A Common Pornography: A Memoir

Interim

On our first night after the fire, we stayed with a family from our church. They were trying to conserve water and I remember taking a bath with one of their boys before bed. The next couple of days we stayed at a motel in Pasco while the insurance matters were figured out. We spent part of those days going through our stuff at the house, figuring out what was too trashed (burned or water damaged) to keep. We stored all the salvageable things in our garage, which was just a cluttered mess of a structure made out of concrete, tin, and mismatched wood.

A few days later, we found a basement apartment to live in and we started moving our stuff over. It was only a block away, which was convenient, but besides that, it was way too small and depressing. The main problem was that it didn’t have windows. Living there made me feel like I was in solitary confinement. Or “family confinement.” A friend asked me if we lived in a bomb shelter.

The June sun was unbearably hot and everyone was sweaty as we carried boxes of stuff down the alley to our temporary home. Toward the end of the day, Matt and I tried to help Dad move the refrigerator down the concrete steps to the apartment. Halfway down, Dad’s fingers got slippery and he smashed them on the guardrail. “Fuckshitgodfuckcockbitchfuck!” he yelled.

It was the most inspired stream of bad language Matt or I had ever heard and we would repeat it often for the next few years. We had that George Carlin record where he said the “seven words you can’t say on television,” but that routine paled in comparison to this.