by Tom Wilson
“Go to bed now or I’ll put your head through the wall like Mr. Strang did to Archie’s,” Bunny would say. “Do your homework or I’ll put your head through the wall like Mr. Strang did to Archie’s.” “Clean up your toys or…” It was the sixties after all, and other people’s misfortune could be used to enforce fear and inspire a work ethic. A threat for all occasions, you might say.
In addition to several drunken moments throughout the year, Mr. Strang made an annual visit to our house on Christmas Eve, when he would enter the house, bounce off the walls and into a chair at the kitchen table, where George Wilson would pour him rum until his head hit the table and he pissed on the kitchen floor.
“Bunny…I pissed on your floor,” Strang would announce. Bunny would grab a mop and some soapy water, and Strang would bounce off a few more walls, out the front door and out into the night.
Bunny loved everything about mob life. Maybe because when she was a child the famous Legs Diamond hid out in her hometown, taking the local kids for rides in his Cadillac and buying them soda pops. She loved to gossip about mobsters, mob hits, mob hangouts. Hamilton provided her lots to fuel her obsession. Everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who grew up with, worked for or got worked over by Johnny Pops. Johnny Papalia that is, sometime local kingpin, monster and much-feared enforcer of the Southern Ontario mafia. His power reached up to Montreal and down through Buffalo to New York City, making Hamilton a hotbed of fun, drugs, frontier justice and foulmouthed streetwise banter that otherwise could only be heard coming from Hollywood gangsters on the big screen. Bunny had a front-row seat to it all and she loved every minute of it.
Bunny tended to group all Italians into the mobster category and as a result kept a close eye on some of our Italian neighbours. Out of this came an index finger wet with dishwater that pointed directly across the street to Jimmy Monte. Bunny estimated that Jimmy was a low-ranking diabetic mobster in the Johnny Papalia crew. He was notorious for not taking his insulin and falling into a coma, usually to be found by his son Bobby when he arrived home for lunch from Blessed Sacrament school. Jimmy and his family were the first ticket scalpers in the city. The first ones I knew of, anyway. He always had tickets to sports events, plays, concerts, in venues from Toronto to Buffalo. His wife, Andrea, had a table at the Royal York’s Imperial Room in Toronto for any show she wanted to see—Al Martino, Anne Murray, Bobby Vinton.
Andrea was kinda boy crazy. She worked as a cashier at the Dominion store at Gage and Fennell along with a handful of other boy-crazy neighbourhood women. They all had crushes on the shelf stockers, delivery truck drivers and customers who buzzed around the grocery store. If Jimmy had got wind of Andrea’s crushes, he could have had any and all of these unsuspecting men disappear into the Hamilton harbour to swim with Rocco Perri.
Jimmy’s kids loved him and so did I, even though looking back he was really just a grumpy Italian guy. Jimmy would sometimes glance across East 36th Street, see me hanging around on my front porch and take me along with his kids, Teresa and Bobby, and their cousins to things like the Hell Drivers at the CNE and the Shrine Circus and the Ice Capades, and one time we all went to the Hamilton Forum to see Little Joe (Michael Landon), star of Bonanza, in person along with a real rodeo. Bunny dressed me like I was going to my first communion, in a black blazer, red vest and a tie, and warned me to stay close to the Monte clan because there were going to be a lot of “homos” down there at the Forum waiting to steal young boys and take them into bathroom stalls and “bugger” them. (Mind you, the way Bunny had me dressed I looked like the belle of the ball for every pedophile north of Barton Street.)
I took this advice to heart, and even though I didn’t know what she was talking about I thought the words “bugger” and “homo” did not sound too good. They were mystery words like the words Stan Nixon spit out in the schoolyard.
One time I went with Jimmy and his relatives to a Ticat game at old Civic Stadium, and after the game he took us all down to the locker room to meet Angelo Mosca. I remember Jimmy guiding us past the weak security and down into the bowels of the stadium. The hallways were concrete blocks and the lighting was dim. It was like a scene out of an old black-and-white movie: we were like gangsters on our way to pay off a boxer under the ring before the fight. In reality, though, we were a gangster with neighbourhood kids going down to meet the CFL defensive lineman.
We walked into the Tiger Cats’ dressing room, and Mosca was right there before us in a towel eating a plate of chicken and pasta out of a Tupperware container that his wife must have packed for him. He was not so friendly to us kids, but he was all smiles for Jimmy. They disappeared to talk about something or other in Italian, and we just stood there in the middle of a room of naked football idols. Tommy Joe Coffey, Joe Zuger, Garney Henley…it was like my CFL football card collection coming to life. Naked.
Jimmy never went to a job like the other dads. He just went out late at night. Bunny would keep tabs on him through our kitchen window. “Ah…there he goes…runnin’ around town for Johnny,” she’d say while she did the dishes. Later, she would stand in the dark kitchen in her underwear and apron waiting for him to return. I’d get up to go pee in the middle of the night and hear CHML softly playing Glen Campbell or CFRB’s Starlight Serenade. “Shhh,” she’d say. “Jimmy is out working for the mob tonight. I am waiting to see what he unloads from his car.” I imagined him digging holes up on Limeridge Road under cover of darkness and dumping loan-sharked deadbeats and rival gang members from the trunk of that Pontiac. But mostly I think he drove his green Parisienne around in the middle of the night picking up party girls and sandwiches for the big boys at their card games down at the Connaught Hotel.
A VOICE THAT RARELY GETS HEARD
I used to sneak into Bunny and George’s bedroom, where secret treasures of their past lay on the floor, in the closet and hidden in the pages of the Wilson family Bible. I discovered that in the top drawer of her dresser Bunny kept an old wallet that had belonged to her brother-in-law John Lazare, a chief on the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve who was once married to Bunny’s sister Isabelle. Inside the wallet was a black-and-white photo of my cousin Janie as a little girl, maybe four or five years old, holding a fluffy dog. Janie loved animals. I think she saw herself in them. She protected dogs on the rez from stone-throwing little fuckers who treated these animals like they didn’t deserve to live, like they didn’t have hearts pleading through their eyes. Janie saw their hearts. Janie stepped up for little creatures that couldn’t defend themselves. I would sit and stare at the photo. I could see Janie. Really see her, staring back into the camera and out of the photo at me. I was drawn to the innocence and the beauty I saw in the picture. In it Janie looked free.
Janie was nineteen years older than me, but even when I was a child, I knew her life had not been easy. The black-and-white photo was taken before school kids on the reserve recognized her as half them and half the others. The others. The French. Everywhere she stepped, Janie carried generations of the enemy on her back. The photo was taken before Janie’s mother made her feel guilty for growing breasts too early. Before her mother, without giving a reason, alienated Janie from her father and her sister, Millie. Isabelle was a brutal, controlling woman. The little girl didn’t stand a chance.
I also knew that I was not the first child Bunny had cared for. Janie was. Bunny’s loyalty and love for Janie were deep. Bunny was there when Janie was born. She reached into her sister Isabelle and delivered a baby who was underweight and sick, and Janie stayed that way through her childhood. She was taken for x-ray after x-ray after x-ray when she was a child in Quebec, but her doctor there was unable to help her in any lasting way. On one occasion when Bunny came to visit, she intervened. “I’m taking Janie,” Bunny told John Lazare. “This little girl is going to be dead within the year if she stays here any longer.” So Bunny packed Janie up and took her to Sick Kids in Toronto. She was in Toronto for six and a half years. They needed to build up her strength and weight
, and when she was strong enough she had a lung removed. Bunny cared for her the whole time.
Two of Bunny’s sisters—Isabelle and Pearl—married Mohawk men, but Bunny coached Janie to deny that side of her heritage. If Bunny, George and Janie were out together, at a War Amps dinner, down at the Legion or at George’s confectionery, and someone asked Janie where she was visiting from, Bunny would barge in between them, interrupt and answer so that everyone around could hear, “This is our niece, Jane Lazare. She’s visiting from Montreal. She is my sister’s daughter.” So even Bunny’s kindness towards Janie came with an edge.
When she was fifteen, Janie got a job at Sammy’s, the grocery store on the reserve. On Fridays Janie would finish her shift and roll a shopping cart up and down the aisles to top up her family’s kitchen cupboards. One Friday, she returned home with her arms full of groceries. She came in through the kitchen door to find the family sitting, eating dinner at the table. Following Isabelle’s instructions, nobody spoke to Janie and nobody looked at her. Not even her father, which surprised and hurt Janie the most. Janie sat in the rocking chair by the front window of the house with her bags of groceries at her feet and thought, “Okay, if this is how it’s going to go, then, I bought food and I’ll make my own dinner.” She reached in the bag, opened up a package of Montreal smoked meat and a loaf of bread, went back into the kitchen and boiled some water, made some instant coffee, went back to the rocking chair, sat down and ate her dinner. Janie stayed there in silence every morning before work and every night after, as her family talked and ate and laughed and went about their business, for three months. She was never told why she was treated this way for so long.
Bunny had four sisters: Madeline, Doris, Pearl and Isabelle. Isabelle was a particularly dark and venomous woman, but they were all a competitive and cutthroat brood, quick tongued and silver threaded, ready to brawl at the drop of a hat. And they came by their disposition honestly: Irish and French and hidden Mohawk blood running through their veins, and every one of them stunningly beautiful. Their Irish mother, Beatrice, lined them up and struck them across their backsides with a wooden stick to ready them for a cold, cold world. A world Beatrice knew well.
Bunny loved to tell me the story of how her mother, Beatrice Neeland, met her father, Orlando St. James. She would break into a smile before launching gleefully into the romantic tale of her parents’ magical union. Though it has to be said the story was a little sparse and sketchy:
One night, when Bunny’s mother was just a teenager, she was with two men in a car parked on a dark country road near Ville La Salle, when one of the men got fresh with her. He attacked her, but she was tough and feisty and she beat him off, swung the car door open and jumped to freedom, tearing down the road to the first farmhouse in view, her attacker in close pursuit. Out of breath from leaping over snowbanks, she frantically banged at the door, her small frozen hands almost shattering on impact, her dress torn and her makeup smeared across her face. Bunny’s dad, Orlando, answered the door in his one-piece long underwear. He was six feet three inches tall and had the build of a working man. A train man, to be exact. He’d been shovelling coal and swinging hammers all his life. He looked like a giant raging ghost with a face full of shaving cream and talcum powder, waving a straight razor over his head and screaming and spitting in French as he chased the men off, down the icy mud road.
I never had any reason to question Bunny’s story when I was a kid. It was exciting and romantic like it was pulled from a Nancy Drew novel. She told it with pauses built in for giggles and laughter. The same pauses every time.
Of course, what went unsaid in this story of love at first sight was what Bunny’s mother was doing on that dark road in that car with two men to begin with. What was never mentioned in this fairytale was that mother Neeland was a resourceful crook who apparently had her daughters out earning on the streets of Montreal at an early age. Beatrice Neeland just may have been turning tricks and robbing johns for some time. She learned these skills from her brutal Irish mother. The same mother who ordered some of her sons into the Montreal police force, knowing that having a silver badge, a legal gun and a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy on her side would buffer the family’s dark dealings. Others escaped their mother’s reach, joined the army and died fighting overseas in World War I. Their pictures hung in every Neeland home, and they were carried by Bunny’s grandmother to mass every Sunday.
After Beatrice and Orlando were married, the Neelands went on to terrorize the St. James family. Over the years, they robbed Orlando’s house and his dairy business, raided his garden, stole cars and drank any bottle of booze they could get their hands on. Bunny and her sisters were forbidden from visiting the Neelands at their home in Montreal for fear they might be sold off into white slavery down in Chinatown. Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Isabelle ended up somewhat cruel and warped.
When she could, Janie left Kahnawake, and as I was growing up she was always around. She’d come in from Toronto to attend events of any significance: communions and hockey playoffs, and later she and Bunny would come to my concerts and shows at festivals and in theatres. Janie was a bit like Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Nobody really knew what Ed was doing there on TV every night, but Johnny always had him to bounce his zingers off. Janie was Bunny’s sidekick. She always stood a few feet behind Bunny. Bunny would say her piece and then Janie might respond with a laugh or a head shake or sometimes a few words, words that were often lost in the crowd of conversation buzzing around us. Janie’s was a voice that was rarely heard. There’s plenty of heartbreak in a voice that rarely gets heard.
DEATH RATTLE SUNSET
In the summertime, Bunny and George used to shut the house down after supper. Bunny didn’t trust me in my own bed, so she’d make me get into bed with her on the pullout sofa in the front room. How depressing it was to lie wide awake in bed with the sun still full in the sky, listening to the “normals,” the neighbourhood families in their yards, with their puffy, red-faced boozy friends dropping over, barbecuing and snapping the tops off bottles of beer with church keys, and kids laughing and fighting, and wives getting drunk and smoking cigarettes around the cheap metal patio furniture and picnic tables, gossiping about the heathen Protestants and whether there’d be a strike at Stelco next year and about who was stepping out on who around the block and up the street at O’Hannigans’ drugstore, about the dirty details of the cashiers and the managers in the stockrooms at the Dominion store. Meanwhile, in my house the very last sounds of the day came from down the hall, where George Wilson lay alone in his own bed in his own darkness away from Bunny and me. George kept a transistor radio beside his bed. He would lean in towards the tiny speaker and tune in the news. The voice of Ray Sonin. The dim light of the radio dial. My first signs of how lonely life can be. What was it about the monotone male newsreader that made me feel like I didn’t belong, like there was so much going on that had nothing to do with me?
When I was four years old I stood in Bunny’s kitchen, three feet tall, and came right out with what was on my mind: Why did I not look anything like Bunny and George? And why were they so old? Bunny was quick to tell me I should be happy with who and where I was. I stopped asking for a while after that.
There were, however, bold, mouthy, confident kids in the Peace Memorial schoolyard and up and down East 36th Street who were happy to tell me to my face that I looked different. They talked to me like there were no mirrors in my house to see it for myself. We had mirrors, but somehow I could stand in front of the one in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and combing my hair before school, and no longer see what they saw. They’d ask me if Bunny and George were my real parents or if they were my grandparents. They asked me if I was adopted. They asked me the questions I didn’t dare ask myself, questions that more often than not ended in fist fights.
I was on my own out there. I tried to divert their attention away from me. I made up stories that Bunny and George were s
ecret agents, working undercover looking for the Germans. I focused on George’s blindness and his war-hero status. I became the kid with the blind father instead of the kid with the giant head, and that suited me fine. I lost myself in a dreamland to avoid being seen.
I doubted myself. I didn’t have any confidence. I compensated by acting up. My report cards often read, “Tommy plays the clown to get attention from his fellow students.” I sang in class, out loud, all the time I’m told. My daydreams became one-act plays with me running around the classroom, through jungles like I was Tarzan or Sergeant Rock or the Hulk. I couldn’t control myself.
Teachers would drag Bunny into the school to report on my odd behaviour. They told her that I should be put back a grade or two or put in the slow class, which led to the opportunity class, which led to Crestwood Vocational School, then maybe even Mounthaven, where the slow kids went. I was on a downward spiral and I was just seven years old. Hell, I was just getting started.
Teachers would move my desk around the classroom to keep an eye on me. I’d start out in the general population, then get moved to the back of the class where I would be isolated. But that didn’t work, so I’d be told to move my desk right beside the teacher’s desk so that I’d never be out of her sight or reach. Eventually I’d end up with my desk out in the hallway. I’d have to listen in on the classroom through the doorway. The voices in the morning saying the Lord’s Prayer and singing “God Save the Queen” melted into the sound of chalk against the blackboard and then just the sound of pencil lead on notebook paper. My assignments were usually delivered to my desk by cute girls like Patti Wilk or Lynn Harris. I loved it, the voices and footsteps that echoed off the walls up the long hallway. I’d nap and dream and doodle the days away. If this was punishment I was all in.