A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  * * *

  It was nighttime. I was in the living room. My dad and some of his friends were sitting around the coffee table in front of the couch. A lamp hanging down from the ceiling cast a circle of glaring white light on the glass surface of the table and made the rest of the room disappear. The adults were laughing and playing a game where they tore pages out of a magazine. The page I could see had a glossy picture of a bright blue ocean and a wide blue sky. The sky was full of hot air balloons, and the balloons were all the colors of the rainbow. The adults tore the page into strips, rolled the strips up into tubes, and used them to inhale lines of white powder off the tabletop, into their noses. Sometimes after they snorted some of the powder, one of them would rub his nose with the heel of his hand and squint his eyes. I thought it must hurt to snort that stuff.

  * * *

  I woke up when someone knocked on our door. Maybe it was that same night, maybe some other night. Everything was dark until someone opened the door and the porch light shone into the living room. I could see that whoever had opened the door was silhouetted against the light, peeking cautiously out to talk to someone on our porch. They spoke in quiet tones, like they didn’t want to wake up the neighbors. Not that we had neighbors. After a few minutes, someone else went to the door to see what was going on. At some point another person turned on the overhead light in the living room and stepped back to open the front door wider.

  There were men on the porch, and then they were coming into our house. They weren’t like us. They weren’t our people. The one I could see best, the one in front, wore big square glasses with brown plastic frames. He had shaggy medium-length brown hair. He was wearing denim pants and an ugly white button-down shirt with black stripes that were broken up by symbols from playing cards: diamonds, spades, hearts, and clubs. He was holding a big silver gun in his right hand, like the kind in cowboy movies, but shinier. There were a few other men behind him, similarly dressed.

  One of them had a chrome-plated shotgun that he was holding in both hands—one hand on the stock, one hand on the pump—but he didn’t look like he expected to do anything with it. I noticed that the wood on the grip of the pump slide was a light blond color and seemed dirty in the place where his hand rested on it. The shotguns our friends owned were all made out of dark blue metal and had dark wood grips on the pumps, or just had two short barrels side by side and big pistol grips instead of rifle stocks. I thought this man’s shotgun was supposed to look cool because it was so shiny, but it really just looked like a toy. It was tacky.

  There were four or five of these men. Two came into the house. The one with the tacky shotgun stood by the door. One or two more stood on the porch.

  There were five or six of our people in the house; me, my dad, Marianne, and two or three men whose names I didn’t know. The men with the guns were talking to our people, and our people seemed ashamed and scared and angry at the same time. They didn’t want to make eye contact with the armed men. They moved like they wanted to run or fight, but they were forcing themselves to move slowly and stand still. I kept looking around, trying to understand what was happening. When I glanced back toward the door I saw police officers standing in the doorway, in blue uniforms. On TV, cops were the good guys, so I thought we were probably going to be all right.

  Marianne came over and picked me up, then sat in a chair next to the front door with me in her lap. The armed men didn’t seem interested in her. She sat me on her lap while the men with the guns talked to my dad and his friends, and told the police where to go. I started to get the idea that not only were the strangers cops, in spite of their plain clothes, but that they were actually the cops in charge.

  The uniformed police started to make their way into the house. They walked around freely, turning on lights and looking in rooms without asking permission. I didn’t know you were supposed to ask permission to walk around in someone else’s house until I saw the police officers not doing it. I realized I might have been mistaken about things being okay because the police were here. Finally, I understood that something was going very wrong; it was just taking a long time to actually happen. I heard a noise, like someone dropping an armful of wood, and looked through the doorway that led into the kitchen. There was a cop in there with a long pole, tearing panels off the ceiling.

  I looked at my dad. He was talking to the man with the silver pistol.

  That’s my only clear memory of my dad from that time: thin, medium height, with a beard and a receding hairline. Dark skin. Long, dark, wispy hair. He had a high forehead, strong cheekbones, and a large, straight nose. Some people thought he looked Arabic. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of bellbottoms. His wide, sensitive mouth was tight with fear and anxiety. Marianne reached up and grabbed my arms, like she thought I might try to get off her lap, but she didn’t say anything. I could feel the fear in her—the tension in her leg muscles and the way she held her body perfectly rigid behind me. I kept expecting her to say something about how everything was going to be okay, but she was completely focused on the men with the guns.

  Later that night, some people came to collect me. I never went back to that house again.

  2

  My dad was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1950. He had a mother and a father and two older brothers. My grandfather, John, was the son of Hungarian immigrants with a German surname. John served in the Navy during World War II, came home, and got a job operating construction cranes during the postwar West Coast building boom. My dad’s mother died when Dad was in high school. My grandfather remarried to a woman named Margaret. Margaret and my father did not get along, so my father left home when he was still comparatively young. At some point, he met my mother. The two of them got married and, when my dad was twenty-two, I was born.

  These are the things I can prove.

  My dad, when he told me the story of his life, always framed it in terms of Leave It to Beaver. Until he was about twelve, he said, his life was just like that TV show: nuclear family, stern authoritarian father he called “sir,” a politely maternal mother; clean house, big yard, meat and potatoes for dinner. All the boys had crew cuts. They wore slacks and shirts for school, suits for church, jeans and T-shirts during summer vacation. A guy in white coveralls and a flat cap delivered their milk twice a week, and candy bars cost a nickel.

  Dad’s mother, who had grown up during the Great Depression, used to tell her kids that they needed to appreciate everything they had—that nobody in the history of the world had ever had it this good, and probably nobody ever would again. If history had seasons, my dad and his brothers were born during the warmest, gentlest, most bountiful summer anyone had ever seen. But it wouldn’t last, because it never did. When Dad talked about his childhood, he talked about it like a perfect day at the beach.

  Then, in a different kind of mood, he’d talk about having been born premature. He said his parents had resigned themselves to the fact that he was going to die while he was in the hospital, and they never seemed to know what to do with him when he didn’t. He said he never felt like part of that family. That he was always a runt compared to his older brothers. That he made up for it by being smarter, and that his father and his brothers resented him for it, particularly the middle brother, Paul.

  “Paul used to do this thing,” Dad would say. “Where he’d sit on me while he loaded his BB gun. Then he’d get off me, let me run, count to five, and start shooting. One time he got me in the knee and we had to pry the BB out with a screwdriver. I blackmailed him for everything he had, then told on him anyway. That was Paul to a T. He was the kind of guy who, if there was a piece of cake in the refrigerator and our parents told us not to eat it, not only would Paul eat it—but then he’d leave the empty plate in the refrigerator. That was the kind of stupid your uncle Paul was.”

  I once asked my dad’s oldest brother, my uncle John, what my dad was like when he was a kid. Uncle John confirmed Dad’s version of events in more ways than he probably meant to
. He said Dad was extremely precocious, but that he’d always been sickly on account of being born premature.

  “Like his hair,” Uncle John said. “If you grabbed him by his hair, it’d just come out in your hand. In big clumps.”

  3

  A lot of what happened when Dad got busted was a mystery to me, during and afterward. Years later he told me there was some kind of bureaucratic screwup and the social worker who was handling my case sent me to Texas, where my mom’s parents had recently settled. Only once I got down there, nobody knew what to do with me, so I spent one night in a foster home before being shipped to California, where I stayed with my other grandparents—John and Margaret—in Torrance, the blue-collar suburb of Los Angeles where my dad and his brothers had grown up. I didn’t follow any of it. Afterward I had a vague memory of airplanes, and stewardesses being nice to me. At some point someone gave me a stuffed raccoon.

  Dad’s explanation of what befell him back in Eugene was, if anything, less clear than his description of what had happened to me: he was arrested, charged, and spent some time in jail. Then his friends bailed him out while he was awaiting trial and, somehow, he ended up on probation. The whole process took several months. Then he had to find us a new place to live and deal with other hassles that arose from the arrest. That took a few more months.

  * * *

  Not long after I arrived in Torrance, my grandparents took me to Disneyland. It was my first experience with a completely manufactured environment of faux finishes and fake people. I was disappointed to learn that Mickey Mouse was really just a guy in a stupid costume, but I appreciated the experience afterward because it gave me some context for my grandparents’ house, where they had a real brick fireplace that they’d gone to the trouble to paint red—except for the mortar, which they’d painted white. The food all looked like food. In fact, it often looked exactly like the pictures of food on the boxes that Grandma took it out of before she cooked it—but it still tasted like cardboard. The furniture all looked like it should be comfortable: the couches were new and clean, the tables and shelves were store-bought (instead of improvised out of stolen packing containers), and the blankets and pillows looked fluffy and inviting. But the textures were all wrong. Everything was dry and soulless and unpleasant to the touch. I later realized that it was because every object in the house was made out of polyester and plastic.

  Even my grandparents themselves seemed like escapees from the theme park. Grandpa was gruff and stoic. He spent most of his time sitting in his recliner—a piece of furniture I’d seen on TV but had never encountered in person—watching sports broadcasts that I didn’t understand, and ignoring me. Grandma, who’d never had any children of her own, seemed to go the other way: no matter where I was or what I was doing, her attention followed me like a spotlight. She dressed me up in tight polyester clothing, cut my hair short, dragged me to church every Sunday, and started telling me—constantly, it seemed like—about Jesus and how wonderful he was. Her reactions to everything surprised me. I felt like I was constantly breaking rules nobody had told me about but that everyone seemed to expect me to just know.

  The only thing in the house that made sense to me was Grandma’s Yorkshire terrier, Tigger. He was dirty, and he stank, and he hated my living guts, either because he was jealous of my arrival in the house or because he was a furry little demon from hell. But his dislike of me was the only thing in that house that seemed authentic. I appreciated it in a way, even if I also sort of wanted to kick him into traffic when Grandma was looking the other way.

  I was there for eight months before my grandparents handed me over to another team of stewardesses, who put me on another plane and took me to another airport. Only this time, when I made my way up the weird metal hallway into the airport, Dad was waiting for me at the other end. He didn’t seem to recognize me at first. He looked over my head for a second before his eyes settled on me, and he got a curious, questioning look on his face.

  “Holy shit,” he finally said. “What the fuck have they got you wearing?”

  4

  Eugene was a college town, which is to say that it had been a small town once upon a time—a lumber town, a farming town, a textile town—that had been taken over by its college. The college that ate Eugene was the University of Oregon. City people had come to that small town from all over the country, to work or study at the U of O, and they’d brought their city money and city ideas with them. In the sixties and seventies, those city people were flower children, baby boomers with a taste for sex, drugs, and loud music. Most of them were just passing through. The ones who decided to stay were back-to-the-earth hippies who used their parents’ money to buy farms outside of town and turn them into communes. Or they were people like my dad, who serviced the drug pipeline that kept all those college students in grass, smack, acid, and blow. There were still people in and around Eugene who thought of themselves as being from Eugene; who worked in lumber or farming or textiles. But to my dad and his friends, those people were like the Indians who used to spend summers in the rich Willamette River Valley before the whites came along and took it all away from them. Eugene’s townies were a historical curiosity whose time had come and gone. They were the police. They drove the buses and taught in the schools. And it may at some point have occurred to someone in my dad’s circles that the townies also repaired the streets and the sewers, kept the water running and the lights on—it may have occurred to someone at some point that the people they considered the least relevant were actually the most important. Or maybe that kind of big-picture thinking was still another ten or fifteen years away for the revolutionary vanguard of hard partying and free love that my dad imagined himself to be a part of. Mostly, we just avoided the straights, as we called them, and mistrusted them. And for me it all boiled down to one simple rule that even a child could remember: Never tell them anything.

  Our world was not a great place for kids. Not to say there weren’t a bunch of us kids running around. As Dad often said, you get a lot of people taking drugs that make them forgetful and horny, you’re going to get a lot of kids. But most of us existed by default. Abortion was effectively illegal in all but four states until the year after I was born, so a certain number of us were just accidents. And some of us were the product of short-lived attempts at normalcy. My dad often told me that he and my mom had gotten married and had me because they thought that, by acting normal, they could become normal. It only took them a year or two to realize that wasn’t going to work out. Then they went back to being a couple of strung-out fuckups—only now I was along for the ride, too. A lot of the kids in our crew had a story like that. So we inhaled a shitload of secondhand pot smoke. We got taken to cow pastures to help pick magic mushrooms. We went to noisy, confusing concerts, and we often had really exciting birthday parties. But the rest of the time we got left home alone a lot. And we watched a lot of television.

  * * *

  As eager as I’d been to leave my grandparents’ house in California and get back to my dad and Eugene, I found the transition from Torrance a little jarring. When Dad came to get me in the airport, he was wearing a bright red headscarf to cover his receding hairline, a green silk shirt, and tight denim bellbottoms. He had a large gold nose ring, piercings in both ears, a sort of dramatically sculpted beard and mustache, and a big brass bracelet on his left wrist. And, of course, the peace sign he had tattooed on the back of his left hand, in the crotch between his thumb and forefinger.

  He gave me a hug and a kiss, and called me “Boo,” which was his nickname for me when I was a baby. At almost four years old, I still got some comfort from it. I was glad to see him. Glad to be home. But I felt people staring at us, and part of me wished he could have toned it down a little, just for the airport. The airport was straight territory, and I was tired of getting disapproving looks from these people: in eight months with my grandparents, I’d never blended in, never felt like one of them. In my memory, it was just eight months of these looks.

>   Dad felt my hesitation and quieted down until we got my luggage and caught the bus back to town. Then he asked me about Grandma and Grandpa, and what they’d told me about him while I was down there. I told him he hadn’t come up much in conversation, which was true. Then he asked me about the rest of it, and I told him about how they’d forced me to get a haircut, and how Tigger used to snap and growl at me when nobody was looking, and how I had to go to church every Sunday. The only good part, I said, was that Grandma had set me up with this cool deal where I was going to live forever.

  “Hold on,” Dad said. “What was that last part?”

  “Well,” I said, “Grandma told me that if I invited Jesus into my heart, I’d live forever. So I did it in the kitchen one time. I said, ‘I invite Jesus into my heart.’ So now I’ll live forever. That’s what she said, anyway.”

  Dad was quiet for a minute while he thought that over. The bus was mostly empty, and I wanted to sit on his lap because the bus seats were uncomfortable. But he didn’t like me climbing on him, so I just waited for him to say whatever he was going to say. He was obviously building up a pretty good head of steam about it.

  “Did Grandma tell you who Jesus really was?” he asked after a while. “How he was born, in the manger, and the three wise men?”

  Since I’d been with my grandparents over Christmas, I’d heard the story a bunch of times. I told him the parts I could remember, but he started shaking his head before I was even halfway through.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s a government lie. The truth is, Jesus was part alien.”

  I blinked. “Part alien?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like, from Mars?” I asked, thinking of Marvin the Martian in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “Only a lot farther away than that. Aliens have been coming to Earth from millions of light-years away, and they’ve been doing it for thousands of years, in secret. Then, about two thousand years ago, they decided to try to communicate with us. So they used a technique called artificial insemination to get Mary pregnant with an alien baby that would look like us and talk like us but have some of the traits of an alien. That’s why she could give birth even though she was a virgin—she’d never had sex, but the alien technology made her pregnant. And the star of Bethlehem was a spaceship. Like a flying saucer. The wise men followed it because they knew that it was hovering above the place where Jesus was being born, making sure everything was okay. And the reason Jesus had all those powers, like healing the sick and walking on water, was because he was part alien—so he was telekinetic and telepathic. The aliens sent Jesus here to teach people to love each other, but the people in charge realized he was a threat to the system, so they had him killed. After he was dead, this narc named Paul corrupted his message and turned it into a mind control tool for the government. And that’s what your grandma was teaching you in church.”