Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (12 page)

Dad conceived of
SOUP
as a way to showcase new directions in writing. He envisioned a literary magazine that would be both inclusive and progressive, incorporating interviews with and work from gay and lesbian writers (Judy Grahn), minority writers (Luisah Teish), transgressive writers (Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker), as well as older figures who inspired these newer works (Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, Jack Kerouac). Our neighbor Robert even contributed photos.

As this was years before the Internet, Dad pulled together his own money to typeset, print, and distribute the magazine. He hoped he’d recoup the cost in sales. The first issue ended up $1,800 in the hole, which was a lot of money for us. With his many jobs and daily market research work, the stress was considerable, as evident in a cartoon letter he wrote to John Dale.

Steve Abbott, January 1980

Despite the stress, Dad found his calling editing
SOUP
. When it came to promoting his own work—his comic strips and books of poetry—Dad could be quite shy. This reticence was left over from his formative hippie days, when self-promotion, even professionalism, were looked down on as bourgeois. But when it came to promoting other writers, my father had no such hesitations. In his interviews and criticism as editor of
Poetry Flash
and now
SOUP
, Dad fiercely pushed other writers’ work, especially if he believed the perspective was sharp, new, and underexposed. He was among the first to seriously evaluate the work of Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, but when their fame surpassed his, he felt left in the cold.

Some months after
SOUP
came out, Dad and a friend, an older gay writer named Bruce Boone, were walking down the street when my father pointed out how all the writers they knew were white. Dad and Bruce had just completed a two-week seminar with the Marxist literary critic Fred Jameson and were inspired to ignite change, especially in light of the recent inauguration of Ronald Reagan and the self-declared Moral Majority that had helped elect him. “Well, what should we do about it?” Bruce asked. After discussing several ideas, they decided to put together a two-day conference, which they’d call Left/Write—a play on both military lockstep and the lefty orientation of the writers they hoped would take part. The goal was to bring together writers with divergent, and often competing, aesthetic agendas, in the hope that doing so would foster “an activist sense of Leftist unity.”

Over two hundred people crowded the Noe Valley Ministry in February 1981. There were workshops for “Criticism as a Political Tool,” “The Political Impact of Lesbian and Gay Writing,” “Radical Asian-American Writing,” and more. Ron Silliman, the only participating Language poet, implored the audience to “leave our aesthetic differences at the door just as cowboys used to leave their guns at the door.” But guns were drawn. Many panels ended in screaming arguments, yet all were sold out.

In the decade before the conference, these different coalitions had held rallies and protests for their individual causes. Left/Write was important because it brought the groups together in conversation with one another, some for the first time. The event inspired future identity-oriented conferences, including Out/Write. Though Left/Write gave him no financial reward, Dad was proud to have fathered it.

DAD’S INCREASING
literary commitments meant I had even more afternoons and evenings to myself. More often than not I’d return from school to a scribbled note, and either a Swanson’s TV dinner in the freezer or five dollars to buy myself something in the neighborhood. If I didn’t want to pester Robert, I set up interviews with our gray tabby, Heidi, so named because of her tendency to hide under the furniture whenever I entered the room. I’d ask Heidi a question, then pinch her ear with my fingernails to elicit a response, capturing the exchange on Dad’s playback tape recorder. But this activity only increased her elusiveness.

I was about ten or eleven when I became expert at inviting myself to dinner at friends’ homes. Taking the bus to and from French American each day, I made friends with several kids who traveled the same route, a few of whom lived only a short walk or bus ride from my home.

I became especially close with Yayne [YAI-nee], the daughter of an Ethiopian dad and an African American mother. Because she was born on the first day of spring, she explained, she was named Yayne Abeba, “flower of my eye” in Ethiopian. She also told me she was descended from African royalty, a detail I unquestioningly accepted, sealing our friendship. Soon we’d greet each other in the halls of French American yelling our entire names.

“Yayne Abebe Mengeshe Wondafarow!”

“Alysia-Rebeccah Barbara Abbott!”

Yayne’s parents owned a local sporting goods store and after school, we bopped around until her mom eventually growled, “You’re driving me crazy!” and sent us out onto Haight Street. We hung out at the local library, reading back issues of
Rolling Stone
and
National Lampoon
, but almost always ended up at Kiss My Sweet, a Haight Street café landmarked by a pair of puckered neon lips glowing pink in twin windows. Here we drank peppermint tea sweetened with gobs of honey. Sitting over steaming teacups, we squeezed the café’s honey bear so that the honey would “percolate” in time with the Maxwell House jingle: “
Da
na na na
na
na / Na na na
na
na
.”

We returned to Hoy’s Sports just as Yayne’s mother was locking up. After she went upstairs to count out the register, Yayne and I turned the spotlights, previously illuminating running-shoe displays, toward the floor. Then we blasted the pop station KFRC and took turns emulating the sultry moves of the dancers we studied on
Solid Gold
, a weekly pop countdown TV show hosted by Marilyn McCoo.

In Yayne’s upstairs apartment we played Barbies, imagining grown-up lives, going to college and fetching lusty boyfriends in our purple Corvettes. But when I heard the sound of the dishes being laid on the table and smelled the aromas of dinner, I didn’t rush home. My strategy, which began unconsciously, was to hang around until the inevitable shift into mealtime. At Yayne’s house, as at the houses of my other friends, I learned how to ingratiate myself and work my orphan eyes. I acted surprised when the invitation finally came, but over time I expected it.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Alysia?”

“I’ll have to call my dad,” I’d say.

In the other room I’d dial my number and it would ring and ring, as my dad was still out. And then, returning to my friends’ parents, I’d say, “He said it’s fine.”

During these years I perfected a parent-friendly manner that in the short term could make me a happy addition to the dinner spread and in the long term might inspire future invitations. I was polite, always saying please and thank you, asking questions, laughing easily, always helping to clear the table.

My friends’ parents generally seemed glad to host me. My presence sometimes provided a needed distraction for fighting siblings. They also knew that I lived alone with my dad, and over time I was treated like an extended member of the family. Mengeshe, Yayne’s cologned dad, used to call me “monster” in his thick Ethiopian accent, and I called him “man star.”

I was fascinated by these dads but especially by the moms like Yayne’s, who worked, or other moms who stayed home, and always kept the refrigerator stocked with snacks, the bathroom with fresh towels and bowls of potpourri. I loved to look for any physical resemblance between my girlfriends and their mothers, and was sensitive to every display of affection and tension.

Kathy Moe, the daughter of Cloud House poet David Moe, lived with her divorced mom out in the Sunset district, only a few blocks from the ocean. A small-boned painter from Kansas, her mom was always dabbing away at massive moonlit portraits of women who looked like herself: big-eyed and pale. But while their hair was drawn thick and flowing, I noticed her own was thin and brittle. I’m sure raising Kathy alone frayed her nerves. She turned to incense and Buddhism. From behind closed doors Kathy and I giggled as we listened to her chiming and chanting, “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”

I sometimes spent whole weekends at Kathy’s, watching TV (
Creature Features
on Friday nights,
Love Boat
and
Fantasy Island
on Saturdays) while we ate Kraft mac and cheese and bowls of sugary cereal that turned our milk blue-gray. But, as much as I wanted to, I could never return Kathy’s hospitality. She suffered respiratory asthma and could spend no more than an hour in my house before reaching for her inhaler.

The dust that troubled Kathy so much was invisible to Dad and me. We had no cleaning person and no cleaning schedule between us. Occasionally Dad told me to do the dishes and I made a game out of it. Our big rubber tub in the sink became a pot over a hot flame and me a chef making “dish soup.” Dad and I took turns hauling the garbage down to the alley each week but did no other cleaning. Our rooms were both blanketed in books and paper, the surfaces draped with clothes. We’d only straighten up if Dad hosted a dinner party, and even then, the people he entertained always appreciated a certain degree of dirt and clutter.

Then one evening, while brushing my teeth, I noticed the grime on our bathroom sink and out of curiosity took a piece of toilet paper, wet it under the faucet, and wiped the grime away. What a feeling! It was fun to make something dirty clean, like erasing pencil markings from a sheet of paper. So periodically I’d “clean” the bathroom, ripping off some toilet paper and dabbing it under the faucet, always feeling a little proud as Dad never asked me to attend to the sink but always noticed my efforts.

With so many evenings and weekends spent at friends’ homes, I have to think I annoyed some parents, who’d maybe not planned to feed an extra mouth. But I was extremely sensitive to this possibility. If I detected the least hesitation when a friend asked if I could stay, if I heard any behind-door whispering or glimpsed the slightest eye roll, I’d quickly absent myself and make my way home. I always had Haight Street.

When we moved to 545 Ashbury, the Haight was still recovering from its threadbare past. Bars and liquor stores dominated the strip and several storefronts were boarded up. But as the 1980s progressed, the neighborhood went upscale. Stores like Coffee Tea & Spice, Bakers of Paris, Auntie Pasta, and Yayne’s family store catered to a growing gourmet-eating, health-conscious middle class. At the same time, many of the new shops opening up were gay-owned, and these among others had suggestive names. In addition to the Kiss My Sweet café, there was a craft shop called The Soft Touch, a vintage furniture store called Sugartit, and a large toy store with a gurgling fountain called Play With It. I loved the Haight as a kid.

On weekends, Kathy and I grabbed sandwiches at Viking Sub then roller-skated into Golden Gate Park, our long straight hair flying as we descended the hill into the tunnel. At the Big Playground, skates off, we rode the half-moon swings and then sped down the long cement slides on ripped pieces of cardboard. Eventually we skated over to the Legion of Honor near where the roller boogie dancers set up every weekend. I loved their bright-colored short shorts and their undulating grace, the way they maneuvered around overturned cups and did fancy tricks off ramps while Donna Summer sang from a battery-powered boom box.

After school I often went to Wauzi Records, catty-corner from my apartment. The high ceilings were hung with spinning cardboard displays, the far walls were plastered with posters, and music thumped through the speakers. I spent hours there browsing rows and rows of vinyl, moving from pop to rock to heavy metal to R & B. I always paused at the wildly suggestive covers of the Vanity 6 records, which featured three women in white, black, and red teddies, all heavily made up, posing and pouting under the scrawled title “Nasty Girl
.
” In the heavy metal section I studied records by Judas Priest, the Scorpions, and Black Sabbath, which featured seething demons strapped into straitjackets, vengeful skeletons with mullets wielding axes or crawling out of graves, all stills from a nightmare. Before YouTube, before everyone had their MTV, this is how we surfed culture, how we weighed style choices. Where do I fit in? I used to wonder. Which tribe is my tribe?

Walking down the Haight in the 1980s, the air would be thick with the smells of pot, piss, and patchouli. In your ears, a constant whisper: “Doses, doses.” Or “Buds, sweet buds.” Candy was my drug of choice then, and with the five dollars Dad left me for dinner I could fill up on a fried chicken leg from Fat Fong’s and still have plenty of change left over for penny candy at Coffee Tea & Spice.

The bell hanging from the door would ring as I entered, its chime followed by the powerful and slightly bitter smell of fresh-ground coffee. But my attention focused on the polished wooden counters lined with large glass jars full of candy: chocolate-covered raisins, black and red raspberries with tiny sugar “seeds” that crunched between your teeth. Next to these were the German gummy bears I coveted, which cost 25 cents a pound. I watched eagerly as the clerk’s small metal shovel scooped and dropped the bears with a delicate thud into a small white bag on a scale. On good days, I’d get eighteen bears; on not-so-good days, sixteen.