of Camp Acadia for Boys. Acadia and its sister camp, Our Lady of Lourdes for Girls, were advertised for years in the back of The New York Times Sunday Magazine as "The Catholic Camps in the Catskills."

On July 3, 1963, I jumped off the dock at Lake Uncas to take a swimming test. It was my first summer at Acadia. I was 10. I had taken swimming lessons in the frigid salt-water pool at Jones Beach for several years and felt confident that I'd be able to do the two laps to the float and back — probably 100 yards total — with no problem. I ran into trouble posthaste. That evening, I wrote home to Mom and Pop:

This morning I tried to pass the swimming test and guess what? I failed with flying colors — and that's not all. When I got to the middle using a freestyle stroke, I tried to turn to do the back float. I didn't make it and began to swim under water, but it was too much excitement in 2 seconds for me. I went up and down bobbling in the water gasping for air. I tried to scream and after what seemed an hour to me, the instructor came to the save.

The water at Jones Beach shriveled my testicles and raised swirls on my fingertips, but Lake Uncas afflicted my psyche. From that day forward, I avoided all waterfront activities, except canoeing, with every contrivance I could scheme. In 1969, when I was a 16-year-old "senior" camper, I talked the head counselor, Walt Bahr, into taking the annual, much-hated, camp-wide trek to the Bearverkill campgrounds, a few miles over hills and dales, on a scorching day when our group was scheduled for a swim across Lake Uncas and back.

Three times that year — the summer of Woodstock — I was caught drinking or sneaking over to the girl's camp, or both, with my good friend Rich and some other sinners. The first time we were caught, the punishment was a time-honored camp tradition for transgressions of all kinds. We stood at the end of the dock.

"Assume the position," Bahr barked, a burned-out stogie wedged between his right lips.

He whacked our butts with a canoe paddle. But Bahr was an inherently good-hearted man, and the impact was light. We dove into the water nonetheless, trudged up the rickety wood ladder, and took another couple of shots for good measure, the sting supposedly intensified by the water.

The second time we were caught coming back from Our Lady of Lourdes at dawn, our punishment was a bit more creative. Counselors roused us several times during the night and force-marched us to the girl's camp and back. It was probably worse punishment for the counselors than it was for us, but it certainly prevented us from sneaking over that night.

The third time we were busted for drinking and carousing at Grossinger's, the fabled Jewish resort, where the older campers were taken annually for a day trip. That time we were threatened with expulsion, and our parents were notified by phone while we stood by and hung our heads, but it was all a bluff (and we knew it). We had a little pot that summer and popped some diet pills, too, and once experimented with smoking the cut up slivers of a ping-pong ball (it does not get you high, kids) but blessedly we were never caught with these "hard" drugs, which surely would have resulted in our exit.

A couple of weeks after the last escapade, I won the camp-wide "Mr. Tracy Most Representative Camper" award, as well as "Best Camper" for the senior (13-16 years old) division. Rich was runner-up in both categories. We both agreed that he should have won the awards, but what's the difference among drinking buddies?

Looking at the larger picture, of course, it's a travesty to suggest that either of us were representative of the precepts that the Archdiocese of New York espoused. There are, too, clearly issues of enabling. Were we just "boys being boys" (and girls being girls)? Or should we have been booted after the second, or third, transgression to, as they used to say, teach us a lesson.

I don't know if expulsion would have had any effect on my drinking in subsequent years. There were no re-habs, or wilderness therapy programs, or boot camps in those days (although I vaguely recall a threat of military school). As for Richie, to this day he is happily married to Marjorie, the girl he was visiting that summer on the dew-laden grass of the girl's hockey field.