Read Online Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father by Alysia Abbott - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Alysia Abbott
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Arsonist.”
The following Thursday we returned to Cloud House and Dad shared his poem, which was showered with praise: “It’s like William Blake!” Kush insisted Dad let him Scotch-tape the poem to the wall. Emboldened, my father began to do a series of comic poems, which he mimeographed at Cloud House as eight-by-ten broadsides, then taped up in cafés and laundromats all over town, with me running just behind him.
Dad had studied poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska with John Berryman and Karl Shapiro, but stopped writing in 1967 because poetry then seemed to him “an empty, meaningless parlor game.” Finding Cloud House reignited his passion. Soon he stumbled on a used copy of Jack Spicer’s Billy the Kid. The book changed him utterly. In the 1950s Spicer, along with Robin Glaser and Robert Duncan, helped forge an avant-garde poetry which they named the Berkeley Renaissance. Spicer especially showed Dad that poetry was a way to get in touch with his gay identity. “Spicer’s work acted like a magnet drawing out mine,” he wrote .
We were soon spending several nights a week at Cloud House. I’d find a sun-faded pillow in the corner, where Dad would set me up with paper and crayons. I drew fluffy cloud houses and cloud high-rises, all populated by eager inhabitants arriving on the backs of birds. Kush hung my pictures in the windows, so that every time I walked into Cloud House, it felt like my house too.
So many evenings of my girlhood were spent sitting in crowded, hushed rooms, waiting for the quiet to be pierced by these strings of strange words. Rarely could I follow what was being read. To me it was just background noise, a soundtrack for my curious wanderings, paging through books on shelves or looking at the Garfield and Snoopy comic books I’d brought from home. Other times, the steady and repetitive rhythm of the readers, the warmth and tone of their different voices, worked on me like a lullaby. I’d climb onto Dad’s lap and drift off to sleep, soothed by the movement of his breathing, his warm skinny chest which I listened to as it vibrated in animated conversation. There was no place I’d rather be.
Cloud House readings were often followed by potluck dinners. The grown-ups often drank too much, filling the rooms with their cigarette and marijuana smoke, reciting poetry, then arguing about it.
Poet 1: “In order to bring poetry to the people it has to relate to them personally, to expand their dreams. Protest poetry puts blinders on people.”
Poet 2: “But if there’s no revolutionary poetry, there may be no revolution!”
Poet 3: “I see the cassette tape recorder as the lethal weapon. We’ve gotta go out with the cassette players and instead of playing disco, play some consciousness!”
Dad and I always came home late from these evenings. We’d stumble into our respective beds, still in our clothes, and the next morning we’d wake up and rush out the door, late to school again.
SOON AFTER STARTING at French American I began to wet myself. At five and a half, I was three years out of diapers. I was not a bed wetter at home and I have no recollection, nor does Dad record in his journals, of my having accidents at home or anywhere else. But at French American, at the least convenient moments and least convenient places—high on the jungle gym or on the farthest reaches of the schoolyard—I’d have a sudden and uncontrollable urge to pee.
I was old enough that I could simply have gone to the bathroom in the morning or broken off from the single-file march from our classroom to the playground. But during those first few months I developed a deep and abiding wish to disappear. I didn’t want to call attention to myself by asking to go to the bathroom and I didn’t know how to ask in French. Besides, I’d grown accustomed to holding inside anything that was too embarrassing or too shameful to share: my dad’s boyfriends, my mom’s death, my pee.
Over the
The following Thursday we returned to Cloud House and Dad shared his poem, which was showered with praise: “It’s like William Blake!” Kush insisted Dad let him Scotch-tape the poem to the wall. Emboldened, my father began to do a series of comic poems, which he mimeographed at Cloud House as eight-by-ten broadsides, then taped up in cafés and laundromats all over town, with me running just behind him.
Dad had studied poetry as an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska with John Berryman and Karl Shapiro, but stopped writing in 1967 because poetry then seemed to him “an empty, meaningless parlor game.” Finding Cloud House reignited his passion. Soon he stumbled on a used copy of Jack Spicer’s Billy the Kid. The book changed him utterly. In the 1950s Spicer, along with Robin Glaser and Robert Duncan, helped forge an avant-garde poetry which they named the Berkeley Renaissance. Spicer especially showed Dad that poetry was a way to get in touch with his gay identity. “Spicer’s work acted like a magnet drawing out mine,” he wrote .
We were soon spending several nights a week at Cloud House. I’d find a sun-faded pillow in the corner, where Dad would set me up with paper and crayons. I drew fluffy cloud houses and cloud high-rises, all populated by eager inhabitants arriving on the backs of birds. Kush hung my pictures in the windows, so that every time I walked into Cloud House, it felt like my house too.
So many evenings of my girlhood were spent sitting in crowded, hushed rooms, waiting for the quiet to be pierced by these strings of strange words. Rarely could I follow what was being read. To me it was just background noise, a soundtrack for my curious wanderings, paging through books on shelves or looking at the Garfield and Snoopy comic books I’d brought from home. Other times, the steady and repetitive rhythm of the readers, the warmth and tone of their different voices, worked on me like a lullaby. I’d climb onto Dad’s lap and drift off to sleep, soothed by the movement of his breathing, his warm skinny chest which I listened to as it vibrated in animated conversation. There was no place I’d rather be.
Cloud House readings were often followed by potluck dinners. The grown-ups often drank too much, filling the rooms with their cigarette and marijuana smoke, reciting poetry, then arguing about it.
Poet 1: “In order to bring poetry to the people it has to relate to them personally, to expand their dreams. Protest poetry puts blinders on people.”
Poet 2: “But if there’s no revolutionary poetry, there may be no revolution!”
Poet 3: “I see the cassette tape recorder as the lethal weapon. We’ve gotta go out with the cassette players and instead of playing disco, play some consciousness!”
Dad and I always came home late from these evenings. We’d stumble into our respective beds, still in our clothes, and the next morning we’d wake up and rush out the door, late to school again.
SOON AFTER STARTING at French American I began to wet myself. At five and a half, I was three years out of diapers. I was not a bed wetter at home and I have no recollection, nor does Dad record in his journals, of my having accidents at home or anywhere else. But at French American, at the least convenient moments and least convenient places—high on the jungle gym or on the farthest reaches of the schoolyard—I’d have a sudden and uncontrollable urge to pee.
I was old enough that I could simply have gone to the bathroom in the morning or broken off from the single-file march from our classroom to the playground. But during those first few months I developed a deep and abiding wish to disappear. I didn’t want to call attention to myself by asking to go to the bathroom and I didn’t know how to ask in French. Besides, I’d grown accustomed to holding inside anything that was too embarrassing or too shameful to share: my dad’s boyfriends, my mom’s death, my pee.
Over the
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