A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  What Dad was doing during these long nights was, he was learning to be gay.

  Calliope had explained to me what it meant that Dad was gay the year before, when I was nine. Dad hadn’t exactly been keeping it a secret, but he hadn’t really gone into detail about it either. Calliope was the one who told me that being gay meant Dad was actually having sex with other men.

  We were walking home after having snuck into the zoo. The Woodland Park Zoo was a mile or so from my house. On rainy days, when the low visibility gave us some cover, Calliope and I would scale a tree next to the fence, climb out on a branch, and drop down onto the path near the elk exhibit. Nobody ever went to look at the elks, so nobody ever saw us do it.

  I walked a few blocks in silence while I thought about what she’d said, and tried to square it with the technical information I had about sex. But it didn’t compute.

  “How does that work?” I asked finally. “Men don’t have vaginas.”

  “They stick their dicks in each other’s butts,” Calliope said.

  I laughed. Then I looked at her and realized she was completely serious.

  “At the same time?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “They take turns.”

  I ran several possible interpretations of this scenario in my head, and each one seemed more ridiculous than the last. I knew that sex involved thrusting a penis into a woman’s vagina repeatedly, so I had an idea that each man would thrust into his partner’s butt once, pull out, turn around, let his partner thrust into his butt, and so on. That seemed like a lot of work. And a lot of movement. Phillip had slept over many times. Surely if he and Dad had been engaged in these kinds of acrobatics I would have heard them fall out of the bed at least once. But otherwise what did “taking turns” mean in a butt sex scenario? I decided this was one of those questions I didn’t need a clear answer to. The relevant part was that Dad was having sex with people’s bottoms. And they were having sex with his.

  “Isn’t there poop in there?” I asked.

  “I’d think so,” Calliope said. “I’ve never understood that part. And when they aren’t having sex with each other’s butts, they give each other blow jobs.”

  “Blow jobs?”

  “They put each other’s penises in their mouths.”

  “What about teeth?” I asked.

  “They just don’t bite down. Like this,” she said, demonstrating on her finger.

  “Do they blow on them?”

  “No.”

  “Then why’s it called a blow job?” I asked.

  “I … you know, I don’t know. Anyway, they suck. They don’t blow.”

  “They take turns for that, too?”

  “Actually, that one they sometimes do at the same time. I guess it depends on how tall they are, compared to each other. And they have to lie down. I guess. Unless one of them’s really strong. I guess he could…”

  She made a gesture that suggested holding something heavy in front of her, and moving it up and down.

  “That seems gross,” I said.

  “It all seems gross, until you’re doing it,” she said.

  She and I had talked about this quite a bit. There was a woman named Julie who lived at the end of Calliope’s block who was friends with Cal and Olive. She had a massive collection of lesbian porn for straight guys—cheerleaders with acrylic fingernails and shaved pussies having sex on motorcycles. Cal and I would go over to Julie’s place sometimes and spend hours looking at her porn, critiquing it and joking about it while Julie lay comatose in her bed a few feet away. None of the women in the magazines looked like they were having much fun. They never smiled. But Cal and I understood, just by watching the antics of grownups in their relationships, that sex of one type or another pretty much made the world go around.

  This had been true in Eugene, too—Dad and his friends back in Oregon were always sleeping together, breaking up, and sleeping with other people. The difference between our old scene and the new one, for my purposes, was that all the screwing that had been going on back in Oregon had occasionally produced a kid. Lots of people had at least one. So when someone threw a party, or had a get-together, everyone brought their kids so we could entertain each other while our parents got high and talked. I had a place in Dad’s social circles in Oregon. With Dad’s gay friends, there were no kids and, consequently, no place for me.

  * * *

  Dad got a new boyfriend shortly before I turned ten, an older man named Charles. Charles wasn’t British, but in my mind he sort of was. His face was all lines and planes, but the main thing was that his colorless blue eyes were always partially lidded. Not like he was stoned or sleepy, but like he was considering things very carefully. He had a thin, dark blond mustache and a straight, narrow nose. He had the face of someone who could drink tea with his pinkie finger sticking up, or charge a line of Russian cannons with a lance. He would have looked perfectly credible wearing a monocle.

  His personal style tended toward long-sleeved button-down flannel shirts in various plaids, straight-legged jeans, and heavy leather shoes. He wore a bulky canvas coat lined with wool. It was all stuff I thought of as lumberjack gear. The idea wasn’t totally incredible. We still had lumberjacks in Seattle then. But that wasn’t Charles’s line. He was a graphic artist. He worked for a print shop in Bellevue, and painted in his off hours.

  Dad didn’t have a clear plan for how he wanted me to think of Charles. Or he didn’t seem to. There was some implication that Charles was going to be part of “our” life now, and I had to just get on the bus. I didn’t understand where all the pressure was coming from. Phillip had just been a friend, like our friends back in Eugene. He seemed to like me. He told jokes I understood. He laughed at my jokes. He was also a raging alcoholic, but that only came up once during an ill-fated vacation weekend with my dad in Victoria, British Columbia, where Phillip had sobbed uncontrollably for ninety minutes in our hotel room before passing out on the floor. Most of the time he was my friend, and also my dad’s boyfriend. With Charles, the expectations were different.

  Even at the age of ten, I chalked some of this up to my dad’s newfound militancy about being gay. They say there’s no zealot like a convert, and Dad was definitely a convert; having grown up in the closet, then being sort of semi-closeted in Eugene, he’d found his full gay self in Seattle at the age of thirty. And thirty-two-year-old gay Dad was pretty pissed off about all those wasted years of having sex with women just to impress other people with how straight he was. Thirty-two-year-old gay Dad was pissed about a lot of things. Somewhat to my surprise, this became a bonding experience for me and Charles, even as it was driving a wedge between me and my dad.

  We’d be eating breakfast and something would set Dad off. Something would remind him that straight people could kiss in public and he couldn’t, and he’d just start ranting.

  “Sometimes it just makes me so mad!” he’d say. “Sometimes at Green Lake or Madison Park, I just want to follow them around going, ‘Eeeeew! Gross! That’s disgusting!’ Talk about them the way they talk about us. Show them how it feels.”

  And Charles, who liked to read the paper over breakfast, would lower the Arts section just enough to look at Dad over the top of it and say in his deep, cultured, and surprisingly un-British baritone, “Jesus, Mark.”

  Then Charles’s gaze would slide over to me and we’d make eye contact. I’d smile. The skin around his eyes would wrinkle minutely. Then the paper would go back up. But it left me feeling like we’d connected in some meaningful way.

  * * *

  Charles lived in a duplex on Capitol Hill, near the reservoir. He lived with another mustaches-and-flannel-shirts homo named Billy and an enormous, ill-tempered basset hound named Boris. Billy was the compositional opposite of Charles: a tall, thin man with dark brown hair and a bushy red mustache, full mouth, enormous eyes, and narrow shoulders. Billy had a ridiculous sense of humor. Once, he took me to the International House of Pancakes and pretended to blow his nose on a fla
pjack. Then he put it down and ate it. The old couple sitting next to us got up and moved to another table.

  Charles and Billy’s place was a study in San Francisco classical revival homoerotic reductionism. The walls were papered in collages that featured photographs of Renaissance Italian statuary—nude men in marble—and famous opera singers. Over this were mounted framed posters for art shows and concerts, paintings by Charles and his friends (lots of suggestively framed Catholic religious iconography), wood-block prints, Asian calligraphy, and a deer’s head with a studded leather belt wrapped around its antlers. Furniture tended toward the comfortable and overstuffed. Lots of thrift store purchases made presentable with a carefully placed Mexican horse blanket. Overall the place had a Canadian-logging-camp-meets-Andy-Warhol’s-factory vibe that seemed to say, “Welcome to our lovely home. We like men. No, really—we like men.”

  There were three things I really enjoyed about Charles’s apartment. One was Billy. Another was that Charles and Billy had built a loft in their living room. Or maybe “built” is too strong a word. At some point they’d noticed that the stairway that led up to their apartment had a lot of dead airspace above it. Never ones to let a damage deposit get between them and another ten square feet of living space, they used a sledgehammer and a power saw to tear a giant hole in the wall, exposing the hidden cavern above the stairs. Then they framed in a plywood platform to make a wooden box about six feet long, three feet deep, and three feet high in the east wall of their living room. They put a futon in the box and—ta-da!—instant sleeping loft.

  The loft was awkwardly located, about five feet off the ground, and hidden by curtains in such a way that it looked like a blacked-out window until you peeked inside. If they had allowed me to move in and live in the loft, I would gladly have thrown away my bed, most of my toys, and all of my clothes. Living in a hole in the wall that I could pop out of like a preadolescent cuckoo bird was a fantasy I hadn’t known I had until I got to act it out in Charles and Billy’s living room.

  The third thing I liked about Charles and Billy’s place was that they had pirated cable that included dozens of extremely weird channels I’d never seen or even heard of before. They had a channel that showed nothing but Japanese cartoons, in Japanese, with no subtitles, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There were Spanish soap operas. There were low-budget monster movies in languages I couldn’t even recognize. Their TV was kind of small and the picture was crap, but the stuff they got on their pirated cable stations fascinated me. I felt like my horizons were expanded every time I went over to their house.

  There was a painting above the TV that Charles had done, of a man who looked very much like Billy, naked, tied to a stump, and shot full of arrows. Sometimes I’d find myself staring at the painting instead of the TV, wondering what it was supposed to mean. One day as I was sitting on their couch watching Ultraman—in its original Japanese without subtitles—Billy came into the living room and sat down next to me. We watched in silence for a while before I pointed at the painting.

  “Is that supposed to be a metaphor for being gay?” I asked. “Like, you’re just putting yourself out there and being who you are, and everybody else shoots arrows at you and hates you for no reason?”

  Billy looked up at the painting for a long time.

  “That’s Saint Sebastian,” he said. “Some pagan kings ordered him to be shot full of arrows because he refused to renounce Christianity, and he survived because he was a saint, full of the glory of God. After he healed, he went around preaching the falseness of the pagan gods. This time an angry mob beat him to death with sticks and rocks and threw his broken body in a ditch where they used to shit. And he stayed dead. Why did God save him from the arrows, but not the mob? Those mysterious ways we’re always hearing about, I guess.”

  He looked back to me. I looked at him.

  “Yeah,” he said after a minute. “It’s a metaphor for being gay.”

  “I knew it,” I said.

  “Yes, you’re very smart.”

  We returned our attention to Ultraman.

  * * *

  In the fall of 1982, when I was ten years old, Billy got a weird fever. None of us thought anything of it, except that it was making Billy totally miserable. He stayed home from work for days, sniffling, moping around the house, wrapped in quilts and blowing his nose until it was red and sore. He tried going back to work, but the fever didn’t go away, and when he went to work he got sicker. He started losing weight. Charles had seen a story on the news earlier that year about GRID, Gay Related Immune Deficiency. Nobody was sure how it was spread. Most people thought it was caused by poppers, a kind of club drug that came in little crushable capsules that were “popped” to release a substance like industrial strength airplane glue. Some people used them constantly, but that wasn’t really Billy’s scene so we assumed he just had a persistent cold. Then, after almost two months, he seemed to get better.

  A few weeks later, Dad came down with the same bug. It was January of 1983.

  31

  With the exception of a few drug dealers who just happened to be at the apogee of their career arc when I knew them, Carol Green, the child psychologist my dad worked for, was the richest person I had ever met. She lived in a giant house, on a double-size lot, in one of the richest neighborhoods in town. There was a golf course across the street from her place. She had a microwave, which was considered a relatively fancy piece of equipment at the time. There was a water faucet and an ice machine built into the door of her refrigerator, and she and her husband owned four cars between them. She had so many cars that she just loaned one to Dad while he was working for her—a big green ’68 Rambler Rebel—so it would be easier for him to run her errands. He called it his company car. And she paid him a good wage—seven dollars an hour—right out of her own pocket, in cash.

  It was important that Dad got paid in cash, so we could defraud welfare. It was important that we could defraud welfare because, as Dad often said, “the world is just a goddamn uncertain place.”

  Through most of the 1980s, Aid for Families with Dependent Children paid about $360 a month for a single parent with one kid; by way of comparison, rent at the Aloha Street house had been $250, and the Ballard house ran about $350. We got food stamps and subsidized housing as well, but it was effectively impossible for us to live on welfare alone, so Dad had to work. The problem was that if he got a straight job, we either had to get off welfare, or we had to take all the money that Dad made in excess of $360 a month and give it to the welfare office. Dad told me that, the way the rules worked, if you were on welfare you got $360 a month to live on no matter what.

  This would make getting off welfare seem like a no-brainer—certainly that was the intention of the people who designed it—except that the kind of work people like my dad could get wasn’t particularly reliable. Low-end service jobs could end at any time, for any reason. For example, it was perfectly legal to fire someone for being gay. But if Dad took us off welfare and then lost his job, we’d have had to wait a couple of months—maybe as long as a year—to get back on the rolls. During which time, a family like ours could easily disappear under the surface and never be heard from again. So the smart play was to find an under-the-table job and just be really careful not to get caught. One thing Dad had to do to avoid getting caught was to never run any work income through his bank; signing a release allowing the welfare narcs to poke around in his bank account was a condition of being in the program. The easiest way to avoid a paper trail altogether was to get paid in cash.

  Most employers weren’t willing to go to all that trouble. The ones who were willing, for whatever reason, typically paid about thirty percent under market rate for any given job. Partly this was because the employer couldn’t claim an under-the-table employee as a business expense for tax purposes, so they recouped the loss by gouging the wage they paid. Then they’d gouge a little more, to mitigate any future losses they might take as a consequence of getting caught wi
th a bunch of undocumented workers. And there was always a small fuck-you surcharge, on top of everything else. Most under-the-table employers could take you or leave you, so they tended to act like major assholes.

  As far as all this went, Carol was better than most. The wage she paid was fair, and she didn’t make Dad eat too much shit to get it. Basically, he just did whatever she told him to do. He handled her calendar and organized her office, but he also cleaned out her basement, picked up her dry cleaning, arranged catering for important functions, and helped her son pack for college. He worked a lot of seven-dollar hours doing this stuff, and for the better part of a year we were doing pretty well. But there were weird little side costs associated with working for Carol that made it hard to remember how lucky we were to have her.

  For example, Carol did a lot of running around. But no matter where she was or what she was doing, at eight o’clock in the morning she would rush to the nearest television set, change clothes, and do the 20 Minute Workout. This was a televised aerobics routine that was popular for about as long as it took Americans to figure out that aerobics is, in fact, just as hard as any other form of exercise and that spandex was not actually going to be this year’s black. If Carol happened to be in Ballard when eight o’clock rolled around, she would come to our house, pound on our door until Dad let her in, and do aerobics in our living room for twenty minutes.

  In addition to being obnoxious, this routine made it pretty much impossible for me to watch morning cartoons. That was my beef. But I knew it was basically worth it for the seven dollars an hour. And the company car. And also, I got a lot of free stuff from Carol.

  Carol had one child and an unhappy marriage to another medical professional. So when her son was still young, she bought him tons of stuff to compensate for all the other unhappiness in her life. And she was pretty unhappy, so her boy got a lot of great toys. Boomerangs, comic books, Erector Sets, chemistry sets. All the stuff any red-blooded American welfare kid really really wants and can never afford. But when I was ten, Carol’s son was heading off to college. So she told my dad to pack up all those old toys and records and stuff and give them all to Goodwill. She’d never need any of it again. And Dad, being Dad, went through it and brought all the really good stuff home to me.