Sometimes I Think About It Read online

  SOMETIMES

  I THINK

  ABOUT IT

  Also by Stephen Elliott

  Novels

  Happy Baby

  What It Means to Love You

  A Life Without Consequences

  Jones Inn

  Erotica

  My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up

  Nonfiction

  The Adderall Diaries

  Looking Forward to It: Or, How I Learned to Stop

  Worrying and Love the American Electoral Process

  As Editor

  Where to Invade Next

  Sex for America

  Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction

  Politically Inspired: Fiction for Our Time

  Co-writer with Eric Martin

  Donald

  SOMETIMES

  I THINK

  ABOUT IT

  ESSAYS

  STEPHEN ELLIOTT

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  Copyright © 2017 by Stephen Elliott

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Some of the essays in this collection appeared originally in different form in the following publications:

  “Where I Slept,” “An Interview with My Father,” and “An Interview with Lorelei Lee” in the Rumpus, “My Little Brother Ruined My Life” in Maisonneuve, “Hate To Be Alone” in McSweeney’s, “Sometimes I Think About Suicide” in the Sun, “Jimmy Wallet Is Buried Alive” in Esquire, “The New New Middle East” and “The Score” in the Believer, “California Superpredator” in LA Weekly, “Why Britney Matters” in the Stranger, “The DIY Book Tour” in the New York Times Book Review, and “Silicon Is Just Sand” in Epic Magazine.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-775-7

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-968-3

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930119

  Cover design: Steve Attardo

  Cover art: Shutterstock

  It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us but revealed to us our true level. —Simone Weil

  Contents

  In Country

  Where I Slept

  My Little Brother Ruined My Life

  Hate to Be Alone

  Sometimes I Think About Suicide

  An Interview with My Father

  A Place in This World

  Jimmy Wallet Is Buried Alive

  The New New Middle East

  California Superpredator

  The Score

  The Business of America Is Business

  Why Britney Matters

  The DIY Book Tour

  An Interview with Lorelei Lee

  Silicon Is Just Sand

  These essays were written between 2003 and 2015. They’re mostly personal essays. After assembling them, I went through, pulling out redundancies. Sometimes the echoes were interesting, and I let them remain. Sometimes I didn’t feel that an essay represented me anymore but decided to keep it anyway. That’s the problem with writing things down; we change, the person who wrote is no longer there.

  SOMETIMES

  I THINK

  ABOUT IT

  In Country

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, climbing next to me in the bed, still fully dressed.

  Where I Slept

  My homeless year began early in October 1985 and ended the last day of August 1986. I was thirteen, and then fourteen, and it’s a story I’ve never told, partly because I slept in so many places that year. I slept in the broom closet of a friend’s apartment building. The closet was just inside the entryway, past the eight slotted mailboxes. It was the size of a single bed, crowded with mop buckets and cleaning solutions, and I could stretch all the way out and my toes would just touch the door. The building itself was a tan brick four-flat. Kwan lived with his parents and grandmother in a two-bedroom on the second floor, part of a wave of Korean immigrants who had arrived on the North Side of Chicago in the early eighties, on their way to the suburbs, along with the Kurds and Russian Jews. When I would come over to visit after school, Kwan’s grandmother would clutch my head in her bony hands and pray for me.

  “She wants to know if you’re going to church,” Kwan would explain. When it was time for dinner, Kwan would politely ask me to leave.

  I had a leather bomber jacket my father had given me in one of our better moments, and some clothes, and I wore them all when I slept in the broom closet. It was just as hard and cold there as it was outside, and it was winter in Chicago and I was thirteen. I could see my breath pooling in the dark and woke shivering every night. I had a watch, so I knew it was usually three, and then I’d wait until six, when I went to the Laundromat on California Avenue and would sit there trying to get warm. But after a while I couldn’t get warm and even in school I was shivering all the time, vibrating in my big jacket.

  But this isn’t about school (I was in eighth grade). And it’s not about my father handcuffing me to a pipe and leaving me there in the basement of his old house. And it’s not about the hotel room I ended up in one homeless evening, with a man in a nurse’s uniform and a wig giving head to three larger, stronger men, lines of coke spread haphazardly across the table. All of that is true, but this is just a list of the different places I slept.

  I slept at home. I went home several times. I had a large bedroom, and the walls were covered in wallpaper that looked like an open sky full of birds. I had a down comforter and two pillows in Charlie Brown pillowcases. I had a manual typewriter I banged on, and I taped bad poetry over my walls and listened to Pink Floyd albums on the cabinet record player. I made dinner from endless cans of Chef Boyardee and stacks of frozen steaks. If I were to guess, I would say that rapprochements with my father led to me sleeping at home a full month out of the eleven I spent as a homeless child in Chicago. Other friends who ran away would climb in through my window and sleep beneath my bed.

  I turned fourteen in a basement I had broken into with my friends Albert and Justin. Justin was often homeless that year too, and he also slept in many places. The floor was blue cement, and we sat up most of the night against the wood storage sheds, working our way through pints of vodka and confessing to things like masturbation. In the morning the police woke us with flash-lights and boots and sent us back to the streets.

  I slept in the police station, the Twenty-Fourth District, the flat, dark building with the giant parking lot on Clark Street. I was arrested for curfew, then drug possession, then breaking into parking meters. I slept on the scratched steel cot inside the cell in the juvenile unit or sitting uprigh
t with my wrist next to my ear, handcuffed to a steel loop in the wall.

  A Jewish man found me in the broom closet. He seemed confused. He couldn’t understand why a child was sleeping there. He probably owned the building. He was probably just coming to get a mop. “It’s OK,” I told him, gathering my things in my arms, careful not to look in his eyes, and walking away. I was fourteen. I didn’t want to answer obvious questions. The broom closet was locked after that.

  On the coldest nights, when my lashes became icicles, I snuck into a boiler room and slept next to the warm pipes and left when I heard the banging that meant someone was coming down the stairs. I walked along Devon Avenue when the bank clock read twenty below. I had hypothermia. It was like a circuit at times: roof, roof, boiler room. Other times things settled and I would go to the same place over and over again and go to sleep just like anyone else.

  I slept at my father’s girlfriend’s apartment, on a couch in her living room, and I watched her sleep through the half-open door to her bedroom, her blanket riding up her naked thighs. She slept flat on her stomach with her head turned, breathing softly into the pillow, and her legs slightly spread. I watched the balls of her feet, the curve of her toes, and her tan calves. This is not about her struggling to hold on to me, arms wrapped around my waist while I lunged for the doorknob, my father on his way, upset over the social workers who had begun to bother him about his homeless child. Or the violence that occurred after he found me walking late that night down Chicago Avenue, covered in snow, and took me home and smacked me across the face and shaved my head.

  I slept in my grandparents’ small flat outside Sheffield, England. My grandparents are dead now, both of them. They weren’t expecting me. I drank barley wine at night with them, and my grandfather told me stories about the Great War and made jokes about his missing thumb. When they went to sleep, I journeyed out to the pubs and I drank some more. During the day I hiked the Uden valley, watched the sheep in the long green fields. I found my first strip club in the back of a small pub with a broken window. Several times I hitchhiked into Sheffield to watch punk-rock bands and met people who were looking for fights. I wasn’t looking for a fight. After a week my grandparents sent me back to America.

  I slept above the Quick Stop on Pratt and California, only a block away from my grammar school. I climbed the gutters to the roof and lay in the corner beneath the lip to block the wind. Sometimes I would poke my head up and see the lights at the crosswalk and the black, empty streets, and I would feel so lucky and free. There were video games in the store, but I wasn’t allowed inside. The teachers knew I was homeless and bought me lunch, but no one offered to take me home. My friends’ parents also didn’t offer to take me in. At PTA meetings parents were warned to keep their children away from me. I was a known drug user, an eighth-grade drinker, when I could get the money together. One time Justin’s father chased me down the sidewalk in his taxi, trying to run me over. When I jumped the fence to get away, he pressed a gun against my friend Roger’s chest and commanded him to tell where I was. But Roger didn’t know, and that, like so many other things that happened that year, is not what this is about.

  I stole food from the dumpster behind the Dominick’s, cold packets of meat just past the sell-by date. I slept at the canal, where we built fires and planned adventures, all the neighborhood’s forgotten children, the ones whose parents didn’t notice they were missing or didn’t care, dancing near the flames. Nobody looked for us. We named things. The tree I sat in was called Steve’s Office, the fire pit was Pete Brown’s Grave. Pat had a throne dug into the dirt below the path, and Rob had Rob’s Chair, which was just the tip of a boulder protruding horizontally from the slope. We respected each other’s space most of the time. We built a fire every night, and we threw rocks at the rats as they scurried in and out of the filthy water. We had wonderful times at the canal playing heavy-metal music and dropping acid while trying to stay awake for cops and tougher kids who might want to beat us up. One time Fat Mike came running, out of breath. He had seen headlights near the baseball stadium. “Dude,” he said. “Could be a cop car, could be a party car, I don’t know.” We laughed for hours over that. We woke up covered in dirt, reeking of smoke, and went to school.

  I slept at home. My mother was dead. My father didn’t always notice me when I came back; other times he woke me with a loud whistle. He never reported me missing when I left again. We didn’t want each other, and eventually he moved himself to the suburbs with his new wife and didn’t bother to get me his forwarding address.

  I slept three nights with a Christian man who did painting work for my father. He lived in a small apartment, and his wife was dying rapidly, as my mother had. I went with him to church. I ruined his baking pan cooking hamburger on his stovetop. It wasn’t working out, he told me. Years later my father contacted me demanding I write his Christian friend a thank-you letter.

  There was a man named Ron. He had an apartment beneath Pat’s mother’s apartment. Pat’s mother was a junkie and Ron was just a twenty-year-old slacker who would one day go to community college and get a degree in hospitality that would allow him to work in a hotel. I had stolen some money and bought a quarter pound of marijuana, and Ron let me stay with him until the marijuana was gone. Pat’s mother is dead now. Justin’s parents are also dead. Roger’s dad is dead. Dan’s mom is dead. It has nothing to do with the story, but my friends’ parents all died young.

  I slept beneath Brian’s bed, and when Brian’s father caught me, he kicked me out, and then he beat Brian. Brian’s father saw me stumbling down the street drunk, with my shirt off in the middle of winter, and he said to his daughter, “I ought to put him out of his misery.” He did too much coke and had a bad heart. He died too.

  I slept in the closet of an independent-living home for wards of the state. The home was on Sacramento. A normal, boxy-looking house in the middle of the street, with a small basketball court in the backyard. Eight boys lived there, transitioning between group homes and living alone. Some of the boys snuck me inside. The closet was small, and I had to sleep sitting up with my legs crossed. I was discovered by the staff, and they fed me a bowl of cereal. Someday soon the state would take custody of me and I would also be a ward of the state and I would live in that very home for a time.

  More often than anything, I slept outside. I slept in parks and in the woods and on the neighborhood rooftops. But when you can fall asleep anywhere, you often do. I was always the last to leave the party. I never had to go home.

  Sometimes Justin would have a girlfriend, and I would sleep on the couch and he would sleep in the bedroom. Justin was popular that way. He was beautiful, like a woman, with his long black hair. Sometimes Justin and I slept together on a gravelly rooftop, and he would wrap his thin legs over my legs and his sinewy arms across my chest and hold me tight, his face buried in my neck, and I was never sure if he was doing that because he wanted to or because he thought I expected it from him.

  Justin and I slept at the Maxworks, a hippie commune in Jewtown. The neighborhood doesn’t exist anymore. They paved it over to expand the university campus. The Maxworks was a three-story abandoned building taken over by radicals, many of whom lived there for twenty years. They smoked dandelions and banana skins and made pocket money selling handmade pipes to the junkies sitting around garbage cans outside. Justin and I were too young to recognize what we had stumbled on: the failure of an earlier generation’s promise. They gave us acid—yellow sunshine—and one of the women in a flowery skirt with unshaven legs and armpits had sex with Justin. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her spinning in circles in a trash heap near a fire. Her arms were outstretched and her dress was translucent. I was so jealous, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was an ugly child, and sometimes my ugliness kept me safe.

  From the Maxworks, over eight days in the summer of 1986, Justin and I slept our way in cars and trucks across America. The truck stop in East Los Angeles was a sea of flashing lights
, the air wavy with gasoline, open trailers filled with rolls of carpet, men standing on dock ladders or leaning back in their rigs, chatting lazily on the radio in the deafening hum of the motoring engines. I slept in the cabin of a truck while the driver molested Justin in the front. I slept right through it, and in the morning, sitting in a doughnut shop under a blank gray sky, surrounded by highways and the roar of traffic, Justin told me he wanted to kill that man. He had stolen our only bag, and inside was my poetry and our maps. I thought that was what Justin was talking about, the poetry and the maps, but it wasn’t. Years later, when I was at a party telling my favorite story, about hitchhiking from Chicago to California with my best friend, Justin would interrupt me and say, “Steve, I was molested.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I asked, which was a dumb thing to say. I was so angry.

  In Las Vegas we slept in the juvenile detention center. We had caught a ride with a German, and he took us from Los Angeles to the Strip. He wore shorts and drove with a beer between his legs. Good beer, he said, from Germany. He stopped in a convenience store and bought cheap beer so we would have something to drink too. He had a small bong in the glove compartment and a pillbox filled with weed, and we smoked that as we drove into the desert, and he dropped us off at Caesars Palace, where we stocked up on free matchbooks and wondered what to do next.

  A state trooper answered that question. We were out on the entry ramp, trying to hitch a ride out of town. Our clothes were muddy and ripped. We were put in jail as runaways. They contacted my father, who stopped in the print shop on Pratt Boulevard and told the woman working there, “They arrested my son in Las Vegas. I’m not going to get him.”