Fascinatingly disturbing, this memoir chronicles seven years in the life of a distinctly unordinary American family. In 1973, Dirk Jamison's father started having a midlife crisis that never ended, and after purposefully losing his construction job, he moved his family to a ski resort and started feeding them from dumpsters in an effort to reject money and all its trappings. They were never homeless, never desperately poor, but they lived on garbage. While Jamison struggled with adolescence, he faced a father who valued freedom more than anything, an overweight Mormon mother, and a cruel sister who delighted in physical abuse. Hilarious and horrifying, this heartbreaking account tells the strange story of the anti-American dream.
Fascinatingly disturbing, this memoir chronicles seven years in the life of a distinctly unordinary American family. In 1973, Dirk Jamison's father started having a midlife crisis that never ended, and after purposefully losing his construction job, he moved his family to a ski resort and started feeding them from dumpsters in an effort to reject money and all its trappings. They were never homeless, never desperately poor, but they lived on garbage. While Jamison struggled with adolescence, he faced a father who valued freedom more than anything, an overweight Mormon mother, and a cruel sister who delighted in physical abuse. Hilarious and horrifying, this heartbreaking account tells the strange story of the anti-American dream.
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Overview
Fascinatingly disturbing, this memoir chronicles seven years in the life of a distinctly unordinary American family. In 1973, Dirk Jamison's father started having a midlife crisis that never ended, and after purposefully losing his construction job, he moved his family to a ski resort and started feeding them from dumpsters in an effort to reject money and all its trappings. They were never homeless, never desperately poor, but they lived on garbage. While Jamison struggled with adolescence, he faced a father who valued freedom more than anything, an overweight Mormon mother, and a cruel sister who delighted in physical abuse. Hilarious and horrifying, this heartbreaking account tells the strange story of the anti-American dream.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781556525995 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2006 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Dirk Jamison has contributed work to LA Weekly, Self, Utne Reader, and on PRI's This American Life. His documentary film about his father, who still dumpster-dives at the age of 71, was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
Read an Excerpt
Perishable
A Memoir
By Dirk Jamison
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2006 Dirk JamisonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-236-3
CHAPTER 1
Mother makes a birthday cake from scratch, then decorates it with little marzipan Eskimos standing in marzipan canoes. She's using her shoulder to pin the telephone against her ear. The cake is huge, and so is she. The cake is for me.
She tells the phone this:
"Now with me, you start cutting from the end of the watermelon and everyone has a slice. His way is to cut down the middle and eat the heart out, because that's the part he wants. I told him he's being selfish. The heart is the best part, and you should only take your share of the best part. But he says he can take whatever he wants."
She's talking about Dad. Her tone of voice suggests that the phone line leads to one of her Mormon sisters living in Oregon. It's the third time she's told this story today.
"I warned him not to do it again, but you know him. He did it again. So I picked up the melon and went after him. He could see that I was gonna throw it, so he started running. He ran right out of the house, and I hit him in the head while he was on the steps. But it didn't make a difference. He did it again today. I keep thinking he's going to evolve, that these weirdnesses in him are going to change. But it keeps getting worse instead of better."
For each sister, at some point, Mother whispers "midlife crisis" so I decide to say something as she hangs up. I use the phrase Dad got from Carlos Castaneda.
"What?" She repositions one of the Eskimo's arms, then starts streaking the river blue with food dye on a toothpick.
"You said 'midlife crisis' again. He says it's a Path with Heart."
"What?"
"Dad calls it a Path with Heart."
There's purple frosting at the corner of her mouth, and she's staring at me, almost cross-eyed. I get the feeling I usually get when she stares. I wonder whether she's forgotten my name.
"Oh, honey," Mother says, with ... I'm not sure what it is. Pity? Disappointment? She uses the toothpick to jab the Eskimo two blue eyes, then goes to her room to cry for a while.
* * *
Dad tucks us in. My older sister always gets an "abalone story" from his days as a professional scuba diver. For my little brother, it's a memorized list of tropical vacations:
"Where we going at three, Daddy?"
"Hawaii."
"Four?"
"Belize."
"Five?"
"Cancún."
These are the places he will take us. One paradise per hour.
I get a kiss on the forehead, and the same thing whispered every night. "I wanna be like you when I grow up."
But then that insomniac poke after what always feels like only a couple minutes. It's two in the morning and Dad hasn't slept for weeks. "Happy birthday," he whispers. "You feel like walking?"
We head to the beach so he can tell me a few things. Free will versus Determinism. Nature versus Nurture. Society versus the Individual. There's always a versus, and his favorite is Male versus Female. I understand maybe a tenth of it because I'm seven, but one thing is clear. He's not happy.
We go to our usual perch on the deck of lifeguard station #7. The boardwalk is lined with towering palm trees, all leaning too far in the same direction. Someday they'll all tip over. It's freezing, and there's a tractor-sized grooming machine cruising parallel with the water. Dad gives me his jacket, then reads me his latest poem. His money diary has turned into a book of poetry — The Messiah's Handbook: Feet of Clay Walking in Shoes of Arrogance. It's a ledger book with graph paper. He used to keep track of money made and spent while diving for abalone, so old entries generally go something like this:
Minney's swap meet. Pulley and rope — $2.
New entries sound more like this:
God abhors the goodness of man
it stinks to heaven
making the pure places rotten
paths obscure
plucking the seeing eyes and rolling
them in offal
'til a whited image is left a monument
to Satan.
I ask him, "What's offal?"
"Feces."
"What's feces?"
"Human shit."
"Ah."
* * *
Dad says, "Poor bastard," as the grooming machine passes. A spotlight above the deck shows us the driver slumped forward like he's dead. Dad is counting weeks like he used to count days. His life has become a tedious holding pattern where nothing adds up. He doesn't bother washing his pants anymore. They just get dirty again the next day. His wife is a massive jack-Mormon wrapped in polyester who can't take a single sentence at face value. "If I say two words, she hears six!"
A jack-Mormon is a member who no longer spends time in an actual church. Mother considers herself a serious believer prevented from worshipping by a godless husband who thinks Mormons have no brains.
Dad gave her a Soap-on-a-Rope in the shape of an aspirin because that's what she swallows at night to sleep. Just a joke. But Mother warned me that the oversized pill meant her husband wanted her to "go to sleep for good." Once, in a crowded mall, Dad let go of a door and nailed her in the head. Just an accident. But rather than accuse him of being impolite, Mother stunned shoppers with the accusation that her husband was trying to kill her with public doors.
She's a little sensitive lately. She's still trying to recover from her discovery of a list a few months ago. An Enemies list. Written by Dad during a night panic, then hidden in plain sight on the bedside dresser. The list was long, and Mother is working on forgetting about it. But she's having trouble forgetting the first two items listed:
1. Wife
2. Kids
* * *
Dad describes The Virtue of Selfishness, by Ayn Rand, which claims that the word selfish was invented in order to push people around.
"When you hear that word, you gotta pay attention. It means somebody wants to keep you from doing what you want. Self-interest is a better word since it's impossible not to act in your own self-interest. Even when you work like a dog for other people, it's still for you. So why not just do the things you like?"
It seems like a chance to mention it, so I do. "Like eating the watermelon heart."
"Exactly!" He's quiet a moment. "What did she tell you about that?" "Nothing."
"She threw the damn thing at me. Did she tell you that? And I got another watermelon just for her. Did she tell you that? I even said to her, 'Now I want you to eat the heart.' I wanted her to experience that same thing I did. You've got this really great part! I wanted her to experience the heart of life, I guess. You give yourself that gift. The gift of what happens. And that's what makes life worthwhile. But she wouldn't do it. I said, 'This one's just for you. You eat the heart!' She said, 'I can't. I can't eat the heart.' She couldn't eat the heart! Even if I cut it out and gave it to her, she still couldn't eat it. And I don't know why. I guess she doesn't think she deserves it. That's probably why."
* * *
Dad tucks me in again and wishes me luck on our dreaming project. His goal is to expand our "cognizant minds" by controlling our dreams, which will allegedly encourage the merging of the unconscious and conscious. "Good luck," he says.
Mother suggested that dreams serve a purpose. "So you shouldn't mess with them."
"Jesus," Dad said. "Of course we should mess with them!"
The first step is to simply acknowledge the dream state. I am dreaming. Then you look around to identify your location. This is usually what trips Dad up. It's the third step that gets me. You look at your hands, which initiates a new transitional state just beneath consciousness. You're supposed to float there, but I always jolt awake, already in a sitting position and looking at what I assume are my real hands. It's a feeling similar to tipping over backward in a chair.
There are seven total steps. Once we get through them all, Dad says, we can spend all night doing whatever the hell we want.
* * *
Tonight's dream is this:
I'm treading water in the ocean when a cartoon whale surfaces and starts chasing me. His teeth are tree stumps made of cement. I say to myself, do not piss your pants. You are only dreaming. Just swim faster than possible. But there's no shore, so I decide to fly instead. I don't flap my arms. I just glide. Then I remember to look at my damn hands, and plunge horribly into my real bed.
Dad is getting ready for work in the kitchen. The sun is starting to show. I tell him about the dream.
"Christ, really?" he says. "That's fantastic!"
"Shhh."
"The flying is step four," he says. "You made a conscious decision in your unconscious. The only problem is that it came before step three. So next time, look at your hands just for a second, then look away. Don't stare at them. That's when you get stuck."
He empties his carpenter's pouch onto the counter. Nails, screws, drill bits, sawdust. "Hey, you know what birthdays are for? So you can take stock. You stop and ask yourself, How's this life thing going so far?" He clips the carpenter's belt around his waist, then uses scissors to open a jumbo bag of sunflower seeds. "So how's it going?"
"Huh?"
"How's it going?"
"Me?"
"Yeah."
"Pretty good."
"Yeah? Because I've been thinking about something my grandfather said. He had a heart attack waiting for a bus. I told you that, right? He just laid back on the grass and died. But he told me something a couple days earlier. He said, 'We shit on life, then wonder why it stinks.'" The carpenter's belt has three separate pouches. Dad fills all three with sunflower seeds. "That seems very pertinent to me lately."
"What's pertinent mean?"
"It's like when you say something speaks volumes. Or it just means that's how I feel. But don't worry. I have a plan." He pats one of the pouches bulging with seeds. "In fact, why don't you come to work with me?"
"I have school."
"That doesn't matter. It'll be fun. That's one hell of a birthday cake, huh?"
It's on the kitchen table. There's an entire second tier now. It looks like a wedding cake. There are dozens of cheerful arctic characters. Orcas, otters, dolphins. But Mother has added clubs to the hands of the Eskimos. The clubs are raised over their heads, and they've cornered a marzipan walrus.
CHAPTER 2The job site is a half-finished restaurant called The Spaghetti Factory in Newport Beach. Dad stuffs his cheek with the sunflower seeds and waits for the foreman to catch us sitting in a corner. He describes a scene from a Carlos Castaneda book that Mother calls "the butterfly book." She blames this book for teaching her husband how to "ignore all the rules." When she first noticed a change in him, he was carrying a paperback copy around constantly, and there was a butterfly on the cover.
Dad's description of the scene gets interrupted by a carpenter wearing a baseball cap backward. He stops to stare at us. "You brought your kid on the job?"
"That's right," Dad says. "He can control his dreams."
"What?"
"He controls his dreams."
"Is that good?"
"Jesus, Lou, nice talking to you."
"What, I just don't understand what you're telling me."
"Yeah, I noticed. Go back to work."
"Look who's talking!"
In the scene, a mentor is trying to show his apprentice how to broaden his reality by sitting in a desert and just looking around for days at a time. When the apprentice sees a giant lion-faced lizard breathing fire behind a bush, he points with great excitement, then realizes that it's nothing. Just a plastic bag caught on the bush, thrashing in the breeze. He laughs and describes what he thought he saw.
The mentor tells him, "Well, you had it right for a second there."
* * *
Dad's best friend shows up late with a hangover. His black hair is even shaggier than usual, and his handlebar mustache, which is usually twisted into points, looks like two sparrow wings. His name is Bob K——— but that has to change soon because he's in trouble for crashing motorcycles, then walking home. If he stayed, he would get arrested for drunk driving, which is far more expensive than the motorcycles he abandons. He only drives pieces of crap registered under fake names. Something didn't work right this time, though, because now the police are after him.
While Bob hammers, Dad disputes the existence of a grocery store across the street.
Bob says, "What the hell are you talking about? It's right there."
"How can you be so sure?"
"I see it. Right there."
"Yeah, I see something."
"Look at the sign! It's says Stater Bros."
"Yeah, I see that too. But I'm not convinced."
"Christ ..."
Dad climbs a ladder to graffiti a steel beam with an orange carpenter's crayon. He writes what his grandfather said about shitting on life, then cups his hands like a bullhorn and addresses the crew. "I wrote down a little wisdom for you miserable sons a bitches!"
A few carpenters laugh.
Dad sits atop the ladder and begins spitting sunflower shells on the floor while singing this song:
"If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife. So from my personal point of view, get an ugly girl to marry you."
Someone shouts, "Take a day off, man. You're losing it!"
"Hey, shut up down there! I'm in charge now. So somebody better sweep up these godawful sunflower seeds!"
Bob slaps his knees when he laughs, sometimes rocking back and forth, depending on how funny something is. It's one of the reasons I like Bob. He laughs so hard, it looks like he's going crazy.
When the foreman finally peeks in, Dad is lifting his first hammer of the day, to smash a hornet on a floor joist overhead. The foreman heads back to his boss trailer without Dad even noticing him, which gets Bob laughing again.
"What?" Dad laughs a little without knowing why. Bob's laugh has this effect on people.
Bob tells him about the foreman.
Dad comes down off the ladder. "Christ Almighty." This is one of his favorite things to say. "Jesus Christ on a goddamn crutch" is another.
* * *
We go to Bob's bungalow apartment for lunch and advice on getting fired. Dad has lost so many jobs without trying, he figures doing it on purpose will be a cinch.
Every time he works with Bob, they get canned. On their last job, plywood sheets were being peeled from a concrete wall with a huge crane. It was six stories up, and the bosses expected the carpenters to stand directly next to the action and help. Ernie was a friend who had gotten them the work. He was the only one dumb enough to do it:
"So Ernie's up there working like a madman. Bob and I are on the ground laughing. Then he gets knocked off balance and goes swinging out with the plywood. Just hanging on with his hands! It was crazy. We wouldn't even go up there, let alone work on the edge of the building like that. They expect you to risk your life for some silly job."
But that's not why they got fired.
"No, it's because we were laughing too much. That happens a lot."
* * *
From his front porch, Bob gives driving advice instead: never stop your car for a woman waiting to cross the street.
If you just zoom past, the woman will hurry home to offer her husband or boyfriend intercourse. She will do this to mask the injury of you not liking her enough to stop your car and study the way she walks. Each time Bob does this, he imagines what the intercourse she's about to give will look like. He claims it's better than finding out how she walks. And it feels good to help his fellow man get some tail. He feels a sense of brotherhood because tail is so difficult to get.
* * *
A neighbor woman starts moving stones around. Bob's driveway is outlined with stones that people have kicked out of position. The woman is putting them back into a nice curve, but she keeps glaring over at us. Bob whispers that it's because the driveway is shared by all the tenants. The rocks also belong to Bob, and the woman is upset because the men aren't helping.
Dad calls to the woman, "It's OK not to do something."
She squints. "What?"
"It's OK not to do something."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Hey," Bob says, "don't aggravate these people. I have to live here." Then he offers to narc. He used Dad as an impartial reference to get the job, so the foreman is unaware of their friendship. Bob can turn him in for swiping lumber after dark.
"I wanna get fired, not arrested." Dad goes down to the driveway, but not to help the woman.
Bob says, "How about I just tell the him the truth? You're a lazy shit."
"That sounds about right." Dad starts picking up cigarette butts. Bob smokes like a fiend, and tosses each butt directly in front of his home.
Bob says, "What the hell are you doing that for?"
Dad thinks a moment. "It's OK not to do something. And it's OK to do something." He addresses the woman again. "Right?"
"What?"
"It's OK to do something."
She hurries inside.
Bob slaps his knee. "She hates your guts."
"No. She's just shy."
* * *
Dad dresses up like a pirate for my birthday dinner because he doesn't have an Eskimo costume. He says "arg" as I blow out the candles. Then he tilts up his eye patch and opens a mason jar full of banana wine that's been brewing above the fridge for two weeks. He wants to celebrate an "important decision" that none of us bother asking about. He won't tell anyway. He prefers to spring things on you when you aren't asking. Bob gave him the wine recipe. It smells like vinegar. Dad drinks half the jar, then goes outside to vomit repeatedly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Perishable by Dirk Jamison. Copyright © 2006 Dirk Jamison. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Part One: Huntington Beach, California, 1973,Part Two: Mammoth Lakes, California, 1975,
Part Three: La Grande, Oregon, 1977,
Epilogue,