The tape roll a bit here before we get… Luke? You need anything, Luke?
No, I’m fine.
I thought we could first talk about Nick Fedderly. About when he was a kid.
Sure. I first met Nick in kindergarten. Everyone knew he was poor. When he came to birthday parties nobody expected him to bring a present. When he came to one of mine he gave me a used Mad magazine, which was a big deal. The money he saved up to buy it. He lived with his mom—her name was Star—in what was basically a shack out in the woods on Bainbridge, in a place we all called Hippie Hill. This was before the real estate boom of the eighties and nineties. The island was back-to-the-landers, some berry farmers, very simple living. You got to Nick’s house on a narrow road through the trees. It was almost like there was no ditch, just enough room for one car. And no gravel, just rutted mud. Steep. If it was raining, forget it. But at the top of the hill the drive opened into a little meadow with the shack. Smoke coming out of a stovepipe. At the edge of the property was the frame of a house that Nick’s father had started building but died before finishing. In the shack they didn’t have any electricity or gas heat and they cooked all their meals on a woodstove. His mom always looked exhausted. She would have been in her twenties but looked twenty years older. She wore stained housedresses and Holly Hobbie bonnets, her hair in thick, flower-child braid pigtails. It was just the two of them.
How did Nick’s father die?
He died trying to build that house. Apparently he was working on it one day and fell. There’s a right way and a wrong way to land. Apparently he landed in precisely the wrong way. This tragedy was pretty fresh when I first met Nick. I think I sat behind him the first day of class.
Did you two become friends immediately, or…?
Not really. Friendships are fickle at that age, or at least they were for me. Part of it I think is that I wasn’t ready for him yet. I hadn’t grown in the ways I needed to in order to really get to know him.
Star. What did she do exactly?
Odds and ends. She sometimes sold chicks and ducklings at the feed store. Split lumber. Janitorial stuff. Nothing too noteworthy or dignified. Poor Star. I think she tried to get jobs at restaurants as a waitress but she was always so wrecked-looking. I remember grown-ups talking in low voices about her fitness as a parent. They’d see Nick show up at school without shoes. I think they mostly lived off the insurance payout they got after Nick’s dad died. They kept living that same life up there in the woods in the shack with no electricity, an honest-to-god outhouse out back, the rain coming down hard turning everything to mud. Naturally everyone thought she was completely insane.
Did you ever go over to Nick’s house?
Sure, once we started playing together. This would be second grade. I rode my bike to school and one morning my chain blew out, so I had to walk it the last half mile. When some of the bigger kids saw me they laughed and made fun of me and I guess Nick heard about it. I parked my bike in the rack behind the gym thinking I’d have to have my mom come pick me up. But that afternoon I found that my bike had been fixed. Another kid told me he’d seen Nick messing with it at recess. The next day I confronted him about it, asked if he’d been the one who fixed the bike. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes, just sort of sank down into himself and stared at hopscotch markings. I finally got him to admit that he’d repaired it and I gave him a Superman trading card as thanks. He just pocketed it and ran away.
A while later I was assigned to be his reading buddy. We were supposed to read the same book and talk about it together in front of the class. We read some kind of science fiction story, I don’t remember what it was, but I remember he started to open up a bit. He didn’t get to see many movies, so I’d tell him the plots and highlights of the ones I’d seen. He didn’t have a TV or a telephone at home, which amazed me. Not having a phone, more than not having clothes, equaled abject poverty to me.
What about your family? Tell me about your parents.
[sighs] My folks were college professors. They jokingly referred to themselves as the Doctors Piper. My dad, Gordon, taught English, and my mom, Gail, taught Library Science. Her dad had owned a shipping company and died when she was in her twenties, leaving her a sizable inheritance. Our house was on the north end of the island with a view of Seattle, a hundred feet of beachfront all to ourselves, right up against a steep embankment. We had a boat. A dog. The house was full of books and had big bay windows looking out on Puget Sound. My younger sister and I spent a lot of time exploring the beach and the woods, making up stories and games, on our own for hours at a time. My mom bolted a big ship bell to the side of the house that she rang when it was time for dinner. We took lots of vacations, to Canada and the San Juans mostly, but a couple times to Costa Rica, the Caribbean, Hawaii. My parents had lots of friends, brilliant colleagues from the university. One thing I noticed right away was how being smart usually meant also having a unique sense of humor. We stayed up late watching Monty Python, eating homemade ice cream, or we’d drive out to Suquamish to see a movie at the drive-in. You could say my childhood was an embarrassment of riches. I had toys, sure, but never an obscene amount. Mostly we amused ourselves with our own minds, the last generation to really do so, in my opinion. Nothing scheduled, no overload of after-school activities, just constant conversations with our parents about anything and everything. Their interests were all over the map. At dinner we’d talk about politics, economics, art, sex, history, war, astronomy. You could throw any obscure topic at my mother and she’d tell you the three seminal works in that particular field, what the best editions were, and who published them. My dad liked to recite what he called his “Poem of the Week,” something he’d committed to memory. My parents and Nick’s mom were like two evolutionary branches from a common ancestor. My folks had grown outward, embracing the world, while Star had grown inward, into places the rest of us couldn’t fathom.
What do you mean by “places”?
Well let me back up. You can understand how our community considered her a pathetic creature, someone who’d started off weird, probably fried her mind on acid then suffered the horrible loss of her husband. You could be forgiven for making that kind of judgment. That’s how I felt about her when Nick started inviting me to his house. I kept on making up excuses as to why I couldn’t go, then finally one day I came home from school and my mother told me I’d received a birthday party invitation in the mail. That Nick had wrangled up enough money for a card, envelope, and stamp was a small miracle. I tried to get out of it but my mom was adamant that I attend. So I bought him a Star Wars pop-up book and one spring afternoon my mother drove me to his house, bottoming out the Saab on that hellish driveway. She must have known about Star’s reputation but she was an open-minded, Marxist liberal intent on exposing me to different social strata. Even so, I think she was a little shocked by the condition of their house. There was all this crap surrounding the shack, rusted and moldy junk that looked puked out of a garbage truck. I got out of the car wearing my ridiculous khaki slacks and polo shirt, the wrapped present under my arm, and walked up the muddy path to their front door. Star greeted us there, with Nick standing behind her. She reached out and took my mother’s hand and said some things that made me want to cry. She said, “Thank you so much, Mrs. Piper. Luke is the only kid at school who is nice to Nick. It means so much to us that you came.” She invited us in and we ducked into this little space almost entirely devoid of anything you could call a creature comfort. Table, two chairs, two beds in an adjoining room. Outside the shack was a disaster but inside was clean and well-kept. And it smelled nice, too, like incense. We sat on pillows in what would have been the living room but it could very well have been considered the dining room. Star served tea, and cake made from scratch. It was a chocolate cake with frosting, all made to look like E.T. The movie alien, remember? It took me a minute to realize this was the party. Star was relaxed and comfortable in her own house and made pleasant conversation with my mom. Questions like, “I understand you teach librarians?” It struck me that Nick had gleaned all these little pieces of information from me and formulated a comprehensive portrait of who my family was. Now, hearing about all the things Nick and I had talked about, I could tell that he admired me. His admiration didn’t ever come out when it was just the two of us together, but hearing his mom talk about what he’d told her about me confirmed our friendship. When we finished the cake, Nick opened the present. I’d never seen such gratitude. It was as though I was witnessing the first act of altruism in human history, a pivotal moment in the development of the species. Nick’s mother actually got teary-eyed. Nick was beside himself with happiness. We played with that pop-up book for over an hour, acting out scenes from the movies I’d seen a half dozen times and Nick hadn’t seen at all. Nick added little addendums and characters, which at first bugged me because I wanted to stay true to the original version but then I kind of gave up and went with it. I remember his favorite character was Chewbacca, he kept wanting to be Chewbacca, while I, of course, was Luke, when really I should have been Han Solo. Anyway, while our moms talked we took our game outside, into the woods, and it was then that I noticed there was another building on the property. A small shed. I think maybe I tried to take a look inside but Nick stopped me, real serious, and told me it was off-limits. After a while our moms came outside, standing there chatting like they’d been friends forever, and it was time to go. No birthday party I ever attended ever matched what I felt that day.
What was in the shed?
Nick’s dad’s shop. They hadn’t opened it since he died.
What did your peers make of your friendship with Nick?
My answer to that is going to sound like a lot of bragging but the fact is, my primary talent in life has always been my likability. When you’re someone everybody likes you can get away with befriending people who aren’t liked. My peers always looked to me as a leader, came to me for my approval or blessing, wanted my opinions on stuff. Kids questioned my friendship with Nick. “Why are you hanging out with that freak?” they’d ask me, and I’d tell them they were idiots who didn’t realize Nick was a genius. The things that should have marked Nick as an outcast became, thanks to my psychological campaign, examples of his edginess. His clothes, the piercings he got before anyone else in high school. In a way I think I achieved the impossible by making poverty cool.
You mentioned his fixing your bike. Were there other times when Nick’s mechanical inclinations became apparent?
He was always taking things apart to see how they worked, putting them back together about half the time. My parents, the most technologically inept people I knew, were amazed by this. My dad could barely get the lawn mower to turn over. Sometimes Nick came over and helped my dad in the garage, or fixed things around our house, like our water heater.
He fixed your water heater?
Yeah, when he must have been about twelve years old. He was coming over to our house a lot around that age. Our home was one of the rare places where Nick could find praise. He certainly wasn’t getting any at school. School bored the hell out of him. And even though I had succeeded in making him sort of acceptable to our classmates, he really didn’t take much initiative to make any friends other than me. He didn’t like to play with me when I was with other kids. He’d wait to get me alone and then we’d enter our world of codes and secret passageways, our games of trap doors and monsters. He bonded with my parents and asked them lots of questions about history and science. Sometimes my sister and I would just end up playing together by default when Nick was over, since he was so wrapped up in learning about the Luddite movement and the invention of radio with my mom and dad.
Your sister. Tell me about her.
Man. She was incredible. She would have grown up to become a beautiful and talented woman. Claudine. I miss her every day. She loved music. Always twisting my arm to sing songs with her. She considered all the heavy thinking in our household sort of comical. She could defuse a deep conversation with a perfectly timed joke. If my family was the Beatles, she would have been Ringo.
And you would have been—
Paul.
Let’s talk about high school.
Sure. I was your typical debate nerd, specializing in Lincoln–Douglas, also did a pretty decent job as a fullback on the football team, elected to student council, founder and president of the Photography Club, never at a loss for a girlfriend. Again, I floated by on charm and all the things I learned through osmosis from my parents. Kept a 4.0 GPA, volunteered at a retirement home teaching senior citizens how to use computers. My high school career was an unmitigated success from start to finish. I was miserable. [Laughs].
And Nick?
He started smoking. Hanging out with the poorer kids, making out in public with these skanky chicks. Spent a lot of time in the vocational-tech departments. Those teachers, the wood-shop, metal-shop guys, sports coaches mostly, they loved him. He did really well in math and science, lousy in Spanish and English. Hated art.
And you guys remained friends?
Strangely enough, yeah. We had a real Goofus and Gallant thing going on. We orbited each other, admired each other as opposites. Nick started smoking pot as a freshman and one night convinced me to try it. We stayed up watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall and talking about philosophy. He told me he looked up to me for how I could get anyone to do anything I wanted them to. I told him I admired him for his genius. But there were whole weeks that went by when we didn’t talk to each other. Just pass in the hallway with not so much as a nod. I still defended him when friends of mine talked shit about him but we started to have a lot less contact than we used to. Then the science fair happened.
The science fair at Bainbridge High was kind of a big deal. Sometime in the late eighties scouts from tech companies started coming over to check out the budding talent. The idea was to identify the innovators really young and give them scholarships. Of course this poisoned the spirit of the thing and after a while everyone was writing unoriginal programs in DOS. It turned into more of a computer fair than a science fair. So junior year, the first year Nick qualified, he shows up with these boxes of crap. Gears and wires and hammered-out panels and screws and stuff. Little pieces of wood and coils of string. It looked like the contents of a junk drawer. I sat there with my display on Puget Sound pollution watching Nick set up his project. He refused to say anything about it. The pieces appeared to fit together in random configurations but Nick worked on it with such a sense of purpose that I had to believe the machine he was building actually did something. Kids and parents wandered around, smirking about the bizarre contraption Nick was building. If Nick heard them he didn’t show it. He was absorbed. After about an hour, his project was built. It was a battered metal cube, about a foot and a half square. He put up a sign that said, “The Machine” and sat behind his table, stone-faced, his black hair hanging in front of his eyes. I was convinced he was putting everyone on. Then the judges stopped by with their clipboards and frowns and asked Nick what the machine did.
Nick took a key from his pocket, like the kind used to wind up an antique toy. He inserted it into a hole in the top of the box and twisted it a few times. We waited. At first nothing happened. By now a crowd had gathered, curious to see what the hell this thing did. Then a panel popped off and landed on the floor. Inside were gears and screws, little pistons, whirling things. The machine shuddered and then appeared to dismantle itself. Screws and rivets shot out in all these directions. People stepped back. Somebody made a crack that it was a bomb. No one could take their eyes off the thing. Within a minute the entire machine was dismantled, lying in pieces all over the table and floor. There was a moment of quiet. Then, one by one, everyone realized this was the end of the show, and started to laugh. Nick didn’t move. Just sat in the same position he’d been sitting in, quiet, while everyone roared. Once the crowd was tired of this they moved on to look at someone’s model of a double helix.
One man lingered. He wore slacks and a black sport coat over a white shirt. Young guy, maybe twenty-five years old. Handsome, short haircut. He slowly bent down and picked up a gear from the floor and turned it over in his hand. He cleared his throat and told Nick he liked his invention. At this, Nick looked up, sort of wary and angry, prepared for a punch line. But there was no punch line. The man handed Nick a business card. The card just had a name and phone number on it. Dirk Bickle. He said he was a scout for an organization that was always on the lookout for innovative young minds, then nodded and said good-bye.
I helped Nick pick up the pieces of his machine. As I was putting the pieces back in their boxes I realized that Nick’s machine hadn’t just fallen apart. It had dismantled itself so thoroughly that every moving part had been detached from every other part. Not a single screw or gear was connected to anything else. When I pointed this out to Nick, he smiled for the first time that afternoon and said, “You figured it out.”
What about this Dirk Bickle character?
Nick stashed the card. They didn’t speak until a year or so later.
You guys weren’t curious about why Dirk expressed interest in the machine?
Sure, I guess we were for a day or so, but other stuff came up, or we got distracted by the day-to-day bullshit of being kids. Nick got busted for smoking pot behind the art building. The principal pulled me aside and basically told me to stop hanging out with him. Said I would sully my reputation by associating with a kid like Nick. I told him that Nick was brilliant and if he couldn’t see that it meant he wasn’t doing that great a job as an education administrator. [Laughs]. That didn’t fly so well.
You mentioned girls. I’m wondering if you could talk about your and Nick’s girlfriends at this time.
So we’re on to sex, okay. I went through quite a few girlfriends. I can’t remember a lot of their names. I know that’s bad. It was typical high school stuff. Leaving notes in lockers, slow dancing, finding remote places to make out. It’s the make-out sessions I remember most. Spending literally an hour with your face pressed up against a girl’s, that warm delta in her jeans. Her hair. They wore it long in those days, my God, I’d live in those ringlets and strands. The girls I was most attracted to weren’t the designated popular girls but the smart ones who should have known better. They wore thick woolly sweaters you could just slide your hand under. Whenever I rode in the car with my dad, he’d try to start conversations by asking what I was thinking, and invariably I was thinking about sex. The way you think about sex before you’ve even had it, the unanswered hormonal question of it.
And Nick’s sexual activities in high school?
Like I said, he trolled the lower echelons of the socioeconomic strata. Had girlfriends in Poulsbo, off the island. None of the rich, pretty girls wanted anything to do with him. He attracted girls who had self-esteem issues. He obsessed over them and despised them. Treated them really poorly. I got on him about this a couple times. While I worshipped female pulchritude, I think he found the whole act of sex degrading. There was this one girl Laura who he fucked with psychologically, over and over. Just ground her down emotionally, backing her into these arguments about the nature of reality while she was high. Fucked-up stuff. We argued about girls a lot. I’m tired of talking about this. Let’s move on to something else.
Do you want to talk about the mud slide?
Okay.
Go ahead.
All right. Our house, I think I mentioned, was built against a pretty steep embankment. During the winter of my junior year of high school, we got twenty straight days of rain. Being hardy Pacific Northwesterners, we didn’t think anything of it. One Friday night I was in my folks’ VW van with a girl named Carrie Powers. I’d been seeing her for a month or so. We had gone out to a movie in Poulsbo and were driving home. She, or I, I can’t remember, suggested that we find a remote road and pull over. We found a place and lay down a blanket in the back of the van and fucked hard for what must have been about two hours. That incredible, young fucking when you’ve finally figured out how to really fuck and no one’s preventing you from fucking. The rain was coming down on the windows in sheets. It was beautiful. At some point one of us looked at a watch and realized we were way past our curfews. But it was totally worth it. I dropped her off a block from her house and drove home in the rain, my dick sore. I remember I was listening to an R.E.M. album, a song about being Superman. I sang along with the music on full blast, just elated after an epic screw. Then I came to my road and saw a lot of flashing lights. My first thought was that it would be strange for there to be a fire with so much rain. I pulled over and looked for my house but couldn’t see it and for a second I thought maybe I was turned around. I kept looking for my house in the flashing lights but there was just this empty spot where it used to be. Then I noticed the mud. A big slick of it running down the embankment, across the road, across the beach, into Puget Sound. The mud slide had completely wiped out my house. And with it my family. I stood in the rain with the firemen and the cops, calling out for my mom and dad, my sister. Their bodies were recovered from the sound two days later.
What happened in the days immediately after that event?
I don’t remember. I assume the whole social services side of things went into motion. There were counselors and the Child Protective Services. I met with people. Police. Lawyers. The thing I hated most was the way people wanted to be a part of my mourning. Moms of other kids came up to me in downtown Winslow, asked how I was doing, whether I needed anything, tried to buy me lunch. I suspected they were getting off on my tragedy. They were elated at the opportunity to show their concern. The reaction of the adult world to my circumstances appeared overly scripted to me. They spoke of “healing” and “closure” and used all this other bullshit terminology. For a while I stayed in a motel on the island and had these visitors constantly coming by to bring me fucking casseroles. I couldn’t stand it.
After the motel where did you stay?
I had only a year until I was supposed to go to college so it didn’t make much sense for me to go live with aunts and uncles I barely knew in Chicago. Everyone agreed it would be best if I stayed and graduated from Bainbridge High. So what I needed was a sort of foster home situation. That’s where the limits of the island’s generosity became apparent. No one came forward to offer me a place to live. Except Nick’s mom, Star.
You moved in with them.
Well the beauty of it was that I had the VW van. I parked it on their lawn. Or the muddy patch that was supposed to be their lawn. They’d covered parts of the yard with slabs of plywood so you could walk from the shack to the outhouse without sinking. I slept in the van, ate in the shack, and used the outhouse. I got into a bunch of colleges but decided to go to UW. I was really worried about money even though my inheritance was in the seven figures, plus the life insurance payments. I was a parentless millionaire living in a VW van, shitting in an outhouse, and meditating with my best friend’s mom in their shack, burning Nag Champa incense. I cried all the time, as you can imagine. But I learned to control the valves of my grief, making conscious decisions as to when I’d let myself cry. And Nick took care of me, too. He had been through this kind of grief before and had endured the disingenuous condolences of strangers. He helped just by keeping me to my routines, banging on the van in the morning so I’d get ready for school. He must have been grieving pretty hard, too, since he’d been so close to my family. The mud slide changed the game. Nick started to clean up his act, quit smoking pot and took a sort of vow of celibacy for a while. We started listening to these bands from Washington, D.C., called… I’m trying to remember the genre.
Punk?
It was an offshoot of punk. Straight edge. Yeah. It was this movement that evolved in the eighties, a sort of monastic offspring of punk rock that swore off drugs and alcohol. The real hard-core adherents swore off sex. The idea was that punk up to that time had railed against control and authority, especially governmental authority. By being straight edge, you attempted to cut out all the external forces that might control you. The band we got into in a big way was Minor Threat. Nick and I spent a lot of time in the woods talking about this philosophy, reading the fanzines. We realized that to break free of societal control you had to control yourself and exercise extreme discipline. I looked ahead to UW and started to get this dull ache in my gut. I had sort of arbitrarily decided to go into premed. But every night I spent under the spell of Star’s Kwakiutl folk tales and herbal remedies, the more I began to see the whole university system as a sham. I started to hate my own conformity. How I’d learned to play the game of school without actually learning anything. How I could charm anyone. In retrospect I think I decided to withdraw my application because college reminded me too much of my parents. I decided I’d travel instead. Then, one afternoon while Nick and Star were away, in town or something, I don’t know where, I did something I’d been wanting to do ever since that first birthday party visit. I broke into Nick’s dad’s shed.
Ah…
It didn’t take me long to find the key to the padlock. It was where you’d expect it, in a random drawer in the kitchen. I pushed the key into the rusty lock and pulled open the door. Lots of cobwebs. Light coming through translucent windows. The place was about fifteen feet square. Along one wall were carefully arranged tools: saws, hammers, nothing that required electricity. The deal with Nick’s dad was he had intended to build them a house using only tools that existed in the nineteenth century, or some such hippie shit like that. There was still a half-finished chair sitting there just as Nick’s dad had left it the day before he died. A coffee cup with the coffee long evaporated. On the other side of the room stretched a bench, piled with papers. Some of them had become moldy and illegible. There were big sheets of paper tacked up all over the walls and tucked into cardboard tubes, too. Blueprints. Pictures of buildings. Cross sections of sewers and electrical systems and subways. Yellow legal pads filled with tiny, uniform engineering scrawl, three-ring binders with all sorts of tabs separating the sections. What was this even about? I looked closer, at the names of streets and parks and monuments. It was New York City. I became so enrapt in the schematics that I didn’t hear Star and Nick until they were standing in the doorway. Their shadows fell on me. I asked them what this was, what it meant. Nick was silent, sort of frozen. Then Star spoke, calmly but with her voice carrying a weight that terrified me. She said, “Lock up when you’re done.” Then she walked away. What the hell was I supposed to think of that?
What did Nick do?
He joined me and started looking over the blueprints and notes. None of it made any sense to either of us. Especially when we started noticing there were maps of Bainbridge in there as well, with street names we didn’t recognize. Lexington Avenue. Bleecker Street. In the notes we found several references to the “New York Alki” project. I’d taken Washington state history and knew what this meant. When the first white settlers came to the region in the nineteenth century, they debated what to call their settlement. They had big aspirations for their little frontier outpost but were really bummed out by all the mud and rain. To cheer themselves up they considered naming the place “New York Alki.” Alki was a Chinook word for “by and by.” Meaning, “someday.” “New York Alki” meant that someday this place would be as big and vibrant as New York City. But cooler heads prevailed and decided that naming their city after New York, itself named after old York, was retarded. So they named the city after Chief Sealth and called it a day.
We figured that Nick’s dad had latched on to this little piece of history, too, and had decided to create a game out of it. A hobby. We convinced ourselves of this even though the notes seemed more intense than what a hobbyist would have come up with. Who would have dreamed up such a crazy idea in the first place, anyway? Who would have thought it possible to create a life-size replica of Manhattan in Puget Sound?