Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  Copyright © 2018 Cathal Kelly

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  Portions of “Star Wars” and “The Church” were previously published in a different form in The Globe and Mail.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Kelly, Cathal, author

  Boy wonders / Cathal Kelly.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385687485 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780385687492 (EPUB)

  1. Kelly, Cathal—Childhood and youth. 2. Sportswriters—Canada—Biography. 3. Popular culture. 4. Autobiographies. I. Title.

  GV742.42.K45A3 2018 070.4′49796092 C2018-901707-4

                      C2018-901708-2

  Cover and book design by Leah Springate

  Cover image: (texture) NikolaVukojevic/Getty Images

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.3.2

  a

  For Margaret

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Star Wars

  Porno

  My Bedroom

  The Lord of the Rings

  Hockey

  Fights

  Television

  Baseball

  The Michael Jackson Jacket

  Hair

  The Subway

  Dungeons & Dragons

  Music

  Sex

  Love

  Hood Ornaments

  Work

  Notre Dame

  The Church

  Lists

  Orwell

  The Umbrella

  INTRODUCTION

  I WAS ALMOST NINE YEARS OLD when I began digging the hole. I picked a spot near the rear of our backyard, in a flower bed hard up against the neighbour’s chain-link fence. Since nothing grew there anyway, it seemed like a good spot for renovation.

  A good deal of my life up until that point had been spent obsessing about machines that excavated—backhoes, tractors, snowplows. Just about any sort of large truck thrilled me. The power of them, these tools of transformation.

  I also liked the idea that if anybody got in your way, you could just run them over. If you had a truck, you were free to do as you liked. The hole was an extension of this desire. I started it with an old metal Tonka toy that operated as a miniature gravel mover. That got me nowhere fast. Then I switched to one of my mother’s garden tools. That was equally useless. Eventually, I found a shovel buried under a pile of junk in the garage and began making some serious progress.

  I can’t say how many days I spent on the hole. It seems like dozens, but at that age time accordions inward. A day is like a week, a week like a month. I did spend a good long time on the hole. Longer than I’d ever spent on any one project.

  It was tough going at first, but once through the toughened top layer, the earth got sandy. After a couple of days, I was planted inside the hole, up to my knees.

  Every so often, my younger brother, Brendan, would come out to inspect the work. He wanted very badly to participate, but this was my hole. After a short argument, Brendan wandered off to dig his own hole. Since digging a hole is a ridiculous thing to do, he soon lost interest. From then on, he settled on coming out into the backyard to annoy me for hours at a time by throwing a baseball against the back wall of the garage. The wall was wooden and the ball had no bounce, it would only drop to the ground directly in front of the garage. He’d have to run over and fetch it each time. It was an even stupider thing to do than digging a hole, though, in retrospect, a telling insight into our brotherly relations.

  My mother showed no interest in the hole until the neighbours complained. (God, how our neighbours suffered over the years.) They worried that my hole would collapse a portion of their immaculately kept garden. It is a potent Irishism that no one should presume to tell you what you can or can’t do on your own land. My mother was now suddenly pro-hole.

  I began buttressing my hole with boards I found in (or stole from) the laneway behind the garage. Everything a kid needed was in that laneway—bricks, bottles, stones. All the detritus that can be used to build or destroy—the two polarities of the boyhood imagination.

  The biggest problem was what to do with all the excess dirt. I could dig for a while, tossing it out behind me. But then I’d have to get out and re-shovel the pile to a point where it wasn’t slipping back in. Eventually, I was spending most of my time moving the pile farther and farther away. That slowed me down.

  After a few days, I was ready to show the hole to people. Friends would come over and nod approvingly at its width and depth—about the size around of a manhole cover and maybe four or five feet deep.

  “How far will the hole go?” they asked.

  I wasn’t sure. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of starting a hole, you don’t want to limit yourself.

  After the sandy bit, the earth got hard again, loamy and compact. There were roots to cut through—emanating from where, I couldn’t say. The nearest tree was thirty feet away. Working only with the strength of a child and a steak knife filched from the kitchen took forever. Eventually, I was right down there in the hole, though I could still get my elbows up on the edges and pull myself out. I considered expanding the hole. Maybe I could enlarge it to the size of a grave? But that would mean ruining the grass. There was nowhere to go but down.

  One night, my mother asked me if I was going to China. The question annoyed me because she knew I knew all about the Earth’s molten core. But I said yes, sure, China, why not?

  One day I really got at it. It must’ve been hours of digging. After a while, I could no longer hear the noise of the neighbourhood. No cars passing or birdsong. I was working with a trowel, smoothing the sides and rearranging the boards. After the day’s work was done, I tossed out the trowel and reached up to grab the sides. They had grown beyond my grasp. I was perhaps five feet tall, and the hole was close to seven.

  I tried planting my feet against the walls of the hole and propelling myself upward. That didn’t work. There was no purchase there. I straightened my back against one wall and tried running up the other. That worked just well enough to allow me to fall back down into the hole from a height several times. I called out once or twice, but stopped because I had at the time a strong fear of seeming foolish. I did not want a stranger to find me in a trap of my own idiotic design.

  I ran through the scenarios.

  What if no one found me? Unlikely.

  What if it rained? I’d float to the top.

  What if I had to go to the bathroom? Dirt is very absorbent.

  What if the hole collapsed? Not my hole. This was a hole built with quality in mind.

  So I sat down in the hole to wait. That’s what I remember best.

  Memories are strange things. Think back on the fondest recollections of your distant past. Usually, the memory is reassuring and warm. In all likelihood, it’s remarkably detailed. Coming down the stairs on Christmas morning or that thing your father explained to you on that long drive to wherever, something that’s always stuck with you and helped to orient your relationship with him. These remembr
ances seem almost too real to be credited.

  Freud would say that’s because they are. He called them “screen memories”—several disparate impressions, often unconnected, pastiched by your mind into one powerful recollection that covers over all the others. In the process, negative feeling is removed.

  It’s a powerful tool of the brain, meant to comfort us.

  By Freud’s lights, screen memories often have a negative function, compelling us to repeat in adulthood those anti-social behaviours we observed as children. Maybe your father was screaming at you during that drive, rather than talking to you. Maybe you’ve become a screamer. Maybe you can’t bear to be around screaming. Maybe you’ve figured out the difference between what you think happened and what did and found a way through it. And maybe it actually happened the way you remember. Your father’s gone. Who’s to say?

  Everything that follows here is not necessarily exactly as it happened, but exactly as I remember it happening. I’ve seen Rashomon enough times to know there’s a profound difference.

  But at our core, what are we but an agglomeration of the things we believe happened to us? Reality has very little to do with it. So I remember being in the hole. I remember it better than yesterday or the day before. I still dream about it. Those few times I have trod across a freshly plowed field, the smell transports me back there.

  It was cool in the hole, and utterly still. It was soundless, but it did not have that same quality as the silence you feel when you cover your ears. It was wide-open in its emptiness. What I felt there was safety. I was hidden away and could not be disturbed or impeded by any person or force. I felt calm. My thoughts were liquid and ordered at the same time. I wasn’t thinking about the hole or why I’d done it or how I’d got there. I wasn’t thinking at all. It’s only in childhood that we can have purpose without an end. A child at play has no objectives or goals. We do in order to do. Taking religiosity out of it, it was the first time I felt whatever people mean when they say the word Zen.

  Like so many other insignificant happenings of childhood, that one has defined me. As an adult, I have strong mole-like tendencies. I like to be tucked up in small places, as long as the exit is open. If I get into a bed that is pushed against a wall, I cannot sleep unless my back is touching it. When I enter a room, I move to its rear and put objects—a table, a bar—in between the crowd and myself. I like to watch what’s happening at the party through that aperture, however haphazard.

  I was in there a while. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. I wasn’t bothered, and so kept no track of time. When I heard my mother’s voice out in the yard, it wasn’t an interruption. My moment of profound, aimless introspection simply stopped, and the buzzing in my brain kicked up again, like an engine turning over.

  “Here,” I said. “I’m here.”

  She wandered over and looked into the hole. “Are you finished?”

  “Yes. Can you help me out?”

  My mother is not a big person and, even then, I was. She lay down at the edge and I got hold of the arms of her shirt and scuffled up the sides until we were able to wrestle me to the top. She was as filthy as I by the end of this process, and more than a little put out. Annoying the buttinsky neighbours was good and all, but it was she who had to do the laundry.

  “I think that’s enough digging,” she said. My mother never said I couldn’t do things. She only suggested it in a way that had more force than any order.

  I didn’t argue. The hole had achieved its purpose. The next day I filled it in. There was a sizable excess of dirt left afterward, which I believed to be meaningful, but could not say why.

  From then on I would think of everything I did, every exploration, every falling down the wormhole of a new obsession, every occasion that seemed a portent of something more important than itself in the terms of digging that hole. That’s what we do in life—we dig. Occasionally, we get somewhere, discover some small treasure. More often, the hole collapses in on us. Or we fill it in. And then we dig again.

  * * *

  —

  WE LEFT THAT HOUSE when I was fourteen years old. It was an ugly, aluminum-sided bungalow, conspicuously out of place in a working-class west-end Toronto neighbourhood filled with two-storey brick homes. We’d spent six or seven years there. We lived in many spots throughout my childhood, but if you ask me which one was home, that was it.

  I went back there recently. It’s only twenty minutes across town, but I hadn’t been there in years. In order to get to it, I passed what had been my father’s house, around the corner and a block down the street.

  Though the same in every general way, the neighbourhood has changed in every important way in thirty years. Become expensive and moved up the class ladder. It isn’t quite as Maltese and Italian. The frontages are spiffier. The trees have grown. All the spots I knew are gone or replaced.

  My home is much as it was, though freshly painted. I snuck up the driveway on a weekday afternoon to peek into the backyard. They’ve refurbished the deck and the garage. The cherry tree is gone. It’s foreign territory now. In the spot where there was once a hole, someone has planted a large, opulent bush of some sort, the sort that takes a long while to come in.

  But in my mind, I know the hole is still there. Because I dug it.

  As life goes on, digging seems less momentous because it has become a habit. Somewhere between ten and twenty, you stop digging for its own sake and begin digging for something specific—a job, a relationship, money, admiration, an escape. Like your perception of time, once you cross over from one to the other, there is no going back. All that remains is the echo of how it once felt, and a nostalgia for those careless times.

  STAR WARS

  TWO MOVIES STICK IN MY MIND from the summer of 1980. The less important of them was Ordinary People.

  My parents had recently split up. I was now spending weekends with my father, a man of few fixations. The only extracurriculars I remember him enjoying were the odd bit of hockey watching and long hours spent sitting in an easy chair listening to John Prine at skull-cracking volume. Years later, I’d work a Prine concert and nearly convulse during the first bars of “Sam Stone.”

  When my father did settle on something, it was intensely important that it be followed up on immediately. One day, having never before shown any interest in what I did in school, he decided to teach me algebra. At the time, I was still struggling through multiplication tables. I sat down with him suspiciously. He took out a textbook he’d acquired from God knows where. There was a long preamble that involved saying, “This stuff is easy” many times over. “If x equals 2 and y equals 3, then what is z?” he asked, jabbing at the numbers on the page as if that might make them more comprehensible.

  Blank look from me. More jabbing from him. Silence. Further jabbing. Now sighing. Mounting frustration, which I knew from experience would soon become rage. When I asked why x instead of, say, a or g or r, he got up, flung the book across the table and left the room. He never mentioned algebra again.

  I still don’t understand why it can’t be a or g or r and think of it as a small revenge that I will never know.

  All that to say that when my parents were together my father did very few things with us. Nothing, actually. But now that he was on his own, he felt pressure to engage in cultural activities with his children. Of course, they were always the sort of thing he thought he might like, rather than anything we liked. Aggressively so.

  This is how I came to be sitting in a theatre on a Saturday afternoon at eight years old watching Ordinary People. Because he could neither drink nor smoke, my father fidgeted through the entirety of a two-hour movie particularly unsuited to children. The plotline involved a frigid mother, her gentle, wronged husband and a son who cannot forgive himself for having driven them apart. Even as a kid, I thought it rather too on the nose.

  My father wept at the end and I ate myself sick on popcorn. Neither of us left the theatre feeling enlightened. I was already beginning to miss my old father—the
one who had no interest in things or in doing any of them with me.

  What truly pained me about the experience was that I had very specifically told him what I wanted to see—The Empire Strikes Back.

  “Haven’t you already seen that?” he said.

  “Yes, but what does…”

  “Then forget it.”

  While we sat upstairs at the Runnymede Theatre suffering through one of our intermittent attempts at bonding, I could occasionally hear an explosion or laser blast from the downstairs showing of the Star Wars sequel. Oh, the humanity.

  Like everyone else in my generation, Star Wars was not just one of my interests. It was a singular obsession. If you were a kid in the late seventies, Star Wars was Jonestown with a marketing arm.

  I had seen The Empire Strikes Back earlier in the summer with my mother. In its own way, that had also been a painful experience. There had been an unbearable buildup to that excursion. I’m not sure when I heard that Star Wars would have a sequel (the term was not yet in common parlance—we just thought of it as “another”). Word got to us through the schoolyard telephone. This was the blissful time of life when you were forewarned of nothing—things just happened and you heard about them afterward. So this was a precious piece of advance intelligence.

  Of course, you couldn’t trust kids. Kids talked all sorts of nonsense. Another Star Wars? I mean, they’d already wrapped that thing up, hadn’t they? What else were these people going to do, blow up another planet? (This is, I assume, how Hollywood works—think like a seven-year-old.) After hearing about Star Wars II, I fled school like an animal to seek confirmation. When an adult told me that, yes, it was true, I felt a very-close-to-hallucinogenic level of joy.

  From that point, time worked to two points of a vector—the right now and the whenever-the-next-Star-Wars-arrived. It may have been weeks. It felt like years. The in-between was unbearably sweet. Life had its purpose.

  Everything pulls back into focus on a Bloor Street sidewalk outside the Runnymede Theatre waiting to be let into an afternoon showing of The Empire Strikes Back.