Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

by Alysia Abbott

  Well, NYC will still be there in a year and I may not be. So if you stayed there & missed being with me, you might even feel worse and more guilty . . .

  One night, as Brad was walking me back to my apartment, I told him I had only a few months left in the city.

  “What? That’s crazy. You can’t leave now.”

  “I have to,” I said. “It’s my dad.” My face flushed. I felt dizzy and sick with emotion, like I was confessing to some crime, as if by articulating my dad’s illness I would somehow make it more true. “He’s going . . . blind.”

  I can’t remember if I used the word AIDS. Brad thinks I did. We didn’t talk about it again. Not my return. Not Dad’s health. Brad and I resumed our New York escapades, as if nothing was going to change. And I quietly prepared my leave.

  THAT DECEMBER, I turned twenty-one. On the night of my birthday, the Weiksners took me out with Brad and another friend to the Gotham Bar and Grill, a sleek Union Square restaurant famous for its dramatically towering entrées. Spotlit from above, each plate looked like a death-defying circus act. Sandra and George sat at their own table in a distant, but still visible, corner of the restaurant, leaving my friends and me to our own conversation. At night’s end, the Weiksners picked up our tab. They even sent over a birthday bottle of fine champagne.

  Then it came time to open my presents. I got a travel alarm clock, a comment on my perpetual tardiness. Brad gave me a mug from Bruno’s and a cassette of Nirvana’s Nevermind, which had come out that fall. In Paris, Brad and I had bonded over the Pixies. We loved everything about the power-punk band—lyrics inspired by surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, badass bassist Kim Deal, and especially the controlled chaos of the music. We joyfully slam-danced watching them perform in Paris and that fall in New York. Banging my body into strangers with all my force, I felt both light as a feather and hard as a brick.

  Like the Pixies, Nirvana made beauty out of mess, juxtaposing feedback and screeching guitar with the vulnerability of Kurt Cobain’s broken voice and lyrics that yearned for a “Leonard Cohen afterworld.” Nevermind provided a framework for my mixed-up feelings about leaving New York. As I packed up my apartment to move home, I listened to the tape over and over, clinging to Cobain’s poetic rage as if it were my own.

  The night before my flight home I forgot to set my new alarm clock, and the next morning woke up late. I rushed out the door and found a cab to LaGuardia. When I arrived at the terminal, it was thick with families and harried singletons wearing Walkmans, all lugging suitcases full of Christmas presents. I waited in the check-in line with my bags for the better part of an hour. When I reached the ticket agent, I gave her my ticket and ID card.

  She looked at the ticket and frowned.

  “Your plane is leaving from Kennedy. In about”—she looked at her watch—“forty minutes. You might be able to make it if you leave right now.” She pushed the ticket back toward me over the counter. Already overtired and distraught, I broke down in hiccupping sobs.

  “Kennedy?”

  I tried to wipe away my tears but they kept coming, washing down my face and drawing curious stares from my airport-weary neighbors.

  “It’s going to be okay,” said the ticket agent. “It’s going to be okay!”

  “You don’t understand. I have . . . I have to go home to see my dad! I’ve got to . . . I’m going to . . . I can’t make it to Kennedy in thirty minutes!”

  She started furiously tapping on her keyboard.

  “Okay. I found you a spot on a flight for San Francisco with a layover in Denver. But it’s boarding now. Grab your bags. You’ve got to run.”

  Taking my hand in hers, she passed me off to another attendant who rushed me through security and instructed me to run to my gate, which I did as fast I could. Sticky and out of breath, my heart beating in my throat, I squeezed myself between two annoyed strangers and, closing my eyes, sank into an exhausted fog. I was heading home.

  PART VI

  Return

  Serene stands the little captain,

  He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low,

  His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns.

  —WALT WHITMAN, “Song of Myself”

  22.

  I DON’T KNOW what happened with Theo and me. I’d been looking forward to his visit to San Francisco that Christmas, but from the moment he landed nothing felt right. 545 Ashbury appeared grimy and tiny through Theo’s eyes. And I was defensive when he made fun of the cheap caviar Dad served on Christmas Eve and the sparkling wine Dad mistakenly called champagne. Theo’s gifts to me—a small bottle of Chanel perfume and a pair of pistachio green, fur-trimmed gloves—now seemed frivolous and silly, belonging to another life, another person. We fought over this and stupid things and Theo said I had a mauvaise caractère. I felt justified in my annoyance. How could he not see the pain I was going through? How could he not know what I needed? But in truth, I didn’t know what I needed. I just knew that there was no room for Theo within the confused emotions of my return. We didn’t break up before he boarded the plane to Paris, but I knew it was over. His letters continued to arrive for months. They piled up on the spool table unopened, worthless promissory notes of a dream unfulfilled.

  After Theo left, I tried to throw myself into a job search, but the country was mired in an economic recession. Waiting for responses to my applications, I had nothing to do but linger next to Dad’s bed watching him count out pills in the palm of his hand, and accompany him on depressing visits to the doctor. With my friends still at college and few activities to distract me, I fell into deep pits of despair.

  Then I got busy. I started weekly GRE classes to improve my chances at getting into graduate school and chased down every job opening I could find. By March, I found a full-time $300-a-week job selling videotapes of the news to local Fortune 500 companies, and an internship at Movie Magazine, a radio program broadcast from the nearby college station, KUSF.

  By spring, I swaggered past the storefronts of the Lower Haight and inner Mission. I wore big silver hoop earrings, white V-neck t-shirts, Dad’s black suit vest (just the right vintage), and form-fitting jeans. The tattooed, grunge-tinged scene that permeated cafés like the Horseshoe and Café Macondo now felt like my scene despite the fact that I had no tattoos, nor odd piercings. My generation was reveling then in the gritty and the authentic, and nothing felt more genuine than my life with Dad.

  Entering the Horseshoe café one afternoon, I was ready to forget for a moment why I was in San Francisco and not in New York. I noticed the blue-eyed boy behind the counter. I flashed him large dark eyes then looked down, smiling demurely. After finding a seat in a dingy corner with a mug of Earl Grey tea, I watched the boy pass my table. Dinosaur Jr.’s “Freak Scene” played fuzzy loud through an overhead speaker. Watching the counter boy clear tables, I pushed my hair behind my ears. I pulled a navy corduroy newsboy cap down over my head, feeling slim, young, pretty—twenty-one.

  The counter boy asked if he could sit. He sucked hard on a lit cigarette. We exchanged names and chatted. He’d moved from New Jersey and was going to break into San Francisco’s music scene. He just needed to get the band together. I noticed Scott wore a skull ring but, with his café apron, diminutive stature, and thrift-store fedora, he looked cute and boyish. When I announced I had to go, I asked Scott if it was too forward for me to want his number.

  Soon Scott and I were dating. Though our romance lasted only six months—he’d drop me as his band started getting bigger and things with me too serious—lying on Scott’s unmade bed in his Mission apartment, sheets smelling of cigarettes, the floor cluttered with empty beer bottles, notebooks, and CDs, I tried to erase myself, obliterate all evidence of my life past and present. But even after a passionate night with Scott, I’d burst into tears holding his thick arms tightly while he sat rocking me, saying nothing.

  Whenever I returned to 545 Ashbury, I was hit by heavy and oppressive warmth. Sweat trickled down my back.
There was no forgetting in this air. At home I was again, always, my father’s daughter. I was also a nurse, helping him count pills from the many vials that covered his end table. And a maid, wiping the floor around the toilet and picking up the stiff, crumpled tissues that gathered around his bed. Every week I bought gallon after gallon of juice to replenish the fluids he lost during his night sweats. He woke up looking like he’d been doused with a bucket of water.

  Some weekends, Dad would accompany me to the Café Flore in the Castro. I had to slow my pace so he could keep up, but we still loved sitting at our favorite corner table on the outdoor terrace, drinking up lattes and the beautiful boys that surrounded us. But as his illness progressed, his eyes worsened and he couldn’t make the trip anymore. “It breaks my heart,” I wrote in my journal. “What’s the point of going to a café if you can’t see anyone?”

  That’s when the boys started coming to our house. These were the young men I got to know through Dad and his letters. The Alexes, the Larry-Bobs, the Oliviers, and the Dans now showed up every few weeks to help or to distract. Dan delivered Marx Brothers movies to lift Dad’s mood. Alex and Larry-Bob brought over Philip K. Dick books, and issues of the Bay Area Reporter, which they’d read aloud, since Dad could no longer read to himself. Olivier helped with groceries a couple of times and, once, washed our windows.

  Other days, Dad lay in bed watching television. He now had a violent cough. Sometimes his cough was so loud and sustained that it overwhelmed the sound of the TV, distracting me from my GRE prep tests, and reinserting his illness into the “healthy” world I was trying so hard to grow.

  Use the following words in a sentence: aberrant, faculties, assiduous:

  For many, my father’s was an aberrant lifestyle.

  Each day my father loses more and more of his faculties.

  In an attempt to distract herself from her very real sadness, she was assiduous in all that she did.

  (I barely wrote in my journal during this time but did keep these lists of GRE sentences.)

  Sometimes Dad’s coughing was just too much. “Shut up!” I once yelled from my desk. Even though his coughing had subsided, I believed he hadn’t heard me through the French doors separating our bedrooms. But then he brought up the incident later, shaming me. “I cough so much sometimes I think I’m going to throw up,” he said. “I can’t help it.” I felt terrible.

  I was overwhelmed by the task of caring for my dad, but I also loved him and wanted to comfort him. At least once a week he asked me to run the vacuum, not to clean but because he liked the sound of the muffled motor. He told me it reminded him of being a little boy at home in Lincoln, Nebraska. The sound of his mother vacuuming always made him feel safe and loved. As he huddled beneath bedcovers, the Hoover droned loudly, upright and immobile next to his bed, while I lay on the sofa beside him staring at the ceiling.

  In the mornings, we sat together at the large spool table. I made him a bowl of cold cereal, then gave him a quick kiss on the forehead before pulling on my fingerless bicycle gloves, strapping on my helmet, and lifting my mountain bike over my head, down the stairs, and out the door. In the fresh morning air, I soared down Haight Street, past the hills of Divisadero and Laguna, down to South of Market and my job at Video Monitoring Services. I zipped between cars, breaking rules, running lights.

  Faster. Faster. Faster.

  VIDEO MONITORING SERVICES became my only reliable escape during my first several months at home. I loved playing the eager little salesgirl, dialing all the numbers on my morning call sheet, catering to clients like Gap, Levi’s, and Nike. Immersing myself in their PR campaigns and selling them news video and transcripts, I could finally compartmentalize my feelings about Dad.

  VMS had three departments: monitoring, production, and sales. Because we were the sales department, needing to access whatever magic might convince clients to spend a hundred dollars for two minutes of tape, we were given free rein to design our environment. We played music on a boom box and wore whatever we wanted. When things felt too stressful—managing a Chevron oil spill, say—we took turns lying down on the carpeted floor with a lavender-scented silk beanbag draped over our eyes. We called it the “cosmic eye pillow.”

  In the early nineties, Video Monitoring Services was a journey point for waves of alternative-minded liberal arts grads and aspiring creatives who came to San Francisco in search of a media job but who couldn’t live off bookshop wages. Through VMS I’d meet future roommates, editors, and boyfriends, but I first became close with Jon, a super-mellow cycling enthusiast who turned me onto toe-clips and fingerless gloves, and Karin Demarest, who’d hired me to replace her when she was made general manager.

  When I sat down to be interviewed by Karin, with her warm smile and large blue eyes, I decided to do something I’d not done in previous interviews: I told the truth. I told her that my dad was sick with AIDS and I’d graduated early and moved home to care for him. This openness would characterize my relationship with Karin who, along with Jon, took on the role of older sibling and mentor. When I first started at VMS, my fingers resting on Karin’s old Rolodex and petrified to make my first call, she gave me a note, previously kept over her desk and which I taped over mine:

  “Be brave. If you’re not, pretend to be. Nobody knows the difference.”

  In truth, we were all pretending, all of us kids playing grown-up. We made sales presentations touting the importance of “proactive” versus “reactive” PR. We used computer monitors so big they took up our entire desks. We faxed “rush” orders to other offices and shipped huge stacks of VHS tapes all over the country so those PR folks could show their bosses they’d done a good job. Selling the news every day, we learned that much of what was broadcast wasn’t news at all but one big public relations effort. Unwittingly, we even looked forward to disasters. Every oil spill, airline crash, and product recall meant we’d make our monthly goal. We watched so much TV that the absurdity of the enterprise overtook the tragedy.

  It was easier for me to manage the crises of my clients than the crisis I was facing at home, so I threw myself into work and the world of Karin and Jon. At the end of each day, I bicycled with them to the Rosemont Estates, the name given to the apartment complex where they lived with half a dozen of their friends on Rosemont Street, a San Francisco version of Melrose Place. In their shared backyard, the site of future ecstasy-fueled costume parties, I met Karin and Jon’s neighbors reclining in a bubbling hot tub beneath a big hand-painted sign that read “George Clinton not Bill Clinton.”

  I watched as Karin and Jon kicked off their shoes and rolled a joint or popped a beer, inviting me to do the same. But, much as I wanted to, I rarely could. I always had to get back to the Haight, to Dad.

  Returning home from work one evening that summer, Dad’s mere presence on the bed, in the same position in front of the television where I’d left him eight hours earlier, forced a pained sigh from my lips. Where Dad used to vociferously disdain TV as “the idiot box,” this role now fell to me. “Does it always have to be on?” I pleaded. Because my father couldn’t read anymore, television provided him both company and cultural text. Without books to critique, he applied his intellect to old reruns of Burns and Allen, Perry Mason, and Bewitched.

  “Don’t you see,” he pointed out to me, “Bewitched is all about the conflict between anarchical spirituality, Samantha, and the repressive patriarchal quest for order, Darrin.”

  “Never noticed that, Dad.”

  In other circumstances I’d have loved to engage Dad on the cultural subtext of sixties TV, but I couldn’t see past the inherent sadness of our situation. After seven months of living at home, I’d long since exchanged my Harold and Maude–inspired fantasies of the fearlessness of the fatally ill—Stealing cars! Outrunning police! They had nothing left to lose and the world was theirs for the taking!—for the tiresome reality of nurse visits and pill vials and Open Hand meals delivered night after night by another kind-faced stranger. (Project Open Han
d, started by San Francisco retiree Ruth Brinker, then provided hot meals to over 2,300 AIDS patients around the city, free of charge.)

  “How was your day?” he asked, as I moved awkwardly through the dining room with my bike.

  “Fine,” I mumbled, resting my bike against the spool table. Unbuckling my helmet, I asked, “How was yours?”

  “Well,” he chuckled, “ I was heating up the Open Hand meal for lunch, and, well . . . I fell asleep and it burned.”

  “So you didn’t eat?”

  “No.”

  Hearing my father’s pitiful “no,” I felt myself propelled from the room, eager to jump back onto my bike and head to Rosemont Street or to Scott’s or to anywhere. I wrestled with my conscience then, and I wrestle with it still. Had I not left him alone, maybe he wouldn’t have burned his Open Hand meal and he would have eaten. Maybe he wouldn’t have tried to change the dining room lightbulb on his own: wouldn’t have dropped the glass shade, wouldn’t have cut his finger.

  SOME DAYS Karin and I made VMS sales calls in San Jose or Palo Alto, and on these days I took the bus instead of my bike. Returning home in my mint green Ann Taylor suit, I weaved my way through the smelly throngs that were always parked on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, skinny white kids with dreadlocks, tattoos, and piercings. They asked me for change as I passed my corner, and I surveyed the gang of them. Amongst their bedrolls and beat-up paper bags, they made stacks of peanut butter sandwiches and played bad guitar. A teenage girl with a nose ring clutched a big-eyed puppy. A young guy with a sunburned face took a swig from a paper-sheathed bottle.

  Haight Ashbury had been a mecca for runaways and freedom-loving drifters since the late 1960s, but now the hippies were joined by the “gutter punks” who, unlike their middle-class sixties counterparts, had often run away from abusive homes. They didn’t sing songs of love and peace; they favored heroin, meth, and crack over LSD and pot. The increasing numbers of these kids—camped out on corners and on front stoops, begging for change, shooting up in the bushes, or drinking themselves into oblivion—became for me an ugly reminder of all the changes to my neighborhood, of all the beauty and magic that I’d already lost and was now painfully losing. By the late fall of 1992, the energy of Haight Street was as angry as I’d ever seen it, seeming to reflect back my own free-floating anger, which only made it worse.