After the cold snakes of scarves and hats, coughs and galoshes were removed, I detected the bright, harsh tones of my aunt’s middle-of-nowhere country home. The hallway walls were filled up with family photographs. They might as well have been portraits of aliens, I had no idea who most of these people were.
The dining room table was set, all crisp and angelic, long and empty awaiting clutter and population. In the living room, my grandparents were sitting on a couch. A small bevy of snacks had been put out. The way Dad said "veggies" drove me nuts, I found it degrading to them somehow. The house was filling with gravy scents, high-octane red wines and the pithy scent of cranberry sauce minced alchemic with my ghastly cologne, borrowed from Dad’s bureau that morning.
"So how was the drive up, Dave?"
"Fine."
The three-hour drive, peppered with traffic, was slow at times, so I put in the only tape that Dad could tolerate, which was the Barenaked Ladies.19 He would expunge little half-syllables of what I believed was approval that would ping-pong in the car; his effort to loosen perhaps, an emotional muscle. He had the same type of half-cocked interest when I started listen to the Beatles ten years earlier.
19. When the album came out and was getting substantial Toronto video and radio play, Andrew used to sing the line from the song “Enid”: “I took a beating when you wrote me those letters,” as a conversational stilt. At this time, I was writing him notes almost every week.
Dad sat down and leaned in for a piece of celery, while his sister, my aunt Rebecca, brought him a glass of wine, calling him Dave over and over again and speaking in a tight, loud pitch as she entered the room with her five-foot frame.
I had a miniscule glass of ginger ale with ice and watched Dad take the first sip of his adult beverage, as more relatives appeared in the living room—some still coming, some in the washroom, some still in mid-greeting.
"There you are now," Grandfather said, grinning all holy and slow as a vampire, shifting on the couch, looking a bit uneven in his sweater and priest collar, restricted to the standard threadbare he’d worn for sixty years.
"And school? How is school? University now?"
"School is fine." I didn’t know what to say. "And your sister? Mom?"
"Mom is sick, has the flu," I said. That much was certain.
Just like history does, like a flagpole exploring soil, Dad was deep in the conquering.
"If Diane wants the house, if she tries to take it from me, I’ll tie her up in court for years," Dad began to say, shifting his weight, half a cracker awkwardly juggling in and out of his jaw.
The vegetables and roast’s steam coaxed things: sleeves, sweater collars, rims of eyewear. We had only been in the house for a short while before things got messy, before I balled up into a myriad of clammy symptoms, hands hurting, dry throat, nauseous stomach, thick salty tears aborting, and the swell of a panicked, bull-like breathing pattern.
"I’m in control; she’s not going to get the house. I’ll keep her tied up in court for years; if she wants to leave me, she’ll get nothing," Dad concluded, legs crossed like a talk-show guest, and now awkwardly stuffing that final bit of cracker and cheese into his mouth, as if the piece of food was afraid to enter.
I began to tear uncontrollably. A sickness flamed up in my stomach and dried out my heart.
My embarrassing tears pulled me up from the couch and told me to leave the house, to cry in the snow in the afternoon, and so I put on my jacket and boots and went to the car to smoke a cigarette.
I shuffled into the passenger’s seat, smoking sickly, jarred by his callous words. I stared blankly at the scenic house—white and blue tones, simple stone brick base—and smoked and panicked. Things would change, they would surely change, the storyline would swerve and change.
That second, that little Moment, that time trickle: Dad was all Real Estate, sip of drink, cracker-and-cheese cough.
My heart was on fire when I saw Dad opening the front door. He was walking towards the car. What the fuck?! He opened the driver’s side seat and slid in...I could smell Dad: the worst stink known to mankind. I felt sick with rage; the cigarette not enough, his words still barbed and bleeding in my throat.
"Thought I’d join you," Dad said, sitting beside me in the car. Was he just going to sit down? I’ll never know, because his presence spurned me to leap from the passenger’s seat and, like I’d seen so many times on police dramas, they’d race around to the driver’s seat and open the door...
"How could you say that shit about Mom!" I said with a gusty shout, and pulled him out by his winter-coat collar. "Asshole!" I threw him down on the ground. "You fucking piece of shit!" As he tried to get up, I kicked him twice hard in the stomach; bits of snow exploded around each leg thrust.
The words would get erased. Just me kicking him. That’s it.
"YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!" I blasted with hateful fangs.
The gargantuan winds had subsided. All that remained was a cold and brutal afternoon, the fake sun hanging benign.
I was dead and could no longer breathe. I went back into the house, smelling of half a cigarette and smarting with hate and frosted skin. Dad entered shortly after. I was still taking off my shoes and putting my coat on a hook. He motioned to Aunt Rebecca, coughing, holding his ribs, "I need to lie down." And so he did, on a couch in a spare room.
"It can be difficult with family sometimes," Grandmother offered in a soft, unspooling murmur, unaware of what went down outside, the wintry, abject unravel. I felt sick.
The three-hour drive home loomed ahead. What would Mom think? What would we tell her? And Holly...
Why did I agree to drive out here with him?
I was still fuming in silence as I clenched my teeth, sucking up the remaining ginger ale and ice.
"Smells great, Rebecca," Tom offered.
"Tom, why don’t you finish setting the table!" Aunt Rebecca shouted. Tom looked at us with an impish smirk, rising from the couch to assist his wife.
Dinner was swelling now. It was time to eat.
To this day, I know that I was right, that I had done the right thing, that Dad had started on a venting rant and that I was right there, watching him monster it up, talking over everyone in his chalky voice.
Dad eventually made it to the dinner table. I said nothing, save for the necessary table responses like, "That’s fine," as I watched the dense mashed potatoes cascade from the serving spoon to my plate. My uncle returned the large silver spoon to the hot white mound, and then pulled out a fresh snowball-sized clump of carbohydrates for the next plate.
Dad and I avoided eye contact. Grandfather said grace.
"Amen," everyone repeated. I ate fast.
No one else knew the real, I thought. No one cared about the meaning of things, the way it felt. I just wanted it to be over.
We drove in silence for nearly three hours, back to Toronto. The road was imperfect: cuts and nicks, bumps and snow swells. Reverse. Acceleration.
Besides the cold wind that trickled in and the intense empty highway’s infinite darkness, the drive home was put on mute, permanent, save for the sound of lighting and extinguishing cigarettes in the culpable dark.
14 )
State of the Nation
Late April 1994
Outside, the telephone poles, trees, parked cars and construction artifacts were bigger to me than before, livelier and raw. Maybe it was because I was about to share these objects with Carie-Jane, or that this frenzy of teary, early adult energy and the extra anxiety of university calculated itself cruelly and panicked me.
"Home from school?"
"Yes, it appears so. We just had to hand in our essays," I said, appreciating the campus was forty minutes from our house.
Friday afternoon just after three. Dad was skulking around the house looking for shoes and socks.
"I have to work at five," Dad said, buttering a piece of toast and washing a tomato. "Probably be on call all weekend too."
I spent the next hal
f-hour in my room hiding any embarrassing signifiers of juvenility that would open up portals of shame, ridicule or emasculation.
I went to the basement stairs to get a pop from the cupboard.
"Have you seen my shoes?" Dad bellowed from the kitchen.
"No. They’re probably in the front closet. Mom puts all the shoes there."
"Did you remove them from the closet?"
"Did I remove20 them?"
20. Throughout all the domestic surveillance I’d shot, my Dad made one blurry appearance. The shot was taken from the living room with a basket. I was doing stop motion. My father is blurry brown in the far corner, sitting on the couch. “Then remove the basket, then remove the cat, then remove. . . ” He kept saying “remove” over and over again, and you can hear me say “Would you be quiet, you. . . removing! . . . ”
Dad stared at me now with his cold grey arctic-wolf eyes, his jowls beginning to show under the 60-watt lighting brilliance of our dilapidated kitchen.
"No. I haven’t seen your fucking shoes. And if I wasn’t here, what would you do? Blame Sadie?"
"Oh, fuck off!"
After a stare down, a back and forth of shouting and more low-syllable count obscenities, Dad came at me, and I felt his hard centre-of-gravity torso push into my shoulder, so I shoved back, pivoting him into the refrigerator, knocking a box of cereal over into Sadie’s food dish.
Regaining footing in our sock feet, we both pushed off the unkempt tiles and lunged at one another. I didn’t want this one; I didn’t want to go through it all. Not now. You win; you can have this one, asshole...
Dad went for my throat, and I went soft. I just didn’t want this, not this time, and went limp as he clamped down. My face teared up, all red inside and out, feeling fucked up and dead, smelling his calloused hands still firmly clasped around my stupid neck. My brain was pissing itself in sadness, and I couldn’t decide what had lit the powder keg this time.
All I could think of was Carie-Jane, finding her on the corner, my new girlfriend of five weeks, the one who had travelled ninety minutes from Scarborough to spend the weekend, or at least a Friday night sleepover with me. Here.
It was going to be historic, the first time ever a girl would sleep over.
Running across my front lawn, neck smarting, my throat strangle-fresh, I howled and wolfed down the street.
Holding my side, as I walked jarringly down the street and turned south on Laird, I could still feel the tingle from the scratches, the vice around my throat, how we went back and forth with each other, shouting and pushing, how this was closer, more real, his attack this time straight-on, no passive-aggressive body language, weird defensive turns, none of that. This was a new arsenal, the air being gobbled up by our wild punches, a rough collision and torment.
Dad’s hands had left their final resting place on my corpse. The wind pierced my eyes, forcing them even wetter.
Carie-Jane’s face was all red and raw.
"Can’t go home," I said.
"What happened?" Carrie asked from behind her ski coat, which was zipped up to her nose. "Fought with my Dad, he, oh shit, he just [bawling] tore into me...I don’t know...he’s pissed at me or something!" I blurted out. "I’m not sure what this could mean, I said, exhaling loudly.
Carie-Jane shoved her hands into her coat pockets. "So now what?"
"Can we go to your place?" I suggested.
"I guess so," she said, shaking her head in disbelief.
"Sorry," I said, "I know it took you forever to get here," adding in between sobs, "I had no idea this would happen."
The traffic noise was suspended in the air as we boarded the bus. She made room for me beside her, offering me the window seat.
"I don’t care," I said, rubbing my hands on my pants nervously. My room tidied and anticipating her presence: dinner, movie, alone—now this, rush hour, commuting nightmare overwhelming, sitting in, replacing what could have been—
Now we’d travel east for close to two hours, TTC and Scarborough RT included, telling her mom the ordeal in a series of humiliating conversations that lasted all weekend, the fierce recollections of Dad and me in fisticuffs assembled raw and brutal in my sleep.
15 )
Procession
August–October 1994
Carie-Jane broke up with me in late April, ending my first major run (six weeks, fourteen days) with a girlfriend. The summer had provided me with few answers: return to school or not? Move in with friends, try to live at home and return for another year at university? I had also started experimenting with cutting myself on the chest with a razor blade I’d found in my father’s workshop. I would take the time to burn the blade to disinfect it; somehow, I thought that was necessary. I’d cut several half-inch digs into my chest, watch the blood trickle and lie down topless on the bedroom floor.
Autumn arrived, and I moved in with a new friend named Karen, and began living in the basement at her family’s house. Karen was an anorexic redhead with freckles, one year younger than me, and our sole shared common interest was George Michael. The George Michael bond was enough to accelerate our friendship to a closeness that transcended time and space.
Karen took me to her psychotherapist, named Leslie Morgan, who listened to me moan and wail about my homelessness, uncertainty and rage. I told her money was my only emotional problem. I was starting my second year at Glendon, taking Spanish, French and a couple of other electives and was still new to the world of student loans and administrative blizzards.
I’d been in to talk with Leslie sporadically at Karen’s mother’s suggestion since, just prior to moving in with Karen, I’d hacked into my forearm with a steak knife and had to drive myself to Sunnybrook Emergency.
The grim steak knife slash ordeal was a jump-cut in my life’s edit if there ever was one. I remember feeling a chaos brewing, that something was simply not being said. Would I return to school? Go on welfare? Work retail and find a mysterious apartment? The white void that represented my future lacked any colour, so I had pushed the colour bar with this red tirade. I couldn’t discern any reasonable facsimile to a normal life, a beginning, ending. It was hopeless, formless and unconditionally disparate.
I remember showing Mom my cuts, and she did her usual feigning of concern with the bunched up forehead and brow all hound dog. "Put a Band-Aid on it," she said, and floated in her housecoat into the unlit hallway. I went back downstairs, looked again and saw some veins presenting themselves.
I called Karen and told her what I’d done. She came over to find me in my room, and she looked at the bloody facecloth and paper towels accumulating on the bedroom floor as I clasped down on my wound with a fresh towel. It felt like I’d been shot. She cried, "We have to take you to the hospital right now." She sat with visible concern, big-eyed and nervous as I drove us to the emergency room at Sunnybrook.
Two hours later, we were both back in my bedroom, sitting on the small couch that ran across one wall. Her large eyes looked at me; I felt weak and sick, ashamed, undead, really angry and confused. Karen put me to bed and slept on the couch upstairs. She left me a note21 saying she’d talk to me later, writing it in pencil on a scrap of wallpaper, of all things.
21. Dear Nate,
Ah yes, well, it seems you've REALLY done it now. Was it inevitable? Have I been commissioned to save you? Only you can rescue yourself. You are your own cavalry. Still, I'm the optimists' optimist (or perhaps plain hard-headed) and persist in trying. Everyone's a fool at heart. What's next for you? Can you escape without any severed members? Am I to stay tuned for the next episode? You ought to know now that I can't watch. I don't have an iron gut, and you don't have iron will. Quite a pair we make. I trembled at the hospital. In fact, I felt ill. The answered questions painted a gruesome portrait of some madman I refused to recognize. How far you've strayed from my initial image of you! Your arm looked like a cadaver's limb. And when the doctor reached for the surgical thread, I felt like bursting into tears. It wasn't because of the sight
of your blood all over the table and floor; it was because he couldn't suture you where it really hurts. I'm forever grappling with helplessness. Is THIS rock bottom? Please go out and get the best help you can find. You need more than I can give you. Have I failed you? I'm writing this on pages torn out from somewhere and in pencil because it's more immediate, less permanent. Appropriate, somehow. Your father and mum have taught you well, but you are a less proficient butcher. I love you. Please live. K
Mom told me later Karen was crying when she woke up. A few days later, I made the move to Karen’s place, and with the exception of some minor administrative changes at home (phone messages, a pack of clothing, some books), carried on as if nothing had happened.
*
Rocketing down the stairs of 161 Glenvale (I still had the keys, and Karen had loaned me her car for the afternoon), I saw a pile of binders from the annals of academic history piled in a corner. One or two were crammed with Holly’s high school homework. Her familiar cursive in black spooled out on three-hole paper. As I flipped through the pages vigorously, nearly tearing some sheets from the rings, I stopped my rapid eye scan on "Depression" dated September 23/90, in Holly’s loopy cursive:
The small stern face of my father is in the centre of, at times, a round, plump head with a receding hairline and neat, cropped hair. I remember Uncle Carl telling us how he always tried to film him from the stomach up, because of Dad’s huge beer gut. Now his head sits beneath a dusty brown and grey coif. Mom said he’s lost weight and that you can see it in his face too, from less beer … She also said we stopped getting bronchitis every winter when Dad stopped smoking inside the house...
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