I went to the after-party at Kris’s apartment. There was a lot of food. There was a sheet cake with a palm tree and a rainbow on it that had “Aloha, Mark!” written on it in frosting. I expected the party to be relaxing compared to the funeral, but mostly it was a lot of people I didn’t know—people from Dad’s support groups and service agencies. They all said nice things about him—generally to each other rather than to me, but I could hear them. After about an hour I decided I was just bringing everyone down, so I left. I walked to the Greyhound station, a half mile away, and waited for the next bus heading south, back to school. The benches in the terminal were full, so I sat on the floor and stared at the clock on the wall above the ticket office.
I realized I’d left my dress shirt at Kris’s house.
It was funny. The whole thing was funny.
I wanted to call someone and make jokes about the funeral. I wanted someone to come pick me up and take me to a coffee shop. Or maybe to the beach. Someplace with a view. But Ryan was on the outside of this particular circle, and apart from him there really wasn’t anyone else left. I hadn’t spoken to Calliope in over a year. I wasn’t even sure I still had her number. Marti and I hadn’t talked since school ended, and she wouldn’t thank me to call her now, for this. I had a lot of acquaintances, but hardly any friends. The people I’d been close to were all gone—and only about half of them were dead. So what did that mean?
* * *
Grandpa died three weeks later, of another heart attack. He died in his easy chair, in his living room, up on Camano Island. Probably he was watching baseball when it happened. I’d moved by then to a place where I didn’t have a phone, so I didn’t get Uncle John’s messages until after the funeral. It didn’t upset me much. Grandpa had been sick for a while, and anyway, it was how everything was going now; everyone was dying or moving on. My whole universe was closing up shop.
79
I told most of my classmates at Evergreen that my dad had died of tuberculosis. It was the lie he and I had settled on when he first got sick. And not just because of homophobia. A 1985 Los Angeles Times poll had said that a majority of Americans favored forcing AIDS patients into quarantine camps. Then a U.S. congressman named Dannemeyer had actually suggested doing it. In the pre-Internet age, Xerox copies of newspaper articles about that kind of thing were passed around the AIDS community like banned books. It all seemed crazy, but World War II hadn’t been that long ago and nobody wanted to find themselves sitting in a bunkhouse in central California, surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire, thinking, “Wow. They actually did it.” I knew I was safe from that kind of thing, now that Dad was gone, but fear of how straights would react to the truth about anything was a lifelong reflex by that point.
Staying in the closet about my own family background kept me at a boil for months, and then years, but I had other problems. It was true that my old life had ended when my dad died, but I carried fragments of it around inside me afterward, like pieces of shrapnel I’d picked up in some unpopular covert war, and they ate at me in ways that surprised me. I kept thinking I was going to wake up some morning and breathe a sigh of relief because nobody was going to come into my room in the middle of the night and start screaming at me. Or hitting me. Or trying to smash my head in with some kind of blunt instrument. I didn’t have to worry about accidental fluids exposure anymore. I’d survived my dad. But surviving a trauma and being able to live with it were two different things.
I started to shake apart. It was little things at first. I’d always had trouble sleeping, but at Evergreen it just spiraled. By the end of my first year, I was going days at a time without rest. And when I finally did sleep, it was rarely for more than four or five hours at a time. Other things followed. I’d been kind of jumpy for years. But now I couldn’t sit in a room with my back to the door—couldn’t relax at all in a room where the door was open. When I did sleep, I slept fully clothed. I kept a knife under my pillow. If someone startled me—if they came up behind me or talked to me while I was reading—my hands snapped up in front of me, like a boxer, ready to fight. Sometimes I’d start shouting obscenities at them. I overreacted to normal stimulus. All the time, in every situation, I was so angry I was vibrating with it. I couldn’t regulate the volume of my own voice. I couldn’t concentrate.
And I couldn’t explain any of it.
People talked a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder in the eighties, when everyone suddenly started giving a shit about Vietnam veterans. I’d seen the symptoms in everything from Rambo movies to Magnum, P.I. reruns: flashbacks, hypervigilance, insomnia, mood swings, increased fight-or-flight response. But it was only ever talked about as something that happened to soldiers. There was nothing in my background that would justify me being as messed up as I seemed to be. The physical violence, with my dad—it hadn’t really been that bad. Or I didn’t think it was, anyway. And I’d seen other people who had it so much worse. The idea that I might be suffering from a delayed stress reaction didn’t seem credible, even to me.
In the absence of a good reason for being like I was, I made up a lot of ridiculous lies about the hard life I’d had on the streets and the horrible acts of violence I’d committed and witnessed there. Some of the people who were afraid of me also started feeling sorry for me. Unsurprisingly, this also made me angry.
By the end of my second year, I was behind on my rent, unemployed, and I was only passing about half my classes. Evergreen didn’t have grades—they issued written narrative evaluations to students at the end of every academic term. But other schools converted those evaluations into grade equivalents, and I knew I was running about a high-D average. I figured I was doing myself more harm than good staying in school, so I dropped out and went back to Seattle.
That was when things started to really suck.
80
I spent my first six months in Seattle camped out in Kris’s hall closet, before I moved into an apartment I couldn’t afford with a guy I barely knew in a neighborhood up north of Ballard. I didn’t have a bed because the dorms at Evergreen came with them, and I couldn’t move or store one anyway. So I slept on the floor, wrapped in the Pendleton blankets Dad had bought with his inheritance when I was four years old, and I used my wadded-up army surplus field jacket as a pillow.
I looked for work that could tolerate my mood swings. I spent a year using toxic chemicals to rinse laboratory glassware in a small, poorly ventilated room with no windows. I hated the job, but I could have as many bad days as I wanted to in that room. Nobody tried to talk to me. Nobody told me they were scared of me, or accused me of anything, or asked me what was wrong with me. When that job ended, I worked four part-time jobs at once, washing dishes, running a cash register, making pizza, and covering a few nights as a pantry cook.
The cash register job required more contact with people than I would have liked, but the environment was uniquely suited to my temperament. I worked the downtown bar rush two nights a week, serving pizza and ice cream to drunk suburbanites, college students, and the criminals who preyed on them. My boss carried a gun in a shoulder holster, and we kept a baseball bat next to the register. When I caught a customer pissing in a back stairway of the restaurant, I grabbed the bat and made him clean it up with a roll of paper towels. Afterward I was horrified by my own willingness to do serious violence over something that really wasn’t that big a deal. I told my boss about it at the end of the night, assuming I’d be fired on the spot, but he just told me I’d done the right thing and that being ready to mess people up was part of the job.
A week later, my boss told me he wanted me to help his cousin remodel another pizza restaurant, a few blocks away. I spent three weeks on that job, working side by side with the cousin. We talked about all kinds of things. He asked me a lot of questions about my background. Then, after three weeks, he took me to lunch and told me he wanted to promote me.
“To do what?” I asked.
“I’m looking to move into patents,” he said. “
To buy them from inventors. But I need someone who can convince them to sell. I hear you’re a guy who knows how to talk to people.”
I laughed.
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“The way I hear it, you convinced a guy to clean up his own piss,” the cousin said.
I stopped laughing.
“This is no small-time operation,” the cousin assured me. “We’re vertically integrated. You work for me, you’ve got a house, a car, clothes. Medical and dental. The works.”
“What about a lawyer?” I asked, to make sure I understood what he was saying. “Bail. That kind of thing.”
“That shouldn’t be necessary,” he said. “But if it came up, I’d have you covered.”
“I’ll need to think about it,” I said.
I gave notice a few days later and got another job making pizza in a different neighborhood.
I spent a lot of my spare time exercising, shadow boxing and doing calisthenics. If I wasn’t working out, I was reading. I read novels, and nonfiction books about revolution: Emma Goldman, Bobby Seale, and Malcolm X. I read books about tree spiking and industrial sabotage. I read history books about the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. I didn’t know what I thought I was preparing for, but the feeling that some kind of doom was just around the corner followed me everywhere. When it didn’t arrive on its own, I started to think about what I could do to hurry it along. When I turned twenty-one I got a permit to carry a concealed pistol. I never did buy a gun, but I spent more on knives, saps, and throwing stars than I did on clothes.
I kept circling the idea of doing something irrevocable. And while I thought about that I did stupid, pointlessly dangerous things. I walked fifteen hours—almost fifty miles, in a fall rainstorm—wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I went out in the middle of the night and crept through the camps of the homeless men who lived in the woods above the railroad tracks. Or I walked on the tracks from Seattle to Edmonds, the next town up to the north, with the ocean on one side and cliffs and deep ravines on the other. It was an easy walk by daylight, so I’d start at 10:00 p.m. walking in the dark as quietly as I could, so I’d be able to hear the chirp of the tracks if a train approached. When the engines went by, I’d crouch on the edge of the stone seawall while the cars roared past just a few feet away.
I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But I didn’t have any friends to talk to about it, or family to have to explain it to, so it seemed not to matter. It seemed like I could go as crazy as I wanted to and there was no societal mechanism to reel me back in. I kept expecting someone at one of my jobs, or even a random stranger on the street, to tap me on the shoulder and say something like “It’s none of my business, buddy, but you need therapy.”
It never happened though.
At some point I ran into Brandon’s cousin Ian—the guy whose arm I’d maybe dislocated on the night I asked Maria for her phone number, all those years earlier. I bumped into him on Broadway, on Capitol Hill. He looked the same in most respects, but his eyes were strung out as hell.
“What’ve you been up to?” I asked.
“Not much,” he said, scanning the street over my shoulder, not making eye contact. “Joined the Army. Rangers.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking about doing that. How was it?”
“I got discharged,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Like—thrown out?”
“Yeah.”
“What for?” I asked.
“Well, you know,” he said. “Those guys are a bunch of fucking hypocrites. They’re supposed to be training us to fight—to kill—but then they get all freaked out when you want to get good at that part of it.”
“Uh,” I said, “so … what actually happened?”
“Officially it was some weird subclause in some regulation. But really it was because my sergeant found out I’d sharpened my entrenching tool.”
“Your entrenching … you mean those little shovels? Like they use to dig foxholes?”
“Yeah,” he said, his eyes focusing on me for the first time. “You sharpen one of those up, it’s basically a battle ax. It’ll split you from here … to here.”
As he finished the last sentence he put the first two fingers of his hand on my left collarbone and slid them down my torso to my right hip. Something about the gesture was disconcertingly intimate.
“Okay,” I said. “Well, good to see you. How’s Brandon doing?”
“He’s still with Maria. They’ve got a place up the hill.”
“Right,” I said. “Well, that’s good. I’m glad they’re doing well. I’ll see you around, man. You take care of yourself, okay?”
“Roger that,” he said. He was already looking somewhere else, and I was glad to get out from under those eyes.
It wasn’t until I got home later that night that I started to wonder if most people would think Ian and I were pretty much the same guy.
* * *
The idea that I might come across the same way Ian did bothered me for a lot of reasons, but one of them was that even I knew I wasn’t totally beyond help. There were days—sometimes even two of them in a row—where I still wanted to be Han Solo, and believed that was possible. I just didn’t know how. And I worried what would happen if I joined something, like the military or some church, to try to find my way. Because I recognized in myself the potential to be a zealous convert to any organization or philosophy that promised me direction—and it scared me. Better to stay away from those who might claim to have all the answers; messed up as I was, I knew I’d probably believe them.
Still, I felt like I was waiting for the universe to give me a hint. Left to my own devices, I cobbled my divine mandate together from cheesy movie dialogue, fortune cookies, and things I saw spray-painted on walls or written in bus shelters with felt-tipped markers. When I was walking down the Ave, in the University District, and some gutter punk handed me a homemade leaflet that said, “Why pay the government to tell you what to do? Take back your life!” I knew that was a message I should think about. When I heard George Carlin say, in a stand-up routine, “That’s the whole secret of life: not dying!” I thought, Yeah, that’s the stuff. A few years later, The Shawshank Redemption came out, and no lesser personage than Morgan Freeman told me to “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” I knew I had my walking papers.
Of course I also knew that I was making the whole thing up; that my intermittent bouts of optimism were just a reflection of my own gradually improving mental health. But, functionally, I didn’t really see the difference between taking my cues from Morgan Freeman or from Jesus the space alien. Emma Goldman’s advice, that “The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being,” seemed as complete, to me, as anything I’d read in the King James Bible or heard at Grandma and Grandpa’s churches.
Mr. Freeman had told me to get busy living, but, just like before I went to Evergreen, I struggled to understand what a happy ending—a real life—would mean for me. When I’d asked my dad how regular people went on about their business while a family in Cambodia was being trampled by elephants, he’d implied that ignoring suffering was a core tenet of the straight paradigm. Calliope had told me that our secret superpower—hers and mine—was to hear all the screaming and horror that straight people tuned out. The cheerleaders for the American dream told me that if I worked hard and sacrificed, I could be normal someday. But I couldn’t bring myself to want that. The rage I’d felt toward the straight world, for standing idly by while AIDS destroyed my home and my community, wouldn’t allow it. I could feel the crashing of giant feet on the earth and hear the sounds of human suffering. I had an obligation to listen, even if it kept me from ever being normal.
But what was I supposed to do, then, in order to get busy living? Join the patent-mafia and start strong-arming inventors?
I found my answer
in the gospel of Frank. And it was only when I was out on my own, lost and looking for direction, that I realized I’d already been baptized into his religion.
Frank and I had lost touch while I was at Evergreen. Or it might have been more accurate to say he’d let me go. Not because he wanted to, but because it had been our arrangement; there were no strings attached to the help he gave me. So he sent me a few letters telling me I was welcome at his house for Thanksgiving, or for Christmas, if I happened to be in town, but that I shouldn’t feel obligated. And when I didn’t respond, he let that be that. I appreciated his forbearance. Those years had been hard enough without having him watch me stumble and fall, over and over again. But I understood now that Frank’s gift to me wasn’t the money he’d given me, or the help with my school applications. It was the promise he’d let me make, that I’d pay it all forward some day.
In a certain light, Frank was as straight as they came. He was an old white guy, a retired professional, married, with a grown son. But his career path, as an educator, had been in public service. And when he retired, instead of going on cruises or traveling in Europe, he’d volunteered to clean houses for a group of people that the rest of the country wanted to banish to quarantine camps. He hadn’t done any of it because Jesus told him to. He’d done it because it was right. Or maybe because someone had done it for him once. He would have been a good example in any case. But then he helped me, when nobody else could or would. And when I took his help, I promised to follow his example.
When I was three, my grandma had told me that all I needed to do in order to be saved was to invite Jesus into my heart. Later, I understood that the ritual she was talking about was really just a metaphor for internalizing a value set or an idea. I hadn’t been willing to take the plunge with Jesus the space alien. But Frank W. Ross—there was a guy I could commit to.
* * *
Once my path was clear, I just started to put one foot in front of the other. I enrolled in a community college. I set my sights on a four-year college. I got back in touch with Kris and Lizzie, and the three of us got a house in Ballard. We did Christmas and Thanksgiving together. Whenever Kris bought ice cream, I ate it all—and they let me get away with it. They teased me about it.
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 38
