A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (27 page)

“You owe me this,” Dad would say to me.

“For what?” I'd ask.

“For everything.”

We'd been fighting a lot since he got sick. He wanted me to work more, to carry my weight more. He wanted me to clean the house more often. Dad liked the house vacuumed twice a day. He liked me to do the dishes. Except for the compulsive vacuuming, it was all basic stuff—stuff any of my friends had to do at their houses. For some reason, when Dad told me to do it I dug in my heels. And lately he'd really started losing it when we fought. He'd always had a temper, but lately he'd started a new litany when we argued.

“You fat, lazy piece of shit!” he'd scream at me. “I can't believe I raised you! I can't believe I wasted my life on you!”

I didn't exactly blame him. I thought I even knew where his anger was coming from.

Every day we were hearing about more AIDS deaths. Newspapers were saying the infection could be much more widespread than people realized, because the disease stayed relatively dormant for the first couple of years after exposure. Billy was getting worse again. Bruce's last long-term boyfriend had died of AIDS the year before. He'd been one of the first in Seattle to die of it.

If Dad had previously assumed he'd have time to live his life after I grew up and got out of the house, he was reevaluating that assumption now. Even I could see it. If he died sooner rather than later, that would mean I was his life's work. And I wasn't good enough. It was that simple. What he saw when he looked at me didn't make him feel like his life had been worth it.

He liked everything about me less every day. He'd always told me how beautiful I was; how thick my hair was, what a good nose I had, how naturally graceful I was. Lately it was all about how fat I was. How I ate too much. How I didn't respect myself. How he was embarrassed to be seen in public with me. I used to be smart, but now I was lazy. I used to be full of love, but now I was just hateful and bitter. I used to be fun, but now I just took, and took, and took.

“Bruce can get us out of here,” Dad said. “He wants to move with us, to Southern California. Someplace I can see the sun.”

“I don't want to move to L.A.,” I said. “I hated it down there.”

“You'll move wherever I tell you to,” Dad said. “But I don't want to move to L.A. either. San Diego. That's where we're going.”

*   *   *

We moved in fits and starts as the weather got better. Dad and Bruce made a plan with Dad's friend Nikki, a submissive lesbian witch we knew from Capitol Hill. A month or so before the end of my sixth grade year, Dad announced we'd be moving into Bruce's one-bedroom condo to save money before the move to San Diego in October. I had mixed feelings about it, but there was nothing left for me in Ballard. I hardly ever saw Eddie, and after Gabe's mom married a rich lawyer and moved to a better neighborhood, the old D&D group didn't want to have much to do with me.

We put our stuff in storage that spring, in the garage of an old lady at the end of our block in Ballard. She'd once threatened me with her dead husband's .45 when she caught me stealing plums off the tree in her yard, but she didn't seem to recognize me when Dad gave her a check for $150.

Then we spent four months in Bruce's little one-bedroom condo while Dad and Bruce went on a landscaping and home repair spree, fixing up the building so the condo association would allow Bruce to rent his unit while we were in San Diego. Dad took some other steps to make sure we'd have a fallback plan in Seattle if San Diego didn't work out: he transferred our Section Eight housing to the apartment of his drug dealer, Scotty, on Capitol Hill. Scotty had a two-bedroom apartment in a converted house, and he agreed to risk losing the apartment to us, if we came back, in exchange for at least a year of reduced rent—plus our welfare checks and food stamps, which he'd also collect on our behalf. The arrangement carried a risk: at least three counts of fraud, and we'd never get on the rolls for any of those programs again if they caught us. But Dad didn't think we'd ever come back to Seattle, so he figured the insurance was cheap at the price.

Dad finally sold the Vega for scrap. He and Bruce split the cost of a '66 Volvo sedan to take to California with us.

I didn't bother registering for school in Seattle that fall. We'd be gone soon enough. Anyway, I needed to be home so I could take our dog, Thunder, for walks twice a day. In Ballard he'd been almost wild, with Dad letting him out all night, every night. Now he was cooped up in a tiny third-floor walkup, and I had to put him on a leash and walk him around the neighborhood while he did his business on the parking strips. However much I hated living in Bruce's apartment, Thunder hated it more. He exuded an almost existential angst. He also developed canine eczema on his lower back, which was pretty gross.

That October we packed everything from the garage in Ballard, and all Bruce and Nikki's stuff, into a U-Haul truck and a trailer, and began our five-day pilgrimage to sunny Southern California. Dad and I rode with Thunder in the truck. Bruce and Nikki took the Volvo.

It would have been a four-day trip, but we had to stop in San Francisco so Nikki could visit her dominatrix, Mistress Lisa. Mistress Lisa insisted we all come up and say hi. Her apartment was bright and homey. She had wainscoting in her kitchen and a lot of potholders with Midwestern ranch-themed prints on them hanging on hooks near the stove. I looked at a coffee table book about circus freaks while Lisa's slave brought us Red Zinger tea, and Dad and Lisa talked about gardening and interior design.

*   *   *

Nikki had a girlfriend in San Diego, in a neighborhood called Ocean Beach. When we got there, we spent a few hours moving Nikki and her girlfriend into their new apartment, but after that we were pretty much on our own with a truck full of stuff, no place to stay, and no income. It took Dad about two hours to rent a garage where we could store our things, on the ground floor of an apartment building next to the Ocean Beach Municipal Pier. We spent the rest of the day loading boxes and furniture into the garage before Dad and Bruce left me on the pier so they could return the truck to the nearest U-Haul place. Dad asked if I wanted Thunder to keep me company. I told him to take the dog with him in the car, and spent an hour walking around the beach by myself.

The fishing pier was enormous. It stood on concrete pillars twenty-five feet high and reached a good quarter mile out into the ocean. There was a building at the end of the pier, with the word
CAFÉ
painted on the side in huge black letters. The beach itself was dotted with public restrooms that had showers and working toilets; in Seattle most of the public bathrooms were closed nine months out of the year, and the toilets hardly ever worked. The Southern California air was warm. The smells were totally alien to me, some combination of sage and ocean. The sunlight made everything look white and blasted. It was unlike anyplace I'd ever been. I was willing to believe that was a good thing.

 

40

The first order of business was to spend as little money as possible while Dad and Bruce looked for work. Dad's solution was to get us all a room in a place called the Eagle Crest Hotel, between San Diego and Ocean Beach. The room cost ten dollars a night and had two twin beds and a small refrigerator. No TV, but that was fine—we just got one of ours from the garage storage unit. The bathroom was down the hall, and there were separate shower rooms. The men's shower room was a large open space with white subway tiles covering the walls and ceiling and small hexagonal tiles on the floor. All the tiles in the room seemed to be held in place by a dense black mold that was packed tightly into the crevices, like grout. A dozen shower nozzles poked out of the wall at regular intervals. When I went down the hall to check it out, there were three guys in there, and a cockroach running across the floor toward one of the open floor drains. We stayed in the Eagle Crest for two weeks. I didn't shower once.

Dad found a gig for himself and Bruce with a house-cleaning service that did one-time projects, like cleaning out trashed apartments so they could be re-rented. It paid more than enough to meet our needs. After that, he had no trouble finding us a place to live near the beach. Unfortunately, the town house wouldn't be ready until the end of the month, so Dad decided we should move into the storage garage to save money while we waited. We rearranged our things so there was a bed for Dad and Bruce in the back of the garage. I slept in the gap between two couches, where one was stacked on top of the other. We used the toilets and showers at the public bathrooms on the beach. We were careful not to be seen coming and going. Our rental agreement specifically forbade living in the garage.

I got to spend another two weeks lounging on the beach while Dad and Bruce cleaned the homes of dead shut-ins and junkies. I had to take the dog for walks, which I found annoying because I'd started to think of him as a spoiled sibling. But really, I'd had worse times.

 

41

We moved into the town house a month after we arrived in San Diego. Dad and Bruce took the upstairs, with the living room, the kitchen, and one of the bathrooms. I took the downstairs room that had its own bathroom and its own entrance. Once we were settled in, Dad registered me for the seventh grade at a nearby middle school. It was mid-November.

I didn't like the school. The layout was confusing to me; it was a bunch of separate one-story buildings connected by covered walkways, with no apparent rhyme or reason to how the rooms were numbered. A lot of my classmates only spoke Spanish in social settings. I was hot all the time. I didn't understand any of the classes because they were actual content classes instead of the general concept stuff I'd been learning in elementary school, and I was starting two months late. Computer science? Algebra? What? Oh, right, like those word problems I did in sixth grade where it says “n
=
?” Now, what's this business with “x”?

After two weeks, I told my dad I didn't want to go back.

“Fine with me,” he said. “Just don't sit around the living room watching TV all day.”

I promised I wouldn't. I had cable in my room. I'd sit around down there watching TV all day.

*   *   *

At some point in early January, my middle school noticed that I'd been gone for kind of a long time and sent Dad a letter asking if I was coming back. When he called them to tell them he had no plans to reenroll me, they asked if I'd like to take part in their experimental learning program.

“What's that, exactly?” Dad asked.

The woman on the phone said that it was basically a homeschooling program. Every week a teacher would come to my house, drop off new assignments, and pick up my completed ones. The teacher would have up to an hour to spend with me if I was having any problems with the subject matter. Otherwise, there was a number that I could call during regular school hours if I was really stuck on a math problem or something. And I never had to set foot in a middle school again.

“What's the catch?” Dad wanted to know.

“He's got to take an IQ test to qualify,” the woman said. “And some aptitude tests.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “That shouldn't be a problem.”

*   *   *

A week later I took another trip out to another remote administrative building and took another battery of tests. There were more questions this time, and more of them involved reading, but I did my best. As I finished each section, a tall bald guy in a suit and tie would collect my work. After about three hours, I joined Dad in a small waiting room while the school people finished their evaluation. The waiting room had windows that faced out into the hallway, and nice lighting. The furniture was a lot newer and nicer than what I was used to seeing in government offices. Everything had clean edges. Nobody had scratched their initials in anything. There were some Legos in a bucket near the door. I looked at them longingly, then started flipping through
National Geographic
magazines instead. I'd been avoiding Legos for two years, just to prove to myself that people like Carol couldn't hold anything over me.

After about forty-five minutes of us sitting in the waiting room, the tall skinny bald man in the suit came in. He sat down across from Dad, near me. I went and sat down next to Dad, so I'd be able to see the bald man's face.

“Thank you for waiting,” said the man.

“Sure,” Dad said. “Did he qualify? For the program?”

“Oh, I should say so. Has he had tests like this before?”

“In Seattle,” Dad said.

“Ah,” said the bald man. “Okay. So … based on these scores, what we'd like to do is, we'd certainly like him in the program this year. Of course. And, I don't know—I'm not sure there's much point in him starting eighth grade next year.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Well,” said the man. “We've got two choices, really, with these tests. He could start high school next year, and just skip the eighth grade. Or, instead of high school, we could also do an early admission program.”

“Early admission to what?” Dad asked.

“College or junior college, if you want to go that way. I don't know what you can afford. If it's a city college we could cover part of the tuition. We've got a program for that. You'd have to go ahead and get a GED, but I don't think that would be a meaningful impediment.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “I don't even know algebra. How can I go to college?”

“Well, you don't know algebra,” said the bald man. “Sure. But the thing is, we think you could learn, say, first year algebra, in a couple of weeks, if you had the right instructional environment. So whatever you know or don't know, teaching it to you isn't really going to be the hard part. Getting you into a situation that funnels information into you as quickly as you can learn it. That's going to be the real trick.”