A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  * * *

  Eddie and I never went back to Bobby and Barb’s house. As far as I knew, they never came to Ballard, and he never mentioned either of them again.

  33

  By the time I was eleven, it was pretty obvious that I was going to be really big. I broke five feet when I was nine, and put on another four inches over the course of the following year. Dad started to get visibly nervous about it. Not just because he thought I was a psychopath who mutilated animals—that belief came and went, depending on his mood—but because he used to hit me a lot. And by the time I was eleven, after he hit me sometimes I’d ask him what he thought was going to happen when I got to be bigger than he was.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he’d say. “I’ve trained you like a dog. Get a dog when it’s little, show it who’s boss, it doesn’t matter how big it gets—it will always be afraid of you. You will always be afraid of me.”

  He seemed to be hoping that if he just said it often enough, it would turn out to be true. Not that he confined himself to verbal reinforcement. As I got bigger, he hit me more often, and harder.

  On his thirty-third birthday I’d gone out with Eddie to a park that had sandstone cliffs overlooking the ocean. Dad had told me when I left home to be back before dark, stay off the cliffs, and stay out of the water. When I came home after dark, soaking wet, and with the Fire Department having called him after they rescued me and Eddie off the cliffs, Dad ambushed me: he was waiting next to the front door in the dark when I came in. I started to say, “Dad, I’m home!” and he punched me from behind, hard enough to knock me down. Once I was down, he started kicking me.

  He did a thing when he really lost his shit, where he muttered and whined under his breath while he was working me over.

  “Punk motherfucker! Fucking! Fuck! You! You! Piece of shit! Fucking!”

  I was too surprised to cry. I just curled up in a ball. He tried to uncurl me and punch me in the face, but I stayed locked up so he dropped me again and went back to kicking me in the back, ass, and thighs.

  As Dr. Epstein had noted when I fell off the high dive, I didn’t bruise easily. But Dad wasn’t wearing any shoes and he had long, hard toenails, so all the places where he kicked me were covered in little purple crescents the next morning.

  He was full of fear.

  But it wasn’t just fear of me.

  * * *

  Dad got sick in January of 1983, and it happened to him just like it happened to Billy. He got a weird lingering fever. Symptoms that didn’t add up to anything. He kept going to the hospital and the doctors kept sending him home. Whatever was wrong with him, it wasn’t bacterial, so they couldn’t treat it with antibiotics. It wasn’t cancer or flu. He just felt like shit all the time, and he never seemed to get better. But in the three months since Billy had gotten sick, more and more news stories had been coming out about GRID. Only now people were calling it AIDS, and we knew it wasn’t caused by poppers. It was some kind of disease. It was contagious. And it killed people. Mostly gay men.

  There was no test for it. It caused a low white cell count, but so did other kinds of illnesses. The only two symptoms that were considered more or less definitive were a kind of skin cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, and pneumocystis pneumonia. Which was kind of like telling someone that the only way they could know for sure if they were falling was if they hit the ground at a hundred miles an hour.

  Eventually Dad got better, just like Billy had. But we knew by then that getting better didn’t mean you weren’t still sick.

  34

  After the Lego incident, Dad worked for Carol less often. He didn’t exactly quit his job, but he worked fewer and fewer hours. Which meant we went back to being broke and Dad went back to coming up with interesting ways to save money. I almost didn’t mind. It was nice to have something to distract myself with.

  When blackberry season started, we went around to all the bushes that grew in the empty city rights-of-way between lots or next to roads and picked as many blackberries as we could carry. Then we did the same thing when apple season came in. When we got them home, Dad cooked them down and spooned them into boiled peanut butter jars. Then, while the fruit was still hot and the jars were still sterile, he’d pour molten paraffin wax into the jar, sealing the fruit in. We didn’t eat any of those right away—we just packed them and stowed them in cabinets, for the winter.

  I had to go back to drinking reconstituted powdered milk, pretty much for the first time since Hayes Street. And we ate a lot of generic food, food that came in white packaging with plain black lettering and simple descriptive names like “bread” or “macaroni and cheese.” My personal favorite was a kind of meat-based hash that came in a can that was just marked “food.” The generic stuff always cost a lot less than brand-name food, and sometimes it was available on sale at ridiculous prices. At one point Dad came home with four shopping bags full of generic chicken, turkey, and beef pot pies. Bartell Drugs had them on sale ten for a dollar. Dad stuffed the freezer full of them, then turned the refrigerator all the way up and stacked the rest in there. For weeks afterward, my reconstituted milk had chunks of ice in it and all I ate, three meals a day, was chicken, turkey, and beef pot pies.

  We went back to sharing bathwater to save money on our utilities. When the house next door got a new roof, the roofers threw enormous piles of old cedar shingles into a Dumpster they’d parked on the front lawn. Dad would go out at night and transfer the wooden shingles into our basement. He stopped paying the electric bill that month, and when the electric company turned off the power, we spent two months cooking and heating our water over a fire pit in the backyard, where we burned a few hundred pounds of cedar shingles. When we ran out of shingles, Dad paid the bill and got the electricity turned back on. He figured he saved us fifty or sixty dollars with that trick.

  I was surprised how little I missed TV, as long as I could stare at a fire for a few hours every night.

  35

  That year at school I wrote yet another check with my mouth that my ass couldn’t cash. I had a running beef with a kid in my grade named Chad Hicks. I couldn’t even remember how it started, and normally Chad wouldn’t have deigned to engage with a kid as far below him on the social totem pole as I was; he was smarter, better at sports, and had a lot more friends than I did. But he was also one of the only black kids in school, so after he’d established that he completely outclassed me in every conceivable way, I resorted to calling him a nigger.

  If I’d done it once, I might have gotten away with it. Standards for that kind of thing were a lot looser in 1983. But I could tell as soon as it came out of my mouth that I’d finally found something that really pushed Chad’s buttons, so I did it about twenty times over the next couple of months. I knew it was a bad idea. Leaving aside the fact that it was just an awful thing to say, I could plainly see that I was alienating everyone in the school. But I’d developed a weird itch that year, and sometimes it felt like the only way I could scratch it was by pissing off as many people as possible.

  The problem that eventually caught up with me was that, besides being better than me at pretty much everything, Chad was also, hands down, the toughest kid in school. It probably had something to do with being one of the only black kids in Ballard. He also had a lot of dangerous friends who all hated my guts. By Thanksgiving Chad had given me three of the worst beatings I’d ever gotten off another kid, and I was taking recess and lunch off campus to avoid picking up a fourth. Chad wouldn’t be denied his justice though, so he called in a middle school friend of his named Mikey to wait for me after school. Middle school ended an hour before elementary school, so there was no way for me to avoid Mikey. He was four or five inches taller than I was, broader, and a lot stronger. When he confronted me one day after school I ran until he cornered me.

  Getting my ass kicked at school was one thing—the fights were necessarily brief, because the teachers were always around to break them up. Off campus, Mikey wouldn’t have to stop beating on me unt
il he got bored. So when he caught me in a driveway, I pulled out my pocket knife and waited for him.

  “You gonna stab me, you little faggot?”

  “If you make me,” I said. I tried to sound cool and collected, but I was already crying from fear.

  “Pussy,” Mikey said. “Faggot chickenshit. Can’t fight fair. Need a knife to protect yourself?”

  “You’re two years older than I am!” I said. “This is bullshit!”

  “I can wait here all day,” he said, blocking me into the driveway.

  “Then I’ll cut you!”

  “All right,” he said, stepping back. “But you and me are gonna dance again. See if we don’t.”

  I waited until he was out of sight before I went back out to the sidewalk, made sure he was gone, and went home. I didn’t tell my dad about it. There was no point.

  * * *

  The next day I got called in to see Principal Adams. He asked me if I had a pocket knife.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Let me see it,” he said.

  I took it out and handed it to him. It was a four-dollar Barlow knife from Fred Meyer, with a two-inch blade that didn’t lock. I used it to open boxes, sharpen sticks into make-believe swords and spears, and to clean my fingernails. And, that one time, to threaten Mikey. Mr. Adams set it down on his desk and opened one of his drawers. He took out what looked like a paperback book.

  “These are the rules and regulations for the Seattle School District,” he said. Then he opened the book to a page he had marked and read a passage that said that carrying a weapon on school grounds was a criminal offense.

  “What I’m supposed to do now,” he said, “is call the police and let them deal with you.”

  I started crying. It happened almost before I knew it was coming, but my face got hot and my nose clogged and I started sobbing.

  My experience with cops was uniformly bad. They’d arrested my dad and let Carmella harass us with impunity. I’d had a few run-ins with them on my own. They’d never arrested me, but they never believed anything I said. When I was nine, one of them had threatened to beat my head in with his nightstick if I didn’t rat out my friends for throwing rocks at a girl—who, incidentally, had been throwing rocks back. It didn’t even matter that the only reason I’d gotten caught was that I stayed with her after she was hurt. Cops were pretty much the worst thing that could happen in any situation. Always.

  “You can’t call the cops!” I said. “Every kid in school has a pocket knife like that!”

  “Every kid in school didn’t threaten to stab someone with their pocket knife yesterday.”

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “I got a call this morning, from a parent.”

  “He’s an eighth grader who was going to beat me up after school. It wasn’t even on school grounds. Why are you doing this?”

  “I have the complaint, and I have this knife,” he said.

  I just sat there and cried. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.

  “I suppose,” he said, “we can forgo the call to the police. But you’ll get four swats, instead.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Four swats,” he repeated.

  I stopped crying. Now I was confused. The deal he was offering was almost too good to be true. Corporal punishment was still used in my school, and I’d been on the receiving end of plenty of it. I’d been swatted in fourth and fifth grade, and once so far in sixth grade. The procedure was always the same: go out in the hall, stand with my legs apart, hands on the wall, and let some old guy hit me in the ass with a wooden paddle. It hurt, sure: the paddle was two and a half feet long, with holes drilled in it, and a tape-covered handle on one end. But really, it was nothing compared to what I got at home.

  “Four swats?” I asked.

  “Four,” he said.

  “And no cops?”

  “No police,” he agreed.

  “Are you going to call my dad?”

  “No,” he said. “We’ll handle it all here and now.”

  I didn’t want to seem too eager, but I couldn’t help it.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He got up and closed his office door.

  “Are we … am I getting swats?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, returning to his desk.

  He opened his desk drawer and took out his paddle. I’d never seen anything quite like it. It wasn’t so much a paddle as a length of two-by-four with a big crack down the middle of it. It was held together at the handle with cloth tape and a length of twine. I couldn’t really believe he was going to hit me with it, but things were happening too fast for me to think them through. I got up and went to the wall of his office to assume the position.

  “Not like that,” he said, turning his chair out. “Come over here, pull down your pants, and lie across my lap.”

  I turned around and looked at him. I was over five feet tall, and I weighed 115 pounds.

  “I won’t … fit,” I said. There were more things going through my mind, but I didn’t say them.

  He sighed, opened his drawer, and put the paddle away.

  “We can still call the police,” he said.

  I knew then what was happening, but I couldn’t find an angle on it. He hadn’t really done anything yet, one way or the other, so I didn’t have anything I could hold over him. And even if I did, nobody would believe me. Nobody liked me. Nobody liked my dad—or at least nobody in this neighborhood liked him. I walked around Mr. Adams’s desk and stood there staring at him. He raised his eyebrows and took the paddle out of his desk.

  I slowly unbuckled my jeans and pulled them down. I was lucky, on this score at least. I’d only started wearing underwear a few weeks earlier. Dad didn’t buy them for me. He said they were a waste of money for little kids. But I’d gotten big enough to start stealing Dad’s, so I had one pair I wore all the time. They were dirty. I was embarrassed about that. And I was suddenly aware of how naked I was, standing there in my T-shirt, with my pants around my knees, and this man sitting in front of me holding a split piece of lumber.

  “Over my lap,” he said, positioning his chair.

  I started to lean down and put my hands on his legs to position myself.

  “No,” he said. “Hands at your sides. Just get on your knees and slide across.”

  I stood back up and looked at him. He was such a mild-looking man. White hair. White mustache. White skin. Pale blue eyes, like everyone else in Ballard. Three-piece gray suit. Light gray. Like him.

  I got down on my knees, laid my chest on his thighs, and pushed myself across until I was draped awkwardly over his lap. The fabric of his trousers was soft and thin. I could feel a bulge in his pants, up against my side, through my T-shirt. He picked up the paddle, put his free hand on my back, and hit me, once, hard.

  It was different from the paddles the other teachers used. Less sting, but more force. Less like being slapped; more like being kicked. I felt the jolt travel from my ass up into my stomach. He took a few deep breaths and hit me again. I clenched my teeth and hissed, and tried not to cry. I didn’t know why it mattered. I’d cried every other time I’d been paddled. But I didn’t want to cry this time. Then I did anyway, when he hit me the third time. When he hit me the fourth time, I barely noticed.

  He sat there for a few seconds, with his hand on my back. Then he put the paddle in his desk drawer and said, “Okay.”

  I slid off him, back onto my knees, and stood up, pulling my pants up as I stood.

  “We done?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  I went back around the desk and sat down. I was numb. Defeated. I kept trying to think of a way where what I’d just let him do to me was okay, and not coming up with anything. It made me want to die.

  “Why was he after you?” Adams asked. “The boy. The eighth grader.”

  “He’s a frie
nd of Chad’s. Chad hates me.”

  “Why does Chad hate you?”

  “Because I called him names,” I said.

  “Just called him names, hm?”

  I nodded. I figured that was all it was, at the end of the day.

  “All right. It sounds to me like we have an ongoing problem here. I want you to come back here, every Wednesday at lunch. For counseling.”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up. “See you next Wednesday.”

  “I’ll hang on to this,” he said, dropping my pocket knife into his drawer.

  “Fine,” I said.

  36

  Trusting my instincts was hard for me where adults were concerned.

  There had always been things about my home life that I wasn’t supposed to talk about with regular people. When I was very little, most of them had to do with drugs and sex. Those were things that our people handled differently than the straights, and if the straights found out too much about us, they’d send police. Child Protective Services would come. I’d be taken away from my home, like I’d been taken away when I was three.

  Then, around the time I started going to elementary school, Dad had added another item to the list of things I wasn’t supposed to talk about to the straights: I was never supposed to talk about getting hit at home. And if I did, I should always use the word “spankings.” It was also around this time—around the time I started going to Ida Patterson Elementary School, in Eugene—that Dad started telling me I was mistaken about how often I got hit. Or how hard I got hit. Or if I got hit at all. The conversations we had about whether he’d still be able to hit me when I was bigger, or what would happen then—those were conversations we had when he was threatening to hit me and the reality was present in the room with us. The rest of the time, he just denied he ever did it. If I brought it up, especially in front of other people—even our people—Dad would laugh and say, “I never hit you.”

  If I pressed him, he might admit that he spanked me. But he certainly never hit me. And anyway, I blew the whole thing out of proportion. I made it sound so much worse than it was. If I ever talked to someone about it, they’d get completely the wrong impression. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as I made it out to be. Or it never happened. The point was, I shouldn’t talk about it. Or I’d be taken away. I’d have to go live with someone else. Maybe my grandparents. Maybe a foster home. But I could never live with Dad again.