Shoulder the Sky

by Lesley Choyce

  SHOULDER THE SKY

  SHOULDER THE SKY

  Lesley Choyce

  Copyright © Lesley Choyce, 2002

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Editor: Barry Jowett

  Copy-Editor: Jennifer Bergeron

  Design: Jennifer Scott

  Printer: AGMV Marquis

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951-

  Shoulder the sky / Lesley Choyce.

  ISBN 1-55002-415-9

  I. Title.

  PS8555.H668S47 2002 jC813’.54 C2002-902282-7 PR9199.3.C497S47 2002

  1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada. Printed on recycled paper. www.dundurn.com

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks to Julia Swan for early editorial suggestions, Barry Jowett for his enthusiasm and editorial work, Jennifer Bergeron for copy-editing, and Malcolm M. Ross for suggesting the title, which is borrowed from a poem by A.E. Houseman.

  This book is dedicated to my friend Luigi Costanzo, and all other professionals who work with troubled kids.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’m sure I had problems even before she died — my mother, that is. After her death, everyone seemed to think that my biggest problem was that I didn’t have any problems. Life went on as normal for me without any really obvious changes. That’s why I went to see Dave, a psychiatrist unlike any other shrink around. Unconventional is probably the word that fits.

  Dave encouraged me to write my story, and now that it’s done, I don’t mind that you are reading this. I originally meant to show only Dave and no one else, but then I figured, what the heck. So, if you are reading this now, I don’t feel it’s like an invasion of privacy or anything.

  There’s probably not going to be much here that is all that secret. All you will find out is what happened, what I really thought, what I felt, and what I imagined. I better admit up front, though, that I had holes in my memory. Like holes in socks or black holes in deep space. Like missing pages from a book or scenes snipped out of a movie.

  Also, I should tell you that, in a sense, there were three versions of me. There was the regular, not-too-interesting private me: Martin Emerson. Then there was the enigmatic public persona of me that was created for the Internet at Emerso.com. Even though it ends in com, I never sold stuff. The site was very successful. I wrote about anything that went through my head. I also gave advice for free to anyone who wanted to hear what I had to say. People in the real world knew me as Martin Emerson. On the web, I somehow evolved into Emerso. People who visited my site didn’t know I was only sixteen years old. They believed I was older and smarter than I really was. More on that later.

  Then there was the no-name Martin, Martin number three. This version couldn’t remember parts of the past and sometimes couldn’t remember where he was the night before. I didn’t have too many clues about exactly who he was or what he was up to. Not until we left for Alaska.

  Anyway, Dave always wanted me to write something about my mother and my father, so I’ll start there. If I get going about website stuff again, tell me to shut up.

  My mother was creative. She made paintings of places that looked completely different from where we lived. My father thought they looked like Asia, but I always thought they were alien landscapes: the deserts of Mars, maybe, or swirling gassy places on Jupiter. But my father was pretty sure it was Asia. My sister, Lilly, always said she hated my mother’s paintings. Until my mother died, that is, and then Lilly put many of the paintings in her room — the ones that were finished. The unfinished ones, my father tried to complete, and that didn’t turn out well at all.

  My mother once told me that painting is just another way of keeping a diary. This didn’t help explain the alien/Asian landscape paintings, but maybe it fits in with Dave’s idea about me keeping a journal.

  For a long time after my mom’s death I called my father the Invisible Man. Sometimes you could see him when he moved through rooms or went out the door. You could see him clearly when he was behind the wheel of the van, backing too quickly out the driveway. But most of the time he was invisible. Or not there at all.

  My very first posting on Emerso.com went like this.

  http://www.Emerso.com

  Welcome to my website. This website is designed to improve the world, and if you aren’t interested in that you should probably go to another site. That’s perfectly fine with me. I will update it when I have the time. If you found this at all, it is probably because you were looking for something else. My friend the Egg Man taught me how to mess with search engines. He is really good if you ever want the world to go to your website. I think he charges money now but he did it for me for free — as they say, that’s what friends are for.

  The Egg Man taught me how to do this: let’s say you want to find out about how zippers work, or if coffee can kill you, or you want to know more about Britney Spears’ tonsillectomy (or maybe it’s Madonna), or, say, Star Wars toys. You type in “Madonna” or “Star Wars toys” and you end up at Emerso.com.

  I just wanted to be up front about how you got here. You can leave any time you like but if you stick around you may learn something. I’ve got a few things figured out and I’m figuring out more every day. I hope to deal with the really difficult issues, like what is the meaning of life, and why do people die, but I will also be discussing less important things like brand names, politics, coffee, revenge, teachers, chewing gum, and whether or not God exists. I’m not selling anything on this website so you don’t have to have your credit card handy.

  Also, my friend the Egg Man taught me how to make sure that my identity remains a secret. If you try to trace the origin of the site, you’ll hit a dead end. It’s not that I’m famous or doing anything illegal. I just want my privacy. We all deserve our privacy. That’s one of the rules here at Emerso.com. It’s my only rule so far, but I’ll probably come up with a few others as things develop.

  So far there are seven choices to click on if you want to explore Emerso further:

  1. Meaning of Life (under construction).

  2. Stuff That May or May Not Be Important.

  3. Junk.

  4. Opinions.

  5. Advice.

  6. Art.

  7. The Universe.

  If you are wasting time like this, just goofing around on the Internet and still at my site, it
’s possible that your life is, well, not all that exciting. No offence. Just a candid observation. Some of what I have to offer may or may not help, but one thing I am sure of is that you have a limited time here on earth, so you need to get on with something or other — just about anything, as long as it doesn’t hurt people or small animals.

  Emerso

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not long after our mom died, I tried to talk to my sister, Lilly, but she didn’t want to talk about it. My mother had an illness that lasted about four years. It was not cancer but it might as well have been. She had treatment and got better and then got worse and we all did very poorly in dealing with it and with her.

  My father was trying, but he was already turning invisible and that didn’t help. Lilly was rebellious at the time. She had even changed her name to Lilith for a while when she discovered that Lilith, in Jewish folklore, was a vampire-like killer and nocturnal female demon. Older than me, she was experimenting with drugs and dying her hair and she kept finding some new part of her body to pierce. She was angry almost all the time, which seemed all wrong to me but, as Dave would say, she was probably venting her anger about our mother dying. Unfortunately, she was mostly angry with our mother for being so sick, and that wasn’t Mom’s fault.

  Lilly stayed out really late, and once she got into trouble with the police at an all-night rave. That surprised me because she always told me she hated rave music. Lilly and I could never talk to each other about my mother’s condition when Mom was alive. None of us were big talkers in my family. That’s why Dave thought that writing would be a good way for me to “open up.” Dave didn’t know about my website back then.

  My mother — and I want to use her first name here — Claire — was brave about the fact that she was slipping downhill. Her paintings of the alien landscapes got much better. She tried to open up more about herself and she tried to pull the family together even as it was falling apart. My mother, I now believe, was like the sun — bright and cheery and a great warm gravity anchor that held all of us little planets in orbit. When she died, we all went spinning off into the void.

  But the odd thing was that, to everyone around us, we seemed like we were handling it well. We acted as if nothing particularly important had happened. Lilly kept sulking and piercing and sometimes smoking. She went through a string of truly repulsive boyfriends, even one who was the lead singer in a band called Repuke.

  My father made hasty, furtive appearances around home, slipping in and out of the bathroom, in and out of the kitchen, holed up watching hockey on TV in the bedroom, and slipping out to his van in the morning to go to work just as I was waking up — and it didn’t seem to matter what time I woke up.

  It was a month after Claire had died that my math teacher — the HMMWMT (heavy metal mud wrestling math teacher) took me aside and said, “Martin, you have a serious problem. I think you are too normal and it’s not normal to be normal after you’ve had a trauma in your life.”

  Mr. Miller, HMMWMT (who only mud wrestled at bars on weekends after his professional career as a world champion wrestler had ended), was one of the few people in the school kids listened to. He had once played a really nasty lead guitar in a heavy metal band called Gangrene, and they sold a lot of CDs before he retired from the road and took up teaching math. He still had a small ponytail even though he was kind of bald up top. And once every week Mr. Miller would bring in his Fender guitar and Marshall amp and try to explain algebra using some screeching distortion riffs that would bring the principal banging on the door. The principal never actually walked in to say anything, because nobody messed with the HMMWMT. But if Mr. Miller saw his boss peering in through the little window in the door, he’d crank the amp back to five instead of ten.

  It was the HMMWMT who told me I should go see a “professional” about my problem. He explained that my kind of “personal dilemma” needed something more than that wimp, Egan, our guidance counsellor, could offer. When Mr. Miller takes you aside, you listen, so I knew I had to take the advice. He recommended his old friend Dave, who had once been a roadie for Meatloaf before taking up psychiatry. And the rest, as they say, is history. Or my story, at least.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dave and Mr. Miller agreed that I should seek out some form of rebellion to release my anger. I still wasn’t sure I had anger. Hurt and disappointment, however, were present and deeply buried in the suitcase of my mind. I suppose I had learned from my father — or somehow inherited his genetic code — to keep things bottled up. We were not moaners, complainers, whiners, or wimps in the Emerson household, and I had descended, apparently, from very stoic apes, followed by a genealogical string of New England workaholics who faced life’s adversities with coping mechanisms that required no tears.

  I asked Lilly to take me somewhere to have my nose or my ear pierced but I chickened out when I saw the young woman — not much older than Lilly — who was about to do the job. She claimed to be a professional, but I could tell that she had been drinking. I came home without a puncture or laceration and so I failed to get my anger out by means of primitive body defacement.

  Every day at noon, however, I had watched the teenaged smokers from my school march in a purposeful but ragged procession towards the woods, where they would smoke away lunch hour instead of sitting in the cafeteria with the rest of us eating cafeteria food or scarfing down homemade mock chicken sandwiches. I had a kind of breakthrough one day there in the cafeteria, unwrapping a sandwich I had packed that morning: bologna with relish, pickles, mustard, and salsa. The sandwich reminded me, with the force of a hurricane ripping the roof off a Florida condominium, how much I missed my mother’s vegetarian sandwiches.

  My mother had been a vegetarian, although she could never fully explain why. She wasn’t an animal rights person or a gung-ho health nut. But she had met a woman who claimed to be a shaman, and the shaman (who sold real estate for a living) told her to cut down on the meat her family was eating. My father, not wanting to cause an argument, went along with it, even though he was a great lover of nearly raw steaks consumed on family pilgrimages to Ponderosa.

  The sandwiches my mother created for me were fashioned from homemade brown bread, lentils, sprouts, tofu, three kinds of pickles, salsa, and relish. The other kids all had great pity for me, but I had eaten the sandwiches dutifully.

  Until my mother was too sick to make them. Then I was on my own with bologna or mock chicken, but I could never face tofu in the morning. And what was left of my family had regressed to white sliced bread as well.

  So I was eating lunch with the Egg Man — my friend Darrell — who had his usual egg salad sandwich (but that was not why he was called the Egg Man), and studying the various varieties of pickles as they fell from my sandwich. The cafeteria was loud and making my ears ring. Dave and Heavy Metal Math were still occasionally hounding me about my normality, and I had my own private disappointments with the failed piercing. The Egg Man was going on and on about how to fool search engines into sending people to his site — which was then an odd combination of images of movie stars from the fifties in bathing suits, reposted tirades against marijuana, sound bites from NASA, and his own personal rants against cellphones. Through the window I could see the parade of smokers heading to the woods. The guys were all stoop-shouldered and the girls wore short skirts and multilevel shoes that seemed completely wrong for tromping into the semi-wilderness. But they looked deliberate and determined — and I decided I wanted to be one of them.

  School and smoking have never had an easy relationship, as far as I can tell. Bathroom smoking was always a covert activity where someone eventually got caught and got into trouble. Kids used to be able to smoke outside of some schools — right on the grounds — but nonsmoking perimeters kept spiralling outward from school buildings. Fortunately, as long as you didn’t live in a big city, there always seemed to be some nearby woods to sneak off into for a smoke.

  The principal knew who smoked where at our school. So did
the guidance counsellor, Mr. Egan. Heck, all the teachers knew. Lectures had been delivered in hallways more than a few times. Once, the HMMWMT walked out at noon hour to try to convince the smokers that they were ruining their lungs, shortening their lives, and even promoting possible future sexual incapacity. But they wouldn’t listen even to him. And if you couldn’t be persuaded by the HMMWMT, no one was going to change your mind.

  But remember, Dave and Heavy Metal had told me I needed some kind of rebellion, and today was my day. I left the Egg Man to dream on about ways to fool the new search engines and I went to the woods to smoke.

  They all stared at me at first. Some of the guys laughed but took elbows in the ribs from girls who knew about the death of my mother. Intuitively, they knew why I was there. Bill, a guy I’d known since elementary school, shook a cigarette out of a pack and handed it to one of the girls. I was a little surprised to see Scott Rutledge there. Scott must have arrived by his own alternate, less conspicuous route. That’s because Scott was the one kid in school that everyone admired. Teachers liked him. Girls adored him. He could clown with the hooligans but he was also kind to the geeks.

  It was Scott who flipped a cigarette my way. A lighter flared, and I leaned and sucked at my very first tug of smoke. Everyone waited for me to cough, but I did not. Only a wisp of tobacco and nicotine had passed my lips and descended into my lungs. But I exhaled with enthusiasm and took a second drag. People nodded and approved. I felt like I had been accepted into a sacred religious cult.

  The girls all tried to look sexy (or were sexy, depending on who it was) and the guys all looked like actors who played the roles of young thugs in made-for-TV movies. I didn’t try too hard to look cool because I knew I couldn’t pull it off.

  The conversation was mostly about how ugly all the teachers were and how messed up the school was. There was universal agreement about those two subjects. I offered no opinions but was halfway though my second cigarette when the bell rang. Amazingly, the thugs and chicks (the guys actually got away with calling girls “chicks” in this primordial world of green leaves and ritual smoke) all dropped their butts, ground them into the rich forest soil with heavy heels, and turned towards the school. Scott nodded at me and headed off for his circuitous path back to class.