A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (36 page)

“Go away,” he said.

“What happened?” I asked. “Was it someone we know, or…?”

“I didn't get in a fight. I got mugged.”

“You got…?” I tried to figure out what the difference might be. “Like, someone robbed you?”

“In the hall,” he said. “I was going to the bathroom during class, when the halls were empty. Some kid told me to give him my money. When I said I wouldn't he hit me with a bottle.”

“Jesus! Are you all right?”

“He hit me in the arm. Then he ran off. It hurts, but I'm fine.”

“Can I take a look?”

“No. Go away.”

“Brandon…”

“Go away!” he shouted.

I backed out of the room and went home. I tried calling a few times that night, but Brandon's dad said Brandon didn't want to talk. When he came to the school bus stop the next morning, I asked him if he was all right.

“Don't ever bring that up again,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Just don't,” he said.

I tried to accommodate him, but I also wondered what he thought made him so goddamn special. The idea that he just thought all of us were entitled to more, and that he might be right, never crossed my mind.

 

58

Dad did the five stages of grief on a weekly rotation, at random. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, whatever. Once he woke me up at three in the morning to help him move all the furniture in his bedroom. He read magazine articles about AIDS: treatment options, politics, and conspiracy theories.

“Doesn't it seem convenient?” he asked. “That there's this disease that mostly kills gay men, junkies, and Africans? That it spreads fastest in places that have overpopulation? I'm not saying it was engineered by the government. I'm not saying that. But if Ronald Reagan were going to design a virus, this is the virus he'd design.”

I had to admit it: he wasn't wrong.

He read books about religion and spirituality at the meta-level: Carlos Castenada, Alan Watts, and their contemporaries. There was a long-standing family rumor that Grandpa's mother had been Jewish, so that was the religion Dad settled on. Not in the sense that he studied Hebrew or learned anything about the religion, the history, or the culture. But he started wearing his gold Star of David necklace all the time, and sometimes for a goof he'd wear a yarmulke.

Some days he yelled at me for not doing the dishes or for leaving my shoes in the bathroom, but most days he barely seemed to notice I was around. One night I came home at two in the morning and he was waiting up for me in the living room, with the phone on the couch next to him.

“Where the fuck have you been all night?” he screamed at me. “I've been worried sick!”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I've been doing this four nights a week for months!”

It was true, but it wasn't like I was out partying and having fun. Usually I was just walking with Brandon, or by myself, and actively not being home.

Dad tried to hang out with other people who had AIDS, so he could learn how to be an AIDS patient, the same way he'd learned how to be gay. But it was hard to form a community with other AIDS patients. Everyone was going through their own long dark night of the soul, so they weren't at their most social. Plus, of course, people kept dying.

“I met this couple today,” Dad would say. “Al and Pat. It's the saddest story. They've been married for twenty years. Al had one gay affair, because he was sort of questioning his sexuality. He got infected, then infected Pat before they had the antibody test. He didn't even know he was sick.”

Then a few weeks later, “Pat's been really sick.”

Then a few weeks after that, “Pat died. Al's devastated.”

Then, “Al's been in and out of the hospital all month.”

I never even met most of them. They were like TV shows. He'd find one he liked, get into it, and start telling me how good it was. Then it would get canceled before I had a chance to watch it.

Bruce, meanwhile, seemed to be in perpetual syndication. Somehow, in spite of having two boyfriends with AIDS, he was still HIV negative. Not that anything else was going particularly well for him. Everyone he knew was dying, and he and Dad were on the rocks.

Dad had never been easy to live with, but I suspected the underlying problem between him and Bruce was emotional exhaustion. When we got back to Seattle, Bruce had gotten a job at one of the downtown department stores—a different one than he'd worked for before we left for San Diego—but then he'd been laid off. He hadn't taken it well. Like me, he seemed to have been operating under an assumption that everything would be okay if we could just get the hell out of San Diego; that we'd be made whole, and get back everything we gave up before we moved down there. Instead, Dad was sick, Bruce was unemployed, and his life savings were long gone. His three years with Dad had been, probably, about the worst thing that ever happened to him. Not that I forgave him for spending three months hanging around the house, drinking and sponging off our welfare, but I at least had to admit that it was karma.

Finally, Bruce got another job at another department store and things started looking up for him—though not so much for his relationship with Dad. Bruce moved back to his condo at the beginning of my tenth grade year. He and Dad were theoretically still a couple; once Bruce had a little money in the bank they planned a big trip to Mexico together, to the Yucatán Peninsula. But even I could tell it was a last hurrah.

*   *   *

I didn't mind that Dad was going to the Yucatán Peninsula to look at Aztec pyramids without me. I didn't even mind that he was planning to be gone for the better part of a month. What I did mind was that he wanted me to take care of his birds while he was gone.

Dad still had most of his birds. I hated them. Bruce hated them. Our neighbors really hated them. Dad had taken to moving all the cages onto our back porch on sunny days, and the noise had kicked off yet another feud with the guy who lived in the house to the west of us. I'd told Dad from the minute he started talking about going to Mexico that he'd need to arrange for someone else to take care of the birds while he was gone, because I just wasn't doing it.

We fought about it for a couple of days. My solution was that he should get rid of the birds, but he wasn't having it. At one point he tried the old “You live under my roof and I pay your rent!” thing, but I'd recently had a realization about that, and I took this opportunity to trot it out.

“You don't pay my rent!” I said. “I pay yours! If I didn't live here, you wouldn't get welfare or food stamps. So go ahead and kick me out. Try getting by on just SSI, I fucking dare you. You might be able to pay rent, but that drug budget's gonna take a big hit.”

At that point in the conversation he said, “You motherfucker,” grabbed a bottle off the knickknack shelf in the hall between our rooms, and tried to brain me with it. I snatched it out of his hand and pushed him away.

This was how our conflicts had been going lately. He still got to smack me around sometimes, if he caught me sleeping or something, but in a waking confrontation we'd switched roles: I was three inches taller, faster, and much stronger than he was. Anymore, I got the feeling he only tried to hurt me as a form of protest, just to let me know how pissed off he was. Except that he'd taken to trying to use things that were lying around the house as equalizers. Before the bottle he'd come after me with a wooden spoon, a shoe, and once with a kitchen knife. It always went the same way. I just snatched the weapon out of his hand and told him to back off. Once, in the kitchen, I sat on him until he calmed down. Bruce, who'd sat calmly by while Dad had beaten the crap out of me back in San Diego, was horrified.

After I took his bottle away, Dad screamed obscenities at me for a minute longer before he stormed off into his room.

Then, a few weeks before he was supposed to leave, the situation seemed to take care of itself. Bruce had met a woman named Cathy at one of his earlier department store jobs, and Cathy needed a place to stay for a month while she was between apartments. Her need happened to line up with the time that Dad and Bruce were going to be in Mexico. They made arrangements for her to put her stuff in the living room of our apartment and sleep in Dad's room. I'd never met Cathy, but I said it was fine with me as long as I didn't have to deal with Dad's birds.

It was all set to happen on the night before Dad and Bruce were leaving. Cathy would come over with her stuff. Dad would show her the birds. Then Dad would go to Bruce's for the night and Cathy would move in. Unfortunately, at the appointed time on the appointed evening, Cathy didn't show up. She didn't show up at six o'clock, when she was supposed to. She didn't show up at seven. And there was no way to call her or figure out what was going on. By eight o'clock Dad was in a rage. By nine, he was apoplectic. I tried to pretend I didn't notice what was happening or guess where it was leading, but around ten he came and stood in my bedroom doorway, fuming for a few minutes.

“This is ridiculous,” he said after he'd worked up a head of steam. “If she can't even bother to get here when she's supposed to, she can't stay here. Fuck her. Tell her she missed her chance. You'll have to take care of the animals.”

“Nope,” I said as I sat in bed reading a book. “She'll be here tomorrow. She can take care of them.”

“I said she can't stay here.”

“What do you care? You'll be in Mexico.”

“This is my fucking house, and I said she can't stay here! And you'll do as you're told or so help me God—”

I looked up at him with the same expression I'd had on my face when I took his bottle away from him.

“You'll what?” I asked. “Call me names? Look, she'll be here tomorrow. And it's really none of your business whether she stays here or not. I'll have to deal with her. You'll be gone. And I'm sorry but there's just no way I'm taking care of those goddamn birds while you're partying in Mexico on Bruce's dime. Just deal with it.”

“You'll do what I say while you're living under my roof!”

“Not this time,” I said, and went back to my book.

He stared at me for a while. I read. I could feel him looking at me, but I wasn't going to engage.

“You know,” he said. “I can have you committed.”

It was so out of the blue that it took me a minute to understand what he'd said.

“What?” I asked.

He smiled. “I looked into it. You've got a history. Your mom's crazy. I can have you committed if you don't do what I tell you. I'll turn you over to the state.”

I narrowed my eyes at him.

“And if you lay a finger on me,” he said smugly, “I'll have you arrested for parent abuse.”

I expected to get mad. I thought the sheer audacity of it would make me mad. Instead, I could feel myself starting to panic. There were a lot of things converging in my head, but one of them was that I'd thought I was finally safe from him—I was bigger, stronger. I didn't think he could keep hurting me. And now this. Having that feeling of safety taken away was worse than never having had it.

“I'll run away,” I said.

“That just makes it easier,” he said, still grinning like a vindictive child.

“What would you tell them?” I asked.

“That you're a danger to yourself. That you're a danger to me. You are. I'd tell them about the cat. I'd tell them about the time you whipped the dog. All of it.”

The panic jumped and slammed into me like a wave.

“None of that's true,” I said.

“You hurt that cat. You hurt Tom.”

“That was an accident.”

“What about Kit-Kat?”

“I had nothing to do with that!” I shouted. “She got hit by a car!”

“Really, Jason? Really? Or is that just what you tell yourself?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did Kit-Kat really get hit by a car? Or are you just blocking out what really happened?”

“You can't do this,” I said. “You can't. You're the one who hits me. You're the one who used to kick the dog until he couldn't walk straight. You. Not me.”

“How do you know? How do you really know?”

“I know.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “They'll take my word over yours.”

I noticed my hands were shaking. My face was hot. I realized I was finally crying.

“I fucking hate you,” I said.

His face went purple, and he stepped into the room and jabbed his finger at me.

“You know what?” he hissed. “Someday I'll be gone, and you're going to look back on all this and you're going to be sorry. I fought with my mom when she was sick. And when she was gone, all I wanted was to have her back. You'll see.”

“No I won't,” I said. “I'll be glad when you're dead. So glad. I hate you. I fucking hate you.”

“You need to watch what you say to me,” he said calmly. He'd won. He could afford to be calm now.

Then he left. I stared at the place where he'd been for a second, in disbelief. Bruce was waiting in the living room and had probably heard the whole thing. But he'd never gotten between me and Dad. I could hear them in there a minute later, talking in quiet tones.

I sat on my bed for a while, hyperventilating. Then I got up and closed my door, went back to my bed, grabbed my phone off the floor, and set it in front of me. I had no idea who to call. My phone list, my piece of paper with all my personal phone numbers on it, was next to my bed. I picked it up and stared at it for a while, then dialed a number in Hawaii.

The phone rang a few times and someone picked up.

“Hello?” said a woman's voice. She was chewing on something.

“Calliope?” I asked.