A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  If it happened at night, I’d bring my flashlight and watch the sand stream down the street, like giant white snakes. If it happened during the day, I’d go to the beach and sit down with my back to the wind. Then I’d close my eyes and wait for the sand to bury me.

  * * *

  Dad and I fought about my room. A lot. He said it was attracting bugs. I thought he was probably right, but I didn’t care. Or I didn’t seem to be able to care. Once he told me to clean it by the time he got home from work or else. I went upstairs to watch TV in the living room and fell asleep on the couch. When he got home, he came back into the house through the basement entrance, took a look in my room, and came upstairs. He didn’t even bother to wake me up, just started hitting me while I was on the couch asleep.

  But it was getting harder. Hitting me. We were the same height now, and I was heavier. He was still a lot stronger, but the time was coming when he wouldn’t be. Once we got in a fight about cleaning while I was in my room. He was yelling at me and I was arguing with him and he snapped and threw a punch at my head. A big looping haymaker. I blocked it with my elbow. We were both pretty surprised. Then he swung with his other hand, and I blocked that one, too. He screamed in frustration, shoved me onto the floor, and ran out of the room.

  * * *

  I took karate for a little while. I wasn’t very good at it, and I didn’t get along with the other kids in the class. Or the teacher. Or his kids. Or any of the grownups at the school. So I quit after a couple of months.

  I tried writing to my friends in Seattle. Mostly Gabe. I’d send him enormous sheaves of paper with ideas for D&D games, or new gaming systems based on movies I’d seen on late-night cable. Sometimes I’d call him long distance, just to have someone to talk to.

  “My mom says we keep owing postage on the stuff you send,” he said. “She says to put more stamps on the envelopes.”

  I tried to write Calliope, too, but I gave up pretty quickly. I didn’t really have anything to say.

  Dad and Bruce made a lot of friends. Sometimes, if they were having a party upstairs, I’d go up and hang out. Everyone was always nice about it, but then I’d say something inappropriate or weird, and Dad would kick me under the table or something to try to get me to shut up.

  “Why are you kicking me under the table?” I’d ask.

  Then everyone would laugh awkwardly.

  My life was breaking off from my dad’s in a way that was confusing to me. More and more, he and Bruce had their own lives upstairs. He lavished affection on the dog. He bought a bunch of birds—parrots and finches, budgies and cockatiels—and started referring to them as his babies. Meanwhile, he and Bruce started calling me “Prophet of Doom,” supposedly because I was always such a massive buzz-kill. Whatever we were doing, I could be counted on to point out what could go wrong or why something wouldn’t work. They had a valid point, but I was twelve. Mostly it all just made me feel like I was in the process of getting divorced from the only family I’d ever known.

  I started having trouble sleeping. I could go a few days with hardly any sleep at all. When I did sleep, it was usually from about three in the morning until noon. Then later and later, until I’d flip the clock and get back on a normal schedule for a few days.

  I gained a bunch of weight. At five foot ten I was around 160 pounds, but it was soft weight, all baby fat. Whenever I did see Dad, he made a point of telling me how heavy I was getting. I tried sticking my finger down my throat, to make myself throw up after I ate. I’d heard about that on TV. Unfortunately I seemed to have virtually no gag reflex. I tried using some ipecac syrup that I got for free from the fire station a few blocks away, but the vomiting was so painful and it gave me such bad gas I never tried it again.

  I had a horrible racking cough that lasted for three months. Dad said it was psychosomatic. Before it went away, my throat was so raw that I was spitting up blood. But then it did just mysteriously disappear, so maybe he was right.

  Two or three times a month Dad would take me out to his boss’s house in El Cajon, and I’d get paid $2.50 an hour to dig ditches or clear rocks out of the horses’ paddocks. I used the money to order Domino’s pizzas. There were no good toy stores in Ocean Beach, I didn’t have anyone to play with, and I suspected I was getting too old for toys anyway.

  * * *

  Dad and Bruce liked to go on trips. Sometimes we’d go down to Tijuana, just the other side of the Mexican border, for shopping expeditions. I’d buy cheap souvenir bullwhips and throwing stars for a couple of dollars apiece. Dad would buy Mexican horse blankets, or semiprecious stones: opals, amethysts, and quartz crystals with veins of gold in them. Other times we’d go out to the desert, or we’d take a day trip to Torrey Pines Park.

  We went out to Palm Springs a dozen or so times. Somewhere in the desert between San Diego and Palm Springs there was a truck stop that sold soft-serve ice cream. The place was always full of crusty old truck drivers, and the parking lot was always full of semis. The walls inside were covered with dried rattlesnake skins, from snakes that had been found dead on the highway. I loved it in there. And no matter where we were in the desert—even if we weren’t actually going to Palm Springs—I could always find the truck stop. Dad was fascinated.

  “Is it the lay of the land, or the direction of the sun or what?” he’d ask.

  “I don’t know,” I’d say. “I can just … feel it. The ice cream calls out to me.”

  I liked the Palm Springs trips for other reasons besides soft-serve. Dad and Bruce and I would get a room in a cheap hotel we liked and take day trips up into the mountains around the town. Looking at the desert floor from so high up, I could see the shadows of clouds moving across it, and I saw mountain springs, and streambeds shining with quartz crystals, agates, and fool’s gold. Palm trees hanging with dates. I saw caves, and bats, and coyotes. And mile after mile of pristine desert mountain streams, roaring through deep crevices in the exposed bedrock of the desert floor and tumbling hundreds of feet down the sides of mountains.

  Then one night, after a long hike, I was sitting in the hot tub at our cheap hotel with my dad and Bruce and a few other guests, and this old lady kept staring at me and muttering under her breath. Eventually Dad and Bruce noticed her doing it, and Dad finally asked her what her problem was.

  “It’s just not right,” said the old lady, glaring at me.

  “What’s not right?” Dad asked.

  “Letting a girl that age run around without her shirt on.”

  I was twelve. Almost six feet tall. Overweight. I had shaggy, shoulder-length hair. And my voice hadn’t changed yet.

  Dad stared at the old lady, then sighed and closed his eyes. Did a thing where he massaged the bridge of his nose like it hurt. Scrunched up his face. Then opened his eyes and looked up at the woman.

  “That’s a boy,” he said. “That’s my son.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “Oh! I—”

  “All right,” I said, getting out of the hot tub. “That’s great. Thanks.”

  “Nice work, you nosy cunt,” I heard Dad say as I walked back to our room.

  When we got back to San Diego, I did my usual thing of going to the beach. Only now I wore both my shorts and a T-shirt to swim in. I never took my shirt off in front of anyone again, if I could help it.

  * * *

  Late that spring, as I was nearing the end of my school year—such as it was—and thinking about going to Point Loma High School, Dad came down and knocked on my door.

  “Yeah?” I said. I was sprawled in bed watching TV. As usual.

  “Hey, Jason,” Dad said, poking his head into my room. “I just got off the phone with Charles.”

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Billy died.”

  I looked at Dad. He looked like he was worrying more about me than thinking about what this might mean for him. I couldn’t decide if it would be better to get upset or seem like I was okay.

  “That’s too bad,” I said. “Did it �
� how did it happen?”

  “He just died. Pneumonia.”

  “The AIDS kind?” I didn’t seem to be able to stop myself from asking.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “That kind.”

  I looked at the wall above my TV and thought about Billy, tied to a stump, naked, and shot full of arrows.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Dad lingered at the door for a second, then closed it and went back upstairs.

  44

  Near the end of our first summer in San Diego, Dad’s boss got busted for tax evasion. Dad called a kind of family meeting to tell me about it.

  “That still works?” I asked incredulously. Having been educated mostly by television, I couldn’t find Kansas on a map, but I knew the Untouchables had put Al Capone away for tax evasion in 1931. I would have expected any competent criminal to know how to avoid such a thing.

  “Well,” Dad said. “It was sort of the lesser of two evils. He’s been having some trouble with his in-laws. They’ve never really trusted him because he married into the family business, and I guess there’s been some talk of maybe, you know, sending someone up here to blow his brains out over some perceived accounting irregularities. Or something. He was kind of vague on the details. So he may have engineered this tax thing so he could take a little break in Club Fed. Give everyone a chance to calm down.”

  “How long a little break?” I asked.

  “Twelve to eighteen months. Give or take.”

  “Okay. So—” I realized why he was telling me this. “You don’t have a job anymore.”

  “Right,” Dad said.

  “So what’s that mean?”

  “Well,” Dad said. “We said we’d give this a year. We have our contingency plan back in Seattle, and that runs out in October. I can probably set something up again here. Something like what we had with Karl, or something better. But if we’re going to leave, now’s—”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Well, I was—”

  “What did Bruce say?” I asked.

  “He wants to go back, too.”

  I wasn’t surprised to hear that. Bruce hadn’t been having an easy time of it in San Diego either. He wasn’t as bored and lonely as I was, but he seemed to have a hard time matching the Southern California temperament. Which he and I agreed was uniformly rude and standoffish. It was pretty much the only thing we agreed on, besides our mutual love of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the campy hostess of a late-night TV show.

  Bruce had mostly been keeping his unhappiness under wraps for Dad’s sake, but he’d taken to pouring half a cup of pharmacy-grade grain alcohol into his coffee every morning to take the edge off. That was his traditional purchase on our Mexican shopping trips: I’d buy novelty weapons, Dad would buy rocks and textiles, and Bruce would buy Everclear.

  “So,” I said. “Are we doing it? Are we going home?”

  Dad didn’t want to say it, but he did.

  “Yeah. I guess we are.”

  45

  My return to Washington State wasn’t especially triumphant. We had to spend a month living with Bruce’s sister in Marysville while Scotty, the drug dealer who’d promised us his apartment if we returned, looked for a new place to live. I felt kind of bad about Scotty. He’d been in the same place on Capitol Hill since before the Indians came across the land bridge from Siberia, but a deal was a deal and Scotty had gotten a year of Section Eight housing, welfare checks, and food stamps for his trouble.

  We were supposed to stay in Marysville until Scotty moved out, but after that first month, Dad said he couldn’t handle Bruce’s family anymore. He figured Scotty would be more motivated to find a place if we were in the apartment with him. He wasn’t wrong.

  * * *

  Scotty’s apartment, the one we were taking over, was in a converted house on the west slope of Capitol Hill. At some point in the distant past, it had been an enormous single-family home with a good-size backyard. Then it had been divided up into a bunch of sub-units. Each of the two main floors was converted into a spacious two-bedroom apartment. The attic and basement were turned into somewhat less spacious apartments. The backyard was paved over, for parking.

  Whoever had converted the house into apartments had done kind of a half-assed job of it. There was one water heater for the entire building, and one fuse box. The fuse box was in the basement apartment, and each unit ran on one circuit. So if we turned on a space heater and a toaster at the same time, the whole apartment would go dark. Then someone would have to go downstairs and hope the neighbor was home to flip the breaker.

  Otherwise, it was a nice apartment. There were two small bedrooms on the west side, with great views of the Space Needle and the mountains. The bathroom was next to the bedrooms, and there was a large kitchen with room for a table, and a dining room and living room on the east side of the house. The main entrance was a door on the west side that could be reached by going up an exterior staircase that was built onto the back of the building. There was also an old staircase left over from the original design of the house that went from the living room of our place, down to a lobby area on the first floor, and out to the front porch of the house. There was an awkward trapezoidal landing on our floor, outside the living room. The front yard was too small to use for anything, and it was mostly covered with some ugly, thorny shrubbery, just in case someone got any ideas about having any fun out there.

  The refrigerator in our unit was self-defrosting, the cooking range was gas, and there was plenty of counter space.

  When we moved in, Scotty had to retreat to one of the bedrooms on the west side of the house while he kept trying to find somewhere else to go. Dad and Bruce turned the living room into their bedroom, and the dining room was turned into a living room. Dad put all his birds on the landing, in the stairway outside their shared bedroom. I took the other back bedroom, across the hall from Scotty.

  * * *

  Scotty had always bothered me. When I was younger, it was because he didn’t like kids and he was pretty open about that. So I disliked him right back. As I got older, it got more complicated. Most of the gay men I’d met through my dad were just dudes who happened to have sex with other dudes. Plenty of them were palpably gay, but Scotty was the only full-on silk kimonos and eyeliner homo I knew personally. He lisped. He flounced. He actually had limp wrists, which I’d always thought was just some kind of weird story straight people made up to frighten their children. He shot smack, and when he was nodding he got even looser. I was thirteen years old, and I was trying to reconcile my dad’s ever-shifting opinions on masculinity against what I was seeing on TV. Scotty just stressed me out.

  One day Scotty found me in the bathroom, messing around with his hair products. He had various gels and mousses on the counter near the sink. I didn’t know why he needed any of it. He had advanced male pattern baldness, and what hair he did have never seemed to be styled in any particular way. But my hair was always sticking out in ways that bugged me. I was trying to use some of Scotty’s mysterious compounds to pin it down when I noticed him standing in the doorway, watching me and smoking a cigarette.

  “Sorry,” I said, stepping away from the counter. “I was just … I don’t know what I was doing.”

  “It’s fine,” Scotty said, putting his cigarette in an ashtray next to the door. There were always ashtrays in the bathrooms of places where our people lived. He walked over and stood next to me, looking at me in the mirror. He was wearing a bright red embroidered kimono over a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of pajama pants. He was junkie-skinny, with big features and long fingers, like a cartoon. Small eyes. His light brown hair seemed to jump away from his head, like he’d been electrocuted.

  “What are you trying to accomplish?” he asked.

  “Just trying to get it to lie down,” I said.

  “Mm,” he said. “I’m not sure that’s the best look for you.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He ran his fingers through my
hair, pushing it into various shapes as he spoke.

  “You have extremely thick hair,” he said. “You can brush it down like that, but you’re always going to be fighting with it. Why not brush it back, away from your face? That way it frames your features, and it’s not always in your eyes.”

  “I don’t like where my hairline is,” I said. “It makes my forehead look too big.”

  He snorted. His forehead had probably been prominent even before he’d gone bald. My cheeks got hot, but I tried to keep my face blank.

  “It’s just not—” I stopped and tried to figure out what I was saying. “Most kids just have a part, then they let their hair fall down straight. Like the Hardy Boys.”

  It was 1985, but I still considered Sean Cassidy the height of fashion cool.

  “So you want to look like everyone else?” Scotty asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “It’s easier.”

  He shrugged. “Fuck those people, Jason. You can drive yourself crazy, trying to get them to accept you. It’s a waste of your precious life, believe me.”

  He picked up his cigarette and started to leave the bathroom.

  “Scotty?” I said. “Your friends—why don’t they ever come over? Nobody’s come over since we’ve been here.”

  I didn’t know where the question came from, but I’d always had the impression, before we moved to San Diego, that Scotty had tons of friends—that his social calendar was always full. That he knew everyone, and that everyone knew him. But in the time since we’d been back I hadn’t seen him leave the house, let alone have anyone over.

  He smiled. “I’m a drug dealer, dear. We don’t have friends, we have customers. And all my customers are dying.”

  Then he went back into his room, where I heard him turn the radio on to a jazz station. I’d surmised it was what he liked to listen to when he was shooting up.

  I stood in front of the mirror for a while longer, pushing my hair down and brushing it straight with my fingers until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I needed it cut, I decided. That was all. I just needed to cut it all off.