A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (32 page)

I swallowed the idea as many times as I had to in order to make it stay down, then I picked up the phone and dialed Gabe's number.

He was the first friend I'd made at my elementary school in Ballard, and he was geographically closest to me. The lawyer his mom had married owned a big house in Montlake, an upper-class neighborhood on the north end of Capitol Hill, where a lot of University of Washington faculty lived.

I called the last number I had for him, with a Capitol Hill prefix.

“Hello?”

I recognized his voice immediately.

“Gabe,” I said. “It's Jason. I'm back in town.”

“Who?”

“Jason Schmidt.”

“Oh … okay?”

“I'm back in town,” I said.

“Right. You said that.”

“Yeah. I was thinking—you wanna do something sometime?”

“I'm kind of busy,” he said.

“I … okay. Uh, like maybe next weekend then?”

“Nope,” he said. “Got plans.”

“Sure, okay…” I said.

“Hey, I gotta go,” he said.

“I'll try you some other time.”

“Uh. Sure. Okay. Bye.”

I hung up the phone. Then I went to the kitchen and got a piece of bread. I wadded it up and tucked it into the corner of my mouth as I went back to my bedroom, lay down on my bed, and stared at the ceiling for a while. I waited for my face to stop feeling hot; I waited to stop wanting to punch things. I sucked on the wad of whole wheat bread like a piece of candy; it was a trick I'd learned for staving off hunger without eating very much actual food. Besides curing my munchies, it was also strangely relaxing.

When I thought I was back under control I got up and called Ryan, in Ballard. That call went better. No water parks or parties, but I went over to his house later that afternoon and we sat around in his living room watching football on TV. I didn't know anything about football, in spite of having watched hundreds of hours of it at my grandparents' house. I didn't understand the rules or the scoring. I didn't care. We talked about kids from Mr. Fields's class during commercial breaks. He told me about a new gaming system he was into.

For the first time in months I felt like I existed.

 

50

About two weeks after school started, Eddie and I decided to go fishing down at Shilshole Bay, as sort of a reunion tour. I got a bus to Ballard early in the morning, and we made it out to the bay in time to lay down a dozen or so drop lines. Then we went to all our old haunts: the dinghy we used to hide under during rainy days, where we'd eat lunch and Eddie would get high; the rope swing above the railroad tracks, where a child molester had once approached us and tried to lure us into the bushes so we could watch him jerk off. We brought our slingshots and spent a few hours breaking beer bottles the hoboes left in the drainage ditches next to the tracks. Then, as it started to get dark, we went back to the bay and checked our lines. We hadn't caught anything. So we walked to the Ballard Locks and caught a bus up to his house.

We got off on 3rd and Market, where we'd always gotten off. As we were leaving the bus, we ran into David Milcher, a kid who'd been in Mr. Fields's class with us.

“Hey, Dave,” I said, as we went past him.

“Hey, Jason!” he said, getting on the bus.

I turned around in time to see Eddie cutting around the front of the bus. Normally that wasn't a good idea, but this particular bus stop was at an intersection with a terrific light. I assumed the light was red because the bus wasn't moving, but the way it was blocking the crosswalk, I couldn't see the pedestrian signal on the other side. I assumed Eddie had checked it though, so I followed him into the street. That was as much as I remembered, afterward.

*   *   *

When I woke up, my head hurt. It took me a second to figure out that I was in the back of an ambulance. There was a man in blue coveralls sitting on a bench on the other side of the ambulance, just at the edge of my vision. Eddie was sitting next to him. The ambulance was moving. And my head hurt because it was taped down. I'd been taped to a gurney, and the tape on my forehead was so tight that it was pulling the skin. Just like when I'd fallen off the high dive.

I opened my mouth to talk, but my face was just one big wound. My mouth sent stabs of pain shooting down my jaw and into my spine. I felt around with my tongue and realized I was missing one of my top front teeth. My lips were hamburger. When I explored my bottom lip I could feel a place about halfway down where something was cold. It took me a second to realize that the cold feeling was air. There was a hole in my bottom lip, about a half inch down from my mouth. I'd gotten braces while we were in San Diego. It was one of the things Dad had done during our short burst of prosperity while working for Karl the drug trafficker. They were gone now—just scraped off my teeth, leaving pieces of dental cement behind. Apparently at least part of them had been scraped off right through my face.

“Eddie,” I whispered. He looked down at me. He looked mad. In a scared and worried kind of way. “What happened?”

“You got hit by a car, dude,” he said.

“Where's my front tooth?” I asked. “Did you find it?”

“No,” he said. “I fucking looked, while they were loading you up. It could have come out anywhere.”

“Did you look on the ground?”

“Dude,” he said. “You bounced for about fifty fucking feet. You flew all the way across the fucking street and partway down the next fucking block. I fucking—I checked in all the places I saw you skid, but—fuck, dude. I don't know what to tell you.”

“Can you move your toes?” the medic asked.

“Yeah,” I said, wiggling them.

“Fingers?” he asked.

“Sure. I'm really worried about the tooth though.”

“Don't be,” he said.

“Eddie,” I said. I was starting to panic, thinking about my tooth. And my braces. My dad was going to kill me. I started crying.

“Jason,” Eddie said. “You need to be quiet. Your mouth—I'm worried you're gonna tear it.”

I closed my eyes and tried to think about what else might be wrong. I could feel all my parts. I could breathe. Everything seemed to be where it was supposed to be.

“How's my brain?” I asked the medic.

“It's fine,” he said. “Or it seems fine. You mostly landed on your face.”

I almost laughed. Then I stopped.

“Someone called my dad?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Someone called him. He'll meet us at the hospital. Now seriously, dude. Shut the fuck up.”

*   *   *

When we got to the hospital, a doctor came and looked at me. He flashed a light in my eyes and checked my reflexes. He told me I seemed to be in surprisingly good shape, all things considered. My spine seemed fine, but they needed to do some tests before they let me move. Then he took off and left me taped to the gurney in the hallway. Eddie was leaning against the wall a few feet away, looking exhausted. I was about to say something to him when I heard my dad's voice, calling my name. Eddie glanced up, and his face went scared again. Dad was coming from the direction my feet were pointing so I couldn't look at him, but he was saying my name over and over again, and then his face came into view. It was his purple-bulging-vein face, more than his oh-son-how-are-you face.

“Jason!” he hissed at me as he got closer. “What. The. Fuck?”

“Dad, I'm sorry. I—”

“Let me see your—oh shit! Goddamn it!” He fingered my mouth to move my lips around, looking at the condition of my teeth. “What the hell? Your braces. Your tooth. Oh my fucking—after all the money I spent on these? Are you kidding me?”

“Dad—” I said, when he took his hand away from my mouth.

“And you!” he shouted, turning on Eddie. “You motherfucker, I knew something like this would happen if he just kept hanging out with you long enough! I fucking knew it! I told him a million times you were a bad influence—and now look at him!”

“Dad!” I said.

“You shut your goddamn mouth!” he yelled at me. “And you,” he said, turning back to Eddie. “Don't ever let me see you darken my door again. I mean it, you piece of shit. I ever hear about Jason so much as walking down your block, I'll be calling Child Protective Services on your junkie mom faster than you can say what the fuck happened!”

“Dad!” I shouted again.

Eddie looked from me to my dad. His face was red and clenched, and I could see that Dad had just said what Eddie had been thinking the whole ride in the ambulance. He didn't even say anything back. He just turned around and left. I was sobbing by that point.

“Dad!” I said.

“Mr. Schmidt?” I couldn't look up, but I knew the doctor was back.

“Mr. Schmidt,” the doctor said again, as he walked up next to me. “I'm going to have to ask you to wait outside. You're upsetting him.”

“I'm upsetting him?” Dad sneered.

The doctor surprised me by grabbing Dad's arm. Hard.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “You're upsetting him. Whatever you think happened here, I assure you, he's been through enough. Can I talk to you outside, please?”

The doctor physically dragged my dad down the hallway, toward the same door Eddie had just gone out of. I expected the doctor to come back, but he didn't. I was alone in the hallway for so long that I was starting to fall asleep when I heard footsteps nearby. I opened my eyes and there was a cop standing over me. Cop uniform, cop face. Dark brown hair. Dark brown mustache. Glasses with thick plastic frames.

“Jason Schmidt?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. My throat seemed to have gotten dry while I was lying there.

He held up a pad and tore a piece of paper loose, then put it on my chest.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Jaywalking ticket,” he said. Then he turned around and left.

*   *   *

The doctors wanted to keep me overnight for observation, but they couldn't stop talking about how incredible it was that I was even alive, let alone so relatively unharmed. I didn't feel unharmed. I felt like I'd been dragged over a mile-long cheese grater. I had a scab that went from my forehead to my chin. My lips were puffed up to three times their normal size, and my face was full of tiny pieces of gravel. The insides of my lips had been ground into raw meat by my braces. My nose was completely crushed. My hands, knees, and elbows were all shredded. I had a cut on the side of my left knee that went past the skin, down to some kind of white material that was either fat or cartilage. Everything hurt. On the other hand, except for my nose and my tooth, I hadn't broken a single bone, and I'd nearly totaled the car that hit me. So maybe it was another miracle tale of survival after all.

On the morning after my overnight observation, the hospital brought in a dentist to look at my face. She was Swedish.

“Ya,” she said, peering into my mouth with her little penlight. “We're going to need to do some major work in here. Get this old cement off. Put in new braces. But there is no point replacing that tooth right away. I am not even sure you will keep the ones around the missing one. They are all completely shattered. Like a teacup? The kind with all the cracks, that holds together anyway? That's your front teeth. The only thing holding them together is what's under the enamel.”

“So I have to just … have no tooth?” I asked, when she was done.

“For a while,” she said.

“How long is a while?” I asked.

She shrugged. “A year or two.”

Dad picked me up that afternoon. He'd called my school and told them I'd be out for two weeks, and asked them if they could send my homework to me. Brandon and Ethan came by after school the next day to drop off my assignments.

“Wow,” Brandon said, staring at my face.

“Dude,” Ethan said. “Did the car hit you, just, like, right in your face?”

“Is that my homework?” I asked, nodding at the paper Brandon was holding in his hand.

“Uh,” he said, glancing down. “Yeah. Are you okay?”

“Great,” I said, plucking it out of his hand. “Thanks.”

I did my homework for the week in a few hours. Then I went to bed for three days. The accident had happened on a Saturday. I went back to school the following Thursday, as soon as the swelling in my lips went down. My teachers were all surprised to see me. I said I was fine. It looked worse than it was. And, unlike at home, at least nobody at school was yelling at me about my fucking braces.

 

51

Some kids at school started right in on me about the missing tooth. A guy in my history class started calling me Gappy, which, fortunately, didn't stick. But the accident seemed to earn me some cred with Ethan and Brandon, who, having seen me in the immediate aftermath, were loudly amazed by how little I bruised and how quickly I healed up. They were especially impressed when I squeezed the odd piece of black gravel out of a healed cut, which I was able to do pretty regularly for a few weeks.

“You're like that Wolverine guy, in the comics,” Brandon said.

If we'd been on a date, that line would have gotten him to at least third base.

I eased into my friendship with the brothers, playing it as cool as I could given how desperate I was to make friends. We started out in the backyard, messing around with a throwing knife their dad had brought back from Indonesia a decade before. We could spend hours taking turns hurling it at a piece of plywood that we'd leaned up against their back porch. Then I had the idea to bring down some of the cheap bullwhips I'd bought in Tijuana, and that was another skill set we built together. We practiced on milkweed and thistles at first. When Halloween rolled around we tied pieces of braided copper wire to our whip tassels and used them to slice pumpkins to shreds.

In between all the wanton destruction, we watched movies on their fancy top-loading VCR. Summit Foods, the corner store down the street, had a selection of VHS tapes they displayed on an old wire rack designed for paperback books. They only carried a dozen or so movies we ever wanted to watch.
Star Wars
,
Time Bandits
, and
Escape from New York
featured prominently in our rotation, plus a few things Ethan and Brandon had recorded off HBO at their cousin's house, like
The Terminator
and
War Games
, both of which we regarded as deeply philosophical.