A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (41 page)

“You can't kill yourself with a bottle of aspirin,” I said.

Or by cutting up your stomach with a kitchen knife, I thought.

“Well, sure,” she said. “I know that now. It happened because I ran away. I mostly lived in the University District. In squats, or with friends. I told people my name was Lauren, so it would be harder for the cops to track me down. Eventually they caught me and sent me home. My parents went with me everywhere for a week, to keep me from running away again. So I swallowed a bottle of aspirin to get away from them. Afterward, they said they were taking me to family counseling. We went to this place up north that turned out to be another hospital. But I didn't know that. We all went in together, and I was in front, and I went through this doorway ahead of them and the door closed behind me. When I turned around and tried to open it, the doorknob just spun.”

I frowned. I was thinking that someone who did something like that to me would be taking their life in their hands to sleep in the same house I did every night. But then, my dad had done plenty of awful shit to me—including threatening to have me committed—and I had never killed him in his sleep. So maybe it was all relative.

“I fought the nurses for a while,” she said. “They tied me down. Four-points restraints, they called it. I was like that for days. Eventually I just gave up. They kept me for a few weeks. Counseling. Group sessions.”

“Why'd they let you out?” I asked.

“The doctors said I was better. I think really our insurance just ran out.”

She never asked me anything about my dad or my home life. She never asked me where Dad was all the time or why he never came out of his room when he was home. Never asked me where my mom was. I wondered who she thought she was talking to, what she thought I was thinking while she was telling me these things.

“Anyway,” she said, “they're not my real parents.”

I jolted back into the conversation.

“What?”

“I'm adopted,” she said. “You can't tell?”

“How would I be able to tell?” I asked.

“They're white.”

“… and you're not?”

“I'm one-eighth black,” she said. “That's why my hair's so curly.”

“Oh,” I said.

It was sort of possible. Her hair
was
curly. She had blue eyes, but that didn't mean much. Even at Garfield I knew a few blue-eyed black people. Still, I figured that about half of everything Alexis told me was pure bullshit. I could just never tell which half.

“How do you know?” I asked. “About being part black?”

“It's on my birth certificate,” she said.

I sighed. That was no help. I decided it didn't matter. I'd let her have this one.

 

63

Brandon and I spent a lot less time together during junior year. Partly it was just that we were heading in different directions personally. But there was a social component as well. Since his initial foray into womanizing, Brandon had gone through a couple of evolutionary downgrades, each one harder to respect than the last.

Appearance-wise, he'd stepped up his game considerably. He trimmed his old bowl cut down to a standard side part, which he held in place with enough hair product to achieve what we used to call the wet look. He got rid of his parachute pants in favor of artificially distressed jeans, and he started wearing an old denim jacket of mine, with the sleeves rolled up, over designer T-shirts. He was still kind of chunky and his skin wasn't great, but he had kind of a nerdy River Phoenix thing going on that seemed to work for him.

Once his physical transformation was under way, he had apprenticed himself to a guy named Andre, who he'd met through one of his cousins, or who maybe was one of his cousins. Brandon's extended family relationships didn't make a lot of sense to me. Andre didn't go to our school. He wasn't even a kid—he'd graduated from high school three years earlier, in 1985. He had a day job of some kind and owned a nice car, and he was an unnerving amalgam of hotness: short, spiky black hair, pale skin, thick black eyebrows, dark eyes, and a hawklike nose over a wide, angular mouth and a sharp chin. He was medium height, rail-thin, and ridiculously muscular.

Andre and Brandon spent a lot of nights cruising the all-ages clubs in South Lake Union and the University District. The summer before our junior year, Brandon told me he'd had sex with thirteen girls in parking lots, alleys, and the bathrooms at Skoochies—arguably the most important downtown hangout for teenagers looking to score since the closing of the Monastery a few years earlier. I never went to either place, but I heard a lot of stories.

Apart from his formidable skills as a pickup artist, Andre also had a black belt in tae kwon do, which was something Brandon had been interested in since the mugging incident where the kid hit him in the arm with the bottle. They started training together, and Andre introduced Brandon to the Guardian Angels, a local chapter of a New York–based vigilante organization that got its start doing community safety patrols in the New York subways. The Seattle Angels were a mixed bag of prison guards, full-contact martial artists, cop wannabes, and local busybodies who were just looking for some shit to get into. Brandon started going on patrols with them, and pretty soon he'd mastered not only sex but violence as well. And, by extension, fear.

Once Brandon got over the rush of being able to have meaningless sex in parking lots whenever he felt like it, he settled down and got a regular girlfriend. Or, actually, two regular girlfriends in a row. The first one was named Jane, and the second one was Jane's best friend, Meadow.

Meadow and Jane were a couple of private school kids from the east side of Capitol Hill who, for administrative reasons I didn't pretend to understand, happened to be on Garfield's speech and debate team. Brandon started out with Jane around the middle of our junior year. I knew almost nothing about her or their relationship, except that she bit him. Hard. Every couple of days he'd show up for school looking like he'd been mauled; dark red tooth marks on his neck, his arms, his shoulders. Everywhere. They were together for a few months, and he professed to be very happy with her. Then, one day while we were sitting on his porch, he admitted to me that he'd made out with Meadow, at a debate tournament that Jane hadn't attended.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Meadow's … very pretty.”

Never having seen either girl, I had no basis for comparison.

“Well, what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Not much I can do,” he said. “Meadow and Jane are best friends. There's no way Meadow will keep it a secret. She's already feeling guilty about it. The best I can hope for is to end up with Meadow. There's no version of this where I get to stay with Jane.”

“Which is what you want to do?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I'm kind of in love with her, actually.”

“Well, then why the fuck did you mess around with Meadow?” I nearly screamed at him.

He put his head in his hands and sighed.

“I have no idea,” he said.

 

64

Dad started taking AZT that year, the year I was fifteen. It was the latest thing in AIDS drugs. It was supposed to slow the replication of the virus. It didn't seem to do much for Dad's health, but it did mean he had to get something called a PICC line, which was basically a catheter that went from the inside of his left arm, through his brachial artery, to his heart. Drugs of all sorts could be injected into the catheter through a rubber gasket that hung out of Dad's arm near the bend of his elbow. A nurse came by a couple of times a week to administer the AZT by connecting the PICC line to a machine that would then spend a few hours slowly pushing this ridiculously toxic material into Dad's system. The PICC line was necessary because the AZT was so poisonous that it would burn his veins if it was injected directly into them. It had to be administered in such a way that it was able to mix with the large volumes of blood near his heart, to dilute its effects.

AZT was originally developed as a chemotherapy drug, and it hit Dad like chemotherapy hits cancer patients. Every time he got a treatment, he would spend the next twelve hours in the bathroom, throwing up and crying. Sometimes he'd talk while he was in there. He'd say things like “Oh, Jesus Christ, please make it stop! Help me! Fuck, someone, Jesus.” It would come out between sobs and horrifying bouts of retching. And it didn't stop. It wasn't like a few minutes of that, then silence, then a few minutes. It was twelve solid hours of that kind of thing. It was like listening to someone being tortured to death. Or what I imagined it would be like, listening to someone being tortured to death.

I tried not to be around for it. If I was home, it was usually because I needed to sleep. Which didn't really work. I'd end up lying in bed, staring at my ceiling reminding myself that, as unpleasant as it was to listen to, at least I wasn't the guy in the bathroom hugging the toilet and praying to a God I didn't believe in for salvation that wasn't coming.

*   *   *

At some point during eleventh grade, I noticed that Dad wasn't really Dad anymore, and hadn't been for a while. He was never fully present. His hair was stringy and dirty and his eyes were clouded over. Even when he wasn't stoned, he was exhausted and sick all the time. It was easy to forget there was a person in there. That he was dangerous. He couldn't keep track of time. Sometimes he'd suddenly get mad at me about something I'd done two years ago and try to ambush me—hit me with a broomstick or a bottle, or try to punch me. But mostly he just staggered around. He didn't eat much. He couldn't cook. He was down around 120 pounds. When he held his arms out I could see both the bones in his forearms.

Amid all the general deterioration, it took me a while to notice that something more specific was happening. He was sleeping harder than he used to. He was falling over a lot. He'd spend two or three days in agony, then he'd spend two more days in a drug coma. I just figured it was the disease. He was having good days, and bad days. Or something.

Finally, one day in January of 1988, when I was fifteen, I came home from school and he was standing in the kitchen in his underwear with his back to me. Every bone in his body was visible through his skin. His briefs hung off him. He had the gas stove on, and he was doing something in front of the stove. A gesture I recognized—his left arm was extended, and his right arm was curled in front of him. Head forward, focused on what he was doing. I was only a few feet from him when he realized I was there and turned around to look at me with an expression of naked panic on his face.

“Shit!” he said. He dropped the syringe he'd been holding, ran into his bedroom, and slammed the door.

I stood there, looking the situation over. There was a spoon on the stove with a few empty gelatin tablets lying next to it. The spoon had a clear residue in it, from whatever he'd been cooking down. The bottom of the spoon was scorched. The syringe was lying next to the rest of his works.

So he was cooking down his pain pills and shooting them into his PICC line. Of course he was. Why wouldn't he be? And suddenly I understood the weird cycles I'd been seeing. He was stockpiling the meds. He'd spend a few days in agony, then a few days slamming the drugs, stoned to the gills. Agony, ecstasy. Back and forth, no in-between.

*   *   *

Dad's doctor was a well-known local AIDS doctor that everyone called Dr. Barton. Dad had been referred to him shortly after he was diagnosed, but I'd only recently started to have a lot of contact with him. He was hooked into the whole community, trusted and respected. Once I got to know him I started going to him for my medical needs as well—like the HIV tests I took once or twice a year, just in case Dad used my razor by accident, or if it turned out the virus was transmittable from cleaning up puke after all.

When I saw what Dad was up to I called Dr. Barton and told him what was happening. He gave me a choice. I could either have Dad admitted to the hospital, or I'd have to start administering his pain meds to make sure he didn't overdose.

“What do you mean, administering?” I asked.

“You'll separate them out into daily dosages. Make sure he takes them. Don't let him stockpile them like he's been doing.”

Dad had been in and out of the hospital the whole time he'd been sick, but that wasn't really what Dr. Barton was suggesting. When he was talking about admitting Dad in this context, he was talking about hospice care; he was talking about checking Dad into the hospital for the last time.

“I'll need to ask him what he wants,” I said.

“Sure,” Dr. Barton said. “Of course.”

I already knew what Dad wanted. I just needed to be sure.

*   *   *

The first week of me administering his drugs, he tore my room apart while I was at school, looking for his dose. He didn't find it. The next week he tore my room apart again. Still to no avail. I'd stashed his pills down inside my weight set, knowing he was too weak to get to them.

He started out complimenting me on being so good at hiding things. I told him it was a skill I'd learned back when he used to steal money out of my piggy bank to buy cigarettes at the end of the month, when we were low on cash.

The second week he told me the prescriptions weren't enough. He needed more. Especially during his AZT push. Surely I could see that.

“Dr. Barton sets the dosage, Dad,” I said. “Take it up with him.”

“What the fuck does he know about pain?” Dad wanted to know.

Seeing as how the overwhelming majority of Dr. Barton's patients were AIDS patients, I guessed he knew quite a bit about pain. But I didn't see the point in saying so.

The third week, I came home one day, and Dad and Kris were in the kitchen with a jar from my room on the table between them. The jar had been on the table next to my door. It was full of odds and ends—bits of string and beads, gears and pieces of toys. And, at the very bottom of that jar, I'd had one of my dad's daily doses.