A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (16 page)

*   *   *

A week later Dad and I went down to the Metro administrative office to get our bus passes. Metro was the government corporation that ran Seattle's buses and, for some reason, also ran the city's sewers and was in charge of water quality. As we approached the office, Dad kept coaching me on how to act.

“Remember,” he said. “You're supposed to be retarded.”

“So are you,” I said defensively.

The bus passes Dr. Epstein had set us up with were for people with disabilities. The easiest disability to fake, we figured, was being developmentally disabled, but in 1981 the term in common usage was “retarded.”

“Sure,” Dad said. “The point is, you don't want to seem too smart. And that goes for when you're using the pass, too. You don't want some driver to figure out we're scamming the things and take it away from you. Dr. Epstein's going out on a limb for us with this.”

“What's a retarded person act like?” I asked.

“I don't know. Don't worry about that. Don't actually try to act retarded. Don't make a thing of it. Just don't go reciting the Gettysburg Address while you're on the bus or anything.”

“The what?”

“That's my boy!” he said, slapping me on the back as we walked into the office.

The process of getting the passes turned out not to take very long. We got our pictures taken, and they stuck the pictures onto cards that had our names and other information on them. Then they laminated the whole thing and put a sticker on it to show it was valid, and told Dad how to renew the stickers by mail. And just like that, we had new super-cheap bus passes. As we were leaving the building, Dad noticed something and grabbed my shoulder.

“Come here,” he said. “And don't say anything. You got it? Don't say a word while we're in here.”

“Okay,” I said. I looked up as he guided me into a large room with a counter up near the door and a bunch of metal shelves behind it. The sign above the door said
LOST AND FOUND
.

“Hi,” Dad said to the guy behind the counter. “This is lost and found?”

“Sure is,” said the man, looking up from a book.

“We left a couple of things on the bus about three weeks ago. I didn't know you all had a lost and found, or I'd have come to get them sooner.”

“What'd you lose?” the man asked.

“A jacket,” Dad said. “A dark blue nylon windbreaker. And an umbrella. Black. One of those kinds that folds up.”

“What size was the windbreaker?” the man behind the counter asked.

“I got it at Sears,” Dad said. “And I can't remember if it was sized in numbers or letters. It's either a medium, or about a 34.”

“Hold on,” the man said. Then he disappeared into his shelves for a while and came back with a large plastic box. “This is what I got.”

Dad picked through four or five windbreakers before he found one like the one he'd ripped the year before, during our Christmas-tree-stealing expedition. It took him less time to pick out an umbrella he liked.

“You get a lot of stuff through here?” he asked.

“You wouldn't believe,” said the man.

“People usually come claim it?” Dad asked.

“Not even a tenth of it,” said the man.

“What happens to the rest?”

The man shrugged. “We throw it all out every couple of months. Or donate it, depending.”

Dad looked at me. I was wearing a Goodwill ski jacket I'd picked up a few seasons back. It was already too small for me, and the arm was covered with duct tape to keep the stuffing in.

“You got anything that's about to expire?” Dad asked. “Like that ski jacket?”

“Hold on,” said the guy behind the counter. He went back into his shelves and came back a minute later with a brown ski jacket in my size.

“You lose this on the bus?” he asked me, holding it up. I looked at Dad, who nodded.

“I sure did,” I said.

“Here you go, kid,” he said, handing me the jacket.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Yeah, thanks,” Dad said. “Let's go, Jason.”

As we turned to go, the guy behind the counter cleared his throat, and Dad turned back to look at him.

“Not for nothing,” said the man. “But you wouldn't want to lose things on the bus too often. Not more than once or twice a year. You know what I'm saying?”

“Sure,” Dad said, nodding. “And thanks.”

“You have a good day now,” said the man.

When we got outside we sat down in a bus shelter. Ironically, Metro's administrative offices were sort of off the beaten path, and bus access to them wasn't very good. We had a good wait ahead of us.

“I guess I should fall off high dives more often,” I said.

“No,” Dad said. “You shouldn't.”

*   *   *

We got onto Aid for Dependent Children that fall. Dr. Epstein may or may not have had something to do with it. Dad didn't want to tell me. But AFDC included medical coupons, which meant free doctors and dentists. One of Dad's bottom teeth had disintegrated the year before, and I'd never actually been to a dentist, so the coupons came in handy. Dad got some gold crowns on the backs of his bottom teeth, and I went to Odessa Brown Children's Dental Clinic to have some folks poke around in my mouth a bit.

“You're going to need braces later,” said the nice lady dentist who did the exam. Then she shot my mouth full of Novocain and pulled out two of my incisors.

Generally, our second year in Seattle was going better than our first. With AFDC, we were able to keep our heads above water financially. But also, we were re-creating the same type of network we'd had in Eugene. A better one, really; the one we'd had in Eugene hadn't included any doctors. And Dad was meeting people through Seattle Counseling Service who helped us out in various ways. Dad had a regular drug dealer named Scotty, who gave him a good deal on pot. And Phillip was introducing Dad to people around town. Dad was doing small deals, selling pot a few ounces at a time, and going to some parties, which was how people like us built support systems.

School still sucked, and Olive announced that she and Calliope would be moving out at the end of the school year because, evidently, that whole no-power-or-running-water thing was becoming kind of inconvenient. But even that worked out for the best. Our subsidized housing finally came through that summer, and Dad started shopping for rentals on the north end of town.

“We can get a place with two bedrooms,” he said. “And a better yard. And a better neighborhood.”

I would have settled for a house that didn't smell like mushrooms, but a bedroom of my own sounded nice, too.

 

22

In the summer of '81, the summer I turned nine, we moved into a two-bedroom house in a north Seattle neighborhood called Ballard. The house was almost perfect. It had a huge yard, it was a half block from an elementary school, and it had a good-size living room and dining room. There was even a third bedroom in the basement, but the basement could only be reached through an external side door, so it wasn't convenient to use as an actual sleeping space. And Ballard was a historically Scandinavian neighborhood with a lot of kids in it.

Our new landlord was a scruffy-looking young guy named Tim, who came from a rich family. He had a slim, muscular build, curly brown hair, blue eyes, and the kind of tan that pale people get when they spend too much time in the sun: part tan, part permanent sunburn. Tim had gotten himself semi-disowned by his rich parents after dropping out of college and going off to fish for crab in the Gulf of Alaska, but not before he used his trust fund to buy the house in Ballard.

“I used to stay here between crabbing seasons,” he said, when he showed us around the house. “But that meant it was vacant so much of the year, I just figured fuck it. Someone should get some use out of it.”

“We'll definitely get use out of it,” Dad said.

“Yeah,” Tim said. He led us out on the front porch and took a cigarette out of a crumpled pack he was carrying in his back pocket. “The only thing I guess I should mention is Carmella Johnson, the bitch who lives next door.”

He leaned over the porch railing and pointed at the neighbor's house as he said it. I looked to see what he was pointing at, but there was nobody there. Just a squat little house behind a thicket of old plum trees. There was plenty of yard and trees and bushes, but whoever owned the place was too old or too lazy to take care of it. The grass was three feet high, and the trees pushed in over the patio to hide the house in shadows.

“What's her deal?” Dad asked.

“She's just a bitch on wheels,” Tim said. “This driveway that lies between the properties, technically we've got an easement on it. So we can get to our parking space down at the back of the lot there. But Carmella, a couple of years ago, started parking her car to block the driveway so I couldn't get in there. She does it long enough, I might lose the easement. So we've been back and forth over that for years. But the main thing, I have to admit, is mostly my fault.”

“What's the main thing?” Dad asked.

“Well, she's got these two little rat dogs,” Tim said. “And I guess … well, it doesn't make me proud to admit this, but there used to be three of them.”

“No,” Dad said, sounding slightly horrified. Or like he was pretending to be horrified. Ironically horrified.

“Yeah,” Tim said, skipping over the irony. “About a year ago I was walking home and those little rat dogs were out in the front yard, barking at me. And I just picked a rock up and winged it at them. Like, not thinking I was gonna hit anything. Just to scare them? And I tagged one right in the head, by accident. It kept barking, but it started running in circles. And then it just kind of … slowed down. Like a clock winding down. Yap-yap-yap yap yap yap, yap, yap, yap … yap. Yap. Boom. Dead.”

“Jesus,” Dad said.

“Yeah,” Tim said. “Like I said, it was an accident. I hate those little dogs, but it isn't their fault Carmella's the goddamn Antichrist. Dog's just a dog, right? Anyway, she's had it in for me big-time since then, and I guess she might bestow some of that hatred on whoever moves in here as my tenants.”

“Well,” Dad said. “We'll try to steer clear of her.”

I made a little noise that was almost a laugh.

*   *   *

I kept on meeting with Grace every other week for a few months after we moved to Ballard. Apparently whatever deal Dad had worked out with Booker and the other GAOP teachers was with the district, more than with anyone in particular at Stevens, so even though I changed schools, I still had to finish out my sentence. As it were. Grace acknowledged that we were going to be done soon and seemed to want to ask me a lot of big-picture questions to wrap things up.

“What's the most important thing to you?” she asked.

“I want to be good,” I said, without pausing to think about it. That was part of what I used her toys for. By focusing on the toys, I found I could answer her questions without having to concentrate on them very hard.

“What's that mean to you?” she asked.

“Like Han Solo,” I said. “You know Han Solo? From
Star Wars
?”

“I know Han Solo,” she said. “But I'm surprised. What about Luke?”

I wondered why people kept asking me that.

“Luke doesn't do anything,” I said. “Like, not really. He didn't do anything much in the first movie. And in the second one, he went to Yoda, and Yoda told him what he needed to do, and he couldn't even do that. He just ran off to save Han and Leia, even though Yoda told him not to. But Han—he could leave at any time. He had a whole life before he met Luke and Leia. He sticks around because he wants to. He asks questions. He thinks about stuff, and makes fun of people for being stupid. But when it comes right down to it, he does the right thing. And I think it means more when he does it. Him and Leia both, really. Luke wants to be a hero because he's got some stupid idea about being the good guy just to be the good guy. Han and Leia do it because they know why it's important. They understand what's at stake. Luke never even seems to think about that part of it. How many Bothans died to bring us the plans to the Death Star, or whatever. He could give a shit. He just wants to be the guy with the blaster who everyone says ‘thank you' to.”

“But you said you wanted to be good,” Grace said. “Isn't that what Luke wants?”

“Luke doesn't want to be good. He wants everyone else to think he's good. It's different. That's why he's vulnerable to the dark side. He's full of pride.”

I kept playing with the toys from Grace's box, but at some point I realized she hadn't said anything in a while and I glanced up. She was sitting on the floor with her writing pad, same as she always did, but she was giving me a weird look, like something I'd said, or the way I said it, made her uncomfortable.

“What?” I asked.

She shook her head and looked at the clock.

“We're done for today,” she said.

 

23

Olive and Calliope had found a place over in the Eastlake neighborhood, a few miles away from our new place in Ballard. Like our new digs, their house was half a block away from a school and had two bedrooms. Otherwise it was a completely different vibe. They lived in a triplex instead of a single-family house, and the backyard was an overgrown mess. The neighborhood was an industrial nightmare, pinned between Interstate 5 and the shipyards of Lake Union. The playground for the school near their house was pretty good. It had a wooden play structure, a zip line, and a big field. But the rest of the neighborhood was full of shattered blue-collar retirees, scraping by on workers' comp and Social Security. Even the lake was a ruin. The shipyards had turned it into a giant oil slick full of solvents, and during heavy rains, raw sewage would blow right into the water from the combined sewer outfalls that emptied out every five or six blocks along the shoreline.