A Common Pornography: A Memoir (16 page)

After the service,
everyone filed out the front doors of the church and we each said hello to the priest and shook his hand. Some people thought there was going to be an open casket and a chance for people to see my dad one last time, but the casket stayed closed. I got the feeling that people felt awkward about it and didn’t want to ask if the casket could be opened. There was an anticlimactic feel to the whole thing.

Before the service, Matt, Russell, Mark, and I had to carry the casket from the hearse into the church, and now we had to carry it back out. It was heavier than I thought it would be and the handles felt like they were made of hard plastic. They dug into my fingers uncomfortably. It was as if Dad wanted to give us, the kids, one last moment of discomfort. I could imagine him purposely picking out the heavy one with crappy handles.

With Dad back in the hearse, we gathered on the church steps to figure out who was driving with whom to the cemetery. Then Mom stumbled down the church steps, and even though I was holding her hand, she fell awkwardly on her side. Some relatives I didn’t know helped me get her up and she said she was okay, just clumsy.

A short line of cars followed the hearse out to the cemetery. Like a tragically comic movie, it had begun raining and the wind began whipping around like it does in a desert city. At the cemetery, we again had to carry the coffin, this time to the grave. I hadn’t brought a jacket and I was pretty cold. I could barely hear the last formulaic words of the priest and I just wanted to get back in my car. I saw the backhoe behind the crowd, behind a tree, like it was an animal trying to hide from us.

That night, a
bunch of the family met at an Olive Garden for dinner. I felt a nagging sense of shame that we went to such a cheerful place. Its peppy waitstaff gave the illusion that the world is a fair and happy place and no one ever dies.

I sat next to my cousin Terry, who is about ten years older than me. I didn’t know him that well. He asked me about living in Portland and said he sometimes visited there to go to bookstores. He was a history teacher at a high school in Walla Walla and had a room in his house just for his library. There aren’t too many people in my family whom you’d call literary, so I was excited to have someone to talk books with. The conversation soon turned to family though. We played connect the dots with the bloodline. His mom was my dad’s sister, Evelyn, who had spent time at Medical Lake, being treated for psychosis at the same time Elinda was there getting shock treatments. His dad was someone he never knew. Apparently, he was a drug dealer who was shot and killed in their front yard when he was a little boy.

He asked me in all earnestness, “How was it growing up with John?” I could tell he knew the answer wasn’t going to be good, and I could also tell that he had his own opinions to share.

“It was kind of crappy,” I offered.

He nodded and said, “I used to go to your place a lot when you guys were little and I just wondered how you guys dealt with him. He was a bastard.”

I ordered another Spanish coffee and we talked more as we ate. By this time, I was tired of everyone treading softly and pretending that Dad’s life was saintly. “It’s nice to know that there’s someone here who isn’t full of shit,” I said to Terry. I was actually starting to feel like Dad’s death would become a reason for the family to open up more. After all, if there’s someone in your family whom you’re always afraid of offending, it can be stifling for everyone involved. Terry told me about being a kid and going to visit my dad a few times with his mom. This was a couple of years before I was born, when Matt was a baby and Mom and Dad were split up. Dad was living in some kind of motel out by the airport in Kennewick and there were
Playboy
s scattered around. One day, after hearing that he didn’t get a job that he’d been hoping for, Dad got so angry that he trashed the place, knocking holes in the walls and breaking furniture. He grabbed a gun and went outside and shot bullets into the hard ground.

Matt heard us talking about Dad and joined in the conversation. Soon we were joking and laughing about his spazzy temper and creative cursing. Matt and I tried to remember the exact order of f-words and other swears when he smashed his fingers moving the fridge down the stairs. It’s the closest we got to a eulogy.

That night, I
stayed in a hotel room with my older brother Russell. I was in bed, with the lights out, falling asleep, when Russell said, “I was surprised to hear how negatively you spoke of your dad today.” He must have been referring to some of the things he heard at the restaurant.

At first I thought he was going to scold me for that, but I told him frankly about how disappointing a father he was. I talked calmly for fifteen minutes about all the reasons. In a way, Russell reminds me of Dad, so I wasn’t sure whose side he would take.

I was surprised to hear him respond with similar stories and feelings. I listened to Russell’s voice in the dark and could feel the pain in the air around us. I had always thought of Russell as the serious-minded, conservative, military, older brother, but now I could see that he was vulnerable too. I told him about how having a bad father made me try to be a good father and he told me about some of the things he, too, learned as a father. He had a son named Charles when he was much younger, with a woman he was not with for long. When the relationship ended, he let her take his son. Now, after years of having not talked to him, he had no idea where his son was.

After he lost contact with his son, Russell fell in love with a Korean woman and married her. She had two children from a previous marriage, a son and a daughter, and Russell became their father. A couple of years into the marriage, his wife was in a car accident and was paralyzed. She’s been in a wheelchair ever since. They went back and forth from Korea to America and maintained a strong and loving relationship. But still, I got the feeling that Russell was regretful about not staying in touch with his son.

We talked for a couple of hours and then fell asleep. At five in the morning, the alarm went off and Russell had to get up to catch a flight. I stayed in bed, half-asleep, and said good-bye to him. He set his bags in the hallway and stood in the doorway. “Well, it was really good to talk to you,” he said. “And I want you to know that I love you and I’m proud of you.”

My brother Mark,
the “golden child,” is the only one in the family that has never lived outside the Tri-Cities. I think about how soul-crushing that must be. The few times he has driven Mom to visit me in Portland, he doesn’t want to go anywhere or to explore the city. It’s as if nothing interests him. When any of our relatives visit the Tri-Cities, he usually disappears and does not answer his phone. I have noticed that just in the past couple of years, many of his teeth have fallen out and his glasses are usually dirty and broken. His bedroom, across from the bathroom in Mom’s home, is always riddled with clothes, electronic things that have been taken apart, Budweiser posters, and weird smells. When he is around, it is surprising if he speaks beyond a few mumbled words.

He was the only one I saw crying at Dad’s funeral.

The day after
the funeral, Mom wanted to have some one-on-one talks with each of her visiting boys—Russell, Matt, and me. Gary did not come to the funeral and wasn’t at our family reunion a few years before. He was living in Ohio and working as a truck driver. I haven’t seen him in twenty years and it seems like he has been avoiding the rest of the family as well.

I drove Mom to the new Sonic drive-in that opened down the street from them. It seems like every imaginable chain store or restaurant has opened up in the Tri-Cities since I moved away. The landscape has gone from desert to a sickening glut of consumerism. They call it expansion and growth.

We ordered root beer floats and sat in my car and talked about Dad. This is when she told me about her first husbands and how abusive they were. She explained more details about Matt’s dad. She talked about Elinda and why she was sent to Medical Lake and how she got pregnant there. Then she told me what happened between Elinda and Dad.

I sat with her for about three hours, holding her hand and listening to this flood of information. These were all the things that weren’t talked about when I was growing up. Stories kept from us kids.

When we were ready to leave, I tried to start my car but the battery was dead. I had kept my headlights on the whole time. I walked around and asked people in the other cars if they had jumper cables, but nobody did. Finally I asked one of the roller-skating servers and they brought out a battery charger. After a quick zap, the car started right up and we drove off, embarrassed but relieved.

The first time
I went to visit Elinda after the funeral was when she had to get remarried to Chris, someone she thought she had legally married more than twenty years before. But it turned out, as I mentioned earlier, that Elinda hadn’t been officially divorced from her first husband yet. She found this out when her first husband passed away with the old divorce papers, unprocessed, still in his possession.

I drove to Olympia for their small wedding at the courthouse. Mom and Mark were also there, along with a dozen other friends and relatives of Chris’s. When Elinda saw me show up at the last minute, she ran over and gave me a big hug and said, “Look, everyone. My baby brother!”

During the ceremony, the judge started to go through all the various oaths. Elinda fidgeted and complained, “I just wanted to say ‘I do.’”

“Well, okay then,” the judge stammered.

Afterward, we went to a place called O’Malley’s, a cheap family restaurant connected to a bowling alley. Dinner was a variety of chicken strips, fish and chips, and hamburgers.

I stayed with Mom and Mark at Elinda’s trailer park home. The decor was as seventies as it looked from the outside, with fake-wood paneled walls, fluffy carpet, and one narrow hallway that led to two cluttered back bedrooms. The bathroom was full of dollar-store items. In the kitchen, Elinda showed me the cupboards, packed full of boxes and cans of nonperishable food. She also had a freezer full of more food that she showed us with a proud smile.

Outside, there was a small shack at the end of the driveway that they called the smoking room. Instead of smoking in their home, they smoked in this shack. It was just large enough for a card table, some shelves filled with board games, a TV, and a boom box. One of Elinda and Chris’s friends was staying with them this same weekend and all three of them sat in the smoking room most of the night while Mom and Mark and I stayed in the trailer watching the Mariners get shellacked by the Baltimore Orioles. I looked through some photo albums that were out and kept asking Mom who people were when I didn’t recognize them.

There were a couple of photos of Mom and a pretty little girl that I wondered about. “That’s me with Elinda,” she said. I had to stare hard at them to recognize Elinda. She was thin and happy looking, a little glint of mischief in her eyes. Probably about thirteen years old. “That was before she left,” Mom said.

I turned the page and there was another picture of Elinda. In this one, she was much taller and bigger, but still young. Maybe about eighteen. She was slouched against a bench somewhere outside and her head was tilted. Her mouth was slack and open and her eyes looked faraway and helpless.

I put down the albums and went out to visit Elinda and Chris and their friend in the smoking room and noticed that there were no windows, no ventilation in the thing. At first I thought it was funny, but then I grew appalled. “You should get some windows put in this thing,” I told Elinda. I felt like I was lecturing them a bit. They puffed and coughed and nodded their heads like it was old news. “Or get an air purifier or something.” I could barely stand in the doorway without feeling sick. They sat in their own haze, playing cards.

That night, I slept on one of the couches in the front room. Mark slept on the other, snoring loudly. There were several lights on in the room that were keeping me awake, so I got up and turned them off. In the middle of the night, I was woken up by Elinda and her friend stumbling around and wondering if the electricity had gone out. They turned all the lights back on and went back to bed.

The next day we were at a Kmart and I looked at air purifiers, thinking I would get one for Elinda and her smoking room. Her birthday was two days away. I talked with the manager of the pharmacy area and discussed my concern with him. He told me that an air purifier would do very little to help. He said they should install some windows and fans to blow the smoke out, but even that was probably not enough. He asked how old Elinda and her husband were and I said, “About sixty.”

He shook his head and said, “The best thing for them to do, really, would be to quit smoking. If they don’t do that, you probably can’t be too much help.”

I knew he was right. I bought her oven mitts instead.