* * *
I got up for school the next day. I went to class. I came home after school. Dad wasn’t home. Bruce wasn’t home. I wanted to talk to someone, but there was nobody to talk to, so I went into my room and watched TV. At some point I turned off the TV and tried to do my homework, but I didn’t seem to be able to give a shit. I turned the TV back on and thought about the Cambodian girl I’d met in Ballard—the one whose family had been trampled by elephants, while I and everyone else I knew went about the daily business of our normal lives, thousands of miles away. But not me. Not anymore. As of yesterday, I was living in a war zone.
54
Ryan and his mom still lived on the same block in Ballard that they’d lived on when I left for San Diego, though they were in a different apartment now. They’d moved out of their old apartment when their downstairs neighbor, a woman whose kids Ryan used to babysit for, was smothered with a pillow while her two toddlers were asleep in the next room. They knew the neighbor’s death didn’t imply anything about the safety of the apartments, or the neighborhood; the murder was an outlier. But they moved anyway, to another apartment across the street and half a block to the east.
I didn’t like Ryan’s new place much. It was a 1960s duplex, with a basement unit and an upstairs unit, torchdown roof, low ceilings; the entire front of the building was a bank of garages, with a wide concrete driveway where a front yard should have been. The backyard was a sunken concrete patio and a raised “garden” full of beauty bark and juniper bushes. The place had all the charm of a TV dinner, but Ryan liked the abundance of concrete surfaces. He liked to start fires, and he was glad to have a place to do it without having to worry about burning down the entire block.
The bus ride from my place on Capitol Hill took more than an hour, so it wasn’t worth the trip on a weeknight. Even on weekends, it was only worth it if I stayed the night. The first couple of times I did it, there was a nod to the whole idea that I was a guest. Ryan’s mom would make dinner, and I’d share breakfast. But they really didn’t have the money to feed another kid two days a week, so after a few weeks I started bringing money to buy my own food. I’d sleep on Ryan’s floor on Friday night, get up with him at six o’clock on Saturday morning to help him put rubber bands on newspapers for his paper route, and split the route with him, working one side of the street while he worked the other. Then we’d goof around all day Saturday. Every other weekend or so, I’d sleep over on Saturday night, too. Get up with him Sunday, do his route with him again, goof around a while longer, then head home.
Ryan didn’t have a VCR—most people didn’t—so when we were on our own, we spent a lot of time recounting the plots of horror or science fiction movies one of us had seen that the other hadn’t, or talking about our favorite parts of a movie we’d both seen. Sometimes we went fishing down by the locks with Ryan’s neighbor Brian. If we could get enough other kids together we’d have rubber band wars or squirt gun wars.
Every so often some toy company would make a toy gun that fired plastic or rubber projectiles hard enough to cause physical pain at close range. We spent a lot of time stalking around the neighborhood with other kids, shooting spring-loaded guns at each other with no eye protection of any kind, and leaving the projectiles scattered around each other’s houses for younger siblings to find and choke on. Eventually the guns would break, and we wouldn’t be able to buy new ones because the toy company had been sued and had stopped making that particular model. Then a new kind would come out and we’d buy a bunch of those and start up our endless war all over gain.
We also played Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games with names like Gamma World, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, and Car Wars. We painted lead figures. We went to movies at the Bay Theatre in downtown Ballard—usually war movies or science fiction flicks. Sometimes Ryan could put together enough guys for a softball game or touch football. No matter how many times we played, I never did understand the rules for football.
Ryan and his friends smoked a little pot together from time to time. I never smoked with them, which gave me a reputation as kind of a Goody Two-shoes. For some reason, the irony was totally wasted on me.
* * *
Ryan was friends with most of the kids in his neighborhood, including two guys at the end of the block named Dale and Daryl Johnson. Daryl had been in Mr. Fields’s class with me and Ryan, but Dale was a couple of years older. Their home situation was unusual. Their parents were still together, which was almost unheard of in our school. They had a stay-at-home mom and their dad made them call him sir. He worked in lumber or farming or textiles. Also their house was full of guns. Once when we were all still in elementary school, we’d been playing hide-and-seek and I’d crawled under their kitchen table and found a loaded .357 revolver in a metal bracket, bolted to the underside of the table and pointed at the front door. There were other pieces stashed around the house in various easily accessible places, in case drug-crazed hippies kicked down the door while the family was watching TV, or while Mr. Johnson was sitting on the toilet. And there was a stockpile of assault rifles, handguns, and shotguns in a large gun safe in the basement. By the standards of the time, this sort of behavior was considered eccentric but not worth calling CPS over.
Dale and Daryl’s dad didn’t just own guns; he liked to shoot them. A lot. When he wasn’t shooting them, he was pretending to shoot and reload them, while his wife timed him with a stopwatch. He traveled all over the state, and sometimes around the country, participating in shooting competitions. He spent hours at the range every week. He fired so many bullets through his many, many guns that eventually he figured out that he could save money if he just made his own bullets. Which meant that not only was his house full of guns—it was also full of gunpowder. He kept really close track of what happened with the guns. For some reason, he was a lot less careful about the gunpowder.
This was how Dale, Daryl, Ryan, and I came to be standing in front of Ryan’s house late one night arguing over how best to detonate a large pile of gunpowder that we’d dumped on the sidewalk. The other three had carried out various experiments in making things go boom, such as packing tennis balls full of gunpowder, sticking a waterproof fuse in them, wrapping them tightly in duct tape, lighting them, and throwing them in lakes. Evidently this created a large splash and, on a good day, a few dead fish. To hear Ryan and the Johnson brothers talk about it, you’d think they’d been on Normandy Beach at D-Day but, of course, rather than making me annoyed, their endless repetition of the stories just made me jealous. Now, standing on the sidewalk next to the boom-y stuff, I wasn’t sure jealousy had been the appropriate response.
“This is retarded,” Dale was saying. “It’s not gonna explode!”
“Come on!” Ryan said. “Let’s just try it!”
The pile of gunpowder was a loose heap, about six inches high and as many inches across. A thin trail of primer powder extended about three feet from the large pile, like a fuse. Later on, after everything went horribly wrong, we could never remember exactly who had suggested this arrangement. But we all agreed we’d gotten the idea from Wile E. Coyote.
What we thought was going to happen was that we’d light the very end of the trail of gunpowder and it would hiss toward the big pile, like it did in the cartoons. When the spark got to the main pile, there’d be a modest explosion. We didn’t actually know if this would work; part of the experiment was to find out if the cartoons bore any relationship to reality. That four children were using live explosives to test a hypothesis based on a cartoon didn’t raise a warning flag for any of us.
“It’s not going to explode,” Dale kept saying. “It needs to be tamped down. It needs to be under pressure. It’s just gonna fizzle like this.”
“I just want to see what will happen,” Daryl said. “Let’s try it and see what happens.”
“It’s a waste of gunpowder,” Dale said.
“Would you guys hurry up?” Ryan said.
He was
looking around anxiously. Ballard was usually pretty dead by midnight, even on a Saturday, but he was worried about the neighbors seeing us.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s see it already.”
“Fine,” Dale said.
Me, Ryan, and Daryl stepped back, while Dale lit a wooden match, crouched down low, and reached out for the tail end of the fuse from as far away as he could get.
All of us were watching the match except Ryan—who was watching his house. Just as Dale was about to light the fuse, Ryan thought he saw his upstairs neighbor’s curtain move, and he panicked.
“No!” he yelled, leaping forward—over the pile of gunpowder—to kick the match out of Dale’s hand. He didn’t quite make it. To those of us who were standing there watching, it looked like Ryan yelled, “No,” jumped forward, and exploded in a cloud of smoky black fire. When the smoke cleared, Ryan was gone. There was just a giant blackened circle on the sidewalk where he’d been. Then we heard him screaming.
All three of us looked up, expecting to see him shooting toward the horizon like one of the cartoon characters we’d based our experiment on. But then we heard him scream again and spotted him, sprinting down the sidewalk about half a block away.
We took off after him. We had no idea why he was running, and no idea why he’d jumped into the gunpowder. As keyed up as we were, taking off after him was pure herd instinct. We chased him for about a block before he ducked into a sunken driveway and leaned against the wall, panting. We charged in after him and took cover against the same wall.
“What the fuck?” Dale hissed. “Did you see a cop or something?”
“What?” Ryan said. “No, no cop. The old lady. Upstairs. Looking out the window. Tried to stop you.”
“Then why’d you run?” Daryl asked.
“Run?” Ryan said. Evidently he hadn’t noticed he’d been running. “Shit! Am I on fire?”
He started swatting frantically at his clothes. We all circled him and looked him over, but he was fine. The explosion had been too brief to ignite him. His bangs were singed, and all the hair had been burned off his legs, but that was it. No tissue damage. No shrapnel.
It was all funny when it was over, and we told and retold the story at every opportunity; the match, the curtain, Ryan jumping over the gunpowder at the exact instant it caught fire. It was the kind of story that never got old, because it was exciting and nobody had died.
* * *
Sometimes Ryan and I would go up to Northgate Mall with a bunch of guys from his Ballard crew. We’d goof around and prank each other, go to toy stores and sporting goods stores and look at all the cool stuff we couldn’t afford. We’d all pretend I was one of them.
Ryan had a gag he liked to run when we were up there. If one of us bought a soda, he’d wait until we were walking down the main concourse of the mall, then ask if he could have a sip. He’d take it. He’d drink out of it. Then he’d look at whoever had given him the soda with wide, terrified eyes, and shout, “What?! You’ve got AIDS?”
Ryan and his friends always thought that was hilarious.
55
Once, in San Diego, I’d met a kid my age at the beach. It was on Christmas Eve. The local chamber of commerce had a giant Christmas tree lighting ceremony that drew thousands of people down to the parking lot next to Ocean Beach’s main lifeguard station. The mood was festive. Lots of people partying, lots of bonfires. I climbed up onto a lifeguard tower to get a better view and there was another kid up there already. We spent the whole night goofing around together. He seemed cool. Denim jacket. Medium-length mop of dark brown hair. Pierced ears. He mentioned at some point that his parents were dealers. I told him mine were, too. He asked if I lived with my mom or my dad and I told him I lived with my dad and his boyfriend. Maybe I was caught up in the excitement of the night, or maybe I just didn’t think it should matter, but his reaction was everything I could have hoped for.
“Your dad gay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“A lot of people think I’m gay,” he said. “Because both my ears are pierced. That, or they think I’m a girl. I don’t give a shit.”
When we parted ways early on Christmas morning, he told me where he lived, in an apartment next to the freeway overpass. He said we should hang out again sometime. When I mentioned him to my dad the next day, I said I’d just come right out and told the kid about Dad and Bruce. It was really liberating, not to worry about it for once.
Dad got really quiet.
“Listen,” he said after a while. “I should meet people before you tell them that.”
“He seemed fine,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “But I should meet them.”
“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “If he’d been a dick about it, I just would have blown him off. That’d be that.”
Dad sighed. “If the wrong people find out about us, the cops might try to take you away. But that would be one of the least bad things that could happen, really. People could come to our house, burn it down with us in it, and nobody would try to stop them or punish them for it. No law protects gay men.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“Jason … a couple of years ago some Jesus freak walks into San Francisco City Hall and shoots the mayor of San Francisco in cold blood, because the mayor supported a gay city council member. Then he goes and shoots the queer city council guy. Gets arrested. Goes to trial. Gets five years. He got out of jail last year. This guy shot the mayor, Jason. You understand what that means?”
The kid I’d met down by the beach really had seemed okay. But I never did go to visit him in his apartment by the overpass.
* * *
Our apartment on Capitol Hill wasn’t a place for me. It certainly wasn’t meant as somewhere I could bring friends back to. It was an apartment where two gay men lived. I happened to live there, too.
My bedroom was next to the back door. I had two windows; one facing north and one west. The window to the west gave me a view of the mountains and the Space Needle and Puget Sound. It overlooked the stairs that were built onto the back of the house. When people came or went through our back door, they walked past my bedroom window. The window swung into the room on a pair of top-mounted hinges. It was surprisingly heavy. I used a piece of a broom handle to prop it open. I was always afraid it would come loose, slam closed, and shatter. The north-facing window was a sash window that looked down on the street below. Both windows had gray venetian blinds that had come with the apartment.
My closet was on the east wall, in the north corner, adjacent to the sash window. There was no door on the closet. I had a pair of heavy red velvet curtains covering the closet doorway. They hung from a curtain rod that I’d improvised out of a piece of bamboo. The curtains were made from a set of much larger curtains that Dad had stolen out of a condemned mansion in L.A. in the late sixties. We had a few more sets of curtains and three or four chairs that were upholstered in the same fabric: deep bloodred velvet, with swirls of paler fabric worked in, like ocean waves.
I had an old deer skull nailed to the closet door frame, above the red curtains.
The light in the room came from a frosted glass light fixture on the ceiling, a sort of inverted umbrella of glass with flowers etched into it. I didn’t like it. It collected bugs.
The walls and ceiling were painted white, but they were smoke-stained and dirty from previous tenants. The floor was real linoleum rather than vinyl, patterned in large gray and brown squares. It was so scratched, and there was so much dirt ingrained in its surface, that no amount of mopping or sweeping could make it look truly clean.
My bed was against the north wall, in the northwest corner, with the foot pointing toward the closet. It was an old latex foam twin mattress on a box spring. I had always tossed and turned so much at night that I couldn’t keep sheets on it: I woke up every morning tangled in them. So when we moved into the Capitol Hill place, I just stopped using sheets altogether. The mattress got dirty pretty fa
st after that, but I didn’t really care. I slept fully clothed, in jeans and a T-shirt. Sometimes I even wore my shoes to bed.
I had a bookshelf nailed to the wall above my bed. When I moved in, there were just some knickknacks on it. Later, I filled it with cheap sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks.
Clean clothes went in the dresser up against the south wall, next to the bedroom door. Dirty clothes went in a pile in front of the closet. The closet itself didn’t have any clothes in it at all. It was just packed full of junk.
The nearest laundromat was a block away, next to Summit Foods. I rarely changed or washed my clothes. I didn’t own very many that fit me. I wore my pants for weeks without changing them. I stuffed candy wrappers and bus transfers in the pockets until they were bulging with garbage. I put all my useful stuff in my coat pockets: tools, weapons, toys. I always carried a spool of twine or cord, a screwdriver, and a Swiss army knife of some kind. I always had a flashlight. I carried a long, narrow chisel that I’d sharpened to a point. I always had a ball—usually a handball or a tennis ball—to bounce against a wall or the ground if I got stuck somewhere and didn’t have anything better to do.
I never had enough socks or underwear. I wore them until they rotted. I didn’t use deodorant until Ryan couldn’t stand it anymore and begged me to buy some Right Guard or something. I hadn’t even known I smelled. The idea that it could be that bad without me knowing it was disturbing.
I took a bath at least once a day, but I wore the same dirty clothes for days or weeks at a time. Dad never talked to me about any of it, or explained to me that I stank. He’d always been squeamish about bodily functions. Once, when I was seven, my ass had itched so bad that the doctors thought I had worms. Turned out I just wasn’t wiping well enough, and never had; Dad had just never been willing to talk to me about it. It was the same way now. He told me my feet stank, but he didn’t suggest that buying more socks might help with it. At some point he started sneaking into my room at night and dumping huge quantities of foot powder in my sneakers. It just crusted around my toes.
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 26
