I'm Not High Read Online Free Page B

was born on June 21, 1967, the first day of summer.
    To this day, if anyone ever asks Mom about me, the first thing she says is, “All the doctors said that I should abort him.” Thanks, Mom. She makes sure to add that they also warned her that her baby could have physical or mental defects. Of course, many people I know think that the doctors were right.

    A lot of my early life was spent at the Rock Front with my dad behind the bar. It was just a local Long Island hangout, but to me it had a smoky Goodfellas mystique, with regulars who had names like Tricky Dick, Whistling Dick, Dan Dan the Oil Man, Shady Pete, Lucky Lucy, and Jimmy the Rat. Not the Jimmy the Rat, but close enough. While my dad slung them brandy old-fashioneds, vodka sours, and longneck Miller High Lifes, these guys taught me, at age four, to play pool and shuffleboard.
    And I taught them about the New York Mets. My love for the team came from my dad—baseball is one of the first things he ever shared with me. At the bar, the Mets games on TV and my baseball card collection were my babysitters when Dad got busy. He challenged customers to quiz me and I was rarely stumped. I knew the stats for any guy on the Mets’ twenty-five-man roster across a three- or four-year span. To me, it was unbelievable that these gods played their games just a few miles away and had a pitching staff with guys like Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Jon Matlack, and Tug McGraw.
    If I wasn’t at the Rock Front I could likely be found at the house of my sitter, an Italian American woman named Mary. She and her husband were a little older than my folks, in their fifties, and for a long time they were really like another set of parents. While my parents worked, I’d spend every afternoon with Mary playing army men, coloring, and helping her with household chores, and all the while she’d never stop singing, “Fairy tales can come true/It can happen to you.”
    Mary and her husband, Jimmy, lived in a modest house, not far from where life for me started out—the Fenwood Apartments, a low-income housing development in Valley Stream—and as I spent more and more time at Mary’s house, her singing decreased. Her relationship with her husband took on a new wrinkle—at least to me—and it confused me. Jimmy looked a lot like Uncle Junior from The Sopranos, bald on the top, with a little hair on the sides. At first, I thought he was great. I even called him “Grandpa” for a long time, but I eventually saw him transform into an animal. I’d be watching Chico and the Man on TV or playing Matchbox cars on Mary’s kitchen floor, he’d come home, and it would get ugly. He’d start chasing her around trying to slap her.
    “Get over here,” he’d yell menacingly, rolling up his sleeves, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth.
    “No,” she’d cry. “Wait! Not in front of little Jimmy.” She’d push him away and scoop me up and put me in a bedroom. Then she’d take her beating from him. The closed bedroom door didn’t do much to muffle the sounds and it scared the hell out of me.
    When he was finished, he’d scram, and Mary would do her best to pull herself together, even though she’d often have bruises all over her body. One day at school, my teacher, Mrs. Gerdick, pulled me aside.
    “Is everything okay at home?” she asked. I have no idea how I was acting, but I must have looked shell-shocked.
    “Yeah,” I said a bit too unconvincingly. She called my mom in for a conference.
    “Something’s going on with Jimmy,” Mrs. Gerdick said. “He’s seeing something somewhere, and he’s traumatized and sad from it.”
    I was too nervous to spill it there and then. I didn’t want to make trouble, ruin Mary’s life, or worse, get Grandpa Jimmy angry with me. But when we were driving home, I couldn’t keep the situation from my mom any longer.
    “He’s beating her, Mom,” I said. “Jimmy beats Mary up all the time.”
    My mom’s eyes welled with tears. “How long