....Whatever town we were in, whenever we were traveling, I knew we were almost there when I started to see a lot of broken-down cars in peoples’ front yards. When lawns gave way to mud and dirt. When houses had hubcaps nailed to the front door and wind chimes hanging from the eaves—or wind chimes made of hubcaps. When fences were falling down. When people had tattoos and bad teeth and long greasy hair. When they wore a lot of old denim and black leather. Those were our neighborhoods—like one shitty little town, smashed to pieces and scattered all up and down the West Coast.
And the first dirty kid I saw playing in a tiny front yard, pounding on a dusty engine block with a hammer or playing with a stuffed animal that obviously did double duty as a chew toy for the pit bull—that kid was pretty much always going to be a friend of mine.
Those houses always smelled like beer and cigarettes. Pot and incense. They always had bookshelves made out of planks and cinderblocks, and the shelves were always sagging under the weight of history, philosophy, car repair, science fiction, pornography; empty beer bottles and garbage knickknacks; glass fishing floats, animal bones; bullets and boxes and spilled candle wax. Cigarette burns on couches and tables. Round stains on every flat surface. Those houses were dark and private and you didn’t want to go poking around in the drawers, because there was always a needle or a gun and some people definitely had a better sense of humor about that kind of shit than others.
By the time I was in high school I was saying, “Back where I come from…”
Back where I’m from you don’t pull that kinda shit. Back where I’m from you can get killed for that kinda shit. Back where I’m from we don’t do things that way.
And some smart ass would always want to know where that was.
So I’d say Seattle or Eugene or wherever.
And every once in a while somebody’d come back with, “I’m from Seattle and I never saw anything like that.”
“Must be a different Seattle,” I’d say. “Like Paris, Texas, you know?”
The history my dad told me about wasn’t any history I learned about in school. The antiques Dad collected were from this alternative history: opium chests from the Boxer Rebellion and Victorian cocaine spoons; glass hypodermic needles and ivory snuff boxes; sea chests with false bottoms; sword canes and blackjacks; kerosene lamps and alcohol burners.
You asked Dad about pirates, he’d tell you about sodomy. You asked him about the Inquisition, he’d tell you that faggot is a slang term for kindling; that queers are called faggots because the Catholics used to burn them before the witches, as a kind of warm-up for the main event.
Sherlock Holmes was a morphine addict. Freud was a coke fiend. And the richer and more uptight someone was, the more likely it was that they had a secret room someplace where they spent lonely nights having sex with young boys or farm animals.
That’s history, he said. The wooden teeth and the cherry trees are for the tourists. The cannons and the war memorials are for the suckers....
