A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Field Trip

Mom served up a hundred hot dogs and then helped someone bandage his hand after he hurt it with a firecracker. She often volunteered to help with my fifth grade outings.

Summer vacation was just an hour away.

All the kids got back on the bus to head back to school. We had spent the day at Sacajawea Park. Mom was missing. I asked my teacher and she said she didn’t know where she was.

Driving up Washington Street on the bus, I noticed smoke billowing up somewhere in my neighborhood. Seconds later I was yelling at the bus driver to stop. I saw the firefighters spraying at the flames that came out of my bedroom window. The driver said he wasn’t allowed to let me out. When we got back to school, a friend’s mother drove me to my house, which was badly burned on the top and on the sides by our upstairs bedrooms. Mom had left the field trip early and was home already, watching the tall flames from a neighbor’s driveway. The cause was unknown but I heard someone imply that my older brother Mark was home from school, smoking pot (I’d seen him and his friends smoke pot once and thought it looked cool—there was this twisted glass thing they used).

We stood outside watching. Nobody was hurt. My dad was in the alley screaming, “Fuck the world!”

It seemed like a lot of people were watching the house become wrecked with fire and water, and when they grew bored of it, they went back home.