Jason Schmidt - Sit Tight, Kid

 

So, my parents split up when I was two. My mom went to California by herself. I stayed in Eugene, Oregon, with my dad. My mom wanted to be an artist, my dad wanted to be a parent. But he was a young guy. He was 22 when I was born, and he was a junkie, and a dealer, and stuff was just always going wrong. When I was three, he got busted in our living room right in front of me for dealing coke. And then, when I was four, our housemate accidentally burned our house down. It was just always one thing or another like that. 

 

But Dad had this trick that he could do. You know, the bad thing would happen, and we'd be sitting next to the road with all of our worldly possessions, and he'd say, "Sit tight, kid. I'll be right back," and then he would leave and come back. And when he came back, he would have a phone number, or a used car, or some friend who owed us a favor, or 10 years on probation instead of 20 years in jail. It was like this magic trick he could do, and it was amazing. He was like a superhero to me. There was nothing my dad couldn't do. But it didn't mean that life was easy. 

 

The economy in Oregon back then was really bad. He couldn't work straight jobs, because he had a felony conviction, and he couldn't deal because he was on probation. But then when I was seven, they cut his probation short because of some budget problem, and they were letting nonviolent offenders go early. Dad had an idea where we were going to go. We had heard that there were jobs in good schools and cheap housing, if you can imagine such a thing in Seattle. [audience laughter] It was the 1970s. [audience laughter] 

 

So, we put all our stuff in storage, and we got in Dad's crappy yellow Vega. He had just enough cash in his pocket for food, gas, and we were hoping, first, last, and deposit on a place here in Seattle. So, the only thing was, we were going to do one thing before we left. We were going to go camping for a little while, because just outside Eugene, there's this little piece of heaven. It's the Fall Creek watershed, and it's gorgeous. We'd had a lot of good times out there with our friends, and we wanted to say goodbye to it before we left. 

 

So, we got in Dad's car with a little bit of cash and some blankets, and our stuff was in storage. We went to Fall Creek, and we got a great camping spot right next to the river. Got out, had a campfire, roasted some marshmallows and told some stories and got in the car and went to sleep. And in the middle of that night, our first night camping, my dad wakes up because he's hot. He can't figure out why he's hot. That's his first question is, why am I hot? He can't figure out why. And then, he realizes it's me. I'm generating a tremendous amount of heat. I was hot to the touch. He actually couldn't leave his hand on my forehead. 

 

So, he wakes me up. I'm kind of lucid. I seem functioning. It's dark, it's the middle of the night. He doesn't know what to do. But I seemed okay, so we went back to sleep. And in the morning, every little nick and cut on my body, like little kids get, was red and swollen. There was one on my arm, and he just touched it and it just burst open, and blood and pus started running down my arm. And he said later that the thing that was most terrifying about that moment was that I didn't react to it. I was seven, and I was just looking at it like it was happening to somebody else. 

 

So, he got in the front of the car, and we drove down to our family practitioner Dr. Barry Hill. Dad and I sat in the exam room, and he gave me Tylenol to lower my fever and antibiotics and he said that what I had was a flesh-eating staph infection over most of my body. He prescribed us this special soap that was supposed to take care of the staph infection, and he said my dad would have to monitor my temperature. If it got above 104, he should take me to the emergency room immediately and that I should get plenty of fluids and a lot of sleep. 

 

It wasn't said, but it was strongly implied that what we shouldn't do was go live in the woods, [audience chuckles] and bathe in the stream with all the living things that have their poop and their own bacteria. So, we went out in the lobby, and dad went to the pharmacy, and he used our house money to get the soap and a handful of change. He came back. I sat there next to a phone booth in the lobby, and he made calls. He called everybody we knew. Nobody could take us, because they had kids and they couldn't risk them getting infected, or they had roommates where they were dealing and they didn't want a kid in the house. 

 

So, I was sitting there and I was watching my dad making phone calls. He wasn't yelling and he wasn't begging, but he was getting scared. I'd never really seen that before in all of his previous magic tricks. I had this moment, this seven-year-old epiphany, where I was thinking about all the other times that stuff like this had happened. I was thinking about it from his perspective, and I started to realize that to him, each of these near misses were just points on a trajectory leading to this moment where we had been sliding downhill for a couple of years. That's what it would have looked like to him. I just hadn't noticed, because I was a kid. 

 

So, he runs out of change, and we go back out, and get in the car. He sits there with his hands on the steering wheel, and I'm still hoping I'm wrong, so I look at him and I go, "Where are we going, Dad?" And he goes, "Just be quiet for a minute." And then, he starts the car, and we go back out to the woods. It wasn't the end of things like it had looked like. The soap worked, and he checked my temperature, and it went down, and we spent a while out in the woods. It was fun. It was almost what we'd intended to do, except that we weren't camping anymore. We were homeless. 

 

We stayed there longer than we needed to. At some point, I did that thing again where I tried to imagine it from his perspective, and I started to understand that he was avoiding the reality that we didn't have any money for a house when we got to Seattle. But eventually, we just had to go. So, we got to Seattle in dad's crappy yellow Vega with $20 and no place to stay. And that worked out, eventually. That worked out. We had other houses, and we had other near misses. But the way that I saw my dad had really changed forever. He wasn't a superhero or a magician to me anymore. He was just a man who did his best. Thank you.