A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Read online

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  For Tricia, who makes everything possible

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

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  77

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  80

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  “I’m not making up any of these stories I’m telling you tonight. Um … except for one. Except for the fact that the banana sticks to the wall when it hits. That’s the only one. Everything else is true.”

  —Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia

  The names and identifying characteristics of many of the people described in this memoir have been changed, and some characters are composites. This has been done to protect the innocent, and give everyone else plausible deniability. I have also engaged in what I understand to be a memoirist’s usual prerogative to fiddle with time, dialogue, and small details. Quotes are meant to convey my memory of the gist of conversations as I recall them.

  Finally, because a lot of people have asked me about my recall, and the level of detail in my writing, I feel like I need to explain something about how these stories have been preserved over the years. One of my earliest memories is of riding a tricycle across town when I was three years old. I described that memory to my father when I was about seven years old, and he confirmed that it had, in fact, happened. Then he told me his memory of it, fleshing out the story for me. For years afterward, I retold the story to friends and family, and occasionally thought of it myself. When I was in a familiar place that I hadn’t visited in a long time, I would flash back to that long-ago tricycle ride, and the sensation of navigating through dreamlike associations with obscure landmarks. Twenty or thirty years passed, and now I’ve written the story down. Is it a memory, or a story about a memory? I have no idea and, for purposes of this memoir, I have chosen not to be particular. But quite a few of the stories in this book are like that. Whether a story becomes more or less true after frequent retellings is, of course, a matter of opinion, but they’re accurate to the best of my recollection.

  And that’s about it.

  Everything else is true.

  Prologue

  “There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine.”

  —Captain Benjamin Willard, Apocalypse Now

  When I was sixteen years old I came home from school one day and found my dad crawling around on the kitchen floor in a big pool of blood. He was down on all fours with a dishrag, trying to mop it up, but there was a lot of blood and it was a small dishrag so things weren’t going very well. When I walked in from the back hallway and saw what he was doing, it wasn’t immediately obvious where the blood had come from. I stopped in the doorway and stood there for a minute, hoping he’d notice me and offer some kind of explanation. But he just kept scrubbing away.

  “Dad,” I said, after a pause. “Hey, Dad.”

  He finally looked up at me and smiled placidly.

  “I fell,” he said. Now that he was looking right at me, I could see that some of his hair was caked into a sticky mess on one side of his head. A little knot of tension let go in the back of my skull. Once I knew the blood was his, I knew what to do: I went to the phone in my bedroom and called a cab. I thought about calling an ambulance, but I wasn’t sure Medicaid would cover it and the last thing we needed was another bill we couldn’t pay. When I came back out a minute later, Dad had gone back to scrubbing at the blood. Same patch of floor, same dishrag. He hadn’t even rinsed it.

  “Dad,” I said.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Hey!” I said. “Dad!”

  He looked up at me slowly, like he was seeing me for the first time. This was how it was with him now. Everything happened at one-quarter speed, and half of it ended badly. Watching him use a step stool or a kitchen knife was enough to give me nervous fits.

  “Come on,” I said. “We need to go downstairs and wait for the cab.”

  I tried to make it sound fun, like we were going on a trip to the park.

  “Cab?” he said. “No … I have to … we … have to clean this up.”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said, still talking to him like he was a reluctant child. “I’ll clean it up when I get home. Come on. We have to go.”

  “Go?” he muttered.

  “We have to go. Downstairs. For the cab.”

  “Oh,” he said, looking like he was trying to remember something. “Okay. Um.”

  He tried to stand up, but I could see right away that it wasn’t going to happen. The linoleum floor was slippery from all the blood, and Dad was profoundly stoned on painkillers. He went up, he came down. Went up, came down. I watched him flop around for a minute longer than I probably should have, then I stepped in and hoisted him onto his feet. Once he was standing he started looking around and patting his pockets.

  “I need…” he said.

  “You’re fine,” I said. “Come on.”

  I managed to get him out onto the landing and down the stairs. I was worried about the stairs, but he didn’t weigh anything. I carried him down in my arms, like a baby. When we got outside, we sat down on the front steps and waited for the cab. The building we lived in was an old house that had been subdivided into apartments, so it had a proper porch and a small front yard.

  We waited longer than I expected to. Longer than I wanted to. Holding still this long had been hard for me lately. If something bad or scary didn’t happen every few minutes, I started to worry that someone somewhere was saving it up for me.

  “My son’ll be home from school soon,” my dad said.

  I looked over at him. He was staring out at the street. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right until he followed it up with “He’s doing really well in school.”


  When I understood what was happening I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

  “He’s got the whole world in front of him,” Dad continued. “Anything he wants to do. He’s … he’s doing really well. He’ll be … really well.”

  I thought, not for the first time, how satisfying it would be to kill my father. How easy. To just fucking kill him.

  I went back and forth with myself about whether it was a good idea. There was the whole getting caught thing, but, really, that wasn’t a significant problem. He overdosed on his pain meds all the time. Once or twice a month, I had to sit next to his bed, timing the intervals between his breaths on my cheap digital watch. If he didn’t take one at least every two minutes, I was supposed to call 911. But that would be the time to do it. If I just held a pillow or a damp cloth over his face one of those nights, I doubted anyone would ask questions.

  My real hesitation was that I might regret it. Probably not right away, but eventually. If I lived a really long time. And I never wanted to regret anything to do with my dad. When he died—which would happen soon, with or without my help—it was important to me that I’d have the moral authority to despise his memory for the rest of my natural life. So, fine. If taking care of him until he died of natural causes was what it took to establish for good and all that I was different than he was, then the insurance was cheap at the price.

  Dad kept muttering about how great Jason’s grades were and how bright Jason’s future was, but I tuned him out. I dug at the peeling paint on the front porch stairs with the toe of my sneaker. When the cab arrived, I got Dad up and helped him into the back seat.

  “Swedish Hospital emergency room, please,” I said to the driver.

  When we got there, I eased Dad onto the curb and leaned in to pay the cabdriver.

  “There’s some blood on your seats,” I said, tipping him with my last five dollars. “You have to clean it with bleach water. Wear gloves.”

  He looked at me like he had no idea what I was talking about.

  “Gloves?” I said, making totally incomprehensible gestures, like jazz hands. “You have to wear gloves. His blood’s poison. You understand poison? You have to wear gloves.”

  The cabdriver gave me a look and nodded. I handed him the money and he drove away. Then I got my dad up again and helped him along through the automatic doors, into the emergency room.

  It was a slow day at the hospital or something. When they saw me come through the doors they all came running: a couple of nurses and an orderly with a gurney.

  “What happened?” one of the nurses asked.

  “He fell and hit his head,” I said. “But be careful with him. He’s got AIDS.”

  They all skidded to a stop. One of them put on a pair of elbow-length gloves and helped me get Dad onto the gurney. The others left and came back in blue plastic moon suits with huge Plexiglas face shields.

  “I feel sick,” Dad said, as the hospital people surrounded him on the gurney.

  “We’ve got him,” one of the space-suited nurses said to me. I stood back while they wheeled him into an exam room. One of the orderlies barely managed to get a bedpan in front of him before he sat up and vomited into it. It was a wet, focused explosion, like he was breathing fire. The nurses started giving each other instructions in those loud, barking tones they use, while one of them talked to my dad, trying to keep him calm. Trying to keep him awake. Every so often one of them would ask me a question: What was he on? Did he have any allergies? How long ago did this happen? I answered their questions and wished Dad had one of those conditions where vomiting and passing out actually meant the end was nigh. That this would be over soon.

  I don’t know how long I stood there before I looked down and noticed I was covered with his blood.

  1

  My first memory is of riding my tricycle under a pale blue sky, down streets lined with compact houses and generous yards. I rode toward things that pleased me—the shape of a tree, the spacing of telephone poles, an arrangement of power lines above the street. I rode down the middle of the street, so cars would be able to see me.

  I didn’t feel worried or afraid. It was a beautiful day. I took my time. When the door of one of the houses opened and I heard my mother call, “Jason?” I smiled and waved at her.

  She brought me inside. Her living room had a big picture window that faced onto the street. The curtains were drawn back, and the room was full of light. Most of the floor space was taken up by a large wooden loom, but there was a couch and a big overstuffed chair farther back in the living room, near the kitchen. There was a small square trunk next to the chair. The shape of the loom, the pedals and the rows of steel wires, reminded me of a piano. I sat on the couch while Mom called Dad on the telephone. Dad showed up a little while later, and I sensed that I was in trouble so I crawled under the loom, but nobody yelled at me. He sat down on the couch, and she sat down on the chair.

  “Honestly,” he said. “I didn’t even know he was gone.”

  “That’s not very comforting,” she said.

  Then they were quiet for a while.

  “It’s more than a mile, Mark,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. He looked at me then, and I could tell he didn’t know what he should say. What he should think.

  They talked for a while longer, then he took me home.

  It was the summer I turned three years old; the summer of 1975.

  * * *

  My dad and I lived in a dark brown house with a gently sloping roof, a wood-slat exterior, and windows that opened out like little doors instead of sliding up and down the way windows were supposed to. It was built in a flatter, more sprawling style than most of the other houses in town. I didn’t like it. It was the only house on a dead-end street in the middle of a giant field. There were no other kids nearby. There were never any people walking on the sidewalk or playing ball out in the field. When I went outside, all I heard was wind.

  The street ended a block past our house, where a heavy galvanized steel chain was stretched across the road between two metal posts. The posts were made of thick metal pipes that had been driven into the ground and filled with concrete. They were painted bright yellow, and the chain was locked in place with a bulky rubber-coated padlock. The blacktop road ended at the chain. Beyond that, it was a dirt road, covered with gravel, that went toward a large, low building in the distance.

  I spent a lot of time contemplating the mystery of the posts and the chain. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to put them there, but they seemed like a poor solution to a problem that didn’t really exist. If someone really wanted to go on the dirt road, all they had to do was drive into the field and go around the posts. And yet I never saw it happen.

  Of course, people did dump garbage near the posts, and I never saw that happen either. So maybe the chain did serve some function, even if it was just to keep the garbage on our side of the posts. One day I went outside and found a burned-out mattress lying in our driveway. I had no idea how it had gotten there. All the cloth and stuffing had burned away, leaving nothing but the metal springs and frame, like the bones of some poorly evolved dinosaur. I climbed onto it and started bouncing as hard as I could. Cartoons had given me the idea that a really enthusiastic bounce would launch me ten or fifteen feet into the air, but I didn’t seem to be able to get more than a few inches of clearance. At some point, Marianne came out and told me to be careful on that thing.

  I looked back at her, as she held open the screen door that led out of the house and onto the driveway—a plump hippie with a wild mop of curly brown hair. She had a wide face with sunburned cheeks; strong nose, weak chin. She looked sleepy. She sounded sleepy; she had a scratchy voice, like someone who’d just woken up. She wore loose blue jeans and a baggy T-shirt. She didn’t live with us but she was around a lot, and she seemed to want to look after me. Most of my dad’s friends ignored me.

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  She nodded and went back inside.


  Everything else I remember about that house amounts to a small collection of moments. I make guesses about when they happened, or in what order. The last memory is the only one I’m sure of.

  * * *

  I was hiding in my dad’s closet, watching him through a crack in the door while he did something he didn’t want me to see. I felt clever for catching him, but I didn’t understand most of what I saw.

  I tried to make up a story that would explain what he was doing, but whenever I thought I understood what was happening, he did something else that surprised me: burning silverware with a lighter; holding a hot spoon between his knees; tying a piece of rubber around his arm. No story I could come up with explained what he’d done so far, let alone anticipated what he’d do next. At some point the whole ritual reached a kind of climax and he sat there on the bed for a while, like he was doing some really deep thinking. Then he stood up and started hiding his collection of strange implements in various small wooden and metal boxes around the room; the rubber tubing went in one box, the spoon in another box, and so on.

  I waited until he left the room, then snuck out of the closet and opened the last box I’d seen him touch.

  I recognized the thing in the box as something that doctors used. I even had some idea what it was for, though I didn’t know the word for it. It was a little plastic tube with a wire-thin needle poking out of one end. The other end had a blue plastic plunger with a rubber tip, which was used to push liquid through the needle. I didn’t know what Dad had been doing with it, but I knew the pointy metal needle meant I shouldn’t touch it. I closed the box and left the room.

  * * *

  I was in the living room. I wasn’t doing anything, just sitting quietly and watching. Marianne was standing across from me. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a black vest. The curtains on the front window were open, and there was afternoon light coming in behind her, framing her in two giant golden rectangles. The living room was cluttered, and she was making her way carefully toward the back of the house. She had one hand on the wall, like she needed help staying upright. In her other hand, she had a glass jug full of red wine. She lifted the jug to her lips and took a swig, then shivered and shook her head like the flavor had hit her wrong.