A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me

by Jason Schmidt

  * * *

  Scotty moved out at the end of that month, to an apartment a few blocks away. Dad took Scotty’s room as his own. He still slept with Bruce in the living room, but he liked having his own room as a retreat.

  “Is it true?” I asked Dad a few weeks later. “That Scotty doesn’t have any friends?”

  “Evidently,” Dad said. “He always had friends as long as he was dealing. People wanted to talk to him so he’d get them high for free, over a cup of tea or something. Now? People are afraid to get too close. They don’t want to have to take care of him.”

  “Take care of him?” I asked.

  “He’s got the lesions,” Dad said. “Kaposi’s. On his back, a couple of months ago.”

  46

  Dad and I spent a few weeks arguing about whether I should go to high school or not. It was the same argument over and over again, once every other day or so. He thought I should get my GED and find a job.

  “I’m thirteen,” I said. “They don’t let thirteen-year-olds work in Washington State.”

  “Then go to college,” Dad said. “That way you can get a better job when you’re finally old enough.”

  “Dad,” I said. “I think maybe I need to spend some time around people my own age. I think there’s sort of something wrong with me. From skipping so much school?”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “I’m not normal.”

  “What’s so great about being normal?” he asked. “Normal people are monsters.”

  “I cry during Coke commercials.”

  “What?”

  “And Family Ties reruns,” I said.

  “Are you making a joke?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m making a joke. But not about needing to be with some kids my own age. That part I’m totally serious about.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Don’t come crying to me when you can’t stand it. Again.”

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  * * *

  I was intimidated by our new apartment. It was the first place I’d lived that was properly urban. I’d visited cities and slept over in apartment buildings, but I’d never really lived in one. Not since the place Dad had caught on fire, after we moved out of the Hayes Street house.

  West Capitol Hill was a neighborhood full of apartments, condominiums, and town houses. Every block was a mixture of three- and four-story brick buildings from the twenties, converted houses, and various kinds of mid-century architectural monstrosities, about half of which had been built as hotels for the World’s Fair in 1962. When the fair was over, the former hotels were converted into hideous, badly made, low-rent housing that festered around the neighborhood for decades. It seemed like I couldn’t walk past one without witnessing some kind of ugly domestic violence drama in the parking lot, or seeing a couple of junkies screaming at each other on the balconies.

  The people living in purpose-built homes weren’t much better off. The news stories were always about how the whole country was in the middle of a massive crime wave. Poor people were still mostly concentrated in the cities, so the neighborhood had something of a bunker mentality. All over that side of Capitol Hill, windows were broken, boarded, painted over, or blocked up with stacks of garbage that had been shoved against them by pensioners or drug addicts, people who had been locked away from the sunlight for decades. Not one building in ten had been repainted since Nixon was in office, and driveways and garages were full of broken-down cars covered in layers of moss and rust, some of them packed to the gills with junk, like wheeled storage units with dirty windshields.

  There was an abandoned house at the end of my block with a chestnut tree growing up through the shattered roof. Homeless people squatted there, and junkies used it as a shooting gallery. Ten years later the house would burn down and the land alone would be worth a quarter million dollars, but in 1985 it was just this black hole, kitty-corner to the convenience store and the laundromat.

  There were almost no yards or parks in the neighborhood, which I assumed meant there were no kids. Or if there were kids, I wouldn’t get to meet them, because they’d never have any reason to go outside.

  When I took Thunder for walks, I went over to a vacant seven-story apartment tower half a block to the south. The building had a small grassy area behind it that was perfect for a doggy bathroom. Dad said the project had been started four years earlier, then run out of money before it was completed. I thought that must have been frustrating for the developers. The heavy work had already been done. The concrete walls, floors, and balconies were all poured and ready. The underground parking garage was completed. It was just missing its moving parts: doors, windows, and elevators. And, of course, people.

  My dad had showed me pictures once of a place he’d visited with his mom when he was a kid, called Mesa Verde—an abandoned Indian city built in a cave on the side of a giant cliff. The empty tower reminded me of that. Not just forsaken, but hopeless.

  * * *

  Between the move back from San Diego, the stopover in Marysville, and the delay in getting unpacked while Scotty found a new place, I carried on my grand tradition of registering for school late. I signed up for ninth grade two weeks after classes started, in September of 1985. I ended up going to Garfield, one of several mostly black south end high schools in comparatively white Seattle. Dad had tried to get me into one of the north end schools, because that was what most white parents tried to do in the eighties, but Seattle had a mandatory busing program designed to desegregate the public education system. Apparently someone at the district office thought that busing me out of my neighborhood so I could go to school in a whiter part of town would undermine that mission.

  Registering for school meant me and my dad going to the main office at Garfield and filling out paperwork. Bringing Dad to any place where there were a lot of straights was always kind of a nervous business, but I couldn’t see any way around it. He made the appointment and drove me over there in the Volvo. He brought my records from San Diego with him in a beat-up manila envelope, which was his preferred tool for organizing papers.

  The school was big; two blocks long, one block wide, and three stories tall over most of its length, with a redbrick and terra-cotta exterior. I didn’t get much of a sense of how it was put together. Dad parked in the small lot near the main entrance of the building and we went up three flights of concrete steps to the front doors. There were trophy cases in the lobby, and we passed a psychedelic mural that included images of Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, and some guy I didn’t recognize who was playing a trumpet. Someone told me later he was Quincy Jones, and that the school auditorium was named for him.

  When we got up to the office on the second floor, I found it was like most school offices I’d been in, only bigger: lots of wood trim and cabinets that had been varnished half to death over sixty years. Fluorescent lights, secretaries with big hair, and the smell of mimeograph solvent. Dad checked in with one of the secretaries and we sat down across from another family in a little waiting area; a very straight-looking older black couple and a girl about my age. The dad was actually wearing a tie.

  We sat there for a few minutes before I caught the girl’s eye. She had short hair and a tight-fitting yellow sweater over acid-washed jeans. Sneakers that looked almost like ballet shoes and socks with little ruffles around the ankles. I thought her outfit looked kind of 1950s.

  “You signing up for ninth grade?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Where’d you move here from?” I asked.

  “Rainier Beach,” she said. “You?”

  “San Diego,” I said.

  “Is that where you’re from?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Mostly I’m from here, I guess. Oregon before that. And sort of L.A. for a little while. We lived in Ballard before we moved to San Diego.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I’m Jason,” I said.

  “Sharon.”

  We all sat quiet
ly for a while longer. Finally, one of the guidance counselors called the girl and her family into another office to fill out their paperwork.

  “Maybe I’ll see you in class,” I said, as she got up to leave.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  She was smiling when she left. I felt good. Proud of myself for overcoming my shyness and talking to someone right off the bat. A girl, even.

  “You shouldn’t be so chatty,” Dad said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You couldn’t see how uncomfortable you were making her?”

  I hadn’t seen anything of the sort, but this was something Dad had been on me about recently—that I missed social cues. The nature of the thing meant that I had to take his word for it, or not. There was no way for me to judge whether what he was telling me was true.

  “Why was I making her uncomfortable?” I asked. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Guys like you just don’t talk to girls like that,” Dad said.

  I didn’t know what he meant. I tried to picture it from his perspective, to figure out what he was seeing. I was big for my age, but my face still looked very young; I had a weak chin and I carried a lot of baby fat in my cheeks. I wore a brown polyester ski jacket—a thrift store purchase I wore more or less year-round, even in San Diego. It was getting to be too small for me. I’d solved the problem of my wild hair the week before by buying a camouflage-patterned cap at a surplus store downtown. It was the kind the Marines wore. Instead of brushing my hair in the morning I just shoved the hat over it before I left the house. My jeans were dirty, because I only owned two pairs, and my shoes were beat-up Chuck Taylor high tops. When I pictured that guy talking to a pretty, well-dressed girl like Sharon, I started to get an idea what my dad might be trying to tell me.

  Eventually we got called into a guidance counselor’s office. I didn’t have much choice of classes because everything was already full, and I had a lot of mandatory courses I had to take. I wanted to learn Spanish, but I ended up in German. The counselor gave Dad a folder that included my schedule, a map of the school, and a sign-off sheet for my teachers to fill out. Otherwise I didn’t follow a lot of what my dad and the counselor were talking about. I was having trouble letting go of the conversations I’d had in the waiting room.

  47

  Dad and I had registered me for school on a Friday, so I had the weekend home before I had to start yet another foray into public education. We spent part of it running laundry back and forth from the laundromat a block away. The distance was small but the load was big, so Dad had brought our clothes home in the car. I was taking a load up to our apartment when I saw a guy about my age stalking along the walkway of an apartment building two lots down, carrying a squirt bottle.

  He looked like he was engaged in a TV shootout, except for the part where he was a teenager with a squirt bottle. I went back down and got another load of laundry from the car, and as I got up to my porch I saw another kid creeping through the backyard of the house next door—also carrying a squirt bottle. I dropped the laundry inside, then went and stood at the railing, watching to see what would happen next. When the kid in the yard next door noticed me he held up his squirt bottle, raised his eyebrows, and said, “You wanna play?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

  I turned and took two casual steps back from the railing, then ran into the house and started digging frantically through the stuff under the kitchen sink, looking for our old green squirt bottle that we’d had since Eugene.

  “Dad!” I shouted. “Where’s the squirt bottle?”

  “Hall closet!” he called from the front bedroom.

  I found it on a shelf, then ran into the kitchen and rinsed it, in case it was full of bleach water or something. Then I was back out the door and pounding down the stairs.

  The kid who was waiting for me down there was strange-looking. Or rather, he was sort of classically handsome except for being kind of short and fat. He had a chiseled jaw, cleft chin, straight nose, high forehead, and thick blond hair that seemed to fall naturally into a perfect side part. It was the perfection of his face relative to his pronounced frumpiness that made him weird-looking. He was wearing baggy cargo pants and a sweatshirt; the preferred style of male teens with a weight problem, in my observation. It was similar to what I wore myself.

  “I’m Ethan,” he said.

  “Jason,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Come on,” he said.

  He led me between buildings, to the sidewalk out in front of my place. Then he waved down the block to one of his friends, who waved to someone else and came jogging our way.

  A few minutes later there were three other kids on the sidewalk with us. One was a tall skinny guy with broad shoulders, enormous hands, a jutting lantern jaw, and tiny, close-set eyes that were magnified to almost-normal proportions by a pair of Coke-bottle glasses in thick plastic frames. He had a tuft of stiff dark blond hair jutting out of the top of his head, like a Muppet. Next to him was another tall skinny guy, with a wild mop of dark brown hair, terrible skin, and large yellow teeth, which were noticeable because he smiled almost constantly. Both the taller kids wore jeans, T-shirts, and button-down shirts in neutral colors. The guy with the glasses had a stencil of a bird’s skull printed on his T-shirt.

  Finally, there was another short, heavyset kid with light brown hair in a classic bowl cut. He looked like an understudy from the cast of The Goonies, with a child actor’s round features, large eyes, and freckles. Like Ethan, he had everything going for him except his build, his height, and his sense of style: he was wearing a tight black T-shirt over a pair of navy parachute pants and some blue Nike tennis shoes with a bright yellow wave on the side. Even a fashion disaster like me could see that it was a bad look.

  “Everyone,” Ethan said. “This is Jason. Jason, this is Brunner.”

  The giant with the weird face nodded at me.

  “Kyle,” Ethan said, gesturing at the kid with the teeth, who smiled and unleashed a string of gibberish.

  “He pretends to be Australian when he’s nervous,” Ethan supplied.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I can see that.”

  “And this is my brother,” Ethan said, pointing at the bowl cut kid. “Brandon.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Brandon said.

  * * *

  Brandon and Ethan lived in the house next door to mine. We spent most of the day taking each other’s measure, trying to figure out if it was a good thing or a bad thing that we were neighbors. When they asked me questions about myself, I tried to sound more interesting than I was. My version of that involved talking about my love of martial arts and my exciting life as a surfer in San Diego. I giggled compulsively when I lied.

  After a few hours of chasing each other around with squirt bottles, Ethan and his brother invited me to their place with the other guys, to get some food and cool down. Their house was roughly the same size as my building, but it had never been converted to apartments; it was still a single-family home. Normally that would mean money, but I wasn’t sure what to expect here. The backyard was full of weeds, piles of broken masonry, and garbage. The front yard was paved over in red brick, with two cars parked there: a Honda Civic that had seen better days and an old red Volkswagen Beetle. The house itself was in poor repair from the outside, with peeling white paint, a few damaged and broken windows, and no real porch; just a set of wooden stairs nailed onto the front of the house, leading up to the door.

  The inside, it turned out, was even worse off.

  “We’re renovating,” Ethan said, when I paused in the doorway and looked around.

  “Okay,” I said.

  The main floor was one large open space. The ceiling was made of clean, new drywall with recessed lighting fixtures. There was a bay window in the living room, with new venetian blinds on it. But everything else was gutted. The walls were either bare drywall with the mud and tape st
ill showing, or they were exposed studs. The floors were chipboard, except where they were covered with carpet remnants or the battered remains of old Persian rugs. There was a kitchen in the back of the house, separated from the rest of the main floor by a long counter. The front of the room was home to a few chairs and couches and an old color TV. The open space between the kitchen and the sitting area was occupied by a grand piano.

  Kyle, Brunner, and the others made themselves at home. I stared at the piano.

  Ethan caught my look.

  “It’s Brandon’s,” he said.

  “It’s … a piano,” I said.

  The instrument was all polished wood and majesty. As I circled it I saw the name Steinway & Sons above the keyboard cover. I had a vague recollection that it was a good brand, in sort of the same way that I knew Dom Pérignon was good champagne, some half-remembered quote from a movie or something.

  “Our parents got it for him when we were little,” Ethan said. “I got a violin. It’s downstairs. Smaller, but worth about as much money.”

  “How much is that?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

  “Now? Fifteen thousand. About.”

  “So that’s worth $7,500?” I asked, pointing at the piano and thinking about the fact that my dad and I got something like $4,000 a year in welfare.

  “No,” Ethan said, looking annoyed. “Fifteen thousand each.”

  “I love this thing,” Kyle said, sitting down and opening the fallboard that covered the keys. He started to play a few Joplin tunes that I recognized from elementary school music classes, blending one effortlessly into the next. I suddenly felt very much out of my depth. I’d never met anyone my own age who could play an instrument, let alone just sit down and start improvising.

  “How … does one come to … buy a piano?” I asked Ethan.

  “You mean how did we find it?” Ethan asked.

  “No,” I said, trying to figure out how to phrase the question. “I just mean—I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in someone’s house before.”