A Common Pornography: A Memoir

by Kevin Sampsell

  My connection with Laura was odd. Since she was a poet, I began to feel more for her than any of the others. We actually said to each other: I love you. She had no confidence in herself and her writing, but I published a book of her poems because I thought they were great and disturbing in a quiet, simple way. Later, after leaving Spokane, I would lose touch with her. A few times I’ve met people who remind me of Laura or maybe look a little bit like her. I am instantly drawn to that person and it makes me feel a little sad or foolish.

  A few years ago I got a postcard that was not signed but I’m almost certain it was from her. It said: I remember walking to and from our beds. The nights turned into mornings. Do you remember LIVING in Spokane?

  Arkansas

  I moved to Arkansas when I was twenty-four. I don’t really have a sensible reason except I was getting bored of Spokane and wanted to try something totally different. Of course I didn’t just poke a blind finger on a map. Paul, a guy I went to broadcasting school with, had gotten in touch with me and said I could get a job at an all-news radio station in Fort Smith, Arkansas. I had never liked Paul and was a little surprised that he even graduated with me, but his offer sounded like a good chance to get more of a fulltime radio job.

  I packed most of my stuff into my friend Stephen’s Dodge Omni and we asked Vince if he wanted to join us on a road trip. Stephen and Vince had been my best friends and confidantes during my stint in Spokane. I had made music, shot films, wrote poetry, and rode motorcycles with them. Just a couple of months before I decided to move, I had a breakdown in Stephen’s car and told him that I felt like we were drifting apart. He had been the first person to take me seriously as a writer, even when I wrote garbage. I didn’t want to lose him.

  The three of us drove to the Oregon coast, down Highway 101 to San Francisco, then to Las Vegas, Arizona, Texas, New Orleans, Memphis, and, finally, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Stephen wouldn’t do acid but Vince and I dosed a few times on the trip.

  When we arrived in Fort Smith, Stephen and Vince dropped me off at Paul’s house. I hadn’t seen him since broadcasting school and he had since gotten married to a girl in our class he’d been going out with. I always thought they were a weird couple. She was a hyperactive New Waver and he was a tobacco-chewing oaf who made fun of the other students even though he could barely speak into a mic without twisting his tongue. When they moved to Arkansas, he dropped out of radio to pursue a window-washing business while she did news at a low-ranking AM station. He’d gotten her pregnant and she had developed this unhealthy infatuation with Reba McEntire. There were posters of her everywhere and cassettes played constantly throughout the day while I tried to read Camus or Dostoyevsky or whatever I was reading back then. Sylvia Plath probably. She also owned a collection of Reba T-shirts.

  I soon found out that the radio job I thought had been offered to me wasn’t going to happen and I had to find other work. I stayed with my ex-classmates in their trailer home and rationed myself a couple of dollars a day before I became officially broke. Most of that money seemed to be spent at a cheap bakery I found that sold glazed doughnuts for fifteen cents a piece. Eventually I got a job at a factory assembling baby cribs and I was able to move into my own place. That job lasted a month before I became a busboy at a Mexican restaurant called El Chico in Central Mall.

  In the meantime, I had bought a used ten-speed and would cruise the small downtown area in search of any kind of youth culture. When I lived in Spokane I went out every other night and I was anxious to find a social life in my new city. I was starting to wonder if moving to Arkansas was a mistake. When I asked people about fun places to go, they’d always say Tulsa or Dallas.

  I found out about a place called the 700 Club, a warehouse-type space where local punk and alternative bands played. They had an open mic night coming up and I was eager to go. When I got there that night, it turned out that whoever had the keys to the place hadn’t show up. So one of the club regulars put the tailgate of his truck down and made that the stage. It was a humid late-summer night and unlike the Spokane open mics, most of the people who came to the 700 Club (or at least its parking lot) were there with acoustic guitars. It was more like a punk hootenanny.

  There wasn’t any kind of sign-up list. After someone played a few songs they’d just ask the couple dozen people there who wanted to be next. I watched three or four people strum and sing before I felt like I could get up there. I stood in the bed of the truck and read a few poems. At the time, I was heavily influenced by a Seattle writer named Jesse Bernstein, who wrote violent and funny stories and read them in a crazed scratchy panic. I did my best to imitate Bernstein’s voice as I read my own attempts at dark humor. I prefaced my reading by telling everyone that I had just moved there from Washington State. Afterward, a few people talked to me, mostly to ask about the Northwest. Apparently, the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had debuted just the night before and a couple of the kids at the open mic couldn’t stop talking about it. They couldn’t believe it when I told them I saw Nirvana play once in a parking garage.

  One of the girls there was what I always envisioned a sweet Southern girl would be like. She was warm and pixielike, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a face that glowed with honesty and hope. The only thing missing was the Southern accent. I talked with a few of the guys there and they all acted like they wanted to date her. She had gotten out of a long relationship recently and they were just trying to figure a way to ask her out. After two more open mics, I finally worked up the nerve myself.

  We started dating and fell in love. I felt a little weird since she was still in high school, but as soon as she graduated, we decided to move to Portland, Oregon. We ran an espresso cart business and I started publishing more of my writing in magazines. I also met many more writers and began publishing more books by other writers. Even though I was happy, I felt anxious. My girlfriend and I had our ups and downs. There were breakups and infidelities and apologies. There was a miscarriage that I didn’t know how to handle. I was unfairly distant and selfish.

  But then we got back together and my son was born.

  Zach’s was a home birth, just after midnight on the hottest day of the year in 1994. The next morning, going out the front door and walking to the store, the world did indeed feel totally different. The sky looked larger and gravity felt nonexistent. I noticed every color and every movement around me. I didn’t know much about babies or how to be a father yet, but I knew right away that I was going to do better than my own father.

  Aneurysm

  Nearly fourteen years after I became a father, I got a message about my own dad. It was from a cousin or aunt, someone I’d never met. She was using that uncertain voice that people use when they’re not sure if their message is being recorded. “Kevin? It’s about your dad. He had a brain aneurysm and he’s in the hospital. They’re not sure if he’s going to last much longer. Your mom wanted me to call some people and tell them. If you want to see him, or say good-bye, you should probably come right away.”

  I knew that this was a call I’d be getting soon. For his last four years he was in a wheelchair and everything about him was shutting down. I would call home and talk with Mom about various things and then she’d hand the phone to Dad. It was obvious that speaking had become harder for him. Slowly and with little volume, he would try hard just to get one sentence out, probably about a chore around the house he would never get to or something about church. The words barely made it above the pained breathing. His voice was an eerie death rattle coming through the phone line.

  And now this came through the phone line. I played the message over a few times and then saved it.

  I was at home in Portland, a four-hour drive away. I had no desire to go right away. I was about to go to work anyway.

  I called Mom and talked to her. She said he was brain dead but still breathing. I asked if he was responding to anything, if he could hear her. The phone line was crackling and cutting out and she couldn’t understan
d what I was saying. I had been waiting for him to die, and had even fantasized about it, but I couldn’t help feeling anxious now that it was really happening.

  “Can he hear you? Can you talk into his ear?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Can he understand words?”

  “I’m sorry, Kevin. I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

  “Could you tell him I love him,” I finally said. I was starting to cry.

  “Maybe you should take some days off of work,” she said gently.

  I knew I wasn’t going to drive up there until he died. I didn’t want to take the days off work and hang out in Kennewick on a deathwatch. The place made me depressed more than nostalgic. Mom and Dad had moved out of the big house we used to live in, the one we rebuilt after the fire. They bought a much smaller manufactured home out behind Columbia Center Mall in the mid-nineties and Mark was still there too, living with them. He was Dad’s caregiver the last few years, doing everything from getting him out of bed each day to driving him around. Sometimes Mark and Dad got into arguments and Mark would disappear somewhere for a few days. A few times, Dad himself would try to disappear, cruising in his electric wheelchair along the side of some busy road, going who knows where, until a police officer would stop him and call Mom to come pick him up. I had to laugh the first time I heard about one of these runaway attempts.

  I decided to stay in Portland and wait it out, pretend business as usual. I wasn’t going anywhere until the heart stopped beating, until the funeral was set.

  The Viewing

  Dad died a couple of days later and I drove up to Kennewick.

  The day before his burial, I went to the funeral home to see Dad in his coffin. I went with Dad’s sister Evelyn and her husband, Rolando. I remember meeting Evelyn a couple of times when I was a kid but I had never met Rolando before. They lived around Washington, D.C., most of my childhood and there was some tension on Dad’s side of the family because Rolando was black.

  Despite the early disapproval of others, they have been married for more than fifty years and have several children and grandchildren. I heard that Dad’s family didn’t like to advertise that they had a mixed marriage among them. I don’t recall Dad ever mentioning Rolando.

  One of Evelyn and Rolando’s children became an airplane pilot though and that fact became worthy of mention for Dad when he talked with others. “My nephew is a pilot for that airline,” he would say, as if he had some hand in this success.

  Evelyn is very religious and as we walked into the funeral home she was quietly praying and making the sign of the cross. Rolando, a large man with a kind nature, gently touched her back as they walked. Some piped-in music greeted us in the room that kept Dad’s coffin. It was the beginning of viewing hours and I was a little surprised that there was no one else there. Evelyn and Rolando stood back and prayed as I looked closely at my father. His hands looked thin and smudged with spots, as if they had been flattened in some sadistic way. His head was like a skull with fake waxy skin molded around it. I thought I’d see some kind of evidence of the brain aneurysm that finally killed him, but I didn’t know what to look for. What little hair he had was swept across his scalp like the faint suggestion of a haircut. His forehead was the only thing that looked strong and real. I looked at him for a few minutes, wondering if I could see myself, but I couldn’t. I moved my hand to his head and watched my fingers rest on his forehead. I petted his forehead and thought how strange it was to touch my father this way. I started to cry a little, though I didn’t want to. My sniffling gave me away and Evelyn came to my side and touched my arm lightly. She started to talk about how he was in Heaven and that God was taking care of him now, or something like that. I was more annoyed than comforted by her. I looked down at his chest. He was dressed in a dark blue suit with a blue-and-silver tie and the kind of light blue button-up shirt that he would sometimes wear while working in the yard. His chest looked wide but caved in. I stared there, where his heart would be, and watched for any movement. Any sign of a soul.

  No Eulogy

  The next day, toward the end of my dad’s funeral service, the priest asked if anyone wanted to say some words or share a fond memory of my dad. I have not attended many funerals in my life, but I know that this is usually the most emotional and interesting part of the service. Some people think that God lets you watch your own funeral to see what people say before he takes you up to Heaven or gives you to Satan or whatever.

  There was an awkward moment when no one approached the podium. Then one of the two older nuns at the service went up and started talking about how helpful my dad was. “Whenever we needed to use a truck, John was always willing to help,” she said.

  In his last several years, my father was an usher at the church. I think he even did it in his wheelchair for a while. Most of the priests and nuns and churchgoers knew him. A few days before the funeral, someone from the parish told my mom that the church, which holds about 150 people, would probably be full for the funeral. There were about 30 people there.

  As the nun talked more about my dad, she shifted from “John was always there for the church” to “John was also a family man who loved his wife and children.” Even under the roof of the church where I had spent so many Sunday mornings, my bullshit detector went off. This was a woman, a child of God, who had no idea.

  When she was done speaking, there was another uncomfortable pause in the service. I glanced discreetly at Mom and saw that she had no intention of approaching the altar. Elinda sat next to Mom, holding her hand. I thought about going up myself but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  One of the only good memories I have of my father are of the times when we’d go to some river or creek somewhere and I would gather agates or any other cool rocks. The year before he died, when I remembered to send him a Father’s Day card, I had mentioned these memories. It was one of the few times I wanted to give him something genuine. I knew that he was getting closer and closer to his end.

  I stayed seated in my pew, unsure about my ability to speak. I did feel an emotional tug, a burst of tears ready to fall, but they couldn’t make it over whatever hurdles were there in my heart. I imagined myself in the casket. My funeral. What people would say. I imagined all of this selfishly, to bring tears, but that didn’t work either.

  Matt sat next to me, also thinking about what he would say. He told me after the service that he thought about getting up and saying that John was a flawed man, a lonely, disappointed person who wanted forgiveness. He thought about announcing his forgiveness. But maybe the silence was more suitable.

  My brother Russell eventually stepped up and started speaking. It seemed like he was up there merely to take up the slack for those of us who had nothing good to share. His words were cautious and faintly praising. He said, “John was a good provider.” But, I wondered, of what?

  After

  After the service, everyone filed out the front doors of the church and we each said hello to the priest and shook his hand. Some people thought there was going to be an open casket and a chance for people to see my dad one last time, but the casket stayed closed. I got the feeling that people felt awkward about it and didn’t want to ask if the casket could be opened. There was an anticlimactic feel to the whole thing.

  Before the service, Matt, Russell, Mark, and I had to carry the casket from the hearse into the church, and now we had to carry it back out. It was heavier than I thought it would be and the handles felt like they were made of hard plastic. They dug into my fingers uncomfortably. It was as if Dad wanted to give us, the kids, one last moment of discomfort. I could imagine him purposely picking out the heavy one with crappy handles.

  With Dad back in the hearse, we gathered on the church steps to figure out who was driving with whom to the cemetery. Then Mom stumbled down the church steps, and even though I was holding her hand, she fell awkwardly on her side. Some relatives I didn’t know helped me get her up and she said she was okay, just clum
sy.

  A short line of cars followed the hearse out to the cemetery. Like a tragically comic movie, it had begun raining and the wind began whipping around like it does in a desert city. At the cemetery, we again had to carry the coffin, this time to the grave. I hadn’t brought a jacket and I was pretty cold. I could barely hear the last formulaic words of the priest and I just wanted to get back in my car. I saw the backhoe behind the crowd, behind a tree, like it was an animal trying to hide from us.

  Olive Garden

  That night, a bunch of the family met at an Olive Garden for dinner. I felt a nagging sense of shame that we went to such a cheerful place. Its peppy waitstaff gave the illusion that the world is a fair and happy place and no one ever dies.

  I sat next to my cousin Terry, who is about ten years older than me. I didn’t know him that well. He asked me about living in Portland and said he sometimes visited there to go to bookstores. He was a history teacher at a high school in Walla Walla and had a room in his house just for his library. There aren’t too many people in my family whom you’d call literary, so I was excited to have someone to talk books with. The conversation soon turned to family though. We played connect the dots with the bloodline. His mom was my dad’s sister, Evelyn, who had spent time at Medical Lake, being treated for psychosis at the same time Elinda was there getting shock treatments. His dad was someone he never knew. Apparently, he was a drug dealer who was shot and killed in their front yard when he was a little boy.