A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [9]
Summer vacation was just an hour away.
All the kids got back on the bus to head back to school. We had spent the day at Sacajawea Park. Mom was missing. I asked my teacher and she said she didn’t know where she was.
Driving up Washington Street on the bus, I noticed smoke billowing up somewhere in my neighborhood. Seconds later I was yelling at the bus driver to stop. I saw the firefighters spraying at the flames that came out of my bedroom window. The driver said he wasn’t allowed to let me out. When we got back to school, a friend’s mother drove me to my house, which was badly burned on the top and on the sides by our upstairs bedrooms. Mom had left the field trip early and was home already, watching the tall flames from a neighbor’s driveway. The cause was unknown but I heard someone imply that my older brother Mark was home from school, smoking pot (I’d seen him and his friends smoke pot once and thought it looked cool—there was this twisted glass thing they used).
We stood outside watching. Nobody was hurt. My dad was in the alley screaming, “Fuck the world!”
It seemed like a lot of people were watching the house become wrecked with fire and water, and when they grew bored of it, they went back home.
Interim
On our first night after the fire, we stayed with a family from our church. They were trying to conserve water and I remember taking a bath with one of their boys before bed. The next couple of days we stayed at a motel in Pasco while the insurance matters were figured out. We spent part of those days going through our stuff at the house, figuring out what was too trashed (burned or water damaged) to keep. We stored all the salvageable things in our garage, which was just a cluttered mess of a structure made out of concrete, tin, and mismatched wood.
A few days later, we found a basement apartment to live in and we started moving our stuff over. It was only a block away, which was convenient, but besides that, it was way too small and depressing. The main problem was that it didn’t have windows. Living there made me feel like I was in solitary confinement. Or “family confinement.” A friend asked me if we lived in a bomb shelter.
The June sun was unbearably hot and everyone was sweaty as we carried boxes of stuff down the alley to our temporary home. Toward the end of the day, Matt and I tried to help Dad move the refrigerator down the concrete steps to the apartment. Halfway down, Dad’s fingers got slippery and he smashed them on the guardrail. “Fuckshitgodfuckcockbitchfuck!” he yelled.
It was the most inspired stream of bad language Matt or I had ever heard and we would repeat it often for the next few years. We had that George Carlin record where he said the “seven words you can’t say on television,” but that routine paled in comparison to this.
Mayfair
Darren Green was one of my best friends. His grandparents lived next to us, so I saw him only every few weeks when he visited them. But we became best friends and always talked about what it would be like when we got older and moved into a loft apartment together. One of our favorite things to do was go to Dairy Queen and get sundaes in those plastic football helmets. We did that for a few football seasons, trying to collect the helmets of all the teams.
Another thing we did was look at dirty magazines. We discovered that the guys’ employee bathroom at the Mayfair Market was a good place to look. Even though we lived right across the street, we would sometimes use the bathroom there, and we’d usually find a Playboy or Penthouse poorly hidden behind the garbage can.
We were just becoming familiar with naked women since the Dinken brothers had shown us some of the hardcore magazines their dad kept behind the seat of his old pickup. I’d steal candy bars for those Dinken kids, and, in exchange, they’d tear out pages from the magazines for me. The pictures were often of couples, and those confused me more than anything.