A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (11 page)

I ended up staying with Grandma and Grandpa for about three months.

I was enrolled in second grade at Stanwood Elementary, which meant a forty-five-minute bus ride into town every morning, and a forty-five-minute ride home in the afternoon. I tried to make friends, but the other kids confused me. Every place I'd been up to then, there were rules about not swearing and not telling dirty jokes, but they were teachers' rules. Flouting them was usually the easiest way to get other kids on my side and make friends. Instead, the kids I met on the bus and at school seemed genuinely upset when I told jokes about poop, or called one of them a cocksucker.

Their attitude toward violence was also strange. When I pushed one of them, instead of pushing me back or beating the stuffing out of me, or even running away, they'd go and tell the teacher. At first I interpreted their curiously nonconfrontational behavior to mean that they were all just exceptionally nice, but that didn't turn out to be true either. Most of them were really forthcoming about telling me they didn't like me, and telling everyone else what a jerk I was (evidently “jerk” was the strongest word most of them felt comfortable with, which I also found confusing). Meanwhile, the houses on the island were so far apart that there were no kids close enough to want to play with me just because I was convenient. After a month or so I pretty much gave up on my classmates and resigned myself to playing alone until I could get out of there.

Then, to my complete surprise, I started having a lot of fun at church.

Grandma and Grandpa took me to church every Sunday, and I barely tolerated the services. I disliked the singing and the sermons. I hated getting dressed up and having to hold still for an hour. Most Sundays, I felt like the only kid in a congregation of geriatrics. Then, after a few weeks, the youth pastor sent me a letter inviting me to their youth groups on Wednesday and Saturday. I went reluctantly, but it turned out to be more fun than regular church. There was some Bible stuff that I was basically indifferent to, but there were also a lot of activities and, finally, at the end of each youth group, a chance to vent some aggression.

They played a game at youth group that was a little bit like tag. We'd get a bunch of boys on a field, someone would throw a ball out in the field, and we'd all try to get it. Whoever got it then had to run while everyone else tried to clobber him and get the ball. When the runner was tackled, he'd throw the ball up in the air and someone else would pick it up. Officially there were no points, but we compared the number of times we'd possessed the ball, and bragging rights were given for more possessions. I'd never played a game quite like it before. It was called “smear the queer.”

Dad came up every week or two and stayed overnight in the basement room, smoking (in spite of Grandma's frequent admonitions), sleeping late, and refusing to go to church. When I told him about smear the queer he got very quiet for a while, then said, “Jason, remember when we talked about Jesus?”

“The alien thing?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sure.”

“Well, this is still that same church. That game they've got you playing is about teaching you to hate and persecute people who are different than they are. They're teaching you to single someone out, gang up on him, and beat the shit out of him because he's different.”

“Well, but, anyone can get the ball,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “But you know what ‘queer' means?”

I realized I didn't. I had sort of an idea that it was something undesirable, but I didn't know the exact meaning.

“It means ‘different,'” he said. “It means odd, or strange. If you heard a noise in the middle of the night, you might call it a queer sound. If your food tasted wrong, you might say it tasted queer. Spoiled milk would taste queer. And if there was someone you knew that just didn't seem to fit in, you might say that person was queer. They're teaching you to smear—to beat—the outsider. That's what that game means.”

I might have dismissed Dad's analysis of smear the queer out of hand except that, like his Jesus-was-an-alien kick, it answered so many of the questions I had about what I'd seen and heard since being at my grandparents' place. I thought about the way kids at school were, and how they'd all reacted to me. They didn't just dislike me—they talked about it. They created consensus: pizza is our favorite lunch, celery's the worst vegetable, and Jason's a jerk. They didn't give second chances. There was no romantic after-school-special idea about finding out that the weird kid was cooler than you thought he was. That wasn't even part of their thinking.

And what did it mean that the only place where any kind of violent physical play was allowed was at church during smear the queer?

After Dad went back to Seattle, I spent a few days thinking about what he'd said. When youth group came around again on Wednesday, I just went through the motions while I watched people, and thought about the things they did in terms of the positive and negative reinforcement stuff my dad was always talking about. What kinds of behaviors did kids receive praise for? What kinds of behaviors were they criticized for or ignored for? What were the incentives? Which kids were considered leaders? By the end of the night I felt sort of sick to my stomach. Because it wasn't just smear the queer. Everything they did seemed designed to teach the kids in the group how to identify, isolate, and attack outsiders. People they disagreed with. All the little Bible stories they read basically boiled down to one thing: do what we tell you, or else. How had I not noticed this before? Why was Grandma sending me to these people?

Of course, I knew the answer to that one. She was the one who'd had me invite Jesus into my heart, back in L.A. Dad had told me once that, when she was young, Grandma had been a missionary in Japan—a career path the youth group people at her church talked about all the time. Kids who had done missionary work with their families were considered the rock stars of the group. And Grandma was a charter member of this goddamn freak show.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. When I went to youth group that Saturday I got put in the “penalty box” during smear the queer for mauling one of the missionary kids after he'd already given up the ball. Everyone glared at me for the rest of the night. When Wednesday rolled around I told Grandma I wanted to just stay home and watch sports with Grandpa.

About a month later, Dad and Grandma got into a huge fight about how him coming up to visit me was “disruptive.” He called her a fucking cunt, told me to pack my shit, and took me back to Seattle that same night.

“Do we have a house yet?” I asked, once we were safely in the car and moving. I hadn't wanted to say anything that might make him change his mind until we were past the point of no return.

“No,” he said.

“Then where are we going to stay?”

“With my boyfriend,” Dad said.

 

15

Once, during a party in the Hayes Street house, John's friend Kris and her boyfriend Jimmy had snuck off to have sex in my bedroom. It was the kind of thing people did at big parties in that house, but I was home at the time so at some point I went into my room and found them naked on my bed, Jimmy on top of Kris, and Kris screaming her head off. In my four-year-old's mind, it seemed obvious that Jimmy was hurting Kris, so I did what I had to do: I jumped onto Jimmy's back and bit him as hard as I could. Hard enough to draw blood. Jimmy screamed. Kris screamed. Then I shouted something like “Stop hurting her!” and Kris started laughing. I was embarrassed that she was laughing at me, but I got the idea that she wasn't actually in danger, so I shifted down out of attack mode.

Once Jimmy got over his perfectly understandable anger at being attacked and savagely bitten in the middle of sex, he and Kris went back to what they were doing—only this time with an instructive narrative component: “See, Jimmy's penis goes in here. This feels good. Then he moves, like so. Men and women enjoy this.” Eventually they finished up, got dressed, and left me in my room. By the next morning, every one of our friends knew about me biting the shit out of Jimmy mid-thrust, and the teaching moment that followed. It was regarded as both a funny story and an illustration of how much better our people were than the straights, who lied to their kids about sex.

It was as clear and unambiguous a lesson in human sexuality as any child could ask for. The only problem was that I didn't take a single useful fact away from it. If anything, my experience with Jimmy and Kris left me more confused than I had been before.

Sex didn't make sense to me. And not just because I was four when I got my first lesson.

My friends—my kid-aged friends—talked about sex as something both gross and aggressive. “Humping” was something you could be accused of doing in various contexts. Any kind of accidental up-and-down motion of the body near anything—such as during a clumsy attempt to climb a tree or an unsuccessful attempt to lift one's friend off the ground—could be construed as an attempted hump. On the other hand, some kids I knew humped each other like dogs in a pack, to assert dominance—“Haha! I just humped you!”

Playing with oneself was also frequently mocked, though that idea made even less sense to me than humping.

Then, of course, there was TV. On TV, there was a lot of emphasis on romance, and lots of kissing, but no clear connection between romance, kissing, and what Kris and Jimmy had been doing. It didn't help that, on TV and in movies, pretty much everyone got married when they were in love. Where I came from, hardly anyone got married. Or they did, but then they got divorced almost immediately and ended up hating whoever they'd been married to. Among my people it was considered axiomatic that the best way to totally ruin a relationship was for two people to get married. Jimmy and Kris weren't married. Jimmy had been married to someone named Janet and had a kid with her, but they'd divorced and now they hated each other.

My people tended to “be together.” And then later, they'd “stop being together.” These terms were rarely explained. Jimmy and Kris were together. Dad and Marcy had been together, briefly, but then they stopped being together and were friends until Marcy and Kenneth got together.

How did screwing fit into all this? Humping? And fucking. What was fucking? Calling someone a fucker was bad, but fucking was good? I had no idea.

And, of course, in a totally separate file from all this was the idea of reproduction. I'd spent enough time around farm animals to understand that a male of virtually any species could put his penis in a female of the same species and leave some sperm there. Then she'd either give birth or lay an egg, as her anatomy dictated. I didn't give the idea much thought, but I assumed that this ritual occurred when the individuals involved wanted to reproduce, and probably at no other time.

I didn't understand any of it. And while I knew that it was extremely important to other people—mostly adults—I didn't worry very much about not understanding it because there were just so many other things in the world that I knew were important but that I didn't understand at all; things like drugs, and jobs, and the difference between a city and a state. I didn't understand why we had to stand in line to leave or enter the classroom at school. I didn't understand why girls got to wear pants but boys didn't get to wear skirts. Life was full of things I didn't understand. The only way I'd figured out to cope with all of it was to play along. Stand in line? Okay. Raise my hand to go to the bathroom? If you say so. Hop on one foot and crow like a rooster? Sure, why not. Overthinking it was the path to madness.

And that was my entire approach to the question of sex, and who was having sex with who, and why, and what it all meant: just say what seems expected of you and don't think about it too much. Which was why I didn't really understand, when my dad introduced me to his boyfriend, Phillip, in Seattle in October of 1979, that something important had happened.

*   *   *

Phillip was a small, fit man about the same height and build as my dad, though he usually dressed more conservatively due to his professional status as a registered nurse. He had an angular face, dark brown skin, a pencil mustache, and an enormous mane of black hair that could only be intended to frighten predators and impress potential mates. Dad told me that Phillip's family was from the Philippines and that this meant Phillip was a Filipino. When I asked him the obvious question, Dad said there was no connection between Phillip's name and his ethnicity, but I found that idea difficult to credit.

When we got to Seattle, Dad and I spent about a month in Phillip's tiny one-bedroom apartment on Boren Avenue. Phillip was a surprisingly good sport about it, all things considered, and he went out of his way to engage with me. He was a decent artist, so he drew cartoons for me on the fly, and he liked to tell jokes and play games. I found the obviousness of his efforts a little unnerving, if only because the last person who'd tried so hard to get along with me was my grandmother. But he was patient and friendly, and he mostly won me over.

All the same, I didn't like being in Phillip's apartment alone, so Dad took me to work with him at a place called Seattle Counseling Service. Dad was nonspecific about what Seattle Counseling Service did exactly. I spent most of my days in their employee lounge, watching TV and drawing dinosaurs and dragons on the backs of typed documents that Dad retrieved from the office scrap bin. The office was housed in a two-story brick building at the intersection of two busy streets; the main doors were on the corner of the building, rather than off to one side or the other, and there was a concrete eagle above the door with a large clock set into its stomach. The eagle and the clock fit with my idea of what buildings in cities were supposed to look like, ideas based almost entirely on Bugs Bunny cartoons and Humphrey Bogart movies.