A Common Pornography: A Memoir (6 page)

One morning in
early 1981, I was at my friend Brian’s house, where I had spent the night. His family had lived just down the street from mine but was now in a much bigger house in an area where a lot of new houses were being built. Brian was a year younger than me but he always played football with Matt and me and the other neighborhood kids. He had a good arm and I always thought he’d be a star quarterback.

We were in his front yard, playing catch, when his mom came out and excitedly told us that the American hostages in Iran were going to be set free. Although I didn’t understand the situations behind the hostage crisis, it was something that I thought about for a lot of that year when it was happening. As in:
What would I do if I were held hostage for 444 days?
It was a hypothetical source of worry and paranoia for me. I was starting to doubt America’s power.

Brian must have been asking himself those same hypothetical questions, because we looked at each other and I could tell he was as relieved as me. We started jumping around and whooping it up. We dashed into the wide new streets of the housing development and ran along them, up and down the paved hills, shouting, “The hostages are free! The hostages are free! The hostages are free!”

From sixth to
eigth grade, Dad made me go to a Wednesday-night Catholic Bible study thing called CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine). It was held in a building behind the church. I have very little recollection of it, because I constantly skipped it. Instead, I would hang out at the bowling alley next door for an hour, playing video games. I was obsessed with these new machines, my favorites being Space Invaders, Battlezone, and Pac-Man. I even bought the books that showed you different play patterns to use. I prided myself on making up my own strategies though, and I was really good, topping the high score and creating calluses on my thumb at the same time.

Dad never found out that I was skipping so much. I did go to the class just enough to earn a certificate. It said I was a confirmed Catholic.

I went to
a friend’s church with him when I was sixteen. It was much more exciting than the dull Catholic church that Dad and I went to. I told Dad I was thinking about switching churches, not realizing it would be a big deal.

He was not happy about this. Mark had gone to Mass with him before, when I was a baby, but somehow was able to get out of it eventually. I was the only family member who went to Mass with him. I used to wonder why Mom didn’t go either, but Dad explained to me once, with a dismissive wave of his hand, that she wasn’t religious. He thought I was having a spiritual crisis and made an appointment for me to see the priest, to have a talk with him at the church offices.

Dad explained to me that the church I wanted to go to was a Protestant church and that the word
Protestant
came from
protest
. “The Protestant Church is for people who protest the Catholic Church,” he explained. “The Catholic Church is the original faith and Protestants were the people who left the Church.”

The priest chided me lightly with a mix of pity and disappointed detachment when I visited him the next day. I looked around at the office, which was down the street from the church, and wondered if he lived there. There were alarming signs of normalcy—a television, regular clothes draped on the arm of a couch, some mystery paperbacks, a dusty refrigerator. I nodded and half-listened to his lecture, but mostly my mind wandered. I realized that the part of Mass I would miss the most was communion. For some reason that was never clear to me, I wasn’t supposed to eat an hour before church started. So by the time everyone lined up for the communion wafer, I was starved and ready to consume what essentially was a snack to me. In fact, I thought it would be amazing to break into the church some night and steal a whole box of the things. I imagined myself chomping away on them as I watched TV.

The priest cracked my daydream by asking if I wanted to put my soul in danger by abandoning the church. I felt bad because I hadn’t been listening close enough to what he’d been saying, so I simply said no, I didn’t want to endanger my soul. I would remain a Catholic.

After church the following week, the priest shook my hand and gave me his best look of forgiveness.

After this “lapse
of faith” (as Dad called it), he acted a little more cold to me at church, sitting a couple of inches farther away and never looking my way. At one Sunday evening Mass, I suddenly started to feel warm and queasy. I was stuck between an older obese man on my right and Dad on my left. I told Dad that I needed to go to the bathroom, but he acted like he didn’t hear me. It was still early in the service and one of the third-string priests was monotoning some particular passage so heavy with ancient metaphor that it made my sickness speed up my throat. I threw up a little on my pant leg and Dad looked at it and shook his head, as if to say, You’d better not do that again. The obese man on my right had his eyes closed as if he were sleeping there. I looked at Dad and hoped he would let me out. When everyone finally stood up for the main gospel, Dad looked at me and said, “You stink. Go wait outside.”

I walked over to the bowling alley instead and played Centipede for twenty minutes, watching the clock carefully. A white smear of sick dried on the left leg of my black pants.

A year or
so after the fire, we were still living in the small, windowless apartment. A ten-year-old girl named Jaynee and her mother lived in the apartment above us. I don’t think she had a father and her mom was rarely seen. Whenever Dad wasn’t rebuilding the old house, he was hanging out with this little girl. They’d watch TV, go for walks, and play games together; things he’d never do with my brothers or me. Matt and I were curious what the deal was. They seemed to be keeping secrets. I even remember Jaynee going to Mass with us once. We suspected Dad of being a pervert. (Even before Jaynee, we noticed how he would always stare at young girls.)

We began following them on their walks and watching them through the window curtains when they would watch TV, sitting close together on the couch. Even Mom sensed something and acted tense whenever Jaynee was around. The whole family, except Dad of course, began to secretly hate Jaynee. We’d sometimes split up with walkie-talkies and spy from the bushes or trees that lined the alleyways and ditches of our neighborhood. I don’t think we were jealous of them, but on some nights we’d lie in bed and hear sounds from upstairs. We wondered what was inside her heart.

This is how
I learned what the word
monotony
means.

Instead of using the money from the insurance company to hire builders for the house, Dad decided to “save money” by doing it himself. What he hadn’t bargained for was that it would take him much longer to get it done that way. So for four years we lived in an apartment that was too small and too ugly. Matt or Mark or I would take turns helping Dad do different things at the old house. The first few things, like smashing down walls with sledge hammers and sorting through ashen remains, were fun. But then came the boring stuff like measuring and insulating. Our big job then, as Dad’s assistants, was to keep the tape measure in place, or hold the flashlight when the afternoon became night.

We’d have to do this for hours each day. If it seemed like we weren’t needed, we’d ask Dad: “Can I go play next door with Darren?” And he’d say: “No, I might need you to hold the flashlight.”

Each morning would become a game between my brothers and me of who could leave the apartment fastest. The last one always lost. “Say, Matt, I mean Mark, I mean Kevin, don’t go planning anything today. I’ll need your help over at the house.”

The whole rebuilding process was slower than anybody ever thought it would be.
Help
became the most painful word for my brothers and me to hear.

The day that
Mt. Saint Helens blew, I thought it was Doomsday. I spent the morning in church with my dad and when we came out around noon, the sky was dark and ashen, as if the sun had disappeared. Instead of going to the church basement for doughnuts, everyone stood frozen and talked quietly on the front steps of St. Joseph’s.

Someone said, “Well, it really happened.”

It was probably a half hour later when I finally caught on to what was happening.

The next morning, I went out with the neighbor kids and we gathered as much ash from the sidewalks and car hoods as we could. We filled up tiny bottles that formerly held Gerber baby food. Someone said the bottles would be worth money someday.

It was spring break when this happened, and when I went back to school the next week, everyone had bottles of ash to show.

The hydroplane races
that happened on the Columbia River were a big event every summer in the Tri-Cities. The population of about 100,000 swelled to 150,000 for race weekend. The scene at the actual race site was like a big wild party, with people lined up along both sides of the river—the Pasco side and all through Columbia Park on the Kennewick side. There were bleary-eyed union workers freely swigging beer, stereos cranked up loud, scantily clad headbanger girls, the smell of sweat and cocoa butter lotion, and some fistfights here and there.

I wasn’t allowed to go until I was thirteen, and then only if Dad went with me. So, that year, after church got out on race day morning, we headed to the river. Not wanting to pay the steep $5 charge, Dad parked somewhere along the outskirts and showed me a dark irrigation tunnel that we could sneak through to get to Columbia Park. For a moment, it wasn’t like I was with my dad at all. He wasn’t a humorless, God-fearing bore, but rather a rule-breaking outlaw. I almost expected him to take off his shirt and light up a joint as we walked.

When we emerged at the other side of the tunnel—an excruciating half hour later—we pushed aside an old fence and climbed up a rocky bank to get to the park. Some people saw us come in this way, but they were either embarrassed for us or didn’t care. This place, where we snuck in, was the same place the bones of the famous Kennewick Man were found a few years later.

With nowhere to sit and watch, we strolled back and forth along the river, struggling to see the race through the people cheering for the boats. It didn’t matter to me though. I was busy gawking at the slumped drunks, loose bikinis, muscle cars, motorcycle gangs, and skinny, pony-tailed stoners. Dad was also transfixed, especially by the bikinis.

It was like how I imagined Mardi Gras, or a college football game would be.

That was the year the Pay ’N Pak hydroplane did a double flip and almost killed its driver. I remember the sound that came from the crowd when it happened—the collective gasp, the exhale, the sudden silence.

Dad gave me
a vibrator once. Sort of oval-shaped. He gave it to me so I could wrap it and give it to Mom as a birthday present. Later, they kept it in a drawer by the bed. Then, shortly after, they slept in separate beds.

In middle school,
I became really good friends with a skinny redheaded kid named Maurice. We were the kind of friends who had their own secret language. We wrote notes to each other, full of weird words, and passed them to each other between classes. We decided that our parents needed nicknames.

My mom was Fuzz because she had one of those white old lady Afros that became so popular, partly due to the influence of the TV show
The Golden Girls
. My dad was Pudlow because he was kind of scrawny and weak, even though he had these little humorous outbursts (known as spazzes back then) and tried to act all authoritative. Maurice’s parents’ nicknames were somewhat more random and obscure. His mom was Art for the simple fact that she made some fuss about taking up painting once. Garno was his dad’s nickname, because it rhymed with Yarno, and John Yarno was a big dorky-looking offensive lineman for the Seattle Seahawks at the time. Maurice told me once that his dad’s fingers would often become curled in cold weather because of some metal in his hand. He called that “doing the Garno.”