Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  Eddie Body moved to New York but returned to San Francisco only a few weeks later. He’d lived with his wife and daughter but left them after deciding it was “too much.” He started dating women again, and even moved in with Moonbeam’s mom. Since my father had introduced them, their coupling was especially painful for him. He visited us a few times but he never stayed very long, and it always confused me. I missed him and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t with us anymore.

  In the years that followed, Dad had other boyfriends but none lived with us. And after Eddie Body, I stopped paying close attention.

  5.

  IN 1976 EVERYTHING was new. Dad dubbed it his “bisextennial year.” We lived on a new block, in a new apartment, and the walls of this apartment were painted with a fresh coat of white paint. The smell of these walls invigorated me. Even today, freshly painted walls smell to me like new beginnings.

  When we moved into 1666 Page Street, with its smell of fresh paint, I decided it was magic. I was five years old, but would soon be six and there were six letters in my name. The Page Street apartment was ours alone, a haven of unconditional love, a place I remember as safe. We kept a cage full of doves. Even when the newspapers in the cage smelled dirty, there was always the loud rhythmic cooing of the birds, a sound full of deep satisfaction.

  Sunshine poured through our front windows every afternoon. As the light passed through the crystals that hung in the windowpanes, rainbows shimmered around the room. On weekends and after school we walked to the Panhandle to play. On the way, we passed run-down Victorian houses with chiseled faces, jutting chins, and large glass eyes. Many of these buildings were crumbling at the edges, with cracked and peeling paint, but with their occasional pillars and names like “Queen Anne” they were romantic to me, like the ruins of a lost kingdom.

  Every weekend, beneath the Panhandle’s grand acacia and cypress trees, Dad learned tai chi from a local teacher, who was later immortalized on the mural outside the Park Branch Library. For a while Dad had me learning too. The movements were strangely slow. A strong arm reaches forward, then around. A leg stretches out, then down. We looked like people caught in a time warp, stuck on the edge of 1976, trying to swim in midair, trying to escape the trappings of our life on earth.

  Months after the breakup with Ed, Dad was still trying to heal himself. In his writings he describes a persistent sense of isolation and disconnectedness. “I fit in neither with the gay nor straight community because of Alysia and because of my attitudes, which are not click-ish nor faddish.” In addition to practicing tai chi, Dad quit smoking, drinking, and doing drugs. While I was at my grandparents’, he attended a six-week alternative medicine seminar where he learned to meditate and cleanse auras.

  In the move from Oak Street, Dad also sold and gave away all of his dresses and most of his jewelry. “I’m just not that into drag anymore,” he wrote to John Dale, “not even on Halloween.” But he saved the best—the heavy Egyptian necklace and the scarves of Spanish lace—for me. In its place he adopted a butch look: handlebar moustache, plaid shirts rolled at the sleeve revealing furry forearms, worn blue jeans, and a heavy black leather jacket. Though Dad claimed not to be faddish, this look was so popular it came to be known as the Castro Clone. The uniform reflected a changing aesthetic among the city’s gay men, referencing working-class machismo instead of the more feminine style of generations past.

  The prevalence of the Clone look coincided with a growing number of openly gay men moving to the city. Four thousand people marched in the first Gay Pride parade in 1972. In 1976, 120,000 took part, including Dad with me riding atop his shoulders. The face of San Francisco was being transformed by these new residents, who spent weekends in the Castro, enjoying lunch at the Patio Café, standing in clusters outside the Twin Peaks bar. I was especially fascinated by the well-built men with moustaches and tight jeans, hands in their neighbors’ back pockets, knocking back beers, staring and smiling, but rarely at me.

  As a girl, I always longed to stay among them, to find my way into what I perceived as their tight sense of family. Dad wanted to as well and whenever he could, he did, leaving me with friends or neighbors while he tried to find love in the many gay bars. “I’m a poet,” he used to tell the strange young men. And in San Francisco, in 1976, this still meant something.

  My dad was also struggling to find work, any work, to supplement the Social Security paid to us after my mom’s death so he could make the monthly rent. He sold blood, did substitute teaching at the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center where I went each day, and painted their mural: “A jungle scene, the lions, monkey and giraffe looking very spiritual and mystical and happy. Quite colorful.”

  He was also struggling to find his voice as a writer, and visited different bookstores around the city in search of community. He wrote in notebooks in cafés or at home when I wasn’t jumping all over his lap, craving some kind of attention, some kind of something that he didn’t quite know how to satisfy.

  I still wanted simple things: sunny days, cartoons, and French toast, a dog or a cat, not the birds or fish which we had. In the living room, we kept a tank with guppies and kissing gouramis. Frustrated by a pet that could only be watched behind glass, whenever I was alone I grabbed the small net and scooped guppies into my hand. I watched their tiny blue and silver bodies, wet and squirming, tickling my bare palms. Sometimes a guppy would slip out of my hand onto the rug and I’d quickly retrieve it and throw it back in the tank. Sadly, a number of fish died after these games, but I still played them.

  But more than any animal, I wanted my father. I wanted Him. I wanted him all to myself. Dad tried to oblige me. We still played our games of hide-and-seek in Golden Gate Park. Sometimes we skipped together. At home, he made me spaghetti. We’d “wrestle around the room” until I was red-faced and out of breath. Then we’d watch TV or he’d read me stories: Jack and the Beanstalk or Ten Apples Up on Top.

  Other nights I accompanied him to neighborhood potlucks or to readings where adults crowded the room, a forest of legs for me to push through to find Dad against the wall deep in conversation. I’d crawl onto his lap or lie on the floor beside him, waiting for time to pass. On the drive home, I usually fell asleep. Even if I woke up I pretended to be asleep so that Dad would carry me from the parked car up the stairs of our building to my bed.

  But I tired of going out so many nights. One evening when my dad wanted to take me out with him, I told him “No, I want to stay home,” and despite the fact that there was no one to watch me, he let me stay home alone.

  “Don’t answer the door,” he said. “Just stay here and play with your Little People.” I put on a brave face. I was a big girl of five almost six. After he left, I decided to do what he might have done, like a big girl does. I would wash my hair. In the bathroom by the bathtub I found a clear bottle filled with yellow shampoo. I overturned the bottle and sticky globs poured into my hand. I then massaged the globs into my hair, like Dad did each week, sitting on the edge of our porcelain tub.

  I can’t remember if I wet my hair but I do remember it lathering into a mass of bubbles and sticky heft. I remember my head being too heavy for my body as I tried to get it under the open faucet. Here the hair seemed to drip, a mass of mess served up on my shoulders, unraveling and falling all over me. The soap dripped down onto my face and made my eyes sting and tear. I was scared because I didn’t know what to do. I cried, but no one heard me. The water kept running, the hair kept dripping, my eyes kept stinging, but no one answered. So I shut off the water and walked my heavy mess of head into the living room where I could play with my Little People and try to make the wet hair go away.

  Sometime later the door unlocked with a pop and there was Dad. I was thrilled to see him, to know that he’d returned and that I was no longer alone. But a shadow passed over his face when he saw me with my wet hair and the trail of suds and pools of water that had followed me from the bathroom into the living room.

  “Why’d you do this?” he
wanted to know.

  In the bathroom he lifted the bottle—once full, now almost empty. He wasn’t happy. He rolled his sleeves up past his elbows. He put me in the tub while he sat on the tub’s edge. He rinsed my head under the faucet and it hurt to have my hair washed out. The heavy tangles and knots pulled at my head. I started to cry because I couldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. The smell of the new paint had gone. And there we both were, with eyes stinging, hopes dashed.

  ALYSIA’S HAIR ON BEING WASHED

  Not flower sweet nor tough as seaweed

  Quiet it hangs—

  Soft, Damp Spanish Moss

  Spun fine as glass, as dreams

  And so it grows

  Unthought, uncut, unexpurged.

  No Legion of Decency hair this

  But wild unhairlike hair

  Wrapped round impossible boats

  Clinging there, growing there, aching there

  Like poems in America

  Like love

  Like life, threatened in your mermaid sea.

  O hair of my daughter

  Uncombed, unused to water

  Medusa head—

  For all that,

  Still you endure.

  6.

  IN THE FALL of 1976 my father enrolled me in the French American Bilingual School, then located at the corner of Steiner and Grove. Dad had high hopes for me at French American. It was an expensive private school filled with children of diplomats and businessmen and a far cry from the grotty world of the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center, with its hippie teachers and single moms into astrology and macramé. “I feel like she’s gotten into Harvard!” Dad wrote in his journal after I was accepted. He enlisted my grandparents to help cover the tuition. “Barbara would have liked it,” he argued. As Munca and Grumpa were both deeply committed to education, they agreed.

  French American required their students to wear a uniform of white blouse paired with a navy skirt or slacks. Since I had nothing like this in my wardrobe Dad drove us out to the Stonestown Galleria, the only mall we’d visit together. We wandered the circular racks of clothing in the children’s department as if in a maze. I click-clacked the hangers, observing the colors and textures with my fingers, while Dad occasionally examined the price tags with round eyes. We continued aimlessly until we were rescued by a saleslady with red hair and shiny teeth, who quickly sized us up as the clueless pair we were. Chatting up Dad, she learned everything about French American and their uniform. And of course, she made friends with me. “Entering first grade? That is exciting!”

  She led us to the rear of the floor and into a dressing room with large mirrors and a heavy green drape you could pull back and forth across the ceiling. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Elevator music played as I jumped around looking at my reflection and Dad fidgeted with a pack of Carlton Regulars.

  Our saleslady soon reappeared, arms stacked high with white and navy clothing. She pulled the drape closed, and with Dad’s help, I tried on everything. He zipped me in and out of polyester pants. He buttoned and tied ballooning blouses. He pulled vests and dresses over my head, and then yanked them off, my tangled hair getting caught in the buttons. Every few minutes the lady would return, always bringing more, then cheerfully removing what didn’t fit.

  Then our saleslady returned, announcing she had something “very special.” A manicured hand jutted through the dressing room curtain holding a sleeveless quilted blue jumper with a matching white blouse. “We just got this in last week!”

  I stepped into the dress and my father fastened me up, struggling with each button in the back.

  “How’re we doing there?” she asked.

  “Almost,” my father answered. “There’s a lot of buttons.”

  Dad stood behind me as I considered my reflection, then he pulled open the drapes so I could walk out. But my shoes were rooted to the dressing room floor. My eyes were focused on the girl in the mirror. On the front of my dress I could see a Holly Hobby look-alike wearing a wide-brimmed bonnet and a long dress similar in shape and style to my own. Except that this other girl was standing in profile and she was standing upside down.

  Outside the dressing room I faced the red-haired lady uncertainly. A wide smile gripped her face. She turned to Dad for a reaction and then she turned to me. My apprehension must have been evident because without my saying anything, she said: “The girl’s upside down to everyone else, but when you look down”—she motioned me to look down—“she looks just right!”

  I was still too young to doubt the lady openly, but I could tell that there was something off. The girl on the dress is upside down. This is the truth. There is no way to right her.

  Looking at the saleslady’s shiny teeth and gums, I got a tight feeling in my stomach and turned to Dad. Surely he’ll point out the absurdity of the upside-down girl. He’ll take me out of here and return us to the Haight and maybe we’ll go to the Panhandle or to Mommy Fortuna’s for dinner. But Dad just smiled and nodded at me in that stupid dress. I felt sick. I realized I was alone and yet, even alone, I knew that I was right.

  “What do you think?” the saleslady asked again.

  “Well, I think it’s very pretty,” said Dad. “You look like a real big girl.”

  “I don’t like it,” I mumbled.

  “Is it too tight in the back?” the saleslady asked. “Because we can get a bigger size.”

  “I . . . don’t . . . like it!”

  Dad woke up from his haze. He looked confused and embarrassed. The saleslady’s smile was replaced by a tight-lipped smirk. Dad avoided her eyes and walked me behind the curtain with a firm hand. He pulled off the dress, grabbed a handful of blouses, stockings, and skirts, and paid for them. We drove home in silence.

  UNLIKE THE OTHER students in my new class, I didn’t know any French. So Dad set me up with a summer tutor. I enjoyed my books, especially Babar in French: “Babar est sorti de la grande forêt et arrive près d’une ville. Il est étonné parce que ç’est la première fois qu’il voit tant de maisons.” “Babar has left the big forest and arrived at the edge of a city. He’s shocked because it’s the first time he’s seen so many homes.”

  At first-day orientation Dad introduced me to my French teacher, Hortense, but I couldn’t understand anything she said. Mornings were conducted exclusively in French. Like Babar, I felt like a true foreigner, walking on all fours, unused to the ways of civilization. What made matters worse was the fact that Dad and I arrived late nearly every day. No matter how much he tried to get me to school on time—setting the alarm, locating my one pair of shoes—we always seemed to sleep in, to run out of milk or clean stockings. We’d inevitably rush out the door and fall into the dingy VW bug out of breath. After racing down Oak Street, Dad would pull up in front of the school, move the stick shift into neutral, and take a drag from his cigarette. He’d pull me up the stairs and kiss me quickly on the cheek before pushing me through the doors of the white Victorian townhouse. Outside my classroom, I could hear the muffled voice of my French teacher inside. Pulling open the heavy wooden door, her voice suddenly loud and inescapable, I hurried to my seat at the back of the class.

  I watched as Hortense moved up and down the aisle that split the classroom, her arms folded behind her back, her triangle of frizzy hair bouncing with each step. Behind rectangular wire frames, Hortense had deep-set, suspicious eyes. She surveyed the students, then she found me.

  “Alysia . . . quel jour est-il?”

  I stared at Hortense dumbly, then looked away.

  “Ah-lee-see-YAH.” Her heels tapped on the wooden floor as she approached my desk and stood before me in flesh-colored stockings and a brown wool skirt. Her mouth was tight and thin: “Quel. Jour. Eh-TEEL?”

  The liaison of “t’il” was quick and sharp like a whip. Involuntarily I straightened my back. But the question was still impenetrable, like a tangle that couldn’t be combed out.

  “I don’t know.”

  “En fran-ÇAIS, s’il vous
plaît.”

  “Je . . . Je . . .” A girl kicked my seat and I heard laughing.

  “Attention!” Hortense commanded sharply, and the class was again silent.

  Hortense pivoted on one foot and turned. “Quelqu’un?” And a sea of hands shot up. She called on a girl in the front row.

  “Il est lundi, Madame Hortense.”

  “Très bien, Nicola.”

  Nicola wore two parallel dark brown braids down her back and a shelf of bangs cut straight across her forehead. Her pleated skirt fanned around small knees. Her argyle socks were pulled over firm calves, which crossed discreetly under her chair, ending in polished loafers, perched as if ready to bolt at a moment’s notice.

  I looked down. My own blouse was rumpled, tucked unevenly into my navy skirt. My chalky white stockings were too small and crept down my backside.

  The next morning I asked my dad to tie my hair up like Nicola’s, but braids were beyond him. He managed a lopsided ponytail but fastened it with a sticky rubber band pulled from around our morning Chronicle. When he removed it that night, he took several strands of my hair as well.

  September 12, 1976: Alysia’s been having quite an adjustment to her new school. Friday she spilled her juice and had to wipe it up. Monday, she skinned her knee and a girl behind her was kicking her chair. She says she can’t understand her French teacher. A lot of groaning in the mornings. One night she kept me awake grinding her teeth.

  Dad, in the meantime, was finally finding his voice as a writer at Cloud House. The building was located on the corner of 16th and Guerrero and we’d pass it on the way to a food co-op in the Mission where, while Dad shopped for organic produce, I roamed the aisles, stealing carob stars from giant plexiglass bins.