A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (17 page)

On hot days we swam in the lake anyway, figuring the chemicals from the shipyards would kill whatever was leaking out of the sewers. We just tried not to get any in our mouths.

Whatever setup Olive had to pay her bills, she spent most of her time drinking and shooting smack at the Eastlake Zoo, a bar a couple of blocks from their house. Some of her friends from Oregon had made their way to Seattle by this time, and most kept plying their trade as fishermen in the Alaskan fleet that launched out of Salmon Bay every year. But that meant they had most of the year to sit and drink with Olive, who would bring one of them home every so often. There was Paulie, with his giant early-model Suburban, the Blue Beast. And Will, who seemed like a decent enough guy except Calliope told me that once she woke up in the middle of the night to find Will on his knees next to her bed, jerking off and crying.

Between the masturbating, the crying, the drinking, and the smack, Calliope chose to spend a lot of nights and weekends at our house in Ballard. Also, we had cable, and MTV had just come on the air. Calliope was obsessed with MTV.

*   *   *

Ballard was as much like the 1950s—as much like how my dad described his childhood—as any place I'd been up to that point. Ballard had been its own town until it was swallowed up by Seattle in 1907, and it still had its little downtown, with a movie theater, a pet store, the Scandinavian Shoppe, and an old Carnegie free library that had been boarded up and abandoned years before. Block after block of single-family housing: five-thousand-square-foot lots, compact brick houses, lawns, kids, old people.

Big chunks of Ballard were still semirural. There were areas without sidewalks or storm sewers; places where there were still just ditches next to gravel roads. Some of the houses still had barns behind them, from when they'd been farms, and there were properties in the neighborhood that ran to a couple of acres, sometimes taking up an entire city block. The topography of Ballard also meant that some areas just couldn't be developed. The street grid was interrupted by unstable cliffs, or greenbelts that cut across places where the grade was too steep to build on. Ballard was part of the City of Seattle, and had been for seventy-five years, but there were still wild deer in the northern reaches of the neighborhood, and every once in a while a cougar would wander down the railroad tracks from the north and eat a few house pets before Animal Control could catch it and relocate it.

Ballard's big attraction was the Ballard Locks, which included a fish ladder. The locks allowed boats to move between Puget Sound and the inland lake system, including the tug boats that took half-mile-long log booms from all over the Puget Sound basin upstream to the lumber mills of Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish, a few hundred logs at a time. The fish ladder was equipped with rows of windows in an underground viewing room, where tourists could watch giant schools of thirty-pound salmon making their way upstream twice a year. The neighborhood also boasted dozens of factories, a steel mill, sheet metal fabricators, car dealerships, a decent hospital, and one of the largest commercial fishing fleets on the West Coast. It was a prosperous blue-collar neighborhood with an economy that included everyone from the paperboy to the plant manager. People lived their whole lives without leaving Ballard more than once or twice a year.

There was a lot of desperation underneath all that prosperity. Bars where young single moms would go to try to pick up a Navy husband, and crackerbox apartments and multiplexes where they could raise their kids on a shoestring budget while their deadbeat ex-husbands started new families a thousand miles away. And however many layers beneath that, 15th Avenue was three straight miles of used car dealerships, no-tell motels, and junkyards. The meth labs and maintenance alcoholics were in the old boarding houses, nestled between small-scale factories that were one insurance-fraud fire away from closing up for good.

The school where I started fourth grade that year was a 1930s brick building with an asphalt playground. Most of the teachers in it were men in their late fifties or early sixties; Korean War veterans with thick glasses in plastic frames, polyester slacks, button-down polyester shirts. Pocket protectors. They called boys by our last names. If we acted out in class, we got paddled. Each teacher had his own paddle; a long, flat slab of plywood with holes drilled in it and a handle. The paddles didn't look improvised in any way. I sometimes wondered if there was a woodshop teacher somewhere who'd made them, or if they could be ordered in a catalog.

Most of the kids I met in school came from the basement apartments and multiplexes—the land of the single mother. Or maybe those were the only kids who invited me over to their houses.

*   *   *

A lot of things changed when we moved to Ballard. Dad and Phillip broke up, though they remained friends. We stopped using our old Speed Queen and started doing laundry in the new washer and dryer that Tim put in our basement. And Dad quit working for Seattle Counseling Service and started working under the table for a rich child psychologist named Carol.

I had no idea how Dad and Carol had met each other, but she needed a personal assistant on the cheap and Dad needed an under-the-table gig that wouldn't cut into our welfare benefits, so he went to work for her about thirty hours a week at seven dollars an hour. That was huge money to us at the time, and between that and welfare, Section Eight Housing, and food stamps, we were almost fifty percent above the poverty line. It was hard not to get a little giddy at first. Of course Dad had a good use for that surplus income; he increased his pot consumption so he was getting high about eight times a day, every day. He smoked weed about as often as he smoked cigarettes. Meanwhile, he spent most days out at Carol's house, cleaning garbage out of her basement, mowing her lawn, or organizing her patient files. Whatever she needed him to do.

Dad's agenda changed around this time, too. He started talking about staying in Ballard for a long time and trying to keep things stable for me. The Ballard time warp seemed to make him sentimental, and he started talking a lot about trying to provide me with everything he'd had when he was growing up. Mainly he mentioned food, housing, and clothes; all the things we'd always had kind of a spotty relationship with. He took me to the JCPenney in downtown Ballard before school started and bought me my second new pair of shoes and a bag of new tube socks. Then we went to Goodwill, loaded up on used clothes, and grabbed a few more pairs of shoes. Used shoes, but still: multiple pairs of shoes was a new thing. And a load of
Star Wars
toys for my birthday that year.

“I can't believe how spoiled you are,” Calliope would say every time she walked into my room and looked at all my toys. I couldn't argue. Calliope actually had almost no toys, and hadn't for as long as I'd known her. She had a pretty good comic book collection, a few Barbie dolls that she committed various cosmetic atrocities against, and a few other special things that had been given to her or made by the various adults who looked out for her while her mom was asleep at the wheel. But compared to the ridiculous haul of swag I had in my room, she was absolutely right: I was spoiled as hell.

One other thing that changed when we first moved to Ballard was our pet ownership situation. We still had Thunder. Dad mostly took care of him—insofar as leaving him outside at night and letting him back in the next morning was “taking care” of him. But shortly after we moved to Ballard we also got cats. Nine cats. Or, it started out as nine cats.

*   *   *

We had a friend named Elise, whom Dad had met at Seattle Counseling Service. Elise lived in West Seattle, and I thought she was great. She was a tall, big-boned, incredibly overweight woman who told a lot of jokes, laughed easily, and always gave me ice cream.

“He doesn't need ice cream,” Dad would say. “He's getting fat.”

“Mark!” Elise would bark. “What a thing to say about a kid. Jesus. Let him eat his ice cream.”

Elise gave me a portable record player and a transistor radio as house-warming gifts when we moved to Ballard. I had a bunch of Disney records Dad had picked out of Carol's trash when he was cleaning out her basement for her that I listened to on the record player all the time. At night, if I was having trouble sleeping, I listened to the AM radio. Elise was an unqualified good in my mind.

Right after we moved to Ballard, Elise's neighbor, who owned nine cats, had to move. And she couldn't take the cats with her. Elise was bummed that the cats might have to go to the pound, so Dad and I took them to our new house with its fabulous new yard.

“They have to be outside cats,” Dad said.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

When we got them home, Dad put an old steamer trunk with the lid open under the back porch and lined it with an army blanket. And that was pretty much that. The cats lived in the trunk. We put food out on the back porch for them every day or two. And water. And otherwise, Calliope and I just played with them whenever we wanted to. Sometimes we brought them down in the basement room, where Dad had set up a bunch of bookshelves and a bed. We'd pile the cats on top of us and read and color all day while we were covered in a heap of purring happiness.

At some point we noticed that the cats were multiplying. Dad said we could give them away, but he never got around to putting up a sign. By the end of the school year, nine cats had turned into twenty-one cats, and Carmella Johnson started to give us a hard time about it.

 

24

It had taken Dad about two months to start getting into it with Carmella. If anything, I was surprised by his restraint. Between his battle with Marcy back at the Fillmore Street house, his fights with Grandma, and his interactions with my teachers on Aloha Street, I'd started to get the idea that Dad sort of thrived on conflict. Having been warned that we were moving in next to another pathological shit-disturber, I was surprised by how long it took them to find each other.

It started, as Tim had warned us it would, with the driveway.

The driveway ran along the border between Carmella's property and ours, then branched at the bottom. The left branch was Carmella's and the right branch was on our property. The actual parking space, on our side, was a massive wooden deck that had been the floor of a garage, once upon a time. It was clear from the state of the remaining timbers that the people who lived in our house had been using the driveway to reach that parking space since at least the 1940s.

The Vega was barely running by this time. The cobblestone streets of Capitol Hill had been a real challenge for a car that had suffered the kind of trauma the Vega had experienced back in Portland. At one point, when Dad was driving me to school, the alternator had actually just fallen out of the car and landed on the street underneath us. Dad heard it hit the ground, stopped the car, got out, and took a look. Once he realized what had happened, he took a loose piece of two-by-four out of the back of the car, wedged the alternator into position against the firewall, started the car back up, and kept on driving. A year later, when we were in Ballard, the alternator was still being held in place by a piece of wood.

All this car drama meant that getting the Vega in and out of the driveway could be kind of a production. Sometimes Dad had to push the car up the driveway, out onto the street, and get it rolling so he could compression-start it. So when Carmella blocked the driveway with her silver Cadillac half-ragtop, it really added insult to injury. Eventually she did it on a day when Dad had an errand to run.

“I'm gonna go next door and ask Carmella if she can move her car,” he said to me.

I was sitting at the table in our dining room, eating a bowl of Raisin Bran. He was standing by the front door, dressed for work. I looked up at him with a mouthful of cereal and shrugged.

“I'm just gonna be really polite about it,” he said.

I swallowed.

“Sure,” I said.

“It shouldn't be a problem,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows. “Okay.”

“So I'll be right back,” he said.

“Okay. See you in a minute.”

He took a deep breath and patted his pockets to make sure he had his keys and his wallet. Then he waved at me again and stepped onto the porch, letting the door close behind him. I watched out the window as he went around the side of the house, walking down the disputed driveway to Carmella's house. Once he was out of sight I went back to eating my cereal.

I had time to finish up, get dressed for school, and be ready to leave before he came back.

“That fucking bitch is crazy!” he said, stepping inside and slamming the door closed behind him.

“Polite didn't work?” I asked.

“She just started talking my goddamn ear off about Tim!” Dad said. “And I listened for a while, but then I was like, ‘Yeah, I don't know anything about that. I just need to get my car out.' And she just kept talking! About how he's trespassing, and how it's her land and how there's no reason we should be able to access our parking spot, even if it is on our land, and—Jesus. So finally she gets down to it, and says she'll move her car but I just need to understand it's her driveway. Hers. And I said I didn't know anything about that. That's between her and Tim. I just rent. No, she says. It's her driveway. I can drive across it. But I have to ask permission, like, every time.”

“That's when you lost it?” I asked.

“That's when I lost it,” he agreed.

*   *   *

Things continued to escalate over the next few months. First with the driveway. It took Dad all of two weeks to decide the solution to the blocking problem was to drive over Carmella's lawn to go around her car. Then it was a thing with the dogs. She let her two little dogs run loose in her yard all day. Thunder ran loose over the whole neighborhood when Dad let him out at night. But Carmella insisted that all the dog shit in her yard came from our dog. She and Dad argued that one back and forth for about a month before I came home one day and found three police cars parked in front of our house.