Free A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me by Jason Schmidt

later that the cops knew something was up but they couldn’t prove anything, so they arrested him for leaving the scene of an accident. Dad explained that he hadn’t left the scene of the accident—that he’d just arrived when the police showed up. That excuse worked, but not before he’d spent two days in jail and squandered his phone call trying to reach Sean. Sean was Dad’s go-to guy when it came to getting bailed out of weird situations. But while he was a great guy to have on your side in almost any situation, he didn’t yet own one of the newfangled answering machines that were just coming out on the market. After Dad got home, he got paid for the delivery, but most of the money went to cover the cost of having the eviscerated corpse of the Vega towed back to Eugene.
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    After the Vega was totaled, Dad finally quit community college, took an actual break from dealing drugs, and found a semi-straight job working under the table with an anarchist tree-planting collective called the Hodads. The job took him out of town for days at a time, sleeping in the converted school bus the Hodads used as a mobile bunkhouse and planting saplings in the wreckage of clear-cut forests.
    Dad quitting school meant I couldn’t go to day care there anymore, but the theory was that Marcy would cover child care while Dad was gone. In practice, she wasn’t around much either, and all four of us kids spent a lot of time on our own. We didn’t mind. There were a lot of other kids in our neighborhood, and Eugene still had enough small town innocence that even Isaac and I, who were only five, could wander around relatively freely.
    The nearest busy street was West 11th Avenue, just to the south of us, which we weren’t supposed to cross. But we could go as far as we wanted to the east or west, and that meant we could play in the alleys behind the businesses on our side of West 11th. Whenever the weather was good, Isaac and I would traverse the whole area, Dumpster-diving and rooting through junk, looking for old machine parts or packing material that we could turn into toys. We could tell just by looking at a Dumpster whether it would be worth opening. Most were too gross to mess with, but some of them belonged to warehouses or auto parts stores. The outsides of those Dumpsters were always clean. When we opened them, they were usually full of broken-down cardboard boxes.
    On a hot day, the smell of dry cardboard wafting out of a clean Dumpster was enough to make me want to crawl inside it and go to sleep. Except that when I mentioned something about it to my dad he told me a story about a kid getting emptied into the back of a garbage truck and crushed by the truck’s big hydraulic compactor. It didn’t keep me out of Dumpsters, but it took all the romance out of the idea of sleeping in one.
    Mostly Isaac and I just played with the boxes. If we could find empty ones, we’d fold them back into cube-shapes and pretend we were superheroes, throwing giant empty boxes at each other like Superman and Captain Marvel hurling Styrofoam boulders. But every once in a while we’d find something interesting—like the time we found dozens of small white cardboard boxes with individually wrapped chandelier crystals inside. We assumed someone had accidentally thrown out several pounds of diamonds, and we brought as many of them home as we could fit into our pockets.

 
    12
    My grandpa had a heart attack while we were living on Fillmore. It was his first one. Dad, all of twenty-seven years old, still felt enough of a connection to his father to drop everything, get special permission from his probation officer, buy some overpriced plane tickets, and fly us down to L.A. to visit Grandpa in the hospital. I didn’t really know what a heart attack was, and I didn’t know why Grandpa having one meant we had to go to Los Angeles, but I didn’t mind making the trip. I