A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  So I’d stop, on my way in or out of my room, and cross the hall and sit awkwardly on the end of his bed. He’d lie there under his Pendleton blanket, joint in one hand, smiling at me, and looking at me through lidded eyes.

  “How’s school?” he’d ask.

  “Fine,” I’d say.

  “You meeting any girls?” he’d ask.

  And I’d shrug. I was still missing one of my front teeth, my clothes were all trashed, and I didn’t have any friends. So really, what was the point?

  And then the conversation would go somewhere else.

  Once it started with him saying, “I tried with your mother, you know.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “She’s just—you know how she is. She just makes you nuts. She could push Gandhi into punching her in the mouth. I’d come home from work, you’d be sitting on the floor screaming, with a diaper full of shit, there’d be a sink full of dirty dishes, she’d be pulling her hair out and crying. We just fought all the time.”

  “Sure,” I said again. Most of my life, my dad had been telling me that he and my mom had broken up because he couldn’t stand what a slob she was. So this lined up with the story I’d always heard.

  “We used to fight,” he said. “We’d fight all the time.”

  I remembered them in the Hayes Street house, before Mom moved to San Francisco; the two of them, standing at either end of the dining room table, screaming at each other. I remembered them screaming at each other on the phone. In the park. Once at a doctor’s office.

  “Like one time,” Dad said, “we were just going at it. Seemed like for hours. The fight went out in the hall. We were living in this apartment building. Nice older place in downtown Eugene. We’d been fighting for hours, and I decided to leave. She followed me out into the hall and I totally lost it. There was this big wide stairway down to the lobby of the building. I just grabbed her and threw her down the stairs.”

  I looked up. I’d never heard this part of the story before.

  “You threw her down the stairs?” I asked. “Like, actually—threw her? Down the stairs?”

  “Well, yeah,” Dad said, pausing to take a hit off his joint. “I was trying to kill her. I threw her down this long flight of wide stairs, and she just screamed and cursed all the way down. Didn’t shut up. So I went down, grabbed her by the hair, dragged her back to the top of the stairs and threw her down again.”

  I blinked.

  “Didn’t kill her that time either,” he said regretfully. “Never could shut that bitch up. Hit her. Threatened her. Tried to strangle her once. Never could shut her up.”

  He gave me a pleasant, stoned smile.

  “Hey,” he said. “How’s school? You meeting any girls? I didn’t date much in high school. I took a girl to prom. Japanese girl. Mom flipped out. But she was just a friend. The Japanese girl. After a while people started saying I was queer, so my buddies set me up with this girl. Laurie Gannett. She’d had a crush on me for years. Got me high and we had sex. She said later I got her pregnant. I was leaving town anyway by then. I gave her two hundred dollars and told her to take care of it. I think she probably did. I never heard anything about her having a baby. But I guess you never know. You should check that out later. Maybe you’ve got a brother or a sister or something.”

  Sometimes I used these retrospectives to ask any pressing questions I’d had floating around in the back of my mind.

  “Hey, Dad, how did you actually get out of jail? I was never clear on that.”

  “Marianne and some other people got money together for bail,” he said.

  Again, this was what I’d always been told: Dad’s friends bailed him out. That was how he got out of jail. It was only when I was older, into high school, that I realized bail was a pretrial thing. It didn’t explain how he’d gotten probation instead of doing hard time. Oregon was notoriously hard on drug offenders in the seventies. Dad stared out the window, thinking.

  “Then,” he said, “while I was out on bail, I was staying in this hotel, and I … sort of tried to kill myself. I got in the bath and I cut my wrists. But I chickened out. I called an ambulance. There was a psychological evaluation. The shrink told the judge I was … something. Maybe paranoid schizophrenic? Anyway, the doctor said there was no way I could do the time. I’d crack up in jail. So the judge gave me probation. Barely left a scar.”

  He held up his arm for me to look at his left wrist. And, sure enough, he had two hair-thin lines of scar tissue across the base of his wrist. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed them before. Then I realized he usually wore a watch on that wrist.

  “That reminds me of this time,” he said. “Before I was with your mom. I was living in Venice Beach, with these two guys. Boyd and Aaron. We were dealing out of our apartment and the cops were onto us, but we only dealt with people we knew, so they couldn’t get probable cause for a warrant. To get around it they sent two narcs—not cops, but confidential informants—around to pick a fight with us. They just knocked on the door, shoved their way in, started beating the shit out of us. One of them almost bit my ear off. The other one was beating on Boyd. Aaron came out of the kitchen and stabbed the one that was beating on Boyd with a kitchen knife. It went all the way through him. Through his back, came out of his chest. The other guy ran off. I hid the drugs in a vacant lot next door. The cops were furious. They took me to a hospital to get my ear fixed and the doctor let me sneak out the back door.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got to go. I need some fresh air.”

  “Hey, Jason. Come here and talk to me for a sec. We never talk anymore.”

  “I can’t, Dad. I have to be somewhere else.”

  * * *

  I finally got rid of Dad’s birds. Some of them went to friends, and some of them went to pet stores, but all of them went and I didn’t bury any of them in the garden. Thunder had been spending more and more time down in Kris’s apartment. I didn’t mind. I’d never liked him much, and the fewer things I had to take care of besides myself, the happier I was.

  60

  Sometime during my tenth grade year, I told Brandon my dad was gay. I got Dad’s permission first, but I had to argue my case. Dad didn’t think it was anyone else’s business. I basically agreed, but the traditional lie—telling people Bruce was my uncle—wasn’t going to fly anymore.

  “Dad, Brandon lives in the same neighborhood we do. He sees gay guys all day every day. If he had a problem with it, I’d expect to have heard him say something by now. And one way or the other, he’s going to figure it out. Better I tell him, don’t you think?”

  “Fine,” Dad said. “But don’t come crying to me if it blows up in your face.”

  One of Dad’s great fears in life was me coming crying to him for any reason.

  I didn’t know how to approach Brandon, so I just invited him up to my place, sat him down on my bed, and told him.

  He stared off into space for a minute, then said, “So … how were you born?”

  “I—” I paused. That wasn’t the response I’d been expecting. “Dad was married for a while. To a woman. I was born. It’s not like every guy can just be who he is. Most guys take a while to come out, and sometimes, before they get there, they have kids. And some guys are gayer than others; some of them are into men and women both. That happens, too.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That all?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Remember how I told you last December that my dad had been diagnosed with tuberculosis?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Not tuberculosis?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay. I knew. You know that, right?”

  “I guessed. I just wanted to get it out there.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Any questions?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  And that was pretty much the last time we ever talked about it.

  * * *

  While Brandon could be exceptionally c
ool about some things, he pushed hard against the glass ceiling that relegated him to hapless dork status, and he wasn’t picky about whose back he stood on while he did it. Midway through our sophomore year he started hanging out with a crew of girls at school who occupied kind of a weird social niche.

  I didn’t know them, but I’d noticed them around school. They generally hung out with guys who were on the chess team or in Latin Club. Some of them had some nerd chops of their own—they were in advanced math courses and physical sciences classes. Most of them were in marching band. Their clothes, body types, and hairstyles varied widely. Their most notable feature, from where I stood, was that they didn’t seem to be able to keep their hands to themselves. It seemed like whenever I saw them, they were laughing and tickling some poor band geek, or wrestling him to the ground, or ganging up on him and putting makeup on him or something.

  Brandon and Ethan were well networked with the pocket-protector-and-slide-rule set, but Brandon had shunned them for most of his first year of high school. Then, at some point, he leveraged those connections to start spending a lot of time with these geek divas. None of it meant much to me, except that sometimes when I saw the band geek girls mauling a guy, it turned out to be Brandon. And sometimes he’d drop off the radar for a few days.

  “What do you do with them?” I’d ask, when he came up for air.

  “You know,” he said. “We just goof around.”

  “Like how?”

  “A little making out. Whatever.”

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “It varies,” he said.

  Then after a few months he started spending most of his time with a girl named Sadie. Sadie didn’t look like someone Brandon would be into. One of the things he and I talked about when we went for walks was what we liked in girls, and Sadie didn’t have a single item on Brandon’s list, except maybe her vagina.

  She was tall and broad-shouldered, with a flat face, a heavy forehead, and a nose like a veteran prizefighter’s. She had terrible skin, and braces, and she generally dressed in oversize flannel shirts and jeans. I liked to imagine she’d undergo some kind of developmental transformation and turn out to be a future Miss America, because God knew she had something like that coming, karma-wise, but in the meantime she was not remotely Brandon’s type. And yet, when he disappeared lately, he disappeared with Sadie.

  Then, suddenly, he had all this free time again and I didn’t see him with the geek girls anymore. I didn’t think much of it. We went back to hanging out on weekdays—watching movies and going for walks around the neighborhood at night. And one day we were sitting on his front steps talking when Ethan poked his head out the front door.

  “Brandon,” he said. “Phone for you.”

  “Who is it?” Brandon asked.

  “Sadie,” Ethan said.

  “Tell her I’m not home,” Brandon said.

  “Okay.” Ethan disappeared back inside the house.

  I looked at the space where Ethan had been, then back at Brandon.

  “Were you and Sadie going out?” I asked.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “But enough to break up?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why’d you break up with her, man?”

  “She got too attached.”

  “Hold up,” I said. “You just said she got too attached?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, that’s funny. If someone else said that, I’d think it was because she put out, and he kicked her to the curb after he got what he wanted.”

  He looked at me, but he didn’t say anything. We stared at each other for a while, then I looked away.

  “That’s cold,” I said.

  “She a friend of yours?” he asked.

  “Nope. Don’t even know the girl.”

  “Then what do you care?”

  Maybe he had a point. What would Han Solo do? Mind his own goddamn business, probably. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was letting someone down. Maybe it was Brandon.

  61

  The summer after my tenth grade year, the dentists at the free clinic where I got my teeth worked on finally replaced the tooth I’d lost in the car accident. That also happened to be the summer I started working out—and the summer my wardrobe improved, courtesy of the AIDS epidemic.

  A lot of the gay men on Capitol Hill had been effectively disowned by their straight families when they came out of the closet so when they died, there was no grieving mother to sort through their stuff and dispose of it. The straight family didn’t even come to the funeral a lot of the time. For the first couple of years, dead gay men’s property typically went to their closest friends. But then those friends started to die or their apartments filled up, and suddenly there was this ominous surplus of secondhand rattan furniture, glass-topped coffee tables, posters for Broadway musicals—and clothes. Lots and lots of young men’s clothes in a wide variety of styles. And, after about the time I turned fifteen, that was how I dressed myself.

  Some of my new clothes came from people I’d known. I got a collection of really nice St. John’s Bay button-down shirts that used to belong to Billy. The sleeves were a little short for me, because I was taller than Billy had been, but I kept them rolled up, and otherwise the shirts fit fine. I had some jeans and T-shirts I got from a guy named Mac, who was a friend of my dad’s. The T-shirts were different than the ones I got on the cheap at JCPenney—they were tight, single-color shirts made out of some kind of stretchy cotton-synthetic blend. And I had a lot of other clothes I just picked up in alleys, when some landlord would have to throw an entire apartment full of stuff in the Dumpster—pants, shirts, and belts. I still didn’t have enough underwear or socks, but I was all set for outerwear. My new look was topped off when Bruce gave me a leather bomber jacket for my birthday that year. He and my dad were still broken up, and he and I still didn’t get along, but he was part of our network and he wanted to do me a favor. He used his employee discount to get it for me at the big downtown department store where he worked. Even with the discount, it was the most expensive thing I’d ever owned.

  I undertook this makeover with no particular expectation that it would pay off for me, and it didn’t seem to amount to much at school. On Broadway, however, the effect was immediate and in no way subtle. Or maybe there was a subtle component that was just drowned out by the guys who hooted at me from passing cars, came out of bars to yell things like “Gimme some of that!” and followed me home, got my name off my mailbox, looked my number up in the phone book, and called me to ask me out on dates.

  I didn’t think any of the guys who were cruising me realized that I was jailbait. I’d always looked older than I was, and I was already shaving. But I was still a little unnerved by the intensity of their interest.

  The new attention was confusing in other ways, too. I couldn’t talk to my dad about it. Even if he hadn’t been stoned on pain medication night and day, he had too much of an agenda when it came to stuff like this. I could sort of talk to Brandon or my friends at school about it, as long as I kept it philosophical—as long as I talked about how over-the-top the men were being, and how inappropriate it would be for a straight guy to hit on a woman like that. But as soon as I started to take the conversation toward the thing I actually wanted to talk about, the reactions I got were so negative that I’d stop immediately, change course, back up, and cover. Because the thing I actually wanted to talk about was the fact that I liked it.

  I liked the attention and I liked the affirmation. It made me feel good to be wanted, and it didn’t matter much who I was wanted by, or what they wanted me for. The wilder the pass, the better it made me feel about myself. When a muscular blond guy with a chiseled jaw and a California tan drove his convertible over the parking strip and cut me off on the sidewalk across the street from Volunteer Park to ask me if I wanted to take him for a ride, I told him I wasn’t interested. It was half true. I didn’t want to have sex with him. But I’d absolutely been walking near V
olunteer Park in the hope that someone like him would give me that little boost. I felt better about myself for the rest of the week.

  Which was extremely confusing. I didn’t have a single role model in books, TV shows, or movies to tell me what it meant to be a fifteen-year-old tease in one of the gayest neighborhoods in the country. Even the idea of a teenage boy basing his self-esteem on his looks or having people hit on him was uncharted territory for me. My dad and his friends had said some things that referred to it, but I’d never seen it anywhere in my own world—in my world of comic books and war movies, after-school specials and syndicated sitcoms.

  I was pretty sure Han Solo wouldn’t approve. Though, really, who knew? He had a certain swagger. Meanwhile, I just had to find my own way with it, and I had no intention of forgoing all that attention just because I liked girls.

  * * *

  Living in a gay neighborhood, dressing in the clothes of dead gay men—and trying to get live ones to hit on me—did yield other kinds of attention. During my afternoon walks around the Hill, guys with mullets and trucker caps would sometimes slow their cars down on the street next to me, roll down their windows, and yell “Faggot!” at me. Or “Faggots!” to everyone on the street, depending on where I was. At first I just thought it was funny; the fact that these redneck assholes drove out of their way to cruise through my neighborhood and shout insults from passing cars, like a bunch of cowards. But then one day a pickup truck with two guys in the back stopped about twenty yards ahead of me and one of the guys yelled, “Hey, faggot!”

  And I yelled, “Come over here and say that shit to my face!”

  I was pretty sure he’d be too chickenshit to actually do it.

  But then he said, “All right,” and jumped out of the back of the truck, followed by his friend. The driver got out and watched over the cab of the truck.

  In spite of my wardrobe upgrade, I still carried a lot of odds and ends in my pockets, so when they got out of the truck I took my sharpened chisel out of one pocket and an expandable club out of the other pocket. The expandable club was a cheap version of the kind police carried: it was made of three steel tubes, one inside the other, that could be extended and locked into position to form a club about eighteen inches long. I’d bought mine at a martial arts store in the International District, Seattle’s Chinatown, for twenty dollars. It was a piece of junk, but when I snapped it to full extension the two guys coming toward me slowed down.