Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  So there we were, alone on the wood slat bench, naked except for our towels, and I was shuffling the deck. The air was so hot and dry I could barely swallow. My skin felt like it was on fire. I remember the sweat dripping down my back and down my forehead, trickling into my eyes and ears. I had to stop shuffling so I could wipe my face with another thin white towel. Then I cut the deck and let Dad deal each of us a hand. We took turns pulling cards off the open deck, hoping to find a consecutive run of three cards from the same suit or a set of three cards of the same rank.

  There was no clock in our sauna. It didn’t matter, because there was no place to be. We were neither alone nor burdened by company. There was no pressure to entertain or to find a clever remark or conversational strand. We just played gin rummy, taking turns pulling cards until:

  “Three sevens. How ’bout you?”

  “Nine, ten, and a queen of hearts. You win.”

  Over time, the heat of the sauna curled our playing cards so that they reminded me of the little Fortune Teller Miracle Fish cut out of red plastic film that kids would sometimes bring to school. The way it moved in your hand was supposed to reveal your “true heart.” A moving head meant “Jealousy.” A moving tail, “Independence.” If the fish turned over, your heart was “False.” If it curled up entirely you were “Passionate.”

  I remember sitting there and remarking on those curiously curling playing cards, coming to life in our palms, attesting to our love. And I remember our nakedness, which was so natural and easy.

  PART V

  Departures

  And one of the things I’m really happy about is my relationship with you. And your letters. I don’t think I ever imagined it would be this wonderful & enjoyable & interesting. I guess when you were growing up I had my hands so full of trying to be with you in the present & keep up w/ your changes that I never had time to imagine what the future might bring. But it’s really neat when “the future” turns out better than one expected.

  —STEVE ABBOTT, letter dated December 10, 1990

  15.

  WHEN I WAS a little girl, my father and I used to play hide-and-seek among the thick conifers of Golden Gate Park. One day when he was hiding and I was seeking, I couldn’t find him. After I called his name, all I could hear was the sound of eucalyptus leaves rustling in the wind. So I sank down onto the nearest park bench, waiting for him to emerge and wrap his arms around me again. But waiting for him, watching all the not-my-dad men walk by, the minutes slowed. I imagined what would happen if I was still sitting on that park bench after the air cooled and the sky darkened to black. Would I join the legions of orphan characters I knew so intimately from books and movies?

  For each storybook orphan that rose above tragedy to become king of the elephants (Babar) or to star in the circus and beat up the town bullies (Pippi Longstocking), there were those orphans that were cruelly mistreated before redemption (Little Orphan Annie, Shirley Temple in The Little Princess, Jane Eyre) and the orphans who died of neglect before finding redemption in the afterlife (“The Little Match Girl”). I was especially scarred by a 1970s TV version of this Hans Christian Andersen tale, which shows the match girl freezing in the wintry streets while busy Christmas shoppers ignore her offers of “Matches! Matches!” By the light of her last match, she’s warmed by a brilliant image of her dead grandmother before ascending to heaven to join her.

  I deeply believed (in a ritualized exercise in self-pity) that my father was the only thing standing between me and the fate of the orphans I loved so much. With morbid fascination I studied these stories, thinking that if I familiarized myself with their different shades of tragedy I’d be better equipped to survive should anything happen to him. Every time my father and I temporarily separated—at the market, the street fair, or Golden Gate Park—images of the forsaken orphans would flood in. Who would take care of me now? Would anyone love me like he did?

  When I was very small playing hide-and-seek with my dad, I could always get him to appear. If I called out, “Where are you Daddy?” he’d answer, “Here I am!” until the sound of his voice led me to him.

  In July of 1988, I moved to New York, living for the first time beyond the sound of his voice.

  NEW YORK felt hot: dirty, hot, and sweaty. I was riding in a taxicab from La Guardia Airport over the Brookyn-Queens Expressway. The taxi had no air-conditioning so I kept the windows rolled down. But the wind whipped my hair around my face so I rolled them back up. When the cab finally pulled up in front of a red door in the East 80s, I smoothed down my hair and emerged into the humid evening.

  I carried my suitcase to the Weiksners’ door, wiped my face, sucked in my breath, and pressed firmly on the bell. Though sticky and tired, I also felt energized, taking in the sights and overripe smells of summer in New York. Then the door opened and I saw a small child with brown bangs and a candy heart necklace.

  “San-draaaa! Alysia’s here!”

  This little girl was my new charge, Sarah Smiley. I gave her my friendliest grin and followed her into the townhouse.

  “Hell-ooo!” This was the contralto of my new employer, Sandra Weiksner, calling from the back of the house. After lugging my suitcase inside the front door, I walked toward her, stepping over a leather floor mat, which had been tastefully painted to look like an oriental rug with a corner pulled back and overlaid with windblown yellow gingko leaves. Trompe l’oeil, Sandra would later explain. “It’s French for ‘fools the eye.’ We had an artist do it.”

  Sandra sat at her kitchen island with a thick stack of papers, a glass of red wine, and a plate of Boursin cheese and crackers.

  Sandra and her husband, George, were friends from Dede’s Stanford days back in the sixties. They’d once been sympathetic to the New Left, but now were members of the corporate elite. George worked as an investment banker and Sandra was a partner at a prestigious law firm on the bottom tip of the island. She’d been looking for a “mother’s helper” to take care of Sarah, her three-year-old niece visiting for the summer while Sandra’s sister studied acupuncture in China. Dede had arranged for me to watch Sarah in exchange for room and board.

  “It’s so nice to meet you. How was your flight? Good? Good. Good. Welcome! Listen, is it okay if Sarah gives you the tour? I’ve got to finish these notes tonight. You’ll meet George later. He’s working late. The boys are playing basketball in the neighborhood. They’re due back for supper. I don’t know how they do it in this heat! Isn’t it disgusting? So . . . is that okay? If Sarah takes you? Your room’s on the top floor.” She waved me toward the nearest staircase.

  “Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Weiksner.”

  “Sandra, you can call me Sandra. No need for for-mal-ities!” she sang.

  As I grabbed my suitcase and followed Sarah up the stairs, I looked back at Sandra. She wore her dark hair short with straight bangs that she kept brushing off her forehead into a middle part. When she spoke, her eyes were bright and her bracelets jangled up and down her arms with each exclamation. As she settled back into her work, she carefully put each bracelet back in place and took a sip of wine, as if to center herself.

  Sarah led me up the stairs to the second floor, an airy, light-filled living room with upholstered wallpaper, Louis XIV chairs, and twelve-foot ceilings. The corners and tabletops were crowded with African sculpture, delicate silver boxes, and painted porcelain fruit the size of babies’ fists. The walls were hung with paintings, including a small Braque (“My mother gave it to me when I was sixteen,” Sandra later told me), a Sonia Delaunay tapestry (“through a client of George’s”), and a Mirò.

  I was studying these when the three-year-old grabbed my hand. “C’mon, lets go upstairs!” She pulled me up the carpeted staircase toward the next floor as if she were the grown-up and I the distracted child. I moved slowly, holding on to the thick wood banister with my free hand, trying to absorb my new surroundings. Within the dimensions of the house I felt small—tiny, even. I’d never seen anyplace like the Weiksners’. My only refe
rence for material comfort was Munca and Grumpa’s two-bedroom ranch house. Their all-white living room, with its tasteful modern art, black piano, and sliding glass doors facing the deck, had been the height of elegance for me, and the site of many pretend balls as a girl.

  After showing me around the third floor, including Sandra and George’s room and the “library,” Sarah led me to the fourth floor and pointed to a series of doors: “Mike’s room. Nick’s room. My room. Bathroom. Your room!”

  “This is such a beautiful house!” I said.

  “Can we go downstairs now? I’m hungry.”

  “Okay, Sarah. Let me just put my bag down.”

  I settled my suitcase into the corner of my new room, which was hung with muted watercolors of clowns and acrobats. I peered out the window facing 81st Street and felt an immediate and powerful urge to rush outside, to walk everywhere and see everything. I forced myself to take a deep breath before heading back downstairs.

  Later than night, after a light dinner in the walled garden with the rest of the family—George Weiksner and the Weiksners’ two robust teenage sons, Mike and Nick—I lay in my little bedroom in a bed next to the window. Jet-lagged, I had a hard time falling asleep. I imagined my father back in San Francisco where, it being three hours earlier, he might be drinking a latte at the Flore, or be perched on the edge of his futon at home talking on the phone, or sitting cross-legged, scribbling in his spiral-ring notebook.

  Did he miss me? Was he thinking about me? I wanted to tell him everything.

  At eleven at night, the city was still thick with activity. As I lay in bed, I tried to isolate and identify each sound I could hear through the window. There was the distant pulse of traffic and car horns on Lexington Avenue, a large truck wheezing and rumbling down 81st Street, a group of kids talking and laughing, a radio playing from a distant apartment window. Thinking about all the life happening outside, in every direction, my whole body buzzed. In my head, I started repeating a single phrase over and over, and each time I said it I felt a little more excited: “I’m in Manhattan. I’m in Manhattan. I’m in Manhattan. I’m in Manhattan.”

  BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO, my father was sitting on his futon, hard at work editing The Zombie Pit, a collection of stories by Sam D’Allesandro. Since he was again trying to quit smoking, he was also sucking on a Hershey’s Kiss, which he’d unwrapped from its foil after pulling it from a bag he kept in the drawer of his end table. Dad was still not drinking or doing drugs, but quitting smoking seemed harder. His nervous energy was constant, expressing itself through the shaking of his right foot as it dangled over his left leg, and the way he’d fidget with the tinfoil wrapper in his lap. Early the next morning, he’d calm this energy by sitting zazen meditation.

  After six years of going to the Hartford Street Zen Center, Dad had evolved into a devout Buddhist. The previous summer we had spent ten days in Kyoto, Japan, an experience that inspired his book Skinny Trip to a Far Place, and he sat zazen every morning. He saw his practice as the only reliable way of letting go of unproductive thought patterns and habits. Facing the wall, he’d crouch down, folding his legs around a stiff round pillow on the tatami floor, silently sitting with several other members of the community as incense swirled in the air and the gong rang.

  He now had another dimension to his practice: every Friday afternoon Dad walked upstairs from the basement meditation room and into a small room with a rubber tree plant, a hospital bed, and two chairs. There he’d sit for several hours with J. D. Kobezak, a twenty-three-year-old with AIDS.

  In 1988, AIDS continued to ravage the gay community. At the end of 1985, there were 15,527 reported cases of AIDS in the US; three years later, that number had swelled to 82,764. But while newspapers ran articles about quarreling AIDS researchers and pundits and bureaucrats argued over policy (with some advocating tattooing AIDS patients), little attention was paid to people actually living with the disease, especially those suffering through its late stages. Men who were still closeted in their hometowns were forced out of the closet once they became sick and bedridden. Often forsaken by their families, these men had to rely on friends and lovers to care for them in their final months. Others fell through the social net and, unable to care for themselves, ended up homeless and on the street.

  One day, Issan Dorsey, the abbot of Hartford Street, found a homeless kid with AIDS sleeping under a table in a local laundromat. Issan understood what it meant to live on the street. Decades before, he had performed as Tommy Dee, The Boy Who Looks Like the Girl Next Door!—a cross-dressing opening act for comedian Lenny Bruce. After some years working the North Beach nightclub circuit, he started shooting drugs and eventually would wake up in the gutter. It was through a chance encounter with Allen Ginsberg and LSD that he found his way to Buddhism and a devoted practice that led to his opening and then running Hartford Street, the city’s first gay Zendo.

  Issan took the homeless kid back to Hartford Street and set up a bed for him upstairs. Within a year, thanks to the generosity of one of the Zendo members, Issan bought the Victorian house next door so he could convert the space into an eight-bed AIDS hospice, the first of its kind in the country. The hospice was named Maitri House (maitri means “compassionate friendship” in Sanskrit).

  Maitri House was one of a dozen AIDS organizations that formed in San Francisco in response to the epidemic. Much as in the late 1970s, when Anita Bryant and John Briggs had posed a common threat with their anti-gay political campaigns, the gay community was energized by the AIDS crisis. Lesbians, some of whom still felt more kinship with the women’s movement than with the gay movement, organized blood drives and marched alongside gay men in angry ACT-UP demonstrations demanding cheaper and faster access to AIDS drugs. Filling the void left by a brutally indifferent federal government, a slew of organizations formed to provide counseling, health care, home visits, and education for anyone affected by AIDS, including the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

  This powerful response was due, in part, to the tightly woven sexual communities that had been forming for decades. In Stagestruck, the writer and historian Sarah Schulman argues that the bathhouses, bars, and other meeting places that were blamed for the AIDS epidemic were also the very structures that allowed for efficient organizing and dissemination of knowledge once the epidemic began.

  To support the transition of the Hartford Street space from a Zendo into a twenty-four-hour AIDS hospice, Issan asked members of the community to volunteer their time and talents. My father, who’d overseen benefits for Cloud House and Poetry Flash, helped organize a fund-raiser for Maitri, and every Friday afternoon he sat with J. D., the kid from the laundromat. Sometimes Dad pushed J. D. in his wheelchair around the neighborhood or out to the Gay Pride parade or the Folsom Street Fair. In a letter to a friend, he described these Fridays as the “happiest time of my week.” His experience, as detailed in the epilogue to View Askew, was common to many gay men who suddenly found themselves caring for sick friends and lovers:

  AIDS is neither a curse nor a blessing: it just is. I see its inexorable progression in a 24-year-old friend whom I’ve been sitting with every Friday for the last nine months. I got to know J. D. in a healing workshop. He came up to me one night and gave me a hug because, he said, he just felt I needed one.

  J. D. is such a beautiful person I found it hard to believe at first that he was sick. But last fall he became bedridden. I wasn’t sure if I could cope with helping care for him – I’m not trained as a nurse – but it was just something that needed doing so I did it. I felt awkward at first but he encouraged me and gave me confidence.

  Words can’t tell what I’ve learned from J. D. – about myself, about life. Sitting with him every Friday and watching his courage and dignity in the face of this disease has been one of the most intimate, inspiring experiences of my life. Often we’ve sat for hours together and said nothing, yet said more than most people ever do. His hands flutter like butterflies. He some
times suffers delusions. But don’t we all?

  IN NEW YORK CITY, I was the model of an Upper East Side mother’s helper. Each day at noon I picked up Sarah from a neighborhood day camp, fed her lunch, and entertained her until dinner and then bed at seven. Some afternoons we took the subway to the Bronx Zoo or walked to the playground in Central Park or wandered the cool marble halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I kept Sarah happy with street vendor pretzels and shaved ice that turned our mouths bright blue. In my free mornings, I walked the avenues studying the windows of the high-fashion shops and watching doormen in their anachronistic brass-buttoned uniforms hailing cabs or helping neighborhood ladies with their packages.

  Back at the Weiksners’, with the boys at soccer camp, Sandra and George at work, and Marcia, the housekeeper, doing laundry and making beds, I roamed the open rooms examining all the art, playing with Foxy, the family’s Abyssinian cat, and writing letters home.

  When summer came to a close I moved into my freshman dorm, a new construction downtown with the uninspired name Third Avenue North. Our first night, my new roommates and I looked out our kitchen window and watched the prostitutes who did business on 12th Street.

  Though my nanny job had ended, I remained close with the Weiksners. Three nights a week I’d catch the express train to their house for a hot meal and, through Sandra, found work proofreading at her law firm downtown.

  I was ten to twenty years younger than all of my coworkers, who nicknamed me “Seventeen-something,” a riff on the then popular TV show thirtysomething, but it was an ideal college job. I worked weekends and as often as not was able to while away the hours clipping grocery coupons from the Sunday Times and studying my art history and psychology textbooks for school.

  While I enjoyed most of the classes I was taking—how thrilling to take art history and then study Giotto paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!—I felt disconnected at NYU. Classes were held in large auditoriums located in one of a cluster of nondescript buildings surrounding Washington Square Park. Once class let out, students were simply absorbed into the anonymous city crowds. There was no actual campus that focused social life. A handful of dorms were located in and around Washington Square, but my own was the farthest-flung, at least a twenty-minute walk from class.