Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  My father tried to date other people, but this opened him up to a different set of risks. “Maybe I’ve not overcome my emotional dependency at all but merely spread it around more,” Dad wrote in his journal. “A lot of sex would be okay except for the dangers of AIDS.”

  He felt too attached to Charlie to quit their relationship, yet it continued to hurt him. Sometimes Charlie failed to show up for dates or showed up late, his pupils dilated, clearly high. Though Dad enjoyed smoking pot and sometimes dropping acid with Charlie, he tried to curb his coke habit, which he felt was taking a toll on Charlie’s health. “Is there any way I can stop you from doing coke besides getting you busted by the cops?” he pleaded. But Charlie argued that cocaine was “no more harmful than eating sugar,” adding that he could do more, without a toxic reaction, because he was a vegetarian.

  In love with Charlie but increasingly jealous and helpless to control Charlie’s comings and goings, Dad became obsessed, filling pages of his journals with unsent letters and fantasies about how he could get back at him. Dad considered puncturing Charlie’s bike tires, or putting superglue in his bike lock. Deciding these were too risky because he might get caught in the act, he settled on another plan. With a felt-tip pen and a stack of white stickers my father wrote out, “Hi. I’m cute, blonde and will have sex for a half-gram of coke. Call Charlie at this number.” Dad then posted the stickers in the bathroom stalls of cafés and bars all over town.

  Most of the stickers were torn down the first week, with only a couple remaining at Café Flore. At first Charlie didn’t know who was behind the stunt and complained to Dad about the “character assassination.” But then one morning, after sex, Dad confessed. “Charlie’s eyes widened,” he wrote in his journal. “He pushed me away, reached for his clothes & started dressing. He was hurt, angry, but more perplexed by it all. I don’t know why I told him.”

  Needless to say, Charlie wanted nothing more to do with my father after that. Frustrated and despairing, Dad started fantasizing about getting a gun and killing Charlie. When he confided these fantasies to a friend over the phone, the friend recommended Dad admit himself to Narcotics Anonymous, which he did that very night.

  I didn’t know then the extent of what went on with Charlie. Even now, almost thirty years after the fact, it’s painful for me to see my dad so out of control, acting quite this crazy. And there’s part of me that wants to hide these details, to keep them squirreled away inside the pages of the private journals where they belong. To protect Dad from Dad. But would I feel this way if he weren’t my father? If he weren’t my father, I’d just focus on the story. This is what happened, and maybe this behavior’s not so unusual for drug addicted gay men in 1980s San Francisco. But he’s not just anyone. He’s my dad. And even if he’s not walking around out there, I’m still afraid of how his actions and choices will reflect on him. Does this behavior confirm the worst stereotypes about gay men: promiscuous, morally compromised? And then, I’m afraid of how his behavior might reflect on me. The sins of the father.

  I didn’t know about the dramas with Charlie while they were going on. I never even noticed Dad’s drug use (which included coke, speed, and LSD) until it ended. He was always in and out of the house at odd hours. He was always a little preoccupied, though usually with work. Only now, newly sober, did he start to get into my business and play the asshole in earnest. Just as he used to lecture me about the evils of excessive television, he now made me read articles on how “addiction runs in the family.” If I showed any impatience for some deferred treat—new clothes, a movie, TV—it was evidence of my need for “immediate gratification,” more proof of my “addictive personality.” Suddenly he noticed I wasn’t doing my household chores, though the house wasn’t any messier than it had been before he quit.

  “If you’re going to act like this,” I told him, “I wish you’d get back on drugs.”

  My father even coerced me into joining him at one of the twelve-step meetings he attended four nights a week at “Our Lady of Safeway,” as he called the church on Market Street across from the supermarket.

  I sat next to him in the circle of facing chairs, while everyone sipped on Styrofoam cups of coffee. But I could barely suppress my laughter as the addicts went around the room, introducing themselves in turn: “Hi, my name is Dan and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict,” followed by a deafening chorus: “HI DAN!!!”

  It all seemed so pathetic and ridiculous. What losers, I thought. Then assorted members of the group would stand up from their rickety metal folding chairs and share a sob story about their addiction, about when they knew they’d “hit bottom.” And each of these stories would be punctuated by someone else in the group calling out one of NA’s many slogans:

  “Let go. And let God!”

  “It works if you work it!”

  “Take it one day at a time!”

  “Turn it over!”

  Each platitude seemed more insipid and cringeworthy than the one that came before. But instead of anyone involuntarily rolling their eyes, as I did, the room all enthusiastically nodded or mm-hmm’ed in agreement. What kind of cult is this? I thought. The meeting ended with everyone in the group clasping hands and collectively putting their faith in a higher power.

  It was almost too much for a teenager to bear.

  WHILE DAD was concerning himself with getting sober, I was concerning myself with getting money. At fourteen and fifteen years old, everything I wanted cost money. I knew that cash was cold, hard, and in high demand. Newsweek declared 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie.” Even the shops on Haight Street sold cheeky t-shirts that asked: “Nuclear war? What about my career?”

  Dad talked about money all the time too. From the other room I could hear him yelling. He yelled when he knocked out another filling from his mouth. “That’s seven hundred bucks!” He yelled about the phone bill. “Fifty-five dollars!” He yelled when I lost the five dollars he gave me for my Muni Fast Pass. “I was depressed that day,” I said, pleading mercy. He yelled when I knocked the TV off the milk crate in a rush to get the phone and he cursed as we watched the broken knob roll across the floor and behind his bookshelf. Dad couldn’t afford to fix or replace the TV, so we started changing the channel with a pair of pliers, which always seemed to go missing.

  At French American I had money for lunch, but not snacks. A skinny fourteen-year-old with a fast metabolism, I was constantly hungry. I’d often ask for bites of my friends’ snacks. I didn’t think it such a big deal until a kid named Xavier noticed and started calling me “A-leech-a.” Since he was among the popular kids, classmates took notice and I stopped.

  I didn’t want to ask my father for money because I didn’t want to quarrel. So I started borrowing money from my friends and their mothers, which I then had to pay back. In the mornings, while Dad was asleep, I’d sneak into his bedroom. On the floor I’d find his jeans, scrunched like an accordion, then quietly pull out the smooth leather billfold from the back pocket. I’d open the wallet and slide out a ten, sometimes a twenty. He won’t notice, I thought. And he never did.

  I hated the sneaking and lying, but I wanted money to buy clothes and magazines and records and snacks. I found a job babysitting every weekend for a single mother who worked at Daljeet’s, the punk shop next to the IBeam. She and a pair of her jewelry-designing sisters had come out from Philadelphia and lived in a three-bedroom apartment off Polk Street. While I loved her three-year-old son, how he called me his “girlfriend,” and I loved watching her MTV, where I would slog through countless videos by Rod Stewart (please, not “Infatuation” again!) hoping for the one Duran Duran or Billy Idol, my $15-a-night salary didn’t take me far.

  So that December, I applied for my first job as a cashier at a local health food store. Sun Country Foods sold fresh-pressed wheatgrass juice for the neighborhood hippies and overpriced gourmet sandwiches for the neighborhood yuppies. The owners of Sun Country required that all their applicants—from manager to cashier—take a lie detector
test. I heard the owners had been into EST, a popular 1970s self-assertion cult, as though this might explain their paranoia. But I didn’t question the requirement. I just wanted a job, so I made an appointment and headed over that week after school.

  Inside, I met the administrator and handed him my application, neatly printed in ballpoint pen. He led me upstairs, where there were two chairs, a table, and large windows that overlooked the store below.

  I sat on the far chair with my back to the windows while this stranger wrapped thick white tape around my index and middle finger and then stretched a band around my waist.

  After he set everything up, he sat across from me with a notebook on his lap and asked if I was ready.

  “I guess so.”

  Following a series of questions confirming my work experience, my name, and my address, he cleared his throat and asked, “Ever been arrested?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever stolen anything from a store?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever stolen anything from an employer?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever smoked marijuana?”

  “Yes.”

  The administrator jotted something down in his notebook but gave me a gentle look as he did so. Maybe he could detect my nervousness, or maybe he felt strange giving a lie detector test to a teenage girl.

  “That’s okay. Lots of people have. Ever done LSD?”

  “No.”

  “Meta-amphetamine?”

  “What?”

  “Speed.”

  “No.”

  “Cocaine?”

  I paused. I remembered Dad and those half straws around the house, the curious way they burned and melted into amorphous, unpredictable shapes. And I felt myself getting nervous. The wand started to move back and forth. I watched the administrator’s pencil moving as he noted something in his pad. I thought I’d better say something. He repeated:

  “Have you ever taken cocaine? Snorting or shooting.”

  “My father does. Did. He doesn’t anymore. He’s in NA.”

  The administrator looked at me.

  “Narcotics Anonymous.”

  My breathing was still uneven. The wands were moving again. I heard them scratching on the rolling paper and I could feel my face getting hot, my eyes starting to fill. I’d not talked to anyone about Dad’s drug use. I didn’t know what I felt or even how I was supposed to feel. I was still trying to figure out where Dad’s crimes ended and where my own began.

  “That’s okay,” the administrator said reassuringly. “We’re almost done.”

  When it was all over, he removed the tape from my finger, the band from my waist, and then he complimented me.

  “Most applicants have done a lot more drugs than you.”

  And I smiled, feeling pretty good about this.

  The next afternoon when I came home from school, Dad was on the phone but handed me a piece of paper. “Sun Country store manager called. Twenty hours a week. $5.25 an hour. Start Saturday?”

  TWO DAYS before Christmas 1984, Dad and I were eating dinner at home when he asked me to attend John Norton’s Christmas night party with him. I refused. The prospect of joining John Norton or any of Dad’s other boring old writer friends for a whole evening filled me with nauseating dread.

  “I already have Christmas plans,” I told him. “With Yayne.”

  Even though Yayne and I now attended different schools, she still treated me like family. Every Christmas she invited me to spend the day and night, an invitation I always accepted. Yayne had just the sort of rambunctious family I longed for during the holidays. She only had one brother, but her mother was the oldest of six siblings, all living in San Francisco. Each holiday the aunts and uncles and assorted baby cousins with their pom-pom pigtails and animated braids would gather at Yayne’s grandmother’s place, the grown-ups and kids assembling in different rooms. Since Yayne was the oldest cousin she was the de facto sitter, and with me as her helper we ruled the roost, determining what TV to watch, who was in trouble for talking back, and who had to sit where to eat. I loved the food especially—sticky yams, buttered corn bread, rich corn casseroles—and the sense that I was welcome, my presence never questioned. I could just watch TV and disappear.

  But my father was insistent. “I want you to come, if only for some of the party. You might even enjoy yourself.”

  “I have a free soul,” I shot back. “You can’t force me to go and you can’t force me to enjoy myself.”

  We sat in silence at the spool table while I traced the wooden grain of the tabletop with my fingers. Our arguments would often stall like this, the ongoing silence signaling to me that my father had capitulated. He usually didn’t have the energy to face off against my will for very long. I was used to winning arguments. But on this evening I took no satisfaction in my victory.

  Hoping to pick up the mood, I asked him to draw me. If he could draw me, I decided, everything would be okay. We would return to our special place. We would be us again.

  “I can’t draw you tonight, mouse,” he said. “I’m too tired.”

  “Can we go on a walk somewhere then? Somewhere in the neighborhood, or we can take a bus to a café or someplace we’ve never been?”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “Or maybe we can just sit on the roof together? It’s really nice up there.”

  We ended up staying home and talking. Dad told me that he needed me and confessed that because of his “addictive obsessions,” his drug and alcohol abuse, he hadn’t given me that much time or attention. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  We made plans for Christmas Eve. We went to Friends for linguine with clam sauce. After dinner we walked home, opened presents, and drank big mugs of hot chocolate with tall peaks of whipped cream.

  On Christmas morning, I went to brunch at Dede’s house in Bernal Heights, while Dad attended a Narcotics Anonymous marathon, a full day of meetings which he broke up with John Norton’s Christmas party. I attended some of the party with him, something we agreed on, and even had fun, watching MTV with a friend’s eighth-grade daughter. After the party, we went our separate ways again.

  At 3PM Alysia and I left. She to go to Yayne’s and me back to NA Marathon. It was intense – two people spoke about being near suicidal and I got into some deep feelings of my own, which the two suicidal people responded to. I felt emotionally drained after all this.

  At 10:30 on Christmas night, my father came home from the marathon to an empty apartment. He called me at Yayne’s.

  “I want you to come home.”

  “But Yayne invited me to spend the night.”

  “I want you home.”

  “We’ve already set up sleeping bags in the living room!”

  “I said, come home. Why do we have to argue about everything?”

  When I came home twenty minutes later, I avoided Dad’s eyes and refused to speak to him. After letting myself into the apartment, I marched into his room and turned on the television. Dad complained that I was invading his privacy, and I blew up. Here he had forced me to come home and he wouldn’t even let me watch TV!

  “That’s so unfair,” I yelled. “You are such a dictator!”

  My father’s face turned red. He charged at me, and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Up until now I haven’t given you much spiritual guidance, but it’s time I do. Let’s start with some self-discipline,” he said, still trembling. “You. Have to get over. This need. For immediate. Gratification.”

  He then started to detail the drug excess he and my mother were into when I was little, his “drug and booze fuck-ups” since, and what his recovery and NA meetings were about now. I pressed my hands against my ears. I couldn’t stand hearing him talk this way. This is not what I want to be about, I thought to myself. This is not where I want to come from.

  Now crying, I backed out of Dad’s room into the dining room. I was shaking my head as I looked at him, blurred through my tears. I wanted to erase everyth
ing he said from my memory. Leaning against the dining room closet, I sank down to the hardwood floor. Dad looked scared and confused. He tried to hug me but I wouldn’t let him. I closed my eyes and imagined my mother.

  Whenever I felt uncertain about myself as a teenage girl, I’d bring a picture of my mom to mind and meditate on that image. Our life might feel like crap, filled with drug-addict losers, weighed down by loneliness, disappointment, and sometimes squalor, but I knew, at least, that I came from this beautiful, brilliant young woman. The first-chair clarinet. The straight-backed valedictorian. The Smith graduate.

  “I want you to draw me,” I said to Dad.

  “Draw you? Right now?”

  “Yes. I want you to draw me.”

  After another moment of silence, he reached into his bookshelf and pulled out his drawing pad and charcoals. He asked me to pose in his room, but I insisted on maintaining my position against the closet door, even though I turned my back to him. I could hear his charcoal pencil scratching lightly against the paper, but I kept on crying, still imagining my mother.

  When Dad finished sketching, he called me over so that I could see what he’d drawn. But the version of myself I encountered on his sketch pad wasn’t pretty or interesting or even remotely poetic. I was just an ugly amorphous mass, huddled against a door.

  “I hate it.”

  I started crying again and Dad looked puzzled and struggled to find something to say. Then I went into my room and climbed up the stairs to my loft bed and, looking out the window, watched the characters of Haight Street until I fell asleep.

  IN THE NEW YEAR Dad refocused his creative work, which had languished during his ordeal with Charlie. He organized a benefit reading, co-sponsored by City Lights and the Art Institute, for poet and Living Theater founder Julian Beck, who was sick with cancer. He did a daylong interview with Allen Ginsberg to be published in The Advocate and Poetry Flash. Dad had first met Ginsberg at an SDS conference when Ginsberg was traveling cross-country in 1966. Dad, then an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, invited him to read at the university. Ginsberg wrote “Wichita Vortex Sutra” on the way to Dad’s house. For the Poetry Flash interview, our neighbor Robert Pruzan took photos of them walking together through the arboretum in Golden Gate Park, both looking distinguished with their beards and glasses.