Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  Dan White served five years, one month, and nine days in prison. Less than a year after his parole ended, he took his own life, using a garden hose to funnel carbon monoxide into his parked white Buick sedan.

  10.

  I FIRST SAW 545 Ashbury at night. The previous tenant was a friend of Dad’s who, coming off a painful breakup with his longtime live-in lover, sold us the apartment’s contents for an even $200. He was eager to move to South America with as little as possible, he told us, and wanted to be rid of the “bad energy.” On the balcony he had kept his dog, a musty Irish wolfhound named Molly who’d chewed the doorknob down to a ragged nub. Molly’s gray fur lined the wall-to-wall carpet of the balcony bedroom.

  “This will be your room,” Dad said. “We can replace the doorknob and vacuum the rug. Won’t you like to have a balcony? Like a real princess!” In giving me the only real bedroom in the apartment, Dad was giving me the gift of privacy and space, a gift he himself hungered for but which he knew was important for a growing girl.

  We moved into the Victorian apartment in January 1979. In the picture of the Grateful Dead posing with the Haight-Ashbury street sign, ours is the balconied building to the right of the band, the one that looks like it’s wearing a witch’s hat. Photos like this would later turn our corner into a mecca for soul-searchers the world over, crowding the street with beggars and camera-snapping tourists. But as the 1970s were coming to a close, 545 Ashbury was ours alone, a beautiful new beginning.

  Our first year in the apartment, Dad worked to make it ours, painting the walls of my bedroom my favorite color, lavender, and building me a pine loft bed for my ninth birthday. Each night, I climbed the rickety ladder, lay down on my cut-foam mattress, and looked through the eye-level windows onto Ashbury Street at the many street dramas unfolding, as if on a stage.

  Adjacent to my room and separated by a pair of French doors was the living room, which doubled as Dad’s bedroom and office. He set up a writing desk in the rounded windows facing Ashbury Street, which he separated from the bedroom by hanging a large square of yellowed Irish lace, stretched taut between four sticks of bamboo. He built a makeshift bookshelf against the wall, stacking orange and gray milk crates separated with horizontal plywood boards that gave me splinters whenever I ran my fingers over them. Over the years, he filled these with layers of books: review copies from small poetry presses and rare and dusty paperbacks he picked up poking through his favorite city bookstores.

  The double door frame of Dad’s room led directly into the dining room, which was dominated by a twelve-foot-wide spool table. The spool was our dinner table, our meeting table, our drawing table, our everything table. I’ve seen similar tables sealed but ours never was, and over the next fifteen years the crumbs from a thousand meals collected in the table’s many cracks and grooves.

  A swinging door separated the dining room from the kitchen, which had a bright window over the sink but could fit no more than two people at a time, uncomfortably. The kitchen was painted caramel, with an avocado green refrigerator, a chrome sink, and across from it an ancient oven. The oven had no vent and the walls were streaked with grease, especially where they met the ceiling. But the grime was offset by a large, cheery star someone had cut out of cardboard, spray-painted silver, and hung high over the oven. Seen through the open kitchen door, it seemed to watch over us.

  We’d spend close to fifteen years living here, the longest we’d live anywhere.

  Because there was so much within walking distance of 545 Ashbury, we stopped driving the car. Dad parked it two blocks from our house on Oak Street and there it remained from the spring of 1979 into the summer of 1980. Because he neglected to update the tags, parking tickets quickly and thickly collected under the wipers. Walking to the Panhandle, I could see them fluttering in the wind, a swarm of white moths, until one day we discovered the car had been towed.

  “What a relief,” Dad sighed. “That car was nothing but trouble!”

  We never paid to retrieve the bug, nor did we bother to get a new car. Dad would never get around to teaching me how to drive; I wouldn’t learn until after my fortieth birthday. Not that it mattered. More than half a dozen buses and streetcars were within walking distance. For a nickel, I could get anywhere in the city with a transfer that lasted the whole day. Now that I was older, I could navigate public transportation on my own.

  Riding the bus to school every day and to my friend Kathy Moe’s on the weekends, I became fluent in the language of Muni. Though technically faster than the 7 Haight and 6 Parnassus, I knew it was never worth taking the 71 Limited home as the after-work crowds inevitably slowed service. I knew that I could board the N Judah in the middle of the car before the Dubose Tunnel then exit the streetcar just after, thereby skipping the fare when in a pinch. I learned how to get to Fisherman’s Wharf from Union Square on the cable car without paying. And if I was waiting for a bus or a trolley from behind a hill, I learned to listen for the sound of the electric current, like the snapping of a giant rubber band, from the cable above or the track below. This sound would announce the bus’s imminent arrival, like an inverse echo. I loved being able to read the Muni lines this way. It felt like eavesdropping on the internal workings of the city’s body.

  One afternoon, after getting off the bus from school, I reached into my pocket for my key and it was gone. I searched my backpack but found nothing. I rang our bell but nobody answered. I moved my finger down to the round white button next to #2, and after briefly hovering, pressed hard.

  Robert Pruzan lived in a tiny studio across the hall from us. I didn’t know Robert but I knew his garden, which I’d discovered my first afternoon at 545. Exploring the back stairway alone, I followed a dark and narrow basement corridor ending in a latched door. After unlatching the door I entered the most extraordinary oasis filled with rare and exotic blooms: orchids and lilies and jagged bonsai. I loved playing in the garden. Our electric and gas meters became knobs on a time machine. By setting the dials to the prehistoric age I would arrive next to a swamp, where I’d run from screeching pterodactyls and hide beneath the fronds. An avid horticulturalist, Robert tended gardens all over the city and was famous for his landscaping behind the Haight’s Shady Grove Café. He worked to prevent the thinning of Buena Vista Park, and later inspired the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Robert?” I yelled into the whistling intercom.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Alysia. From apartment one. I left my keys at school!”

  After buzzing me in, Robert greeted me at his apartment door with a smile. He was small and trim, outfitted in tight jeans, t-shirt, and vest. With his neat beard and mischievous laugh, he possessed an impish quality. I wasn’t surprised when I later learned he’d played the fool in a 1969 Roundabout Theater production of King Lear.

  “Why hello, A-lyyy-sia. Come on in!”

  After a quick exchange, Robert walked me through his apartment to the back stairs so that I could check if my back door was unlocked. It was bolted shut, so we returned to his apartment, where I waited until Dad came home. Robert had spent much of the 1960s in Paris studying mime with a protégé of Marcel Marceau and had a delicate, precise way of moving through the narrow confines of his studio. Between my repeated calls home, Robert showed me his collection of rocks and shells, theatrically explaining the provenance of each. When I told him I was hungry, Robert fed me vinegar-soaked artichoke hearts from a jar, the only snack food his refrigerator would yield. Together we watched Entertainment Tonight on his flickering kitchen TV until Dad’s return.

  Since I often lost my keys, I got to know Robert pretty well. It seemed like he was always around. I later learned he lived off a family inheritance, never having to bother with an office job, and spent days in the curtained darkroom he’d built inside his closet, developing and printing photographs he’d take roaming the city streets—Gay Pride parades, Harvey Milk rallies, street fairs. Many of these pictures were fo
r the Bay Area Reporter, one of the city’s gay weeklies, where he worked as a photojournalist, but most were for himself.

  The walls of Robert’s apartment were covered with framed portraits of notables he encountered and often befriended: the writers James Baldwin and Thom Gunn, the disco diva Sylvester. In the corners I spied his cameras and wide-eyed lenses and long-legged stands, all looking like pieces of a disassembled robot.

  One afternoon, a few weeks after meeting Robert, I was playing dress-up. I pulled on a long white sparkly gown and dug through the remains of Dad’s collection of scarves and jewelry from the days when he still did drag. Around my neck, I draped the heavy jeweled Egyptian necklace inlaid with amber and teal stones. Around my wrist, I snapped a cuff bracelet overlaid with faux brass leaves. On top of my head I fastened a long strip of lace. I studied my reflection in the bathroom mirror and, satisfied with my transformation, searched for Dad, whom I found loudly typing at his desk, a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside him. He smiled at me appreciatively but, fingers on the keys, soon returned to his typing. I then remembered Robert and crossed the hall.

  I knocked on his door, listening to the muffled sound of opera until he answered. He looked me up and down, the opera now blaring behind him in the doorway, and his face broke into a toothy grin.

  “Well, look at you! Okay if I take your picture?”

  I nodded enthusiastically.

  San Francisco, year unknown. Photo by Robert Pruzan. Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

  He turned into his apartment to fetch his Nikon. When he reappeared, he led me to the carpeted hallway that connected our apartments. I posed, chin up, my arms outstretched dramatically, left one up, right one down, both hands clasping the banister stairs. A few days later, he handed my dad an eight-by-ten print of our session, a picture he called “Alysia in Communion Clothes” and which Dad later published in one of his magazines. Looking at the photo now, I notice my Snoopy watch visible under my glittery sleeve and am surprised to see how small I look against the staircase banister, much smaller and more self-conscious than I felt myself to be at the time.

  In the late 1980s, a new landlord forced Robert out of his rent-controlled studio. We lost touch and his fabulous garden was overtaken by weeds. Before then, I called on Robert so often, big-eyed and wanting, that I must have been a pest, but he never gave me that impression. With his Nikon and later his Polaroid, he patiently documented my best dress-up sessions and even took a picture of my cat the day we brought her home from the pound. Robert always made me feel welcome in his apartment, as though I were the most fascinating nine-year-old in the world.

  IN THE EARLY 1980S, Dad had no shortage of writing work. His position as columnist and editor at Poetry Flash brought offers for book reviews and interviews with local gay papers, a magazine based in LA called The Advocate, and several poetry periodicals across the country. But while this work steadily improved his reputation, it provided little money. The social exchange between writers and editors, which valued ideas over economic concerns, helped build a culture that thrived on, and appreciated, art and thinking. It was one of the great things about this era of San Francisco. But we still needed to pay our bills.

  To supplement his income, Dad started doing market research from a tiny cubicle in San Francisco’s financial district, a job he’d keep for years. In especially lean months, he shaved money off our rent by vacuuming the halls of our apartment building. This work led to a few jobs cleaning high-rises across town. I remember climbing Nob Hill to a particularly ornate building. While Dad got to work, I lay down on the wall-to-wall carpeting and propped myself up on my elbows so I could finish my homework. Looking out the window, I admired the views of downtown, which was in the process of being “Manhattanized” by Mayor Feinstein. The buildings of the Embarcadero were lit around the edges and looked like Christmas presents. In my ears, I could hear the roar of the vacuum. I turned to Dad as he awkwardly wrestled with the extension cord of an industrial carpet cleaner, and I felt a mixture of amusement and pity. “Are you okay?” I asked before moving to help him untangle the thick, veiny cords.

  I later learned that he took these odd jobs to help pay for new literary ventures. Now that we were living alone and spared roommate drama, Dad brought real focus to his creative work. As editor of Poetry Flash, he tapped into the incredible diversity and vitality of the city’s poetry scene. He oversaw several special issues including “West Coast Black Writing” (September 1979), “American Indian Poets of California” (October 1980), the “Grand Piano” reading series (February 1981), and “Gay Writing” (March 1981). Then, in January 1980, he launched SOUP, laying out its mission in the debut issue:

  To be in the soup! I found myself in it when I started writing editors: “Gee I like yr mag but why don’t you stress history, ideas, politics more; tackle deep & scary subjects; publish more of so & so.” They’d reply: “Sounds like it’s time you start your own mag.” So here it is.

  Dad conceived of SOUP as a way to showcase new directions in writing. He envisioned a literary magazine that would be both inclusive and progressive, incorporating interviews with and work from gay and lesbian writers (Judy Grahn), minority writers (Luisah Teish), transgressive writers (Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker), as well as older figures who inspired these newer works (Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac). Our neighbor Robert even contributed photos.

  As this was years before the Internet, Dad pulled together his own money to typeset, print, and distribute the magazine. He hoped he’d recoup the cost in sales. The first issue ended up $1,800 in the hole, which was a lot of money for us. With his many jobs and daily market research work, the stress was considerable, as evident in a cartoon letter he wrote to John Dale.

  Steve Abbott, January 1980

  Despite the stress, Dad found his calling editing SOUP. When it came to promoting his own work—his comic strips and books of poetry—Dad could be quite shy. This reticence was left over from his formative hippie days, when self-promotion, even professionalism, were looked down on as bourgeois. But when it came to promoting other writers, my father had no such hesitations. In his interviews and criticism as editor of Poetry Flash and now SOUP, Dad fiercely pushed other writers’ work, especially if he believed the perspective was sharp, new, and underexposed. He was among the first to seriously evaluate the work of Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, but when their fame surpassed his, he felt left in the cold.

  Some months after SOUP came out, Dad and a friend, an older gay writer named Bruce Boone, were walking down the street when my father pointed out how all the writers they knew were white. Dad and Bruce had just completed a two-week seminar with the Marxist literary critic Fred Jameson and were inspired to ignite change, especially in light of the recent inauguration of Ronald Reagan and the self-declared Moral Majority that had helped elect him. “Well, what should we do about it?” Bruce asked. After discussing several ideas, they decided to put together a two-day conference, which they’d call Left/Write—a play on both military lockstep and the lefty orientation of the writers they hoped would take part. The goal was to bring together writers with divergent, and often competing, aesthetic agendas, in the hope that doing so would foster “an activist sense of Leftist unity.”

  Over two hundred people crowded the Noe Valley Ministry in February 1981. There were workshops for “Criticism as a Political Tool,” “The Political Impact of Lesbian and Gay Writing,” “Radical Asian-American Writing,” and more. Ron Silliman, the only participating Language poet, implored the audience to “leave our aesthetic differences at the door just as cowboys used to leave their guns at the door.” But guns were drawn. Many panels ended in screaming arguments, yet all were sold out.

  In the decade before the conference, these different coalitions had held rallies and protests for their individual causes. Left/Write was important because it brought the groups together in conversation with one another, some for the first time. The ev
ent inspired future identity-oriented conferences, including Out/Write. Though Left/Write gave him no financial reward, Dad was proud to have fathered it.

  DAD’S INCREASING literary commitments meant I had even more afternoons and evenings to myself. More often than not I’d return from school to a scribbled note, and either a Swanson’s TV dinner in the freezer or five dollars to buy myself something in the neighborhood. If I didn’t want to pester Robert, I set up interviews with our gray tabby, Heidi, so named because of her tendency to hide under the furniture whenever I entered the room. I’d ask Heidi a question, then pinch her ear with my fingernails to elicit a response, capturing the exchange on Dad’s playback tape recorder. But this activity only increased her elusiveness.

  I was about ten or eleven when I became expert at inviting myself to dinner at friends’ homes. Taking the bus to and from French American each day, I made friends with several kids who traveled the same route, a few of whom lived only a short walk or bus ride from my home.

  I became especially close with Yayne [YAI-nee], the daughter of an Ethiopian dad and an African American mother. Because she was born on the first day of spring, she explained, she was named Yayne Abeba, “flower of my eye” in Ethiopian. She also told me she was descended from African royalty, a detail I unquestioningly accepted, sealing our friendship. Soon we’d greet each other in the halls of French American yelling our entire names.

  “Yayne Abebe Mengeshe Wondafarow!”

  “Alysia-Rebeccah Barbara Abbott!”

  Yayne’s parents owned a local sporting goods store and after school, we bopped around until her mom eventually growled, “You’re driving me crazy!” and sent us out onto Haight Street. We hung out at the local library, reading back issues of Rolling Stone and National Lampoon, but almost always ended up at Kiss My Sweet, a Haight Street café landmarked by a pair of puckered neon lips glowing pink in twin windows. Here we drank peppermint tea sweetened with gobs of honey. Sitting over steaming teacups, we squeezed the café’s honey bear so that the honey would “percolate” in time with the Maxwell House jingle: “Da na na na na na / Na na na na na.”