Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  Conservatives like Anita Bryant and California senator John Briggs feared that gay teachers would inculcate kids into a “gay lifestyle,” but Dad made no such efforts. In 1975, he wrote:

  I’m not trying to get her to grow up gay. I’m not hiding my gayness to get her to grow up straight. But she can see that there are many orientations and many ways to be. Hopefully, by the time she grows up we will have a society where those dichotomies of whether you’re gay or straight, a man or a woman aren’t so important. Where people can just be as they feel most natural and comfortable in being.

  I always and only saw that people spent time with the people they loved.

  9.

  DAD’S FRIEND and sometimes publisher, Ken Weichel, heard of all the trouble we were having with Lynda and Krista and offered to set us up temporarily in a pair of rooms in the house he shared with his girlfriend, Patti, in Merced Heights. In May 1978, we moved in.

  It was a long drive out to the house—past San Francisco State, past the Stonestown Galleria, and then past a restaurant called the Doggie Diner that featured a fifteen-foot-high statue of a dachshund wearing a chef’s hat. But Ken’s two-story house was pretty, with wooden shingles and a small patch of grass in the back, and it was quiet. You could hear birds outside the window, and from the kitchen you could see a narrow strip of ocean. When Dad told me we were going to move into the “Doggie Diner house,” I exclaimed, “Goody goody gumdrops!”

  Despite my initial excitement, I was lonely. I had few friends to play with and spent most of my time after school by myself, since Dad was always writing. Determined to make my room feel more mine, Dad asked Ken if we could paint a mural on the walls. With Dad’s help I painted a magic island with palm trees and galloping unicorns and a rainbow that stretched across the sky. It was a place I called Ecnarf—France spelled backward—and I wrote the name in small green letters. I decided to add some water to the paint on the tops of the palm trees, to give the impression that the trees were blowing in the wind. It looked good. Hoping to replicate the effect with the herd of white unicorns, I applied water to their legs, but it just turned them into a large gray smudge. Still, I loved my mural, my room, my own safe place.

  Meanwhile, Dad worked on his verse, eventually pulling together the writing that would form his third book of poetry, Stretching the Agape Bra. Through his readings at Cloud House and the events he organized around the city, including a reading for the 1978 Gay Pride parade, he was starting to make a name for himself. When a friend asked if he’d like to take over editing the calendar of Poetry Flash, a well-known West Coast poetry newsletter, Dad jumped in. When they arrived at the staff meeting at the paper’s East Bay headquarters a few days later, they discovered that the old staff, overworked and exhausted, had decided to quit en masse.

  Richard Hoover of Hoover Printing Co., to whom seventy-five dollars was owed, offered to take over as publisher, but he needed a managing editor. After a lengthy interview, he asked my dad to take the job and organize a new staff. Dad was initially hesitant but agreed after he was promised he could also write a monthly column—more work, but one that would put forth his own voice.

  Just after the meeting, my father walked to the nearby house of Joyce Jenkins. She was a local poet who’d directed the 1978 San Francisco Poetry Festival. Dad knew her by reputation as an excellent worker and as someone strong in areas where he was weak—notably, attention to detail. He invited her to join him as an associate editor and she accepted.

  Together Dad and Joyce turned the monthly around. When they started, Poetry Flash was in debt. It was also criticized for being conservative and elitist. Over the next five years they would quadruple the monthly’s circulation (from 1,500 to 8,000) and expand its size and scope. They worked to avoid favoring any single poetry clique, instead seeking coverage of the best writers in all poetry groups. Sometimes Dad would attend seven or more readings a week, including at Cloud House and North Beach, where he’d been a regular, but also women’s readings, gay readings, African American readings, and Asian readings.

  Dad’s involvement in Poetry Flash soon became all-consuming. I would often accompany him on his monthly trips to the East Bay for meetings at Hoover Printing. I remember the loud “ja-junk, ja-junk” of the press as we descended into the basement offices, the heady smell of ink, and the barren industrial landscape of downtown Oakland. There was absolutely nothing for an eight-year-old to do on these visits, and I felt besieged by boredom. I preferred the meetings held at Joyce’s big house in Berkeley. She and my dad would stretch layouts across the big driftwood table in her living room, talking details, while I played with Joyce’s refrigerator magnets and a fluffy cat named Jessica.

  Joyce had wavy brown hair, large-framed glasses, and a generous smile. She was pretty and sweet, and always feeding me snacks. I liked her immediately. If Dad was spending so much time with her, I reasoned, maybe something romantic would develop. I imagined their marrying and our moving into her big house with its grand views of the Berkeley Hills. When my cousins, Judson and Jeremy, grilled me about Dad’s romantic life that summer while I was at my grandparents’ in Kewanee, Illinois, I even turned her into his girlfriend.

  Most often, if anyone (usually teachers or parents of friends) asked why Dad had never remarried, I’d lower my chin and talk about my mother’s death, suggesting that Dad was still too grief-stricken to remarry. I hoped to convince my listener, and maybe even myself, that my dad loved my mom too much to replace her. This strategy, I later learned, worked doubly well with curious strangers. Not only did it throw them off the scent of my dad’s sexuality, but it refocused the conversation on my mother’s death.

  “How did she die?”

  “A car accident. A car hit her car and she flew into the street.”

  This story was so unpleasant that it deterred further prying. But with my preteen cousins, I knew this tactic wouldn’t work.

  We were sitting in my grandparents’ wood-paneled den. I could hear the heavy summer rain drumming the back porch, prohibiting our daily swim. The three of us were snacking while watching TV on my grandparents’ massive set. As usual, the brothers were teasing each other, as boys did at that age: “You’re gay.” “No, you’re gay.” Then Judson turned to me, sitting on the recliner across from him: “Your dad’s gay.” They looked at each other and laughed. I was gnawing on a frozen Milky Way, one of scores of candy bars Grumpa kept stocked in the garage freezer for us.

  “No, he’s not.”

  “Oh yeah? He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, he does. He does have a girlfriend.”

  “What’s her name, then?”

  “Joyce.”

  In truth, as much as I liked to fantasize about Joyce and my dad’s coupling, I came to accept that no romance existed between them. In fact, when she did walk down the aisle with her actual fiancé, I was her flower girl. But I had a name and a portrait to go with the name. I knew that, armed with details, my lie would be stronger, and I stuck to it vigorously. “Her name is Joyce and she has brown hair and glasses!” My cousins never asked about my dad again.

  MY FATHER wrote a monthly column in Poetry Flash called “Up into the Aether,” a reference to Jack Spicer’s “Heads of the Town Up to the Aether.” The column, full of historical and contemporary literary gossip, alternately delighted and outraged San Francisco’s poetry community. The poet and playwright Ishmael Reed called Dad the “Hedda Hopper of the poetry world” because of items like these:

  Gregory Corso’s back from Europe. I know because he came to my reading with Jack Mueller at the Grand Piano & tried his best to disrupt it. Didn’t succeed of course. “Well, Jack,” I said afterwards, “When the big guns come after us it must show we’re starting to get somewhere.”

  About a Modern Language Association convention, he wrote, “Academic critics continue to get fat spinning webs of Confucian pedantry while the real movers and shakers of poetry live at the edge of poverty.”

  Accor
ding to my father, even the most well-intentioned of these remarks could cause umbrage. Soon he was publicly confronted by snarling poets who felt themselves to be unjustly used. On one occasion, a disgruntled poet named Leon Miller decided to stage a sit-in at Poetry Flash. Unfortunately, he barged into a real estate office several doors away.

  Better-known poets, however, realized that Poetry Flash now had one of the widest circulations of any literary journal in the area, and started to treat my dad with the respect that had previously eluded him. Dad was amused to find himself referred to in magazines in faraway cities and countries as “a leading force in San Francisco poetry.” He was amused because, since he’d taken over as editor of Poetry Flash, he had little time for his own poetry. He was inundated with offers to read and with requests to contribute to special issues of magazines that had previously scorned his unsolicited manuscripts with the curtest of replies. “How ironic,” he wrote in his journal, “that fame should pursue me when once again I am doing nothing and plagued with self-doubts about where I want to go from here.”

  In the pages of Poetry Flash, my father was also the first to seriously consider a new poetry movement, which would come to dominate the Bay Area scene over the next several years. Language Poetry, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry as it came to be known from the magazine bearing that name, evolved in response to the “raw” performance-oriented poetry that the Beat poets and their descendants were doing.

  At first, my father found the Language poets appealing for their intellectual disputes. “Our concern’s for what’s on the page, not on the stage,” the poet Ron Silliman told him. This was clearly true, for unlike other poets in town, most Language poets read in a flat, rapid-fire monotone. Even on the page, what most interested them was a language so deconstructed as to be almost totally removed from ordinary discourse. Unlike Dad’s North Beach and Cloud House friends, these writers criticized each other’s work relentlessly and saw themselves as advancing the Modernist project, in the tradition of George Oppen and Gertrude Stein. If nothing else, this was a great foil for Dad’s own writing, especially in the years to come.

  WHEN OUR OLD VW bug broke down again, Dad thought I could ride the bus from school back to Ken’s place on my own. I was almost eight years old and very tall. He sat me down at our dining room table with the Muni map, carefully drawing out my route. Delivering myself from school to home would take nearly one hour on two buses and a streetcar.

  I remember a great stretching openness, a nothing of space that yawned between French American and our home at Ken’s. The last leg of the ride, on the M Oceanview, was the most tedious. I’d doodle in my notebooks and seek whatever entertainment I could find. The streets in west San Francisco are named alphabetically—Anza, Balboa, Cabrillo—and as the streetcar wound south I loved to hear the conductor call out the stops in his nasal voice, especially “Wa-wo-na, Wa-wo-na.” I perked up each time we passed Larsen Park at the corner of Ulloa and 19th Avenue, where a decommissioned US Navy F-8 fighter jet sat on a wide expanse of green as a play structure. From the window I’d watch kids climb all over and even inside the plane while their parents sat on nearby benches. Each day I’d pass that plane, and each day I wanted to get off the bus and ride it.

  Then one afternoon as we approached Larsen Park, the sunlight flashed on the jet’s platinum nose. Just as the conductor was about to close the doors, I jumped off. A thrill of transgression passed through me as I made my way toward the plane, which looked so much larger from the vantage point of the ground. I set my pack down on the soft grass, climbed one of the two ladders leading into the plane, and explored its interior tunnel and many knobs. Climbing onto the silver wing, I lay down, imagining what it would be like to fly above the city. When I first arrived crowds of kids had swarmed around me, but after a short while the sky began to darken and mothers and fathers started to call names and grab hands.

  I headed to the bus bench to wait for my train home. An L Taravel and two K Inglesides passed without any sign of the M Oceanview. When a second L pulled up, I decided to board. The L wouldn’t take me home, but I knew it traveled some of the same stops as the M and figured it’d be worth getting closer to home. When the L turned toward the zoo I quickly got off, knowing that was the wrong way.

  I had to find my way back to the M Oceanview, but was daunted by the prospect of walking back to my original stop, especially as it was now getting dark. When the San Francisco dampness sets in, it chills you to the bone. You can button your sweater, zip your jacket, and still not shake the cold. Just then, a car pulled up to the curb. From the window, a man motioned me over.

  “Are you lost?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Shields and Beverly.”

  “That’s not very far. I can drive you. Get in.”

  I considered his offer. I didn’t know this man, but he had a nice smile. I just wanted to be home. As I was about to open the door to his car, a woman swept in beside me. “Excuse me, little girl, can you come over here with me?”

  She led me by the hand back toward the bus stop and called over her shoulder, “I’ve got her, thanks!” I turned my head and watched the car drive away. “I didn’t want you to get in that car with a strange man,” she told me. She wore a pantsuit and purse and had curly hair and large urgent eyes. I didn’t know her but I felt like I did.

  “Are you okay? Are you lost?” she asked me.

  “I got on the wrong bus.”

  “Where do you live? What’s your name? Do you know your phone number?”

  I told her what I could but I couldn’t remember my phone number. I felt odd, a mixture of embarrassment and guilt. I’d made a mistake and was now tied to this strange woman, whom I needed to make everything better.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  The lady walked me across the street to a nearby gas station where she managed to find Ken’s number in a phone book. He and Patti came to pick me up. I got into the backseat and watched as the lady exchanged some words with Ken and then waved goodbye to me as the car pulled off.

  “Alysia’s too young to ride the bus alone,” Patti told Ken on the drive back. He just shrugged his shoulders, keeping his eyes on the road. Then Patti turned around in her seat so that she could face me and said, “I know it’s not my place to say so, but I think it’s irresponsible of your dad.”

  Back at home, I found Dad waiting in the front room. He’d returned while Patti and Ken were picking me up. After Ken calmly explained to him what had happened, Dad crouched down and looked me in the eye.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “Why did you get off the bus?”

  I rushed into Dad’s arms. He started to scold and lecture but with my head now buried in the folds of his flannel shirt, I could no longer hear what he was saying. I knew we were going to move again. Pressing my ear against his chest, I breathed in his familiar smell and I didn’t care.

  THAT NOVEMBER, the San Francisco that Dad and I knew ended. Within the span of two weeks, a pair of violent tragedies pierced the heart of the city. On November 18, the Reverend Jim Jones, founder of the People’s Temple and a major political force in local politics, led a mass suicide of his followers in the jungles of Guyana. Over 900 people died, mostly poor black San Franciscans, including 270 children, all poisoned by cyanide-laced grape Kool-Aid. The Jonestown Massacre, as it came to be called, was the largest single-day loss of American life in peacetime until the events of September 11, 2001.

  Nine days later, on the morning of November 27, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were gunned down in their offices. At first there was only confusion in City Hall. Reporters suspected that the People’s Temple had dispatched assassins to kill the mayor, just as they had killed California representative Leo Ryan when he flew into Guyana. Then Supervisor Dianne Feinstein appeared, well dressed but ashen faced, and broke the news to a crowd of city workers and reporters: “As president of the Board of Supervisors, it’s my duty to make thi
s announcement: Both Mayor Moscone . . . and Supervisor Harvey Milk . . . have been shot . . . and killed.” The crowd, which included several seasoned war reporters, erupted into gasps and sobs before Feinstein continued, “The suspect is . . . Supervisor Dan White.”

  A conservative Irish Catholic, White had been elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977, the year of Anita Bryant’s cries to “save the children,” by campaigning as a “defender of traditional values.” Before the morning of the murders, White was up all night eating cupcakes and drinking Coke, a detail that would be used by his lawyers.

  Word of the deaths rippled across San Francisco. City schools announced the news on loudspeakers. At French American, my third-grade class spent the afternoon writing condolence letters to Gina Moscone, the mayor’s widow.

  At home, Dad learned the news watching television. He immediately burst into tears. “First Jonestown,” he wrote in his journal. “Now this.”

  By early afternoon, crowds had assembled at City Hall. Among the flowers and pictures, someone placed a handmade sign: “Happy, Anita?”

  White’s lawyers defended his actions by arguing that his diet of Cokes and Twinkies had pushed him over the edge. The jury, scrubbed of gays and other “new” San Franciscans, was moved by the recording of White’s teary confession, hearing in it the cry of a broken man. Though he’d crawled through the basement window of City Hall, shot George Moscone four times, reloaded his gun, and then crossed the hall and pumped five bullets into Harvey Milk, the last at point-blank range, Dan White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, the lightest possible sentence.

  When news of the verdict reached the streets of San Francisco, thousands of protestors descended on City Hall, smashing windows and torching a row of police cars. As a man ignited the last police car, he shouted to a nearby reporter, “Make sure you put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies!” Police retaliated later that night by taking their billy clubs into the Castro.