A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (5 page)

I found it strangely thrilling to watch them while they did this. I got light-headed. Euphoric. It was like their voices just sucked all the air out of the room.

When Mom finally gave up and went to California, I felt strangely bereft. Not about her moving, but because I didn't get to watch them fight anymore. I needn't have worried. She called once a month or so and they jumped right back into it over the phone. I only got Dad's half, but he'd always done most of the talking anyway.

 

7

One advantage of having my parents fighting over me was that they periodically tried to buy my affection, or my forgiveness, with presents. The regret and guilt they felt was transitory, but the swag just kept accumulating, so I had a slightly ridiculous stock of really nice toys.

My favorite was an old cap gun that was designed to look like an old cowboy six-shooter. It had a hammer that I could either cock back with my thumb, or cock and fire in one motion by just pulling the trigger. The barrel and the frame of the gun were cast out of some kind of cheap steel alloy, with elaborate scrollwork etched into the barrel and a cylinder that slid open to reveal a bunch of metal spools and gears where I could insert a roll of paper caps. Every time I pulled the trigger, the gun would feed a fresh paper cap into the space between the hammer and the striker, drop the hammer, and the toy would make a noise like a real gun. Sometimes the caps would even throw some sparks. Most of the gun was built to last a million years, except for the cheap plastic handle that broke off after I'd had the toy for less than a month. It could be taped back on, but the tape would inevitably get loose and the handle would come off again.

One morning, while I was playing by myself before my dad got out of bed, the handle fell off. The tape was in my dad's room to keep me from playing with it, but he was asleep. He usually stayed up late and slept in, and the rule was that I had to leave him alone until he woke up on his own. So maybe I forgot, or maybe I was just four years old and wanted what I wanted, but I knocked very gently on his bedroom door and poked my head inside his room.

“Dad?” I said.

He was under the covers on his bed and he didn't move, but I could tell he was awake.

“Yeah?” he said after a minute.

“Dad, can I have the tape? My cap gun's broken.”

“Let me see it,” he said, holding out his hand.

I walked over and handed the toy to him, hoping he'd have some magic fix that only grownups knew. He looked it over for a second, then threw it against his bedroom wall as hard as he could. It was a quick, startling motion and I jumped back away from the bed. The gun exploded into pieces and loose parts that rained down on his bookshelves and dresser. There was an enormous dent in the wall where it had struck. I was too surprised to react for a second.

“I've told you once,” he said in an even, measured tone. “I've told you a million fucking times. Do not wake me up in the fucking morning unless it's a fucking emergency.”

I started to cry. Partly from surprise, but mostly from disappointment. I was still processing the fact that he wasn't going to help me fix my toy.

“Stop that fucking sniveling or I'll give you something to cry about!” he roared.

I scurried out of the room, but I stopped to close the door carefully behind me. Because slamming the door was something else I wasn't supposed to do in the morning, and I was in enough trouble as it was.

Supposedly, this was all part of Dad's master plan.

Whenever he told me to do something and I refused, I got to the count of three to comply or there'd be a spanking. Usually a set number of swats with his bare hand while he held me over his knee. That was his version of obedience training. But there were other kinds of spankings, where maybe I got to the count of three or maybe I didn't. Maybe we were fighting, or maybe I did something that just pushed him over the edge. Those were the ones where I screamed and tried to get away and he'd hold me down while I was thrashing and hit me anywhere he could get a piece of me—ass, back, legs, neck, head. There were the kind where he'd use a spatula or a belt. And all of that fell into his general philosophy of parenting. He was always telling people—sometimes right in front of me—that parenting was all about positive and negative reinforcement. He said that even if he wasn't consistent about punishment, there was an overarching consistency to his moods, and subtle cues that I could learn over time if the stakes were high enough. So sometimes there were spankings and sometimes there were beatings, and one time when I was four he picked me up and threw me against my bedroom wall.

He was telling me to do something and I was saying no, I wouldn't do it—and he just charged. I dropped to the ground and curled up, even though I knew it was a bad idea. Any time I tried to protect myself it always made him madder: running, hiding, trying to cover my head or face. That was all forbidden. Once he started coming, I was supposed to hold still and take it. So I knew when I dropped to the ground that I was only making it worse. But instead of flailing away at my back like he sometimes did, he hissed “Motherfucker” under his breath, grabbed me by my leg and shoulder, hoisted me into the air, and threw me at the wall, above my bed.

At first I didn't even understand what had happened. I was dazed and my ears were ringing, but nothing was broken except something inside the wall. I'd heard something under the plaster crack when I hit, but the wall looked fine. I didn't know what to do, so I just lay there on the bed. And Dad was gone. He'd run out of the room as soon as he did it.

When I made some reference to it later, he told me never to talk about it again.

“Anyway,” he said, “it was an accident. I was aiming for the bed.”

*   *   *

Over the course of a year, John told me the whole story of
The Hobbit
and
The Lord of the Rings
. He may not have read me the books in their entirety, but if he didn't read every word, he certainly read from them while he worked his way through the epic. He used different voices for a lot of the main characters. He sang the songs and chanted the poems. Sometimes he'd compare one or another of the characters in the book to some of his lead figures, to show me what chain mail or a long sword looked like. John particularly liked doing the voice of Gollum, the wretched creature that follows the heroes through most of the story, and nearly destroys the world because of his sycophantic obsession with a stolen magic ring. I let John do the voice as long as I could stand it because I knew he liked doing it, but one day as we neared the end of the story, I just snapped.

“Stop it,” I said. “I hate that voice.”

“Why?” he asked. He was clearly surprised by the criticism.

I thought about it before I answered.

“I hate Gollum,” I said. “He's the worst person in the book.”

“Why's that?” John asked.

“He's weak. He can't even fight. He just lies and cheats and steals. Anyone could kill him—should kill him—but he begs and whines and they let him live. And then he does bad things to them after they were nice to him.”

“Well,” John said. “That's true, I suppose. But that's the thing about Gollum. He knows what the right thing is. He can see it. And he wants to be good. But he had some bad luck. Right? He found the ring. And once he found it, he needed it. The ring made him that way.”

“Because he's weak.”

“Maybe,” John said. “But remember—nobody else could carry it besides Frodo and, for a little while, Sam. None of the other good guys even wanted to touch it. Gollum just didn't know how dangerous it was. Isildur, the first human to carry it, was a good guy before he got the ring. But once he had it, it corrupted him.”

“Then he shouldn't have messed with it.”

“How could he have known? You might say, Jason, that the most evil thing the ring does is take people who were good, or who wanted to use the ring to do good, and change them. And that once they're changed, they can't go back. Not all the way. Gollum had that ring for hundreds of years.”

“I'd never let it change me,” I said.

“A lot of people think that. Boromir thought it. But you can't know until you go up against the power of the ring, and most people lose that fight. Everyone except Frodo and Sam, in fact.”

I didn't know what to say to that one.

I still hated Gollum.

*   *   *

We spent almost exactly a year on Hayes Street, and I was bored out of my mind for most of it. There were six other kids my age within walking distance: two straights who lived on our block, two hippie kids who lived at the end of the street, and two kids from our crew who lived a few blocks away. The two straights, a girl named Mickey and a boy named Kurty, made me nervous. The girl was a year older than I was, and the boy a year younger, and they both had “narc” written all over them. Their father, Mr. Wagner, was a grumpy older guy with a day job, who wore plaid pants and short-sleeved sweaters and kept his hair short. Their mom was a tense middle-aged woman who wore more makeup than any woman I knew besides my grandma, and dressed like Mrs. Jetson. Mr. and Mrs. Wagner clearly didn't like me or my dad or our housemates; they seemed to want us all to go away. Possibly Mr. Wagner worked in lumber, or farming or textiles. The kids didn't seem to feel as strongly about me as their parents did but they were eager to please, and I could easily imagine them running straight to their parents if I let something slip about Dad smoking pot or having gone to jail or any of that.

The hippies at the end of the block, Geoff and Sarah, were okay except that their parents were the real deal; honest-to-god house-building guitar-playing ex–Peace Corps vegetarian pacifists. In some ways this made them as dangerous as Mickey and Kurty. My people looked like hippies: they dressed like hippies, listened to hippie music, and said “man” a lot. But we were basically white trash rednecks in hippie clothing. Most of the adults I knew loved meat and many of them got in fights all the time and had decent gun collections. To say nothing of all the crime. Besides dealing drugs, my dad and his friends engaged in fraud, theft, and vandalism on a regular basis. Geoff and Sarah's parents might be willing to occupy an ROTC building or march without a permit—they might even smoke some grass every so often. But if they knew half of what went on in our house, or in our social circles, they'd call the cops on us as sure as Mickey and Kurty's parents. They'd probably agonize over it more, but they'd do it.

The two kids from our crew were Ezeriah and Edward. Ezeriah was one year older than I was, Edward two years older. Their mom, Emmy, was a friend of my dad's, though she didn't have much to do with the rest of Dad's social circle. She was tall and thin, which was what Dad liked in women, and he could never shut up about how beautiful he thought she was. I didn't have much of an opinion about her one way or the other, and as nice as it was not to have to worry about what I might let slip around her kids, I didn't like playing with them. Edward was just a little too old, and Ezeriah was just a little too butch. I liked make-believe games based on the stories John read to me. Ezeriah liked sports—as in games that grownups played, with bats and balls. And math. Lots of math. He constantly talked about his favorite players and their batting averages and errors and—Jesus. I didn't even know what a batting average was. He talked about football. He talked about the Ducks. I had no idea. I didn't even know the University of Oregon had a football team. Once we both got chickenpox at the same time and spent a week in my living room watching
Dialing for Dollars
and
Sci-Fi Theater
, and we got along pretty well that week because we had a shared love of war movies and Godzilla and we happened to get sick between seasons for his favorite sports. But most of the rest of the time he just confused me.

And that was about it for my social outlets. There were some other kids in our crew who I got along with pretty well. Calliope and Miles were my favorites. But they didn't live nearby and I only saw them once or twice every couple of weeks. The rest of the time I played by myself or watched TV or hung out with John.

When my dad got tired of listening to me complain about how bored I was, he'd give me a serrated steak knife and tell me to mow the lawn with it. I'd spend hours out in the front yard, cutting clumps of grass loose from the dirt, trying to make them all a nice uniform height. Sometimes it was the high point of my week.

 

8

My dad's Grandma Brown died sometime during the summer of 1976, and she left us about $4,000. She was Dad's mother's mother, and the last of Dad's grandparents to die. Dad spent the money on a new car, a new TV, and two Beaver State Indian blankets from the Pendleton Woolen Mills, Pendleton, Oregon. Personally, I wanted to spend it on groceries—Beth had recently pointed out to me that not only were the little black things I kept finding in my powdered milk not supposed to be there, but that they were actually mouse shit. So my vote would have been for milk that came in liquid form, and maybe some fresh fruit. But Dad said we had to cash the check and get rid of the money immediately or the welfare people would take it all. So we got a new Vega and I kept eating USDA cornflakes and mouse poop–flavored powdered milk for breakfast.

*   *   *

Dad started classes at Lane County Community College the month after I turned four, which meant I was eligible to start going to their Montessori day care. I'd been to day care before, in Los Angeles, where my grandparents had sent me to something called a Town & Country preschool, but I hadn't done very well there. I had a problem with authority. I had a problem with other kids. Basically, I just had a lot of problems. Things didn't go much better at Lane Montessori. I only made two friends the whole time I was there: a teacher named Dee Dee, who took a special liking to me, and my chicken, Charlie.