She Came From Beyond!

by Nadine Darling

  “I can’t describe them anymore,” he told me over the phone very soon before his career shit the bed. “I’ve said all I can say about them. They’re long and crisp and they have parts of a fish that have been bleached and minced stuffed inside of them. They repeat on me. Do you know this is the first year in nearly five years that I haven’t gotten a bonus?”

  “Oof,” I said, “what kind of bonuses do they give there? Like twenty, forty bucks?”

  “No,” said Harrison. “It’s more than that.”

  “Sorry.”

  He couldn’t make rent then, and he called Joan to tell her that they would have to move to Oregon. She accused him of slacking off on work on purpose, and he shrugged and said, “you know what? The fucking job is gone. It doesn’t matter if I meant to get fired or didn’t mean to or if I shot the place up. It’s over.”

  Then she told him she was trying to find a lawyer, a bluff, and he called that bluff, and she cried finally and said, “what, you want me to live with my parents, is that what you want? To move me across the country so that you can have your whore and kids at the same time? You sicken me. You sicken me and you make me sick.”

  They sold the minivan and bought plane tickets. He came first because he couldn’t wait any longer, and he ended up on my front stoop waiting for me when I strolled up with canned cinnamon rolls and white bread and cinnamon and sugar and butter for making cinnamon toast. I was on a whole cinnamon kick that week; it haunted me, I dreamed in cinnamon.

  He grabbed me and kissed my belly which was honestly more fat than baby, and he told me how beautiful I looked, which was awesome and hilarious because I looked like shit. All the makeup from the show mixed with all the crazy hormonal mess had left me with a kind of cystic acne that made me look as though I’d been punched in the face by a greasy case of the mumps, and there was probably food in the corners of my mouth because I’d had the day off work and spent most of the afternoon shoving food into my mouth, an action punctuated by several small trips to the store for ever more delicious supplies.

  “We will never be apart again,” is the thing that he said to me, very heroic and old fashioned, and when I remembered that experience I would often picture him wearing a wide brimmed hat and holding flowers. He told me that he wanted to adopt my dog and my cat, and that he wanted to stay.

  9.

  THE FIRST WAY POPS STARTED GOING CRAZY WAS THAT HE GOT insanely bad dandruff; that was the sign, dry skin. He used all the usual tools first, the ion brush, the brown tar shampoo, the fish oil capsules, and nothing did anything. He went to the doctor and was actually diagnosed with cradle cap, the thing newborn babies get. It was that kind of a year for Pops; all of his dignity had tripped over its feet and split.

  It just went on and on. All of this shedding, the skin came off between the teeth of a comb like stacks of morels, layers and layers flying away as though there would be something to reveal. I imagined the white yellow of his skull, half hidden like a dinosaur bone, and something like a panicked love overcame me, but it was less a panicked love than a moment of Pop’s shame somehow broadcast throughout my own brain. I wanted not to be him in that moment, and not to be affiliated with him. I don’t know that I ever felt hollowness at not having his blood in me, but that was the first time I’d ever felt relieved about it.

  Then he started to lose his hair in random, violent patterns like a stabbed-out map, and the reason turned out to be that he was pulling it out. So he shaved his head and went around all wild-eyed, looking like some Muppet-in-chemotherapy character. And finally he wandered into a police station with a loaded gun from godknows-where (he always told me that you could find anything in Chinatown, so maybe it was from Chinatown), and announced to the police officers that he was going to kill himself. They put him on the floor and all that; I guess it had been a slow day. Then I got a call from a lady who hardly spoke English and I kept telling her I was sixteen but she wouldn’t listen, so I called Dad and he came wearing a trench coat and hat that Lisa must’ve bought him. I remember that being the most bizarre and surreal thing, that hat and coat. I was like, what? Are you a detective now? Did you leave us to become a detective? It was the first time I could remember being angry with him over anything, and it was all wrapped up in the wanton hubris of that hat and coat.

  The week after Pops got out of the hospital he was hit by a car, an undercover DEA agent on the case; she hit my father and dragged him nearly ten feet, not realizing he was jammed beneath her vehicle. His pelvis was fractured in four places, his kneecap nearly severed, eight ribs broken, barely missing his heart. His mother, my Grandma Rose, visited for six weeks while Pops was bedridden and she shook her head a lot, her mouth puckered with the unfairness of it all. She wore a lot of flowery floppy stuff from Chico’s and old lady perfume from the drug store and she was all about those purses from Vera Bradley, with those colorful vomit patterns. She was really excited, I remember, when someone got her the limited edition colorful-vomit-for-breast-cancer purse. I remember the tears from it, the disbelief. She didn’t cry while caring for Pops, though. She tried to feed him even though his arms and brain were perfectly normal and uninjured, and kept attempting to make me pin the accident on my stepmother. I remember her taping some of our conversations, actually, and never saying anything about it. She would corner me in a room and start talking and then very casually press record on this old-ass tape recorder that was suddenly just there. Then she would ask me about Lisa’s Mafia ties. I don’t know. She was a person who I felt obligated to love but then only hated more for that obligation.

  Pops was very quiet during those six weeks. With Grandma Rose there, he was allowed to stay in the house on Castro Street in a rented hospital bed instead of a convalescent home, but he still needed us to do everything for him. He couldn’t walk of course, or even turn over in bed by himself because his leg with the fucked up knee had to be in this huge, bulky immobilizer. I changed a lot of bed pans, is what I mean to imply. I learned that kids shouldn’t have to see their parent’s shit unless a.) the kids have seen their parent’s shit all their lives, or b.) the parent is like eighty and the kid is like forty. You should not be a teen and have your parent’s shit thrust upon you. It is not a thing that that kid recovers from.

  I had a lot of really sad conversations with him, the kind of conversations that have you staring into space for great periods of time afterward.

  “How’s your Dad?”

  “He’s great,” I would answer, and then see the grimace and downgrade accordingly, “he’s good. He’s okay.”

  “And how is your father’s wife?”

  “Fine.”

  “Don’t be that way. It’s okay. We’re all adults here.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Well. Close enough. No worries. Let’s have a light.”

  “Where did you get those? Grandma Rose …”

  “Fuck. Grandma Rose. Give me a light. I know you fucking smoke.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks. God. God. Oh that’s … I needed that. Wait. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. To the bathroom?”

  “It’s a question? Do you have to go to the bathroom or not?”

  “I guess I don’t. I just haven’t gone in a while. But I can stay.”

  “Good. Thanks. I want you to know that I don’t hate her, okay? I just hate what she did. Do you understand that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Because it’s not my place to judge them. Don’t … what is that face?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that you’ve already judged her, right? That’s how it seems.”

  “Well that’s God’s job. I’m just disappointed. I guess I’m just a disappointed person in general now.”

  “Okay.”

  Pops had taken to the Bible lately, in a hilarious way that surprised no one. Grandma Rose was Catholic, and not so secretly delighted over the breakup of her kid’s longtime gay relationship. She was a staunch believer in the changing-y
our-sexual orientation-if-you-pray-enough method, and she was trying to get Pops on her side.

  “I think about the reasons for things, you know? I like that there may be this amazing reason for the breakup, going insane, and getting hit by that car. I’m like Job, I think.”

  “Nothing good ever did happen to Job, Dad.”

  “What? Really? Nothing? He didn’t get like a big thing of riches, or something?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know. Some God movie.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Maybe I’m like some other guy who had it rough. Lot?”

  “Wife turned into a pillar of salt.”

  “Then someone. Someone else. Are there any gays in the Bible? In any of the movies?”

  “No. Pretty sure no.”

  “Well then maybe I am Lot. Maybe all of this is because of my wickedness. That would explain a lot. Your father changed, the way you’re supposed to change, and look at him, happy as happy can be.”

  “That’s retarded.”

  “Don’t say it like that, it’s insensitive.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I can’t … why can’t I like women? I tried, I’ve been trying. It’s just not there.”

  “Pops … Dad had magazines with naked cheerleaders in them, girl ones. In the basement. I found them.”

  “What? When?”

  “Always. Years ago before he left.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I didn’t know why he had them.”

  “Well, what did you think?”

  “I tried not to think about it at all, really. It wasn’t a thing I wanted to think about.”

  “You didn’t want to think about saving your parents’ marriage?”

  “Jesus, really?”

  “You didn’t want to think about keeping me from looking like a fat, gay idiot shitting in a pan while my only love fucks Miss Sacramento?”

  “I can’t be here for this.”

  “Yes, go. Just like your father. Go. Run away into your cave of fucking lies.”

  And it went on like that. I was just THAT MAN, a part of THAT MAN, who was somehow both sinner and saint, a bad man who became something that people could believe in, in my cave of fucking lies. Once, when I was at Dad and Lisa’s, a guy with a bad cough called asking to put Dad in a religious comic book. He wanted to make a graphic novel of his life, his life as a gay who became straight. I told him to fuck off, and he asked if I was the kid, the kid from the gay marriage and I said, I’m sorry, did I stutter? Then the guy coughed and said he would pray for me, which is just a religious person’s way of saying fuck off back to you.

  I don’t know. I am not one to take sides when there is no benefit in it for me, but I could see the anguish of Pops, the way that he was like some man hearing voices, some lesser-known Shakespearean character who ends up hurling himself out of a window and then haunting everyone just because. Haunted is actually the best word I can come up with. He told me once that he dreamed of Dad every night, and until I fell in love with Harrison I don’t think I really believed him. After that I knew what it was like to wake up with the memory of a person still on your breath and in your skin, and to be angry and sad and betrayed to even be alive, and to hate God and still somehow believe in God more than ever. It seemed to me that Pops’ pain was catchy in some way, that I would be around it long enough and it would find a way to burrow into my bones where I would carry it always like a limp or bus money. I would be transformed by it, a veteran-by-proxy.

  I have an aunt named Jane on Pops’ side who is a burn doctor here in Troubadour; she relocated from Los Angeles eight or so years ago. She does grafts and face transplants and all that. She has seen so much and knows so much that outside of the hospital she can hardly function as a person. Like, try having dinner out with her. She can barely even speak to the waiter and always ends up getting some crazy shit like curried lobster and then picks at it for two hours until it’s time to pick at dessert. And yet she can make a nose, you know? That is the rub—you know what you do and do what you can and after that there is curried lobster. I have always liked her. She has always been my favorite aunt.

  I spent a few summers with her and her son, my cousin Avery, also adopted. He and I had nothing to say to each other in the best kind of way. When we did speak it was really polarizing. He would tell me about the patient that once stayed with them who had been in a cherry picker that touched electrical wires, the party that they threw him to celebrate his new ears. I would tell Avery about the time Carol Doda came over after a big ceremony at the Castro and explained cock rings to me. Being with Avery made me feel horrified and relieved. We even looked alike, not in the features but in our expressions. Nothing concerned us. I will always claim that as the best wrinkle prevention, feeling nothing. Avery and I lived in caves and sometimes wandered out to stare at the moon, the same moon in the same sky meaning the same thing. There was happiness in that, in accepting things preemptively. We were happy kids with happy lives. We were kind and grateful kids.

  Pops got a big settlement less than a year after, because the DEA did not want to go to court. Our lawyer, a terrible cliché of a lawyer who much later would go on to defend Casey Anthony, told Pops that he would have gotten more money had he been blinded or slashed across the face, something unthinkable and disfiguring. Had that happened, the lawyer explained with a sigh, Pops could’ve pretty much named his price.

  “Yes, but he would be blind or disfigured,” I said, and our horrible lawyer smiled horribly at me.

  “Aren’t you a pretty thing?” he said, and turned away.

  At day’s end, Pops walked away with nearly four hundred thousand. He used most of it to buy a flat with two bedrooms in Eureka Valley. He asked me if I wanted to live with him and I answered, “well, what do you want?”

  “You’re the kid, Easy,” he said, and it was something of a moot point. I was barely a kid. I’d gotten Dad’s permission to drop out of high school because I’d gotten a sweet gig as the number eight in a daily production at a children’s theater downtown. Pops didn’t know, as he was crazy and hobbled and crazier still. He limped about in some modification of a bathrobe with a four-pronged cane, looking spooky, looking like he might just suddenly grab your hand and tell you how you were going to die. I did not want to live with him. I wanted to watch According to Jim with a supermodel while her quarterback husband sat silently and stoically, like a pair of dogs I saw in a backyard once, one barking, one with its head buried in the dirt. I wanted to smoke backstage at children’s theater and flirt with odd numbers. I wanted the life where your stepmother comes into your room wearing a bedspread and says she’ll give you a hundred dollars to get lost because she wants to fuck your father in the kitchen.

  But it is hard to not lie to a man in a bathrobe with a four-pronged cane. The sadness of the cane grew exponentially with the addition of the prongs; one prong meant a skiing accident, four meant the next fall would be his last.

  “I’m good with whatever,” I said. His new house smelled like cat-box. The previous owner had died there of AIDS, and he’d owned a cat, and I guess as the owner got sicker he sort of let the cat shit wherever it wanted to shit. I am not judging, here. I’m sure I would have felt the same way in the same situation. No one had bothered to change the curtains or carpets or anything after Pops moved in, though. There was no air-conditioning but there were sky lights you had to open or close using a long metal thing with a screw ending. And when I say you, I mean me. I mean I was constantly doing it and failing, arms weak and aching, bits of dirty window debris drifting into my face like the ashes of something. And there was no dishwasher. And there was a washer and dryer in the garage but they smelled like mold and gasoline simultaneously, and the first time I opened the washer there was an old load of underwear in there, white, black and orange with mold and at first gla
nce I thought they were swarming with caterpillars. And instead of doing laundry I went upstairs and laid down on the new couch with the plastic still on and thought about starting a load of underwear and then dying. I did not want to live in that house. I was not fine with whatever.

  “Well, maybe you should stay with your father and your father’s wife. It’s good for a kid to have a kind of structure, the structure of a family.” Then he stuck his chin out a little, daring me. I thought of nice things to say and didn’t say them. They clogged there in my chest like a wad of moldering underwear, secret and unrecognizable.

  “Yeah,” is what I said.

  “Yeah? You have a room there? A nice girl’s room with a desk and vanity?”

  “I have a desk,” I said, “not a vanity.”

  “Girls should have a vanity.”

  “I use the bathroom mirror, mainly.”

  Or I used the one in Lisa and Dad’s room, which I did not mention.

  “Well. Okay. Okay, then, Champ.”

  There was a pause because I think that even he knew how weird it was to call me champ, or slugger or kiddo or any of those nonchalant names you call a person who is younger than you. We sat there on the couch, the plastic fart-squeaking sadly beneath us.