by Cathal Kelly
We ate lunch at the house of our babysitter, a saintly woman named Mrs. Spiteri.
Over the years, Mrs. Spiteri had as many as a half-dozen kids under her watch at any given time. They were all ages. Over the years, I went from one of the youngest to the oldest.
I wasn’t in Mrs. Spiteri’s care, as such. Out of necessity, I’d been minding myself after school since my parents separated. I only showed up for a free meal.
We were allowed into only one room of her house—a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet. The dining room and living room were maintained in better order than a museum exhibit—all the furniture sheathed in plastic. Those rooms were a forbidden zone and though I saw into them every day for years, I never once crossed their threshold.
With all these kids penned in one small area, Mrs. Spiteri maintained order through cunning use of a television. We’d tramp in after noon, wedge together thickly around a Formica table and be directed toward a small black-and-white TV set perched on one edge.
“Watch,” she’d say. “Quiet. Watch.”
Along with “Eat” and “Go,” those were her only instructions.
She was one of those gentle people who rule by moral suasion. She never raised her voice. She had that rare ability to make commands sound like requests. In a different time and world, she could have a run a country.
We weren’t allowed to touch the dial. We watched whatever was on.
The only thing that was ever on was Gilligan’s Island. We’d get there halfway into one repeat, and get halfway through the beginning of another.
We didn’t talk to each other. We watched, shovelled food for twenty minutes and then we left. When I got home after school I turned on Gilligan’s Island and watched it again, often the same episode. I know the textual references of Gilligan’s Island more completely than any Oxford scholar can know Shakespeare. I was one of millions of such experts.
At home, we had the run of the TV. As a rule, my mother never sat in front of it. She’d been raised on a farm without a television and had no interest in being seduced by one now. The only thing we watched together as a family was the marriage of Charles and Diana. I had mumps at the time and was swollen up like a blowfish. Nevertheless, my mother dragged me out of bed at five in the morning on a weekend to attend the festivities. It was so much an event in our house that my mother brought out the camera and we took pictures of each other.
Like everyone else in our family, my mother despised the Royals. They represented everything we did not have—the ability and resources to float above the troubles of real life.
Also like everyone else in our family, my mother was obsessed with the Royals. She’d occasionally rail about them—the Queen’s Christmas address was an annual target. No winter holiday was complete without a rundown of what the Queen had said and why all of it was rank hypocrisy. She couldn’t bring herself to watch it live. She read the text in the next day’s paper.
During Diana’s wedding, I was more interested in watching my mother watching it than I was in anything that was going on. At points, she was close to tears. This was an early lesson in how people are complicated. Even my mother. Maybe more than most.
During the time I was in grade school, there were two varieties of TV—Canadian (i.e., bad) TV and American (i.e., good) TV.
Everybody got Canadian TV. It required no additional equipment. You turned on the set and there they were—the leafy greens of television, informative and good for your development. It was also cheap and banal. Banal in this achingly, well-intentioned Canadian way.
The first issue was presentation. All Canadian TV looked the same—flat and overlit, like someone had set up a spotlight behind the camera. Cop shows, kids’ shows, soap opera knockoffs—they all had an identical, washed-out palette.
The second issue was narrative. Canadian auteurs were determined to make TV from topics of the least possible interest. For a long while, the big show was The Beachcombers. It was an adventure story about logging. Really. That was it. They gunned up the coast and logged. People were forever jumping in boats because some logs were headed their way.
Why are Canadians so good at satire? Because in the Canadian language, “drama” is the more correct way of saying “comedy.”
I didn’t know anything about anything, but I knew in my bones that this was second-rate stuff. There had to be something better. That was American TV. It got beamed in across the border from Buffalo, New York, a magical place in my mind that would remain so until I went there and learned the truth. To access American TV, you needed cable. We didn’t have cable. We couldn’t afford it.
I begged my mother for cable. Her rejoinder? “When are you getting a real job?”
I was ten. I had a job, delivering newspapers after school. But I didn’t care to share my earnings around for something that obviously fell under the accounting line of “Adult Expenses.”
My father didn’t have cable either. The one time I asked him about it, he took the same “get a job” position as my mother.
This is where I might’ve said, “I have a job. What about you?” but that seemed unwise.
This lack of cable nagged at me, but I’d learned to live around it. When other kids talked about shows they were watching on American TV, I’d nod along thoughtfully and say things like, “That was so good” and “I can’t wait for next week.”
Then V happened.
V was a three-part miniseries about an alien invasion that aired in 1983. It was my first experience of event television—something that would happen only once, briefly, like a comet passing overhead, and then be entirely inaccessible for all the rest of time.
You had one chance at V. After that, there would be two types of people in the world—those who had seen V and those who did not matter.
Other American TV didn’t bother me because you heard about those shows after they’d aired. There was no point in regretting something that had already happened.
But V got massive publicity in the run-in. The schoolyard was abuzz with it.
I didn’t bother asking for cable again because cable had grown so large in my mind that I imagined the installation process was akin to building a third floor on your house. Something as incredible as cable must take months to set up. There must be dozens of workmen involved. It was already too late.
After the first episode, kids would come to school early just to talk about it. And it sounded fucking amazing. It was the greatest thing that had ever happened. Like you were there at the birth of Christ, but with aliens.
There was a bit in it where one of the aliens—who look indistinguishable from people but are lizards in disguise—eats a hamster. Puts it in her mouth and eats it. Nobody had ever done anything that interesting on The King of Kensington.
The hamster detail crushed me. Someone asked if I’d seen it and I was forced to pretend I had.
“Yes! Of course! Gross!” I squealed, withering inside.
I could have gone to a friend’s house to watch V, but that would have meant admitting our no-cable shame. I had my pride.
But really, what was the point? Why go on? It would never get any better than this, and I’d been at home watching The Littlest Hobo.
My despair moved my mother. Or maybe she got a little bump in pay. Who knows? But a few months after that, she folded. There was no preamble, no preparatory celebrations. One morning my mother said someone was coming over to install cable and it happened like that.
I was embittered and beyond caring. Where was this guy when I needed him? It was too late now.
The cable guy showed up and fiddled around outside the house for a bit. We stood in the living room, staring at the TV like a stone idol.
He came back in, plugged in a remote the size of a phone book and turned the TV on. Static. He turned the dials. Nothing.
I knew it. I fucking knew it. There was something wrong with our house. Cable would never happen here. Could not happen here. It was a cosmic prank.
The wor
kman went outside again.
I wheeled on my mother and shrieked, “Nothing good ever happens to us.”
And she slapped me. A good, hard, open palm across the face.
When the workman came back in, the three of us were standing there dumbly, staring at each other. I felt enraged and ashamed. My mother was trembling. My brother was about to cry.
The workman said something like, “I think that’ll do it,” turned the TV back and on and voila—cable. Then he left.
I suppose this is where I should say something about the disappointment of getting the things that you want, but that would be another lie. Cable was even better than I’d dreamed. It was a bridge into a better, more professionally lit world.
I arranged my life around the broadcast schedule—Family Ties; Miami Vice; The A-Team; Magnum P.I.; Knight Rider. I spent entire days doing nothing but watching music videos. I spent many hundreds of hours in front of the TV and I regret not one minute of it. I suppose I might’ve been downhill skiing or building my own computer, but I don’t like those things. We waste far too much time worrying about what we should have been doing at the expense of enjoying whatever we did. I refuse to play that game.
(I did eventually watch V on VHS. It’s horrendous schlock and I would still give anything to be able to go back and see it as it aired in real time.)
Most of my TV life is a big blur of multi-cam sitcoms, news broadcasts and baseball games, except for the day we watched the space shuttle Challenger disaster at Mrs. Spiteri’s house.
It was 1986. I was in grade eight. The shuttle itself was no longer a big deal. They’d been running it up into space for nearly five years at that point. It never seemed to do anything up there except float around grabbing things. But that launch was an event because of Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire schoolteacher who’d been chosen to participate as a sort of “citizen astronaut.” The spacecraft exploded live on television just over a minute after takeoff.
I remember that day perfectly. I remember where I was sitting when it happened—crowded in around Mrs. Spiteri’s kitchen table. I remember the sound in the room when it happened—silence; Mrs. Spiteri detaching herself from her habitual pose over the stove to come over and whisper something in Maltese while crossing herself. I remember my brother, still only ten years old and therefore a hopeless optimist, saying, “They’re okay, right?”
I ran back to school to talk about it and found that I was breaking the news. Most of my friends ate in the lunchroom in the basement. They hadn’t heard a thing.
Nobody would believe me. It was too incredible. I was making it up.
But after we got back into class, the principal made a PA system announcement about the accident and we said a prayer. While everybody bowed their head, I looked around the room feeling a smug sense of vindication. It’s ended up being a happy memory of a bad thing.
It’s seldom that you get the chance to match a distant memory of childhood directly against the historical record. Perishingly few things register that deeply. When I went back to check what I recall against the indisputable record, there were discrepancies.
The shuttle blew up at 11:36 a.m. EST. That’s a fact.
At 11:36 a.m., I would still have been at my desk in Ms. Florio’s class. The lunch bell didn’t go until noon. The walk to Mrs. Spiteri’s took about ten minutes.
Evidently, what I remember is a replay of the explosion. That’s why the channel wasn’t on Gilligan’s Island or Happy Days. They’d interrupted regularly scheduled broadcasting. Mrs. Spiteri must have already known it had happened.
Did she still cross herself, then? Maybe. Did my brother still wonder if the astronauts had survived? Possibly. But given that I’ve got other things wrong, very possibly not. While I’ve spent three decades collecting this memory, my subconscious has been rewriting it. Not changing it entirely, but applying a series of corrective tweaks. Replacing good lines with better ones, inserting people on the periphery who weren’t there, monkeying with the timeline.
However it actually went, my mind has retroactively put me there as it happened, rather than just after. How many of my other memories have shifted in this way? How much of what I believe happened is an approximation of events rather than a documentary record?
You don’t recall your life as a broad sweep of events. It isn’t a two-hour film with a beginning, middle and end. Instead, it’s a series of random snapshots. They have a cinematic clarity—who was standing where, what they said and what you said back.
At best, these small moments are interconnected vignettes that, were you to shuffle them into the right order, might make a decent art film. It’s probable only you would get it.
BASEBALL
IF YOU GREW UP IN TORONTO in the seventies and eighties, it was hard to love the Blue Jays. They had no stars. They were no good. They played in what was functionally an industrial site with the concrete floor painted green. They were the Leafs minus the history.
Now the Expos—that team was pure (platonic) sports sex. Tim Raines, Gary Carter, Andre Dawson. Several of them were raging cokeheads, which in retrospect just makes them seem cooler.
Think back to every time you’ve done drugs. Now picture yourself wheeling out of the bathroom to find the living room suddenly filled with thirty thousand people. You’re standing there in pyjamas and a guy is launching ninety-mile-an-hour projectiles at your head. That’s talent.
The Expos were rock stars. The Jays were an unusually fit branch of the pipefitters’ union.
I came to the Blue Jays in reverse. It wasn’t the team that interested me at first, but the mechanics of the game.
At the time, the local paper would run all the statistics of every major league player once a week. Two pages of them, tightly spaced. This was life perfectly ordered—who was good and who was bad. There was no arguing with this arrangement of numbers. Its internal logic was ruthless and consistent.
There are all sorts of reasons that people give over so much of their time and consideration to pro sports—tribalism, escapism, the vicarious thrill of watching better men do things you can’t. But I believe the root of it is that sports are the closest we come to a meritocracy.
You can fake your way through most things in life. It’s been my experience that the most successful people are usually the most adept phonies. There’s no harm in it, I suppose. Working life is a competition. Some adapt to it better than others, and have earned the spoils.
That was another one of my mother’s mantras—don’t complain. Nobody cares and it doesn’t change anything. Every time someone tells me about so-and-so having gotten what they have unfairly, I picture all the zebras down at the watering hole moaning about the lions.
Schoolyards, schools and jobs are unfair places. You don’t get what you think you deserve.
That doesn’t happen in baseball. You are exactly as good as your batting average. No more, no less and no use in whining about it. Doesn’t matter if you’re ugly or unpopular or a complete goddamned weirdo. If you can hit the ball, you’re in. If you can’t, it’s your own fault.
That was the appeal of baseball for me. It was fair.
I have never watched much baseball. The games were interminably long and the stakes were too often small. But I enjoyed reading about it. I liked collecting the information.
Someone had given me a Maury Wills book on the hundred greatest players of all time—a series of thumbnail sketches. I pored dozens of times over No. 1—Hank Aaron.
Imagine being the best—the very best—at something. Of all time. And having the numbers to prove it.
I memorized career batting averages and home run totals. I learned how to score a game by hand.
My mother would occasionally take us to a game at the old Exhibition Stadium—a decrepit football facility ill suited to baseball. The seats were always miles away from the plate. You couldn’t see what was going on. Regardless of the season, it was cold. More often than not, the Jays lost.
Most disapp
ointingly, none of the players were iconic in the way Hank Aaron was. At best, the contrary part of me enjoyed being part of a lost cause.
I still had a Gary Carter poster on the wall, but the Jays got better and I bought in. By 1985, they were good. They won the division and made the playoffs for the first time.
For Thanksgiving that year, my father’s family had their one and only reunion. There were twelve brothers and sisters. There were so many kids in the Kelly family they had spares. They’d given a daughter away to a childless relation as they left Ireland. There were dozens more people connected as cousins.
Whenever my father’s immediate family gathered in a group, it fell to fighting. That was inevitable. Things would go well for a while. Then everyone had a few drinks. Then someone said something to Frank about Noreen, which was filtered through Kathleen. Frank got upset. Sean got involved. Finnan tried to bust it up. (The names and roles here—Donal, Michael, Emer, Deidre—were interchangeable.) Then the shouting. Then the general scrum.
It never quite got to fisticuffs, but it was always close.
At this point of greatest danger, someone would set to wailing, “This is killing Mammy!”
Mammy, my grandmother, was a small, inoffensive woman. She spoke in a tremulous whisper. There was a soft whistle in her words, an especially sibilant s. Even in the most mundane situations, she seemed forever on the verge of tears.
My grandfather died before I was born. He was apparently a cartoonish brute. This conferred upon my grandmother a saintliness particular to Irish mothers who’ve suffered. There was a tragic intensity about her that, even as a boy, I found hard to bear. I could never quite meet her eyes.
Just as her adult children and their spouses were set to begin battering each other at a Canada Day barbecue, my grandmother would be produced. There was a great theatricality to this gesture that everyone understood. The crowd would part and she would appear—James Brown—style, being led by one of her sons.
