A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  I had fun with all the new swag, but the one toy in the haul that I really connected with, on a spiritual level, was the Lego set. Like most kids, I’d always loved Legos. But they were surprisingly expensive so I never had any of my own. And I had never in my life, not even once, seen a Lego set at Goodwill or Salvation Army or any of those places. So I played with Legos at friends’ houses, and dreamed my impossible dreams. But it worked out that Carol’s son had a huge box of these things; what would have been two or three hundred dollars’ worth of Legos, if I’d bought them new. And she told my dad to take them all to Goodwill.

  I was ecstatic. I could build anything I wanted. I could spend days messing around on one project. The sky was the limit. And at an age when most toys entertained me for a few weeks at the outside, I played with those Legos constantly for a good six months. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  I should have known better.

  Carol’s job as a child psychologist meant that, every so often, she had to do something public for kids. Fund-raising. Donating time to shelters. That kind of thing. And for Christmas of 1982, she helped sponsor a toy drive for underprivileged children. But Carol was kind of scatterbrained. She didn’t remember until the very last minute that she had told Dad to donate all her son’s old toys to Goodwill. So, on the day of the toy drive, she got out of bed and went downstairs to get some used toys to give away—and panicked when she found them all gone. Until she remembered that the last time she was over at our house doing aerobics, I had been playing with Legos while I was waiting to get my TV back so I could watch cartoons.

  When I woke up that morning I found Carol, in a Santa suit, digging through my closet. She was taking the Legos by the handful and dumping them into a red bag with white fur trim. It took me a minute to absorb what I was seeing; my mind was cycling through the millions of scenarios that would have been more plausible than what actually seemed to be happening. I glanced over and noticed my dad standing in my bedroom doorway. He looked weird. Angry and humiliated, but resigned. I hadn’t seen that exact mix of emotions on his face since the night he got busted, back in Eugene. That was when I realized this wasn’t a joke.

  “All right,” Carol said, standing up and turning around. “That’s all of them?”

  She was talking to me.

  “All the Legos?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Uh. They were … all in that box.” I craned my neck to look behind her, and saw the box empty on the floor in the closet. “Yeah. That was all of them.”

  “Great,” she said. “Sorry to wake you.”

  She paused for a second, then actually slung the bag over her shoulder, Grinch-style, before leaving my room. My Legos—the Legos—made a brittle sloshing sound in the bag as she left. Dad followed her to the front door and let her out, then came back and stood in my doorway again. I frowned at him.

  “Is she bringing those back?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. I tried to talk her out of it.”

  He explained her charity toy drive to me. The longer he talked, the less likely the story sounded. If it weren’t for the expression on his face, I never would have believed him.

  “Why didn’t she just buy some toys?” I asked. “She’s got more money than God. Surely she could have just stopped at Fred Meyer and bought something new.”

  “They had to be used,” he said. “It’s part of the thing. Like, ‘Don’t throw those used toys away, donate them!’”

  “To kids!” I added. “Who are on welfare! Like the one she just took these Legos from! Isn’t she a child psychiatrist?”

  “Psychologist,” Dad said.

  “What’s the—? Never mind. She’s not bringing them back?”

  “No.”

  “And she’s not replacing them,” I said.

  “No. When she showed up here this morning she was asking for the Legos she ‘loaned’ us. Jason, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure she really understands … any of it.”

  “Okay,” I said, rolling over and pulling my covers up around my neck. “I’m going back to sleep now.”

  “Jason…”

  “I need to sleep!” I snapped.

  He sighed and closed my door behind him as he left.

  I didn’t sleep. I just lay there for a couple of hours, hating Carol with an intensity that made me sweat, and telling myself a bunch of furious lies about how, once I grew up, I’d never have to bend over for anyone like her ever again.

  32

  One day when I was ten, my headbanger friend Eddie asked me if I wanted to come hang out with him and his friend Bobby. The question surprised me. I’d never met Bobby, never heard Eddie mention him, and Eddie didn’t usually introduce me to his other friends, so I wasn’t sure why he suddenly wanted me to meet this Bobby kid.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “A friend of mine from when I lived in Rainier,” he said.

  “He still live there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said.

  “He white?” I asked. Rainier Valley was one of the blackest of Seattle’s few black neighborhoods.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “Ask your dad if you can sleep over.”

  “At Bobby’s house?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said.

  “You’re not dragging me all the way down to Rainier just so I can watch you score, are you?” I asked. Eddie often wanted me along on his buys in Ballard. I wasn’t sure why. I was visibly harmless. Maybe he just liked to show people he had a friend.

  “Naw,” Eddie said. “Nothing like that, dude. I like his sister. I want you to come along to keep Bobby busy.”

  I sighed dramatically.

  “Fine,” I said.

  My dad might normally have wanted more background on a kid I was going to spend the night with, but he hadn’t been feeling well lately so he didn’t make a thing out of it. I went up to Eddie’s house after school that day and we caught three buses to get down to Bobby’s place, on the other end of town. When we got on the 48, going deep into Rainier Valley, I took my wallet out of my back pocket and stashed it up my sleeve so nobody would steal it. Not that there was anything in it. Slowly the bus filled with black people, getting off school or work. One of them was a kid about my age, who sat down near where Eddie and I were standing. He looked me over curiously.

  “Hey,” he said, after a minute. “You live around here?”

  “Uh,” I said. “No. Why?”

  “The way you’re carrying your wallet in your sleeve there, that’s about as subtle as a heart attack, man. The hell’s the matter with you?”

  Eddie had been staring out the window, but he turned around to look at me now and he was scowling.

  “Quit being such a goon, dude,” he said.

  I was too embarrassed to put my wallet back in my pocket while the other kid was watching, so I just stood there wishing I had a hole to crawl into until Eddie told me we were there.

  Bobby’s house was a blue-gray Craftsman with a chain-link fence around the yard. Tall grass out front, single-pane picture windows, and asbestos shingle siding about ten years past its warranty date. Dirty venetian blinds covered all the windows from the inside. We walked up a weed-choked path to a peeling front door and Eddie knocked once, hard.

  The kid who answered the door was about our age, but he had the same look as Eddie: desiccated, hardened, underfed. His child’s face was bony and flat, and his teeth were crooked and yellow. He had a cut on the underside of his jaw, like a skin infection. Pale complexion, hazel eyes, light brown hair under an unmarked blue baseball cap. Blue sweatshirt a few sizes too small. Jeans and sneakers.

  “Eddie,” he said, opening the door wide and letting us in.

  “This is Jason,” Eddie said.

  “S’up,” he said, nodding at me.

  “Barb around?” Eddie asked.

  “Naw,” Bobby said. “She gets off work in a while. Wanna play some video games while we wait?”

  “
Sure,” Eddie said.

  The living room was typical white trash: dirty shag carpet, nothing on the walls, polyester couch, vinyl easy chair. Boxes stacked in one corner. The living room was separated from the dining room by an archway, and the dining room was dark and full of junk—an old Formica-topped table and four ugly metal-frame chairs with vinyl covers that were textured to look like cloth. The rest of the room was buried under boxes and milk crates full of machine parts, old fans, a broken vacuum cleaner, records with moldy covers, plastic flowers, and a synthetic Christmas tree covered in spray-on snow and tinsel.

  In spite of all the other squalor, the TV in the living room was top-of-the-line: twenty-five inches, color, with a remote and an Intellivision game console. A few hundred dollars in game cartridges were scattered around on the floor.

  Eddie and Bobby sat down and started to play. I took a seat on a chair in the corner, next to the boxes, and settled in. When Eddie asked me if I wanted next game, I just shook my head. Something about the place made me think it would be a good idea to keep my back against a wall and my hands empty.

  After we’d sat there for a while, a man who looked like a much older, fatter version of Bobby, with big cheap plastic-framed glasses, came in and sat down in the easy chair. I expected him to tell Eddie and Bobby to turn off the game, but he watched them play without saying anything, and without looking at me. We all sat there quietly for an hour or so until the front door opened and a girl came in. She was young. Too young to have a job. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair, the same pale skin as her brother, but fleshier features: round cheeks, fuller lips, and a wide mouth. She was wearing old bellbottoms and a turtleneck sweater under a long coat with fake fur trim. Her shoes were a kind of sandals made of flesh-colored vinyl. They were supposed to be worn on bare feet, but she was wearing them with thick hiking socks.

  She didn’t say anything when she first came in. Just looked at her dad, then at Bobby and Eddie. Eddie had been watching Bobby play, so he got up and went over to give the girl a hug.

  “All right,” Bobby’s dad said. He got up and dug around in his front pocket for a minute before he came up with a roll of cash. He counted out $50 and gave it to the girl, who I assumed was Barb. “Don’t come back until tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay,” said the girl. “Come on, Bobby.”

  “I’m almost done,” Bobby said, still focused on his game.

  “Time to go,” his dad said.

  “Just a sec,” Bobby said.

  His dad walked over and hit him casually in the head. He didn’t hurry, the dad, and he didn’t seem to make a big deal out of it, but the force of the blow was enough to knock Bobby over sideways. I winced sympathetically. It was hardly the first time I’d seen another kid get hit. Danny, the kid who lived across the street from me, had recently picked up a stepfather named Garry who really liked to go to town on him. Just a few months earlier I’d watched from my front yard while Garry stood on the balcony of their apartment and kicked Danny into the railing over and over again, until part of it had broken off and fallen onto the sidewalk. But even with Garry, Danny usually got some warning. Bobby’s dad just sucker punched him.

  Nobody said anything while Bobby shook it off and got to his feet. He didn’t look at any of us, or at his dad. Just walked over to the couch, picked up a ski jacket, then shuffled over to us and said, “Let’s go.” We filed out of the house behind him.

  “What are we doing now?” I asked Eddie, as we walked back to the sidewalk.

  “Dunno,” he said. He looked at Barb. “What do you want to do?”

  “Let’s just go downtown,” she said.

  I followed them to a bus stop for a route I didn’t know. When it came, the bus was pretty much empty. Bobby and I sat together on one seat, while Eddie and Barb sat behind us. Eddie was a good two inches shorter than Barb, but he put his arm over her shoulder and whispered in her ear. She smiled and leaned into him.

  “How old’re you?” I asked Bobby.

  “Eleven,” he said, without looking at me.

  “What about her?” I asked, nodding toward his sister.

  “Twelve,” he said.

  “What’s her job that she was coming home from?” I asked. I’d started looking for a regular job lately. I made some money mowing lawns from time to time, and sometimes our friends had one-time gigs for me, like selling glow sticks during a concert, but Dad had started giving me a hard time recently about getting a regular job and carrying my weight in the house. I told him it was illegal to hire kids under the age of sixteen in Washington State, but he wasn’t having it, so I followed any tip that might lead me to a place that would hire underage kids.

  “She works at McDonald’s,” Bobby said.

  “No shit? Which one? They hire kids?”

  But Bobby was already shaking his head.

  “She has a fake birth certificate and stuff, says she’s sixteen,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  We rode the rest of the way to downtown in silence, except for Eddie and Barb’s whispering. We got off on 3rd and Pine and walked up to a video arcade on 2nd that had a pretty good selection of games. Barb gave us five dollars each to get tokens with, and we loaded up and went our separate ways, each of us looking for our favorite games and getting an idea of where the arcade had its difficulty levels set.

  I played games I knew, like Galaga, and took long breaks between sets, going over to watch Eddie play Defender. We were in the arcade for a couple of hours before we ran out of tokens, and we made a strategic decision to save the other $30 for whatever we might want to do later in the night. When we left the arcade it was dark outside. The temperature hadn’t been above freezing for a week, and we were all dressed for it except Eddie, who never seemed to get cold.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “Come on,” Eddie said, leading us south, deeper into downtown.

  We walked down streets that had been abandoned because of the cold. Eddie handed me two dollars and said, “Buy me some Fritos.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  He gestured and I saw we’d stopped in front of a convenience store.

  “Buy me some Fritos,” he said again.

  “Okay,” I said with a shrug.

  We all went into the store and wandered down the aisles. I found a bag of Fritos and brought it up to the cash register. Bobby and Barb came up a minute later with Hostess pies, and Eddie bought a soda. When we got out on the sidewalk I tried to hand Eddie his chips and he just waved them off.

  “Keep ’em,” he said. Then he held open his jacket and showed Barb that he had a can of beer in each of the inside pockets of his denim jacket.

  I was surprised. I’d never seen Eddie drink beer before. He’d told me he didn’t like the taste. Pot was enough for him.

  After the beer raid, we went to McDonald’s for dinner, and Eddie emptied a super-size soda down the sink in the bathroom, then filled the cup with his beers. He and Barb spent an hour or so trading the cup back and forth while Bobby and I talked about horror movies. It was past midnight by then, so we decided to head up to Seattle Center, just because it felt safer. There were fewer homeless people and dealers around on that end of downtown.

  An older guy in a fleece-lined denim jacket was going the opposite direction on the sidewalk, but stopped when he got close to us. He was wearing a baseball cap, nylon pants, and too much bulky gold-plated jewelry. His short hair was hidden by a Mariners baseball cap.

  “You kids need a place to stay?” he asked. “Get in out of this cold?”

  “Fuck off,” Eddie growled.

  “Hey!” barked the guy. “Watch it, you little punk.”

  We just kept on walking and didn’t make eye contact. The older guy didn’t seem inclined to make a thing out of it, and we continued on our way. The walk took the better part of an hour.

  Seattle Center was the leftover grounds from the 1962 World’s Fair, where the Space Needle and the Pacific Science Center were located.
There was also something called the Fun Forest, which was a kind of low-rent amusement park full of most of the same rides I would have expected to find in a traveling carnival. Except that, in the Fun Forest, the portable carnival rides hadn’t ported anywhere for twenty years.

  Of course none of that stuff was open when we got there, so we spent another hour or so walking around the abandoned grounds, looking at closed-up rides and the closed-up Space Needle and the closed-up Science Center. Sometime around three in the morning we noticed that one of the big fountains near the Arena, where the Seattle Supersonics basketball team played, had frozen more or less solid. And that was really all we needed for the rest of the night. Eddie and Barb were pretty well lit by that point, so we spent the next four hours sliding around on the frozen pond in our shoes. Barb and Eddie spent some time making out and dry humping on one of the bronze statues in the middle of the fountain. Bobby and I found a thin spot in the ice and broke some chunks out and started playing a hybrid game of hockey and soccer with them. It was a good time.

  When we saw the sun coming up in the east, we decided to head over to the Denny’s on Mercer, near the old Ford factory, and have some breakfast. We were glad we’d saved some of the money Bobby and Barb’s dad had given us, because we were starved by then. We took our time, working our way through pancakes, sandwiches, and milk shakes before we wrapped it up and paid our bill with seven dollars to spare.

  Around nine that morning, we all took the bus to Bobby and Barb’s house and dropped them off. Eddie and Barb kissed clumsily but passionately on the doorstep. Then Eddie and I caught a couple of buses home and I watched TV until about seven that night, when I went to bed and slept for twelve hours.