A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (13 page)

I didn't exactly thrive at GAOP any more than I had in Stanwood Elementary or Ida Patterson Elementary. Dad said it was because I wasn't a cog in their machine, but I knew there was something else going on. I didn't have a name for it, but I could feel it: a kind of static that filled my head whenever I was around groups of kids my own age. Or groups of people generally. Or more than two people. Or one person I really liked. It wasn't exactly excitement, and it wasn't exactly fear. There didn't seem to be a word for it in the language other people spoke. But when it was happening, I had a hard time controlling the volume of my voice. Or what happened on my face. It made me rowdy. When I got wound up, I wanted to knock other kids down and jump up and down on them. It wasn't out of any conscious desire to do violence. It was more of a full-body nervous tic. I would have been just as happy for them to knock me down and jump up and down on me, but nobody else seemed to feel the urge to do this.

Kids in my class were always asking me what was wrong with me. The question confused me, made me angry, and embarrassed me. I didn't know what the answer was, but I was starting to suspect it wasn't a circumstantial problem. It wasn't just about being new to Seattle, or new to Stanwood, or new to elementary school or day care or whatever. It had been happening for a while.

I felt like I didn't have any friends. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I really never had. My dad got mad at me when I said that. He accused me of feeling sorry for myself, but it was sort of true. I had acquaintances: I'd meet a kid, we'd hit it off, we'd spend a few days playing together. But then they'd always start trying to get away, like they'd turned over some stone in my personality and found a poisonous snake.

Back in Eugene, most of my friends had been family friends—the kids of my dad's friends. We hung out because we had to, and we got along. But most of them had other kids they hung out with in their neighborhood or at their school. I was the only one who didn't have friends outside our network. On Hayes Street, Mickey and Kurty had played with me, but only when they had absolutely nothing else to do.

The idea was hard to hang on to. I had to work my way around to it, going over all my interactions with people, remembering each kid I'd thought of as my friend and how they seemed to feel about me. What their faces looked like when they saw me show up at their house, or what they said to me when we played together. If I added it all up, I could start to get a clear picture of how much most kids my own age seemed to dislike me. But it wasn't like other conclusions I arrived at through my own reasoning; proving it once didn't make it true in my mind. As soon as I relaxed my grip on the facts, the whole idea started to seem ridiculous. It implied questions I didn't have answers for, like what did it mean if I was just some irredeemable prick that nobody liked? Was I just supposed to hate myself? That couldn't be right. There had to be another explanation. Because, for one thing, even irredeemable pricks had friends. Some of them were actually quite popular. I'd seen kids—really awful kids—who had lots of friends.

Like, for example, Dickie Seever.

*   *   *

Dickie Seever was a kid in my class at GAOP. He wasn't exactly a bully. He didn't beat up on little kids or kids who won against him in tetherball or whatever. He didn't seem to act out of insecurity or physical opportunism, and he didn't really have that kind of reputation. Dickie was more calculating than that; a sociopath looking for a target for his predations—a target who wouldn't create too many collateral problems for him. Someone he could injure with impunity. Someone like me. Because within a month of starting at GAOP I'd alienated the teachers, the students—everybody. And I was big for my age. I was the biggest kid in my class. I was bigger than most of the kids one grade up. People would always give Dickie, an average-size white boy with a tight, puckered face, the benefit of the doubt.

I felt him circling, but I didn't do what I should have done: I didn't go quiet and try to avoid him. Later, I had to admit to myself that I may have let his ridiculous-sounding name lead me to a deeply mistaken estimate of how dangerous he wasn't.

Our first run-in was a month or two before the end of my second grade year. We were lining up to go back into class at the end of recess and he cut in front of me. I stepped around him to get my place back in line, and he shoved me.

“The fuck is your problem?” I asked. I cursed easily when I was upset.

“The fuck is your problem?” he mimicked, shoving me again.

“Don't shove me!” I yelled, shoving him back.

We locked into the traditional kid-shoving stance, arms on each other's shoulders, trying to throw one another off balance and onto the ground. But after just a few seconds of this grappling behavior, Dickie did something that took me completely by surprise: he jerked back and, as I stumbled forward, he kicked me in the nuts. Hard.

I collapsed onto the ground. Once, back in Eugene, Isaac's older sister, Crystal, had kicked me like this and gotten in a lot of trouble for it. I'd never done it to anyone. I couldn't imagine making a choice to inflict this kind of pain on another human being.

Dickie stood over me for a second, then kicked me in the ribs and went inside. Other kids just walked around me while I cried on the ground. After a few minutes, I was alone. When I got my breath back I got up and limped inside.

*   *   *

When Dad came home from work that night I told him about what had happened. His response surprised me.

“Just punch him in the nose, Jason,” he said. “You punch him in the nose once, he'll decide you're more trouble than you're worth and leave you alone.”

“How do you … do that?” I asked.

“Do what?” Dad asked.

“Punch a person in the nose,” I said.

I wasn't trying to be cute. I'd always liked to roughhouse, and sometimes I injured other kids by accident when I got too wound up. But the idea of intentionally hurting another person outside the context of an action movie or a comic book just wasn't part of my emotional anatomy. Dad may as well have told me to swing from a tree by my nonexistent tail.

“I don't understand,” I said.

Dad chose to interpret my confusion as a technical problem. He gave me a little seminar about how to make a fist and which part of the nose to aim for. He talked about how I should only use the first two knuckles of my fist. He showed me a guard position that was supposed to keep me safe while I threw my punches.

“You can't let them push you around,” he said. “You have to establish dominance.”

“What's that mean?” I asked.

“Like dogs,” Dad said. “There's a top dog and a bottom dog. You have to fight back.”

None of this made any sense to me. I didn't understand the mechanism involved. How would hitting someone in the nose with my hand show them that I was a top dog? How would being a top dog keep them from hitting me back?

“If you beat this Dickie kid up, he'll be too scared to mess with you again,” Dad said.

“But … he already beat me up,” I said. “Now I'm scared of him.”

“You have to get past that!” Dad said.

“I don't understand,” I whined. “If I can get past him beating me up, why can't he do the same if I beat him up?”

“Because he's not as smart as you are,” Dad said.

Dad said stuff like this a lot. I had yet to see any objective evidence of this massive intellect he thought I had, but I appreciated his vote of confidence. Unless it meant I had to commit suicide-by-bully.

“Can't I just tell the teachers?” I asked.

“Nobody likes a narc, Jason,” Dad said.

*   *   *

The next week Dickie cut in front of me in line again. I shoved my way in front of him again. He seemed genuinely confused by my response.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

I made a fist, reared back, and said, “Hiiii-ya!” as I threw a gigantic cartoonish haymaker … at a spot about a foot to Dickie's left.

Dad's explanation about top dogs and nose punching had made sense in theory, but when it came to cases, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Not even to Dickie. Just thinking about it made something in my brain recoil in horror. I hoped I could get away with fudging it. Maybe if I pretended a willingness to punch him in the face, Dickie would get scared and leave me alone. Later in my life, when someone explained the puff-up-to-look-bigger trick employed by certain animals as a defense strategy, I grasped the idea immediately.

Dickie leaned to his right and watched as I sailed past him. When I turned to face him, curious to see what effect my posturing might have had, he frowned, shrugged, and punched me in the mouth hard enough to split my lips.

When I told my dad about it that night, he sighed and shook his head.

“I've done all I can,” he said. “You have to deal with this.”

*   *   *

A few weeks later, Dad asked me how I'd feel about the idea of having his friend Olive and her daughter Calliope come to live with us. Calliope was ten years old, two years older than I was, kind of ill-tempered and a girl into the bargain, but she was one of my two favorite kids from our Eugene years.

“Where would they stay?” I asked.

“The house out back,” Dad said.

“But … there's no power. No heat. The roof leaks, you told me.”

“You remember their house in Charleston?” Dad asked.

He had a point. Olive and Calliope had moved from Eugene to a fishing town on the coast of Oregon, a few miles south of Coos Bay. Charleston had about two hundred people in it. The town's fishing fleet docked in a slough next to the ocean and processed their catches through a packing plant that dumped its waste into the same slough. Whenever Dad and I went to visit, we could always smell Charleston before we could see it.

My strongest memory of visiting there was playing barefoot on the docks with Calliope and getting a splinter the size of a pencil that went in through my heel and ran the length of my foot. Dad and Olive had to use a razor blade and a pair of pliers to get it out, then flushed the open gash with rubbing alcohol. My whole leg swelled up from the fish guts and creosote in the wound.

The house Olive and Calliope had been living in there was a shack next to the water, with a decent-size yard and a fence made out of street signs. It had a certain piratical authenticity, if you went in for the whole fishing-nets-and-glass-floats aesthetic. And, contrary to Dad's suggestion, it had been weather-tight when we stayed there. But nobody could say it was many steps up from the extra house we had in our backyard.

“When are they getting here?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” Dad said.

 

18

Olive and Calliope had come north to get away from Olive's boyfriend, Mike; Mike the fisherman, also known as “Crazy Mike.” The only surprising part about their move was that Olive had finally gotten wise and made a run for it. In our circles in Oregon, in spite of all the crime, there were really only two people that everyone was genuinely afraid of: Sean and Mike. And Sean was considered the saner of the two by a wide margin. He'd had that one murder rap, and he'd snuck up and put a .44 Magnum up against the head of a surveyor once—“Guy crawling around my land, in the bushes, with a telescope on a stand. How the fuck was I supposed to know he worked for the Department of Transportation?” But Mike was a whole other thing.

While Sean had the sort of quaint story about how he'd blown all the windows out of his farmhouse with a shotgun during a bout of meth-induced psychosis, Mike had the story about how he'd smashed all the windows and half the walls out of Olive and Calliope's house while he was trying to kill Olive with an ax. Sean had thought he was in a shootout with imaginary DEA agents. Mike was actually trying to murder Olive in the rational light of day—while Calliope was in the house. Mike was definitely fucked up on speed when he did it, but he wasn't nearly so far from himself that the incident could be regarded as a complete aberration, or even much out of his way.

I wasn't sure what Mike had done to drive Olive north. Maybe it was the ax incident, and she'd just needed a year or so to think about it and decide it was worth leaving the state over. Maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, Dad and I were happy for the company, and the help with the rent.

*   *   *

Olive had grown up on a pig farm in Georgia. It gave her a southern accent, and a Hobbesian worldview, like she almost didn't trust a meal that hadn't been loved by its mother. My dad admired her pragmatism and her emotional detachment; Olive didn't want to get rich, or build anything. She ran drugs because it was the easiest way to make money, and worked straight jobs because they covered her fixed costs, like rent. But if she had enough cash on hand to cover booze, smack, and a little food, she'd walk right past a million-dollar score. I always thought that, with just a little more ambition, Olive would have been a natural as a contract killer.

She was tall and rail-thin, with curly black hair that stood straight up, and a high forehead. She always wore a pair of small sunglasses with dark purple lenses. I'd only seen her actual eyes a handful of times—narrow horizontal slits in a long, oval face. Our people in Eugene called her Olive Oyl, and the nickname was dead-on physically but totally inappropriate for her personality. In spite of her cartoonish appearance, the only sign of whimsy I'd ever seen in Olive was that she named her daughter after a steam-powered pipe organ.

Calliope looked nothing like her mom—she had a broad, open face that usually wore a blank, slightly appraising expression. Her smiles were sudden and transformative, but I never understood what caused them. There was no rhyme or reason to it. She wore glasses, which was unusual among kids in our circles. They were the square-framed plastic kind that everyone on welfare wore, and she was forever having to repair them with various improvised splints and pins. Her hair was an even brown color, her skin pale. Like me, she was always dirty and scraped up. And she cursed like a sailor, which I found affirming since I didn't seem to be able to break myself of the habit. She had some of her mother's pragmatism, but in Cal I found the trait more admirable and less intimidating than I found it in her mom.