A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (24 page)

She didn't say anything when she first came in. Just looked at her dad, then at Bobby and Eddie. Eddie had been watching Bobby play, so he got up and went over to give the girl a hug.

“All right,” Bobby's dad said. He got up and dug around in his front pocket for a minute before he came up with a roll of cash. He counted out $50 and gave it to the girl, who I assumed was Barb. “Don't come back until tomorrow morning.”

“Okay,” said the girl. “Come on, Bobby.”

“I'm almost done,” Bobby said, still focused on his game.

“Time to go,” his dad said.

“Just a sec,” Bobby said.

His dad walked over and hit him casually in the head. He didn't hurry, the dad, and he didn't seem to make a big deal out of it, but the force of the blow was enough to knock Bobby over sideways. I winced sympathetically. It was hardly the first time I'd seen another kid get hit. Danny, the kid who lived across the street from me, had recently picked up a stepfather named Garry who really liked to go to town on him. Just a few months earlier I'd watched from my front yard while Garry stood on the balcony of their apartment and kicked Danny into the railing over and over again, until part of it had broken off and fallen onto the sidewalk. But even with Garry, Danny usually got some warning. Bobby's dad just sucker punched him.

Nobody said anything while Bobby shook it off and got to his feet. He didn't look at any of us, or at his dad. Just walked over to the couch, picked up a ski jacket, then shuffled over to us and said, “Let's go.” We filed out of the house behind him.

“What are we doing now?” I asked Eddie, as we walked back to the sidewalk.

“Dunno,” he said. He looked at Barb. “What do you want to do?”

“Let's just go downtown,” she said.

I followed them to a bus stop for a route I didn't know. When it came, the bus was pretty much empty. Bobby and I sat together on one seat, while Eddie and Barb sat behind us. Eddie was a good two inches shorter than Barb, but he put his arm over her shoulder and whispered in her ear. She smiled and leaned into him.

“How old're you?” I asked Bobby.

“Eleven,” he said, without looking at me.

“What about her?” I asked, nodding toward his sister.

“Twelve,” he said.

“What's her job that she was coming home from?” I asked. I'd started looking for a regular job lately. I made some money mowing lawns from time to time, and sometimes our friends had one-time gigs for me, like selling glow sticks during a concert, but Dad had started giving me a hard time recently about getting a regular job and carrying my weight in the house. I told him it was illegal to hire kids under the age of sixteen in Washington State, but he wasn't having it, so I followed any tip that might lead me to a place that would hire underage kids.

“She works at McDonald's,” Bobby said.

“No shit? Which one? They hire kids?”

But Bobby was already shaking his head.

“She has a fake birth certificate and stuff, says she's sixteen,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

We rode the rest of the way to downtown in silence, except for Eddie and Barb's whispering. We got off on 3rd and Pine and walked up to a video arcade on 2nd that had a pretty good selection of games. Barb gave us five dollars each to get tokens with, and we loaded up and went our separate ways, each of us looking for our favorite games and getting an idea of where the arcade had its difficulty levels set.

I played games I knew, like Galaga, and took long breaks between sets, going over to watch Eddie play Defender. We were in the arcade for a couple of hours before we ran out of tokens, and we made a strategic decision to save the other $30 for whatever we might want to do later in the night. When we left the arcade it was dark outside. The temperature hadn't been above freezing for a week, and we were all dressed for it except Eddie, who never seemed to get cold.

“What now?” I asked.

“Come on,” Eddie said, leading us south, deeper into downtown.

We walked down streets that had been abandoned because of the cold. Eddie handed me two dollars and said, “Buy me some Fritos.”

“Huh?” I said.

He gestured and I saw we'd stopped in front of a convenience store.

“Buy me some Fritos,” he said again.

“Okay,” I said with a shrug.

We all went into the store and wandered down the aisles. I found a bag of Fritos and brought it up to the cash register. Bobby and Barb came up a minute later with Hostess pies, and Eddie bought a soda. When we got out on the sidewalk I tried to hand Eddie his chips and he just waved them off.

“Keep 'em,” he said. Then he held open his jacket and showed Barb that he had a can of beer in each of the inside pockets of his denim jacket.

I was surprised. I'd never seen Eddie drink beer before. He'd told me he didn't like the taste. Pot was enough for him.

After the beer raid, we went to McDonald's for dinner, and Eddie emptied a super-size soda down the sink in the bathroom, then filled the cup with his beers. He and Barb spent an hour or so trading the cup back and forth while Bobby and I talked about horror movies. It was past midnight by then, so we decided to head up to Seattle Center, just because it felt safer. There were fewer homeless people and dealers around on that end of downtown.

An older guy in a fleece-lined denim jacket was going the opposite direction on the sidewalk, but stopped when he got close to us. He was wearing a baseball cap, nylon pants, and too much bulky gold-plated jewelry. His short hair was hidden by a Mariners baseball cap.

“You kids need a place to stay?” he asked. “Get in out of this cold?”

“Fuck off,” Eddie growled.

“Hey!” barked the guy. “Watch it, you little punk.”

We just kept on walking and didn't make eye contact. The older guy didn't seem inclined to make a thing out of it, and we continued on our way. The walk took the better part of an hour.

Seattle Center was the leftover grounds from the 1962 World's Fair, where the Space Needle and the Pacific Science Center were located. There was also something called the Fun Forest, which was a kind of low-rent amusement park full of most of the same rides I would have expected to find in a traveling carnival. Except that, in the Fun Forest, the portable carnival rides hadn't ported anywhere for twenty years.

Of course none of that stuff was open when we got there, so we spent another hour or so walking around the abandoned grounds, looking at closed-up rides and the closed-up Space Needle and the closed-up Science Center. Sometime around three in the morning we noticed that one of the big fountains near the Arena, where the Seattle Supersonics basketball team played, had frozen more or less solid. And that was really all we needed for the rest of the night. Eddie and Barb were pretty well lit by that point, so we spent the next four hours sliding around on the frozen pond in our shoes. Barb and Eddie spent some time making out and dry humping on one of the bronze statues in the middle of the fountain. Bobby and I found a thin spot in the ice and broke some chunks out and started playing a hybrid game of hockey and soccer with them. It was a good time.

When we saw the sun coming up in the east, we decided to head over to the Denny's on Mercer, near the old Ford factory, and have some breakfast. We were glad we'd saved some of the money Bobby and Barb's dad had given us, because we were starved by then. We took our time, working our way through pancakes, sandwiches, and milk shakes before we wrapped it up and paid our bill with seven dollars to spare.

Around nine that morning, we all took the bus to Bobby and Barb's house and dropped them off. Eddie and Barb kissed clumsily but passionately on the doorstep. Then Eddie and I caught a couple of buses home and I watched TV until about seven that night, when I went to bed and slept for twelve hours.

*   *   *

Eddie and I never went back to Bobby and Barb's house. As far as I knew, they never came to Ballard, and he never mentioned either of them again.

 

33

By the time I was eleven, it was pretty obvious that I was going to be really big. I broke five feet when I was nine, and put on another four inches over the course of the following year. Dad started to get visibly nervous about it. Not just because he thought I was a psychopath who mutilated animals—that belief came and went, depending on his mood—but because he used to hit me a lot. And by the time I was eleven, after he hit me sometimes I'd ask him what he thought was going to happen when I got to be bigger than he was.

“It doesn't matter,” he'd say. “I've trained you like a dog. Get a dog when it's little, show it who's boss, it doesn't matter how big it gets—it will always be afraid of you. You will always be afraid of me.”

He seemed to be hoping that if he just said it often enough, it would turn out to be true. Not that he confined himself to verbal reinforcement. As I got bigger, he hit me more often, and harder.

On his thirty-third birthday I'd gone out with Eddie to a park that had sandstone cliffs overlooking the ocean. Dad had told me when I left home to be back before dark, stay off the cliffs, and stay out of the water. When I came home after dark, soaking wet, and with the Fire Department having called him after they rescued me and Eddie off the cliffs, Dad ambushed me: he was waiting next to the front door in the dark when I came in. I started to say, “Dad, I'm home!” and he punched me from behind, hard enough to knock me down. Once I was down, he started kicking me.

He did a thing when he really lost his shit, where he muttered and whined under his breath while he was working me over.

“Punk motherfucker! Fucking! Fuck! You! You! Piece of shit! Fucking!”

I was too surprised to cry. I just curled up in a ball. He tried to uncurl me and punch me in the face, but I stayed locked up so he dropped me again and went back to kicking me in the back, ass, and thighs.

As Dr. Epstein had noted when I fell off the high dive, I didn't bruise easily. But Dad wasn't wearing any shoes and he had long, hard toenails, so all the places where he kicked me were covered in little purple crescents the next morning.

He was full of fear.

But it wasn't just fear of me.

*   *   *

Dad got sick in January of 1983, and it happened to him just like it happened to Billy. He got a weird lingering fever. Symptoms that didn't add up to anything. He kept going to the hospital and the doctors kept sending him home. Whatever was wrong with him, it wasn't bacterial, so they couldn't treat it with antibiotics. It wasn't cancer or flu. He just felt like shit all the time, and he never seemed to get better. But in the three months since Billy had gotten sick, more and more news stories had been coming out about GRID. Only now people were calling it AIDS, and we knew it wasn't caused by poppers. It was some kind of disease. It was contagious. And it killed people. Mostly gay men.

There was no test for it. It caused a low white cell count, but so did other kinds of illnesses. The only two symptoms that were considered more or less definitive were a kind of skin cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma, and pneumocystis pneumonia. Which was kind of like telling someone that the only way they could know for sure if they were falling was if they hit the ground at a hundred miles an hour.

Eventually Dad got better, just like Billy had. But we knew by then that getting better didn't mean you weren't still sick.

 

34

After the Lego incident, Dad worked for Carol less often. He didn't exactly quit his job, but he worked fewer and fewer hours. Which meant we went back to being broke and Dad went back to coming up with interesting ways to save money. I almost didn't mind. It was nice to have something to distract myself with.

When blackberry season started, we went around to all the bushes that grew in the empty city rights-of-way between lots or next to roads and picked as many blackberries as we could carry. Then we did the same thing when apple season came in. When we got them home, Dad cooked them down and spooned them into boiled peanut butter jars. Then, while the fruit was still hot and the jars were still sterile, he'd pour molten paraffin wax into the jar, sealing the fruit in. We didn't eat any of those right away—we just packed them and stowed them in cabinets, for the winter.

I had to go back to drinking reconstituted powdered milk, pretty much for the first time since Hayes Street. And we ate a lot of generic food, food that came in white packaging with plain black lettering and simple descriptive names like “bread” or “macaroni and cheese.” My personal favorite was a kind of meat-based hash that came in a can that was just marked “food.” The generic stuff always cost a lot less than brand-name food, and sometimes it was available on sale at ridiculous prices. At one point Dad came home with four shopping bags full of generic chicken, turkey, and beef pot pies. Bartell Drugs had them on sale ten for a dollar. Dad stuffed the freezer full of them, then turned the refrigerator all the way up and stacked the rest in there. For weeks afterward, my reconstituted milk had chunks of ice in it and all I ate, three meals a day, was chicken, turkey, and beef pot pies.

We went back to sharing bathwater to save money on our utilities. When the house next door got a new roof, the roofers threw enormous piles of old cedar shingles into a Dumpster they'd parked on the front lawn. Dad would go out at night and transfer the wooden shingles into our basement. He stopped paying the electric bill that month, and when the electric company turned off the power, we spent two months cooking and heating our water over a fire pit in the backyard, where we burned a few hundred pounds of cedar shingles. When we ran out of shingles, Dad paid the bill and got the electricity turned back on. He figured he saved us fifty or sixty dollars with that trick.

I was surprised how little I missed TV, as long as I could stare at a fire for a few hours every night.