“You’re in AA? Doesn’t that mean you’re an alcoholic?”
“A recovering alcoholic. That’s what we say.”
“When was the last time you drank?”
“Two years ago.”
“What did you drink?”
“Didn’t matter. The point was to get drunk.”
“Why?”
“Because then I could forget about everything.”
“Why’d you want to do that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I didn’t like myself very much.”
“Why not?”
“This just doesn’t end with you, does it, kid?”
“You said I could ask whatever I wanted.”
“Fair enough. At first I didn’t like myself because I wanted to be a doctor but I wasn’t smart enough so I drank to feel better. Then after a while I didn’t like myself because I drank so much. So I drank to forget that too.”
“That doesn’t sound fun.”
“It wasn’t. It’s a disease, you know. Like polio or cancer.”
“Is it contagious?”
“No. But it runs in families.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really. But it progresses like a disease does. It gets worse and worse as time goes on. Eventually, it got to the point where I didn’t even go to bars. I’d just get a bottle and go park my truck somewhere in the woods. I’d wake up and wonder where I was. That’s when I knew I had a problem and I went to AA.”
“Do you like AA?”
“It beats drinking alone in the woods.”
“What do you do at AA?”
“We talk about when we drank and how bad it was and we help each other work the twelve steps.”
“What are the twelve steps?”
“They’re a bunch of things that you do that make it so you don’t feel like you need to drink anymore.”
“Did you do all twelve?”
“I did them all in one weekend.”
“Is that fast?”
“Yeah. That’s not really how you’re supposed to do it. So then I went back and did them over six months or so.”
“Did you feel better?”
“I did, actually. I felt lighter. Like I didn’t need to forget so much because I liked myself more. I can’t believe I’m telling all this to a little kid. You sound like you’re thirty, ha-ha!”
“Do you love my mom?”
“Yes I do.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can we watch cartoons now?”
“Sure.”
He takes us fishing down on the banks of the Willamette River beneath the West Salem bridge. He has a green tackle box full of lures and we go to a bait shop to buy earthworms and bright pink garlic marshmallows for the rainbow trout. He teaches us how to curl the worm around the hook so it goes through the body in three different places, how to cast the line out and reel it in slowly, careful not to hit anyone standing behind us, how it’s important to release the line at just the right point to get the most distance. Tony catches a trout. We put it on a metal line attached to a rock in the river that goes through the mouth of the fish and back out through the gills. He teaches us to skin it, right there on a flat rock on the shore of the Willamette with a fillet knife that he uses to cut open the belly and take out all the guts. Then he cuts the head off, splitting it into two halves right down the middle. We take it home and Paul fries it up with garlic and butter and salt and we wish we could eat fried fish every night.
When Tony and I start school at Englewood Elementary three blocks away, Paul is there to pack our lunches in the morning and even walks with us to the front gate. I’ve never been to school before so when I see the huge yellow building in front of the baseball diamond, it seems like a spaceship. I think maybe I’m going on a journey somewhere. I know I’m supposed to go inside because that’s where all the other kids are going, into the spaceship to be launched into space.
There are so many kids in my class and they are all different shapes and sizes. Timothy Manning, who seems mean with his dirty face, making fun of everyone from the back row. There’s a girl who wears dirty clothes like Tony and me, but she smells like pee. This is good, I think because even though our clothes have holes in them, at least we don’t smell. There’s a boy with smooth, well-trimmed black hair and tight designer jeans with white stitching that says Jordache across the pocket and a pretty blond girl in a dotted blue dress. She looks like a doll, something I’m not allowed to be near in my dirty pants and stained red ski vest from the Salvation Army.
On the first day the teacher gives everyone number lines that are supposed to teach us how to add. One plus one then three plus two. You take your pencil down the line to mark the answer. But I already know how to add and subtract and multiply and I don’t understand why the other kids can’t do it too. I watch them struggle and wonder what I’m missing. The teacher gives me a workbook for second graders that has pictures of birds inside circles and I have to say how many are in the circle and how many are outside it and how many there are total and again I don’t understand why we would have to write something so silly.
When I give her the workbook back, she reads it and after a little while she tells me we should go visit the third-grade teacher. So we go across the hall to the third-grade class during nap time and the teacher there gives me a workbook. She shows me how I’m supposed to follow directions and put my name in the upper-right-hand corner on each page, so I do. Then she says do I understand and I say yes and they both watch me read the workbook which is all about blocks and numbers and shapes and making change for a dollar.
One day the vice-principal comes into the classroom and talks to my teacher who calls me up to the front of class. We sit down in the corner and he says, “Have you ever been to school before?” And I say no because I don’t think the Synanon School counts since it was like an orphanage and nobody talks about it. So he says, “Do you do schoolwork at home?” I say no because maybe that’s cheating, to talk about all the books Mom gives me. I don’t want to get in trouble and these kids are all bigger than me and they’ve been to school before and my brother is in fourth grade and he’s always putting me in headlocks and breaking my stuff.
The vice-principal says they need to talk to my mom about it but maybe I’d be “more comfortable” in a different class. He says he called her at work but she was busy and I say, “Well yeah, she’s got a lot of prisoners to deal with,” and he gives me a funny look.
When I tell Mom all about the workbooks and what the vice-principal said, she says she isn’t surprised because all we ever did in Synanon was read and write and I’m the special life that she had to protect and bring into the world so I could change it someday.
She skipped two grades in school when she moved to the United States from Dutch but she hated it because everyone was older than her and no one spoke Dutch and it was hard to have friends.
When the vice-principal takes me out of class, he puts me at a desk in his office and says he wants me to do a test. After the test I get to go outside for recess. All the boys climb on the monkey bars and play tag in the field and I’m thinking about the test and about the story I read about a poor couple who couldn’t buy Christmas gifts for each other so the woman sold her hair to buy a watch chain for her husband. But the husband sold his watch to buy a brush for his wife’s hair so neither of them can really use the gifts that they were given. The gift is a waste. The test asks you to give an example of ironing but I just write down that it’s funny that they tried to help each other by giving away the thing they love the most and at the end they realize they don’t really need possessions anyway as long as they have each other which is what Mom is always telling us when we want her to buy us a new Star Wars action figure.