Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (4 page)

3.

W
HEN I REMEMBER
Dad now, I mostly remember his innocence. His sweetness. His gentle manner. He wasn’t tough. None of the tragedy he’d known—losing his wife in a car accident, feeling rejected by family and lovers—had hardened him in any way that I could tell. His hands were soft. He had pale skin and freckles. He burned easily in the sun, so he generally avoided it.

As a little girl, home from first grade and resigned to cozying up to the television for company as Dad worked on his poems and cartoons, I developed a crush on Mr. Rogers. He was so like my dad, with his slender shoulders, brown hair, and light eyes, the careful way he removed his loafers and laced his sneakers, his gentle manner of speaking and of inviting you into his life. Every day he sang me a song and every day I answered him: “Yes, I will. I will be your neighbor.”

You could hear Nebraska whenever my father opened his mouth. His conversations were peppered with folksy sayings and examples of the dry wit he’d admired in his grandma Focht. Widowed young and never remarried, she cared for her two children on a schoolteacher’s salary and helped raise my father until my grandfather returned from the Second World War. “If ya burn yourself,” she used to tell him, “ya gotta sit on the blister.”

I used to tease him—the way he pronounced café “cuh-FAY,” the way he called the remote control “the clicker,” or the way he called every pasta dish we ate “spaghetti” instead of differentiating between linguine, fettucine, and angel hair as I’d learned to do, a San Francisco sophisticate. When he said “Okey dokey!” and smiled his toothy grin, it sounded old-fashioned and silly. Sometimes his more literary friends made fun of him. They laughed when at a fancy dinner Dad told them a story about his childhood dog, Sparky. But the quirkiness of his speech, as much as I teased him for it, just made him more of the dad I loved.

Dad’s sweetness and easy manner charmed people and animals. Whenever we were at a party or at someone’s house for dinner, whatever cat was around would inevitably end up on Dad’s lap, purring away while he stroked its fur absentmindedly. At many of these parties I was the cat, always drawn to his lap, always calmed by his breathing, his vibrating chest and soft voice. And on his lap he would also pet me with those gentle loving hands.

I have pictures of him at age eight. His parents used to drive him and his younger sister from Lincoln to Denver, Colorado, every summer. In Estes Park you could feed chipmunks with peanuts sold by the bag at the park entrance. In one picture he’s crouched perfectly still, his hand balanced on a boulder, his fingers outstretched, clasping a peanut. At the end of that peanut, a tiny chipmunk nibbles away while my father looks content and serene. In the background, his younger sister, Elaine, is in bangs and pigtails, her mouth open in mid-complaint. No matter how much she tried to tempt the chipmunks with her swaying peanut, they were always drawn to Dad.

As a child, I loved looking at pictures of my father’s boyhood in Lincoln. There he is riding a tricycle. There he is playing pony express and circus with the neighborhood kids. The scenes of my father captured so diligently by Grandpa Abbott looked to me right out of the shows that aired every afternoon on television:
Leave It to Beaver
and
Father Knows Best
. Grandpa Abbott scribbled titles on the photo backs: “Dancing Steve.” “First Communion.” “Taking time out for refreshments.” These titles unwittingly masked a quiet unhappiness I only understood after reading Dad’s journals.

When some people age, you can see a history of disappointment in their face and posture. A smile is creased in the corner, as though it painfully swallowed an unpleasant truth. Sad eyes slant and sag. Cheeks grow pale. Shoulders slump as if weary from carrying the burden of grief, guilt, or unresolved hurt. But look at a photo of this same person as a child and you may see someone else entirely: someone full of lightness and joy and that peculiar, almost stupid hope that can only come from inexperience.

Munca talked about that stupid hope. It was maybe for this reason she avoided looking at pictures of herself when she was young. I once asked about her wedding portrait, which we didn’t find until after she died. “I don’t know where it is,” she said. “I think I saw it once and thought, ‘That stupid girl. She doesn’t know what she’s in for.’”

My father also didn’t know what he was in for as a grown-up, but that stupid hope came later. In pictures of him as an adult in San Francisco, with his arms slung around the neck of a young boyfriend or pulling me onto his lap in a cluttered apartment kitchen, he looks relaxed, almost giddy. Posed among a group of illustrious writers in the basement of City Lights bookstore, he appears content and proud. Standing on Haight Street in his beard, fedora, and 1940s topcoat, he looks in his element, like a king surveying his lands, unaware of the invaders at the gate.

You find a different Steve in the Nebraska pictures. As a three-year-old he already looks uncertain. As a child of seven he’s often looking away from the camera, while his sister will be smiling and looking straight on. In another photograph, a close-up of him in an Indian headdress leaning against a tree, he sneers. In his eyes, there’s an aggressive snarl that seems deeper than the pretend play typical of children. In pictures with his parents, I rarely see affection. His body is stiff next to his mother in a parking lot somewhere in Colorado. Both of them are looking away, as though trying to find their real families. In the family album, I see, in fact, that no one in my father’s family hugs. They rarely touch. Hands are in laps or at sides, clenched into loose fists.

Lincoln, year unknown

My father never officially came out to his parents. Helen and Gene Abbott learned their son was gay by reading a letter Dad had written to his brother David, which had been left out on the table. But they had long been suspicious.

Dad wasn’t able to be himself, his true self, his naked and profane self, until he left Lincoln for Atlanta and then San Francisco. Once he came out, he was fully out. He could never go back in.

PART II

Motherless

I knew if I wanted to keep Alysia I’d have to stop being crazy. I didn’t know if I could but I had to try. Alysia was all I had left in the world and I was all she had too.

—STEVE ABBOTT, 1976

4.

I
CALLED HIM EDDIE BODY
. At four years old, language was my playground. “Eddie Body’s not anybody! Eddie Body’s not anybody!” I’d repeat, relishing the near symmetry of the sounds. Eddie Body was Dad’s new boyfriend, his first serious relationship after our move to San Francisco in 1974. There’d been different men—good-looking men, funny-looking men, almost always tall and skinny and young—that I found in Dad’s bed in the mornings. But it was different with Ed. He was the only one with whom I became close. He is the only one I can remember. We spent six months living with Eddie Body. I loved him.

A twenty-two-year-old kid from upstate New York, Eddie Body had moved to San Francisco to get away from his pregnant wife, Mary Ann. He’d made a pass at my dad one afternoon over a game of chess in the Panhandle Park. Soon after, Ed moved into our apartment, a four-bedroom Victorian located a few blocks from Haight Street.

Haight-Ashbury’s “Summer of Love” had ended in 1968 with the arrival of heroin and petty crime. For years the neighborhood was dominated by bars, liquor stores, and boarded-up storefronts. But rent was cheap and soon my father, along with scores of other like-minded searchers, moved in, setting up haphazard households in the dilapidated Victorian flats that lined Oak and Page streets. Many of these new residents, if not hippies themselves, shared an ethos of experimentation and free expression. Many also happened to be gay.

By 1974, the Castro was emerging as the political and commercial center of gay San Francisco, with future supervisor Harvey Milk already running campaigns out of his camera shop at 18th and Castro. The post-hippie Haight was a gay-friendly alternative. Unlike the Castro, where gay men put their sexual identities front and center, the Haight’s gay residents fit into a larger bohemian mosaic. They got checkups at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, shopped for crafts at Far Out Fabrics, joined the Food Conspiracy co-op, and patronized Mommy Fortuna’s, a restaurant which hosted cross-dressing musicals featuring members of the psychedelic, nationally renowned theater troupe the Cockettes and their offshoot, the Angels of Light. This diverse community, which favored aesthetics over activism, gave my father a sense of belonging he hadn’t experienced in Nebraska, or even in post-Stonewall Atlanta. It was in this world that Dad and Eddie Body met and fell in love.

In his journal Dad described Ed as “a joy, a help, a comfort and often-times frustrating as hell.” When Eddie Body first moved in, he had ambitions of musical stardom. He played guitar beautifully and wrote songs, including a tender ballad for my father. Ed had a job downtown selling high-end pots and pans. But after a few months in our apartment, he’d quit the job and dedicated his waking hours to getting stoned, strumming on his guitar, and halfheartedly watering ferns around the apartment. By early 1975, Eddie Body mostly lived off Dad and the Social Security checks we received after my mother’s death.

Dad, Eddie Body, and I lived with two roommates, Johnny and Paulette, on Oak Street. Johnny had spent two years in a Buddhist monastery before moving to San Francisco. After smoking several joints, Dad and Johnny would listen to Tibetan bell music and engage in lengthy conversations about the afterlife. But while spiritually enlightened, Johnny showed little interest in the material aspects of the house. Dad alone scoured neighborhood stoop sales and thrift shops for the mirrors, rugs, plants, and Indian fabrics that decorated the apartment. Dad also picked out colors—Indian earth brown and imperial jade green—and painted all the rooms himself.

Johnny was known in the Haight as Joan Blondell, a drag character named after the old Hollywood star famous for her sarcastic wisecracks. Joan would get all dolled up and yell things like, “Don’t you feel hot?” then kick over a chair for everyone’s amusement. Dad fondly described Joan as “the bitch of death.”

Paulette was our roommate who replaced Suzan, who replaced Wade. Like Johnny, she enjoyed dressing in drag; unlike him, she did it full-time. Originally from Alabama, Paulette embraced a Southern Gothic aesthetic mixed with 1940s film fantasy. She decorated her room like the inside of a casket, stapling drapes to the ceiling and outfitting the corners with mahogany antiques and funereal plants.

Paulette also expected everyone to be her servant, an honor Johnny—and Joan—resolutely declined, precipitating many quarrels. Perhaps Paulette was jealous of Joan’s local fame. In a letter, Dad recalled New Year’s Eve 1974–75, when Paulette couldn’t get into the bathroom and had to wait forever before Joan was ready to come out. “You should have seen the feathers fly,” he wrote.

“You actually don’t look forties at all,
Johnny
. You look like a—well, a
whore
!”

“I know,” Joan replied. “Isn’t it
divine
?”

AS WE SETTLED
into 1975, our household calmed down, with each of us living in our own world: Eddie strumming his guitar, Paulette grooming herself in the mirror, Johnny meditating in the sunroom. Dad was happy to be left alone to read and write while I drew mermaids by the window.

My mornings were spent at the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center. Through the center Dad became acquainted with some of the neighborhood’s more colorful single moms. Lola’s mother, an actress with the Angels of Light, had performed in a Warhol film. Moonbeam’s mother sold grass out of her apartment on Oak Street. She had a knack for dating young guys, getting them on General Assistance, and then pocketing their checks.

When I wasn’t playing with Moonbeam or Lola, I was often left to myself. “Faggots find her cute but are afraid of her,” my father wrote in a letter. “Child = responsibility, the ultimate freak-out for the selfish and the escapists.”

But not Eddie Body. Each afternoon he’d pick me up from child care, a big smile on his face. On one occasion, he arrived wearing a dress. The attendants wouldn’t allow him into my classroom until I heard his voice and then ran into his arms. After day care, Ed and my dad would take me on long walks in Golden Gate Park.

When I was a little girl, the sun was always shining in Golden Gate Park. Entering the park seemed otherworldly. I knew well the papery, banana-shaped eucalyptus leaves and tiny acorns that littered our path. We walked down a hill to a murky pond framed with fern trees and pointy bushes. I imagined it was inhabited by a lady of the lake, who’d only reveal herself after the sun went down and we’d left the park. After the pond we’d descend into a tunnel designed to resemble a cave: brown painted walls toothed with sculpted stalactites. The home of a wayward dragon. Past the cave, the path spilled into an emerald field where towering eucalyptus and pine trees cast long shadows.

To the right of the field was Hippie Hill. Music was always playing; there was a drum circle, maracas, and someone dancing, limbs flailing loose and free. Dad, Eddie, and I would lie on the grass among the clusters of wanderers. In the 1970s, to be aimless, even homeless, was still considered more a philosophical choice than a product of economic destitution. Eddie would patiently thread daisy chains for me while sitting cross-legged in the grass. Sometimes he teased me.

“Eddie Body, I’m hungry,” I said one afternoon.

“Hi, Hungry.”

“Nooooo, I’m
hungry
.”

“How are you, Hungry? My name is Ed and this here is Steve.”

“Noooo.
Nooooo
. That’s
not
good.”

Dad chastised him. Then Eddie Body gathered me into his arms and squeezed me to his bare chest, his whiskers tickling my neck. He smelled of Egyptian musk and BO.

The three of us stayed in Golden Gate Park as long as the day would have us. When the light faded and the air cooled, we began the long walk home together. The leaves of the eucalyptus trees shimmered in the early evening light, looking like rust-colored sequins.

At home, Daddy made din-din while Eddie Body took a bath. I watched him lounging in our rust-stained claw-foot tub. He washed himself with a thick white bar of soap, the same soap Dad used to wash me each night. Eddie was leaner and browner than my dad. He barely had any hair on his chest and a small migration of whiskers sat precariously above his mouth. When he bent forward, his shoulder-length hair hid his face. Eddie watched me watching him and laughed.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“What is what?”

“That.” I repeated. “There!” I pointed to two egglike spheres I could make out in the dark mass of hair between Eddie’s legs.

Eddie coughed and adjusted himself in the bathtub. A small streak of water spilled over the tub’s porcelain edge.

“Those are testicles,” he said.

I tried the word on for size. “Tess. Tess.”

“They’re also called balls.”

“What do they do?” I asked.

“Um . . . they help make babies,” he answered. “Didn’t your dad tell you about this yet?”

“No.”

“They help make babies. Men have them.”

“I won’t have them?”

“No, you won’t have them.”

After dinner, Eddie and Dad took turns reading me stories before tucking me in to sleep. The next morning I woke up, opened the door to my dad’s room, then crawled into his bed. Eddie Body was always there, always happy to see me. “It’s wake-up time!” I announced. I cuddled between them and lay there, awake but with my eyes closed, while the two of them fell back asleep. Feeling warm and safe, I didn’t want to disturb this special time. Often when I crawled into Dad’s bed I’d slow my breathing so that it moved in time with his. Together we’d breathe like one. But on this morning Eddie Body’s sleep was less steady. Behind me I could feel his breath move from slow to fast. So I tried to adjust my breath to match his. I then moved between the two of them, always trying to reconcile the difference, but always failing.

In the mornings at school I liked to draw. My drawings at four and five were generally the same: an ocean scene. On the surface of the water two boats bob attached by a rope. The girl boat is full of girls, rendered as triangles with stick legs and arms, each topped with a smiley face circle and long hair that curls at the end. The boy boat is populated with rectangles with stick arms and legs and smiley circle heads. Under the water, vast mermaid families swim together: grandma and grandpa mermaids, dogfish and catfish, and birdfish with wings. This mermaid world was fluid, endless, and real to me.

Living in a boy boat, I wanted to do everything the boys did. Every few weeks, Dad would put Lou Reed’s
Transformer
on the turntable. Then, together with Johnny and Paulette, he’d dig into the big closet and pick through baskets of jewelry while Lou Reed seductively serenaded them, calling them “slick little girl[s].”

While Dad dressed up with Johnny and Paulette, wrapping a white scarf around his neck and pulling a plantation-style picture hat over his head—“Very
Juliet of the Spirits
, don’t you think?” he asked—I draped myself in sparkly scarves and a heavy faux-Egyptian necklace Dad had found at the local junk shop. The fairies may have outnumbered me, but I was still the reigning princess, able to primp in the mirror along with the best of them.

But it wasn’t enough to dress up with the boys. I wanted to
be
a boy and told Dad I wanted to be called a boy.

“You have a vagina,” he patiently explained. “Boys have penises.”

“Can’t I get a penis at the store?” I asked.

“No, you can’t.”

I also noticed that Eddie Body and Daddy peed as easily among the thicket of conifers in Golden Gate Park as in our toilet at home. When I had to pee in the park Dad had to take me through the tunnel, past the pond, and up the hill to the McDonald’s, just beyond the entrance, my bladder barely containing itself. After watching Eddie retreat to the bushes one afternoon, I told Dad that I wanted to pee like him. So that night, in our chilly bathroom, he taught me to pee standing up. With gentle hands he helped thrust my pelvis forward while keeping my legs straight and steady so I could better aim into the toilet. I was small in relation to the seat, so it wasn’t hard to pee into the bowl, or at least onto the bowl. After several days of practice, I managed to make it in, not getting any on the floor or down my legs.

“Far
out
!” my dad said. Then he ran into the bedroom to share the news with Ed.

“It’s a bad kind of life you’re giving Alysia, growing up around queers.”

“What do you mean? She’s happy,” said my father.

“She needs a mother. You should get married to a woman.”

“Like you and Mary Ann?” my dad asked.

ROOMMATES
(queer or otherwise) weren’t simply a way for my dad to save money on housing; they were a source of free child care. On any given night Dad would ask Johnny or Paulette to watch me so he and Ed could go out dancing in one of the many bars that were swelling with excitement in post-Stonewall San Francisco: Sissy’s Saloon, the Mineshaft, the Stud. On one occasion Paulette reported that I’d turned on all of the kitchen burners, which she’d discovered only after the smell of gas had permeated the apartment. Another time I drank half a bottle of medicine and suffered a minor tummy-ache.

Reading about these events in my dad’s journals, it’s hard not to feel angry. My father expressed resentment because I asked him to fix me breakfast when, at age four, I was “perfectly capable of doing it alone.” Maybe Dad couldn’t understand my needs because our life was populated by so many needy wanderers like himself, young people escaping bad homes and bad marriages, all searching for their true selves and open to anything that might further that quest: Hollywood, bisexuality, cross-dressing, meditation, Quaaludes, biorhythm charts, bathhouses, Sufi dancing. Renegades all, but few truly suitable for raising kids, let alone watching them for a night or two.

Eddie Body said I needed a mother. In truth, everyone in that apartment needed a mother, someone to cook and clean, someone to settle the quarrels and to dispense the love and acceptance that was so elusive to these men when they were growing up. I liked to play the role when I could, a Wendy to Dad’s lost boys. I’d call him “my poor little Da-da” and serve us bowls of Jell-O, saving the biggest serving for myself. When Eddie Body and Dad were tripping on drugs and dressed in drag I came up and said, “You can be a boy or you can be a girl, you can be whatever you want to be.”