by Bruce Geddes
“Oh no,” he said, shaking his head. “Not a chance.”
27
By the time I arrived at the UCF building that Saturday, later than planned, Forzante’s 90th birthday party was already underway. From behind a wall, I heard the low rumble of voices. A red-faced man rushed to the bathroom. Although convinced that I had to be there, I had the uneasy feeling of a gate crasher.
“No tie? No entrance,” a monumental security guard announced after I paid for my ticket.
“I didn’t realize there was a dress code.”
“Out of respect for Mr. Forzante on the occasion of his birthday.”
“You wouldn’t happen to . . .”
But the man was already reaching into a box holding a tangle of neckties for the informal and uninformed. “Five bucks to rent. Plus twenty for the deposit.”
With the tie fastened around my neck, I followed hand-drawn arrows to the assembly hall entrance, pausing before black and white photos displayed for the occasion. The first batch showed strikers, grease-smeared and weary-eyed, in the final days of the Krull Motors sit down of ’45. Other shots displayed clutches of men hoisting wide banners in the air demanding fair wages, safer factories, death to scabs. Here was Allistair Forzante, driving the one-millionth union-made car off the line. There he was again, sporting dark glasses against the summer sky, dipping a golden shovel into the ground to celebrate construction of the Vanmark Spring Plant. These gave way to later shots of the face of the UCF, bulky around the waste and shaking hands with the likes of Cheddi Jagan, David Lewis, and Joan Baez.
I looked for Gord. He was surely present when most of them were taken. But unless he was among the hatted, face-hidden men in the crowd listening to Forzante’s 1952 speech outside Tuck Electric, or among blurred well-wishers at the Wanstead air field clapping as Forzante boarded a plane delivering him to Geneva and the ILO’s Employment Injury Benefits Convention of 1964, Gord was not in any of the photos that I could see.
Another display showed an impressive number of birthday cards and notes sent by the connected and powerful: Parliamentarians, the mayor, every city counsellor. And a clump from some personalities, Rick Salutin, Judy Rebick, Stephen Lewis, reminding us of a time when the political left and organized labour stood on more common ground. Easing down the corridor, I stooped to read other cards. In one, Gordie Howe called Forzante ‘the best face-off man alive’. In another, the same Gordie wrote: ‘To Mr. Union, Best wishes from Mr. Hockey’. I checked the dates and realized that the wall displayed not only cards celebrating Allistair Forzante’s 90TH birthday, but also several of those celebrated in previous years, some as far back as 1984, the year after Gord was killed, when the patriarch turned 65.
Pushing through the doors to the main hall, I was taken back to rallies and events I had attended as a kid, some next to Gord, others with my mother, while on the stage Gord flanked Forzante. There hadn’t been many changes. The walls were paneled from floor to ceiling in a kind of woven fabric, once smooth and beige, now pilled and darkened by smoke and dust. The floor had been carpeted in wear-resistant brown. Even dressed up like this it was a charmless, cheerless place. A buffet along one wall steamed aromas of stewing chicken, roasted potatoes, warm buns, gravy. And lemon meringue pie under glass for dessert. Despite the hot food and clacking aluminum vents in the ceiling, the atmosphere remained unfresh, as though encrusted in slow-growing mould.
I wandered past the orchestra, each musician decked in matching tawny vests with varying numbers of trading pins fixed along each panel. They played sing-a-long songs, reaching to turn sheet music on silver stands. A woman in a two piece canary-coloured outfit tried to get the crowd going, conducting fervently with her free hand, cajoling long-forgotten lyrics with rushed cues between lines. But few could remember the words or if they did, when they sang it was always off the orchestra’s pace.
On a separate stage, I spotted Allistair Forzante and stole a moment to regard him. Even in the chair, he was bigger than I remembered. Rounder and fatter. The barrel chest, once menacing, had sunk into his gut, covering much of his upper thighs. His neck was rendered shapeless by rolls of skin. The bushy sideburns were gone, but he still had most of his hair and his mouth was just as I remembered: small, darty, full of tiny, fierce teeth. A mouth like that resisted silence. It was always well lubed with saliva, tongue lolling even when silent, revving for the next sentence.
Three men accompanied Forzante at the head table. One was stationed behind him, ready to push the wheelchair when ordered. The second, erect in a tailored black suit, thumbed at the keys of a Blackberry. He bent down, first to whisper something into Forzante’s ear and then lower to get the response. The third, old like Forzante, was rooted on his left, and watched the band with rheumy eyes.
A moment later, the music stopped. At the head table, the young assistant wheeled Allistair Forzante to the microphone. The crowd quieted. Forzante wiped some stray spittle from his mouth with a napkin.
“My great grandson, he’s only four. He couldn’t be here tonight but his parents are. You all know my granddaughter Sophie and her husband Josh.” A trickle of flimsy applause made its way across the room.
“Before we got started tonight, Sophie told me the cutest damn story about little Andy, their boy, my only great grandson. A few nights back, Andy wakes up from a bad dream and goes into his parents’ bedroom and asks if he can sleep there. Well, they’re dead tired but they’re good parents and they say ‘yes’ and so Sophie pulls back the blankets and she and Josh are naked as the day they were born. Little Andy crawls in and he’s still awake and he says, ‘Mommy, what are those?’ Sophie, she doesn’t want to get into the birds and bees, so she says ‘Those are mommy’s headlights.’”
Laughter rolled in lightly. At her table, Sophie glanced helplessly at her husband, who picked with his fingernails at his teeth.
After wiping his mouth again, Forzante continued. “A few minutes on, Andy’s still wide awake, the poor kid, and so he says to Josh. ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ And Josh, who works hard for us over at Fabitex, he’s tired and doesn’t want to get into it and so he says, ‘That’s Daddy’s snake.’” More laughter, some of it nervous, danced around the room. At his table, Josh twisted the wedding band on his finger.
“So, poor Sophie and Josh, they’re awake now but Andy he’s not done and he points you-know-where and he says, ‘Mommy, what’s that?’ and my granddaughter says, ‘That’s mommy’s grass.’” Sophie began to chew the collar of her sweatshirt.
“Well, with all his questions answered, they think little Andy is finally going to go to sleep but just when they figure he’s out, what happens but Andy pops up and shouts, ‘Mommy, mommy, turn on your headlights, there’s a snake crawling in your grass!’”
Laughter. Applause. A coughing fit or two. Sophie, head bowed, slid off to the exit, bouncing off two chairs and a bus table. Someone shouted ‘Long live Allistair Forzante!’ and the laughter turned to cheers. Forzante raised a hand to calm the laughter.
“I am so pleased you all could come to help me celebrate my 39TH birthday. Only sixteen more and I can retire!”
“Nooooooo!” groaned the crowd.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry. I’m as healthy as an ox. But I promise you this. Whether for one more year or fifty”—he paused with a hatchet gash smile—“and it could be fifty, I will continue to fight for the rights of our brothers and sisters in this union until the Day! I! Die!”
Those who were able sprang to their feet, extending on their toes, hands slapping wildly together. Others, fixed to their chairs by age and weakness, banged on the tables, shaking the cutlery and glassware. The assistant with the Blackberry cued the band and they launched into ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. From the ceiling, white confetti fell along with yellow balloons that popped like pistol shots when they landed on the hot buffet. The man behind Forzante backed the wheelchair away from the
microphone and, with the band now playing ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, pushed Forzante from table to table.
Forzante shook every hand. He accepted kisses from the ladies, and squeezed the back of loyal necks with his thick fingers. Another assistant followed to collect gifts: bottles of Johnny Walker Black, boxes of Cohibas from individual members. The leadership of the Key Makers, Local 32 made a novelty sized gold key. To Mr. Allistair Forzante, the inscription read, for all the Doors He Has Opened for Workers in Sixty-five years of Service. The Arena Workers, their ranks diminished in recent years, pooled their resources to buy a Wanstead Mustangs jersey for their union president, his name stitched across the back over the number ‘1’. Another group offered a tribute of an aquarium. Between two rocks, a box turtle snoozed.
“This kind of turtle is known to live up to a hundred years, Mr. Forzante,” said the spokesman for the group.
“That’s the trouble with pets,” Forzante said. “Just when you start to get attached, they die on you.”
The parade wound around the room, pausing at every table like a passenger bus on a milk run. When Forzante and his entourage turned the corner, heading my way, I downed my drink, pushed my chair back from the table and skipped out of the room, ducking towards the washroom. Once there, I lingered at the urinal. Its pit was filled with ice. They all were. Taped to the wall, a notice from management: Please do not eat the ice.
Now, at the sink, as I scrubbed between my fingers, I was as disgusted with myself as much as with Forzante, angry at my willful short-sightedness. Rinsing my hands under scalding water, I felt the urge to talk to Tony. I thought: I will call him tonight. I will offer to buy him a beer, a case if necessary, and sit with him and listen to his side of the Al Del Col story and other stories about this union letting its members down and how much better things would have been if Gord had lived. And I’d sit there and listen, not only to those stories but to all the stories about his life that I hadn’t heard, that I hadn’t bothered asking about over the past quarter century. His breakup with Drew, the deep temptation he must have felt to throttle her chap Gus on first sight. All at once, I felt a deep need to hear all of this, to drink well past last call and then move on to the bleachers of a ball diamond or to the swing set at a public park or even the steps of the St. Andrew’s Church Hall, listening until he was finished telling me everything. And most especially all the reasons he had for believing that Forzante had killed my father. And then I’d look at the evidence he had and help him search for more. Tony had earned a hearing at least, even if I should have been listening all along.
Out of the bathroom, I slid the tie off and walked to the front door. But before I could present my tie receipt to the doorman, the assistant with the Blackberry was at my side.
“You won’t leave before Mr. Forzante has a chance to say hello, will you?” he said.
His tone was smarmy and unpleasant.
“Uh, no.” I said. “I’m not going anywhere with you.” I felt the doorman come to attention behind me.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, slipping the Blackberry into his pocket. “He’s been looking forward to this all week.”
28
Veins on Forzante’s hand showed through thinning skin like a range of purple mountains on a relief map. I shook and felt the cold of his skin. Looking at him so close, I saw the deep wrinkles, the hanging flesh, the terrible impact of age that happens when one’s natural expiry date is exceeded. Forzante pulled me into a hug with what I thought was remarkable strength for a man of ninety. When we separated, a stain of drool remained on my shoulder. The band began to play happy tunes again.
“Have a seat there, Tricky,” Forzante said. Like his handshake, his voice was steady and strong, as though his body were decaying selectively, directing energy to preserve life where it was most needed. An assistant arrived with a chair. I sat down. My arms hung awkwardly. I wanted to rest them on the table, but the chair had been placed too far away.
“When are they going to play ‘How High the Moon?” Forzante asked.
“It’s the next number,” said the man next to him.
Midway through a swinging version of ‘How High the Moon’ and Forzante had yet to say anything more to me. Now tugging on my scar, I also began to wonder with growing agitation why I hadn’t been offered a drink.
“This is great entertainment. Really first rate,” Forzante said. “Now, Phil, what does that make you think of?”
Phil, a veteran from Forzante’s 34TH, leaned in, cocked his ear and cupped a shaky hand around it. “Eh?”
“The Krulls sit-down strike of ’45 is right!” Forzante said. “Thirty-three weeks, Phil. Thirty-three!” in case Phil no longer remembered. “We did everything to keep the boys motivated, including entertainment. What a lot of people don’t realize is that we put on our own shows. Some fine social dramas like ‘Eight Men Speak’, if you can believe it. They shut it down in Toronto but they couldn’t touch us during the strike. We did musicals. The one with ‘Old Man River’ in it, I don’t remember what it was called, but in our version, the cast was fully integrated. That’s how you got its powerful message. Lucky there were a few summer students, skinny types for the girl parts. Cause it wasn’t like it is today. No women working in the plant. Can you imagine? A thirty-three week strike these days? Woo-hoo! Fellows would be lining up!”
‘How High the Moon’ slipped seamlessly into ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’. Forzante, his stare fixed on the stage even as he reminisced for Phil, tapped a toe on the wheelchair’s footrest.
“Happy days. Happy days those were. But not easy. No they were not. Winter comes and we’ve got no heat cause they’ve cut it off trying to freeze us out and soon enough we burn through the pallets and the truck panels and all the crates in the warehouse, the broom sticks, the tool handles, everything. And then we use rags soaked in grease and buckets of oil paint. I still feel that smoke in my throat, goddammit. But for me it was nothing. Andy Lamb, he was a skinny reed with thin blood and always cozied up near to the flame and that smoke black as night and by the end of it he was down to a quarter-lung. I don’t know if you ever met him, but he was a genuine prince. You know what he says to me with his dying breath? He’s lying in the hospital—this was a few years later—he’s got tubes up his nose, tubes in his arms, tubes in his dick, and he looks right at me and you know what he says? ‘It was worth it.’ Remember him, Phil? I watched them lower him into the ground and then in the car on the way home from the cemetery I cried like a Frenchman.”
Phil shook his head, thinking of others. “Remember Darko Govich?”
“Christ yes. Darko Govich, who was with us for the thirty-three weeks and then a few, maybe ten years later his foot gets stuck on the line and he gets wedged in and for tonight we can spare the gruesome details but the man lost his foot and much of his leg. Cut off, just below the knee. Could have been worse, too. It happened a lot in those days, didn’t it, Phil? So he can’t work of course but we find him a nice room to live that’s easy on a cripple and a few months later I visit him, just to see how he’s doing, I got a cake for his wife, a bottle of the good stuff for him and he says to me, he says, ‘Captain’—because they all still called me captain, the old army guys like Phil here did—‘Captain,’ he says, ‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate this, I do, but what I want is to work. I’m cracking up here. I gotta work,’ he says. ‘Without work, I might as well put a bullet in my head.’”
“That same night I’m in the plant manager’s office demanding a place at Krulls for Darko.
“‘The guy with one leg?’ he says. ‘You’re having me on.’”
“I say, ‘I’m not joking.’ I never liked that manager. I made a lot of enemies in my day, that’s the business, but this guy was a genuine asshole. He says: ‘There’s nothing in the contract says we have to hire gimps or cripples.’
“So I say, ‘Well, fucknuts, there is no
w’ and zip-a-dee-doo-dah, next day starts the Krulls Wildcat Strike of 1958. It lasts just three hours and Darko Govich spends the next 19 years until his retirement in the warehouse making sure the boxes of 100 bolts have 100 bolts because a supplier will happily rip you off if you let him, that’s capitalism. They care more about a missing bolt than a man’s life. Darko died a few years back. Fell off his fishing boat and drown in the river. Not a terrible way to go if you ask me.”
Forzante finally turned his head to me. He raised a finger to his mouth and smudged a trickle of spit into his chin wrinkles. He sized me up as though fitting me for a suit. I tugged on my rented knit tie.
“Wish I’d known there was a dress code,” I said. “Good thing your man at the front had some extras.”
“I hear you’re representing Tony Langlois in his arson case,” Forzante said. “Aren’t you a good family man.”
“Actually, I never took the case.”
“Good thinking,” he said. “That part of the law can be tricky to navigate. Especially in this town. Besides, Tony Langlois is a problem of a man,” Forzante said. “Trouble. Not a team player. You know about his stay on the coo-koo ward? Too bad. He was a good man for us once. And we’ve been in some scraps where we could have used him. But we couldn’t trust him. And now—this whole thing with him trying to burn down this place. Let me just say this: I sincerely hope he gets the help he needs.”
“Maybe lately he’s had some problems, but he was once the most trustworthy guy I knew. I remember this mid-term in high school—”
“Well, that all changed, Tricky,” Forzante said. “Right around the time of your father’s tragic death. After you left town. It happens. I’d be willing to write a letter on his behalf to the court. Your mother doing okay?”
“She’s fine, thanks.”
“She’s got a nice setup. Right by the water there. From the third floor you get a view of the palm grove on one side, the sunset over the ocean on the other. You and Inés ever make it down?”
