by Alex Pugsley
~
We would be leaving the only home I’d known. The new house, on Dunvegan Drive, was not far from the Jubilee Road boat launch where Uncle Lorne and I strayed that June afternoon. It was a split-level modern place with brown wall-to-wall carpeting, white-painted rail banisters, all-new plastic windows. And it was big—the finished basement had five rooms of its own. There, us kids were given a rec room big enough for the TV, the now fully-opened ping-pong table, and the old living room stereo, an all-in-one Clairtone console. Carolyn had come home with the Band on the Run album and one evening I was listening to its title track, mesmerized by the spinning green apple of the centre label, headphones fully on my ears, when the ceiling lights flashed on and off—a phenomenon quickly connected to Bonnie’s presence in the doorway behind me. “What are you doing?” I asked, talking over the music in my ears and indicating by my tone that I was moments away from all-out rage.
With tired officiousness, Bonnie informed me that I had to come upstairs for another family meeting.
“Another family meeting?” I took off the headphones. “What’s it for?”
Bonnie left the rec room. “Didn’t you hear? Mom’s leaving Dad again.”
“Who said that?”
Bonnie started up the stairs. “Because she wants to start her life over. She’s leaving. You really didn’t know, did you?”
I sat beside Faith and Katie in the barely-furnished living room, all of us on chairs pulled from the dining room. My youngest sisters’ legs were not long enough to reach the floor, and their flip-flops swung hysterically back and forth as they tried to keep from crying, though their cheeks were wet with tears. The meeting was notable for their efforts to choke away their sobs, my parents chain-smoking menthol cigarettes, and the serious monologue that issued from my father as he informed the family that he and our mother would be separating in the next few days, explaining she would be moving to New York for an unspecified period of time. I stared at the systems of cigarette smoke as they rose and dissolved in the corners of the ceiling. Apart from numb surges of sympathy for my father, I wasn’t sure what to feel, but I remember thinking it was repulsively inappropriate that Uncle Lorne was not present. He’d lived with us for eight years, as long as Faith had been alive, and, yes, he’d misbehaved but he’d been grounded for it, and to decide not to include him in such a family meeting seemed irresponsible and insensitive and just wrong. At that moment, as if ready for his entrance, Uncle Lorne pulled open the side door. All of us in the living room went silent and for a few moments we listened to Uncle Lorne move about the new house. There was the sound of two brief nasal sniffs and the noise of him sorting through the most recently rerouted mail, before he went still, having heard Faith and Katie’s sniveling.
My father called out, “Lorne, would you come in here a minute?”
Uncle Lorne stepped into our proceedings, shared a glance with my mother, and then, as if acknowledging a pre-existing understanding, simply shook his head and turned around and glided back out the side door.
I ran to him and found him on Jubilee Road smoking a cigarette in front of a telephone pole, his chin bobbing in time to some imaginary music. In his other hand, he held a packaged envelope from Passaic, New Jersey. “Whose race you running now, Grub?” he asked, smiling, contemplating me with amused affection. He carefully slid the comic books out of the package, showing me the team-up issue of the Justice League and Justice Society. “Crisis on Earth-X, Grub,” he said, reading the issue’s title and presenting me with my copy. The story was about a mix of superheroes sent through a dimensional transporter to an alternate world where the Nazis, having won that earth’s Second World War, controlled everybody with a mind control ray. It was a bit much for me to absorb all at once and I asked to look at the other comics. Spying the distinctive checker-top of Silver Age DC comics, I realized with an excited jump that his new acquisitions finished a run of Justice League and that my uncle, Lorne Anthony Wheeler, was now in possession of a perfect, unbroken consecutive sequence of the Justice League of America from November 1960 to the present moment. There were rumours of two cousins in Dartmouth who had amassed a whole run, and a brother-and-sister team in Cape Breton who had all but the first three issues, but those were achievements shared by two people. Uncle Lorne had done it on his own, as he shifted from city to city to city, as he moved from his own family to ours. A collection started when he was seven years old, with a purchase at a Lawtons Drug Store in Truro, was now inviolably complete as of August 26, 1974. I asked about his plans—to complete another title? To put his Justice Leagues in a vault? “Negatory, Grubster,” said Uncle Lorne, pushing his still-lit cigarette into a wrinkled crack in the telephone pole. He moved his gaze to look across the Northwest Arm, contemplating the far horizon, before speaking to me in a weary, exhausted voice, suggestive of his Boris the Spider diversion, but more as if he really were exhausted. “I don’t think so. Time to exit the Batcave. Time to adios before the planet explodes. Time to get the hell out of Dodge.”
~
“What happened that summer?” my sister Faith would ask me many years later. “When Mom and Dad separated, that really shook me up. We were like the perfect frigging family. Mom and Dad’s friends were shocked. Weren’t you? I remember Mom saying she felt Dad was just checking things off. ‘Get a law degree? Check. Get a job? Check. Get married and have kids? Check.’ But without stopping to think what it would mean to her. I’m not sure that justifies running off with what’s-his-nuts who played Jesus in ‘Godspell.’ That lunatic in the Winnebago. But do you know I have not seen Uncle Lorne since the day of the family meeting? Since that summer? He didn’t come to Carolyn’s wedding, did he? My God, do you blame him? Why would he? What a sin, the poor thing. It falls apart with Nanny and Dompa and he gets fobbed off on us. It falls apart with Mom and Dad and what’s he going to do? Live with Aunt Kate? The poor bastard.” Faith’s choice of words was not consciously literal, and however treasonous it might have been to suggest in childhood, later evidence would point to such a conclusion, that someone beside Dompa was Uncle Lorne’s father. What were Uncle Lorne’s secret origins? I never knew. Even my father, keeper of a hundred of the city’s secrets, may not have known. Uncle Lorne makes a cameo appearance in a Super-8 movie of Katie’s fourth birthday. In that footage, he runs up to the birthday cake to smile prankishly at the camera, showing both sets of teeth, squinting from the incandescent camera light, before lightly kissing Katie and retreating off-screen. He must have been seventeen at the time and you could see how his features had elongated—eyes slanting, eyebrows darkening on the ridge above his nose—charismatically vampiric. He always had the dash and darkness of a nocturnal superhero like Deadman or Nightwing or Dr. Fate. It was only when this birthday film was transferred to video twenty years later that I saw with adult eyes, when he withdrew into the shadows, just how shy, how Asperger’s-y, how nervous seventeen-year-old Uncle Lorne really was.
~
What happened to my parents’ marriage was happening everywhere. Divorce, a legal dissolution rather rare the generation before, rushed toward its 1970s statistical zenith. Many families were dissolving—there were crises on infinite earths—but this did not exactly reassure me. After reporting to a bearded child psychiatrist who asked rather over-placidly which parent I wanted to live with—and me not being able to answer—I lapsed into a surly, uncomprehending funk. Everything seemed in disarray and, as we began the exercise of unpacking in the new house on Dunvegan, I was noticing omissions. There was a yellow water pistol that had not made the move, a number of Laugh-In stickers, and, most ridiculously, Uncle Lorne’s entire comic book collection. “We moved everything,” Bonnie told me. “Carolyn said the old house is finished. There’s nothing left but garbage.”
“It’s not garbage—”
“If it was in a box, Aubrey, it got moved. Did you check the basement? Why do you even care? They’re just Mom’s brother’s old co
mics.”
I began to explain the reasons why this collection was significant but, for whatever reason, my ideas came out all at once—emotional, jumbled, and, in anticipation of Bonnie’s disapproval, abruptly defensive.
She regarded me with a mix of puzzlement and disdain. “I feel sorry for you,” she said. “You’re just like him—weird. You’re going to be just like him—weird and alone with no friends and pathetic, loser.”
Quite immediately I formed an interior resolution that my sister would have to be considered absolutely irrelevant if I wanted to preserve any of my own ideas about my life—and, in response to her last statement, I simply made for the side door and pushed it open.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked. “You can’t be like this if you live with us!”
I did not answer and, stepping outside, swung the door shut so it cracked the door’s peek-through window. From inside the house, Bonnie asked again where I was going and, already sprinting away, I screamed I was going to the store to get her a Fresca—to get everyone in the world a fucking Fresca—that’s where I was going. But I ran without knowing where I was going. I was passing by the Camp Hill cemetery before I realized, as some maple seeds helicoptered into my eyes, that the late summer evening had darkened into night. For some minutes my mind had been empty of self-awareness and turning the corner on Summer Street I eased into a single-pointed, euphoric state where I was, finally and simply and transcendently, running my own race. I arrived at our Tower Road house as the last hints of colour vanished from the sky. I went to the backdoor, where Chris Cody often banged to be let in, and turned my key in the old Otis lock. I stood a few moments in the back porch, my clothes damp with sweat, listening for cues to other occupants. Curiously, recalling the Mary Celeste moment of two months before, a plate of dinner had been left on a double-boiler but, as I could quickly see, the water had boiled dry and the meal was crusted and cracked and sticking to the plate. I turned off the burner and opened the unplugged refrigerator—four tins of Pepsi, a shriveled carrot, a jar of Dijon mustard.
I took a Pepsi, closed the refrigerator, and walked to the front hall. There was a trace of Mr. Clean in the air—a faint and bitter smell that made the few straggly details all the more hopeless and remote. The rooms were bare but here and there were a few abandoned expressions of our family. A plastic container of Kaopectate, a chalky medicine Carolyn swigged during exams, stood like a forgotten sentry on the front stairs. The fallen leaves of the departed ficus plant, whitened, dried, dead, trampled into the shag carpeting of the living room. At the end of the hallway, a mimeograph from Katie’s kindergarten forgotten on the floor. I picked it up and saw it was a spelling test that had been folded into a paper fortune teller. Katie had made some effort to decorate it using a blue Flair marker. But all the verve of the home, all the dreams and desires, all the hopes and fears of all the years, of course all of these were gone. The Tower Road house was now some anonymous structure—hardwood floors, stained carpets, mottled walls where late Mrs. Abbott’s silkscreens had hung. Turning from the living room, I opened the basement door and went down the stairs two at a time, calling for Uncle Lorne. In the centre of his room, the fluorescent black light tube was stuffed in a metal garbage can along with a pillow, a broken model of a gun-boat, and his mauve Duo-Tang folder. I took a moment to open and drink my Pepsi, the taste from the tin mixing with the disturbed dust in the air of the basement. Then I dropped the tin into the garbage can and pulled out the Duo-Tang. Across from each entry, in Uncle Lorne’s expert and miniature handwriting, was a dollar value for every comic book. At the bottom of each page was a tally and, flipping to the end, a grand total for the entire collection, the circled sum of thirty-four hundred dollars. He would not use any of the thirty-four hundred dollars for the motorcycle—the Abbotts, free-minded Americans, would give him that as a gift—and he spent very little as he motorcycled along the Trans-Canada, sleeping in camp-sites, staying with the Oldrings in Vermont, a cousin in Calgary. The purple of the Duo-Tang and the blue marker on Katie’s paper fortune teller I found very calming, in the way that the colour combination of lilac and blue can calm you when your family is falling apart and you have no control over your future, and the colours recalled to me my experience of “Band on the Run” and so the song returned unbidden inside me, complete, continuous, the soundtrack to a few more moments of my summer, and in the upstairs hallway I found a bare mattress, diagonal on an empty floor, and fell on it, face down, my hands under my hips, and lay there, exhausted, sweat evaporating from my forehead, soon falling asleep, knowing I was absolutely alone for the first time in my life.
Fudge
One afternoon when I was nine, I played a soccer game at Westmount School. This was the northernmost fringe of my known world, in a disorienting subdivision by the Halifax Shopping Centre. It was the last Sunday of the summer, the Sunday of Labour Day weekend, and we lost 3–2 in penalty kicks. I flubbed my shot and missed the net entirely. I was under family orders to bicycle home immediately following the game, before it got dark, but I was gloomy with defeat and I didn’t like my bike. It was a girl’s bike, a hand-me-down from my older sister—a blue CCM Rambler refurbished with a white banana seat. To me it looked like a clown’s prop with the banana seat, no crossbar, and low handlebars.
I was embarrassed by it and waited till my soccer team left. I hadn’t even locked it, half-hoping it would be stolen by a bored kid wanting a joyride or a junky contraption to push off the cliff of the railway cut. But my bike was still there after the game, on its side, and, as I picked it up and pushed it toward the school, clomping the mud off my cleats on the pavement, I noticed a group of kids congregated around the school courtyard. Some kids lingered in the corners. Others skittered on the roof. A boy with red hair stood in the centre with a not-fully-inflated soccer ball. But all attention was on another kid, maybe thirteen or fourteen, but older looking because he was fat and had a moustache. This kid trudged into the courtyard, dragging a Koho hockey stick.
At first I thought I was watching a low-energy street fight or the aftermath of a street fight. The big kid with the hockey stick was pummelling people. The kid with the soccer ball was next. The kids on the roof had escaped. But it was just a game of stickball or a North End variant of stickball, sort of soccer baseball with a hockey stick. The kids in the corners were standing at improvised bases, the kids on the roof were outfielders, the kid with the soccer ball was the pitcher. And the fat kid was the batter. He wore a blue parka with a fur-lined hood, Kodiak boots, and brown corduroy pants. And, in the way that fat kids always seemed to wear pants too big for them, these brown cords drooped beneath his belly and hips. But unlike most fat kids, he didn’t yank them up to hide the waistband of his underwear. He just let his pants droop, even though this would have constricted his batting motion.
He took aim on a pitch, swung viciously, and missed. From the rooftop came hoots and jeers. The soccer ball bounced back to the red-haired kid. Another pitch and the fat kid let it go by. There was some controversy whether this was a strike, whether the ball had caught the lower corner of a painted square on the brick wall behind him. But the fat kid shook his head and glared at the pitcher. Then he shoved some hair off his face and tightened his grip on the hockey stick. A kid on the roof said “Fudge” and this word got chanted over and over, in tones of irony and fear, and I realized with a shiver of alertness that the fat kid with the hockey stick was Howard Fudge—the Howard Fudge. The name was a distant legend to me, like Beowulf or Dirty Ernie or Billy the Kid, and before this afternoon I wasn’t sure if Howard Fudge actually existed or if he was just some mythological creature my uncle invented to torment me. But here he was, Howard Fudge, the toughest kid in the North End, a kid who told teachers to fuck off, who pissed in the gas tanks of cop cars in the police station parking lot, who crashed a Toyota Celica into the Hyland movie theatre when he was twelve, Howard Fudge, a fearless kid liable to do anything
to anybody—here he was at Westmount School playing stickball with a bunch of little kids on the last Sunday of the summer. Something in my look or posture must have advertised my new knowledge because I felt Howard Fudge’s attention on me at this point, noticing me for a first time, and I thought to preoccupy myself with some detail of my soccer uniform, as if I might be troubled by the top of my shin guard. When I looked up, the last pitch was in the air and I saw Howard Fudge smack it into the sky, sending the soccer ball above us all, over the heads even of the kids on the roof. As those kids scrambled to retrieve it, Howard Fudge looked at me and lobbed the hockey stick in my direction. It clattered into the front spokes of my bicycle. I stared at it, my heart turning to panic, then I ignored Howard Fudge, got on my girl’s blue bike and pedaled off, head down, legs pumping.
Safely away from Westmount School, I was puzzled by a few particulars. Why was such a big kid playing with little kids? Was he bored? Were his real friends somewhere else? What would I have done if Howard Fudge wanted to fight me? And were those Westmount kids Bad Kids? I thought further of Bad Kids. The boy who said the F-word outside my bedroom window when I was four, and the teenagers who smashed my mother’s flower planters in the middle of the night, and the kids in the Halifax Forum parking lot who smoked cigarettes and threw rocks at people they didn’t know. What happened to these kids that made them think their behaviour was appropriate? Why did they do the things they did? But as the summer day dimmed and twilight began and as I rattled into the leafy streets of the South End, those questions fell away and I was left with the one idea I would remember to report to my sisters and uncle. Howard Fudge was real and I had seen him. I had seen that he was capricious and odd and bullying but, like kids everywhere, filled with his own kinds of folly and truth and instincts and humour.