“Heard a singer on the radio late last night says he’s gonna kick the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight…”
My beef with the younger generation, if I even have one, isn’t that the video games they play are oscar-worthy-cinematic as opposed to the 8-bit RGB games I played in the 80’s. It isn’t that the are 500 channels/streams that have become thief of the joy that Saturday Morning Cartoons once brought. It’s not that they can’t wait for their little pea brains to come up with whoever sang whatever song and they just Google it. No, I’m only jealous that they get to have a soundtrack with them wherever they go. Headphones, earbuds, noice cancelling audio contraptions, (none of them coming in with a price tag under $100 FFS). Its equal beef and an understanding that hearing the music we listened to back in the day didn’t come without some effort to get to. The bottomless on-demand well of arts and entertainment of today has buried our magical yearning for a tune, and sunk it six feet under with nary an epitaph. My Rotten Kid will never have to twist a dial on some shitty little radio to eke some classic rock turn of phrase out from within the fuzz. This isn’t an old man yelling at The Cloud™ (even if I wanted to, I forgot my password). This one time she was about six and we were watching terrestrial CABLE. An ad came on and my daughter asked, “Is it over?” Look, no hate here, I’ve embraced the future. I wouldn’t trade a frequency failing when it rains for strutting through the shelving aisle in the hardware hearing “Shook Ones II”. Not for a million bucks.
Many of you know that I’m a fan of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. I’ve been a listener stalwart on Mondays and Thursdays for over 2000 episodes. As his stellar run comes to an end, I need to say: I’ve always found something adjacent to the punchlines, pathos or wry wit that he shares. A moment that I felt belonged to he and I alone. It happened almost every episode. I gave him an example of this once in a letter I penned one Thursday evening after hearing his show. The same letter I heard him read the following Monday. Hearing my words come from his mouth made me nearly drive into oncoming traffic with excitement. I’m unsure if it was a current episode or one from way back (I’ve been going into the archives the last few weeks) that I took to heart. Marc and Guest were talking about music and, off the cuff he mentioned that there are “…some songs some people can’t hear enough…” I have one I can’t hear enough. We all do.
‘92 I lived in a little blue-panelled house in a small town waaaaay up in Northern Canada. One evening, three mildly stoned roomies sat around a television watching an NHL game while the snow of a dark and pitiless winter gathered at our door. TV time-out or something and a beer commercial came on screen. The voice-over extolled the virtues of the breweries’ glacier-fed glory as six or eight beer cans bobbled and bounced downstream towards us. Just before they hit the camera, one after another they dropped down a waterfall. Being broke, mildly stoned and 20 years old with an innate need/ability to make everyone laugh, I took this moment to dive from the couch with outstretched arms and cupped hands to catch each gloriously wet and sun-dappled can as though they were going to fall to our filthy living room floor. It was a visual gag and my roomies all chortled through the haze. One of them, a guy I’d only known a month or so, cackled, shook his head and through wide grin muttered,
“Oh, you are a fuckin’ dreamer aren’tcha?”
I thought for a beat to take issue with this biting insight (which was my style at the time) but I shut my mouth because I couldn’t argue. It was succinctly put and right on the money.
I’ve always been a dreamer.
My roomies and I all worked at a local lumberyard and that’s how we met. Two days after the beer waterfall episode, we’re all at work trying to do as little as possible in Beaver Lumber’s Whitehorse yard in all of its forty below-ness but still tryna stay warm. Its a delicate balance. It hadn’t snowed yet that day but it was in the mail. Dense grey clouds were inbound from the west but over the yard, blue sky and sunshine. The waning daylight made the wild wind that tore in between lifts of lumber up and around pallets of concrete mix more punishing. You could be up in the warehouse among batts of insulation or pop a door open on a truck or forklift and boy, the wind, it’d find you. I served a few more roofers then ducked inside the main store for a bit to warm up and take a whizz. 30 minutes later, 4:00 PM and its like midnight. Seeking refuge from the elements and paying customers, I headed to the Nail Shed. Its where we’d go for a little peace amidst the turmoil. A little oasis. I knew there was a shitty little radio in there that was always on. It was plugged in so even at night when everything sat silent while feet of snow developed on top the piles of building materials like those squat little tombstones you see, there was a song playing.
There are days up North with almost no light. An hour, maybe three around mid day. Something about the earth’s rotation on its axis and the elliptical orbit it takes around the sun. When you can’t find the fucking Nail Shed due to equal parts darkness, howling wind and blowing snow, and only armed with an 8th graders understanding of the paths of celestial bodies, it can for sure just feel like some higher power is making things pretty personal. Fully dark at 4:30pm, that shitty little radio was fuzzing out the local station like a beacon through the elements. Sometimes late in the afternoon before closing we’d turn it up as loud as we could, park all of the machinery in a wide semicircle and beam all of their lights towards an icy home plate and we’d play stickball in the afternoon dark. Should you ever meet anyone who worked there in the early nineties, they might speak of these games, just know it was MY idea. I wonder if they still do it.
So anyway what I do is I stumble, fumble and do my level best do evade the shock of the wind to find refuge in the Nail Shed. It was a hut inset below a larger wooden structure. It was about 8 feet by 6 feet but shelves of nails cut into that so you really only had about an area of 6 by 4 and a really low ceiling. Some guys had to hunch. There was and empty socket where a lightbulb should have been but wasn’t. Ye Olde Nail Shed represented a sort of haven in this wintry hellscape, but even in the summer you could duck in there and pretend your were doing some sort of half-assed inventory should you need an escape. Anyway, I duck in and find, warmly ensconced in this tiny enclosure, two of my esteemed associates. They are both stone faced and slit-eyed leaning up against the shelving. I’m greeted with a grin from one while the other sucks on a punctured can of Hires Root Beer. In this cradle of tin, a nugget of weed flares hot in the dark. He inhales, holds it all in for about 7 or 8 seconds then blows it my way. His lips jut out like how a little kid thinks you’re supposed kiss and his lungs send a thin ribbon of smoke my way to bathe my face. “Hey man.” He coughs just as he runs out of air then turns the can opening towards me. I lean in and take a nice deep one, then tilt my head back. Hold. Hold. Hold. Here we go.
Oh there we go.
I let the heavy dump into my lungs and let the feeling wash over my brain. Simultaneously, tiny aluminum root-beer-can-particles, wild from the heat, come loose from the can’s interior. They take up on the wind I provide and ride the smoke coursing down inside me. down and around my internal parts and along the inner walls of my veins, then shoot out to my extremities. Leaving no part of my nervous system untrammelled and with nowhere left to go, they come to rest in my chest. These tiny tin corpuscles remain there today, just as this jet black-haired chick I was hot-knifing hash with YEARS later told me they would. Sometimes when I’m at a light or stuck in traffic, I think of them moving, spinning at top speed through by bloodstream in wild orbits irrespective of one another. Each of them with a microscopic branding that reads Hires™. I purse my lips and flick my tongue furtively against them so the vapour looks like its from the smokestack of some steam engine chugging across the great plains of the frontier. I turn my head towards the door of the Nail Shed and begin to move out into the afternoon night, up to my hips in what feels like preset concrete.
Just then a song came on the shitty little radio in the Nail Shed and I took pause.
All alone at the end of the evening
And the bright lights have faded to blue
I was THINkin’ ‘bout a WOman
Who might have loved me
I never knew
I said thanks for the hit and tipped on out, exhaling frosty air. I looked up and just then the running lights of the one, lone plane that left my little town at the same time every day shot across the sky. I realized in that moment that I’ve been, and probably will be a leaf in the wind for a considerable time hence. Right then through the fuzz and the wind the guy from The Eagles goes, he goes, he’s all like…
You know I’ve always been a dreamer
Some thirty years gone, that day, and I can listen to ‘Take It To The Limit’ on my AirPods, headphones, in an aisle at Home Depot or on some shitty little radio and it will take me back there to the Nail Shed. I can’t hear it enough.
I have to say goodbye now to my time Up North. I’ll miss the way the sun bronzed The Yukon’s great and terrible wilderness in the early afternoon. I’ll miss the joy and wonder friends and family alike have brought me in my time there. The full and intrepid hearts of those that choose to reside there are a wonder to behold. I recommend you visit if you can, but Up North is behind me now, at last. It has been a wonderful relationship, one that I took to the limit. Gotta dream on.
For all the pain the pandemic ushered in, I feel like an element of introspection and a larger lean towards care for our mental health has been introduced. If you haven’t yet, I recommend you at least dip a toe into these waters. Dive in head first if you like, but fair warning: Should you proceed, you’re likely to encounter more than a few phrases and buzzwords that will appear in readings and discussions around the world of well being. “My authentic self” and “Standing in my truth” come to mind. I’d hear someone say that and my brown eyes would rollll back white. These phrases just seemed like a collection of words thrown together and they would trigger me. “Trigger”. I still don’t love that word.Its nestled itself nicely in the wellness lexicon. I use it here because that term is important to this tale. And this is just that, a tale. I’m not here to go on about the path I’m shuffling down towards a better brain, body and being or the understanding about myself I’ve gained by just sitting across from a therapist talking. No, I’m gonna tell you about a situation that was just one of many that landed me in that chair. It all began about a year ago when I was “TRIGGERED“.
Last fall, I dragged My Rotten Kid to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. “Ooh, an aristocrat!”, you might think. Ha! Picture The Child and I up in the balcony peering through tiny binoculars, poo-pooing performances under powdered wigs. For those unfamiliar, a few times a year the orchestra will perform the musical accompaniment to a suitably symphonic film that plays behind them on a massive screen. I learned that the VSO was putting on a production of “Jurassic Park”. I knew it would be a real thrill to see this movie on the big screen again and a great way for My Rotten Kid to experience it in a space outside of the living room, neither of us dicking around on our phones. I was not wrong.
Much of the wonder we feel from film is owed in a large part to the soundtrack. Spielberg’s amazing stories are often buoyed by a specific score from John Williams. Unseen for well over an hour and into the film JAWS, that fish might seem toothless absent the accompaniment of the six basses, four trombones, a tuba and eight celli that herald the Great White menace just below the waterline. You know the bit I’m talking about. 12 year old girls are less than eager to roll with their loser dads ANYWHERE, so without letting her know the destination, I dragged her downtown. I hauled her across Saturday Night city streets fresh of rain. Yanked her through the lineup and still up sweeping staircase past ornate fixtures and sat us both in the Orpheum’s wondrous domed auditorium in downtown Vancouver. And man, she loved it. Its easy to forget how amazing that first island scene is. Sam Neill and Laura Dern are awed by the sight of several thunderous Brontosaurs, and we’re awed with them. Jurassic Park premiered in 1995, almost 30 years ago. Time files on leathery wings, no? During the kitchen scene, my daughter shot me a look of legitimate fear. She stared at Dad wide-eyed if only to avoid witnessing what looked to be the bloody and carnivorous death of two children, one of them right around her age. I held her arm and smiled at her with my mouth closed. I didn’t want her to know I was clenching dealing with my own shit from a single shot on screen only moments earlier. I had been TRIGGERED.
The year was 1984. I was close to the age my daughter is now, around 13, and I kissed a girl. This wasn’t the first girl I’d kissed, just the first one I wanted to. It happened at a summer camp dance amid plastic chairs that rung out in concentric circles facing a wide and open mess hall floor. This girl was about four seats down from me to my left. She leaned her chair back on two legs like you do in class ’til you learn better. She caught my eye with a smile that was unmistakably for me. Oof. A heat began in my pants and coursed up to roil around my tummy. I took a deep breath and my throat began to close up. Too late. The warmth shot north and came rest in my cheeks. Were I a white boy, I’d have blushed. She had those heavy-lidded eyes that suggest at once both wanton desire and remote indifference. My wife has the same countenance and I’ll be damned if a look from her across a room doesn’t make me feel feelings. Camp Dance Girl these had rosy cheeks and wavy brown hair. I had an afro. Both of us had hearts just roaring with an indelible fever, a byproduct of the combined chemicals of adolescence. There is a wild promise that youth can bring. Of what, you can’t quite put your finger on until its gone. That evening two sparkly souls untrammelled by the doubt, wine or weight that fifty summers can bring made out on the dance floor. I kissed her like a babysitter had taught me. I kissed her like I’d seen them do on the daytime soaps. Kissed her as if All My Children in all of The Days of our Lives depended on it.
Six days earlier, ten or fifteen busloads of kids from across the southern slab of a western Canadian province converged in one space. I remember the straight shot of a journey out from my prairie town the bus cresting a hill, hurtling downward then slowing to make a wide turn into a driveway on the right. Crunching gravel and dust plumes abound as the bus came to rest. It was here that they buses barfed out hundreds of teens suddenly beset upon all sides by wide, sloping yellow hills emanating waves of heat under an open, living Saskatchewan sky. We’d arrived in the heart of the Qu’apelle Valley. It was new and weirdly exciting to this young rube, and whenever I hear The Tragically Hip’s Born in the Water, I’m just stepping off of that bus.
Rollin’ hills all covered in suede I’m heat nervous and out of road
How they mapped it out and selected what kid was going to what cabin, I cannot remember., but we lined up and they figured something out. All of us were desperate to keep our hometown or local connections but were separated nonetheless by some analog algorithm like even/odd numbers or first/last names shouted out by the King of Camp Counsellors from his perch on a ramshackle porch hanging off of Counsellor HQ. Each cabin was named for a tribe of what we now call First Nations. There was Kiowa, Sioux, Seneca just to name a few. A number of others come to mind but I’m unsure how beholden to the local region they were. This was a way, I guess, to honour the people who were here before and traversed the plains chasing buffalo e’re treaties were made and summarily broken. In the same way that I acknowledge that the district in which I write this is on the shared, unceded, traditional territory of the Katzie, Semiahmoo and Kwantlen Nations. It is the absolute LEEEEEEEEEEEAST I can do.
Hundreds of kids were to spread out across these badlands from Sunday to Sunday and, for me, It was a week fraught with peril. Since my arrival, I’d been caught ‘dancing with myself’ by my cabin counsellor who, in enough ways resembled Billy Idol (so that’s what we called him). I got into my first fistfight with a dude named Corey. I witnessed a near drowning and the subsequent first-aid applied. I’d been left (I assumed) to die in the pitch black of night with only the stars to guide me. Camped out overnight in front of what we were told was AN ABANDONED INSANE ASYLUM but what I now know to be the Church’s bloody thumbprint left on this blasted land. We scrambled through poison ivy and thorn. Suffered injury and certain doom atop rocky, ruddy cliffs. There was blood and there were gopher guts and archery emergencies. It was all kid’s stuff and it was great. Oh yeah, I also engaged in an egregious display of racism.
Our cabin was named for the Pawnee. Broadly speaking, we didn’t learn shit about the First Nations people, locally or otherwise. Mid-week, Pawnee and a few other cabins went on a two-day/overnight hike. It was on this hike that I learned fairly sharply that I was not white. I was not like white boys. I don’t get to play white boy games. There were some local native boys we ran into during day one of the overnight. We all exchanged words and peacocked like boys will at that age. A few of my cabin mates leaned into some more derisive terms. Terms that isolate and separate and can cut right to the bone. And I joined in.
I can speak my mother tongue
Every racial epithet that ever came my way has came from the chest. There is a deep breath that allows space before a slur is uttered. In that moment before the whole dynamic changes, the breath is taken. The lips curl back unnaturally. The eyebrows attempt to meet in the middle of the forehead and the eyes can become slits.
For example, if you’re going to say “N****r”, the tip of your tongue has to find the roof of your mouth just behind the teeth in order to form the first letter. The lips curl into a snarl and out it comes.
There is a common slur cast to denigrate females. C**t. Here, the back of your tongue must meet the upper part of mouth’s roof just before the throat to utter a hard “K” sound. The lips curl back into a snarl then out it flies.
Gay people somehow making your life miserable by simply existing? Why not yelll “F****t”? Ok, here, the bottom lip comes up to meet the top row of teeth. Breath is ushered forth to form the initial “F” sound. The lips curl back into a snarl and out it goes.
The snarl is our face’s default position when uttering words like these and it has to be! The lips have gotta get there first and that snarl is our face giving away the game, letting everyone around the card table know we’re just about to make a terrible mistake. It might seem like it is coming from a place of hatred. Hatred is only a byproduct of fear, doubt and misunderstanding. That snarl is why openly hateful folk often look like sad, wrinkled wretches well before their time.
Writing this, I remember the slur I snarled not quietly. I won’t share it here.
A heartbeat after the poison passed my lips at the boys across the creek, a counsellor from one of the other cabins, a white guy, came down on us like a drill sergeant. He told us to shut our fucking mouths and line up. Six of us stood shoulder to shoulder. We could do naught but gaze at our shoes as he laced into us. He told us what everybody on earth should know.The tone in his voice had an edge that told me he would way rather smack the shit out of us, but was bound by camp regulations and no less, the law.
“Nobody is better or worth anymore or any less than another in this world or even entitled to think that way. Some people have it easier and some people have it harder and some people are lucky barely have a fucking shot at all at happiness, so fuck you for trying to take that away. If you choose make someone feel less than you because of their colour, upbringing or current station in life, well that’s about the worst trait a person can have, and you should be lucky to call yourself ‘human’ if that is how you choose to use your voice.”
Not sure about my fellow fine young cannibals, but I felt the kind of sick a kick in the balls makes you. He was not finished. He then came to me, the only person of colour in the cabin, camp (and really, at that point, my life) He grabbed my chin with his thumb and forefinger like a frustrated father. Yanked my head up so I couldn’t avoid his gaze. I’ve written here about a piece of graphite in my palm. There is a jagged piece of calcified stone near my heart. Bound in orbit there by the thin transparent membrane I’m certain envelops all the heart’s sacs, veins and valves. Wraps it all up like Saran and keeps the volatile machine in my chest from falling to pieces. It is a small white rock that spins on an unpredictable axis. It is that man’s words manifest…
“… And you of all fucking people should know that…”
How could you do it? How could you even try When you were born in the water And raised up in the sky?
When I tell folks I was raised in Saskatchewan, Canada, they often ask “Bro were you like, the only like, black person in your school?” Picture me taking a belt of scotch, drawing on a cigarette. I hold the smoke in and I’m all like, “BRO.” in that creaky-holding-smoke-in-voice… “I was the only black person in my HOUSE…” Picture me then exhaling the smoke while stubbing the cigarette out in a dirty ashtray. Picture me tossing a wrinkled American twenty on the bar and picture me heading out of the dimly lit bar into the sharp and indifferent Vegas sunlight. early on a Wednesday afternoon.
Despite being adopted and raised by a loving (white) mother and loving (white) father, having two spectacular (white) brothers… Despite growing up and navigating this (white) world to the best of my ability… Under no circumstances do I get to play by white boy rules. I am reminded of that daily and in no uncertain terms. One day I’ll write about the games I need to play just to get through the day.
Camp Ta-Wa-Si holy shit what a week. We come to it at last. Ten wild and dirty boys, initially at odds and unfamiliar, have now bonded over team building war canoe trips, campfire indiscretions, scorching hot hill climbs, nascent sexual proclivities and near-death experiences. It was time for us to show the rest of the cabins, kids and counsellors how we’d perform as a team.
Boys of Pawnee Cabin! Eschew petty grievances! Cast off troubling thoughts or doubt! Forget whatever wars you are waging with acne and each other! Under the righteous tutelage and blessed hand of Billy Idol, come together as one to perform a piece of theatre at the gathering of the tribes held in Ta-Wa-Si’s Great (mess) Hall!
Pawnee’s trusted counsellor and the second coolest guy in the world (Bob Basu uber alles), broke our performance down for us. I’m paraphrasing here but the stage direction we got went something like this;
The setup:
There are 10 of you.
6 of you are a firing squad. You will stand shoulder to shoulder and hold brooms as rifles.
3 of you are world leaders: Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Pierre Trudeau
Each of you is accused of crimes punishable by death.
10 feet away, facing the firing squad, you will stand with your hands behind your back, bound by invisible rope.
1 of you is the Captain. You will hold a sword (broom) aloft and decide when each of the 3 die by announcing READY. AIM. On “FIRE”, you’ll bring down your sword.
The turn:
Just before the Captain shouts “FIRE”, the first politician set to die, Ronald Reagan, will loudly proclaim, “EARTHQUAKE!”
The Captain and all members of the firing squad will squeal like the pigs they are and head for the hills, allowing Ronnie Raygun to scurry away into the night (through the kitchen saloon door). What a clever politician!
Regaining some composure, the firing squad will reassemble, this time dead set on sending criminal politician number two, Mikhail Gorbachev, straight to hell in a hail of lead.
Just before the Captain shouts FIRE, the dirty Commie will loudly exclaim,
“TORNADO!”
Similarly, this sends all parties into a similar panic and they head for similar hills. Gorby then fucks off sharply (through the kitchen saloon door).
Feeling not a little foolish, the firing squad returns to their original positions. One target left, they raise rifles and train their iron sights on The Right Honourable Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
Realizing the ease with which the previous politicians dodged their coffins, ol’ P.E.T. gives a wry grin and thinks he’ll pull the same trick and escape unscathed. “Just watch me.”
READY…
The captain raises his wicked blade…
AIM…
Being a veteran political animal, Mr. Trudeau understands that EARTHQUAKES and TORNADO are unlikely to elicit the same cowardly response from his executioners as before, so Pierre chooses a different type of disaster…
And the prestige:
FIRE, he exclaims.
Cue the sharp report of rifle fire and all watch as Trudeau crumbles
AND SCENE
Seems simple enough, right?
Whether I was chosen or volunteered be Ronald Reagan, I do not recall. Nevertheless, I’d be first up on the proverbial chopping block and first outta there. This should present NO conceivable problem. My BRAIN goes through the steps we’d rehearsed maybe twice on the porch of Pawnee’s cabin.
Be Ronald Reagan
Yell Earthquake
Run through Saloon Door
You’re done
Wait for Gorbachev to do the same
Wait for Trudeau’s cosmic blunder
Head out the kitchen saloon door to warm accolades and garlands of roses for your performance
Two cabins were up before us, giving me ample time to gird my loins.
One up. One down, we were on deck. Remember Chris;
Ronald Reagan.
Earthquake.
Run through Saloon Door.
You’re done.
My mind raced. How soon would the crowd fall in love with me? How wide would my basso profundo carry o’er the wind and wild talk of hundreds of kids? Certainly they’d weep as this skinny black boy and his awkward afro embody the affable, addled countenance of a wrinkly and worm-brained Ronald Reagan? Last cabin before us and my debut was fast approaching. I surveyed the area we’d be standing on and took a sidelong glance at the saloon door to the kitchen, where I’d soon abscond.
When I write SALOON door, you might have an image of those bat-wing waist high double doors that cowboys get tossed out of in westerns. In this case, the saloon door is a large but strangely light steel surfaced door separating the back of house (kitchen) from front of house (serving floor, bar, etc). This door is mounted on a double hinge that enables it to swing both ways, allowing serving staff to move in between the disparate realms of front and back of house, free from the impediment of reaching for a handle and pulling or pushing. Commonly there is a rubber strip or neoprene bumper on the long jamb edge from top to bottom that, while at rest keeps you, the diner, from hearing the colourful banter and egregious expletives that can be the common tongue of kitchen staff. In most cases you’ll find a circular window maybe eight or ten inches in diameter around eyeball height like the porthole on a boat. This allows parties on either side of it to see and anticipate what is charging through the respective areas avoiding the mess of collisions with hot plates or tempers. This portal can go a long way towards unifying both front and back of house teams in a common goal. There is a tacit understanding that this borderline must be shared and worked with, it’s movement and timing enabling all parties engaged to move between both crucial spaces with the alacrity that the smooth running of a restaurant, bar or mess hall requires.
NEXT UP, PAWNEE
Cheers erupt as our cabin assembles. Our motley crew was ready to use it or lose it.
Six boys stand shoulder to shoulder facing the three seemingly doomed politicians. My BRAIN does its thing.
BRAIN: Here we go Christian, you’re first up.
CAPTAIN: DOOM, GLOOM, ET AL.
BRAIN: Are you ready, Chris, you lonely little tool?
CAPTAIN: READY!
BRAIN: Be ready Chris
CAPTAIN: AIM
BRAIN: They’re taking aim, Chris
BRAIN: Think of an emergency Chris
BRAIN: Think of a disaster Chris
CAPTAIN: [RAISES IMAGINARY SWORD]
BRAIN: Don’t panic, Chris. Just think of absolutely ANY instance that has the potential for wanton, indiscriminate destruction
BRAIN: I CAN’T
BRAIN: OKAY THEN YOU SHOULD FOR SURE PANIC
I brought my bottom lip up to meet the top row of my teeth. My lips curled back and out it came…
“FIRE”
I knew in an instant I’d fucked up, and in the parlance of my parents, “Right Royally!”, too. I scrunched my face up to the gathering storm as flop sweat gathered on my eyelids.
But lo, what absence of sound is this? No peals of laughter? No pointing fingers? No jeering faces? Just stony silence and confused looks from the firing squad as they perceptibly slump. Maybe I pulled it off–Oh. Wait. The crowd doesn’t KNOW I fucked up. The LAST guy is the FIRE guy. I’m the FIIRST guy. The EARTHQUAKE guy. My head swims and I knew it was time to head for the saloon door. Seven or eight steps to get to the kitchen. Had to escape before the truth was realized. BAM, saloon door swings open and I crumple on the floor. I was still hoping that it would be ok, but I knew what I’d done. “You fucking ruined everything…” I muttered to myself, “you fucking idiot.”
Laying down on the floor, I wished each surface in that kitchen a silvery tombstone around me and that I was long dead. A thought hit me and said, “I can fix this”. So I set about doing so.
All I’d need to do is WISH. Just wish and wish with all of my young and sparkling soul that I could inhale deep and long enough to swallow all of my brown skin, tearing it wide away from the seam down my spine and ingest it. I’d then be unrecognizable to my cabin mates when they stormed the room. I’d only exist as a heaving mass of shameful muscle and sinew undulating on the kitchen floor. My sickening form would then collapse in on itself further allowing my tiny soul to follow the path of least resistance, out through my own ass hole, my essence personified into its purest and loneliest shape, that of a worm. My sparkle fading, I’d then wish myself along the dark trough between the red/brown floor tiles sloping and slick, and make for nearest filthy drain. Slipping through its grill, I’d hang down for a moment until gravity takes me. I’ll fall towards a rugged bend in a lower pipe where I’ll hear a cacophony of cheers. Could it be the crowd of kids I’ve left so far behind? No. It will be a writhing kingdom of grimy, ancient bacteria waiting and welcoming me into their fold. My soul-worm will somehow sneer as I fall past them and reflect upon a Groucho Marx line that I haven’t even heard yet about refusing to respect any club or organization that would have me as a member. I’ll wish myself on past them into a long refuse pipe sloping downward. I’ll then find a crack in the plastic and wish myself through the spaces in the concrete beneath. I’ll wish myself in and through another fissure and still further down. Passing at last through a layers of clay, shale and Jurassic bone from eons past, I’ll break from all earthly materials into free fall. I have an idea what’s coming so I’ll curl up like when you’re older brother tries to drag or move you somewhere and you somehow will yourself heavier. I’ll tumble for what will seem like days until I feel the warming glowing warming glow of magma surrounding the earth’s core. Almost home, I’ll think, then stretch out like a skydiver and rocket downward. My wishes will all come true and I’ll open my dumb stupid soul-worm mouth and the white-hot heat of a welcome Oblivion will burn me into ash from inside out.
But y’know, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride.
Highway horses laugh but of course When they don't know where the hell they are
The crowd had by now caught on to my blunder and the crashing thunder of laughter that should have been reserved for the skit’s end had come just a little early. I heard it in patches as the saloon door swung inward then outward. Raucous laughter fading into silence as the door swung towards its jamb only to be presented again as it reached its zenith, swinging back to its rubber flange dimming the roar if only for a moment. Again the roar. Understanding now that the sweet release of death was not in the mail, I jammed my foot against the door to stop its swing and dim the howls. Good thing I did too, ‘cause just then Corey, he of the aforementioned fistfight, threw a shoulder into it. I held fast. Nobody was getting in here because I’m not dead yet. I looked up from my place on the floor to the circular window above. There I saw Corey, eyes lolling like a dolls eyes in an effort to clap on to the source of his anger, ME. His breath fogged the glass and I heard his muted shout over the din of the crowd: YOU FUCKING RUINED EVERYTHING YOU FUCKING IDIOT!
Sweet magma. Why hast thou forsaken me?
I don’t clearly remember what had happened as I came out of that kitchen. My heart tells me that these boys and girls all as equally prone to blunder as I, roared with applause. I choose to remember it that way and I don’t think I’m wrong. It was OK. It wasn’t the end of the world. The other cabins all went up and did their thing. We laughed and for a time, I suffered the slings and arrows of my cabin mates. It only really amounted to good natured ribbing and laughter.
The dance began and I sat stone-faced, the electricity of failure still crackling about me. Stacy leaned back on that chair and smiled. It was not the heat of Oblivion I was feeling. Not sure who asked who to dance (probably her) and we had the first kiss I’d ever wanted. I’ll never forget it.
In writing this, I’ve answered many of my own questions. The answers to questions we have about ourselves only present themselves when we choose to shine a light that burns away the shadow of the days, memories or moments we choose to secret away.The trauma and pain many of us have experienced can rot inside of us if they’re not brought into the light. I used to take old, cold memories and pack em tight like a prairie ice-ball. I’d then confidently rip sidearms into targets that had neither understanding nor blame for my pain. As we age and our circle of friends and family grow smaller, the only ones in range now are the ones we love . How wildly unfair has it been for me to visit my pain on those who care the most about me… Or anyone at all?
I could not have shared this without someone I love suggesting that I talk to an objective professional. Our talks are not just pain. I share my successes and wonders and joy too. Talking to someone might not “fix” you, but it took sitting and talking to J_______ to realize I’m not REALLY broken. I’m just learning to manage my heart, mind and the misgivings of a boy who still lives in my chest and comes is with me wherever I go. I’m finally able to hold that kid’s hand and let him know it’s OK. Both of us exist and at this point and our goal is to move through the world together with love and, on my best days, empty of ill intent.
*Apologies to Robert Heinlein for stealing the title. I stole it from a pocketbook I keep tucked up under my fifty-mission cap.
What a stellar performance by the Jays this season! All of us armchair shortstops were watching letting ‘em know just how to operate out there. So many of us are, in our hearts, still yearning to be out there to pull some clutch shit like they did off all season (until the end). I know baseball teams play eleventy-thousand games a season, but I remarked to a friend of mine as we watched their run that I’d like to play baseball professionally. Not for for the money but for the downtime. Bullshitting in the dugout. Spitting sunflower seeds or tobacco, ripping on teammates and giving hot-foots. What a riot. You see, I have a Masters in goofing off and I really do feel that professional baseball would be right in my wheelhouse, if only I had PUSHED myself. Geez if I only this or if I only that. My Rotten Kid is on a ball team right now. The laughter and camraderie emanating from the dugout is what I live to hear at her games. There aren’t many moments when I engage in the sport other than as a father/observer. I don’t rage at the coach or spit venom at umpires. I might be at a Thursday night practice and I’ll offer to toss the pill around if the attendance numbers aren’t even. If its a batting practice, I’ll sit on an upturned 5 gallon Home Depot bucket and let the pitchers do their best to nail me in the throat.
I have “ball sense”. On field, I know where the ball is going the moment its released, be it by hand or foot. For 12 on 13 years of my young life I played soccer. I began at about 8 through high school until my senior year. I was a mid-fielder which, as anyone involved will tell you, means doing most of the hustling. SOCCER. There were times on a rainy Saturday morning moving up and down the field with anticipation and precious little game interaction, soaked bone wet, I’d ask my fellow mid fielder, “Don’t you just wanna go home? Like, why are we doing this?” It isn’t that I hated soccer. It was that at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning was fucking Prime Looney-Tunes time. At around 7 or 8 you’d get some periphery cartoons like “Thundaar” or “The Super-Friends”, but Looney Tunes BEGAN at 9AM, right when I’m out here doing stupid stretches under the expert and furiously English tutelage of Coach Otis. Meanwhile at home, Bugs Bunny was dodging shotgun blasts in a grass skirt strumming a ukulele. What am I doing here? What a maroon. I felt it all a colossal waste of time but there were boys who felt otherwise for sure. I remember a Spanish or South American kid we played against. Marco. I mean this kid was magic with the ball. He and another red headed kid combined for double digit goals against my Rangers on more than one occasion. Marco would pass out to the wing, sprint up the centre towards the goal yelling commands at his ginger counterpart. To this day, when we need to jaywalk or move with alacrity across some parking lot or a busy street, I’ll bark like Marco did at his guy to My Rotten Kid: “Crosse la!” CROSS IT. These boys, part of the Celtics’ crew, were budding champions. I once outmaneuvered one of their players, Kevin Holness, (later an International soccer player of some note) on his home pitch one morning. Its not a brag, I’m just letting you know that that was the high-watermark of my soccer prowess. I have mentioned “ball sense” but I only felt that (and still feel it) because my father, stalwart on the sidelines, mentioned it to Coach Otis one day while I sat benched… Despite my father’s insistence, I knew one thing for certain; I was in no way prepared, excited or interested in being a professional soccer player in any future past the half-time of this particular game. I wasn’t the only one who noticed. From my efforts, Coach Otis could see that my mind was far from what was happening on the pitch. I had Asteroids in my eyes. Otis was from England where they took soccer/football far more serious than we ever would or will on the barren Canadian prairies. Do you remember The Muppet Show? He wasn’t a commonly occurring character, but picture, if you will, Sam Eagle.
That’s what Coach Otis looked like but with wilder, grey eyebrows and deep set eyes that lolling above bags that only a thousand Sunday League pints can elicit. Anyway, he could spot a champion with a competitor’s heart and eye for the beautiful game. He could also spot the dearth of that. He maybe felt that I might write the next ‘Odyssey’. Maybe I’ll solve homelessness or world hunger and in so doing, achieve World Peace. MAYBE. Not his concern. The only thing Otis gave a single shit about was winning games. I might one day rise, arms outstretched above the great and worrisome throngs of the poor and feed them all with a wave of the hand. But right now as a midfielder, this kid ain’t gonna win us any blllloooody games. He looked it as apathy, but what my performance should have shouted was that in the world of 1986, there was such a thing called VIDEO GAMES, and it was no secret to anyone that I’d rather be playing one right now. In fact, only hours ago my father had had to drag me from in front of the basement television that just weeks earlier had been hooked up to an ATARI. Moments later, that same ATARI console had accepted something called a ‘cartridge’. That cartridge housed various circuits and electronic connections that would allow this boy to play, AT HOME, the arcade game ASTEROIDS. Shit, I had been up since 6 AM playing it. Now, the HI-SCORE on Asteroids could only ever reach 100,000. That was all that the screen digits and computing power would allow. Surpassing that, the 6 digits would ‘flip’ back to zero. I’d been playing for 90 minutes and had flipped the score not once, but twice. There was no stopping me. I was in The Zone before they even had a name for it and, if I didn’t have to leave with Dad at 8, I might still be playing today. It was a heartbreak to leave the gaming console and I was thinking about how far I might have been right around halftime in the rain.
This brings me back to baseball or clutch shit. The money spread around in the world of professional sports is more than you and I will ever experience. Sure, ball players get to goof off and chew gum between at-bats. When the moment, and there MIGHT be a moment when all of the 90 minute early morning or late afternoon drives to a little league game, the 4:30 ice time and the hundreds of miles driven to tournaments… The wild tears from the wins and the hot ones from the losses… The skinned knees, black eyes and blown knees under ripped pants. The bus rides in the minors in and through shitty little towns and the equally shitty little sandwiches on the bus from some random diner… It all comes together when a bat is swung, a shot is slapped or a punch is thrown and the sharp report of it echoes throughout the stadium, living room or from a bar TV like a gunshot. That is when all of us fans, gamblers, bettors and bandwagoneers collectively hold our breath. That’s what these boys and girls are paid for. Not for the hit itself, but for their ability to give us all the hope that they can under the immense pressure that a contract, conditions or a country can put on any one team or individual.
I watched my lovely and wonderful child stand, click the dirt off’n her cleats and awkwardly slip from the base, for all the world like fawn in the trees. Just then her head swung to the pitcher and immediately after, home plate as she prepared for the play. CRACK as the ball was hit, pitcher snagged it out of the air and swivelled to rip it to Talia on third. In less than a heartbeat she became a predator. Double-play on the final play of her final game of the season. She was ready for it and I have to tell you, she got that awareness from her coach and a hundred practices and some celestial understanding that tells her ‘you know what to do’. It wasn’t hereditary ball-sense. It was just from playing the game. I’d love to think that my erstwhile birth father was some stellar athlete and that the brief flashes of prowess I show prove it. Her Mom’s no slouch either but I can’t take anything away from the work she’s done.
An inning or so earlier one of her teammates fouled a ball up over the backstop. You know the high angled part designed to stop errant balls just like this one? Well, it arced over it and fell towards the stands heading directly for a small boy. He sat hunched and oblivious, not quite far enough under his parents dual umbrellae. His tiny hands were claw-locked around a mini gaming console. I’d snuck a peek earlier to see what he was up to on it. Digital rhomboid characters moved about with definitive purpose around the small screen at the behest of his thumbs. Also, a spinning softball was now inbound ready to dash his young brains all over a cold, wet set of aluminum bleachers. I moved quickly, the ball-sense my father had verbally imbued upon me at 11 years old working overtime. I did not catch it (IT WAS WET. THE BALL WAS WET, DAD). I did however deflect it, mere inches from his soft, tiny skull. Play went on and his parents thanked me. He looked up a few seconds later, oblivious to the doom that had come so near. He smiled and I smiled back. I was all like… “Hey what game are you playing?”
I was at the dentist today. You know how they kind of hold your cheeks or turn your head so they can get at your molars and scrape away at the decades of Halloween candy lodged in there? Anyway this lady was being bossy with my face and I started laughing. Not “HA HA” laughing but just shudder laughing like when little short breaths come out. The dentist smiled beneath her mask and asked, ‘What’s funny?’. I didn’t say anything, I just shook my head and squinted with her hands in my mouth, hopefully she knew it wasn’t from any pain. If I knew her better, I’d have told her that, when my Mom used to cut my hair, she’d move my head around in the same sort of way. I’d turn my head the opposite way like the pain in the ass I am, then make a weird face in the mirror. Momma would then give me a good solid SMACK on the side of my head or cheek and say ‘Hold still!’ ‘Stop SCREWING around!’ She didn’t know how to cut an afro FFS. She did it anyway. Just the idea or thought of my dentist giving me a cuff in the ear made me laugh and miss my Momma. Miss all them good times we done had.
Chad Davison completely ruined any efforts I had of being a lonely new kid at the the school I suddenly found myself in in grade three. Let me explain.
I’ve written in this space before about Magic. Not the Houdini-Copperfield type, no. Not the pick-a-card-now-here’s-your-watch close magic either. A few months ago, feeling bereft, I snarled into the phone to someone that I know quite well that ‘…the only Magic is music…’. The truth is, the castles of cards I’ve built in my mind can easily tumble when set upon by a stiff breeze or the hot breath of words uttered in anger. What a foolish boy I can still be even in my advancing years. There is Magic, and its found in the moments and even the separation and distance between those times that we share with one another.
Chad wasn’t at my wedding. I wasn’t at his. I wasn’t a co-worker at his first job after high school and he wasn’t around when the fates I let take me insisted that I become a door-to-door salesman. Or a telemarketer. Or a whatever. We weren’t around for each other’s first girlfriends or the relationships that broke our ankles, then hearts. We never got to tell one another about any of those formative moments. Times and experience that that pound incessant waves at the rocky shore of a boy’s heart with a frequency and indifference that forge an adult.
What I’m trying to get at here is that there are weeks and months and moments he shared with people I don’t and may never know. I understand that all of his peeps are suffering from his absence and in writing this, I won’t pretend for an instant that I knew him to the depths that they do. In no way will I try to rent or rend any memory of him they have. What I need all of them to know is that your Son, buddy, boss, brother or husband, your father, was the first real friend I ever had.
We all have those mashups when our Moms drag us to a another Mom’s place and our heads get knocked together like a couple o’ coconuts. We’d just have to get along while they drank “coffee” on a weekday afternoon. It’s great and its lovely and there are wonderful relationships that many of those situations will beget. These are circumstance. What I’m writing about is happenstance. The weird and ebullient Magic that allows two kids’ paths to cross in the hallways or upon the crests of the rolling hills of their ‘hood and they have a silent agreement. It’s organic. It can be forgiven that the purity of these moments are lost on a kid or a pre-teen’s smooth and barely formed brain because maybe it is Magic and we’re not supposed to get or appreciate it just then. As we age and stumble headlong into life and/or have children of our own, we can at last understand the sanctity of those encounters. A tacit understanding made with just a glance, nudge or shared laughter after hearing a fart or a schoolyard jibe or “cheddar” (If You Know, You Know) let loose. It is a pact absent any insistence of favour. No cult, crew or kaffee klatch has any sway or say about it. An unspoken gesture that is sealed with look of understanding that says;
“We’re gonna be friends”.
That’s what happened with Chad and I.
Cue the montage of Chad and I ripping around our neighbourhood on BMX. Football scrimmages every recess and lunch hour and an almost superhuman and intuitive on-field connection between QB and WR (interchangeable). C.A.L.E. Communications satellite dishes sought purchase of airborne frequencies in our periphery (IYKYK). Rides and Rider’s games with he and Dallas. Once, spellbound by the mesmerizing spiral of a hot orange coil, I ruined my thumbprint on the lighter in his parent’s van in the parking lot of some ballgame. Watchin’ TV. Climbing stuff. Hanging out in front of Happy Shopper or the Green Thumb Grocery (I only have enough for a handful of MOJOs). Summer twilights just bullshitting about how wide and vast we were sure our tiny worlds were… and a few memorable moments spent at his family’s place by the beach. Dude.
Chad’s parents invited me out for a weekend at their cottage. We were barely or maybe just teenagers. I still think about it at least once a week which means I think about Chad and all the adventures we done had. Memories that sit snug in the back pocket of whatever jeans my brain wears on any given day. These come about so often there is really no time that they are not with me. Are they just memories if they are ever present and an indelible part of me? Times that still, decades later, inform the path I choose?
1984 I think. Plus/Minus. Chad and I made our weekend home in his parent’s camper-trailer about 30 feet and down some wooden stairs from the door of their cottage. This camper was maybe 10x 12 with a louvered window on the rear and a few small ones on either side. Didn’t matter. You couldn’t see a god damned thing looking out just ‘cause of whatever illumination emanated from within VS the dark of the world without. There was a small cot lengthwise on one side at one end and a wider bed at the other end laterally. We laughed and joked in our little Honeycomb Hideout. We were just free kids dicking around and cutting up. Casey Kasem’s American Top Forty seethed out of a transistor radio rom a shelf on the corner of the camper, and he was “countin’ ‘em down”. I’d hear it a day later from some car on the beach, but in the camper that night this song came on. I’d love to say that it was even in the top 5 that week but I don’t know or remember. Hang on a sec.
Yeah.
No.
Nope, yeah the Infallible Internet tells me that on that particular year/month it was #24. All I know is that when The Cars’ Magic came on, we were both immediately entranced by the wind-up intro of the post-new wave pop-syth/harmonics of this weirdly wonderful tune. Billboard be damned. It was Number One that night in the camper.
I was fifteen in the mental wrestling wring of adolescence. Through the speakers it came… It opens with the sound of, like, a UFO beaming some cow up in a tractor beam and then a guitar riff comes in that’s already got me pinned. Then this synthesizer comes in from the top rope and its notes only hint about what we are about to hear. They’re gone for a bit but then Ric Ocasek is like, he’s all like,
Summer, It turns me upside down…
Summer Summer Summer…
It’s like a merry-go-round…
I tap out because I’m now 30 seconds in and I know I’ll love this song for the rest of my days.
I’m typing away and have the headphones turned up past eleven to LOBOTOMY when the keyboards go TING TING TING TING TING TING TING with the same cadence of the sprinklers Chad and I used to run through in the park and every key and every note is showering my limbic brain with so much joy it brings me to tears. In the middle and then the end, pal, I’ve listened to it a zillion times but I’m never ready for Benjamin Orr coming in out of nowhere and exhaling GOT A HOLD ON YOUUUUUUUUUuuuuu. It all combines into something that is still so much for a boy of 52.
Play that song when I’m around and I’ll close my eyes and breathe in through my nose. Same thing when I hear it on the radio sitting in bullshit traffic or in some bullshit bar on a Wednesday afternoon. At home alone about 5 beers in like I am right now. I could be working the third shift in a fish rendering plant and if Magic came on the breath I’d draw would smell only of salty french-fries and suntan oil.
Such freedom, such a low level of supervision than either of us had been used to at home or in the city. Wearing nothing but swimming trunks and velcro/zipper pocket with maybe two or three Canadian fives (soon to be converted into quarters and obliterated in the beach arcade). Music blasting from Camarii and what seemed like a thousand girls only a year or two older than us in bikinis. There were a thousand girls! If my math was correct, which it rarely is, that meant two-thousand boobs. It would still be a number of years before I touched a pair, but Lordt, the boobs. The whole three day stint at the beach/cabin was a fever dream of sounds and smells, a rolling calliope for two boys blissfully ill-informed of the perils of the planet proper outside of our space and we were all the wilder and happy for it.
WAIT. STOP. Go back. Okay so we’re in the camper and up waaaay too late (a predilection I have yet to shake), and Casey Kasem is letting us know what is climbing the charts to number whatever when we hear someone outside circling the camper, making footsteps in the surrounding gravel.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
We freeze. I mean we fucking freeze into statues. We look at each other with eyes wide as saucers. I close my eyes and tap into a million crime shows that I won’t see for thirty years and think: White male 25-40. Six foot four, maybe five. He’s got a hitch in his step which could be the result of a accident from his teen years that healed improperly. That, or his gait is compensating for the wooden-handled ax he carries in his left hand. He favours the other leg to a degree because it’s off set by an eight-inch hunting knife kept loosely in his boot and/or a belt with a leather strap from which hangs a small hatchet on his right hip. Likely both. Kinetics aside, whatever criminal insanity that is rotting his brain has given him a thirst that only violent and bloody murder will satisfy.
“Shut the radio off…” says Chad.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
They stop.
Dude He heard us. He heard us hear him.
Collective sphincter clenchage ensues.
Then nothing.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
Four minutes pass.
Ok he’s gone.
CRUNCH. Oh fuck.
Silence. Three minutes.
OK he’s gone.
CRUNCH. JESUSFUCKINGCHRIST.
In our minds, the only reason this maniac hasn’t torn the locked door (with a pin-lock that wouldn’t stop a charging hamster) off of its hinges, is that he can’t decide which of his weapons he’d like to carve us up with just yet.
“SHH!”
Nothing.
OK he’s gone.
CRUNCH.
We’re going to die tonight.
The killcrazy maniac continued to circle.
The sum total of every time we’d blinked was the only shut-eye we got that evening and, blissfully, the sun eventually rose. Strangely, the drooling psycho had been circling the camper ALL FUCKING NIGHT AND WAS STILL OUT THERE. There were birds singing for Christ’s sake. Let it GO. I don’t know how we ranked among the rest of his victims, but I had to believe the blood and bones of two virgin boys kept him up and interested until well past dawn.
Sunlight bathed the yard in front of the cabin. It was time to make a break up to the stairs to Chad’s parent’s place to safety. But who was gonna go first? Better to ask who is gonna be snatched by the devil-worshipper lying in wait just outside the camper door, dead set on cleaving us in two so we’d be his army slaves in the afterlife. I mean this guy was obviously a sick, sick fuck.
The camper door slammed open like a gunshot and both of us bolted for the stairs as fast as our boy legs could take us. Its like that old joke about bears, “I don’t have to outrun Jason Vorhees, I just have to outrun YOU.” Maybe two steps on the ground before we three-stairs-at-a-time hot-footed it up into the cottage, blasted through the screen door then searched and scrambled for whatever blanket or couch we could hide under. His parents, Larry and Barb, likely had quizzical looks at one another over plates of eggs like ‘what the fuck are these morons on about?’ We explained from dry throats that, from dusk ’til dawn, we’d been stalked! Coulda been Jason. Coulda been Pumpkinhead. Maybe that non-binary person from Sleepaway Camp. Nobody really knew. They calmly counselled us through chuckles that it was likely just local kids creeping about. Fifteen minutes later we mustered the courage to head out to the relative safety of the porch and looked upon the would-be crime scene from above. Summer sun shone upon an almost idyllic scene. There was nobody and nothing. Just the camper-trailer comfortably ensconced in a copse of trees, one of which leaned lazily offering a lone, leafy branch that the wind brushed up and down incessantly against the open vent on top of the camper…
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
CRUNCH.
Like it had all the time in the world.
I wish now we could laugh again about what boys we were that night. Best I can remember we wended through the years in elementary school and then off to different high schools and all the weird, new experience that a boy’s life entails at that age.
Blink, and an eon passes.
Thirty years later I get a Facebook message. Its Chad and he says he’ll be out to the coast with his family for his daughter’s volleyball tournament and, would I like to meet up?
Boy, would I?!? A week or so later here I am walking up to some restaurant tacked on to a shopping mall near the edge of a coastal town maybe 30 minutes from where I live. I see two dudes roughly his age and height speaking to the hostess. It’s really busy so a second hostess darts around them to assist me but I see Chad’s frame and and I know it can be nobody else. I tilt my head and nod towards these two rogues and tell her, “I’m with them…” Meaning Chad and who I now know as Paul. Both hostess look at them and then shift their elven eyes in unison, to me. Chad follows their gaze and after a million years or a moment, Chad Davidson and Chris Vermeulen look upon one another once again. All of the dust of days between us gone. Not sure what he saw, but for me? Those same deep-set, laughing eyes above rosy apple cheeks, and an open and honest smile a mile wide.
Chad F**king Davison.
Same pattern on the table. Same clock on the wall.
We say in unison after entirely too long, “HEY!” We do the awkward ARE WE SHAKING HANDS OR HUGGING and work that shit out. We have a seat at the bar.
What a time. The seed of our initial friendship was wandering around and about our conversation the whole time. We shared loves and losses. Feats of derring-do and spoke of maybe mistakes we maybe made. We left in an hour or so and said goodbye at the front of the restaurant. He called me over to meet his family and in that moment, I tried to be cool and whatever. To be whatever it is I think people think of me. This thing I try to show you all while I harbour a secret hope you don’t see the static at the seams. I felt an immediate but brief jealousy of Paul and their relationship. Then a sort of mild, momentary mourning that we hadn’t had a chance to share our lives experiences until now.
There was a suggestion, but Chad never shared his diagnosis or health issues during our conversation. That’s OK. Its OK because that stuff wasn’t FOR me. It was for all of you that knew and experienced this wonderful, magical guy. I’m sorry and sad because I know this guy was a champ. I knew it in grade three.
I say goodbye to Paul, then Chad and his family. While he gathered his team, I fumbled for my keys as I wandered across the parking lot. I sat in my truck for a moment wishing or thinking I could say more, because there was more I had to say. If I’d known it would have been the last time I’d see him, I’d tell him, “So long, first friend. You’re Magic.” And he’d know what I meant. Off we all went on our separate ways.
Just west of us waves crashed incessantly against a rocky shore.
There was this one time when I stayed in Saskatchewan for Grade 12 while Mom & Dad moved out to BC. It did allow some freedoms that many or most of my friends didn’t have. One of them was eating in my room downstairs. I won’t lie, I was somewhat reticent in returning dish ware to the kitchen on a regular basis. Anyway all my room furniture was shipped out to BC immediately after grad. Upon opening the bottom drawer of my dresser and finding not just a living, breathing, but a THRIVING ecosystem of various creatures that had made the journey in their new home around my leftovers, Carol Ferro was… Well the nice way to say it is she was apoplectic.
Moments ago went looking for some colourful markers in The Kid Talia’s room to brighten up the wrapping on her Grade 7 grad present. I found them in the bottom drawer, AMONG. OTHER. THINGS. With a shaky hand I completed my task. I won’t like it, but now I gotta go up there and handle it.
I miss my Momma terribly in many ways and for many reasons, but at this particular moment, I wish she was around to unleash a full-throated cackle after I explain to her how uncomfortably close to the tree the apple fell.
I was talking to my Father the other day about the semi-charmed life I’ve led. No concrete complaints thus far. HOWEVER… I can be at The Rotten Kid’s softball game or in some sales meeting (When is the last time anyone made a god damned dime off of a Sales Meeting?). I might be in line at the bank or sitting in traffic, stewing in my own hateful juices, when my brain bends back to a glorious time or a lovely moment. Sometimes I’d WAY rather it was Sunday night around 7:45 at Malone’s, right when the volume gets turned up and I’m with Dale and Jeffy, sucking back far more than our fair share of Coronas. Each clear bottle of golden nectar doled out by the one and only Chris Matlock (can this bill be right? There’s no WAY we drank that many). All involved absent of ill will or any conceivable consequence. Its just nostalgia and I’m lucky to have the memories I do.
If I was what Sheldon wanted me to be, or even what he thought I could be… This is what I’d do; I’d come in high above whatever western water. I’d close my eyes and I’d roll over on my back at twenty or twenty-five thousand feet. I’d perform an angular dive towards the bright lights of Burnaby. I’d deal with the Gs, jink left and in a heartbeat I’d pull prone to come in straight and true maybe sixty feet above those big homes near the lake. Thirty feet now and I’d wail over McMansions inland. “Howl Tony, like a TIE fighter” he’d whisper. And I would. Past the old Telus building at Boundary, setting off every car alarm up Kingsway. “Scream East”, he’d urge. Taking into account my speed, he’d (and he’d be specific here) want me to bust the sound barrier only AFTER the intersection at Joyce. This would shatter glass in all of any of the fish joints and the laundromats or the stores and the bars or and especially the dump we used to live in. He’d laugh that maniacal laff of his, and he wouldn’t have to tell me to pull up and roll away. We’d both be a million miles gone before the fuckin’ cops showed up.
Its so fucking difficult to explain to The Kid Talia that these people around in her life, both those that she cares about and the ones that vex her young days and nights, they will not be around forever. While whimsical of late, I’m not talking about DEATH, more the shifting plates of friends, friendship and god help me sweet Jesus, lovers. I met a girl once, lived across the bridge from me in Trail. We were lovers for I think, like, 3 months. Couldn’t pick her out of a lineup today and I doubt she could me. Same deal, I hung out with one dude in the mid 2000s for like, 8 weeks. Hung out at bars, went shopping and the movies together. Narrowly avoided a DUI pulling a U turn in his Taurus on Columbia. “Undue care and attention” (wink). Good guy. Funny guy. Could not tell you his name or what he looks like. If he walked into my office on Monday it would be a brand new relationship. They come and they go and that time can be wildly enjoyable or fraught with peril, but mostly they’ll land somewhere in between.
I’ve met a ton of Talia’s friends because we’re at the TaxiDad stage. I’m not entirely blameless. Recently, my wife told me about a particularly harrowing drunk driving death that affected the entire community up north. It was at that point that I told Talia that no matter what… Anytime, any place, I will come get you. What I MEANT was when she was drinking age. She’s only twelve, but hey, I swore an oath so now its mall trips, sleep overs and PICK ME UP AT 6. NO. 7. NO 8 NOW DAD. NO WAIT… I’m sleeping over for FUCKS SAKE CHILD. Anyway, buddies come and go and who the fuck is this now in the backseat? DAAAad its DeNISE. You’ve MET HER.
Shrug.
I love her friend ____________ though. When they get together, they are complete idiots. Reminds me a lot of Dale and I. Whatever subterranean adolescent girly-girl patois they engage in, it sends them both into paroxysms of teary-eyed laughter, and its a wonder to hear. I’ve given up trying to understand it. Not because I think the humour is beneath me, but because it’s not FOR me. This damnable diction is foreign by default and for good reason. Whatever teenage country these morons live in, my passport from Loserton will in no way grant me passage, so I just wait by the gate ‘till she needs a ride.
I’ll tell you about a country I DO get into tho. One that welcomes me with open arms like some conquering hero back from miles of long. Every five or six years, the men you see pictured manage to end up in the same pub or living room and, for me, it is a fucking riot and a joy rarely experienced.
After graduation in Regina, I rocketed out to Trail/Rossland in BC’s southern interior. Not long after, I was off to Whitehorse, but In that almost 2 year span, these guys became such good pals that they’ll forever be mates. We skated, snowboarded, drank booze and partied and just generally goofed off, and not necessarily in that order. The stories we told tonight were as though I’d spent ten years among them, beers in hand, toes cooling in lake waters under Kootenay skies. First and foremost, they’re all great Dads. Anyway, these guys have, all of them have such razor-sharp wit and stellar comedic timing. Each has the innate ability to blow the dust off of some rare and ancient reference, and drop it into the middle of another’s tale of drunken derring-do circa 1993. Its all I can do to keep up and catch a breath between the laughs. Alone each man is almost TOO funny and with the three of them at a table… Listen, in this… nobody steps on anyone’s story. There are beats and pauses enough where someone can pop in with a last name or clarification but its only ever a redoubt that enhances the tale.
So that’s it for another few years. Now I’m just supposed to go to work on Monday and allow the conversations about Purchase Orders and Closing The Loop and How are the First Few Bites Tasting make me feel like I’m wandering through my days hip deep in setting concrete.
So The Kid Talia might not know it when it is happening or why, and that these friendships we make can be fleeting or forever. I know its confusing for a young mind, ‘cause I had one once. I don’t tell her outright, but I do encourage certain relationships that I see promise in and roll my eyes at those I don’t. Be yourself. Be yourself kid, and wrap your arms around ’em anyway. The stuff that falls out is just stuff you can’t, shouldn’t or don’t wanna carry. They’re for someone else and thats OK. The ones that remain are close to your heart. Like these wildly enjoyable clods are to me.
Your cat might do this. Or your dog. Might be your ferret or monkey. In a weird way, it might be your husband or wife. Your kid does it. Kids have these smooth brains that aren’t cluttered with 40 years of Top 40, nattering nonsense or the News of the Day… When I pack a bag to go someplace, Our cat Frankie likes to sit inside of it as I dump my gonch and toiletries into it. I try to placate him with treats and snuggles. He’s got this sense about him. He knows I’m going somewhere and look, I don’t know how the minds of cats or animals work but I know that when I pack my bag, bring it downstairs, and the garage door opens he’s a little frantic. I try to assure him verbally that I won’t be gone long, but he’s only two, so his English Comprehension is questionable. There might be a long time until that garage door opens again. When it does, it’s totally Pavlovian. He knows I’m back, shakes off his 18 hour slumber and he’s at the top of the motherfucking stairs yowling like a raccoon. Boy do I get lovin’ then. It might be three, maybe seven, maybe ten days, but my return is heralded with meows and kisses and a joy for both of us that we do our best, in our own shells, to express. What I feel like sometimes is when he hears that garage door open when I’m leaving, even if it’s just down to the corner store on my skateboard to get a soda pop, does he wonder whether that that garage door is ever going to open again… Or does he think once it closes that he may never again hear that sound? Does he think I’m Gone Forever?
My Rotten Kid and I have this thing that we do… When I drop a quarter or lose the cap of of the toothpaste… The lid off of some spices or condiment in the kitchen and it dances across the floor into some recess betwixt appliances. “GONE FOREVER!” We’ll shout. Some errant chit from an event or an earbud falls into the yawning cavernous depths between the passenger seat and the console “GONE FOREVER!” A knife slides off of a plate on the way to the dishwasher hits the floor, spattering filth, still CLEARLY VISIBLE, gleaming and mustardy on the hardwood. We’ll still mutter in unison, GONE FOREVER.
Even as it falls.
I’ve written about this trip in this space before, but if you’re at my house, you can plug Trail BC, where Momma lived, into your preferred map app and it’ll tell you 7 hrs 1m. This trip is hardwired in my brain, as it is in my younger brother Cameron’s. There is an eidetic map we both follow along the HWY3 Crowsnest pass that allows us to leave at the optimum time and make it there in 6:30. I’d gamble we can both do parts of it with our eyes closed. I think Cam has made it in 6:25 but I’m pretty sure his Malibu had a HEMI.
Before she finally passed from complications due to her multiple myeloma, My Momma was in and out of the hospital three times in six weeks. I raced back to Trail the first and second time she went in. The second time she came out of care, she told me “The next time I come back here I’m just not gonna come out.” The pain was just too great. Third time she went in, I think I had some moronic trade show or travelling for work on the Monday following. Whatever…. For some weird reason the third time, around noon on a Sunday, I’m all like “Well let’s just see what happens…” Like a moron. 7:30. My younger brother calls me and says, “We lost Mom. I could have made it.
Now, I don’t want you to think I harbour any guilt for not being there during her last moments. Like no two people on this planet, she and I knew where we stood with one another. That is sacrosanct. Well before the garage door closed on her days for the last time, she told me. She told me she wasn’t coming back. I’m unsure as to what silly church you couch your faith in, but in a succinct a way as one facing death would, my Momma told me she was gonna be GONE FOREVER.
Even as she fell.
I’ll tell you my one regret: I know what she would’ve said to me had she been able to. Had I been there for her last moments. She she would’ve said “I just hope I did a good job with you kids…”
I’d have responded to that concern she’s had since fucking forever. I’d have held her hand and said,
Tonalvoice 