A Common Pornography: A Memoir (2 page)

I thought Kennewick
was the ideal place to grow up. Of course, this was before I even saw anywhere else.

My favorite attraction was the Cable Bridge. I remember the kind of awe and joy that only an eleven-year-old can muster about such an object. When the bridge opened for traffic in 1978, it seemed almost unbelievable that this was the first cable-stayed bridge in the country. Dad drove our family across on the first day it opened. My other brother who still lived in the house, Mark, was with Matt and me in the backseat. We craned our necks to look out the back window and watched the cables slanting to the high columns in the middle of the bridge. We didn’t have any tall buildings or other interesting structures at all in the Tri-Cities and this first impression was breathtaking. It made me think of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which I knew only from pictures. I thought the Cable Bridge, which connects Kennewick to Pasco, was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in person. It was a majestic backdrop for the yearly hydroplane races, which were also a source of hometown pride, as they were supposedly the second most well-attended hydroplane events in the country.

The only other interesting creation in the area was the Wet ’n Wild water park, which opened up by the Columbia Center Mall when I was a teenager. It also had some important-sounding rank among national attractions. It supposedly had the third longest water slides in the country. Going down those slippery tubes rubbed the hair off my calves and made my body feel like it was full of static electricity. Then I had to wait in line for a long time, shivering and dripping, until I was back at the top. The lifeguards there were always too cool to look at anyone. They kept their eyes set on a particular curve of the slide and then waved their hand lazily, signaling the sliders to go. For some reason, it was closed down a few years later and then eventually demolished to make room for a car dealership.

Elinda is my
mother’s first child, born in 1946.

Elinda’s father was with my mother for only a brief time, physically abusing her and then disappearing for a long time after he was sent away for an armed robbery in Great Falls, Montana.

Shortly after that, Mom met a man named Jimmy and they got married. Elinda was afraid of Jimmy and would have nightmares about him, even after Mom had two children with him—Gary and Russell.

Mom and Jimmy got divorced when Elinda was five.

My dad came into the picture in 1956. He wanted to help Mom with the children, but he was often overwhelmed trying to provide for them. Despite their struggles, he wanted to have his own children. My brother Mark was born in 1960.

When Elinda was a little girl, she would often daydream in school and her teacher thought she was mentally retarded, or, as they called it back then, “feebleminded.”

Mom was wrestling with her own health concerns. She was epileptic and would have seizures quite often, shaking the whole house, scaring the kids, and waking up unsure of what was happening to her. It took several years and several treatments to get the right medicine to stop the attacks.

When my sister, Elinda, became a teenager, she was sent to Medical Lake, a psychiatric hospital, from 1960 to 1970. When she began there, she weighed ninety-eight pounds. Two years later, she weighed two hundred. She became diabetic.

While she was there, she received eight shock treatments. After each treatment, she would sit somewhere and wonder,
Why can’t I think?

She was sexually active in the hospital and became pregnant after having sex with one of the other inmates on the concrete floor of the mailroom. She wanted to get married to this person and have a life outside of the hospital with him, but when she had the baby, a healthy boy, the hospital officials deemed her unfit to be a mother. The child was immediately taken from her before she could see it.

There was an
old woman at Medical Lake with Elinda. She was like a grandmother to everyone and would play pinochle with Elinda. She was in there for killing her husband and children. Another woman had drowned her kids. Those were reasons for being there, Elinda thought. Those women had even sent warnings and when those warnings were ignored, they did what they said they were going to do.

Another woman who spent time at the hospital while Elinda lived there was my dad’s sister, Evelyn. She was battling depression and schizophrenia. But oddly, they weren’t aware of each other.

Elinda could never come up with a clear, solid reason why she was there in the first place. No specific label or complicated acronym. “The simple way of expressing what I could have had is
crazy,
” she has told me. “But they wouldn’t label me crazy. I’ve got to fight my brain all the time now.”

When she left, she was worse than when she entered.

Matt told me
a story once about how I almost got lost at the Medical Lake hospital when I was four. We had gone with Mom to visit Elinda and he was supposed to be watching me. I ran off somewhere, scampering around corners, hiding behind doors, trying not to laugh. Finally Matt found me, just before I walked into the outstretched arms of a drooling old woman in a tattered nightgown.

When Elinda turned
twenty-four, she left Medical Lake and was married soon after. Joseph, her first husband, like Mom’s first husband, was a terrible mistake. He drank and smoked all day long and was physically and emotionally abusive. He treated Elinda like less than an animal and accepted money from friends who wanted to have sex with her. She became pregnant with the child of one of his friends and, despite her situation, wanted to keep the baby.

Elinda and Joseph were living in Pasco at the time, not far from Mom and Dad and the rest of us, across the bridge in Kennewick. I was just a toddler.

Mom discussed Elinda’s circumstances with Dad, knowing that Elinda would probably not be allowed to care for the baby herself. The baby was going to be half-black, and whether that was part of the reason or not, Dad refused to be a caregiver for another child.

When the baby, a girl, was born, Elinda was allowed to be a mother for a few days before the baby was taken away and given up for adoption.

Elinda’s troubled marriage soon came to an end. Joseph became more violent than usual and kicked her front teeth out and broke her nose. He told her that if she didn’t leave, he was going to kill her. So she left.

She served him with divorce papers after that, wanting to cut him out of her life, but he didn’t file the papers properly and thirty years later, after he died, she found out that they were never legally divorced.

One of my
earliest memories of Elinda is the bird whistle trick. Matt and I had these plastic whistles that were shaped like birds. You would put water in them and blow into a hole by their tails and it would sound like the fluttering tweet of a bird. My sister was sitting on the front porch of our house, watching the traffic on Washington Street or maybe squinting at the giant neon cross of the Nazarene church across from us. Matt and I would hide around the corner and blow on the whistles. Elinda would whip her head around and shout, “Where’s that bird at? Birdie? Birdie birdie?”

Dad saw us through the window and shook his head. Mom finally came out and told us to knock it off.

Elinda stayed with
us sometimes at our house. She would sleep on the couch. One night, she awoke at 3:30 a.m. and felt Dad touching her. He didn’t say anything but she could smell alcohol on his breath. She didn’t know what to do and thought for a moment that maybe she was dreaming. The house was quiet and she felt paralyzed. He climbed on top of her. She decided that she could not scream because she didn’t want to wake up any of us kids.

I was probably four at the time. Matt and Mark and I were sleeping upstairs. I remember that every night in that house, Mom would tuck me in and say, “Good night.” Then I’d answer, “Sleep tight.” Then she’d say, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” We would repeat this, back and forth, even as she left my room and walked back down the stairs. Her voice answering my voice until I stopped saying, “Sleep tight.”

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

I did not know about what happened between Elinda and Dad until the day after his funeral. Mom wanted to have some one-on-one talks with her kids before we all scattered again. So she and I ended up at a new Sonic drive-in. We ordered root beer floats and for the first time ever, we spoke openly about the dysfunctions of the family. She told me more about her first husbands, about Elinda’s childhood, about why she stayed with Dad, even though it was evident that there was little love from him.

I felt bad for Mom because, in a way, it seemed like she was apologizing on behalf of Dad for not being a good father. When she told me the story about him and Elinda, it answered one question I had always had: Why was there no affection displayed in our family? Now I understood that she was disgusted. The kind of disgust that flowed through our bloodline and poisoned everyone in our house.

Dad had made Elinda pregnant on that night.

Elinda went to
Yakima and got an abortion after that. She came back to our house a few weeks later. Nobody knew where she had gone or that she had been pregnant. She knew that she had to tell someone, so she told Mom. I believe this was the moment when all of Mom’s affection for Dad disappeared. After that, Dad constantly became angry at Elinda. The sort of anger that was made up of jealousy, resentment, and embarrassment. He started to blame her for every little thing that went wrong—a broken wiper on the truck, a mess in the kitchen, the heat being turned up too high. Then once, late at night when they were alone again, Dad went over and sat next to Elinda on the couch. He put his arm around her and told her he loved her and wanted to marry her. She told him, “You can remove your hand, and I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.”

The family name
was originally spelled Samsel. Some time in the 1930s, when my dad was a kid, his mother changed it slightly, adding the
P
and extra
L
. Apparently, someone named Samsel had committed some terrible crime that summer and she didn’t want her kids going to school with that name.

Two of the
neighborhood kids, Willie and Todd, joined my brother Matt and me in a game we had invented. We’d make a quick buzzing sound and become a “spirit,” which was like a superhero. There were good guy spirits and bad guy spirits, and each one had a special power.

Matt’s main spirit, The Claw, had a dangerous weapon called the Brain Hold. There was no defense against this hold but Matt was fair by not doing it all the time. He’d often yell, “Brain Hold!” whenever he was going to do it. I had one spirit that was so fast he could run around the house several times and not look like he was moving at all. I had to tell my friends when he was done running. I imagined that this spirit might have a female sidekick, but there were no girls who would play with us. Todd’s sister was about our age, but we all teased her because she wasn’t pretty and her name was Sissy.

At night, in our bedroom, Matt and I would talk about what our spirits were going to do next, and discuss maybe killing off some of our old spirits for new ones. It was highly dramatized and loosely scripted, like the professional wrestling we watched on Saturdays. The show,
Big Time Wrestling,
was a weekly ritual for us. This was before wrestling became glitzy and hugely marketed. Some of the popular Northwest wrestlers like “Playboy” Buddy Rose, Jimmy Snuka, Jesse Ventura, and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper even came to Kennewick and wrestled at the high school sometimes.

I was going to make up a spirit with a super brain to combat The Claw and his famous hold, but Willie and Todd moved away and we stopped playing.

That’s when Matt and I began reading books about Bigfoot.

Two plastic record
players and a nice stack of Top 40 45s were all I needed to start my own radio station. My plan was to do a pirate radio show that would broadcast to my neighborhood. Instead I just pointed my speakers out the upstairs window and hoped the sound reached the corner.

In fifth grade I started writing really bad pop song lyrics. When I wrote something I thought to be particularly hit-worthy, I’d cut out a piece of paper in the shape of a 45, and then, after coloring in the black wax area, I’d put the name of my song on the “label.” Some of these hits were “Sound of Thunder,” “Rich Dude,” and “Diamond Girl.” The name I gave myself was Billy Rivers, because I thought it sounded cool.

After cutting out the center hole, I’d string the smash hit to a hook on my ceiling. I imagined I was a megastar. Sometimes I’d even put them on one of the turntables and watch them spin. Forty-five revolutions per minute. Once I put a needle on one as it spun and ruined the needle. I had to go to the record store, where they sold little smoking pipes and stoner posters, spending my entire five-dollar allowance on a new snap-on needle.