looking at places from my childhood. We parked and walked around my old neighborhood and along the ditches where the floons used to be. I pointed out Willie’s and Todd’s old houses. We walked slowly by the house I grew up in, the house that caught fire. A woman was in the yard playing with a dog and then noticed us looking at the house. I wanted to say, “I used to live here and I’m writing a book about it.” But I would have felt like a dork. Instead I just made it blatant that we were talking about their house by pointing to the window where my bedroom used to be.
We went to the Mayfair Market even though it’s now called the Red Apple. Even twenty years later, I thought I might recognize someone.
We got back in the car and drove up Garfield Hill to the house that my friend Matthew grew up in and I saw that their last name was still on the mailbox. I hadn’t talked to Matthew since those days in Spokane, and I wanted to go up to the door and say hello to his parents, but I chickened out.
When it got dark, we drove by my high school and saw that there was a football game going on. We stopped and snuck in the back gate and watched for an hour.
It was like a farewell tour.
Back at Mom’s place, I looked through more dusty boxes of photos and artifacts. A few old letters caught my attention. There was one addressed to Mark at a correctional institute that he was in while I lived in Spokane. He had been convicted of a drug crime that I didn’t know about. I also found two letters for Dad from someone named Marie who was living in Portland. They were both postmarked 1956, before he and Mom were together, but I wondered why he had kept them. They were both very romantically written and addressed to him at a place called the Welcome Hotel in Arlington, Oregon. At the bottom of one of the boxes, I was also surprised to find evidence of Dad’s creative side. There were a couple drawings of horses and one of a woman’s profile that looked like Judy Garland. They were pretty clean and well done, almost as if they’d been traced. But the paper was thick and Dad had signed his name on them. Some brittle papers were filled with rhyming poetry. I wondered if this was a clue to his life. If he had wanted to be an artist or a writer and just gave up hope on those things as more children and more problems piled up for him.
I was hoping I might find some older things of mine too, like the notebook of song lyrics I used to pass around in middle school. I did find a big stack of note cards with football statistics and player analyses I had written on them.
I put all the boxes back and gathered up the things I wanted to keep. Most of the boxes were old issues of motorcycle magazines that belonged to Mark.
After washing my hands, I checked out the spare room where Barb and I were supposed to sleep. It was the room where Dad had slept for the past several years, but now a friend of Mark’s had taken it over. There was an overpowering cigarette stench in the air that was making our heads ache.
I asked Mom about this friend and she tried to explain that it was a woman who had been kicked out of her place and they were just letting her stay there for a while. I wasn’t clear if she was Mark’s girlfriend, but I figured she wasn’t. Mom said that the woman was staying somewhere else that night, so we could sleep there. I looked around at this woman’s stuff and saw photos of a couple of girls, presumably her daughters. There were hair clips all around the bed frame and a cheap old TV with a collection of bad movies on DVD and VHS next to it. I randomly opened a small drawer in the bedside table and immediately shut it.
“Look in there,” I said to Barb.
“What is it?” she asked. She could see from my face that it was something serious. “Is it a dildo?”
I shook my head and said, “No. Worse.”
She opened the drawer to see a crack pipe sitting there, not even concealed. Underneath the pipe was a letter that the woman had written, or was writing, to someone. It was a sad, pleading letter, begging someone for forgiveness. Asking for a second chance.
I put the pipe and the letter back and we decided to sleep on the living room floor instead.
Home
The next day, we went to the cemetery and found Dad’s gravestone. I was surprised to see that Mom’s name was on it too. I wondered if they had arranged that a long time ago. Even though they were never affectionate with each other when I was growing up and in the twenty years since I left the Tri-Cities, I guess they formed some kind of bond, or a truce that would keep them together forever. Maybe it was formed out of a mutual stubbornness, or perhaps they were used to each other, even though terrible things had happened between them. Unforgivable things. But maybe the unforgivable things were forgivable after all, for the sake of not being alone.
There were some plastic flowers at his grave. I didn’t bring anything to leave. I reached down and felt the raised letters of my last name. “See you later, Dad,” I said.
That night, while driving the four hours back to Portland, I realized that I probably wouldn’t be coming back to Kennewick again. At least not to see any family. I will have nowhere to stay after Mom sells her place. Mark will surely stay in town after he finds a place for himself, but I doubt anyone will hear from him.
Sometimes I think about growing up in Kennewick and how normal and good it was. How I was glad that I didn’t grow up in a smaller town or a bigger city. I think about my own son, growing up in Portland, and I know that his childhood, his youth, is very different. I wonder if he’ll move on in a few short years and feel nostalgic later. If he’ll always think of Portland as home and remember me as a good father. Maybe, right now, he thinks everything in his life is normal the way I thought my life and family was normal.
I realize that nothing is really normal. All it takes to alter normalcy is a death or a birth. Or just some misguided fear, love, or loneliness that never goes away.
Acknowledgments
Parts of this book first appeared online at
There are many people who have supported and encouraged me in my writing life. Your love and friendship mean the world to me, especially in the past two years. Thank you: Stephen Kurowski, Andrew Monko, Elizabeth Ellen, Erika Geris, Dayvid Figler, Joe O’Brien, Mike Daily, Laural Winter, Magdalen Powers, Riley Michael Parker, Gary Lutz, Pete McCracken, Reuben Nisenfeld, Melody Owen, Melissa Lion, Zachary Schomburg, Patrick deWitt, Brian Christopher, Joseph Lappie, Bob Gaulke, Melody Jordan, Ritah Parrish, Jenn Lawrence, Chelsea Martin, Martha Klein, Suzanne Burns, Emily Kendal Frey, Zoe Trope, Frank D’Andrea, and Elizabeth Miller.
Special thanks to Michael Johnson, who took some of these stories and created songs from them (long live Reclinerland).
Extra special thanks to my family for their help in piecing this together, especially: Mom, Elinda, Terry, Russell, and Matt. The good outshines the bad. John Elton Sampsell: Rest in Peace. Zacharath: I am proud that you’re my son, and I hope I’ve learned enough to always be a good father.
For my friends at Powell’s, the best bookstore in the world. Chris Faatz and Meredith Schreiber are like guardian angels. Everyone on the Publicity team (hi, Frances!) and in the Blue Room, especially Linda Watson, whose cookies and hugs have saved me a few times.
Many times to my always growing publishing-family tree. The writers I publish on Future Tense continue to inspire me. My friends at Akashic, Manic D Press, Chiasmus, and Word Riot have made me a better editor and writer.
Thanks to all the writers I’ve met over the years who have offered their friendship, writing secrets, blurbs, and support: Sam Lipsyte, Dan Kennedy, Miriam Toews, Jonathan Ames, Willy Vlautin, Jami Attenburg, Robin
