A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me Read Free Page B

everything they had—that nobody in the history of the world had ever had it this good, and probably nobody ever would again. If history had seasons, my dad and his brothers were born during the warmest, gentlest, most bountiful summer anyone had ever seen. But it wouldn’t last, because it never did. When Dad talked about his childhood, he talked about it like a perfect day at the beach.
    Then, in a different kind of mood, he’d talk about having been born premature. He said his parents had resigned themselves to the fact that he was going to die while he was in the hospital, and they never seemed to know what to do with him when he didn’t. He said he never felt like part of that family. That he was always a runt compared to his older brothers. That he made up for it by being smarter, and that his father and his brothers resented him for it, particularly the middle brother, Paul.
    â€œPaul used to do this thing,” Dad would say. “Where he’d sit on me while he loaded his BB gun. Then he’d get off me, let me run, count to five, and start shooting. One time he got me in the knee and we had to pry the BB out with a screwdriver. I blackmailed him for everything he had, then told on him anyway. That was Paul to a T. He was the kind of guy who, if there was a piece of cake in the refrigerator and our parents told us not to eat it, not only would Paul eat it—but then he’d leave the empty plate in the refrigerator. That was the kind of stupid your uncle Paul was.”
    I once asked my dad’s oldest brother, my uncle John, what my dad was like when he was a kid. Uncle John confirmed Dad’s version of events in more ways than he probably meant to. He said Dad was extremely precocious, but that he’d always been sickly on account of being born premature.
    â€œLike his hair,” Uncle John said. “If you grabbed him by his hair, it’d just come out in your hand. In big clumps.”

 
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    A lot of what happened when Dad got busted was a mystery to me, during and afterward. Years later he told me there was some kind of bureaucratic screwup and the social worker who was handling my case sent me to Texas, where my mom’s parents had recently settled. Only once I got down there, nobody knew what to do with me, so I spent one night in a foster home before being shipped to California, where I stayed with my other grandparents—John and Margaret—in Torrance, the blue-collar suburb of Los Angeles where my dad and his brothers had grown up. I didn’t follow any of it. Afterward I had a vague memory of airplanes, and stewardesses being nice to me. At some point someone gave me a stuffed raccoon.
    Dad’s explanation of what befell him back in Eugene was, if anything, less clear than his description of what had happened to me: he was arrested, charged, and spent some time in jail. Then his friends bailed him out while he was awaiting trial and, somehow, he ended up on probation. The whole process took several months. Then he had to find us a new place to live and deal with other hassles that arose from the arrest. That took a few more months.
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    Not long after I arrived in Torrance, my grandparents took me to Disneyland. It was my first experience with a completely manufactured environment of faux finishes and fake people. I was disappointed to learn that Mickey Mouse was really just a guy in a stupid costume, but I appreciated the experience afterward because it gave me some context for my grandparents’ house, where they had a real brick fireplace that they’d gone to the trouble to paint red—except for the mortar, which they’d painted white. The food all looked like food. In fact, it often looked exactly like the pictures of food on the boxes that Grandma took it out of before she cooked it—but it still tasted like cardboard. The furniture all looked like it should be comfortable: the couches were new