Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  Dad also redoubled his efforts to stay sober and healthy. He started swimming three days a week at a public pool in inner Richmond. He went to NA meetings four nights a week and he started sitting zazen at a gay-friendly Zen Center on Hartford Street in the Castro. He had learned about the Zendo when profiling its founder, Issan Dorsey, for the San Francisco Sentinel.

  Over the next few months, Dad started meditating in the Zendo basement several times a week and even picked up a meditation pillow at a stoop sale so he could meditate at home. He initially found it difficult to empty and focus his mind, but with the help of a two-week all-juice diet and the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, he found his way. I also noticed how the practice changed him. When he first quit drugs, my father had been irascible and impossible to be around. Zazen seemed to calm and focus him.

  But even with his Buddhism and swimming, his regular meetings, and my increasing independence, Dad questioned whether he had the stamina to be a single father. On top of his persistent loneliness (“I don’t like cruising,” he confided in his journal; “I’m afraid to make eye contact & get scared when I do”) and his fragile state as a recovering drug addict, there was me at my most obnoxious and now, inconveniently, smoking pot every weekend with my friends. On top of this, I failed to support Dad in his sobriety. I refused to attend any other meetings with him and derisively rolled my eyes whenever he discussed them.

  In fact, while twelve-step meetings helped Dad clarify what was behind his using—“Tonight’s meeting focused on fear,” he wrote in his journal; “I probably started drinking & doing drugs because I was shy – afraid of being lonely and unloved, too inhibited (unable to be gay & feel okay about it). I’ve clung to Charlie because I’m afraid w/out him I’d have no love – that I’d never find another”—I hated thinking about my dad “in recovery.” The idea of him sitting in a roomful of strangers and introducing himself, “I’m Steve Abbott and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict,” made me sick. Living in our one-bedroom apartment, just the two of us, I felt suffocated by these feelings. His struggles became my struggles, his romantic disappointments my romantic disappointments. I hated it. And Dad wasn’t happy either.

  For much of the past 6 months I’ve wished I didn’t have Alysia. I have no privacy at home, feel she interferes (perhaps prevents) me from having a relationship. I greatly resent this. I’ve raised her by myself for 12 years & I’m exhausted. Don’t want the responsibility or the hassle. Then I feel guilty. I love her and enjoy being with her lots of times. Perhaps this is the only as well as the best relationship in my life.”

  Whenever I felt particularly down about my life, I turned on the television. Dad was never into TV. He had one or two shows he liked—The CBS News with Dan Rather, Saturday Night Live, and sometimes Dynasty, for its campiness—but otherwise he preferred to read, visit with friends at cafés, or go for walks to the beach. TV was important to me because, especially in the late seventies and early eighties, it was rife with situation comedies revolving around reconfigured families. Some of my favorites:

  Laverne and Shirley: Two single women who are best friends live together in a run-down basement apartment in 1950s Milwaukee. Antics ensue.

  Silver Spoons: A father and son are filthy rich but, without a mother, must take care of each other. Antics ensue.

  Family Ties: A pair of former sixties liberals raise their three kids, including a hard-core Reagan conservative. Antics ensue.

  Mork and Mindy: A man from outer space moves in with a woman in Boulder, Colorado. The alien is played by Robin Williams. Antics ensue.

  While the backstories of these TV shows differed (with some characters from working-class urban families, others from professional suburban families), the spirit of each, summed up in the catchy theme song that opened the program, hewed to the same hopeful note:

  “We’re going to make our dreams come true, for me and you.”

  “Together, we’re going to find our way.”

  “And there ain’t no nothing we can’t love each other through.”

  As saccharine as these songs could be, I found reliable solace in them. I believed in their premise, that we could heal our collective pain and broken homes with humor and love as long as we stayed together. And so, for a while, I turned to these shows obsessively. I watched them in prime time. I watched them in reruns during afternoons when I wasn’t working or when my friends were busy. And I watched them after the ten o’clock news, before bed. I knew the characters intimately and longed to enter their worlds, where “everybody knows your name” and no problem is so big that it can’t be resolved within a twenty-four-minute format.

  I always thought Dad and I could get beyond the comedic pain of our situation: “Forty-something gay writer in recovery tries to raise a teenage daughter by himself in a tiny one-bedroom. Antics ensue.” But when, in the early summer of 1985, Dad was struggling to build a life without Charlie—whom he continued to see biking around the Castro—and without drink or drugs, and while I was continuing to be a narcissistic jerk—borrowing his clothes and art supplies without asking, failing to deliver his phone messages, and leaving the house a mess—a rehab counselor he was seeing suggested Dad put me in foster care.

  I realize that when Charlie left my life my emotional sexual support system collapsed. And w/o drugs the stress is harder to take still. I keep looking for someone outside to “fix” me. Some of it is simply how I look at my life. I have health, a place to live that’s okay, enough money, good friends. To what extent am I being a baby & just refusing my responsibility?

  On the other hand, I simply cannot meet Alysia’s needs or be good for her if I’m a mess myself. Visitors point out that we’re not good for each other. Our needs mix like fire and oil. Or maybe I can do okay, but the addition of her problems, personality, or simply “teenage changes,” becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

  My options:

  a) foster home

  b) grandparents

  c) here, w/ improved relations & therapy.

  Dad opted for a variation of c). The missing piece, as he now saw it, was zazen meditation—for me. If I would agree to sit daily zazen with him at the Hartford Street Zen Center, he felt I would find a semblance of calm and peace. If I refused, he would send me to live with my grandparents in Kewanee for good. Naturally, I thought he was nuts. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” I told him.

  In July of 1985, I flew to Kewanee for my annual visit. Dad and I talked on the phone every week. He continued to feel strongly that only meditation would set me on the path to peace at home, and I continued to think he was off his rocker. Then he talked over our conflict with our friend Sam D’Allesandro, when he was over one afternoon. Sam said he thought I was doing fine and that Dad couldn’t make me do zazen. After he left, Dad wrote this letter. It’s the only typed letter he ever sent me.

  30 July 85

  Dear Alysia,

  I was writing you a rather stern, serious letter last Saturday when Sam came over. After talking to him I decided I was too extreme to expect or insist that you do zazen with me every day.

  What it is, I think, is that I feel really exasperated & unhappy about certain aspects of our relationship. When I love someone I tend to give my power away & be dominated. And that’s very unhealthy, especially when it inverts the parent/child relationship.

  Authority means authorship. The parent is the author of the child. The child comes from the parent’s seed at birth & is shaped, authored by the parent who feeds it, clothes it, teaches it to crawl, to walk, to talk, etc. Authority does not mean dictatorship. Take a story, or a poem – I write it, have to decide what changes to make etc. But the story or poem also has somewhat an energy or life of its own too. For instance language, the stuff a poem or story is made out of, comes to the author already charged. Language by itself wouldn’t make a poem or a story, however. Language by itself doesn’t even make a dictionary unless some author puts it into that shape. So a good story or poem can o
nly result when there is a proper balance or relationship between the independent, charged spirit or energy of the language and an author who shapes this energy while respecting its independence.

  I raised you from birth showing a lot of encouragement of your independence. But now I sometimes wonder if I have not erred too far in that direction because independence with no respect for any discipline or rules is anarchy and chaos, a big mess. You have will power, yes, but you mainly seem to want to put it at the service of momentary, self-indulgent impulses: I want, I want, I want & I want NOW!

  I think one of my own character defects is that I want to escape from reality, to escape from doing anything unpleasant. So maybe you’ve picked up these habits from me. But even during the worst days of my alcohol and drug addiction I achieved something! Since 1978 I’ve published 3 books of poetry, written two novellas, and published about 100 interviews, essays and reviews, published and edited 4 highly respected issues of Soup magazine, for 8 years edited the monthly Poetry Flash and was a contributing editor and columnist for other magazines. And I’ve been invited to read & participate in conferences & poetry festivals in other countries. All this didn’t happen by accident. I had to want it, plan for it, work constantly for it regardless of whether I was happy or unhappy & often in opposition to a particular mood or impulse.

  I guess the reason I wanted you to do zazen with me is that it brings harmony, clarity, serenity & discipline to a person. And I think you are very much in need of these virtues.

  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. And I’m not at all sure it’s good for you to be around me when I’m so angry & unhappy & depressed. All the ways I used to cope with stress are gone: booze, drugs, cigarettes & most importantly, my relationship with Charlie. I feel as if I didn’t have any skin, that my raw nerves are constantly exposed.

  So if you don’t like any of my ideas on how things could be made better between us, what ideas do you have? I want to emphasize that I don’t think you are a “bad” person or that the problems that exist are your fault, or that the one solution is for you to live with your grandparents or elsewhere. I would consider that only as a last resort & have mentioned it far too often, I think, because I get to feeling so exasperated so quickly (perfectionism, lack of patience – other traits of alcohol/drug addict personalities). Getting counseling, trying to work out agreements that we could stick to without fail (like your doing the chores around the house without my having to nag or blow up at you to get it done) would be far, far preferable.

  Otherwise everything is fine. Glad to hear you are swimming and getting tan. I do love you sweetie pie—even through my anger, frustrations & various depressions (many of which go back a long way and have nothing to do with you). I realize how I’ve been these last several months or longer makes it very hard on you too.

  Hope to hear from you soon.

  Dad

  I saved this letter, but not until years later, after my father died and I was sifting through our apartment’s copious stacks of papers, did I reread it, and only then was I able to absorb its contents. The truth is: I did want to be my dad’s poem. I wanted to be his drawing, his novella, his most refined work of art. I wanted him to shape me with his love and intelligence. I wanted him to edit out my mistakes and many indulgences, with a sharp red pencil or a clean eraser.

  Unfortunately, he was often fast and loose in authoring me, many times just improvising on the page. He didn’t have the time. He was tired. He was lonely. He was too wrapped up in his own dramas, his own failed romances and career struggles, to manage this “already charged” teenage girl. And too often he made the mistake of sharing these struggles with me, when I was too young to understand them or to bear their weight on my shoulders. Yet we both knew I was a work in progress, so we never really worried. We had each other. And we had the will, and the desire, to keep returning to the page, to keep working on that draft.

  But what happens to an unfinished poem if the author dies?

  14.

  IN THE FALL of 1985, my sophomore year of high school, I transferred out of French American Bilingual School into George Washington, a public school in the Richmond district. During my last year at French American I’d been more interested in friends than studies. Though I excelled in music, art, and drama, my report cards were otherwise mediocre. Disappointed with my grades, my grandparents announced they’d no longer foot the bill for my education. Dad couldn’t afford to keep me at French American, and his journals reveal that he started substitute teaching there in order to pay off unresolved bills. That same year, my friend Andrea transferred to Urban, a local private school, Niki and Anne-Marie both moved away, and our band of girls dissolved.

  Relocating from a private high school of fifty to a public high school of three thousand was a big adjustment. During my first year I was slow to make friends and preferred to spend lunch breaks doing homework in hidden corners of the school hallways and stairwells to facing the social dynamics of the football bleachers or “the Wall” behind the school, where students broke into cliques. Instead, after school, between the hours of 3:30 and dinner, I roamed the Upper Haight, bouncing between bookstores, boutiques, record stores, and most of all the coffeehouses—Chattanooga, Double Rainbow, and For Heaven’s Cake (formerly Kiss My Sweet)—and the friends I found there.

  There was sixteen-year-old Rudy di Prima, son of famed Beat poet Diane di Prima, Carlos with his red-rimmed eyes (always in trouble), and Father Al Huerta (always trying to keep Carlos out of trouble). There was long-haired Lara, who went to Urban but who lived with her hippie parents only a block from me. There was twenty-one-year-old Eddie Dunn, whose father ran the local recycling center, and his best friend, an Andrew McCarthy lookalike who’d take speed to meet his deadlines programming for Apple computers. And there was towheaded Christopher, a teenager who lived in a van at the end of the park, panhandled on the street (“Spare a smile? Spare a smile?”), and sometimes showered at Lara’s. Some of my friends were students from the local private schools: Lara and Andrea (Urban), Camille (French American), and Red Head Jed (University). Others were high school dropouts who worked in the local cafés (Jeff). Many dealt drugs, like Steve (pot), Aragorn (mushrooms), and Andrea’s boyfriend, Colin (acid). Others were addicted to drugs, like Creature (speed). But everyone was up for the ride, open for conversation, or just hanging out over coffee or a joint. There was among us, it seemed, a shared expectation of curiosity and tolerance.

  We saw old movies at the Red Vic, holding hands across threadbare sofas that stood in for theater seats, wooden bowls of buttered popcorn (yeast optional) balanced on our laps. Sometimes we dated. Lara dated Eddie Dunn for some years. I dated the Andrew McCarthy look-alike for ten days. Sometimes we smoked pot and then frolicked in the playgrounds of Golden Gate Park or groped each other after hours in the Tactile Room of the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s science museum, where friends of friends worked as “explainers” and got us in for free.

  With the freedom I had, I could have been shooting heroin or turning tricks in the Tenderloin. But I was never that kid and my father knew it. After witnessing all the NA craziness with him, I wanted always to maintain at least a veil of control. Sure, I tried speed—the night of Red Head Jed’s high school prom, I stayed up all night, chatting the ear off of anyone within reach. And I took mushrooms a couple of times, once at Double Rainbow with Andrew, Eddie, and Lara, all of us stumbling back to Lara’s bedroom afterward to marvel at her soft skin and “baby hands.” But I was, for the most part, a good kid. I never did acid. I never touched a needle.

  Many of my teachers advised me to take my work more seriously. “Alysia would do better if she just applied herself” was a frequent refrain in parent-teacher conferences at French American. But by the time I graduated from George Washington in 1988, I had several AP classes under my belt and a 3.5 GPA. Besid
es, if I flaked on my term papers, which I did too often, I was getting an education in the cafés of Haight Street. Dad was frequenting many of these same cafés, with friends (such as Father Al Huerta, who helped Dad get a job teaching expository English at the University of San Francisco) informally keeping an eye on me.

  Ultimately, Dad wanted to give me the same freedom he himself enjoyed, the freedom to live a public life, that of a flâneur, where we could trade the boring concerns of home for the intellectual gymnastics of coffeehouse banter, the unpredictability of the street. This was our chosen life.

  Though I sometimes met up with Dad at For Heaven’s Cake, or Café Picaro or Café Macondo in the Mission, his main stage was, and would always be, Café Flore. The Flore, as it was also known, was a sunny, foliage-infested patio café with a corrugated tin roof located at the corner of 16th and Market. Since opening in 1973, it had become the social and intellectual heart of the Castro district. At the Flore, men and women, young and old, black and white, gay and straight (but often young gay men), would go to meet friends and make friends with interesting-looking strangers. Deep inside the café, behind the bar, an illustrated circus poster of Kar-Mi, a fortune-teller in turban and moustache, surveyed the colorful scene, acting as a calming presence.

  Dad would spend full days at the Flore, filling spiral-bound notebooks on the café’s copper tabletops. When he started working as a weekly columnist for the Sentinel in 1986, and a sometime essayist for the B.A.R., SF Weekly, and Bay Guardian, he found many of his ideas there, amidst the conversations he took part in, or overheard, at neighboring tables. The finest of these articles helped get him nominated for the Cable Car Award for Best Gay Columnist and were later assembled in his essay collection, View Askew (1989). He was always chatting up younger men at the Flore, trying to find out what creative work they were doing and then recommending books to read and people to meet. He sometimes hoped these friendships would develop into romances. They rarely did. Nevertheless he loved playing an avuncular role in the community. Some believe this was among his greatest contributions.