A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 4

  One morning, while I was playing by myself before my dad got out of bed, the handle fell off. The tape was in my dad’s room to keep me from playing with it, but he was asleep. He usually stayed up late and slept in, and the rule was that I had to leave him alone until he woke up on his own. So maybe I forgot, or maybe I was just four years old and wanted what I wanted, but I knocked very gently on his bedroom door and poked my head inside his room.

  “Dad?” I said.

  He was under the covers on his bed and he didn’t move, but I could tell he was awake.

  “Yeah?” he said after a minute.

  “Dad, can I have the tape? My cap gun’s broken.”

  “Let me see it,” he said, holding out his hand.

  I walked over and handed the toy to him, hoping he’d have some magic fix that only grownups knew. He looked it over for a second, then threw it against his bedroom wall as hard as he could. It was a quick, startling motion and I jumped back away from the bed. The gun exploded into pieces and loose parts that rained down on his bookshelves and dresser. There was an enormous dent in the wall where it had struck. I was too surprised to react for a second.

  “I’ve told you once,” he said in an even, measured tone. “I’ve told you a million fucking times. Do not wake me up in the fucking morning unless it’s a fucking emergency.”

  I started to cry. Partly from surprise, but mostly from disappointment. I was still processing the fact that he wasn’t going to help me fix my toy.

  “Stop that fucking sniveling or I’ll give you something to cry about!” he roared.

  I scurried out of the room, but I stopped to close the door carefully behind me. Because slamming the door was something else I wasn’t supposed to do in the morning, and I was in enough trouble as it was.

  Supposedly, this was all part of Dad’s master plan.

  Whenever he told me to do something and I refused, I got to the count of three to comply or there’d be a spanking. Usually a set number of swats with his bare hand while he held me over his knee. That was his version of obedience training. But there were other kinds of spankings, where maybe I got to the count of three or maybe I didn’t. Maybe we were fighting, or maybe I did something that just pushed him over the edge. Those were the ones where I screamed and tried to get away and he’d hold me down while I was thrashing and hit me anywhere he could get a piece of me—ass, back, legs, neck, head. There were the kind where he’d use a spatula or a belt. And all of that fell into his general philosophy of parenting. He was always telling people—sometimes right in front of me—that parenting was all about positive and negative reinforcement. He said that even if he wasn’t consistent about punishment, there was an overarching consistency to his moods, and subtle cues that I could learn over time if the stakes were high enough. So sometimes there were spankings and sometimes there were beatings, and one time when I was four he picked me up and threw me against my bedroom wall.

  He was telling me to do something and I was saying no, I wouldn’t do it—and he just charged. I dropped to the ground and curled up, even though I knew it was a bad idea. Any time I tried to protect myself it always made him madder: running, hiding, trying to cover my head or face. That was all forbidden. Once he started coming, I was supposed to hold still and take it. So I knew when I dropped to the ground that I was only making it worse. But instead of flailing away at my back like he sometimes did, he hissed “Motherfucker” under his breath, grabbed me by my leg and shoulder, hoisted me into the air, and threw me at the wall, above my bed.

  At first I didn’t even understand what had happened. I was dazed and my ears were ringing, but nothing was broken except something inside the wall. I’d heard something under the plaster crack when I hit, but the wall looked fine. I didn’t know what to do, so I just lay there on the bed. And Dad was gone. He’d run out of the room as soon as he did it.

  When I made some reference to it later, he told me never to talk about it again.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it was an accident. I was aiming for the bed.”

  * * *

  Over the course of a year, John told me the whole story of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He may not have read me the books in their entirety, but if he didn’t read every word, he certainly read from them while he worked his way through the epic. He used different voices for a lot of the main characters. He sang the songs and chanted the poems. Sometimes he’d compare one or another of the characters in the book to some of his lead figures, to show me what chain mail or a long sword looked like. John particularly liked doing the voice of Gollum, the wretched creature that follows the heroes through most of the story, and nearly destroys the world because of his sycophantic obsession with a stolen magic ring. I let John do the voice as long as I could stand it because I knew he liked doing it, but one day as we neared the end of the story, I just snapped.

  “Stop it,” I said. “I hate that voice.”

  “Why?” he asked. He was clearly surprised by the criticism.

  I thought about it before I answered.

  “I hate Gollum,” I said. “He’s the worst person in the book.”

  “Why’s that?” John asked.

  “He’s weak. He can’t even fight. He just lies and cheats and steals. Anyone could kill him—should kill him—but he begs and whines and they let him live. And then he does bad things to them after they were nice to him.”

  “Well,” John said. “That’s true, I suppose. But that’s the thing about Gollum. He knows what the right thing is. He can see it. And he wants to be good. But he had some bad luck. Right? He found the ring. And once he found it, he needed it. The ring made him that way.”

  “Because he’s weak.”

  “Maybe,” John said. “But remember—nobody else could carry it besides Frodo and, for a little while, Sam. None of the other good guys even wanted to touch it. Gollum just didn’t know how dangerous it was. Isildur, the first human to carry it, was a good guy before he got the ring. But once he had it, it corrupted him.”

  “Then he shouldn’t have messed with it.”

  “How could he have known? You might say, Jason, that the most evil thing the ring does is take people who were good, or who wanted to use the ring to do good, and change them. And that once they’re changed, they can’t go back. Not all the way. Gollum had that ring for hundreds of years.”

  “I’d never let it change me,” I said.

  “A lot of people think that. Boromir thought it. But you can’t know until you go up against the power of the ring, and most people lose that fight. Everyone except Frodo and Sam, in fact.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that one.

  I still hated Gollum.

  * * *

  We spent almost exactly a year on Hayes Street, and I was bored out of my mind for most of it. There were six other kids my age within walking distance: two straights who lived on our block, two hippie kids who lived at the end of the street, and two kids from our crew who lived a few blocks away. The two straights, a girl named Mickey and a boy named Kurty, made me nervous. The girl was a year older than I was, and the boy a year younger, and they both had “narc” written all over them. Their father, Mr. Wagner, was a grumpy older guy with a day job, who wore plaid pants and short-sleeved sweaters and kept his hair short. Their mom was a tense middle-aged woman who wore more makeup than any woman I knew besides my grandma, and dressed like Mrs. Jetson. Mr. and Mrs. Wagner clearly didn’t like me or my dad or our housemates; they seemed to want us all to go away. Possibly Mr. Wagner worked in lumber, or farming or textiles. The kids didn’t seem to feel as strongly about me as their parents did but they were eager to please, and I could easily imagine them running straight to their parents if I let something slip about Dad smoking pot or having gone to jail or any of that.

  The hippies at the end of the block, Geoff and Sarah, were okay except that their parents were the real deal; honest-to-god house-building guitar-playing ex–Peace Corps vegetarian pacifists. In some ways thi
s made them as dangerous as Mickey and Kurty. My people looked like hippies: they dressed like hippies, listened to hippie music, and said “man” a lot. But we were basically white trash rednecks in hippie clothing. Most of the adults I knew loved meat and many of them got in fights all the time and had decent gun collections. To say nothing of all the crime. Besides dealing drugs, my dad and his friends engaged in fraud, theft, and vandalism on a regular basis. Geoff and Sarah’s parents might be willing to occupy an ROTC building or march without a permit—they might even smoke some grass every so often. But if they knew half of what went on in our house, or in our social circles, they’d call the cops on us as sure as Mickey and Kurty’s parents. They’d probably agonize over it more, but they’d do it.

  The two kids from our crew were Ezeriah and Edward. Ezeriah was one year older than I was, Edward two years older. Their mom, Emmy, was a friend of my dad’s, though she didn’t have much to do with the rest of Dad’s social circle. She was tall and thin, which was what Dad liked in women, and he could never shut up about how beautiful he thought she was. I didn’t have much of an opinion about her one way or the other, and as nice as it was not to have to worry about what I might let slip around her kids, I didn’t like playing with them. Edward was just a little too old, and Ezeriah was just a little too butch. I liked make-believe games based on the stories John read to me. Ezeriah liked sports—as in games that grownups played, with bats and balls. And math. Lots of math. He constantly talked about his favorite players and their batting averages and errors and—Jesus. I didn’t even know what a batting average was. He talked about football. He talked about the Ducks. I had no idea. I didn’t even know the University of Oregon had a football team. Once we both got chickenpox at the same time and spent a week in my living room watching Dialing for Dollars and Sci-Fi Theater, and we got along pretty well that week because we had a shared love of war movies and Godzilla and we happened to get sick between seasons for his favorite sports. But most of the rest of the time he just confused me.

  And that was about it for my social outlets. There were some other kids in our crew who I got along with pretty well. Calliope and Miles were my favorites. But they didn’t live nearby and I only saw them once or twice every couple of weeks. The rest of the time I played by myself or watched TV or hung out with John.

  When my dad got tired of listening to me complain about how bored I was, he’d give me a serrated steak knife and tell me to mow the lawn with it. I’d spend hours out in the front yard, cutting clumps of grass loose from the dirt, trying to make them all a nice uniform height. Sometimes it was the high point of my week.

  8

  My dad’s Grandma Brown died sometime during the summer of 1976, and she left us about $4,000. She was Dad’s mother’s mother, and the last of Dad’s grandparents to die. Dad spent the money on a new car, a new TV, and two Beaver State Indian blankets from the Pendleton Woolen Mills, Pendleton, Oregon. Personally, I wanted to spend it on groceries—Beth had recently pointed out to me that not only were the little black things I kept finding in my powdered milk not supposed to be there, but that they were actually mouse shit. So my vote would have been for milk that came in liquid form, and maybe some fresh fruit. But Dad said we had to cash the check and get rid of the money immediately or the welfare people would take it all. So we got a new Vega and I kept eating USDA cornflakes and mouse poop–flavored powdered milk for breakfast.

  * * *

  Dad started classes at Lane County Community College the month after I turned four, which meant I was eligible to start going to their Montessori day care. I’d been to day care before, in Los Angeles, where my grandparents had sent me to something called a Town & Country preschool, but I hadn’t done very well there. I had a problem with authority. I had a problem with other kids. Basically, I just had a lot of problems. Things didn’t go much better at Lane Montessori. I only made two friends the whole time I was there: a teacher named Dee Dee, who took a special liking to me, and my chicken, Charlie.

  Charlie was the product of a school science project. The teachers had designed and built an egg incubator out of stuff they got at the hardware store and told us all about how it worked. Then they brought in some fertilized eggs and put them in the incubator, under a bank of warm lights. We all watched the eggs obsessively and when the teachers passed around permission slips that would allow students to take the chickens home with us, I talked my dad into signing one.

  “We don’t have any place to put it,” he said at first.

  “We’ve got the whole backyard!” I said.

  “It’s not fenced.”

  “We can build something.”

  By which I obviously meant that he could build something. He sighed.

  “Fine,” he said. “But it’s your problem.”

  Keeping in mind here that I was four.

  When the chickens hatched, all us kids were ecstatic. We watched the birds poke their way out of their shells, and we talked about how long it took them to be born. Sometimes a chick would spend a couple of hours working its way to freedom, sometimes the process would last overnight. And once they were out, the entire school got to play with them for a few days before they started getting sent home with the kids who’d talked their parents into signing permission slips. My dad balked again when he came to pick me up and actually saw—and smelled—the baby chickens in the incubator, but I whined until he let me bring Charlie home.

  It started out well enough. I kept Charlie in a cardboard box in the living room. He was small. He didn’t eat much or make much noise. But as he grew, it started to become obvious we’d need to take him outside. Dad stalled as long as he could on building me a chicken coop, but then one day he found an old playpen in an alley and brought it home for me to put Charlie in. He unfolded it proudly and stood back to show how the vinyl-padded metal frame supported the pink polyester mesh walls that would keep Charlie safe and sound in the backyard.

  “It’s got holes in it,” I said. “He’ll get out.”

  “No problem,” Dad said. He went into the house and came out with a darning needle and a roll of dental floss. A few minutes later he’d patched all the largest holes with dental floss, in such a way that it looked like a giant spider had been making half-assed webs in the gaps.

  “Won’t he peck through?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Dad said.

  And the playpen worked pretty well for a few weeks, until Charlie started to crow. By this time he’d gone from a little yellow fuzzball to a medium-size white rooster with a bright red crest, and he wanted to let the world know he was in our backyard. Eugene was still rural enough that the neighbors didn’t give us any grief about the crowing, but the sound drove Dad batshit.

  “Jason,” he said one day. “We can’t keep Charlie. He’s too noisy.”

  “What do you want to do with him?” I asked.

  “Give him to Sean,” Dad said, referring to a friend of ours who owned a farmhouse out near Dexter, some twenty-five miles from the center of town.

  “Sean eats his chickens, Dad.”

  “Well—okay. But he won’t eat Charlie if we ask him not to.”

  Sean was a car mechanic from Georgia who was best known in our circles for getting so jacked up on speed that he once blew all the windows out of his house with a shotgun. That, and beating a murder rap for supposedly killing a woman he’d picked up in a bar one night. He was one of the least child- and animal-friendly people I’d ever met, and I had absolutely no faith in any promise he might make not to eat my chicken. I could already imagine him saying, “Charlie? Oh yeah, that’s him, right there. What’s that? Charlie was white and that one’s orange? Well shit. I don’t know what to tell you, kid.”

  Something on my face conveyed all this to my dad, and he sighed dramatically.

  “What if I get you another pet?” he asked.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Something quiet. Like a gerbil. That way you can keep it in the house. And play wi
th it.”

  I had to admit that second part sounded nice. As much as I loved Charlie, he wasn’t much fun to play with. He didn’t really learn tricks, and he tended to peck at me when I tried to pick him up. Sometimes, when my friends were over, we’d make little mazes in the front yard by flattening the tall grass with our feet or cutting it with a steak knife, and then we’d run Charlie through the maze. But mostly he just ate, crowed—and pecked holes in the playpen.

  “I’ll try a gerbil,” I said.

  “So I can call Sean about Charlie?”

  “No!”

  “Well. I guess Miles and his mom might take Charlie out at their place.”

  Miles and his mom, Laurie, were part of our extended social network. They lived in a house that was situated on an actual farm just east of Springfield. The land around their house wasn’t being cultivated anymore, but they had a lot of space and a long dirt driveway and an abandoned barn next to it. The whole setup was perfect for a chicken, and I figured they might be willing to give Charlie a patch of yard or something.

  “Okay,” I said. “If I like the gerbil.”

  The next day, when Dad brought me home from day care, I found a brown gerbil in a shoebox in my room. I took him out and tried to play with him, but he didn’t seem to like being held any better than Charlie did and when he bit me, it hurt a lot worse than getting pecked. I played around with him for an hour or so before I put him back in his box and went to ask my dad where the gerbil’s permanent home would be.