In those days, Nana split her time amongst the families of the children who lived in B.C., with extended tours across Canada to see the others. Always a welcome guest, she'd pitch in and help the adults, and always came bearing gifts for the kids. She'd pull us aside as we were running out to the candy store or local movie theater and discreetly tuck a dollar bill into our pockets.
I felt a very special bond with my grandmother. I'm sure my brother and sisters and cousins would share this sentiment, but mine goes back literally to the day of my birth. When the nurses came into that Edmonton hospital room to deliver me into my mother's arms for the first time, Nana was at her bedside.
“Do you and Bill have a name yet?”
“Well,” my mom replied, pushing the blue bunting from around my pink and puckered face, “we've pretty much settled on Michael.”
Nana was not pleased. “Michael's a fine name, but you know everyone will just call him Mike.”
“Not necessarily,” countered my mother.
“Yes they will,” Nana promised. “But not me, I'm not crazy about the name ‘Mike.’ Don't like it. I'll never call him anything but Michael.”
And she never did.
After Dad's retirement and our return to B.C., we settled into a three-bedroom flat in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. Situated across the street from a sprawling strip mall with an enormous parking lot perfect for endless hours of street hockey, the apartment complex also boasted a large if indifferently maintained outdoor swimming pool that was even cooler. The best feature of the neighborhood, though, was a block and a half away: the boxy, blue three-story walk-up where my Nana settled shortly after our arrival.
I'd gladly forsake slapping a hockey ball against the stucco wall of the liquor store or splashing around with my friends in the swimming pool to spend time visiting Nana in her new digs. We were an unlikely duo, a ten-year-old boy and a woman in her mid-seventies, but I liked nothing better than hanging out as she went through even the most mundane of her chores. Sitting in the kitchen, she'd tell me stories as she washed and sorted her collection of cups and saucers. Drying her hands on her housedress, Nana would fish into her gargantuan handbag for a candy bar or box of Chiclets she'd been saving for me.
“Now you tell me a story,” she'd demand.
The shot starts with a wide pan of the room, which is thick with a blue haze of cigarette smoke. Everybody's there but Kenny, who survived WWII but succumbed to cancer in the mid-sixties at the age of forty-two. Moving in and out of the bottom of the frame are the tousled heads of various children, but the camera is concentrating on their parents. Smoking their smokes and quaffing their beers are Uncle Stuey, who, like Kenny, was released from POW camp at war's end; my uncle Albert, who never saw combat duty; and Al's wife Marilyn, chatting with Stu's wife Flo. The pan continues and there's Mom's baby sister, Pat, standing with my parents and her husband Jake. The camera pulls back and we see that they're all grouped loosely around an overstuffed sofa upon which sits Nana, sipping from a beer mug that dwarfs her tiny hands. She lowers it, revealing a small wisp of foam painting her upper lip. She says something now, perhaps to herself, but more likely in response to a remark from off-camera.
There's no sound of course, so I have no idea what exactly the group has been laughing and gossiping about. But I do have personal knowledge of one frequent topic of conversation at many of these family gabfests: me.
Still tiny and decidedly hyper compared to the other kids in the family, I was considered something of an oddity. My parents would often share the latest twists and turns in the strange saga of their youngest son: a doctor's recommendation that I be administered growth hormone, a teacher's insistence that, as good as my grades were, my overwhelming appetite for stimulation needed to be tamped with a course of whatever the equivalent of Ritalin was in those days. (Dad nixed both suggestions.) Since the aptitude I demonstrated was for the arts, it was hard for anyone to imagine me holding a real paying job.
“You weren't going to be a laborer,” my mother explains. “You weren't going to be a union guy. That wouldn't have suited your personality, never mind your physique. You were the dreamer and the artistic type. I mean, years later I see that, but at the time, I can't honestly say that I did because it was just something that had never been in either side of our family.”
And so there was much chin-rubbing and worried conjecture about what would become of me. This is when Nana would always chime in.
“Don't you ever worry about Michael,” she'd intone with a calming certainty. “He's going to be fine. He's going to do things you can't even imagine. And he'll probably be very famous one day.”
And then with a smile, and no doubt a twinkle in her eye, she'd add, “And when he is, everyone will know him as Michael.”
In most circumstances, this would be written off as the indulgence of a doting grandmother, but you have to remember Nana's position in our family. It was accepted, after all, that Nana was something of a psychic. She'd had The Dream. She'd come down the stairs that morning in Ladner thirty years earlier and announced that Stuart was alive. So, if Nana said it, who were they to argue? I mean, if they woke up in the morning and the sun was shining and Nana said “rain,” believe me, they'd all spend the day packing umbrellas. Unlikely as it seemed to everyone else, maybe Bill and Phyl's boy Mike—Michael — was going to be okay after all.
SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER
Burnaby, British Columbia—1972–1979
August 22, 1972: I was in the pool when I heard the sirens. My folks were both at work; Dad as a police dispatcher in Ladner (his postretirement job) and Mom as a payroll clerk in a cold storage plant on the waterfront, so the summer day was like a blank check that I could fill in however I wanted. I might have gone to the movies, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes for the second or third time, then headed down to the lake on my new bike with its sleek banana seat and high-rise handlebars. It was a scorcher though, so I opted for the unheated waters of the swimming pool. Maybe I'd go over to Nana's later, I thought, scrounge some lunch.
It was around noon the sirens started; I remember being unsettled by the sound. I climbed out of the pool, grabbed my towel, pushed through the gate in the chain-link fence enclosure, and climbed the stairs to our second-floor apartment.
I barely had time to dry off and dress before the phone rang. Mom said she was leaving work early. Nana had had a heart attack.
Nana was the first real person I knew to die—not an actor or an American politician, but someone whom I loved, whose voice, touch, and laughter were as familiar as my own. Of my father's father I have the merest glint of remembrance—walking along a sidewalk with a thin, pleasant older man who held my hand—but I was three when he died. I was eleven now, and Nana's death was my first experience of loss. For a period of time afterwards—days? weeks? a month?—a door would open and I'd flush with the irrational expectation that Nana might walk in, or I'd daydream of going to see her in her apartment. The worst were the times I'd believe, for an instant, I did see her, at Woolworth's, or through the window of a passing bus. I would catch myself and simply feel sad.
In time, I absorbed the loss of Nana. I finished elementary school and prepared for junior high. My parents secured an economic foothold in the civilian world and began shopping for the first home of our own. Life moved on.
Over the years to come, though, Nana continued to figure in my life. I knew, in a general sense, that she thought I was a great kid; that she loved me and understood me better than any other adult in my world. I didn't, however, grasp the extent to which she'd been my protector, my bridge to the world of other adults, including my father. And even after Nana was gone, her belief in me held sway. Her conviction that I was somehow different, that special consideration was in order, became a posthumous gift, an emotional trust fund of which my parents were the dutiful, if sometimes dubious, executors.
ONE HAND CLAPPING
Nana wasn't the only one with a rock-solid belief that I was des
tined for a bright future. About this she and I were in complete accord. As a child I didn't define success in monetary or material terms, but I would tell my mom and dad that one day I'd buy them each a new car and a big house for us all to live in. They'd smile and shake their heads. Sometimes this wide-eyed hubris was not so charming. When Mom would tidy my room after endless demands that I do so myself, she'd ask, “You don't think someone's going to be doing this for you for the rest of your life, do you?” “Well, actually . . . yeah . . . I mean, I'll pay them for doing it.” In my mind I was just being honest. So I'd be genuinely confused when she'd take her dusting rag in both hands and look as though she wanted to wrap it around my skinny neck.
How did I plan to achieve this life of leisure? Like most Canadian kids, I played hockey with religious devotion, and hockey represented our only realistic shot at fame and fortune. Being small, I regularly got my ass kicked (more than two dozen stitches in my face by the time I was a teenager and countless broken teeth). Still, I threw myself into the game. Realistically, the odds that I would be the next Bobby Orr (Wayne Gretzky was still a snot-nosed kid himself) were slim to none, but I could still dream.
Maybe my belief in myself sprang from a recognition that many things seemed to come easily to me. School was a snap, especially writing; that's what seemed to get the grown-ups (like Nana) the most excited. Even at five and six, I was writing long, multistanza, epic poems about my adventures, real and imagined, and later moved on to short stories, essays, and book reports that won praise.
But I had other passions too. When I was preschool age, my dad would return from his trips bearing gifts for all the kids; mine were often big picture books. Dad would later recount with amazement that I'd read a book, cover to cover, then find paper and pencil and, without tracing, replicate page after page of drawings in meticulous detail. This was the beginning of a lifelong love of cartooning, including caricatures that occasionally delighted but more often offended my friends and family.
Music was another obsession. I had to be one of very few eight-year-olds who got excited when Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood got together to form the supergroup Blind Faith. I bugged my parents for a guitar and one Christmas I found a shiny Fender knock-off, complete with amplifier, under the tree. Listening to my brother's LPs, I taught myself to play.
Maybe these proficiencies were what Nana had in mind when she'd preach her sermons of assurance; maybe not. For my own part, I never thought about success in terms of any one particular skill. I just knew there were a lot of fun things to do in the world, and a few of those things I was pretty good at.
I remember looking forward to junior high for two reasons above all others: the first being the hundreds of new kids who would soon be pouring into my little world from feeder schools across the district, and second, the elective class. Electives were opportunities for students to choose their subjects of study. Awesome responsibility. Serious implications. I weighed all this, and selected acting and guitar. My guidance counselors and parents were unenthusiastic, but that's where my interests lay and, just as important, that's where the girls were.
Guitar was a breeze, real basic stuff, finger picking “Alley Cat” from the Big Note Songbook. But it was in that class that I made a friend who would help me realize my musical ambitions. Andy Hill was a grade ahead of me and already the acknowledged king of Edmond's junior high school. A four-sport star athlete—hockey, basketball, rugby, and track—his athletic prowess paled in comparison to his self-taught proficiency in music. We'd swap Keith Richards guitar riffs, with me usually on the learning end of our jam sessions. By the end of the first semester, we'd formed a band, named Halex after the Ping-Pong balls of the same name. In our early teens we were already making the rounds—playing high schools, navy bases, and one or two places we weren't even old enough to enter legally. As I saw it, rock and roll offered a far more realistic shot at the big time than the NHL. Of course, to everyone else in my working-class Canadian world, a world with which I was beginning to feel increasingly out of sync, both fantasies were equally ridiculous.
Then there was drama class. Prior to junior high, I had appeared in a few school plays and discovered, if not a passion for acting, at least a mild affinity. Memorizing lines came easily. And I drank up the laughter and attention. At the secondary school level, with more challenging material and a greater focus on process, I felt myself being drawn deeper into the campus theatrical community.
And then I had what was for me a revelation: with a modicum of effort, I found I could effectively lose myself in whatever character I was called upon to play. At a time when I was increasingly finding myself at odds with various codes of conduct—school, family, social cliques—acting provided me with the freedom, in fact the imperative, that I follow my impulse, behave in any manner I saw fit, just so long as it served the role. Excellent!
I appeared in every new school production, eventually joining the school touring company, which meant spending a great deal of my time with Edmond's acting teacher, Ross Jones. One of those charismatic anti-teachers that artistic students tend to gravitate toward—long hair, droopy mustache, red-rimmed eyes—Mr. Jones was so subversive he actually let us call him Ross. Like most of the drama teachers I've known, Ross was a frustrated performer who was excited by students that showed a potential that in his own life he may have felt he hadn't taken full advantage of. He pressed me to take my theatrical studies as far as I could. “There could be a future in this for you, Mike.” I'd laugh. “You're high, Ross. Acting isn't a job. You can't make a living at it . . . not like rock and roll.”
For most of my secondary education, my head was in the clouds as I explored drama and music and art. Academically, however, it was somewhere else—up my ass, if you asked my father. My grades were slipping precipitously; the straight As I brought home from grade school were a memory. If my junior high school career was any indication, I wasn't exactly poised to set the world on fire—not the real world, anyway.
Sure, in subjects that were outright creative, I excelled; drama, music, creative writing and various art electives, drawing, painting, printmaking, etc., consistently earned me As. But in any subject that was based on fixed rules, like math or chemistry and physics, my grades tanked.
I can remember the exasperated look on my mother's face at report card time as I'd try to explain this to her. “These are absolutes, Mom. They're boring. Take math, two plus two equals four, I mean, that's already on the books, right? Somebody's already nailed that down. So what do they need me for?” Mom would sigh and make sure to sign the report card before Dad got home from work.
When red flags began to pop up on the school front, Dad, army signalman that he was, got right to work. A barely passing grade, or a call from school about a trip to the principal's office, meant a harsh reprimand from Dad, followed by probative questions about what the hell I was thinking and demands that I immediately cease and desist. My failure to comply wasn't rebellion, strictly speaking; it wasn't motivated by anger toward my parents, or anybody else for that matter. In fact, I shared their surprise I wasn't doing better in school. Yet, through junior high my academic grades continued to decline. The instant reprisals from Dad, once automatic, became more rare as he recognized their futility. Instead Dad resorted to curling his lip, throwing up his hands, and stalking off—that is, if I didn't slink off first.
I preferred to avoid confrontation. During my teenage years that meant avoiding my dad as much as possible. My essential approach to life, my predilection for winging it, was clearly antithetical to his. He just didn't get it. It's not that I consciously sought to flaunt my opposing point of view. To do that would be to provoke his anger, which was the last thing I wanted to do. But I could say things to Dad that seemed perfectly benign, yet in a flash our conversation would somehow shift into a one-sided recitation of the riot act.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that two powerful forces were at play here, the two gravitational fields I've already
referred to: Dad's battle-tested pragmatism and Nana's idealistic belief in destiny. It seems obvious now that my reaction to her passing was to do whatever I could to bolster my detachment from the practical world. I instinctively resisted any effort to fit me into the work-a-day mold embraced by my parents and their parents before them.
So an uneasy standoff developed between Dad and me. When he eventually began simply to throw up his hands, this didn't mean I had worn him down—I was, after all, the fourth of five kids. No, I think the truth of the matter lies in Dad's own inner compass. What was most important to him was that his children be safe, and that meant developing a clear sense of what was expected of them in the world, preparing them to play contributing roles in a society that, if his experience was any indication, wasn't likely to cut them any slack. This was the test that I was failing, and he was at a loss about how to make me understand what was at stake.
It's not that Dad didn't take pride in my creative pursuits. He and Mom showed up for every dramatic production, and out of the corner of my eye I could always find them in the front row. And when I couldn't actually see his face beaming with enjoyment, I could always hear his laughter booming above everyone else's. He'd even brag about my musical exploits to his co-workers; I was surprised when I went with Mom to pick him up from work one day and all the cops were slapping me on the back, tousling my shoulder-length hair, and referring to me as “the Halex kid.”
Rock and roll—loud, unintelligible, and antisocial—was anathema to Dad. Even so, he managed to show up at a couple of our band's gigs, though he'd always be standing at the back of the room, as far from the noise as he could get without stepping out the door. Once, sticking around after a show to watch us pack up, he asked about the massive PA speakers we were loading into the truck. I explained that they were rentals, $250 a night. “How much you getting paid?” he asked. “$100,” I said with a flush of self-satisfaction. His face reddened, the lip curled, and I sensed him struggle to maintain composure. “Let me get this straight. You have to rent equipment to do a job that doesn't even pay you enough to cover the rental of the equipment that you need to do the job?” The arms went up and he stomped off. So much for détente.
Lucky Man Page 6
