by Peter Gatien
The season also brought high-spirited holiday dance nights, when my relatives gathered at our house. My parents rolled up the rug in the living room and threw talcum powder down to create a better slide on the dance floor. My grandmother had forty-six grandchildren, so there were a lot of us. We sang chansons à répondre, call-and-response songs that represented an expression of communal love and shared joy. It was like the beginning of Don McLean’s song “American Pie”: “A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.”
My horde of cousins and I would all go down in the basement to play, and we’d look up to see the floor joists jumping with all the adults dancing and singing upstairs. Dust filtered down just like Tinkerbell’s magic sparkles. When I’d venture upstairs, all I saw were happy, smiling people. As frugal as they were, when I saw my parents at those parties I knew they were filled with a generous spirit. Their guests were, without exception, people who led hard lives, but there they were, joking and laughing for hours. There was real joy in our house during the holidays.
As an adult, high on this or that illicit alkaloid, I never managed to achieve the elation and happiness that my family possessed in their hearts as they sang and danced together. But a few times, when I stood on a balcony at one of my clubs, the exuberant expressions on the dancers below reminded me of the wedding receptions, the card parties, and those homespun Christmas hoedowns of my youth.
Our house at 30 Vimy Avenue squeezed itself in between rows of almost identical 750-square-foot homes. None of them were plush or spacious, but they were the standard dwelling in our neighborhood. Many of our neighbors lived in even tighter circumstances than we did, with eight or nine kids squeezing into two bedrooms. My friend Billy Tyo lived a few doors down and had to share that same type of house with thirteen siblings.
Despite the close quarters, or maybe because of them, my brothers and I got along. We had the regular tussles, but we were never mean spirited. With the twins, I had to take two of them on at a time once in a while, just to demonstrate who was boss, but our fights never ended in blood or broken bones.
In a neighborhood teeming with other kids, I had a lot of options. Moe, Ray, Mark, and Paul weren’t the only game in town. We all hung around in our separate crews, and then each of us was competitive in sports. There was hockey, of course—ball hockey in summer, ice hockey on the barely plowed winter streets—as well as football, lacrosse, and baseball.
The childhood activities of the neighborhood had a mysterious quality. Trends seized everybody at once, gripped us in an obsessive frenzy, then faded just as quickly. One day, I and all my friends acquired peashooters. The air filled with stinging green projectiles, and we were only as rich as the number of peas we possessed. Peashooter season lasted for about a month, before being abruptly replaced by yo-yos, or Hula-Hoops, or marbles, all of which enjoyed similar vogues. When every kid suddenly had to have a Davy Crockett–style coonskin hat, my mother dutifully sewed up a few pelts for me and my brothers. No logic seemed to dictate the crazes, but I was determined to keep on top of them.
I should have recognized a certain singular quality about myself as a kid, based on the fact that I always, always had to be the captain on any team I played for. I refused to have it any other way. No matter what I was doing, I had to be first or else I wasn’t interested. Which was why, when it came to academics, I became something of a slacker. I was bright enough, and always got good grades, but the competition from my brothers was fierce. Maurice was so bright they skipped him up two grades. Raymond turned out to be a whiz, too.
The school often buzzed with some news like “Ray Gatien got a ninety-nine on the math test.” I didn’t know how I could compete with that. Even if I put in as much work as Ray did, I was always going to fall a few points short.
Second best was never going to cut it with me. I would not be outshone. My brothers and I were all overachievers, and since I would never surpass them in the academic realm, I lost interest. I had to find another way.
CHAPTER TWO
Frog
In May 1958, when I was six years old and in first grade, I noticed all the classes ahead of mine had a bat and a softball to play with during recess. My life could have taken an entirely different trajectory if I had just accepted that first graders are at the bottom of the elementary-school pecking order. They are supposed to be deprived. It wasn’t up to pipsqueak me to question the order of the universe.
“Hey, Brother, Brother!” I wasn’t calling to my brothers Moe or Ray, but was rather tugging on the sleeve of one of the ordained Catholic teachers who oversaw the playground of Saint Jean Bosco School. Named after “Don Bosco,” Giovanni Melchior Bosco, who had dedicated his life to educating poor ragamuffin kids like me, my public school was run by nuns in habits and “brothers” wearing cassocks.
“Brother!”
The teacher turned a tired eye toward me.
“Can you get us a ball and bat? How come the other kids get them and not us?”
“Because you’re too young to play baseball,” responded Brother Playground Monitor, although the real reason was that the school had few resources, and the older kids had grabbed all the equipment.
Jean Bosco School was a French Canadian institution, so the whole exchange went on in French: “Parce que tu es trop jeune pour jouer au baseball,” said the brother.
“Frère! Frère!” I called, but he was already walking away.
Even at that young age I had an edge. It was torture for me to be overlooked.
“Hey, Brother! Brother!” I repeated every recess for three or four days.
Finally, just to shut me up, Brother Authority Figure found the most pathetic baseball in the world, one with the leather cover blown off and the string wrapping exposed. What a prize! But it was ours, and a half dozen of us scurried off to play a game like the big boys.
Bosco was coed, but the school grounds were strictly segregated by gender—girls on one side and boys on the other. If we ever snuck over to catch a peek at what the girls were doing on their side of the playground, the brothers would give us hell, so all our attention turned to the first ball game of the spring among the first-grade classmates.
We scavenged a broken broomstick for a bat. I took my place as starting pitcher. As I let loose the first toss, a shiny late-model car going by on the street distracted me. I turned my head slightly. The kid in the batter’s box swung the broomstick and it slipped out of his hands, flying across the playground like a wooden javelin.
That sharp, jagged end of the makeshift bat tore out my left eye.
I never saw it coming. The stars had lined up perfectly: a cool car, a slight turn of the head, a swing at the ragged-ass ball that I myself had procured. All resulting in a bloody wound that left me one eye short.
I passed out. I remember coming to in an ambulance, then arriving at the hospital and being moved from a stretcher to a gurney to a hospital bed. My first thought was for the blood-soaked shirt the emergency-room nurses cut off me. My mother had bought the shirt only the day before at a rummage sale. I’m going to get in real trouble, I thought. Then I passed out again.
When I finally came to the next day, my mother was in the room. “How are you feeling?”
“My eye feels funny, Maman,” I reported. “I can’t open and close it.”
“You don’t have one,” she responded through tears, unable to put a reassuring spin on the situation.
What is she talking about? I thought. Don’t have one what? I could still blink my eye, sort of.
When I was six, I was too young to consider what effect an accident like that might have on my future. I’m a frigging kid, living in the moment—what do I know? Plus, I had fallen into a state of deep shock. There wasn’t a lot of pain and there wasn’t a lot of introspection. Both my parents were by my bedside, weeping hysterically. I couldn’t understand why they were so upset.
“You lost an eye,” Maman said, trying to break through my stupor.
I was hospitalized for two weeks. When I returned home, I was still waiting for repercussions, figuring that my father had to be mad, since the hospital stay was bound to cost a lot of money. But neither Papa nor Maman ever complained about it. I was much more worried I might be held accountable for the damage than I was about my future with the glass eye I’d acquired, which left me feeling cockeyed and uncomfortable.
Bernard and Lilianne’s ire was aimed elsewhere. My simple, conservative, lifelong-Catholic parents took an astonishing action and brought a lawsuit against the parish. It’s hard to convey how outlandish, how difficult and absurd it was for them to take that step. In those days we didn’t know a single person in our community who had taken any legal action at all, and certainly not against the Catholic Church. To the public at large, suing a religious institution was the equivalent of poking God in the eye with a broken-off broomstick. Every cent of any potential settlement money would be snatched from the mouth of the Holy Mother Church.
My brother Moe remembers the scene at the school on the day of the accident. He was summoned to the offices of the sister superior. The principal of the school appeared, as Moe remembers it, “severe and intimidating in her nun’s uniform.” He felt that the holy woman’s reaction to my injury was one of annoyance, as if the Gatien family had somehow disturbed her day.
“Now, what should be done here?” she asked, seeming eager to shift the responsibility onto the shoulders of my nine-year-old brother.
She initially suggested that Moe take me home. Luckily, he was smart enough to insist she call the hospital. That surly response from the sister superior set the tone for Saint Jean Bosco School’s attitude in the incident’s aftermath. Let’s just say they didn’t exactly do their namesake proud. The negativity on the part of the church rose to especially shrill levels when it became apparent that the Gatien family was seriously considering filing a civil suit. All of us boys changed schools after that.
There exist a surprising number of myths, proverbs, and anecdotes floating around that relate to the loss of an eye: “In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king,” of course, and “an eye for an eye,” as well as the declaration that something is “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” Homer relates the famous story of Ulysses and the one-eyed Cyclops. In dreams, Freud tells us, loss of an eye symbolizes castration. According to one scientific theory, two-eyed sight evolved in order to better detect the slithering movement of venomous snakes.
The whole incident serves as an easy parable about the twists and turns that life can sometimes take. When I think about the way that accident shaped me, I always come back to an old song by the sixties novelty group Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, “Oh That’s Good, No That’s Bad.” The lyrics tell of a guy who breaks his leg. Oh, that’s bad. But his injury lands him an enormous insurance payment. So, no, that’s good. It goes on that way, the guy’s circumstances flipping, what’s bad turning out to be good, what’s good proving to be bad.
Losing an eye was, of course, bad—but as I got older, the wound was something that set me apart, gave me an identity. In high school I gradually switched from the glass eye to an eye patch, which I hoped would prove a cooler and more rebellious accessory. When I first started wearing patches, my mother sewed each one, fashioning them out of black suede, two and three-quarter inches by two and a half, tied with a string of black threaded silk. I instantly became a member of a select fraternity of eye-patch wearers, which included James Joyce, Bazooka Joe, Sammy Davis Jr., David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, and Snake Plissken, the hard-ass hero of the movie Escape from New York. (More recently, Madonna occasionally dons one in her “Madame X” persona.)
Choosing the patch gave me armor as surely as if it were Captain America’s magic shield. I was an instant outlaw, suave and hard, Johnny Danger, someone not to be fucked with. Without it, I was just a shy small-town boy who had absolutely no business attempting to conquer the world of big-city nightlife. With it, I was Peter the Pirate. The patch became an instant image, and the image became something I could hide behind.
Over the years, there have been a number of articles that claim a “hockey accident” supposedly caused my eye loss when I was thirteen. The American media gobbled up the tale because it fit with the timeworn “Canada equals hockey” formula. In truth, the spread of the tale is not entirely this or that reporter’s fault. When I started getting publicity after opening the second Limelight, I was looking for someone to handle my PR. I ended up hiring John Carmen, who was Grace Jones’s road manager when I booked her in 1976.
Carmen was, like all good flacks, an outrageous liar. I recall cracking up, eavesdropping on his phone calls when we shared an office.
“I gotta put you on hold,” Carmen would say, “Liza’s on the other line and she’s having a breakdown.” Then he’d make a call, not to Liza Minnelli but to the deli across the street, order a sandwich, and then hop back on with the person he’d put on hold. “Wow, that woman is a real piece of work,” he’d exclaim, while I tried to contain my laughter.
Carmen was responsible for inventing the hockey-injury story. I had given John a bunch of vague replies whenever he asked me about my eye. I just didn’t want to get into it. As it turns out, truth is a flexible concept in public relations. I made no move to correct John’s fabrication. There was a mystique that John helped create around me, an extension of that cool, rebellious character I’d been trying to create in high school.
Underneath all that there is still a lot of sadness, and way more vulnerability than I’d like to admit. I sometimes cry, still, when explaining the accident, tears from one eye shed for the ghost memory of the other. I allowed John’s story to supersede my own, because I wasn’t keen to revisit the image of my parents standing heartbroken beside my bed. I wasn’t ready to think about them taking on the Church, an institution that they revered. I wanted an unencumbered story more than I wanted the truth.
Losing an eye. Oh, that’s bad. Wearing an eye patch. Oh, that’s good. The coin flipped from one side to the other many times.
Two circumstances, poverty and bigotry, dominated my early days. The first caused my prickly awareness that my family was poor, that other families had more money, and that the impoverished town we lived in had few paths toward prosperity. The defining tensions of my young life were the day-to-day grind of poverty, and my desperate desire to not be poor.
When I grew up, I decided simply to refuse to be broke. I rejected my father’s frugality, which struck me as small minded. No matter that my father’s penny-pinching attitudes and my mother’s ingenuity were born of necessity. Emotionally, poverty made me feel like someone was squeezing all the air out of my lungs. Mine wasn’t a joyful, Buddhist sort of frugality. It was the sullen sort.
On one occasion, a couple of years after my jailbreak by tricycle, I took a turn as Vimy Avenue’s resident thief. I rifled through the pockets of my mother’s best coat, a respectable rabbit-fur number for the harsh winter cold. Deep inside a pocket I discovered treasure: a Canadian dime.
“God bless the Queen,” I whispered to myself, seeing the image of Elizabeth II on the face of the coin. The enticing mirage of a bottle of Orange Crush hovered before me. I had enough to buy my soda and still have a penny left over from the pilfered dime. With impeccable childhood logic I took the dime but hid the coat, on the theory that if my mother didn’t wear the coat, she wouldn’t discover the coin was missing.
I stashed the garment beneath the bed. My mother, of course, could not find it, and she proceeded to search the entire house, to no avail. In those days the dry cleaners would actually come to a customer’s house to pick up clothes. They had been by that afternoon, so suspicion naturally fell on them. My father phoned the police. Meanwhile, my mother happened to glance at me, and one glance revealed all. Guilt was written all over my face.
“Did you have something to do with it?” my mother demanded.
“No, Maman, no! Nothing at all!”
The hidden rabbit-fur coat remains in my mind as a cautionary tale of how poverty can lead directly to crime. Entering into adolescence, I developed a slightly more convincing poker face, but I also decided that pilfering dimes from random pockets wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to be. I turned, begrudgingly, to honest work.
When I was about six, I took on a paper route. I kept that job until my teens, but right up until the day I relinquished my route, that bulging canvas bag I toted around felt more like a badge of poverty than a sign of enterprise and independence. I obsessed over the images of newsboys from the movies, scruffy, dirty-faced kids scrambling for every nickel. I imagined hearing the sneers of passersby: Look at that boy delivering papers—man, he must come from a really poor family!
Nonetheless, the gig represented a path toward pocket money. As a byproduct, I glimpsed the private lives of the residents on my route. The view wasn’t always pretty. There was a man who stood six feet four, a scary Freddy Krueger type, complete with a beat-up fedora and long yellowish nails. Part of my job was to collect forty cents from each household every Thursday. Instead, Krueger insisted on paying by the month.
“Here’s your paper, mister,” I’d say. “You owe me two dollars.”
“Wait a minute, sonny-boy. Why don’t you tell me how many weeks there are in a month?”
Somehow I knew it didn’t matter that the last billing cycle had been a spillover month, with five weeks in it. All I could do was stare mutely back at him.
“There’s four weeks in a month,” Krueger growled. “Everybody knows that.”
I remained silent, too intimidated by his frightening presence to come up with a response.
