Shakey

by Jimmy McDonough

  Over forty years before, it had been at this house, across the road from the old mill bridge, that a chubby Neil Young—dressed, no doubt, in the ragtag corduroy overalls he refused to let Rassy mend—marched up to the door and calmly requested that Jay’s father, Austin, remove the fishhook embedded in his stomach. Apparently Neil accepted this as an occupational hazard in the life of a fisherman. “God, Neiler had little pinprick scars all over his stomach for years,” said Rassy.

  The old mill is gone, as is the tannery, and the train no longer stops in town, but Omemee, said Jay Hayes, “hasn’t changed that much since I was a kid, really.” People still get their eggs from a farmer on the outskirts of town, taking what they need and leaving their money on the kitchen table. Scott Young recalls Omemee’s crime waves—the stickup man who, after robbing the gas station, found his getaway car had left without him and sheepishly went back in to return the money; and the time the bank manager’s wife was taken hostage and plied her captor with cigarettes and booze until the police arrived. Hayes remembers when stealing an apple earned you “a kick right in the backside. Certainly was different, I’ll tell ya, than it is today—and I don’t see that much wrong with what happened then.”

  Founded in 1820, Omemee went through several name changes before settling on an Iroquois word meaning “wild pigeons.” Although just eighty-seven miles from Toronto, the village of 750 could’ve been from another century, even when the Youngs lived here in the early fifties. Some residents were still without electricity. For refrigeration, Jay Hayes remembers, “a wagon came around with a block of ice.” Most folks farmed or worked at the tannery, North American Leather. Doctor bills were sometimes paid “in potatoes and carrots,” said Hayes. “Nobody had any money, eh.”

  Somehow, authors fit in. The Young household was often visited by Scott’s fellow scribes. As Jay Hayes put it, “Writers? We were overrun by ’em.” And not ashamed of it, as Scott Young would find out when he contributed a daily column on the 1950 Winnipeg flood to the Toronto Globe and Mail. “I saw myself as a real national hotshot, printed in Montreal, Toronto, across the country,” said Young. Back home at the post office, he encountered a local who had taken turns with his sister reading the column aloud. “Nobody in Omemee coulda did better,” the local told the writer proudly. “Nobody.”

  It was an idyllic time. Scott was able to focus primarily on fiction for the first time, writing short stories and novels. In his spare time, he took his sons for long rides in the family jalopy, entertaining them with old songs like “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Their dog, Skippy, rode along in the trunk when not watching over Neil. “Nobody got within half a mile of Neil without Skippy being there,” said Rassy, who often went hunting with her father, returning home to whip up a roast duck stuffed with wild rice that people remember to this day. Unlike Bob, Neil would have nothing to do with hunting. “If they came back with no ducks, he’d laugh. He’d figure it was a victory,” said Bob. “But Neil did eat the duck.”

  If it wasn’t fishing, it was turtles. Rassy recalls trying to make soup out of a gigantic snapper “that went bad in the heat. I’m staggering around with this stinkin’ turtle, and Neil decided this was funny. He was leaning on the barn killing himself laughing. Neil could never stop laughing when he started guffawing about something.” Turtles could serve a multitude of purposes—as his friend Garfield “Goof” Whitney III recalls, “Neil used to scare the girls with ’em.”

  When asked what kind of child Neil was, Scott replied with a description that a relative had given him: “A droll little boy.” Already he was earning a reputation as an upstart in school. By 1953, the Omemee principal was routinely sending home missives such as the one beginning, “Dear Mrs. Young, this small person has been causing Miss Jones a great deal of trouble over a long period….” As Scott writes, Neil “had a zany kind of a wit that gave his report cards for years one constant: his teachers always wanted an improvement in his conduct.”

  “Neil was a great little kid,” said his cousin Marny Smith. “Life was always a little more cheerful with Neil around. He never let anything stop him.” Others remember him for the things he didn’t do. “When we’d have summer holidays, main thing would be playin’ ball or somethin’,” said Goof Whitney. “Neil was more of a loner—all he wanted to do was fish.”

  “I was always shy,” Young told Dave Zimmer in 1988. “I never took part in anything. If there was some sort of group thing, I always just sort of stood and watched.” Whitney, a bit older, subjected Neil to endless tortures. “There used to be a woman who lived next door to Neil, Olive Lloyd—we used to tease her to get her goat. She was a real outlaw, this woman—she’d chase you with a butcher knife. I said to Neil, ‘Call her Mrs. Peeniehammer and she’ll give ya candy.’ And he yelled it out, and Holy Jesus, she come right out chasin’ Neil. Every time he walked to school he’d have to cross the street. He was scared to walk by the place.”

  Yeah, the—Peeniehammers. That probably wasn’t their name. I thought it was, because of my friend Goof. I was so fuckin’ naïve. When you’re a little kid and you’re real gullible and you go for anything anybody said, people remember that. Next time you come by, they’ve got a new idea for ya.

  I had several pet turtles. I guess the one that comes to mind is the one that got stepped on at one of my father’s parties. It was just a little guy—some of the kids were playin’ with it and they took him out and put him on the floor and phhhhhhht! A sad case. But before that, I had a sandbox and it was all full of turtles. Then I’d let ’em out or forget about ’em—which has sometimes been my history with pets.

  Omemee’s a nice little town. Sleepy little place. I remember this one guy, Reel. Skinny Reel used to have this great little shop—it’s still there—and there used to be all these pansies out in these wooden boxes. The sidewalk was pretty wide and you’d go walkin’ along and there’d be all these boxes of pansies, the colors were so great … walkin’ through, y’know, and it’s all happening. Life was real basic and simple in that town. Walk to school, walk back. Everybody knew who you were. Everybody knew everybody.

  We had a TV in Omemee. Saturday mornings—Lone Ranger—that made an impression. Hopalong Cassidy. That and toy trains … that was kind of my world at that time. The Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey show. The Honeymooners. Dragnet. The $64,000 Question. This Is Your Life. Jack Benny. The Perry Como Show—I remember that my mom—our family—used to watch Perry Como all the time. I couldn’t fuckin’ figure out what the hell that was about. Y’know … I just don’t understand the cardigan. The stool. I mean, when I look at it now, it’s pretty cool—the guy’s just tryin’ to be laidback and do a really mellow show…. Who knows?

  Out behind our house in Omemee the railroad tracks went by. Maybe a thousand yards back from the house, maybe less. I used to put a penny or a nickle down on the track so I could get it flat when the train came around. The steam engines would come through with passenger trains, every once in a while a freight train would come through. With a lot of passengers—it was the mode of transportation in the early fifties. So I was familiar with the big steam engines. I can still remember seeing them standing there … I liked the smell of the track, I liked the railroad bridge—which is still there. Took out the tracks, though. I’ve got a couple of the nails.

  First train my dad got me—my dad and mom—was when I was livin’ in Omemee. Marx. Got it through the Eaton’s catalog. Five years old or somethin’. My dad built the table and we put the thing together. Just before I went to sleep at night I’d turn the train on. It was all dark in the room and it was right there by my bed. I’d turn it on and just watch it go around in the dark, and pretty soon that old AC motor inside would start smelling that ozone smell. I don’t know if you know that Lionel smell, but now when I smell that, I remember that feeling. Trains. I find their sounds inspirational. So fuckin’ big—wide—vibrating. Awesome.

  I enjoyed the dedication of the school in Omemee to my dad a lot. It was great se
ein’ my dad and all the old-timers…. Principal got up and talked. At one point, the choir walked in and they were about to sing and they started talking and they were saying the words to “Helpless”—“There is a town …” One kid would say it, and way over on the other side in another row, the other kid would say the next line, and they just dotted around through the whole choir like that and repeated the lyrics to the first verse. That was just really moving. I was just sitting there, y’know … it was an emotional night.

  In some fantasy world, I think, “Okay, I can go back there.” But I really couldn’t. It’s not possible. At least not for the next several years. But to be able to come and go—just drop in and pull out—that’s gonna work. It’s funny, maybe because I’m getting older, I feel a kind of pulling from the area where I remember things as a kid. It’s an innaresting sensation.

  “Neil got polio and lost all his girlish curves,” said Rassy, shuddering at the memory. “Damn near died. Gawd, that was awful.” Nineteen fifty-one was the year of the last major outbreak of poliomyelitis in Ontario. The virus preyed mostly upon young children, and nearly half those afflicted suffered some form of paralysis or muscle loss. There would be 1,701 cases of polio in Ontario alone during 1951, and in Peterborough, Omemee’s county, seven people would die, including one child from the village.

  “Polio always struck everybody to the marrow of their bones,” recalled Rassy. “The worst thing was, the doctors would say, ‘Well, good luck.’ ’Cause nobody knew what to do.” The Salk vaccine was still a few years away, so when late-summer “polio season” came, people were afraid. “In the cities the ultra-cautious walked instead of taking streetcars, and kept their distance from everyone else,” writes Scott. “City or country, the fearful woke in the night wondering if that back pain was polio back pain, or that sore throat was the polio sore throat.”

  In the wee hours of the morning on August 31, 1951, Neil Young, nearly six at the time, awoke suddenly. The previous day, he’d gone swimming with his dad in the Pigeon River, and now, at one in the morning, his moans attracted the attention of his father, reading in bed. Neil had a sharp pain in his right shoulder blade and felt feverish. By noon the next day when Dr. Bill came to examine him, he couldn’t touch his chin to his chest and yelped in pain when his knees were bent up against his stomach. A few hours later, Neil was so stiff, Scott writes, that he moved like “a mechanical man.”

  Dr. Bill suspected polio and suggested that the boy be taken to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Neil, wearing a surgical mask and clutching a toy train his father bought him that morning, rode stretched out in the back of the family car. Up in the front seat were Scott, Bob and Rassy, who, despite being bedridden from a minor surgery, insisted on coming along. “Rassy never came up empty when there was a challenge,” said Scott. A storm raged as Scott battled Labor Day traffic to make the ninety-mile journey.

  When they arrived at the emergency room, Scott listed his son’s symptoms and the nurses recoiled. “It was like a scene from the Middle Ages when a man spoke of having the plague,” he writes. Neil was whisked off for tests, and Rassy, unable to bear Neil’s yowls of pain as they extracted a sample of his spinal fluid, had to leave twice. “Neil refused to have an anesthetic,” she recalled. “I was scared stiff.”

  A little while later, a doctor informed the Youngs that their son was indeed suffering from polio, and a masked nurse wheeled him away to isolation. The others returned to Omemee, where a white quarantine sign was soon placed in front of their house. Only Scott was allowed out to purchase supplies, while the family waited by the phone for word of Neil’s condition. “We spent a lot of time clinging to each other in the middle of the night,” said Scott.

  Six agonizing days later came word from Toronto that the Youngs could take their son home. When they got to the hospital, Neil was fresh from a disinfectant bath, his black hair in spikes. “I didn’t die, did I?” were the first words out of his mouth. “He was so glad to see everybody,” said Rassy. “The nurses sang ‘Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes,’ Neil crying away. Christ, he looked like hell on the highway. Skin and bones. He never got fat again.”

  Neil spent that fall convalescing at home. “We knew he wasn’t gonna be dead, but that’s about all we knew,” said Rassy. “We didn’t even know if he’d ever walk. His left leg wouldn’t go where it was supposed to.” Rassy’s sister Toots came to help care for him, and the sickly boy amused himself by drawing pictures of trains. “Neil was ambidextrous,” Rassy recalled. “You couldn’t tell where one hand left off and the other began. I used to say, ‘You’ll either be a musician or an architect.’”

  “When it finally got to where he could walk, he’d walk very slowly,” said Rassy. “He’d walk to Dr. Bill’s, two or three houses away. I said, ‘That’s kind of far, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘Well, I can sit on the sidewalk and talk to Mrs. Hoosit.’ He didn’t want me to go, ’cause then he figured he wasn’t doin’ it by himself. And he fell—I knew goddamn well he was going to fall—and everybody went shootin’ out of their houses to collect Neil so he didn’t get hurt. He continued—went to see Dr. Bill. When Neil makes up his mind he’s gonna do somethin’, he does, y’know—and nothing could stop him.”

  When winter clothes proved too heavy for Neil’s frail body, the Youngs rented a $100-a-month cottage in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. They left Canada by car on December 26, arriving in Florida on New Year’s Day, 1952. They would remain there until May, allowing Neil to gather strength in the hot sun as well as his very first impressions of the United States.

  Scary. Couldn’t move very well. Had to lay still for a long, long time. Propped up on pillows in the bed. Then I’d fall asleep, and when I’d fall over it would hurt. I was real young and I had no idea what the fuck was goin’ on. I just remember lying there, partially paralyzed. The doctor came in that morning. Later that day, we got into the car. I was lyin’ down in the backseat. Sleepin’. Drove all the way to Toronto—my dad drivin’, my mum in the front seat. A rainy, stormy night. Checked me in to the hospital. Got in the waiting room—the white outfits and everything—they took me in right away, put me on a table. They did a lumbar puncture, where they go into your spine and extract spinal fluid. They did that right away. That was the most painful thing they did … I probably didn’t want the needle.

  Polio fucked up my body a little bit. The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don’t know where it is—but over the years I’ve discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it’s gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left.

  That’s why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured.

  I never gave it a lot of thought growin’ up, but I think if I’d had the dedication, architecture would’ve been like fallin’ off a fuckin’ log for me. The only thing I can’t do is draw. I can sketch, but my sketches are so rough, I obliterate out all detail. I used to draw this same boat. Had this big front end, came back to this little thing with a motor on it. It was like a wedge. Made it so it lifted out of the water … most of the front end sort of flying along, only this little part in the back where it was real skinny still in the water. I failed to take things like windage into account, heh heh. Critical flaws in the plan. I just drew pictures of things I wanted built. Plans for sailboats, plans for speedboats….

  I always liked building things. I like having crews working, stuff going on. Creativity. People working and getting paid and creating something—feeling good about what they’re doing.

  I like Frank Lloyd Wright and Gaudí … ancient things in architecture—like Aztec architecture. The Indians and the architecture of the tepee—basic architecture. Basic. Think of how incredible it would be to come up with a form that could be used in the way that the Indians used
the tepee? Imagine what it would be like to think of that. Architecture is a reflection not of the one person, but of a time and place where civilization is at. The architecture is more important than the artist, where a lot of other art, the line’s kinda blurred—like, fer instance, rock and roll, okay?

  I remember drivin’ down to Florida. Seein’ all the new cars. Going down in the winter of ’52, seein’ a new ’53 Pontiac. Wow. Fuck, man. With two bars goin’ down the side. Unbelievable. Canadian cars were like American cars, but you never saw so many new ones. And in Canada you tend to get the bottom of the line—people couldn’t afford them because they were so expensive. I can remember seein’ these new cars I’d only seen pictures of and they were all over the place—the cool ones. “Wow! Look at that!” I could name any car, who made it, what year it was, what model, if it was the big one or not. I knew every car on the fuckin’ road.

  I love old cars. Forties, fifties. Big cars. Heavy metal. I even love new cars. ’Cause they get me where I wanna go. I love travel. I got hooked on those trips when I was five, six years old. I think it was my dad. The highway bug. I’ve always loved it.

  —What did the cars here tell you about the States?

  Well, dreams come true, heh heh. What can you say?

  “We were not a close family,” said Scott Young. “There were far too many thistles in the salad.” Both sides of Neil’s family were populated with outspoken, independent individuals who didn’t necessarily get along, particularly the women. The rivalry between Rassy and Bob’s wife, Merle, continued unabated. To Rassy, Merle was still the goddamn foreigner who’d once had designs on her husband. Get-togethers between Scott’s and Bob’s families were intense. “When Rassy was around, everything was so stressful,” said Neil’s cousin Stephanie Fillingham. “The kids would all kind of hide.”