A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

I watched in stunned fascination. I’d never seen my dad engage in any kind of sports activity. Ever. But there he was, running and jumping and catching the ball. The weirdest thing, from my perspective, was that he seemed to be taking the game absolutely seriously.

  When the game was over, Dad and the other guys chatted for a while before everyone started leaving.

  “Go ahead,” Dad told Dave. “Me and Jason are going to stay here for a bit.”

  “You sure?” Dave asked.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “We can get a bus.”

  “Okay,” Dave said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  They waved their goodbyes, and Dad came over to where I was sitting on the grass.

  “Come on,” he said.

  I got up and followed him across the park.

  “We used to come to this park a lot when I was a kid,” he said. “Me and my brothers—your uncles—would play football right here. I went to church with a lot of those guys when we were kids.”

  I looked around the park. It was nice. Surprisingly green, for Southern California. It had hedges and a rose garden, big trees, and green grass rather than the dried-up brown stuff I’d seen in most L.A. parks.

  “There’s a duck pond down this way,” Dad said, gesturing toward a wooded area up ahead of us. One of my favorite things to do in Eugene was when Dad would take me to the mill pond, next to the pulp mill on the east side of town, to feed the ducks. The pulp mill smelled like God’s own fart gas, but I loved the ducks and their soft quacking. There were very few lakes or ponds in Eugene—our water was generally on its way somewhere else—so ducks were a special treat for me.

  When we got to the pond I saw a small lake, with cattails and reeds near the shore, and a little house next to the water for the ducks to roost in. I could tell by the way the shoreline dropped suddenly into the water that the lake was man-made, but it had a nice feel to it. I climbed on top of the house and looked down at a flock of mallards, who came over to check me out. Dad stood nearby and smoked a cigarette.

  “Hey, Jason,” he called after a few minutes. “Look at this.”

  I hopped down off the duck house and went over to where Dad was standing, reading a sign posted near the trees. I wasn’t a great reader, but I recognized KEEP OUT easily enough. There was a bunch of other stuff underneath that part.

  “What’s it say?” I asked.

  “Says the swans are roosting,” Dad said. “They’re laying eggs back in the underbrush here.”

  “And they don’t want people to step on the eggs?” I asked.

  “I guess,” Dad said. “It says they’re easily upset when roosting. Come on. I want to see a swan egg.”

  “But…” I pointed at the sign.

  “They’ll get over it,” Dad said.

  “I’d feel bad,” I said, “if I stepped on an egg.”

  “Okay,” Dad said. “You don’t have to come.”

  I went over to the duck house and climbed back on top. Dad crept quietly into the trees and disappeared from view. Everything was quiet for a few minutes before I heard branches breaking. And hissing. And screaming.

  Dad came staggering out of the bushes, pursued by an incredibly pissed-off swan. I’d only seen a few swans before, and I’d never fully appreciated how big they were. Maybe because I’d never seen one next to a person, where I could get a good sense of scale. This one had its wings spread and raised, and it looked bigger than Dad. Dad, for his part, wasn’t moving quite fast enough to stay clear of the bird, because he was running backwards. If he’d just turned around and really tried to sprint, he probably could have gotten away pretty easily. But he didn’t seem willing to admit defeat and run away from a bird—even a thirty-pound bird that was chasing him and hissing at him like a demon from hell.

  The swan snapped its wings down and forward, scissoring Dad’s calf between its beautiful white limbs. The impact made a sound like a two-by-four snapping in half. I jumped. Dad screamed again and staggered back. The swan hissed and kept chasing him, hitting him over and over again. The sound was horrifying. Finally Dad just gave up, turned tail, and ran.

  The swan stood triumphantly in place for a minute, hissing and coughing and snapping at the air. Then it turned and waddled angrily back into the trees. I stayed on top of the duck house until Dad came and got me.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not okay!” he said. “Look what that fucking thing did to me!”

  He rolled up his pants and showed me one of his shins, which was now covered in angry red welts. I climbed down off the duck house for a closer look. I could see right away that the bruises, when they formed, would be totally black.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  I followed him out of the park, and we caught a bus back toward Aunt Gin’s house.

  “Not a word about this to anyone,” he said as we sat on the bus.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “I know.”

  I knew I wouldn’t need to keep the promise. Dad would tell everyone we knew, sooner or later. He liked a good story too much to keep this one to himself, even if it was kind of embarrassing. Besides, I didn’t need to tell anyone else. Until that day, I’d never seen anyone or anything get the better of my dad. Never even known it was possible. But nobody would ever enjoy hearing about my dad getting his ass kicked by a bird half as much as I’d enjoyed watching it happen, and trying to prolong my satisfaction by telling other people about it would just be greedy.

  * * *

  Dad went out to the hospital the next day and came back looking frustrated and angry.

  “We’re going home tomorrow,” he told me. “Aunt Gin says I can borrow her car to take us to the tar pits. Get your shoes on.”

  He drove us a few miles north in Aunt Gin’s old Buick. When we finally stopped we pulled into a parking lot in what looked to me like a park. Which I supposed made sense. They wouldn’t just leave one of these things sitting in the middle of an intersection. They’d want a clear area around it, both to keep people from falling into it and so they’d be able to collect any dinosaur bones it pooped out. I followed Dad across the parking lot and into a sort of nondescript building in the middle of the park.

  The building turned out to be a museum, full of all the bones people had found in the tar pits. There were saber-toothed tigers and giant sloths and lots of other interesting things. There was a weird trick with mirrors that turned a human skeleton into a half-naked cavewoman. Then Dad took me out to the pits themselves, which had a life-size fiberglass model of a mammoth being sucked down into them, and giant chain-link fences all around the whole area.

  Dad walked me to the edge of the pits and stopped. At first I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at; it just looked like a big oily lake. The fences hugged the shore pretty tightly. In some places the black water crept out under the fences and left sticky slime in the grass. I stood there for a few minutes, looking at the filthy water and wondering when we were going to get to the tarpits. When it seemed like we were going to stare at the black stuff for a while, I decided I’d better humor Dad by pretending I was interested, if only so we could go on to the good stuff.

  “What is that?” I asked, pointing at the noxious muck.

  “It’s a tar pit,” Dad said.

  I scowled. “What, you mean, like, the tarpit’s down under there or something?”

  “No,” Dad said. “That’s it. Right there. That’s the tar pit.”

  “What’s that black stuff?” I asked, pointing at what I assumed was old motor oil floating on the surface of the water.

  “That’s the tar.”

  I stared at the pit for a long time. Looked at him. Looked at the pit.

  “That’s tar?” I asked, pointing at the pit.

  “Yes,” Dad said, clearly starting to get annoyed.

  “So it’s a pit,” I concluded. “A pit full of tar. That’s a tarpit?”

  “Yeah,” Da
d said. “That’s tar. That’s a tar pit. Animals get stuck in it, and they drown. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  I stared at the tar pit for a while, readjusting my worldview. Then I asked if we could go home now. Dad gave me some “But you’ve been begging to see this for days!” static about it, but he relented pretty quickly. I think he could tell how disappointed I was, though he didn’t seem to understand what was actually bothering me.

  The next day, Dave drove us out to the airport and we went back home to Eugene, our bodies mostly intact—our illusions somewhat less so.

  13

  As often as my dad was out of town working with the Hodads, I spent surprisingly little time with Marcy. She didn’t seem to like me much. I just found her confusing. She was an overcooked redhead who always seemed slightly greasy to me, like her features would smear if I touched her. She had big blue eyes and wore a lot of makeup, tight clothes, and high-heeled shoes. My instincts told me that I had to be careful with her; she was absolutely the kind of grownup who would hold a grudge against a five-year-old. In spite of all of this, Marcy had a lot of friends, including John, our old housemate from Hayes Street, and Kris and Jimmy. Kris was a friend of John’s from when he was in high school, in Arizona, and Jimmy was Kris’s man—a tree planter who’d hooked Dad up with his job at the Hodads.

  John and Kris both liked kids, so they came by the Fillmore Street house a lot and hung out with me and Isaac and the girls. Sometimes they took us to the park or to Fall Creek. Other times they took us out to the movies—and not just Disney movies. They took us to epic fantasy movies, like the postapocalyptic cartoon feature Wizards or the animated version of Lord of the Rings. And Star Wars. John invited me to Star Wars a dozen times, and I begged off every time because it wasn’t animated and I didn’t like grownup movies. But eventually he talked me into going, and sometime in early 1978, my mind was thoroughly blown.

  John took me, Isaac, and Miles to see it. Miles had already seen it, but he was happy to go again. We sat in the dark, joking and pushing each other, until the curtain parted and the 20th Century Fox fanfare came up. We slowed down and stared. Then the startling jolt of brass instruments as the score kicked up, and a stream of words I couldn’t read rolled up the screen and into the distance. All of that stood out clearly in my mind afterward. Then, comprehension ended, and I spent the next two hours being blasted into my seat by a pure adrenaline rush of emotion. Because sure, there were spaceships and sword fights and special effects and all that. But mainly, it was the first time I could remember seeing people like me—people who looked like me and my dad and our friends—portrayed on-screen as heroes.

  The protagonists were two guys with shaggy haircuts, an alien who basically was a shaggy haircut, two gay robots, and a sarcastic hippie in a muumuu, and they were noble and selfless and brave. George Lucas’s “used future” looked a lot like the houses and communes my people lived in. His main characters bought stolen junk machinery from shady Jawas, jumped into Dumpsters, worked for mobsters, smuggled contraband, and fought against the police—and they were the goddamn good guys. I’d never seen anything like it.

  When the movie was over I rode back to the Fillmore Street house with John, Isaac, and Miles. Isaac and Miles were recounting all their favorite parts of the movie, but I was just staring out the window. John kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye until finally he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Did you like it?” he asked me. “Did you like the movie?”

  He’d already seen it forty times. It was important to him that I like it, too.

  “I loved it,” I said. “I want to be Han Solo.”

  “Han—what about Luke?” John asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Luke didn’t look anything like me. He was blond. He had blue eyes. And while he could do a lot of cool things, he never seemed to have much choice. Or he never made choices. Han Solo made choices, and most of them were pretty self-serving. He was a smuggler. He shot that green guy in the bar. But when the chips were down, he made a choice to come back and join the fight. He saved Luke and sent Darth Vader spinning off into the void. Luke was fine. But I wanted to be Han Solo. I wanted to be the guy not to fuck with, who comes through at the last minute and saves his best friend’s ass. I didn’t care about destroying the Death Star. I wanted to be loyal. And brave.

  John just kept glancing at me, like he was expecting me to say more.

  “Han Solo, huh?” he finally said.

  “Yeah,” I said, with the sincerity of a religious convert. “I wanna be Han Solo.”

  “Then I’ll be Luke,” Isaac said.

  “Sure,” I said. “You can be Luke.”

  I was already thinking about how we could use the wreck of the Vega, sitting in our garage back on Fillmore Street, as our own Millennium Falcon. With the front caved in like it was, it even kind of looked like Solo’s ship.

  14

  Dad and I lived on Fillmore Street for more than a year before Dad and Marcy started fighting. Most of their fights happened behind closed doors so I didn’t hear the details, but I could feel Dad’s moods the way a bird on the wing can judge the weather, and I knew we were heading for some kind of blowout. Then one day, Dad told me to stay away from Marcy’s boyfriend, Kenneth. Kenneth had the distinction of being pretty much the only black person I knew, besides Dad’s probation officer, Diana, and he was the front man for a local band. Otherwise he was totally unremarkable; just another tall skinny guy in bellbottoms and a loud shirt.

  “What do you mean, stay away from him?” I asked.

  “Don’t be alone with him,” Dad said.

  “Alone with him?” I was never alone with Kenneth. He was always with Marcy. Or, when he was around us kids, it was all of us in a group. Like the time he and Jimmy took us all to get ice cream cones over in Springfield.

  “Just do what I say,” Dad said, using his serious voice.

  I said I would.

  About two weeks later, Dad told me we were moving. When I asked him why, he said Kenneth was messing with Faith and Crystal.

  “Messing with them how?” I asked.

  “Touching them in ways he shouldn’t,” Dad said.

  Usually, when I asked Dad questions about grownup stuff, he just gave me the facts and let me sort out the reality as best I could. That was his approach to questions about drugs, sex, violence, politics—pretty much everything. But for some reason, when it came to sex crimes, he tended to resort to evasions and opaque metaphors. A few months earlier there’d been a string of rapes in Spencer Butte Park, and Dad had taken that opportunity to explain to me that a rapist was a kind of monster who attacked women and children at night and forced his penis into them. The image that conjured for me—a sort of half-bat vampire thing with an enormous erect phallus—was terrifying, but made no practical sense.

  On the other hand, things I’d seen on TV and stories other kids had told me had alerted me to the existence of perverts and molesters. Here again, the exact nature of the evil was a little vague in my mind, but I understood that perverts and molesters touched children’s genitals—our “underwear area” as my friends said—in ways they weren’t supposed to, and that this was probably what Dad was talking about in reference to Kenneth.

  “Did Marcy tell you that?” I asked finally.

  “No,” Dad said. “The girls did.”

  “Did you tell Marcy?” I asked.

  “Of course I did,” he said.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She said the girls were lying. At first. Then she asked them about it. They started to tell her what they’d told me and she flipped out, and they changed their story. Told her they’d never said it. So then she said I was lying, because I’m jealous of Kenneth. And because he’s black.”

  Another point of confusion for me: among the hippies of Eugene, people talked about Martin Luther King Jr. the same way my grandma talked about Jesus Christ. Even my dad, when I asked him questions abou
t Dr. King, talked about what an incredible leader he was, and how moral and committed he was. But I also knew, based on things Dad had said, that he disliked black people generally. He made fun of how they spoke—or how he thought they spoke. And he thought they were dangerous. It didn’t come up very often, if only because I could count the number of black people I’d met in Eugene on one hand, but I knew it was part of Dad’s thinking. A few other people were aware of it, too, and Marcy was apparently one of them.

  I didn’t think it went as far as making something like this up about Kenneth, though. Dad tended to use words to make real things bigger or smaller, but total fabrications weren’t his usual way of lying.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “But one thing is, we might move to Seattle.”

  “What’s in Seattle?” I asked.

  “Jobs,” he said. “Something. I don’t know. It can’t be worse than here.”

  * * *

  We probably would have left Eugene after the Hayes Street house burned down, but the conditions of Dad’s probation barred Dad from leaving Oregon for any reason. It wasn’t a small problem; the economy in Oregon was a shambles, and Dad still had a couple of years on his sentence. But Diana had recently told Dad that the state was trying to save money by granting early release to nonviolent offenders, including people on probation for drug crimes. It wasn’t a sure thing, but under the circumstances it was all Dad felt he had to look forward to.

  So after we moved out of Marcy’s house we spent most of the next nine months in a big cheap house at the edge of town, waiting for word to come down from my dad’s probation officer that we could go to Washington. We left most of our stuff in the storage unit we’d been using since the Hayes Street fire, so we wouldn’t have to move it twice, and lived as simply as we could out in the boondocks of Roosevelt Boulevard.

  * * *

  I’d turned six that summer and started first grade that fall, when we were still living with Marcy. I went to Ida Patterson Elementary, in Mrs. Shoemaker’s class. I was enrolled for almost two months before I realized that the giant field behind the school was actually the field I’d lived next to when my dad got arrested, three years earlier, and that the large low building I’d seen in the distance back then was, in fact, the school.