Elliott - Sometimes I think about it: essays

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 authors 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 McSweeneys , 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

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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

These essays were written between 2003 and 2015. Theyre mostly personal essays. After assembling them, I went through, pulling out redundancies. Sometimes the echoes were interesting, and I let them remain. Sometimes I didnt feel that an essay represented me anymore but decided to keep it anyway. Thats the problem with writing things down; we change, the person who wrote is no longer there.

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

My homeless year began early in October 1985 and ended the last day of August 1986. I was thirteen, and then fourteen, and its a story Ive never told, partly because I slept in so many places that year. I slept in the broom closet of a friends 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, Kwans grandmother would clutch my head in her bony hands and pray for me.

She wants to know if youre 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 Id 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 couldnt get warm and even in school I was shivering all the time, vibrating in my big jacket.

But this isnt about school (I was in eighth grade). And its not about my father handcuffing me to a pipe and leaving me there in the basement of his old house. And its not about the hotel room I ended up in one homeless evening, with a man in a nurses 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 upright 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 couldnt understand why a child was sleeping there. He probably owned the building. He was probably just coming to get a mop. Its OK, I told him, gathering my things in my arms, careful not to look in his eyes, and walking away. I was fourteen. I didnt want to answer obvious questions. The broom closet was locked after that.