A Very Uncomfortable Time

A Very Uncomfortable Time

When I was 15 years old, I was living in Berkeley with my father and brother in a house on Grizzly Peak Boulevard. My father and I each had a bedroom on the main floor, and Eric had one downstairs, next to the laundry room.

I was woken up one school morning by my father’s alarm clock. I went into his bedroom and shut it off, noticing that his bed had not been slept in.

I found him on the living room sofa, collapsed onto the newspaper, utterly silent. I poked him in the shoulder, and found it cold and hard.

It was clear to me that he was dead, but I had no idea what to do about it. After a few moments, I hear Eric’s shower go on. I called him on the intercom, “Get up here. I need you.” And up he came.

He thought there might be some hope, and called for an ambulance. The EMTs made a show of working on Dad, and Eric went with them to the hospital.

I stood in the driveway and wondered what to do. The mother of the family across the street had heard the ambulance and came out. After I told her what had happened, she brought me into her house to await word from the hospital.

When the call came, she spoke with the hospital. I told her she didn’t need to say the words; it had been obvious. I carried in my purse an address book, and we called Dad’s brother and his ex-wife, our mother, with the news.

He had died from a drug overdose, probably accidental. A closeted gay man and a doctor, Dad had self-prescribed all manner of psychoactive drugs. Mother had told us of his drug use, without explaining why it was up to us to deal with it. We had noticed that he sometimes passed out at the dinner table or was very hard to awaken in the mornings, and that his emotions were volatile. Once he stopped talking to us for several days. But we figured that was more or less normal.

I was in the throes of a crush on one of my women teachers at the time, and I had imagined her having to tell me that my father had died, and she would take care of me.  I felt guilty when part of my fantasy came true.

Mother borrowed a truck and came to take us to live with her in Santa Monica. She was ruthless in cutting down our possessions to what would fit in the truck. I would be separated from my home, school, friends, and much of my stuff. But at least I’d spent many vacations in Santa Monica, so there was something familiar about our destination.

I remember that our first day at Santa Monica High School was April 1. I was a straight-A student, so I settled in pretty quickly. I wrote the following poem around that time. It was published in a mimeographed literary journal called The Voltaire:

Fog, all around me,

Sheltering me

From my world that was

Torn apart.

When will the sun

shine again?

I can’t see

Through the fog,

Nor do I want to see

My world that was.

I look forward

To sunshine.

Upon what

Will the sun shine?

What will I see

When it rises again?

What?

What new road

Lies ahead,

Shrouded now by fog,

which will soon be revealed?