Rowdy

by Ariel Teal Toombs

Fortunately, there was some respite for Roderick—from the new city and the troubles beckoning him, and from the increasing tension between him and his father. Come summer, they all went back to Burns Lake for a few more weeks among the Andersons. In the bush, where Stanley could let down his guard, father and son’s natures found temporary common ground.

  The Andersons had an old gas-powered washing machine. It ran on a kick-start Briggs & Stratton two-stroke engine. When the washing machine broke, Roderick tried to make a go-kart out of the motor. When Stanley’s vacation was over and it was time to return east to Toronto, he had the motor shipped from BC to the apartment in Don Mills. Roderick and Stanley worked on it on their apartment balcony, making them popular with the neighbours, no doubt.

  “You guys started it and the odour from it was just horrible,” said Eileen.

  “That’d be the same balcony where I had to play my bagpipes every Sunday,” said Roddy. His practice regimen was strictly enforced, but as he improved he started enjoying the instrument.

  He also played them in parks, sometimes busking. Eileen remembered, “We would go out, we’d jump in the car and take it out to the park. Rod would stand there playing ‘The Lone Piper’ or something on the bagpipes. He had an audience every time. It was lovely.”

  “The kids at school didn’t think it was quite so lovely.”

  “I love the bagpipes,” Eileen said.

  If there’s any mystery why Roddy stayed so committed to his gimmick throughout his life—aside from the fact it worked so well—the answer might be as simple as this. He wanted to make his mother happy.

  —

  Roddy learned another skill in Toronto that shaped his professional wrestling career. “I started boxing in Lansdowne. I don’t know how I found it. It was so far away. I’d sleep in that subway station at Lansdowne ‘cause they shut down at a certain time.”

  The Lansdowne Boxing Club was a focal point of the Toronto fight scene. How Roderick found his way to the cramped little gym is a mystery. Stanley had tried to teach him to box, and his uncle Tupper was a renowned boxing coach. It’s possible Rod showed up at Lansdowne at his father’s urging, another attempt at instilling some discipline in his wayward son that went very wrong. “It was a really rough gym,” Roddy recalled. He thrived at the sport, eventually competing in a Golden Gloves competition, a sort of gold standard—if you didn’t get that from the name—for amateur fighters. But where Stanley might have wanted to instill discipline, he cultivated his son’s independence instead.

  Don Mills is northeast of the city core and Lansdowne Road well west of downtown. By bus and subway, it’s nearly twenty kilometres. At age thirteen, Roderick would have travelled alone on public transit for a couple hours each way. It’s no wonder he woke up hidden in some nook of the Lansdowne subway station, either ready to box before heading back to Don Mills for school or too late to catch the last train home. Don Mills was a midcentury commuters’ paradise, filled with ranch-style bungalows on wide lots. Lansdowne was one of the most crime-ridden streets in the city.

  Roderick missed the last train home a lot. He was missing a lot of school, too. In junior high, a vice principal made the boys strip naked for swim class. Roderick refused and pulled a switchblade to make sure his position on the matter was understood.

  Around thirteen or fourteen, little Roderick, favoured target of bullies across half the width of Canada, grew tall. He was suddenly tall enough that movie theatres wouldn’t let him in for children’s prices. To get the kids’ deal, Stanley had to go with him and insist.

  Marilyn came back to live with the family when she started a job in Toronto. (Cheryl had since moved on.) Then she got married and was quickly gone again. “Rod wouldn’t leave me at my wedding. He kept following me to the car because he didn’t want me to leave. So I said, ‘Rod, I’m getting in the car now. I have to go.’ ‘I don’t want you to go!’ He felt abandoned by us a bit.”

  Straying ever more from his parents, he started sleeping over at the home of a senior member of the pipe band. “I stayed there, wouldn’t come home,” he remembered. “Then I started drinking, and got really drunk one night on homemade wine. My dad finally said just fuckin’ let him be your father.” For all the grief he was causing his father’s sense of pride and propriety, he was reaching out to his mother in some small measure by continuing with the band. It was a decision Roddy would regret. “It was almost like a fuckin’ Charlie Manson commune or something,” he said of the way the band was run. Junior members were often targeted for abuse. The Toronto Star ran a photo that Rod remembered well, in which he appears marching with the band in a parade. The photo doesn’t reveal much beyond the well-rehearsed unity and singular purpose of a well-drilled band that would finish fifth in international competition—a result he frequently cited later in life. But he marched in pain that day. He’d been made to wear boots two sizes too small as punishment for not going along with some demeaning bit of hazing or another. He came home after an overnight trip with the band and dumped clothes stained with blood in the laundry basket. No questions were asked. No suggestion was offered that he quit.

  Fathers. Teachers. Leaders of any stripe. It was enough to convince a teenager well on his disillusioned way that authority exists only as a means to exploit you. If you don’t possess it, you suffer its will.

  And then the ultimate authority in his life was gone. His parents moved away, and this time Roderick—now well into his teens and tall enough to intimidate on the street when he needed to—didn’t join them for the trip.

  “I guess they left,” he said of his parents. He wondered, too, how he eventually caught up to them. “I cannot recall how. I was never on an airplane. Must have been on a train. Got into Winnipeg.”

  2

  Concede or Get Up

  Our dad met his first real friend the way you’d expect. “My buddies brought Rod over to my house, and they knocked on my back door. They said, ‘Hey, Cam, you’re pretty tough and this guy’s pretty tough, why don’t you guys have a fight?’ I go, ‘Okay.’”

  Over six feet tall, Cam Connor was still, at sixty-one, an imposing presence. The years had been kinder to him than to Roddy. When they saw each other for the last time in 2015, it had been over forty years since they’d first met in Winnipeg. Roddy brightened considerably in Cam’s company.

  The steadfast trust between them hadn’t come easily, but it had come quickly. “We walked inside, my friends stayed out. Just the two of us went in the garage and closed the door. Then we went at it,” Cam recalled.

  Cam lives in Edmonton now, where he works in sales for a camp and catering company servicing the Alberta oil industry. It’s not his first career. In 1979, he scored a double-overtime playoff-series winning goal for the National Hockey League’s Montreal Canadiens on their way to a Stanley Cup championship, eliminating their arch-rival, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Later, he played for the Wayne Gretzky–led Edmonton Oilers and the New York Rangers as well. And given the company he kept as a teenager, the part that won’t surprise you is that he spent a significant proportion of his NHL career in the penalty box, a consequence of being big, fierce and willing to fight for his teammates.

  Cam continued the story: “Every time he threw, it was so fast, and I’d barely get my head out of the way and a fist would come flying. He was throwing hooks at me.”

  After about thirty seconds of trading punches, Cam realized the new kid wasn’t going to kick or tackle him. He wanted to fight standing up. “I knew this guy was trained. I could tell when he moved his head just a little bit, he knew what he was doing.” Most teenagers in a fight would jump out of the way to avoid a punch. Roddy—the name Roderick was becoming a relic of family life—avoided Cam’s fists with subtle shifts of weight, an elegance that required genuine skill. “He just dodged the punches, minimal effort, and that’s when I said to myself, ‘Uh-oh, I’m gonna have to knock him out if I’m going to beat him.’”

  Cam went all in. He threw a roundhouse right, ho
ping to turn the tide of the fight. It had worked in hockey fights, and he’d ended his share of street fights the same way. He missed. The force of the punch tore a muscle in his arm. “That’s when he started hitting me. I couldn’t use the arm anymore ‘cause my triceps was gone.” Roddy grunted with every punch. “He hit me a few times, then, honest to God, I had a motorcycle parked there, whoop, I went over the motorcycle. Just like in the movies.”

  If Roddy had come around that motorcycle and tried to finish it, Cam would have been just one more guy in one more fight. But he didn’t. Both kids would soon be professional fighters, and already they grasped the most basic of codes between opponents. Rod stood back and gave Cam a chance to concede or get up. “The fight was over,” said Cam. “I go, ‘What’s your name again? I think I’m gonna be your friend.’”

  —

  Having followed his parents to Winnipeg, Rod moved in with them. But he quickly fell into the old pattern, calling his parents’ place home while sleeping many nights wherever else he could find.

  He enrolled in high school. For a tough guy, he had an unexpected impact on his new best friend, who was an unrepentant jock with a nose for trouble. “Rod always talked to the nerdy guys. He changed my outlook with people different than me. He’d see good people inside.” Roddy quickly became popular with classmates. He didn’t strut through the halls, hassling smaller students or picking fights to prove himself. He would strike up a conversation with anyone.

  Cam recalled them walking down Portage Avenue, one of Winnipeg’s main streets, and passing an older man begging for change. Being teenagers, neither kid had much money. Roddy had $30 to his name. “Rod turned around and put twenty dollars in the old guy’s tin, never mentioned it after.”

  If parents often notice the worst in their teenage kids, peers sometimes see their friends at their best. But that doesn’t mean Roddy left Toronto and became a saint.

  He had a favourite trick when trying to avoid school. If the classroom was empty before class began, he would jam a toothpick into the lock and break it off. When the teacher arrived and tried to unlock the door, the key would push the toothpick in farther. By the time the janitor was called and got it open, the period was half over and class got cancelled. Talking it over one day, several teachers realized they weren’t the only ones who had found a scrunched piece of wood in the lock. So they compared which students they had in common. “Turned out to be Rod, me and the smartest guy in the school,” said Cam. “They always thought it was me. I never squealed.”

  Though Rod kept up with school and joined a local pipe band, his relationship with his father continued to sour. The streets in the notoriously cold city were equally inhospitable. As generous as he could be with people who posed no threat to him, a kid looking to survive on those streets had to be mean and a little ruthless. Roddy was fast learning to be both.

  Looking back, he couldn’t remember exactly when he robbed a Shell station. But he remembered getting caught. Scared, he asked the police if there was any way he could avoid getting a criminal record. The cops knew him a little. They might also have known his father, still with the CN police, as every new promotion sent him a little higher up the force’s hierarchy. Maybe they decided to help a troubled kid whose life was going wrong. Maybe they just used him. Whatever their intent, their proposal nearly got him killed.

  The cops told him that a student at Windsor Park High School was selling drugs. At the cops’ request, Roddy arranged to meet him at a popular restaurant where drug deals were common. It just so happened that our father and Cam had already developed an interesting working relationship with that establishment. “We used to be bouncers in a restaurant, if you could believe that,” says Cam. “It was where the gang members hung out. It was called the Burger Bar. It was pretty rowdy in there.” The tough clientele didn’t deter the two friends from keeping the peace, even if they weren’t getting paid to do it. Their compensation was more immediately satisfying: cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

  Roddy kept the peace with diplomacy more often than force. “He’d be calm with people, not confrontational,” said Cam. “Not looking for a fight, not bull against bull. He’d just go, ‘Ah, buddy, you could probably kick our ass, but the boss doesn’t need any trouble in here.’”

  The police’s scheme to catch the drug pusher went sideways when he showed up at the Burger Bar. He was a very popular high-school student and Roddy tried to keep him out of trouble. “When I saw it was him—and I liked him—I tipped him off,” recalled Roddy. “I said get out of here. Well, that tipped everybody off to me.”

  The police hauled their target out of the restaurant and left Roddy behind. Their oversight wasn’t lost on Cam, who ran outside and told the cops they were hanging Roddy out to dry if they didn’t appear to arrest him, too. It would be obvious to anyone watching that Roddy was in on the sting. The cops went back in, grabbed Roddy and took him to a car. It was too little, too late.

  The pusher was a good customer to a group of Winnipeg gangsters, and not the calibre of gangsters who hung out at the Burger Bar. These were serious men who weren’t going to allow the loss of business to go unpunished. Roddy was back at school right away (in case people hadn’t already figured out he’d cooperated with police), and the gang went to work on him.

  As he approached his locker one day, a trickle of red was leaking from inside and pooling on the hall floor. He opened the locker to find his books soaked in blood and a pig’s head staring out at him. Small dead things sometimes found their way into the lockers and desks of prairie kids, to make a point or just to get a rise out of a squeamish schoolmate. A whole pig’s head was a statement of a different order. Roddy was in trouble. “All of a sudden,” he said, “everybody fuckin’ turned.”

  If the severed head wasn’t signal enough that the drug bust would be avenged, he happened on another sign, one meant for more than just him. “On the drug dealer’s court date, I went into the bathroom. I closed the stall door and carved into it was a coffin with a little cross in it, and ‘Jan 23 Toombsday,’ ‘cause that was gonna be the day.” It was a warning to anyone who disagreed, and a rallying call to others who wanted to avenge the student’s arrest.

  Toombsday arrived officially after school when a couple of bikers caught up with Roddy in an open field near his parents’ house. “I was good with my hands, I was good. But they were much older than me. They got me, rolled me a little bit. But I could tighten up. A little bit of pain, but they couldn’t get my teeth, my nose. I got balled up. They had a bike chain made into a belt.” The kicks and punches and lashes weren’t intended to kill him, exactly, just to kill any ambitions he might have harboured of challenging for their drug turf. “Things got pretty fuckin’ testy there.”

  So many years later, you wouldn’t expect anyone to get the facts perfectly straight about an emotionally charged episode like Roddy’s Toombsday story. It says a lot about our father that, until he and Cam sorted out during their last visit exactly how it all went down, Roddy remembered events a little differently: “I went into the marijuana selling business,” he said. “Other people were taking my turf over. So I went right to the cops.” In Roddy’s mind—which often understood everything bad that happened to him or those around him by way of his own guilt—he had made a very calculated decision: he would use the cops to burn a rival pot dealer. “I made up a story about how my sister had OD’d or died or whatever, and I set these guys up. I set up a buy and I told the cops, ‘Yes, it’s business, get them off my turf.’”

  He did remember trying to warn the drug-dealing student to get out of the restaurant. But in his memory, he obscured that small act of grace with the belief that he had caused the whole mess. And to whatever degree the sloppy bust was not his fault, he believed the police were to blame. For decades he remained certain that after his criminal ambition had led him to co-operate, the police abandoned him: “Cops came in, saying I was a stooge. I denied it, but they sent people to get me.”

  When
anyone had leverage over him, the one thing—and only thing—he trusted them to do with it was betray him.

  —

  With his departure from Toronto, Roddy left boxing behind. He played a few sports at school, but wrestling soon became his athletic focus. He quickly climbed the ranks of the local high school competitions but got frustrated when a wrestler from Louis Riel, the French school across town, proved impossible to beat. Losing to this kid drove him to distraction until he finally won the Manitoba 167-pound amateur wrestling championship. The amount of time he spent on the streets was giving him ample opportunity to practice fighting away from the mat and outside the rules as well.

  Winnipeg had one of the country’s largest French-speaking populations outside Quebec. The passing of Canada’s Official Languages Act in 1969—which meant that government services in the whole country had to be offered in English and French—had put the multilingual city on edge, especially the English-speaking teenagers at Roddy’s school, Windsor Park, and their rivals at Louis Riel. “A lot, a lot of street fights,” remembered Roddy. French and English kids got along individually, but in sports or in large groups, small differences became big excuses to fight. “There were constant rumbles,” said Roddy. I’m a WASP, I wasn’t allowed to date a French or a Catholic girl.” Of course, he found a girlfriend who was French and Catholic—or at least had a French last name.

  Roddy’s amateur wrestling coach was a priest named O’Malley. Having some concern for the souls of all his young charges, O’Malley worried especially about the troubled ways of his star wrestler. Roddy remembered his coach sitting him down so he could consider an idea that might appeal to him.

  “Father O’Malley says, ‘You know, Roderick, this is what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to go out some night, you’re going to be cold. You’re gonna rob a 7-Eleven, they’re going to catch you, they’re going to put you in jail, they’re going to rape you, then they’re going to kill you.’”