Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (5 page)

So many characters and faces that will forever be engrained in my mind. The smell of stale beer and vomit as we did our sound checks before the doors opened. As I got older, my favorite places to sing were biker bars. The bikers were always protective and sweet toward me.
When I was about twelve, playing at the Trade Winds biker bar in Anchorage, a man was outside foaming at the mouth, overdosing on PCP. Angel dust, I remember a woman whispering to me. When I saw the red lights flashing through the window, I set my mic down silently mid-song and walked from the stage to the bathroom so I wouldn’t get kicked out for singing in there underage. I knew the routine. A couple of the biker men saw me do this and nodded to their women, who silently followed me to keep me company. The bathroom was long and narrow, and I remember the women coming in, drink making them warm and wordy. We sat on the toilets, the doors all flung open, and two sat on the sink counters, all of us looking at each other in the long mirror above the sinks. The stalls on each side of me were occupied by women weathered and road weary, bleached blondes, brunettes, and one redhead, all wearing acid-washed jeans, tank tops, and leather jackets. Slight variances on the same theme. My stall in the middle, startling in contrast. A twelve-year-old wearing a long-sleeved shirt buttoned up to the very top button, showcasing a whimsical and heartbreakingly sweet pattern of kitty paw prints in beige. Long honey blonde hair straight as sticks tucked behind my ears, posture erect as I visited with the ladies, glad for their company.

The brunette on the sink wore fringed boots that hung off the edge of the counter. “You sing real nice, kid. Real nice.”

“Thanks,” I said, enjoying the compliment.

“You know, my old man is finally gonna make an honest woman of me. The son of a bitch,” she said, to several chuckles from the other stalls before she continued. “You guys should sing at our wedding.”

I knew not to accept gigs on my own, and so I said, “My dad handles all of our bookings, but I’m sure we would love to sing at your wedding.” In most bars I felt invisible, but it was always the bikers who kept an eye on me, sensing my vulnerability the way only other outcasts can. Bikers had their own code of ethics, which was palpable to me even at that age.

With time I learned to be street-smart and to trust my instincts elsewhere in barrooms. I had to. When I was about nine, a man in Alice’s Champagne Palace placed a dime in my hand, folding my small fingers around the cool silver, and said, “Call me when you’re sixteen.” Another time I was walking to the bathroom, and as a man passing by caught a quick glance of me, he said casually, “You’re going to be a great fuck when you’re older.” I learned to let my energy expand only on stage. Offstage and between sets I stayed small and drew little attention to myself. My dad made rounds and visited with patrons, and I would entertain myself by looking in a Michelob beer mirror, learning how to move each muscle in my face. In fifth-grade science class we were told about involuntary muscles, and how we couldn’t move them, so I set out to prove that wrong, starting with my lower eyelids. I mastered moving my ears in all directions, isolating my lower eyelids and each nostril separately, and each quarter of each lip independently.

I loved to observe people. I watched love and life play out in a million ways, but one of the best things I learned was this: You don’t outrun pain. I saw men and women in those barrooms all trying to outrun something, some pain in their life—and man, they had pain. Vets broken and drifting, abused women, abused boys who had grown up to be emotionally crippled men. I saw them all trying to bury that pain in booze, sex, drugs, anger, and I saw it all before I was able to indulge in many of those behaviors myself. I saw that no one outran their suffering; they only piled new pain upon their original pain. I saw the pain pile up into insurmountable mountains, and I saw the price people paid who buried all that pain, and along with it their hope, joy, and chance at happiness. All because they were trying to outrun the pain rather than walk through it and heal. I knew I was young, and that I’d already had more than my fair share of confusion and pain. I resolved at that time to never drink or do drugs, to try to find the courage to face myself as honestly as I could. I
was keenly aware that numbing my feelings and instincts meant cutting myself off from the only real safety net I had. I knew I was vulnerable, I knew there were predators around me, and I also knew that my body came equipped with the most exquisite alarm system in the world—emotions and instincts—and that, for the most part, mine worked beautifully. I could tell in a second who felt safe and who did not. I learned to read people instantly.

At home my feelings were alive and well, if not always pleasant. I could tell that being hit did not feel good, and because I was emotionally alive, I could tell it was not my fault. But as any child who has suffered this way knows, the unpredictability and randomness of even infrequent rages can be excruciating. I could tell I was scared, and being able to tell that meant I could tell when I wasn’t. If I cut myself off from my only alarm system by numbing my feelings, I would be defenseless. Not having access to my senses could lead to disaster, and so instead of turning away from my feelings, I turned toward them. I studied them. I turned to writing rather than to drugs to take the edge off. I vowed to try to tell the truth about myself when I wrote—not the version of myself I had to learn to be in order to keep my dad’s temper from flaring, nor the version I had to be in bars to stay unseen, nor the persona I was onstage. At school, at home, in bars, I was an emotional contortionist, alternating between awkward self-aggrandizing and trying to win favor so as to fit in. When I wrote, I let myself be dead honest, flaws and all. But I was myself, I felt real. I went inside myself when a pen was in my hand and enjoyed that space in there. When I went in deeply to myself and my creativity, I was amazed at what I knew and saw. I had answers to things I did not otherwise have access to. I was able to see patterns in places that had confused me before. I wrote about the way my dad treated me. The way he made me feel that so many things at such a young age were my fault, and I was able to untangle the web of his projection and separate myself from him. At times I
was too young to make sense of it all, but I vowed to come back later when I had better skills to deal with it. Until then, I told myself I could not control the pain or my situation, but I could control the pain I inflicted on myself. I was confused, scared, hurt, but I was alive in there. At least I had that. Maybe if I didn’t let it go, maybe if I used words like Hansel and Gretel used breadcrumbs, I could find my way out of the woods and avoid being eaten by the witch and the wolves.
Maybe.

four

emotional english

I
n fifth grade we moved from my uncle’s machine shop to the saddle barn on the homestead where my dad was raised. The barn was situated about a hundred yards from the cabin where my dad had grown up and where my grandpa Yule still lived. One large room downstairs housed the kitchen, living room, and dining area with a view of green meadow, gray waters of the bay, blue mountains, and white glaciers. A metal oil drum that had been welded into a coal-burning stove sat in the middle of the floor, radiating heat, its rusted pipe climbing through the ceiling to lend warmth to the upstairs, where I shared a room with my brothers. There was a small room, partitioned off, which was Dad’s. Countless times he must have gone into that saddle barn as a young man for cinch or rasp. No wonder he seemed disoriented all the time now that it was so completely repurposed.

Winter was the price you paid for the unearthly Alaskan summers, dark and cold in a way you could not shake off or dress for. It
is
possible to dress for, but our hand-me-downs and secondhand clothing always left
me with a chill. Alaska’s famed midnight sun eventually gave way to the winter solstice, its stingy grip allowing only the faintest dusk to slip through its fingers for a few hours a day. The coal stove would go out in the middle of the night, and I remember waking with frost on the tips of my eyelashes, making it nearly impossible to get out of the cozy nest of feather blankets in my bed. We would wake to inky blackness, and I would cook breakfast while Shane did the lion’s share of chores, milking the cow and feeding the horses while Atz Lee got dressed and ready for school. My dad was usually asleep still, often hungover in those years. We did the dishes and then walked two miles in darkness on the dirt road to the bus stop. Sometimes the ice would be so bad we could not walk a couple of steps without falling, so we devised homemade snow cleats by taking the removable soles out of our shoes, poking screws through the rubber bottoms, and then replacing the padded sole. It was a bit uncomfortable, as the screws always tried to push back up, but the thick padding kept them from poking us too badly.

At school, recess was taken in a twilight state, that weak light lasting only a few hours, darkness descending again by the time we rode back to the bus stop. I remember looking down and not being able to see my feet. My eyes would strain to see the outline of the dirt road in front of me, but often it felt like we walked back and forth by braille on those days with no moon.

At home in the evening, Shane again did the chores, Atz Lee got coal for the stove, and I would either milk the cow or help start dinner. My dad was a great cook, a skill required of him in Vietnam. His creativity shined in the kitchen; he loved to bake breads from scratch and make Swiss-style apple tarts. Our food was what we raised with our own hands, and the flavors of my childhood stay with me still. Fresh butter that I would make in the morning before school, squeezing out the buttermilk with a spatula. Fresh raw whole milk. Meat from our own cattle that we
bled and butchered each fall. Fresh vegetables from our garden that we canned in the winter. Water from the creek. Sourdough bread from a starter that was older than I was. Alaskans can be quite proud of their sourdough starter. It is a living thing that must be fed and nurtured in the fridge. When you take some out, you add a few more ingredients back in so that its flavor keeps maturing. We got our starter from Yule, and he’d inherited his decades earlier.

I was proud to live on the homestead and to live off the land. I knew the sound of porcupines climbing the trees in winter, and could track the cattle in the snow back to where the water was. Wolves sang me to sleep at night across the canyon, and the winds whistled, exciting my imagination. Alaska is a land of extremes, with mountains climbing out of the ocean and glaciers that reach down into the sea like great white limbs, impossibly slow. Too much food in the summer, and too little in the winter. It is a place that requires great preparation for a human to have any sort of consistent sustenance. It requires a hardy, practical, and energetic approach to life, one that served me well on the long and winding road I’ve taken since then.

Extreme characters also seem to be drawn to Alaska, especially the smaller towns. Extreme political views, from hippie communes (there were a few rather famous ones that settled near the head of the bay in the ’70s, including the Love Family and the Barefooters), left-wingers, expats, outlaws, and mountain men who felt they needed to get just that much farther from the government. On East End Road lived a female belly dancer with a full beard. There was Stinky, who lived in an underground shelter he’d dug in an old junkyard—a refrigerator lying on its back served as a door, and it would hinge open, coffinlike, and up Stinky would emerge from his underground dwelling, still convinced a Cold War was possible. There were immigrants like my family, and fishermen, lumberjacks, and Russian Orthodox in their brightly colored traditional
clothes. All of us living separate lives on the same peninsula. The rule was that everyone had the right to be themselves and pursue liberty how they saw fit. At night when we sang, I was always amused to see such a collection of hippies, hillbillies, and rednecks all sitting at the same bar.

One of my favorite things about Alaska is that people are not jaded or too touched by pop culture. There is a tangible optimism that comes from making a living with your own hands. It’s honest and grounded and down-to-earth, qualities that served me well in a business that was anything but.

Our own home reflected the extremes of the land. My dad’s drinking continued. I remember him being so “sleepy” on the drive home after gigs that he would ask me to help keep the wheel steady. There was lots of yelling, rage, outbursts, though not always when he was drunk. The abuse escalated in the drinking years though. It was random and I could never predict what would spark my dad’s temper, and it began a lifetime of walking on eggshells for me, trying to read the signs and check moods. I think he hit the boys occasionally as well, but I felt he had a particular problem with me for whatever reason. Maybe it was female need. Maybe I reminded him of my mom. Maybe. All I knew is we fought a lot.

In some families this brings siblings closer together, but it seemed to splinter us. Shane handled it by being the responsible older brother, reliable and true, who would escape into fantasy books. Atz Lee was the favorite, and quite a rascal, defiant in his right to play and goof off. He could take hours just to fill a bucket of coal, the fire long out while we were waiting for him. I handled the stress by trying to be the best at singing and horse riding, and by trying to eliminate the competition. I didn’t understand that it was not my brother’s fault he was the favorite, and I resented him badly for it. I had a sharp tongue and I used my intuition like a weapon; whatever insecurity and weakness I sensed in him, I exploited. I tried to make him feel as badly about himself as my dad made
me feel about myself. My need to be loved was so strong that it took several years for my writing to expose the real issue, and for my conscience to get a foothold and defend my younger brother. To this day I am deeply regretful and sorry that I was not mature enough to see he was not an enemy but a victim in the same war. It took years of reflection to see that being the favorite can be a worse trap, as it leaves no door to exit by; loyalty to the love one receives, dysfunctional as it may be, is sometimes too strong a force to break free from. I had no idea what a gift it was that at least I knew I wanted out.