Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father by Alysia Abbott Read Free Book Online

and Ed could go out dancing in one of the many bars that were swelling with excitement in post-Stonewall San Francisco: Sissy’s Saloon, the Mineshaft, the Stud. On one occasion Paulette reported that I’d turned on all of the kitchen burners, which she’d discovered only after the smell of gas had permeated the apartment. Another time I drank half a bottle of medicine and suffered a minor tummy-ache.
    Reading about these events in my dad’s journals, it’s hard not to feel angry. My father expressed resentment because I asked him to fix me breakfast when, at age four, I was “perfectly capable of doing it alone.” Maybe Dad couldn’t understand my needs because our life was populated by so many needy wanderers like himself, young people escaping bad homes and bad marriages, all searching for their true selves and open to anything that might further that quest: Hollywood, bisexuality, cross-dressing, meditation, Quaaludes, biorhythm charts, bathhouses, Sufi dancing. Renegades all, but few truly suitable for raising kids, let alone watching them for a night or two.
    Eddie Body said I needed a mother. In truth, everyone in that apartment needed a mother, someone to cook and clean, someone to settle the quarrels and to dispense the love and acceptance that was so elusive to these men when they were growing up. I liked to play the role when I could, a Wendy to Dad’s lost boys. I’d call him “my poor little Da-da” and serve us bowls of Jell-O, saving the biggest serving for myself. When Eddie Body and Dad were tripping on drugs and dressed in drag I came up and said, “You can be a boy or you can be a girl, you can be whatever you want to be.”
    But, of course this was just pretend. Ours was a defiantly motherless world. Sometimes we were like Huck and Jim, beyond law, beyond rules, eating with our hands. We were unkempt but happy, with Dad affectionately calling me his “Wild Child.” Other times we were like Tatum and Ryan O’Neal in Paper Moon , a traveling father-daughter act pulling schemes, subsisting on our charm, and always sticking together.
    We hoped that Eddie Body could share this life with us, but their fights became more frequent. More and more he went out without my dad. And, according to my father’s journals, Ed became less interested in sex. Lonely and dejected, Dad remembered my mom:
    Sometimes I think of Barb and how callous I was to her for so long, so maybe it serves me right that Ed’s like that to me sometimes. I had a dream about her the other night. I was going around to all the bars alone, feeling lonely, and she brings me the car in the parking lot. We feel so good being together. “But this really isn’t happening you know, you’re dead.” She looks hurt. “It’s not that I don’t love you,” I say.
    One afternoon, at the Haight-Ashbury Daycare Center, I didn’t see Ed at the classroom door. Dad met me and we walked to the park. Back in the trees beside Hippie Hill, we started playing our game of hide-and-seek, a favorite from the time I was a toddler back in Atlanta. I called, “Where you are, Daddy?” He answered, “Here I am,” and I followed the sound. When I found the tree where he’d been hiding, I circled around it while he circled in the same direction so that he was always just out of reach.
    “Where you are, Daddy?”
    “Here I am!”
    Until, finally, I ran and caught him. When I became hungry and tired, we walked home together hand in hand. As we entered the tunnel leading to the opening of the park, Dad told me about Ed.
    “Eddie Body and I are having problems,” he said.
    “What kind of problems?” I asked.
    “Well, Ed doesn’t seem to like me anymore. He doesn’t want to sleep with me.”
    “I’ll sleep with you,” I said. And I pulled his hand and started skipping, so that he would be forced to join me, which he did happily.
    As we skipped through the tunnel, I began to sing a song I’d learned at day care: “This little light of mine,