And so with mounting frustration I spent that whole morning laboring in vain to construct something, anything. I had it fixed in my mind that that would impress him in a way I never had. It was a disaster: I could not so much as attach one piece of wood to another. Dad finally arrived to find me inconsolable. He scooped me up, balancing my butt on the underside of his powerful forearm, and I buried my face in his uniform. I can still remember the coarseness of the wool and the tang of its smell when dampened by my tears. For once in my young life, I was at a loss for words. We walked home and on the way, I wet my pants. Even Tom Sawyer had bad days.
Whether it was that day or another, at some point in my childhood I simply stopped dealing with people's expectations and started going my own way.
BOX OF GHOSTS
Chilliwack, B.C.; North Bay, Ontario; Burnaby, B.C.—1967–1972
Like a field researcher's string and twine grid laid over a fresh archeological dig, I've tried for the purposes of this book to organize the periods of my childhood into logically defined segments. If the first square on the grid outlined the murky, impressionistic soup of my toddlerhood up to the beginning of school, the second would frame the period of 1967–1972, ages six to eleven. As it happens, a few select scenes of this era are easy to recover.
For Christmas in 1989, my sister Jackie collected the remnants of Dad's old 8mm home movies. A sporadic family chronicler at best, Dad nevertheless had recorded enough fragments of our family's day-to-day existence to be compiled into a wordless, somewhat shaky and unfocused, but emotionally stirring family documentary. Jackie hired an editor to transfer the 8mm onto videotape, and filled him in on the chronology of the random snatches of footage.
Tracy, Sam, and I didn't make it back to Canada for the holidays that year, but when I received my tape via FedEx, I immediately fed it into the machine. I might have expected the flush of nostalgia, but the images of Nana, who'd been dead since I was eleven, blindsided me. I couldn't look at the tape very long, but promised myself that in a couple of weeks I'd watch it through. Before that happened, however, my father died in January of 1990. The last thing I wanted to do then was to see all those images of my father alive. So I put the tape away and didn't think about it for a very long time.
I didn't think of it again, in fact, until I began writing these pages. Finding it all these years later meant digging through countless sloppily labeled cassettes: children's birthday parties, leftover Super Bowls, prizefights, hockey games, and old Larry Sanders episodes. But to my surprise, it only took one trip to the tape shelves to uncover this treasure. A skewed label marked in Jackie's neat, if florid, hand, Fox Family Home Movies: The Way We Were, 1967–1972.
Weird, huh?
I removed it from its cardboard dustcover and made my way toward the VCR—not without some hesitation. Before that first viewing in 1989, I hadn't given much thought to what I was about to see, so the images of Nana surprised me. Now I knew that she was on there, as was Dad—walking and talking, smoking and joking—animate for the first time in more than a decade.
These two figures, my maternal grandmother and my father, represented two distinct poles of my childhood, two gravitational fields that helped form my character.
My father, the career military man, personified the boundaries of expectation and the acceptance of one's limitations, both external and self-imposed. He was a pragmatist, a realist, a sixth-grade dropout who called himself “a graduate of the school of hard knocks.” He'd had dreams as a young boy and man, but they'd been effectively knocked out of him, and he'd felt the sting for the rest of his life. Fiercely loyal, his first commitment was to his family, whom he was determined to protect from any threat, including the disappointment that would inevitably result from the pursuit of romantic fantasy.
In comparison, Nana, the matriarch and wartime clairvoyant, possessed an essential nature that hinted at the possibility of escape, of transcending life's limits. She delighted in my accomplishments and eccentricities, always encouraging me to believe in the power of my dreams. When others in the family would express doubts about my direction, she was my staunchest defender and greatest champion. She'd laugh off their concerns with a wink at me, as if we both knew something that was beyond the understanding of others.
With the recovery of the videotape, I had the means to see the two of them again, a prospect that filled me with both curiosity and trepidation.
REELING IN THE YEARS
The opening frame features a medium shot of a black sheepdog, a small white blaze on his chest. The darkness of his coat is in sharp contrast to the bright green of the surrounding lawn. Dead for over a quarter century, he's alive again on my television screen, scratching furiously at a flea hiding in his shaggy coat. The dog's name was Bartholomew. He wasn't ours; he belonged to Ed, my older sister Karen's boyfriend. Dad hated the dog and he wasn't too crazy about Ed either, branding him a hippie, which in 1967 was the worst thing my father could think of to say about anybody. I don't remember the circumstances, but the dog disappeared after about a year or so; Ed, to my Dad's chagrin, stuck around, for a time becoming my sister's husband.
Cut to my sister Kelli, three years old, adorable, towheaded, scrunching her already twice-broken nose and smiling, her full attention focused on the lens. She puts on a sharp little red summer-weight jacket and models it. It's an engaging performance, hinting at a future on the stage.
An interior shot now; the camera is panning left and finds my father. He looks great. Heavy, but not as heavy as I remember him. More bulky than fat, he amply fills his plaid short-sleeved shirt. He looks young, I think, and then realize that the man on the tape is two years younger than I am at this writing. Beneath his crew cut—his hair was never styled any other way during his entire career in the military—his eyes are bright, and he favors us with a quick smile.
Outside again, a group shot with Mom in a sleeveless cotton shirt and Capri pants, chatting with a group of neighbors. Kelli dances in the foreground and a couple of the women observe her through horn-rimmed, cat's-eye glasses.
Next sequence. From a distance, two figures are strolling towards us through a heavily arbored, sun-dappled walkway. The smaller of the pair has a distinctive bow-legged gait that I recognize immediately. It's my grandmother. Closer to the camera now, her features come into sharper relief. She's beautiful. On this particular day, her unruly gray hair has been fashioned into tight little pincurls and tamed with pomade and bobby pins. Her face is smiling—always smiling—though it would be hard for a stranger to tell because the left side droops from Bell's palsy. Round and comfy looking, Nana's in a gingham housedress and black lace-up shoes; a comically oversized handbag dangles from her wrist. Grandmothers always used to look like this. The slightly taller figure is my brother Steve, allowing her to set the pace. More than anyone, she resembles the Queen Mum; as a loyal British subject, she'd be tickled by the comparison.
And this: the six-year-old me pushing my bicycle. A couple of quick steps, and then with concentrated cool I quicken the pace, swing my leg, and I'm up on the bike, pedaling across vibrant green grass. My left hand grips the handlebars and from my right dangles a writhing garter snake.
We were still on the Chilliwack base, but out of the PMQs and into a duplex apartment on Nicomen Drive. Strictly speaking, these homes were reserved for servicemen of a higher rank than my father, but with five kids now he was entitled to a housing upgrade. Dad put in for the change in residence back in 1963 when Mom first found out she was pregnant with Kelli, but the army, remember, viewed families as “nonessential personnel” and were in no hurry to grant Dad's request. Their attitude was basically, “Show us the baby.” In other words, only when the newest Fox child was an undeniable physical fact would they even consider his application. (My dad put up with twenty-five years of this shit.) Almost three years after Kelli's arrival, the papers finally went through and the duplex became available. Her birth may have cost us a color TV, but thanks to Dad's persistence, it did
win us a little more elbow room.
Not that I required too much in the way of elbow room. On the tape, I am as tiny as advertised. In two-shots with my three-year-old sister, we do in fact look like twins; almost exactly the same size, except for our heads: mine is disproportionately huge, a major league pumpkin.
As I watch, I can't help but notice how self-contained I am as a six-year-old—not playing to the camera at all, wholly involved in whatever I'm doing at the moment. This comes as something of a personal revelation. Given my family reputation for childhood extroversion and relentless precocity at school, home, and in social situations, I'd always assumed that much of this was for effect—that I harbored an intense desire for attention and acceptance.
In searching through my own and my family's memories, hoping to understand who I am, I tend to view myself through the lens of who I have become. Those events and personal qualities that support the current version get singled out unconsciously, distorting memories in order to illuminate my path more brightly. But the tape short-circuits that process of subjective recall. To revisit the analogy of the archeologist's grid, viewing this thirty-odd minutes of videotape is like taking a core sample, reaching back to show me who I really was then.
I'd always bought into the notion that I became a performer because I craved love and attention; that approbation was, in my case, the mother of self-invention. At first glance, the tape supports this assessment. I mean, I'm very busy with all the activities I'd heard about: drawing, reading book after book, brandishing an oversized fishing net like a drum major's baton as I lead my parents on a bullfrog hunt around the reedy shoreline of a local pond, and—still my favorite—taking that snake on an involuntary bike tour of the backyard. On closer inspection, however, it's clear that all these antics were done for nobody's benefit but my own. First and foremost I am a boy out to entertain myself, completely undisturbed by the presence of the lens.
It is plain from these scenes that in many ways who I am is who I always was. So the question is then not “How did I get this way?,” but “How did I stay this way?” The answer is, “I'm not sure that I did.” Along the way came distractions and self-doubt, detours and adjustments, but the tape tells me that the adult I am today has more in common with the kid on the bike than with the person I was in between. It's gratifying to know that I somehow found my way back, and it's bracing to realize that my Parkinson's diagnosis played an important part in leading me there.
FAMILY TIES
The first time I saw The Honeymooners and Jackie Gleason blustered onto our old black-and-white TV screen, I thought, “Hey . . . that's my dad!” Aside from his striking physical resemblance to Gleason, Dad was Kramden-esque in many other ways: imposing, funny, passionate, capable of an exasperation at once comical and threatening. He, too, could swing in a blink of an eye from “How sweet it is” to “One of these days, Alice, pow, right to the moon!” Both men seemed to be at the mercy of forces beyond their control, but, unlike Ralph, Dad harbored no romantic notions about transcending his lot in life with a get-rich-quick scheme. Instead he relied on persistence, a solid work ethic, and his formidable intelligence. Besides, he had one very important thing that Ralph Kramden did not; the possession of which, I'm sure my father felt, made him wealthier than he ever dreamed he could be: a family.
There are a few key scenes on the tape that make me feel so close to my father, so overwhelmed by his presence, that I could cry. Each of these scenes takes place in a different year, but each is almost an identical replay of the one before. No one, not even my father himself, appears in the frame.
This is the shot: a slow, loving, left-to-right pan of a lit Christmas tree in an otherwise darkened living room, with particular emphasis on the bounty that lies beneath the tinseled boughs. The quantity of the gifts seems to grow with each successive year.
It's Christmas Eve and everybody else has gone to bed. The hand holding the camera is my father's. He's sitting in his favorite chair. A bottle of beer he'd convinced us to leave out for Santa in lieu of milk and cookies rests on the folding TV table beside him.
This was an annual and very private ritual. I know this because, on many a Christmas Eve, I'd creep down in my pajamas and stand on the landing at the bottom of the stairs quietly watching him. One year I fell asleep there, and when my father picked me up to carry me back to my bed, I stirred briefly. I asked him if he was waiting for Santa Claus. He smiled and said yes, “Just in case Saint Nick has to assemble something and he needs to borrow a wrench.”
My father's tree-watching vigils continued well into my adulthood when, home from the States for the holidays, I'd stumble in from Christmas Eve reunions with my old high school buddies, sit down, and join him for a nightcap. He didn't say much, didn't share his thoughts. He didn't have to. I knew exactly what they were.
During the Depression, my father's father (also named Bill) struggled to provide for his family in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. It was a losing battle. What little they had, they lost. By the outbreak of the war, Bill Sr., desperate for work, turned to the military. The army deemed him too old for active service and assigned him to guard duty at a military prison in Alberta. This meant leaving my dad, his older sister Edith, younger brother Doug, and little sister Lenore in the care of their mother Dolly. But Dolly was a mother in name only. In her husband's absence, Dolly could not handle the responsibilities of being an impoverished single mother with four children. She sought refuge in the beer halls along Hastings Street and the nightclubs of East Vancouver.
Dad and Edie took on the role of raising their younger siblings. They both left school early to find work; for a time Dad clerked at Spencer's department store. Dad and Dougie, two years his junior, were especially close, and they often wandered their down-on-its-luck, working-class neighborhood in search of diversions to distract them from their hunger. Half a mile from their home, west on Hastings Street, North Burnaby's main drag, stood the fairground and Exhibition Park, western Canada's largest, year-round horse racing venue. The boys loved the track and spent hours peering through the slatted fence—not only at post time, but in the mornings while the stable hands walked and watered their horses and the trainers put them through their paces. Growing bolder, the boys soon snuck in, and before long had insinuated themselves into the exotic world of the racetrack.
Eventually the young brothers won low-paying jobs such as hot-walking the horses. Dad, barely five feet six inches and thin as a rail in those days, was considered “potential jockey material,” my mother tells me, and his apprenticeship began in earnest. By the time he was sixteen, he was earning mounts in a few races. Giddy from this turn of events, the Fox brothers got drunk one night and set out for the tattoo parlors of Vancouver's rough waterfront district. Dad had his left bicep permanently emblazoned with the profile of a thoroughbred, a horseshoe-shaped laurel of roses draped around its neck.
The war ended, and with it Dad's short-lived dreams of a career in horse racing. Servicemen returning from overseas flooded the job market, and Dad soon found he had few options but to trade places with them. He had spent enough time around racing touts, punters, and pari-mutuel windows to know that a life in the military was his safest bet. Shortly after Dad enlisted, his kid brother Doug, his best friend, contracted spinal meningitis and died before reaching his seventeenth birthday. Bill Sr. returned from Alberta, but a year or so later Dolly drifted away for good. No one in the family ever heard from her again.
Something positive did come out of this period, however—a life-altering event that my father would credit as his salvation. As a new enlistee housed in Ladner's army barracks, he met a cute and spirited redhead at a local dance. In Phyllis Piper he found someone who made him feel needed. At the same time, she displayed a stubborn independent streak that he respected. He sensed, correctly, that if they married, settled down, and had kids, Phyllis was not someone who would ever drift away.
Christmas Eve after Christmas Eve, Dad sat there relishing the bounty
of gifts spread out under the tree, thinking about how far he'd come. Certainly the presents symbolized material success, but beyond that they implied love and connection—a nuclear family, intact. For all his hardships, Bill Fox had managed to achieve something great. With my mom, he had helped to create a family, to care for and protect them, and at the end of another year they'd even managed to see to it that there was something left over. To ask for anything more would be asking for trouble. These, at least, are the thoughts I imagine going through his head those sweet evenings alone. Gaze never leaving the tree, he'd lean back in his chair, take a long pull on Santa's beer, his beer, and smile.
DON'T YOU WORRY ABOUT MICHAEL
Burnaby, British Columbia—1971–1972
In 1968 we were transferred once more, to Dad's shock this time, clear across the country to North Bay, Ontario. Dad had been considering retiring in 1971 when his eligibility would come up, and the seeming capriciousness behind this latest transfer sealed the deal. After three years back east, Dad retired and moved the family back to B.C. for good. It was the start of a new life for us, a civilian life, with all of the freedom and uncertainty that implied.
We weren't the only ones making this change. Almost all of my adult male relatives had military careers, and the early seventies set off a wave of retirements. From every corner of Canada, all the branches of the Piper family tree returned to their roots in the west. Resettled into new homes in the greater Vancouver area, all within easy driving distance of one another, the progeny of Harry and Jenny Piper initiated a series of mini-reunion celebrations that would pick up where they left off virtually every weekend.
In the case of the large social gatherings I remember as a child—birthdays, backyard barbecues, holidays, and homecomings—the term “friends and family” is redundant. My parents’ closest and dearest friends were almost all family. They needed very little excuse to get together, sit back, tip a few beers, cook up a big feed, and watch their offspring, a closely knit clutch of cousins, scramble in and out of whomever's home the tribe had assembled at that weekend. “In or out, kids, in or out—and close the door, for chrissakes, the neighbors are complaining about the heat”—that was a favorite of Dad's. Presiding over the festivities, and perhaps enjoying the warmth and camaraderie more than anyone, was the family's matriarch, Nana.
Lucky Man Page 5
