Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (14 page)

The next afternoon I overheard a conversation between Dad, Brautigan, and Jan Kerouac, daughter of Jack, who was also reading at the festival. They were comparing anecdotes about the peculiar poetry that comes so naturally to children. Kerouac described a moment when, as a girl, she mistook the moon for the sun and woke up her mother. “It’s daytime, Momma,” she explained as she started to unravel her mother’s long braids. My dad recalled the time I asked, “Why is the moon following us?” a quote that he worked into one of his poems. Brautigan described a day at the beach with his young daughter. She was playing with a brand-new pail when a big wave came in and carried it out to sea. Distraught, Brautigan ran into the water, frantically splashing around trying to find it. His daughter, watching from the shore, exclaimed coolly, “Forget it Daddy. It’s gone,” as though she were the adult and he the anxious child who needed soothing.

In the years since this trip, I’ve held on to the memory of this conversation like a stone in my pocket, rubbing it between my thumb and forefinger until it’s become flat and smooth. I always longed to be part of my father’s dialogue, the necessary appendage to his writer’s life. This moment, among others, was the fulfillment of my bohemian fantasy.

That evening, I sat and watched my dad read in one of the Melkweg’s dark, smoky galleries. His final selection was “Elegy,” the poem that closed his last book of poetry,
Stretching the Agape Bra
(1980). In it he writes about all the deaths he’s known in life, including the death of my mother:

When I learned my wife’s skull was crushed by a truck, my head

swam like an hourglass into a TV set. All the channels went crazy.

My dad had never spoken with me in detail about my mom’s car accident, and it felt uncomfortable to hear him sharing something so personal with an audience of foreign-tongued strangers. It was also strange to see the power of my father’s words on this otherwise boisterous crowd. His voice unfurled like a heavy bolt of fabric across the room, hushing conversations and quieting clinking glasses. As he continued, his words filled the room and cleared the smoke until all attention focused on the pale and slender man onstage, until I could hear only his words, words he seemed to speak only to me:

We distance ourselves for protection,

Wear scarves when it’s cold.

What seems most outlandish in our autobiography

Is what really happened.

The last night of the festival, the Lebanese ambassador had all the poets in the festival bussed to his tightly guarded mansion for a cocktail party. The ambassador wrote poetry himself, it seemed, and he wanted to play them a rare recording of Apollinaire on his old gramophone. But none of the assembled writers paid much attention, preferring to smoke and drink on his many plush sofas.

As there were no kids to play with, I brought along my camera to occupy myself. I took a photo of my dad in conversation with several poets, his hands hard at work explaining a complicated thought. I took photos of Brautigan in his vest and blue jeans, sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a couch. He kept getting up to fetch a fresh martini at the open bar, each time asking that his martini be “a little more dry” until, finally, the exasperated bartender simply handed him a bottle of gin. Brautigan laughed when he returned to the poets on the couch, showing off the bottle like a trophy. He again brandished the gin on the bus, knocking back swigs for the duration of our trip back to the town center. All the grown-ups were by then pretty drunk, sitting on each other’s laps, French kissing, and dancing in the aisles despite the driver’s repeated admonishments. I continued taking pictures.

“Hey Alysia!” Brautigan called. “Take a picture of me. I need to sober up.” So I snapped my camera inches from his face, setting off a bright flash of light. The photo would later reveal Brautigan’s face bathed in white, with only the contours of his round glasses and poofy cap visible. He blinked into the distance. “Thanks, darling.”

The highlight of the trip for my dad took place our last morning in Amsterdam, when we shared a private breakfast with William Burroughs at the hotel. I had no idea why Dad was so nervous about meeting this creaky old man in a three-piece suit and hat. Even my dad was a little disappointed, later writing about the meeting, “our talk at breakfast was rather banal (about cats, living in Lawrence, Kansas versus more urban areas, etc.).” But the notorious author of
Naked Lunch
was very interested in hearing about the two years my father had spent studying in a Missouri seminary before grad school, an experience he was in the process of fictionalizing for his novel
Holy Terror
, for which Burroughs would give him a blurb. Dad presented Burroughs with a copy of the third issue of
SOUP
, which he liked.

My favorite moment of the week took place the last night of the festival, when the German punk singer Nina Hagen performed to a packed house at the Melkweg. That week, thousands of Europeans had converged in the capital of West Germany to protest the further deployment of American missiles across western Europe. All this collected anger and energy coalesced on the floor of the Melkweg. From a staff balcony, I watched the scene below: crowds of punks with neon-striped mohawks, wearing metal spikes and ripped clothing and makeup the color of bruises, all pulsing to the rhythm of Nina’s spastic singing. The crowd pushed forward and back, dancing. But this dancing looked like fighting, with writhing bodies slamming together and apart and together again. The visiting poets showed only passing interest in the punks below, but I was mesmerized. The energy! The violence! And I could see it all from my own private balcony.

A year after Dad and I returned to San Francisco, I found a picture of Richard Brautigan in our morning paper. He’d killed himself with a .44 Magnum in his home in Bolinas, California. No one knew the exact date of his death. His decomposed body was found on the floor in front of a large window overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Next to him a suicide note read simply, “Messy, isn’t it?”

12.

O
N A DAMP EVENING
in November 1983, a couple of weeks after our return from Europe, I picked up the television from the stacked milk crates in Dad’s room and carried it into our bathroom. I carefully set the TV down on the floor in the corner, plugged it in, and turned the dial to channel 7.

As I undressed and eased myself into the rising bathwater, I watched the opening titles of a made-for-TV movie called
The Day After
. It didn’t seem strange to me to watch television in the tub. Dad was out for the night and I needed a bath, but I didn’t want to miss this “TV event,” which had been advertised for weeks. While running a soapy washcloth over my arms and legs, I followed the life of two Kansas families leading up to, and following, a Soviet-led nuclear strike on the US. After the bomb hit, channel 7 stopped breaking for commercials, and I was quickly drawn into the horror of the drama. A young boy stares at the blast at the moment of impact and is blinded. Homes become scorched rubble. Hundreds of bystanders become vaporized silhouettes. I watched as the blistered survivors slowly died of terminal radiation sickness.

I was unable to get out of the bathtub until the movie ended, long after the water went cold, and I sat shivering in my nakedness. I climbed into my loft bed with pruny fingers, feeling withered and deeply shaken. “What is this world?” I asked myself. I lay in bed until I heard my father come home.

I had a hard time falling asleep that night. Lying in bed, I listened to the skinheads, new to our neighborhood, who gathered at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. They hurled obscenities in shades of anger and grief, and empty tin cans that echoed in the streets.

As I walked to the grocery store that week with Dad, and later alone, I watched them. Wearing lace-up Doc Martens, they roamed in gangs. I was fascinated by their corner dramas and curious uniforms, especially the skinhead girls who’d shaved their heads but left locks of hair softly curling around their ears and foreheads. The skinheads never bothered me, nor did they ask me for change. Mostly I was ignored, but once or twice a skinhead girl smiled in my direction and said, “Hey.” I shyly looked away each time but wondered if she or her friends ever saw me as one of them.

As 1983 moved into 1984, I felt increasingly isolated from the world around me. The
CBS Evening News
, which Dad and I watched most nights over dinner, was filled with diplomatic maneuvering that barely concealed the incomprehensible and too-plain fact that any day the leaders of the world’s two superpowers could kill hundreds of thousands of people with the flick of a switch. President Reagan had deployed troops in Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, and Beirut, where in October, the same night as the Lebanese ambassador’s cocktail party, 229 Marines were killed by a roadside bomb. Down our street, posters in the window of the local pharmacy warned of a “gay cancer.” In addition to the Cold War there was
The Big Chill
. Baby boomers seemed caught in a navel-gazing spiral of shame, trying to reconcile their sixties ideals with their eighties pocketbooks.

That spring, I was running through the dials on my stereo when I discovered a new radio station: KQAK, the Quake. The station played music that sounded like nothing I’d heard before, certainly not like the Def Leppard and Michael Jackson then dominating the FM dial. The Quake played music that celebrated weirdos and loners, music that addressed the darkness of our atomic age with a peppy, synthesized beat. This music spoke of disillusion and fear, what the band Tears for Fears called a mad world. I couldn’t get enough.

Every day after school I’d retreat to my room and switch on the Quake, scribbling down the name of each band the DJ played. The Quake broke local bands (Romeo Void and the Call), but mostly played British bands before their albums were released stateside: Scritti Politti, Depeche Mode, the Cure, Peter Shilling, the Smiths, New Order, Tears for Fears, and Duran Duran. I especially loved these British bands, with their exotic provenance and sexually ambiguous lead singers. The harder I worked to learn about them, the more attached I felt to their music.

At Wauzi and Rough Trade Records, I stared longingly at import albums and twelve-inch singles I couldn’t afford to buy on my allowance. So I set up Dad’s tape recorder, the one he used for his interviews, and, placing it at the foot of one of our tall stereo speakers, captured hour after hour of the Quake, stopping for each commercial and then hitting “record” once the commercial ended. Most of these tapes were muddy, riddled with clicks and distortions. But for me it was audio gold. I loved the tapes, because I could play them whenever I wanted, on my stereo and, after my thirteenth birthday, on a cheap Walkman.

By myself in my room, headphones on, volume up, I spent hours familiarizing myself with Thatcher’s depressed England, made romantic by the Smiths’ angst. Bands like Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears conjured an industrial landscape with synthesizers and electric drums, the sounds of pipes being knocked together. This world sounded like the future, and by listening I felt like I was a part of this future. More importantly, this was a world I was choosing instead of one I was simply inheriting from my father.

At the newsstand, I hunted down imports like the
NME
,
Melody Maker
, and
Smash Hits!,
skimming the pages for any news of my beloveds, delighting in the discovery of their faces, their hair, their habits. I couldn’t afford to buy the magazines so I hungrily absorbed every detail I could, furiously flipping pages until the shopkeeper kicked me out.

New Wave, as it was called, was a world where cool boys wore eyeliner and cool girls wore men’s clothes. At thirteen, I was still skinny, flat, and late to bleed. Here was an androgynous aesthetic I could embrace with stylish ease.

I cut my hair boy short with a peekaboo curtain hanging over one eye, and I started to borrow liberally from Dad’s closet. I donned his old button-down shirts and a pair of his Levi’s, the man’s waist fastened with a large paper clip, the knees ripped, the thighs decorated with my in-class doodles. I wore a single silver bat earring dangling on a chain from my left ear, a pair of cuffed leather Beatle boots, and a lapel pin I picked up on Haight Street: “Punk Preppy.” The centerpiece of my uniform was Dad’s 1940s gray fedora, which I kept firmly planted on my head, removing it only to shower or sleep.

BY MY THIRTEENTH YEAR
I had outgrown most of my preteen friends. I saw less of Yayne, who’d left French American, transferring into a public school. Kathy Moe was getting into a heavy metal scene, favoring thick foundation and spraying her feathered hair into stiff armor. She started hanging out with the WPODs (White Punks on Dope), a Derby-wearing gang that ruled the Sunset district and had a taste for LSD that I didn’t share. My other girlfriends, who’d been so good to me at eleven and twelve, hosting me for sleepovers and pancakes, now just seemed too good, with their ribbon-threaded barrettes and Miss Piggy wall calendars.

I gravitated toward a new set of girls at French American who, like me, loved David Bowie, the Cure, and Duran Duran. Each girl was a child of divorce and each possessed an edgy humor and sense of style. Niki routinely gave one of us the DF (Dumb Fuck) award each day for stupid behavior. Andrea wore a permanent scowl, her preppy V-neck sweaters turned backward, her eyes rimmed in black.

At lunch, the five of us would meet in the back stairs of the parking lot behind French American, and after school, we’d ride the Haight Street bus to my place. Where I’d once been ashamed of bringing friends to my apartment, I now knew it was something cool I could share. If the weather was warm enough, we’d situate ourselves on the thick ledge of balcony overlooking Ashbury Street and Anne-Marie and Andrea would smoke Marlboro Lights pilfered from their moms’ purses or single Export-A’s bought at Pipe Dreams around the corner. Long-legged Anne-Marie, the oldest and most experienced among us, would twist the rings on her fingers and sweetly giggle as she told us about the latest with her boyfriend, while Camille, her blond bob wrapped in a long white scarf, coolly looked on.

Sometimes Dad would be home, scratching away in his spiral notebook, but most often he was out. Either way, I was very protective of his space, not allowing anyone into his room, which I closed off behind a trifold screen. I didn’t do this so much out of respect for his privacy as for my own. I still thought I could cordon off all that I couldn’t control. I was convinced that his orientation, our “weirdness,” would be revealed in his mess—certainly in his bookshelves, where anthologies with titles like
Man Muse
and
Men on Men
could easily be spotted. Even in my circle of enlightened outsiders, I didn’t feel comfortable “coming out.” Anne-Marie and Niki would later tell me they knew Dad was gay and sometimes talked about it privately. They recognized the Castro papers that littered our table and noted how, when Dad was home with friends, there were only men, never women.

On weekends, the five of us went to eighteen-and-over clubs that advertised themselves in glossy neon four-by-five cards with embossed lettering that we found stacked on the counters in the Haight’s growing array of punk boutiques. A couple of us had fake IDs and the rest were let in by lax doormen. At the IBeam on Haight Street, the Noh Club in Japantown, and the Palladium in North Beach, I danced away my anxiety about my too-slow-changing body and the too-fast-changing world, my anxiety about Dad and all that I didn’t understand.

One Friday I told Dad that I was going to spend the night at Andrea’s house. Andrea told her mom that she was staying at my house, and we both met at the house Camille shared with her sister and divorced mother in Stanyan Heights. At Camille’s, the three of us applied lipstick and electric-blue mascara in the bathroom mirror and then split a cab into North Beach. Inside the Palladium, everyone danced looking at the floor. I coiled my hands into fists and pedaled my arms close to my body, as though my shoulders, arms, hips, and knees were a series of small gears shifting and turning toward and then away from each other, in rhythm to the music.

The music I listened to on the Quake now echoed through the Palladium, filling my ears, the bass beat thumping into my molars. From the ceiling, lights cascaded across the floor, flashing blue–red, blue–red, then switched into black light, making everyone’s teeth and eyes glow neon, revealing white bras and undershirts. This made us smile. We were all electric now, plugged into the same beat, all dancing alone, but still powerfully together. One of my favorite songs of the night, Billy Idol’s “Dancing with Myself,” even celebrated this communal isolation.

Just before 1 a.m., the Palladium finished the night, as they did each week, with the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” The crowd lifted and rolled over the wave of Johnny Marr’s perverse reverberating guitar line, which seemed to cut us into two, three, four, chopping us into bits before Morrissey’s cool voice and smart lyrics put us back together again.

When the music ended, I found Camille and Andrea at the door, and together we pushed through the crowd and stumbled onto Broadway and into the fresh December air. The streets of North Beach were thick with people and it seemed like everyone knew everyone. The same black eyeliner, the same black clothes, the same pale skin and dyed hair. Without saying anything or doing anything, I felt an electrifying sense of belonging. Keeping close, we hurried through the smellier streets, past the flashing “Live Nude Girls” sign at the Lusty Lady. We passed the Big Al sign, his machine gun at the ready. We passed the tall cartoon Carol Doda sign that advertised the Condor Club, her flashing neon nipples looking like hard cherry candies. We peered into doorways where strippers sucked on cigarettes and men tried to lure us inside with rapid-fire lines and overactive eyebrows.

We averted our eyes as we scurried past, staring at our pointed shoes, counting the blocks to the massive house in Pacific Heights where Andrea’s dad lived with his new family. Though Andrea lived with her mom, she figured she could avoid her mom’s curfew by crashing at her dad’s undetected.

Cars honked at us on our walk home, but we ignored them. Someone yelled, “How much?” and I yelled back, “You couldn’t afford me!” And then we all laughed and I flipped them off for good measure.

At Andrea’s, we entered through the back door into her stepbrother Deke’s basement apartment, where we crashed on his couch and floor. When he found us the next morning, sprawled in our smeared makeup and clothes from the night before, he laughed at his little sister’s teen antics. In my zip-up black jacket smelling of cigarettes, I waited for the bus home. Twenty minutes later I arrived at my apartment and was surprised to find Dad sitting upright on his folded futon, looking at me sternly.

“Where were you last night?”

“What do you mean? I was at Andrea’s.”

“I talked to Andrea’s mom last night. You
did not
spend the night there. Where were you?”

“We slept at her dad’s house.”

“Andrea’s mother didn’t know that.
She
didn’t know where you were. And neither did I. Do you know how hard that is for a parent? To not know where your kid is?”

“We were fine, Dad.”

“I’m sure you were. But you have to call. I didn’t know where you were!”

“Sometimes I don’t know where
you
are.”

Dad just stared at me. He knew I was right. What authority did he have to punish me? Freedom to come and go as we each saw fit soon became the unspoken rule of our house. If Dad started keeping me on a curfew, then he couldn’t feel free to wander in and out at all hours of the night either.

“I just want to know you’re okay,” he said. “Did you have fun, at least?”

“Yeah. I did have fun.”

DAD HAD COOL
new friends too. Frustrated by the infighting and lack of professionalism he saw at Cloud House in the late 1970s, Dad started attending writing workshops at Small Press Traffic, a bookstore located in a Victorian townhouse in Noe Valley. There, writer Bob Glück ran several workshops in a tiny parlor next to the kitchen with some money that came from an NEA grant. Dad attended a few of these but became especially close with the members of the gay writers group, including the lanky intellectual Bruce Boone and the Tab-drinking Kevin Killian. Killian would marry writer Dodie Bellamy; the feline pair evolved into San Francisco’s avant-garde “it” couple. Each week the gay writers group would bring in a new piece of writing to discuss—sometimes a work by lesbian poet Judy Grahn, a piece of feminist theory, or an essay by Roland Barthes or Georges Bataille (whom Dad introduced to the group). They then vigorously workshopped one another, always trying to push their writing in new directions. Meeting for years in this cramped Victorian parlor, the writers became very close.