Except, the night I’d asked Maria for her phone number, Brandon and I had both been flirting with her. I’d been the one to make the first move, but if Brandon had been serious about her, then watching me date her—and break up with her like a complete asshole—would have been pretty hard. I didn’t think Brandon had a lot of scruples when it came to dating, but if I asked him I knew he’d tell me that he was at least a believer in the bro code: you don’t date girls your friend is interested in, and you don’t date your friend’s ex-girlfriends. So maybe he’d been mad at me for a while, and this was just the first obvious sign. Maybe he was mad at me for breaking the code. Or maybe he just really wanted to be with Maria, and me dating Meadow gave him the excuse he needed to go ahead with it. That last seemed most likely, now that I was looking back at the problem I’d created for myself, rather than forward at the one I hoped to avoid.
Hindsight. Fuck.
I wished I was better at understanding normal people. I wished I could call Brandon and ask his opinion about all this.
* * *
My initial assessment of Meadow turned out to be accurate: she was far more trouble than she was worth. It was nice being with someone who had at least a theoretical understanding of my dad’s situation, and Meadow was, indeed, very pretty. But she was simultaneously distant and demanding, and shockingly egocentric. After six weeks she told me she needed to take time off from the relationship to deal with an argument she was having with her mom about where she should go to college. I refrained from pointing out that I had some parental issues of my own that I somehow managed to balance while also being attentive to my relationship. When she called me back two weeks later to say she’d worked it out with her mom, I told her that I didn’t want to get back together.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Honestly?” I said. “I didn’t really appreciate how unhappy this relationship was making me until we took this break you demanded. I’ve been so much happier. It was like this enormous load was lifted.”
A few weeks later she sent me a letter explaining that she was very proud of herself for having been brave enough to be with someone as damaged as I was, and that I would always be part of her “herstory.”
71
I was alone with my dad, but I wasn’t alone with his illness. In the three years since he’d been diagnosed, AIDS support organizations had been growing up steadily around the city. As they got bigger, they started helping him out—and, by extension, helping me. By 1988 massage therapists were coming by once or twice a week to give Dad back rubs. The Northwest AIDS Foundation did everything from loaning us the machine that Dad needed to take his AZT to sending a nurse to administer it. They also had caseworkers and social workers who connected us with other services.
One of those services was called the Chicken Soup Brigade. They started working with Dad when he got too sick to take care of himself. In my senior year, they started bringing him cases of a vitamin-enriched nondairy beverage called Ensure, that was designed for people who couldn’t hold down solid food. They also brought prepared meals, like lasagna and enchiladas, and loaned us a microwave to cook them in. And at some point, someone decided to send us a housecleaner.
We needed one. As Dad got sicker, time meant less to me. When I was between girlfriends, I could go a few weeks without changing my clothes and not notice until the smell caught my attention. I would forget to go to school, or leave in the middle of the day and go for a walk. I wanted to be around other people, but I couldn’t talk to them. I went to parks and coffee shops. I’d sit down, watch the people for a few minutes—then have to leave.
I kept punching walls. I tried to keep it a secret. Brandon was the only one who knew how bad it really was. But sometimes punching a wall or a telephone pole was the only thing that calmed me down; the pain in my hands took the edge off the panic. It didn’t make it go away. Nothing did. It was in the background all the time, and it drowned out everything else. Taking care of myself was hard. Taking care of the house was impossible.
So Frank started coming to our apartment. He was a nice old man in his late sixties. He had short white hair, and he usually dressed in slacks and polo shirts. He came about once a week, did the dishes, swept, vacuumed, and sometimes cleaned out the refrigerator.
It bothered me having someone cleaning my house. It was embarrassing, because it was necessary. If I was home when he started cleaning, I came out of my room and started trying to clean ahead of him, so he wouldn’t see what the place normally looked like. It was stupid, I knew. A waste of time. And it made me look like a crazy person. I couldn’t stop doing it. My dad was in the hospital three weeks out of four, so this was mostly my mess. What Frank was actually seeing was how I couldn’t even clean up after myself.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said one day, as I was sweeping the kitchen.
“I kind of do,” I said. “I should clean up my own stuff.”
“All right,” he said.
After a couple of weeks, Frank and I got to talking. We talked about all kinds of things, but he mostly seemed interested in what I was going to do after high school. The conversation happened in bits and pieces over time. I didn’t like talking about it. I had no idea what I was going to do after high school. I didn’t even know how I was going to live. Partly, it was that I didn’t believe I was going to. Partly it was just that I didn’t understand the mechanisms involved. My dad had always paid the bills. He never had me help him with it or showed me how it was done. I didn’t know how to find a straight job or get a place to live. I wasn’t even allowed to have a bank account in my own name until I was eighteen. I wouldn’t even turn seventeen till a few months after I graduated.
That left a year where I’d be a nonperson, with no place to go and nothing to do. In theory I was supposed to live with my dad’s oldest brother, my uncle John, if my dad died before I was eighteen. That was the deal Dad and John had worked out after he was diagnosed. But I knew I wasn’t going to do that. There was no point. If I went there, it was only a matter of time before I screwed it up so badly that I’d have to leave. And Uncle John would tell everyone it was my dad’s fault, and my fault, and that we deserved everything that had happened to us. That we were beyond help, just like he’d been saying all along. May as well skip the middle part and not give him the satisfaction, was my thinking on the matter.
“Jason,” Frank said one day while he was sweeping, “would you mind if I … offer an opinion?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
He stopped and leaned on the kitchen counter. “You’re sure? It’s a bit strong. I wouldn’t want to make you angry.”
I sighed. “Go ahead.”
“Well, all right. If you don’t change course—if you don’t have something waiting for you, even if it’s just something to occupy you until you turn eighteen, you’re not going to make it. You need to make a plan for next year.”
I tried to think about what he was saying, instead of just flying off the handle.
“I don’t have a lot of options,” I said. “I can’t afford college. And I’m pretty sure I’ve missed all the application deadlines.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s true. But suppose it weren’t? Which college would you want to go to?”
“Evergreen?” I said, naming a four-year college in Olympia, eighty or so miles away.
“Why Evergreen?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hear it’s kind of a hippie school.”
“I see,” he said.
Of course, I didn’t really want to go to Evergreen in the sense that they had a curriculum I liked, or anything like that. It was just one of two state schools I knew the name of. The other one was the University of Washington, and I knew for a fact that I was short of their admissions requirements. My grades weren’t good enough, and I didn’t have enough years of foreign language or math.
The next week, when Frank came to clean, he had an application for admission to The Evergreen State Coll
ege, and a Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
“Listen,” he said, when he showed it to me. “I know this is an inconvenience. But I’d consider it a personal favor if you’d fill these out.”
“Frank,” I said, “there’s no way I can get in. The application deadline already passed. Even if I got in, I couldn’t afford it. Look, it says right here that the priority filing date for financial aid was last month.”
“I know,” he said. “And you’re probably right. Let’s call it a contingency plan. Please fill it out. Just to humor me.”
I sighed.
“You know what I did before I retired?” he asked.
He’d told me before, but I’d kind of forgotten.
“Teacher?” I guessed.
“Principal,” he said. “I had a lot of students over the years. Some of them work in colleges. You fill it out and send it in. Let me see what I can do.”
“Fine,” I said. That kind of networking, at least, was something I understood. And it wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I filled out the forms and sent them in.
72
Grandpa had another heart attack that winter, and this time he ended up in Providence Hospital, in Seattle. This turned out to be sort of convenient. Dad was still technically living at home, but he spent about half his time at Swedish Hospital, a half mile away from Providence. So once or twice a week I could make the rounds to visit both of them in one day. Grandpa looked different this time than he had when he had a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was unshaven and haggard-looking. His toupee was on crooked. And he looked scared every time I came to see him. He held my hand and talked about his first wife, my dad’s mother.
“I’ll see her again soon,” he whispered to me.
Margaret was standing a few feet away. I avoided looking at her.
Going to see my dad was a stranger experience. He looked better than Grandpa, but he was farther along. He’d never stopped hallucinating bugs and ninjas. Dr. Barton told me it was something called viral dementia. I thought the more likely culprit was chronic drug abuse, but it didn’t really make any difference to me what was causing it.
Now, in the hospital, Dad was hallucinating other things.
“Frank tells me you’re going to get a scholarship,” he’d say when I came to visit him. “You’ve got a straight-A average. Things are going to be all right for you.”
None of which was true, but I didn’t see the point in getting into it with him.
“Sure, Dad,” I’d say. “Everything’s great.”
Then he’d hold my hand and cry. Sometimes he’d bring up his dead mother. I thought it was nice, in a way, that he and Grandpa were on the same page for a change.
* * *
I still spent the odd weekend in Ballard, staying with Ryan and his mom, sleeping on the floor. Like Brandon, Ryan had developed a whole new scene—a whole new group of friends and new interests. He’d started doing a little light dealing late in his junior year, and by senior year we were spending a lot of time sitting in unfamiliar basements while he got high with people I’d never met before, and a few that I had. Ryan had started hanging out with this kid Wendell we knew from Mr. Fields’s class. Wendell was a skinny little dude with curly blond hair, big features, and baggy eyes. He played bass and smoked his body weight in pot every week—and he knew a lot of dealers and users in the white trash north end drug scene. So one day while we were all sitting around watching TV I asked him if he ever heard anything about Eddie, and Wendell said yeah, he’d just heard something about Eddie recently, as a matter of fact.
“Really?” I said. “What’d you hear?”
“Heard he’s dead, man,” Wendell said. “Heard he overdosed on coke a few weeks ago, up in some squat in Shoreline.”
Ryan looked at Wendell, then looked at me, then punched Wendell in the shoulder.
“Ow! The hell?” Wendell demanded, rubbing his arm.
“What’d you tell him like that for?” Ryan said. “You know they were friends back in Mr. Fields’s class.”
“Oh,” Wendell said. “Yeah. I … sorry. I kind of forgot.”
“Jesus,” Ryan said. “I hope you get some bad news like that someday. Asshole. Jason, you okay?”
“Huh?” I said. “Yeah. Sure. Fine.”
I hung around for an hour or so, then said my goodbyes and headed back toward Capitol Hill. I decided to walk instead of taking the bus. I walked the railroad tracks, from Salmon Bay to Fremont. I stopped on the way and punched the side of an old warehouse until my right hand was bleeding and I couldn’t make a fist.
And maybe it was the weather or something, because it was just a few weeks later that Brandon called me at home and told me Marti had been trying to get in touch with me all day.
“I was visiting my grandpa,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s Alexis,” Brandon said. “She … Listen, Jason, the thing is, she shot herself yesterday.”
I felt it go through me, but it didn’t stick. She’d shot herself. She might not be—
“Is she okay?” I asked. “I mean—”
“She’s gone, Jason. She died.”
I took a few deep breaths.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Call Marti,” he said. “She needs to hear from you.”
“Okay,” I said.
I hung up the phone. I was alone in my room. And I was doing okay, except that it just seemed like too much. It was too much.
“Too much,” I started saying, over and over again. “Too much, oh, Jesus, too much.”
The words became sobs, and I tried to get up from my bed and walk, but my legs were broken by the words, and then I was just kneeling next to my bed, like a little kid saying his prayers, except all I was doing was sobbing and gasping and saying, “Too much. Oh, no, no—too much…”
* * *
Marti told me the story a few days later, over the phone. Alexis had been living with her new boyfriend, an older guy named Chris. They were both students at Shoreline Community College, where Alexis was getting her GED. I’d spoken to her a few months ago, and she’d sounded really happy. Marti said it was just a thing—just one of those things Alexis did sometimes. Chris had a single-shot .22 caliber rifle in his closet, and while he was at work Alexis took it out, braced the barrel against her collarbone, and pulled the trigger.
“Her collarbone?” I said.
“Yeah,” Marti said. “It bounced off the bone, traveled at a downward angle, and hit her pulmonary artery. And she died.”
I could picture it then. Alexis and her cries for help. Knife cuts to her stomach. A bottle of aspirin. A small-caliber bullet high on her chest—away from her vital organs. But .22s are dangerous precisely because they bounce. It must have been such a surprise, I thought, as she collapsed onto the floor and bled to death. It would only have taken a few seconds.
“So she didn’t mean to,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Marti said. “I thought that, too. But she was wearing her pearls. They were special to her. Like maybe she expected someone to find her.”
“Her pearls?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Marti said. “Her mom asked me to wash the blood off them. So Alexis could be buried in them.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that one.
The funeral was just for family, and a few close friends like Marti. The memorial service was a week later, and that one was general admission. I went with Marti and Brandon and a few hundred other people: people from the church Alexis hadn’t been to in years and from her parents’ circle of friends. Extended family. Her brother. And a bunch of us students from Garfield.
I cried for Alexis, like I hadn’t cried for my dad, Billy, Scotty, or Eddie. Why I could cry for a teenage girl who’d basically killed herself by accident, when I couldn’t cry for all these other people who’d so desperately wanted to live, was beyond me. Maybe I was really crying for myself. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand anything anymore.
* * *
Dad wasn’t technically in hospice care yet so he still came home sometimes. I liked it better when he was in the hospital, but I wasn’t willing to admit that to myself or anyone else, so I took care of him as best I could when he was around. I kept him from leaving the house in the middle of the night when he said people were coming to get him. I kept lying to him about bug-bombing the house when he was in the hospital. I just kept going. I didn’t see any choice in the matter.
I tried to do better—in school, and with the house. Frank’s concerns were starting to make an impression on me, and I knew I had to keep my shit together at least enough to graduate. It wasn’t easy. I had dozens of absences in some of my classes, and there were new policies in place that required my teachers to fail me based on my attendance record alone. The policies were being tested this year. They’d be mandatory next year. I negotiated with my teachers individually to get them to give me passing grades.
“You shouldn’t go to Evergreen,” Dad said one day. “You should go to community college.”
“I need to go to a four-year college,” I said. “Community colleges don’t have the kind of financial aid I’ll need. Or dorms.”
“You shouldn’t go to Evergreen,” he said. “I took care of you. You should take care of me.”
“What?” I said.
“If you leave, they’ll put me in hospice, at Swedish,” he said.
“But—what about my grades, and my scholarship and all that? How good everything’s going to be for me?”
“You owe me,” he said.
“Okay, Dad. I’ll think about it.”
A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Page 35