A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (35 page)

In some ways, his was worse.

*   *   *

Garfield had 1,700 students, which meant Brandon and I had a lot of room to avoid each other at school. After school, we started spending most of our time together. He showed me pieces of himself a bit at a time. I saw his room, and the basement where he lived with his brother. They shared a bathroom that had no walls, just sheets thumbtacked to the studs where walls would be someday. They lived in bedrooms with doors that slid back and forth on metal rails, instead of having hinges. The doors didn't meet up with the walls or the floor—there were several inches of clearance on all sides—so they didn't offer a lot of privacy. Brandon and Ethan's beds were mattresses set in wooden boxes hinged to the wall and supported by lengths of nylon rope. The sort of thing you'd expect to find in a prison or a barracks. Ethan kept his room comparatively neat, if only so he could manage his extensive pornography collection. Brandon just kept his room dark. The concrete floor was always covered in clothes and loose bits of junk—electronics, and art projects Brandon worked on for fun.

We spent most of our time together avoiding being home. Freshman year we got into skateboarding. Neither of us could do any tricks, but we liked riding quickly down the street, or in parking garages. We knew all the covered garages in our neighborhood, and which ones tended to be empty at midday. We'd take our skateboards there on school holidays and spend hours skating in circles, shooting soundlessly along on the smooth-finished cement, kicking every so often, but mostly just enjoying the wind in our hair, and the silence.

We also started going for walks at night. Brandon claimed to sleep better than I did, but when I went and knocked on his window at eleven o'clock or midnight, he was always ready to spend a few hours walking around the neighborhood, talking about girls or movies or whatever.

It took me a while to get used to Brandon's version of friendship. My D&D group back in Ballard had hopelessly skewed my perceptions when it came to the difference between friendly teasing and outright abuse. Even with Eddie, who I thought of as my one true friend, we tended to communicate by mocking each other, pushing, and shoving. Brandon had no patience for any of it. Our first few months hanging out I repeatedly pushed him too far only to have him stop whatever we were doing, tell me I was being an asshole, and go home. Up to that point in my life, I'd really never seen anything like it. But I was intrigued by what it implied.

At school, Brandon had his own friends and his own social life. But it almost never came home with him. The kids he hung out with at Garfield were just kids he bantered with, kids he took classes with. Freshman year, and most of sophomore year, those kids didn't even know his phone number. He had some friends from his old neighborhood who he introduced me to: rich kids in big houses who went to private schools. They were too far away to be regular hanging-out friends. Day-to-day, around the neighborhood, it was usually just him and me.

We spent a lot of time talking about school, and the social dynamics there. We talked about clothes, and our body types, and how we could dress to look cooler. We talked about our haircuts. My missing tooth, and how it probably meant I'd never get a girlfriend—as if that was the only thing holding me back. We almost never talked about Brandon's dad and how he seemed to be in the process of going nuts, or Ethan and how he seemed to be following their father down the rabbit hole. Or my dad.

We pretty much never talked about my dad.

 

56

The summer I turned fourteen, Kris moved north to Seattle with her five-year-old daughter, Lizzie. Jimmy stayed in Arizona. Things hadn't gone well for them down there. Kris said it was because they got married: no better way to fuck up a perfectly good relationship than to get married, she said. Then the two of them had Lizzie together. That might have been stressful, too. But I thought it probably had more to do with Jimmy's drug habit. He worked as a miner, and like many people who work sixteen-hour shifts in jobs where a moment's inattention can result in the violent amputation of an arm or a leg, Jimmy mainlined a shitload of speed. Nobody really blamed him for it until one of his drug buddies molested Lizzie when she was three. After that he was persona non grata for a while. Kris divorced him and moved out on her own. When Dad told Kris that the apartment under ours was coming up for rent, she came to Seattle and moved in downstairs.

Having Lizzie around was weird. The only way I knew how to interact with little kids was to roughhouse with them, so after she and her mom moved to Seattle I spent a lot of time chasing her with a squirt bottle or smacking her around with a pillow. I usually didn't go after her—she'd come to me for this abuse, which I thought meant we were just playing around. I knew my compulsion to bounce her off a wall every ten minutes—and her compulsion to come looking for it—probably came from some more deep-seated issues, but I didn't have a lot of extra mental capacity for productive introspection. I managed to avoid injuring her, and she learned how to pick the lock on a pair of handcuffs.

*   *   *

Not long after Kris and Lizzie arrived in Seattle, I was talking to Kris and made some offhand comment about how my dad never hit me. Kris stared at me like I'd just grown another head.

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“About what?”

“That your dad never hit you.”

“Well, of course he spanked me sometimes.”

She didn't seem to be able to make up her mind how to respond. After a minute she said, “Jason, when you and Mark were in Arizona with us, Jimmy and I got in a huge fight about this. Your dad did more than spank you. We could hear it through the wall, and I was saying we should go in there and cool him down, and Jimmy was saying it was none of our business. It was the same thing in Eugene. You don't remember that?”

“I remember it,” I said. “I just thought—I was making it out to be worse than it really was.”

“How so?”

“Well, it's not like he beat me with a coat hanger.”

This was something my dad used to say when I complained about him hitting me. I didn't even know what it meant, but I repeated it without thinking about it.

“Okay…” Kris said. “I guess that's true, if that's the goalpost. He wasn't beating you with a coat hanger. But he was flipping out, totally losing control, and hitting you in a way that was pretty scary to witnesses. So I don't think you were probably making it out too much worse than it was.”

“Huh,” I said.

“He still do that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Hit you.”

“No,” I said. “I'm too big for it.”

It was mostly true.

“Well,” Kris said. “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.”

“I guess,” I said.

During my many years of being home during the day and watching
Dialing for Dollars
, I'd seen a lot of old movies. One in particular that had always disturbed me was an Ingrid Bergman movie called
Gaslight
, about a woman whose husband tries to drive her crazy. He uses small tricks: He takes a picture down from the wall of their house and says she did it and just doesn't remember. When she hears noises from the attic, he tells her she's imagining it. The whole scheme turns on a simple device—take someone who's socially isolated and dependent and make them doubt the reality of their own senses. I'd even heard it used as a verb: gaslighting.

In the end of the movie, a detective comes into the house and tells the woman he hears the footsteps in the attic. That was all it took. One other person to confirm the truth.

“Hey, Jason,” Kris said.

I looked up at her. I realized I hadn't spoken in a while.

“Don't make a big thing out of it,” she said. “With him. I'm just not sure it's worth it at this point.”

“Sure,” I said. “I won't make a thing out of it.”

 

57

Around the middle of my sophomore year I realized I was sort of falling in love with my high school. It started as a physical thing. The building was full of little pieces of other people's lives. The seats and soundproofing in our auditorium were all from the late fifties, but the stage was part of the original building, and the walls in the backstage were covered with graffiti. Not the wild styles that had been popular since hip-hop; mostly it was just the names and graduation dates of students, going back to the thirties. JB, class of 1940. Class of '52. Class of '63. Kids who had fought in Europe. Kids who had gone off to march on Washington with Martin Luther King Jr., and kids who had joined the Black Panthers. Japanese kids, who'd been shipped off to concentration camps in California and Idaho. Kids who had seen and done everything I'd learned about in history class, or seen in movies. Kids who had grandkids now. Kids who ran businesses or invented new medicine; who had changed the world. Kids whose bodies were buried in some field in France, or in a rice paddy in Southeast Asia.

The more I looked at the school, the more there was to see. Coal chutes and loading bays. The old greenhouse, where the botany classes did experiments with avocado plants. A giant clock in the office, full of gears and switches, that used to control the bell system for the entire school. We had a new gym down the block, next to the swimming pool, where all the regular physical education classes happened. It was a gigantic building with four full-size basketball courts and a weight room. But there was another gym in the middle of the main building that nobody used anymore—two rooms, each a quarter of the size of the new building, with thick maple floors, forty-foot ceilings, and peaked skylights. One of the rooms had a cork-floored jogging track on a mezzanine that could only be reached through a narrow spiral staircase.

The school had its problems. Building maintenance was massively underfunded, so finding a working bathroom could be a challenge. The textbooks were trashed; there were only one or two computers in the whole school. The landscaping and shrubbery were crawling with rats, and there were crack houses across the street on three sides. But none of that mattered to me. The classrooms were always warm, nobody ever told me to leave, and pretty much everyone ignored me. I could shower after swimming class. I got more sleep in school than I did at home. I'd never felt so safe in my life. I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up. I wanted to go back to Garfield after college. I wanted to spend the rest of my life there.

Even I recognized that the school had won my heart by just not caring enough about me to reject me. But, from my perspective, Garfield was also the first place I'd ever spent a significant amount of time where none of the adults called me stupid, hit me, or tried to cop a feel, and where none of the kids went out of their way to hurt me or make fun of me. I got into a couple of fights at Garfield, and had a couple of long-term hassles with people, but all those situations, without exception, were my fault. I could retrace every one of them to the exact moment when I broke the rules and started the problem for myself. And if I was willing to let the conflict go, it always disappeared in the rearview.

That was my definition of the Promised Land: the only bad things that happened to me at Garfield were bad things I caused. Hallelujah, and praise mandatory busing.

*   *   *

While I was developing a passionate relationship with my school, I was also learning to develop shallow relationships with my classmates. I regarded this as a significant improvement in my social skills. Up to that point in my life, I was so desperate for friends I tended to latch on to anyone who spoke to me, like a drowning person clinging to a piece of driftwood. At Garfield, I finally learned the art of forming satisfying nonfriendships with other kids in a bunch of my classes.

One of my long-term nonfriendships was with a girl in my German class named Marti. She had short brown and blond hair, a pixie's face, sapphire-blue eyes, and a mischievous smile. Her high, breathy voice reminded me of Marilyn Monroe. If she hadn't had kind of spotty skin and a slight mustache issue, she probably would have been a cheerleader—but her loss was my gain; if she'd been more popular she probably wouldn't have talked to me.

We chatted at the beginning and end of class. Sometimes we passed notes about something funny the teacher said, or another student. She said hi when I passed her in the hall. When I missed school she asked me where I'd been.

It was nice. I felt like I was a regular person for a change. I knew better, but I enjoyed the experience anyway.

*   *   *

Brandon's version of Garfield was better than mine in a lot of ways. He had more friends, got better grades, and just generally did better in school than I did. He hated it anyway. He hated the way all the girls he knew kept him in the friend zone; he hated the way the bigger kids bullied him and the cooler kids ignored him. It was hard not to take it personally—not just that he didn't seem to love the school the same way I did, but that he seemed to feel like his life, which was better than mine in every measurable way, was just a long string of unbearable indignities.

One day early in our sophomore year, he wasn't on the bus going home. He'd been there that morning, but he never showed up for the afternoon bus. When I went by his house to see where he'd disappeared to, his dad told me he'd come home early.

“Was he sick or something?” I asked.

“No,” his dad said. “He got in a fight. Came straight home after. He's been downstairs in his room ever since.”

“Can I check on him?”

“Sure.”

I went downstairs, but it was quiet down there. I found Brandon sitting on his bed in the dark, wrapped up in a blanket.

“Hey,” I said, stepping carefully into the sea of junk on his bedroom floor. “Your dad said you got in a fight. You okay?”