The Helium Brothers

I was 16 and an only child when my mom met her 19-year-old boyfriend John. She was 44 and going through that time in her life when her body could no longer warrant children but it did warrant and desire a lot of sex. It was a perfect match. John was a virile, sex-crazed late-teen from Queens without a job, and she was a single successful businesswoman with cash and time on her hands. They had a blast together for almost five years, and so did I, finally landing the big brother I never had.

There were always drugs of some kind or another around and I was free to partake, although not to excess around my mom. This leniency was limited to pot and mushrooms, but there was coke in the picture as well, and I must have nicked multiple ounces from my mom's dresser drawer over the years. She always had a bindle of white powder, maybe an eighth of an ounce, sitting badly hidden in her underwear drawer. I would dip in, carefully moving her dildo collection to the side, to the point of nearly cleaning her out weekly. I always felt I was doing a service by snorting all her coke because she did too much as it was. On the other hand I felt bad that she might think she was going nuts, wondering either, "I'm doing a lot of coke," "I'm doing too much coke" or "My son is doing a lot of my coke." Whatever way, I was convinced it was the right thing to do, little addict that I was.

John had a similar relationship with her drugs, but it was in the open and it eventually led to serious problems for him and us. He gradually moved on from snorting it to smoking it, and would cook up rocks with baking soda standing over the stove with a little copper Turkish coffeemaker. He was like some chemist Emeril Lagasse, carefully stirring the cream so it didn't curdle or burn. Wide-eyed, he taught me to get the shit hot, add some soda, a little water and cook it together till it solidified into a hard ball. Then in a glass pipe he would smoke it.

We would sit around and make crazy movies on my General Electric VHS camera with the separate unit that you put the tapes in. It had to be attached to the camera with a cord and we weren't all that mobile, so we would make these parodies in my mom's wildly decorated apartment. Karate spoofs, mock cooking shows, fake newscasts and the mother of all un-pluggeds, "The Helium Brothers," where we inhaled tons of gas out of balloons and sang hits like "Far Away Eyes" by the Stones.

John convinced my mom to get me a guitar and taught me his licks and some crowd-pleasers. Learning to play an instrument was a milestone; to this day my ax brings me great pleasure, even when I'm boring my friends playing those same old covers of Led Zep and Dylan that he taught me. John played a mean cover-band guitar repertoire of songs that included Billy Squier's "Lonely Is the Night," all the Stones hits and my favorite, "Shooting Star" by Bad Company. "Johnny was a school boy when he heard his first Beatle song..." John would sing. "Don't you know that you are a shooting star?"

I always felt this was John's anthem, this tragic song about a dead rock star. Yet today he's doing great, with a beautiful wife and daughter, and stops by to see my mom every now and then. But I'm jumping ahead.

The night would grow late and I would be dozing off on the couch while John continued his baking in the kitchen. When the bag would start to thin I would raise my eyelids and see him searching the apartment for the drugs he'd hidden while he was in the throes of smoking. He would always hide a few rocks in nooks and crannies around the kitchen and living room, then forget where he put them and whether or not he smoked them, waking me accusatorily with cross examination. This kind of freaked me out, but my mom really liked the guy so I put up with it; and besides, when he wasn't totally wasted he was a ton of fun to hang with.

There were a few instances that could have ended in disaster, and as I grew older I felt it might be in my mom's and my best interest to get this dude out of our lives. One particularly harried night after a violent row my mom kicked him out. He tried to get back in the building, but the doorman, a sweet lightweight Latvian, was given the word that he was not to be let in. John overpowered him and tied the poor man to his chair, scaling the building to my mom's third-floor bedroom window. I assume she let him in, realizing that forcing him to go back down could be dangerous.

Surprisingly, his addiction was not what led to their breakup; it involved another woman. John had been having an affair with a friend of a friend of my mom's, and it just killed her. I think she was most upset that all her friends knew of the affair before she did. She would say, "How could he shit where he eats?" between sobs and sips of Johnny Walker Red.

She had always said, to my dismay, that she loved this guy more than she loved my father. At the time I had trouble believing this, but have since figured out where she was coming from. It was an affair of two ages. A young stud 25 years her junior who could rekindle the youth she'd spent with my father, who was three years her senior and with whom she'd lived 25 years (though they never got married). There are so many cliched instances of older men with younger women, but to me the real match is the one my mom found with her 19-year-old lover, who satisfied her impending-menopause and chemically induced desires.