Savage

by Nathaniel G. Moore

  Mom snapped down the stairs, "Is Sadie in your room?"

  "Maybe she went to the store," I mumbled, coming up the stairs.

  The phone rang. I walked past it to the main-floor bathroom.

  "When?" I heard Mom ask someone. I was in the bathroom now. It was super early; no one called us this early.

  "Well, thank you, yes, we’ll call later on, then," she said, hanging up on whomever.

  I brushed my teeth. When I stopped running the taps, I could hear Mom sobbing and Dad’s distinct treble bouncing in every few seconds. Her nasal ignition turned on and began its familiar gunning sound, water works, bright red.

  "Just now, I have to phone Unc," she said.

  I walked into the hallway.

  "Grammy died this morning," Mom said, her steps slow, looking to the ground, hands wringing, eyes watering, breathing hard.

  "When?"

  "Just about an hour ago."

  A growing abject itinerary followed, which I found curious. My stomach ached with each commandment Dad began to unleash. I got a drink of water from the kitchen, trying to drown out his rant in the process.

  "I’d better call Holly," Mom said, biting her nail.

  I was amazed by my father’s insistence: once he found out about the death and that the cadaver was cold, he went into funeral-planning mode, as if his mother-in-law’s death was a scenario drawn from the night-school course material he had been reviewing. He repeated himself, determined that I be one of the pallbearers at the funeral, which by all accounts was now scheduled for sometime next week.

  "Hell, no!" I said. "I’m not carrying my dead grandmother’s coffin!"

  "What did you say?" Dad asked.

  "No! It’s too weird." I turned the tap on fiercely, watching the stream blast the mustard and ketchup from the plate. The thought of carrying her coffin was grotesque.

  "You have to or else we have to pay someone," Dad said.

  I poked my head into the living room. Dad raised his eyes to catch my face.

  "Then pay someone."

  "If he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t have to," Mom said. "There’s still time to think about it, all right?"

  Dad stewed on the couch in obvious distress and agitation.

  "You don’t deserve to go to the funeral," Dad snickered.

  "Fuck you," I said. "You’re not even related to her!"

  "Just calm down," Mom said.

  I ran to my room, pulled my bed across my door frame and got dressed for school. I felt tears in my eyes, swelling. I didn’t know why I was crying, whether it was anger or fear or sadness or everything swirling in a threaded heap of brutal annoyance lodging itself miserably in my throat. I turned my electric heater off, closed my window and turned off the stereo.

  I drew a sketch of my father’s severed head boiling in a big translucent witch pot, then a caption: "LOOK SON, IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT THAT I DIDN’T GET A JOB AT A FUNERAL HOME BUT AT AN ICE-CREAM PLANT. THEN I’D BE LECTURING YOU ON HOW TO EAT ICE CREAM, TELLING YOU THE RATE AT WHICH IT MELTS, THE TYPE OF CAKE TO SERVE WITH IT, HOVERING OVER YOU AS YOU ENJOYED DESSERT. BUT I WORK AT A FUNERAL HOME NOW AND KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT THE DEAD AND SO EVERYONE IN THIS HOUSE MUST ABIDE BY MY CENSUS-CANADA INSIGHT. REMEMBER WHEN I FILLED OUT THOSE FORMS FOR US WITHOUT ASKING YOU GUYS ANYTHING? SAME DEAL! I AM THE OGRE! WASH MY DISHES!"

  *

  I hit REC on the camcorder and in a retro outfit a little tight and binding from my fall 1987 collection (Polo Ralph Lauren plaid dress shirt, tapered pants and a T-shirt) recorded the following video diary entry in fuzzy low-lit headshot, interview style:

  This year no one is going to stop Nate Savage, no way, no how, dig it, yeah! Death by Squash? Hell no, I will squash squash Andrew! It took two of you to destroy me; you and Alex may be best buddies now, driving around eating sandwiches at all hours of the night talking squash and hogwash while I sit here waiting for a title shot, yeah! Well, go to the woods of your world, Andrew Beverly, yeah, and take your buddy Alex with you and slice open his heart and let him slice open yours, and you shall see there will be no blood flow, because from black hearts, no blood can flow! Dig it? And with no blood flow, no bond can form!

  [PAUSE.]

  "Nate, your inserts are here!" Mom bellowed from the kitchen. Assembly usually took close to an hour, and depending on the weather, I would place a garbage bag over my papers inside the buggy to prevent them from getting soaked.

  On these early morning paper-route missions that spanned sixteen blocks, I would pass Andrew’s house, imagining him asleep, then waking up, eating breakfast and then being filled with the desire to call me, see what I was doing for the rest of the day. Maybe a movie … a game of street hockey. I left Andrew a note on his car windshield and would follow this gesture up with a phone call.

  After my papers were delivered, I jumped back into my bed to warm up, clutching my faded blue comforter, bunching it up towards me. I could hear my parents speaking some mysterious words, words slackened in coffee and toast as they prepared for church. I took refuge in this crack in time, inhabiting the morning sun, listening to them work in the house with tread and routine.

  Late in the afternoon that Sunday, I found Andrew at home, apathetic over the phone. I squirmed on my end, unable to speak, and then suddenly needing to say anything, the simplest arrangements of words.

  "I just wanted to hang out," I said.

  "What’s with the note? It’s like you’re acting like I broke up with you or something."

  "No, it’s just," I said. "It’s just—"

  "There were tear marks on it!" Andrew laughed, a scalded brief laugh, followed by a short sigh.

  "No, it was the rain," I said, nervous and aching.

  "Didn’t rain today," Andrew said.

  "How’d you know? It was like seven in the morning."

  "Yeah, right."

  11 )

  Ceremony

  Thursday, December 10th, 1992

  Grammy’s funeral was on a cold Thursday afternoon. She had died the previous Monday on the seventh at the age of seventy-five.15

  15. “Having grandsons seemed to be one of the happiest times of her life, but her health didn’t give her the energy she needed. Thanks for remembering.” Note from Mom, December 2012.

  It was a bright afternoon when I began the twenty-minute snow stomp from school to Beverly Funeral Home, where Dad had, of course, arranged for Grammy’s funeral to take place.

  Andrew’s dad greeted me at the door, offering me his condolences. Dad was somewhere behind the scenes, acting out his dutiful destiny. I spotted Mom and Holly and sat beside them.

  After the service, Mom served pie and coffee at our house, telling me, "Grammy’s having a good laugh with this weather," pointing to the blizzard that had cropped up. I wasn’t exactly sure how her funeral and the blizzard were related.

  While Grammy’s death was not a massive shock to anyone, her departure represented a larger significance for sure. I was down one ally, one less person who could sympathize with me or even understand me. After her funeral, we all sat around the living room. I urged everyone to watch the last known footage of Grammy, at which Uncle Carl waved me away, suggesting it wasn’t the time. That was it: she was gone. The streets outside were empty. The snow billowed down, and it was cold in the house. The hot gauze of pink from the living-room decor filled my head, as did the foreign perfumes minced with coffee and tea. I kept staring through the slight gap in the front curtain, across the street to the large maple tree’s voluminous branches swaying in the wind and snow.

  Since her death, whenever I pass those plump red geraniums at a grocery store or in someone’s garden, I travel back to the 35mm footage from the late 1970s, and me in my glasses and gay cheeks, my Eskimo hood, running across the street in the minus-eleven December weather, and Uncle Carl lending me the camera to film him getting some more film from his car. Action sequence! Eating Chinese food: the foil plates and turtlenecks and cheeks filled with rice and chicken balls. Thes
e were silent films, lost dialogues from ancient history.

  The geraniums were inside Grammy and Grampy’s incubator of an apartment, all year long. Those thick petals, dropping leper-like. That apartment was the land of glossy salmon-coloured hallways, TV dinners and second-hand smoke, blueberry jelly with toast in the morning and Hee-Haw every Saturday evening (a terrible country and western sketch comedy and music show), which was on at the same time as CHCH’s WWF Maple Leaf Wrestling. I would have to flip back and forth pushing the light-brown buttons of the channel changing box, much to the chagrin of my grandparents, who needed their country and western comedic fix.

  As the guests left our small gathering of family and friends, Dad carried out his final act. True to his new calling as chief administrator of death and ghouls, Dad went over to our United Church minister, Julia Thomas, and tried to give her a hundred dollars for doing the service. She awkwardly refused.

  1992 and all its roller-coaster anxieties with Andrew and Dad was almost over. On my way to school one frozen day, I couldn’t help but get lost for a second or two in the faces of the garbagemen, about a week before Christmas break. I just stood there, mouth agape. They asked me what was going on, but I remained silent.

  I felt eerie and a bit dead too, as if Grammy’s death was a partial passport into my own sense of … whatever. The garbagemen resembled a cut of brutal roast beef, a tough end, peering from behind a film of morning fog. As I walked south of Sutherland, approaching Broadway, I thought I saw Andrew—just a fleck of pink face peeling by in his silver Camaro through it all, the sun now golden, having chased the depraved and odd fog away as his car glistened pristine and rapid, heading west, shrinking as it zoomed towards Hanna Road.

  I had reached this stretch of cement a thousand dull times without meaning. Grammy was dead. The Mega Powers were finished. High school would be over in seven months.

  Friday, December 25th–Thursday, December 31st, 1992

  I filmed all of us on Christmas morning, on which the housecoat-wearing trio of Holly, Mom and Dad opened gifts, slurped coffee, scratched and yawned. The lamp in the corner, sitting on a table, created a halo of lighting concerns when I would eventually play the video back. Holly can be heard grumbling about wearing a paper bag over her head, and on two occasions, gave the camera the finger.

  The hour-long "Christmas Morning 1992" clip ended with Dad coughing, followed by his hand slamming against the coffee table, Mom handing him an orange and Holly throwing a ball of wrapping paper at the camera.

  Videotapes filled with housebound surveillance were now a commonplace time-filling activity, their production growing in frequency since Andrew and I had dissolved our friendship via video tribute in the fall. I found myself consulting the lens on a daily basis before going to bed, the time of the recordings was usually just before midnight.

  On New Year’s Eve, I was watching television when my parents returned home from an errand around nine o’clock. My father said, "Oh, look: Nate’s home." I took it as a jab to my global unpopularity and began to cry, retiring in depressive sobs to my room.

  As midnight approached, I set up the video camera in the obscenely pink living room and filmed myself jumping up and down with joy that 1992 was over. Downstairs in my room, I continued my broadcast, vowing that I would not let anyone hurt me in 1993.16

  16. In February 1993, I saw a psychiatrist at Sunnybrook, who asked me if I was attracted to girls and if I had fantasies. I remember him being very hairy and aggressive in nature. In April, atWrestlemania IX, Hulk Hogan returned and won his fifth WWF title. Randy Savage was there but didn’t wrestle. In June, I bought an army jacket and had “Vengeance is Mine, Romans 12:19” silkscreened large on the back. When I was picking up the order, a middle-aged man said, “You know, there’s a meaning to that.” I also had a shirt made with a biblical font that read “Death By Squash.” I ignored Andrew, save for my yearbook write-up in which I referenced the death of the Mega Powers 1987– 1992. My caption began with “left to the wolves” and only got more emotional from there. No one seemed to notice. I graduated from Leaside with little fanfare, spent the summer arguing about school, stayed at friends for weeks on end and finally got into Glendon College, taking a full course load. In October, I attended commencement and got my diploma. I wore white Doc Marten dress shoes, a pinstriped suit and had dyed my hair insanely blonde.

  12 )

  Fine Time

  January 1994

  "Nate, if you would like, you can work wi—Dad’s staccato coughing like thunder in a paper bag interrupted his speech flow and the sentence’s subsequent recovery—with me Sunday. It pays seventy-five dollars, I believe, about two-and-a-half hours of work," he said with his mouth full, eating a toasted sandwich. "Two o’clock."

  "I guess," I said.

  "They need another pallbearer," Dad said, making a series of little vocal pulses that just skimmed across our nearly fifteen-year-old sand-coloured broadloom.

  "You may borrow my overcoat," he told me. "I have an extra tie."

  On Sunday morning, I filmed myself getting dressed for the pallbearer gig. I was still recording a low-grumbled VHS diary entry. Low grumbled only because I didn’t want anyone to hear what I was talking about on video, or because I usually would record late at night as I had perpetual insomnia.

  Dad pulled into the parking lot, the familiar signage "Beverly Funeral Home" in white letters, permanent and regal, greeting my gaze from the passenger’s seat. The building’s grey brick and shutters were painted the same colour as parts of Andrew’s house. It was emblazoned in my psyche, nudging me with familiar warmth.

  When I walked into the funeral home, I immediately saw Andrew. Andrew was working too. I had no idea he would be there, and I must have looked as shocked as he did when he saw me walk in with Dad.

  We didn’t say a word to each other. I hadn’t talked to him in over a year. I thought: We were doing a job; this was professional, and this wasn’t personal. I was being paid and so was he; this will be over and no one will remember a thing—but all I could feel was my giant red heart accelerating as if a lead foot was pressing down on it and I was aware, now, that something else controlled all. That it was never ever me.

  I can’t speak for Andrew, but I was consumed with a huge raw discomfort as we got into the car, as we lifted the casket from the service room to the hearse, as we nodded hello to the priest, as we took instruction from our director, as we moved slow and somber from the car to the gravesite and then back.

  As we approached Laird Drive, I asked to be let off; no sense in traveling all the way back to the funeral home, which was on Mount Pleasant, another fifteen minutes east.

  "I can get out here," I said, and was pleased when the driver slowed down for me, happy not to be going back with the rest of Team Death.

  "I’ll see you at home," Dad said. And I got out of the car and walked from the red-light intersection on the northeast corner of Laird and Eglinton, where Andrew and I had bought a thousand freezies, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and half-litres of chocolate milk to amplify our foul nights of teenage excess.

  When the cheque from Beverly Funeral Home came two weeks later, I photocopied it before cashing it, feeling smug, glad that I’d been paid for a portion of our time spent together.

  13 )

  Ruined in a Day

  Sunday, February 6th, 1994

  Outside, the gusty winter blustered away, and I knew it would soak my pant cuffs and add to my torment. We were going to visit Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Tom in Kingston for dinner. Grandmother and Grandfather were also going to be there. I opted to wear double socks in my clumpy, overheated boots. Mom had packed us both snacks. A riot of colours lay blurred in the twisted plastic-bag cocoon.

  "Share these with your father," Mom said. "I need to lie down, and this cold is killing me."

  "Just take it easy; don’t throw out my room," I said, adding, "I’m serious."

  Mom had this consistent habit of throwing things out of my
room in sporadic bouts of amnesia or some weird game in which I had to guess which memento she had sacrificed to indifference.

  Don’t throw out my room was my latest jingle in a series of catch phrases designed as a type of mutiny against the unauthorized purging of things in my bedroom: some minor object or trinket would invariably go missing, snatched up into a an ethereal nothing and now floating in the home in sad purgatory.

  We17 drove in silence with sparse radio traffic reports and one coffee stop. "What time are we supposed to be there?"

  17. Dad and I were the only ones willing to go that weekend, when at the 11th hour, my mother got the flu, and of course my sister Holly was studying for exams. (Even though we were about ten minutes from her campus in Kingston, she insisted she couldn’t spare the time away from “cramming.”)

  "Half past five," Dad said.

  Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Tom’s house was blanketed in predictable snow, resembling a structure you’d see in a sketch on a gift-shop greeting card. The snow had subsided and for the first time that day, the sun emerged bright and real.

  Dinner was still a few minutes away, my Aunt Rebecca18 informed us. It was our first time at her new house, which was located in a remote wilderness, miles from the highway in Kingston.

  18. My Aunt Rebecca was the second eldest child next to Dad. She had ears that stuck out like his and mine but had surgery in the early 1980s to pin them back. She married Tom, an architect who enjoyed acting like the useless husband who couldn’t get anything right, always laughing at his own domestic shortcomings, whether it was making coffee, setting the table or hanging guests coats. Tom loved to fail and get a rise out of my Aunt. It was their thing. Rebecca had been a nurse for twenty-five years and was now only taking sporadic shifts at the main hospital in Kingston. Though not as religious as her father, or Dad, Rebecca did possess an amazing ability to give sermons on just about any topic. You didn’t even have to know the person to visualize their shortcomings. Her succinct sound bites and re-enactments were completely believable, be it something stupid Tom did with his sailboat or a fabulous recipe she had improved on and impressed a room full of boating enthusiasts with one summer afternoon.