Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (17 page)

At French American I had money for lunch, but not snacks. A skinny fourteen-year-old with a fast metabolism, I was constantly hungry. I’d often ask for bites of my friends’ snacks. I didn’t think it such a big deal until a kid named Xavier noticed and started calling me “A-leech-a.” Since he was among the popular kids, classmates took notice and I stopped.

I didn’t want to ask my father for money because I didn’t want to quarrel. So I started borrowing money from my friends and their mothers, which I then had to pay back. In the mornings, while Dad was asleep, I’d sneak into his bedroom. On the floor I’d find his jeans, scrunched like an accordion, then quietly pull out the smooth leather billfold from the back pocket. I’d open the wallet and slide out a ten, sometimes a twenty. He won’t notice, I thought. And he never did.

I hated the sneaking and lying, but I wanted money to buy clothes and magazines and records and snacks. I found a job babysitting every weekend for a single mother who worked at Daljeet’s, the punk shop next to the IBeam. She and a pair of her jewelry-designing sisters had come out from Philadelphia and lived in a three-bedroom apartment off Polk Street. While I loved her three-year-old son, how he called me his “girlfriend,” and I loved watching her MTV, where I would slog through countless videos by Rod Stewart (please, not “Infatuation” again!) hoping for the one Duran Duran or Billy Idol, my $15-a-night salary didn’t take me far.

So that December, I applied for my first job as a cashier at a local health food store. Sun Country Foods sold fresh-pressed wheatgrass juice for the neighborhood hippies and overpriced gourmet sandwiches for the neighborhood yuppies. The owners of Sun Country required that all their applicants—from manager to cashier—take a lie detector test. I heard the owners had been into EST, a popular 1970s self-assertion cult, as though this might explain their paranoia. But I didn’t question the requirement. I just wanted a job, so I made an appointment and headed over that week after school.

Inside, I met the administrator and handed him my application, neatly printed in ballpoint pen. He led me upstairs, where there were two chairs, a table, and large windows that overlooked the store below.

I sat on the far chair with my back to the windows while this stranger wrapped thick white tape around my index and middle finger and then stretched a band around my waist.

After he set everything up, he sat across from me with a notebook on his lap and asked if I was ready.

“I guess so.”

Following a series of questions confirming my work experience, my name, and my address, he cleared his throat and asked, “Ever been arrested?”

“No.”

“Have you ever stolen anything from a store?”

“No.”

“Have you ever stolen anything from an employer?”

“No.”

“Have you ever smoked marijuana?”

“Yes.”

The administrator jotted something down in his notebook but gave me a gentle look as he did so. Maybe he could detect my nervousness, or maybe he felt strange giving a lie detector test to a teenage girl.

“That’s okay. Lots of people have. Ever done LSD?”

“No.”

“Meta-amphetamine?”

“What?”

“Speed.”

“No.”

“Cocaine?”

I paused. I remembered Dad and those half straws around the house, the curious way they burned and melted into amorphous, unpredictable shapes. And I felt myself getting nervous. The wand started to move back and forth. I watched the administrator’s pencil moving as he noted something in his pad. I thought I’d better say something. He repeated:

“Have you ever taken cocaine? Snorting or shooting.”

“My father does.
Did
. He doesn’t anymore. He’s in NA.”

The administrator looked at me.

“Narcotics Anonymous.”

My breathing was still uneven. The wands were moving again. I heard them scratching on the rolling paper and I could feel my face getting hot, my eyes starting to fill. I’d not talked to anyone about Dad’s drug use. I didn’t know what I felt or even how I was supposed to feel. I was still trying to figure out where Dad’s crimes ended and where my own began.

“That’s okay,” the administrator said reassuringly. “We’re almost done.”

When it was all over, he removed the tape from my finger, the band from my waist, and then he complimented me.

“Most applicants have done a lot more drugs than you.”

And I smiled, feeling pretty good about this.

The next afternoon when I came home from school, Dad was on the phone but handed me a piece of paper. “Sun Country store manager called. Twenty hours a week. $5.25 an hour. Start Saturday?”

TWO DAYS
before Christmas 1984, Dad and I were eating dinner at home when he asked me to attend John Norton’s Christmas night party with him. I refused. The prospect of joining John Norton or any of Dad’s other boring old writer friends for a whole evening filled me with nauseating dread.

“I already have Christmas plans,” I told him. “With Yayne.”

Even though Yayne and I now attended different schools, she still treated me like family. Every Christmas she invited me to spend the day and night, an invitation I always accepted. Yayne had just the sort of rambunctious family I longed for during the holidays. She only had one brother, but her mother was the oldest of six siblings, all living in San Francisco. Each holiday the aunts and uncles and assorted baby cousins with their pom-pom pigtails and animated braids would gather at Yayne’s grandmother’s place, the grown-ups and kids assembling in different rooms. Since Yayne was the oldest cousin she was the de facto sitter, and with me as her helper we ruled the roost, determining what TV to watch, who was in trouble for talking back, and who had to sit where to eat. I loved the food especially—sticky yams, buttered corn bread, rich corn casseroles—and the sense that I was welcome, my presence never questioned. I could just watch TV and disappear.

But my father was insistent. “I want you to come, if only for some of the party. You might even enjoy yourself.”

“I have a free soul,” I shot back. “You can’t force me to go and you can’t force me to enjoy myself.”

We sat in silence at the spool table while I traced the wooden grain of the tabletop with my fingers. Our arguments would often stall like this, the ongoing silence signaling to me that my father had capitulated. He usually didn’t have the energy to face off against my will for very long. I was used to winning arguments. But on this evening I took no satisfaction in my victory.

Hoping to pick up the mood, I asked him to draw me. If he could draw me, I decided, everything would be okay. We would return to our special place. We would be us again.

“I can’t draw you tonight, mouse,” he said. “I’m too tired.”

“Can we go on a walk somewhere then? Somewhere in the neighborhood, or we can take a bus to a café or someplace we’ve never been?”

“I’m too tired.”

“Or maybe we can just sit on the roof together? It’s really nice up there.”

We ended up staying home and talking. Dad told me that he needed me and confessed that because of his “addictive obsessions,” his drug and alcohol abuse, he hadn’t given me that much time or attention. “I’m sorry,” he said.

We made plans for Christmas Eve. We went to Friends for linguine with clam sauce. After dinner we walked home, opened presents, and drank big mugs of hot chocolate with tall peaks of whipped cream.

On Christmas morning, I went to brunch at Dede’s house in Bernal Heights, while Dad attended a Narcotics Anonymous marathon, a full day of meetings which he broke up with John Norton’s Christmas party. I attended some of the party with him, something we agreed on, and even had fun, watching MTV with a friend’s eighth-grade daughter. After the party, we went our separate ways again.

At 3PM Alysia and I left. She to go to Yayne’s and me back to NA Marathon. It was intense – two people spoke about being near suicidal and I got into some deep feelings of my own, which the two suicidal people responded to. I felt emotionally drained after all this.

At 10:30 on Christmas night, my father came home from the marathon to an empty apartment. He called me at Yayne’s.

“I want you to come home.”

“But Yayne invited me to spend the night.”

“I want you home.”

“We’ve already set up sleeping bags in the living room!”

“I said,
come home
. Why do we have to argue about everything?”

When I came home twenty minutes later, I avoided Dad’s eyes and refused to speak to him. After letting myself into the apartment, I marched into his room and turned on the television. Dad complained that I was invading his privacy, and I blew up. Here he had forced me to come home and he wouldn’t even let me watch TV!

“That’s
so
unfair,” I yelled. “You are such a dictator!”

My father’s face turned red. He charged at me, and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Up until now I haven’t given you much spiritual guidance, but it’s time I do. Let’s start with some self-discipline,” he said, still trembling. “You. Have to get over. This need. For immediate. Gratification.”

He then started to detail the drug excess he and my mother were into when I was little, his “drug and booze fuck-ups” since, and what his recovery and NA meetings were about now. I pressed my hands against my ears. I couldn’t stand hearing him talk this way.
This is not what I want to be about,
I thought to myself.
This is not where I want to come from.

Now crying, I backed out of Dad’s room into the dining room. I was shaking my head as I looked at him, blurred through my tears. I wanted to erase everything he said from my memory. Leaning against the dining room closet, I sank down to the hardwood floor. Dad looked scared and confused. He tried to hug me but I wouldn’t let him. I closed my eyes and imagined my mother.

Whenever I felt uncertain about myself as a teenage girl, I’d bring a picture of my mom to mind and meditate on that image. Our life might feel like crap, filled with drug-addict losers, weighed down by loneliness, disappointment, and sometimes squalor, but I knew, at least, that I came from this beautiful, brilliant young woman. The first-chair clarinet. The straight-backed valedictorian. The Smith graduate.

“I want you to draw me,” I said to Dad.

“Draw you? Right now?”

“Yes. I want you to draw me.”

After another moment of silence, he reached into his bookshelf and pulled out his drawing pad and charcoals. He asked me to pose in his room, but I insisted on maintaining my position against the closet door, even though I turned my back to him. I could hear his charcoal pencil scratching lightly against the paper, but I kept on crying, still imagining my mother.

When Dad finished sketching, he called me over so that I could see what he’d drawn. But the version of myself I encountered on his sketch pad wasn’t pretty or interesting or even remotely poetic. I was just an ugly amorphous mass, huddled against a door.

“I hate it.”

I started crying again and Dad looked puzzled and struggled to find something to say. Then I went into my room and climbed up the stairs to my loft bed and, looking out the window, watched the characters of Haight Street until I fell asleep.

IN THE NEW YEAR
Dad refocused his creative work, which had languished during his ordeal with Charlie. He organized a benefit reading, co-sponsored by City Lights and the Art Institute, for poet and Living Theater founder Julian Beck, who was sick with cancer. He did a daylong interview with Allen Ginsberg to be published in
The Advocate
and
Poetry Flash
. Dad had first met Ginsberg at an SDS conference when Ginsberg was traveling cross-country in 1966. Dad, then an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, invited him to read at the university. Ginsberg wrote “Wichita Vortex Sutra” on the way to Dad’s house. For the
Poetry Flash
interview, our neighbor Robert Pruzan took photos of them walking together through the arboretum in Golden Gate Park, both looking distinguished with their beards and glasses.

Dad also redoubled his efforts to stay sober and healthy. He started swimming three days a week at a public pool in inner Richmond. He went to NA meetings four nights a week and he started sitting zazen at a gay-friendly Zen Center on Hartford Street in the Castro. He had learned about the Zendo when profiling its founder, Issan Dorsey, for the
San Francisco Sentinel
.

Over the next few months, Dad started meditating in the Zendo basement several times a week and even picked up a meditation pillow at a stoop sale so he could meditate at home. He initially found it difficult to empty and focus his mind, but with the help of a two-week all-juice diet and the book
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
, he found his way. I also noticed how the practice changed him. When he first quit drugs, my father had been irascible and impossible to be around. Zazen seemed to calm and focus him.

But even with his Buddhism and swimming, his regular meetings, and my increasing independence, Dad questioned whether he had the stamina to be a single father. On top of his persistent loneliness (“I don’t like cruising,” he confided in his journal; “I’m afraid to make eye contact & get scared when I do”) and his fragile state as a recovering drug addict, there was me at my most obnoxious and now, inconveniently, smoking pot every weekend with my friends. On top of this, I failed to support Dad in his sobriety. I refused to attend any other meetings with him and derisively rolled my eyes whenever he discussed them.

In fact, while twelve-step meetings helped Dad clarify what was behind his using—“Tonight’s meeting focused on fear,” he wrote in his journal; “I probably started drinking & doing drugs because I was shy – afraid of being lonely and unloved, too inhibited (unable to be gay & feel okay about it). I’ve clung to Charlie because I’m afraid w/out him I’d have no love – that I’d never find another”—I hated thinking about my dad “in recovery.” The idea of him sitting in a roomful of strangers and introducing himself, “I’m Steve Abbott and I’m an alcoholic and drug addict,” made me sick. Living in our one-bedroom apartment, just the two of us, I felt suffocated by these feelings. His struggles became my struggles, his romantic disappointments my romantic disappointments. I hated it. And Dad wasn’t happy either.