A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (23 page)

It was important that Dad got paid in cash, so we could defraud welfare. It was important that we could defraud welfare because, as Dad often said, “the world is just a goddamn uncertain place.”

Through most of the 1980s, Aid for Families with Dependent Children paid about $360 a month for a single parent with one kid; by way of comparison, rent at the Aloha Street house had been $250, and the Ballard house ran about $350. We got food stamps and subsidized housing as well, but it was effectively impossible for us to live on welfare alone, so Dad had to work. The problem was that if he got a straight job, we either had to get off welfare, or we had to take all the money that Dad made in excess of $360 a month and give it to the welfare office. Dad told me that, the way the rules worked, if you were on welfare you got $360 a month to live on no matter what.

This would make getting off welfare seem like a no-brainer—certainly that was the intention of the people who designed it—except that the kind of work people like my dad could get wasn't particularly reliable. Low-end service jobs could end at any time, for any reason. For example, it was perfectly legal to fire someone for being gay. But if Dad took us off welfare and then lost his job, we'd have had to wait a couple of months—maybe as long as a year—to get back on the rolls. During which time, a family like ours could easily disappear under the surface and never be heard from again. So the smart play was to find an under-the-table job and just be really careful not to get caught. One thing Dad had to do to avoid getting caught was to never run any work income through his bank; signing a release allowing the welfare narcs to poke around in his bank account was a condition of being in the program. The easiest way to avoid a paper trail altogether was to get paid in cash.

Most employers weren't willing to go to all that trouble. The ones who were willing, for whatever reason, typically paid about thirty percent under market rate for any given job. Partly this was because the employer couldn't claim an under-the-table employee as a business expense for tax purposes, so they recouped the loss by gouging the wage they paid. Then they'd gouge a little more, to mitigate any future losses they might take as a consequence of getting caught with a bunch of undocumented workers. And there was always a small fuck-you surcharge, on top of everything else. Most under-the-table employers could take you or leave you, so they tended to act like major assholes.

As far as all this went, Carol was better than most. The wage she paid was fair, and she didn't make Dad eat too much shit to get it. Basically, he just did whatever she told him to do. He handled her calendar and organized her office, but he also cleaned out her basement, picked up her dry cleaning, arranged catering for important functions, and helped her son pack for college. He worked a lot of seven-dollar hours doing this stuff, and for the better part of a year we were doing pretty well. But there were weird little side costs associated with working for Carol that made it hard to remember how lucky we were to have her.

For example, Carol did a lot of running around. But no matter where she was or what she was doing, at eight o'clock in the morning she would rush to the nearest television set, change clothes, and do the 20 Minute Workout. This was a televised aerobics routine that was popular for about as long as it took Americans to figure out that aerobics is, in fact, just as hard as any other form of exercise and that spandex was not actually going to be this year's black. If Carol happened to be in Ballard when eight o'clock rolled around, she would come to our house, pound on our door until Dad let her in, and do aerobics in our living room for twenty minutes.

In addition to being obnoxious, this routine made it pretty much impossible for me to watch morning cartoons. That was my beef. But I knew it was basically worth it for the seven dollars an hour. And the company car. And also, I got a lot of free stuff from Carol.

Carol had one child and an unhappy marriage to another medical professional. So when her son was still young, she bought him tons of stuff to compensate for all the other unhappiness in her life. And she was pretty unhappy, so her boy got a lot of great toys. Boomerangs, comic books, Erector Sets, chemistry sets. All the stuff any red-blooded American welfare kid really really wants and can never afford. But when I was ten, Carol's son was heading off to college. So she told my dad to pack up all those old toys and records and stuff and give them all to Goodwill. She'd never need any of it again. And Dad, being Dad, went through it and brought all the really good stuff home to me.

I had fun with all the new swag, but the one toy in the haul that I really connected with, on a spiritual level, was the Lego set. Like most kids, I'd always loved Legos. But they were surprisingly expensive so I never had any of my own. And I had never in my life, not even once, seen a Lego set at Goodwill or Salvation Army or any of those places. So I played with Legos at friends' houses, and dreamed my impossible dreams. But it worked out that Carol's son had a huge box of these things; what would have been two or three hundred dollars' worth of Legos, if I'd bought them new. And she told my dad to take them all to Goodwill.

I was ecstatic. I could build anything I wanted. I could spend days messing around on one project. The sky was the limit. And at an age when most toys entertained me for a few weeks at the outside, I played with those Legos constantly for a good six months. I couldn't believe my luck.

I should have known better.

Carol's job as a child psychologist meant that, every so often, she had to do something public for kids. Fund-raising. Donating time to shelters. That kind of thing. And for Christmas of 1982, she helped sponsor a toy drive for underprivileged children. But Carol was kind of scatterbrained. She didn't remember until the very last minute that she had told Dad to donate all her son's old toys to Goodwill. So, on the day of the toy drive, she got out of bed and went downstairs to get some used toys to give away—and panicked when she found them all gone. Until she remembered that the last time she was over at our house doing aerobics, I had been playing with Legos while I was waiting to get my TV back so I could watch cartoons.

When I woke up that morning I found Carol, in a Santa suit, digging through my closet. She was taking the Legos by the handful and dumping them into a red bag with white fur trim. It took me a minute to absorb what I was seeing; my mind was cycling through the millions of scenarios that would have been more plausible than what actually seemed to be happening. I glanced over and noticed my dad standing in my bedroom doorway. He looked weird. Angry and humiliated, but resigned. I hadn't seen that exact mix of emotions on his face since the night he got busted, back in Eugene. That was when I realized this wasn't a joke.

“All right,” Carol said, standing up and turning around. “That's all of them?”

She was talking to me.

“All the Legos?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Uh. They were … all in that box.” I craned my neck to look behind her, and saw the box empty on the floor in the closet. “Yeah. That was all of them.”

“Great,” she said. “Sorry to wake you.”

She paused for a second, then actually slung the bag over her shoulder, Grinch-style, before leaving my room. My Legos—the Legos—made a brittle sloshing sound in the bag as she left. Dad followed her to the front door and let her out, then came back and stood in my doorway again. I frowned at him.

“Is she bringing those back?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I'm sorry. I tried to talk her out of it.”

He explained her charity toy drive to me. The longer he talked, the less likely the story sounded. If it weren't for the expression on his face, I never would have believed him.

“Why didn't she just buy some toys?” I asked. “She's got more money than God. Surely she could have just stopped at Fred Meyer and bought something new.”

“They had to be used,” he said. “It's part of the thing. Like, ‘Don't throw those used toys away, donate them!'”

“To kids!” I added. “Who are on welfare! Like the one she just took these Legos from! Isn't she a child psychiatrist?”

“Psychologist,” Dad said.

“What's the—? Never mind. She's not bringing them back?”

“No.”

“And she's not replacing them,” I said.

“No. When she showed up here this morning she was asking for the Legos she ‘loaned' us. Jason, for what it's worth, I'm not sure she really understands … any of it.”

“Okay,” I said, rolling over and pulling my covers up around my neck. “I'm going back to sleep now.”

“Jason…”

“I need to sleep!” I snapped.

He sighed and closed my door behind him as he left.

I didn't sleep. I just lay there for a couple of hours, hating Carol with an intensity that made me sweat, and telling myself a bunch of furious lies about how, once I grew up, I'd never have to bend over for anyone like her ever again.

 

32

One day when I was ten, my headbanger friend Eddie asked me if I wanted to come hang out with him and his friend Bobby. The question surprised me. I'd never met Bobby, never heard Eddie mention him, and Eddie didn't usually introduce me to his other friends, so I wasn't sure why he suddenly wanted me to meet this Bobby kid.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“A friend of mine from when I lived in Rainier,” he said.

“He still live there?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

“He white?” I asked. Rainier Valley was one of the blackest of Seattle's few black neighborhoods.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Ask your dad if you can sleep over.”

“At Bobby's house?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

“You're not dragging me all the way down to Rainier just so I can watch you score, are you?” I asked. Eddie often wanted me along on his buys in Ballard. I wasn't sure why. I was visibly harmless. Maybe he just liked to show people he had a friend.

“Naw,” Eddie said. “Nothing like that, dude. I like his sister. I want you to come along to keep Bobby busy.”

I sighed dramatically.

“Fine,” I said.

My dad might normally have wanted more background on a kid I was going to spend the night with, but he hadn't been feeling well lately so he didn't make a thing out of it. I went up to Eddie's house after school that day and we caught three buses to get down to Bobby's place, on the other end of town. When we got on the 48, going deep into Rainier Valley, I took my wallet out of my back pocket and stashed it up my sleeve so nobody would steal it. Not that there was anything in it. Slowly the bus filled with black people, getting off school or work. One of them was a kid about my age, who sat down near where Eddie and I were standing. He looked me over curiously.

“Hey,” he said, after a minute. “You live around here?”

“Uh,” I said. “No. Why?”

“The way you're carrying your wallet in your sleeve there, that's about as subtle as a heart attack, man. The hell's the matter with you?”

Eddie had been staring out the window, but he turned around to look at me now and he was scowling.

“Quit being such a goon, dude,” he said.

I was too embarrassed to put my wallet back in my pocket while the other kid was watching, so I just stood there wishing I had a hole to crawl into until Eddie told me we were there.

Bobby's house was a blue-gray Craftsman with a chain-link fence around the yard. Tall grass out front, single-pane picture windows, and asbestos shingle siding about ten years past its warranty date. Dirty venetian blinds covered all the windows from the inside. We walked up a weed-choked path to a peeling front door and Eddie knocked once, hard.

The kid who answered the door was about our age, but he had the same look as Eddie: desiccated, hardened, underfed. His child's face was bony and flat, and his teeth were crooked and yellow. He had a cut on the underside of his jaw, like a skin infection. Pale complexion, hazel eyes, light brown hair under an unmarked blue baseball cap. Blue sweatshirt a few sizes too small. Jeans and sneakers.

“Eddie,” he said, opening the door wide and letting us in.

“This is Jason,” Eddie said.

“S'up,” he said, nodding at me.

“Barb around?” Eddie asked.

“Naw,” Bobby said. “She gets off work in a while. Wanna play some video games while we wait?”

“Sure,” Eddie said.

The living room was typical white trash: dirty shag carpet, nothing on the walls, polyester couch, vinyl easy chair. Boxes stacked in one corner. The living room was separated from the dining room by an archway, and the dining room was dark and full of junk—an old Formica-topped table and four ugly metal-frame chairs with vinyl covers that were textured to look like cloth. The rest of the room was buried under boxes and milk crates full of machine parts, old fans, a broken vacuum cleaner, records with moldy covers, plastic flowers, and a synthetic Christmas tree covered in spray-on snow and tinsel.

In spite of all the other squalor, the TV in the living room was top-of-the-line: twenty-five inches, color, with a remote and an Intellivision game console. A few hundred dollars in game cartridges were scattered around on the floor.

Eddie and Bobby sat down and started to play. I took a seat on a chair in the corner, next to the boxes, and settled in. When Eddie asked me if I wanted next game, I just shook my head. Something about the place made me think it would be a good idea to keep my back against a wall and my hands empty.

After we'd sat there for a while, a man who looked like a much older, fatter version of Bobby, with big cheap plastic-framed glasses, came in and sat down in the easy chair. I expected him to tell Eddie and Bobby to turn off the game, but he watched them play without saying anything, and without looking at me. We all sat there quietly for an hour or so until the front door opened and a girl came in. She was young. Too young to have a job. She had shoulder-length dark brown hair, the same pale skin as her brother, but fleshier features: round cheeks, fuller lips, and a wide mouth. She was wearing old bellbottoms and a turtleneck sweater under a long coat with fake fur trim. Her shoes were a kind of sandals made of flesh-colored vinyl. They were supposed to be worn on bare feet, but she was wearing them with thick hiking socks.