During this phase, when he needed to watch something on VHS, he used the television in the living room, but only when Anna and I weren’t around; we’d occasionally catch him at the tail end of such viewings. Mostly he watched DVDs on his laptop. And he listened to music on his mp3 or used his earphones. With a cable splitter and cable extension cord, he linked the cable to a small television in his room. The TV noise was the only sound that came from his room, and it was infrequent for he was mostly a reader.
The smell of marijuana coming from his room was a different matter.
“I can’t have him smoking in here.”
“Where do you want him to smoke?” The conversation took place about six weeks into Paul’s reclusive phase, one evening while Paul was at work.
“I don’t know, but I know I don’t want him smoking marijuana here. If he doesn’t stop, he’ll have to leave.”
“And go where?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“Did you say you don’t care?”
“You know I don’t mean that.”
“Well, you better say what you mean when you are dealing with Paul. He is over 18, Ma! You understand? 18!”
“Well, he should act like it.”
“How is an 18-year-old supposed to act, Ma?”
“Like you did when you were 18.”
I looked up at the ceiling and swallowed.
“He’ll abide by my rules or find his own place.”
“When has Paul ever followed your rules? When have you been able to make Paul follow your rules?”
“Are you blaming me for his behaviour?”
I didn’t answer.
“Answer me! Are you blaming me for his behaviour?”
“I don’t know, Ma. Maybe in 20 years I will. What I know is that Paul never found in you the nurture Grama and others gave him. But I don’t blame you.”
She was silent for several seconds. “I can’t let him turn my home into a dope den. I can’t have him smoking marijuana in here. This is my home too. I have the right to feel comfortable in here.”
“Ma, Paul has been smoking marijuana in his room since he was 13. You smell it now because he spends more time in his room.”
“And you’ve let him! You’ve let him! Jay, you disappoint me.”
“There are worse things in this world than smoking marijuana. I don’t care whether or not he smokes. So long as he isn’t addicted. He says it helps control his asthma.”
“I don’t believe that.”
There was a long pause during which she seemed to be staring at the table top.
“Ma put aside all this anti-marijuana propaganda — from your church, George Bush, the Reform Party, or whatever they call themselves nowadays. Ma, listen to me, please, please. Paul” — I hesitated — “Paul’s depressed. His withdrawal is too sudden. It’s not normal. In a way, I prefer the abusive, abrasive Paul to this shadow that slinks in and out of his room. If you confront him now about his marijuana smoking, you’ll push him over the edge, never mind threatening to put him out. Don’t go there, Ma. Paul is still a child, still quite immature for an 18-year-old. He loves books and ideas but he doesn’t know much else. I suspect he’s afraid of the future.” I dismissed telling her that that was probably what his marijuana smoking was about. “Paul cannot survive on his own. Not at this point in his life. If you put him out, I’ll be forced to rent an apartment and let him live with me.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard me, Ma.”
The conversation ended there that day.
A week later it resumed. “I’m sure the neighbours are smelling it. We’ll be evicted again. I can see the end: the neighbours calling the cops, the cops at the door, Paul led out in handcuffs, television cameras recording the whole thing, then seeing it again on television. I won’t be able to show my face at work. It will send me straight to the Douglas.”
“Cool your imagination, Ma. Douse it. Even if it ends that way, there are worse things in life: living in a refugee camp in Darfur, in the DRC, or being a surviving Rwandan Tutsi widow. Paul’s depressed. Your first concern should be why. Not what the neighbours think. You should be offering him help; you should be assuring him that, whatever happens, you’ll try to help him through it and would always be there for him.”
“And if he begins to abuse me or tell me I am the cause of his problems?”
“You take it like an adult should. You tell him you are ready to make amends.”
“Amends! For what? What are you hinting at?” Her voice was shrill. “And if he threatens to kill me?”
“Tell him to stop being childish. You should try to have this conversation with him in his bedroom, in his space. I don’t want to be here when it’s taking place.”
She sighed deeply. “What a country this Canada is! Parents taking orders from their children.”
She sat on a dining chair and was silent for a long time. “How come at your age you know all this?”
“Forget that, Ma. See to Paul. He needs all the encouragement he can get to pull out of this slump.”
A couple weeks later, she told me she’d spoken with him, and that it had gone well. He told her he felt bad, real bad, inside. He’d refused to say about what, and refused her offer to let her insurance pay for psychological counselling.
It was another three months before Paul resumed verbal contact with us. And I bungled the one occasion when Paul might have volunteered information about his depression.
***
Paul, where are you? Why aren’t you here? How have we failed you, Paul? Do you know that Ma ended her marriage and has led a loveless life here, because she didn’t want you to grow up with a violent father?
***
Four months before Paul left on his travels, he came in one afternoon while I was watching Making Sense of the Sixties. He sat down beside me.
“This is like heavy stuff, man. Awesome! Where’d you get this?”
“In Concordia’s library.”
“I should o’ been an adolescent then. This looks like fun. Wow. Cool, man. Ma,” he called to Anna in her bedroom, “did you ‘turn on, turn off, and drop out?’” She hadn’t long come in from the dayshift. “Ocean would dry up first, right. Woodstock! Far out. Look at what you missed, Ma! Ma, you missed Jimi Hendrix: God with a guitar!”
“Paul, Ma was only 13.”
“So, Jay, you guys are like studying this? Cool, man! Wow!”
“It’s an independent study course. The professor’s interested in this sort of thing. He was part of the scene.”
“Your professor! Really. Tell me more.”
I paused the VCR. “It’s an interdisciplinary course. History and literature mostly. He calls it ‘The Other America.’ We do the readings — three of us: Jonathan, a girl called Sarah, and myself. We meet every week at his flat, near Chomedey and Maisonneuve, and discuss the works. We’ve done your favourite author: Thoreau, along with Emerson. Walt Whitman too. Tomorrow we begin Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and in two weeks we’ll be looking at The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the Sixties Revolution, and after that three or four more authors.”
Anna came into the living room then. “Jay, what are you getting Paul into?”
“What are you talking about? I just celebrated my 19th birthday!”
“In years only.”
“I’ll watch what I want, when I want. Who do you think you are?”
“But not where you want?”
“Jay, aren’t you going to stand up for me?”
“You’re quite capable of defending yourself, Paul.” I got up and went to the Media Centre to continue watching the documentary.
A week later, as soon as I got in from school, Paul began to sing:
What did you learn in school today?
What did yo
u learn, my brother Jay?
To rob the poor, turn all earth grey —
That’s what you learned today?
What did you learn in school today?
What did you learn, my brother Jay?
To starve the poor, feed them hay —
That’s what you learned today?
What did you learn in school today?
What did you learn, my brother Jay?
To pillage and lie, the capitalist way —
That’s what you learned today?
What didn’t you learn in school today?
What didn’t you learn, my brother Jay?
To be a man, choose your own way?
You didn’t learn that today.
“My dear brother,” he said, closing his eyes and rocking his head and shoulders — swagger meant for Anna, who was in the kitchen. “I have seen Making Sense of the Sixties. Momsy dear.” He went to where she was peeling vegetables at the sink and put his arm around her waist. “It taught me nothing I didn’t already know about drugs. I’m glad to see that 35 years ago people agreed with me that education is slavery and brain death, and they did something about it. Gave the finger to the plantation and freed their minds with grass.”
He walked back to the living room and sat on the sofa beside me. “By the way, Bro, as a follow-up I read two of your books: Do It and Die, Nigger, Die! Pass me The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as soon as you’re done reading it. I leafed through it yesterday. You think your prof would let me sit in on the discussion, would let me onto the bus?”
“I don’t know.” Professor William Samson (he insists that we call him Bill) is flamboyantly gay; according to Jonathan, a queen without a crown. On the eastern wall of his living room, there’s a massive painting of three life-size naked men: a European, an African, and an Asian, their interlaced bodies filling the canvas. On top of a long glassed-in mahogany bookcase that divides his living room from the dining room, he has a half-metre high carving in ebony of a penis and testicles mounted on marble. It’s in your face as soon as you enter the living room.
I was tempted to lie, to say that Bill had said no. And I didn’t want a confrontation with Anna. A year earlier, a Saturday evening, Jonathan had visited, and we had become engrossed in playing Chinese checkers, and Jonathan had missed the last metro and slept over. When Anna arrived from work next morning, Jonathan was still there. As soon as he left, Anna called me into her bedroom. “Why’s he sleeping here? What’s going on between you two?” She tried to keep her voice low. We’d thought Paul was still asleep.
I explained what had happened.
“You’re sure there’s nothing more going on between you two?”
“What do you mean, Ma?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. You will have to say it.”
“Oh, Ma,” Paul shouted from his bedroom door, “Jay’s old enough to screw with whom he wants. Don’t get our lives mixed up with your religion.”
“Leave! Go!” She waved me away and began to cry.
***
Jonathan is gay, gay and visibly androgynous. Our friendship began banal enough my first year in CEGEP. The first full summer I spent here Jonathan found out that I didn’t have a driver’s licence and decided I should have one. On evenings, when the parking lot of the Versailles Shopping Centre was empty, he taught me the basics of driving in his father’s 1990 Nissan Maxima — his sky-blue eyes glowing, his manner at its most earnest. At the end of every driving session, he took me home — the same duplex, now with more recent renovations — and reheated apple, blueberry or strawberry pie and served it to me with ice cream and orange or apple juice.
Sometimes his Tante Jeanne, an ex-nun, who lived upstairs, was there.
“You like it, the life with electricity?” Tante Jeanne asked me the first time we met.
I laughed and she blushed. I told her my grandmother had a washing machine and dryer, that we did our homework on a computer, and when we walked barefoot it wasn’t because we didn’t have shoes. She went on to talk about sending money to some nun in Haiti and then asked me: “Why you come to Canada, donc?”
“Il faut poser cette question à ma mère.”
Thereafter our conversation was reduced to a cool hello.
A year later, when I visited one Saturday, Cecile, Jonathan’s mother, gave me a bumbleberry pie to take home. Those days Anna was too tired from working long hours to be even curious about where I went. Her eyes bulged when she saw the pie.
“What’s this? From your future mother-in-law or what?”
“Maybe.”
“When are we meeting her?” Paul asked.
“My mother-in-law?”
“No. The daughter, smart aleck!”
“Not very soon. You’ll try to steal her.”
“Does Jonathan have a girlfriend?” Anna asked when I was in second-year university.
“I don’t know.”
That second year at McGill, Jonathan and I spent December 27-29 at his parents’ chalet in Lac Sept-Îles, some 50 km northwest of Quebec City. Jonathan brought along snowshoes for both of us. He helped me put on mine, put on his own, and showed me how to walk easily in them. We slung on our backpacks and trudged through thick snow and naked yellow birches for about 200 metres to reach the chalet. Below it, at the bottom of a steep slope, was a clearing that showed their jetty, the boathouse, and the broad field of ice that was the lake, its solid white surface glowing in the late afternoon sun. To the right two of its seven islands were visible. There were over a dozen skidoos crisscrossing it.
Downstairs of the chalet, there was a well-equipped kitchen, a living room and dining room, a bedroom and a toilet. Upstairs there were three bedrooms.
Quickly we took wood inside from off the porch and lit the stove. It was a struggle keeping the cold out. We closed the trapdoor to the floor upstairs to prevent the heat from escaping and shut the doors to all the other rooms to concentrate the heat in the living room. Even so, by the time we got the temperature to 12 degrees, the sun had gone down. All around the lake gleamed, lit by the thin line of houses of those who lived there yearlong. The rest was forest all the way up the slopes. Up to 8 pm, the skidoos were still racing along the lake, their headlamps beaming. Jonathan wanted us to go walking, but at that hour I didn’t feel like tromping about. Indoors it varied between 11 and 13 degrees, depending on the strength of the wind, and outdoors −22 without factoring in the wind.
We slept on sleeping bags and blankets in front of the stove. I vaguely remember hearing him adding wood to it during the night. When I awoke next morning my nose felt frozen and I would not throw off the bedclothes until, in a tussle, Jonathan pulled them off me. Two years ago, while he and I were watching Broke-Back Mountain, I wondered what would have happened if Jonathan had moved his sleeping bag close to me that night and pulled me into his arms.
“C’est ça, l’hiver québécois, l’hiver que mes ancêtres ont vécu. Goûtes-y, mon vieux!” (“This is the Quebecois winter of my ancestors. Taste it, buddy.”) In those days, he spoke to me almost exclusively in French, to improve my listening and pronunciation skills. (Paul never had such language problems; overnight he became un petit Québécois grillé.)
After breakfast I bundled up: double gloves, a long, thick scarf piled around my neck, a toque pulled down over my ears, four layers on my torso, two on my lower limbs; Jonathan not specially so — he wasn’t even wearing a toque and certainly no long johns — and we went walking on the lake, Jonathan occasionally pushing me into snowbanks and throwing snowballs at me. We walked for a good two hours, circling three of the islands and keeping out of the skidoo paths. It was around one when we returned to the chalet — icicles hanging from my nostrils and sweat saturating my underwear, Jonathan’s face wind-burnt a bright pink — to eat crackers and a pot of soup we’d left to heat on the woodstov
e. Next day, we drove for about a kilometre along the lake road to the entrance to Parc Jacques-Cartier, put on our snowshoes and went snowshoeing on a path that paralleled a road used to bring timber out of the park.
It was on the drive back to Montreal that Jonathan told me that he was gay. I visualize the furrows in Jonathan’s forehead and the sweat dripping from the steering wheel as he awaited my response. “It’s alright, Jonathan.” It had taken me a long time to say so, because I hadn’t known what to say, and it didn’t feel right that Jonathan should tell me.
Paul was around 14 and had already figured out that Jonathan was gay. I hadn’t. My mind returns to Anna’s obsessive fear that we might be gay — put there by what Bulljow told her when she first came to Canada.
***
I stand, stretch, touch my toes, and walk to the visitors’ lounge. I check my cellphone to see if there’s a message from Jonathan or Paul. I left a message on the answering machine at home telling Paul to call me on my cell as soon as he got the message. In fact it’s the only reason I have a cellphone. I’m exhausted to the point of staggering, as I walk back to Anna’s room, too exhausted to even feel sleepy. I stand at the bedside and try to get a view of Anna’s face before I sit down again.
***
Bill agreed to have Paul come to the remaining classes. At one point Bill said that he’d been one of the students who took over the faculty club at UBC when Jerry Rubin spoke there. Paul applauded. Paul and he became fast friends. Bill plied him with books and sometimes they met for coffee. Paul probably saw him as someone who’d rebelled and who was therefore “real.” I find their friendship both a puzzle and a relief: a puzzle because of Paul’s homophobic taunts, a relief because it tells me Paul was merely posturing.
Anna found out about their relationship after overhearing Paul and me speculating about Bill’s sexual fantasies. She questioned me about it in Paul’s absence. “Ma, first: remember that Paul is 19, so if he’s sleeping with Professor Samson, which I’m pretty certain he isn’t doing, it’s perfectly legal. Second: Professor Samson is good for Paul. Paul looks up to him. It means that he’ll be able to influence Paul in a way you and I can’t. To go back to school, maybe. Don’t knock it. Third: You fundamentalists are apoplectic now because you’ve just lost your divine right to persecute gays. Don’t count on Paul and me to help you. Fourth: Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with Paul?”
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