A Common Pornography: A Memoir Read online

  A Common Pornography: A Memoir

  Kevin Sampsell

  In 2003 Kevin Sampsell authored a chapbook memoir of the same title. It was written as a kind of “memory experiment,” in which he recollected luminous details from his childhood in independently amusing chapters. It functioned as an experiential catalogue of American youth in the 70s and 80s.

  In 2008 Kevin’s estranged father died of an aneurysm. When he returned home to Kennewick, Washington for the funeral, Kevin’s mother revealed to him disturbing threads in their family history—stories of incest, madness, betrayal, and death—which retroactively colored Kevin’s memories of his upbringing and youth. He learned of his mother’s first two husbands, the fathers of his three older, mythologized half-siblings, and the havoc they wreaked on his mother. He learned of his own father’s seething resentment of his step-children, which was expressed in physical, pyschological, and sexual abuse. And he learned more about his oldest step-sister, Elinda, who, as a young girl, was labeled “feebleminded” by a teacher. When she became a teenager, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital. She entered the clinic at 98 pounds. She left two years later 200 pounds, diabetic, having endured numerous shock treatments. Then, after finally returning home, she was made pregnant by Kevin’s father. Only at the end of the book do we learn what chance in life a person like this has.

  While his family’s story provides the framework of the book, what’s left in between is Kevin’s story of growing up in the Pacific Northwest. He tells of his first jobs, first bands, first loves, and one worn, teal blue suitcase filled with the choicest porn in all of Kennewick, Washington.

  Employing the same form of memoir as he did in his previous book, Kevin intertwines the tragic with the everyday, the dysfunctional with the fun, lending A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY its undeniable, unsensationalized reality. The elastic conceit of his “memory experiment” captures the many shades and the whole of the Sampsell family—both its tragedy and its resiliency. Kevin relates this history in a charming, honest, insightful, and funny voice.

  Kevin Sampsell

  A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY

  A Memoir

  Author’s Note

  Some parts of this 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.

  Introduction

  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.

  Washington Street

  Dad came home and 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.

  Egg Hunt

  When the gun sounded, 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 spec
kled 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.

  Attractions

  I thought Kennewick was 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.

  Elinda

  Elinda is my mother’s first child, born in 1946.

  Elinda’s father was with my mother for only a brief time, physically abusing her and then disappearing for a long time after he was sent away for an armed robbery in Great Falls, Montana.

  Shortly after that, Mom met a man named Jimmy and they got married. Elinda was afraid of Jimmy and would have nightmares about him, even after Mom had two children with him—Gary and Russell.

  Mom and Jimmy got divorced when Elinda was five.

  My dad came into the picture in 1956. He wanted to help Mom with the children, but he was often overwhelmed trying to provide for them. Despite their struggles, he wanted to have his own children. My brother Mark was born in 1960.

  When Elinda was a little girl, she would often daydream in school and her teacher thought she was mentally retarded, or, as they called it back then, “feebleminded.”

  Mom was wrestling with her own health concerns. She was epileptic and would have seizures quite often, shaking the whole house, scaring the kids, and waking up unsure of what was happening to her. It took several years and several treatments to get the right medicine to stop the attacks.

  When my sister, Elinda, became a teenager, she was sent to Medical Lake, a psychiatric hospital, from 1960 to 1970. When she began there, she weighed ninety-eight pounds. Two years later, she weighed two hundred. She became diabetic.

  While she was there, she received eight shock treatments. After each treatment, she would sit somewhere and wonder, Why can’t I think?

  She was sexually active in the hospital and became pregnant after having sex with one of the other inmates on the concrete floor of the mailroom. She wanted to get married to this person and have a life outside of the hospital with him, but when she had the baby, a healthy boy, the hospital officials deemed her unfit to be a mother. The child was immediately taken from her before she could see it.

  Reasons

  There was an old woman at Medical Lake with Elinda. She was like a grandmother to everyone and would play pinochle with Elinda. She was in there for killing her husband and children. Another woman had drowned her kids. Those were reasons for being there, Elinda thought. Those women had even sent warnings and when those warnings were ignored, they did what they said they were going to do.

  Another woman who spent time at the hospital while Elinda lived there was my dad’s sister, Evelyn. She was battling depression and schizophrenia. But oddly, they weren’t aware of each other.

  Elinda could never come up with a clear, solid reason why she was there in the first place. No specific label or complicated acronym. “The simple way of expressing what I could have had is crazy,” she has told me. “But they wouldn’t label me crazy. I’ve got to fight my brain all the time now.”

  When she left, she was worse than when she entered.

  Saved

  Matt told me a story once about how I almost got lost at the Medical Lake hospital when I was four. We had gone with Mom to visit Elinda and he was supposed to be watching me. I ran off somewhere, scampering around corners, hiding behind doors, trying not to laugh. Finally Matt found me, just before I walked into the outstretched arms of a drooling old woman in a tattered nightgown.

  After Medical Lake

  When Elinda turned twenty-four, she left Medical Lake and was married soon after. Joseph, her first husband, like Mom’s first husband, was a terrible mistake. He drank and smoked all day long and was physically and emotionally abusive. He treated Elinda like less than an animal and accepted money from friends who wanted to have sex with her. She became pregnant with the child of one of his friends and, despite her situation, wanted to keep the baby.

  Elinda and Joseph were living in Pasco at the time, not far from Mom and Dad and the rest of us, across the bridge in Kennewick. I was just a toddler.

  Mom discussed Elinda’s circumstances with Dad, knowing that Elinda would probably not be allowed to care for the baby herself. The baby was going to be half-black, and whether that was part of the reason or not, Dad refused to be a caregiver for another child.

  When the baby, a girl, was born, Elinda was allowed to be a mother for a few days before the baby was taken away and given up for adoption.

  Elinda’s troubled marriage soon came to an end. Joseph became more violent than usual and kicked her front teeth out and broke her nose. He told her that if she didn’t leave, he was going to kill her. So she left.

  She served him with divorce papers after that, wanting to cut him out of her life, but he didn’t file the papers properly and thirty years later, after he died, she found out that they were never legally divorced.

  Bird Whistles

  One of my earliest memories of Elinda is the bird whistle trick. Matt and I had these plastic whistles that were shaped like birds. You would put water in them and blow into a hole by their tails and it would sound like the fluttering tweet of a bird. My sister was sitting on the front porch of our house, watching the traffic on Washington Street or maybe squinting at the giant neon cross of the Nazarene church across from us. Matt and I would hide around the corner and blow on the whistles. Elinda would whip her head around and shout, “Where’s that bird at? Birdie? Birdie birdie?”

  Dad saw us through the window and shook his head. Mom finally came out and told us to knock it off.

  Bedbugs

  Elinda stayed with us sometimes at our house. She would sleep on the couch. One night, she awoke at 3:30 a.m. and felt Dad touching her. He didn’t say anything but she could smell alcohol on his breath. She didn’t know what to do and thought for a moment that maybe she was dreaming. The house was quiet and she felt paralyzed. He climbed on top of her. She decided that she could not scream because she didn’t want to wake up any of us kids.

  I was probably four at the time. Matt and Mark and I were sleep
ing upstairs. I remember that every night in that house, Mom would tuck me in and say, “Good night.” Then I’d answer, “Sleep tight.” Then she’d say, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” We would repeat this, back and forth, even as she left my room and walked back down the stairs. Her voice answering my voice until I stopped saying, “Sleep tight.”

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  I did not know about what happened between Elinda and Dad until the day after his funeral. Mom wanted to have some one-on-one talks with her kids before we all scattered again. So she and I ended up at a new Sonic drive-in. We ordered root beer floats and for the first time ever, we spoke openly about the dysfunctions of the family. She told me more about her first husbands, about Elinda’s childhood, about why she stayed with Dad, even though it was evident that there was little love from him.

  I felt bad for Mom because, in a way, it seemed like she was apologizing on behalf of Dad for not being a good father. When she told me the story about him and Elinda, it answered one question I had always had: Why was there no affection displayed in our family? Now I understood that she was disgusted. The kind of disgust that flowed through our bloodline and poisoned everyone in our house.

  Dad had made Elinda pregnant on that night.

  Last Man

  Elinda went to Yakima and got an abortion after that. She came back to our house a few weeks later. Nobody knew where she had gone or that she had been pregnant. She knew that she had to tell someone, so she told Mom. I believe this was the moment when all of Mom’s affection for Dad disappeared. After that, Dad constantly became angry at Elinda. The sort of anger that was made up of jealousy, resentment, and embarrassment. He started to blame her for every little thing that went wrong—a broken wiper on the truck, a mess in the kitchen, the heat being turned up too high. Then once, late at night when they were alone again, Dad went over and sat next to Elinda on the couch. He put his arm around her and told her he loved her and wanted to marry her. She told him, “You can remove your hand, and I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.”