Moments before my scheduled drive to Toronto from Montreal, Jimmy took it upon himself to kamikaze suicide off the balcony. I guess he thought I was abandoning him, noticing the boxes, the strangers helping me move, the general upheaval.
With my uncle Carl in and out of the hospital, Tabitha came to visit once or twice for morbid post-break-up torture sleepovers. She would sit on the couch naked, walking by the large front window, drapes gapingly wide open. I shook my head in partial terror, but mostly just smiled like a pervert.
"Sometimes I cry when I think about the type of food you eat," she said over the phone, frustrated with my general silence. "You waste my time and energy, Nathaniel!" Tabitha said, "And you deny everything!"
I had told Tabitha very casually that Mom told me that Andrew had gotten married. It was the way Mom said it, just the blunt sound bite.
I never knew how to properly explain my bouts with nervous energy to Tabitha. Everything I said to her was put under a giant microscope. Even relaying something about my mom telling me Andrew was now married made Tabitha suspect I was not being honest with her about my feelings. To me, it was no different than any number of tales I’d conjure up for her from the mid- to late-’90s. She explained her desire for different experiences of sexuality, like playing the part of the short-skirted nurse bending over to wipe the drool off of a bald man in a wheelchair, who keeps trying to pinch her butt while eating from a bowl of popcorn.
Tabitha continued, "I forget we can’t discuss a certain subject, watch a film or walk down a street because of 1998!" She’d shake her head in frustration. Then, recovering from her caustic lashing, she’d begin to drone out a Goth-like refrain, "1998," and shook her head miserably. Despite the intent of her cruel focus group, it made me laugh.
"I don’t believe Andrew abused you, you are such a whining coward. You totally participated in it and you were sad when he married. When we played badminton, you admitted you had been in love with him—it was an abuse you very much enjoyed—enough to try to repeat it with me—you said he would suck you last, because you fell asleep after you came. He dumped you for another boy, right? Fuck, Nate, pick up the phone! Maybe you really don’t know how shallow and selfish you are; I try to show you by telling you exactly what my feelings are; I feel quite a lot of disgust for shallowness. It’s also extremely frustrating, considering all the time I believed I might have been talking to a real person but I realize now I was not. I hope your family listens to this message. I guess I prefer men of other cultures; maybe I am just not attracted to North American men. In any case, I don’t see you as a real man but a masturbating boy. I know eventually you’ll grow out of this ugly phase, but I’m not sacrificing myself to help you grow. I am trying to wake you up. But I also never think about you. It’s not that I haven’t tried, Nate. It’s just that your routine has gotten boring and I am numb to your histrionics."
A few days later, Uncle Carl had come home from the hospital, only to be persuaded back the next morning in a dramatic intervention. The second cousin, Doug, had come by to take me for what ended up being our final visit. We had to dress in our SARS aprons and stood looking pensive as the nurses led us into the next stage of antiseptic visitation. Uncle Carl handed me his wallet and his watch. He was in considerable pain; the doctor later told us his stomach had grown so weak that his lungs were resting on top of it, now collapsing from the inside, making it impossible to digest any food.
All those times he refused to stay for dinner, the meals, pieces of cake were symptoms of a finality that would take him away from all of us prematurely, even if it was just by a few years.
I was waiting to hear when the memorial for Uncle Carl would take place, since he had not left any instructions for his funeral arrangements other than he was to be cremated and no plot, no gravesite, nothing really. Mom’s voice was up first on the answering machine, and it was official: Uncle Carl’s staged-wake tombstone-less, barely-catered memorial service would be this coming Sunday at noon with our second cousins and their heir-apparent family.
I phoned Mom back.
"Got your message. So is Holly going to fucking speak to me at this thing?"
Tabitha phoned to tell me she was in love with someone named Ronnie from Holland whom she had never met and wanted me to be happy for her. I was exhausted. Her voice chewed into my skull, my chest, and made me feel queasy as she went through an abject itinerary of how I had failed her during our 372 days of hell, fire and brimstone—and then some.
"I remember watching a video of you when you were young; I remember feeling startled at how much I disliked you. Even though you were only a little boy and totally innocent, I saw this shallow arrogance and jealous domination of your sister and the weird fetish of sexual repression and control you had with your mother—will you ever grow out of it? This mode of introverted sexuality made you the stud you are today needing blow jobs and unable to touch me, a denial of femininity and sensitivity in yourself. A kind of masochist self-worship, you just fuck yourself; you don’t need me. You just use me to reflect you and masturbate you. I have never met such a lazy man... maybe it is your bloated pomposity."
Tabitha carried on, but every one of those insights she had were tweaked and manipulated in this hyperbolic sermon. I didn’t know what the point of it was other than a big break-up PowerPoint presentation: gratuitous and shaming.
"I guess how you behaved is just a reflection of everything else. I used to wonder what some girls put up with from boyfriends whose behaviour I found gross. Now I know why my friends were worried. It’s not like you are the only stupid boy I’ve dated for this period of time. But I, too, am trying to improve my life. I think I am doing the healthiest thing by submitting to the attractions of more worthy and at least more exciting people and spending more time with my friends."
The unravelling boycott was cardio for her, a big dump, a press conference for one, where she could lower my stock value and fuck with my self-confidence. The details she went into to cut me down and hold up a dystopian portrait has since gone unmatched.
I drew a bath, tried to clear my mind of my whole life. Shutting the bathroom door behind me, I undressed. The less opportunity to open portals to the past, the better. I moved the suction grip-pad and filled up the unfamiliar tub.
It was a challenge not to think of Andrew in our glorious VHS reels, the ones, hidden in their plastic black rectangular video time capsules. I couldn’t hide anything, even alone with the door locked, the lights off, where you can only see your fingertips, tree-lines of time that circle the rubbery skin—a constant confession.
Sunday, May 25th, 2003
From the videotape marked: "UNCLE DEATH ’03"
I started up my old camcorder and heard the familiar gear gurgle. 2003 was barely half done and already so much terrible garbage had transpired. I took this deep breath and spoke, staring into its unblinking red eye:
It’s eight days before Uncle Carl’s 83rd birthday, and I am watching their feet walk towards the house...oh, are they knocking? They’ll figure it out.
I saw the feet of my estranged second cousins, my sister and Mom enter the airless bungalow. I continued:
Holly hasn’t said shit to me and barely spoke to Carol or anyone like she doesn’t want me to hear her fucking voice or something like I’m going to impersonate her. Mom says she’s getting married in August; I’m like, remembering my top Uncle C-Note memories were not shared with these bizarro family members. The pink-haired warrior surviving my father’s ridicule, his 8mm film collection, the song "Lucky Star" blaring on the radio in ’85 or ’86, and us nearly getting into a car accident because I insisted we turn the volume up and Uncle Carl was accommodating me (THANKS A LOT MADONNA!), the year 2001 turning over and Uncle Carl asking me if 2000 even took place or did it jump from 1999 to 2001? "There was no year 2000, right?" The Playboys and cherry chocolates under the couch. Our insane behaviour led Uncie Carlos to reconsider the frequency of his visits, always a sliver of brittle cake and a
gulp of tea, a few photographs, then his car tires squealing east back to his anorexia camp! Oh yeah! Aunt Wildabeats probably even named her daughter Carol in some homage to our beloved gangster pharmacist Uncle Carl. I’m wearing his socks to mark this sad occasion. I think it’s show time. Here we go—
The plastic affair began as planned at noon. I had to take the phone off the hook because Tabitha kept calling me to tell me off. Officially in attendance were my mom’s cousin Carol and her husband Doug the bloated water-colour painter, plus their two sons, who we last saw in January 1987 at Grampy’s funeral. I remember vividly that Holly had shaken me in the cloakroom, "Why aren’t you crying?" and I was ten or eleven, standing in shock as our family’s estranged sides showed up and shook our little hands and asked if we knew who they were.
I hadn’t spoken to Holly for more than ten seconds straight in over three years. She walked up the stairs from the side door, her hair now cut shorter than I remembered it, resting neatly on her shoulders. She was wearing a subtle black shirt with dress pants, while following behind her was Mom, wearing a deflated smile.
Without a formal ceremony in place (no priest, no lawyer, no outside friends in attendance save for the across-the-street neighbour, aged nineteen years, who just kept saying, "I can’t believe he’s gone," over and over again before sobbing and asking us to forgive her for her emotional display), I decided to say a few words. My head pulsed with confusion; the cheap wine was rotten or high in acidic resin, coating my tongue in a harsh, unnecessary way.
Later, Mom would go on to explain that she knew what was at hand: for over a decade now Great Aunt Bethany wanted to position her daughter as the heir apparent over Mom, and it would be a competition to see who would win out and ultimately get their name on the will. This was a stunt wake if there ever was one.
These tidbits and facts had been carefully released from Mom’s coveted war room of intelligence.
"There you are," Mom said, her grimace on pause, followed by a long sigh and gum-chew combo. She scanned the living room. "Should we get more chairs?" She sniffed the air, "Gonna open a window." Mom wore a variety of items ranging in pattern (stripes, floral and leopard print scarf) and texture variables too (silk, poly blend and plastic).
Mom drowned in the terrain of Uncle Carl’s furniture (the very couch where, just a week before, I had held his ticking remains, taking breaks to run downstairs and cry in the basement over Tabitha over Jimmy over life and facing death head-on with my uncle in a gruesome summer showdown; "Where are you?" he shouted, then asked me mercilessly to insert a laxative rectal shit capsule, wash him, light him a cigarette, make him some soup, pour him an Ensure drink...) and sat back with a plate of food, only to drop the contents (several grapes, finger sandwiches, piece of marble cheese) onto the carpet. Holly and I caught each other’s brown eyes, and in a Moment, we shared a smile.
In the kitchen, Mom and I briefly squabbled over the sequence of carbohydrates.
"Maybe I’m losing my mind," Mom said. Holly stared straight ahead, not yet adjusted to the abject core the afternoon offered all of us.
The food kept coming in trays, courtesy of our second cousins, the heirs apparent. As she undid the dips and vegetables and sandwiches, I remembered my great uncle Carl bragging how Carol didn’t ever have time to cook food because she was so busy as a real estate agent. Then I saw Mom with her action-figure accessory—a loaf of homemade banana bread. Her earnest baked signifier sat on a paper-plate slab, high on an emotional altitude. Mom pontificated about the unique ingredients and how recently she made it for this occasion.
"I was up late last night," Mom said. We sat drinking terrible wine, and the neighbour came over and began to cry on the couch beside me. "I’m sorry," she said. "He was so nice." We were silent.
"I don’t have time to bake, Diane," Carol snorted.
I read from a folded piece of paper with nothing on it but waving lines and a sparse grocery list:
"There’s a fire in life that burns," I said, pretending to read from a note.
These phrasings came to me; I forgot them immediately, like wiping the database. I improvised another line, "We’re lost in a beach-shell memory, a photographic paradise," closing with "...and you always said the right things to me."
I figured someone should say something, beyond the stock phrases. He liked to travel; he came to my hockey game; he was a fan of country music; he was the youngest of four brothers; he liked going to Mexico...He liked Playboy and chocolate, kept them in proximity.
Unable to discuss the reality, the will and money, the fight over his estate, the obvious divide, the strain—we were all improvising. "Gonna just take these dishes to the kitchen," Mom said.
We passed a tiny black-and-white photo of the four brothers from Saskatoon with Uncle Carl being the youngest, sitting on a chair next to his brothers—a faint image of a blonde boy awaiting his mother’s joy, the ultimate momma’s boy. They lived together here from 1953 until her death in January 1976.
This was a collage of a family, masking-taped together for an afternoon in Saran Wrap prestige, one last visit in the iconic bungalow, a solid twenty-minute walk from Eglinton and Brimley in what I called early Scarborough.
Tears streamed purple down Mom’s face as she braced herself in the stairwell. Her deep buckshot sobs soared down the basement into forgotten pockets. "That’s all we have now, our memories; we knew him the best," Mom howled, mouth now webbed in saliva and ruin. Holly took the remaining bits of food and a small box of photographs into the car. I threw my body on the bed that night in my uncle’s spare bedroom, wearing his clothes, endeavouring a sensation of ghostly presence as I fell into deep slumber.
I don’t know if my uncle was a well-read or emotional person, though some Moments I have recalled with great depth in the shrapnel of his rattling voice a shade of regret.
"My friend Eddie didn’t like the idea of having a boyfriend." Eddie was a friend he had met while working in East General Hospital in the ’60s and ’70s, who worked in labour. They would hang out over an occasional cup of coffee. Uncle Carl’s sentence about Eddie’s reluctance for his friendship always resonated with me. I don’t think I ever met Eddie, but remember him being some fat plumber in a Polaroid.
I was disturbed by the most detailed dream of Jimmy. He was sitting on the lap of a large brown bear in a junkyard. I wanted so badly to wake up next to his sleeping face, tiny nostrils breezing at me. I awoke to the harsh tone of Uncle Carl’s rotary and pulse-tone phones simultaneously going off.
In the morning, what I believed was an outline of my uncle Carl’s skeleton passed right by me, thrown in the raging morning sunlight. My eyes were sore and raw. The dust in the house was thicker than a century, sprawled out in an outline of a large recumbent hand.
19 )
Special
Late November 2009
Steps from Dundas south of Ossington, the waitress at the Burger Shack was explaining to me how the long glossy banquet tables were made from old bowling alley lanes. Holly spotted me. We had been hanging out again on a regular basis for about six months when we decided to take Mom out for a lunch and then back to her place to sort through some of her belongings in an effort to downsize her wardrobe, books and carbohydrates.
I was now working three days a week for a sports-media website (Shooting Star Wrestling Review) that had a focus on vintage and contemporary pro wrestling. I was one of five people who gathered material from archives or recently recorded "shoot interviews," which were usually by retired or semi-retired wrestlers pontificating on their careers, inside gossip and any other assorted details fans might want to delve into.
"It’s a fucking zoo out there," Holly said, shoving her big leather purse under the table. "Sarah says she wants you to come over and play monster."
"Tell Sarah to take a number," I said. Sarah was an energetic three-and-a-half-year-old, capable of long deliberations and inquisitions, frantic doodles and misplaced vowels, bowls of cereal and talking s
tuffed animals. She was my estranged niece, and at this point, I’d met her only three times.
"Burgers are a neutral food," I said, my tone as sincere as I could manufacture, adding "and besides, the city is obsessed with them—gourmet burgers, onion rings on top, bacon, seaweed; they’re everywhere, Hol."
"Yeah, I guess so," Holly said, "good to keep Mom abreast of all civically ordained glow trends." The waitress was filling up some ketchup bottles and glanced over. "I always end up asking the waitress to tell me what to eat."
"So what’s new?"
"Nothing much. I woke up this morning."
"That’s a good start," Holly said.
"How is life with your husband and only child?"
Holly mouthed a thank you to the waitress who brought us both large glasses of water. "You sound like an ESL student," she said. "So, any girl in the picture?"
"I like this one person named Sherri. She’s a bit slippery."
"Where’s she from?"
"Earth. Not too long ago, actually," I said. "We’re not dating. I just like her and try to talk to her. I see her at work, and we worked this conference together for, like, a weekend, but I think she has a boyfriend."
"What is she like?"
"She’s twenty-three and looks like Katharine Ross from The Graduate, minus the wedding veil and with thinner lips, cleaner hair and she wears pompous berets sometimes. Comes into work hung-over a lot."
"Coo-coo catchew," Holly said, glancing over the menu.
"She also played the shrink in Donnie Darko."
"Your office teen crush?"
"No—Katharine."
I didn’t want to explain all the details of Sherri to Holly but I let her listen to the messages. The first was about her hair being curly today and buying too many grapefruits.
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