*
A week ago, our Aunt Amy (Dad’s other sister) had rehashed a family-centric article in the Toronto Star, and the clipping was still crisp on Dad’s coffee table, the same gruesome table that we had bounced each other of off at least three times. The newspaper story, spearheaded by my estranged Aunt Amy (herself now, like her father, an Anglican minister). My only recollections of her in the last ten years were her floating around sparse family gatherings all Holy, ghoulish and thunderbolts, bouncing theories off Grandfather about Jesus’s intent or Joseph’s fluorescent leather jacket, her chalky, tight, high-pitched voice arguing and slicing away at the gravy-filled air while the rest of us recoiled in itchy Sunday-best horror.
I watched Dad pace back and forth with a long great ash on his cigarette. The article brought forth what he had wanted so badly to forget from that dark-cloud year, 1968. In addition to new testimonials from the past, the article included several long passages from the original article, including the trial and news wires that ate up the controversial scandal.
"Want to watch something?" Dad asked me, moving in what I perceived as slow-motion across the hallway towards the small green phone he had plugged into a half-stripped wall. Dad loved renovating, continuously refurbishing a wall or piece of wood, always leaving bits of the places he lived in with a sense of vulnerability, of incompleteness.
Though I couldn’t articulate the words because I was pilled, I tried mumbling something.
"I haven’t felt this bad since my fiancée died," Dad told me, awkwardly pulling a tallboy from the refrigerator and plucking it open.
Dad walked past the stove, and I gazed at the kettle’s slow resolve, its unhealthy sound as it came to a boil. How hollow and weak the metal sounded.
Up until a few days ago, he had been studying for a final exam to become a funeral director.
With those words, "I haven’t felt this bad..." it became perhaps the first time I had ever heard him utter a sentence detailing an inward sentiment, devoid of physical or temporal properties or public inquiry into the location of shoes, socks, lawnmower, weed pick, coffee, person or condiment). Where’s my shoe, what’s for dinner, where is Diane, where are my keys, the newspaper, the Visa bill, the car, the letter from Grandfather, your sister’s postal code...
Dad lit another cigarette.
"I can’t take the test again; that was my last shot," he said, running his index figure along his cheek.
During my academic and mental uncertainty, Dad’s apartment had become frequent destination for strong tea and long weak cigarettes; the two of us would eat together once a week, even grabbing a drink after one of his earlier dead man shifts once in a while.
I saw a vulnerable bicep deflating under his weak cotton arm, a set of unsettling eyebrows, unkempt for years, and his hair getting grey on fast-forward. A weakening man, caught in his own loquacious storm.
I was witnessing Dad’s transportation to a time that predated my own mortal coil, that predated our own family’s origins to this time before Diane Shaw dropped her last name, before Holly was born (1972) or Benji the cat reigned supreme (1970–1985), before any of us were ever photographed, imprisoned in celluloid glaze.
The array of pink pills I’d been popping all evening gave me a sick feeling all over. I staggered into the kitchen, wearing one of Dad’s blazers and a paisley tie, a fuzzy toque, my hair curling out from the sides, the Epivals swimming hard in my blood, downed every few minutes with an anti-anxiety chaser. Who was this fiancée, someone before Mom? Why hasn’t he ever said anything about—Holly said something about an accident, before—my face unshaven, raw, occasional pimples thwarted only by my itchy, uneven beard.
"I got too nervous," Dad said, summing up the reality. I made a wheezing noise. He continued. "I may be able to take it in a year’s time, but I have to talk to the Dean to reapply."
"Shit," I said, my mouth a gauze of spit that felt foamy and at once dry, imaginary. He stubbed out his cigarette.
"That sucks."
"I’m going out for a minute. Want anything?"
I shook my head. "Naw." I had had more than enough. A strange buzzing sound filled my head now as I glanced into a tall jar of pasta, spaghetti, the translucent red jar, the same one from our house on Glenvale. "Be right back," Dad said, shuffling down the narrow stairwell into the guts of the funeral home.
I found three more pills and swallowed them, lit a cigarette and went outside onto Dad’s balcony, noticing a neighbour walking up the metal stairwell. She was asking me some questions, when I realized I couldn’t comprehend words. Into the charcoal night I broke through my silver breath, destroying the temporary poltergeist I made by breathing. I made my way back into the apartment, now fully controlled by my own chemical roulette.
I stood at the small kitchen sink, pawed at the dirty dishwater, witnessing plump noodles floating in the dirty soap suds. My tongue was animated, thick and heavy. The tips of my fingers tingled, seeking out more Epival, that sweet pink shrapnel. Two stray ones sparkled on the mauve carpet, and I downed them.
I moved my maelstrom towards the cluttered dining-room table, replete with text books and binders strewn across the pink tablecloth.
"Hello?" Dad said.
"Hi," I answered. I began to pour the pills out in a big pink train on the kitchen counter.
"I bought some chips if you’d like some," Dad said from the living room.
Twelve pills bright and pink. I spoke into my micro-recorder: "I’m going to do it, I have to do it, I um, I gotta, I have to," my speech lubricated with drool and a veritable buffet of snarls and warbles, now permanent on the tape.
I circled the dining-room table, covered in a sheet and full of paint chips, and knocked several flash cards over in the process. As I picked them up, my eyes fell on the alien terminology, as if a new language had invaded us: Adaptive Funeral Rite: a funeral rite that is adjusted to the needs...4. Egalitarian: Male and female have equal rights, duties...14. Enculturation (Socialization): The method by which social values are internalized...5. Humanistic Funeral Rite: a funeral rite that is in essence devoid...8. Neo-traditional Funeral Rite: a funeral rite that deviates from the normal...18. Rite: any event performed in a solemn and prescribed...9. Social Stratification: categorization of people by money, prestige...Canopic jars used by the Egyptians; four jars—
My vision was now runny pink and clumpy, an uneven pie smear. Objects were melting and reforming, and a raging black silhouette was continually trying to blanket my turbulent peripheral.
The pills swam, and everything now had a thickness. My head was ticking and I stopped hearing.
I imagined Mom at home, pacing with nervous agitation, her face poised on the brink of tea or toast, sighing eternally, chewing on something while speaking to Holly or Dad, her voice crumbling into the receiver.
I felt my stomach break in half, parts of me leaking, possibly soiling myself. I let out a soft cry as if had God abandoned me forever.
I saw Mom waving her hands across an overheated bagel as it entered her mouth, the phone ringing, and her choking, not taking the time to finish the chew before answering the third ring. With toasted dough lodged in her molars, she would let out the newsfeed to Holly.
"I overdosed," she might have said, half-choking on her food. "I mean, Nate overdosed," Mom switched gears, her coughing fit creating a temporary lull in tone.
"When?" Holly asked.
"Just now. Your father took him to the hospital," Mom might have said, her slippers scuffling along the tiles.
I half-imagined all this from my pink netherworld tomb. "Just now, he overdosed, he’s asleep at the hospital."
My skull was clean against the ambulance slab, immovable; a gurney, and finally a bed: Her only son, the only son of her nuclear family. These were the molecules, the sounds, the aroma of a life vanishing, left unkempt, left to my own useless devices. A dash of autopsy ingredients, an obituary in rehearsal: my actions explained nothing, except that I was hopeless and
autobiographical.
My nightly self-lust, self-destruct setting was enhanced by the chemical roulette: a swan song only I could hear.
God had died inside me.
I woke up strapped to the thin sliver of a hospital bed. The mattress was firm and a bit moist.
"You peed all over me," the nurse said, as I came into consciousness. I eyed the plastic straw.
"Sorry," I said, mouth swollen and dry.
"And you bit me," she said, blurring off in a shade of white I had never seen before.
Mom appeared at my side, dishevelled, raw and tired. "They say you can leave in an hour," she said, her mouth knotted in strange creases.
"Do you want something to drink?"
"No way."
"They have some questions for you."
"Department of Administrative, um, uh...anxiety."
In what I thought was the final performance of my life, the playlist from hell had accompanied me into a pharmaceutical oblivion. The menacing songs on repeat, the pink bullets, the pharma-slugs in my stomach, I possessed a vampire’s bloodlust, overplaying and pouring into my membranes; my central nervous system bankrupting into a histrionic nosedive; reddening pool of skin.
From the distance, one clean juice straw appeared on a table, just out of reach. I homed in on the wallow, inflating the agony.
This symphony ruled me, the twenty-seven pills they took from my stomach now dissolving in a sink, in a pipe, back into the water supply.
Nate, you listen to me, it’s yourself talking at you: You forget about your tragic upbringing and you motor around, along, beside, inside, up and down, while your never worked a day in your life hands gently squeeze—the blood flowing through your rusty tributaries, the power and glory of it all and everything goes black and the cool mattress becomes transparent and you can see all the way to the earth’s feeble cortex and as your vision goes deeper and you see further and further past anonymous shards of time, random earth debris and the molten synapses firing away, you see your Great Uncle Carl in a glossy black-and-white photo with serrated edges taken five years before your birth and he’s wearing a squeaky clean business-class suit and a bib and his gimmicky bow tie, his smile is full tilt and the Japanese chefs are beside him, proud of their presentation until the photo gets snapped by a giant hot lobster claw and melts. Cut to infinite underwater bubbles. You see your sister at a cottage with friends; Elizabeth is there. You see your parents watching TV in separate rooms, the glow illuminating their eyes and nostrils and fidgeting digits. Despite this distance, you feel like your family is still booking your whole cocksucking life talking to each other like the corrupt sports agents they are, like the strangers-at-the-soup-kitchen type chatter they give you, like the let’s-talk-about-the-weather-alienation-street treatment they are comfortable with, all the while getting you the cheapest and bestest suicide rate for your stupid unattended provincial funeral.
*
The next morning, I found myself recuperating on Mom’s couch. I looked down at my feet, hidden under a thin blanket. "I’m going out for a while, Nate, so, just rest," she said. "I got you some ginger ale." I sat up slowly, looked around her empty apartment. When I coughed, I felt the sticky thing they used to monitor me was still on me, tangled in my chest hairs.
I walked with soft, uneven steps towards the answering machine in the hallway and pressed play.
It was last night: I heard my parents talking. Mom as usual hadn’t reached the phone in time when Dad called, and the tape’s brittle finesse captured my parents discussion as my body lay on Dad’s stinking kitchen floor, as Mom paced on her own kitchen floor, as Dad’s stomach grumbled, oozing coffee and spaghetti sauce, peering down at me, looking at my rib cage for movement.
Seeing the remaining pills lined up on the kitchen counter, the empty bottle on the floor beside me all crime scene and raw, Dad sounding residual, not certain whether I was in fact dead or poisoned.
As I listened, I wrapped the thin blue blanket around me tighter. The gargling answering machine tape played my parents’ emergency exchange—as if the lines had been adlibbed by someone else with a tone of closure, exit wound and severity. There was no escape from hearing them, and understanding exactly what it was they were saying.
"Nate took some pills."
"He’s supposed to take pills, David."
"Well, he took a lot. He’s not moving."
"Is he breathing?"
"I don’t know."
"Well, check."
"I think so."
"Call the hospital or somethi—"
The tape ended abruptly, cutting out and rewinding with a tight metallic whirl and belch. I tried to speak. I wanted to say something to disengage from the finality of the pre-millennial answering machine’s cold facts that contained the secrets of the universe, but my throat hurt and my mouth felt extinct, as if words were impossible to emit. My head was full of spinning animation: little dots in heavy rotation floated past my eyes.
I slugged myself back to the couch, my out-of-work stomach turned in considerable pain, the smell of charcoal still strong and deeply tattooed in my nostrils.
PART III:
THE LAST SAVAGE
(1997–2011)
17 )
Brutal
February 1997–December 2001
In film, to demonstrate the passage of time, transitional montages will culminate with textured shadows across a barren landscape—glints of spastic sunshine on building sides, frost building up on window panes, bricks and mortar becoming scuffed by sleet, and wooden beams eroding and becoming brittle, while trees scuttling through seasons are plumed with rain venting down, sun drying it up, soil hardening and foliage muted with cold hints of early snow. This passage of our family’s post-Glenvale colour and friction was not captured on film but was catalogued in cognitive recesses—new and selected. The past settled.
The memories were so big in my head that even the dulling of the drugs I was taking didn’t wash them out completely. How could I gift wrap a sister, Mom, Dad, dead Great Uncle, four dead grandparents, various psychiatrists, bartenders and neighbours and Mom’s strolls by bread sticks jutting out of metal troughs decorating storefronts along Mount Pleasant Avenue, south of Eglinton, several minutes by foot from Canada Square Cinemas, Eglinton subway station, Orchard View Library and the new gaudy logo noise of Yonge and Eglinton version 2...order up!
Of all the things I kept with me on my odyssey, it was my RCA CC-432 VHS Analog Camcorder that acted as a strong phantom limb, a perennial, albeit cumbersome, necessity for my ever-changing wilderness. On one of many couch-surfing exits, forgetting I had stuck my camera in the bottom, I tossed my large duffle bag down a flight of stairs, cracking the camcorder’s plastic body. Luckily, for a few months at the time, I was living with someone who said he knew a guy at his work who could fix it. And so the artificial life force that mimicked observation skills was extended. What had become a lonely broad-casting tradition (the sadcore video diary entries as midnight struck and one year dissolved digitally into the next) had grown into a weekly parody of life in an adult suit. I went insane when I thought about money, employment, society; others could escape the bleakness I championed, chartered and gargled with acuity.
During a particularly low stretch of months I could be seen at the height of fashion, combining Hawaiian shirts, blazers, my father’s bowler hat and a thick black overcoat worn with army boots. My hair curled over my ears in a mangy frenzy, and my facial hair was trimmed into a goatee. My eyes were a deep set of stale chocolates, glazed over with an intense look of betrayal, detached from specific focus. My stomach was usually hot-wired in coffee, pizza, pasta or a gauntlet of carbohydrates home cooked by near strangers. In December 1996, I moved to Waterloo, a city an hour and a half outside of Toronto, to live with some friends for cheap and escaped each night into a deep, pilled-out sleep.
*
Mom now lived with banana bread and white furniture cleaned with Windex, Lysol and J-Cloths,
six or seven blocks from our first house at 61 Mann Avenue, across from the Dominion where I’d mispronounced the word truck often and at high decibels, and where the glass jar of mythological goose grease fell from my hands in the basement, February 5, 1976, and I fell on it, the broken glass and grease and cut my face and eye open from brow to right beside my right nostril, the pupil dangling by cords and wiring.
Dad’s attempt at a stabilized career at the new funeral home was interrupted by the beer-store slip and his failure to get his funeral-director’s licence, and by mid-1996, he had moved out of Toronto for good. Before disappearing into his rural pre-coffin life in Elgin, Ontario, he showed me the bottoms of his soles, how the treads had worn thin, and told me that he had never shown the shoes to his lawyer.
"They’re going to settle for nineteen thousand bucks!" Dad laughed, as if he was getting away with something.
Within weeks of the settlement, he had fastened himself inside a permanent trailer, telling us later the land was cheap because it was built on a patch of degenerative swampland.
I had visited him that first Christmas, but left the next morning on a bus, unable to stomach the cigarette smoke and late-morning beer drinking.
And then a harsh laugh from Mom, oozing nervously on the phone, "Thank God we don’t all live together!"
Savage Page 15
