A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (33 page)

Like a lot of people, we were mostly just caught up in the novelty of being able to watch whole movies, on demand, at home. Until about two years earlier, if we'd wanted to rewatch one of our favorite sci-fi adventures, we'd have had to wait for it to come around at the Neptune, a repertory movie theater in the University District that showed double features, grouped by theme, Sunday through Thursday—and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
at midnight every Friday and Saturday. Calliope had taken me to
Rocky
once when I was ten. The police searched us at the door to make sure we weren't bringing any glass bottles into the theater. I was a fan of the repertory theater model, but
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
came through there about once a year, so getting to watch it three times in a day at home, where we could pause it for bathroom and snack breaks, felt like a bizarre futuristic luxury to us.

I didn't have a clear picture of which of the brothers I was actually friends with at first. Brandon was in my grade, and he was only a year older, while Ethan was three years older and an eleventh grader. But Ethan and I had more in common: he was the one who liked weapons and Dungeons & Dragons and was more of a committed sci-fi geek. Unlike Brandon, he also liked to wrestle. I still suffered from my inexplicable desire to jump up and down on people, so Ethan's willingness to scrap with me was a major plus—until it wasn't. Ethan liked to spar, but he also liked to physically intimidate people during arguments. And because I was always looking for something to push up against, I didn't back down. It only took about a month for us to end up rolling around on his kitchen floor, trying to hurt each other without being obvious about it. Ethan, who was older, with an adult's muscle density, was the clear winner.

The next day at the bus stop, Ethan studiously ignored me, but Brandon stood next to me on the corner.

“I was thinking we should take the whips down to Discovery Park this weekend,” he said. “Kill some plants. Maybe jump down those cliffs by the sewage treatment plant.”

“That'd be great,” I said. “It's not going to … cause a problem for you?”

“Dude,” he prison-whispered to me, “Ethan's been pushing me around since I was five. You see this scar here?”

He pointed to a horizontal line between his bottom lip and his chin, very similar to the one I had left over from the car accident.

“Ethan did that when we were kids. Tied a giant Tinkertoy on a string, swung it around, hit me in the face with it. My bottom teeth went right through my lip. The only thing you could have done the other day that would have made me happier was if you'd kicked his fat ass from one end of the house to the other.”

“I … will work on that,” I said. “Next time.”

“Cool. Meanwhile—Discovery Park? Saturday?”

“Sure,” I said.

 

52

I waited a few months to try to reach Eddie again. Partly it was to give my dad time to cool down, and partly it was to give Eddie some breathing room. Things Eddie had said to me back when I lived in Ballard, things I'd seen him do, I knew he'd always worried in the back of his mind that he was a bad influence on me. He knew I was no normie, but he also knew I was clean by choice, and he worried that me hanging out with him was going to work against all the other good decisions he thought I was making in my life. So Dad had really gone right for the nuclear option head-fuck with the stuff he'd been screaming at Eddie in the hospital. I figured giving him some time to walk it off would make it easier to get past it.

Not such a good plan, it turned out.

I started calling him in mid-November, but it always went through to the answering machine. I left messages, but never got a call back. Finally I gave in and just went over there to see him on my way home from a weekend sleepover at Ryan's place.

Eddie's mom's boyfriend, Dan, was in the driveway next to the house, working on his van. I'd met him a bunch of times—even gone trailer camping with Dan, Eddie, and Eddie's mom once, on some land Dan owned out on the Olympic Peninsula. But he didn't seem to recognize me until I asked him if Eddie was around.

“Oh,” he said. “Jason, right? Eddie's friend.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Eddie doesn't live here anymore, man.”

“I … what?”

“Shirley just got too goddamn strung out,” he said, fiddling nervously with a socket wrench. “Coke, man. Bad news. She still calls me asking for money. That's why I never answer my phone anymore.”

“You know where they went?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Up north, I think. Shirley was hooking Eddie up, too. That was part of why I told Shirley to leave. It happened fast, man. One day it was just a line or two every once in a while, the next day Eddie was breaking into places and stealing shit to sell, to buy coke for him and his mom. Didn't figure it was safe to have them around anymore. Fucked up, but I had to do it.”

I looked at his van and his house. The van had the full A-Team muscle kit: a GMC V8 with red detailing and a spoiler on the roof. The house was a mansion, by Ballard standards. Maybe by anyone's standards. He made good money as a contractor, and Eddie had been living in his basement for three years. What did it take to make someone a parent? It didn't matter. He and Eddie had never really gotten along.

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

I walked to the nearest bus stop. It was the same stop where I'd gotten hit by the car.

I never saw Eddie again.

 

53

I came home from school one day in December, and Dad said he needed to talk to me in the kitchen. He was dressed like he'd just come in from outside; he had on a black wool coat, a brown scarf, jeans, and his broad-brimmed brown Stetson hat. It was dark out. That time of year, between the overcast skies and the early sunset, it was nearly full dark by four o'clock. The kitchen was lit by a bank of fluorescent lights set into the ceiling behind a warped cover of beaded plastic. The plastic was impregnated with decades of grease and smoke. It gave the blue-green fluorescents a comforting yellow cast, like a bright incandescent bulb.

I sat down at the kitchen table, and Dad sat across from me, with his back to the living room.

“I went to the doctor today,” he said.

I said, “Oh yeah?”

I knew what the rest of the conversation was going to be. I had no idea what to do about it, but I knew where it was going.

“You know I've been sick,” he said, like he was explaining something to a five-year-old. “Last month, the doctor drew some blood for a test. There's a test for AIDS now. It's—the virus that causes AIDS is called HIV, and people get antibodies if we're infected. They can't find the virus, but they can find the antibodies. So they test for those.”

He looked at me like he wanted me to say something. I had no idea what to say, but I figured I should do something. I narrowed my eyes. I chewed my lips and crossed my arms. I was wearing too many layers. Crossing my arms pulled my jacket and shirts tight across my shoulders. It all felt too bulky. Too constricting. I couldn't move.

“I got the results today,” he said. “When I went to the doctor, they told me. The test was positive.”

“Positive?” I asked. “Positive good, or positive bad?”

“Bad,” he said.

He was starting to lose it. His face was getting red. His eyes were welling up. It made me uncomfortable, so I looked at the table.

“Is there…” I said. “Do they ever get false positives?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “But not this time. The—I guess the numbers were pretty high. The number of antibodies. Conclusive.”

“What's that mean?” I asked. “Conclusive. What happens now?”

“Most people…” He stopped to catch his breath. He was having trouble getting it out. “Usually most people last about six months. That's what usually happens. About six months.”

I looked up at him. His face was a wreck. When our eyes met he started gasping and crying.

“I don't know what to do,” he said. “I don't want to die. I'm so sorry. I won't be here. I don't want to die.”

I took a deep breath. I was starting to panic, because I wasn't having any kind of reaction. I didn't feel anything. I tried. But there was just nothing there. I couldn't tell him that. He was sobbing across the table from me, and I had to do something or he'd realize I wasn't going to cry. I moaned and put my elbows on the table and used my hands to cover my face so he wouldn't see that I wasn't crying. I tried to think of things that made me cry. I cried in movies all the time. I cried over that Coke commercial. None of it gave me so much as a stuffy nose while my dad was telling me he was dying. I couldn't feel anything. I bit the insides of my cheeks, but it just hurt. Finally, the combination of the pain and the fear of getting caught caused enough anxiety to elevate my breathing and my pulse. I'd have the right expression on my face. My cheeks would be flushed. I took my hands away. Dad and I looked at each other and stood up to hug. I was thirteen. I was two inches taller than he was. He sobbed against my shoulder. I stood there, holding him, and thinking about myself.

*   *   *

I got up for school the next day. I went to class. I came home after school. Dad wasn't home. Bruce wasn't home. I wanted to talk to someone, but there was nobody to talk to, so I went into my room and watched TV. At some point I turned off the TV and tried to do my homework, but I didn't seem to be able to give a shit. I turned the TV back on and thought about the Cambodian girl I'd met in Ballard—the one whose family had been trampled by elephants, while I and everyone else I knew went about the daily business of our normal lives, thousands of miles away. But not me. Not anymore. As of yesterday, I was living in a war zone.

 

54

Ryan and his mom still lived on the same block in Ballard that they'd lived on when I left for San Diego, though they were in a different apartment now. They'd moved out of their old apartment when their downstairs neighbor, a woman whose kids Ryan used to babysit for, was smothered with a pillow while her two toddlers were asleep in the next room. They knew the neighbor's death didn't imply anything about the safety of the apartments, or the neighborhood; the murder was an outlier. But they moved anyway, to another apartment across the street and half a block to the east.

I didn't like Ryan's new place much. It was a 1960s duplex, with a basement unit and an upstairs unit, torchdown roof, low ceilings; the entire front of the building was a bank of garages, with a wide concrete driveway where a front yard should have been. The backyard was a sunken concrete patio and a raised “garden” full of beauty bark and juniper bushes. The place had all the charm of a TV dinner, but Ryan liked the abundance of concrete surfaces. He liked to start fires, and he was glad to have a place to do it without having to worry about burning down the entire block.

The bus ride from my place on Capitol Hill took more than an hour, so it wasn't worth the trip on a weeknight. Even on weekends, it was only worth it if I stayed the night. The first couple of times I did it, there was a nod to the whole idea that I was a guest. Ryan's mom would make dinner, and I'd share breakfast. But they really didn't have the money to feed another kid two days a week, so after a few weeks I started bringing money to buy my own food. I'd sleep on Ryan's floor on Friday night, get up with him at six o'clock on Saturday morning to help him put rubber bands on newspapers for his paper route, and split the route with him, working one side of the street while he worked the other. Then we'd goof around all day Saturday. Every other weekend or so, I'd sleep over on Saturday night, too. Get up with him Sunday, do his route with him again, goof around a while longer, then head home.

Ryan didn't have a VCR—most people didn't—so when we were on our own, we spent a lot of time recounting the plots of horror or science fiction movies one of us had seen that the other hadn't, or talking about our favorite parts of a movie we'd both seen. Sometimes we went fishing down by the locks with Ryan's neighbor Brian. If we could get enough other kids together we'd have rubber band wars or squirt gun wars.

Every so often some toy company would make a toy gun that fired plastic or rubber projectiles hard enough to cause physical pain at close range. We spent a lot of time stalking around the neighborhood with other kids, shooting spring-loaded guns at each other with no eye protection of any kind, and leaving the projectiles scattered around each other's houses for younger siblings to find and choke on. Eventually the guns would break, and we wouldn't be able to buy new ones because the toy company had been sued and had stopped making that particular model. Then a new kind would come out and we'd buy a bunch of those and start up our endless war all over gain.

We also played Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games with names like Gamma World, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness, and Car Wars. We painted lead figures. We went to movies at the Bay Theatre in downtown Ballard—usually war movies or science fiction flicks. Sometimes Ryan could put together enough guys for a softball game or touch football. No matter how many times we played, I never did understand the rules for football.

Ryan and his friends smoked a little pot together from time to time. I never smoked with them, which gave me a reputation as kind of a Goody Two-shoes. For some reason, the irony was totally wasted on me.

*   *   *

Ryan was friends with most of the kids in his neighborhood, including two guys at the end of the block named Dale and Daryl Johnson. Daryl had been in Mr. Fields's class with me and Ryan, but Dale was a couple of years older. Their home situation was unusual. Their parents were still together, which was almost unheard of in our school. They had a stay-at-home mom and their dad made them call him sir. He worked in lumber or farming or textiles. Also their house was full of guns. Once when we were all still in elementary school, we'd been playing hide-and-seek and I'd crawled under their kitchen table and found a loaded .357 revolver in a metal bracket, bolted to the underside of the table and pointed at the front door. There were other pieces stashed around the house in various easily accessible places, in case drug-crazed hippies kicked down the door while the family was watching TV, or while Mr. Johnson was sitting on the toilet. And there was a stockpile of assault rifles, handguns, and shotguns in a large gun safe in the basement. By the standards of the time, this sort of behavior was considered eccentric but not worth calling CPS over.