1979

by Ray Robertson

  ~

  Things that people gave you, if they were good things, were things you could keep and call your own and could even become part of who you were. I’d never thought of being outside—of being in nature—as anything much but the opposite of being inside, where people usually were and therefore were supposed to be. But jogging with Allison in the cemetery made me like the surprise of a cool breeze on a warm day, to stop and stare at late-afternoon long shadows cast by summer-swaying trees, to sniff deep the dewy smell of early-morning earth just waking up. There wasn’t any point to any of it—breezes and shadows and smells couldn’t make you any smarter or stronger or put more money in your bank account—but I liked it anyway, I just liked it. That was another thing about good things: you never had to give a reason, you never had to come up with a convincing argument as to why they were good. Good was good because it was good.

  But sometimes you didn’t want to put on your running shoes and scurry in step with someone else’s moving, maybe you just wanted to sit alone and read yet still be able to pause and look up at the sky’s big blue nothing before going back to your book. I’d gotten a biography of Amelia Earhart out of the Chatham Public Library and taken it, a bath towel, and a can of C Plus onto the small tarpapered roof at the back of our building overlooking the parking lot. You could only get to it from Julie’s bedroom window, but she was working at Dairy Queen and wouldn’t be home for hours. I changed into my bathing suit and carried my supplies through the window and outside. I’d wrapped my pop in tinfoil to keep it cool, something Dad used to do with his can of beer when we lived on Vanderpark Drive and it was summertime and we’d play lawn darts in the backyard. Even your parents could give you something good that became yours.

  Tarpaper wasn’t grass, the roof of the building next door wasn’t a sprawling weeping willow tree, but the sweet-and-sour sun was still up there—the mashed-potato clouds and the blue Mr. Freeze sky too—and the sweat that occasionally slid down my forehead and along my cheek and drop-plopped onto the page of my book testified that I was part of something bigger than just me and what I was reading. Outside, no matter where you were or what you were doing, you became a little piece of the puzzle of everything. It wasn’t a bad feeling, not like you might expect, wasn’t like being the last guy on the bench on a basketball team, the necessary eleventh man; was more like realizing there couldn’t be a game without you even though it was all in your head, that there really wasn’t any game at all. I was a frog on a rock on the shore of a lake, sitting and staring and sweating, just another stupid little amphibian whose stupid little amphibious brain was never meant to understand where all this water came from or what it was there for.

  I skipped to the end of the book, the part where Amelia disappears over the Pacific Ocean while trying to fly around the world in 1937. The author said her plane hadn’t run out of fuel and crashed and sank into the ocean like the government and the newspapers said, but that Amelia was a spy for America and that, after her plane crash-landed on a Japanese-held island and she was taken prisoner, she died of dysentery, and that the US government knew all about it but didn’t do or say anything because they didn’t want to be embarrassed and weren’t ready to go to war with Japan or anybody else. I wondered how the government and the newspapers could have gotten away with lying to people, but before I could get all the way to the end of the book I fell asleep on my towel. When I woke up, I knew I was going to have more than a tan, and I was right. I soaked myself in Solarcaine, but I could still smell the sunburn underneath.

  Chapter Nine

  The Harrison Hall people put up a good fight, but the game was over, the mall people won, the city decided that old city hall could be demolished. Chatham council rejected the $150,000 offer from the Ontario Heritage Foundation, and when Mr. Brown and the rest of his group asked the Ontario Municipal Board to reverse city council’s decision, the OMB said there was nothing they could do. The editorial in The Chatham Daily News said it was a victory for democracy and the entire town, so it had to be true.

  Dad scored a victory, too, finally found a building he wanted to buy and thought he could afford, a realty hat trick: a permanent place of business for him, a brick-and-mortar legacy for his dependents, a home for all of us. And it would be a home, too, not just two floors of small rooms staring at William Street with a parking spot in the back for an extra ten dollars a month. It was still downtown, the new shop would still benefit from the shopper spillover that the new mall was going to supply, but it was near the nice old houses that cosseted CCI. Its floors were hardwood, not wall-to-wall linoleum; there was a gas furnace and heat vents in every room instead of steam radiators that constantly needed to be drained; there was central air-conditioning, which meant we could closet our two rotating fans and use our magazines exclusively for reading, not fanning; there was even a small backyard surrounded by a wooden fence. It faced Tecumseh Park, and if the wind was strong enough and blowing in the right direction when you stuck your head out of any of the building’s three floors of large windows, you got a whiff of cedar as the trees waved and bowed in the breeze instead of a nose full of car exhaust. And trees were nicer to look at first thing in the morning than a garbage truck or a stumbling drunk stunned he’d run out of night. Even Julie was sort of impressed.

  “At least the bathroom has a window,” she said as we walked home from our first family viewing after supper one night.

  “Both bathrooms,” Dad said. He’d been there a few times already with the owner, who wanted to make sure he was serious about buying before he showed it to us. He was. The owner must have thought so too, because he let Dad take the key home. Dad said the man who owned the building didn’t want to use a real estate agent. This way, Dad said, he could pass on some of the savings from not having to pay a commission to the agent.

  “Living with two guys and one bathroom,” she said. “I should get an award or something.”

  “Well, you’ll only to have suffer for one more year,” Dad said. We all laughed, even though it wasn’t very funny. It was usually Julie who brought up how much better her life was going to be once she left for university, and generally only when she was sore about something she didn’t get or something that didn’t go her way. Hearing Dad making a joke about it, even a lame joke, made her leaving seem more real.

  “I’ll be back for Christmas and summer holidays,” Julie said. “Don’t rent out my room or anything.”

  Dad put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. “Don’t worry, Jewel, wherever you go or whatever you do, my little girl will always have a place she can come back to whenever she wants.”

  Julie pulled away, gave him a playful poke in the shoulder. “I’m not anybody’s little girl, Dad.” We kept walking, and Julie slid back beside him, let him put his arm back where it was.

  “The same goes for you too, son. Don’t ever forget, you’ll always have a home, no matter where you end up or whatever you end up doing.”

  “I know,” I said.

  We stood at a red light. A cool-looking car, like a car in a Steve McQueen movie, bulleted through the intersection. We were standing safely on the sidewalk, but couldn’t help stepping back when it raced past.

  “What kind of car is that?” I said.

  Dropping his hand to his side, watching the car disappear down King Street, “The kind driven by an asshole,” Dad said.

  Julie and I looked at each other. “Hey, I know what we should do,” she said.

  Dad didn’t answer; the light had turned green, but he was still scowling down King.

  “What?” I said, even though she wasn’t talking to me, not really.

  “You know what we should do? We should celebrate. The new building, I mean. Let’s go to Dairy Queen. My treat. What do you say?”

  Dad looked at Julie, then at me, then smiled, was back to being Dad. “Don’t you spend enough time there already?” he said. “You�
�d think you’d have better things to do on a nice summer night than hang around with your dad and brother.”

  “Who said I don’t?” Julie said, smiling. “But let’s go anyway. I can only use my employee discount card while I’m an employee. I won’t always be able to save fifteen percent on ice cream cones, you know.”

  Downpayment on First Home or Very Own Dream Car? Rare Camaro Threatens to Drive Apart Local Family

  “Who Am I Without This Car? This Car is

  Who I Am. Without This Car I’m No One”

  “DOUCHEBAG” WAS A not infrequent appellation. That, and “freeloader,” “waste of space,” and, far less often, “Gary.” She—and only she, and only when they were alone, and usually when they were making love or had just finished making love or were lovey-dovey leading up to making love—called him her “Gare Bear” or “Gary Gorgeous” or, for reasons neither of them could recall, “Bunny.” Because they didn’t know him. Didn’t understand him. Not the real him. They didn’t know what they did when there was no one around but the two of them and what they did. What he did to her. The happiness that he made happen. The delicious ache that only he could create and—so softly, so gently sometimes—end. The emptiness, the fullness, of afterward.

  He barely managed to graduate from high school and she never earned less than a B. She’d been the setter on both the junior and senior girls’ volleyball teams and a member of the Travel Club (they did the Europe’s Greatest Hits trip during grade thirteen March Break; she sent him several postcards all signed, Love, Janice). He called the school’s athletes (her excepted, of course) “fags” and anyone who served on student council or was in the Debating Club or the Investor’s Club a “dweeb,” a “wuss,” or a “loser.” His friends were all parking-lot smokers and lunchtime stoners and he didn’t bother to apply to any universities or colleges. Worse, he didn’t seem concerned about what he was going to do after graduation. “Relax, Babe, you’ll live longer,” he’d tell her when she tried to talk to him about his future. About their future. Sometimes it seemed as if he wanted to end up a… a nothing with nothing to show for his life, like he was trying to prove something or hoping to show somebody that he wasn’t going to do what everyone always told him he was supposed to do.

  Naturally, the summer before she was supposed to leave for Fanshawe College to study to be a dental assistant she became pregnant, they got married and moved into her parents’ basement, and it turns out that the future ain’t what it used to be. (Slight respite because A Baby! A Baby! It’s a girl, a girl! A miracle, a blessing, a great big bundle of blah blah blah.) A year and a half later, she was a cashier at a drugstore and he was still looking for work and her parents were beginning to wonder aloud when they were going to get their rec room back. “Christ, I’m looking, what more do they want?” he said when she reluctantly brought up the subject. “How would they like to work in a fucking convenience store?” She didn’t argue. What was the point? She had to get up early for work in the morning and didn’t want to wake the baby.

  Then he won the car. Bar-hopping in Windsor with some buddies because the talent at the Chatham titty bars was getting stale, he filled out a ballot at some place or another to win a car as part of a beer company promotion and for Godsake’s he got the phone call at home that he won. The first thing he’d ever won, ever. And not concert tickets or steak knives, but a vintage 1969 Chevrolet Camero ZL1. Uh huh, uh huh, that’s right, the muscle car of muscle cars: 435 horsepower, zero to sixty in under six seconds, look at everybody looking at me in my shiny, lovely robin’s-egg blue 1969 Chevrolet Camero ZL1. He washed it, he waxed it, he used a toothbrush to scrub the engine clean. Eventually he didn’t even drive it that much—too many a-holes out there to hit it or dent it or scratch it. Even her parents were mildly impressed—at least he cared about something.

  Then she got pregnant again and the solution was obvious. Sell the car—he’d already had offers, good ones, without even putting it up for sale—and use the money to place a downpayment on a house. Her parents were so concerned about seeing them settled that they even offered to contribute a thousand dollars from their own skimpy savings. It wasn’t like he’d earned the cash, but money was money, and as long as the table stands it doesn’t matter how it got built. Her parents started circling reasonably priced homes for sale in The Chatham Daily News and leaving it on the breakfast table, right next to the cereal bowl his wife always put out for him before she left for work. You know Gary—he has to have his Sugar Crisp and glass of Tang first thing in the morning.

  But he wouldn’t sell it. Hell no he wouldn’t sell it. He went along with the initial gentle joshing (“Kiss your baby goodbye, Gary, I’m gonna slip a For Sale sign on it tomorrow.” “You mean Janice? I don’t think she’ll fetch that much.” “Oh, Gary”). He endured their non-stop nagging (“But Gary, what are we going to do if you don’t sell it? We can’t live in my parents’ basement forever.” “Listen to me, son, my daughter and her children deserve to have a roof over their heads, a place they can call their own.” “It’s just a car, Gary, it’s just a car”). He ignored their threats and all of their bullying (“If you can’t take care of your family, maybe it’s time for Janice to find someone who can.” “You know I’ve never pushed you to do something you didn’t want to do, Gary, but if you’re not working, then at least maybe you could help out by getting some money from selling the car.” “You’re ruining my daughter’s life, do you know that? I think you do, and to tell you the truth I don’t think you even care”). He put up with all of their bullshit. But he wouldn’t sell it.

  In a way he felt sorry for them. None of them had ever owned anything as beautiful as he had. Owned as in “owned” as in his and his alone. They didn’t understand.

  ~

  Why? had come first; now there was also What? If you didn’t know any better, it sounded like something Mr. Roberts, the grouchy old retired philosophy professor whose newspaper I delivered, might think about. But I knew better. I knew it was just about me.

  Now that I’d filled an entire notebook with several months worth of what I’d eaten and drank, what was I supposed to do with it? The why of it had been easy. I wasn’t who people thought I was. I didn’t know what they thought I knew. I felt like a fake. I was a fake. Filling a red notebook with dates and the names of foods and liquids every day was the perfect punishment.

  But something happened. Now the daily recording felt like something else, something different, something—I wasn’t sure what—almost real. It was as if doing it was itself almost reason enough to do it.

  So now what? Just a red notebook full of dates and the names of foods and liquids. I slid it into the middle drawer of my desk. I took out a fresh notebook from the bottom drawer and opened it up to the first page, pressed it flat with the palm of my hand. I entered today’s date. I remembered and I wrote.

  Decades of Dedicated Scholarship and Contemplation Fail to Prevent Ex-Philosophy Professor from Being Perpetually Pissed Off

  “The Soothing Salve of Wisdom is a

  Steaming Crock of Shit”

  SOMETIMES IT WAS good not to be angry. Sometimes music, wine, good prose, good weed, the cat’s thank-you meow, a friend who called and something to do, someone doing their job effectively and with pride and without fuss, something, sometimes. More often than not, though, Plato was a fucking fool; this is it, this is what there is, truth, beauty, and goodness just things you read about in books when you’re young, visions of Platonic sugar plums dancing in your empty head, no Form of the perfect anything floating around anywhere, no consoling peace of mind while you wait out your imperfect time down here.

  A week-long sample list (79/08/07-14) of sundry items that stuck in his craw, that got his goat, that grinded his gears, that reminded him—as if at age sixty-seven he needed reminding—that sage philosophical detachment is as much a lacerating lie as the guilty getting what they deserve and the cheque being in
the mail:

  The mouth-breathing man who lived next door and his preternatural ability to know to roar his lawnmower just when his neighbour had ventured out of his house for the first time in days to settle into a lawn chair with a book and a glass of iced tea.

  The cow-eyed wife of the man who lived next door whose perpetual mopping, dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, polishing, vacuuming, and hanging of basket after basket of laundry on the backyard line testified to her belief that a clean house wasn’t just a place to live, but, indeed, a reason for living.

  The dirty, shouting, snot-dripping children of the man and woman who lived next door, whose own particular reason for existence seemed solely to consist of losing their tennis balls and basketballs over his back fence and in ringing his doorbell and demanding them back.

  The people of his city of birth, the city where he was going to die and spend earthly eternity, who had two hockey rinks and one bookstore, the POETRY section of the latter almost as large as the one containing PLUMBING (HOW TO).

  The newspaper of his city of birth delivering a different national or international poke to his supposed third eye every day: the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown; oil spills in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico; an anthrax leak from a military factory in the Soviet Union that killed over a hundred citizens and was explained away by the government as merely an unfortunate outbreak of tainted meat; Mother Teresa of Calcutta the rumoured front runner for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, although presumably not for her condemnation of birth control for the overpopulated planet’s poor, starving, swarming misbegotten; an amusement ride fire in Sydney, Australia, that killed six children because park officials hadn’t budgeted enough money for sufficient fire safety; and in nearby Perth the stage collapsed at the Miss Universe pageant when contestants and photographers alike rushed to greet her Highness as she was tearfully ensconced on her cushy winner’s throne.