A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (49 page)

I had trouble sitting through the lecture on aesthetics. I kept needing to stretch, crack my knuckles, crack my neck. I couldn't get comfortable in my chair. I rolled my shoulders. I felt like I was in a box. After the lecture, the class split up into small seminar groups, and I went into my assigned room ready to tear something apart. I sat there holding on to it as long as I could, but all I could think was that none of these assholes understood—they didn't even understand what the lecture was about. They could read about it, but they didn't get it. They didn't comprehend anything.

“I think Tanizaki is critiquing Western culture's obsession with technology,” one of my classmates said. “And our lack of appreciation for subtlety and context.”

“Which might be a valid critique for him to make,” I drawled, stepping on the end of her sentence, “if he'd ever spent any time in the West. But since he didn't, either his critique is full of shit or you are.”

The room caught its breath, and I suppressed a scream of frustration. Anywhere I'd ever lived up to that point, an insult like that would have been a clear invitation to everyone at the table to throw some hands. These useless pricks didn't even speak English.

“That was out of line,” the seminar leader muttered, avoiding eye contact.

“Sorry,” I sneered. “I guess I'm a little irritable today. My dad died last night.”

The uncomfortable silence that followed gave me a warm, vicious glow, but it didn't burn hot enough to take my mind off anything.

*   *   *

There was a funeral in Seattle a few days later. I didn't even know who organized it. I'd told Kris and Bruce they could do whatever they wanted as far as I was concerned. Kris called me and told me the particulars. She gave me plenty of notice, but I was late anyway. I wore black jeans and a black T-shirt; I was carrying a white dress shirt that I'd meant to change into, but I never got around to putting it on.

The service happened in the chapel of a funeral home on Capitol Hill. The chapel was tall and deep, but very narrow, and made entirely out of concrete. Thick pillars supported the high ceiling, and banks of nondenominational stained-glass windows shone down from high on the north wall. There was standing water on the floor, like the place had been sprayed out with a pressure hose right before we came in.

My uncle John and his family sat with me near the front, in an uncomfortable wooden pew. My grandparents were boycotting the service because there were Buddhists speaking.

I didn't really pay attention to what was said or who talked. Afterward, I remembered the wall sconces. They had white plastic lilies in them. Dad had hated plastic flowers. The whole thing took about twenty minutes. I had the feeling we were getting some kind of welfare-funded pauper's funeral special, but realized later it was probably paid for by the Northwest AIDS Foundation or the Chicken Soup Brigade. Or maybe Bruce.

I went to the after-party at Kris's apartment. There was a lot of food. There was a sheet cake with a palm tree and a rainbow on it that had “Aloha, Mark!” written on it in frosting. I expected the party to be relaxing compared to the funeral, but mostly it was a lot of people I didn't know—people from Dad's support groups and service agencies. They all said nice things about him—generally to each other rather than to me, but I could hear them. After about an hour I decided I was just bringing everyone down, so I left. I walked to the Greyhound station, a half mile away, and waited for the next bus heading south, back to school. The benches in the terminal were full, so I sat on the floor and stared at the clock on the wall above the ticket office.

I realized I'd left my dress shirt at Kris's house.

It was funny. The whole thing was funny.

I wanted to call someone and make jokes about the funeral. I wanted someone to come pick me up and take me to a coffee shop. Or maybe to the beach. Someplace with a view. But Ryan was on the outside of this particular circle, and apart from him there really wasn't anyone else left. I hadn't spoken to Calliope in over a year. I wasn't even sure I still had her number. Marti and I hadn't talked since school ended, and she wouldn't thank me to call her now, for this. I had a lot of acquaintances, but hardly any friends. The people I'd been close to were all gone—and only about half of them were dead. So what did that mean?

*   *   *

Grandpa died three weeks later, of another heart attack. He died in his easy chair, in his living room, up on Camano Island. Probably he was watching baseball when it happened. I'd moved by then to a place where I didn't have a phone, so I didn't get Uncle John's messages until after the funeral. It didn't upset me much. Grandpa had been sick for a while, and anyway, it was how everything was going now; everyone was dying or moving on. My whole universe was closing up shop.

 

79

I told most of my classmates at Evergreen that my dad had died of tuberculosis. It was the lie he and I had settled on when he first got sick. And not just because of homophobia. A 1985
Los Angeles Times
poll had said that a majority of Americans favored forcing AIDS patients into quarantine camps. Then a U.S. congressman named Dannemeyer had actually suggested doing it. In the pre-Internet age, Xerox copies of newspaper articles about that kind of thing were passed around the AIDS community like banned books. It all seemed crazy, but World War II hadn't been that long ago and nobody wanted to find themselves sitting in a bunkhouse in central California, surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire, thinking, “Wow. They actually did it.” I knew I was safe from that kind of thing, now that Dad was gone, but fear of how straights would react to the truth about anything was a lifelong reflex by that point.

Staying in the closet about my own family background kept me at a boil for months, and then years, but I had other problems. It was true that my old life had ended when my dad died, but I carried fragments of it around inside me afterward, like pieces of shrapnel I'd picked up in some unpopular covert war, and they ate at me in ways that surprised me. I kept thinking I was going to wake up some morning and breathe a sigh of relief because nobody was going to come into my room in the middle of the night and start screaming at me. Or hitting me. Or trying to smash my head in with some kind of blunt instrument. I didn't have to worry about accidental fluids exposure anymore. I'd survived my dad. But surviving a trauma and being able to live with it were two different things.

I started to shake apart. It was little things at first. I'd always had trouble sleeping, but at Evergreen it just spiraled. By the end of my first year, I was going days at a time without rest. And when I finally did sleep, it was rarely for more than four or five hours at a time. Other things followed. I'd been kind of jumpy for years. But now I couldn't sit in a room with my back to the door—couldn't relax at all in a room where the door was open. When I did sleep, I slept fully clothed. I kept a knife under my pillow. If someone startled me—if they came up behind me or talked to me while I was reading—my hands snapped up in front of me, like a boxer, ready to fight. Sometimes I'd start shouting obscenities at them. I overreacted to normal stimulus. All the time, in every situation, I was so angry I was vibrating with it. I couldn't regulate the volume of my own voice. I couldn't concentrate.

And I couldn't explain any of it.

People talked a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder in the eighties, when everyone suddenly started giving a shit about Vietnam veterans. I'd seen the symptoms in everything from Rambo movies to
Magnum, P.I.
reruns: flashbacks, hypervigilance, insomnia, mood swings, increased fight-or-flight response. But it was only ever talked about as something that happened to soldiers. There was nothing in my background that would justify me being as messed up as I seemed to be. The physical violence, with my dad—it hadn't really been that bad. Or I didn't think it was, anyway. And I'd seen other people who had it so much worse. The idea that I might be suffering from a delayed stress reaction didn't seem credible, even to me.

In the absence of a good reason for being like I was, I made up a lot of ridiculous lies about the hard life I'd had on the streets and the horrible acts of violence I'd committed and witnessed there. Some of the people who were afraid of me also started feeling sorry for me. Unsurprisingly, this also made me angry.

By the end of my second year, I was behind on my rent, unemployed, and I was only passing about half my classes. Evergreen didn't have grades—they issued written narrative evaluations to students at the end of every academic term. But other schools converted those evaluations into grade equivalents, and I knew I was running about a high-D average. I figured I was doing myself more harm than good staying in school, so I dropped out and went back to Seattle.

That was when things started to really suck.

 

80

I spent my first six months in Seattle camped out in Kris's hall closet, before I moved into an apartment I couldn't afford with a guy I barely knew in a neighborhood up north of Ballard. I didn't have a bed because the dorms at Evergreen came with them, and I couldn't move or store one anyway. So I slept on the floor, wrapped in the Pendleton blankets Dad had bought with his inheritance when I was four years old, and I used my wadded-up army surplus field jacket as a pillow.

I looked for work that could tolerate my mood swings. I spent a year using toxic chemicals to rinse laboratory glassware in a small, poorly ventilated room with no windows. I hated the job, but I could have as many bad days as I wanted to in that room. Nobody tried to talk to me. Nobody told me they were scared of me, or accused me of anything, or asked me what was wrong with me. When that job ended, I worked four part-time jobs at once, washing dishes, running a cash register, making pizza, and covering a few nights as a pantry cook.

The cash register job required more contact with people than I would have liked, but the environment was uniquely suited to my temperament. I worked the downtown bar rush two nights a week, serving pizza and ice cream to drunk suburbanites, college students, and the criminals who preyed on them. My boss carried a gun in a shoulder holster, and we kept a baseball bat next to the register. When I caught a customer pissing in a back stairway of the restaurant, I grabbed the bat and made him clean it up with a roll of paper towels. Afterward I was horrified by my own willingness to do serious violence over something that really wasn't that big a deal. I told my boss about it at the end of the night, assuming I'd be fired on the spot, but he just told me I'd done the right thing and that being ready to mess people up was part of the job.

A week later, my boss told me he wanted me to help his cousin remodel another pizza restaurant, a few blocks away. I spent three weeks on that job, working side by side with the cousin. We talked about all kinds of things. He asked me a lot of questions about my background. Then, after three weeks, he took me to lunch and told me he wanted to promote me.

“To do what?” I asked.

“I'm looking to move into patents,” he said. “To buy them from inventors. But I need someone who can convince them to sell. I hear you're a guy who knows how to talk to people.”

I laughed.

“Where'd you hear that?” I asked.

“The way I hear it, you convinced a guy to clean up his own piss,” the cousin said.

I stopped laughing.

“This is no small-time operation,” the cousin assured me. “We're vertically integrated. You work for me, you've got a house, a car, clothes. Medical and dental. The works.”

“What about a lawyer?” I asked, to make sure I understood what he was saying. “Bail. That kind of thing.”

“That shouldn't be necessary,” he said. “But if it came up, I'd have you covered.”

“I'll need to think about it,” I said.

I gave notice a few days later and got another job making pizza in a different neighborhood.

I spent a lot of my spare time exercising, shadow boxing and doing calisthenics. If I wasn't working out, I was reading. I read novels, and nonfiction books about revolution: Emma Goldman, Bobby Seale, and Malcolm X. I read books about tree spiking and industrial sabotage. I read history books about the Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground. I didn't know what I thought I was preparing for, but the feeling that some kind of doom was just around the corner followed me everywhere. When it didn't arrive on its own, I started to think about what I could do to hurry it along. When I turned twenty-one I got a permit to carry a concealed pistol. I never did buy a gun, but I spent more on knives, saps, and throwing stars than I did on clothes.

I kept circling the idea of doing something irrevocable. And while I thought about that I did stupid, pointlessly dangerous things. I walked fifteen hours—almost fifty miles, in a fall rainstorm—wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I went out in the middle of the night and crept through the camps of the homeless men who lived in the woods above the railroad tracks. Or I walked on the tracks from Seattle to Edmonds, the next town up to the north, with the ocean on one side and cliffs and deep ravines on the other. It was an easy walk by daylight, so I'd start at 10:00 p.m. walking in the dark as quietly as I could, so I'd be able to hear the chirp of the tracks if a train approached. When the engines went by, I'd crouch on the edge of the stone seawall while the cars roared past just a few feet away.

I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But I didn't have any friends to talk to about it, or family to have to explain it to, so it seemed not to matter. It seemed like I could go as crazy as I wanted to and there was no societal mechanism to reel me back in. I kept expecting someone at one of my jobs, or even a random stranger on the street, to tap me on the shoulder and say something like “It's none of my business, buddy, but you need therapy.”