Rebecca Johnson

Word Count 1,826

I had been dating the man who would become my husband for several months when he announced his  brother was in town and wanted to meet me.  I suggested he bring Norman up for the weekend to my country house. (N.B. This makes me sound grander than I am. When Vogue, where I was a writer for twenty five years, sent a photographer to shoot me there, someone in the art department remarked that my house looked like a trailer.)

From the start, I was taken aback by Norman. He was on the short side with  a turned up nose, high cheekbones, full lips, square jaw and a mass of thick, curly hair. His ever-scheming mother once tried to get him work as a child model but I’m sure those casting agents took one look at him and could only imagine a miniature devil. She got her wish with my husband who became America’s top child model at the age of 11, but that’s another story.

 My husband tended to wear faded polo shirts and beat up boat shoes on the weekend; Norman was wearing a loud Hawaiian print shirt over his large belly and gold-rimmed aviator glasses. His voice was loud and booming and his eyes were often slits. Probably because he was high.

I made dinner for us that first night, including an apple crisp served with vanilla ice cream. In the middle of the night, I heard unfamiliar noises coming from the kitchen. I went to investigate and saw Norman, backlit by the cold, blue light of the freezer door as he spooned ice cream into his mouth. I went back to bed. The next morning, I found the ice cream container in the trash. Licked clean. First lesson learned about my future brother in law—once he started, he had a hard time stopping.

At the time, Norman was one of those guys who would cold call people, trying to sell them gold bullions. He worked in a large room filled with other characters like him-- middle aged men who had slipped a few rungs on the ladder of life because of drug problems, alcohol problems, women problems. Norman had them all. His office was somewhere near LAX and whenever I imagined it, I thought of one of those David Mamet plays from ‘80’s that lays bare the soul of capitalism.

If you didn’t know Norman’s backstory, he could be charming. He once answered the phone at our house and ended up chatting with an acquaintance of mine for twenty minutes. Later, she gushed to me, “Norman is great!” I almost bit my tongue in half on that one.

I sound harsh.  I was. Not to him directly. I never said anything unkind to him. I planted a half smile on my lips when I was around him and tried to be agreeable. By the time I met him, the family had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bailing Norman out of his scrapes. Including the time he was arrested for getting in a fight at a Lakers game. While he waited for the money to post, someone in the holding cell broke his jaw. A part me felt sorry for the disaster he had made of his life, but another part of me was forever silently shouting “Grow the fuck up!”

Maybe he never had a chance. These days, we talk about the epigentic effect of trauma, how it leaves a chemical mark on the survivors and their offspring. If that’s true, Norman carried a heavy load. His mother  was a Polish Jew who survived the Warsaw ghetto, a hell hole where the Germans allotted 184 calories a day to its residents. Norman’s father died before he was born, the victim, his son was always told, of a car accident. That was a lie. His father, a black marketeer, was pushed off the road by a business rival. He was, essentially, murdered by the mafia. But to survive in the chaos of post-war Eastern Europe, you had to be part of the mafia.

My mother in law got herself to New York, where she gave birth at 17 years old.  She found work as a model and a hat check girl at a night club. One night, a young reporter from The Wall Street Journal walked in and handed her his coat. Edyta and Thomas Smith had almost nothing in common. Her English wasn’t great but she was beautiful and he was recently returned from war and hungry for life. Marriages have thrived on less. But not theirs. I don’t think I ever met a less compatible couple.

After the marriage, they had their only child. My husband. By then, Norman was seven years old and Thomas “raised him as his own.” As they say.

It is tempting to lay all Norman’s problems at the feet of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, when drugs were so readily available. Certainly, that was Edyta’s story. “It was the drugs,” she would always say to me when we discussed Norman. He was bright kid and voracious reader with good enough grades for the University of Virginia. But he got kicked out at the end of freshman year for selling marijuana to his classmates. 

Back in New York, he’d had the bad luck (a recurring motif) to sell marijuana to an undercover agent at a nightclub in Southampton where he was working. A few weeks later, the police arrived pre-dawn at the family’s Sutton Place apartment in Manhattan to arrest him. Norman was low level but they hoped to flip him for information he didn’t possess. By then, with the formidable Edyta by his side, Thomas had climbed the ladder at Chase Manhattan bank to become Vice President. “CHASE EXECUTIVE’S SON ARRESTED IN DRUG BUST” was the next day’s headline in The New York Post.

The bank let it be known that Thomas’ future lay elsewhere. The entire family pulled up stakes to move to London. To this day, when people ask my husband why he grew up in London, I see him hesitate. Tell the whole story? Or elide it with a social anodyne? Elide. Mostly.

 Norman returned to the states where he built a career on the fringes of the entertainment industry. He also moved into harder drugs. He married a woman who accidentally killed herself when she ran off the road on the way to the airport to meet a friend who was also a dealer. Somewhere along the way, he picked up the Hepatitis C virus through a dirty needle. Alcohol was the worst thing for an ailing liver but, still, he drank.

Sarasota, Florida, 2004. The family is gathered to celebrate Thomas and Edyta’s 50th wedding anniversary. Even my husband’s ex-wife is there. I am awakened in the middle of the night by screams coming from the living room. It’s Norman howling at the tops of his lungs. I try to make out the words but it’s gibberish. My husband is awake too.  We have an infant who, thankfully, sleeps through it all. We hear glass breaking and lie rigid in bed, holding our breath. I ask him if he thinks he should go outside. He shakes his head. Whatever demon has taken hold of Norman that night is beyond us.

I would wonder what kind of family I have married into but I’ve seen my father do equally self destructive things. We don’t choose our family. 

It’s the entitlement that kills me. One year, Norman asked my husband to buy him tickets to Cirque de Soleil for his birthday. Front orchestra seats cost $250 a piece. I tell him to buy rear orchestra at $125 a pop. The show comes and goes. Norman says nothing. Finally, Andrew asks how he enjoyed it. “I’d rather not go at all than sit in seats that bad,” Norman answers

There are more stories of failed rehab, bailouts, endless requests for money. Norman likes the good life. When his teeth fail, he doesn’t want dentures for $5,000; he wants implants for $15,000.

The saddest story may be the last story. After years of abusing alcohol, Norman finally kicked alcohol through intensive AA and the knowledge that the alcohol would kill him. For all his fuck ups, Norman desperately wanted to live. 

The doctors tell him that his only chance for survival is a liver implant. He goes on the waiting list. There are meetings with social workers to determine whether he is a “viable” candidate. Nobody comes out and says it out loud, but the criteria for viability feels uncomfortably close to eugenics. Is the patient a functioning member of society? Can he support himself? Does he have family? Friends? On paper, Norman passes. And, in fact, he does have a large network of friends. He has always had the charm to draw people towards him, especially if there is something in it for him. He’s an extrovert in a world that values them.  His caseworker becomes one of his biggest supporters. 

The only condition is that he must stay off drugs. Miraculously, he manages to do this for years as he inches up the waiting list. After so many disappointments, my husband and I are both hopeful. Is it possible that he has finally crossed the threshold into adulthood in his late ‘60’s? 

But then he cracks. It’s a few years before marijuana will actually be legalized in California but Norman has always known where to score. He starts to smoke again. He is nearing the top of the list for the implant so they call him in for a drug test. He fails. And, just like that, he is permanently kicked off the list. He begs them. He pleads. In the past, this has always worked with the family. Nobody ever wanted to see him hit rock bottom. Nobody wanted him to live on the streets or eat out of garbage cans so the resources were always summoned. But the hospital turns a deaf ear. These are the rules. There is no mercy. 

Norman’s skin begins to turn yellow. My husband arranges for an AA buddy to move into the guest bedroom of the condo the family has bought him. He hires a housekeeper. My husband goes to visit. Three days after he returns home, Norman watches a football game, goes to bed and never wakes up again. 

With my brother in law, I always felt like I had a front row seat to a slowly unfolding disaster. It was a show I didn’t want to see, but I had been trapped into my seat by the inexorable bonds of family, even if just by marriage. It pained my husband, so it pained me , though to a much lesser degree. Now the show was finally over and we could all rise from our seats and leave the interminable theater, saddened by the tragedy but also somewhat relieved.

Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020), Working Mother, etc. Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why.