Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  If school friends planned to stop by the apartment after class, I’d spend twenty minutes rearranging Dad’s clutter in an effort to hide evidence of his transgressive lifestyle—the issues of Gay Sunshine and Fag Rag, the peacock-feathered roach clips, the plastic baggies full of pot. It was easier to just not have friends over.

  But my unusual position, as it turned out, would become both my greatest complaint and my greatest comfort. As I grew into a teenager, I came to see our difference as something powerful, like a secret weapon. Dad and I weren’t just odd, we were set apart. We may not have enjoyed an expansive lawn in Marin County, as so many of my classmates did, or even a working car. But we were artists.

  As ridiculous and pretentious as this might sound, I sincerely believed and needed to believe that our position in bohemia was born of our separation and that the pain of our separation could be redeemed by our brand of bohemia.

  Camped out on the sagging fold-out futon in the living room that doubled as Dad’s bed, I’d page through his many books and comics, skipping over the weird and dirty bits, focusing instead on the potential for transformation. In a cartoon panel he made when I was five, I was no longer a timid and bullied first-grader but a fierce and proud monster-killer! Studying the cover of Dad’s poetry book Stretching the Agape Bra, I didn’t see a lonely nine-year-old in Nikes but a Victorian ghost-child dressed in white sleeves with a mysteriously somber expression.

  In Dad’s second issue of SOUP, published in 1981, he transformed me from an uncoordinated, so-so French student into Sylvan Wood, the sassy lead singer of an up-and-coming rock band he invented called Toxic Schlock! He posed my friends Kathy as the bassist Sarah Lee Wood and Juliana Finch as the guitarist Twinkie. Yayne was supposed to be our drummer Picture Tube, but because she cancelled on the day of the photo shoot Dad played the part with a blanket over his head.

  Across from the attitude-dripping band photo (the photographer told us to look bored), Dad wrote up a fake interview and inserted lyrics to our new hit single, “Burning to Speak.” He even had me copy out the lyrics in my own loopy ten-year-old script.

  Burning to speak, burning to speak

  Been waiting on the phone for nearly a week

  Burning to speak, burning to speak

  I guess you think I’m just some kind of have-to.

  Sometimes I’d sing “Burning to Speak” to myself, making up my own tune, jerking my body from side to side in my bedroom mirror. Dad’s lyrics channeled my own yearnings, my desire to have him to myself at least some of the time. Though I was still in love with Dad and assumed he reciprocated my love, I worried that I was for him, “some kind of have-to.” So I jumped at any chance to play the role of poet’s muse, the occasional Alice to Dad’s Lewis Carroll. If I had to contend with some funky mushrooms and a crazy queen or two along the way, it was worth it.

  ONE EVENING in the fall of 1983, my father showed me a letter he’d received inviting him to participate in the One World International Poetry Festival in Amsterdam. The annual festival encompassed four days of talks and readings culminating in a lavish cocktail party held at the house of the Lebanese ambassador to the Hague. Dad was invited to read, along with such leading poets and writers of the day as Marguerite Duras, Richard Brautigan, Robert Creeley, and William Burroughs. The invitation legitimized him as a serious writer and editor. It was an opportunity he couldn’t miss.

  The Dutch club that hosted the event offered to pay for Dad’s airfare and hotel. He could have easily sent me to stay with my grandparents or with local friends but he was determined that I should accompany him. He’d long imagined our traveling to Europe. In 1978 he wrote: “I am thinking of Paris . . . & fantasize drawing Notre Dame again with Alysia @ my side, drawing pad also before her. Urchin child of the artist.” Dad took on extra writing assignments and temp work, and even borrowed money from his reluctant parents, in order to cover my airfare.

  “You know, I didn’t get to Europe until after college,” Dad told me over breakfast our first morning in our first stop, Paris. “It was 1968 and the streets were full of revolutionaries, not as commercial as it is now. There were no McDonald’s.” He waved his hands across the street as I took a sleepy bite of my buttery tartine.

  We were sitting in a dingy café in the 19th arrondissement, weary and jet-lagged. Since it was October, we sat inside the large café window facing the street, our luggage pressed against our knees, scanning the passersby for Michael Koch, the ponytailed poet friend of Dad’s who was to host us in his nearby apartment. Michael had moved to Paris with his painter wife and their three-year-old daughter, Piaf. He supported his family with translation work.

  “Piaf’s a poet like her father,” Dad said by way of introduction when Koch arrived. “The other day, when Michael was helping her on with her socks, she spotted a hole and said, ‘A hole in my sock, a balcony for my toes!’” I listened sullenly to Dad’s story. I wondered, did he secretly wish that I was more poetic and writerly? Should all poets have poet daughters?

  The next day, Michael and his family joined us for breakfast and a tour of the Pompidou Center. We capped the afternoon with a visit to Berthillon, an outdoor ice-cream shop on the Île Saint-Louis that attracted crowds even on chilly fall afternoons. Licking my dainty cone of berry sorbet, I started banging my body against Dad’s side as he chatted with Michael about living as an American poet in Paris. After twirling away from him into the crowd of people, I banged back into him again. But in one of my twirls I felt something strange, a hand touching the back of my jeans between my legs. My whole body stiffened and I whipped my head around and caught the stare of a short man with greasy black hair. His eyes boldly looked at me and then darted to a tall blond woman beside him, who I assumed was his girlfriend, then back to me. I quickly returned to my father’s side but felt too embarrassed to tell him what had happened.

  “I want to go back to Michael’s,” I said, pulling his arm toward the nearest Métro.

  “Wait a second. Let me finish my ice cream.”

  “I want to go back!”

  Later that night, sleeping next to Dad on Michael’s living room floor, I dreamed that I was kicking the man with the black hair. I kicked him and kicked him as he lay rolling in the gutter. Again and again I kicked him in the gut.

  So when, the next day, our last in Paris, my father and I were walking across the quai toward the Eiffel Tower and he asked me, “How’d you like to live in Paris?” I answered, “I don’t want to.”

  “You’ve been having a good time, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “But you already speak French! We could probably transfer you to a school here.”

  I shuddered, then suddenly, and violently, spat on the street.

  “I hate Paris. I hate it here.”

  I refused to tell Dad why I was so against the idea, and he didn’t push it. I never imagined that I’d return to live in Paris, not once but twice. And I never imagined that ten years later, on an overcast February morning, I would seek out a spot on the bank of the Seine on the Île Saint-Louis, walking distance from the Berthillon ice-cream shop, and that there I would scatter my father’s ashes from a gilded cardboard box, finally granting him his wish to live in France.

  THE NEXT MORNING, we took the train from Paris’s Gare du Nord to Amsterdam. The International Poetry Festival was being hosted by the Melkweg, or Milky Way, a former dairy factory which had become a gallery and performance space catering to aging Dutch hippies and a growing Euro-punk scene.

  We arrived on the second day of the conference but quickly found our way around. While readings took place on the main stages, poets speaking French, Danish, German, Hungarian, and Dutch took over the club’s dusty back rooms and upstairs. I quietly watched them sipping weak coffee, nibbling on stale pastries, and gossiping amongst themselves.

  During our first couple of days in Amsterdam I talked to no one but Dad, who like me was feeling shy. Soon, though, I felt free to wander around the Melkweg
alone. That’s when I started hanging around with an odd American writer named Richard Brautigan, famous for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America.Over six feet tall and barrel-chested in a red “Montana” t-shirt, Brautigan was a formidable presence. But with his round wire-framed glasses, poofy hunter’s cap, and red, bushy handlebar moustache, he looked almost cartoonish, like a sad-eyed Yosemite Sam.

  Brautigan took a special interest in me. He was estranged from his own daughter who, though ten years my senior, had been about my age when he’d last seen her. After a couple of afternoons chatting amiably in a back room of the Melkweg, he decided to offer me advice that he said he wished he could share with his daughter. “Be careful,” he warned. “If you see a small blister on the tip of a man’s penis, stay away.” At twelve, I hadn’t yet kissed a boy, so his words hung in the air around us, compelling but never belonging to me. “That’s herpes,” Brautigan added. “It’s not pretty.” I sat through his warning and other rambling stories, flattered by his interest and, though not always understanding, curious to hear the next weird thing he might say.

  The next afternoon I overheard a conversation between Dad, Brautigan, and Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack, who was also reading at the festival. They were comparing anecdotes about the peculiar poetry that comes so naturally to children. Kerouac described a moment when, as a girl, she mistook the moon for the sun and woke up her mother. “It’s daytime, Momma,” she explained as she started to unravel her mother’s long braids. My dad recalled the time I asked, “Why is the moon following us?” a quote that he worked into one of his poems. Brautigan described a day at the beach with his young daughter. She was playing with a brand-new pail when a big wave came in and carried it out to sea. Distraught, Brautigan ran into the water, frantically splashing around trying to find it. His daughter, watching from the shore, exclaimed coolly, “Forget it Daddy. It’s gone,” as though she were the adult and he the anxious child who needed soothing.

  In the years since this trip, I’ve held on to the memory of this conversation like a stone in my pocket, rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger until it’s become flat and smooth. I always longed to be part of my father’s dialogue, the necessary appendage to his writer’s life. This moment, among others, was the fulfillment of my bohemian fantasy.

  That evening, I sat and watched my dad read in one of the Melkweg’s dark, smoky galleries. His final selection was “Elegy,” the poem that closed his last book of poetry, Stretching the Agape Bra (1980). In it he writes about all the deaths he’s known in life, including the death of my mother:

  When I learned my wife’s skull was crushed by a truck, my head

  swam like an hourglass into a TV set. All the channels went crazy.

  My dad had never spoken with me in detail about my mom’s car accident, and it felt uncomfortable to hear him sharing something so personal with an audience of foreign-tongued strangers. It was also strange to see the power of my father’s words on this otherwise boisterous crowd. His voice unfurled like a heavy bolt of fabric across the room, hushing conversations and quieting clinking glasses. As he continued, his words filled the room and cleared the smoke until all attention focused on the pale and slender man onstage, until I could hear only his words, words he seemed to speak only to me:

  We distance ourselves for protection,

  Wear scarves when it’s cold.

  What seems most outlandish in our autobiography

  Is what really happened.

  The last night of the festival, the Lebanese ambassador had all the poets in the festival bussed to his tightly guarded mansion for a cocktail party. The ambassador wrote poetry himself, it seemed, and he wanted to play them a rare recording of Apollinaire on his old gramophone. But none of the assembled writers paid much attention, preferring to smoke and drink on his many plush sofas.

  As there were no kids to play with, I brought along my camera to occupy myself. I took a photo of my dad in conversation with several poets, his hands hard at work explaining a complicated thought. I took photos of Brautigan in his vest and blue jeans, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a couch. He kept getting up to fetch a fresh martini at the open bar, each time asking that his martini be “a little more dry” until, finally, the exasperated bartender simply handed him a bottle of gin. Brautigan laughed when he returned to the poets on the couch, showing off the bottle like a trophy. He again brandished the gin on the bus, knocking back swigs for the duration of our trip back to the town center. All the grown-ups were by then pretty drunk, sitting on each other’s laps, French kissing, and dancing in the aisles despite the driver’s repeated admonishments. I continued taking pictures.

  “Hey Alysia!” Brautigan called. “Take a picture of me. I need to sober up.” So I snapped my camera inches from his face, setting off a bright flash of light. The photo would later reveal Brautigan’s face bathed in white, with only the contours of his round glasses and poofy cap visible. He blinked into the distance. “Thanks, darling.”

  The highlight of the trip for my dad took place our last morning in Amsterdam, when we shared a private breakfast with William Burroughs at the hotel. I had no idea why Dad was so nervous about meeting this creaky old man in a three-piece suit and hat. Even my dad was a little disappointed, later writing about the meeting, “our talk at breakfast was rather banal (about cats, living in Lawrence, Kansas versus more urban areas, etc.).” But the notorious author of Naked Lunch was very interested in hearing about the two years my father had spent studying in a Missouri seminary before grad school, an experience he was in the process of fictionalizing for his novel Holy Terror, for which Burroughs would give him a blurb. Dad presented Burroughs with a copy of the third issue of SOUP, which he liked.

  My favorite moment of the week took place the last night of the festival, when the German punk singer Nina Hagen performed to a packed house at the Melkweg. That week, thousands of Europeans had converged in the capital of West Germany to protest the further deployment of American missiles across western Europe. All this collected anger and energy coalesced on the floor of the Melkweg. From a staff balcony, I watched the scene below: crowds of punks with neon-striped mohawks, wearing metal spikes and ripped clothing and makeup the color of bruises, all pulsing to the rhythm of Nina’s spastic singing. The crowd pushed forward and back, dancing. But this dancing looked like fighting, with writhing bodies slamming together and apart and together again. The visiting poets showed only passing interest in the punks below, but I was mesmerized. The energy! The violence! And I could see it all from my own private balcony.

  A year after Dad and I returned to San Francisco, I found a picture of Richard Brautigan in our morning paper. He’d killed himself with a .44 Magnum in his home in Bolinas, California. No one knew the exact date of his death. His decomposed body was found on the floor in front of a large window overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Next to him a suicide note read simply, “Messy, isn’t it?”

  12.

  ON A DAMP EVENING in November 1983, a couple of weeks after our return from Europe, I picked up the television from the stacked milk crates in Dad’s room and carried it into our bathroom. I carefully set the TV down on the floor in the corner, plugged it in, and turned the dial to channel 7.

  As I undressed and eased myself into the rising bathwater, I watched the opening titles of a made-for-TV movie called The Day After. It didn’t seem strange to me to watch television in the tub. Dad was out for the night and I needed a bath, but I didn’t want to miss this “TV event,” which had been advertised for weeks. While running a soapy washcloth over my arms and legs, I followed the life of two Kansas families leading up to, and following, a Soviet-led nuclear strike on the US. After the bomb hit, channel 7 stopped breaking for commercials, and I was quickly drawn into the horror of the drama. A young boy stares at the blast at the moment of impact and is blinded. Homes become scorched rubble. Hundreds of bystanders become vaporized silhouettes. I watched as the blistered survivors slowly died of terminal radiation si
ckness.

  I was unable to get out of the bathtub until the movie ended, long after the water went cold, and I sat shivering in my nakedness. I climbed into my loft bed with pruny fingers, feeling withered and deeply shaken. “What is this world?” I asked myself. I lay in bed until I heard my father come home.

  I had a hard time falling asleep that night. Lying in bed, I listened to the skinheads, new to our neighborhood, who gathered at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. They hurled obscenities in shades of anger and grief, and empty tin cans that echoed in the streets.

  As I walked to the grocery store that week with Dad, and later alone, I watched them. Wearing lace-up Doc Martens, they roamed in gangs. I was fascinated by their corner dramas and curious uniforms, especially the skinhead girls who’d shaved their heads but left locks of hair softly curling around their ears and foreheads. The skinheads never bothered me, nor did they ask me for change. Mostly I was ignored, but once or twice a skinhead girl smiled in my direction and said, “Hey.” I shyly looked away each time but wondered if she or her friends ever saw me as one of them.

  As 1983 moved into 1984, I felt increasingly isolated from the world around me. The CBS Evening News, which Dad and I watched most nights over dinner, was filled with diplomatic maneuvering that barely concealed the incomprehensible and too-plain fact that any day the leaders of the world’s two superpowers could kill hundreds of thousands of people with the flick of a switch. President Reagan had deployed troops in Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, and Beirut, where in October, the same night as the Lebanese ambassador’s cocktail party, 229 Marines were killed by a roadside bomb. Down our street, posters in the window of the local pharmacy warned of a “gay cancer.” In addition to the Cold War there was The Big Chill. Baby boomers seemed caught in a navel-gazing spiral of shame, trying to reconcile their sixties ideals with their eighties pocketbooks.