A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (4 page)

“Wow,” I said after a while. “Poor Grandma. She's got it all wrong.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “She does. But don't you feel sorry for that woman. She's got it all wrong because she wants to.”

*   *   *

Our people usually lived in sort of leftover houses. Dad was always talking about history, and the movement of money and jobs—it was an obsession he'd learned from his mother—so I knew how we came to have these places. They were houses that had been built by straights during some period of prosperity—a lumber boom, farm boom, or textile boom—and then abandoned for various reasons when things got bad again. In the big cities, middle-class white people were heading out to the suburbs to get away from black people, Mexicans, gays, and other undesirables; white flight, people called it. In Eugene, the straights had been migrating out of town since World War II. New telephone lines, power lines, and highways built since the war had made it possible for a blue-collar worker to buy a giant ranch house on a cheap five-acre lot in the middle of nowhere, drive to the mall to shop, drive to church to worship, and drive to the hospital to see the doctor. That idea seemed to appeal to a lot of Eugene's straights, so they left town in droves to move to suburbs and exurbs like Dexter, Junction City, and Cottage Grove. And, after they were gone, our people moved into their nice old houses in town, dug their nice old furniture out of the landfills, and turned the factories and hardware stores where they used to work into artists' lofts and coffee shops. The only problem was that our people weren't great at taking care of things, or fixing things after they were broken, and we were generally too poor to hire anyone else to do it. So after a couple of years a lot of those nice old houses started to get pretty run-down.

The house my dad had found for us while I was in California was one of those leftover houses. It was an old Dutch farmhouse on Hayes Street. Dad said it was older than the rest of the neighborhood—older than the streets, even—which was why it was backwards, with a small glass-paned door facing toward the street and an elaborate porch and sunroom facing toward the alley behind the house. It had a big front yard and a backyard that was shaded by an enormous willow tree. The tree had a tire swing hanging from it. It probably would have been the perfect house for an almost-four-year-old except that nobody had taken much care of it for a couple of decades. The walls and ceiling were water-stained from old leaks in the roof. The yard was overgrown and full of scrap lumber and junk, and the kitchen was infested with giant black wood ants and mice. There was no central heating or even baseboards—just a huge wood-burning stove in the living room—so the house was always cold. Everything smelled a little bit like soil and rotting wood. The floor in the bathroom was soft—and not in a good way.

I explored the whole place at a dead run that first day. The best part was that I had my own room on the first floor—about ten feet square, with fourteen-foot ceilings. There was a giant water stain that covered most of the ceiling and part of one of the walls, and the plaster had fallen off in the middle of the stain, exposing the gray wood laths underneath. There was a morning glory growing through a crack in the window frame, and the carpet was worn down to the jute, but my old brass bed was in there, with my antique dresser and a box of my old toys from the house we'd lived in when Dad got busted.

“Pretty,” I said, fingering the big white flowers on the vine that came through the window frame.

“Yeah,” Dad said. “We can pull it out in the fall, when it dies back.”

*   *   *

We shared the Hayes Street house with two housemates from Dad's network: a young Jewish lesbian named Beth, who dreamed of starting a commune, and a truck driver named John who worked for an anarchist trucking cooperative called Starflower, that delivered natural foods all up and down the West Coast. Dad wasn't especially tight with either of them, but they were our people in all the ways that mattered—they were friends of friends, and they knew how to keep their mouths shut. Not that Dad had anything too heavy planned while we were on Hayes Street. He was on probation after getting arrested, so he'd enrolled in drafting classes at the local community college and signed us up for welfare, food stamps, and whatever else he could get to cover at least part of the shortfall from his lost drug dealing income.

Beth wasn't around much, but John's work schedule meant that he was home for big blocks of time, including some weekdays. Dad, who never missed an opportunity to impose on someone else's generosity, had talked John into keeping an eye on me while Dad was at school. It was understood that keeping an eye on me just meant that John had to be home—he didn't actually have to be in the same room as me or anything. Dad had me on what he hoped was an accelerated schedule for self-reliance.

The first time Dad left me home alone with John I managed to hold out for a couple of hours before I got bored enough to go upstairs and see what he was doing. I had some idea I wasn't supposed to be up there, so I snuck up the stairs, and found him sitting on the floor in front of a coffee table, painting tiny lead figures of knights and monsters. When he saw me watching him, instead of getting mad he invited me over to see what he was doing.

“What are those?” I asked.

“Part of a game,” he said. “Like checkers, or chess. But much more complicated. Do you want to learn?”

John had a way of talking about things that made me nervous and excited. He wasn't much to look at—just a pudgy blond hippie with feathered hair and a wispy mustache. He had small buckteeth and round cheeks that made him look a little like a rabbit when he smiled, and most of his clothes were too tight because he'd bought them about fifteen pounds ago. But there was something else about him—like he knew a secret, and he was always just about to tell me what it was.

His room ran the length of the house and had low sloping ceilings, with his bed at the far end under the window. I went over and looked at the collection of little figures he had on the coffee table in front of him. They were interesting, but the comparison to checkers or chess cooled my interest. Rules made me anxious.

John watched my face for a minute, then said, “Or if you want, I could read you a story.”

“Read me a story?” I asked. My dad read to me at bedtime sometimes, and it was one of my favorite things.

“Can I play with these while you read it?” I asked, gesturing to his collection.

“Sure,” he said. “In fact, this story is about people like that.”

“Okay,” I said.

While I started drawing up battle lines with orcs and knights on the coffee table, John went over to the milk crate next to his bed, took a book out of it, and sat on the floor. He fussed with the book until he found the page he wanted, then leaned back against the mattress and box spring and started to read.

“In a hole in the ground,” he said, “there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

 

5

My dad's childhood ended when he was twelve. That was when one of his junior high school teachers molested him. He never talked much about the thing itself. When he told the story, he usually talked about the aftermath; about telling his mom, his mom telling his dad, his dad telling the police, and the arrest and trial that followed. At some point in the process—the arrest, or the trial—the story got out. The teacher was prosecuted, but when it was over Dad had to go back to a school where his teachers and his classmates all knew that he'd been sexually intimate with a man. The law at the time said that if a rape victim—a woman—didn't fight back “to the utmost,” she was assumed to have consented. That legal standard didn't apply to my father because he was a child—and a boy. The teacher could be convicted for other things. Most forms of homosexual sex were felonies under California State law in 1962, to say nothing of the charges arising from sexual contact with a child. But people wondered.

Dad didn't talk about being beaten up, or harassed or called names. What he talked about was that nobody ever looked at him the same way again. His classmates. His teachers. His dad and his brothers. Even the cops who made the arrest looked at him sideways. The only person in the world who stood by him through the whole thing was his mother. When she died of lung cancer a few years later, it felt like a malicious cosmic joke. When Grandpa married Margaret the fundamentalist Christian, that was the punch line.

Somewhere along the way, the boy who would become my dad started to take a turn for the genuinely antisocial. He talked a lot about having various conflicts with Margaret, then doing things specifically calculated to aggravate her: having big parties at the house, and going out of his way to make it obvious to her that he was doing a lot of drugs and having a lot of sex. It didn't take very long for things to escalate to the point where he had to move out on his own.

What Dad did during the time between leaving home and when he moved to Eugene was always a little fuzzy. He had a lot of sex, took and sold a lot of drugs, and traveled around south and central California. At some point he met my mom, but I never got the details. I don't even know what city they met in. Their families knew each other somehow, but Dad was from L.A. and Mom was from San Francisco. Dad went back and forth between the two cities a lot. Maybe Mom did, too. I know that when they met, they were both strung out. Mom had just gotten out of a mental hospital. That was when straight life had betrayed her—when her parents had her locked up. I always figured that shared sense of betrayal had to be the basis for their mutual attraction.

Whatever it was that drew them together, their joint mission seemed to be the simulation of some mythical lifestyle called “normal.” They had a huge church wedding, with a tux and a big white dress and lots of professionally staged photos. Dad kept his hair short most of the time they were together. Wore straight-leg jeans and plaid shirts. And he quit dealing and worked a couple of regular jobs, which was not his usual thing. When they moved to Eugene, Dad said it was mainly because Eugene seemed like such a quaint little town—like Mayberry RFD, but full of hippies. It seemed like the kind of place they could have a house with a yard, and a dog, and a kid.

Dad invited his father and stepmother up, to see the normal house he rented with money from his normal job; his normal wife and his normal life. I've got snapshots of them all having lunch: Mom and Dad holding me while Grandpa and Margaret sit or stand awkwardly nearby. Dad and Mom with big fixed grins, Grandma and Grandpa looking like they wish they were somewhere else.

All the photos I have of my parents from that time, the main thing is they always look like they were trying. Like they were trying so fucking hard.

 

6

Dad liked to tell me the story of how I was born. He said I was two weeks overdue, and breech. The doctors did a cesarean section and botched the stitching. Then they sent us all home.

“The minute you came out, you were just taking everything in,” he said. “It was amazing how alert you were.”

After we got home, Mom was out of commission for days with a rising fever as an infection took hold in the incision from the cesarean. Then, after about a week, her stitches burst.

“It happened at night,” Dad said. “The incision just burst wide open. Pus came pouring out. About a pint of it. It was horrible. It was green and yellow, and a little red where there was some blood in it. But there wasn't a lot of blood. The smell was unbelievable.”

They rushed Mom back to the hospital and kept her there for most of another week on a course of industrial-strength antibiotics. They stitched her back up, and did it right this time. And while all of that was happening, Dad took care of me himself. Mom wasn't breastfeeding, so I had barely any contact with her for the first fourteen days of my life.

“Those first few weeks are critical,” Dad would say, over and over again. “That's when you bond with your parents. Their face. Their scent. It's called imprinting. Only your mom couldn't be with you, because she was so sick. So you bonded with me. Never so much with her.”

That was his theory about why things happened the way they did, and why he was the better choice to raise me. He was a big believer in the idea of behavioralism—of positive and negative reinforcement, and psychological conditioning. He seemed to take a lot of comfort in the idea that I loved him because I had no choice. That I obeyed him because I was programmed to.

I took it less seriously as I got older.

*   *   *

I turned four a few months after I got back to Eugene, and about a month after that my mom moved to San Francisco. It should have been a smaller deal than it was. She hadn't wanted me to live with her while Dad was in jail. Instead she sent a letter to my grandparents explaining that I was better off with them and that she had other priorities. “The only thing that keeps me going is my art,” she wrote. “I believe in my heart that art is God's great gift to humanity … It's the only thing in my life I haven't botched miserably. When I give with art people take gladly. I've had so much locked up so tight inside me for so long, and now some of it is finally flowing out.” I didn't know about the letter for another twenty years, but I didn't need to. Even a four-year-old could see that parenting wasn't at the top of my mom's to-do list.

Not to say she didn't raise a huge stink when she decided to move to San Francisco. For weeks, she and my father raged at each other. Sometimes over the phone, sometimes in our living room. Sometimes out in the yard. One day they stood at opposite ends of the dining room table in the Hayes Street house, legs apart like a couple of gunfighters, and screamed at each other for what seemed like an hour—Dad saying Mom was too irresponsible and selfish to ever take care of me, Mom saying she had a right to raise me. Everything came into the argument: Dad's arrest, their mutual drug use, Mom's drinking, stuff from when they were still together; times he'd been out for days without so much as a phone call; times he'd come home to find the sink full of dishes, me screaming in a dirty diaper, and her hiding in the upstairs bedroom, too overwhelmed to deal with any of it. Then they'd argue about who loved me more. There was a lot of swearing.