Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (21 page)

Words can’t tell what I’ve learned from J. D. – about myself, about life. Sitting with him every Friday and watching his courage and dignity in the face of this disease has been one of the most intimate, inspiring experiences of my life. Often we’ve sat for hours together and said nothing, yet said more than most people ever do. His hands flutter like butterflies. He sometimes suffers delusions. But don’t we all?

IN NEW YORK CITY,
I was the model of an Upper East Side mother’s helper. Each day at noon I picked up Sarah from a neighborhood day camp, fed her lunch, and entertained her until dinner and then bed at seven. Some afternoons we took the subway to the Bronx Zoo or walked to the playground in Central Park or wandered the cool marble halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I kept Sarah happy with street vendor pretzels and shaved ice that turned our mouths bright blue. In my free mornings, I walked the avenues studying the windows of the high-fashion shops and watching doormen in their anachronistic brass-buttoned uniforms hailing cabs or helping neighborhood ladies with their packages.

Back at the Weiksners’, with the boys at soccer camp, Sandra and George at work, and Marcia, the housekeeper, doing laundry and making beds, I roamed the open rooms examining all the art, playing with Foxy, the family’s Abyssinian cat, and writing letters home.

When summer came to a close I moved into my freshman dorm, a new construction downtown with the uninspired name Third Avenue North. Our first night, my new roommates and I looked out our kitchen window and watched the prostitutes who did business on 12th Street.

Though my nanny job had ended, I remained close with the Weiksners. Three nights a week I’d catch the express train to their house for a hot meal and, through Sandra, found work proofreading at her law firm downtown.

I was ten to twenty years younger than all of my coworkers, who nicknamed me “Seventeen-something,” a riff on the then popular TV show
thirtysomething
, but it was an ideal college job. I worked weekends and as often as not was able to while away the hours clipping grocery coupons from the Sunday
Times
and studying my art history and psychology textbooks for school.

While I enjoyed most of the classes I was taking—how thrilling to take art history and then study Giotto paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!—I felt disconnected at NYU. Classes were held in large auditoriums located in one of a cluster of nondescript buildings surrounding Washington Square Park. Once class let out, students were simply absorbed into the anonymous city crowds. There was no actual campus that focused social life. A handful of dorms were located in and around Washington Square, but my own was the farthest-flung, at least a twenty-minute walk from class.

I didn’t feel a natural kinship with my roommates either. There was Jane, an actress from upstate New York, and three dancers, all named Rachel, who came to be known by their last names: Goodman, Strauss, and Shaw. They were all smart and fun but the worlds they occupied were very much their own. In the evenings, Goodman, Strauss, and Shaw would gossip and stretch at the kitchen table, while Jane, practicing her vocal exercises, tried hard to round her
O
s and aspirate her
H
s: “Whhhhere is the party? Whhhhat is the plan?”

To remedy my abiding loneliness, I phoned my grandparents in Kewanee every Sunday morning at ten and Dad whenever I wanted, using an AT&T phone card my grandfather had given me. To save money on phone bills, Dad preferred to write to me.

RRRINGGG!!!

It’s . . . Alysia! When I talk to you on the phone it seems you’re not that far away. When I talked to my Dad about you not writing, he kept using the word, “weaned.” “They get weaned away at college” (like you were a kitten or a puppy).

Issan says we’re all home-leavers, leaving the person you were supposed to be, to become the person you are. Being away from home, from San Francisco, I think you’ll discover (& create) the person you really are more.

Well, I’ll end here – and I didn’t even talk about my “boring” friends (even though they always ask about you).

Now that I was living on my own, I wanted to “discover and create” myself, the way I’d dreamed back in San Francisco. This was supposed to be my Tama Janowitz life. But I had no idea how to do this. I’d applied to NYU because I wanted to be in Greenwich Village and find my way into its storied bohemia, but I spent most of my time hanging out with a family on the stuffy Upper East Side. In addition to joining their dinners, I accompanied the Weiksners for weekends at their country house in Connecticut, evenings at Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera House. They even bought me a winter coat, since I had nothing suitable for the New York weather. For Christmas they gave me an antique pocket watch, which hung from a long silver chain.

Though the Weiksners generously invited me into their privileged life, I knew it wasn’t truly mine. I could mostly fit in, sometimes borrowing one of Sandra’s scarves or a necklace if she thought I didn’t look “fancy” enough for an event. Like a good trompe l’oeil, I could effectively mimic the manners and posture that were expected of me. In my years of traveling between the worlds of home, school, friends, and grandparents, I’d mastered the art of adaptation. But I knew, in my heart, I was different: a pale and scrawny impostor. I was never quite certain what was expected of me or how I could return the Weiksners’ generosity. And I was deathly afraid of making a critical misstep, using the wrong fork, somehow acting gauche.

I would have spent more time among the students at NYU, but outside the Weiksner house I felt totally isolated. Although I casually dated a twenty-something actor-proofreader I met at the law firm, I made no close friends that year. I didn’t anticipate how cold and disorienting the city could be—that if I didn’t yet know myself, no one else could know me either. I felt lost in New York, swallowed whole.

In San Francisco, I also didn’t know myself, but I knew my neighborhood, my friends, and my father. There was a version of myself that I saw reflected back in each of these relationships that was both familiar and acceptable to me. Painfully homesick, I couldn’t wait to return for Christmas.

ON THE FIRST EVENING
of my visit home, I sat with Dad in front of the TV eating dinner. We’d caught up that afternoon, and as I picked at the chicken on my plate, with the TV news boring into me, I felt a strong urge to leave the apartment. Watching television no longer interested me and I was itching to get out before dark so I could explore my old Haight Street haunts. But I knew I should be keeping my dad company, at least until dinner was finished.

“Is it okay if I head out for a walk?” I asked finally.

“Yeah, sure.” The TV light flickered on Dad’s face and he turned to me. “Don’t stay out late though, okay?”

“Okay.”

I walked with long powerful strides down Haight toward Golden Gate Park, eagerly looking for anything familiar. Unlike in New York City, with whom I still suffered the self-doubt and nervousness of a new love, I felt bold and sure of myself walking the streets of San Francisco. I intimately knew the city. When I closed my eyes, I could imagine myself like a ghost floating down Haight toward the Fillmore over to Dubose Park to Café Flore and up the hill of 18th and Castro back toward home over Ashbury Heights. I breathed in the street’s peculiar perfume—the faint smell of marijuana, eucalyptus leaves, and wet wood. Walking through the light fog, I even enjoyed the familiar cold dampness penetrating my jacket and jeans, taking up residence in my bones, so different from the razor-sharp winds of New York.

Surveying Haight Street, as I did on each of my subsequent visits home, I made note of the many stores remaining from my youth and those replaced by new ones. The old Shop ’n’ Save had closed, to be replaced by a used clothing warehouse called Villains. Etc. Etc. had become the brightly lit Beauty Store. Passing different windows, I searched faces at café tables and in the aisles of boutiques, hoping both to recognize and to be recognized.

When I caught sight of the park, I turned and walked along the opposite side of the street toward home. At the corner of Haight and Schraeder, I spotted a familiar form: Jimmy Siegel, the owner of Distractions. Pulling shut a heavy gate, he had his back to me. He’d shaved his moustache but I easily recognized him: his leather jacket, his short blond hair, his cute, boyish face.

“Hi,” I yelled over the loud roll of the closing gate. “Do you remember me?”

He was bent down low, fastening a lock. He turned around, looked at me, and stood upright. “Yeah, I do. How are you?”

“I’m good. I moved to New York. NYU! I’m just back for Christmas.”

“That’s great.”

“Hey, whatever happened to Tommy? Does he still work here?”

I had first discovered Distractions in 1984, after being drawn in by its punk rock window display and the New Wave music playing on the shop speakers. The front of the store had a large glass case full of intricately carved wood and metal pipes, sparkling rhinestone-encrusted cigarette holders, Zippo lighters, and Tommy. He was hard to miss.

Already six feet, he was three inches taller in the roller skates he wore around the store, whizzing back and forth behind the counter. Tommy’s hair was styled short on the sides and high on top, which made his big ears appear bigger. His hair color changed depending on his mood—one week it would be purple, another week pink or blue. Beneath his pompadour he had sparkling green eyes and a mischievous, thin-lipped grin. When he smiled, he’d give his eyes a playful roll, like Mae West delivering her best lines.

“Oh aren’t you a pretty little plum, but still too green to pick!”

Back when I was being ignored by the high school boys and gender was still a puzzle I couldn’t solve, Tommy coaxed me out of my shell. He entertained and flirted with me, and Distractions became a regular stop in my after-school circuit.

I eventually learned that Tommy was not paid to work the register at Distractions. He made his living dealing coke in the neighborhood. He used to brag about his star clients from prominent 1970s rock bands—all references lost on me, a Duran Duranie through and through. Tommy was the ex-lover and best friend of Jimmy Siegel, the store owner, and worked the register simply because he liked to hang out, to soak in the Haight scene. Sometimes his two dogs, a poodle named Cuddles and a terrier named Teddy, would join him behind the register.

When one day I shyly revealed to Tommy that my dad was also gay, he asked with a wink, “Is he a top or a bottom?” When I gave him a confused look, he said, “Well, I am a top,
definitely
a top.” I just enjoyed watching Tommy: the way his back arched when he laughed his wicked laugh; his pretty, smiling eyes.

“Tommy?” Jimmy asked. “Tommy died. He died of AIDS six months ago.”

Jimmy said it apologetically, as though I were too young, female, and straight to be troubled with such news. As Jimmy spoke, he looked into the middle distance, as though Tommy was just one of many men he pictured in his mind’s eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really liked Tommy.”

“Me too.”

Tommy’s death marked a change for me. When I was still living with my dad, my preoccupation with the world of my straight friends had mostly protected me from the effects of the AIDS epidemic. But on these first few visits back from college, I noticed how it altered everything. Dad would later tell me our former neighbor Robert was sick. Another night, seeing a classical concert downtown, I recognized the usher as one of the cute guys I used to chat with at the outside table of Café Flore. “Hey!” I called. “How are you? How’s everybody?” He just shook his head, not feeling as chatty as he’d once been.

The street I knew growing up was changing. Some transformations between 1987 and 1992 might have been the effects of the economic recession, but much was a result of the AIDS crisis, as members of the city’s gay population went into retreat, either dying or caring for those dying, or else living in a perpetual state of shock about the deaths taking place behind so many closed doors.

It was dark when I turned onto Ashbury Street. Upstairs in our apartment, I found Dad beneath the covers on his futon bed. The TV was still on, the volume loud. Dad squeezed the “clicker,” turning down the volume, and then turned to me.

“How was your walk?”

“It was fine.”

“Did you run into any of your friends?”

“No,” I said, thinking of Tommy. “Not really . . . Shop ’n’ Save is closed.”

“Yup, you have to walk all the way to Cala to get groceries now.”

“Well, goodnight, Daddy. I’m going to bed. I’m still feeling jet-lagged.”

“Goodnight, sweetie. Oh, by the way. I bought some new Bic razors. The ones in the Pacific Drug bag you can use. Don’t use mine.”

ON CHRISTMAS EVE,
Dad and I went out for sushi and a movie at the Kabuki Center in Japantown, a favorite outing of ours, and at my suggestion we saw
Working Girl
, about a Staten Island secretary who dreams of her own office on Wall Street. The movie opens with a wide shot of the Staten Island Ferry crossing into downtown Manhattan. As the camera panned over Battery Park and Bowling Green I elbowed my father and pointed out the Cleary Gottlieb office building: “That’s where I work!”

At home we opened presents under the tree and I gave Dad a surprise that I’d been working on for weeks: a collection of my best writing from that semester, which I’d printed and collaged with magazine clippings into a book I called “For My Father.” The book was divided into four sections: criticism, autobiography, poetry, and essay, which included the essay on Sam D’Allesandro. He loved it so much he pulled me to his lap and squeezed me against his chest. When Sunday came, I was sorry to have to leave for New York. Shortly after my return I received this letter:

I’m really proud of how you’re doing Alysia. Even though I haven’t seen your report card, I have seen your writing and I’m really pleased to see your self-confidence more solid than when you left. And when I get a job again, I’m sure mine will be more solid too. Then we can really enjoy each other’s company.