Kevin Sampsell: A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Some parts ofthis memoir were previously published in 2003 as a limited edition sixty-page book, also called A Common Pornography . It was written as a kind of memory experiment. A gathering of recollections from my small-town youth. Many people who read it told me they wanted to read more. I started to write more of these little vignettes, even though I wasn’t sure if I would actually publish a longer version of the book.

Then, in March 2008, my father died and I went back up to Kennewick, Washington, for his funeral. I was there for four days, looking through dusty boxes of photos, letters, documents, and odd memorabilia. There was no room for me to sleep at my mom’s house so one of my older brothers, Russell, let me stay with him in a nearby hotel room. Russell, and most of the other relatives who were in town for the funeral, are people I don’t know very well. Russell and Gary are my two oldest half brothers; along with my oldest sibling, my half sister, Elinda, they were not around as I was growing up. I stayed up late with Russell on my last night there, talking about Dad and hearing stories I’d never heard before.

That night, and the following day when my mother and I had a long private conversation, I discovered disturbing threads of my family history and realized I needed to write about them. Although it started as a book about myself, I wanted to pull back and get a wider view. I conducted interviews with my mom, brothers, and, perhaps most important, my sister, Elinda, who spoke frankly about things other people would not want to face. In some parts of the book, I state the specific thoughts and feelings of those people. This is not conjecture on my part. It is the recollected truth, as gathered through these interviews.

In August 2008, I had a panic attack that forced me out of my home naked. It was three thirty in the morning. I was startled awake with the feeling of something holding me down in bed. I was in my apartment alone. My fourteen-year-old son was staying at his mother’s house that night. I looked around my bedroom as my eyes adjusted to the dark. My closet door was open, and a heap of dirty laundry was spilling out of it. I felt like something was standing there, watching me, ready to hurt me. Maybe it was my father. I tried to yell or scream, but I couldn’t fill my throat with air and the sound came out hoarse and hollow like it does sometimes when I have bad dreams.

I kicked the blankets off and pushed myself out of bed. I turned on the lights and cautiously looked around my apartment, shaking and fearful. I paced around and thought about getting back in bed but I couldn’t go back into the bedroom. I thought about calling someone, but I didn’t want to wake anyone up. Plus, my phone was in the bedroom. I felt trapped and decided that I needed to leave my apartment. I grabbed the car keys and tried to go back into the bedroom to grab some clothes. I made myself speak, to see if anyone else was there and also to simply break the dull silence. “Hey,” I said. And then louder, “Hey!”

There was a short echo that brought more panic into my chest and I turned and ran out the door.

I got in my car and started it. I didn’t have my phone, my wallet, or any clothes. I drove around the quiet streets for a while. A few times I drove past early-morning commuters, driving slowly with their headlights on, sipping coffee from their travel mugs, half asleep and unaware that a scared, naked man debated whether or not to plow into them with his car like a missile.

I knew I needed help, but I didn’t want to go to a hospital. If you go to an emergency room naked, what do they do? I wondered. I decided to go to my friend Lynne’s house. She woke up, dazed and probably wondering if she was dreaming. She tried to calm me down, but I couldn’t stop shaking and whipping my head around, like someone was sneaking up on me. She started a bath for me and gave me an anxiety pill. She covered me with blankets as the tub filled and I was telling her, as if giving her instructions, “The books [this book and an anthology I was editing] are on my computer. My will is in one of my yearbooks.” I felt like I was cracking apart, drowning in an ocean, losing a long battle.

When I got into the tub my body started convulsing. Lynne was in her kitchen trying to find something and I felt deserted for a moment. I began wailing and crying uncontrollably. I felt possessed by a demon, both awful and sad. Maybe this, six months after the fact, was how I grieved for Dad. Maybe his ghost said, You haven’t grieved for me properly . He didn’t care that I didn’t want to grieve for him or that I felt like I didn’t have to. He was going to make me, even if it was against my will.

Dad came homeand went straight upstairs to the bedroom I shared with my older brother Matt. “I’m going to throw everything into the middle of the street,” he yelled. He would get mad when the house wasn’t clean. His brown work shoe tapped the side of our small television, making the picture flicker. I imagined the traffic on our busy street, dodging our piles of clothes, destroying our dressers, spraying chunks of broken dishes everywhere.

Matt and I had grass stains from playing Nerf football all day. There was a bowl of melted Neapolitan ice cream sitting next to my bed, near a pile of clothes and some comics.

This kind of scenario happened more than once.

I was the youngest. Two of my older brothers lived there in the house still, but all the others—two half brothers who seemed like myth and a half sister—had walked through similar emotions and trials already. They were free somewhere in the world.

When the gunsounded, Matt ran ahead of me with the other kids who filled the park. I could tell they were all excited, yelling into the wet spring air. The sky was speckled with birds and high dark clouds. I ran the other way, back toward home.

When I got to the house, Mom held me as I cried for no good reason. My brother came in the side door with his homemade Superman cape over his shoulder and a basket of decorated eggs and chocolate candies. It was the first time I gave up.

I thought Kennewickwas the ideal place to grow up. Of course, this was before I even saw anywhere else.

My favorite attraction was the Cable Bridge. I remember the kind of awe and joy that only an eleven-year-old can muster about such an object. When the bridge opened for traffic in 1978, it seemed almost unbelievable that this was the first cable-stayed bridge in the country. Dad drove our family across on the first day it opened. My other brother who still lived in the house, Mark, was with Matt and me in the backseat. We craned our necks to look out the back window and watched the cables slanting to the high columns in the middle of the bridge. We didn’t have any tall buildings or other interesting structures at all in the Tri-Cities and this first impression was breathtaking. It made me think of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, which I knew only from pictures. I thought the Cable Bridge, which connects Kennewick to Pasco, was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in person. It was a majestic backdrop for the yearly hydroplane races, which were also a source of hometown pride, as they were supposedly the second most well-attended hydroplane events in the country.

The only other interesting creation in the area was the Wet ’n Wild water park, which opened up by the Columbia Center Mall when I was a teenager. It also had some important-sounding rank among national attractions. It supposedly had the third longest water slides in the country. Going down those slippery tubes rubbed the hair off my calves and made my body feel like it was full of static electricity. Then I had to wait in line for a long time, shivering and dripping, until I was back at the top. The lifeguards there were always too cool to look at anyone. They kept their eyes set on a particular curve of the slide and then waved their hand lazily, signaling the sliders to go. For some reason, it was closed down a few years later and then eventually demolished to make room for a car dealership.