Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  We returned to Hoy’s Sports just as Yayne’s mother was locking up. After she went upstairs to count out the register, Yayne and I turned the spotlights, previously illuminating running-shoe displays, toward the floor. Then we blasted the pop station KFRC and took turns emulating the sultry moves of the dancers we studied on Solid Gold, a weekly pop countdown TV show hosted by Marilyn McCoo.

  In Yayne’s upstairs apartment we played Barbies, imagining grown-up lives, going to college and fetching lusty boyfriends in our purple Corvettes. But when I heard the sound of the dishes being laid on the table and smelled the aromas of dinner, I didn’t rush home. My strategy, which began unconsciously, was to hang around until the inevitable shift into mealtime. At Yayne’s house, as at the houses of my other friends, I learned how to ingratiate myself and work my orphan eyes. I acted surprised when the invitation finally came, but over time I expected it.

  “Would you like to stay for dinner, Alysia?”

  “I’ll have to call my dad,” I’d say.

  In the other room I’d dial my number and it would ring and ring, as my dad was still out. And then, returning to my friends’ parents, I’d say, “He said it’s fine.”

  During these years I perfected a parent-friendly manner that in the short term could make me a happy addition to the dinner spread and in the long term might inspire future invitations. I was polite, always saying please and thank you, asking questions, laughing easily, always helping to clear the table.

  My friends’ parents generally seemed glad to host me. My presence sometimes provided a needed distraction for fighting siblings. They also knew that I lived alone with my dad, and over time I was treated like an extended member of the family. Mengeshe, Yayne’s cologned dad, used to call me “monster” in his thick Ethiopian accent, and I called him “man star.”

  I was fascinated by these dads but especially by the moms like Yayne’s, who worked, or other moms who stayed home, and always kept the refrigerator stocked with snacks, the bathroom with fresh towels and bowls of potpourri. I loved to look for any physical resemblance between my girlfriends and their mothers, and was sensitive to every display of affection and tension.

  Kathy Moe, the daughter of Cloud House poet David Moe, lived with her divorced mom out in the Sunset district, only a few blocks from the ocean. A small-boned painter from Kansas, her mom was always dabbing away at massive moonlit portraits of women who looked like herself: big-eyed and pale. But while their hair was drawn thick and flowing, I noticed her own was thin and brittle. I’m sure raising Kathy alone frayed her nerves. She turned to incense and Buddhism. From behind closed doors Kathy and I giggled as we listened to her chiming and chanting, “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.”

  I sometimes spent whole weekends at Kathy’s, watching TV (Creature Features on Friday nights, Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturdays) while we ate Kraft mac and cheese and bowls of sugary cereal that turned our milk blue-gray. But, as much as I wanted to, I could never return Kathy’s hospitality. She suffered respiratory asthma and could spend no more than an hour in my house before reaching for her inhaler.

  The dust that troubled Kathy so much was invisible to Dad and me. We had no cleaning person and no cleaning schedule between us. Occasionally Dad told me to do the dishes and I made a game out of it. Our big rubber tub in the sink became a pot over a hot flame and me a chef making “dish soup.” Dad and I took turns hauling the garbage down to the alley each week but did no other cleaning. Our rooms were both blanketed in books and paper, the surfaces draped with clothes. We’d only straighten up if Dad hosted a dinner party, and even then, the people he entertained always appreciated a certain degree of dirt and clutter.

  Then one evening, while brushing my teeth, I noticed the grime on our bathroom sink and out of curiosity took a piece of toilet paper, wet it under the faucet, and wiped the grime away. What a feeling! It was fun to make something dirty clean, like erasing pencil markings from a sheet of paper. So periodically I’d “clean” the bathroom, ripping off some toilet paper and dabbing it under the faucet, always feeling a little proud as Dad never asked me to attend to the sink but always noticed my efforts.

  With so many evenings and weekends spent at friends’ homes, I have to think I annoyed some parents, who’d maybe not planned to feed an extra mouth. But I was extremely sensitive to this possibility. If I detected the least hesitation when a friend asked if I could stay, if I heard any behind-door whispering or glimpsed the slightest eye roll, I’d quickly absent myself and make my way home. I always had Haight Street.

  When we moved to 545 Ashbury, the Haight was still recovering from its threadbare past. Bars and liquor stores dominated the strip and several storefronts were boarded up. But as the 1980s progressed, the neighborhood went upscale. Stores like Coffee Tea & Spice, Bakers of Paris, Auntie Pasta, and Yayne’s family store catered to a growing gourmet-eating, health-conscious middle class. At the same time, many of the new shops opening up were gay-owned, and these among others had suggestive names. In addition to the Kiss My Sweet café, there was a craft shop called The Soft Touch, a vintage furniture store called Sugartit, and a large toy store with a gurgling fountain called Play With It. I loved the Haight as a kid.

  On weekends, Kathy and I grabbed sandwiches at Viking Sub then roller-skated into Golden Gate Park, our long straight hair flying as we descended the hill into the tunnel. At the Big Playground, skates off, we rode the half-moon swings and then sped down the long cement slides on ripped pieces of cardboard. Eventually we skated over to the Legion of Honor near where the roller boogie dancers set up every weekend. I loved their bright-colored short shorts and their undulating grace, the way they maneuvered around overturned cups and did fancy tricks off ramps while Donna Summer sang from a battery-powered boom box.

  After school I often went to Wauzi Records, catty-corner from my apartment. The high ceilings were hung with spinning cardboard displays, the far walls were plastered with posters, and music thumped through the speakers. I spent hours there browsing rows and rows of vinyl, moving from pop to rock to heavy metal to R & B. I always paused at the wildly suggestive covers of the Vanity 6 records, which featured three women in white, black, and red teddies, all heavily made up, posing and pouting under the scrawled title “Nasty Girl.” In the heavy metal section I studied records by Judas Priest, the Scorpions, and Black Sabbath, which featured seething demons strapped into straitjackets, vengeful skeletons with mullets wielding axes or crawling out of graves, all stills from a nightmare. Before YouTube, before everyone had their MTV, this is how we surfed culture, how we weighed style choices. Where do I fit in? I used to wonder. Which tribe is my tribe?

  Walking down the Haight in the 1980s, the air would be thick with the smells of pot, piss, and patchouli. In your ears, a constant whisper: “Doses, doses.” Or “Buds, sweet buds.” Candy was my drug of choice then, and with the five dollars Dad left me for dinner I could fill up on a fried chicken leg from Fat Fong’s and still have plenty of change left over for penny candy at Coffee Tea & Spice.

  The bell hanging from the door would ring as I entered, its chime followed by the powerful and slightly bitter smell of fresh-ground coffee. But my attention focused on the polished wooden counters lined with large glass jars full of candy: chocolate-covered raisins, black and red raspberries with tiny sugar “seeds” that crunched between your teeth. Next to these were the German gummy bears I coveted, which cost 25 cents a pound. I watched eagerly as the clerk’s small metal shovel scooped and dropped the bears with a delicate thud into a small white bag on a scale. On good days, I’d get eighteen bears; on not-so-good days, sixteen.

  As at all the stores I frequented in the Haight, I got to know the clerks, who were captive behind their registers. At Coffee Tea & Spice I met Sean, a Kentucky native with dazzling blue eyes, a Victorian wax-tipped moustache, and an exotic Southern lilt. He flashed me the brightest smile and was always generous with the scale, often giving me nineteen or twenty bears for my quarter. So when I
received my sixth-grade school pictures, I carefully cut out a two-by-four-inch print, walked over to Coffee Tea & Spice, and handed it to Sean across the counter. When I next came in, he invited me behind the register to show me where he’d taped the picture and scribbled horns on either side of my head. The photo would remain on the register for years.

  After Coffee Tea & Spice, I went to Etc. Etc., a novelty store whose greatest draw was the rolls of stickers my friends and I collected in three-ring binders: unicorn stickers, scratch-and-sniff stickers, and round stickers that revealed a rainbow sheen when you tipped them in the light. I also fingered Garfield page-a-day calendars, glossy Betty Boop and Popeye plates, fruit-flavored lip smackers sold in narrow slide-top metal tins, and stuffed animals of every type and size. I especially coveted a black-and-white Felix the Cat clock, which hung high on the wall above the register. It had jeweled eyes and a tail, which moved left-right, left-right, with each tick.

  Kent Story, the owner of Etc. Etc., was exceedingly nice and let me interview him for a sixth-grade school assignment. He and I sat on the store’s back stairs, with Dad’s playback tape recorder heavy on my lap and a set of questions I’d scribbled on a sheet of paper in my hand. “What’s the most expensive thing in the store? What’s the cheapest?”

  A few years later, Kent would contract AIDS, and like so many in that first wave quickly became sick. Etc. Etc., like the other stores he owned on the street, would change hands and eventually be replaced by brightly lit chains, just as Gaston Ice Cream on the corner of Haight and Ashbury would become Ben & Jerry’s and Wauzi Records across the street would become the Gap, and next to the Gap, Seeds of Life would become Z Gallerie. And on, and on.

  At the beginning of the eighties I believed in unicorns and rainbows, the transformative power of sparkly shoelaces and cherry lip smackers. My friends and I sang along with Styx and Olivia Newton-John, believing these were “the best of times.” That we were all, indeed, “magic.” That, like Newton-John in the movie Xanadu, we might be muses in the guise of mortal roller skaters. I believed that this decade might carry us away on the back of a winged horse. But by decade’s end, the fabulous creatures had mostly perished. I didn’t believe in unicorns anymore. We were not magic. We were not able to transcend our fleshy selves but were, in fact, slaves to these bodies and their tragic fragility.

  AS MUCH AS I enjoyed exploring the Haight, I still longed for time with Dad. In the summer of 1980, while I was staying with my grandparents in Kewanee, Illinois, I wrote him a story telling him so:

  Once a father did a poem about his daughter Alysia. When he read it the audience was amazed. It was the best poem they ever heard. It made the rest of the poetry sound like chicken feed. It was so good he read it on radio and television! He did more excellent poems about Heidi as well as Alysia. One time, the president asked him to read them during an election because it was so boring.

  What happened to Alysia, you ask? Well, she was at home with Heidi, miserable and lonely because her dad was working. She was the reason for the “sudden success” but she didn’t get any credit. So she decided to write a letter telling him what had happened with such success. When he read the letter he decided that no success would stand in the way of his daughter and Heidi.

  After my return from Kewanee, Dad decided we should share a special dinner together one night each week. Sometimes he’d fix one of my favorite meals: spaghetti with butter, or baked chicken, which we ate at the round wooden table instead of on our laps in front of the TV. Other weeks he took us out to one of the neighborhood’s many restaurants.

  At All You Knead, I was just tall enough to look over the counter and watch the pizza chef make our ham-and-pepper pie, which we ate in a wooden booth. At the Grand Victorian near Clayton Street, the blond, moustached waiter led us to our favorite table in the window facing Haight Street. The restaurant’s easy elegance, the white tablecloth and vase with a single red rose, always inspired me to sit with a straight back and long neck.

  My favorite restaurant was Friends, an Upstairs Café. You reached the restaurant by climbing the narrow staircase of a three-story Victorian. Inside, the apartment was lined with tables for two, the walls adorned with framed black-and-white pictures of stars from Hollywood’s golden era: Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Veronica Lake, Marlene Dietrich. Under the glamorous gaze of these women, I ordered linguine with clam sauce. The round plate of pasta was always too big for me, but I liked working at it until it resembled a gleaming crescent moon.

  On each of these outings, Dad and I sat across from each other, he sipping a glass of wine, me 7-Up over ice. I told him about school and my new neighborhood friends and he told me about his memories of school, or asked me questions, or just smiled appreciatively. After dinner we walked down Haight Street toward home, hand in hand, taking in the shop windows: the punk mannequin displays at Daljeet’s, the delicate stained glass at Acacia Glass. Along the way, both of us watched as the many street characters made their mischief into the wee hours.

  PART IV

  The Quake

  Maybe it’s normal for teenagers to be rude & sullen & rebellious but I don’t particularly like to be around it. In fact I hardly have the energy to govern or properly love myself, let alone take on added tension.

  —STEVE ABBOTT, letter dated July 30, 1985

  11.

  DESPITE THE FREEDOM I now enjoyed living at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, I suffered a peculiar feeling. It came over me many afternoons when I got home from school, rereading the scribbled note Dad left me on our dining room table. It came over me as I peeled back the foil on another Swanson’s fried chicken dinner while listening to the opening song of a TV sitcom I’d long since memorized. It took shape in my growing awareness that on these nights Dad was somewhere else, somewhere that had nothing to do with me, with someone who had nothing to do with me.

  Dad tried to shield me from this feeling. He still took me to his places when he could, adult worlds of writers and words and ideas that were usually bigger than me and which I rarely understood. Sitting to one side as my dad interviewed Robert Duncan in his Berkeley home or sitting beside Dad at his Poetry Flash meetings, I could never follow what was being said and strained to find anything that might engage my imagination.

  But inside these worlds of Dad’s I was, more often than not, the only child among adults and the only girl among men. Just as in the halls of French American, I felt like I was the only kid in the world with a gay parent and no mother.

  There’s no one like me. There’s no one who knows what this is like, I used to think.

  In fact, there were many children who had gay moms or dads—sometimes both—in the seventies and eighties. More often than not, these gay parents had had kids with straight partners before coming to terms with their sexuality. They either came out, divorcing their spouse to pursue same-sex affairs, or else remained closeted and married, privately despairing or seeking furtive encounters. In some ways I was lucky. Though often romantically disappointed, Dad at least was free to be himself and was spared the confusion and self-loathing that afflicted so many closeted parents.

  I didn’t meet any children of gay parents until I was an adult. And among these “queerspawn,” as some have chosen to call themselves, I’ve felt a powerful bond, especially around that peculiar feeling, something like loneliness but more akin to isolation. In those first decades after Stonewall, our families had no way to connect, to make sense of ourselves and where we belonged. We had no Provincetown family week, no openly gay celebrities like Ellen or Dan Savage, no Modern Family. We saw no versions of our parents in books or on screens. And so we considered ourselves outside the social fabric, cut off from “the normal.” As kids, we often existed in a state of uneasiness, a little too gay for the straight world and a little too straight for the gay world.

  To grow up the child of a gay parent in the seventies and eighties was to live with secrets. For me, there was the secret of Dad’s boyfriends,
whom I kept hidden from friends, teachers, and family, who maybe knew or suspected Dad was gay but didn’t want to know details. There were the pastels of naked strangers I found in the backs of Dad’s hardcover sketchbooks where I doodled my own landscapes. Who were these men? I wondered. What happened with them? And there was Dad’s poetry and prose, which so often depicted the struggles of openly gay men and what those men did together.

  My father never asked me to keep quiet about his sexual orientation. He himself was as proud to march in parades as he was to write and publicly read his gay-themed poems. But I couldn’t yet share that pride. Waiting for the bus with a cluster of my fourth-grade classmates one afternoon, I pointed to a sun-faded “No On Prop 6” campaign poster stuck in the window of a nearby Victorian. Proposition 6 was an initiative sponsored by Senator John Briggs that would have banned gays, lesbians, and anyone who supported gay rights from working in California’s public schools.

  “My dad has that poster,” I offered, not knowing what it was about.

  “Ewww!! You know what that means, don’t you?” exclaimed one of my classmates. “That’s when boys like boys and girls like girls.”

  Determined to escape unwanted attention, I said nothing, trying to distance myself from the “gross” association. And in the years that followed, I worked hard to hide the details of our queer domestic life.

  When, in the spring of 1983, Dad grew a wispy rattail on the back of his head and bleached it blond, I chased him around the house with scissors trying to cut it off. At first he thought it was funny: the precocious preteen girl shocked by the rebellious antics of her father! But I was truly angry. He was ruining my efforts to fit in. I persisted in chasing him with the scissors until he sharply told me to put the scissors down. Now.