A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  * * *

  We moved in fits and starts as the weather got better. Dad and Bruce made a plan with Dad’s friend Nikki, a submissive lesbian witch we knew from Capitol Hill. A month or so before the end of my sixth grade year, Dad announced we’d be moving into Bruce’s one-bedroom condo to save money before the move to San Diego in October. I had mixed feelings about it, but there was nothing left for me in Ballard. I hardly ever saw Eddie, and after Gabe’s mom married a rich lawyer and moved to a better neighborhood, the old D&D group didn’t want to have much to do with me.

  We put our stuff in storage that spring, in the garage of an old lady at the end of our block in Ballard. She’d once threatened me with her dead husband’s .45 when she caught me stealing plums off the tree in her yard, but she didn’t seem to recognize me when Dad gave her a check for $150.

  Then we spent four months in Bruce’s little one-bedroom condo while Dad and Bruce went on a landscaping and home repair spree, fixing up the building so the condo association would allow Bruce to rent his unit while we were in San Diego. Dad took some other steps to make sure we’d have a fallback plan in Seattle if San Diego didn’t work out: he transferred our Section Eight housing to the apartment of his drug dealer, Scotty, on Capitol Hill. Scotty had a two-bedroom apartment in a converted house, and he agreed to risk losing the apartment to us, if we came back, in exchange for at least a year of reduced rent—plus our welfare checks and food stamps, which he’d also collect on our behalf. The arrangement carried a risk: at least three counts of fraud, and we’d never get on the rolls for any of those programs again if they caught us. But Dad didn’t think we’d ever come back to Seattle, so he figured the insurance was cheap at the price.

  Dad finally sold the Vega for scrap. He and Bruce split the cost of a ’66 Volvo sedan to take to California with us.

  I didn’t bother registering for school in Seattle that fall. We’d be gone soon enough. Anyway, I needed to be home so I could take our dog, Thunder, for walks twice a day. In Ballard he’d been almost wild, with Dad letting him out all night, every night. Now he was cooped up in a tiny third-floor walkup, and I had to put him on a leash and walk him around the neighborhood while he did his business on the parking strips. However much I hated living in Bruce’s apartment, Thunder hated it more. He exuded an almost existential angst. He also developed canine eczema on his lower back, which was pretty gross.

  That October we packed everything from the garage in Ballard, and all Bruce and Nikki’s stuff, into a U-Haul truck and a trailer, and began our five-day pilgrimage to sunny Southern California. Dad and I rode with Thunder in the truck. Bruce and Nikki took the Volvo.

  It would have been a four-day trip, but we had to stop in San Francisco so Nikki could visit her dominatrix, Mistress Lisa. Mistress Lisa insisted we all come up and say hi. Her apartment was bright and homey. She had wainscoting in her kitchen and a lot of potholders with Midwestern ranch-themed prints on them hanging on hooks near the stove. I looked at a coffee table book about circus freaks while Lisa’s slave brought us Red Zinger tea, and Dad and Lisa talked about gardening and interior design.

  * * *

  Nikki had a girlfriend in San Diego, in a neighborhood called Ocean Beach. When we got there, we spent a few hours moving Nikki and her girlfriend into their new apartment, but after that we were pretty much on our own with a truck full of stuff, no place to stay, and no income. It took Dad about two hours to rent a garage where we could store our things, on the ground floor of an apartment building next to the Ocean Beach Municipal Pier. We spent the rest of the day loading boxes and furniture into the garage before Dad and Bruce left me on the pier so they could return the truck to the nearest U-Haul place. Dad asked if I wanted Thunder to keep me company. I told him to take the dog with him in the car, and spent an hour walking around the beach by myself.

  The fishing pier was enormous. It stood on concrete pillars twenty-five feet high and reached a good quarter mile out into the ocean. There was a building at the end of the pier, with the word CAFÉ painted on the side in huge black letters. The beach itself was dotted with public restrooms that had showers and working toilets; in Seattle most of the public bathrooms were closed nine months out of the year, and the toilets hardly ever worked. The Southern California air was warm. The smells were totally alien to me, some combination of sage and ocean. The sunlight made everything look white and blasted. It was unlike anyplace I’d ever been. I was willing to believe that was a good thing.

  40

  The first order of business was to spend as little money as possible while Dad and Bruce looked for work. Dad’s solution was to get us all a room in a place called the Eagle Crest Hotel, between San Diego and Ocean Beach. The room cost ten dollars a night and had two twin beds and a small refrigerator. No TV, but that was fine—we just got one of ours from the garage storage unit. The bathroom was down the hall, and there were separate shower rooms. The men’s shower room was a large open space with white subway tiles covering the walls and ceiling and small hexagonal tiles on the floor. All the tiles in the room seemed to be held in place by a dense black mold that was packed tightly into the crevices, like grout. A dozen shower nozzles poked out of the wall at regular intervals. When I went down the hall to check it out, there were three guys in there, and a cockroach running across the floor toward one of the open floor drains. We stayed in the Eagle Crest for two weeks. I didn’t shower once.

  Dad found a gig for himself and Bruce with a house-cleaning service that did one-time projects, like cleaning out trashed apartments so they could be re-rented. It paid more than enough to meet our needs. After that, he had no trouble finding us a place to live near the beach. Unfortunately, the town house wouldn’t be ready until the end of the month, so Dad decided we should move into the storage garage to save money while we waited. We rearranged our things so there was a bed for Dad and Bruce in the back of the garage. I slept in the gap between two couches, where one was stacked on top of the other. We used the toilets and showers at the public bathrooms on the beach. We were careful not to be seen coming and going. Our rental agreement specifically forbade living in the garage.

  I got to spend another two weeks lounging on the beach while Dad and Bruce cleaned the homes of dead shut-ins and junkies. I had to take the dog for walks, which I found annoying because I’d started to think of him as a spoiled sibling. But really, I’d had worse times.

  41

  We moved into the town house a month after we arrived in San Diego. Dad and Bruce took the upstairs, with the living room, the kitchen, and one of the bathrooms. I took the downstairs room that had its own bathroom and its own entrance. Once we were settled in, Dad registered me for the seventh grade at a nearby middle school. It was mid-November.

  I didn’t like the school. The layout was confusing to me; it was a bunch of separate one-story buildings connected by covered walkways, with no apparent rhyme or reason to how the rooms were numbered. A lot of my classmates only spoke Spanish in social settings. I was hot all the time. I didn’t understand any of the classes because they were actual content classes instead of the general concept stuff I’d been learning in elementary school, and I was starting two months late. Computer science? Algebra? What? Oh, right, like those word problems I did in sixth grade where it says “n =?” Now, what’s this business with “x”?

  After two weeks, I told my dad I didn’t want to go back.

  “Fine with me,” he said. “Just don’t sit around the living room watching TV all day.”

  I promised I wouldn’t. I had cable in my room. I’d sit around down there watching TV all day.

  * * *

  At some point in early January, my middle school noticed that I’d been gone for kind of a long time and sent Dad a letter asking if I was coming back. When he called them to tell them he had no plans to reenroll me, they asked if I’d like to take part in their experimental learning program.

  “What’s that, exactly?” Dad asked.

  The wo
man on the phone said that it was basically a homeschooling program. Every week a teacher would come to my house, drop off new assignments, and pick up my completed ones. The teacher would have up to an hour to spend with me if I was having any problems with the subject matter. Otherwise, there was a number that I could call during regular school hours if I was really stuck on a math problem or something. And I never had to set foot in a middle school again.

  “What’s the catch?” Dad wanted to know.

  “He’s got to take an IQ test to qualify,” the woman said. “And some aptitude tests.”

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  * * *

  A week later I took another trip out to another remote administrative building and took another battery of tests. There were more questions this time, and more of them involved reading, but I did my best. As I finished each section, a tall bald guy in a suit and tie would collect my work. After about three hours, I joined Dad in a small waiting room while the school people finished their evaluation. The waiting room had windows that faced out into the hallway, and nice lighting. The furniture was a lot newer and nicer than what I was used to seeing in government offices. Everything had clean edges. Nobody had scratched their initials in anything. There were some Legos in a bucket near the door. I looked at them longingly, then started flipping through National Geographic magazines instead. I’d been avoiding Legos for two years, just to prove to myself that people like Carol couldn’t hold anything over me.

  After about forty-five minutes of us sitting in the waiting room, the tall skinny bald man in the suit came in. He sat down across from Dad, near me. I went and sat down next to Dad, so I’d be able to see the bald man’s face.

  “Thank you for waiting,” said the man.

  “Sure,” Dad said. “Did he qualify? For the program?”

  “Oh, I should say so. Has he had tests like this before?”

  “In Seattle,” Dad said.

  “Ah,” said the bald man. “Okay. So … based on these scores, what we’d like to do is, we’d certainly like him in the program this year. Of course. And, I don’t know—I’m not sure there’s much point in him starting eighth grade next year.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “Well,” said the man. “We’ve got two choices, really, with these tests. He could start high school next year, and just skip the eighth grade. Or, instead of high school, we could also do an early admission program.”

  “Early admission to what?” Dad asked.

  “College or junior college, if you want to go that way. I don’t know what you can afford. If it’s a city college we could cover part of the tuition. We’ve got a program for that. You’d have to go ahead and get a GED, but I don’t think that would be a meaningful impediment.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t even know algebra. How can I go to college?”

  “Well, you don’t know algebra,” said the bald man. “Sure. But the thing is, we think you could learn, say, first year algebra, in a couple of weeks, if you had the right instructional environment. So whatever you know or don’t know, teaching it to you isn’t really going to be the hard part. Getting you into a situation that funnels information into you as quickly as you can learn it. That’s going to be the real trick.”

  I just sat there blinking at him. Nothing he was saying made any sense.

  “We’d like to start in the home study program,” Dad said, after a minute. “And I think we can safely say we’d like to skip the rest of middle school. We’ll have to talk about the college thing.”

  “All right,” said the bald man. “Let me get some forms together for the home study program, and there’s nothing to fill out about skipping the next grade—we’ll just put that in his file.”

  “Thanks,” Dad said, standing up and shaking the bald man’s hand.

  “Yeah,” I said, from where I was sitting. “Uh. Thanks.”

  I followed Dad out to the car in a kind of daze. This was all totally ridiculous. Out of six and a half years of public school, I’d attended a grand total of about four. I’d never gotten better than a B average. Pretty much every kid my own age who’d ever offered an opinion on the matter had told me I was an idiot, and the teachers at Stevens had wanted to put me in special ed. I never really trusted the IQ test I’d taken in sixth grade. I figured I’d either gotten lucky or Mr. Adams had somehow falsified the score. And now here was this bald guy in a tie telling me I was such a mutant genius that I didn’t even need to be in school if I didn’t want to be. There was no question in my mind that I was worthless and stupid. Not being able to figure out why these bureaucrats kept lying to me about it was freaking me out.

  “Well, that’s pretty cool,” Dad said, as we got into the car.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

  42

  Dad and Bruce didn’t work for the cleaning service for very long. After about six weeks of cleaning up crime scenes and abandoned buildings, they got a call out to a mansion in El Cajon, a desert suburb of San Diego. The way Dad told the story, the job was just to get the house ready for the owner’s in-laws, who were going to be visiting from Colombia. Bruce started cleaning as soon as they got there, but Dad looked around a bit and couldn’t help noticing all the lightly armed men who just seemed to be standing around not doing anything, or the way there seemed to be a glass-topped coffee table in every room. The house itself was newly built, and the landscaping was only just beginning. Dad joined Bruce and finished the job for the day, but when it came time to get their time sheets signed, he asked to talk to the owner of the home.

  “He’s busy,” said the man who’d been overseeing Dad and Bruce’s work.

  “We can wait a little while,” Dad said.

  Eventually the homeowner came to see what Dad wanted. The man’s name was Karl.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, when he came into the room where Dad and Bruce were waiting.

  “Well,” Dad said. “I was actually hoping I could do something for you. I notice you’re doing a lot of landscaping. I was a landscape architect in Seattle, and my partner and I work at a very reasonable rate.”

  “Not to be rude,” Karl said, “but I can hire a landscape architect anywhere. What makes you special?”

  “I’m a landscape architect. I can do the work that you need done around the house. I can keep my mouth shut. I won’t see or hear anything while I’m working.”

  According to Dad, Karl didn’t need to think about it very long.

  “You have references?” he asked.

  “Felony possession with intent. In Eugene, Oregon. Nineteen seventy-five.”

  “I’ll check it out and get back to you.”

  A week later, Karl called Dad and hired him and Bruce on as landscape architects at twelve dollars an hour, each. Cash. Plus expenses. Plus, every once in a while, he’d give Dad a goodie bag of drugs. The only condition was, Dad wasn’t supposed to sell them. They were for personal use only; Dad the drug dealer was working for Karl the drug importer, and all he was doing was putting in garden irrigation systems, building decorative fountains, and taking care of the trees on the property. Karl didn’t shit where he slept.

  43

  Under the home study program it usually took me about four hours to do all my homework for the week. After that, I spent most of my days down on the beach, which started at the end of our block. I had a $20 Styrofoam boogie board Dad had picked up for me at Target, but I mostly used it as a flotation device. On a low tide I’d go a half mile or so out to sea, then just let the waves carry me back in; then I’d swim back out and let the waves carry me back in. I could spend five or six hours doing that, three or four days a week. I kept the board with me as a kind of security blanket, in case I caught a rip or something. And to keep me from having to go down into the cold water, four or five feet under the surface. The feeling of those cold-water currents touching my feet was enough to send me into a panic. I imagined the water down there w
as black. I knew better, but that was what it felt like.

  My dad got me a new bike for Christmas that year. I outgrew it almost as soon as he bought it for me. I was about five feet ten inches tall when I was twelve. But I rode it anyway. Mostly I rode it around the neighborhood, but every once in a while I’d cross over into Mission Beach to the north, or south toward Sunset Cliffs and Point Loma.

  When I got home I’d shower in my room. Go upstairs and get some food, then take it to my room to eat it. I ate on my bed while I watched TV. My room always smelled like rotting orange peels. I hated the smell, but my best efforts at cleaning were thoroughly inadequate.

  I watched shows about families. Kids with brothers and sisters and friends. Sometimes, for reasons I didn’t understand, I’d start crying while I was watching TV. It used to happen a lot during a Coke commercial that showed around Christmas: snow, people holding hands, lighting candles, and singing about how they’d like to buy the world a Coke. When I watched it, a strange sort of panic would grab me. A crushing fear that everyone else was off somewhere, together, and I was alone in my basement room. That I’d always be alone in my basement room.

  If it wasn’t too late, on nights like that I’d get dressed and go down to the beach. There were big concrete fire rings down there. College kids would burn scrap lumber in them, then stand around them and drink on into the night. Sometimes they surfed by moonlight. I’d stand near the fires, looking at people’s faces, just soaking up the presence of other human beings. Listening to their conversations and their jokes. It was never enough, but it was better than nothing.

  * * *

  Once every other month or so a big windstorm would blow in from the ocean. I’d put on my swimming goggles, wrap a scarf around my face, and go outside to watch. Because we lived so close to the beach, the windstorms sent tons of sand blowing down our street. Sometimes whole cars would be buried.