The Interview
I arrived at Anne's house in the late morning. Annemarie and Teo, who had come down from Connecticut, were puttering in the garden when Anne and I sat down at her kitchen table and talked about the days when saloons were the social nexus, along with the church, for adults in the village. It wasn't all about drinking for some of the habitues, like Anne, although it would certainly be naive to suggest that it wasn't for many.
After we finish the formal interview, Anne spoke a little about Amber, and the period she grew up in, with which, of course, I was intimately familiar. The defining leitmotif of the late Sixties and early Seventies, I would argue, was experimentation with drugs of all varieties. Protests, free love, being green, hippies, yippies, Woodstock, be-ins, Volkswagen vans, power to the people, cross-country trips, communes, dropping out, turning on, music, art, and every other movement or artifact of the time was wrapped up in getting high in one form or another, at least for most of the people I knew.
Anne mentioned that when she was putting together a list of potential attendees for her fortieth Hastings High School reunion, she was pleasantly surprised to find that only a handful of classmates had passed away. Amber was surprised, too. She surmised that, due to drug abuse, the percentage of living classmates would be far less for her own class of 1971.
Anne told me about Amber's struggles and detoxes during those years. When her daughter was "under the influence," she said, she always tried to keep in mind that the person in front of her was "not Annemarie."
I knew that it had been the drugs talking when Carrick yelled at us to go fuck ourselves the day before, but it was helpful to hear Anne reaffirm what is hard to fathom when you're in the thick of battle. Dealing with an addict can be mentally eviscerating. Anne's husband Bob, who was a very gentle and reserved man, one day ripped a telephone out of the wall socket from frustration while talking with Amber, Anne said. Anne said that when Amber realized how mad she'd made her father, she sat down and said, "Mom, I know I have a problem." That is, of course, the classic first step to recovery.