His furniture raids also yielded things we could use around the house, including an old Speed Queen washer from the thirties. It was a giant metal tub on three legs, with an agitator in the bucket, and a set of wringers on the side for wringing water out of clothes. He had to rewire it to make it work, but the engine was in good shape and the wringers were dangerously powerful.
“You get your hand caught in these, you hit this emergency bar here,” he said, showing me the silver bar that would pop the ringers apart.
“What happens if I can’t?” I asked, looking skeptically at the arrangement.
“It’ll crush every bone in your hand and your wrist, then pull the skin off and spit the pieces out on the other side.”
That seemed like an awful lot of risk to take on just to get your clothes halfway dry, but I didn’t say anything. The washing machine would save us five or six dollars a month, and on our budget that was real money. We kept the machine in our fenced-off backyard, and dried our clothes in the kitchen over the stove.
* * *
Olive found a gig working at a clothing store in Pike Place Market, a kind of farmers’ market located in downtown Seattle. It had been built at the top of a cliff in 1907, and in later decades it spilled over the edge, down toward the waterfront. The original market up at the top still sold lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, local meats and fish. The buildings that backed up against the cliff under the main market were a chaotic warren of stairways, ramps, and bridges connecting a few enormous market halls. The halls were lined with small stalls that sold everything from used books to exotic pets and stage magicians’ equipment. Calliope and I could spend a whole day down there, looking at Mexican amethysts, Brazilian pythons, and dried apple cores from Wenatchee being sold as shrunken heads from Papua New Guinea.
Olive made friends in the Market, like Tillie, who owned a little toy store called Pippin. She would let Cal and me hang out in her store for hours at a time, but most of the toys she sold were “craftsman” toys, like wooden tops and popguns with actual corks in them. It was entertaining for a while, but we were used to toys with more flashing lights and clever gimmicks, so we got bored with the good stuff pretty quickly. We ended up spending most of the summer of 1980 at home by ourselves, trying to keep each other entertained.
Finding things we both liked to do was always a challenge. Calliope didn’t like to watch TV as much as I did, so we did a lot of projects. I had a toy bow and arrow set I’d bought in a novelty shop in Tucson, during my avoid-the-volcano vacation earlier that year. It was designed to be pretty low-power, but Calliope and I figured out that if we shortened the string and reinforced the bow with duct tape and pieces of bamboo, we could increase its power significantly. It didn’t take us long to shatter the cheap arrow that had come with the bow, so we got some better ones from the sporting goods section of the Fred Meyer department store on the other side of the hill and spent a couple of weeks knocking holes in the big piece of plywood that fenced the front yard off from the backyard, until the overworked bow finally gave up the ghost entirely.
We also put together some puppet shows for our parents, and a jitterbug routine we’d dance to an old Andrews Sisters record my dad had in his collection—“The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” We drew comics, and told stories, and had little sketch routines we’d perform based on Star Blazers, a Japanese cartoon that came on early weekday mornings.
I got a Daisy lever-action BB gun for my eighth birthday that summer. Once I had that, it was pretty much all Calliope and I played with. We could spend hours at a time in the backyard, shooting paper targets. By the end of the first month, we could walk BB holes across a piece of paper from thirty feet away, putting each shot within millimeters of the last.
The other thing we did was, we fought like crazy. I always got the worst of those encounters. Calliope and I were exactly the same size, but she was twice as mean. While I fought to dominate—I’d try to push her down and pin her—Calliope fought to kill. She’d pull hair, bite, scratch, gouge. When all else failed, she’d resort to trying to strangle me. I knew I had to do the same if I ever wanted to win. But if I couldn’t bring myself to take a swing at Dickie, I certainly couldn’t hit Calliope. So I got my ass kicked a lot and took my revenge in other ways—like locking Calliope out when she needed to use the bathroom, or unplugging the extension cord that ran across the backyard to bring power to her house. I knew Han Solo would approve. After all, he’d been happy enough to use a disguise to sneak into the prison and then just start blasting away at the guards. Sometimes you had to take your shots when you could get them.
20
I developed a Star Wars action figure habit over our first summer in Seattle. Marcy’s son, Isaac, had owned a few back in Eugene, but we didn’t play with them much. In Seattle I got really into them and funneled all my allowance money into buying them. I could afford to get one about once every three weeks, and I went to the toy section at Fred Meyer every week to see if they had any new figures in. I had a few Battlestar Galactica figures, too, but the Star Wars collection was my pride and joy. When The Empire Strikes Back came out that year, half of my excitement was that there’d be new action figures issued because of it.
I started third grade at Stevens that fall, and one day, in spite of the no-toys policy at GAOP, I brought my brand-new Bossk bounty-hunter action figure to school with me. None of my classmates were very impressed, and my teacher confiscated it immediately. When the final bell rang I went and asked her for it. She went to her desk and looked around for a minute. Then she said it was gone.
“You threw it away?” I asked.
“No,” she said with a shrug. “It’s just gone. It was right here on top of my desk.”
“But … that’s not fair. You took it and you lost it!”
“That’s a risk you run when you bring toys to school,” she said.
I noticed then that some of the other kids in class—Dickie and a new kid named Virgil—were whispering and laughing to each other. And suddenly I knew exactly what had happened. I walked over and held out my hand.
“Give it back,” I said.
“Give what back?” Virgil said.
“My action figure,” I said. “You took it off her desk. Give it back.”
Virgil and Dickie exchanged a smirk, and Virgil turned back to me, grinning.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Lynne,” I said to our teacher. “Virgil took my action figure off your desk!”
Other kids had to call their teachers Mister or Miss whatever, but GAOP was supposed to be too progressive for that, so we called our teachers by their first names. Suzie and Lynne.
“Virgil,” Lynne called from her desk. “Do you have Jason’s action figure?”
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Virgil said.
I looked at Lynne and she just shrugged again. By now some other kids had come over to see what the fuss was about, and half the class was standing behind Virgil and Dickie. I looked Virgil over and saw the unmistakable shape of an action figure in the front pocket of his jeans.
“It’s right there!” I said, pointing.
“Right where?” Virgil asked, looking down.
“Right there,” I said, poking at the plastic toy through his pants.
“Get your hand off my dick!” he said, slapping my hand away.
Dickie and the other kids laughed.
“Lynne!” I said. “I can see it. It’s right there in his pocket!”
“I can’t search him if he says he doesn’t have it,” Lynne said.
“So you can take my stuff and let him steal it, but you can’t come over here and look and see that he’s got my action figure?” I asked.
I couldn’t believe this was really happening. Lynne and Suzie had never liked me much. Suzie had even gone so far as to tell me she didn’t like me once, when I awkwardly asked permission to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. She listened to me
stammer out my request, including a lot of phrases like “I need to…” and “To the you-know…” followed by obscure hand gestures. Because having to ask to take a leak was one of the many conventions of public school life that always seemed totally uncivilized to me. When I was done with my little mime routine she looked me right in the eye and said, “You know, stuff like that—that’s exactly the reason nobody likes you.”
I’d walked across the playground to the bathroom feeling like I’d swallowed a bowling ball.
So maybe this behavior from Lynne wasn’t so surprising. But it seemed to me that colluding with other students to rip me off was crossing some kind of line.
“Jason,” she said. “You knew you weren’t supposed to bring it to class. It’s not my responsibility if you can’t follow the rules.”
I thought about the weeks I’d saved to get that action figure, and how happy I’d been to get it. I thought about the weeks I’d have to save to get another one, and the possibility that Fred Meyer might be sold out of Bossks by the time I’d saved up enough to buy one. And my face got red. And then I started crying.
“Oh, he’s crying!” Dickie said. “Like a little baby!”
“Fuck you!” I screamed, rounding on him. “Fuck you! And fuck you!” I shouted at Virgil. “Fuck every single fucking one of you fucking motherfuckers! And fuck you, Lynne! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!”
Nobody seemed to know quite what to do with that one. Lynne looked totally shocked. Other kids giggled nervously. Dickie smiled triumphantly, and Virgil’s face just went totally blank. I stormed over to the coat hooks next to the door, grabbed my jacket, and ran out of the building.
For most of the walk home I was just plain mad. It wasn’t until I was a few blocks from my house that I started to wonder what was going to happen next. What would Lynne do? What would the school do? What would my dad do when he found out? By the time I got home, I was in a panic. When Calliope came home a few hours later, she found me curled up on my bed, in my bedroom/dining room.
“Hey,” she said. “I heard you went nuts today.”
I groaned and covered my face. Cal was in fifth grade, in the main building. If she’d heard about it, that meant the whole school knew. And Lynne would have to do something. She couldn’t let it slide if the whole school knew about it. Not that she would have anyway.
“What happened?” Calliope asked.
When I told her the story she just shook her head.
“You’ve gotta learn to rein that shit in,” she said.
“They ripped me off!” I protested.
“Of course they did,” she said. “What did you expect?”
“But all they talk about—they’re always talking about not stealing and telling the truth,” I said, trying to figure out how to explain what bothered me about it so much.
Calliope got it immediately.
“You mean because they’re straight?” she asked.
I nodded.
“That’s what they do,” she said. “They lie. They steal. And they never admit it, so they’re a thousand times worse than us. I don’t know why you can’t get that through your head.”
“So I can’t trust anyone?” I asked. “Ever?”
I was being sarcastic. What she was saying sounded ridiculous to me, but she didn’t get it.
“Nope,” she said. “Nobody. But at least here, with our own, we know what the rules are and nobody lies about them.”
When Dad got home, his reaction to the story was pretty much the same as Calliope’s: that it was my own fault. Partly it was my fault for bringing the toy, but mostly it was my fault for not having protected it, and for being surprised when a bunch of straights fucked me over, and for letting that push me into losing control.
“Cops are the worst thieves,” he said. “Politicians and lawyers the worst liars. Priests and teachers molest children. The only reason those people have so many rules is so they can break them to fuck people like us over.”
That didn’t sound like it could possibly be true. The implications were just too horrifying. But I wasn’t really in a position to argue the point.
* * *
I didn’t go to school the rest of that week. When I finally went back the following Monday, Lynne was rude and brusque with me all day. I was ready for that. I was ready for the note she gave me at the end of the day, too, to take home to my dad.
“I’ll need him to sign this, and you bring it back,” she said.
“Fine,” I said, taking the paper and walking home.
The note told Dad he needed to come in for a conference. Later that week, he met with Lynne, Suzie, the school principal, and Booker, the fourth grade teacher who sort of ran the GAOP program. The meeting was after school, so I had to go home and wait for him. When Dad finally got back, he looked tired.
“They wanted to put you in special ed,” he said.
“Like, for retarded kids?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, not exactly for retarded kids. They said you need too much attention, and you take time away from other students. They said that, in special ed, teachers would have more time to spend on you. So it’s not so much that they think you’re stupid, as that they just can’t handle how smart you are.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t really buy that interpretation, but it was one of my dad’s necessary fictions. “What did you say?”
“I told them you’re smarter than they are, and that the only reason you’re acting out is because you’re bored. I told them I’d sue if they tried to put you in special ed. That there’s a stigma attached to it.”
“What’s a stigma?” I asked. “Like, when you can’t see?”
“That’s an astigmatism. Kind of the reverse idea. An astigmatism means you can’t see things. Lack of the ability to identify a mark. A stigma is a mark that doesn’t come off. It means even if you’re plenty smart, people will assume you’re retarded because you’re in special ed.”
“What did they say to that?”
“They didn’t care. Educating children isn’t much of a priority for them, really. So I asked to talk to Booker privately and we came to an arrangement.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The facts of life,” Dad said. I assumed this was a euphemism for some kind of threat, though I wasn’t sure what Dad could have threatened Booker with that would stick.
“So now what?” I asked.
“Now you go to counseling at Seattle Mental Health every other week, to deal with your anger issues. And you keep going to GAOP.”
“What’s Seattle Mental Health?” I asked.
“It’s a shrink. You’re supposed to go to a shrink.”
I wasn’t sure how being crazy was less of a stigma than being retarded, but nobody was asking my opinion.
* * *
Dad and Phillip were still dating, but they usually went out instead of staying home, so I didn’t see as much of Phillip as I used to. He was still working as a nurse, but he was getting a more advanced nursing degree from Seattle University. This only mattered to me because SU had a swimming pool, and SU students were allowed to use it and to bring guests. Once or twice a month Phillip loaned Dad his student identification so Dad could take me to the SU pool.
This was how Dad and I met Dr. Epstein.
The SU pool had a high dive that I liked to walk to the end of. Then I’d gird my loins and jump off. It was only about fifteen feet to the water, but standing on the end of the thing gave me vertigo. The problem was that most of the people who used the SU pool liked to swim laps. So, before I could jump into the pool, I had to look under the diving board and make sure there weren’t any lap swimmers under me. I couldn’t do this from the end of the board because I was too dizzy and I was afraid I’d fall off. The fifth or sixth time Dad took me to the pool, I leaned over the railing above the ladder to see if there was a lap swimmer under me and just flipped right over the rail.
Dad was sitting on the edge of the pool a few yards away
, and he watched helplessly while I fell fifteen feet and landed flat on my back, on the concrete floor that surrounded the pool. He said afterward that the worst part was that I bounced. He’d never seen a person bounce like that before. Didn’t even know it was possible.
When he got to me, my eyes were rolled completely back in my head, and he yelled at the lifeguard to call 911, but the lifeguard was already running over to me so Dad got up and ran into the office and started punching frantically at the phone, but nothing happened.
“How the fuck do you get an outside line on this thing?” he shouted at the lifeguard. But she was bent over me running through her first aid checklist: airway, breathing, circulation.
“The phone’s not working!” Dad screamed at her. “How do I make the fucking phone work?”
“Dial 9!” she shouted back at him.
He dialed 9. Nothing happened.
“It’s not working!”
“Dial 9, then dial 911!” she yelled back.
Dad punched in the number and finally got through to an emergency operator and ordered an ambulance.
That was Dad’s story of the incident forever after: me bouncing, my eyes rolled back in my head, not being able to get the phones to work, and not being able to get the lifeguard to answer his questions.
I woke up as they were taping me to a backboard. Being taped down hurt. The tape on my forehead hurt. When I tried to move my head, the tape pulled at my skin. That hurt. My head hurt. Everything hurt. I started to panic. Suddenly Dad was in my field of vision.
“What happened?” I asked.
“You fell off the high dive,” he said.
“Mr. Schmidt,” one of the ambulance guys said. “Why don’t you follow behind us in your car? We’ll meet you at Harborview.”
They rolled me out to the ambulance and drove me to a hospital. At the hospital I got rolled down various hallways and left sitting like a piece of abandoned furniture outside the doors of various offices while I waited to be X-rayed, poked, and prodded. The outcome was as surprising to me as it was to everyone else: there was nothing wrong with me at all. No fractures, no sprains. Once they were sure my spine was okay they cut me loose from the backboard, and I realized that most of the pain I’d been experiencing was from being taped to a piece of wood. When they rolled me onto my belly there wasn’t even a bruise on my back where I’d landed. I’d been knocked unconscious, but I didn’t have so much as a goose egg where my head smacked into the concrete.
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 11
