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

  11

  Dad had toned down his drug business considerably after his arrest, but every so often a deal came up that seemed relatively safe and offered a good rate of return and he’d be tempted out of his semiretired status. Not long after we moved in with Marcy, he was offered a chance to make a few hundred dollars delivering a shipment of pot from Eugene to Portland. It fit his criteria of low risk and high profit, so he agreed to make the run and left me in Eugene with Marcy while he headed north. He wasn’t heard from again for three days, but when he came home he had a story to tell.

  He was supposed to move the shipment in a dozen thirty-five-gallon black garbage bags, full of bud and loose leaves. Dad preferred to transport large quantities of pot in garbage bags; he said that if he got stopped, he could just tell the cops he was taking a bunch of yard clippings to the dump. Even if he did end up getting searched, he could claim someone else had given him the bags and paid him a couple of dollars to get rid of them. It wasn’t much of a defense, but it had the advantage of being plausible and easy to remember.

  The dozen garbage bags completely filled the hatchback of the Vega, so Dad drove the whole 110 miles north using his side-view mirrors to change lanes. When he got to Portland he had some trouble finding the address where he was supposed to make the drop, but eventually he made his way to a small house on the west side of the city. He parked the Vega on the street and went to the door to make sure he had the right place. When he pressed the doorbell, another young male hippie answered.

  “I’ve got a delivery here,” Dad said.

  “From Eugene?” the man asked.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “I—”

  But the dealer interrupted him and asked, “Is that your car?”

  What happened next is probably owed to the fact that most of Oregon is comparatively flat. Not Midwest-flat, but Eugene and Portland are both in the Willamette River Valley, and most of the development is on the low, level ground near the river. The problem here was that Dad’s connection didn’t live in the Portland basin. He lived in Portland Heights, an upper-class residential neighborhood on the slopes of the Tualatin Mountains, west of Downtown Portland. The Heights have good schools and great views. And they also have steeper hills than any urban residential neighborhood in the state.

  Afterward, Dad always claimed he’d set the parking brake when he got out of the car—that it was broken, and he’d just never noticed because Eugene is so flat. But he also neglected to turn his front wheels toward the curb.

  When Dad looked over his shoulder to see what the connection was staring at, the Vega was just beginning to roll. Dad lunged after the car. For a few frantic seconds, as he chased it down the street, his fingers brushed futilely at the driver’s side door handle, but gravity had sunk its teeth in by then and the car was accelerating. It inched ahead, then really took off, almost like it wanted to get away from him. By the time it slammed into the galvanized steel utility pole at the bottom of the hill, he figured it was going a good sixty miles an hour.

  The pole took the car dead center and sliced halfway through the engine compartment. The entire front of the car just puckered up like a horrified face. The headlights were pointed, more or less, at each other.

  Dad stopped and stared, but only for a second. The sound of the impact was still echoing through the hills when he ran back up to his connection’s house. The door was closed. Dad pounded frantically until the guy looked out past his security chain.

  “Help me get that shit out of the back of the car!” Dad shouted.

  “No fucking way,” the connection said. “Get it up here and dump it in my backyard, I’ll keep it. But I’m not going down there.”

  Dad just turned around and ran. He couldn’t blame the dealer. It was exactly what Dad would have done under the circumstances.

  Surprisingly, there was still nobody around when Dad got back down to the car. He used his key to pop the hatchback, grabbed four garbage bags, and ran back up the hill. Then down and back, two more times. He threw the last set of bags over the fence and came back down the hill to check on the car. A few of the neighbors came out on the street to see what was happening. Then, just as Dad got to the bottom of the hill, a police car pulled up.

  Dad said later that the cops knew something was up but they couldn’t prove anything, so they arrested him for leaving the scene of an accident. Dad explained that he hadn’t left the scene of the accident—that he’d just arrived when the police showed up. That excuse worked, but not before he’d spent two days in jail and squandered his phone call trying to reach Sean. Sean was Dad’s go-to guy when it came to getting bailed out of weird situations. But while he was a great guy to have on your side in almost any situation, he didn’t yet own one of the newfangled answering machines that were just coming out on the market. After Dad got home, he got paid for the delivery, but most of the money went to cover the cost of having the eviscerated corpse of the Vega towed back to Eugene.

  * * *

  After the Vega was totaled, Dad finally quit community college, took an actual break from dealing drugs, and found a semi-straight job working under the table with an anarchist tree-planting collective called the Hodads. The job took him out of town for days at a time, sleeping in the converted school bus the Hodads used as a mobile bunkhouse and planting saplings in the wreckage of clear-cut forests.

  Dad quitting school meant I couldn’t go to day care there anymore, but the theory was that Marcy would cover child care while Dad was gone. In practice, she wasn’t around much either, and all four of us kids spent a lot of time on our own. We didn’t mind. There were a lot of other kids in our neighborhood, and Eugene still had enough small town innocence that even Isaac and I, who were only five, could wander around relatively freely.

  The nearest busy street was West 11th Avenue, just to the south of us, which we weren’t supposed to cross. But we could go as far as we wanted to the east or west, and that meant we could play in the alleys behind the businesses on our side of West 11th. Whenever the weather was good, Isaac and I would traverse the whole area, Dumpster-diving and rooting through junk, looking for old machine parts or packing material that we could turn into toys. We could tell just by looking at a Dumpster whether it would be worth opening. Most were too gross to mess with, but some of them belonged to warehouses or auto parts stores. The outsides of those Dumpsters were always clean. When we opened them, they were usually full of broken-down cardboard boxes.

  On a hot day, the smell of dry cardboard wafting out of a clean Dumpster was enough to make me want to crawl inside it and go to sleep. Except that when I mentioned something about it to my dad he told me a story about a kid getting emptied into the back of a garbage truck and crushed by the truck’s big hydraulic compactor. It didn’t keep me out of Dumpsters, but it took all the romance out of the idea of sleeping in one.

  Mostly Isaac and I just played with the boxes. If we could find empty ones, we’d fold them back into cube-shapes and pretend we were superheroes, throwing giant empty boxes at each other like Superman and Captain Marvel hurling Styrofoam boulders. But every once in a while we’d find something interesting—like the time we found dozens of small white cardboard boxes with individually wrapped chandelier crystals inside. We assumed someone had accidentally thrown out several pounds of diamonds, and we brought as many of them home as we could fit into our pockets.

  12

  My grandpa had a heart attack while we were living on Fillmore. It was his first one. Dad, all of twenty-seven years old, still felt enough of a connection to his father to drop everything, get special permission from his probation officer, buy some overpriced plane tickets, and fly us down to L.A. to visit Grandpa in the hospital. I didn’t really know what a heart attack was, and I didn’t know why Grandpa having one meant we had to go to Los Angeles, but I didn’t mind making the trip. I had my own reasons for wanting to go.

  Like most five-year-old boys, I was crazy for dinosaurs. At some point my dad had read me a book
about dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals that included a few paragraphs about tar pits, and how tar pits sucked dinosaurs down into them and dissolved the flesh off their bones over a period of centuries. The book said that the skeletons left over from this process were some of the best-preserved specimens in the world. The book said there were tar pits that had been around for millions of years, like the La Brea Tar Pits, in Los Angeles, which were surrounded by chain-link fences to keep people from getting sucked into them.

  The book had pictures of lots of dinosaurs in it, but no pictures of the tar pits. So my five-year-old brain conjured a picture of a kind of prehistoric monster called a tarpit that basically just sat there on the ground like a giant Venus flytrap and waited for something to step on it. Then it would pull its victim down into its gaping maw and spend a few centuries digesting it before pooping the cleaned skeleton out into the desert where humans would later stumble across it and put it in a museum. I was fascinated by the idea that there were living specimens of these things in Los Angeles—and that I’d missed my chance to see one while I was living in Torrance.

  When Dad told me that Grandpa’s heart attack meant we had to go to L.A., I knew the universe was conspiring to give me another chance to see the tarpits.

  * * *

  Dad’s cousin Dave met us at the airport in L.A. Dave was related to Dad on his mom’s side, and he didn’t look anything like us—he had wavy blond hair and fair skin that tanned a kind of ruddy brown. He was a hippie, but Dad had warned me that Dave was one of those clean-living hippies like I saw on TV and I shouldn’t say anything about our family business around him.

  We threw our stuff in Dave’s van and he drove us straight out to the hospital. I was glad we were going to get this part out of the way, but we ended up in a traffic jam. I’d never seen one before, and I couldn’t believe how many cars there were all around us, or how wide the freeways were. I couldn’t understand why the cars were all stopped or why the ones up front didn’t just go. But every time I asked about it, Dad told me to be quiet. Eventually I gave up and lay down on the floor in the dark back compartment of the van—until Dad and Dave both jumped in their seats.

  “Holy shit!” Dave said.

  I sat up and looked to see what they were staring at and at first I didn’t see anything. Then I spotted something a few hundred yards ahead. Some kind of bird or …

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s a tire,” Dad said.

  That didn’t make any sense, but he was right. It was a tire, bouncing down the shoulder of the freeway toward us. On each bounce, it seemed to go fifty or sixty feet into the air. I wondered where it could possibly have been dropped from to make it go that high.

  “Why’s it bouncing like that?” I asked, as we watched it lope down the freeway toward us.

  “It’s a spare,” Dad said. “It’s still got a rim and a tube in it. Jason, come here.”

  He reached behind him and pulled me onto his lap, then opened the passenger side door a crack. Dave did the same on his side. Neither one of them took their eyes off the tire.

  I realized the tire was moving down the freeway toward us much faster than I’d first thought. I leaned forward and watched it sail into the air, hesitate for a second, and start to come back down.

  “It’ll land in front of us,” Dad said.

  “Yeah,” Dave agreed.

  Watching it come down, I started to get scared. When it hit the concrete shoulder of the freeway I felt the impact as much as I heard it, and then the tire flashed back up into the sky again, so fast I could barely see it. Dave tilted his head and watched in his rearview mirror.

  “Wow,” he said.

  Slowly but surely, the traffic started to move again.

  “Was that it?” Dad asked. “How many miles could that thing have bounced down the freeway without going off?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave said.

  Ten minutes later we saw a delivery van on the left shoulder of the freeway with a police car parked behind it.

  “Mark,” Dave said.

  “Hey, Jason,” Dad said, pointing at an imaginary object on the right side of the van. “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” I asked, looking where he was pointing, expecting to see another tire. But he wasn’t looking where he was pointing, and neither was Dave. They were looking at the van. When I tried to look where they were looking, we’d already passed it.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “That van got hit by the tire,” Dad said. “The cab was crushed and the driver was killed.”

  “How could you tell?” I asked.

  “It was obvious,” Dad said.

  “Wow,” I said. “He was just driving along and—splat.”

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “Sometimes that’s how it happens.”

  Dave gave Dad a look, like Dad had said something wrong, but I wasn’t sure why.

  * * *

  When we finally got to the hospital and went up to Grandpa’s room, I couldn’t understand what the big deal had been. Grandpa looked fine, I thought. There was a machine next to his bed: a white metal box on a wheeled stand, with four or five unmarked switches and a few red lights. A clear plastic tube ran out of it and up under Grandpa’s hospital gown. I had no idea what it did. I couldn’t even tell if it was on. Lying in his large, comfortable-looking bed, watching baseball on the cable TV on the wall, Grandpa looked like he always had: big, strong, and totally humorless. He was wearing his usual large-framed yellow-tinted sunglasses. His ridiculous pompadour toupee was on straight, his face was fresh-shaved. His dark skin was a little yellow, but otherwise he seemed healthy and lucid.

  “Hi, Dad,” my dad said when we came in.

  Grandpa looked at Dad, but his expression didn’t change much.

  “Mark,” he said.

  Dad sort of looked like he wanted to hug Grandpa, but Grandpa didn’t move or respond to Dad’s movements, so Dad just stood next to the bed, holding on to the metal railing. Grandpa’s eyes drifted down to me.

  “How’s it going, pardner?” he growled. He was always calling me stuff like that. He always said it in that raspy growl, like he was making an effort to sound extra-tough when he was talking to me.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “All right,” Grandpa said, and went back to looking at the TV.

  Dave was standing in the doorway behind us. I looked at him, but he was watching Dad and Grandpa.

  “I’m glad you could make it,” Grandpa said. His eyes flicked away from the TV, then back.

  “Of course,” Dad said. He sounded surprised.

  Dad and I stood there for a while. Eventually I noticed a chair up against one wall and sat down. Dad stared at Grandpa. Grandpa looked at the TV.

  “All right,” Dad said after about twenty minutes. “We’ll head out. We’re staying at Aunt Gin’s. I’ll be back.”

  “Okay,” Grandpa said. He held up his left hand. Dad squeezed it once, then headed for the door. I got up and followed him.

  Dave’s van was in a multistory parking structure next to the hospital. This had been another revelation to me—I’d never seen a whole apartment building just for cars. In Eugene, people parked on the street, in single-car garages, or in parking lots. Between the freeway, the traffic jam, the killer tire, and the parking garage, I was getting a picture of L.A. as a place where cars had made a world for themselves. They had their own roads, where people weren’t allowed to walk or ride bikes; they committed acts of violence against each other, and had special buildings to sleep in. People were just along for the ride.

  When we got to the van, Dad’s mouth was a straight line, and his face had a dark purple cast to it. Most people with our complexion, we didn’t blush, but Dad’s face always got darker when he was upset. I felt bad for him. He didn’t like people to see him get rattled. Grandpa had just surprised him, was all. As a rule, Dad weathered other people’s cruelty pretty well as long as he could see it coming.

  * *
*

  We spent the night in the guest bedroom at Aunt Gin’s place. Aunt Gin was one of my dad’s mom’s two siblings. The other one was Uncle Bud. I’d liked Aunt Gin when I’d stayed with Grandma and Grandpa before. She was friendly and she could cook, which distinguished her from Grandma. And while I understood that Aunt Gin was a Christian of some sort, she never once quoted the Bible at me or tried to convert me.

  Aunt Gin’s husband, Uncle Bert, was hard of hearing. Or, really, he was mostly deaf. I never saw Uncle Bert move, even to go to the bathroom. He sat in the living room, watching sports or news programs on his small black-and-white TV. Sometimes he watched it with the volume down. Other times he ran an earpiece from a wire that plugged into the front of the TV and blasted the commentators’ voices into his good ear at a volume he could hear. Aunt Gin brought him food and glasses of ice water. When she wanted to talk to him, she shouted. He always looked surprised to find her in the room.

  Aunt Gin and Uncle Bert lived in a one-story rambler about three times the size of any house I’d ever lived in. There was a guest bedroom, where Dad and I slept, next to the bathroom. The backyard had a tree that grew edible pink and white flowers. The back fence was a tall cinder-block wall. Lizards liked to climb on the wall, to bask in the sun. I spent hours trying to catch one.

  I was glad we were staying there instead of at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

  * * *

  On our second day in L.A., Dave came to ask Dad if he wanted to come to the park for a game of touch football. When Dad said yes, I assumed touch football had to be a euphemism for something. We went out and got into Dave’s van and drove to a park a few miles away. There were a bunch of other guys about my dad and Dave’s age waiting for us at the park. Dad seemed to know most of them. They exchanged greetings. Some of the men took their shirts off. Then, to my utter amazement, they actually started playing football.