Beautiful Scars

by Tom Wilson

  Family members and friends were encouraged to join in on some of the treatment sessions and lectures. Sandy showed up a few times. She tried her best to support me on the launching pad of my new clean-and-sober life, but I could see it in her face, in her eyes. She was seething on the inside but looked sympathetic and shaky on the outside.

  Colin Cripps, my Junkhouse brother, was my only friend to come. He had watched me fall down the rabbit hole of minor celebrity status and all its trappings for years. He was the keeper of all the stories. Always ready for a laugh. But the joke was over. He knew it, and he was ready to stand front and centre to help me out.

  I did make friends in rehab. I was sitting on a picnic table in the clinic’s smoking area when Ira came driving up to the doors, stepped out of his Mercedes with a beer-can crack pipe, took one last hit and then checked himself in for a six-week addiction program. Ira and I became fast friends within the walls of the minimum security complex.

  I say “minimum security” because even though there were no bars on the windows, the occupants of rehab were prisoners of circumstances we’d created in the outside world. Wives, husbands, kids, friends and employers were no longer going to support our nonsense. If we missed one of the three daily roll calls, we were tossed out with nowhere to turn. The families, the jobs, the friends were all gone, and they’d stay gone if we stepped out, or slipped up, or failed a regular drug testing. We were fucked. Stuck in minimum security.

  One guy, Bernard, snuck heroin onto the floor and OD’ed an hour after being admitted. Thirty minutes after that, we all lined the hallways to watch him get wheeled away to Sunnybrook Hospital, where he would be put back together again, like Humpty Dumpty. He’d return a few days later and laugh his way through his third trip through the recovery program. Maybe this time he’d make it stick.

  Kind of like me, Ira leaned towards cocaine if given a choice. But Ira was a little more pro than me. He was also a white-collar junkie. A guy who’d die with a full tank of gas, real estate and a decent financial profile. In rehab, Ira seemed like the one guy who was going to make it. He seemed smart enough and capable enough to kick the devil off his back. He also had the most to lose—the most worldly things to lose, that is. He was a money maker and a planet shaker, and if he could only resist the impulse to get cross-eyed on the base and watch the sun come up through a dirty motel window, he might just stand a chance.

  I spent Christmas Eve with Ira on the empty ward of the centre. A painful night that Ira made less lonely for me. The next day, with only a skeleton crew present to watch over us, I saw my chance. I knew I could break out through the laundry room, into the parking lot and home to Hamilton. I’d have four hours, including the trip there and back, before anyone would miss me. I got the only guy I knew who’d wake up at 5 a.m. and waste his Christmas morning. That guy was Sandy’s cousin, Shawn MacFarlane.

  We drove back to Hamilton in the freezing blue-Christmas-morning cold. The world was still sleeping and Christmas lights stretched as far as my eye could see, from the side of the highway, across Toronto and into the darkness of the sky. The back seat of Shawn’s car was full of bags of gifts that I’d hidden under my bed in my room in rehab. In an effort to save my dignity, Gary Furniss had gone out to the Yorkdale mall and picked up gifts for my kids.

  I kept myself locked up dreaming the entire morning, celebrating my escape from rehab and my return home for a few precious hours. I kept feeling light until we hit the Main Street East exit ramp. Suddenly the reality of the situation melted like candle wax all over me. I was returning to the scene of the crime. Not my home. Not the home I knew and loved, at least. It wasn’t going to be like that old country tear jerker “The Green, Green Grass of Home,” where everyone comes running to greet the death row inmate in his dream. Instead it was just like they said it would be in rehab, that even though you might change while inside, the world outside is still suffering, hurting from all the stunts you pulled that got you here in the first place.

  Shawn parked his car out on the street, but instead of going in the front door I went around the back and up the stairs that led to our living room. In the little time I had, I didn’t want to wake or see Bunny and Janie. As I crept up the stairs I noticed that mine were the first footprints in the snow. No one had been out in the yard playing. The house was still. I got to the second-floor deck where on Christmases past I’d wake up early and drag a hockey stick across the snow to make the impression of the runners of Santa’s sleigh and use the butt end of the stick to make reindeer hoof prints all over the deck. When the kids woke up, I’d be excited to lead them to the evidence that Santa had come and gone while they were sleeping.

  This year there was none of that.

  I stepped though the unlocked back door, Shawn following behind me. I went straight to the corner and plugged in the Christmas lights, then reached into my garbage bag of presents and put the wrapped gifts under the tree. Then I went through the kitchen and into the hallway, standing in the doorway of the main bedroom, where Sandy and Madeline and Thompson were sleeping together.

  I walked to the end of the bed and gave out a giant “Ho Ho Ho…”

  The kids woke up. “Daddy!” They ran across the bed and into my arms. “What are you doing here?” asked Madeline. “Are you home for good now?”

  “No, no, I just came by to see you guys for Christmas.” Thompson was groggy and smiling. The kids looked a bit different to me. It was all in their eyes. Not behind them but right out front, leading their way. It was like the world had crept in and captured a part of them. They were still joyful but I could see they’d been hurt. Put in a place they didn’t want to be. The pain of it was what was showing, overshadowing the Christmas they were living through.

  Sandy sat up and gave a half-hearted Merry Christmas, then put on a terry towel robe, tied up the belt and walked around the bed past me and disappeared into the bathroom.

  I took the kids to the living room. “Let’s see if Santa came by this year.”

  The kids were excited. Sandy on the other hand wasn’t giving up too much. She was pleasant but not loving. She put the kettle on for tea and whispered to Shawn. I asked her if she wanted to come watch the kids open their presents, to which she replied, “I’m coming.” Two hours went by too fast. I didn’t want it to end but I had to get back to rehab before they figured out I was missing.

  I went out through the back door and disappeared into the frozen morning air the way I’d come.

  The kids would have dinner with Sandy’s family.

  I’d go back and eat cafeteria turkey in my pyjamas with Ira.

  My first Christmas sober.

  When we finally finished our time in rehab, we left behind eight weeks of living in our pyjamas and watching Leafs games and reruns of Law & Order and broke back into the real world. I was going home, and was about to face the fallout from my wayward-rock-star lifestyle.

  I stayed off the booze and kicked coke a few years later, and never looked back. I don’t know how Bernard did on the long haul. Ira went into addiction counselling for a while, but the last time I saw him he showed up unannounced and was parked out front of my house in Hamilton in another, newer top-of-the-line Lexus, taking a hit of crack from a pop can. He had twin sister hookers in the back seat and wanted me to come out and party with him. I just laughed. Laughed really hard. What else could I do? That’s the last time I saw Ira.

  SQUARE ONE AND HARD WOMEN

  On a winter day in 1987 I came home from Kingston to tell Bunny that Sandy was pregnant. Bunny asked me what I wanted to do. Before I could tell her I wanted to be with Sandy and our baby, Bunny offered this: “We can get a hold of that baby, and raise that baby. It has been done before.” When I asked her what she meant, she fell silent. Just another secret she would take to her grave.

  Later, Sandy and I would drink wine into the night, lying on a shag rug. “Bunny’s not your mother. You know that, right?” Sandy would ask me. And I would admit to her, and to myself, t
hat I knew. And then in the morning I would pretend that the conversation had never happened. I had learned from Bunny how to manage lies with expert care. Hiding our secrets where no light could find them.

  There were times, before I was sober, when, having run out of bounds, I would spend the night in our Crown Victoria parked in the Melrose United Church lot across the street from 82 Stanley Avenue. Sandy had made us buy that car because it had a unibody frame known to save lives in head-on collisions. She was always expecting the worst to happen, and when she could afford to take precautions, she did. I loved that car because it could accommodate my big body in times of marital strife. Those nights, I would look across at Madeline’s room on the third floor. Her light would be on, and I knew she was either playing with her Barbies or flipping through a National Geographic or a chapter book. I pictured Thompson already asleep in bed beside Sandy. Even though I was only about thirty yards away, I would long for them and drink myself to sleep.

  Those weeks spent getting sober, I realized that I would do anything to be back with my family. I wanted to be a dad. I wanted to smell my children’s necks after their baths and listen to their breathing as they fell asleep. I wanted to be there when they woke up in the morning. I would find my way through any storm and manoeuvre around all obstacles to be with them.

  And then one day Sandy called me in rehab. She was crying and screaming at the same time. “You have to get these women out of this house.” A few days before, there had been a vicious argument. Sandy had gone down to Bunny and Janie, looking for support, hoping for love, and instead the two of them had ganged up on her. They accused her of having an affair with a professor friend who, it turned out, was a woman in a wheelchair. They blamed her for what had happened to her marriage and offered her nothing in the way of sympathy.

  Sandy was no pushover, especially when she was cornered, so she fought back and left teeth marks in their flesh. “When are you going start telling the truth around here?” she yelled.

  “What do you mean?” Janie asked.

  Face to face with Janie, Sandy said, “Where Tom comes from?” Words set free in the room like a bird of prey spreading its wings and coming at them to pluck out their eyes. Bunny sat silent, but Janie lunged at Sandy and yelled back, “That will go to the grave!”

  I tried hard to focus on what Sandy was saying. Communication had come to a halt. Bunny and Janie had called in a locksmith. Gone was the kids’ access to Bunny’s breakfast table. Gone were their visits down to Grandma’s. Sandy could feel the house coming apart as the seams ripped a little bit more every night, until the ceiling opened up above her bed and she could see the clouds moving across the winter sky as she lay there, silent, wide awake.

  Sandy told me to get Bunny and Janie out of our house, and I picked up a pay phone in the hallway of the rehab centre and made the call. “Mom…things are out of hand. You and Janie are going to have to find someplace else to live.”

  “Okay,” Bunny said. That’s how simple it was. That’s how easily Bunny accepted the situation. Her son was kicking her out of his house and her only response was an agreeable, “Okay.”

  Nothing was making any sense to me. I had just done something that would haunt me for the rest of my life, and the incident was completely without any immediate consequence. I was standing at ground zero without even a hair blown out of place. The only thing that was important to Bunny and Janie was preserving the lie, getting back to the place where everything was normal. The moment just passed, and I imagine now that they set everything back to square one without missing a beat.

  In that house on Stanley Avenue, Bunny and Janie had had space enough for a new dining room set and a cabinet full of china dishes, tea cups and silverware. The two of them saved hard for this fancy setup and I remember them once calling me downstairs to show me how beautiful it all was. They dressed up in their best clothes and set the table full of dishes for what looked like an imaginary formal dinner. When I looked up from the table setting, they were smiling from ear to ear, bursting with pride. They looked so beautiful and so fragile.

  I arrived home from rehab and Sandy told me I’d have to live on the first floor if I was going to stay in the house. She went upstairs and I opened the door to what had been Bunny and Janie’s home. It had been emptied out, and the room where they kept their fancy dishes and dining room set was barren. They’d sold it all off to antique dealers on Locke Street for the quick cash needed to set up in an apartment over on Charlton Avenue. I sat on the floor of the deserted room and cried. We were a few weeks into the new millennium, but inside our house time hardly moved at all. It just limped through the dark hallways and staircases. Ghosts came in from the cold—memories, flashes of old parties, holiday celebrations, hopes, dreams and all that jazz that keeps us living and dying with open or broken hearts.

  PLAYING SOBER

  When I finally got the bottle out of my hand and the drugs out of my system, I walked around like it was my first day on earth. Sobriety was like learning to walk and talk again.

  All my distractions had lost their meaning. They were still out there, still burning bright and trying to get my attention, but I was looking in the other direction. The places I used to go seemed low-definition, dim, flat and depressing. The bars I passed reminded me of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. I loved that painting but there was no distant, time-travel romance in the bars around Hess Village. They all looked lonely. Holding myself together was not easy, but I kept myself on course.

  The first time I was on stage after sobering up was at the Calgary Folk Festival. My manager, Allen Moy, was taking the proper precautions on my behalf. He knew I was vulnerable. He knew and I knew that I was twenty-five years into performing stoned or drunk, and the temptation was going to be turned up to ten. So he put me on a flight that landed two hours before I was due on stage, then had a limo drive me directly behind the stage, where I had little chance of wandering off into a minefield of fans and fast friends. The limo waited behind the stage until the show was over, I walked off, got back in, was taken directly to the airport and flown home.

  I remember we were playing as a trio, just Stephen, Colin and me. No drums, no bass. It was a hot late afternoon, and the lawn in front of the stage was looking about seven thousand strong. I felt good—no nerves, no butterflies. I sat in the dressing room tuning up, then I put on my suit and walked out on stage with Colin and Stephen.

  We hit the top of Fred Eaglesmith’s “49 Tons” like a plane taking off. Completely united. Then we played “Lean on Your Peers,” “Red Dress” and “Patience of a Working Man.” It felt great. I felt great.

  Light and easy and in the groove. In fact, I felt better than I could ever remember feeling playing music. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but like a flash, it hit me: I was sober. I was on stage sober for the first time in my life, and I was in heaven. I sang in pitch and my rhythm was better than ever. I never wanted to play music any other way.

  This was it. I had arrived. I was so attached to the music, every note. Life is going to be so much easier now, I thought on the way back to the airport. We survive, and with those skills, and in that survival, we create art.

  DEATH OF A WARRIOR—TWO

  I put the spirit of Bunny into everything I did. She was everywhere. She was in my art, my day-to-day life. Her brutal and inappropriate observations and her irreverent, rebel attitude stood beside me, guiding me through a world of bullshit. But most especially she was in my relationships. Growing up on East 36th Street I became aware of Diana Belfor, a young woman who was dating two or three boys at the same time. Bunny was aware of her too. She would watch Diana Belfor walk home with different dates each night, and she remarked to me at the timely age of seven or eight that Diana’s “legs were pleasure bent from opening them too much for the neighbourhood boys.” This has an effect on a young boy. Bunny always said if I decided to get married, I should keep a couple of women on the side. Advice I took to heart that turned out not to serve me well.<
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  Sandy and I had a connection and we never really stopped loving each other, like we loved our kids, but in all the wreckage we couldn’t put our relationship back together. When we split up for good in 2002, I missed the warmth of the family life we had once had together. I was separated from it, as if it was trapped inside a snow globe. But through our children we stayed intimately connected. We formed a secret society—Madeline, Thompson, Sandy and me—and somehow there happened always to be a dog in the room with us too. We worked yearly, monthly, weekly to keep the club together.

  It was July 8, 2010. I was heading over to Sandy’s house for Thompson’s birthday party. I’d voiced a commercial in Toronto for Pontiac that afternoon. I had bought Thompson a bike and had arranged for it to be ready for pickup when I got off the GO bus from Toronto on Main Street West by McMaster. I walked over to the bike shop in Westdale and rode the bike across town. Instead of taking on the busy streets and the hazardous off-ramps from the 403, I decided to glide down the hill at Longwood and tool along the Desjardins Recreational Trail, a wooden walkway that joined stylish Westdale with the old-world, blue-collar North End.

  I called the trail “the porthole” because the first time I walked it back in the nineties, I noticed that somewhere in the middle, two levels of society, rarely seen together, met. Coming from the west you’d see white-bread, neon-coloured, Lycra-clad, headphoned, pinched-nosed joggers and cyclists speeding head-on into black-clad Italian and Portuguese widows, biker chicks being dragged along by pit bulls and guys riding old ten-speeds with cases of beer on the handlebars.

  As I arrived at Sandy’s, I received a call from Janie. She was at St. Olga’s retirement home. Bunny was dying, I should come quickly if I wanted to see her before she went. I paid heed; this, at least, was not a mistake I would make twice.