Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “Sure, smoking’s bad for you, but you’re not going to smoke it. You’re just going to let me kick it out of your trap. Hey, nothing to worry about. You’re safe in the hands of your absolutely steady Uncle Teddy.”

  “It’s lit. There’s smoke coming off it. I’ll breathe it in.”

  “Well, yeah, it’s lit, but I got plenty of unlits. A whole deck of unlits. I’ll give you one of the unlits if you want. For chrissakes, this is a trust experiment. So be a truster, Bert.”

  “You’re lit, Teddy, that’s what you are. Lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree,” Ma says.

  And then Uncle Ted falls in a chair and starts to sob because I won’t fucking trust him. Nobody trusts him.

  Counsellor Sally wonders if Uncle Ted wasn’t damaged by the war. She concedes that that doesn’t excuse his dreadful behaviour, but, on the other hand, doesn’t my mother bear some responsibility for letting me be subjected to incidents like that? Don’t I have to ask myself why she didn’t call the cops on Uncle Ted when he was drunk and abusive?

  My answer to those questions is: first, it’s likely that Uncle Ted did more damage to the war effort than the war did to him. Second, that long before “What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas” became an advertising campaign slogan, the Akers had their own version of that catchphrase. What happened in the Aker family stayed in the Aker family. An invitation to anybody to put his nose in Aker family business was viewed as the basest, lowest treachery. That’s why Ma never squealed to the cops on Teddy. Because that would have been fucking unthinkable. So the home invasions continued, for years.

  During all that time Uncle Teddy’s popularity with me went into a slow decline; his Dow Jones Affection Index sank, his Standard and Poor’s Best Uncle Rating got severely downgraded. By the time I turned fourteen, thanks to Teddy, I was a mess, very twitchy and jumpy, very spooked. When I looked in the mirror, black-ringed, sleepless lemur eyes mournfully confirmed my downward spiral. As Counsellor Sally is surely well aware, all the latest, up-to-date literature confirms that pumping the teenaged male body full of gallons of stress hormones makes for a seething toxic stew, has a detrimental effect on a growing boy’s physical and mental health. I’ve heard it said, on the best authority, that it might even lead to rampage-killing fantasies. This was the gist of a documentary that cited many recognized authorities in the youthful-serial-killers field that I recently viewed with interest and appreciation on PBS.

  A flash of headlights on my bedroom wall, the clunk of a car door out in the street, and the old fight-or-flight response would kick in, the hypothalamus would begin to fuss and bother, the hormone spigot would open full force, the adrenaline, the noradrenaline, the cortisol would gush, and I’d pop straight up in bed, thinking, It’s Teddy! It’s the third degree in my underpants again!

  I freely admit I was a Molotov cocktail of unstable incendiary chemicals. One night when Teddy and Ma were having an argument about whether or not it was a sister’s duty to cook a brother bacon and eggs at three in the morning, and Teddy had his arm cocked to pitch a bottle of beer at her head if she didn’t and Ma was taunting him to Let ’er rip!, Teddy flicked the Bic to my fuse by turning to me and saying, “She’s asking for it. You’re my witness, Bert. She’s asking for it. Nobody could blame me. The years of shit I’ve taken from that woman.”

  That was enough to flush this out of me. “You’re a lunatic,” I said. “A grade A lunatic.”

  Teddy’s eyes went all squinty because they didn’t trust his ears. “What?”

  “I said you’re a fucking lunatic.” A little louder, a little more authority wedged into my cracking, quaking adolescent voice.

  “Bert,” Ma cautioned, “careful. He’s drunk.”

  “I’m a lunatic? Well, you’re a punk. A little pussy punk,” Uncle Ted said to me, mouth contorting. “That’s what you are.”

  “I’d rather be a little pussy punk than a lunatic like you.” I rolled my eyes and stuck my tongue out of the corner of my mouth to demonstrate just how gaga he was. “You belong in a straitjacket.”

  Uncle Ted bucked himself off the chair. I broke for the living room. Ma had waxed the floor that day. (She was a far better housekeeper than Ted ever gave her credit for.) Given the fact that he was pissed to the gills and in his stocking feet, Ted had difficulty negotiating the sharp turns I was making around the furniture, and he hit the deck just as I went pelting up the stairs for the attic. Which was not such a clever move since the attic was a no-exit dead end used by our landlord as a dumping ground for junk abandoned by former renters. There I took refuge behind a scarred dresser that some previous tenant had used as a tool cabinet, its drawers filled with rusty wrenches, hammers, and pliers, an assortment of nails, screws, nuts, bolts. I could hear Ted coming in loud and clear from down below, issuing threats and warnings about how I had better get my ass down those stairs, take my medicine because if he had to come up there, it’d be ten times worse. And Ma was screeching, “Lay off, he’s just a kid, pick on somebody your own size!”

  A slap, a yelp of pain, sobs. Until I heard that, I’d never imagined my tough nut Ma was capable of crying.

  The stairs began to creak. The piece of furniture I was behind was heavy oak and stuffed with hardware, but when I put my shoulder to it and pushed with all my might it budged, started to move, groaning menacingly. Lucky for me, there were wheels mounted on the legs, otherwise I’d never have gotten it to the top of the stairs, a vantage point from where I could see Teddy stealthily creeping up on me, step by step. I caught a glimpse of Ma standing at the bottom of the stairs, hand pressed to her nose, blood trickling between her fingers.

  “Ma,” I called out, “get away from the landing.”

  She was clearly in a state of shock. Because instead of doing what Ma would normally have done, bombard me with questions and protests: Why should I get away? Who are you to give me orders in my own house? she just numbly stepped aside.

  I saw it click in Teddy’s head what was coming. The alarm bells started to jangle. He was putting two and two together and it was adding up to bad fucking news for somebody.

  I gave the dresser a shove.

  A series of ass-over-teakettle, dreamy dresser-bounces, the former tool cabinet gathering momentum, drawers popping open to sprinkle rusty hardware confetti all over Teddy. He was half turned to flee when it crashed into him, knocked him clean off his feet, launched him into the void, hands scrabbling at air. The whump and shudder when Ted landed and the dresser landed on him travelled all the way up to where I stood, a mini-earthquake under my feet.

  A moment of silence. Ma stepped over to stare down at the legs and arms jutting out from under the chest of drawers. She glanced uncertainly up at me, then bent over and put a question to the furniture. “Ted, can you hear me?” Nothing but some lab frog twitching of the limbs. “I better call the boys,” Ma said, straightening up decisively. Meaning her brothers.

  My uncles Ben, Bob, and Oswald, the baby of the family, answered Ma’s mayday. They pried Teddy out from under the wreckage. One of Uncle Ted’s canines was poking through his upper lip; Ben suspected broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder, maybe a concussion since his brother was stumped by questions concerning his age, name, and present location.

  Ben lit a cigarette and said to me, “You do this?”

  I nodded.

  “Good job,” said Oswald. “You want to give him a few smacks while you got the chance? Got him where you want him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t you never learn, asshole?” Bob said sternly, trying to get Ted’s vacant eyes to focus on his face. “Shame on you, hitting your sister. What’s the matter with you?”

  They hoisted him up, lugged him outside, and pitched him unceremoniously into the bed of Oswald’s pickup truck. By then Uncle Ted had begun to talk – after a fashion – but his verbal stroll down memory lane didn’t make much sense. “See Naples and die. What a fucking joke,” he intoned to the stars above. “Naples, that
pile of steaming spaghetti shit. You spend one day there and you want to die.”

  Ben reckoned Teddy was reliving the twenty-eight-day military detention in Naples he had been sentenced to for carelessly discharging a Beretta M1934 in a field kitchen mess line. “Somebody cut in front of the war hero for chow,” Ben explained. “Teddy was packing a pistol – he had took it off a dead Italian officer – so he pulls it out and lets off a few rounds at the line-jumper’s feet.”

  “Evie or the hospital?” said Oswald, who had no interest in good old days war nostalgia.

  “Better be the hospital,” said Ben. “We take him home, Evie might smother him in his sleep. She’s going to be right pissed off.”

  “I vote for taking him home then,” said Bob.

  In the end, they hauled Teddy off to the hospital, where Ben’s diagnosis was pretty much confirmed: concussion, dislocated shoulder, broken ribs. The only thing he had missed was the fractured ankle.

  The night I tipped the dresser down on my Uncle Ted was the night I deserted the ranks of the Akers, mentally resigned from Ma’s family. Soon I went as hippie as it was possible to go in a redneck backwater. I grew my hair long, became a Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen fan, and drove Ma bonkers spinning MacArthur Park over and over on my RCA portable record player. The Akers did not approve of the sensitive butterfly that had emerged from the chrysalis.

  Contrary to what Ma and I feared, Ted never paid a revenge call on us, never arrived to settle scores. For months, we had our ears cocked for the sound of a car door slamming in the street outside, for pounding at the front door. It’s hard to explain. Maybe Uncle Ted’s humiliation at being bested by a kid was more than he could take. Maybe he had recognized something of himself in my eyes as I committed the dresser to the no-recall force of gravity.

  Of course, during the three years I had left before I finished high school and could scram from Connaught, I occasionally ran into Uncle Ted on the streets. He looked right through me, Aunt Evie too. I might have been a pane of glass. Back then I thought Uncle Ted had closed the book on me and I on him. However, according to Counsellor Sally’s reading of my situation, it’s not over yet.

  I left Connaught to go to university, the first of the Akers to take such a step, which they considered a calculated slap in the face to family values. Who the hell did I think I was? But as much as I was intent on strigilating the last vestige and particle of Aker family values off me, I couldn’t get myself entirely free from them. For one thing, I had a duty to visit Ma, something that I couldn’t completely dodge given the long summer breaks teachers get. And when I came home, Ma’s sense of family loyalty always led her to host an Aker get-together. This included the whole smorgasbord of uncles and aunts: Ben, Bob, Oswald, Randy, Dot, Jackie, Carmen. As an added bonus, my grown-up cousins were added to the menu, all of whom seemed to have carried on the Aker tradition of bad career choices. The cousins included an ostrich/emu rancher, an instructor in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu studio, a full-time flyer deliverer, a bill collection agent. The only Aker missing at these family shindigs was Uncle Teddy. He was still nursing a grudge against Ma and holding himself imperially aloof. However, she was regularly supplied with plenty of intelligence on Uncle Ted by her other brothers and sisters, intel that Ma insisted on passing on to me whenever I visited, despite my protests that I couldn’t care less about what Teddy was up to.

  But over the years Ma kept the updates coming and they made it clear that time was not being kind to Uncle Teddy, that bit by bit the years were chipping away at him, that he was beginning to flake. First, his ticker began to act up and he needed a pacemaker. Next, he developed such a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis that he couldn’t carry on in the hospitality industry any longer and was forced to sell the motel. Then came prostate cancer.

  Things between him and Evie were slowly disintegrating too. Teddy’s afflictions made him more irascible than ever. “Little wonder,” Ma said, “the man is twisted up something awful. He’s like a corkscrew. First, they clamped braces all over him to try to keep him from corkscrewing up even worse. That didn’t do the trick so he had surgery to put metal rods in his wrists and screws in his ankles to try to straighten him out. None of it’s working. Teddy’s not straightening out. And Ben claims he’s in terrible pain. You know what Ted is like at the best of times. I wouldn’t want to be Evie now for all the tea in China.”

  Apparently one morning Uncle Ted took exception to some harmless remark Aunt Evie made at breakfast. He upended the table, scattering fried eggs, coffee, plates, and cutlery all over the kitchen, stormed out of the house, and beat it to a flyblown hotel in a village twenty kilometres down the road. There he settled in, hardly a place that any sensible man with a disability would choose for a permanent residence since to get to his room Teddy had to crawl painfully up the stairs on all fours.

  Most of his day he passed swilling draft, munching pickled eggs, and brooding about the low class of company he had to keep in the hotel’s beer parlour, where he didn’t have the option of pitching anybody who offended him through plate glass like he’d so much enjoyed doing in the good old days. The inevitable finally happened. Teddy got into a dust-up with a young man with a purple Mohawk. He just couldn’t forgo telling the asshole what a fucking eyesore he was. Things escalated between the generations. Teddy gave Mr. Mohawk a chop to the head with the metal brace on his wrist and Mr. Mohawk threw the old man over a table. The same day, Teddy got his eviction notice.

  All the Akers assumed that Teddy would be moving back in with Aunt Evie, but she had different ideas. She swung into action, applied to Veteran Affairs for a disability pension on Ted’s behalf, and before he knew it he had been squirrelled away into a tiny suite in a government-subsidized housing facility for senior citizens. She was not having his feet back under her table.

  To everyone’s surprise, Teddy didn’t make as much of a fuss as they had expected about Evie’s taking his living arrangements in hand. Probably he was feeling defeated and untypically listless. Only two weeks before he got kicked out of the hotel, a technician treating his prostate cancer had given him a dose of radiation that damaged his bowel. Teddy had to be fitted with a colostomy bag and that indignity must have been hard for a man like him to accept. He had always been vain, what used to be called a fine figure of a man: tall, broad-shouldered, physically powerful, and agile. Now he was a human pretzel with what Uncle Ben told Ma Ted called his “shit purse” tucked under his shirt.

  Teddy must have been living in his cramped senior’s suite for eight or nine years before I paid him a visit. That was entirely at Ma’s instigation. Time had passed and the Akers had been dropping all around her like flies. Ben was the first to go. Bob the pony-wrangling entrepreneur next. Then Aunt Dottie. Aunt Carmen.

  Against all odds, Teddy was the one who hung in there like a bad smell.

  The growing Aker body count softened Ma’s attitude towards her brother. On one of my visits she said to me, “A person can’t help but feel sorry for Ted. What a life he leads. Sitting in that apartment day after day, never getting out, eating that Meals on Wheels slop. I’ve got some lasagna in the freezer that I bet he’d enjoy. You could take it over, pop it in the oven for him.”

  I asked her why she didn’t take him the lasagna and pop it in the oven herself.

  “Oh,” she said, “Teddy would never take anything from me.”

  “And he would from me? I’m the one who tried to murder him once.”

  “Oh that’s different,” Ma said. “He would take lasagna from you. You’re a man.” Ma has always had a never-ending supply of non sequiturs.

  So I agreed to play lasagna delivery boy. What harm could Teddy do me now? When I was going out the door, I found out. Ma said, “Make sure he gets a good look at you through his screen door. Knows who you are. Evie says Teddy’s got a pellet pistol in there.”

  “Jesus Christ. Why’s he got a pellet pistol?”

  “He watches a lot of cable TV from Detroit. You know
how things are down there in America. House break-ins. People killing each other left and right.”

  “But Connaught isn’t Detroit.”

  “Well,” said Ma, “Teddy never gets out. So what does he know about the world anymore?”

  It was a fine July day. Teddy’s suite faced a sunny courtyard. I rang the bell and called to him through the screen door, trying to outshout a television raving in the background. “Ted, it’s your nephew Bert!”

  A querulous voice answered, “Who?”

  “Bert Molson. Your sister Adele’s boy.”

  “The furniture-mover. What the fuck do you want?”

  “Ma asked me to bring you some lasagna. Can I come in?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  As I eased into the suite Teddy put the television on mute. The temperature in his apartment was Saharan. High summer and a space heater pumping out heat full bore. The place was shrouded in shadow, the blinds drawn. The television screen shed flickering light on a little old man, all aggressive nose and furious eyes, scrunched up in an enormous recliner. Holy terror slumping down into itself, a landslide of flesh.

  I showed him the casserole dish. “You want me to heat it up for you now, or do you want it in the fridge?”

  “Fridge.”

  I stowed the lasagna, went back to the living room, and settled down on a chair. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I scanned the room for evidence of a pellet pistol. Noted a suspicious lump under the afghan covering his lap. Also noted six impossibly cute, fuzzy Teddy bears sitting in a row on the chesterfield. Teddy caught me staring at them.

  “I order those off the TV. Give them to the Home Care girls. The ones I like. Young women appreciate cuddly things. Cuddly things like me,” he added grimly.

  “You certainly have a plentiful stock of them. You must have a lot of favourite young ladies.”