Call Me Russell

by Russell Peters

  “I’m in paradise.” He kept repeating that in the dream: “I’m in paradise.” Great, I’m thinking to myself in the dream, Dad’s died … and become a Muslim.

  Since that time, I have never dreamt about my father again. Never. It was as if, after five months of mourning, he was putting me out of my own torment. He was saying, “Look, I’m okay. I’m still there for you. I know what you’re doing.” It kind of pissed me off, because I wanted to dream about him again. I don’t see him anymore in dreams, and it really bothers me that I don’t. It’s been years, and I would really like to have just one dream about him so he could let me know he’s still there.

  I talked to a family friend, Bob Houston, about these dreams. Bob was a very good friend of Dad’s and also happens to be a dream analyst. He’s someone Dad always really looked up to. They’d go drinking together on occasion and Bob, a great sports and boxing fan, used to love watching fights with Dad. He was gutted when Dad died.

  So I asked Bob about the Tucker’s dream, and right away, he asked me, “What was your dad wearing in the dream?” I said he was wearing light-coloured clothing, very light-coloured clothing. “Good,” Bob said. “That’s very good.” Apparently, the darker the clothing, the more the spirit is in limbo, whereas light clothing suggests the soul has arrived. This sounds pretty trippy, I know, but I can’t tell you how good it was to hear this. My dad’s not a lost soul. He’s out there in Tucker’s Marketplace paradise, and he’s doing just fine.

  I’VE GOT ONE BROTHER, just one: Clayton. It feels really strange to even refer to him as Clayton because I never, ever call him by his name and he never calls me by mine. There’s something about using our actual names that sounds disrespectful. Dad’s nickname for me was Cunchi-pops. It’s a made-up name, and I don’t even know where it came from. It was originally Mom’s nickname for Dad. Mom ended up using Cunchi-pops to refer to both Dad and myself. Dad also called me Susu Pot, which basically means pisspot. I just called Dad “Dad” or Pops—or, if I was feeling dangerous, Eric. But whenever I called him by his actual name, he’d just growl back at me, “Hmmm …” Dad just called Mom “Mom” and by her name, Maureen, but he seemed to place the emphasis on the “Mo” part. It sounded more like “Mo-reen.”

  My dad’s nickname for my brother was Walker. Dad originally wanted to call my brother Clint, after the ’60s cowboy actor Clint Walker. Clint Walker was apparently over six feet tall, and Dad thought my brother was never going to be that tall, so he decided to go with Clayton instead. This name change didn’t stop him from referring to my brother as Walker for the rest of his life. He also called him Wapiti, after the elk—I think he just liked the sound of the word Wapiti and the alliteration with Walker.

  These days, I call my brother Brother or Toots or Teets—and he calls me the same things. Toots and Teets come from the George Carlin bit “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” from his Class Clown album. The other part of this bit that we appropriated is Tater Tits, or just plain Tits. That’s right, sometimes I call my brother Tits. Occasionally, I even call him Tits McGee, from Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

  Before all of the “Teeting,” we called each other Gay, as in “Hey Gay, what are you doing?” Now, using gay like this doesn’t mean we’re homosexuals or even homophobic—nothing could be further from the truth. It’s just one of those dumb things that you start out saying and it sticks. Sometimes, even now, we’ll be in a store or something, and my brother will be trying to get my attention, and he’ll yell out, “Hey Gay! Look at this!” Obviously, we feel like idiots when we suddenly realize there are other people around. But somehow, you can’t stop a nickname once it starts.

  My earliest memories of my brother are of him giving me baths when I was three or four years old—how’s that for “gay”? Because he was six years older than me, and both of us were latchkey kids, Brother was responsible for making sure that I was okay from the time he was about ten years old. I remember that, even back then, he was always doing things to make me laugh. In the bathtub, he would cover my head and face with bubbles and make me look like a dog with foamy ears; I would laugh hysterically at just about everything he did.

  When I was in senior kindergarten, my brother would take me to and from school every day. We used to cross the “creek” behind the greenbelt and townhouses where we lived—it was actually a storm drain overflow—and the trick was to run down the banks of the creek (it wasn’t very wide) and leap across to the other side. Some days it would rain and the creek would become impassable, but at this time, it wasn’t a heavy flow. My brother made me go first, and I made it to the other side. Then I was waiting for my brother to cross, and I don’t know what happened next, but suddenly he slipped and ended up on his ass, backwards in the creek, completely sprawled out—spread-eagled and everything. I was killing myself laughing. It was like Lee Majors in The Fall Guy. This is my first recollection of me laughing my ass off. To this day, the memory still makes me laugh. My brother wasn’t hurt, but I was sure he was going to get mad at me for laughing. He didn’t, though. He was cool about it.

  When I was young, I idolized Brother. He seemed to have it all under control. He was always reading and would sometimes sit at the table and draw. I was blown away by what he put on the page. I always thought to myself, Wow, I can’t draw at all, and here’s my brother, with all this talent. When he was fourteen and fifteen, he knew cool, older black guys with these huge Afros, guys who introduced him to funk—stuff like “One Nation Under a Groove” by Funkadelic and “Ready or Not” by Herbie Hancock. At the time, these songs were meaningless to me, but years later I would realize what important classics they were. Music really seemed to be the thing that connected Brother to people he knew—which I guess is true for a lot of kids in their teens.

  In his later teens, my brother suddenly became Joe Popular. As a kid, I was blown away by all the friends he had, from all backgrounds. At one point, he was hanging out with this guy Marco, who had this huge ’74 Monte Carlo. He’d pull up at the house to pick up my brother and there’d be like two or three girls in the back of the car. It looked awesome to me! Remember that I was this super-skinny, small kid who was only eleven or twelve at this time. Brother was eighteen and had been lifting weights for a while, and in keeping with the fashion of the time, when Flashdance was big, he’d cut off the sleeves and collars of his sweatshirts, showing off what seemed to me, a gangly twelve-year-old, like enormously huge arms.

  A six-year age difference in your teens seems like a lifetime. We didn’t hang out together or share friends—all he was interested in was hanging out with his friends and, of course, chasing chicks, and I was just some little kid. He really didn’t want me underfoot, and I was an annoying pain in the ass. However, he was the quintessential big brother, leading the way and looking out for little Russell who was growing up behind him.

  Unlike other sibling relationships I’ve seen, ours was pretty steady, perhaps because of the age difference between us. When I was in grade school, Brother always had my back, and that remains true to this day. During the years when I would get beat up all the time, I would sometimes run home right before a bully got to me. Before leaving, I’d issue my big threat: “If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to tell my brother!” My brother was bigger than anyone at school, so this usually worked quite well. And apart from being a big kid physically, Brother had this way of walking that deterred anyone from taking him on—much like my dad. If somebody so much as tried, all he’d have to do was grab the little punk by the shirt collar and give him a warning, and the trouble would be over. I saw him rise to my defence on more than one occasion, and it did wonders in making me feel better and safer.

  If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to tell my brother!”

  When I was going to Chinguacousy Secondary School in Brampton, there were these two Italian guys who were giving me a hard time, so I told my brother about them. The next day, he showed up at the school and stood outside the gu
ys’ classroom, waiting for them to leave. They recognized my brother because he was friends with their brothers back in the day. He told them I was his little brother and that nobody should be bothering me, especially not them. They were always very respectful after that.

  Me, and my brother looking like a retarded Lou Ferrigno.

  Brother is an intelligent guy, always has been, and because of that, he’s hardly ever been in a physical altercation in his life. Like my dad, he’s got an incredible power with words, and most of the time, that’s all you need. Admittedly, Brother and I argued on a few occasions. But there’s one argument that grew into a full-blown fight. I was fifteen at the time, and Brother did something that made me furious. Interestingly, I now have no recollection about what it is that he did. Anyhow, typical of me at the time, I lost it. I ended up yelling and grabbing a hammer, which I flung at him. Fortunately, he’s pretty good on his feet, and he ducked fast, resulting in the hammer striking the wall and leaving a rather noticeable hole. As soon as I did it, I thought to myself, Aw, what the hell did I do that for? But it was too late. I’d done it. Our argument was pretty much over at that point, because I had to high-tail it out of the house before my dad saw the gaping hole. To this day, I still don’t even know what made me so angry that I reacted like that. I still feel a little remorse, but as it turns out, my brother doesn’t even remember this incident. Anyhow, you can’t let that kind of thing fester when you’ve only got one brother in the whole world. My dad used to tell us, “After our balls close, it’s just going to be the two of you. You have to look after each other.” He was talking about eyeballs, by the way …

  I lost it. I ended up yelling and grabbing a hammer, which I flung at him.

  During my teen years, there were some ups and downs, the usual big-brother-to-little-brother stuff—“Turn that music down!” “Tell your friends not to park in the driveway!”—but things changed in the summer of 1989. Our whole family had gone to England for an Anglo-Indian reunion, a get-together of AI’s from all over the world. This was the first one ever held. My whole family was staying at Uncle Ron and Aunty Val’s house in South Harrow. There were so many of us that my mom and dad were staying in my cousins Darren and Charlene’s room, while they in turn were sleeping on the floor of their parents’ room. My brother and I slept on the foldout couch in the family room.

  Late one night, my brother and I were listening to this London radio station. They were playing some really wicked music—a lot of it house music, which I was just starting to get into (since my brother was always playing it at home). We were lying there listening, and suddenly this song came on that didn’t sound like anything we’d heard before—ambient, mellow, smooth, with a synthesized sax sound and great highs and percussion. It was “Pacific State” by 808 State. This was the first song that we really bonded to. We both loved it, and it was kind of like I was leaving behind a certain amount of rebelliousness against my brother and our worlds were starting to come together again.

  Music is really important to me, just as it was to my parents. In the late ’70s, my brother used to babysit me on Saturday nights if our parents went out. He’d listen to disco and funk on WBLK out of Buffalo. I pretended wasn’t really into all that—“More Bounce to the Ounce” by Zapp, “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” by Vaughan Mason & Crew, “Christmas Rappin’” by Curtis Blow. Around that time and into the early ’80s, I started getting into Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. I was already into KISS, since ’77. In 1979, when Mom and I returned from a trip to India, my dad and brother met us at the airport. Brother was all excited because he had bought the twelve-inch single of “I Was Made for Loving You” by KISS (their “disco” song), and he knew how much I loved them. He was now part of a DJ crew called Musique. He started playing mixed tapes at around this time, and I’d yell out to him, “Turn that disco shit off!” Truth be told, I actually liked funk and disco, but didn’t want him to know. In 1981, my brother started getting into New Wave—bands like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Haircut 100. They all sounded a bit disco-y, but they were all made up of white guys from England. I dug in my heels. I remember asking him, “What? Now you’re turning into a white boy?” I was a total hypocrite: I was listening to KISS and other all-white rock bands—not exactly world music.

  Yes, this is me.

  Anyhow, on that summer night in London, ten years after he played the KISS twelve-inch for me, something clicked between us. For the rest of the trip, we searched for an 808 State album and kept an eye out for the video for “Pacific State.” It was an important milestone for both of us.

  Around 2000, my brother and I decided—at the tender ages of thirty and thirty-six—to move out. We bought a townhouse together on Piazza Crescent in Woodbridge. My brother found the place while I was away at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. Initially we were going to buy it through a rent-to-own program, but Dad didn’t feel comfortable with that. He thought that paying more than $200,000 for a town-house was crazy. “There are much cheaper ones here in Brampton!” Even so, he helped us out with the down payment. My brother put down the bulk of it and I was mostly responsible for making sure that I put enough into the “house account” we set up to cover the monthly mortgage and utility payments. It was a dope little townhouse—still is. We moved in in January 2001, and then my brother took off on me seven years later ’cause he fell in loooooove with my awesome now-sister-in-law, Emma (or Ellie May or “Sisters,” as I call her).

  Brother changed jobs that year to what he thought would be one with better long-term opportunities, as an international contracts manager for an oil and gas pipeline company in Rexdale. There was only one problem: He hated it. He realized it wasn’t for him when, at the company sales and marketing meeting, held about four weeks after he started, the guys he worked with told him about their initiation program. He was supposed to wear a beanie with a propeller on it for the entire week of the sales meeting. This might be okay for a bunch of engineering-school frat boys, but that’s not my brother. Like my dad, he believes in dignity and self-respect. When he told them he wouldn’t do it, he effectively became an outcast. He hated every minute of the four years he spent working there.

  Me holding my umbrella and trying to keep my pants up (what did you think I was doing??), my sister-in-law, Emma, and my brother on their wedding day.

  I was flat broke and barely making house payments, my brother was working a job he hated, and then my father was diagnosed with a form of skin cancer.

  It was 2002 at this point, I was flat broke and barely making house payments, my brother was working a job he hated, and then my father was diagnosed with a form of skin cancer, mycosis fungoides. Dad was pissed. “All this time and this is what gets me?!” He was determined to fight, and we came together as a family to help him do that.

  It was an awful time. Dad was such a proud man, and the diagnosis hit him hard for lots of reasons. Even before he was diagnosed, he knew something was wrong. He would describe this itch just below his skin, an itch he’d never be quite able to scratch. He’d rub lotion on his arms to help soothe the sensation, but the itching never went away. Later, when the disease progressed, he became obsessed with his skin and how it would flake off. I think he felt like he was losing pieces of himself, and for a man like my father, someone who had an extra awareness of his skin and its colour, this disease offered another layer of cruelty.

  Going into 2003, doctors advised Dad to get a special type of blood treatment that was being done in Philadelphia. The treatment was being paid for by OHIP (the Ontario Health Insurance Plan), but the travel and hotel weren’t. For a while, Brother and I were financing Mom and Dad’s six-hundred-dollar flights to the hospital in the States, which was a huge amount for both of us, as it is for most people. At the same time that this was happening, I was going to shoot an independent film in the States. We would start in January, and the shoot would last three months. I cleared out my schedule of live shows, cancelled any gigs and didn’t book any new on
es until the movie was supposed to be completed. I was going to get paid what was good money at the time—fifteen grand. I’d even turned down hosting The Toronto Show, a talk-variety TV program on the fledgling Toronto 1 channel, to do the movie. Suddenly, just before we were supposed to start shooting in New Jersey, there was a problem with the film’s financing and it was going to be delayed for three months. I scrambled to take on any gigs that I could, just so I could pay for my car, my share of the mortgage and, if possible, help Mom and Dad with their travel. Three months came and went, and the shoot was again delayed three months. Again, a mad scramble to pick up any gigs that I could. I was taking it in the hoop financially and was making very little money.

  Ultimately, the movie never happened. It took me nine months to figure that out. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I had just enough to make car payments, and barely enough for my share of the mortgage. We got behind on our property taxes and even had our gas turned off once. My brother was doing the best he could, but it took a lot to cover one household, let alone help out Mom and Dad at the same time. When we could no longer afford to fly my parents to Philadelphia, we resorted to driving them back and forth—desperate road trips with the singular goal of continuing Dad’s treatment. The trip was nine or ten hours each way, and nobody in that car complained.

  Well, that’s not actually true. After eight or nine hours of driving, Dad would start to get very antsy. This was spring, and the clocks hadn’t sprung ahead yet, so it was still dark early in the evening, and as the sun set and the darkness came down, Dad’s mood would shift. We’d be somewhere on the interstate in Pennsylvania, still a ways from Philly, and Dad would become increasingly frustrated that we all had to go through this.