Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  That spring, I was running through the dials on my stereo when I discovered a new radio station: KQAK, the Quake. The station played music that sounded like nothing I’d heard before, certainly not like the Def Leppard and Michael Jackson then dominating the FM dial. The Quake played music that celebrated weirdos and loners, music that addressed the darkness of our atomic age with a peppy, synthesized beat. This music spoke of disillusion and fear, what the band Tears for Fears called a mad world. I couldn’t get enough.

  Every day after school I’d retreat to my room and switch on the Quake, scribbling down the name of each band the DJ played. The Quake broke local bands (Romeo Void and the Call), but mostly played British bands before their albums were released stateside: Scritti Politti, Depeche Mode, the Cure, Peter Shilling, the Smiths, New Order, Tears for Fears, and Duran Duran. I especially loved these British bands, with their exotic provenance and sexually ambiguous lead singers. The harder I worked to learn about them, the more attached I felt to their music.

  At Wauzi and Rough Trade Records, I stared longingly at import albums and twelve-inch singles I couldn’t afford to buy on my allowance. So I set up Dad’s tape recorder, the one he used for his interviews, and, placing it at the foot of one of our tall stereo speakers, captured hour after hour of the Quake, stopping for each commercial and then hitting “record” once the commercial ended. Most of these tapes were muddy, riddled with clicks and distortions. But for me it was audio gold. I loved the tapes, because I could play them whenever I wanted, on my stereo and, after my thirteenth birthday, on a cheap Walkman.

  By myself in my room, headphones on, volume up, I spent hours familiarizing myself with Thatcher’s depressed England, made romantic by the Smiths’ angst. Bands like Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears conjured an industrial landscape with synthesizers and electric drums, the sounds of pipes being knocked together. This world sounded like the future, and by listening I felt like I was a part of this future. More importantly, this was a world I was choosing instead of one I was simply inheriting from my father.

  At the newsstand, I hunted down imports like the NME, Melody Maker, and Smash Hits!, skimming the pages for any news of my beloveds, delighting in the discovery of their faces, their hair, their habits. I couldn’t afford to buy the magazines so I hungrily absorbed every detail I could, furiously flipping pages until the shopkeeper kicked me out.

  New Wave, as it was called, was a world where cool boys wore eyeliner and cool girls wore men’s clothes. At thirteen, I was still skinny, flat, and late to bleed. Here was an androgynous aesthetic I could embrace with stylish ease.

  I cut my hair boy short with a peekaboo curtain hanging over one eye, and I started to borrow liberally from Dad’s closet. I donned his old button-down shirts and a pair of his Levi’s, the man’s waist fastened with a large paper clip, the knees ripped, the thighs decorated with my in-class doodles. I wore a single silver bat earring dangling on a chain from my left ear, a pair of cuffed leather Beatle boots, and a lapel pin I picked up on Haight Street: “Punk Preppy.” The centerpiece of my uniform was Dad’s 1940s gray fedora, which I kept firmly planted on my head, removing it only to shower or sleep.

  BY MY THIRTEENTH YEAR I had outgrown most of my preteen friends. I saw less of Yayne, who’d left French American, transferring into a public school. Kathy Moe was getting into a heavy metal scene, favoring thick foundation and spraying her feathered hair into stiff armor. She started hanging out with the WPODs (White Punks on Dope), a Derby-wearing gang that ruled the Sunset district and had a taste for LSD that I didn’t share. My other girlfriends, who’d been so good to me at eleven and twelve, hosting me for sleepovers and pancakes, now just seemed too good, with their ribbon-threaded barrettes and Miss Piggy wall calendars.

  I gravitated toward a new set of girls at French American who, like me, loved David Bowie, the Cure, and Duran Duran. Each girl was a child of divorce and each possessed an edgy humor and sense of style. Niki routinely gave one of us the DF (Dumb Fuck) award each day for stupid behavior. Andrea wore a permanent scowl, her preppy V-neck sweaters turned backward, her eyes rimmed in black.

  At lunch, the five of us would meet in the back stairs of the parking lot behind French American, and after school, we’d ride the Haight Street bus to my place. Where I’d once been ashamed of bringing friends to my apartment, I now knew it was something cool I could share. If the weather was warm enough, we’d situate ourselves on the thick ledge of balcony overlooking Ashbury Street and Anne-Marie and Andrea would smoke Marlboro Lights pilfered from their moms’ purses or single Export-A’s bought at Pipe Dreams around the corner. Long-legged Anne-Marie, the oldest and most experienced among us, would twist the rings on her fingers and sweetly giggle as she told us about the latest with her boyfriend, while Camille, her blond bob wrapped in a long white scarf, coolly looked on.

  Sometimes Dad would be home, scratching away in his spiral notebook, but most often he was out. Either way, I was very protective of his space, not allowing anyone into his room, which I closed off behind a trifold screen. I didn’t do this so much out of respect for his privacy as for my own. I still thought I could cordon off all that I couldn’t control. I was convinced that his orientation, our “weirdness,” would be revealed in his mess—certainly in his bookshelves, where anthologies with titles like Man Muse and Men on Men could easily be spotted. Even in my circle of enlightened outsiders, I didn’t feel comfortable “coming out.” Anne-Marie and Niki would later tell me they knew Dad was gay and sometimes talked about it privately. They recognized the Castro papers that littered our table and noted how, when Dad was home with friends, there were only men, never women.

  On weekends, the five of us went to eighteen-and-over clubs that advertised themselves in glossy neon four-by-five cards with embossed lettering that we found stacked on the counters in the Haight’s growing array of punk boutiques. A couple of us had fake IDs and the rest were let in by lax doormen. At the IBeam on Haight Street, the Noh Club in Japantown, and the Palladium in North Beach, I danced away my anxiety about my too-slow-changing body and the too-fast-changing world, my anxiety about Dad and all that I didn’t understand.

  One Friday I told Dad that I was going to spend the night at Andrea’s house. Andrea told her mom that she was staying at my house, and we both met at the house Camille shared with her sister and divorced mother in Stanyan Heights. At Camille’s, the three of us applied lipstick and electric-blue mascara in the bathroom mirror and then split a cab into North Beach. Inside the Palladium, everyone danced looking at the floor. I coiled my hands into fists and pedaled my arms close to my body, as though my shoulders, arms, hips, and knees were a series of small gears shifting and turning toward and then away from each other, in rhythm to the music.

  The music I listened to on the Quake now echoed through the Palladium, filling my ears, the bass beat thumping into my molars. From the ceiling, lights cascaded across the floor, flashing blue–red, blue–red, then switched into black light, making everyone’s teeth and eyes glow neon, revealing white bras and undershirts. This made us smile. We were all electric now, plugged into the same beat, all dancing alone, but still powerfully together. One of my favorite songs of the night, Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself,” even celebrated this communal isolation.

  Just before 1 a.m., the Palladium finished the night, as they did each week, with the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” The crowd lifted and rolled over the wave of Johnny Marr’s perverse reverberating guitar line, which seemed to cut us into two, three, four, chopping us into bits before Morrissey’s cool voice and smart lyrics put us back together again.

  When the music ended, I found Camille and Andrea at the door, and together we pushed through the crowd and stumbled onto Broadway and into the fresh December air. The streets of North Beach were thick with people and it seemed like everyone knew everyone. The same black eyeliner, the same black clothes, the same pale skin and dyed hair. Without saying anything or doing anything, I felt an elect
rifying sense of belonging. Keeping close, we hurried through the smellier streets, past the flashing “Live Nude Girls” sign at the Lusty Lady. We passed the Big Al sign, his machine gun at the ready. We passed the tall cartoon Carol Doda sign that advertised the Condor Club, her flashing neon nipples looking like hard cherry candies. We peered into doorways where strippers sucked on cigarettes and men tried to lure us inside with rapid-fire lines and overactive eyebrows.

  We averted our eyes as we scurried past, staring at our pointed shoes, counting the blocks to the massive house in Pacific Heights where Andrea’s dad lived with his new family. Though Andrea lived with her mom, she figured she could avoid her mom’s curfew by crashing at her dad’s undetected.

  Cars honked at us on our walk home, but we ignored them. Someone yelled, “How much?” and I yelled back, “You couldn’t afford me!” And then we all laughed and I flipped them off for good measure.

  At Andrea’s, we entered through the back door into her stepbrother Deke’s basement apartment, where we crashed on his couch and floor. When he found us the next morning, sprawled in our smeared makeup and clothes from the night before, he laughed at his little sister’s teen antics. In my zip-up black jacket smelling of cigarettes, I waited for the bus home. Twenty minutes later I arrived at my apartment and was surprised to find Dad sitting upright on his folded futon, looking at me sternly.

  “Where were you last night?”

  “What do you mean? I was at Andrea’s.”

  “I talked to Andrea’s mom last night. You did not spend the night there. Where were you?”

  “We slept at her dad’s house.”

  “Andrea’s mother didn’t know that. She didn’t know where you were. And neither did I. Do you know how hard that is for a parent? To not know where your kid is?”

  “We were fine, Dad.”

  “I’m sure you were. But you have to call. I didn’t know where you were!”

  “Sometimes I don’t know where you are.”

  Dad just stared at me. He knew I was right. What authority did he have to punish me? Freedom to come and go as we each saw fit soon became the unspoken rule of our house. If Dad started keeping me on a curfew, then he couldn’t feel free to wander in and out at all hours of the night either.

  “I just want to know you’re okay,” he said. “Did you have fun, at least?”

  “Yeah. I did have fun.”

  DAD HAD COOL new friends too. Frustrated by the infighting and lack of professionalism he saw at Cloud House in the late 1970s, Dad started attending writing workshops at Small Press Traffic, a bookstore located in a Victorian townhouse in Noe Valley. There, writer Bob Glück ran several workshops in a tiny parlor next to the kitchen with some money that came from an NEA grant. Dad attended a few of these but became especially close with the members of the gay writers group, including the lanky intellectual Bruce Boone and the Tab-drinking Kevin Killian. Killian would marry writer Dodie Bellamy; the feline pair evolved into San Francisco’s avant-garde “it” couple. Each week the gay writers group would bring in a new piece of writing to discuss—sometimes a work by lesbian poet Judy Grahn, a piece of feminist theory, or an essay by Roland Barthes or Georges Bataille (whom Dad introduced to the group). They then vigorously workshopped one another, always trying to push their writing in new directions. Meeting for years in this cramped Victorian parlor, the writers became very close.

  San Francisco’s literary scene was now dominated by the Language poets. In Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative, Bob Glück wrote, “It would be hard to overestimate the drama they brought to a Bay Area scene that limped through the 70s . . . Language Poetry’s Puritan rigor, delight in technical vocabularies, and professionalism were new to a generation of Bay Area poets whose influences included the Beats, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, the New York School (Bolinas was its western outpost), surrealism and psychedelic surrealism. Suddenly, people took sides. . . .”

  Dad was among those who took sides. Initially intrigued by the group, he ultimately found their work too abstract and formal. In a 1979 issue of Poetry Flash (“Language Poets: An Introduction”) he chided the poets to remember that “obscurity is not a virtue in itself.” In his monthly column, he questioned the group’s powerful influence on the scene and how they hindered other voices:

  I see the moral guardians are at it again: Should Kathy Acker write this or should Bruce Boone talk that way summed up questioning at 80 Langton poetry and politics forum. It’s the same old saw that separated [Robert] Duncan & [Denise] Levertov years ago. Theories are fine but one must go where one’s poem or novel takes one (a passivist view?) and if you can’t say what you want in your own writing, as Kathy pointed out, then where, pray tell, can you? Which isn’t to suggest that questioning certain modes of discourse isn’t beneficial (here columnist does a dance of Subtle Distinction, trying to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes).

  These others writers, including Acker but especially those Dad met at Small Press Traffic, approached their work with a deeply personal and often political consciousness that wasn’t found among the Language poets. Kevin Killian wrote that the group wanted to “recuperate narrative from the trap of modernism by rearticulating it as a postmodern conceptual art.” In my father’s second issue of SOUP, published in 1981, he named their style “New Narrative.”

  The community Dad found in New Narrative was not only professional but personal. In an untitled essay on Georges Bataille, Dad wrote, “Real friendship is based on extremity where the boundary lines between people break down. It’s like if you’re in an elevator with a group of strangers and the elevator breaks down. Suddenly you look into each other’s eyes and you’re no longer strangers. You can only have real communication when you realize you’re facing possible disaster.”

  The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservatives against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn’t publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.”

  AIDS transformed the landscape for gay men in the 1980s. For writers like Bob, Bruce, Kevin, and my dad, this new landscape couldn’t be addressed with Language Poetry, which, focused on pure language, was detached from everyday experience. Since Language Poetry worked to remove the “I,” New Narrative formed as a way to reclaim personal space in writing, a way to address this communal crisis.

  By 1983 and 1984, Dad regularly entertained versions of the New Narrative group for dinner or drinks in our apartment, often introducing them to visiting writers and artists, our spool table acting as a rotating salon. Over the years, he hosted filmmakers (Curt McDowell and George Kuchar), literary lions (Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, and Robert Duncan), and various odd characters Dad was profiling at the time, such as the anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, who was notorious for books in which he confessed he had sex with the Peruvian and Pacific Islander tribes he was studying.

  As a teenager, I viewed these frequent visitors as nothing but eccentric intruders in our tiny one-bedroom apartment. When I complained about our chronic semi-poverty, which was especially hard for me attending private school, I openly questioned the legitimacy of Dad’s work. “What kind of writer are you if no one’s heard of you, and you make no money?” Furthermore, and more importantly, Dad’s appetite for transgressive outsiders threatened my own fragile sense of identity. There was a thin line between cool and weird and I didn’t want to be on the weird side anymore. So I was aggressively indifferent to Dad’s crowd, all except for a twenty-something writer as handsome as the British rockers whose images wallpapered my room: Sam D’Allesandro.

/>   Dad discovered D’Allesandro in 1984 when he reviewed his poetry book Slippery Sins for The Advocate. Born Richard Anderson to a humble ranching family in Modesto, California, he changed his name both to add glamour to his persona and to protect his more conservative parents. Sam convinced me he was the son of Joe Dallesandro (whom I’d not yet heard of at age thirteen), and was later sued by the Warhol actor when Sam read at an LA venue around the corner from his home. Dad’s friends weren’t as impressed as Dad was by Sam’s first book of poetry, but when Sam starting writing prose he developed a pure and poised style. Kevin Killian even considered him a “genius.”

  I knew nothing of Sam’s writing but, like everyone, I was captivated by his beauty. He was tall and lean, with piercing blue eyes and pillowy lips. And he was radiant, as though lit from within; I couldn’t help but stare.

  I flirted with Sam shamelessly, never seeing his sexuality as an impediment to his affections. (It never was with my father.) And some of my dad’s friends noticed my crush. Kevin jokingly called it a waste. But Sam returned my attention. He frequently joined Dad and me on walks into Golden Gate Park or out to the movies or to go shoe shopping. Since I didn’t know Andy Warhol, he gave me his back issues of Warhol’s Interview magazine. Sam even showed up at my birthday party, giving me a Hallmark card written in Spanish, crossing out the text and adding his own in an energetic hand.

  Sam seemed especially sympathetic to my teenage boredom, my need for excitement and newness. Sam would take me to the Double Rainbow café on Haight Street, where the boys wore dyed hair and thick-soled creepers and the girls dressed in crinoline skirts, cowboy boots, and red lipstick. Sam also introduced me to Jono, a young painter friend of his who lived across from the Double Rainbow.