Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (16 page)

And then there was Dede.

When our television broke I moped around the apartment, complaining of boredom. Dad decided to sign me up with the nonprofit Big Brother Big Sisters of America, which paired motherless and fatherless children with childless adults. On the application form I put down that I liked music and animals. I was soon put in touch with Dede Donovan, a law professor in her late thirties from La Jolla, California, who liked Cat Stevens and Irish wolfhounds and had yet to marry. But Dede and I only saw each other once a month. She’d pick me up in her Dodge Colt, the backseat covered in dog hair, and take me out for dinner. She was always kind, but we were never very close, certainly not close enough to talk about puberty.

Why couldn’t my father give me that talk? Although he took me out on weekly movie dates—alternating between my Brat Pack picks (
Sixteen Candles
,
Breakfast Club
,
St. Elmo’s Fire
) and his grim art house fare (
The Killing Fields
,
1984
)—and though he was always generous with hugs and encouragement, he had little clue how to raise a teenage girl. He had no idea what I was up against in a private school.

Just as when I was a bullied first-grader, these experiences revealed to me that fundamentally I was on my own, and on my own I was subject to the unpredictable judgment of the social world, where I could be weird without wanting to be, without even being aware that I was being weird. (Fairyland’s untidy corners stuck out from beneath the closet door.) As a result of this realization, I increasingly turned inward. What I found there was anger.

ON A BRIGHT
afternoon in June 1984, my father was readying himself for that year’s Gay Pride parade. I had always loved the energy of Pride but I hadn’t gone in years. The sun was pouring into the dining room through the window behind me and I could tell from the light-footed way Dad moved in and out of the bathroom that he was in a good mood.

I could see him looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, tying a red bandanna around his forehead and then finding a red lipstick to paint his mouth. He came over to me, where I sat eating a bowl of cereal, and sweetly asked, “How do I look?”

I was mortified. I’d just come back from hanging out with my gang of girls, where I so wanted to fit in, so wanted to be cool. Dad did not look cool. He looked like the lead singer of the rock band Loverboy, but with red lipstick. Emboldened and sassy, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

“You look
so
queer, Dad.”

I said it the way I heard classmates say it, meaning lame, stupid, weird, embarrassing. As a teenager, I believed it was my right, my duty even, to be honest about everything. Not only did I point out that the emperor was wearing no clothes, I had to describe what was wrong with the emperor’s naked body.

Just as the word “queer” left my lips, Dad’s whole face changed. His hopeful smile gone, his eyes hardened with reproach.

“You can’t say that.”

He now appeared so hurt and serious that all I could do was look at him. I don’t remember him slapping me. But it felt like he did. My face suddenly flushed, and I stared at the floor.

“You can’t use that word,” he repeated.

I didn’t say “sorry.” I didn’t say anything. I simply stared at the floor until Dad walked out of the apartment, leaving me alone with my confused guilt.

As a small child I had no problem accepting Dad, in all his beautiful queerness. Whether in pants or a dress, he was still my daddy, the one who stirred my oatmeal with milk and honey, the one who pushed me on swings in the park each time I yelled “Again!,” the one whose lap quaked whenever he laughed his enormous up-and-down laugh.

But as I got older and became attuned to the world around me, I craved, more than anything, acceptance. His queerness became my weakness, my Achilles’ heel. Not only might it open me up to possible ridicule and rejection, it was something I could not contain. Fine, I thought, if Dad was gay, he was gay! But did he have to
look
so gay? And in
public
?

At least I had some degree of control over my own oddity, but here was Dad, out there, doing anything he pleased, saying whatever he wanted, dressing however he wanted, dating whomever he wanted. Including Charlie.

13.

O
NE AFTERNOON
in 1984, I came home from school, set my backpack down on our large wooden spool table, and called for Dad. Hearing no response, I scanned the cluttered surface of the table and found a note:

Alysia –

I’ll be home at 8pm. Here’s $5 for dinner.

Please take your drawing things out of my room.

Love,

Your Pa

With hours to myself, I walked into Dad’s room, located his large orange marble ashtray and a folded cardboard matchbook, and placed these together on the hardwood floor. Then, walking around the apartment, I set about claiming items of trash: hair from a hairbrush, magazine, newspaper, rubber eraser, and a straw that had been cut in two.

Sitting with my legs tucked under my knees on Dad’s oriental rug, I bent over the large ashtray with my piles of things and matches. Inside the hollow palm of cut marble, I set the lit match to different items to compare how each burned. The hair pulled from the hairbrush burned the fastest. With a sizzle and a pungent burst of smoke, it evaporated as soon as it touched the match flame. A ripped piece of newspaper burned faster than a piece of magazine cover, which I determined must be a result of the heavy stock and shiny color surface. The rubber eraser hardly burned at all but browned at the tip, emitting a fabulously strong scent. But it was the half straws that were the most fun to watch. The sides of the straw melted down and, when cooled, hardened into new plastic shapes. The few times I pulled out the orange marble ashtray I sought out these half straws, which for some reason were scattered about the apartment.

It wasn’t until months later that I figured out why there were so many half straws around the house, and later still before I learned the role Charlie played in any of it.

Dad met Charlie at Finella’s, a massage parlor and sauna that used to be next door to the Café Flore in the Castro. Charlie worked the desk. Tall and skinny, with a heart-shaped face and scraggly layers of dirty-blond hair, Charlie was typical of the guys Dad attracted. My father had an appetite for lost-sheep types—semi-employed young men who’d as easily steal our hair dryer as say hello, and often did. The previous summer, while I was at my grandparents, a nineteen-year-old Dad met lived in my room. In exchange for room and board, he did dishes and cleaned house. Only after he’d left did Dad discover he’d pinched the $200 we’d been saving for our trip to Europe.

My father often lamented his taste in boyfriends, wishing he could have a relationship with a more appropriate peer, but this rarely happened. “I think it’s a character defect,” he wrote in his journal. “I’ve only been attracted to those younger and less powerful than I . . . Is it because inside I feel weak, lost, helpless?”

I can imagine now why Dad might have liked Charlie. He was playful, open-minded, and quick to laugh. And aside from his $1,000-a-month coke habit, he was into healthy living. He rode his bicycle up and down the hills of San Francisco no matter the weather. He took gardening classes, enjoyed knitting, and was a strict vegetarian.

But I couldn’t stand Charlie. It wasn’t the drug use—which Dad kept hidden from me until he stopped using. It wasn’t that Charlie was unkind to me. What I couldn’t stand is that he
was
kind to me. Just as he refused to ever cross a picket line, he tended to sympathize with me, the “oppressed” teenager, in any of my arguments with Dad. One evening when the three of us were watching
Dynasty
in Dad’s room, which doubled as our living room, Dad wanted me to leave so he could be alone with Charlie. When, after I’d been asked to leave several times, I defiantly refused to budge, and Dad said I was acting like a bitch, it was Charlie who left the apartment in protest.

I didn’t want Charlie siding with me. I didn’t even like to be in the same room with him if I could avoid it. With his dingy jeans and chenille scarves stinking of patchouli, he looked like the kids who bummed for change on the corner. I quickly and definitively branded him a loser. I certainly didn’t think Charlie worthy of my father’s attention, especially when it was redirected from more worthy concerns, namely me. And I felt free to share my distaste with Dad, hewing to my policy of total honesty, which prompted many fights.

But as I think it about it now, I suppose I should give Charlie some credit because if it weren’t for him, Dad might never have gotten sober.

ANOTHER FALL AFTERNOON
home from school, another note on the table:

Alysia –

Meet me at Charlie’s: 1236 Cole, Apartment 4G.

We’ll go to dinner from there.

Love,

Dad

It was my first time going to Charlie’s place, an apartment in the neighborhood he shared with two other guys. I rang 4G and was buzzed upstairs. As I climbed the four flights of stairs, I noted the red, navy, and gold paisley carpet, which from its psychedelic pattern and dank, musty smell I concluded dated from the high hippie days. As I approached the fourth floor, I considered how to greet Dad. In my mind I kept repeating, “The carpet leaves much to be desired,” imagining how amused Dad would be by my witty phrasing. Chin high, I repeated the phrase over and over in my head, accenting different words for effect: “The
carpet
leaves much to be desired. The carpet
leaves
. . .” each time more convinced of my precociousness. Finally, I arrived at 4G, knocked, was let in by Charlie, then dramatically announced to everyone within earshot: “The carpet leaves
much
to be desired!”

Charlie’s face fell.

“Steve, your daughter’s here.”

I turned to Dad, who was staring at me, eyes flashing. He quickly apologized to Charlie then led me into the hallway with a firm grip on my arm.

“Charlie just spent the entire afternoon vacuuming the hallways,” Dad said. “Where do you get off coming in like some princess bitching about the carpet?”

Blindsided by my father’s anger, I said nothing. Didn’t he celebrate this sort of bitchiness in
Dynasty
? Surely he must at least appreciate my turn of phrase.

“I was just trying to be funny.”

“Well, it wasn’t funny. You always have to act like such a jerk around Charlie,” my father continued, “when you
know
how important he is to me.”

But I didn’t know how important Charlie was to my dad. How could I? It would be years before I would see my dad as anything more than the source of devoted love, attention, and money that I felt was my due. I used to think that because my mom had died, Dad was obliged to make up for her absence, to offer me twice as much love, twice as much support as he normally would. This made perfect sense to me. Charlie did not.

But here was Dad asking me to consider him an independent person, an adult seeking the solace of a romantic relationship. It wasn’t until well after my father died and I studied his journals that I realized what Charlie meant to my dad. That Charlie made him happy. “I like to be w/ Charlie just because I enjoy it. No reason or analysis. Why does one enjoy flowers, for instance?” But who wants to think of their parent’s sexual and romantic needs? At thirteen and fourteen, I still clung to the idea of my dad’s unrelenting love for my mother, whose death broke his heart so irrevocably that he
turned
gay. I suspected, even then, that this was a shaky story—but as a very convenient story, it wasn’t easily abandoned.

Sometime after the carpet fiasco, Charlie started spending more time with a neighborhood coke dealer. My father was convinced Charlie was seeing him for access to free coke. In the two years of dating my dad, on and off, Charlie was never monogamous, no matter how much Dad wanted them to be. He recalled their disputes in his journals. “I don’t know if I can take this lovership stuff,” Charlie told him one night. Charlie accused Dad of being “too attached,” adding that he’d never been with anyone who loved so much “like a woman.”

My father tried to date other people, but this opened him up to a different set of risks. “Maybe I’ve not overcome my emotional dependency at all but merely spread it around more,” Dad wrote in his journal. “A lot of sex would be okay except for the dangers of AIDS.”

He felt too attached to Charlie to quit their relationship, yet it continued to hurt him. Sometimes Charlie failed to show up for dates or showed up late, his pupils dilated, clearly high. Though Dad enjoyed smoking pot and sometimes dropping acid with Charlie, he tried to curb his coke habit, which he felt was taking a toll on Charlie’s health. “Is there any way I can stop you from doing coke besides getting you busted by the cops?” he pleaded. But Charlie argued that cocaine was “no more harmful than eating sugar,” adding that he could do more, without a toxic reaction, because he was a vegetarian.

In love with Charlie but increasingly jealous and helpless to control Charlie’s comings and goings, Dad became obsessed, filling pages of his journals with unsent letters and fantasies about how he could get back at him. Dad considered puncturing Charlie’s bike tires, or putting superglue in his bike lock. Deciding these were too risky because he might get caught in the act, he settled on another plan. With a felt-tip pen and a stack of white stickers my father wrote out, “Hi. I’m cute, blonde and will have sex for a half-gram of coke. Call Charlie at this number.” Dad then posted the stickers in the bathroom stalls of cafés and bars all over town.

Most of the stickers were torn down the first week, with only a couple remaining at Café Flore. At first Charlie didn’t know who was behind the stunt and complained to Dad about the “character assassination.” But then one morning, after sex, Dad confessed. “Charlie’s eyes widened,” he wrote in his journal. “He pushed me away, reached for his clothes & started dressing. He was hurt, angry, but more perplexed by it all. I don’t know why I told him.”

Needless to say, Charlie wanted nothing more to do with my father after that. Frustrated and despairing, Dad started fantasizing about getting a gun and killing Charlie. When he confided these fantasies to a friend over the phone, the friend recommended Dad admit himself to Narcotics Anonymous, which he did that very night.

I didn’t know then the extent of what went on with Charlie. Even now, almost thirty years after the fact, it’s painful for me to see my dad so out of control, acting quite this crazy. And there’s part of me that wants to hide these details, to keep them squirreled away inside the pages of the private journals where they belong. To protect Dad from Dad. But would I feel this way if he weren’t my father? If he weren’t my father, I’d just focus on the story. This is what happened, and maybe this behavior’s not so unusual for drug addicted gay men in 1980s San Francisco. But he’s not just anyone. He’s my dad. And even if he’s not walking around out there, I’m still afraid of how his actions and choices will reflect on him. Does this behavior confirm the worst stereotypes about gay men: promiscuous, morally compromised? And then, I’m afraid of how his behavior might reflect on me. The sins of the father.

I didn’t know about the dramas with Charlie while they were going on. I never even noticed Dad’s drug use (which included coke, speed, and LSD) until it ended. He was always in and out of the house at odd hours. He was always a little preoccupied, though usually with work. Only now, newly sober, did he start to get into
my
business and play the asshole in earnest. Just as he used to lecture me about the evils of excessive television, he now made me read articles on how “addiction runs in the family.” If I showed any impatience for some deferred treat—new clothes, a movie, TV—it was evidence of my need for “immediate gratification,” more proof of my “addictive personality.” Suddenly he noticed I wasn’t doing my household chores, though the house wasn’t any messier than it had been before he quit.

“If you’re going to act like this,” I told him, “I wish you’d get back on drugs.”

My father even coerced me into joining him at one of the twelve-step meetings he attended four nights a week at “Our Lady of Safeway,” as he called the church on Market Street across from the supermarket.

I sat next to him in the circle of facing chairs, while everyone sipped on Styrofoam cups of coffee. But I could barely suppress my laughter as the addicts went around the room, introducing themselves in turn: “Hi, my name is Dan and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict,” followed by a deafening chorus: “HI DAN!!!”

It all seemed so pathetic and ridiculous. What losers, I thought. Then assorted members of the group would stand up from their rickety metal folding chairs and share a sob story about their addiction, about when they knew they’d “hit bottom.” And each of these stories would be punctuated by someone else in the group calling out one of NA’s many slogans:

“Let go. And let God!”

“It works if you work it!”

“Take it one day at a time!”

“Turn it over!”

Each platitude seemed more insipid and cringeworthy than the one that came before. But instead of anyone involuntarily rolling their eyes, as I did, the room all enthusiastically nodded or
mm-hmm’
ed in agreement. What kind of cult is this? I thought. The meeting ended with everyone in the group clasping hands and collectively putting their faith in a higher power.

It was almost too much for a teenager to bear.

WHILE DAD
was concerning himself with getting sober, I was concerning myself with getting money. At fourteen and fifteen years old, everything I wanted cost money. I knew that cash was cold, hard, and in high demand.
Newsweek
declared 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie.” Even the shops on Haight Street sold cheeky t-shirts that asked: “Nuclear war? What about my career?”

Dad talked about money all the time too. From the other room I could hear him yelling. He yelled when he knocked out another filling from his mouth. “That’s seven hundred bucks!” He yelled about the phone bill. “Fifty-five dollars!” He yelled when I lost the five dollars he gave me for my Muni Fast Pass. “I was depressed that day,” I said, pleading mercy. He yelled when I knocked the TV off the milk crate in a rush to get the phone and he cursed as we watched the broken knob roll across the floor and behind his bookshelf. Dad couldn’t afford to fix or replace the TV, so we started changing the channel with a pair of pliers, which always seemed to go missing.