by Tom Wilson
Copyright © 2017 Tom Wilson
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Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Wilson, Tom, 1959-, author
Beautiful scars / Tom Wilson.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780385685658 (hardcover).—ISBN 9780385685665 (EPUB)
1. Wilson, Tom, 1959-. 2. Wilson, Tom, 1959- —Family. 3. Birthparents—Ontario—Hamilton—Identification. 4. Adopted children—Ontario—Hamilton—Biography. 5. Mohawk Indians—Ontario—Hamilton—Biography. I. Title.
HV874.82.W55A3 2017 362.734092 C2017-904461-3
C2017-904462-1
Cover and book design: Lisa Jager
Cover photo: © Jen Squires
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.1
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TO THOSE WHO HAVE COME BEFORE, THOSE THAT WILL COME AFTER AND THOSE THAT KEEP ME GOING.
EVERY NIGHT I LOOK
FROM STAR TO STAR
THREE THOUSAND MILES THROUGH THESE EMPTY BARS
AND I END UP SLEEPING
OUT IN MY CAR
AND THE MOON SHINES OFF MY BEAUTIFUL SCARS
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
SECRETS
WAKING UP—ONE
BUNNY WILSON’S KID
TAILGUNNER WILSON
A VOICE THAT RARELY GETS HEARD
DEATH RATTLE SUNSET
LAND OF THE LIVING
LIES
HUNGER
THE HONEYED CENTRE
DEATH OF A WARRIOR—ONE
LOST ALONG THE WAY
FATHERS, SONS AND A LOST BOY AT LEAFS CAMP
BUNNY WILSON AND DOCTOR GOD
HITS AND MISSES
FINDING THE DITCH
SOBER TRUTHS
SQUARE ONE AND HARD WOMEN
PLAYING SOBER
DEATH OF A WARRIOR—TWO
TRUTH
THE TRUTH
DRIVING JANIE HOME
A MOTHER CONFESSES
MOHAWK LEGENDS
ON THE DAY I WAS BORN
WAKING UP—TWO
SISTERS
THOMPSON’S GIFT OF RAIN
THE LONG ROAD HOME
A FIGHTING CHANCE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SECRETS
WAKING UP—ONE
I remember waking up in a wooden crib, crying. I was an infant, no more than a year old. There was a lamp, a pink lamb or elephant I think, and its low-wattage bulb filled my corner of the room. The faded walls were the grey of a 1950s institution, and were patchy, like the painter had dropped the roller and split before finishing the job. Right beside me a tall dresser was overflowing with stuffed animals, as if someone had had a lucky night playing skee-ball at a Conklin midway. Some of the animals were hand-sewn. Scrawny, confused-looking creatures, crooked eyes made from hand-me-down flannel pyjamas. Clean but worn.
I never bothered much with these stuffed toys, but my one cherished friend among them was a cloth-bodied, plastic-headed rabbit. Peter, of course. I never went anywhere without him. The story goes that Bunny, my mother, and my cousin Janie were looking out through the back-bedroom window at the snow falling when they saw Bunny’s dog, Trixie, tossing something up in the air, dashing across the snow, wrestling it in her mouth and tossing it up again. The dog came in through the side door and Bunny grabbed the dirty object from her, washed it and put it in my crib. “And that, Tommy, was your first toy,” Bunny used to proudly tell me.
I loved when Bunny told that story because she didn’t have any other stories about me as a baby, and I remember thinking that maybe I’d been dragged in by Trixie from that same yard and pulled from her mouth by Bunny because there was no conceivable way I belonged here with these people. Even as a kid my existence as the son of Bunny and George Wilson seemed far-fetched to me. When I went over it in my head, none of it added up. The other kids on East 36th Street in Hamilton used to tell me stories of their mothers being pregnant and their newborn siblings coming home from the hospital. Nobody ever talked about Bunny’s and my return from the hospital. In my mind my birth was like the nativity, only with gnarly dogs and dirty snow and a chipped picket fence and old blind people with short tempers and dim lights, ashtrays full of Export Plain cigarette butts and bottles of rum.
Once, when I was about four, I asked Bunny, “How come I don’t look anything like you and George? How come you are old and the other moms are young?”
“There are secrets I know about you that I’ll take to my grave,” she responded. And that pretty well finished that. Bunny built up a wall to protect her secrets, and as a result I built a wall to protect myself. I tried to hide how I felt from everyone, including myself. I knew I would be judged harshly if I were to reveal what I was thinking, what I was feeling, so I just dulled the edges of my existence so no one would know who I had living inside me. I became a secret to myself.
I still have those toys, stuffed in a garbage bag tossed somewhere on the third floor of my house. They’ve survived dozens of moves and have stayed in that garbage bag for the better part of fifty-seven years. I come across them once in a while, usually when I’m cleaning out one area of my house and fixing up another. The bag only gets opened when someone has to check to see what’s inside. My ex-wife, old girlfriends, movers and band crews have all looked down the open mouth of the green Glad bag and into my beginnings. Like Rosebud.
“Hey, do you want these? They’re a bunch of old kids’ toys,” or “Fuck—look at this weird shit….These things are scary,” or “Throw them out, throw them all out. Jesus Christ, what are you keeping them for?” girlfriends have said. Over the years, I’ve managed to hold on to the toys but not the girlfriends. I kept the toys as a reminder of where I came from, or at least where I thought I came from. That green plastic garbage bag hung around for years to honour my first memory of feeling hollowed out. Like an outsider in my home, like a stranger not knowing what the heck was going on. The first time I felt I was in the wrong place, like a spaceship had dropped me in the wrong yard.
BUNNY WILSON’S KID
THE NEEDY
Bunny and George were older. George was fifty-one and Bunny forty-seven when I showed up in 1959. George collected a hundred dollars for working five days a week on a “blind stand.” These small confectionery posts were organized by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind and were meant to provide blind vets with work and purpose. George also collected a disability pension for having had his head blown open and his eyes taken away from him as an RCAF flight sergeant.
Bunny stayed home wearing an apron and taking care of things like the washing and ironing and me. I guess she was a housewife of sorts, although the house was always very messy. Things were always kept off the floor so George could manoeuvre his way through the house, and as a result there were pathways made throughout the living room, walled in by stacks of newspapers and magazines and toys and ironing boards piled on either side. The place was a disaster, but at least George would not trip while getting to his easy chair. Bunny wasn’t
much of a cook either. We lived off TV dinners, instant potatoes, wieners, Kraft Dinner, Pop-Tarts and cans of anything she happened to reach for and pull off the shelf—waxed beans, creamed corn, Alpha-Getti, and on down the line. I can’t remember an onion ever hitting a saucepan. Nothing was made from scratch. Bunny would sit in the kitchen reading the paper in her underwear and an apron pondering her next move and telling Trixie, “Well, I guess it’s time for us to strap on the old goddamn feed bag, isn’t it.”
Bunny left school at fourteen to start working at the Sun Life building in downtown Montreal. She took the train into Montreal every morning, got off at Windsor Station and walked with the masses across Dorchester Square, where she reported to her desk in the tallest building in the largest city in the Dominion of Canada. She went straight from a one-room schoolhouse in the sticks of Quebec to filing the foreign insurance policies of fancy clients and answering the calls of wild and worldly customers in faraway lands she’d only seen on maps, places like Cuba and Caracas. She went to mass on her lunch break, and disappeared behind secret doors in speakeasies with gangsters and jazz musicians on Friday nights. So domestic work was not something she understood or cared about. From what I can recall, she would go from messy room to messy room, standing in the doorways with her hands on her hips, sighing in confusion.
George would wake up every morning, shower and shave, and then he and Bunny would sit around the kitchen drinking coffee and eating toast. The radio would be playing as well—CFRB, news, weather, sports, mouthy commentators like Gordon Sinclair and Pierre Berton. I would hear them from my room down the hall. I’d lie in bed until George was ready to go. He would say goodbye and head down the stairs to a taxi idling in the driveway waiting for him. I would wave to him from the front as he went around the corner. Even though he was blind he would wave back before disappearing down Brucedale Avenue. Bunny would throw a couple of Pop-Tarts in the toaster and pour me a glass of orange juice and maybe a cup of tea before I got dressed myself and headed out the door and north up 36th Street to Peace Memorial School.
Peace Memorial sat between Queensdale Avenue and Crockett Street on East 36th. The school was built after World War I and then expanded to accommodate the baby boom after World War II, with two huge wings spreading the building north to south over a city block. The driveway to the teachers’ parking lot bordered on Munn Street, the heart of a post-war housing development. Tiny wood-framed two-bedroom cottages, families with six kids living in and pouring out of them all day and all night long.
Munn Street was where the tough kids lived. Walter Stadnick, a famous Hells Angel, came off that street. He may have been the most notorious figure from our neighbourhood. Guys like Walter were born to be wild on Munn Street. Gangs of kids hung out at the Peace Memorial schoolyard—smoking cigarettes, feeling up their girlfriends, sniffing glue and forming a rodeo of stolen bikes. About three houses south off Munn Street on the corner of East 36th and Queensdale was the site of the hand-to-hand battles that happened every morning at eight and every afternoon at four. The crowds would follow two opponents up the streets shouting a long chorus of fiiiiiiiight!!!! The parade would end on the side lawn of the Kingdom Hall, and the swinging and kicking and blood and tears would start.
These fights usually involved kids from “the opportunity class,” who ran a little slow and who had no chance in a regular classroom. They were the victims of and the entertainment for the rest of the school. They were like the Christians in the Roman Colosseum. They served to keep the mob happy.
I had my own gang of inseparable misfits. My house was the last one on our route to school. Every morning, Ken Peters, Mark Stringer and Doug Crawford would bang on my front door. Bunny was always wary of visitors, but she welcomed these three. They were my best friends. We talked about girls and sports. Together we were all shocked when Kenny Churm told us about the facts of life, explaining that babies were made by our moms and dads rubbing their dinks together. We all paused and stared out over the rooftops on East 36th Street. Impossible. No way that happens. We were interested in the world from a distance, like it was unattainable and not for guys like us from the East Mountain.
I realized I was “poor” around the age of six or seven. Before that age I had no idea. The world has to tell you. The same way the world tells you that you’re fat or your nose is too big. You really don’t know these things until some dick points it out to you. I remember Jackie Washington telling me about the first time he realized he was black, or at least that he was someone different who was assigned a name to go along with his colour. He was playing with a bunch of kids after school in the North End, and they were all running away from one another, pointing and shouting “nigger, nigger.” Jackie joined in but soon realized that they were running away from him. That they were pointing at him and shouting “nigger” at him. He was devastated. He broke away from the group and cried all the way home.
Two incidents illustrated where I stood in the world, and both of those incidents occurred at Christmastime.
The first was the Christmas Eve when Bunny, not having the funds to buy toys, panicked and wrapped up household items to put under our tree instead. The next morning, I unwrapped the old hammer Bunny kept in the kitchen drawer with her knives and forks. The hammer was her father’s. It had a wooden handle and a well-worn head that was a bit wobbly. Bunny claimed her father, Orlando, could fix anything. She told me she used to climb up on the roof with him, handing him nails, holding down shingles and getting his lunch. She’d assist him reframing doors and preparing the storm windows for cold Quebec winters. I was aware even at a young age of what this hammer meant to Bunny. I knew she had given it to me in an act of desperation. I also knew the hammer would be back in the kitchen drawer by afternoon.
I reached under the tree and continued to unwrap the rest of the presents labelled to me: Johnson’s baby powder, a bottle of George’s Aqua Velva, a 1940s Bostitch office stapler and two pairs of socks I’d never seen before. I understood the effort that had been made. I could feel Bunny’s pain at not having the money to buy Christmas presents, though Janie did show up from Toronto later that day with a Hot Wheels track and cars.
The second incident took place in December of 1966, when I was in grade one and Peace Memorial was visited by the Salvation Army, who, during an assembly in the school gym, preached the importance of putting together “Christmas hampers” for “the needy.” The next day after the morning bell, the office announcements, the Lord’s Prayer and “God Save the Queen,” our teacher Mrs. Meyer stood at the front of the class and announced that Christmas was just around the corner and that some Hamiltonians were not as fortunate as our families were. Some boys and girls had fathers who didn’t have jobs, and their families did not have any money for toys and Christmas trees and decorations. These boys and girls, she told us, often went to bed hungry. These families would not even have a Christmas dinner. She too referred to these families as “the needy,” a term that seemed to ignite the young minds of my grade-one class as well as the rest of the school, all the way up to the grade sixes. That recess, the playground was all in a flutter about The Needy.
Where did they live?
Where were they from?
What did they look like?
To be fair, we didn’t have much to go on. Stan Nixon, whose father was a mechanic and whose entire family lived in a small trailer on a lot two streets over on East 39th Street, said The Needy were “niggers” and “Indians.” I knew what Indians were because my uncle John was an Indian and so was my aunt’s boyfriend, Jim Beauvais, but I had never heard the word nigger before. I thought I might try it out on Bunny. We were crossing Upper Gage with George and our dog, and I hurled the word at the cars speeding past us. I was met with a swat to the back of the head. “Don’t let me ever hear you saying that horrible word again, do you understand me.”
But back in the playground, during fifteen-minute-long recess, The Needy were demonized to the level of thieves, Nazis, and mon
sters. A simple game of tag was transformed from “you’re It” to “you’re Needy.” The playground would go wild, with kids running for their lives from the one needy loser who scrambled over the cracked post-war concrete, tackling the slowest of the pack, dragging them down like a scene from Ben-Hur. Ripped flesh, scuffed shoes and tears were followed by taunts of “You’re the Needy, You’re the Needy.”
So even though a certain amount of thoughtfulness was extended to The Needy in the classroom, in the playground they took a beating twice a day at recess.
December rolled along. Christmas decorations were constructed and hung, carols were sung, and in the corner of our classroom, by the front door and beside the chalkboard, was an old Dominion cardboard box decorated with wrapping paper, and in that box we would put our food for The Needy. Mrs. Meyer had announced to the class that some of The Needy didn’t have stoves, fridges or pots and pans, and so it was good to bring in instant (just-add-water) kinds of food. Rice, potatoes, instant milk, pudding and cans of fruit and vegetables were best. Kraft Dinner, spaghetti and cereal were perfect needy-people items.
No stove?
No fridge?
“What the fuck?” laughed Stan Nixon. “Who don’t got a stove? Who the fuck don’t got a fridge?”
Fuck. Fuck? Another word to try out on Bunny, I thought, having not learned my lesson.
When the Christmas holidays arrived, our classroom’s hamper was overflowing with cans and boxes and cartons of army-issue-style food rations. I of course did my part to help. Bunny gave me a paper bag of canned corn, Kraft Dinner and instant milk to add to the box. I felt good about helping out. I felt good about what I had because Bunny always made sure I was thankful for what I received.
I ran out the back door of Peace Memorial on December 20 feeling a mix of relief and freedom and excitement that Santa was coming and that I would not have to be bothered with adding and subtracting and reading and The Needy and Stan Nixon’s words that got me in trouble every time.
