Kevin Sampsell - A Common Pornography - A Memoir

In the meantime, I had bought a used ten-speed and would cruise the small downtown area in search of any kind of youth culture. When I lived in Spokane I went out every other night and I was anxious to find a social life in my new city. I was starting to wonder if moving to Arkansas was a mistake. When I asked people about fun places to go, they’d always say Tulsa or Dallas.

I found out about a place called the 700 Club, a warehouse-type space where local punk and alternative bands played. They had an open mic night coming up and I was eager to go. When I got there that night, it turned out that whoever had the keys to the place hadn’t show up. So one of the club regulars put the tailgate of his truck down and made that the stage. It was a humid late-summer night and unlike the Spokane open mics, most of the people who came to the 700 Club (or at least its parking lot) were there with acoustic guitars. It was more like a punk hootenanny.

There wasn’t any kind of sign-up list. After someone played a few songs they’d just ask the couple dozen people there who wanted to be next. I watched three or four people strum and sing before I felt like I could get up there. I stood in the bed of the truck and read a few poems. At the time, I was heavily influenced by a Seattle writer named Jesse Bernstein, who wrote violent and funny stories and read them in a crazed scratchy panic. I did my best to imitate Bernstein’s voice as I read my own attempts at dark humor. I prefaced my reading by telling everyone that I had just moved there from Washington State. Afterward, a few people talked to me, mostly to ask about the Northwest. Apparently, the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” had debuted just the night before and a couple of the kids at the open mic couldn’t stop talking about it. They couldn’t believe it when I told them I saw Nirvana play once in a parking garage.

One of the girls there was what I always envisioned a sweet Southern girl would be like. She was warm and pixielike, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a face that glowed with honesty and hope. The only thing missing was the Southern accent. I talked with a few of the guys there and they all acted like they wanted to date her. She had gotten out of a long relationship recently and they were just trying to figure a way to ask her out. After two more open mics, I finally worked up the nerve myself.

We started dating and fell in love. I felt a little weird since she was still in high school, but as soon as she graduated, we decided to move to Portland, Oregon. We ran an espresso cart business and I started publishing more of my writing in magazines. I also met many more writers and began publishing more books by other writers. Even though I was happy, I felt anxious. My girlfriend and I had our ups and downs. There were breakups and infidelities and apologies. There was a miscarriage that I didn’t know how to handle. I was unfairly distant and selfish.

But then we got back together and my son was born.

Zach’s was a home birth, just after midnight on the hottest day of the year in 1994. The next morning, going out the front door and walking to the store, the world did indeed feel totally different. The sky looked larger and gravity felt nonexistent. I noticed every color and every movement around me. I didn’t know much about babies or how to be a father yet, but I knew right away that I was going to do better than my own father.

Nearly fourteen yearsafter I became a father, I got a message about my own dad. It was from a cousin or aunt, someone I’d never met. She was using that uncertain voice that people use when they’re not sure if their message is being recorded. “Kevin? It’s about your dad. He had a brain aneurysm and he’s in the hospital. They’re not sure if he’s going to last much longer. Your mom wanted me to call some people and tell them. If you want to see him, or say good-bye, you should probably come right away.”

I knew that this was a call I’d be getting soon. For his last four years he was in a wheelchair and everything about him was shutting down. I would call home and talk with Mom about various things and then she’d hand the phone to Dad. It was obvious that speaking had become harder for him. Slowly and with little volume, he would try hard just to get one sentence out, probably about a chore around the house he would never get to or something about church. The words barely made it above the pained breathing. His voice was an eerie death rattle coming through the phone line.

And now this came through the phone line. I played the message over a few times and then saved it.

I was at home in Portland, a four-hour drive away. I had no desire to go right away. I was about to go to work anyway.

I called Mom and talked to her. She said he was brain dead but still breathing. I asked if he was responding to anything, if he could hear her. The phone line was crackling and cutting out and she couldn’t understand what I was saying. I had been waiting for him to die, and had even fantasized about it, but I couldn’t help feeling anxious now that it was really happening.

“Can he hear you? Can you talk into his ear?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“Can he understand words?”

“I’m sorry, Kevin. I can’t hear what you’re saying.”

“Could you tell him I love him,” I finally said. I was starting to cry.

“Maybe you should take some days off of work,” she said gently.

I knew I wasn’t going to drive up there until he died. I didn’t want to take the days off work and hang out in Kennewick on a deathwatch. The place made me depressed more than nostalgic. Mom and Dad had moved out of the big house we used to live in, the one we rebuilt after the fire. They bought a much smaller manufactured home out behind Columbia Center Mall in the mid-nineties and Mark was still there too, living with them. He was Dad’s caregiver the last few years, doing everything from getting him out of bed each day to driving him around. Sometimes Mark and Dad got into arguments and Mark would disappear somewhere for a few days. A few times, Dad himself would try to disappear, cruising in his electric wheelchair along the side of some busy road, going who knows where, until a police officer would stop him and call Mom to come pick him up. I had to laugh the first time I heard about one of these runaway attempts.

I decided to stay in Portland and wait it out, pretend business as usual. I wasn’t going anywhere until the heart stopped beating, until the funeral was set.

Dad died acouple of days later and I drove up to Kennewick.

The day before his burial, I went to the funeral home to see Dad in his coffin. I went with Dad’s sister Evelyn and her husband, Rolando. I remember meeting Evelyn a couple of times when I was a kid but I had never met Rolando before. They lived around Washington, D.C., most of my childhood and there was some tension on Dad’s side of the family because Rolando was black.

Despite the early disapproval of others, they have been married for more than fifty years and have several children and grandchildren. I heard that Dad’s family didn’t like to advertise that they had a mixed marriage among them. I don’t recall Dad ever mentioning Rolando.

One of Evelyn and Rolando’s children became an airplane pilot though and that fact became worthy of mention for Dad when he talked with others. “My nephew is a pilot for that airline,” he would say, as if he had some hand in this success.

Evelyn is very religious and as we walked into the funeral home she was quietly praying and making the sign of the cross. Rolando, a large man with a kind nature, gently touched her back as they walked. Some piped-in music greeted us in the room that kept Dad’s coffin. It was the beginning of viewing hours and I was a little surprised that there was no one else there. Evelyn and Rolando stood back and prayed as I looked closely at my father. His hands looked thin and smudged with spots, as if they had been flattened in some sadistic way. His head was like a skull with fake waxy skin molded around it. I thought I’d see some kind of evidence of the brain aneurysm that finally killed him, but I didn’t know what to look for. What little hair he had was swept across his scalp like the faint suggestion of a haircut. His forehead was the only thing that looked strong and real. I looked at him for a few minutes, wondering if I could see myself, but I couldn’t. I moved my hand to his head and watched my fingers rest on his forehead. I petted his forehead and thought how strange it was to touch my father this way. I started to cry a little, though I didn’t want to. My sniffling gave me away and Evelyn came to my side and touched my arm lightly. She started to talk about how he was in Heaven and that God was taking care of him now, or something like that. I was more annoyed than comforted by her. I looked down at his chest. He was dressed in a dark blue suit with a blue-and-silver tie and the kind of light blue button-up shirt that he would sometimes wear while working in the yard. His chest looked wide but caved in. I stared there, where his heart would be, and watched for any movement. Any sign of a soul.