Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (5 page)

But, of course this was just pretend. Ours was a defiantly motherless world. Sometimes we were like Huck and Jim, beyond law, beyond rules, eating with our hands. We were unkempt but happy, with Dad affectionately calling me his “Wild Child.” Other times we were like Tatum and Ryan O’Neal in
Paper Moon
, a traveling father-daughter act pulling schemes, subsisting on our charm, and always sticking together.

We hoped that Eddie Body could share this life with us, but their fights became more frequent. More and more he went out without my dad. And, according to my father’s journals, Ed became less interested in sex. Lonely and dejected, Dad remembered my mom:

Sometimes I think of Barb and how callous I was to her for so long, so maybe it serves me right that Ed’s like that to me sometimes. I had a dream about her the other night. I was going around to all the bars alone, feeling lonely, and she brings me the car in the parking lot. We feel so good being together. “But this really isn’t happening you know, you’re dead.” She looks hurt. “It’s not that I don’t love you,” I say.

One afternoon, at the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center, I didn’t see Ed at the classroom door. Dad met me and we walked to the park. Back in the trees beside Hippie Hill, we started playing our game of hide-and-seek, a favorite from the time I was a toddler back in Atlanta. I called, “Where you are, Daddy?” He answered, “Here I am,” and I followed the sound. When I found the tree where he’d been hiding, I circled around it while he circled in the same direction so that he was always just out of reach.

“Where you are, Daddy?”

“Here I am!”

Until, finally, I ran and caught him. When I became hungry and tired, we walked home together hand in hand. As we entered the tunnel leading to the opening of the park, Dad told me about Ed.

“Eddie Body and I are having problems,” he said.

“What kind of problems?” I asked.

“Well, Ed doesn’t seem to like me anymore. He doesn’t want to sleep with me.”

“I’ll sleep with you,” I said. And I pulled his hand and started skipping, so that he would be forced to join me, which he did happily.

As we skipped through the tunnel, I began to sing a song I’d learned at day care: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Dad tried to sing along but I yelled at him. I wanted to do it alone. “Let it shine! Let it shine! Let it
shine
!”

The next morning, I went to the airport to spend a week with my maternal grandparents in Kewanee. After my mom died I spent almost every school break at my grandparents. The week I was away, Dad wrote in his journal that Ed had received a letter from the wife he’d left behind in New York. He’d learned that she’d given birth to a baby girl and now wanted a divorce. My dad held Eddie while he cried.

At the end of the week, my father picked me up from the airport. Driving home on Highway 101 at night, San Francisco looked like a glittering diamond necklace strung across the sky. Dad turned to me and asked, “You didn’t tell Munca and Grumpa about Eddie Body and I, did you?”

I looked out the window. “I didn’t say
nothing
.”

Back at home, we climbed the stairs to our apartment. Dad put down my suitcase and I pulled off my coat then searched the house for Johnny, Paulette, and Ed, but no one was home:

“Where’s Eddie Body?” I asked.

“He’s with Mary Ann.”

“Why?”

“He loves Mary Ann.”

“He loves Alysia,” I said.

“He does love Alysia. But he also loves Mary Ann. And she has a baby.”

“Why can’t Mary Ann and Eddie live with us?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really work that way,” Dad answered.

“But I want Eddie Body.”

“So does Daddy.”

“Daddy is sad?” I asked.

“Yes. Now Daddy doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

“I make you feel better.” I crawled into his lap. “I’ll be your boyfriend.”

When I left Dad’s lap to go to the bathroom, he noticed through the open door that I didn’t pee standing up. When he asked me about it I answered, “Munca and Grumpa said little girls should sit down.”

“Okay. You can do it that way if it’s more comfortable for you. But if you want to pee standing up, you know how!”

“Little girls sit down,” I repeated. “I don’t know how to pee standing up.”

“That’s fine, too.”

Later that night, after putting me to bed, Dad went out to the Stud, leaving me in the care of Paulette. In the back of the club, he got stoned, took two carbitols, and met a rangy eighteen-year-old named Jimmy, whom he took home.

The next morning, I climbed into Dad’s bed, squeezing myself inside the small space between him and the man beside him. My dad was asleep but I didn’t recognize the other man with his shaggy blond hair. I fell back asleep and started having nightmares. I called out to him in my sleep, “Daddy, let me
in
!” He reported on the night’s aftermath:

February 15: Alysia’s been in upset and cranky mood this afternoon. Maybe upset about Ed leaving. She was more clingy than usual. Her eye hurt. She wanted to be held and cried a lot. I thought it was just because she was tired, not having had a nap. Put her to bed around 4–5. Don’t want to go to bar but may go to a party. I think I’ll stay home because Alysia may wake, and maybe no one will be here with her unless I stay.

That night after putting me to bed, instead of going out, Dad drew me a Valentine’s Day card. In his journals he wrote about making the card as a way to help me cope with the loss of Eddie, which was still so confusing and painful after my mom’s death. But looking at it now, I think he really made the card for himself, as a way to articulate his philosophy on love. I see him especially in the angry dog.

Two of my father’s lovers—his most passionate love affairs after my mother—were with men who ended up leaving him to return to women. Each of these men explored physical love with my dad, either because of his charisma or because of a moment that encouraged sexual experimentation. But these men, with girlfriends and wives, were still anchored to society in a way that Dad no longer was and never would be again. My father wrote about this coincidence in a letter to John Dale that February:

You know, it’s so weird I chose Ed as my lover, a man like you (I say man because he’s refused to become another bitchy queen like so many gay men do – refused to shut himself off from the rest of society). And now, like you, he’s going back to his wife. In his case it’s somewhat different. He has a kid too now, a little girl who he loves terribly much even though he’s never seen her. I love Ed & need him but he wasn’t able to find a job here & hated feeling dependent on me. Also maybe his wife & baby need him more, & he them. So I’ve encouraged him to go . . . I hope [his wife] forgives him & helps him to his feet.

February 1975

Given how much the breakup hurt Dad, I was surprised to learn that he had actually encouraged Ed to return to his wife. In the back of his journal I even found a seven-page unsent letter Dad wrote to Ed’s wife pleading with her to take him back. I can’t help but think this letter came from some unresolved guilt Dad still felt about the way he’d treated my mom in the end.

After Ed split, Dad tried to orchestrate a room switch in the apartment, arguing that if he was still paying the most rent he should have his pick of rooms. Johnny didn’t want to trade rooms, accusing Dad of “economic imperialism.” Dad then moved us to a flat on Page Street, a few blocks away and without roommates. He regretted losing the Oak Street place he’d put so much time and energy into, but, as he wrote in a letter: “Just living in a houseful of screaming faggots was driving me up the wall . . . I wish I could find some really together people for Alysia to grow up around, instead of all the neurotic, selfish shit-faces that so abound.”

Eddie Body moved to New York but returned to San Francisco only a few weeks later. He’d lived with his wife and daughter but left them after deciding it was “too much.” He started dating women again, and even moved in with Moonbeam’s mom. Since my father had introduced them, their coupling was especially painful for him. He visited us a few times but he never stayed very long, and it always confused me. I missed him and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t with us anymore.

In the years that followed, Dad had other boyfriends but none lived with us. And after Eddie Body, I stopped paying close attention.