Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (13 page)

As at all the stores I frequented in the Haight, I got to know the clerks, who were captive behind their registers. At Coffee Tea & Spice I met Sean, a Kentucky native with dazzling blue eyes, a Victorian wax-tipped moustache, and an exotic Southern lilt. He flashed me the brightest smile and was always generous with the scale, often giving me nineteen or twenty bears for my quarter. So when I received my sixth-grade school pictures, I carefully cut out a two-by-four-inch print, walked over to Coffee Tea & Spice, and handed it to Sean across the counter. When I next came in, he invited me behind the register to show me where he’d taped the picture and scribbled horns on either side of my head. The photo would remain on the register for years.

After Coffee Tea & Spice, I went to Etc. Etc., a novelty store whose greatest draw was the rolls of stickers my friends and I collected in three-ring binders: unicorn stickers, scratch-and-sniff stickers, and round stickers that revealed a rainbow sheen when you tipped them in the light. I also fingered Garfield page-a-day calendars, glossy Betty Boop and Popeye plates, fruit-flavored lip smackers sold in narrow slide-top metal tins, and stuffed animals of every type and size. I especially coveted a black-and-white Felix the Cat clock, which hung high on the wall above the register. It had jeweled eyes and a tail, which moved left-right, left-right, with each tick.

Kent Story, the owner of Etc. Etc., was exceedingly nice and let me interview him for a sixth-grade school assignment. He and I sat on the store’s back stairs, with Dad’s playback tape recorder heavy on my lap and a set of questions I’d scribbled on a sheet of paper in my hand. “What’s the most expensive thing in the store? What’s the cheapest?”

A few years later, Kent would contract AIDS, and like so many in that first wave quickly became sick. Etc. Etc., like the other stores he owned on the street, would change hands and eventually be replaced by brightly lit chains, just as Gaston Ice Cream on the corner of Haight and Ashbury would become Ben & Jerry’s and Wauzi Records across the street would become the Gap, and next to the Gap, Seeds of Life would become Z Gallerie. And on, and on.

At the beginning of the eighties I believed in unicorns and rainbows, the transformative power of sparkly shoelaces and cherry lip smackers. My friends and I sang along with Styx and Olivia Newton-John, believing these were “the best of times.” That we were all, indeed, “magic.” That, like Newton-John in the movie
Xanadu,
we might be muses in the guise of mortal roller skaters. I believed that this decade might carry us away on the back of a winged horse. But by decade’s end, the fabulous creatures had mostly perished. I didn’t believe in unicorns anymore. We were not magic. We were not able to transcend our fleshy selves but were, in fact, slaves to these bodies and their tragic fragility.

AS MUCH AS
I enjoyed exploring the Haight, I still longed for time with Dad. In the summer of 1980, while I was staying with my grandparents in Kewanee, Illinois, I wrote him a story telling him so:

Once a father did a poem about his daughter Alysia. When he read it the audience was amazed. It was the best poem they ever heard. It made the rest of the poetry sound like chicken feed. It was so good he read it on radio and television! He did more excellent poems about Heidi as well as Alysia. One time, the president asked him to read them during an election because it was so boring.

What happened to Alysia, you ask? Well, she was at home with Heidi, miserable and lonely because her dad was working. She was the reason for the “sudden success” but she didn’t get any credit. So she decided to write a letter telling him what had happened with such success. When he read the letter he decided that no success would stand in the way of his daughter and Heidi.

After my return from Kewanee, Dad decided we should share a special dinner together one night each week. Sometimes he’d fix one of my favorite meals: spaghetti with butter, or baked chicken, which we ate at the round wooden table instead of on our laps in front of the TV. Other weeks he took us out to one of the neighborhood’s many restaurants.

At All You Knead, I was just tall enough to look over the counter and watch the pizza chef make our ham-and-pepper pie, which we ate in a wooden booth. At the Grand Victorian near Clayton Street, the blond, moustached waiter led us to our favorite table in the window facing Haight Street. The restaurant’s easy elegance, the white tablecloth and vase with a single red rose, always inspired me to sit with a straight back and long neck.

My favorite restaurant was Friends, an Upstairs Café. You reached the restaurant by climbing the narrow staircase of a three-story Victorian. Inside, the apartment was lined with tables for two, the walls adorned with framed black-and-white pictures of stars from Hollywood’s golden era: Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Veronica Lake, Marlene Dietrich. Under the glamorous gaze of these women, I ordered linguine with clam sauce. The round plate of pasta was always too big for me, but I liked working at it until it resembled a gleaming crescent moon.

On each of these outings, Dad and I sat across from each other, he sipping a glass of wine, me 7-Up over ice. I told him about school and my new neighborhood friends and he told me about his memories of school, or asked me questions, or just smiled appreciatively. After dinner we walked down Haight Street toward home, hand in hand, taking in the shop windows: the punk mannequin displays at Daljeet’s, the delicate stained glass at Acacia Glass. Along the way, both of us watched as the many street characters made their mischief into the wee hours.

PART IV

The Quake

Maybe it’s normal for teenagers to be rude & sullen & rebellious but I don’t particularly like to be around it. In fact I hardly have the energy to govern or properly love myself, let alone take on added tension.

—
STEVE ABBOTT
,
letter dated July 30, 1985

11.

D
ESPITE THE FREEDOM
I now enjoyed living at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, I suffered a peculiar feeling. It came over me many afternoons when I got home from school, rereading the scribbled note Dad left me on our dining room table. It came over me as I peeled back the foil on another Swanson’s fried chicken dinner while listening to the opening song of a TV sitcom I’d long since memorized. It took shape in my growing awareness that on these nights Dad was somewhere else, somewhere that had nothing to do with me, with someone who had nothing to do with me.

Dad tried to shield me from this feeling. He still took me to his places when he could, adult worlds of writers and words and ideas that were usually bigger than me and which I rarely understood. Sitting to one side as my dad interviewed Robert Duncan in his Berkeley home or sitting beside Dad at his
Poetry Flash
meetings, I could never follow what was being said and strained to find anything that might engage my imagination.

But inside these worlds of Dad’s I was, more often than not, the only child among adults and the only girl among men. Just as in the halls of French American, I felt like I was the only kid in the world with a gay parent and no mother.

There’s no one like me. There’s no one who knows what this is like,
I used to think.

In fact, there were many children who had gay moms or dads—sometimes both—in the seventies and eighties. More often than not, these gay parents had had kids with straight partners before coming to terms with their sexuality. They either came out, divorcing their spouse to pursue same-sex affairs, or else remained closeted and married, privately despairing or seeking furtive encounters. In some ways I was lucky. Though often romantically disappointed, Dad at least was free to be himself and was spared the confusion and self-loathing that afflicted so many closeted parents.

I didn’t meet any children of gay parents until I was an adult. And among these “queerspawn,” as some have chosen to call themselves, I’ve felt a powerful bond, especially around that peculiar feeling, something like loneliness but more akin to isolation. In those first decades after Stonewall, our families had no way to connect, to make sense of ourselves and where we belonged. We had no Provincetown family week, no openly gay celebrities like Ellen or Dan Savage, no
Modern Family.
We saw no versions of our parents in books or on screens. And so we considered ourselves outside the social fabric, cut off from “the normal.” As kids, we often existed in a state of uneasiness, a little too gay for the straight world and a little too straight for the gay world.

To grow up the child of a gay parent in the seventies and eighties was to live with secrets. For me, there was the secret of Dad’s boyfriends, whom I kept hidden from friends, teachers, and family, who maybe knew or suspected Dad was gay but didn’t want to know details. There were the pastels of naked strangers I found in the backs of Dad’s hardcover sketchbooks where I doodled my own landscapes. Who were these men? I wondered. What happened with them? And there was Dad’s poetry and prose, which so often depicted the struggles of openly gay men and what those men did together.

My father never asked me to keep quiet about his sexual orientation. He himself was as proud to march in parades as he was to write and publicly read his gay-themed poems. But I couldn’t yet share that pride. Waiting for the bus with a cluster of my fourth-grade classmates one afternoon, I pointed to a sun-faded “No On Prop 6” campaign poster stuck in the window of a nearby Victorian. Proposition 6 was an initiative sponsored by Senator John Briggs that would have banned gays, lesbians, and anyone who supported gay rights from working in California’s public schools.

“My dad has that poster,” I offered, not knowing what it was about.

“Ewww!! You know what that means, don’t you?” exclaimed one of my classmates. “That’s when boys like boys and girls like girls.”

Determined to escape unwanted attention, I said nothing, trying to distance myself from the “gross” association. And in the years that followed, I worked hard to hide the details of our queer domestic life.

When, in the spring of 1983, Dad grew a wispy rattail on the back of his head and bleached it blond, I chased him around the house with scissors trying to cut it off. At first he thought it was funny: the precocious preteen girl shocked by the rebellious antics of her father! But I was truly angry. He was ruining my efforts to fit in. I persisted in chasing him with the scissors until he sharply told me to put the scissors down.
Now
.

If school friends planned to stop by the apartment after class, I’d spend twenty minutes rearranging Dad’s clutter in an effort to hide evidence of his transgressive lifestyle—the issues of
Gay Sunshine
and
Fag Rag
, the peacock-feathered roach clips, the plastic baggies full of pot. It was easier to just not have friends over.

But my unusual position, as it turned out, would become both my greatest complaint and my greatest comfort. As I grew into a teenager, I came to see our difference as something powerful, like a secret weapon. Dad and I weren’t just odd, we were
set apart
. We may not have enjoyed an expansive lawn in Marin County, as so many of my classmates did, or even a working car. But we were artists.

As ridiculous and pretentious as this might sound, I sincerely believed and needed to believe that our position in bohemia was born of our separation and that the pain of our separation could be redeemed by our brand of bohemia.

Camped out on the sagging fold-out futon in the living room that doubled as Dad’s bed, I’d page through his many books and comics, skipping over the weird and dirty bits, focusing instead on the potential for transformation. In a cartoon panel he made when I was five, I was no longer a timid and bullied first-grader but a fierce and proud monster-killer! Studying the cover of Dad’s poetry book
Stretching the Agape Bra,
I didn’t see a lonely nine-year-old in Nikes but a Victorian ghost-child dressed in white sleeves with a mysteriously somber expression.

In Dad’s second issue of
SOUP
, published in 1981, he transformed me from an uncoordinated, so-so French student into Sylvan Wood, the sassy lead singer of an up-and-coming rock band he invented called Toxic Schlock! He posed my friends Kathy as the bassist Sarah Lee Wood and Juliana Finch as the guitarist Twinkie. Yayne was supposed to be our drummer Picture Tube, but because she cancelled on the day of the photo shoot Dad played the part with a blanket over his head.

Across from the attitude-dripping band photo (the photographer told us to look bored), Dad wrote up a fake interview and inserted lyrics to our new hit single, “Burning to Speak
.
” He even had me copy out the lyrics in my own loopy ten-year-old script.

Burning to speak, burning to speak

Been waiting on the phone for nearly a week

Burning to speak, burning to speak

I guess you think I’m just some kind of have-to.

Sometimes I’d sing “Burning to Speak” to myself, making up my own tune, jerking my body from side to side in my bedroom mirror. Dad’s lyrics channeled my own yearnings, my desire to have him to myself at least some of the time. Though I was still in love with Dad and assumed he reciprocated my love, I worried that I was for him, “some kind of have-to.” So I jumped at any chance to play the role of poet’s muse, the occasional Alice to Dad’s Lewis Carroll. If I had to contend with some funky mushrooms and a crazy queen or two along the way, it was worth it.

ONE EVENING
in the fall of 1983, my father showed me a letter he’d received inviting him to participate in the One World International Poetry Festival in Amsterdam. The annual festival encompassed four days of talks and readings culminating in a lavish cocktail party held at the house of the Lebanese ambassador to the Hague. Dad was invited to read, along with such leading poets and writers of the day as Marguerite Duras, Richard Brautigan, Robert Creeley, and William Burroughs. The invitation legitimized him as a serious writer and editor. It was an opportunity he couldn’t miss.

The Dutch club that hosted the event offered to pay for Dad’s airfare and hotel. He could have easily sent me to stay with my grandparents or with local friends but he was determined that I should accompany him. He’d long imagined our traveling to Europe. In 1978 he wrote: “I am thinking of Paris . . . & fantasize drawing Notre Dame again with Alysia @ my side, drawing pad also before her. Urchin child of the artist.” Dad took on extra writing assignments and temp work, and even borrowed money from his reluctant parents, in order to cover my airfare.

“You know, I didn’t get to Europe until after college,” Dad told me over breakfast our first morning in our first stop, Paris. “It was 1968 and the streets were full of revolutionaries, not as commercial as it is now. There were no McDonald’s.” He waved his hands across the street as I took a sleepy bite of my buttery
tartine
.

We were sitting in a dingy café in the 19th arrondissement, weary and jet-lagged. Since it was October, we sat inside the large café window facing the street, our luggage pressed against our knees, scanning the passersby for Michael Koch, the ponytailed poet friend of Dad’s who was to host us in his nearby apartment. Michael had moved to Paris with his painter wife and their three-year-old daughter, Piaf. He supported his family with translation work.

“Piaf’s a poet like her father,” Dad said by way of introduction when Koch arrived. “The other day, when Michael was helping her on with her socks, she spotted a hole and said, ‘A hole in my sock, a balcony for my toes!’” I listened sullenly to Dad’s story. I wondered, did he secretly wish that I was more poetic and writerly? Should all poets have poet daughters?

The next day, Michael and his family joined us for breakfast and a tour of the Pompidou Center. We capped the afternoon with a visit to Berthillon, an outdoor ice-cream shop on the Île Saint-Louis that attracted crowds even on chilly fall afternoons. Licking my dainty cone of berry sorbet, I started banging my body against Dad’s side as he chatted with Michael about living as an American poet in Paris. After twirling away from him into the crowd of people, I banged back into him again. But in one of my twirls I felt something strange, a hand touching the back of my jeans between my legs. My whole body stiffened and I whipped my head around and caught the stare of a short man with greasy black hair. His eyes boldly looked at me and then darted to a tall blond woman beside him, who I assumed was his girlfriend, then back to me. I quickly returned to my father’s side but felt too embarrassed to tell him what had happened.

“I want to go back to Michael’s,” I said, pulling his arm toward the nearest Métro.

“Wait a second. Let me finish my ice cream.”

“I want to go back!”

Later that night, sleeping next to Dad on Michael’s living room floor, I dreamed that I was kicking the man with the black hair. I kicked him and kicked him as he lay rolling in the gutter. Again and again I kicked him in the gut.

So when, the next day, our last in Paris, my father and I were walking across the
quai
toward the Eiffel Tower and he asked me, “How’d you like to live in Paris?” I answered, “I don’t want to.”

“You’ve been having a good time, haven’t you?”

“No.”

“But you already speak French! We could probably transfer you to a school here.”

I shuddered, then suddenly, and violently, spat on the street.

“I hate Paris. I
hate
it here.”

I refused to tell Dad why I was so against the idea, and he didn’t push it. I never imagined that I’d return to live in Paris, not once but twice. And I never imagined that ten years later, on an overcast February morning, I would seek out a spot on the bank of the Seine on the Île Saint-Louis, walking distance from the Berthillon ice-cream shop, and that there I would scatter my father’s ashes from a gilded cardboard box, finally granting him his wish to live in France.

THE NEXT MORNING,
we took the train from Paris’s Gare du Nord to Amsterdam. The International Poetry Festival was being hosted by the Melkweg, or Milky Way, a former dairy factory which had become a gallery and performance space catering to aging Dutch hippies and a growing Euro-punk scene.

We arrived on the second day of the conference but quickly found our way around. While readings took place on the main stages, poets speaking French, Danish, German, Hungarian, and Dutch took over the club’s dusty back rooms and upstairs. I quietly watched them sipping weak coffee, nibbling on stale pastries, and gossiping amongst themselves.

During our first couple of days in Amsterdam I talked to no one but Dad, who like me was feeling shy. Soon, though, I felt free to wander around the Melkweg alone. That’s when I started hanging around with an odd American writer named Richard Brautigan, famous for his 1967 novel
Trout Fishing in America.
Over six feet tall and barrel-chested in a red “Montana” t-shirt, Brautigan was a formidable presence. But with his round wire-framed glasses, poofy hunter’s cap, and red, bushy handlebar moustache, he looked almost cartoonish, like a sad-eyed Yosemite Sam.

Brautigan took a special interest in me. He was estranged from his own daughter who, though ten years my senior, had been about my age when he’d last seen her. After a couple of afternoons chatting amiably in a back room of the Melkweg, he decided to offer me advice that he said he wished he could share with his daughter. “Be careful,” he warned. “If you see a small blister on the tip of a man’s penis, stay away.” At twelve, I hadn’t yet kissed a boy, so his words hung in the air around us, compelling but never belonging to me. “That’s herpes,” Brautigan added. “It’s not pretty.” I sat through his warning and other rambling stories, flattered by his interest and, though not always understanding, curious to hear the next weird thing he might say.