“I met this couple today,” Dad would say. “Al and Pat. It’s the saddest story. They’ve been married for twenty years. Al had one gay affair, because he was sort of questioning his sexuality. He got infected, then infected Pat before they had the antibody test. He didn’t even know he was sick.”
Then a few weeks later, “Pat’s been really sick.”
Then a few weeks after that, “Pat died. Al’s devastated.”
Then, “Al’s been in and out of the hospital all month.”
I never even met most of them. They were like TV shows. He’d find one he liked, get into it, and start telling me how good it was. Then it would get canceled before I had a chance to watch it.
Bruce, meanwhile, seemed to be in perpetual syndication. Somehow, in spite of having two boyfriends with AIDS, he was still HIV negative. Not that anything else was going particularly well for him. Everyone he knew was dying, and he and Dad were on the rocks.
Dad had never been easy to live with, but I suspected the underlying problem between him and Bruce was emotional exhaustion. When we got back to Seattle, Bruce had gotten a job at one of the downtown department stores—a different one than he’d worked for before we left for San Diego—but then he’d been laid off. He hadn’t taken it well. Like me, he seemed to have been operating under an assumption that everything would be okay if we could just get the hell out of San Diego; that we’d be made whole, and get back everything we gave up before we moved down there. Instead, Dad was sick, Bruce was unemployed, and his life savings were long gone. His three years with Dad had been, probably, about the worst thing that ever happened to him. Not that I forgave him for spending three months hanging around the house, drinking and sponging off our welfare, but I at least had to admit that it was karma.
Finally, Bruce got another job at another department store and things started looking up for him—though not so much for his relationship with Dad. Bruce moved back to his condo at the beginning of my tenth grade year. He and Dad were theoretically still a couple; once Bruce had a little money in the bank they planned a big trip to Mexico together, to the Yucatán Peninsula. But even I could tell it was a last hurrah.
* * *
I didn’t mind that Dad was going to the Yucatán Peninsula to look at Aztec pyramids without me. I didn’t even mind that he was planning to be gone for the better part of a month. What I did mind was that he wanted me to take care of his birds while he was gone.
Dad still had most of his birds. I hated them. Bruce hated them. Our neighbors really hated them. Dad had taken to moving all the cages onto our back porch on sunny days, and the noise had kicked off yet another feud with the guy who lived in the house to the west of us. I’d told Dad from the minute he started talking about going to Mexico that he’d need to arrange for someone else to take care of the birds while he was gone, because I just wasn’t doing it.
We fought about it for a couple of days. My solution was that he should get rid of the birds, but he wasn’t having it. At one point he tried the old “You live under my roof and I pay your rent!” thing, but I’d recently had a realization about that, and I took this opportunity to trot it out.
“You don’t pay my rent!” I said. “I pay yours! If I didn’t live here, you wouldn’t get welfare or food stamps. So go ahead and kick me out. Try getting by on just SSI, I fucking dare you. You might be able to pay rent, but that drug budget’s gonna take a big hit.”
At that point in the conversation he said, “You motherfucker,” grabbed a bottle off the knickknack shelf in the hall between our rooms, and tried to brain me with it. I snatched it out of his hand and pushed him away.
This was how our conflicts had been going lately. He still got to smack me around sometimes, if he caught me sleeping or something, but in a waking confrontation we’d switched roles: I was three inches taller, faster, and much stronger than he was. Anymore, I got the feeling he only tried to hurt me as a form of protest, just to let me know how pissed off he was. Except that he’d taken to trying to use things that were lying around the house as equalizers. Before the bottle he’d come after me with a wooden spoon, a shoe, and once with a kitchen knife. It always went the same way. I just snatched the weapon out of his hand and told him to back off. Once, in the kitchen, I sat on him until he calmed down. Bruce, who’d sat calmly by while Dad had beaten the crap out of me back in San Diego, was horrified.
After I took his bottle away, Dad screamed obscenities at me for a minute longer before he stormed off into his room.
Then, a few weeks before he was supposed to leave, the situation seemed to take care of itself. Bruce had met a woman named Cathy at one of his earlier department store jobs, and Cathy needed a place to stay for a month while she was between apartments. Her need happened to line up with the time that Dad and Bruce were going to be in Mexico. They made arrangements for her to put her stuff in the living room of our apartment and sleep in Dad’s room. I’d never met Cathy, but I said it was fine with me as long as I didn’t have to deal with Dad’s birds.
It was all set to happen on the night before Dad and Bruce were leaving. Cathy would come over with her stuff. Dad would show her the birds. Then Dad would go to Bruce’s for the night and Cathy would move in. Unfortunately, at the appointed time on the appointed evening, Cathy didn’t show up. She didn’t show up at six o’clock, when she was supposed to. She didn’t show up at seven. And there was no way to call her or figure out what was going on. By eight o’clock Dad was in a rage. By nine, he was apoplectic. I tried to pretend I didn’t notice what was happening or guess where it was leading, but around ten he came and stood in my bedroom doorway, fuming for a few minutes.
“This is ridiculous,” he said after he’d worked up a head of steam. “If she can’t even bother to get here when she’s supposed to, she can’t stay here. Fuck her. Tell her she missed her chance. You’ll have to take care of the animals.”
“Nope,” I said as I sat in bed reading a book. “She’ll be here tomorrow. She can take care of them.”
“I said she can’t stay here.”
“What do you care? You’ll be in Mexico.”
“This is my fucking house, and I said she can’t stay here! And you’ll do as you’re told or so help me God—”
I looked up at him with the same expression I’d had on my face when I took his bottle away from him.
“You’ll what?” I asked. “Call me names? Look, she’ll be here tomorrow. And it’s really none of your business whether she stays here or not. I’ll have to deal with her. You’ll be gone. And I’m sorry but there’s just no way I’m taking care of those goddamn birds while you’re partying in Mexico on Bruce’s dime. Just deal with it.”
“You’ll do what I say while you’re living under my roof!”
“Not this time,” I said, and went back to my book.
He stared at me for a while. I read. I could feel him looking at me, but I wasn’t going to engage.
“You know,” he said. “I can have you committed.”
It was so out of the blue that it took me a minute to understand what he’d said.
“What?” I asked.
He smiled. “I looked into it. You’ve got a history. Your mom’s crazy. I can have you committed if you don’t do what I tell you. I’ll turn you over to the state.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“And if you lay a finger on me,” he said smugly, “I’ll have you arrested for parent abuse.”
I expected to get mad. I thought the sheer audacity of it would make me mad. Instead, I could feel myself starting to panic. There were a lot of things converging in my head, but one of them was that I’d thought I was finally safe from him—I was bigger, stronger. I didn’t think he could keep hurting me. And now this. Having that feeling of safety taken away was worse than never having had it.
“I’ll run away,” I said.
“That just makes it easier,” he said, still grinning like a vindictive child.
“What would you te
ll them?” I asked.
“That you’re a danger to yourself. That you’re a danger to me. You are. I’d tell them about the cat. I’d tell them about the time you whipped the dog. All of it.”
The panic jumped and slammed into me like a wave.
“None of that’s true,” I said.
“You hurt that cat. You hurt Tom.”
“That was an accident.”
“What about Kit-Kat?”
“I had nothing to do with that!” I shouted. “She got hit by a car!”
“Really, Jason? Really? Or is that just what you tell yourself?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Did Kit-Kat really get hit by a car? Or are you just blocking out what really happened?”
“You can’t do this,” I said. “You can’t. You’re the one who hits me. You’re the one who used to kick the dog until he couldn’t walk straight. You. Not me.”
“How do you know? How do you really know?”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’ll take my word over yours.”
I noticed my hands were shaking. My face was hot. I realized I was finally crying.
“I fucking hate you,” I said.
His face went purple, and he stepped into the room and jabbed his finger at me.
“You know what?” he hissed. “Someday I’ll be gone, and you’re going to look back on all this and you’re going to be sorry. I fought with my mom when she was sick. And when she was gone, all I wanted was to have her back. You’ll see.”
“No I won’t,” I said. “I’ll be glad when you’re dead. So glad. I hate you. I fucking hate you.”
“You need to watch what you say to me,” he said calmly. He’d won. He could afford to be calm now.
Then he left. I stared at the place where he’d been for a second, in disbelief. Bruce was waiting in the living room and had probably heard the whole thing. But he’d never gotten between me and Dad. I could hear them in there a minute later, talking in quiet tones.
I sat on my bed for a while, hyperventilating. Then I got up and closed my door, went back to my bed, grabbed my phone off the floor, and set it in front of me. I had no idea who to call. My phone list, my piece of paper with all my personal phone numbers on it, was next to my bed. I picked it up and stared at it for a while, then dialed a number in Hawaii.
The phone rang a few times and someone picked up.
“Hello?” said a woman’s voice. She was chewing on something.
“Calliope?” I asked.
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Jason.”
“Jason who?”
“Your brother,” I said. “In Seattle.”
We’d started referring to each other as siblings right before she left for Hawaii. It explained to us, and to everyone else, why two people who got along so badly were also so important to each other.
“Jason?” she asked. “What’s—oh, fuck. Did Mark fucking die? Shit, Jason, I’m sorry—”
“No,” I said. “He’s not dead. I wish.”
“You guys had a fight or something? You know it costs, like, twenty-five cents a minute to call from the mainland, right?”
“Cal, he said he was going to lock me up.”
“What?”
“He said he’s going to lock me up. He’s gonna have me committed. Like, to a mental institution.”
“Oh!” she said, getting it. Then, “Oh … really? He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. Boy. Pot, kettle, huh?”
“What am I gonna do, Cal? I can’t—if he does that, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t go into a place like that. I can’t!”
“Calm down,” she said. “He’s not going to commit you to a mental institution.”
“He said he was! Just now!”
“Look, your dad can’t scratch his ass without making a big production out of it. If he actually gets around to doing it, he’ll tell you exactly what he’s going to do before he makes the first phone call. You’ll have plenty of warning.”
“So?”
“So just leave. If it comes to that. Just leave. Go someplace else. Go to New York. Screw it, go to Canada. Come here. I don’t know. Just leave. Living on the streets is fucked, but if the alternative is letting your dad give you the Frances Farmer treatment, to hell with it. Eventually you turn eighteen, and after that he can never mess with you again. This isn’t the rest of your life. It’s three years, at most. Assuming he lives that long, which he probably won’t. You just have to gut it out.”
“That’s good,” I said after a pause. “That’s a good point.”
“Sure it is,” she said.
“What about you?” I asked.
“What about me what?”
“How are you and Olive getting along?”
“Great, right now. She’s on the big island for a few months, in a shack in the jungle, guarding a pot farm.”
I laughed.
“Our parents suck,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Cal … what if he’s right? What if there’s something wrong with me?”
“There’s no ‘if,’ dude. There’s something wrong with you.”
“I’m serious,” I said.
“So am I. Look, the shit we’ve been through, there’s something wrong with both of us, and there probably always will be. We’re never gonna be happy people. We’re never gonna be like everyone else.”
“Is that a good thing? Sometimes I think I see life more clearly than they do.”
“I think we probably do see life more clearly than they do, but I’m not sure it’s a good thing. It’s like having a magic power. You can hear things nobody else can hear. But the special frequency that you’re tuned into is the screaming and suffering that everyone else ignores. What’s so great about that? You get a free cable channel nobody else gets, but all they show is snuff films.”
“You’re totally cheering me up,” I said.
“Hey, you called me.”
“Yeah,” I said. I’d stopped crying. My heart had stopped racing.
“You think he’s right? About me being messed up? Hurting animals and whatever? Thunder. The cat in Ballard.”
“No,” she said. “I was there for the thing with Thunder, remember? You were being eight. That’s all. You never shot birds with your BB gun, or any of that shit. You never went off and hurt animals in private. You told your dad about the cat, for God’s sake. Still a complete mystery to me, that. You couldn’t even punch a bully at school. You don’t have that in you. It doesn’t mean he can’t use it to fuck you up, but as far as it being true—don’t even think it.”
We were quiet on the phone for a while.
“I’ll be so glad when he’s dead,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
I rubbed my free hand across my face.
“Thanks,” I said. “I feel better now. But, like you said. Twenty-five cents a minute.”
“All right,” she said, turning on a dime. “Later.”
“Later.”
I hung up.
Cathy showed up about twenty minutes later, apologizing profusely. It had taken her longer than she thought it would to get her stuff packed up. Dad let her in and showed her the birds. I peeked out into the hallway and saw a pretty blond woman in her mid-twenties. She was wearing a white button-down shirt and a pair of jeans.
“Jason, this is Cathy,” Dad said. She turned to look at me. She had a nice, open face. Glasses. Friendly eyes. She reached out to shake hands, and her palms were cool and soft.
“Hi, Jason,” she said.
“Hi,” I said, staring at her chest just long enough to be embarrassed about it later.
Dad left without saying goodbye. I didn’t come out of my room again. When I went to sleep that night I could hear Cathy and someone else moving boxes into the living room.
* * *
Dad and Bruce went to Mexico the
next morning. I lived with Cathy for three weeks. She wasn’t home much, but when she was we read through her collection of vintage Time magazines, and talked about how women used to dress in advertisements, and what messages the advertisers were trying to send about their products. She told me why she loved theater. She told me about how she’d lived in Paris once. She asked me what my high school was like, and if gangs were really a thing in Seattle. She tactfully ignored the crush I obviously had on her, and she was kind and funny and fun to talk to. For three weeks, I went home after school, and I slept well at night.
59
Dad and Bruce broke up when they got back from Mexico, pretty much just like I knew they would. I’d never gotten along with Bruce, and in the alternate universe where my dad wasn’t dying, I would have been happy to be rid of the annoying boyfriend so Dad and I could get our groove back. Unfortunately, in the universe I actually lived in, losing Bruce meant taking care of Dad myself, and I wasn’t up for it. I wasn’t up for it because I was still a kid, and I could barely take care of myself. And I wasn’t up for it because the idea of my dad dying bothered me less every day.
* * *
Dad kept wanting to have little talks with me when he was high. It took me a while to figure out that was what was happening. I’d spent so much of my life around people who were living in one kind of altered state or another that even the most deeply aberrant behavior barely registered with me, or if I did notice it I thought it was just an exceptionally heavy mood swing. Dad had spent about half my life up to that point stoned on pot, or in withdrawals from pot, or high on MDA or mushrooms or the chemical of the week, so it was especially difficult for me to pick out when he was on drugs because I didn’t have a baseline of normalcy to compare it to. Since he’d gotten sick he’d been taking handfuls of painkillers like Valium, Demerol, codeine, and Seconal. Anyone else would have been unconscious or dead, but Dad just got weirdly flat. And then sometimes he’d say things like “Hey, Jason, come in here and talk to me for a sec. We don’t talk enough anymore.”
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 28
