After what seemed like a couple of hours of exams, I was taken to an overnight bed, wired up to some machines, and given an IV drip that hurt like hell. The nurse told me it would only hurt when she put the needle in, but for some reason it just kept throbbing.
Dad was ushered in a few minutes later and sat down in a chair next to my bed.
“You’re okay,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
As we sat there in awkward silence, a young guy in a lab coat came in. He was immediately interesting to me: he had dark, curly hair and he was wearing a tiny little hat on top of it, held in place with a bobby pin. He had an oversize metal clipboard in his hand. It was the bobby pin that got my attention, for some reason. He had enormous features, and a slightly stooped posture that may have been explained, at least in part, by his efforts to keep a cup of coffee he was carrying in his other hand from spilling. He was smiling when he came in, and he kept smiling the whole time he was in the room.
“Hiya,” he said, as he set his coffee cup down on a counter next to the door. “I’m Dr. Epstein. How you doing? You’re Jason? And Mark. Nice to meet you. So I’ll just get right to the good news—you’re fine. Remarkable, really. You fell fifteen feet? Onto concrete? Knocked unconscious? No bumps, no bruises, nothing. Never seen anything like it. Kids! They bounce, huh? Amazing. I guess you’re not one of those kids who bruises easily, huh? Amazing. Really. So I’d like to keep you around overnight, just for observation, but I’m pretty sure you’re a-okay. You got any questions? Anything you’re wondering about?”
“Huh?” I said.
“How do we pay for it?” Dad asked.
“You got no insurance?” Dr. Epstein asked.
“No,” Dad said. “And no money.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dr. Epstein said. “We got a program, no sweat. Probably why they brought you here. Swedish was closer. But we do all the free work. We got some paperwork you’ll need to fill out, but don’t sweat it. Hey, you want a free bus pass?”
Now it was Dad’s turn to say, “Huh?”
“There’s a program with Metro, you get a bus pass if you’re disabled. Fifteen bucks a month, unlimited rides.”
“I’m not…” Dad said.
“You broke?” he asked.
“Pretty much,” Dad admitted.
“You’re disabled. The kid, too. You need a note from your doctor. That’s me. I’ll leave it with the kid’s discharge papers tomorrow. How you doing, kid? You doing okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Head hurt?”
“No,” I said.
“Back hurt?”
“No.”
“All right. Hold on.”
He took a little flashlight out of his pocket and walked over to my bed.
“Look at the light,” he said. He flicked it into my eyes; flick-flick, flick-flick. Then he moved it side to side in front of me, and I tracked it back and forth, up and down. He put his light away and held my chin up so I had to look him in the eyes. He frowned contemplatively, like he was evaluating me for something.
“Knock knock,” he muttered.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“Interrupting cow,” he said.
“Interrupting c—”
“Moo!” he shouted.
I giggled and he let go of my chin.
“He’s fine. You’re fine, kid. Mark. Mark, is it? Right? You want a cup of coffee?”
“It’s a little late…” Dad said.
“Come on, we’ll talk,” Dr. Epstein said, making a few notes on his metal clipboard, then picking up his cup of coffee and holding the door open while he waited for my dad, who gave me a quick kiss on the head before he followed the doctor out into the hallway.
“You on AFDC?” Dr. Epstein asked as Dad followed him out.
“We’re on the wait list,” Dad said.
“Yeah,” Dr. Epstein said. “I can move that along for you. Come on. Bye, kid! You’re looking great.”
And then they were gone. I lay there alone for a couple of minutes before I realized there was a TV mounted on the wall near the door, and that I had a remote sitting on the table next to my bed.
21
I started at Seattle Mental Health. My therapist’s name was Grace. She was nice enough, but definitely more of a them than an us. Her dry brown hair was cut to shoulder-length with bangs. She wore light makeup, no jewelry, and one layer of clothing on each part of her body: a sweater and a skirt. Slacks and a tunic shirt. Always solid colors. No textures. Her shoes were simple flats. Her face was smooth and unlined. If someone had asked me to draw her I could have done a good likeness without having to take my pen off the paper more than two or three times.
Seattle Mental Health turned out to be a complex of new buildings about a half mile from our house, near 15th Avenue. The buildings were laid out like a series of small houses, connected by hallways and covered walkways. It was all very 1970s urban renewal, with high, sloping roofs and wood exterior siding. Grace’s office looked out onto a small courtyard with a covered patio and a few young maple trees. There wasn’t much in her office itself: a desk, three government-issue chairs, a box of toys, and a bookshelf full of children’s books. When I came in for my first appointment, Grace told me we were just supposed to talk. We could talk about whatever I wanted.
“Can I play with those while we talk?” I asked, gesturing at the toys.
“Sure,” she said. “As long as you keep talking to me while you play with them.”
That seemed fair, so I got down on the floor and started sorting through the box. Somewhat to my surprise, Grace sat down on the floor across the room from me, leaning up against the wall near her desk and putting her writing pad on her knees.
“What do you want to talk about?” I asked.
“Anything you want,” she said.
“You know why I’m here?”
“Why do you think you’re here?”
“Because I yelled at my teacher,” I said. “And I said a bad word. A couple of times.”
“Was it fuck or shit or…?” she asked.
I paused in the act of picking through the toy box.
“Fuck,” I said. “And … motherfuckers. And fuck you.”
“So I guess you were pretty mad.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“What were you mad about?” she asked.
I told her the whole story, from beginning to end. When I was finished, she was quiet for a while.
“Yeah,” she said finally. “I guess I might have said fuck a couple of times, too. If that had happened to me.”
* * *
A week later Dad and I went down to the Metro administrative office to get our bus passes. Metro was the government corporation that ran Seattle’s buses and, for some reason, also ran the city’s sewers and was in charge of water quality. As we approached the office, Dad kept coaching me on how to act.
“Remember,” he said. “You’re supposed to be retarded.”
“So are you,” I said defensively.
The bus passes Dr. Epstein had set us up with were for people with disabilities. The easiest disability to fake, we figured, was being developmentally disabled, but in 1981 the term in common usage was “retarded.”
“Sure,” Dad said. “The point is, you don’t want to seem too smart. And that goes for when you’re using the pass, too. You don’t want some driver to figure out we’re scamming the things and take it away from you. Dr. Epstein’s going out on a limb for us with this.”
“What’s a retarded person act like?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Don’t worry about that. Don’t actually try to act retarded. Don’t make a thing of it. Just don’t go reciting the Gettysburg Address while you’re on the bus or anything.”
“The what?”
“That’s my boy!” he said, slapping me on the back as we walked into the office.
The process of getting the passes turned out not to take very long. We got our pictu
res taken, and they stuck the pictures onto cards that had our names and other information on them. Then they laminated the whole thing and put a sticker on it to show it was valid, and told Dad how to renew the stickers by mail. And just like that, we had new super-cheap bus passes. As we were leaving the building, Dad noticed something and grabbed my shoulder.
“Come here,” he said. “And don’t say anything. You got it? Don’t say a word while we’re in here.”
“Okay,” I said. I looked up as he guided me into a large room with a counter up near the door and a bunch of metal shelves behind it. The sign above the door said LOST AND FOUND.
“Hi,” Dad said to the guy behind the counter. “This is lost and found?”
“Sure is,” said the man, looking up from a book.
“We left a couple of things on the bus about three weeks ago. I didn’t know you all had a lost and found, or I’d have come to get them sooner.”
“What’d you lose?” the man asked.
“A jacket,” Dad said. “A dark blue nylon windbreaker. And an umbrella. Black. One of those kinds that folds up.”
“What size was the windbreaker?” the man behind the counter asked.
“I got it at Sears,” Dad said. “And I can’t remember if it was sized in numbers or letters. It’s either a medium, or about a 34.”
“Hold on,” the man said. Then he disappeared into his shelves for a while and came back with a large plastic box. “This is what I got.”
Dad picked through four or five windbreakers before he found one like the one he’d ripped the year before, during our Christmas-tree-stealing expedition. It took him less time to pick out an umbrella he liked.
“You get a lot of stuff through here?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t believe,” said the man.
“People usually come claim it?” Dad asked.
“Not even a tenth of it,” said the man.
“What happens to the rest?”
The man shrugged. “We throw it all out every couple of months. Or donate it, depending.”
Dad looked at me. I was wearing a Goodwill ski jacket I’d picked up a few seasons back. It was already too small for me, and the arm was covered with duct tape to keep the stuffing in.
“You got anything that’s about to expire?” Dad asked. “Like that ski jacket?”
“Hold on,” said the guy behind the counter. He went back into his shelves and came back a minute later with a brown ski jacket in my size.
“You lose this on the bus?” he asked me, holding it up. I looked at Dad, who nodded.
“I sure did,” I said.
“Here you go, kid,” he said, handing me the jacket.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Dad said. “Let’s go, Jason.”
As we turned to go, the guy behind the counter cleared his throat, and Dad turned back to look at him.
“Not for nothing,” said the man. “But you wouldn’t want to lose things on the bus too often. Not more than once or twice a year. You know what I’m saying?”
“Sure,” Dad said, nodding. “And thanks.”
“You have a good day now,” said the man.
When we got outside we sat down in a bus shelter. Ironically, Metro’s administrative offices were sort of off the beaten path, and bus access to them wasn’t very good. We had a good wait ahead of us.
“I guess I should fall off high dives more often,” I said.
“No,” Dad said. “You shouldn’t.”
* * *
We got onto Aid for Dependent Children that fall. Dr. Epstein may or may not have had something to do with it. Dad didn’t want to tell me. But AFDC included medical coupons, which meant free doctors and dentists. One of Dad’s bottom teeth had disintegrated the year before, and I’d never actually been to a dentist, so the coupons came in handy. Dad got some gold crowns on the backs of his bottom teeth, and I went to Odessa Brown Children’s Dental Clinic to have some folks poke around in my mouth a bit.
“You’re going to need braces later,” said the nice lady dentist who did the exam. Then she shot my mouth full of Novocain and pulled out two of my incisors.
Generally, our second year in Seattle was going better than our first. With AFDC, we were able to keep our heads above water financially. But also, we were re-creating the same type of network we’d had in Eugene. A better one, really; the one we’d had in Eugene hadn’t included any doctors. And Dad was meeting people through Seattle Counseling Service who helped us out in various ways. Dad had a regular drug dealer named Scotty, who gave him a good deal on pot. And Phillip was introducing Dad to people around town. Dad was doing small deals, selling pot a few ounces at a time, and going to some parties, which was how people like us built support systems.
School still sucked, and Olive announced that she and Calliope would be moving out at the end of the school year because, evidently, that whole no-power-or-running-water thing was becoming kind of inconvenient. But even that worked out for the best. Our subsidized housing finally came through that summer, and Dad started shopping for rentals on the north end of town.
“We can get a place with two bedrooms,” he said. “And a better yard. And a better neighborhood.”
I would have settled for a house that didn’t smell like mushrooms, but a bedroom of my own sounded nice, too.
22
In the summer of ’81, the summer I turned nine, we moved into a two-bedroom house in a north Seattle neighborhood called Ballard. The house was almost perfect. It had a huge yard, it was a half block from an elementary school, and it had a good-size living room and dining room. There was even a third bedroom in the basement, but the basement could only be reached through an external side door, so it wasn’t convenient to use as an actual sleeping space. And Ballard was a historically Scandinavian neighborhood with a lot of kids in it.
Our new landlord was a scruffy-looking young guy named Tim, who came from a rich family. He had a slim, muscular build, curly brown hair, blue eyes, and the kind of tan that pale people get when they spend too much time in the sun: part tan, part permanent sunburn. Tim had gotten himself semi-disowned by his rich parents after dropping out of college and going off to fish for crab in the Gulf of Alaska, but not before he used his trust fund to buy the house in Ballard.
“I used to stay here between crabbing seasons,” he said, when he showed us around the house. “But that meant it was vacant so much of the year, I just figured fuck it. Someone should get some use out of it.”
“We’ll definitely get use out of it,” Dad said.
“Yeah,” Tim said. He led us out on the front porch and took a cigarette out of a crumpled pack he was carrying in his back pocket. “The only thing I guess I should mention is Carmella Johnson, the bitch who lives next door.”
He leaned over the porch railing and pointed at the neighbor’s house as he said it. I looked to see what he was pointing at, but there was nobody there. Just a squat little house behind a thicket of old plum trees. There was plenty of yard and trees and bushes, but whoever owned the place was too old or too lazy to take care of it. The grass was three feet high, and the trees pushed in over the patio to hide the house in shadows.
“What’s her deal?” Dad asked.
“She’s just a bitch on wheels,” Tim said. “This driveway that lies between the properties, technically we’ve got an easement on it. So we can get to our parking space down at the back of the lot there. But Carmella, a couple of years ago, started parking her car to block the driveway so I couldn’t get in there. She does it long enough, I might lose the easement. So we’ve been back and forth over that for years. But the main thing, I have to admit, is mostly my fault.”
“What’s the main thing?” Dad asked.
“Well, she’s got these two little rat dogs,” Tim said. “And I guess … well, it doesn’t make me proud to admit this, but there used to be three of them.”
“No,” Dad said, sounding slightly horrified. Or like he was prete
nding to be horrified. Ironically horrified.
“Yeah,” Tim said, skipping over the irony. “About a year ago I was walking home and those little rat dogs were out in the front yard, barking at me. And I just picked a rock up and winged it at them. Like, not thinking I was gonna hit anything. Just to scare them? And I tagged one right in the head, by accident. It kept barking, but it started running in circles. And then it just kind of … slowed down. Like a clock winding down. Yap-yap-yap yap yap yap, yap, yap, yap … yap. Yap. Boom. Dead.”
“Jesus,” Dad said.
“Yeah,” Tim said. “Like I said, it was an accident. I hate those little dogs, but it isn’t their fault Carmella’s the goddamn Antichrist. Dog’s just a dog, right? Anyway, she’s had it in for me big-time since then, and I guess she might bestow some of that hatred on whoever moves in here as my tenants.”
“Well,” Dad said. “We’ll try to steer clear of her.”
I made a little noise that was almost a laugh.
* * *
I kept on meeting with Grace every other week for a few months after we moved to Ballard. Apparently whatever deal Dad had worked out with Booker and the other GAOP teachers was with the district, more than with anyone in particular at Stevens, so even though I changed schools, I still had to finish out my sentence. As it were. Grace acknowledged that we were going to be done soon and seemed to want to ask me a lot of big-picture questions to wrap things up.
“What’s the most important thing to you?” she asked.
“I want to be good,” I said, without pausing to think about it. That was part of what I used her toys for. By focusing on the toys, I found I could answer her questions without having to concentrate on them very hard.
“What’s that mean to you?” she asked.
“Like Han Solo,” I said. “You know Han Solo? From Star Wars?”
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 12
