Sex didn’t make sense to me. And not just because I was four when I got my first lesson.
My friends—my kid-aged friends—talked about sex as something both gross and aggressive. “Humping” was something you could be accused of doing in various contexts. Any kind of accidental up-and-down motion of the body near anything—such as during a clumsy attempt to climb a tree or an unsuccessful attempt to lift one’s friend off the ground—could be construed as an attempted hump. On the other hand, some kids I knew humped each other like dogs in a pack, to assert dominance—“Haha! I just humped you!”
Playing with oneself was also frequently mocked, though that idea made even less sense to me than humping.
Then, of course, there was TV. On TV, there was a lot of emphasis on romance, and lots of kissing, but no clear connection between romance, kissing, and what Kris and Jimmy had been doing. It didn’t help that, on TV and in movies, pretty much everyone got married when they were in love. Where I came from, hardly anyone got married. Or they did, but then they got divorced almost immediately and ended up hating whoever they’d been married to. Among my people it was considered axiomatic that the best way to totally ruin a relationship was for two people to get married. Jimmy and Kris weren’t married. Jimmy had been married to someone named Janet and had a kid with her, but they’d divorced and now they hated each other.
My people tended to “be together.” And then later, they’d “stop being together.” These terms were rarely explained. Jimmy and Kris were together. Dad and Marcy had been together, briefly, but then they stopped being together and were friends until Marcy and Kenneth got together.
How did screwing fit into all this? Humping? And fucking. What was fucking? Calling someone a fucker was bad, but fucking was good? I had no idea.
And, of course, in a totally separate file from all this was the idea of reproduction. I’d spent enough time around farm animals to understand that a male of virtually any species could put his penis in a female of the same species and leave some sperm there. Then she’d either give birth or lay an egg, as her anatomy dictated. I didn’t give the idea much thought, but I assumed that this ritual occurred when the individuals involved wanted to reproduce, and probably at no other time.
I didn’t understand any of it. And while I knew that it was extremely important to other people—mostly adults—I didn’t worry very much about not understanding it because there were just so many other things in the world that I knew were important but that I didn’t understand at all; things like drugs, and jobs, and the difference between a city and a state. I didn’t understand why we had to stand in line to leave or enter the classroom at school. I didn’t understand why girls got to wear pants but boys didn’t get to wear skirts. Life was full of things I didn’t understand. The only way I’d figured out to cope with all of it was to play along. Stand in line? Okay. Raise my hand to go to the bathroom? If you say so. Hop on one foot and crow like a rooster? Sure, why not. Overthinking it was the path to madness.
And that was my entire approach to the question of sex, and who was having sex with who, and why, and what it all meant: just say what seems expected of you and don’t think about it too much. Which was why I didn’t really understand, when my dad introduced me to his boyfriend, Phillip, in Seattle in October of 1979, that something important had happened.
* * *
Phillip was a small, fit man about the same height and build as my dad, though he usually dressed more conservatively due to his professional status as a registered nurse. He had an angular face, dark brown skin, a pencil mustache, and an enormous mane of black hair that could only be intended to frighten predators and impress potential mates. Dad told me that Phillip’s family was from the Philippines and that this meant Phillip was a Filipino. When I asked him the obvious question, Dad said there was no connection between Phillip’s name and his ethnicity, but I found that idea difficult to credit.
When we got to Seattle, Dad and I spent about a month in Phillip’s tiny one-bedroom apartment on Boren Avenue. Phillip was a surprisingly good sport about it, all things considered, and he went out of his way to engage with me. He was a decent artist, so he drew cartoons for me on the fly, and he liked to tell jokes and play games. I found the obviousness of his efforts a little unnerving, if only because the last person who’d tried so hard to get along with me was my grandmother. But he was patient and friendly, and he mostly won me over.
All the same, I didn’t like being in Phillip’s apartment alone, so Dad took me to work with him at a place called Seattle Counseling Service. Dad was nonspecific about what Seattle Counseling Service did exactly. I spent most of my days in their employee lounge, watching TV and drawing dinosaurs and dragons on the backs of typed documents that Dad retrieved from the office scrap bin. The office was housed in a two-story brick building at the intersection of two busy streets; the main doors were on the corner of the building, rather than off to one side or the other, and there was a concrete eagle above the door with a large clock set into its stomach. The eagle and the clock fit with my idea of what buildings in cities were supposed to look like, ideas based almost entirely on Bugs Bunny cartoons and Humphrey Bogart movies.
At the end of our first month in Phillip’s apartment, Dad found us a house on Aloha Street, on the east slope of Capitol Hill. He took me to see it as soon as the landlord gave him a key. It was a small one-bedroom that had been abandoned for several years. Or at least it smelled like it had been. The walls were covered in thick layers of wallpaper, and the whole house was just … moist. There was a gas stove in the kitchen, and a gas heater in the living room, and an entire extra house in the backyard that we were getting for free.
“Can I live back there?” I wanted to know as we stood in the back doorway and looked at the extra house. The current plan was for me to sleep in the “dining room” half of the living room in the main house. Dad would have to go back and forth past my bed at night to go to the bathroom.
“No,” Dad said. “It doesn’t have gas or electricity, and parts of the ceiling have collapsed from water coming in through the roof.”
I didn’t think that made it significantly worse than the main house, but it didn’t seem wise to say so. Dad was really proud of having found a place we could afford, even if the backyard was a giant mud pit and the ceilings were eight feet high and covered in an underlayer of foam popcorn to give them “texture.” The front yard was dark, wet, and skewed sideways by the incredibly steep hill we lived on. The west side of the property was bordered by a fifteen-foot concrete retaining wall that loomed over the house like a death threat, and the east side was bordered by another retaining wall that dropped down into a vacant lot full of illegally disposed-of construction material. That eastern exposure should have given us a nice view of Lake Washington, but someone had thoughtfully planted a giant salal hedge on that side of the yard, lest any sunlight touch the house. Ever.
We moved into the Aloha Street house with no beds, very few clothes, and no cooking implements. All our stuff was still in a storage unit in Eugene. We spent December sleeping on the floor in improvised bedrolls made of stacks of electric blankets—sans power sources and controls—that we bought at Goodwill for a dollar each. The lumps caused by the wires and heating elements in the blankets could be annoying, but they were incredibly warm and soft.
Dad was in no hurry to register me for school. He had a low opinion of public education. So I spent weekdays hanging out in the break room at his office and weeknights and weekends working on the house; peeling off the wallpaper with a rented steamer, repainting, and cleaning. The process of steaming the wallpaper off and sanding the plaster walls smooth filled the house with mildew and mold spores. The steamer was at least eighty years old, operated by burning kerosene under an ancient cast-iron boiler, with the exhaust vented right into the interior of the house. The latex paint was old-school high-solvent white. Somehow we managed not to asphyxiate or blow ourselves to smithereens, but the memory of the
smell inside that house was burned into my memory forever after.
* * *
Paying two months’ rent and a deposit on the Aloha Street house pretty much wiped us out financially, but it was December so Dad decided we were getting a Christmas tree, whether we could afford one or not.
“We won’t be able to put much under it,” he said, “but you’re going to have a tree.”
“How can we pay for it?” I asked. Normally I didn’t pay much attention to our cash flow situation, but we were sleeping with the heat off, in December, because we couldn’t afford to heat the house. So the idea that we were broke was closer to my thinking than it otherwise might have been.
“It’s no problem,” he said.
I didn’t realize what he meant until he woke me up late that night and told me to get my shoes on. He didn’t need to tell me to get dressed; I slept in two pairs of jeans, two pairs of socks, two T-shirts, and a sweatshirt.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“We’re going to get a Christmas tree,” he said.
I looked out the window. It was pitch-black outside.
“What?” I asked.
“Just get your shoes on,” he said.
We locked up the house and climbed into the Vega. Dad took us south on 23rd, the big main road near our house. I had no idea where we were going, but the streets were completely empty so I could tell it was really late at night. No business would be open at this hour.
“Once we’re there,” Dad said, “you just wait in the car. Don’t get out for any reason. But if we run into any trouble—if we get busted or if the cops come—I want you to cry.”
Dad had given me a lot of “if we get caught…” directions in my life, but they were usually “Just tell them you lost your ticket” or “Throw it in the bushes and no matter what happens, don’t admit it’s yours.” Telling me to cry was a new one.
“What’s that going to do?” I asked.
“It’s Christmas,” Dad said. “Who’s gonna throw a single father in jail for trying to get a Christmas tree for his crying kid?”
We drove for another ten minutes or so. The houses on either side of the road disappeared. They were replaced by big parking lots and a series of strip malls, car dealerships, and warehouses. Finally Dad slowed down and drove up onto the sidewalk next to a tall chain-link fence. It had started to rain while we were driving, and once we stopped I could see that the rain was falling at a sharp angle. This was how it had been since we got to Seattle: raining constantly, almost freezing, but never actually snowing. It was miserable, and all Dad had on for outside clothes was a thin navy blue windbreaker. It was his best coat, but it wasn’t much good in this kind of weather.
“Stay here,” he said, as he got out of the car and went around to the fence. I looked out the window and saw there were Christmas trees on the other side of the fence, but it wasn’t a regular Christmas tree lot. It was some kind of store that sold Christmas trees out front. A sign in the corner of the lot said CHUBBY AND TUBBY.
Dad looked up and down the wide street we were parked on, but the road was deserted. When he seemed satisfied that there were no witnesses, he put his fingers in the fence, braced his toes, and scrambled up the chain links. When he got to the top he grabbed the triple row of barbed wire, swung over it, and hung from it for a second before dropping down onto the other side of the fence.
I watched the whole operation in mute fascination. My dad went through periods of being physically active, but I would never have accused him of being agile. This fence-climbing Dad was an interesting new side of him that I hadn’t seen before.
He walked around between rows of trees for a minute before he found one he liked. A few cars passed on the street, but nobody slowed down. Probably they didn’t even notice us. Suddenly I heard a thump and looked over to see that Dad had thrown a tree over the fence, onto the ground next to the car. Then he came over the fence himself—until he got tangled in the barbed wire at the top. It was angled in, so getting into the enclosure was a lot easier than getting out. I watched him trying to straddle the barbed wire strands while he got his clothes loose, then watched him nearly fall off the fence as he tried to climb down.
That was closer to the Dad I knew.
He ran around behind the car, opened the hatch, and threw the Christmas tree in. Then he came back to the driver’s side, climbed in, and fastened his seat belt.
“Tore my fucking coat,” he hissed as he got the car started and turned around to head back to our house.
I could see a ragged hole in the right sleeve, near his elbow. There was a little bit of white cotton batting poking out, from the jacket’s minimal padding. I knew then the tree-stealing thing had been a bad idea. That coat was the one he wore to job interviews and other official functions. It was worth a hell of a lot more to us than some stupid Christmas tree. When we got home he used a match to seal the edges of the torn polyester, but I knew the coat was basically ruined and I felt like it was my fault.
A few days later we celebrated a small Christmas, with our tree nailed to a piece of plywood to keep it upright and decorations we made out of pieces of tinfoil and cut-up aluminum cans. When Dad got his next paycheck, at the beginning of the month, we took a long weekend and he drove us to our storage unit in Eugene. We loaded all our stuff into a U-Haul trailer and drove it back to Seattle, then spent a week or so unpacking.
It was the first time in almost three years I’d slept in my own bed.
16
We never really settled in at the Aloha Street house. It was dark and cold and smelled like dirt. We couldn’t figure out where the dirt smell was coming from until Dad opened up the storm door that led into the basement crawl space and we discovered that there was no foundation under the house. Most of the structure’s weight rested on posts that were set into concrete pads. Otherwise it was just a wooden box built on top of an enormous hole in the ground. As wet as the climate in Seattle was, water evaporated up through the house like an oversize chimney, bringing mold and the smell of dirt with it.
“I bet I could grow pot down here,” Dad said, as he looked at the dirt basement with a flashlight.
It was interesting to me how rarely Dad and I had the same reaction to a given situation.
* * *
I’d been asking my dad for a dog for years, mostly because I imagined it would give me someone to play with, but we’d never been able to swing it. Because we had roommates, or because we’d be moving soon and we weren’t sure where we’d end up. Because we didn’t have a yard. Because the yard wasn’t fenced. The reasons changed, but the answer was almost always no.
Dad had relented once, back on Roosevelt Boulevard. I’d been so depressed and bored while we were there that he’d gone to the pound and picked up a cute little beagle/hound mix to cheer me up. I named the dog Charlie, in honor of—well, nothing really. I just liked the name Charlie. Besides Charlie rooster and Charlie dog, I’d also owned (briefly) a rabbit and a crow, both named Charlie. I probably would have named the gerbil Charlie if he’d lived long enough to name. But the rabbit escaped and the crow healed up its broken wing and went back to being a wild crow. So when the new dog came along I had a Charlie vacancy that he filled nicely.
Unfortunately he was about as cheerful as a coma patient. All he did was lie around and eat and shit. He never wanted to play or fetch. We never tied him up because he never went more than ten feet from his food bowl. He didn’t even like to be petted. When Dad got off probation and it was clear we’d be leaving the state soon, Charlie mysteriously ran away. That was what Dad told me, that Charlie just ran away. The idea of Charlie running anywhere was ludicrous, but I sensed that examining Dad’s story too closely was only going to bum me out.
When we got to Aloha Street, Dad said I could get another dog. But that wasn’t what ended up happening. Instead, Dad got a dog and tried to convince me it was mine so I’d clean up after it.
“I wanted the black Lab,” I said, after we go
t the new dog home. “You wanted the collie.”
“He’s a Border collie,” Dad said. “And you named him.”
That part was true. I’d made up my mind before we went dog shopping at the pound that I was done with Charlies. This pet was going to be named something distinctive. Authoritative. This one was going to usher in a new era of pet naming. So I named him Thunder. Thunder the Border collie. He was smallish, with a brown and black body, a puff of white fur on his chest, and a slightly curled tail with a jaunty white tip. Pointy ears. Intelligent eyes. Smart. Sneaky. Cleverer than a dog should be. And definitely not mine.
Whenever Dad left the house, Thunder would howl at the door and jump and bark. Sometimes he went on for ten or fifteen minutes. Whenever I left the house? Nothing. Crickets chirping.
A few months after we got Thunder, we went to Arizona to visit Kris and Jimmy, the couple John had introduced us to in Eugene. As the seventies were winding down, most of our people had moved out of Oregon, and Kris and Jimmy had ended up in Kris’s hometown of Tucson. We were going down there partly because we’d just heard that Kris was expecting a baby and we wanted to give our blessings—and partly because there were rumors that Mount Saint Helens was going to explode and bury the entire region under three feet of lava. Dad had always been a better-safe-than-sorry kind of guy when it came to apocalyptic natural disasters.
So we got Phillip to check up on Thunder and headed to Tucson on a Greyhound bus. And, sure enough, the mountain did explode while we were down there, but Seattle survived. So Phillip dutifully fed and watered Thunder and let him out to go to the bathroom twice a day. But he didn’t go into the house much.
Dad thought we might come home to the reek of dog pee. I worried about dog poop. Neither thing turned out to be an issue. The problem was that Thunder had had access to the entire house, except we accidentally left the bathroom door closed. Assuming we must be in there—or, to my reading, that Dad must be in there—Thunder had dug a hole through the kitchen wall, into the bathroom.
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 9
