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.