I Was There the Night He Died

by Ray Robertson

  I Was There the

  Night He Died

  Ray Robertson

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © Ray Robertson, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Robertson, Ray, 1966-, author

  I was there the night he died / written by Ray Robertson.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927428-69-6 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-927428-70-2 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.O3219I2 2014 C813’.54 C2013-907285-3

  C2013-907286-1

  Edited by Dan Wells

  Copy-edited by Zachariah Wells

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover designed by Bill Douglas

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  The author acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.

  Mara Korkola

  Again, of course

  Dan Wells

  C-town boy with an A-1 ear

  Everything is not enough

  Nothing is too much to bear

  —Townes Van Zandt

  Chapter One

  What the hell, why not tell the truth?

  Within reason of course. Too much of anything, it seems, is never a good idea.

  “Sorry,” the teenager sitting next to me says, needing to get by me to go to the restroom for the third time since we left Toronto.

  “Sure,” I say, standing up, letting him slide past. Since we pulled out of Union Station less than two hours ago he’s watched half of a T & A-spiked action movie on his laptop, slayed forty-five minutes worth of black-hooded cartoon terrorists on the same, and made and received enough phone calls and text messages that there’s absolutely nothing going on out there he doesn’t know about. And washed down a large bag of Doritos with a can of Red Bull and another of Diet Coke.

  When Sara and I used to visit my parents—Sara driving, me in charge of changing the CDs and keeping Barney, our overweight Black Lab, from climbing into the front seat when the steaming bag of Harvey’s takeout we’d always pick up on the way out of town was finally unwrapped—by the time we’d get to Chatham I’d be ankle-deep in vegetarian burger wrappers and empty french-fry cartons and soft-drink containers and crushed Tim Horton’s cups and a medium-size Timbits box, only a few dough-and-lard survivors left rolling around inside.

  I pull open the sports section, the only part of the newspaper I ever bother with, and concentrate on the scoring summaries from last night’s games. Kronwall 4 (Datsyuk, Zetterberg), 13:36 makes a lot more sense than thinking about Sara. Or Barney or my mother or even my father, the only one of them still alive, if only in body, Alzheimer’s almost done with its first cruel course—his mind—and in no particular hurry, it seems, to devour what’s left.

  I fold the newspaper in two and slide it underneath my seat and pull the notepad and pen from my shirt pocket. Even a dominating Red Wings road win can’t distract death thoughts; only doing—doing and doing, nada-negating doing—doing the trick. And it is a trick. There’s a hole and you fill it and as soon as you stop shoveling, it’s empty again. Not including the rapid inhalation of an eight ball of good cocaine, however, it’s the only magic I know, so I do what I do, scribble and revise and scribble some more until I notice that the boy is standing in the aisle beside my seat. I have no idea how long he’s been waiting there. Now it’s my turn to say I’m sorry.

  Sitting back down and sticking in his earbuds for another go round with all those pesky terrorists, “You looked busy,” he says.

  That’s the plan, I almost say, before realizing that that’s exactly the sort of thing someone in a novel might say.

  “Yeah” is what I do say, but it’s too late, the kid’s already got both earbuds in, his fingers are already busy at his keypad.

  * * *

  Let’s get this straight. I’m not in denial. Nothing has been repressed. I haven’t bypassed my pain. And what I’m most not is haunted. Only people in sentimental movies and overwritten novels are haunted. I’m sad. Real fucking sad.

  If anything, my grief has been too perfect—textbook, practically.

  I said goodbye to Sara seventeen months ago at a quarter to nine on a Tuesday morning, the same thing I did every Monday through Friday when she left for work at the OSPCA, and by 4:30 pm I was making funeral arrangements. Three days later Sara was in the ground and the world went back to work and Sara was my dead wife, Sara. That’s called Stage One: Numbness or Shock.

  I felt a tightness in my throat. I always seemed to be short of breath. All I wanted to do was sleep. I sighed all the time. The police said the accident might have been her fault, she possibly merged when she shouldn’t have, and when I wasn’t too tired, I was angry at her for that in particular and for dying in general. I was also furious at myself because my last words to her had been a reminder to please not forget to pick up vodka when she went wine shopping on the way home from work. That’s known as Stage Two: Disorganization.

  Days and then weeks and then months and then the lie that everyone tells you actually becomes true: minutes, hours even, when you think about something other than your grief. I knew I was beginning to get better when, ten months or so after Sara’s death, I was putting my change in the dish on top of the refrigerator and a quarter fell to the floor and rolled underneath the fridge and I took out my notebook from the middle drawer of my desk for the first time since the accident and wondered why it was that any time anything gets dropped on the kitchen floor it invariably ends up underneath the fridge, a minor mystery to be pondered right along with where the hell all the missing single socks go and why it is that obese people always own tiny dogs. That’s referred to as Stage Three: Re-organization.

  There isn’t any Stage Four.

  * * *

  The old town looks the same as I step down from the train; except that J.P.’s, the strip club next door to the Via station that for decades has been keeping it shaking, has burned down, and another Goodwill has sprouted up down the street since the last time I was here just a month ago, arson and charity clothing stores Chatham’s two biggest growth industries. Uncle Donny is waiting for me inside his idling Buick.

  “What do you know for sure, pal?”

  “Not much,” I say, putting my bags in the back seat.

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  It’s the same exchange we’ve been having since I was six years old and I’ve got no reason to doubt he’s telling me the truth. I once based a character in one of my novels on Uncle Donny. The nice thing about being a writer from Southwestern Ontario is that the people you tend to write about don’t mind your utilizing their likenesses. Of course, on the down side, they don’t mind because they don’t care, voluntary reading as dubious an adult occupation as, say, Chinese shadow puppet theatre or antique rug collecting.

  “How is he?” I say.<
br />
  “Good. Fine. He’ll be glad to see you.”

  We both know that’s a lie, but I don’t mind hearing it if he’s willing to say it.

  “Goddamnit, goddamn Phaneuf, sonofabitch could go into the goddamn corner with an egg in his pocket and come out with it unbroken.” Uncle Donny thumps the dash with an open palm, punishment for the radio broadcasting the bad news of another Maple Leaf goal against, this time the direct result of a Dion Phaneuf giveaway. Uncle Donny is as much a Leaf fan as Dad and I are Red Wings supporters, but his anger seems a little disproportionate for just another nail in the coffin of just another Toronto loss. Four decades and counting of Stanley Cup futility have a way of taking the edge off one’s competitive intensity. Besides, no matter who’s playing on the radio, Rat Pack casino concert tapes (and, now, CDs) have always been Uncle Donny’s car sounds of choice, Frank and Dean and Sammy’s corny jokes and schmaltzy songs as much a somatic reminder of riding with Uncle Donny as the perennial pine tree air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror. He catches me staring at him muttering into the pop can at his lips.

  “You want to stop by the house?” he says. “So you can drop off your things?”

  “Let’s go there first.”

  Uncle Donny clicks on the turn signal. “You’re the boss.”

  There is Thames View Gardens, a nursing home that has a self-contained Alzheimer’s ward. Just as hometown aesthetic indifference has its professional advantages, I should be thankful that as Chatham’s population has actually decreased since I left for university twenty-five years ago, senior citizens’ homes and extended care units have proportionally increased. Dad was on a waiting list for less than forty-eight hours before they found him his spot at Thames View. Chatham, Ontario: out with the young, stuck with the old.

  It’s only just after seven pm when we pull into the parking lot, but it’s already dark—late-January sleety too—none of which stops Uncle Donny from waving me inside so he can have a cigarette outside the automatic front doors. The few thin strands of black hair he insists on still greasing and combing straight back do what they’re told in spite of the wind.

  “When your Grandmother was at St. Andrew’s I used to smoke right in her room,” he says. “You’d think that the person living there paying the bills would be the one to make that decision, if you ask me.”

  I don’t ask him—just tell him I’ll see him inside—and leave him to his Player’s Light. He could have smoked on the way over, but he’s here almost every day, meaning I haven’t had to be, so I let him have his five minutes of cloudy quiet. Aside from me, Uncle Donny is Dad’s only living relative, five other brothers and sisters Chatham-born and Chatham-buried, most from cancer. No one’s bragging about it, but Chatham is Canada’s cancer capital. Instead of the sign on Highway Six that announces

  WELCOME TO CHATHAM, ONTARIO:

  HOME OF BASEBALL HALL OF FAMER FERGUSON JENKINS

  maybe the Chamber of Commerce should change it to:

  CHATHAM, ONTARIO:

  ALL THE PROBLEMS OF A BIG CITY WITH ALL

  THE INCONVENIENCES OF A SMALL TOWN

  We only moved Dad into Thames View Gardens last summer, but I’d been inside the building itself plenty of times before, most unmemorably May 15 forty-four years ago, when I was born here, when instead of exclusively seeing lives out, Thames View Gardens was St. Joseph’s Hospital and routinely saw them in. My parents wanted children, couldn’t have children, then, when they were both in their mid-thirties and resigned to being childless, discovered they were going to have a child—me.

  You have to walk past general reception to get to the Alzheimer’s ward, as well as the empty dining room, the locked exercise room, and the recreation room where, behind a closed door, someone at a piano is competing to be heard over a chorus of cracked voices singing “Camptown Races.” As hard as it is to get used to your father being a mute, expressionless, staring stranger, imagining him joining in on an after-dinner senior-citizen sing-a-long is even more difficult. Even novelists have their limits.

  Dad and his three roommates (fellow residents? patients?) have been fed and cleaned up and are pillow-propped-up in bed and settling in for their evening’s indifference to anything but the six inches or so directly in front of their faces. Thames View is the best Alzheimer’s care facility in town, but even when, as now, the gag-inducing smell of fresh human feces has been assiduously scrubbed away, the nostril-hair-tingling tang of powerful disinfectants reminds you of what it’s hiding. There are family members gathered at two of the other beds, but since no one here knows me, there are only stoical nods from the men and sad, knowing smiles from the women, the children—or grandchildren, more accurately—probably at the vending machines in the basement if they’ve been coaxed into coming at all. I give Dad a hug that he endures like an unexpected but painless back spasm and sit down on the chair beside the bed.

  If Uncle Donny was here we could shoot the breeze and I wouldn’t feel as if I was ignoring Dad, that Dad, as usual, was just letting his older brother blather, happy to not get too involved. Everyone knows the rudiments of the Alzheimer’s patient’s shutdown countdown, a little less of the loved one a little more each day until there’s no missing person’s report that’ll ever bring them back, but this suffocating silence still feels odd and I don’t know what to do other than what I’m doing, resting my hand on Dad’s forearm. Until I realize it looks like I’m pinning his arm to the bed, so I don’t even do that.

  I stand up and Dad doesn’t notice, doesn’t even blink, eyes open but dull. I’m going to be back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, so I excuse myself for leaving early, lean over and give him a hug goodbye.

  Brut.

  Somebody has remembered to dab some of his favourite cologne on him. My mother used to buy it for him at Shopper’s Drug Mart. $3.99 bought you a year’s worth of smelling like what a man smelt like. My dad, he was a Brut man.

  I kiss him goodbye on his cheek, something I’ve never done before, and breathe in deep the cheap cologne, and there you go, there you are, a K-Mart Blue Light Proustian Special, one stiff sniff and right back where you started, his guiding hand on your very first bike ride and a skinned right knee but that’s all right, and how cool would it be if it pours tonight because the sound of the rain beating on the roof of the tent pitched in your parents’ backyard is, like, so incredibly, totally awesome.

  Everything that matters already happened. Everything since then is just the same thing but different. The decades and decades since your first Pixy Stix and purple Kool-Aid high and your last strictly-against-doctor’s-orders rye and ginger ale only seem like several persons ago, are only the nice fib we tell ourselves about how everybody—everybody including you, too, of course—grows up.

  Look: when Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack while detoxing from years of heroin abuse at some California get-well nightmare called Serenity Knolls, they found him curled up in bed in the fetal position cuddling an apple and with a fat smile on his face. The guy was 53 years old. Sure he was.

  * * *

  And that’s an actual fact, that’s the truth, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) is what I’m calling it. Picking up where Dr. Johnson left off 250 years ago, I’ll add ample electricity and put a good goosing to the good doctor’s definition of our shared subject so as to include more than what’s merely written down vertically rather than horizontally, real poetry really being about greater rather than lesser heat. And what could be hotter than the buzz saw assault of Johnny Ramone’s Mosrite Venture guitar or Howlin’ Wolf’s larynx-shredding voice or Gene Clark’s grievy minor key mood pieces? And just because any book composed of one hundred percent facts is as limiting as one woven entirely out of lies, I’ll include a little make-­believe dollop on top, each chapter beginning with the same elegiac incantation, “I was there the nig
ht he died,” the lament of my surprisingly erudite and well-travelled sixty-­something ex-roadie narrator who’s uniquely qualified to comment upon not only the lives but the deaths of my real-life musical subjects. I’ve even got an epigraph ready, a compositional compass to help keep me on track, from Ford Maddox Ford’s The March of Literature: “For it is your hot love for your art, not your dry delvings in the dry bones of ana and philologies that will enable you to convey to others your strong passion.” Hot love. I mean, really, how can you go wrong with that?

  Because what I’m not going to do is write a novel about Sara dying. And not because it’s too painful to consider or too difficult to do or because it’s wrong to wring ink and paper gladness from flesh and blood sadness. Novelists are nervous vampires who depend upon the busily living for their sedentary livelihood, and Sara was always a very willing victim. Our lust, our lies, our love: all of it is in there in one fictionalized form or another in one or another book, Sara only really objecting once, when, out of laziness or puckishness, I can’t remember which, I’d called the character based on her Sarah.

  But you don’t even spell your name that way. Anyone who knows us will understand that it’s not you.

  This is what is called looking the victim horse in the mouth. As in vampires should be content to make it alive and still sucking in the morning. As in vampires should learn not to push their luck. I changed the character’s name to Mary.

  I’m not going to write a novel about Sara dying because writing a novel makes things go away. A novel is one long delicious scratch that makes the itching stop for good. A novel is a two-year puke of pain and pleasure that cleans out the sweet poison inside entirely, at last.