A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (20 page)

“What the fuck are you doing?” Dad said, snatching the snake out of my hands. “You think it's funny to whip the dog? Do you? You think this is funny, motherfucker?”

I was still trying to figure out why I was in trouble when he hit me with the snake the first time. I yelped and started to get up to run, but he whipped me with it again and I started crawling, trying to get away from him.

“You think this is funny?” he kept yelling while he chased me with the snake. I felt one stinging blow after another, and then the snake broke apart. Dad picked up the pieces and started whipping me with those. Calliope, sitting on the couch, was laughing too hard to talk.

“Stop it!” I screamed, curling up in a ball to protect my face.

“Jesus, Mark!” Calliope finally gasped out. “He wasn't hurting the dog. He was just trying to catch his feet!”

Dad was past hearing. He stood over me, breathing hard, and dropped the last two pieces of the shredded snake on top of me while I lay on the ground whimpering.

“Don't ever let me see you doing that again,” he growled. “Never again.”

Now, in the backyard of the Ballard house, he shook the tent pole fragment at me, with its dangling piece of elastic.

“Is this what you used?” he asked. “You think it's fun to hurt animals? Huh? What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”

I stared at him blankly while I caught up with his line of thinking. He was using the same words he'd used before, or I might not have been able to make the connection.

“What?” I asked.

“Don't you lie to me, you little piece of shit,” he said.

“I wouldn't do that,” I said. “I told you. I told you about Tom. I didn't…”

“Where's the cat?” he said.

I pointed, and he went over to the bushes where Kit-Kat was lying and looked at her for a minute. He was still holding the tent pole. He came back over a minute later.

“I didn't do it,” I said.

“Fine,” he said, throwing the tent pole on the ground and going inside. I followed him in and saw he was looking for a veterinarian in the yellow pages. He stopped and looked up at me.

“Get a shovel and go clean that shit off the lawn,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I went outside and down to the basement, where we kept our garden tools. I grabbed the shovel and started scooping up dead kittens and carrying them to the garbage cans we kept in the bushes next to the kitchen door. Then I used the hose to wash away the blood. When I was done, I put everything away. I went back to the kitchen door and I could hear Dad on the phone inside, talking to a vet. I noticed the tent pole on the ground next to the porch. I picked it up, broke it over my knee, and threw it in the garbage can with the dead kittens.

Kit-Kat lived, but that summer Carmella said we were breaking the law by having so many cats and threatened to call Animal Control on us. Dad finally put up a sign by the road, inviting passersby to take as many cats as they wanted. Two weeks later they were all gone, including Tom.

 

28

I had a good fourth grade year at my new school. Or at least it was a much less shitty year than first, second, and third grades had been, which felt like having a good year. So I went back to school for my fifth grade year with high hopes that were promptly dashed. My fourth grade teacher had done me the favor of not giving a shit about me. He barely noticed I was in class. If I messed up or did something against the rules, he punished me. But then he forgot about it.

My new teacher, Mr. Parsons, made it clear right away that I was going to be a special project of his. He yelled at me in front of the class for slouching, for putting my feet on my desk, for talking to myself; he yelled at me for drawing when he was talking. For laughing. He yelled at me once for loosening my belt. It wasn't exactly unexpected—four years of public school had taught me never to underestimate the viciousness of underpaid civil servants—but I didn't have much tolerance for it either. I started skipping school almost immediately.

Three weeks into the academic year I got a reprieve when the school was reorganized to create a mixed fifth and sixth grade class, with a new teacher named Mr. Fields. Mr. Fields was a comparatively young hippie with a shaggy haircut and an earnest personality. He taught class with puppets he'd made himself, and he was a better-than-fair ventriloquist. I was surprised it worked as well as it did. The class had a higher-than-average proportion of hardcore white trash in it—lots of feathered hair, smoking in the bathrooms, and sweatbands. But when Mr. Fields pulled out his talking worm, we all turned back into regular kids. Even at the time I thought it was remarkable.

I made a couple of new friends in Mr. Fields's class. Ryan had moved to Seattle from New York two years before, and had lived down in South Seattle before moving to Ballard and starting at my school. He was a sixth grader with an October birthday, so he was almost two years older than I was. Other than that, he didn't really stand out. He was of medium height and build—maybe a little on the chunky side—with big features, pale skin, and straight black hair, like I'd expect to see on an Indian or an Asian kid. He was perhaps a little less white trash than the rest of the class, in that he didn't go in for sports and his hair was impossible to feather, but that was his only notable feature. Then one day I noticed him fiddling with a twenty-sided die. Which meant he played Dungeons & Dragons.

Gabe, my action-figures acquaintance from fourth grade, had started a D&D group over the summer. Most of the other kids in the group were friends Gabe already had when I met him, so I jumped at the chance to invite Ryan to the group.
Look
, I wanted to say to them,
I can make friends, too!
And for about a week, Ryan was the new kid I'd invited to the group. He was “Jason's friend Ryan.” By the second week, Ryan was telling me he couldn't hang out because kids in our D&D group who wouldn't give me the time of day were calling him to do stuff on weekends, so his social calendar was basically full.

*   *   *

I liked to believe that my relationship with my D&D friends was complicated, but the truth was actually pretty simple. To say I was at the bottom of the totem pole in that crew would have been a flight of self-aggrandizing fancy. The group was small. It was usually me, Gabe, his friends Joey and Patrick, Ryan, and three other kids who came and went depending on their inclinations and the status of their parents' interstate custody battles: Joel, Nathan, and Ben. What it lacked in size, the group more than made up for with infighting and acrimony.

Joey and Patrick were the source of most of my problems. They'd been friends with Gabe before I came to Ballard, and they weren't super happy about Gabe's decision to include me in their activities. Joey was what we used to call mixed race, meaning some mixture of African American and Caucasian. He lived in the basement of a house with his mom, an overweight blond woman who cooked pasta with red sauce for dinner six nights a week. His dad had been black—still was, for all I knew, but he never visited or came up in conversation. Culturally Joey was as white as the rest of us, and I'd known him for almost a year before I figured out that he considered himself any kind of outsider in ultra-white-bread Ballard.

Patrick was a skinny kid with light brown hair, weasel-like features, and a personality to match. His claim to fame was that he was descended from a famous pirate—Captain Kidd or Blackbeard or someone—and supposedly had a box of exotic knives and swords, stored at his grandmother's house in Canada, to be claimed on the occasion of his eighteenth birthday.

As time passed, Joey and Patrick's initial dislike for me hardened into something more frightening. They frequently hosted our D&D games because they had extra space in their homes, and once Patrick announced out of the blue that the only way I'd be allowed to stay for the game was if I paid a toll: I had to let everyone in the group punch me in the stomach, once, as hard as they could. I took the hits, and every kid in the group, including Gabe, gave it their best shot. After that there was blood in the water, and the conflict just intensified.

Sometimes when I spent the night over at Ryan's house, he'd lock me out on the porch without my shoes and make me answer trivia questions for an hour before he'd let me back in. Once he'd managed to lock me out in my underwear. Gabe's mom had finally relented on sending him to day care after school when he started fifth grade, but she'd also set a four-kid limit on the number of guests Gabe could have at their place when she was at work; whenever the limit was exceeded, I was always the one Gabe kicked out. They regularly ditched me on outings—in parks, in downtown Ballard after movies, or on our way to baseball games or events around the neighborhood. And all that was nothing compared to the abuse they heaped on my characters in various role-playing sessions: in our imaginary world of elves and goblins, my fourteenth-level assassin was castrated, immolated, sodomized, eaten alive, shat out, and magically reconstituted to go through the same ordeal all over again.

I told my dad about it once, only to end up having to talk him out of calling everyone's parents. I convinced him I'd made it sound worse than it was, and that it was really just a lot of regular teasing. The role-playing stuff particularly bothered him. He said it was borderline sexual abuse. After I talked him down I waited a few weeks, then told him it had gotten better.

He didn't seem to understand or care that these people were my best friends—they were the best friends I was capable of making, and the only thing I had to offer them was my desperation.

*   *   *

I made another friend in my fifth grade year, but the time I spent with him felt like some kind of dirty secret. Eddie was one of the sixth graders in Mr. Fields's class. We met during a vote-stacking campaign to set the class mascot for the fake currency Mr. Fields was giving to us. The idea was that we all had bank accounts; we earned “money” for our accounts by turning in our homework on time and doing extra credit projects. We got to spend the money during auctions for novelty items, like mechanical pencils or
Garfield the Cat
comic books. But all of it was based on the idea of a classroom currency, and there was a vote to decide whose face should go on the money. Eddie wanted it to be Jim Davis's iconic Garfield character. I liked that idea better than I liked any of the alternatives, so I helped him consolidate a voting bloc to give us a plurality. We didn't know any of those terms, we just knew the scam: during the pre-vote caucuses we hustled from table to table telling the most popular kids in each camp how the other groups were working against them. We dragged kids out into the hallway and offered them better seats in the class, or desserts from our lunch trays, if they voted the way we wanted them to. Garfield won by two votes.

When Mr. Fields announced we'd need to choose partners for a geography project a week later, Eddie came right to me.

“You know how to get shit done,” he said.

It was the first time, possibly, in my life that a peer had said anything complimentary about me to my face. I wasn't sure what to make of it.

As we spent more time together, I started to realize that Eddie and I had almost nothing in common. He didn't watch TV. He didn't play with toys—he didn't even own any toys. He was small for his age, but hard as a coffin nail, with a wide face and a dry gravelly voice. He wore the standard issue headbanger uniform: denim jacket, acid-washed jeans, tight T-shirts, and basketball shoes. He feathered his hair, drew the logos for heavy metal bands on his Pee Chee folders, and said “fuck” and “dude” every other word. Eddie and his mom lived in his mom's boyfriend, Dan's, house, a block away from mine.

Eddie's room was a finished bedroom in the unfinished basement of Dan's house. He came and went through a door next to the driveway. His bedroom walls were covered in posters and tapestries printed with Iron Maiden album covers. He was fascinated with the band's mascot, Eddie the Head, who appeared in every image. His room always smelled like WD-40 and pot. When I called his house and his mom answered, she'd say, “Hi, this is Shirley; if you've got the dime, I've got the time.”

In spite of all our differences, the things that bothered me about Eddie were all the ways in which his life resembled mine. Once I got a full picture of how much we had in common, I tried to shake him. Making friends was almost impossible for me most of the time, so I assumed all I had to do was not return some phone calls and Eddie would go away. But he kept calling, and kept inviting me to go with him down to the local video arcade; kept asking me to partner with him on school projects and trying to get me on his team during kickball games. Finally, I gave in and resigned myself to our friendship.

We never did anything I thought was fun; he was always forcing me to play his games, which were less like games and more like projects. He liked going for long walks around the neighborhood, ostensibly looking for things to steal. He liked shooting slingshots and BB guns at bottles and cans, and stealing lumber from construction sites to build illegal tree houses on city land, in the wild spaces between platted properties. None of it felt very kidlike to me and, unlike Eddie, I was in no hurry to grow up.

“You smoke weed?” he asked, the first time he lit up around me.

“No,” I said.

“Ever try it?”

“No,” I said. “I don't even take aspirin.”

He took a huge toke off his pipe, held it, and nodded, like he was acknowledging some point I'd been trying to make. Then the smoke burst out of his mouth and nose and he took a deep breath of clean air.

“That's good,” he said. “This shit'll fuck you up. Bother you if I do it?”

I shook my head. “Why would it?”

Eddie didn't have any other friends at our school. I wasn't sure why. From my perspective, he seemed like most of the other kids in our class. He liked the same music, wore the same clothes, and had the same haircut. It wasn't until I was older that I came to understand that most of the other disaffected pot-smoking headbangers in my school came from good middle-class homes. Some of them were even kind of rich. No matter how different we appeared on the surface, as far as the other kids in our class were concerned, Eddie and I were pretty much the same where it mattered.