"No excuses!" he shouts. "I'm telling you—No—I'm warning you—If you don't get an A on your final, bad things are going to happen." And then his next words are like deja vu, I've heard them and other analogies hundreds of times in movies and television: "I'm taking the keys."

Oh shit! Not the keys! Not my baby!

"And one other thing," he says. "You'll find yourself in some jungle south of the border in some poverty and disease stricken village next to your brother."

For a while my brother's send-off had been hard on both my mother and I. She'd almost left my father over it, but he'd convinced her that it was for my brother's own good. Although he's almost two years older, growing up it seemed we did almost everything together. Learned tennis, read the same books, been part of the Academy's chess club. Except for rugby. I did that on my own. He refused to play. He was always afraid he'd get hurt.

As sad as I know my father had felt when he first sent my brother off, it was something that he couldn't back out of. My father had always told us how important it was for a man to keep his word whenever a man said he was going to do something. If you couldn't keep your word then you weren't a man.

Now, the talk apparently ended, my father marches off for the main house. And as his voice grows distant, I hear him mutter: "I'll make men out of you boys yet. . ." I shudder. I can expect him to keep his word.



"WHERE am I supposed to find a drug addict?" I ask Joel in desperation, my friend since our school days at the Beverly Hills Academy.

"Heck if I know," he gasps, pausing in the middle of our tennis match. He stands slumped over, his hands resting on the net and his eyes burning through the ground. When he looks up he appears shameful. He brushes the blonde hair from his eyes. He says, "You know, though—since my cousin Lee's started working as an actor. . .he's been using drugs."

"How do you know that?" I demand, shocked. Drug addicts are the sludge of society. The criminals in the prisons. The very foundations of the inner city ghettos. Recalling the movie, The Doors, I suddenly have another thought. They're also the entertainers. Actors and singers. Poets and painters.

Joel sighs. In answer finally, he says, "I overheard my mom on the phone with my aunt. They were talking about a drug detox—or something-or-other treatment center—that he'd been committed to."

"Then he doesn't use drugs anymore," I conclude.

Shaking his head, Joel says, "Actually. . .he probably does."

"What—why's that?"

"He's been committed to that treatment place more than once, so it seems that he always returns to his old ways."

I ponder this bit of information for a moment, remembering McGinnis's instructions to the class to follow and study a member of a political group. Drug addicts, though? How could they be considered a political group? I guess they could affect politics. Politicians are always campaigning about the war on drugs.