Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  I’d sometimes pop over to Jono’s after school. He’d buzz me into his cavernous floor-through, filled with his large canvases, glossy color-block portraits of long-faced, lean-nosed men like himself. The Mutants or Talking Heads would be blasting as he painted. I was content to just watch him, to eavesdrop on his goings-on: receiving phone calls, making plans, and painting. In this way I imagined my own life as a grown-up, filled with friends and music and art.

  Photo by Jono Weiss

  That spring, I returned to the English Haight Street hairdresser who’d first cut my hair short. I asked her to sheer my bangs so that my hair resembled an overgrown crew cut. When she finished, I immediately went up to Jono’s. I can’t recall whether I asked him to take my photo or if he offered. I just remember being fourteen, hair dyed black as pitch, posing in front of Jono’s big-nosed paintings. Pictures show me in a slate-gray pillbox hat and a vest with snap buttons, a black t-shirt, leggings, and red, red lipstick. (As with my photographer neighbor Robert, I relished the possibility of transformation in these poses.)

  When Sam stopped by Jono’s that evening, I asked him if he could buy a bottle of bourbon for my friends and me. We were planning a weekend outing to Golden Gate Park. He laughed, saying he had done the same as a kid, and agreed to meet me on Friday night outside Cala Foods on Haight Street. In the parking lot I waited with my friends, all of us dancing and jumping in place to ward off the damp cold, when Sam’s sinewy figure emerged from the shadows. He smiled, said hello, and I handed him the ten dollars my friends and I had pooled together. He passed me the paper-sheathed bourbon and I felt flush with warmth, proud that this hip, good-looking guy was my friend.

  Sometime later, totally by accident, I discovered Sam was going out with Sean, the smiling Southerner who’d sold me gummy bears at Coffee Tea & Spice only a couple of years earlier. Sam had seen Sean working behind the counter of the shop. Sam wrote his number on a matchbook cover, pushed it into Sean’s hand, and said, “Use it.” But Sean was intimidated. “He was so good-looking and so intense,” Sean later told me. Not until he ran into Sam five years later in a downtown coffee shop did they finally start dating. When Sam became sick with AIDS, Sean nursed him. When Jono became sick several years later, Sean took him out to expensive lobster dinners. But though Sean was diagnosed as HIV-positive, he never got sick himself.

  When I meet Sean again nearly twenty-five years later, his moustache is gone, along with much of the dazzle in his eyes. “I’m one of the few people I know from that period who was diagnosed with HIV and is still around,” he tells me. “Nobody can relate to it. The whole topic is so . . . It’s as if it’s something in the past.”

  HANGING OUT with Sam and Jono, immersing myself in the Haight’s New Wave scene, I built up confidence at school. Where before I preferred to lose myself in the lines of my art-period drawings, or hide behind my camera at the middle school dances, I now paraded the halls of French American wearing an anti-Reagan t-shirt Dad got for his fortieth birthday and a bright blue nylon Fiorucci jacket he’d picked up in Europe.

  I tried out for Bac A Dos, the school’s evening of bilingual one-act plays, which included Tennessee Williams’s This Property Is Condemned, and nabbed the lead. I played Willie, a girl who lives alone in an abandoned home after “quituating” school. She spends her days walking the railroad track in her dead sister’s evening dress, singing to herself, and clutching a grubby baby doll. It was the highlight of my stage career. Ginger, a redheaded senior, told me she cried watching my performance. My English teacher called me “Willie” for weeks after the play ended to see if I’d still answer, and I always did—gladly. The play earned me a public respect that I’d never before known, a sense that I was carving a version of myself that was my own, apart from Dad, and one that was worthwhile. In my yearbook, a senior boy who’d starred in the French-language one-act would write that, like the heroine in Williams’s Glass Menagerie, I should be careful because “beautiful glass unicorns have a tendency to lose their horns.”

  Then, one morning in the corridors of French American, a popular transfer student named Sarah said she liked my Fiorucci jacket, but when I smiled back she added with a smirk, “You might want to wash it, though.” Only then did I look down to notice how the cuffs and seams were creased with dirt from my constant wear. She laughed her rich-girl laugh—deep and chesty—as she proceeded down the hall, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach, wishing I could disappear completely.

  Another afternoon, my dear friend Niki quietly pulled me aside after class and asked if I used deodorant. When I gave her a puzzled look, she added, “When you become a teenager you can’t just take showers.” When I again looked confused, she sighed, rolled her eyes, and gave me the talk my father should have given me. “Your body goes through changes. You have to wear deodorant.” She then pulled from her bag a smooth blue block, labeled, appropriately enough, Secret, and gently put it in my hands. “I bought this for you. You need to use this . . . every day.”

  The following week, I was out with Niki and the girls at Uncle Gaylord’s, a tall-ceilinged ice-cream parlor around the corner from French American where we’d sometimes nurse caffe lattes after school. I noticed a couple getting up from a nearby table, leaving behind half of an ice-cream sundae. Nonchalantly, I wandered over and picked up a spoon and started to finish their ice cream.

  “What are you doing?” Niki cried.

  “Finishing their ice cream,” I said, swallowing a spoonful of hot fudge.

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Why not? It’s just going to be thrown out.”

  “Come over here. Come over here. You can’t eat other people’s leftovers. That’s disgusting.”

  Sheepishly, I put down my spoon. Though I didn’t exactly see what the big deal was, I suspected Niki was right, and I felt overcome with that familiar feeling of confused shame.

  Why was it still so difficult to contain my weirdness, to hide my dirt and mask my scent? These are painful memories to revisit, even now. “I hope you weren’t too embarrassed,” Niki would later tell me. “Someone needed to tell you.”

  Munca, my grandmother in Kewanee, Illinois, wanted to be that someone. But I only saw her in the summers, and though she taught me how to discreetly dispose of “menstrual pads,” I cringed whenever she talked with me about my impending “menses.” Furthermore, she neglected to tell me about deodorant or even tampons (Niki would later reveal this other womanly secret to me).

  And then there was Dede.

  When our television broke I moped around the apartment, complaining of boredom. Dad decided to sign me up with the nonprofit Big Brother Big Sisters of America, which paired motherless and fatherless children with childless adults. On the application form I put down that I liked music and animals. I was soon put in touch with Dede Donovan, a law professor in her late thirties from La Jolla, California, who liked Cat Stevens and Irish wolfhounds and had yet to marry. But Dede and I only saw each other once a month. She’d pick me up in her Dodge Colt, the backseat covered in dog hair, and take me out for dinner. She was always kind, but we were never very close, certainly not close enough to talk about puberty.

  Why couldn’t my father give me that talk? Although he took me out on weekly movie dates—alternating between my Brat Pack picks (Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire) and his grim art house fare (The Killing Fields, 1984)—and though he was always generous with hugs and encouragement, he had little clue how to raise a teenage girl. He had no idea what I was up against in a private school.

  Just as when I was a bullied first-grader, these experiences revealed to me that fundamentally I was on my own, and on my own I was subject to the unpredictable judgment of the social world, where I could be weird without wanting to be, without even being aware that I was being weird. (Fairyland’s untidy corners stuck out from beneath the closet door.) As a result of this realization, I increasingly turned inward. What I found there was anger.

  ON A BRIGHT
afternoon in June 1984, my father was readying himself for that year’s Gay Pride parade. I had always loved the energy of Pride but I hadn’t gone in years. The sun was pouring into the dining room through the window behind me and I could tell from the light-footed way Dad moved in and out of the bathroom that he was in a good mood.

  I could see him looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, tying a red bandanna around his forehead and then finding a red lipstick to paint his mouth. He came over to me, where I sat eating a bowl of cereal, and sweetly asked, “How do I look?”

  I was mortified. I’d just come back from hanging out with my gang of girls, where I so wanted to fit in, so wanted to be cool. Dad did not look cool. He looked like the lead singer of the rock band Loverboy, but with red lipstick. Emboldened and sassy, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

  “You look so queer, Dad.”

  I said it the way I heard classmates say it, meaning lame, stupid, weird, embarrassing. As a teenager, I believed it was my right, my duty even, to be honest about everything. Not only did I point out that the emperor was wearing no clothes, I had to describe what was wrong with the emperor’s naked body.

  Just as the word “queer” left my lips, Dad’s whole face changed. His hopeful smile gone, his eyes hardened with reproach.

  “You can’t say that.”

  He now appeared so hurt and serious that all I could do was look at him. I don’t remember him slapping me. But it felt like he did. My face suddenly flushed, and I stared at the floor.

  “You can’t use that word,” he repeated.

  I didn’t say “sorry.” I didn’t say anything. I simply stared at the floor until Dad walked out of the apartment, leaving me alone with my confused guilt.

  As a small child I had no problem accepting Dad, in all his beautiful queerness. Whether in pants or a dress, he was still my daddy, the one who stirred my oatmeal with milk and honey, the one who pushed me on swings in the park each time I yelled “Again!,” the one whose lap quaked whenever he laughed his enormous up-and-down laugh.

  But as I got older and became attuned to the world around me, I craved, more than anything, acceptance. His queerness became my weakness, my Achilles’ heel. Not only might it open me up to possible ridicule and rejection, it was something I could not contain. Fine, I thought, if Dad was gay, he was gay! But did he have to look so gay? And in public?

  At least I had some degree of control over my own oddity, but here was Dad, out there, doing anything he pleased, saying whatever he wanted, dressing however he wanted, dating whomever he wanted. Including Charlie.

  13.

  ONE AFTERNOON in 1984, I came home from school, set my backpack down on our large wooden spool table, and called for Dad. Hearing no response, I scanned the cluttered surface of the table and found a note:

  Alysia –

  I’ll be home at 8pm. Here’s $5 for dinner.

  Please take your drawing things out of my room.

  Love,

  Your Pa

  With hours to myself, I walked into Dad’s room, located his large orange marble ashtray and a folded cardboard matchbook, and placed these together on the hardwood floor. Then, walking around the apartment, I set about claiming items of trash: hair from a hairbrush, magazine, newspaper, rubber eraser, and a straw that had been cut in two.

  Sitting with my legs tucked under my knees on Dad’s oriental rug, I bent over the large ashtray with my piles of things and matches. Inside the hollow palm of cut marble, I set the lit match to different items to compare how each burned. The hair pulled from the hairbrush burned the fastest. With a sizzle and a pungent burst of smoke, it evaporated as soon as it touched the match flame. A ripped piece of newspaper burned faster than a piece of magazine cover, which I determined must be a result of the heavy stock and shiny color surface. The rubber eraser hardly burned at all but browned at the tip, emitting a fabulously strong scent. But it was the half straws that were the most fun to watch. The sides of the straw melted down and, when cooled, hardened into new plastic shapes. The few times I pulled out the orange marble ashtray I sought out these half straws, which for some reason were scattered about the apartment.

  It wasn’t until months later that I figured out why there were so many half straws around the house, and later still before I learned the role Charlie played in any of it.

  Dad met Charlie at Finella’s, a massage parlor and sauna that used to be next door to the Café Flore in the Castro. Charlie worked the desk. Tall and skinny, with a heart-shaped face and scraggly layers of dirty-blond hair, Charlie was typical of the guys Dad attracted. My father had an appetite for lost-sheep types—semi-employed young men who’d as easily steal our hair dryer as say hello, and often did. The previous summer, while I was at my grandparents, a nineteen-year-old Dad met lived in my room. In exchange for room and board, he did dishes and cleaned house. Only after he’d left did Dad discover he’d pinched the $200 we’d been saving for our trip to Europe.

  My father often lamented his taste in boyfriends, wishing he could have a relationship with a more appropriate peer, but this rarely happened. “I think it’s a character defect,” he wrote in his journal. “I’ve only been attracted to those younger and less powerful than I . . . Is it because inside I feel weak, lost, helpless?”

  I can imagine now why Dad might have liked Charlie. He was playful, open-minded, and quick to laugh. And aside from his $1,000-a-month coke habit, he was into healthy living. He rode his bicycle up and down the hills of San Francisco no matter the weather. He took gardening classes, enjoyed knitting, and was a strict vegetarian.

  But I couldn’t stand Charlie. It wasn’t the drug use—which Dad kept hidden from me until he stopped using. It wasn’t that Charlie was unkind to me. What I couldn’t stand is that he was kind to me. Just as he refused to ever cross a picket line, he tended to sympathize with me, the “oppressed” teenager, in any of my arguments with Dad. One evening when the three of us were watching Dynasty in Dad’s room, which doubled as our living room, Dad wanted me to leave so he could be alone with Charlie. When, after I’d been asked to leave several times, I defiantly refused to budge, and Dad said I was acting like a bitch, it was Charlie who left the apartment in protest.

  I didn’t want Charlie siding with me. I didn’t even like to be in the same room with him if I could avoid it. With his dingy jeans and chenille scarves stinking of patchouli, he looked like the kids who bummed for change on the corner. I quickly and definitively branded him a loser. I certainly didn’t think Charlie worthy of my father’s attention, especially when it was redirected from more worthy concerns, namely me. And I felt free to share my distaste with Dad, hewing to my policy of total honesty, which prompted many fights.

  But as I think it about it now, I suppose I should give Charlie some credit because if it weren’t for him, Dad might never have gotten sober.

  ANOTHER FALL AFTERNOON home from school, another note on the table:

  Alysia –

  Meet me at Charlie’s: 1236 Cole, Apartment 4G.

  We’ll go to dinner from there.

  Love,

  Dad

  It was my first time going to Charlie’s place, an apartment in the neighborhood he shared with two other guys. I rang 4G and was buzzed upstairs. As I climbed the four flights of stairs, I noted the red, navy, and gold paisley carpet, which from its psychedelic pattern and dank, musty smell I concluded dated from the high hippie days. As I approached the fourth floor, I considered how to greet Dad. In my mind I kept repeating, “The carpet leaves much to be desired,” imagining how amused Dad would be by my witty phrasing. Chin high, I repeated the phrase over and over in my head, accenting different words for effect: “The carpet leaves much to be desired. The carpet leaves . . .” each time more convinced of my precociousness. Finally, I arrived at 4G, knocked, was let in by Charlie, then dramatically announced to everyone within earshot: “The carpet leaves much to be desired!”

  Charlie’s face fell.


  “Steve, your daughter’s here.”

  I turned to Dad, who was staring at me, eyes flashing. He quickly apologized to Charlie then led me into the hallway with a firm grip on my arm.

  “Charlie just spent the entire afternoon vacuuming the hallways,” Dad said. “Where do you get off coming in like some princess bitching about the carpet?”

  Blindsided by my father’s anger, I said nothing. Didn’t he celebrate this sort of bitchiness in Dynasty? Surely he must at least appreciate my turn of phrase.

  “I was just trying to be funny.”

  “Well, it wasn’t funny. You always have to act like such a jerk around Charlie,” my father continued, “when you know how important he is to me.”

  But I didn’t know how important Charlie was to my dad. How could I? It would be years before I would see my dad as anything more than the source of devoted love, attention, and money that I felt was my due. I used to think that because my mom had died, Dad was obliged to make up for her absence, to offer me twice as much love, twice as much support as he normally would. This made perfect sense to me. Charlie did not.

  But here was Dad asking me to consider him an independent person, an adult seeking the solace of a romantic relationship. It wasn’t until well after my father died and I studied his journals that I realized what Charlie meant to my dad. That Charlie made him happy. “I like to be w/ Charlie just because I enjoy it. No reason or analysis. Why does one enjoy flowers, for instance?” But who wants to think of their parent’s sexual and romantic needs? At thirteen and fourteen, I still clung to the idea of my dad’s unrelenting love for my mother, whose death broke his heart so irrevocably that he turned gay. I suspected, even then, that this was a shaky story—but as a very convenient story, it wasn’t easily abandoned.

  Sometime after the carpet fiasco, Charlie started spending more time with a neighborhood coke dealer. My father was convinced Charlie was seeing him for access to free coke. In the two years of dating my dad, on and off, Charlie was never monogamous, no matter how much Dad wanted them to be. He recalled their disputes in his journals. “I don’t know if I can take this lovership stuff,” Charlie told him one night. Charlie accused Dad of being “too attached,” adding that he’d never been with anyone who loved so much “like a woman.”