He asked me in all earnestness, “How was it growing up with John?” I could tell he knew the answer wasn’t going to be good, and I could also tell that he had his own opinions to share.
“It was kind of crappy,” I offered.
He nodded and said, “I used to go to your place a lot when you guys were little and I just wondered how you guys dealt with him. He was a bastard.”
I ordered another Spanish coffee and we talked more as we ate. By this time, I was tired of everyone treading softly and pretending that Dad’s life was saintly. “It’s nice to know that there’s someone here who isn’t full of shit,” I said to Terry. I was actually starting to feel like Dad’s death would become a reason for the family to open up more. After all, if there’s someone in your family whom you’re always afraid of offending, it can be stifling for everyone involved. Terry told me about being a kid and going to visit my dad a few times with his mom. This was a couple of years before I was born, when Matt was a baby and Mom and Dad were split up. Dad was living in some kind of motel out by the airport in Kennewick and there were Playboys scattered around. One day, after hearing that he didn’t get a job that he’d been hoping for, Dad got so angry that he trashed the place, knocking holes in the walls and breaking furniture. He grabbed a gun and went outside and shot bullets into the hard ground.
Matt heard us talking about Dad and joined in the conversation. Soon we were joking and laughing about his spazzy temper and creative cursing. Matt and I tried to remember the exact order of f-words and other swears when he smashed his fingers moving the fridge down the stairs. It’s the closest we got to a eulogy.
Hotel
That night, I stayed in a hotel room with my older brother Russell. I was in bed, with the lights out, falling asleep, when Russell said, “I was surprised to hear how negatively you spoke of your dad today.” He must have been referring to some of the things he heard at the restaurant.
At first I thought he was going to scold me for that, but I told him frankly about how disappointing a father he was. I talked calmly for fifteen minutes about all the reasons. In a way, Russell reminds me of Dad, so I wasn’t sure whose side he would take.
I was surprised to hear him respond with similar stories and feelings. I listened to Russell’s voice in the dark and could feel the pain in the air around us. I had always thought of Russell as the serious-minded, conservative, military, older brother, but now I could see that he was vulnerable too. I told him about how having a bad father made me try to be a good father and he told me about some of the things he, too, learned as a father. He had a son named Charles when he was much younger, with a woman he was not with for long. When the relationship ended, he let her take his son. Now, after years of having not talked to him, he had no idea where his son was.
After he lost contact with his son, Russell fell in love with a Korean woman and married her. She had two children from a previous marriage, a son and a daughter, and Russell became their father. A couple of years into the marriage, his wife was in a car accident and was paralyzed. She’s been in a wheelchair ever since. They went back and forth from Korea to America and maintained a strong and loving relationship. But still, I got the feeling that Russell was regretful about not staying in touch with his son.
We talked for a couple of hours and then fell asleep. At five in the morning, the alarm went off and Russell had to get up to catch a flight. I stayed in bed, half-asleep, and said good-bye to him. He set his bags in the hallway and stood in the doorway. “Well, it was really good to talk to you,” he said. “And I want you to know that I love you and I’m proud of you.”
“Golden Child”
My brother Mark, the “golden child,” is the only one in the family that has never lived outside the Tri-Cities. I think about how soul-crushing that must be. The few times he has driven Mom to visit me in Portland, he doesn’t want to go anywhere or to explore the city. It’s as if nothing interests him. When any of our relatives visit the Tri-Cities, he usually disappears and does not answer his phone. I have noticed that just in the past couple of years, many of his teeth have fallen out and his glasses are usually dirty and broken. His bedroom, across from the bathroom in Mom’s home, is always riddled with clothes, electronic things that have been taken apart, Budweiser posters, and weird smells. When he is around, it is surprising if he speaks beyond a few mumbled words.
He was the only one I saw crying at Dad’s funeral.
The Day After
The day after the funeral, Mom wanted to have some one-on-one talks with each of her visiting boys—Russell, Matt, and me. Gary did not come to the funeral and wasn’t at our family reunion a few years before. He was living in Ohio and working as a truck driver. I haven’t seen him in twenty years and it seems like he has been avoiding the rest of the family as well.
I drove Mom to the new Sonic drive-in that opened down the street from them. It seems like every imaginable chain store or restaurant has opened up in the Tri-Cities since I moved away. The landscape has gone from desert to a sickening glut of consumerism. They call it expansion and growth.
We ordered root beer floats and sat in my car and talked about Dad. This is when she told me about her first husbands and how abusive they were. She explained more details about Matt’s dad. She talked about Elinda and why she was sent to Medical Lake and how she got pregnant there. Then she told me what happened between Elinda and Dad.
I sat with her for about three hours, holding her hand and listening to this flood of information. These were all the things that weren’t talked about when I was growing up. Stories kept from us kids.
When we were ready to leave, I tried to start my car but the battery was dead. I had kept my headlights on the whole time. I walked around and asked people in the other cars if they had jumper cables, but nobody did. Finally I asked one of the roller-skating servers and they brought out a battery charger. After a quick zap, the car started right up and we drove off, embarrassed but relieved.
The Smoking Room
The first time I went to visit Elinda after the funeral was when she had to get remarried to Chris, someone she thought she had legally married more than twenty years before. But it turned out, as I mentioned earlier, that Elinda hadn’t been officially divorced from her first husband yet. She found this out when her first husband passed away with the old divorce papers, unprocessed, still in his possession.
I drove to Olympia for their small wedding at the courthouse. Mom and Mark were also there, along with a dozen other friends and relatives of Chris’s. When Elinda saw me show up at the last minute, she ran over and gave me a big hug and said, “Look, everyone. My baby brother!”
During the ceremony, the judge started to go through all the various oaths. Elinda fidgeted and complained, “I just wanted to say ‘I do.’”
“Well, okay then,” the judge stammered.
Afterward, we went to a place called O’Malley’s, a cheap family restaurant connected to a bowling alley. Dinner was a variety of chicken strips, fish and chips, and hamburgers.
I stayed with Mom and Mark at Elinda’s trailer park home. The decor was as seventies as it looked from the outside, with fake-wood paneled walls, fluffy carpet, and one narrow hallway that led to two cluttered back bedrooms. The bathroom was full of dollar-store items. In the kitchen, Elinda showed me the cupboards, packed full of boxes and cans of nonperishable food. She also had a freezer full of more food that she showed us with a proud smile.
Outside, there was a small shack at the end of the driveway that they called the smoking room. Instead of smoking in their home, they smoked in this shack. It was just large enough for a card table, some shelves filled with board games, a TV, and a boom box. One of Elinda and Chris’s friends was staying with them this same weekend and all three of them sat in the smoking room most of the night while Mom and Mark and I stayed in the trailer watching the Mariners get shellacked by the Baltimore Orioles. I looked through some photo albums that were out and kept asking Mom who p
eople were when I didn’t recognize them.
There were a couple of photos of Mom and a pretty little girl that I wondered about. “That’s me with Elinda,” she said. I had to stare hard at them to recognize Elinda. She was thin and happy looking, a little glint of mischief in her eyes. Probably about thirteen years old. “That was before she left,” Mom said.
I turned the page and there was another picture of Elinda. In this one, she was much taller and bigger, but still young. Maybe about eighteen. She was slouched against a bench somewhere outside and her head was tilted. Her mouth was slack and open and her eyes looked faraway and helpless.
I put down the albums and went out to visit Elinda and Chris and their friend in the smoking room and noticed that there were no windows, no ventilation in the thing. At first I thought it was funny, but then I grew appalled. “You should get some windows put in this thing,” I told Elinda. I felt like I was lecturing them a bit. They puffed and coughed and nodded their heads like it was old news. “Or get an air purifier or something.” I could barely stand in the doorway without feeling sick. They sat in their own haze, playing cards.
That night, I slept on one of the couches in the front room. Mark slept on the other, snoring loudly. There were several lights on in the room that were keeping me awake, so I got up and turned them off. In the middle of the night, I was woken up by Elinda and her friend stumbling around and wondering if the electricity had gone out. They turned all the lights back on and went back to bed.
The next day we were at a Kmart and I looked at air purifiers, thinking I would get one for Elinda and her smoking room. Her birthday was two days away. I talked with the manager of the pharmacy area and discussed my concern with him. He told me that an air purifier would do very little to help. He said they should install some windows and fans to blow the smoke out, but even that was probably not enough. He asked how old Elinda and her husband were and I said, “About sixty.”
He shook his head and said, “The best thing for them to do, really, would be to quit smoking. If they don’t do that, you probably can’t be too much help.”
I knew he was right. I bought her oven mitts instead.
Farewell Tour
Right before Halloween 2008, I went back to Kennewick for maybe the last time in my life. Russell had convinced Mom that she should move out of the Tri-Cities finally. He was going to get her set up in San Antonio soon, near his daughter’s family and closer to Houston, where Matt lives. Russell and his wife were planning to come back to Texas as well, after he was done with his current job in Korea.
My girlfriend, Barb, took the trip with me. It was a short visit and we spent part of it just driving around, looking at places from my childhood. We parked and walked around my old neighborhood and along the ditches where the floons used to be. I pointed out Willie’s and Todd’s old houses. We walked slowly by the house I grew up in, the house that caught fire. A woman was in the yard playing with a dog and then noticed us looking at the house. I wanted to say, “I used to live here and I’m writing a book about it.” But I would have felt like a dork. Instead I just made it blatant that we were talking about their house by pointing to the window where my bedroom used to be.
We went to the Mayfair Market even though it’s now called the Red Apple. Even twenty years later, I thought I might recognize someone.
We got back in the car and drove up Garfield Hill to the house that my friend Matthew grew up in and I saw that their last name was still on the mailbox. I hadn’t talked to Matthew since those days in Spokane, and I wanted to go up to the door and say hello to his parents, but I chickened out.
When it got dark, we drove by my high school and saw that there was a football game going on. We stopped and snuck in the back gate and watched for an hour.
It was like a farewell tour.
Back at Mom’s place, I looked through more dusty boxes of photos and artifacts. A few old letters caught my attention. There was one addressed to Mark at a correctional institute that he was in while I lived in Spokane. He had been convicted of a drug crime that I didn’t know about. I also found two letters for Dad from someone named Marie who was living in Portland. They were both postmarked 1956, before he and Mom were together, but I wondered why he had kept them. They were both very romantically written and addressed to him at a place called the Welcome Hotel in Arlington, Oregon. At the bottom of one of the boxes, I was also surprised to find evidence of Dad’s creative side. There were a couple drawings of horses and one of a woman’s profile that looked like Judy Garland. They were pretty clean and well done, almost as if they’d been traced. But the paper was thick and Dad had signed his name on them. Some brittle papers were filled with rhyming poetry. I wondered if this was a clue to his life. If he had wanted to be an artist or a writer and just gave up hope on those things as more children and more problems piled up for him.
I was hoping I might find some older things of mine too, like the notebook of song lyrics I used to pass around in middle school. I did find a big stack of note cards with football statistics and player analyses I had written on them.
I put all the boxes back and gathered up the things I wanted to keep. Most of the boxes were old issues of motorcycle magazines that belonged to Mark.
After washing my hands, I checked out the spare room where Barb and I were supposed to sleep. It was the room where Dad had slept for the past several years, but now a friend of Mark’s had taken it over. There was an overpowering cigarette stench in the air that was making our heads ache.
I asked Mom about this friend and she tried to explain that it was a woman who had been kicked out of her place and they were just letting her stay there for a while. I wasn’t clear if she was Mark’s girlfriend, but I figured she wasn’t. Mom said that the woman was staying somewhere else that night, so we could sleep there. I looked around at this woman’s stuff and saw photos of a couple of girls, presumably her daughters. There were hair clips all around the bed frame and a cheap old TV with a collection of bad movies on DVD and VHS next to it. I randomly opened a small drawer in the bedside table and immediately shut it.
“Look in there,” I said to Barb.
“What is it?” she asked. She could see from my face that it was something serious. “Is it a dildo?”
I shook my head and said, “No. Worse.”
She opened the drawer to see a crack pipe sitting there, not even concealed. Underneath the pipe was a letter that the woman had written, or was writing, to someone. It was a sad, pleading letter, begging someone for forgiveness. Asking for a second chance.
I put the pipe and the letter back and we decided to sleep on the living room floor instead.
Home
The next day, we went to the cemetery and found Dad’s gravestone. I was surprised to see that Mom’s name was on it too. I wondered if they had arranged that a long time ago. Even though they were never affectionate with each other when I was growing up and in the twenty years since I left the Tri-Cities, I guess they formed some kind of bond, or a truce that would keep them together forever. Maybe it was formed out of a mutual stubbornness, or perhaps they were used to each other, even though terrible things had happened between them. Unforgivable things. But maybe the unforgivable things were forgivable after all, for the sake of not being alone.
There were some plastic flowers at his grave. I didn’t bring anything to leave. I reached down and felt the raised letters of my last name. “See you later, Dad,” I said.
That night, while driving the four hours back to Portland, I realized that I probably wouldn’t be coming back to Kennewick again. At least not to see any family. I will have nowhere to stay after Mom sells her place. Mark will surely stay in town after he finds a place for himself, but I doubt anyone will hear from him.
Sometimes I think about growing up in Kennewick and how normal and good it was. How I was glad that I didn’t grow up in a smaller town or a bigger city. I think about my own son, growing up in Portland, and I know that his childhood, h
is youth, is very different. I wonder if he’ll move on in a few short years and feel nostalgic later. If he’ll always think of Portland as home and remember me as a good father. Maybe, right now, he thinks everything in his life is normal the way I thought my life and family was normal.
I realize that nothing is really normal. All it takes to alter normalcy is a death or a birth. Or just some misguided fear, love, or loneliness that never goes away.
Acknowledgments
Parts of this book first appeared online at McSweeney’s, Eleven Bulls, Nerve, Bullfight Review, The Glut, Surgery of Modern Warfare, Powells.com, and Smith Magazine, and in print in Sleepingfish and Igloo Zine.
There are many people who have supported and encouraged me in my writing life. Your love and friendship mean the world to me, especially in the past two years. Thank you: Stephen Kurowski, Andrew Monko, Elizabeth Ellen, Erika Geris, Dayvid Figler, Joe O’Brien, Mike Daily, Laural Winter, Magdalen Powers, Riley Michael Parker, Gary Lutz, Pete McCracken, Reuben Nisenfeld, Melody Owen, Melissa Lion, Zachary Schomburg, Patrick deWitt, Brian Christopher, Joseph Lappie, Bob Gaulke, Melody Jordan, Ritah Parrish, Jenn Lawrence, Chelsea Martin, Martha Klein, Suzanne Burns, Emily Kendal Frey, Zoe Trope, Frank D’Andrea, and Elizabeth Miller.
Special thanks to Michael Johnson, who took some of these stories and created songs from them (long live Reclinerland).
Extra special thanks to my family for their help in piecing this together, especially: Mom, Elinda, Terry, Russell, and Matt. The good outshines the bad. John Elton Sampsell: Rest in Peace. Zacharath: I am proud that you’re my son, and I hope I’ve learned enough to always be a good father.
A Common Pornography: A Memoir Page 13