When the three of us hit the large and shallow pit Vood and I called the Thunder Bowl, Kate spotted its doggie potential without a word from me. This leafy, dirt-walled bowl spilled down off the trail and was about the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Vood was rarely happier than when he was running in it, around it, or up and over its metre-high dirt walls. “Hey, dog,” she called out spontaneously, “you run in here?” And they were off, all chase and feint, old smugsy me bringing up the rear. I didn’t get proprietary and call him to me, just joined in the communal chase. I’ll get you; no, no, you get me. Only when a panting, ecstatic Voodoo finally rolled over at her feet, her hands rubbing his traitorously exposed belly, did I too bend down and get a piece of Mr. Fluff. Our fingers repeatedly brushed each other’s across his soft, white belly fur. We were closer to the ground, catching its mossy smell. “This is where you kiss me,” she said, unlocking me with a grin. “Lightly.”
7. (This) Ant Farm
Nominally and legally, if not biologically, I’m Antony Williams, third-generation Windsorite. This much you may have been told.
Each generation, including the one that brought us here, Gran and ol’ Bill, had its war. Peg and Bill started out English, grew up around Manchester, miners and miners’ wives. Young widows and a lot of coughing in cramped company houses. The widow part proved true even on this side of the Atlantic. In the Great War, William Williams was a tunneller, a former Manchester clay-kicker exempt from basic training ’cuz Jerry was always digging through from the other side.
There’s that scene in Goodfellas. No, not the garlic and the razor blade. One where he comes home from prison to an apartment he’s been paying for but hasn’t seen. Guy’s been peddling inside. Decent bread, apparently. He’s not in the apartment five minutes before he says, Pack your bags, we’re moving. Swap the war for prison and across the Atlantic for across the state, and you’ve got Bill and Peg in pasty-faced England after the guns went quiet. Legend is Bill couldn’t come home from thousands of men dying every day to slog out a life no different from that of his parents, didn’t want to bring children into the same old mould. So across the Atlantic they went, all hopes pinned to the beaver.
Windsor didn’t prove different enough, the automotive assembly lines too much like that insatiable, mechanical war or simply intolerable after it. In the early 20s, Ford personnel managers did evening spot checks on the homes of line workers. Bill had watched bloated rats gleaming with midnight blood eating their way out of teenaged corpses. After that, how was he to endure his employer inspecting his icebox and linen closet? Gran didn’t just sit through all this with her hands in her lap. The same Windsor-Detroit ferry that smuggled in America’s first copies of Joyce’s Ulysses also carried my great-grandmother with bottles of whisky strapped beneath her skirts. When she showed Bill the money she’d been making, he quit the line and began digging a different kind of tunnel from their riverside basement. We’ll get to that gold mine and grave in a bit.
Then we had our lost generation, Victor-Conrad, my brief, maybe grandfather. Peg and Bill’s only child, raised big and strong on New World bounty. His meat-and-potatoes chest caught a bullet in WW II, though not before he supposedly left something behind with a French working girl. In 1946, Gran, already a widow and now mourning her only child, replied to a French curate’s letter by sailing to France with a suitcase full of butter, nylons, sugar, and cash. Came home with a baby she had christened Gloria, her glory, survival plan for her grief, and legal if not biological heir.
The wars changed and so did we. Gloria, definitely my mother, possibly Gran’s granddaughter, came of age in the late 60s beside, but not quite in, hippie America. Came of age on stage. In her early twenties, Mom was an actor. Don’t worry, this isn’t fiction: while she could eventually feed herself by crawling around screaming in tights one month then being fake British the next, she couldn’t feed us both. Those who can’t afford to do, teach, and Mom’s been a drama teacher for decades. Half battleaxe, half den mother.
Every story’s a detective story, though this memoir (or, indulge me, memwire) starts out with a missing person or two, not necessarily a murder. Immigrant great-grandparents, a bullet-magnet grandfather I never knew, a stern but liberal mother with frustrated dreams, then me. After, of course, a little help.
Trevor Reynolds, sperm smuggler extraordinaire, was an American draft dodger who drove over the Ambassador Bridge in 1969 into a country that would make more art in a decade than it had in all the previous decades combined. Canada’s supposed artistic coming-of-age was actually run by any Yank or Brit who could stand. Publishers, actors, editors, professors, broadcasters, journalists, and directors—anybody who could sign their name on a citizenship application got Canadian taxes to tell Canadian stories (however real). Trevor Reynolds was one of them. Actor, director, and a man who found that after he’d left a family and country once, it wasn’t so hard to do again.
Then there’s my war. Gulf War I? No, no room for small criminals there. Think globally; grow locally: the War on Drugs. Big difference is, those other wars all ended.
I can’t separate starting from being able to start. I thought catapult long before I ever thought catapult weed. Okay, okay, no Cuban: I thought catapult something to America long before I ever thought catapult weed.
The word American didn’t turn me into a tinkering little thing-maker. I was already in love with cause and oh-so-visible effect before the A-word got its paternal tooth into me. Show me how something works and my life changes a little. Growing up for me divides into loving moving things, making moving things, and trying to make things move to America.
On our early dates I couldn’t tell Kate what little I did know about my sire (possibly fake name, criminal absence of rank, no serial number) without telling her about my science fair projects. Grow up the brown-eyed son of a blue-eyed single mother and you’re a genetics lesson waiting to happen. And I’d always been crazy for science fair: demonstrable learning + independent construction + competition = Mmm-mmm-mmm.
I started in grade six with an ant farm, low-rent science coupled with childish narcissism. Antony’s ant farm. But learning will sometimes get in by whatever door it can. Vanity may have taken me to ant farms, but wonder held me there. I’d grown up in a house without whiskers in the bathroom sink, had been the only one in two Williams households peeing with the seat up. Then suddenly I was copying out information about ants and their “division of reproductive labour,” their “visible overlap of generations working and living together,” the “cooperative care for the young” among “sterile castes” (like artists and pot slingers). I had various teachers and a teacher for a mother and suddenly understood them differently when reading about eusocial breeding. In eusocial societies, only a few members of the colony breed, yet every member of the colony shares in the parenting labour. At eleven years old, I thought I was copying out facts and diagrams about ants, not my fate. Gran the real-estate queen, Mom the educated parent, and their heir with his different coloured eyes.
Grade six, an ant farm. Grade seven, genetics. Grade eight, the first in a long line of trebuchets (they’re like catapults). Notice that Treb. 1 came after a fight with Mom about genetics.
In the late 1800s, as England drew up the Canadian divorce papers it’d take a century to sign, the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel experimented with pea plants and tried to introduce the world to genetics. The world wouldn’t listen to Mendel, but his breeding experiments were simple, reproducible by a twelve-year-old, and great ammunition in the family war.
Perhaps you grew up differently. If I wanted to row to Cuba, I’d say I found my values in even-handed play or by purposeful reason or enlightened common sense. As an adult, I’ve never shot the messenger. That’s not true of my life as a kid, not when I had the messenger’s blood on my hands and in them.
In tae kwon do, my only female sensei once gave me a koan-like version of shut the fuck up. One da
y when I was too chatty at the dojo she told me, “You’re asking questions your body’s not ready to understand,” then showed me again she could break every rib I had, in sequence. When I’d first started asking Gloria, “Where’s my daddy?” I’d been old enough to form the question but not old enough to really hear the answer. Apparently I was also old enough to learn that asking the question wasn’t a problem. Until grade seven, I asked with words. Ultimately impatient with mere words for answers, I asked with pea plants and my own version (my first version) of theatre.
Every day I looked at my brown eyes in the mirror and thought of Mom’s and Gran’s blue eyes I saw the genetic laws Mendel found growing peas. Pisum sativum, dinner-table peas, revealed that species and individual animals also have internal and external borders. Even genes move to keep things whole. I sought knowledge and independence with Pisum sativum long before I did the same with Cannabis sativa. Really, I couldn’t make this up. Even the ancientness of the name mocks our recent marijuana prohibition. Sativus means sown or cultivated. Sativus is masculine, sativum neuter, and sativa is feminine. Mendel may have worked with sativum, but my experiments were hardly neuter.
I now confess that the science fair setting was as relevant as the science itself. I made my confrontation with Mom on my stomping ground, not hers. Sure, she was the taxpayer (bit of a pattern, that). She was a passing acquaintance of a few of the teachers at my school and knew countless others throughout the city. But still, the science fair was at my school, not hers.
Kids are hardwired to love, to lie, and to steal. I thought myself scheming, not cruel, when I told Mom that my science fair project that year was going to be a surprise. Then I was tremendously scheming when I asked to photograph Gran’s eyes a few days before I asked Mom if I could photograph hers. Remember the economic law that made my pile: scarcity adds value.
A few times that year I’d slept over at Nathan’s when he was at his dad’s new divorcing-man’s apartment. On his token weekends with Nathan he’d rent us movies with explosions and silicone implants, barbecue us something on his balcony, and, as the empty beer bottles accumulated, toss us pearls of dating wisdom like, “Remember something they like, then invest. All women like money.” One night, rather late and related to absolutely nothing, he muted the TV during a commercial and advised us to, “Fuck her best friend.” Notice that Mom agreed to be my photographic model once Gran had already posed.
My project combined pea plants growing in Jiffy pots, some placards of dutiful prose (…hybrids will show dominant parental character…), a few diagrams with vectors and circles, and a family tree of photographs that still haunts at least one of us. Deep down I’d known the photographs might prove hard to live with. I didn’t know how difficult they’d be to actually take.
You kids with your digital cameras savouring the memories of four seconds ago. I’m not so old/vain to suggest that the paper photographs of my 80s childhood were better. Presumably they pollute more than digital photographs do, and back then everyone snapped photos like ocean-raiding fishermen: take several, keep a few. But there was a pleasure of anticipation when photographs had to be developed. Logged in here, maybe you’ll agree: when gratification isn’t instant, your wants and hopes have time to clarify.
To accompany my pea plants, I tried photographing Gran and Mom’s blue eyes and my browns, but I used my kids’ point-and-shoot camera. I anticipated seeing more than just eyes in the developed photos but in fact saw far less. The thing about ignorance—you don’t know what you don’t know or even that you don’t know. I’d seen countless close-up photographs in magazines: a raindrop suspended from a spiky branch, the legs of a bee coated with nuggety pollen. You can imagine the macro shots available over at Nathan’s dad’s. Close-up photos existed. Cameras took photos. I had a camera and wanted close-ups—voilà, yes? No-là. Mom drove me to the photo developers then endured my impatience as the film went off into its chemical bath. When we picked up the pictures, I was crushed before we’d left the parking lot. My intended close-up photos of the variegated tissue in the irises of two eyes were just blurry gobs of possible faces.
Mom waited an afternoon before telling me, “There’s a lot more to photography than just pressing a button.” By the next weekend she had arranged a photographer to take the photos I wanted, photos which deep down I knew she wouldn’t want to see. Emotional maturity is an oven, and nobody is already cooked before they go in. Also, I was drunk on what science calls “confirmation bias.” It helped me ignore the fact that Ron, Mom’s photographer friend, was no doubt being paid by her in some way. He was one of several stylish men she would collect at busy, productive times in her life. During her Medea, there was her director, Vlad. By her Macbeth, it was Alain, her designer. If they drove at all, they drove once attractive but now aged European cars. They had outfits, looks, a distinct lexicon of clothing. Small vests on this one, band collars on that one, suits and open collars for a third. Photographer Ron helped me speed away from my guilt by using different colour filters to heighten the blues in the eyes of two of his subjects (Gran and Glore) and the browns in a third (me).
Mendel probably discovered even more about genetics than we know. The vanity of his successor prevents the world from knowing. Part Medea, part Cronus, the new abbot who succeeded the deceased Mendel had all of Mendel’s unpublished papers burnt upon his arrival. Picture the ashes of decades of paradigm-shifting research drifting down into Mendel’s monastery garden, birthplace of genetics. What scheming bastard would be so destructive? A celibate one. My family and fortune know that inhibition and prohibition don’t eradicate desire, they just make it more expensive.
My write-up didn’t name the eyes in the photographs, just labelled them Generations A, B, and C. I was pushing boundaries, not trying to kill. And besides, this was science; impersonal, observant science. The hybrids themselves produce offspring in which the parental characters re-emerge unchanged and in precise ratios. According to Mendel, Trevor Reynolds’s dominant brown-eyed gene gave me a three in four chance of having brown eyes. He was only one-half of my parentage, yet that same gene throbbed in me undiluted and (as you know) gave any child I have the same three in four chance of brown eyes. One drop continued to flavour the stew. I illustrated this combination of probability and heredity through my peas in their Jiffy pots, through blocks of data-heavy prose and, staring back at the viewer, an entrapping grid of family photos.
Each photo was just the eyes, a strip from above the eyebrows down to the tops of the cheekbones, an inversion of a cartoon bandit’s mask. I mounted them in a kind of family tree. Where a fourth photo should have been I’d drawn a big question mark.
Gran’s eyes
Mom’s ————— ?
mine
I kept that display at school until showtime. The night of the science fair, parents, teachers, and siblings milling around, Gran and Mom entered the school gymnasium still thinking their boy would want some ice cream after his big night. Not so after they saw that meathook of a question mark.
The photos could have been of any three generations, not even of the same family. In ways, they were just eyes, just colour and age. The two people who could spot my fiction within the science weren’t likely to say anything. What I had called Generation B (Mom + ?) was really Generation C. Generation B was Victor-Conrad, forever sucking his bullet in France.
A decade later I’d better understand Mom’s phrase “post-partum depression” for her enervated, doubt-filled crash after a play regardless of creative or professional success. More than just the stress of work and expectation hit her once a show was down. Change also came at her, but in a staggered, limping pace. That night at Science Fair, I was already starting to feel the PPD when Mom and Gran walked towards my booth. I had thought the project would show me more, get knowledge inside me and shake a few more answers out of Mom. But this was science. I should have known that what I wanted to discover was irrelevant to what I m
ight discover. My sire and I had brown eyes, yet my readings and experiments hadn’t moved knowledge of him forward an inch. For all my intrusive work with photos, the project was still just a mirror, and I already knew all the people caught in it.
Watching Gran and Mom approach, I suddenly wanted to shoo them off, call it a bust, retreat to familiar ground. Instead, I watched them read my displays, watched them look, watched their eyes return over and over to the cropped photographs of their own eyes.
Gran spoke first. “Very thorough, Antony. There’s a place in my garden for those peas if you want to dig them in.” When Glore remained silent, Gran glanced around the gym then dipped her oars a little. “Is that Masie Carruthers I see? Excuse me a moment.”
Mom’s lips were pressing down into their rage line, her nostrils sharp, so, well, strike or be struck. “These are his eyes, aren’t they?” I asked. Defiance, not guilt, inflected my voice.
“Antony, someday you’ll learn that asking questions is more of an art than a science.” She looked me hard in the eye then walked off, pacing her way around another school gymnasium.
8. Detroit Industry
Keeping Things Whole Page 3
