Free Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn Page A

concentrating on what came out of my mouth instead of what went into it. When the experiment failed I had a hole to fill, a hole I sometimes feared was larger than I was. I tried eating again, but the nausea from the venison years came back with a vengeance, so I turned to smoking. I liked it, but I hated the company. The smokers my age were a depressing gang. They came from broken families, dressed in black, and were always swearing idiotic pacts to kill a certain teacher, kill themselves, worship thedevil, bomb the school, or run away to St. Paul and form a rock band. Eventually, out of boredom and contempt, I drifted away from them.
    I made a play to join the drinking crowd—anything for a habit I could share—but it wouldn’t have me because I didn’t play sports. This was just as well. Our town was dry, no bars or liquor stores, and the jocks’ drink of choice was 3.2 beer, a weak concoction that smelled like soapy water and tasted like the glue on envelopes. I had to drink a whole six-pack to catch a buzz, and even then I felt maddeningly alert.
    My need for a painkiller was made more urgent by the fact that Mike and Audrey were fighting. One issue was who worked harder for less acknowledgment. Mike had paid Woody Wolff a thousand dollars to visit his store at the start of summer vacation and autograph shoes and balls. Over a hundred people showed up, but few of them purchased anything, having Wolff sign pieces of paper instead, and Mike accused Audrey of failing to sympathize with this great betrayal. Audrey, for her part, charged Mike with underestimating the thanklessness of the nursing profession.
    The other issue between my parents was Joel, who’d fallen in with the rich kids on the hill. He’d demanded tennis and riding lessons, which Audrey had gone ahead and paid for out of her own earnings. Mike went ape. The night he found out he stayed awake till dawn piling up items in the living room—lamps and books and clothes and kitchen gadgets—which he sold at a garagesale the following weekend. One by one, Audrey replaced the lost items with more expensive equivalents, and each time she brought one home Mike kicked a door or pounded a table. It was hell at home.
    I decided that the answer was hard liquor. I approached the town drunk to find out what his source was. A hairy-nostriled old man named Willy Lindt, he lived on a houseboat whose windows were soaped over like the windows of the dirty bookstores I’d seen on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. He fished for crappies and smallmouth from the deck and took his low-life role seriously. He milked it. Three summers ago a movie production company had come to town—a costume drama about the pioneers—and Willy was cast as a drifter by the director. The only local to land a speaking part, he still wore his costume of canvas dungarees and spoke with the Swedish accent he’d been coached in.
    Willy seemed pleased to have a visitor. I sat on a velveteen couch whose caved-in cushions made me feel inadequate and short as he scurried around with a broom and tidied up. He dumped his trash through a portal in the floor, where the river floated it away.
    “I want to know how to get liquor,” I said.
    “Steal it from your folks.”
    “I can’t. They’d catch me. I’d get sent somewhere.”
    Willy smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I got sent to Pine Island Juvenile. I learned to play chess there. Mastered archery. Far and away the best year of my life.”
    “What if I gave you money for vodka?”
    “Don’t drink clear spirits. Don’t go down that road. They say they’re purer. They’re not. Drink rock and rye. The fruit in the bottle adds important nutrients.”
    I fished in my jeans for the crumpled fives I’d stolen from Mike’s basement workshop. One reason for his despair about money might have been his inability to keep physical track of it; he rarely got through an entire checkbook before losing it down the seat crack of the car, and he