All crimes essentially are formed within the same framework and have one body. And all those who suffer from the pieties of power and empowerment are suffering from the same crime.
Those who suffered under Caligula are the same as those who suffered by the hand of Miramichi serial killer Allan Legere.
Legere’s sniggering as he washed the Downey sisters’ blood from his body is the same sniggering Caligula afforded his entourage. It cannot possibly be different.
Suetonius talks about Caligula mocking Claudius, as well as having an old man dress up as a gladiator to face an equally decrepit lion (as you can imagine, people were rolling in the aisles over this one) to cutting the tongues out of knights, and slaughtering children.
As he tells it, it all seems to be the same sin.
Now, whether Gaius was mad because he drank out of one-too-many lead goblets, who’s to say. There were more than enough lead goblets to go around, and not everyone proclaimed his horse a senator. “Let them hate me as long as they fear me,” he often said.
“If I were you, I’d fear me” I remember Legere telling a boy at the pool hall one summer day in 1966.
Gaius made the court philosopher Seneca the brunt of his mania often enough. Until Seneca wisely noted:
“No one can instill fear, except in the amount they have in themselves.” This is appropriate not only for an emperor but for a small-time hood, as well. It is not one iota different.
Gaius must have had some fairly lonely nights, when he was not stealing his friends’ brides at their weddings or hopping in bed with his sisters.
He must have realized on those brief excursions into the dark, as he saw his reflection in the ditch water, that madness isn’t entirely the fault of one’s stars.
And finally, like Legere, he must have understood that he only thought he was in control.
“I can do anything I please” must have on occasion sounded hollow to him. For it must naturally be followed by “What else can I do?”
(Funnily enough, these are very comparable to the lines Legere is reported to have uttered at his capture: “I could have done this—I could have done that. My name is Allan Legere.”)
Neither could ever seem to do enough. Both were self-agitated by inner loathing. Eventually Caligula was murdered in his garden. His wife and children were murdered shortly after that.
Although Suetonius calls Christianity a “mischievous sect,” and categorizes Gaius’s persecution of the Christians as one of his good acts, there is some comparable reasoning with it.
Suetonius, like Saint Paul, is too observant not to see the toadyism of high culture and false humanity, the rancid perfume that covers up the vomit of vanity.
Suetonius tries to let us understand these men in physical terms, because he wants to warn us “that their bodies are their limitation when compared to some greater idea.” And this is what we come to realize again and again throughout history. That the torture chamber and the knifing on the side street show that power always leaves out the greatest ideal.
Suetonius’s fault lies in his problem of not really knowing what this greater ideal is. He knows there is one—he knows the emperors should have it. He is unsure as to why they do not hold it.
He does not know that the very thing they have limits their ability. Power eclipses the one idea that surmounts it: humility.
Yet he allows us to understand, in his great two-thousand-year-old book, that the power of Gaius is not much more than the power of Legere when looking down from the stars. And hell walks in Little Italy wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit.
The inescapable dilemma of all men and women is that they need to use whatever power they have to prove again and again to themselves that it is theirs.
1993
SMOKING
I BEGAN TO SMOKE AT THE AGE OF THREE, WITH MY FRIEND Kenny, under the veranda of his house, about the autumn of 1953.
We would crawl behind the steps, squeeze our way under the veranda and light up our first cigarette of the day—which was ten minutes after our mothers scrubbed and dressed us, fed us and threw us outside for the morning.
My memories of those children are faint and distant, and are that they were always dressed in bright colours as they walked along the paths between our small white houses.
There was always the smell of wood and smoke at night, and the smell of earth. There were ships in at the wharf, and old men still wore Humphrey pants. Sometimes they had a good pair of Humphrey pants along with a regular work pair. The women wore long dresses, and some women had a mink collar on their winter coats. The radios were still as large as one living-room wall: TVs were a rare commodity.
Kenny’s mother’s purse, black and aristocratic looking, sat upon the counter, with its package of Export sticking out the top of it; sunlight coming through those old Venetian blinds in the corner.
The thieves I knew then were young enough to have a sense of hilarity about their vocation. Gain was nothing without the hilarity attached to it.
As soon as his mother began to clean the house, Kenny would go after those cigarettes with a bravery most people only admire from a distance.
I suppose today he might be called “slightly hyperactive.” We would soon be out the door and under the veranda and lighting up. We would sit back against the blackened brick foundation, and stare at the floor of the veranda—puffs of smoke seeping through the cracks in the boards—and look through the latticework, to watch my grandmother come around to the coal chute; or watch the milkman standing on the veranda above us, wisps of smoke about his feet.
Years have passed, and you know, almost half of the children I grew up with are gone: booze in cars going too fast in the night, or some other sad assault upon the body. Those brilliant and wonderful children I still see in old photos, standing in the schoolyards in the snow.
No cigarette has ever tasted better than the ones I had when I was three and four. The smell of tobacco in the tight paper, mingling with the smell of autumn burdocks scraping the side of the wall in the cooling wind—was, I suppose, as close to purity as I will ever know.
The trouble was Kenny didn’t think so.
It is a fact of my life that I have often been close to people who will never ever leave well enough alone—but who, for some peculiar reason, have to continually tempt God. And worse still, bring me along—as in this instance—as a sort of burnt offering.
It isn’t that Kenny lit me on fire right away—but I did notice him becoming more and more remote—as if he were drawn to some other purpose his mere two-and-one-half-foot best friend in the world couldn’t comprehend.
And never minding all the times he reprimanded me for letting too much smoke go out through the slats or squeeze up through the boards and rise toward the milkman’s knees, he suddenly took it into his head to smoke on the street by the pole—leaning up against it, just once, like the adults did, with our ankles crossed.
So one morning that’s what we did. We walked out of our hiding place with fresh cigarettes in our gobs, like tiny Humphrey Bogarts, and walked right into the arms of my aunt, who was coming down the sidewalk.
“Is that a cigarette?”
I shook my head—as if it wasn’t a cigarette.
“My good God,” she said. “I’m telling your mother.”
“She knows I smoke,” I said.
This was the first of two or three sentences my aunt and I ever exchanged.
Of course I was lying. I had not really told my mother yet. And anyway, my mother was standing out on the porch at that moment.
I don’t think I would have smoked so readily after that day if it wasn’t for Kenny.
* * *
—
Time passed. We smoked in fields, and when snow fell and made the ground ash white, we smoked behind the fence that separated our property. Long ago, we puffed in the she
ds across the street, and sitting in the gully, with cigarettes in our pockets and tucked away in our mittens; and when we couldn’t get cigarettes, we rolled up newspapers and put leaves in them. And once when we couldn’t find a pole to stand beside, we smoked in a hole dug for one, leaned up against the shale rocks and crossed our ankles.
And though we thought we were well hidden, as children always do, we must have been in plain view to grown-ups half the time—because always we were caught, searched, scolded and forbidden to do it ever again. And grown-ups were continually sniffing us up and down—twice a day, at least.
These were the same days as when another little friend of mine jumped off the roof of his house using an umbrella as a parachute, and a young woman—younger than I am now by twenty years—had an infant who was dying, and would stop Kenny and me on the street, as if by talking to us she was somehow able to ease her pain. Nor did I ever feel she wanted other adults around when she spoke. But too often we were trying to hide cigarette smoke when she came to see us. And I never knew her name; remember now only one thing: that her soft wavy hair was brown.
But these in truth are my first few unclear memories of what became a near-lifelong addiction. (I have finally managed to quit.)
Another memory is the movie.
Kenny and I were staring at Rory Calhoun, and Rory Calhoun was lighting a cigarette off a stick he had taken out of a fire, while he leaned back against his saddlebags after a hard day’s ride.
And Kenny came to some conclusions about how we should smoke from then on.
We would go home, he said, and build a fire in his backyard, heat the sticks and light our cigarettes from them. We would, in essence, have a permanent supply of matches.
No one would see the fire, he explained, because we would build it so close to the house—right near the oil barrel—that it would be hidden from view, and we would never let it go out.
Kenny never thought the fire got out of hand, even when my coat sleeve lit up as I was dipping a stick into it. Never once was he daunted in his effort to light a cigarette like a cowboy. Even when he was being hauled away, kicking and screaming, by his mother.
The wall of his house was seared for a year with a burn mark that rose to the kitchen window in the shape of a spruce tree.
The oil barrel was drained and carried to the basement.
Kenny began to carry a silver cigarette case about with him—who knows where he got it: sometimes there were even cigarettes in it. And he began to puff on his father’s cigars whenever he could get his hands on one—and invite me over when his parents were out and Charles, his brother, who was supposed to babysit him, was playing road hockey.
His mother threatened to send him to a home—where the Jesuits would take over. That was the most common threat in those days.
“I’ll send you to a home and let the Jesuits take over.” But she never quite had the heart to.
So it was close to Christmas 1954 that Kenny lit the couch in his house on fire with a big White Owl cigar. He had crawled behind the couch to light the cigar, and puffed away solemnly, not realizing that the tip of the cigar was burning against the couch.
He barely escaped alive.
They dragged the couch outside and let it sit in the snow and mud, upside down.
I don’t remember Kenny’s father very well, but his plan seemed ingenious. He went to the store and came home with a pack of fat White Owls. And then they tied Kenny in his high chair. Then they handed him matches.
“Here you go,” his father said. “You little bugger—smoke them all.”
It is what was once known as “aversion therapy for addiction.” An arcane and cruel method of dealing with addicts—and, back in the 1950s, in its infant stages—which is probably just as well.
“See, you’ll soon get sick now,” his father said. “Smoke them all—you’ll see.”
They stood about the high chair glaring down at him, while Kenny, in weary compliance, struck his first match.
After a while the rest of the family sat down to breakfast.
At that moment Kenny’s aunt drove into the yard. All the way from Nova Scotia. Came for a Christmas visit and wanting to surprise them. She walked through the door. Everyone happy to see her, the baby nonchalantly flicking the ash from his cigar with an experienced finger.
“My God, Jenny,” she said. “I didn’t know the baby smoked.”
* * *
—
I lost touch with him when I moved to the other end of town. As over the years I have lost touch with so many of those children I knew and grew up with, and loved in my youth. But from the age of eighteen on I never opened my third pack of the day without cursing him a little.
I finally went cold turkey, and have come to blame my years of smoking on my own weak will and bad character.
However, if anyone would want me to describe sainthood, I might have to consider Kenny the day I went to visit him while his brother was out playing road hockey.
It is all in the way you perceive how a child of three smokes a cigar.
1986–91
LITERACY
I SUPPOSE, LIKE SO MANY OF US, I DID NOT THINK MUCH OF reading when I was a boy. I know there are those who always had that inclination, and that is a good thing; and no doubt with that inclination there were parents who encouraged it, and that, too, is a good thing. And though I had parents who did encourage learning and school work, I did not really begin to read until I was fourteen years of age.
The book was Oliver Twist, and was given to me by a friend for Christmas, and I remember thinking when I looked at it that I could never read it because it did not have any pictures. And who would put a book in my hand that did not have at least one or two? At any rate, some months later, sometime in March, I did pick the book up after it fell from my night table, and I began to read. I finished the book in three days.
At that time I decided two things: I decided that Dickens was a great writer, and that I wanted to be a writer, too.
There was one remarkable moment in that text that when I read it, I realized that yes, not only is that exactly true, but the exact truth must be sought, understood and known, and if known it should in some way be imparted to others, and in imparting this we must do it with compassion and understanding. That is what that sudden moment gave me, and it changed my life—or at least the direction of my life—and made me realize that without compassion there was neither understanding nor truth.
You see, what that moment revealed was the soul of a boy—not Oliver, but some other orphan on the street—and gave us a certain knowledge about his tragic little life, through empathy and love. For the rest of my life, or at least for the rest of my life until now, I have been obsessed by that perimeter, and a needing to testify about it, if to no one else in the world, then to myself. It was only a single line or two in a book that has long since been misplaced, but it indicated to me a part of my nature that until that moment I did not know I had. Or if in fleeting moments of my youth, I knew I had, I didn’t measure the consequences of having it. But it also allowed me a mirror into the souls of men and women—and Dickens when writing those lines in 1837 could not have imagined that a boy reading them in the spring of 1965 would be so overcome by this that he would relate it to you in the spring of 2018. The souls of men and women were sacred—that is what Dickens was saying.
That is why Tolstoy, who said one could see the heavens in ditch water, also said that all the mad and overwrought characters of Dickens were his friends. Because Dickens showed us the template of goodness in human beings—a woman named Nancy, hardly a saint, and many times a thief would die protecting a child from Bill Sikes; the Artful Dodger and all the irascible crew of little lady and gentleman thieves who could never read or write and who would suffer penury or death in the workhouses of London, or be forced into hard labour or hanged by the neck until dead at the age of ni
ne, were still protective of one another and the orphan Oliver. This was the soul and it had nothing to do with reading, except in reading was revealed to us. A rather strange counterbalance in life. It made me realize what I had realized as a child: that all people were in fact important—why I found solemnness and goodness in the most unremarkable and derelict of people.
For you see I already knew these people. I had seen them on the streets and embankments of my little town. Girls like Nancy and men who had suffered through neglect and war and drink. I knew the rich middle classes, too, and a cross-section of society that middle-class suburbia never experienced. So I knew these people, too, in my heart. Yet in a way it did take a book to allow me to realize it. What does this have to do with literacy? In a certain way everything. For not only did these Dickensian children never have the means to read or write, even where I grew up in the fifties reading and writing to broaden souls was in some ways discouraged by many.
And worse there were times growing up that I saw those who knew how to read and write use it to triumph over others, never to help them. That is the conceit of learning that we must all be aware of, the haughtiness of a degree, which has nothing to do with what a degree is for. It is why I have loved all my life the boys and girls of the street more than the boys and girls of the classroom. It is why I have sat with men who have no education more than with those who have. But I have also seen in them the struggle—like the man who spent his life in the woods and was terrified to take his firearms acquisition test because, though he had hunted and guided from the time he was twelve, he could not read. And he whispered this to me as we sat side by side. So a friend of mine and I managed to tell the forest rangers his predicament, and they allowed him an oral test. For you see, in the woods and on the rivers that man who couldn’t spell woods or rivers would outshine us all. Let us understand this now and forever. Or the young man who did not want his wife, who was discovered to be exceptionally bright, to go back to school, because he was afraid she would become educated and leave him. And how frightened he was when he spoke of this. And it was out of selfishness, yes, but it was also out of loneliness, forsakenness and love. For he himself had never learned to do what she was now being given a chance to.
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