The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets (9 page)

Seen through another lens, the image of a little girl, craning her neck and spilling her hair toward her father’s meager garden a few feet below, declaring that she misses her best friend, a little boy from down the street she’s grown up with, is sweet. People like to be reminded of the child’s pure compassion. It’s this fierce, often pathetic mourning of love so innocent, which for good reason cannot exist in adulthood, that drives people to buy those posters of two six-year-olds pursing their lips on a beach about to kiss, or sharing the sound of the ocean coming from a seashell.

S
hortly before his tenth birthday, James broke his hand on the oak tree that devastated the sidewalk outside my house. I stood with my legs planted firmly, hands slicing the air decisively, instructing him on how to throw a perfect punch at the bare bark. James’s mother couldn’t believe her son had been convinced, as my right hand had been wrapped in pink plaster for two weeks at that point. My father had been my instructor, had duct-taped a throw pillow to the tree, not thinking any ten-and-a-half-year-old’s first attempt would make any serious contact.

I’d been physically pained but enthralled with my newfound power. I fell asleep in my new cast, fingering the ER bracelet, while my father cried down the hallway and thought of what he might say to my mother, to the woman who had birthed such a good punch. He thought he might apologize for his stupidity. He thought, or knew, that she would find it all hilarious. She’d call him an idiot and go to fix two more drinks, but the fifth would be gone, so she’d
walk to the corner store and take so long returning that he’d begin to worry, but she would just be making small talk with the quiet-smiling Korean couple who owned the convenience store down the street. She would come back with a noisy paper bag and some little joke present for him: Jesus-scented incense, extra-large condoms in ludicrous gold wrappers. Then they would fuck in their immaculately white bedroom until the sun peeked in the curtains, her mouth open and smiling the whole time. When it was over, she’d tell him oh honey, oh lamb, this life.

But sex with the dead is always unsatisfying, and even after his forcedly enthusiastic efforts in masturbation, even when he tried to think of the elegantly weary and olive-skinned mother of the brothers down the street, his testicles were left as aching and sad as the rest of him.

O
ur teenage years are just as engraved as the rest in my memory, but they are stories I am hesitant to speak about with anyone who wasn’t present: because they seem boastful, fantastic, no doubt exaggerated; because in telling them we seem to lose credibility as the responsible adults we tell ourselves and the world that we are now.

The river, which we sometimes named as the catalyst for all of it, wasn’t really a river. It was as an estuary, which is a fancy name for slough; it was referred to as a creek until 1959, when the town rallied for some national official or another to give it license as a river. Our parents were fine with calling it that, despite nothing about it being fresh or hurried, and just as accepting of what it spawned: walking bridges dotted with tiny lights, waterside restaurants that didn’t charge for the newspaper and where people spent whole mornings sitting, antique store after antique store.

Separating the cafés where they sat with us on their knees, adjusting their sunglasses as we squirmed, was the
corpse of a railroad that hadn’t run since the town reigned as the egg capital of the world and every family had at least three chickens. Once we were old enough to walk, we tiptoed the steel lines in proud demonstration of newfound balance and secretly, gleefully hoped a train might still be coming. The rails are fenced off now, the wood more decomposed than not, and any drunk from one of the many nearby bars who is foolish enough to adventure onto them will most likely punch a foot through the sweet rot and fall fifteen feet into the filthy, barely moving water.

It’s just one murky winding euphemism, really. Everyone who lives there calls it the river as if in the summer there are lemonade stands, beach towels, the smell of sunscreen, lobster-colored children, young mothers leafing through magazines. The wood of the docks decays slowly as the shopping carts sink into the silt and grime beneath the surface, groaning occasionally and remorsefully to the carcasses of fish and forty-ounces.

When the tide was low in early March, it became harder to romanticize. The tourists on the cobblestone promenade above turned their heads and clapped politely for the bland jazz bands. Below them, we remained loyal and observed the secrets revealed among the hills of silt: parking cones whose bright orange urgency had faded, lifeless ducks facedown, tennis shoes whose brands were unrecognizable or forgotten, Grocery Outlet shopping bags. We named our haunts along the river or accepted those that had been passed down: K-Dock, Lundry’s Landing, The Woodbridge, Anus Beach, The Cop Shop.

Some meanings were forgotten; no one knew what the K stood for. Anus beach had once been Anise Beach, for the herb that grew there persistently. As for Bill Lundry, he’d fallen off the Woodbridge onto the putrid sand below; rumor has it that he finished his beer as he lay there half broken, that he would have died were it not for his sky-high blood alcohol concentration. I remember, still, the miniature jellyfish who returned from their travels once a summer for a month, briefly illuminating the river with undulating circles.

Different people like to tell different stories about the river, about the steamboats that held lavish parties during Prohibition or the people who’d occasionally drowned in it. There was a worn redheaded man who sold pot out of his backpack who liked to say that it used to be different: clear and green like a Rolling Rock bottle, and sometimes kids would even swim in there. I was happy to believe it, and believing can feel dangerously close to knowing.

When I got to college and my peers shared their adolescent experiences, I was shocked. They got into movies for half price on Fridays because Alex or John so-and-so worked there; they had their first drinks before or after prom and became too violently ill to really enjoy themselves; their Midwestern social lives were restricted by distance and whether or not a car was available; their curfews were strictly enforced; they’d had at the most two awkward, unfortunate sexual experiences before leaving
home; their parents were bankers or involved in insurance and had done everything they could to provide a normal, safe upbringing.

A normal, safe upbringing was what our parents had (at least told themselves they) wanted for us, but the place we were raised seemed, the more we looked, to lend itself in every way to an experience that was anything but.

Among ourselves we’ve tried, cautiously, to dissect it. The pedestrian nature of the town certainly had something to do with it: everything could be walked to (though even the few spots that seemed unfeasibly far, we still ventured to), and the centrality made it such that it was easy to feign a respectable bedtime for a school night and slip out a window an hour later. Rarely did we associate indoors; our town was overflowing with unenclosed physical spaces just hidden enough and begging to be occupied.

Below the steel bridge that bisected the town into east and west was a three-by-ten-foot grated platform reached by ladder, and as long as our descent was discreet, no one would suspect that beneath the passing of cars was a group of laughing teenagers dangling their legs, feeling the rumbling, passing a bottle of cheap whiskey in the dark. The roofs of the old buildings could be reached by climbing pipes and fire escapes, and once atop one, other rooftop landscapes were easily accessible. An old Victorian that had been converted to an office boasted an unfenced backyard thick with sound-muffling redwoods and a wooden back porch to sit on; an alley on either side offered a high probability of escape in the case of police.

The roof of the old mill (which housed hair salons, a gym, clothing stores for middle aged woman that sold shapeless hemp dresses and wooden jewelry, and a wine bar that always seemed to be hiring) was a triumphant discovery: a series of intricate angles and slopes that provided secrecy and a clear view of both the river and downtown. I shared it only with Jackson, and it was there that finally we touched each other for the first time since the fall I was seven. (Later, as revenge for breaking his heart the first of a few times, he brought a whole host of people up there. They were too loud, the cops were called, and for insurance reasons they were carried down one by one in a cherry picker. My father happened to drive by and witness Jackson’s abashed descent and declared it one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.)

They are fenced off now, only available to yacht owners who know the keypad’s code, but the docks then felt placed there for our purposes alone. We sat on them night after night, physically below the town though feeling above it, laughing and separating from the circle to walk a few feet and pee off the side into the river. When the tide was especially high they wobbled in mimicry of our intoxicated states.

Bizarrely, the post office doors were always open, perhaps for the P.O. Boxers, though we never saw any, and so the post office was ours, too, though the echo of our voices across the marble floor and the tall ceiling was just not as friendly as across the river or the rooftops, and we reserved it for quiet end-of-the-night beers or refuge from the rain.

On visits home I am sometimes dolorous at the sights of these places, or the spaces they used to occupy. The large
railroad trestle we called The Woodbridge was taken down almost five years ago in the name of flood control, though probably the real reason was that it had been confirmed that a dead kid found floating in the river had begun his night drinking there. Barbed-wire fences have sprung up around many of the places we entered and exited freely, and the narrow, thickly leaved sloping alleys named Pepper School and Telephone, which once seemed forgotten, are now brightly lit and trimmed of excess foliage.

It’s not that I’d like to bring a brown bag of off-sale whiskey bought from the Central Club down to the docks and pretend that years haven’t passed. It’s that the lack of evidence makes the years spent distributing our weight in these places seem moot, makes it clear that our coming of age
was
improbable, that it
shouldn’t
have happened.

T
he hiss of my father’s oxygen tank punctuates our phone calls. His having to stop and force air through his lips every twenty seconds makes everything he says important, waited for. It always takes at least three or four rings for him to get to the phone; often he will pick up after I’ve begun leaving a message. He still has an actual answering machine, and I feel grateful in those times he is out to imagine my voice bouncing off the walls of the living room or perking the ears of the cat, who is unbelievably old and drooling at this point.

My father calls me dear heart even when he is frustrated with me. The fact that Jackson still calls him but not me is painful, and I can’t bear to think of my father pressing Play and smiling while my ex-lover tells jokes or anecdotes into the answering machine. The fact that my father still loves him feels like betrayal.