A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (44 page)

“Well, shit,” I said. “You got it.”

“Cool,” he said. “Here's the money. Leave the story behind the Coke machine.”

He slipped me a five-dollar bill and walked off with his buddy. A minute later, I dropped the paper behind the vending machine and went back to the table where my team was gathered.

“Hey,” I said to my coach. “I think I'm done for the day. I don't feel great.”

“Okay,” she said. She was one of the history teachers at Garfield, and driving the team out to remote locations in a Seattle Schools van was just a way for her to earn a little extra cash.

“You okay?” Meadow asked.

“I will be,” I said.

I never found out how the kid who bought my story did with it—if he won or lost. And it wasn't even the first time someone had paid me for my writing. Some weird kid in my eleventh grade American History class used to buy my homework assignments after the teacher gave them back to us, for a quarter apiece. That kid had said he liked my writing, but he'd also said he was a Satanist and that he was saving up his money to get his teeth filed into points, so I just figured he was using my work to wallpaper the little red room where he polished his ram's horn or whatever.

This thing at the debate tournament was a whole other kind of deal. And, for pretty much the first time in my life, I started to get the idea that I might be good at something that would actually make my life better.

 

68

One day that fall, Dad told me he'd picked up a bad case of lice at the free clinic. We used to get lice three or four times a year back in Eugene, but we hadn't had an infestation in a long time. Dad had gotten some special shampoo and soap, but we'd have to wash all our stuff in special poison laundry detergent and bug-bomb the house. I waited until the next time he went into the hospital, bombed the place, and washed all our clothing and bedding in the machines in the basement of Brandon's apartment building.

A few weeks later, Dad said we hadn't gotten rid of all the bugs, so I did the whole routine over again. I washed the dog. The works.

When it happened a third time, I was dubious, but Dad said the doctors at the clinic were having a real problem with it. He said they'd been sending notices out. The warning labels on the bug bombs said not to use them more than twice a year—that the buildup of insecticide inside a house could make humans and animals sick—but I didn't see I had much choice.

The next time Dad came home from the hospital he told me the house had been attacked by ninjas, his first night back.

“I saw one out my window,” he said. “On the building across the street. It was incredible. I've never seen a human move like that. He was just like a shadow—he shot up the side of the building, using the drainpipe. Then he jumped from their roof to ours, and I saw him come down the side of our building, trying windows as he went. And he never made a noise. No noise at all.”

I looked at the building he was pointing at—the one across the street. It was a good sixty feet away. The next time he told me he had lice, I asked him to show me. Show me some nits or some eggs. When I got back from school that day he had a tiny plastic bag with pieces of dirt he'd picked out of the rugs.

“See?” he said. “Look at the size of that thing!”

It was a piece of bark. I could also see a piece of dried leaf and some pine needles in the bag.

“Okay,” I said. “Next time you're at the hospital, I'll bomb the house.”

I called Brandon that night and told him the whole story.

“The thing I can't figure out,” I said, “is how worried I should be. Like, we've got a gas cooking range. Gas oven. He smokes like a goddamn chimney. Who's to say he's not going to burn the house down? Or, God forbid, blow us all to kingdom come. Lizzie's downstairs. Having him come into my room and kill me in my sleep because he thinks I'm a ninja actually seems like the lesser of several possible evils here.”

“Yeah,” Brandon said. “I don't know what to tell you. Figure out a better way to lock your door.”

“What about your dad?” I asked. “What's he up to?”

“Selling the house,” Brandon said. “He'll kick back half to Mom, for back child support. Then he's going to use the rest to go to Thailand.”

“Sex tourism, huh?”

“Probably. I don't know. We don't talk much anymore.”

“Count your blessings,” I said.

*   *   *

I lived my life in pieces. Marti and I had repaired our friendship, and Alexis and I talked on the phone every couple of months. I still went to Ryan's sometimes. Brandon and I hung out every so often. I had speech and debate. I had my dad. I had homework and school. There was hardly any crossover. Ryan still didn't even know my dad was sick. Marti knew. Alexis didn't. Brandon did, though we never talked about it. I called Maria once, because I liked the idea of being friends with all my ex-girlfriends.

“Why are you calling me?” she asked, after some initial small talk.

“I just wanted to see if we could … I don't know. Be in touch.”

She sighed into the phone.

“You have something you want to do with me, call. You have something you want to say to me, call. You want to make yourself feel better for what you did … deal with that yourself. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. But she'd already hung up.

 

69

The speech and debate team did our first overnight trip in November, heading up to Western Washington University, in Bellingham, about one hundred miles north of Seattle. We brought sleeping bags and camped out in a conference room in the old YMCA building, in the city center. Everybody but me seemed to have gotten some kind of memo about how the trip was going to work, because when I said I was heading to the bathroom to change into my pajamas, Karin, the captain of the team, said, “Don't be such a prude.”

Karin was one of those girls who seemed like she'd been forty years old since birth, so I wasn't sure I'd heard her right at first.

Then Meadow pulled her arms into her T-shirt, did some kind of contortions, and stuck her arms back out through the sleeves—holding her bra in one hand. She stretched the shoulder strap and shot it at my head like a giant rubber band. Some of the other kids on the team tittered and began the process of changing clothes without actually getting naked. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was about to see how nerds partied down.

“Okay,” I said. “That's all fine. I'm still going to change in the bathroom.”

“Booooo!” everyone called as I left the room with my sleeping clothes in a ball under my arm.

The rest of the night was a revelation. Meadow and Karin asked me for back rubs. I got a back rub from Meadow. We played truth or dare. There was even a suggestion that we should play spin the bottle. Nobody broke out any booze or weed and none of us actually ended up getting any play, but I started to get a picture of why Brandon thought these tournaments were such good places to hook up. We were all exhausted the next day at the tournament, but I could tell by looking around at my competitors that we weren't the only team who'd spent last night mainlining pheromones and pushing boundaries.

*   *   *

Bellingham had a reputation as a pretty liberal town, but the judges at the tournament that day were more of the same snooty white, polyester-clad church ladies I'd come to expect at these things. Not that I cared. I was used to losing and I'd had a good night, so the trip was already worth it for me. Then, in my second round, the first person to speak was a standard-issue exurban Young Republican: a compact white girl in a red gingham dress, blue cardigan, red bow in her hair. Thick glasses in round frames that made her eyes look slightly crossed, and black patent leather Mary Janes. She looked at the paper that told us what the subjects were, then kept her head down for a few minutes while she planned her angle of attack. I started doodling on the back of my notepad, trying to copy a picture of a dragon I'd seen in a comic book the week before.

“You see them in the city,” the girl said. “You see them on TV. Some days it seems like we see them everywhere. Men. Walking down the streets. Holding hands. Kissing.”

My head snapped up.

“Everyone knows by now that there's an epidemic overtaking these men. God's punishment, some say. Or maybe it's just a disease. Either way, the question for the rest of us is simple: What should we do? Should we spend taxpayer money to search for a cure for this plague? I say no. I say that the wages of sin are paid by the sinners. This isn't our problem. Let them reap what they've sown.”

She kept talking for another three and a half minutes, but I didn't hear much of the rest of it. I was caught up in a sensation I'd never experienced before. I'd read about it, I'd even seen it in movies, but I didn't know it happened in real life.

I saw red. My ears filled with the sound of an ocean. I nearly blacked out. I crushed my pen in my hand and dropped the fragments on the floor next to me.

It wasn't that I'd never heard this sort of thing before; I'd seen it on TV bunches of times. I'd seen it on
The 700 Club
with Pat Robertson. I'd heard Jesse Helms say it on the floor of Congress. It had been written in op-ed columns and on magazine covers and on posters. Talk radio hosts had said it. Eddie Murphy made AIDS jokes, and everyone at my school loved Eddie Murphy.

But all those people were, fundamentally, performers. They were safe—behind typewriters, behind TV cameras and radio microphones. They said these awful things precisely because they were protected from the consequences of it. I didn't forgive them, but I didn't take them very seriously either. And now here was this girl, saying it in a room full of people. And nobody was getting up and storming out. The judge wasn't gasping in horror and shaking her head while she scribbled reproachful notes on the girl's scorecard. This was just happening.

I could hear my dad's voice in my head. “People could come to our house, burn it down with us in it, and nobody would try to stop them or punish them for it. No law protects gay men.”

When it was my turn, I walked up to the podium in a haze and picked up the piece of paper that was waiting for me there. Three subjects, but my vision tunneled in on one: the federal government should direct more funding toward AIDS research. I read it over and over again. What she'd done was within the rules. Speakers were allowed to argue against a premise. But it was the choice she'd made. She could have gone so many ways with it, and that was the one she picked.

When I looked up at the clock, five minutes had passed.

I looked at the girl in the gingham dress. She was smiling.

I cleared my throat.

“I know someone with an uncle…” I said. Then I stopped. I was gulping my air. My back hurt. I looked at the girl again. Looked her in the eye. “It's been said that the measure of our humanity—of our value as a people—is a function of how we treat the least among us…”

I stopped again. Billy wasn't the least among us. Charles wasn't the least among us. Neither was Scotty. My dad … well, maybe. But not the others.

“People should think about what they say in these things,” I said, looking at a spot on the floor. “You never know who's listening.”

Now the judge was shaking her head and scribbling on my scorecard. I went back toward my seat, grabbed my backpack, and left the room.

*   *   *

The whole team went out for dinner that night to celebrate a good tournament. Everyone on the team had scored unusually well—mostly ones and twos. With the exception of me. And Meadow.

I'd collected my card at the end of the day: two fours and a forfeit. The judge's notes in the second round said, “Totally unprofessional.” Meadow usually ran ones and twos in these things, but at Western, for some reason she'd gone three-two-four. Clearly it could have been worse—she could have had my score—but it wasn't what she was used to. While the rest of the team read each other's cards and talked about their best line or the best moment of the day, Meadow and I sat quietly on the far end of the table staring at our food.

The keys to the van were sitting in the middle of the table, where the coach had dropped them. I looked at them, and looked at Meadow. And I wanted more than anything in the world to break something, so I stood up and said, “I need something from my pack.” Then I grabbed the keys, went outside, and let myself into the van. I left the door unlocked and lay down in the back, where we dumped our stuff. Made a little bed for myself out of sleeping bags and settled in to wait.

Meadow came out a few minutes later. She didn't say anything as she crawled into the back of the van and settled down next to me. I moved my arm so she could rest her head on my shoulder. She reached up and took my hand, where it rested on her arm. We both sighed and settled into each other.

“Hard day,” she said after a minute.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“What was yours? I know you don't care about your scores.”

“Just some fucking … this girl. The question was about funding for … research. For AIDS research. She just—the shit she said. I can't explain it. I never thought I'd hear a real person say things like that. It just took everything out of me.”

Meadow didn't say anything for a long time.

“What about you?” I prompted.

“I don't know,” she said. “Problems with my mom. She's the most important person in my life. I love her. But … we're just having problems. I think it threw me off.”

I thought that over.

“So…” I said. “You're having a hard day because you took a pasting in the tournament? Or because you're having problems with your mom?”

“I'm having a hard day because I'm having problems with my mom and I wanted to forget about it, and taking a pasting in the tournament reminded me of it.”