Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father Read online

  My neighbors, including many former hippies, were angry too. I watched them patrol the area in the evenings, wearing neon-colored t-shirts and carrying signs that read: “RAD: Residents Against Druggies.” The countersigns popped up within a week: “DAMN: Druggies Against Mad Neighbors.” Many felt drugs were an integral part of the local culture, but with the harder drugs came crime.

  The homeless kids were sometimes robbed or attacked in the park where they slept. That November there was a shooting off Haight Street, a drug deal gone wrong. Another night an alarm went off in Coffee Tea & Spice, where I’d bought my gummy bears as a girl. When the police arrived they found the front window smashed in. Amongst the shards of glass, a scruffy kid was stuffing his face with candy. Several shop owners hired security guards to walk a section of Haight Street, but that only deepened the neighborhood’s collective malaise.

  The public restroom in the Panhandle became a shooting gallery. The playground where I used to play was littered with empty bottles and hypodermic needles. In the doorway of my apartment building there was a near-constant stench of urine. I couldn’t walk to the grocery store for Dad’s biweekly juice runs without having to weave through the kids or risk walking into car traffic to get around them. I was hit up for change every single time I passed. It was exhausting and depressing.

  “Yuppie,” was hissed at my back, or—and this one really got me going—“How ’bout a smile at least?”

  “I don’t think I can do this much longer,” I announced to my dad one evening after work, perched on the edge of his bed.

  Quietly he listened to me, propped up by a surplus of pillows and lumpy throw cushions. And he smiled. The light from his eyes shined at me serenely, even though his vessel was failing while mine was still young and sturdy.

  “Of course you can. You can do anything you set your mind to.”

  Peacefully, he looked at me. The television blared, yet only I seemed to hear the penetrating noise. It washed over him like a lulling wave.

  Looking away from him, rocking back and forth, I continued with my plan. “I need a limit. A year. I moved here last Christmas, and after this Christmas I want to move out, maybe even move back to New York.”

  He said nothing.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” I repeated. “I’m not ready for this.”

  Then he answered me, his words a slap: “I wasn’t ready to care for you when your mother died. But I did.”

  I had no reply for that.

  WHEN I WAS A GIRL my father never questioned me when I wanted to stay home from school sick. He never felt my forehead or stared suspiciously into my eyes, trying to catch my lie. He answered, “Fine,” whenever I said I wasn’t feeling well, and sent me back to my wooden loft bed. Lying under the covers, I would listen to my father in the kitchen mixing cherry Jell-O, pausing between beats to take a drag on his Carlton Regular. I could hear him slicing the bananas that would float in the Jell-O mold’s shallow waters. This was step one in our sick-day ritual. While the Jell-O was cooling in the fridge, he went out to buy me comic books—Mad magazine and Betty and Veronica—to read in bed. And for lunch he served me Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Noodle Soup with extra pepper, a favorite of both of ours.

  Now that he was sick, I could have phoned the offices at Open Hand and said, “Thanks, but we don’t need you anymore. I’m dedicating myself to my father.” I could have abandoned my nine-to-five job; I could have ignored all the slim-hipped young men that caught my eye; I could have let go of the radio internship that didn’t even pay, the GRE prep course. Few of these lasted anyway. Each romance flamed out. The grad school applications were never mailed.

  But I feared that if I halted my trajectory—the vision of myself as a body in motion—my burgeoning adult self would be completely absorbed by Dad and his needs. And increasingly, his needs frightened me. It wasn’t just that it was unbearably sad to watch my dad lose weight and get weaker. That was bad enough. But I felt so alone in it, so angry that this had become my life. The only way I could keep going was to cultivate a vibrant self of my own, separate from “daughter”—just as my father needed to be someone other than “Daddy” back when he was caring for me after my mom died.

  Growing up, I fantasized about having a bigger family. Now especially I longed for someone to help with the quotidian work of caring for Dad. But on another, equally powerful level, I also relished the intimacy of our one-on-one relationship.

  The meals Dad prepared for the two of us when I was a kid seemed tailor-made for our single-parent, single-child family. He’d buy a single chicken leg for us to share, bake it until the skin was crispy golden yellow and the juice and butter pooled together on the tinfoil lining our pan, then he’d cut the leg in two, keeping the thigh for himself and giving the perfect-sized drumstick to me. For dessert, we’d split a package of Hostess cupcakes, which were sold in packs of two. I developed elaborate methods of eating mine to prolong the experience, holding the cupcake upside down in my cupped palm, eating the spongy cake first, then the white center, finishing with the chocolate frosting and, finally, the hardened white sugar squiggle.

  Having just enough for two and no more for the possibility of a lover, mother, brother, or sister only heightened the romance of our relationship.

  Still, I was not a nurse. That October it became clear that I couldn’t give Dad the care he needed without quitting my job. He couldn’t make his own meals anymore and could barely get from his bed to the bathroom and back. Because of his many years’ involvement with the Hartford Street Zen Center and Maitri Hospice, the administration said they’d have a bed for him when he was ready. He was ready now.

  ON A COLD weekday morning, my father was lying on the futon mattress while I busied myself at the dining room table, stacking San Francisco Chronicles, sorting mail. I’d taken the day off work. My high school friend Camille, back home from UC Santa Cruz, was to pick us up in her mother’s car at noon. Through the heavy curtain separating my father’s room from the dining room, I could hear him clear his throat.

  “I don’t see how we can possibly be ready by noon,” he called.

  “Noon? That’s four hours from now,” I answered. “We have plenty of time.”

  “I sometimes don’t get up until afternoon. It seems rushed to me. I get exhausted just walking to the bathroom.”

  “I’ll do the packing. I’ll do the lifting. You won’t have to worry about anything.” I continued sorting mail. “Just sit there. I’m here for you. You understand that, right? That’s why I was born.”

  “They call it ‘attendant care,’ when all they do is intrude on my life. They poke and prod and say, ‘Now here, have this medicine . . . have that.’”

  “Is that the way they are at the hospice?”

  “That’s the way they are at the hospital,” he said.

  “You’re going to the hospice, not the hospital. You don’t know what they’re going to be like. Do you even know where you are going, Dad?”

  No answer.

  THREE HOURS LATER.“Do you want an egg salad sandwich before we drive to the hospice?” I asked.

  “Half of one,” Dad said.

  “There’s half a chicken sandwich in the fridge, isn’t there?”

  “It’s a chicken sandwich and I don’t want a chicken sandwich,” he answered.

  “It’s pretty hard to make only half a sandwich,” I said, with my hand on the refrigerator door. “Are you sure you don’t want a whole sandwich and save the other half for later if you can’t finish it?”

  “All I want is half an egg sandwich,” he answered, leaning up from his pillow. “I already said that. Do I have to draw a picture?”

  “Do you even appreciate that I took the day off?” I asked him.

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m kind of grumpy today.”

  Though Dad was little, wee in his now shrunken frame, he was still the captain—silently, cleverly in control. He was the rock then. And I was free-floating and wild. He knew well the
power of the powerless, the steel of the rubber spine. He could refuse to eat my meals. And though the hospice provided TVs for all of their residents, he refused to leave home without his own. “I’ll raise such a fuss they won’t take me!” he argued. I pulled a muscle carrying it upstairs to his new room.

  Of course, it’s now obvious why he was so angry that day. People don’t move into hospice to live but to die. And that half an egg sandwich I ended up making him—that sandwich was the last meal he ate in our Haight-Ashbury apartment, our one true home.

  23.

  ON A WEEKDAY evening, the air was cooling quickly as the fog moved down the hills of 18th Street into the Castro Valley. I unlatched the low, wrought-iron gate at the Maitri Hospice and walked through the small garden and into the door of the three-story Victorian building. In the front room, frail, old-looking men watched television, accompanied by plainclothes nurses and volunteers. I motioned to the attendant nurse in the kitchen and said, “I’m here to see my father, Steve Abbott.”

  As I hurried up the stairs, two steps at a time, I could see the blue light of the TV flickering on the floor outside his room. The door was open.

  “Hi,” I announced, walking in.

  He turned to me and grinned widely. For a moment he looked like a giddy little boy. But then, he always was a little boy. His attention made me uncomfortable. He was too sweet, too good.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  Dad’s room was sparsely decorated. A small tin Buddha he’d bought on his trip to Kyoto sat on the bedside table; against it leaned a picture of Issan, the blue-robed abbot of the Zen Center who’d died of AIDS the previous year. Next to the Buddha stood a framed picture of me beside a vintage brown and beige Rolls-Royce convertible on a Paris street. My grandparents took this photo when they visited me during my junior year abroad. At the foot of Dad’s bed was the television I’d lugged from home the day he moved into the hospice. It was almost always on. And next to his bed stood a large rubber tree plant.

  I’d arrived just before dinner. Maitri had nutritionists on staff who prepared vegetarian meals for all its residents: black bean burritos, winter squash stews, and organic vegetable and rice pilafs. Dad had grown to hate these wholesome meals, as he reminded me each visit. He craved the sort of potato chip–crusted casseroles and mayonnaise-drenched tuna fish his mother used to fix for him. It became my job to rescue him. During one Saturday visit, he told me he wanted a chicken salad sandwich, so I found one easily at the corner deli. Another afternoon he asked if I could get him an ice-cream cone. I raced over to Castro Street and bought two cones—rocky road for him, mint chocolate chip for me. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon and the ice cream was melting down the outside of my clenched hands. I considered running but feared if I did the scoops would tumble off the cones and into the street. So I walked back as quickly as I could, looking like one of those ridiculous “fast walkers.” The whole way I licked the chocolate and mint ice cream as they melted down my left and right fists respectively.

  Tonight, I’d stopped by the local sushi restaurant and bought us both miso soup and what we called “safe” sushi—sushi without raw fish, which can be fatal for someone with full-blown AIDS. Dad sipped his miso soup loudly.

  When I was younger, I used to glare at my dad whenever he ate soup or cereal in my presence. The sounds of his eating, the sluicing and guttural gulping as he downed his cereal milk, always grated on my nerves. But as I watched him now, sitting next to me in bed, loudly sipping his miso, I reveled in these sounds. I didn’t want them to stop.

  Aside from Dad’s eating and the scraping of our plastic spoons on the bottoms of the Styrofoam soup bowls, we sat together in silence. Dad told me that he liked visiting with me above anyone else because other people, he explained, “need to be entertained.”

  “And I don’t always have energy to be cheered up,” he added.

  I took his hand in mine.

  I FELT BETTER with Dad out of the house, knowing he was well fed and looked after. For the first time since returning to San Francisco, I felt like I could breathe. The house was quiet too. But it was a disturbing quiet.

  One night, some weeks after my father moved out, I decided to sleep in his futon for a change. But I went to bed after taking a bath, with my hair still wet. Shivering, clutching a single blanket, I imagined what it must have been like for him, so sick and weak those many months in our drafty Victorian apartment. Picturing him, I felt chilled to the bone. I couldn’t get warm. No matter how much I rubbed my hands and legs together, no matter how much I twisted myself in the blanket, I couldn’t shake the cold. Suddenly I felt as if I was the one who was sick, as if I was my father, and I started to panic.

  I moved to my loft bed, but I couldn’t relax there either. From my window I saw a terrible fight between some kids and a drug dealer across the street. Even after I closed my eyes and turned my back, I couldn’t shut out the scene. They were so angry and loud, it felt as if they were in the bedroom with me.

  I climbed down my ladder and called Karin. She was with a friend, but when I explained to her what was going on, she immediately drove over. She followed me up the ladder to my loft bed. Spooning me tightly, she stroked my hair until I finally fell asleep.

  I made myself busier and busier. I pitched movie reviews at Movie Magazine and worked late hours at Video Monitoring Services. Since Scott the musician didn’t want to date me anymore, I sought out the company of young men I met at VMS or KUSF—anything to distract me from the quiet of the house, the big quiet ahead.

  I visited the hospice several nights a week. But one night late that November, I found my dad perturbed. He was so worked up, I could hardly understand him.

  “They’re taking them,” he told me.

  “Who’s taking what?”

  “The nurses. They’re taking my t-shirts.”

  “The nurses? I’m sure they’re not taking your t-shirts,” I said.

  I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want Dad’s shirts. Though his political Queer Nation and Boys with Arms Akimbo t-shirts held sentimental value, they were worn thin, marked with odd yellow stains, the edges frayed. I wondered whether his paranoia was a product of his sickness or whether he was still upset about the freedom he lost by moving out of our apartment.

  “Well, they’re disappearing. I used to have seven and now I only have four.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe they’re getting lost.”

  “I used to have seven and now only four!”

  “Okay, Dad. I’ll get you more shirts.”

  I vowed to get him t-shirts that no one could lose or steal, and planned to do so while visiting my grandparents that Thanksgiving. Every trip to Kewanee required a stop at Breedlove’s, the local sports shop that supplied the logo-embossed t-shirts for the town’s school teams: the Kewanee Boilermakers, the Wethersfield Geese. Our family loved Breedlove’s because the shirts were inexpensive and came in every color of the rainbow.

  On that first day of my visit, my uncle David drove me downtown to the store. Flipping through stacks of t-shirts, I picked out the brightest hues I could find: kelly green, royal blue, fire engine red, and emergency orange. All size medium. I thought Dad would look so sweet in these shirts, the bright, saturated cotton offsetting his increasingly pale, almost transparent skin. I asked for my father’s name, “Steve,” to be printed in small capital letters on the shirt’s upper left side, just above the heart.

  When I picked them up that Saturday morning, I beamed with satisfaction. No one could lose these t-shirts, because these shirts were exploding with color. No one could steal these shirts, because who would want to wear a t-shirt printed with the name “Steve,” except someone named Steve? There would be no question as to whom they belonged.

  Later that Saturday afternoon, my uncle and I were walking with Munca through the icy streets near her house. As we passed Windmont Park, I decided to break off from them.

  As I walked into the park, it started to rain. Instead of heading ba
ck to my grandparents’, I walked farther in, following the paved perimeter of the lake I’d circled countless times as a child and teenager. The water reflected the gray sky above, and Windmont Park was emptier than I’d ever seen it. After I walked around the lake, letting myself get drenched, I stopped at the big maple tree next to the tennis courts where Munca used to play. The biggest leaves looked like open palms. I watched as they collected rain until the water became too heavy to bear and the leaves collapsed, sending the water to the ground with a splash.

  As I walked around Windmont on this gray winter day I tried to say it, practicing aloud, because I could: “My father is dead.” Circling the lake again and again, I repeated these words, because I knew it might soon be time. I knew I had to get used to these vowels and consonants in my mouth. “My faa . . . Myfatherisdead. My father is dead. My father is dead. My father is dead.” By saying these words without any catching in my throat, by making the phrase sound natural and real, I felt guilty, as if I were betraying something. Everything seemed to conspire with me. The gray and white landscape said, embrace death.As I looked out at the distant bleached horizon, my sadness felt very, very right. In this wet park, alone, I felt more myself, more at home, than I had felt all weekend.

  I returned to San Francisco on Sunday night. I was supposed to visit Dad at the hospice Monday, since I’d been away for Thanksgiving. I had planned to give him his t-shirts then. But the next day at work I phoned him.