A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me (7 page)

After a while my dad seemed satisfied that he'd saved as much from the house as he could, and walked over to where I was standing. He looked sweaty and annoyed, but not nearly as angry as I would have expected.

“We can't stay here tonight,” he said. “I'll have to find us a place.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I'll need to move our stuff, too,” he said. “We can't just leave it out here on the lawn. It'd be easier if I could leave you with someone. What about those kids you were playing with? Could you stay there for a few hours?”

“I don't know,” I said. “They don't like me that much.”

“What about their parents?”

“I was talking about their parents.”

“Oh,” he said. “Come on. I'll talk to them.”

So I walked down the street to Mickey and Kurty's house in the afternoon twilight, and my dad knocked on their door. When Mr. Wagner answered I got the same feeling of vertigo I usually experienced when Dad talked to straight people. Seeing him standing there in his flamboyant hippie clothes while Mr. Wagner stood in front of him in a Lycra polo shirt and plaid slacks, arms crossed, biceps flexed—it was like matter and antimatter were about to collide. I didn't hear much of the conversation but Mr. Wagner seemed to appreciate that our house had caught on fire, and I went inside while Dad ran off to make arrangements for us and our stuff.

I'd never actually been inside Mickey and Kurty's house before. It seemed not to have enough windows, and the dining room table was directly beyond the front door. The whole family was sitting there looking at me—the kids and Mrs. Wagner.

“Won't you join us?” Mrs. Wagner asked.

“Uh,” I said. Then I looked at the table and felt my pulse quicken. It was covered in pretty much my favorite foods ever: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, broccoli, carrots, and peas. I'd never seen that much fried chicken in one place in my life. Everyone was still staring at me, and I remembered I'd been invited to share this bounty.

“Sure!” I said. I started for the table, but Mrs. Wagner looked horrified and I paused again.

“The bathroom's through here,” Mr. Wagner said, guiding me to a small room off the dining room that had a toilet and a sink in it. I went in, because he seemed to expect me to, but after he closed the door I just stood there until I remembered that Grandma had sometimes told me to wash my hands before eating. So I rinsed my hands quickly under some cold water, toweled them off, and went back out. By then they'd made a place for me at the table.

“This looks great,” I said, sitting down and reaching for the nearby platter of chicken. “You guys eat like this all the time?”

Mickey and Kurty exchanged an embarrassed look. Mr. and Mrs. Wagner were giving each other looks, too, but I couldn't read them. I paused and looked at everyone else's plates. They'd all been eating, so I knew they weren't waiting to say grace—the other weird ritual I'd learned from my grandparents. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, but all that good food was calling to me so I piled on the chicken, served up a heap of mashed potatoes and gravy, and dug in.

“Man,” I said, “this is delicious.”

“I'm glad you like it,” said Mrs. Wagner. Then they all started eating, but with a lot of sidelong glances at me and secret looks between each other.

Finally everyone else was done, and the kids got up to watch TV in the other room. I was basically full so I started to get up, too, but Mr. Wagner shook his head and said, “Uh-uh,” while he was looking at my plate.

“What?” I asked, looking around to see what I was missing.

“You have to clean your plate first,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

I started to scrape the remaining pieces of chicken back onto the chicken plate, but he stopped me again.

“No,” said Mr. Wagner. “You can't put it back. You've touched it. It's been on your plate. You have to eat it.”

And I finally realized what all those looks were about.

“But you all made me wash my hands before dinner,” I said. “They're clean!”

I held out my hands so the Wagners could see how clean they were.

“You've been eating with them since then,” said Mrs. Wagner. “We don't share germs in this house.”

“But…” I couldn't even formulate a reply to that one. In my house we ate each other's leftovers all the time. When our crew went out skinny-dipping in Fall Creek, ten or fifteen of us would eat watermelon and whatever else by passing it around and taking big sloppy bites out of it. We all drank out of the same jugs. Me and my dad even shared bathwater to save money on hot water; he'd take his bath first because he liked his water hot, and I'd take mine after when it was just warm.

I looked at the pile of food on my plate. Looked at Mr. and Mrs. Wagner. I could hear the TV playing in the other room, where Mickey and Kurty had gone. The Wagners looked at me. I looked at them. Then Mr. Wagner went in the other room to watch TV and Mrs. Wagner started cleaning up. And I just sat there while she took everything else off the table except my plate. Sat there while she did dishes in the kitchen. Sat there when she went into the TV room with the rest of her family, until finally, after an hour or so, the doorbell rang. When Mrs. Wagner answered it I heard my dad's voice.

He'd found a place for us to stay. He was there to pick me up.

“He's in here,” Mrs. Wagner said, stepping aside to let Dad see me at the table.

Dad just poked his head through the doorway and said, “C'mon, Jason. I got all our stuff in a storage unit. Got your chicken out at Laurie's, with Miles. We'll crash out at Sean's place for a while.”

I looked at Mrs. Wagner. “Can I be excused now?”

“I suppose,” she said.

I hopped down off the chair and grabbed Dad's hand. He thanked the Wagners for keeping an eye on me and we left out the front door. It was dark outside.

“What the hell was that all about?” Dad wanted to know.

When I told him what had happened, he started cursing the Wagners and said that if they had house rules they should've told me what they were before I got a pile of food on my plate. I thought he was right about that, but I couldn't shake the feeling that most people, most of the time, would agree with what the Wagners had done. Most people would think I needed to be taught a lesson in civilized behavior. And I wondered, not for the last time, what being right gets you if everybody else thinks you're wrong.

 

10

Forensic fire investigation was evidently still in its infancy in 1977, because not only did nobody figure out it was John who'd burned our house down, but somehow the thing was ruled an accident from faulty wiring. This was good news for John, who couldn't afford to pay for the damages, but it didn't mean much to me and my dad. Dad left all our stuff in storage and we couch-surfed with friends for a couple of weeks until he found us a place to live.

We ended up in a comfortable little apartment in downtown Eugene. My father had historically expressed his dislike of apartments—he didn't like sharing walls with strangers—but he said this one reminded him of Los Angeles. Which he apparently thought of as a good thing. After we'd been there less than a month he decided to make me some fried chicken of my own—only once he got the chicken going he realized he was out of rolling papers, so he took me down to the liquor store a few blocks away. By the time we got back, the fire department was there and all our neighbors were out on the street. Dad stood on the sidewalk and looked through the open front door into the blackened, gutted interior. As I stood next to him, I was mostly struck by what a huge difference a few minutes of uncontrolled burning could make in the atmosphere of a charming mid-century modern. Older houses stood up to this kind of thing better, I decided.

One of the firefighters noticed us and said, “Is this your apartment?”

Dad looked at the firefighter, looked back through the open front door, and said, “Nope.”

Then he put his hand on my shoulder and started guiding me down the street toward the Vega. When I started to turn around to look back at the firefighters, Dad squeezed my shoulder. Hard.

“Don't do that,” he said.

It wasn't a huge loss for us. All we had in the apartment was a bunch of junk we'd picked up on the cheap at Goodwill. I felt kind of bad about the other people who lived in the building, but I hadn't known any of them by name and it was an easy thing to put behind me.

*   *   *

After the unfortunate burning-down-the-apartment incident, we moved into a small house on Fillmore Street with a woman named Marcy and her three kids, Crystal, Faith, and Isaac. The house only had two bedrooms and space was tight, but the price was right. Marcy got her own room because it was her house, and Crystal and Faith shared the other bedroom because they were older, and girls. Isaac and I bunked in the laundry room. Dad slept in the unheated storage area behind the garage. Dad and I left most of our stuff in the long-term storage locker at the edge of town since there was no place to put it in Marcy's house.

Pretty much the only member of my family who got a better situation at the new house was Charlie—though he may have considered it a step down from the accommodations he'd enjoyed at Miles and Laurie's place. The way the backyard was set up, Dad was able to string some chicken wire between the garage and the neighbor's fence and create a little safe space for Charlie. Or so we thought. He died a few months after we moved, and while Dad wouldn't let me see the body, I got a glimpse of a mangled mass of white feathers. Dad's theory was that Charlie died of natural causes, and that something—a cat or a raccoon, maybe—ate him afterward. I didn't see any evidence to support that idea, but I was happy to believe the fiction.

 

11

Dad had toned down his drug business considerably after his arrest, but every so often a deal came up that seemed relatively safe and offered a good rate of return and he'd be tempted out of his semiretired status. Not long after we moved in with Marcy, he was offered a chance to make a few hundred dollars delivering a shipment of pot from Eugene to Portland. It fit his criteria of low risk and high profit, so he agreed to make the run and left me in Eugene with Marcy while he headed north. He wasn't heard from again for three days, but when he came home he had a story to tell.

He was supposed to move the shipment in a dozen thirty-five-gallon black garbage bags, full of bud and loose leaves. Dad preferred to transport large quantities of pot in garbage bags; he said that if he got stopped, he could just tell the cops he was taking a bunch of yard clippings to the dump. Even if he did end up getting searched, he could claim someone else had given him the bags and paid him a couple of dollars to get rid of them. It wasn't much of a defense, but it had the advantage of being plausible and easy to remember.

The dozen garbage bags completely filled the hatchback of the Vega, so Dad drove the whole 110 miles north using his side-view mirrors to change lanes. When he got to Portland he had some trouble finding the address where he was supposed to make the drop, but eventually he made his way to a small house on the west side of the city. He parked the Vega on the street and went to the door to make sure he had the right place. When he pressed the doorbell, another young male hippie answered.

“I've got a delivery here,” Dad said.

“From Eugene?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” Dad said. “I—”

But the dealer interrupted him and asked, “Is that your car?”

What happened next is probably owed to the fact that most of Oregon is comparatively flat. Not Midwest-flat, but Eugene and Portland are both in the Willamette River Valley, and most of the development is on the low, level ground near the river. The problem here was that Dad's connection didn't live in the Portland basin. He lived in Portland Heights, an upper-class residential neighborhood on the slopes of the Tualatin Mountains, west of Downtown Portland. The Heights have good schools and great views. And they also have steeper hills than any urban residential neighborhood in the state.

Afterward, Dad always claimed he'd set the parking brake when he got out of the car—that it was broken, and he'd just never noticed because Eugene is so flat. But he also neglected to turn his front wheels toward the curb.

When Dad looked over his shoulder to see what the connection was staring at, the Vega was just beginning to roll. Dad lunged after the car. For a few frantic seconds, as he chased it down the street, his fingers brushed futilely at the driver's side door handle, but gravity had sunk its teeth in by then and the car was accelerating. It inched ahead, then really took off, almost like it wanted to get away from him. By the time it slammed into the galvanized steel utility pole at the bottom of the hill, he figured it was going a good sixty miles an hour.

The pole took the car dead center and sliced halfway through the engine compartment. The entire front of the car just puckered up like a horrified face. The headlights were pointed, more or less, at each other.

Dad stopped and stared, but only for a second. The sound of the impact was still echoing through the hills when he ran back up to his connection's house. The door was closed. Dad pounded frantically until the guy looked out past his security chain.

“Help me get that shit out of the back of the car!” Dad shouted.

“No fucking way,” the connection said. “Get it up here and dump it in my backyard, I'll keep it. But I'm not going down there.”

Dad just turned around and ran. He couldn't blame the dealer. It was exactly what Dad would have done under the circumstances.

Surprisingly, there was still nobody around when Dad got back down to the car. He used his key to pop the hatchback, grabbed four garbage bags, and ran back up the hill. Then down and back, two more times. He threw the last set of bags over the fence and came back down the hill to check on the car. A few of the neighbors came out on the street to see what was happening. Then, just as Dad got to the bottom of the hill, a police car pulled up.