Nick’s machine hadn’t just fallen apart. It had dismantled itself so thoroughly that every moving part had been detached from every other part. Not a single screw or gear was connected to anything else. When I pointed this out to Nick, he smiled for the first time that afternoon and said, “You figured it out.”
Nick stashed the card. They didn’t speak until a year or so later.
Sure, I guess we were for a day or so, but other stuff came up, or we got distracted by the day-to-day bullshit of being kids. Nick got busted for smoking pot behind the art building. The principal pulled me aside and basically told me to stop hanging out with him. Said I would sully my reputation by associating with a kid like Nick. I told him that Nick was brilliant and if he couldn’t see that it meant he wasn’t doing that great a job as an education administrator. [Laughs]. That didn’t fly so well.
So we’re on to sex, okay. I went through quite a few girlfriends. I can’t remember a lot of their names. I know that’s bad. It was typical high school stuff. Leaving notes in lockers, slow dancing, finding remote places to make out. It’s the make-out sessions I remember most. Spending literally an hour with your face pressed up against a girl’s, that warm delta in her jeans. Her hair. They wore it long in those days, my God, I’d live in those ringlets and strands. The girls I was most attracted to weren’t the designated popular girls but the smart ones who should have known better. They wore thick woolly sweaters you could just slide your hand under. Whenever I rode in the car with my dad, he’d try to start conversations by asking what I was thinking, and invariably I was thinking about sex. The way you think about sex before you’ve even had it, the unanswered hormonal question of it.
Like I said, he trolled the lower echelons of the socioeconomic strata. Had girlfriends in Poulsbo, off the island. None of the rich, pretty girls wanted anything to do with him. He attracted girls who had self-esteem issues. He obsessed over them and despised them. Treated them really poorly. I got on him about this a couple times. While I worshipped female pulchritude, I think he found the whole act of sex degrading. There was this one girl Laura who he fucked with psychologically, over and over. Just ground her down emotionally, backing her into these arguments about the nature of reality while she was high. Fucked-up stuff. We argued about girls a lot. I’m tired of talking about this. Let’s move on to something else.
Okay.
All right. Our house, I think I mentioned, was built against a pretty steep embankment. During the winter of my junior year of high school, we got twenty straight days of rain. Being hardy Pacific Northwesterners, we didn’t think anything of it. One Friday night I was in my folks’ VW van with a girl named Carrie Powers. I’d been seeing her for a month or so. We had gone out to a movie in Poulsbo and were driving home. She, or I, I can’t remember, suggested that we find a remote road and pull over. We found a place and lay down a blanket in the back of the van and fucked hard for what must have been about two hours. That incredible, young fucking when you’ve finally figured out how to really fuck and no one’s preventing you from fucking. The rain was coming down on the windows in sheets. It was beautiful. At some point one of us looked at a watch and realized we were way past our curfews. But it was totally worth it. I dropped her off a block from her house and drove home in the rain, my dick sore. I remember I was listening to an R.E.M. album, a song about being Superman. I sang along with the music on full blast, just elated after an epic screw. Then I came to my road and saw a lot of flashing lights. My first thought was that it would be strange for there to be a fire with so much rain. I pulled over and looked for my house but couldn’t see it and for a second I thought maybe I was turned around. I kept looking for my house in the flashing lights but there was just this empty spot where it used to be. Then I noticed the mud. A big slick of it running down the embankment, across the road, across the beach, into Puget Sound. The mud slide had completely wiped out my house. And with it my family. I stood in the rain with the firemen and the cops, calling out for my mom and dad, my sister. Their bodies were recovered from the sound two days later.
What happened in the days immediately after that event?
I don’t remember. I assume the whole social services side of things went into motion. There were counselors and the Child Protective Services. I met with people. Police. Lawyers. The thing I hated most was the way people wanted to be a part of my mourning. Moms of other kids came up to me in downtown Winslow, asked how I was doing, whether I needed anything, tried to buy me lunch. I suspected they were getting off on my tragedy. They were elated at the opportunity to show their concern. The reaction of the adult world to my circumstances appeared overly scripted to me. They spoke of “healing” and “closure” and used all this other bullshit terminology. For a while I stayed in a motel on the island and had these visitors constantly coming by to bring me fucking casseroles. I couldn’t stand it.
I had only a year until I was supposed to go to college so it didn’t make much sense for me to go live with aunts and uncles I barely knew in Chicago. Everyone agreed it would be best if I stayed and graduated from Bainbridge High. So what I needed was a sort of foster home situation. That’s where the limits of the island’s generosity became apparent. No one came forward to offer me a place to live. Except Nick’s mom, Star.
Well the beauty of it was that I had the VW van. I parked it on their lawn. Or the muddy patch that was supposed to be their lawn. They’d covered parts of the yard with slabs of plywood so you could walk from the shack to the outhouse without sinking. I slept in the van, ate in the shack, and used the outhouse. I got into a bunch of colleges but decided to go to UW. I was really worried about money even though my inheritance was in the seven figures, plus the life insurance payments. I was a parentless millionaire living in a VW van, shitting in an outhouse, and meditating with my best friend’s mom in their shack, burning Nag Champa incense. I cried all the time, as you can imagine. But I learned to control the valves of my grief, making conscious decisions as to when I’d let myself cry. And Nick took care of me, too. He had been through this kind of grief before and had endured the disingenuous condolences of strangers. He helped just by keeping me to my routines, banging on the van in the morning so I’d get ready for school. He must have been grieving pretty hard, too, since he’d been so close to my family. The mud slide changed the game. Nick started to clean up his act, quit smoking pot and took a sort of vow of celibacy for a while. We started listening to these bands from Washington, D.C., called… I’m trying to remember the genre.
It was an offshoot of punk. Straight edge. Yeah. It was this movement that evolved in the eighties, a sort of monastic offspring of punk rock that swore off drugs and alcohol. The real hard-core adherents swore off sex. The idea was that punk up to that time had railed against control and authority, especially governmental authority. By being straight edge, you attempted to cut out all the external forces that might control you. The band we got into in a big way was Minor Threat. Nick and I spent a lot of time in the woods talking about this philosophy, reading the fanzines. We realized that to break free of societal control you had to control yourself and exercise extreme discipline. I looked ahead to UW and started to get this dull ache in my gut. I had sort of arbitrarily decided to go into premed. But every night I spent under the spell of Star’s Kwakiutl folk tales and herbal remedies, the more I began to see the whole university system as a sham. I started to hate my own conformity. How I’d learned to play the game of school without actually learning anything. How I could charm anyone. In retrospect I think I decided to withdraw my application because college reminded me too much of my parents. I decided I’d travel instead. Then, one afternoon while Nick and Star were away, in town or something, I don’t know where, I did something I’d been wanting to do ever since that first birthday party visit. I broke into Nick’s dad’s shed.
It didn’t take me long to find the key to the padlock. It was where you’d expect it, in a random drawer in the kitchen. I pushed the key into the rusty lock and pulled open the door. Lots of cobwebs. Light coming through translucent windows. The place was about fifteen feet square. Along one wall were carefully arranged tools: saws, hammers, nothing that required electricity. The deal with Nick’s dad was he had intended to build them a house using only tools that existed in the nineteenth century, or some such hippie shit like that. There was still a half- finished chair sitting there just as Nick’s dad had left it the day before he died. A coffee cup with the coffee long evaporated. On the other side of the room stretched a bench, piled with papers. Some of them had become moldy and illegible. There were big sheets of paper tacked up all over the walls and tucked into cardboard tubes, too.
