28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  Jan convinced me to do none except that one news conference. That afternoon, Amanda Lang from CBC called me up—she’s a good friend—and said Peter Mansbridge wanted to interview me for The National broadcast. I was tempted. In fact, very. I had to call up Jan and say, “Tell me why, again, I’m saying no to Peter Mansbridge?”

  Once I’d said no to Mansbridge, however, I knew I could say no to anybody. I had many requests from the media in the time after the charges were dropped. Matt Galloway from CBC Radio’s Metro Morning said he’d have me on for a week, if I wanted to take that much time. (I think he was exaggerating. When he ran into me, near the CBC Studios in Toronto, months after May 25th, he was gracious and extremely convincing.) Toronto Life invited me to every social event known to Toronto, presumably to snap a pic to accompany a piece Leah McLaren did, sans interview, for that magazine. Every media outlet offered the moon: covers, pre-arranged questions, a lot or a little time. But soon it became clear I wasn’t going to talk, and the requests tapered off. (Some friends in the media, however, kept in touch, offered generous personal support, and never once requested an interview, or shared what we’d discussed.)

  I said no that day to Stephen LeDrew. And to Mansbridge, and Galloway, and I would have said no to Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, and The Huffington Post. Then I said goodbye to Susan as she went back to work. I got on the subway. I took it north, up to the Hertz at Bloor and Yonge.

  And I rented a convertible.

  I hadn’t driven a car for nine months. I put the top down. Then I went straight into a traffic jam for 45 minutes, wondering what it was exactly I had missed. I got a phone call about an hour later from a friend, saying she’d heard I was in a convertible. I said I was. She told me to pull over, put the top up, and go home. So I did. Some people might have seen that as the old Bryant chutzpah. But it wasn’t. It was much more than that.

  When I was drinking, I was like a vampire. I couldn’t stand the sunlight. Hangovers were painful in the daylight. I hated being outside. I loved cloudy, rainy days. That’s why Vancouver is a good place to be a drunk. I used to literally hate it when I woke up and the sun was shining.

  Sober, it was the opposite. I always felt that I’d deprived myself of sun. Part of my love of convertibles was a celebration of my sobriety and my capacity to celebrate the day and revel in the light. I also wanted to get back on the horse. I didn’t want to be afraid anymore in a car. I didn’t want to be afraid to live my life.

  I knew that almost everything in my life had changed. But I wanted to see what hadn’t.

  * Mr. Justice Paul Bentley pioneered addiction treatment courts in Canada, and established the International Association of Drug Treatment Courts. He was the founding and presiding Justice for Toronto’s Drug Treatment Court, commencing in 1998. Justice Bentley died of cancer in June 2011. Suffice it to say, my trepidation regarding the presiding judge was paranoid, irrational, and foolish.

  FIFTEEN

  Darcy Allan Sheppard (1975–2009)

  During the nine months that criminal charges hung over my head, Susan and I attended her 25-year high school reunion in Montreal. At it, I was introduced to a man I’d never met before. His eyes glowed bright upon hearing my name and recognizing my newfound notoriety. He leaned in toward me, his whisper growling with attitude and machismo. “Anyone jumps onto my fuckin’ car,” he declared, “ain’t gonna get off it alive either!”

  Err, nice to meet you and how do you do?

  I realize and appreciate that some people were just trying to comfort me by demonizing Darcy (or vice versa, for those seeking to comfort Darcy’s friends and family).

  But still, so many people got so very much wrong during those nine months. So much wrong about what happened that night, about Darcy Sheppard, about me, about Susan. So much wrong about the unbridgeable two solitudes we were purported to represent.

  That anyone, as that man in Montreal apparently did, assumed I had intentionally done harm to Darcy Sheppard shocked me every time I heard it. And I heard it more than once.

  Someone once assured me—by what obscure calculation I have not a clue—that “90 percent of people would have done the same thing.” Only 90 percent? I thought. Wouldn’t any man have tried to escape harm and protect his wife in the same way?

  But it’s true. Whatever the breakdown, some people would surely have done otherwise. They might have done nothing, sat waiting for the storm that was Darcy Sheppard to blow over. Or they might have jumped out of the car to confront him and fight. And, just maybe, doing either would have got them badly hurt or killed—because Darcy Sheppard’s modus operandi was by now well established.

  I don’t know how most would react in such a situation. But many presumed to know how it would unfold. I doubt that they’d have the faintest idea what they’d do if they were ever faced with what I had faced. Just as I had no clue until it happened.

  All I can say for sure is that I never hated Darcy Sheppard. There really wasn’t time in the fleeting but calamitous moments in which our lives intersected. Oddly, I wasn’t even particularly angry with him—not then or since.

  I was, on that night and for those terrible seconds, simply afraid of him; terrified, actually, for both myself and my wife. I wanted only to get away from him. What those who grieve his loss and pour their anger at it out on me might be surprised to know is that at another time, in another context, perhaps at a meeting of the fellowship of which I am a member, I might have poured Darcy Sheppard a coffee, as I have done many times for men and women much like him. As others have done for me, and as I’ve been taught to do, I might have introduced myself, shook his hand, told him a little about my own life, my own struggle with alcohol, what I had done to get sober and he, in turn, might have reciprocated. Because that is what we do there. We share our stories, share the solution we have been blessed to find, and know—above all—that none of us is any better than any other of us.

  The great Canadian theologian Jean Vanier said that finding kindredness with others—especially those lost or broken in body or spirit—was the life undertaking of all of us.

  “It can be a long and sometimes painful process,” he said. “It involves a growth to freedom, an opening up of our hearts to others, no longer hiding behind masks or behind the walls of fear and prejudice. It means discovering our common humanity.”

  Vanier’s establishment of L’Arche, the international network of communities for people with intellectual disabilities, had taught him a lot about loneliness, he wrote, about “the inner pain that springs from a sense of rejection.” Beyond doubt, Darcy Sheppard surely suffered that pain. His restlessness and seeming insatiability—like that of so many addicts—was once aptly described by Hunter S. Thompson, who said: “All my life my heart has sought a thing that I can’t name.”

  That pain can trigger violence, or it can inspire. Johnny Cash wrote of the beasts of addiction being caged by brittle bars. For Darcy’s final weeks, those bars turned to dust under the breath of alcohol. Exit beast.

  For Jean Vanier, the healing from the pain of rejection, the restlessness of mind, body, and soul, the desperate pursuit of false gods can be found only in meaningful relationships. And that’s where I have found it.

  The 28 seconds shared by Darcy, myself, and Susan has been portrayed as rich vs. poor, influential vs. marginalized, privileged vs. oppressed. However, since regaining sobriety in the years leading up to August 31, 2009, and in the years since, I have been a member of a niche of society where such distinctions carry absolutely no weight at all. We are all no better and no worse than the other.

  Alcoholism, as with addiction of any kind, is utterly democratic. It disregards celebrity, social status, bank balances, club memberships, political office. In the rooms of recovery, people with Order of Canada pins on their jacket lapels sit beside men who have done hard prison time. You will find women who are accomplished actresses or CEOs, and those who worked the streets as prostitutes or drug dealers. You will find men and women who arri
ve in high-performance automobiles, and those who come straight from hostels by foot or on the subway. You will find people of every conceivable race, background, religious creed, and sexual preference. You will find people 40 years or more from their last drink, and those still under the influence. You will find people just like me. And you will find people just like Darcy Sheppard. And you will find them talking, one with the other, or, at meeting’s end, briefly holding hands in a prayer for serenity.

  That is why I’ve never harboured anger or resentment toward Darcy Sheppard. I know men just like him. I know the charm and delight and wisdom of them, when they are well. I know the horrors of their lives—and the lives of all those they touch—when they are not. There is nothing dignified about an alcoholic life. There is nothing pleasant about an alcoholic death. I know that none of us, no matter what our background or walk of life, choose such a lot. And I know that neither did Darcy.

  Nor is Darcy Sheppard the author of his own misfortune. For nightmares, brief or endless, can be visited upon any of us, notwithstanding all our efforts to the contrary. I like how author David Foster Wallace puts it. “Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life.”

  And the most astonishing aspect of the life of Darcy Sheppard is not that he behaved for most of his 33 years in the angry, self-destructive way that he did. The marvel, given the appalling story of his life and the monstrous odds stacked against him, is that he managed to do as well as he did.

  No one would approve, obviously, of his history of violence, some of which was chronicled by the special prosecutor, Richard Peck, or of his failure to financially support the children he fathered.

  But few fiction writers would have invented the ghastly circumstances of Darcy Sheppard’s childhood. It’s hard to believe that Darcy’s was a Canadian boyhood, not a hellish tale from the Third World.

  Darcy was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, to an alcoholic mother, on October 11, 1975, in Edmonton. He was aboriginal and would be the eldest of nine children. His biological father, a status Indian, had attended a residential school and was killed when, drunk on the road, he was hit by a car. Darcy was about 2 years old.

  As so often happens in the hideous cycle of damaged psyches and souls, the son would take up where the parents left off. And his plight was worsened by the very social safety net that is supposed to catch those orphaned by addiction.

  Darcy lived with his mother until he was 2 years old. Then, he, a younger brother, and baby sister were taken into custody by Child and Family Services in Alberta. He and his brother were kept together, but they were separated from their sister.

  And here is the gruesome part. I’ll quote from the court proceedings in case you think I’m exaggerating or dramatizing the facts. “Over several years, from about the time he was three or four until the time he was six, Darcy Sheppard and his brother were placed in over 30 foster homes.” Richard Peck, who would read this excruciating biography to the court on May 25, 2010, had one word for it: “Staggering.”

  The two boys moved regularly between foster setting and their mother’s care, Peck said. They were subject in some of these homes to “shocking” maltreatment. The worst kind of trauma he experienced over and over. (Some details were provided in sentencing reports regarding Darcy Sheppard. His brother is still alive and deserves his privacy, so no detailed disclosure of his brother’s circumstances is intended.)

  When Darcy was 6, he and his brother were adopted by the Sheppard family. Eventually, the Sheppards divorced and Darcy and his brother remained living with Allan Sheppard Sr. In court materials from past offences, Allan Sheppard described his boy as intelligent, resourceful, imaginative, creative, and persuasive, but deeply scarred by his life experiences. At 11, Darcy ran away from home, then was placed in the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton. At 12, he overdosed on his medication and was placed in a psychiatric hospital for observation. Until he was 17, he was admitted to a number of residential facilities and group homes that dealt with youth who have psychological and behavioural problems.

  He began using marijuana at 10 and began drinking when he was 16. At 17, with a Grade 9 education, he set out on his own. That was when drug use and drinking were becoming almost daily habits.

  Darcy did not seem to lack a work ethic. He laboured at various times as a disc jockey, a construction worker, a bicycle messenger, a window washer, a club promoter, and a comedy street performer. He also raced competitively in off-road bicycle races for six years and was good enough to gain sponsors for such events. Over the years, he suffered a number of concussions as a result of bike-racing, and the injuries seemed to affect his memory.

  When Darcy was 20, he met and married Tracey, with whom he had two children. Darcy and Tracey separated, and in January 2000 she lost and he gained custody of the children for a short time. Eventually, Tracey’s mom took the children to Toronto. After the loss of his children, Darcy began using crack cocaine daily. That led to the loss of jobs and of bike-racing sponsors.

  In 2001, he fathered a third child, but lost contact with the child and mother one year later. He fathered a fourth child, born in 2004. In 2006, while incarcerated, Darcy Sheppard began attending 12-step meetings for recovery from alcoholism and addiction. In November 2006, he applied for residential treatment at the Rainbow Lodge. “It is self evident from a detailed review of available records that alcohol and drug use, as well as psychiatric issues imperfectly understood, contributed” to his conduct, Peck would say.

  “Given what we know about Mr. Sheppard, it is not surprising that he would go into a rage from time to time, and you know, it is quite an amazing story. Most people are ill-situate [sic] to overcome the obstacles this man faced.”

  Sheppard had a criminal record going back years. In 1996, he was convicted of assault and breaking-and-entering. Less than a year later he pleaded guilty to assault, failing to comply, and failing to attend court.

  In April 1997, he had assaulted his common-law partner at the time. Alcohol was identified as a significant issue. A conditional sentence was imposed. By August 31, 2009, Sheppard had more than 60 outstanding warrants in his home province of Alberta, mostly for fraud and property crimes.

  His life was full of 28-second life bites, most of which ruined him, again and again.

  In 2007, by which time he’d moved to Toronto, Sheppard was convicted, as a result of offences committed in July 2006, of uttering a death threat, possession of a weapon (two air pistols) for a purpose dangerous to public peace, and using an imitation firearm while committing an indictable offence of threatening death.

  What happened? He had entered a cab near Church and Wellesley Streets, told the driver he had “killed someone and I’m going to kill you.” He pulled out the imitation guns and directed the cabbie to another location. En route, he threatened to shoot a woman on the street. Darcy would tell the court he was drinking heavily and using crack cocaine at the time. During pre-trial custody, he attended 12-step meetings and acknowledged that his problem was alcohol, that alcohol was the trigger for his using crack.

  In a pre-sentence report, Sheppard reflected that he had a lot of opportunities at age 23 and lost it all once he developed a crack addiction. He said he was addicted to crack cocaine for years. By his later twenties, he used alcohol daily, he said, beginning the moment he awoke in the morning. When his time was not structured, he drank. He was assessed as a high risk to reoffend.

  In Toronto, Sheppard had joined the subculture of bicycle messengers. There, he apparently found a community where he was liked and valued. Various of his friends have described him as a troubled spirit, but a comic, generous, boisterous sweetheart. To those who got to know him, there was the attractive side of so many addicts and alcoholics, the charm and sense of humour, the resilience, the energy, the potential.

  His friends have told journalists that his challenges were massive, that his efforts
to deal with them had been inspiring. They said he would offer friends his coat if it were cold, fix other people’s cars when they needed repair, stop to help strangers on the street.

  Over the years, he reportedly maintained a good relationship with his adoptive father, Allan Sheppard. Darcy had apparently told friends he would have been dead in his teens without Allan Sheppard Sr., who had seen Darcy only a week before the accident and had urged him once again to deal with his addictions.

  Beyond a doubt, Darcy Sheppard hit all the markers for a predisposition for addiction. He had the genetic inheritance of alcoholism in his family. He had the egregiously ruinous childhood, the abuse, the abandonment, the displacement.

  It’s been said that alcoholism, among many other things, is that voice that comes to you in the middle of the night telling you that you’re detritus, a piece of garbage, one of God’s mistakes. And for much of Darcy Sheppard’s life, he must have felt that the world and most of those in it believed that to be so.

  For some like Darcy, alcohol and drugs can be a bid to still that voice, to fill the great big hole inside, to provide brief respite from loneliness, torment, loss—something to alleviate the accumulated pain of his lifetime.

  I sometimes wonder if I ever actually crossed paths with Darcy Sheppard when we sought recovery in the same rooms. If I didn’t, I have met people who say they did, and men and women from backgrounds much like his. For there is almost nothing in the dreary recitation of the details of his life, or in his death, that would be shocking, or even terribly unusual, in the fellowship of recovery.

  There, we are frequently reminded that untreated addiction ends in a predictable, and predictably awful, way: in either jails, institutions, or death. And anyone who spends any amount of time in recovery programs sees the truth of the axiom played out over and over again.