A Common Pornography: A Memoir (5 page)

Chad Crouch was
my first stoner friend. He lived in a ranch house with faded green paint three blocks from our middle school. There was gravel in the front yard, so his stepdad could park on it, I guess. I sometimes went there after school.

Once he pulled a bong out of a closet and showed me how to smoke pot with it. It didn’t seem like he had this bong hidden very well in the closet, so I assumed his parents used it too. They were a whole family of stoners. Besides my stoner brother, I didn’t know much about drugs then, just that they were bad and made you want to fly through the air like Superman.

I tried to hold the smoke in like Chad showed me but it still didn’t seem to have an effect on me. Chad leaned back with half-closed eyes and said something about how high he was. He looked like a sleepy cat. I thought he was faking it.

I kept waiting for something to happen to my brain, or for my head to feel like a lost balloon, but it never happened. So I faked it a little too, just to keep him as a friend. I laughed like he laughed, at the stupidest things, so I wouldn’t be a total drag.

We went to
California once in a motor home to see a space shuttle land. One of my half brothers, Russell, was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base and that’s where it was supposed to land. We went to some kind of NASA museum that morning before this “historic event” was to occur. Dad bought a black baseball-style cap with
NASA
in yellow letters on it. It was really hot out there by the landing strip and there were hundreds of people around with cameras and umbrellas. People were taking scissors and cutting the sleeves off their T-shirts. Dad got carried away and cut the whole top of his new cap off.

“My head’s gotta breathe,” he said. Everyone thought it was foolish, even Mom, who kind of snorted at him and said it looked silly.

We felt sorry for Dad and I think he felt sorry for himself too, because after a couple of hours he took it off and put it in the motor home.

The space shuttle landed without a hitch, but we couldn’t see anything with all the people there. Later that day, I saw the cap in the motor home’s trash bag.

I always thought
that my oldest half brothers, Russell and Gary, were the favored children in the family. They were both in the military, Russell in the Air Force and Gary in the Coast Guard. I figured Dad was proud of them because they had real careers that were serious and respectable. I was never interested in joining the military, mostly because I was afraid of going to war and I hated those commercials where they said they did more before 8 a.m. than most people did in a whole day or whatever they said. Waking up so early seemed like torture to me. Plus, I didn’t like being yelled at and I knew there was a lot of yelling involved.

Russell told me later that the real reason they signed up for the military after turning eighteen was to simply get away from Dad, not to earn his respect. The way he described Dad’s treatment of them as his stepsons was like psychological torment. At Christmastime, Russell said my father would get him and Gary the most minimal gift possible, sometimes used toys. But for Mark, he would bring out something new and big, like a bike or guitar. He would make a big presentation of telling Mark that Gary and Russell weren’t allowed to play with his gift. It turns out that, back then, Mark was like the Golden Child in the family. Russell and Gary, the older boys, were the targets of Dad’s anger and resentment. Russell said that after he earned his license and bought a car, he would often drive to his girlfriend’s house and sleep in the backseat until morning, and then give her a ride to school. His car was a place to escape.

Once, when I
was twelve, Gary was visiting us when a huge family fight erupted. It started with Dad and Mark at the dinner table. Mom tried to stop it and then Matt got involved too. Dad didn’t like it when Matt voiced his opinion about family matters. He would sometimes try to mute Matt’s presence by saying, “He’s not even my kid.”

Then Mark and Matt began arguing and eventually ended up outside, ready to fight. Mark called Matt a nigger and then it was a blur of arms and legs tumbling over in the middle of the yard.

Something broke in my naïve brain at that moment. I obviously knew Matt was different, but we never really voiced it. It was probably for my comfort that we ignored the difference of our skin. I thought if we talked about this difference it would create a distance and awkwardness between us. I wanted to think that other people were accepting of Matt without thinking about it too much. But in our small-town reality, he was the only black student at Kennewick High School. When he was a kid, there were signs on the bridge to Pasco that said all blacks had to be back in Pasco before a certain time. We never lived in Pasco.

I was totally unfamiliar and ignorant of what he had to deal with because of his skin color. I knew the word
nigger
though, and I knew I never wanted it anywhere near my lips, though there were surely times when I was angry enough to use it. But it would be a knife I’d never be able to pull out. A bullet that would spike his heart and stay there.

Mark scrambled up and ran off somewhere down the alley. Matt walked away in the other direction. Gary came outside then and found me, stunned and alone in the yard. He spoke to me calmly but in a tone of voice that said he was leaving. “If you ever want to get out of here, you can always come and stay with me,” he said. I wasn’t even sure where that was—North Carolina or Ohio maybe—but I could tell he totally understood my situation, as if he had lived through it himself. I let his words calm me. I let them give me hope for some kind of escape. And though I never took advantage of his offer, I still remember those words.

I was a
terrible seventh grader. I made no effort with schoolwork and rarely bathed. I was one of just four boys in concert choir, the reasons I joined still a mystery to me. Perhaps the last fragments of pop-star dreams still squirmed inside my queasy gut. One boy in choir, Mike Rome, was very mean to me. He’d point out when my hair was especially greasy or had dandruff flakes. I started to get pimples as well. My hormones had a war with my body and slaughtered it from the inside out. On the day when Ronald Reagan was shot, our class was interrupted by the announcement squawking over the intercom. Our teacher, Miss Haff, an obese woman whose body resembled one of those Weeble toys, turned on our classroom television. We watched in silence as they showed the shaky footage of John Hinckley Jr.’s attack. As the day wound down, I secretly hoped that Reagan would die. I craved a tragedy for everyone.

After the class, Miss Haff asked me if I could stay after and finish an assignment. I had no clue how to do it. She asked me why I wasn’t paying attention in class. I started balling my eyes out. She tried to console me and told me I was going through puberty and that it was a tough time. She hugged me until I stopped hyperventilating. I felt covered by her. I was disgusted and then relaxed.

At the end of that school year, our choir was having buttons made for everyone as a souvenir. We could have our real names or a nickname on ours. We went around the room, each person saying what they’d like on their button. When it came to me I blurted out, “Desperado.” The other kids grimaced my way and some of them giggled. Mike Rome called me Desperado for the next year, but not in a nice way.

As I became
more insecure in seventh grade, my brother Matt was starting to make real friends in high school. He was the first black student ever to attend Kennewick High, and because of that, he was probably the first and only black person they knew. At this point in his life, Matt still didn’t have a good idea who his father was and never felt like he could pry into the matter. A nagging feeling of not knowing who he was always shadowed him. Some people asked him if he was Mexican and some asked him if he was adopted. When he signed up to play on the high school football team, the coach wanted him to play running back and said he was going to make him “the team’s Walter Payton.” The implied stereotype of the comment weighed heavily on Matt’s mind for a long time.

Besides, his favorite sport was actually hockey. But there wasn’t a hockey team in Kennewick. And at the time, I don’t even think there were any black players in the NHL. I remember the New York Rangers were always playing on the USA Network and that was Matt’s favorite team. I’d hear him shouting and cheering from his bedroom (he was lucky enough to have a TV in his room). He really got into it. Sometimes I’d watch the Rangers with him, but I couldn’t get excited about it.

I much preferred watching football with him. We would usually turn down the volume and pretend to be the play-by-play announcers. We were big fans of Howard Cosell and Brent Musburger. This was also around the time when we tape-recorded fake talk shows with fake commercials, inspired by Martin Mull’s old show,
America 2-Night
.

At school, Matt mostly hung out with three guys who also felt like outsiders. Anthony was Japanese, George was Mexican, and J.D. was Ukrainian. They called themselves the United Nations.

J.D. was Matt’s closest friend and they did things pretty often after school. The first time that Matt went to J.D.’s house didn’t go well though. He rode his bike there after school and knocked on the door. Apparently, J.D.’s mom didn’t know that her son had a black friend. She opened the door with a look of panic on her face and told Matt that he couldn’t come in. “You shouldn’t be friends with J.D.,” she said. “If my husband finds out, he will shoot you.”

Matt got on his bike and rode home in tears. J.D. heard about what had happened and confronted his parents. He told them that Matt was his friend for life and that he would not allow them to treat him like that again. After that, Matt spent a lot of time at J.D.’s house and his parents never had a bad thing to say.

Still, Matt did wonder if there was a gun in the house, and if it had ever been fired.

I was addicted
to football statistics.

Every Sunday during football season I would jump up and down and yell at the television.

Then, on Monday mornings, I would sprint the two blocks to the newspaper machines at the post office. My dog, Scooter, would lope alongside me and I pretended he was a linebacker trying to tackle me. I’d always bought a
USA Today
or a
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
because they had the best stats; I’d cut them out and later add them up during my first-period class. I never liked the Seattle Seahawks because I had an unexplainable dislike for local teams. My favorite football team was the St. Louis Cardinals (who later became the Arizona Cardinals). Picking my favorite team as a kid was mostly based on who had the coolest helmet. I liked the profiled cardinal head and the dark red of their uniforms. All my friends liked the other popular teams of the seventies—the Cowboys, Steelers, and Chargers. The Cleveland Browns didn’t have anything on their helmets. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would like them.

As I ran back home I would imagine myself as a wiry punt returner like Terry Metcalf or a powerful running back like Ottis “OJ” Anderson. My dog was actually named after Ottis Anderson. I had heard that Ottis had the nickname Scooter when he was younger.

The newspaper in my hand turned into a football and I would dodge tacklers, set records, and make highlights that would never be shown.

Matt and I
played football a lot growing up. Most of the time we’d play with the neighbor kids in Miss O’Hara’s yard, which was about half the size of a real football field. We’d ask her first and most of the time she’d say yes, unless she had company and didn’t want to hear all of our yelling. We called her yard O’Hara Stadium. We had to be careful because there was a water faucet sticking up, about groin-level, right in the middle of the field. Amazingly, we avoided any serious injuries there.

I loved playing football but played only one season in high school. I didn’t like having to memorize plays and I didn’t like getting hit. I was a wide receiver and I caught one pass the whole season (a screen play). I preferred the backyard style of game played with the neighborhood kids or, later on, with Matt and his friends, who were all older and much bigger than me. I’d tag along each Saturday to Underwood Park. One of Matt’s friends was the older brother of a short, stocky girl named Jane who was trying to get permission to play on the high school football team. She’d play with us sometimes and she was really good, not afraid to hit and be hit (we played tackle). But one week she ran into the pole that marked the back of one of the end zones. It knocked her out and she stopped coming around after that.

My size worked to my advantage with these guys. I was speedy and elusive, the guy you’d have to watch out for on the “long bomb” route. Or I’d catch short passes and run out of bounds before I could get clobbered.