A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  Ida Patterson was a short walk from the Fillmore Street house. Isaac and I used to make the walk together, cutting through the parking lot of the local National Guard detachment. The Roosevelt place was a lot farther out, and there were no school buses, so I depended on Dad to drive me in one of the loaner cars he borrowed from Sean—which meant I only made it to class about half the time. Other kids made friends and formed little groups. Then I’d show up once or twice a week and spend the day getting picked last for dodgeball, sitting alone in the lunchroom, and not understanding the lessons. The teachers talked a lot about how school was supposed to encourage kids to grow and learn, but it felt to me like everyone in that place either was out to get me or wanted nothing to do with me.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Dad would say. “School just trains you to be a good little worker bee. A good drone. They crush your spirit and your individuality.”

  Which I supposed was a fair description of my experiences at school. But the alternative wasn’t much better. After a couple of months sitting by myself in our big empty house on Roosevelt, I’d started to think I’d gladly let someone crush my spirit if they’d just play checkers with me.

  I got passing grades that year in spite of my abysmal attendance, but I wasn’t looking forward to having to go back at the end of the summer. Then, in the summer before I turned seven, my dad’s probation officer told Dad that the state of Oregon had washed its hands of him; we could leave any time we wanted.

  * * *

  Dad and I left Eugene early that fall, right after my birthday. There were a couple of factors that contributed to the delay in leaving town. One of them was Dad’s strange obsession with getting the Vega fixed up. After having it towed to Eugene from Portland, he’d had it towed from Marcy’s house to the Roosevelt house. When the time came to make the move to Seattle, he insisted we were going to do it in the Vega. He never explained his reasoning, but I assumed he was just mad at himself for having totaled his first new car. Or for having screwed up the pot delivery. Or some combination thereof. It wasn’t exactly surprising. Hanging on to things that would be better let go of was kind of a cultural through-line among my people.

  We didn’t have the money to pay a regular garage to fix the car, so Dad made a deal with Sean, the shotgun-crazy drug buddy he’d wanted to give Charlie to. Sean took Dad’s $500 and the job, which he accepted as a sort of challenge against his prowess as a mechanic and a friend. The Frankenstein contraption he gave back to us a few months later was more or less Vega-shaped and capable of moving forward under its own power, if not much else.

  We packed light, just some bedding and a few changes of clothes. Everything else went into the storage locker with the stuff we’d put in there after the house fire on Hayes. Dad’s plan was to spend our first night camping out by Fall Creek, then head north and look for a house in Seattle.

  We found a good spot that night, at a bend in the creek where the water ran over giant sheets of volcanic rock and shaped the stone into natural pools and rapids. We roasted marshmallows and drank tap water out of old milk jugs. Then we crawled into the back of the Vega, cuddled up under our Pendleton blankets, and went to sleep.

  Dad woke up in the middle of the night because he was hot. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong until he noticed something was off about my breathing. He put his hand on my forehead and I was burning up with fever. He woke me up, and I was lucid enough to answer his questions so he decided to wait until morning and see how things looked.

  When the sun came up it was obvious that something was pretty far wrong. Every nick, cut, and scrape on my body was swollen red. When Dad touched an old cut on my arm, it immediately popped open and started discharging a mixture of pus and blood. That was bad, but the part that really freaked him out was that I didn’t cry. I just stared at the gunk coming out of my arm like it was happening to somebody else.

  He packed up the car and drove straight to Sacred Heart Hospital in downtown Eugene. The ER doctors said it was a staph infection. They loaded me up with antibiotics, and acetaminophen to bring my fever down. They also prescribed a special soap to use against the infection. They said Dad should check my temperature every hour, and if it got above 104, he should bring me back to the hospital.

  Dad stopped at the pay phone in the hospital lobby and called everyone he could think of, looking for a place for us to stay. But most of our friends in Eugene had kids. None of them could risk having the infection spread to their family. I sat on a green vinyl chair next to the phone and watched Dad go through a pile of change. He never raised his voice. His face just got redder and redder.

  “I’m thirsty,” I said.

  “In a minute!” he snapped.

  I lapsed into silence until we were back out at the car.

  “What’s staph infection?” I asked.

  “It’s bad,” he said.

  “How bad?”

  “Really bad.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  We got into the car and he made sure my seat belt was locked in. Then he sat quietly with his hands on the steering wheel for what seemed like an hour before he started the car and drove us back out to Fall Creek.

  I was in and out of consciousness for the next two days. I was too hot, then I was too cold, and I was always hungry in spite of being sick. We didn’t have any food and Dad was afraid to move me to get any. I kept complaining about being hungry, and he just kept feeding me marshmallows and boiling creek water for me to drink. And checking my temperature; it hovered around 104, but never went over. I used the special soap twice a day and rinsed off in the creek. By the time my fever started to drop, my skin was also clearing up. The infected cuts dried out and started to heal. The inflammations went down. By the third day, my temperature was close to normal.

  Dad left me alone at the campsite and went into town to get food. I spent the day swimming in the creek and trying to catch crayfish with a washcloth. Dad was back well before dark. There was a cardboard box full of food in the back of the car. I ate almost an entire box of graham crackers by myself.

  Dad said we couldn’t go to Seattle for at least another two weeks; that was how long I was supposed to keep using the soap, and Dad didn’t want to get caught out on the road if I had a relapse. So we stayed at our campsite on Fall Creek. I spent most days off by myself, swimming and chasing wildlife. Dad sat by the car and read science fiction paperbacks.

  The banks of the creek were steep and rocky. On sunny days, the exposed granite and basalt turned the valley around us into a kind of tropical hothouse. There were shallow caves to be explored, and mossy old trees to climb on. I usually swam in my underwear or naked, and I spent most of that two weeks imagining I was the only person in the world. At one point I noticed that I’d gone a whole day without speaking. I couldn’t recall ever having done that before. Even in the isolation of the Roosevelt house I’d talked to myself, just to hear a human voice.

  Then one day Dad announced that it was time to go.

  “Go?” I asked.

  “To Seattle,” he said.

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. How would you feel about spending a couple of weeks with your grandparents up on Camano Island?”

  My dad’s two brothers and their families had all moved up to the Stanwood–Camano Island area over the last couple of years, and his parents had joined them after Grandpa’s heart attack. The island was about eighty miles north of Seattle, and Dad and I had snuck up there once to visit my uncle John and his family, in spite of Dad’s probation. It had been a quick overnight trip, driving up in a solid eight-hour stretch, then back home the same way the next day. I’d seen my grandparents and my cousins, but mostly I remembered the steep cut-back trail that ran down a cliff behind Uncle John’s house to a thin strip of rocky beach. I’d seen the ocean before, in Los Angeles, but the waves there had been too large for me to swim. The water around Uncle John’s place was calm, almost like a lake, so I waded in fully
clothed and swam around during the dead of winter. In the process, I drank enough salt water to make myself violently ill the next morning and for the whole trip back. Uncle John had been stoic and quietly judgmental, like Grandpa. Dad had done his best to emulate his older brother.

  Dad had talked a lot afterward about how beautiful Camano Island was, but this was the first I’d heard about staying with Grandma and Grandpa. My mind flashed to Grandma’s awful cooking, and her hateful little dog.

  “Why?” I asked. I wondered if I was being punished for getting sick.

  “Well,” Dad said. “We’re pretty much out of money. I didn’t save as much as I’d hoped to before we left town, and that soap was expensive. So was the doctor. So we don’t have enough for first and last on a new place. I was thinking I could leave you with Grandma and Grandpa, just for a couple of weeks. Get a job. Get us a place to stay in Seattle. Then I could come get you.”

  I realized we were up against it, and that Dad didn’t like the idea of sending me up there any more than I liked the idea of being sent.

  “I guess that’d be okay,” I said. “Just for a couple of weeks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Sure. That sounds like fun.”

  * * *

  Two days later, Dad pulled up in front of Grandma and Grandpa’s house. The four of us had an awkward lunch together. Dad stayed the night in a room in the basement, and I slept in the guest room upstairs. The next day he got back in the Vega and headed down to Seattle.

  I ended up staying with Grandma and Grandpa for about three months.

  I was enrolled in second grade at Stanwood Elementary, which meant a forty-five-minute bus ride into town every morning, and a forty-five-minute ride home in the afternoon. I tried to make friends, but the other kids confused me. Every place I’d been up to then, there were rules about not swearing and not telling dirty jokes, but they were teachers’ rules. Flouting them was usually the easiest way to get other kids on my side and make friends. Instead, the kids I met on the bus and at school seemed genuinely upset when I told jokes about poop, or called one of them a cocksucker.

  Their attitude toward violence was also strange. When I pushed one of them, instead of pushing me back or beating the stuffing out of me, or even running away, they’d go and tell the teacher. At first I interpreted their curiously nonconfrontational behavior to mean that they were all just exceptionally nice, but that didn’t turn out to be true either. Most of them were really forthcoming about telling me they didn’t like me, and telling everyone else what a jerk I was (evidently “jerk” was the strongest word most of them felt comfortable with, which I also found confusing). Meanwhile, the houses on the island were so far apart that there were no kids close enough to want to play with me just because I was convenient. After a month or so I pretty much gave up on my classmates and resigned myself to playing alone until I could get out of there.

  Then, to my complete surprise, I started having a lot of fun at church.

  Grandma and Grandpa took me to church every Sunday, and I barely tolerated the services. I disliked the singing and the sermons. I hated getting dressed up and having to hold still for an hour. Most Sundays, I felt like the only kid in a congregation of geriatrics. Then, after a few weeks, the youth pastor sent me a letter inviting me to their youth groups on Wednesday and Saturday. I went reluctantly, but it turned out to be more fun than regular church. There was some Bible stuff that I was basically indifferent to, but there were also a lot of activities and, finally, at the end of each youth group, a chance to vent some aggression.

  They played a game at youth group that was a little bit like tag. We’d get a bunch of boys on a field, someone would throw a ball out in the field, and we’d all try to get it. Whoever got it then had to run while everyone else tried to clobber him and get the ball. When the runner was tackled, he’d throw the ball up in the air and someone else would pick it up. Officially there were no points, but we compared the number of times we’d possessed the ball, and bragging rights were given for more possessions. I’d never played a game quite like it before. It was called “smear the queer.”

  Dad came up every week or two and stayed overnight in the basement room, smoking (in spite of Grandma’s frequent admonitions), sleeping late, and refusing to go to church. When I told him about smear the queer he got very quiet for a while, then said, “Jason, remember when we talked about Jesus?”

  “The alien thing?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, this is still that same church. That game they’ve got you playing is about teaching you to hate and persecute people who are different than they are. They’re teaching you to single someone out, gang up on him, and beat the shit out of him because he’s different.”

  “Well, but, anyone can get the ball,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “But you know what ‘queer’ means?”

  I realized I didn’t. I had sort of an idea that it was something undesirable, but I didn’t know the exact meaning.

  “It means ‘different,’” he said. “It means odd, or strange. If you heard a noise in the middle of the night, you might call it a queer sound. If your food tasted wrong, you might say it tasted queer. Spoiled milk would taste queer. And if there was someone you knew that just didn’t seem to fit in, you might say that person was queer. They’re teaching you to smear—to beat—the outsider. That’s what that game means.”

  I might have dismissed Dad’s analysis of smear the queer out of hand except that, like his Jesus-was-an-alien kick, it answered so many of the questions I had about what I’d seen and heard since being at my grandparents’ place. I thought about the way kids at school were, and how they’d all reacted to me. They didn’t just dislike me—they talked about it. They created consensus: pizza is our favorite lunch, celery’s the worst vegetable, and Jason’s a jerk. They didn’t give second chances. There was no romantic after-school-special idea about finding out that the weird kid was cooler than you thought he was. That wasn’t even part of their thinking.

  And what did it mean that the only place where any kind of violent physical play was allowed was at church during smear the queer?

  After Dad went back to Seattle, I spent a few days thinking about what he’d said. When youth group came around again on Wednesday, I just went through the motions while I watched people, and thought about the things they did in terms of the positive and negative reinforcement stuff my dad was always talking about. What kinds of behaviors did kids receive praise for? What kinds of behaviors were they criticized for or ignored for? What were the incentives? Which kids were considered leaders? By the end of the night I felt sort of sick to my stomach. Because it wasn’t just smear the queer. Everything they did seemed designed to teach the kids in the group how to identify, isolate, and attack outsiders. People they disagreed with. All the little Bible stories they read basically boiled down to one thing: do what we tell you, or else. How had I not noticed this before? Why was Grandma sending me to these people?

  Of course, I knew the answer to that one. She was the one who’d had me invite Jesus into my heart, back in L.A. Dad had told me once that, when she was young, Grandma had been a missionary in Japan—a career path the youth group people at her church talked about all the time. Kids who had done missionary work with their families were considered the rock stars of the group. And Grandma was a charter member of this goddamn freak show.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. When I went to youth group that Saturday I got put in the “penalty box” during smear the queer for mauling one of the missionary kids after he’d already given up the ball. Everyone glared at me for the rest of the night. When Wednesday rolled around I told Grandma I wanted to just stay home and watch sports with Grandpa.

  About a month later, Dad and Grandma got into a huge fight about how him coming up to visit me was “disruptive.” He called her a fucking cunt, told me to pack my shit, and took me back to Seattle that same
night.

  “Do we have a house yet?” I asked, once we were safely in the car and moving. I hadn’t wanted to say anything that might make him change his mind until we were past the point of no return.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then where are we going to stay?”

  “With my boyfriend,” Dad said.

  15

  Once, during a party in the Hayes Street house, John’s friend Kris and her boyfriend Jimmy had snuck off to have sex in my bedroom. It was the kind of thing people did at big parties in that house, but I was home at the time so at some point I went into my room and found them naked on my bed, Jimmy on top of Kris, and Kris screaming her head off. In my four-year-old’s mind, it seemed obvious that Jimmy was hurting Kris, so I did what I had to do: I jumped onto Jimmy’s back and bit him as hard as I could. Hard enough to draw blood. Jimmy screamed. Kris screamed. Then I shouted something like “Stop hurting her!” and Kris started laughing. I was embarrassed that she was laughing at me, but I got the idea that she wasn’t actually in danger, so I shifted down out of attack mode.

  Once Jimmy got over his perfectly understandable anger at being attacked and savagely bitten in the middle of sex, he and Kris went back to what they were doing—only this time with an instructive narrative component: “See, Jimmy’s penis goes in here. This feels good. Then he moves, like so. Men and women enjoy this.” Eventually they finished up, got dressed, and left me in my room. By the next morning, every one of our friends knew about me biting the shit out of Jimmy mid-thrust, and the teaching moment that followed. It was regarded as both a funny story and an illustration of how much better our people were than the straights, who lied to their kids about sex.

  It was as clear and unambiguous a lesson in human sexuality as any child could ask for. The only problem was that I didn’t take a single useful fact away from it. If anything, my experience with Jimmy and Kris left me more confused than I had been before.