In the basement, I tossed dozens of sports magazines and photocopied articles into a pile, destined for recycling. The inventory was growing—from my aging underwear to the remaining plastic guts of my remote-control car.
The front door did its familiar orchestra of sounds. I fiddled in my pockets with change or pills or whatever. Mom stared down at me from the top of the stairs.
"Did you go to your appointment today?"
"Yes, I got a lobotomy," I said, squinting into the late-afternoon sun coming in from the side-door window.
"We can always hope," Mom said, with her usual stiff expression, confident her sick comedy was going to win her an award some day.
*
Later that week I called, asking for Holly. I knew she was home for Thanksgiving weekend. It was surreal phoning my own phone number.
"I didn’t know anyone else liked George Michael," Holly said when she answered the phone.
"What?"
"Your friend Karen was listening to George when I called you a few hours ago."
I arrived at my home at six-thirty by way of the Eglinton 34 bus for Thanksgiving 1994. For all intents and purposes, the last supper I’d ever eat with my family in that house.
I played along with the last-supper storyline, the meal feeling like one big prop: Chinese Food for Thanksgiving.
According to Holly, Uncle Carl balked at the invite, saying his other niece had promised to bring him over some "lovely turkey sandwiches" and he was looking forward to enjoying those. "Mom went nuclear: she kept going on about how whatever her name is, her cousin, is always upstaging her now, and that Uncle Carl never calls..."
Twenty hours later: Thanksgiving 1994, version two, began with Chinese food fumes and my eyes adjusting to the pink living room, the candles glowering on the dining-room tablecloth and its familiar cornflower blue shadowed in parts. The house, this house, the house since March of 1981: the carpet burns, the time Holly sat on a glass and broke it and I pulled the shards out of her bum, the acerbic meat dishes, the napkin-crumpled Sunday afternoons with moods dumping, blood pumping through nervous veins, all coming to this last supper summit, the merlot-coloured candles lit, the tinfoil glint, the steam rising, aroma more hot than food-smelling, just a big vapour.
The glint of worn-down utensils I hadn’t seen in weeks lay across the table in a metallic clump. "It’s nice to see you, Nate," Dad said. "Hope school is going well."
Mom looked at me standing motionless in front of the silverware.
"Can you put these around?" I nodded and began to place the forks and knives around everyone’s plates. "Did you take your pills?" I didn’t answer.
The spectral steam rose from the six large Chinese food take-out containers, lit by the warped merlot candles stuck in the shabby brass holders.
"There’s lots, so eat up," Mom said.
We sat around the dining-room table for the first time in nearly twenty weeks. The summer had been full of upheaval and paperwork, reneging and negotiating. Holly was in her first year of a master’s program at Queen’s and looked across the table at me in what was muted horror. I just kept eating.
Dad served himself some fluffy white rice and steaming chow mein. Holly poured herself a glass of juice.
"Now, this is Thanksgiving," Holly said, a spool of steam escaping the rice as she opened an aluminum dish. "It’s hot!"
The munching ensued. Nervous glances and the pharmacy keeping my blinders in place. The grease on my fork travelled into my solar system.
Dad cleared his throat and set a dish of egg rolls down.
A nod, a deleted smirk, edited body language all around the table.
"So, Uncle Carl wants you to call him sometime," Mom said, snapping into an egg roll.
"I will."
"Want some tea and pie for dessert? We have apple?"
"Let’s get through this crap first," Holly said.
Dad glared.
Twenty-three minutes of chewing and lay-away plans for indigestion ensued with sips of intense-coloured juice and my refusal of seconds. Nothing remained on my plate but fried-food dregs. The antidepressant Zoloft had been newly administered by a psychiatrist who worked with Leslie, and it coursed through my body. Mom took the empty containers off the table. I was trying to explain that the side effects only occur when you stop taking Zoloft. My mom chimed in with, "Well, don’t stop taking it!"
Holly leaned forward, and in a soft lob across the table, said, "We sold the house."
I was blank-faced. Dad took his plate into the kitchen.
"Nate, you want some coffee or tea? David?"
Holly stared at me; her lips flatlined into nothing.
As the kitchen filled with rushing water and clattering, I went to my room, immediately noticing a new paint coat on the walls and that my bed was made and appeared to have been slept in. Some of my school binders from last semester lay in a pile near the door.22
22. I was ready to drop out of my second year of university, a coward on all fronts. During presentations, I would dry up, my mouth full of cotton. I could not, it seemed, interpret anything beyond myself. I could only hermit within an idea. I felt distracted and insane. Nor did I fully believe my efforts would lead to anything, and the anxiety of paying two or three thousand dollars to study virtually the same thing I studied in high school added to my anxiety. I was couch surfing, suicidal and about to see my home sold off to the highest bidder.
"Dad sleeps in here now," Holly said, standing in my doorway. "You want a ride home or something? Want to watch something in my room?"
The walls of my room were now a glaze of eggshell calm. The striped wallpaper Dad had installed in the summer of 1988 had been stripped, suffocated, murdered and erased, along with that dark majestic blue that filled the opposite walls.
The moral learned was money talks. Moulded after Gordon Gekko and Vince McMahon in the late 1980s, "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase once prophesized to his heroes like Hogan and Savage: "Everybody’s got a price."
A few garbage bags sat like sandbags in one corner, and all this filled my paranoid mind full of debris and reruns. If I had to write a will, it would only fill a matchbox flap. But a self-involved snuff letter would occupy months of effort, filling thousands of Bristol board sheets on both sides: the meticulous marinating of my family’s kamikaze descent.
*
Back at Karen’s, I called Holly, who was up watching a movie on her old television set with headphones. "I’m in my room."
Over the last few years, whenever I went into her room, which was rare (I had no real reason to go to the second floor), the walls were always barren, simple outlines of old picture frames, band posters and, when she was younger, a few baseball pennants. She had started to clean out her room years ago, like slowly wiping down a crime scene, piece by piece.
"I … I know you’ve got your problems, issues and stuff; you’re upset and freaking out all the time," Holly said, taking a minute to turn down the sound on the small television she had lugged from the basement, "but you know, we’re all going through things."
Holly explained things to me. For the first time in months, someone directly let me in on something that was going on. She said something about the world expanding and that everything was changing. When I asked if she was high, she chewed me out a bit, calling me square and saying that I was missing the point. "Yes, I’ve been smoking pot. So what?"
"Just, asking. Fuck," I said. I was smoking a cigarette now, in the dark deep in the basement of Karen’s house, through the half-open window. My stereo played quietly in the background until I heard the cassette gears click to a harsh metallic stop.
"In the summer you started moving in an unhealthy self-obsessed direction, and then you decided to act out your fantasy by cutting yourself. To show how you had become a monster. Quit manufacturing hate."
"I don’t," I said, blowing smoke through the tiny mesh screen window. I turned on my own television. The word MUTE was green and wiggled in the corne
r.
That weird commercial about curing things with everyday household items came on. A preachy home-remedies infomercial that was revealed on a video or book you had to buy. Holly and I would listen for the voice-over part as the commercial faded. Cure an earache with a hairdryer was the funniest one, or yogurt on a bee sting. Sometimes we’d make up our own. Stop a volcano’s lava flow by rubbing your knees. Breathe underwater using a banana.
I hated the taste of cigarettes in my mouth. I shut the window and brushed my teeth with loads of toothpaste. Use mint toothpaste to extinguish your cigarette.
I kept the phone to my ear, both mesmerized and repelled by my sister’s trance-like speech, as if it was grand theatre. "Just don’t unravel so much..."
"I might have to drop out of school. I’m fucked for money!"
"If you watch Wall Street with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas, it’s all about that. Charlie becomes the little dog to the millionaire big dog, selling out his old-fashioned but individual father until he realizes the truth and saves his soul. Anyway, I think men find their identity when they become independent from the big father of the culture they are in which feeds off their naiveté and subservience. The wish to be one of the boys, like Mickey Rourke, who wanted to be a rebel but was ultimately living off Daddy’s paycheque. He had no self and when he grew older he got some diamonds and a dog that according to his ex-girlfriend Carrie Otis, he carries around everywhere. Behind the caveman is just a little baby who at first is the master of his small world before he realizes how much bigger the world and the universe really are."
Seventy blocks away from one another, at times telling each other what channel was playing what, now together we watched most of an old John Candy film in near silence.23
23. On my very last visit home on November 15th to pick up some clothes and books, I got into a shouting match with Dad which led to me cutting my forearm with the steak knife. As the ambulance attendant held me down to check on me, I shouted at him, “You’re not my doctor.” Moments before cutting myself, I had leaned into my Dad’s face and stared deeply into his eyes, grabbed his shoulder and with a pre-tear voice, told him “ . . . how fucked up it is you work for Andrew’s father, considering what that piece of shit did to me . . .” I can’t recall verbatim.
16 )
Touched by the Hand of God
Sunday, March 24th, 1996
Q: "So, you’d rather have a manslaughter conviction?" Conn asked.
A: "That’s the only way I can go home," Erik answered.
——
Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn spent most of his cross-examination suggesting Erik has had the last six years to design a sympathetic story that he was abused by his father for over a decade before turning a shotgun on his alleged abuser.
——
JUROR 12: Chinese American female, 42, of Akron. Real estate appraiser, born and raised in Hong Kong. Divorced mother of two. Is afraid of blood. Recalls seeing one of the brothers crying during first trial but wasn’t concerned with it at the time. She believed one’s childhood experiences can certainly carry some explanation to a person’s behaviour. But at a later point in life, an individual must realize he or she is in charge of his or her own life.
The first trial in 1994 had ended in a mistrial. I followed the trial closely, clipping any reports or taping chance television spots, even two terribly acted and rushed television movies; plus I bought a fat paperback on the killings that revealed insight into Erik’s fantasy world and described how he had been working on a screenplay about killing his parents.
"Looks like your guys are going to get the death penalty," Holly said on the phone, almost sounding sympathetic. That week I had caught the tail end of Erik’s attorney, Leslie Abramson, using words like "apoplectic" in a statement to the media, which had me rushing to the dictionary for a definition.
The biggest question, of course, was, did their dad rape them in the fashion they described? Were the Menendez brothers tortured? The motivation for the murders was evident as they stood to inherit over 10 million dollars. Kitty was working on Erik’s university application seconds before they gunned her down.
Once again I found myself lost in a semi-detached connection to celebrity; pondering my own sexual history, the Menendez trauma and the well-lit tears made me question what I had experienced with Andrew more than what had gone on with my family in terms of the casual fist fights and screaming matches.
I was not a killer; no one had died because of my actions, but I felt like a half-tone victim: afraid of expressing the truth, but also not truly knowing the truth either. The violence disturbed me, the end of their family coming at such a cost, such a public drama. My own family settled out of court with a few signatures and moved into their new digs while I became a living ghost, pumped with a rotating constellation of medication, in and out of a fuzzy self-obsession, with anger and general rottenness as a constant and reliable side effect.
The pills had stirred me into a particular focus, a numb, marbleized way of perceiving the small world around me. The Menendez trial was a familiar topic that pulled me in and out of my own static like a dark-blue suture every time they came up on any media signal.
Not much had changed in two years of deliberations: Erik insisted that he was not lying anymore but conceded that he did not want to spend the rest of his life in jail. When the verdict was handed down near the end of March, a journalist noted that Erik and Lyle did not react in any way, no tears, and that they did not look at each other at any point.
I was crashing on Dad’s couch for the time being, trying to plan my next move. Over the last two years, I had played all my drama cards, and the house was sold, and I’d slept in spare rooms and couches. His couch was no different; the pills I was taking at the time cradled me in a silent funk, and my animosity turned into a numb feeling of rigor mortis and melancholy.
Fighting him seemed so far off, a distant time that only served to make me permanently homeless and insane: in my pharmacy-enhanced stupor, realizing there was no long-term home, couch or comfort, my battle turned inward. Why would I throw him down on the ground for another stomp when I’d already lost the war? I slurred a few words in repetitive whirlpool prophecy, until the pills and the counter all blurred into one big blob of pink or orange.
Holly moved in with Mom in a new two-bedroom condo-like co-op building near Mount Pleasant and Eglinton, and Dad moved into a one-bedroom apartment on top of a funeral home. For the past year, I had been getting medical notes and testimonials from the loom of my greatest mental health hits in order to somehow ensure a successful academic trip to Concordia. One semester in and I was panicking, dropping courses and trying to get out of another academic mess. It was as if I was building a case for how impossible going to school was for me. It ended up costing me more money in student loans, personal setbacks and undermined my confidence from day one of classes. I felt like I was a mythological character: left on the university doorstep at twenty-one with a bundle of preordained excuses and conditions, highly choreographed on medical stationary.24
24. “He also gives the impression of being under stress and lacks concentration. Parents have therefore requested a psychological assessment to determine Nate’s present functioning and suitability of the French program for him. A screening for emotional factors was also included as part of the psychological assessment. This indicated that Nate may be generally dependent on others. Although he was able to make up positive resolutions to problem situations, often someone else took the major action to resolve the problem. There was also a significant number of expressions of anxiety in Nate's stories. On the sentence completion, Nate expressed communication difficulties between parents and himself, which may possibly be the source of some of his anxiousness and signs of stress seen at school. In the interview with Mrs. Moore following the assessment, his mother confirmed that there is difficulty at home around communication issues with Nate. Nate is a twelve-year-old boy in the French Immersion program who
was found to have near high-average intellectual functioning on the WISC-R with strengths in abstract reasoning in visual-spatial skills. On standardized achievement tests, his scores were generally in the average range, although he needed extra time to complete the reading test. An emotional screening gave indication of possible dependency, anxiety and communication problems at home.” (January 7, 1987, East York Board of Education, Dept. of Psychology)
Dad had just come back from the hospital after slipping at a beer store while returning some empties. After being hospitalized and having minor hip surgery, he said he was in the process of suing the store for damages. The whole thing had been caught on surveillance footage, and he had a lawyer who was reviewing his case. Dad had a pin inserted in his upper thigh. I visited him once at the hospital, but all he did was complain about not being able to smoke. He showed me his scar and talked about the procedure in gross detail, as if he had performed the surgery himself.
The semester at university in Montreal, my alleged academic comeback, had been nothing but drama, money wastage and sabotage. I had started doing the paperwork to salvage something, to stop the money drain, to make sense of it all, to cover my bases. If they gave out degrees based on how to get your marks erased because you were mentally ill, I’d have received two BAs by this point.
The head psychiatrist at the school’s heath services summed it up in a medical letter mailed to Dad’s apartment earlier in the week:
Nate has asked me to summarize the treatment he received at Heath Services while he was a student at Concordia. He has specifically requested that information be provided regarding the dates of his first and last visits, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and behaviour/demeanor. Nate was first seen at Health Services on September 12, 1995. He last came on December 5, 1995. His symptoms included unusual psycho-motor behaviour, thought disorganization, delusions, and auditory hallucinations that disrupted his sleep. These symptoms were consistent with a psychotic disorder and significantly impaired his academic functioning. He was prescribed Trilafon and Cogentin. He also continued to take lithium, which he had been prescribed in the past. He was briefly hospitalized in October 1995 and treated with Haldol. He did not return for follow-up after December, and it was later learned that he had returned to Toronto. Trusting this is satisfactory...
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