A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (14 page)

Olive and Cal came to Seattle on a Greyhound bus and caught a cab from the bus terminal to our house. We celebrated their arrival with a chicken dinner for the whole family. Dad made a good lemon chicken, cut up into sections and pan-fried; mashed potatoes and steamed spinach on the side. We all ate at the little table in the kitchen. Cal and I talked about our favorite TV shows, while Dad and Olive talked about Mike and developments back in Oregon.

When we were done I caught Olive looking at my plate. I glanced down to see what she was staring at, and she picked my chicken bones off my plate and started plucking at them with her long, calloused fingers. Within minutes she had a huge pile of meat flecks on the plate in front of her. She tossed the cleaned bones aside and looked at my dad as she took a pinch of meat and dropped it into her mouth.

“You'd have let him throw all that food away?” she asked as she chewed. “You're spoiling him, Mark.”

 

19

Dad had a hard time with the weather in Seattle. The constant cloud cover pushed him down into a black funk. He'd hide in his room for days at a time, and when he came out he was always in a foul mood. He smacked me around and yelled at me. And if Thunder got into the garbage or chewed something up, Dad just went nuts. He screamed and kicked the little dog until Thunder curled up in a ball and made a horrifying yelping, howling noise. A noise I'd never heard a dog make before. When he was done, Dad would apologize to the dog. Give him treats. Thunder would hold his head low, wag his tail, and huddle gratefully in Dad's lap. The pattern was eerily familiar.

Dad's depression hit him in other ways. Back in Eugene, his nickname had been Fatty. It was meant to be ironic. At five foot ten his speed- and cocaine-fueled metabolism kept him at a svelte 120 pounds. But by the end of our first six months in Seattle he'd gone up to 180—the heaviest he'd ever be.

He fought back against this lethargy by working various angles to get money. He got us on the wait list for subsidized housing and welfare. He got us food stamps. He kept working as a secretary for Seattle Counseling Service, but he also started working at a methadone clinic, and breaking into empty buildings to find furniture he could fix up and sell.

White flight had left huge blocks of central Seattle totally abandoned. Dad would go out with the Vega, climb through a window or break in with a crowbar, and look for old desks or chairs. Once or twice a month he'd come home with a rolltop desk or a credenza. He'd take it down in our dirt basement and strip it, and replace any parts that were too badly warped or broken to be repaired. Then he'd sell it with an ad in the
Little Nickel
, a weekly listing of classified ads that worked as sort of an early print edition of craigslist.

His furniture raids also yielded things we could use around the house, including an old Speed Queen washer from the thirties. It was a giant metal tub on three legs, with an agitator in the bucket, and a set of wringers on the side for wringing water out of clothes. He had to rewire it to make it work, but the engine was in good shape and the wringers were dangerously powerful.

“You get your hand caught in these, you hit this emergency bar here,” he said, showing me the silver bar that would pop the ringers apart.

“What happens if I can't?” I asked, looking skeptically at the arrangement.

“It'll crush every bone in your hand and your wrist, then pull the skin off and spit the pieces out on the other side.”

That seemed like an awful lot of risk to take on just to get your clothes halfway dry, but I didn't say anything. The washing machine would save us five or six dollars a month, and on our budget that was real money. We kept the machine in our fenced-off backyard, and dried our clothes in the kitchen over the stove.

*   *   *

Olive found a gig working at a clothing store in Pike Place Market, a kind of farmers' market located in downtown Seattle. It had been built at the top of a cliff in 1907, and in later decades it spilled over the edge, down toward the waterfront. The original market up at the top still sold lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, local meats and fish. The buildings that backed up against the cliff under the main market were a chaotic warren of stairways, ramps, and bridges connecting a few enormous market halls. The halls were lined with small stalls that sold everything from used books to exotic pets and stage magicians' equipment. Calliope and I could spend a whole day down there, looking at Mexican amethysts, Brazilian pythons, and dried apple cores from Wenatchee being sold as shrunken heads from Papua New Guinea.

Olive made friends in the Market, like Tillie, who owned a little toy store called Pippin. She would let Cal and me hang out in her store for hours at a time, but most of the toys she sold were “craftsman” toys, like wooden tops and popguns with actual corks in them. It was entertaining for a while, but we were used to toys with more flashing lights and clever gimmicks, so we got bored with the good stuff pretty quickly. We ended up spending most of the summer of 1980 at home by ourselves, trying to keep each other entertained.

Finding things we both liked to do was always a challenge. Calliope didn't like to watch TV as much as I did, so we did a lot of projects. I had a toy bow and arrow set I'd bought in a novelty shop in Tucson, during my avoid-the-volcano vacation earlier that year. It was designed to be pretty low-power, but Calliope and I figured out that if we shortened the string and reinforced the bow with duct tape and pieces of bamboo, we could increase its power significantly. It didn't take us long to shatter the cheap arrow that had come with the bow, so we got some better ones from the sporting goods section of the Fred Meyer department store on the other side of the hill and spent a couple of weeks knocking holes in the big piece of plywood that fenced the front yard off from the backyard, until the overworked bow finally gave up the ghost entirely.

We also put together some puppet shows for our parents, and a jitterbug routine we'd dance to an old Andrews Sisters record my dad had in his collection—“The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” We drew comics, and told stories, and had little sketch routines we'd perform based on
Star Blazers
, a Japanese cartoon that came on early weekday mornings.

I got a Daisy lever-action BB gun for my eighth birthday that summer. Once I had that, it was pretty much all Calliope and I played with. We could spend hours at a time in the backyard, shooting paper targets. By the end of the first month, we could walk BB holes across a piece of paper from thirty feet away, putting each shot within millimeters of the last.

The other thing we did was, we fought like crazy. I always got the worst of those encounters. Calliope and I were exactly the same size, but she was twice as mean. While I fought to dominate—I'd try to push her down and pin her—Calliope fought to kill. She'd pull hair, bite, scratch, gouge. When all else failed, she'd resort to trying to strangle me. I knew I had to do the same if I ever wanted to win. But if I couldn't bring myself to take a swing at Dickie, I certainly couldn't hit Calliope. So I got my ass kicked a lot and took my revenge in other ways—like locking Calliope out when she needed to use the bathroom, or unplugging the extension cord that ran across the backyard to bring power to her house. I knew Han Solo would approve. After all, he'd been happy enough to use a disguise to sneak into the prison and then just start blasting away at the guards. Sometimes you had to take your shots when you could get them.

 

20

I developed a
Star Wars
action figure habit over our first summer in Seattle. Marcy's son, Isaac, had owned a few back in Eugene, but we didn't play with them much. In Seattle I got really into them and funneled all my allowance money into buying them. I could afford to get one about once every three weeks, and I went to the toy section at Fred Meyer every week to see if they had any new figures in. I had a few
Battlestar Galactica
figures, too, but the
Star Wars
collection was my pride and joy. When
The Empire Strikes Back
came out that year, half of my excitement was that there'd be new action figures issued because of it.

I started third grade at Stevens that fall, and one day, in spite of the no-toys policy at GAOP, I brought my brand-new Bossk bounty-hunter action figure to school with me. None of my classmates were very impressed, and my teacher confiscated it immediately. When the final bell rang I went and asked her for it. She went to her desk and looked around for a minute. Then she said it was gone.

“You threw it away?” I asked.

“No,” she said with a shrug. “It's just gone. It was right here on top of my desk.”

“But … that's not fair. You took it and you lost it!”

“That's a risk you run when you bring toys to school,” she said.

I noticed then that some of the other kids in class—Dickie and a new kid named Virgil—were whispering and laughing to each other. And suddenly I knew exactly what had happened. I walked over and held out my hand.

“Give it back,” I said.

“Give what back?” Virgil said.

“My action figure,” I said. “You took it off her desk. Give it back.”

Virgil and Dickie exchanged a smirk, and Virgil turned back to me, grinning.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said.

“Lynne,” I said to our teacher. “Virgil took my action figure off your desk!”

Other kids had to call their teachers Mister or Miss whatever, but GAOP was supposed to be too progressive for that, so we called our teachers by their first names. Suzie and Lynne.

“Virgil,” Lynne called from her desk. “Do you have Jason's action figure?”

“I don't know what he's talking about,” Virgil said.

I looked at Lynne and she just shrugged again. By now some other kids had come over to see what the fuss was about, and half the class was standing behind Virgil and Dickie. I looked Virgil over and saw the unmistakable shape of an action figure in the front pocket of his jeans.

“It's right there!” I said, pointing.

“Right where?” Virgil asked, looking down.

“Right there,” I said, poking at the plastic toy through his pants.

“Get your hand off my dick!” he said, slapping my hand away.

Dickie and the other kids laughed.

“Lynne!” I said. “I can see it. It's right there in his pocket!”

“I can't search him if he says he doesn't have it,” Lynne said.

“So you can take my stuff and let him steal it, but you can't come over here and look and see that he's got my action figure?” I asked.

I couldn't believe this was really happening. Lynne and Suzie had never liked me much. Suzie had even gone so far as to tell me she didn't like me once, when I awkwardly asked permission to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom. She listened to me stammer out my request, including a lot of phrases like “I need to…” and “To the you-know…” followed by obscure hand gestures. Because having to ask to take a leak was one of the many conventions of public school life that always seemed totally uncivilized to me. When I was done with my little mime routine she looked me right in the eye and said, “You know, stuff like that—that's exactly the reason nobody likes you.”

I'd walked across the playground to the bathroom feeling like I'd swallowed a bowling ball.

So maybe this behavior from Lynne wasn't so surprising. But it seemed to me that colluding with other students to rip me off was crossing some kind of line.

“Jason,” she said. “You knew you weren't supposed to bring it to class. It's not my responsibility if you can't follow the rules.”

I thought about the weeks I'd saved to get that action figure, and how happy I'd been to get it. I thought about the weeks I'd have to save to get another one, and the possibility that Fred Meyer might be sold out of Bossks by the time I'd saved up enough to buy one. And my face got red. And then I started crying.

“Oh, he's crying!” Dickie said. “Like a little baby!”

“Fuck you!” I screamed, rounding on him. “Fuck you! And fuck you!” I shouted at Virgil. “Fuck every single fucking one of you fucking motherfuckers! And fuck you, Lynne! Fuck you fuck you fuck you!”

Nobody seemed to know quite what to do with that one. Lynne looked totally shocked. Other kids giggled nervously. Dickie smiled triumphantly, and Virgil's face just went totally blank. I stormed over to the coat hooks next to the door, grabbed my jacket, and ran out of the building.

For most of the walk home I was just plain mad. It wasn't until I was a few blocks from my house that I started to wonder what was going to happen next. What would Lynne do? What would the school do? What would my dad do when he found out? By the time I got home, I was in a panic. When Calliope came home a few hours later, she found me curled up on my bed, in my bedroom/dining room.

“Hey,” she said. “I heard you went nuts today.”

I groaned and covered my face. Cal was in fifth grade, in the main building. If she'd heard about it, that meant the whole school knew. And Lynne would have to do something. She couldn't let it slide if the whole school knew about it. Not that she would have anyway.

“What happened?” Calliope asked.

When I told her the story she just shook her head.

“You've gotta learn to rein that shit in,” she said.

“They ripped me off!” I protested.

“Of course they did,” she said. “What did you expect?”

“But all they talk about—they're always talking about not stealing and telling the truth,” I said, trying to figure out how to explain what bothered me about it so much.

Calliope got it immediately.

“You mean because they're straight?” she asked.

I nodded.