I had made the point that the system needed to take into account the victim and protect society against the criminal, who had shown a willingness to break the social contract. By all means afford the criminal a second chance, but at the same time, let’s not pretend that we don’t now have additional information that allows us to identify one person as more likely than another to break the social contract. If we treat convicted criminals the same as everybody else after a sentence is served, we’re assuming complete rehabilitation of the criminal. Yet there can never be indisputable evidence of rehabilitation, only evidence that the sentence has been served. How can we know, how can we trust that there has been complete rehabilitation? It would be illogical for our system to treat fulfilling a sentence as reason enough to justify equal treatment in the future.
My professor dismissively said, “Oh, so you believe in the scarlet letter.”
He had no idea. Nobody in my class had any idea. Nobody could have imagined how loudly those words, his words, would ring in my head.
For an instant I thought of telling everybody right then and there what had happened to me. But Graham’s secret was safe with me, because I was nowhere near ready to part with it. I neither pushed the matter further nor pointed out that the professor’s use of the literary metaphor was not precisely on point. I resigned myself to the fact that he was neither receptive to ideas that might challenge his view of the world nor particularly well read, given his misuse of the metaphor. His name, however, remains on one of the leading textbooks in Canadian Criminal Law even after his death.
But the law eventually increasingly incorporated the rationale of what I raised in class that day. It’s much more than applying a “scarlet letter.” Next time a supposed giant in his or her field ever dismisses you, keep faith in yourself. Chances are their response might just be based on their unwillingness to accept that nobody owns the truth and everybody can benefit from considering different perspectives.
And, if Professor Mewett had been offended by the thought of figuratively applying a scarlet letter to an offender, imagine what he would have thought had he known about that very real skate that I wanted somebody to shove down Graham’s throat.
I FINISHED THAT first year with what I imagine was one of the strangest transcripts ever at the law school. Some of my grades were higher than anyone could ever have imagined, and others suggested self-sabotage. It was exactly what you would have expected had you known anything about my past and what I was still dealing with or, more accurately, not dealing with.
I was thrown a lifeline at the end of that year. While traveling around Europe, a close friend from Winnipeg, Rod Pertson, had befriended the owner of a hotel in Brighton, England, and was now managing the hotel. He offered me a job for the summer. It was a chance to run away even farther, so I jumped at the offer.
The Queen’s Hotel is located on the waterfront overlooking the Palace Pier and is featured briefly in Quadrophenia as the site of a fight between the Mods and the Rockers, just down the road from the Ritz, where Ace Face, played by Sting in the movie, worked. I spent the summer working as a porter at the hotel and as a doorman at its nightclub.
I had a great summer. After having continued to put on weight and fall further out of shape during my first year of law school, I began to run regularly again. It was liberating to be so close to the sea and feel the salty mist in the Brighton air, to walk along the shore and hear the stones crushing beneath my feet and the gulls calling as they hovered in place against the wind, looking for food. There was a certain freedom to being so utterly removed from everything. My good days outnumbered my bad that summer, though Brighton was a place where it was possible to be very, very bad.
At the end of the summer, Rod and I scraped together our limited resources and traveled through Europe, all the while living in a rented two-door Peugeot. Our strategy was to drive into a town, park near a central square, go out and drink ourselves silly, and then stumble back to our car and pass out. In the morning we would sneak into a hostel or public washroom to clean up and shower. Once again, I was getting by with almost nothing while on an adventure into the unknown with no safety net. It was heaven.
One morning in Switzerland, after spending a freezing night parked in a lot deep in a mountain valley near Täsch, we set out from our car, took the train into Zermatt, loaded up with supplies, and then hiked all the way from the village up to the Hörnli Hut, the base camp for the assault on the Matterhorn. We did it with no prep, wearing jeans and sneakers, and alternating responsibility for carrying not a backpack but a gym bag with a shoulder strap. We were fit.
Rod has since commented that he couldn’t understand how effortlessly I tackled the high, thin ridges where the path fell off to nothing on both sides. Now, in my recovery, I have pointed out to him that back then I had no fear of death because it was in many ways the preferred outcome. That day I often confronted the simplicity of possible suicide, something that ever since the abuse started had always played on my mind to varying degrees of seriousness. All day long I thought about how easy it would be to take a single step to the left or the right and tumble several thousands of steep, rocky feet. But, because it was also one of the single best days of my life, I didn’t.
I RETURNED HOME from that summer with a renewed energy for life. One of my friends at law school decided that he wanted to try out for the University of Toronto varsity hockey team. He had been an NCAA Division III (lower-level) U.S. college player as an undergrad but was looking for something to do to complement his legal studies. He suggested that I join him in going out for the team. While I had come to hate hockey and all that it stood for in my life, I did not reject the suggestion out of hand.
Could hockey be fun again? Could hockey help me? I had only the same old ratty equipment, and although my eyesight had only gotten worse and I was now wearing glasses in class, I did not yet have contact lenses. But the game still had a hold on me, so I agreed to join him.
My equipment was so old and worn out that, at the fifth or sixth tryout session, the heel of my skate separated from the blade when the rivets pulled the sole of the skate out the bottom of the boot. Because I’m so big, because my feet are so big—I wear a size fifteen or sixteen shoe, depending on the make—I can’t buy anything off the rack, including skates. Replacement skates would have to be specially ordered. My friend had already been cut from the team, but I was doing well and having fun and was not willing to walk away simply because I had no skates. More importantly, the varsity coach at that time, Paul Titanic, himself a former U.S. college standout, had liked what he had seen and didn’t want me to leave either.
The University of Toronto Varsity Blues hockey program is the most storied in Canadian university hockey history. The team plays out of historic Varsity Arena, an old rink with several rows of seating completely encircling the ice surface that eventually give way to a web of black iron and steel rafters. It is dark, somber, and imbued with the spirits of those who made the game what it is in Canada. The Blues had regularly featured former professionals and Olympians, as well as standout juniors, and over the years had achieved great success with coaches who went on to the NHL. And here I was, a guy with a broken skate who hadn’t played any real hockey in four years, fighting an invisible battle.
It’s only now, looking back, that I can appreciate that I must have had some talent to have been able to decide on a lark to put on the pads again after four years away from the game and do what I did. I certainly couldn’t see that at the time. Back then all I could see is what I wasn’t, not what I was.
Coach Titanic, a wonderful man with unbounded enthusiasm for the game, ran a hockey school each summer. During that time he had come to know a certain former NHL goaltender named Ken Dryden, whose child had been one of his hockey school students. After the equipment manager had called local stores and failed to find a new pair of skates in my size, Coach Titanic had an idea. He decided to ask Dryden, famous for how big he was, if he happened to have a pa
ir of skates he could borrow for his new goalie. Coach Titanic thought that the fact that I was a Princeton graduate and law student might appeal to Dryden, winner of six Stanley Cups, five Vezina Trophies, a Conn Smythe, a Calder, and a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. And that is how I came to try on Ken Dryden’s skates—the skates that he had not worn since taking them off after winning the 1979 Stanley Cup and then retiring.
Coach Titanic picked up the skates at Dryden’s house and brought them to the arena. He told me that Dryden had said we could do whatever we needed to get them to fit—wet them, stretch them, whatever. And so I sat down in the dressing room, took off my shoes, picked up the skates, and hoped and prayed a little bit that these skates would fit, that maybe, just maybe, Cinderella would get his happy ending.
I have very, very big feet. Ken Dryden, apparently, does not. Ever since I was about fourteen I had been wearing skates that were the biggest made but that were still far too small for me. I was used to skates that didn’t fit me, but this was an even more extreme challenge. I tried curling my toes, twisting my foot, angling my ankle. I would have broken bones if it had meant fitting into those skates. But while Ken Dryden has big feet to fill in so many areas—hockey, politics, community activism, social commentary, and education—his skates just weren’t big enough for me.
So close to greatness, but in the end, just a guy whose once “perfect” feet had let him down again.
I LOVED PLAYING hockey for the Varsity Blues, and in many ways it was a bigger achievement than playing at Princeton would have been. It’s one thing to combine undergraduate schooling with varsity sports, but quite another to combine law school with varsity sports. While rediscovering a bit of myself in hockey improved my engagement with the rest of the world, my periods of self-doubt, self-loathing, and depression simply took on a different form and became far more intense when they did set in, occupying all of my time whenever I let my guard down.
But there is no question that hockey saved my life, and I am deeply indebted to the Varsity Blues for that. I finally made a varsity hockey team. I was able to overcome my demons for at least a short time. I had good times with the team. I have memories that make me smile in spite of what I know was going on inside my head behind those smiles in the pictures—memories of road trips, parties, practices and drills, team meetings that went off the rails, Coach Titanic wheeling a television set into the dressing room to show us a clip of Eddie Murphy in an attempt to loosen us up. And I proved to myself that I could still fight through even my darkest moments and accomplish at least one goal.
As before, there was always humor, sometimes dark. Given my height, the simple geometry is that my five-hole, the area between a goalie’s legs, was quite possibly the biggest in hockey history up to that point. It certainly seemed that way given the number of pucks that found their way between my legs during practices. But whenever a shooter shot a bit high, there was, suffice it to say, pain. For a brief period I seemed to be feeling an inordinate amount of such pain. It was only at the end of the year that the guys let me know that they had been having a contest to see who could shoot the puck between my legs and over the net. Nobody won, with the closest shot having hit the crossbar.
Playing with the Varsity Blues also allowed me to add another name to the list of hockey players who would eventually form part of the intersecting set in the Venn diagram among “players who have scored on me,” “NHL players,” and “members of the Hockey Hall of Fame,” a set bigger than one might imagine, as Rob Blake put one past me during our road trip to Bowling Green State University.
But as before, and for the same reasons, I played with poor equipment and without glasses or contact lenses, an unprotected goalie unable to see the puck. Nobody could figure out why I was so strong in certain drills around the net or on shootouts and then so brutally weak when the longer-range shots came. Of course I wanted to achieve and realize my dreams. Of course I wanted to fail miserably because I thought I deserved to fail. I was still a young man who knew what he wanted but because of his past couldn’t see, literally or figuratively, how to get there.
In many ways it was frustrating to achieve a little success and then to trash that success just as quickly.
Why can’t I function and succeed all the time? Success is clearly possible, so there mustn’t be anything holding me back except my own shortcomings. And if that’s the case, then my past and the abuse really have nothing to do with anything, the abuse must be just an excuse. I probably always just wanted to fail and I was just going to fail anyway. And it probably wasn’t even abuse, it was probably something that I wanted because I’m just that type of person, somebody seeking out drama and other things to take attention off the fact that I’m just a loser.
For a victim of years of sexual assault who has lost all sense of self, there are no successes, simply defeats snatched from the jaws of victory. So, while achieving varsity hockey and good grades at law school would be something to be proud of to the average person, to me they were simply further markers of my own failure. I believed that I was worth nothing, that I deserved nothing, and so, without realizing it, I was taking steps to ensure that I would eventually fail yet again.
I WAS A larger-than-life character at law school. I was the guy playing varsity hockey while going to law school. I was the one who played the role of Batman in the school production of Batman. I was seemingly laid-back and fun to be around. I was the one who secured a position as a summer student at what was then Tory Tory DesLauriers & Binnington, a leading firm with a reputation for securing the best and brightest out of law school. But inside, living in my own inner hell, I was no different from before.
My achievements were meaningless to me. I abused substances. I abused my body by cutting it and digging into it. In the face of wanting to achieve, I would repeatedly put on weight to make myself hideous, to ensure failure, to ensure isolation and avoidance, to ensure safety by avoiding attention. I tried to gain control over myself by bingeing and purging. I would fight through all of these self-destructive actions and still want to win. I would drop weight. I would train harder than anybody else to get back to a point where I could participate in hockey, where I could win the fight against my demons. I would wake early and swim laps at Hart House before classes, then after classes lift until my body ached beyond all imagination. Pictures of me from this period reflect incredible fluctuations in body shape as the desires to win and lose fought so hard against each other, the battle much like a tug-of-war where the ribbon first moves one way, then back the other, back and forth, and back and forth…
You know the pattern now. You know it well enough to finish every sentence I’m writing. And that’s the thing, because if it’s getting so predictable to you, imagine what it was like to have to live it. You can begin to understand my despair at even getting up in the morning, knowing that in the end the song would always remain the same. The miracle of it all is that I kept getting up to fight the good fight, day after day after day after day, hoping against all hope that things would get better.
They never did. But I did graduate from law school. At last, school was out. Forever.
BUT NOT REALLY.
The world of a lawyer can look a lot like school. It was odd to see an adult in a suit sitting at a desk in the law firm library doing research. I don’t know what I had expected to see inside a law firm. I mean, I knew that lawyers wore business attire to the office, but there was something jarring about that first day in the office, about seeing the exact same scene that had played out over years in school with only the clothing changed.
Everything about working in an office was new to me. It was exciting simply getting into an elevator to go to work. My life up until law firm life had not involved elevators, and it always felt like a bit of an adventure in those early days to have to take one to get to the office. Mine had been a life of stairs, of flatlands in the prairies where the only elevators held grain and where my life was not taking me anywhere near downtown. Oh
, I had been outside of buildings with elevators, but those buildings seemed to be a club to which I didn’t belong.
Princeton graduate, U of T law school graduate, guy in a suit excited to use an elevator.
After my summer job at Torys and the last year of law school, I returned to the firm for my articles, a required year of working at a law firm for practical legal training prior to writing the bar exams. I had been heavily recruited by Dale Lastman, a man I came to greatly admire, who had wanted to take me away from Torys to join him at Goodmans. I really liked Dale and his firm, and I sensed it would have been a far better fit for me. But I already knew enough about myself to know how things were going to turn out and that a bridge would be burned in the process. Better to stay put and burn the bridge I already knew was going to come down rather than start a bonfire on a new one. It was very hard to tell him that I would not be joining his firm.
Torys is based in the TD Centre, a collection of buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe, all in the form of his Seagram Building in New York. His mantra of “less is more” meshed perfectly with my view of the world. His entire body of work appealed to me. It did, however, always strike me as somewhat odd that there would be a collection of his buildings, all virtually identical but for height—more of less is more—on a single site. So beyond calling to my inner architect and designer with its sublime lines and modest, functional, and entirely appropriate glass, the TD Centre also offered me a daily smile. It was so Toronto, taking something from New York and, in wanting to make itself so much like New York, utterly corrupting the essence of things in a needless attempt to make itself more than it is, not seeing that it is already practically perfect in every way.
I Am Nobody Page 13
