Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father by Alysia Abbott

Author:Alysia Abbott [Abbott, Alysia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780393240528
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2013-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

WHILE DAD was concerning himself with getting sober, I was concerning myself with getting money. At fourteen and fifteen years old, everything I wanted cost money. I knew that cash was cold, hard, and in high demand. Newsweek declared 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie.” Even the shops on Haight Street sold cheeky t-shirts that asked: “Nuclear war? What about my career?”

Dad talked about money all the time too. From the other room I could hear him yelling. He yelled when he knocked out another filling from his mouth. “That’s seven hundred bucks!” He yelled about the phone bill. “Fifty-five dollars!” He yelled when I lost the five dollars he gave me for my Muni Fast Pass. “I was depressed that day,” I said, pleading mercy. He yelled when I knocked the TV off the milk crate in a rush to get the phone and he cursed as we watched the broken knob roll across the floor and behind his bookshelf. Dad couldn’t afford to fix or replace the TV, so we started changing the channel with a pair of pliers, which always seemed to go missing.

At French American I had money for lunch, but not snacks. A skinny fourteen-year-old with a fast metabolism, I was constantly hungry. I’d often ask for bites of my friends’ snacks. I didn’t think it such a big deal until a kid named Xavier noticed and started calling me “A-leech-a.” Since he was among the popular kids, classmates took notice and I stopped.

I didn’t want to ask my father for money because I didn’t want to quarrel. So I started borrowing money from my friends and their mothers, which I then had to pay back. In the mornings, while Dad was asleep, I’d sneak into his bedroom. On the floor I’d find his jeans, scrunched like an accordion, then quietly pull out the smooth leather billfold from the back pocket. I’d open the wallet and slide out a ten, sometimes a twenty. He won’t notice, I thought. And he never did.

I hated the sneaking and lying, but I wanted money to buy clothes and magazines and records and snacks. I found a job babysitting every weekend for a single mother who worked at Daljeet’s, the punk shop next to the IBeam. She and a pair of her jewelry-designing sisters had come out from Philadelphia and lived in a three-bedroom apartment off Polk Street. While I loved her three-year-old son, how he called me his “girlfriend,” and I loved watching her MTV, where I would slog through countless videos by Rod Stewart (please, not “Infatuation” again!) hoping for the one Duran Duran or Billy Idol, my $15-a-night salary didn’t take me far.

So that December, I applied for my first job as a cashier at a local health food store. Sun Country Foods sold fresh-pressed wheatgrass juice for the neighborhood hippies and overpriced gourmet sandwiches for the neighborhood yuppies. The owners of Sun Country required that all their applicants—from manager to cashier—take a lie detector test.

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