by Alex Pugsley
This is a time before microwaves, when the warm up of a dinner is achieved through the sorcery of a double-boiler—which means leaving a plate of dinner (in this case, pork chop, mashed potatoes, and carrots sliced with a serrated cutter) on a pot of simmering water. There are two plates tonight, and I see it as a sign of my rapidly advancing maturity that I’ve been so singled out. As I touch the dinner plate with the tip of a quilted oven mitt, a song begins on the kitchen clock-radio that my mother uses to check her approaching rehearsal times. I don’t really know what radio songs are, that playlists turn over, or that the song you hear one summer might vanish the next. But “Band on the Run” is around that year, in the way a new neighbourhood kid might be, or in the way you might notice a surplus of ladybugs on a bathroom window one afternoon. I’ve heard the song before but it perplexes me because the opening is filled with so many different progressions, each sounding like a different song, I often confuse it with other offerings on the radio. But as I identify it for a first time, my continued contact with the warmed plate touches off a number of attendant details in and out of the kitchen. The windows are beginning to lose their evening light. The floaty purple fragrance of lilac blossoms is unmistakable in the backyard. The kitchen cupboards, painted turquoise, show signs of blue where the turquoise paint has been chipped—and so my response to the song seems turquoise-blue with an after-sense of lilac and when a crescendo of horns fades to allow for the strumming of an acoustic guitar, alternating the chords of C and F Major 7, the song seems finally to become itself. In a moment of autistic dreaminess, I stand unmoving at the stove, fixed between these two chords, and it’s only when the singer sings about rain exploding with a mighty crash am I released from my abstraction—and a multitude of synesthetic meaning explodes for me, moments at once emotional, sensory, and intuitive, and as they shimmer and gather and burst again I realize it’s the happiest I’ve been without knowing particularly why I’m happy and this song seems to be a part of it, and not just accompanying it, but activating it, coordinating the mood and circumstance and manifold instant. “Band on the Run” on June 20, 1974, is a strangely overwhelming solace for me and will be ever after linked with the events of that summer, and the possibilities of that year, and though many of the proceedings turn out horribly, I am still grateful to the song for what it engenders in my imagination—for it conveys a sense of precarious possibilities gorgeously arranged and met and fulfilled.
~
Uncle Lorne’s door was closed when I went into the basement—an obsolete coal room done over as his bedroom—so I continued into the rec room, a recently dry-walled creation beside the furnace room and home to rainbow-coloured wall-to-wall carpet, a folded-up ping-pong table, Nanny and Dompa’s deteriorating wicker cottage furniture, and a Sony Trinitron television on a rickety stand. I turned on the TV and stood spinning the channel selector, alert to the probable appearance of The Six Million Dollar Man. As I noticed a familiar and above-average episode of Bewitched, the story where Cousin Serena forces a song on Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, I became aware of some indications I was not the first to set foot in the room. On the carpet, beside a wicker armchair, was an unopened can of Fresca, a bag of Fritos Brand corn chips, and an SX-70 Polaroid camera, a recent birthday present to my oldest sister Carolyn. Not that it was Carolyn who would leave such a gift unattended in the basement. It was, of course, Bonnie, my older, contiguous sister and long-standing nemesis within the family. With the arrival in the house of this gadget, Bonnie had taken to photographing assorted personalities off the television screen at extremely inopportune moments. Where these photographs were idiotically hoarded I wasn’t sure—but lately a number of blurry, underexposed Polaroids of Björn Borg, The Partridge Family, and Tony DeFranco had been found behind the radiator in the upstairs bathroom. I have successfully kept my sisters’ details out of these narratives but a few words might be appropriate here. Bonnie, two years my senior, was principally in a lifelong, unwinnable competition with Carolyn, the first-born, who was and has been the perfect child—perfect manners, perfect marks, perfect hair—and always thoughtful, responsible, and over-achieving. Bonnie, when she was alive, was domineering, tactical, and ultra-impulsive—a girl never slowed by an unexpressed thought. She stood now in the doorway, holding a CorningWare bowl full of homemade popcorn, her head tilted to one side, and looking at me with the smile that Tolerance Gives to the Misguided. “Uh, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Watching ‘The Six Million Dollar Man.’”
“Uh, no, you’re not. Because did you say ‘reserve?’ Were you sitting down and did you say ‘reserve?’” Bonnie quickly touched her tailbone to the wall, repeated this code word, and straightened up again. “Because if you weren’t and you didn’t then we’re watching what we want to watch. Plus I was here first and you’re out-voted so tough titty.”
My two younger sisters now materialized in the area behind Bonnie. They were clad in worn and matching flannelette nighties and each held in their hands a cereal bowl of popcorn—the effect was rather like two novice members of the junior choir advancing with opened hymnaries.
“What’re you guys watching?” I asked, stalling, not prepared to walk away from the television.
Bonnie explained they’d been planning all week to watch a movie called The Parent Trap. I had not heard of this plan. I was offended by this plan. And I refused to believe I’d been consulted about this plan. What was this movie even about?
Uncle Lorne came out of his room to investigate the crowd in the newly boisterous rec room. “What is what movie about?” he asked.
“‘The Parent Trap.’”
Uncle Lorne looked to the ceiling, as if to properly assemble his thoughts. “It’s about these kids.” He glanced at Bonnie for verification. “Twin sisters, right? And one night they’re waiting for their parents to come home and then—Kink, do you know what gelignite bullets are?”
I said I didn’t.
“Plastic explosives used primarily in automatic weapons—”
“That’s not the movie, Uncle Lorne,” said Bonnie, with bold impatience. She was pointing at her stash of junk food, ready to launch into a further defence of her viewing rights, when from upstairs we heard our parents come in the front door, their shoe-steps resounding over our heads. All of us, through acquired habit, wordlessly decoded the noises above for signals of disposition, humour, inclination.
“Mom’s drunk, you guys,” said Katie, with casual nonchalance, nibbling a single piece of popcorn. “Bet you any money.”
Our mother, as it would turn out, was not yet drunk. She and our father had been at a party celebrating the opening of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the gathering held across the street in the rented rooms of some new friends, Mr. and Mrs. Abbott—although my sister Bonnie maintained these two were not formally married. When first informed on this point, I wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Abbott were perhaps a travelling gypsy duo who assumed diverse identities and defrauded townspeople out of their children. But the Abbotts, it turned out, were not gypsies or conmen but something else altogether as exotic—they were draft-dodgers, expatriate Americans from Wheeling, West Virginia, who had driven to Nova Scotia on a Honda 450 motorcycle in the summer of 1968. They lived first in an unheated commune in the Annapolis Valley, on the other side of West Paradise, and came to Halifax when their two daughters reached school age. These two daughters, September and Autumn Dawn, were fourteen months apart in age and bizarrely identical to me. Both wore tie-dye shirts and home-made pants with no pockets. Both had blonde hair down to their waists. Their hair was sometimes held back in pinched thickets by yarn string-ties but September, and especially Autumn Dawn, did not care for these yarn string-ties and often the girls ran around with hair loose and unfastened so encountering them in a neighbourhood game of hide-and-seek was like coming face to face with a feral child who had been lost for some months in the black mountain hills of Dakota.
&nbs
p; The Abbott household had a somewhat lax philosophy toward personal upkeep and one or the other girl was always scratching a stye out of an eyelash or separating a scab from a kneecap. Since arriving in Halifax, Mr. Abbott had secured a position as the stage carpenter for Neptune Theatre. Mrs. Abbott had some undefined connection with a new organization called the Ecology Action Centre. She was also a folk artist of some commitment. She worked mostly in macramé, collage, and silkscreen. Because my father had done some pro bono legal work for the Abbotts regarding their immigration, our family had been the recipient of two silkscreened prints—and, as we kids trooped up the stairs from the basement, I saw my father was now in possession of a third, a sort of lacquered silhouette of three ponies in a salt marsh.
“Jesus, Mackie,” he said to my mother, shaking his head. “Where are we going to put this goddamn thing?”
My mother, who this evening was wearing a lime-and-purple print dress—what Carolyn called the Jo Anne Worley dress—pulled open the refrigerator and reached for a bottle of Blue Nun before saying, “Your father made us leave the party early. Like anything’s new.”
My father put the silkscreen print on the kitchen table and made a slight tip of his head, his eyebrows contracting in bemused concentration. It was a familiar gesture which meant he was wondering whether he should imply his real reaction—which was, in this case, that he considered the party overrun with dubious people and dubious practices—or simply forgo any response at all.
“Because,” continued my mother. “This one couple was passing around a marijuana cigarette. As soon as your father saw that, we were out of there.”
“Well,” said my father. “How’s that going to look? It happens to be against the law.”
“Loosen up. Their friends were very nice. When in Rome—”
“Okay, Titania. That’s plenty, thank you. Time to get these kiddles to bed.” He pointed at my youngest sister. “You? Bed. Now. And I mean it, Ditsy.”
My mother grabbed a plastic juice glass from the dishwasher and poured herself four fingers of white wine. “They’re anti-war, you know, these people. Flower children. They think anything’s possible. The wife’s a women’s libber. Vivien. But very sweet. Him? I’m not so sure. Wes is the saintly type. Wants to do good. Like build a barn for mentally retarded kids in New Brunswick.” She tossed back half the wine. “Sure. Why not? But what are they going to do with a barn—shear sheep? Honest to God. Be careful of these so-called saints, children. Believe me, people who act like saints—a lot of so-called saints are trouble. Living in a dream world. Telling people what they don’t want to hear in the first place. And the more Wes is doing good for some retarded kid, the more he’s neglecting his own family, you watch.”
My parents’ conversation continued over the next few hours, sometimes softly in almost inaudible murmurs, other times erupting into strident tones of drunken hostility. By this time, I was lying in my bed, sleepless, restless with every wrongful twist of my bed sheets, staring at my ceiling. The streetlights outdoors created a familiar overglow in my room and I stared as tiny dots of winking dimness generated patterns on my paint-cracked ceiling, patterns I often collected into recognizable images—the man with the nose, the happy cow, the mud-splattered ogre—the last of which I was having trouble looking at more than once. As I heard my parents make their way up the front stairs, I closed my eyes and prayed to God they wouldn’t get divorced again.
“Stewart, would you mind not being such a—”
“Mumsy? I don’t want to hear another word of this.”
“—prig. They’re just trying to do good in the world. Their life isn’t only about making money.”
“Sure, sure, Mumsy. Relax. Relax, kid.”
“I hate it when you get like this.”
“Here we go. Here it is. It’s all coming now. I’ll take the rest of that wine, thank you very much.”
“You want to lose your hand? Just tell me something. Why don’t you try something new for once in your life—like in the last twenty years? That’s the problem between me and you. You don’t care two shits about the environment. And I do.”
“The environment? How in the hell are we talking about the environment?”
There were a few thudding and bumping noises—which I guessed to be my mother’s foot slipping off a step and her subsequent stumble into the creaking banister. “Well,” she said. “I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. That’s a quote. You can look it up.”
“Yes, Mackie. Beautiful performance. Exit stage left with a bear.”
“It’s exit pursued by a bear. Get it right, for Christ’s sake. For once in your crumb-bum life, would you get something right?”
This exchange was followed by the closing of their bedroom door, a brief lull, a night shriek, and the smashing of a bottle. My parents began as actors—they met in college in a play—so we kids were used to these theatrics. But tonight seemed a return to the drear uncertainty of three years ago and as I tried again to fall asleep I began to wonder if what I wanted for myself was really relevant at all.
~
Uncle Lorne was an archivist, a tinkerer, a published poet. The year he came to live with us, he was seized upon by the middle school English teacher, Mr. Jones, who chose three of his poems for the literary section of the school yearbook. Two were about Imperial Rome (“Roma Aeterna”) and a third, and for me most vivid, was titled “Wild Dogs.” It moved with the pace of a Blake lyric and started with the line, “Perturbed eyes and carious teeth.” What was this word—perturbed? Or carious? Or gelignite? In what furnace were such words? Where had he gleaned such lore and stuff? The poems were signed “Lorne Anthony Wheeler,” one of the few times I saw my uncle’s full name in print. When he was in Montreal, living in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Dompa had given him a rubber stamp with his full name and address on it (a very Dompa gift), and this blue, inky imprimatur appeared on the cover of many of my uncle’s earliest collected comics—before he realized making such a mark might devalue the artifact. Uncle Lorne left Montreal just before Expo 67 and, though he seldom talked about it, I could feel, from how he once pinned to his corkboard postcards of the geodesic dome and the Habitat 67 housing complex (communiqués from Benoit Charbonneau and Thompson Oldring—precious friends I’d never meet), that Nova Scotia must have seemed for him a far and distant outpost of empire, and Halifax, vis-à-vis Montréal, a city much reduced in circumstance. I decided it was to cosmopolitan Montreal that he owed his strange intelligence.
My uncle and his abilities I mostly regarded with reverent awe, although I knew he was somewhat eccentric, as if his clockwork required further assembly. Because while Uncle Lorne was made up of a lot of quick parts, not all of them worked, and some were changing colours, and still others awaited their final function. His vocabularies, his silences, his keen intrigues and esoteric associations were all clues, as I sensed them, to the inverted kingdom of his imagination. “My brother’s mind certainly works weird,” my mother would say. “No, Lorne’s brilliant, he is, but he’s not always exactly here, you know. In the real world.” I sometimes wondered if I would ever understand him. And I wanted to. I wanted the fellowship and solidarity and stability such an understanding would supply. My sisters had no idea how Uncle Lorne thought and they’d mostly stopped trying. “You know,” said Carolyn when the gelignite comment reached her desk. “That’s just Uncle Lorne humour.” Bonnie agreed. She tended to speak about Uncle Lorne in a respectful but detectably marginalizing manner and sneaking into her tone lately was the implication that Uncle Lorne was increasingly out-of-touch and peculiar—as if, for her, he was already beyond the point of no return. At the end of June, Bonnie said to me, “You know the Abbotts are atheists, right?”
“So?”
“So Faith asked Uncle Lorne what atheists were and you know what he said? That atheists were families that drown their own pets. Is that supposed to be funny? Like a Chris Co
dy joke?”
“Faith knows what atheists are.”
“But what if he tells Katie that? She’s young and she’ll believe him.” There was no attempt at a tolerant smile here. Bonnie was offended by Uncle Lorne’s deliberate subversion of a religious matter and she would attribute this wayward attitude to the growing influence of Chris Cody, the other paper boy. Christopher Cody was a giggly, bushy-haired teenager who would arrive at our backdoor ostensibly to watch Kung Fu with Uncle Lorne. Later, he might be found shambling around our furnace room in tinted aviator glasses, eating Munchos Chips, and listening on headphones to Grand Funk Railroad or Cream or Santana—albums whose psychedelic cover art used to frighten and confuse me as a small child. To my uncle, Chris was Commander Cody, a name always spoken in a hoarse, back-of-the-throat style, as if Uncle Lorne’s voice were suddenly parched with fatigue or thirst. This voice was used in all manner of Chris Cody settings, often with deliberately sinister implication, and sometimes even in non-Chris-Cody situations, when a bored Uncle Lorne might seek to surprise you by creeping into the rec room to loudly whisper into your ear, “Boris the Spider!” which was the name by which this diversion came to be known—as Uncle Lorne’s Boris the Spider trick.