Dealing.

22 October 2003—A year ago I attended my first Fray event, Fray Day 6 San Francisco. It was actually my second attempt at going to a Fray event, as Sarah and I, along with a new friend of ours, tried to go to Fray Cafe at the South by Southwest conference in March, but it was way sold out, and we had to settle for Mexican food on Sixth Street instead.

Fray, the brainchild of Derek Powazek, is a website devoted to true personal stories that has been around since the web really started getting going. Derek also started coordinating Fray events, where people could come and tell their true personal stories, and over the years it’s blossomed, and Fray Day is now celebrated with events in several cities around the world, complete with featured speakers and musicians as well as an open mic sprinkled throughout the evening.

When Fray Day 6 came around in September last year, Sarah and I decided to go check it out. Not only that, we got there early, and I signed myself up for the open mic. The storytellers, featured as well as open mic, were mostly fabulous. As someone self-trained to count myself lucky if I go to a poetry slam and come away thinking only one of the poems was a revelation, I was floored at the humor and depth of almost all the stories I heard that night.

My big disappointment was that after staying through the whole thing, which went well past midnight, I had never been called. I had prepared a story especially for the event, and as I had never really done this sort of performance, I was nervous and excited to try it. But I didn't get to.

A couple of days later I received a very kind email from Derek saying how sorry he was that I, along with a few other people, hadn’t been called because the event had already gone on far later than he’d worked out with the theater. If I wanted to do the open mic the following year, however, he invited me to email him before the event, and he’d make sure I got on early.

I was touched. I took the story I was going to tell and posted it here instead, which was a fine consolation prize.

A couple of months ago I heard that Fray Day 7 was on its way, and I was conflicted about whether I wanted to go. But around the same time, the father of one of my fellow Impact members died, and one of my old true stories popped into my head. It’s a good story, and I decided to give Fray another go.

So as Derek had offered, I emailed him saying so, and he wrote back, saying he’d be happy to make good on it. So we went, bringing along a few of our friends we thought would enjoy the event. I even got to meet Derek in person and thank him for being so cool about the whole thing.

Derek started off the evening with a welcome and an introduction, as well as a story about his grandfather’s death and how his family was afraid that his grandfather’s stories had died with him, but that they had survived with his grandmother. He then introduced the first featured performer of the night, Mark Weigle, who was terrific. After Mark, Derek got back onstage and announced that he was going to start drawing from the open-mic list.

He started telling the story of the previous year and how late it got and how not everyone was able to get on and how he sent an email around offering such-and-such.

“In industry parlance, this is known as ‘the blow off,’” he said. “But this guy actually wrote back.” And then he called me up to the stage.

I was nervous at the beginning (this photo shows it pretty well, I guess), but Derek’s story had provided me a good place to start, and once I warmed up, I had a fantastic time. The audience was extremely receptive, laughing at all the right places, for which I was grateful because, since it’s about how different people in my family dealt with my father’s death, it isn’t the sunniest topic. The story ended on a really high note (no pun intended — you’ll see), and I was thrilled by the response, very glad I had sucked up my pride and tried it again.

That’s a metastory, really: a story about a story. Here’s the story I told, written a little differently than I told it, since I told it at the event without notes. Sarah encouraged me to do it that way, and I’m happy I did — I felt a lot more natural onstage than I might have otherwise. But here’s the written version, since it’s better for reading.

It’s called “Dealing.”

“You’d better get down here.” That was my sister Janet, fifteen years older than I am, calling me around six in the morning the Friday of Memorial Day weekend in 1991. She hadn’t even woken me; I had been up all night finishing the last of the term paper that marked the end of my junior year at Berkeley. I turned in the paper and got on a plane. My father, who had been living with terminal lung cancer for a year or so, was about to die.

He and my stepmother, Peggy, lived in a little apartment in what was more or less a very distant suburb of Los Angeles. He and Peggy had gone out for several months when I was twelve, and somehow came together again eight years later, and then they got married after he’d been diagnosed.

By the time I got to the apartment, Janet had already been there for a few days, and she and Peggy were nursing my father through his final days. He wanted to die at home.

Janet and Peggy had first really connected at Christmas six months earlier, when she and my other sister, Barbara, and I were all down there to be with Dad, who wanted to talk about the funeral arrangements and the will. Barbara, who was in her early 30s then, giggled through the whole thing; her reaction was unsettling but not unexpected, coming from her. I dealt with the morbidness by acting stoical. Janet, for her part, got high.

That’s how she and Peggy connected: she reintroduced Peggy to the marvels of marijuana. Peggy hadn’t struck me as someone who used to get stoned: she was more like a petite, no-nonsense, old-school suburban working mom. Janet, on the other hand, with her untamed curly hair and freckles for days, could have walked straight in from 1970s San Francisco through a billow of smoke. But there they were, the two of them on the patio, smoking out, having a great time. My father, disgusted, called them a couple of potheads and shut the sliding door.

On this final trip, Janet had brought enough pot with her for several days, and she and Peggy were smoking out once or twice a day. Now, however, my father wasn’t saying much of anything: he was confined to bed, going in and out of consciousness. He barely seemed to recognize me. Across the room a respirator was running 24/7 in the bedroom. Next to the bed, a clock radio played soothing music that I could just barely hear above the respirator.

For the next two days straight I was holed up in the apartment, leaving only once, and that was to go to the supermarket and pick up some Depends, because everything was starting to go. That Sunday, Dad finally passed away in the middle of the night. Janet and I were upset, of course, but also a little relieved that it had finally happened. Peggy was beside herself with grief. At that point there was nothing really to do except sleep, since we couldn’t call the coroner until the next morning. Peggy decided to sleep next to Dad’s body in the bed.

The next morning was a madhouse with the coroner’s people coming in and out and with all the calls that had to be made. After everything had settled down, Janet and Peggy went to smoke out. Problem was, they’d already smoked the last of it.

Peggy has a son who’s about my age. I’d met him when I was twelve and we all went to Disneyland. I generally thought he was an asshole and wasn’t sorry to see him go when Dad and Peggy split up. I was more than a little relieved that he wasn’t around when Peggy reemerged in my father’s life, though it turned out he wasn’t around because he’d gotten busted the year before, trying to sell drugs to an undercover highway patrol officer. Before his trial, though, he’d skipped bail and was on the lam, living with his father in Michigan. California didn’t seem to be looking all that hard for him.

Peggy decided to call him up to see if he knew someone who could sell her some pot. He gave her the number of one of his sketchy friends who lived about a half hour away. I didn’t want to be part of any drug transaction, but at the same time, I don’t know why Janet and I let little suburban-mom Peggy go off alone to meet this guy. But we figured since she was just meeting her son’s friend and it wasn’t that far away, she’d be back in an hour or so. Janet and I, as our part of the deal, went out, picked up some food and rented two movies, Parenthood and Ghost, which we thought were appropriate. We went back, expecting to find Peggy at the apartment.

She didn’t come back for four hours. Turned out the friend didn’t have anything, so when she met him, he drove them to someone else’s place which was a good forty-five minutes away, and they had to wait around there for a while, then drive back to her car, then she had to drive back to the apartment. Peggy finally came back, we ate the food, watched the movies, and they smoked out a good long time.

The next day was the funeral. Before we left the apartment, Peggy and Janet got high together one last time, and we got in the car and drove to the mortuary. I drove.

That was a dozen years ago. I don’t think either Janet or I saw Peggy again after that day. When I reminded Janet of this story recently, she laughed. “Maaaaan,” she said, “that is still the raggiest weed I ever smoked!”