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walked home late from a friend’s house and saw the light on in my brother’s window, which fronted a fairly busy street in our genteel neighborhood. I leaned over a hedge and looked inside: Scott was sprawled naked on the bed, alone, staring through slitted eyes at the ceiling, slowly plucking at his pubic hair.
    That year was the first and last time we were photographed as a family for our Christmas card, something my parents had always considered bourgeois. Perhaps they thought if we perpetuated an illusion of domestic serenity it would come true to some extent. Perhaps, too, there was a kind of curatorial impulse to preserve our little unit for posterity before the final wave broke and dispersed us. The photographer posed us under a tree in our backyard. I remember poring over the contact sheets a week or so later and finding something wrong with almost every shot: our two Saint Bernards, Gretchen and Bruno, kept lurching to their feet and turning their heads the wrong way; Scott couldn’t help but look moody and unpleasant, while I looked like a grinning idiot. Happily, a single photo was all but perfect: my parents were both beaming—aging well in spite of everything—the dogs were just so, Scott looked handsome and sane, and I looked as though I were caught in the midst of an orgasm, such was my almost frantic attempt to seem happy. The dogs too were smiling gamely, though Bruno was already suffering from the heart disease that would kill him within a month or so, and Gretchen followed close behind, and we didn’t have any more dogs after that.
    ONE DAY THAT spring I was sitting in my room with a few friends when I heard—when everybody heard—my mother weeping with perfect abandon in the adjacent master bedroom. We stopped whatever we were doing (some sort of board game) and looked at each other. I can imagine my thoughts at that moment: first, I made a mental note never to have friends at my house en masse again, and then it occurred to me, as I looked at their stunned and staring faces, that everyone but me came from a conventional middle-class home where the worst disasters were kept under wraps, and finally I decided I’d better go see what the deal was. I asked my friends to let themselves out, and they were happy to oblige.
    Marlies was prostrate on the bed, though I noticed with annoyance that she kept her head averted so that her awful noises were unmuffled by the pillow. I’d seen her cry maybe five times before, but never like this. Something terrible had happened, all right. I sat beside her, patting her back, and warily asked what was the matter. Amid harrowing glottal sobs she told me:
    “Scott’s on d- drugs . . . long time now . . . everything . . .”
    “Who told you this?” I asked.
    “Everybody knows. Everybody at the GBR”—Grand Boulevard Restaurant, where Scott was a busboy—“t-talks about it . . . I don’t know what to do . He doesn’t listen to—to . . . I can’t tell P-papa . . .”
    Scott appeared in the doorway. He looked apprehensive in a vaguely amused way, as though he knew what was happening and found it absurd like everything else.
    “What’s going on?”
    “She says you’re taking drugs .” I tried to make my voice sound a little weepy too, but it didn’t come off. With a resigned smirk, my brother took my place on the bed and made to comfort my mother. For a minute or so I stood glowering at him, but I got the impression they wanted to be alone.
    MY BROTHER CONCEDED his pot smoking but said that the other rumors (PCP, THC, various pills and powders) were fucking lies. He also made it clear that pot was no big deal and he had no intention of quitting. In fact he became a lot less furtive after that. He openly subscribed to High Times and kept elaborate paraphernalia in his room; I remember a two-foot bong called “the Skydiver” that involved pulling a ripcord to uncork the stop and release a massive hit of smoke. There was always a fresh “lid” of pot