1982

by Jian Ghomeshi

  “Hello?” It was early. That’s probably why he sounded a bit angry. But then, Mitchell Toker was always a bit angry, because he was tough. He wore a brown, tight-fitting leather jacket. And tough guys were not supposed to be too friendly.

  “Oh … hi, Mitch. It’s Jian. Is Toke there? I mean … is your brother there? I mean … Ron?”

  Mitch dropped the phone. I could hear him shouting Toke’s name. He sounded annoyed that he had to summon his brother on my behalf. Mitch was not very friendly sometimes. Perhaps he was wearing his leather jacket.

  Toke picked up the line. “Hallo?”

  “Toke! John Lennon got shot! Did you hear? John Lennon got killed by a guy!”

  I shouted this into our rotary phone at the top of the stairs in the main hallway of our house. The receiver was army green and had a curly green phone cord attached to a green phone box. I’m not sure why my parents had decided to get a greencoloured phone. I breathlessly delivered the news about John Lennon before Toke could say anything.

  Toke was silent. Sometimes he would pause before reacting to things. But maybe he hadn’t heard me properly.

  I raised my voice even louder to let Toke know this was important. “A guy killed John Lennon! Did you hear me? Toke! John Lennon, who used to be in the Beatles!” Now I was really out of breath.

  I could hear Toke processing the information on the other end of the line. Finally, he spoke. His words came out quite softly.

  “Wow. Dat John Lennon. Ee’s great,” Toke said.

  Oh, yeah, I should explain another thing. Toke would never say the h in “he’s.” It wasn’t really that he had an accent, because Toke would comfortably use the h when saying other words, like “health” or “happy” or “heap.” But not with “he’s.” It was just something Toke did. Toke would also say “dat” instead of “that” and “hallo” instead of “hello.” Again, these were Toke-isms that had little consistency with the rest of his speech patterns. Toke was unique this way. And when Toke didn’t like a guy, he would call him a “weasel.” It was just like the name he had given all the players on the Boston Bruins hockey team. Toke was a Montreal Canadiens fan and had a toque with the Habs logo on it.

  Often, when Toke was in the process of calling a guy a weasel, especially if he was agitated, all of his verbal idiosyncrasies would conspire together in one sentence: “Dat guy … I don’t like dat guy … ee’s a weasel!” This was one of the things that made Toke lovable and strange. But it also made him the target of some less-than-kind impressions. When other kids in our circle imitated Toke, they would simply say, “Dat guy … ee’s a weasel.”

  Toke had said “ee’s great” about John Lennon as if John Lennon was not dead. But he was dead. And it was big news. Neither of us truly knew the cultural implications of John Lennon’s murder in 1980, but we had a sense that this was essential information we needed to share, because adults were taking it very seriously. We knew how epic the Beatles had been, and I had seen a Beatles movie on TV way back when my family lived in England. Besides, I already had two Paul McCartney and Wings albums on vinyl, including Wings Greatest. I also had Back to the Egg on eight-track. Eggs were cool in the ’70s and early ’80s. And I had a Paul McCartney poster in my room that I had gotten with the greatest hits album.

  As you might conclude from the contents of my fledgling record collection and the poster, I was more of a Paul guy as a kid. That is, in the inevitable question of “Who’s your favourite Beatle?”—a question that was still being asked in the ’80s—I would side with Paul. I remember wishing I could look like Paul McCartney when I saw him singing “With a Little Luck” on TV. But this predilection for Paul would not endure. By the end of high school—and forever after—John Lennon had emerged as my favourite Beatle. It was all about his facility for songwriting, his gorgeous, yearning melodies, and his darker-themed lyrics. Besides, cool girls would more likely be fond of guys who were into John Lennon, even though they secretly preferred George Harrison, because he was “the quiet one.” I would later go back and discover all of John Lennon’s solo records from the 1970s. They would occupy a special place in my collection. Not that I didn’t love Paul. I still love Paul. But now he’s number two in my Beatle affections. Here is a short list of my favourite Beatles, in descending order, when John died, followed by a short list of my favourite Beatles now:

  1980

  1. Paul McCartney

  2. John Lennon

  3. George Harrison

  4. Ringo Starr

  Now

  1. John Lennon

  2. Paul McCartney

  3. George Harrison

  4. Ringo Starr

  As you can see, John and Paul are on top and George Harrison comes in at number three on both of these lists. This might suggest that I was not a big fan of George Harrison, since he seems to be scoring very low. But that’s only because John and Paul were members of the Beatles as well, and they were musical geniuses. George Harrison was also brilliant, and his 1970 triple album, All Things Must Pass, is a masterpiece. He just wasn’t better than John and Paul. So, if we included, say, John Oates from Hall & Oates and Andrew Ridgeley (the other guy from Wham!) on the same list with the Beatles, George Harrison would appear much higher. I’ll show you. Look at the list now:

  1. John Lennon

  2. Paul McCartney

  3. George Harrison

  4. John Oates

  5. Ringo Starr

  6. Andrew Ridgeley (the other guy from Wham!)

  See? George is now in the top three out of six. Of course, if Bowie were on this list, he would always appear at number one. As iconic as they were, the Beatles didn’t stand a chance with Bowie. But I will admit that my Bowie mania may have led to some casualties of information in the early ’80s, too. One of my favourite Bowie songs had been “Across the Universe,” a recording that appears on Young Americans, released in 1975. I later learned that this was a John Lennon composition and a famous Beatles song. Even Bowie sometimes took cues from the Fab Four. Mind you, no one has really ever covered the Beatles better than Bowie. And he drew a significant and clear dividing line between the ’60s and the ’70s when he wrote in “All the Young Dudes” about his brother back at home still listening to the Beatles and the Stones.

  The implications of the loss of John Lennon were evident to me everywhere. Later that morning, my music teacher at Woodland Junior High, Mr. Richards, started to cry in the middle of band class. It was obvious he was very sad about John Lennon. I had assumed my position behind the drums for band rehearsal, but Mr. Richards called off the practice and made us all take seats in a circle. He asked that we remain quiet while he played “The Long and Winding Road” on a large tape deck.

  Mr. Richards was our music teacher in Grades 7 and 8. He was probably in his mid-thirties at the time, and he had sandy-blond hair, a beard, and a growing belly. He wore dark checkered shirts with dark checkered ties and dark corduroy slacks. This relatively dim sartorial streak had the effect of emphasizing how white Mr. Richards’s skin was. Mr. Richards was very white. Like, I mean, even more white than normal white people. One time, the teachers agreed to play students in a basketball game in Grade 8, and Mr. Richards was playing on the teachers’ side. That day he was wearing a dark T-shirt and a pair of purple shorts. It was the only time I would ever see his naked arms and his legs. They were very white—like, powdery white. I always wondered why Mr. Richards was so white. But now, on this sad day, his face was the whitest I’d ever seen it. He was very upset at the news of John Lennon’s death.

  At Mr. Richards’s request, the AV lady, Mrs. Ellis, had brought in a hi-fistereo on a trolley with a large tape deck. Mr. Richards dabbed tears from his eyes while “The Long and Winding Road” played on. His eyes had become very red, even though his face was so white. I remember exchanging glances with Murray, who played saxophone in music class and would later be my bandmate in the Wingnuts and then Urban Transit. Murray and I nodded at each other respectfully and lowered
our heads, because we were upset about Lennon. Well, actually, we lowered our heads because Mr. Richards was upset. But we knew we ought to be as well. And the music was very moving.

  Mr. Richards continued to cry, and then he rewound the tape and played “The Long and Winding Road” a second time in its entirety. This was clearly bringing back a lot of memories for him. I concluded that, if Mr. Richards had selected it, this song must also have been a very personal composition for John Lennon. I was well into my mid-twenties before I learned that John Lennon was not the writer of “The Long and Winding Road” at all. I’d fought others on this point for years, in the days before Google settled all debates, because I assumed John had written the song Mr. Richards played the day after he died. I was wrong. It was a McCartney song. I’m still not sure why Mr. Richards would play a McCartney song and cry about John. But the sentiment was very real. On the way home from school, I told Toke that Mr. Richards had been crying and that he played the John Lennon song “The Long and Winding Road.” Toke pointed in the air and said, “Wow! Dat John Lennon. Ee was great!” I nodded. Sometimes Toke had a fine way of summarizing things.

  Toke and I never actually declared that we were best friends. I’m not sure boys ever really do that. It just seemed too intimate and awkward for guys to look each other in the eye and declare best friendship. In contrast, girls often had a list of their best friends and the rankings they occupied. Robin Goldman was able to rhyme off the name of her best friend in Grade 6, and then her second-best friend, and then third, and so on. But with Toke, it was more organic. He and I just ended up together a lot.

  Toke was a Sephardic Jewish kid who lived in a townhouse three streets away from me in Thornhill. He regularly wore brown corduroy pants and had a big, green, hooded coat. Toke was a bit chubby at the time, and I was a bit skinny. He had an Afro, and my hair was straighter. I was a non-practising Muslim, and he was a semi-observant Jew. We had all the makings of an odd couple, and we somehow complemented each other that way. Toke lived relatively modestly with his mother and his older brother, Mitch. In terms of social class, while my family was a little better off than his, Toke seemed fairly equal to me when compared to some of my other peers. And we both had brownish skin.

  My previous best friend, Davey Franklin, was a champion young hockey player and an enthusiastic guy. He lived down the street from us in Thornhill. But his family and their house always reminded me of the things my family didn’t have. Davey had a swimming pool. And his family had three cars. And he was the first kid on the block to have a giant TV screen. Davey invited me to watch the final of the 1979 Challenge Cup hockey series on his giant screen. In truth, the colours were not very good and the rear projection had lots of shadows. Besides, the Soviet national team defeated the NHL all-stars 6-0 that day. But still, I had not seen a screen that big in anyone’s house before. It was very evident that Davey Franklin had things I did not. My family had a console TV in a fake-wood cabinet. It worked well, but it wasn’t very big. Not like Davey’s screen. I was becoming very aware of these differences. And most important, Davey and his family had Dixie cups. You could always tell the well-to-do families because they had disposable Dixie cups.

  Dixie cups were small paper cups that came in a dispenser that you would secure on your bathroom wall. Prosperous suburban families in Canada always had Dixie cups in the 1970s. The concept was impressive: Each time you wanted to drink a bit of water in the bathroom or rinse your mouth, you would take a paper Dixie cup from the dispenser and then happily throw the cup away after its use. It was all very carefree. There was no sense in reusing a Dixie cup, since there were dozens more in the dispenser. And Dixie cups came with fancy pink-and-orange drawings on them sometimes.

  You may think this is a dramatic example of overconsumption. You may think this is more evidence of the bizarre premium that was put on material excess in the early ’80s. But Dixie cups were all the rage for those who could afford them. Even though they masqueraded as a “practical” idea, however, they were really stupid for the environment and didn’t make much sense at all except as a measure of decadence. But most people didn’t think about those things at the time. And none of this would stop me from wanting them when I was eleven years old.

  My family didn’t have Dixie cups. My family simply kept one plastic cup next to each sink that we would reuse each time we wanted water. Either that or we would just cup our right hand to scoop water to our mouths. This was old school. I would later learn that it was more environmentally friendly than throwing away paper cups, but that’s certainly not the reason we didn’t have them.

  My father saw Dixie cups as a needless expense. Beyond an economic status that put us out of competition with the Franklins, both of my parents were always admirably frugal. I see this quality as sage and beneficial in retrospect. But frugality was a great disadvantage to a kid trying to fit in. For instance, between his bouts of mowing the lawn, That Chris from across the street would enjoy single servings of Laura Secord chocolate pudding for lunch each day. My sister and I never had that. My parents saw Laura Secord pudding in all those little containers as another needless expense. We never got the pudding. But nothing was as shameful as the dearth of Dixie cups.

  I had been quite worried about the inevitable moment when Davey Franklin became aware of the lack of Dixie cups if he visited our house. And of course, to my great embarrassment, one afternoon he not only noticed our Dixie cup deficiency, but he pointed it out when he came out of our upstairs bathroom by asking why he couldn’t find them. I had dreaded the question, and I tried to improvise a response. I told him we’d temporarily run out. He must’ve known it was a lie, because there wasn’t even a dispenser.

  I confronted my father about our notable lack of Dixie cups in the middle of Grade 5.

  “Dad, we need to get a Dixie cup dispenser!”

  “What is thees?”

  “Dixie cups. We need to get Dixie cups like Davey Franklin’s family! They have Dixie cups. Why don’t we?”

  “Why we should want thees Dixie cup?” my father had calmly replied.

  “They’re paper cups that you use in the bathroom and then throw out so you always have a clean one! Dad! How are we supposed to drink water in the bathroom?” I said this with some exhaustion. It was obvious that everyone needed Dixie cups.

  “We have cup in the toilet room. You wash the cup and then use thees cup. Why you need all thees paper Dixie cup?”

  My father was answering my questions with questions again. He clearly didn’t understand. In these moments, I let myself imagine that my backward father was too rooted in the old country. Then I could make sense of things in my eleven-year-old mind. Of course they didn’t have Dixie cups when they were wandering around on camels in Iran. I did this often. If I was angry at my father, I would jettison my knowledge of Iranians as a modern people and retreat to heinous stereotypes to explain his intransigence. Okay, so maybe these were the same stereotypes I would later deplore.

  Not surprisingly, my mother felt the need to chime in about the Dixie cups.

  “Honey, you don’t need the Dixie cups. You know, Umar keeps his family’s bathroom spic and span, and the Jans don’t have these cups either.”

  The Jans were a family we became close to when we first moved to Canada. Umar was roughly my age, and he had been my first friend when we settled in Don Mills. His father was Pakistani and his mother was German. I would call them Uncle Munir and Auntie Karen, the way you call family friends who become very close. They were all very nice and dear allies. But Umar was tediously perfect in the eyes of my mother. Just like That Chris. Even when my mother was making a fair and reasonable point, she had to throw in a comparison to another kid who was doing something better.

  If Davey Franklin had lots of fancy things that made me feel bad, the Franklins were also of Anglo background and were quite traditional in some ways. They were, to put it bluntly, white. Not as white as Mr. Richards, but they were Caucasian. In contrast to Davey Fr
anklin and his parents, Toke and his family were more like us. Toke was also a relatively new immigrant and a Moroccan Jew. And when I met Toke, I found someone who didn’t make me feel bad about not having a pool and a giant TV screen and Dixie cups. Toke didn’t have Dixie cups either. But Toke was much more clear-headed about such things, or at least less neurotic. I once asked him whether he wished he had Dixie cups. Toke responded, “Dixie cups? Of course not.” I liked my new friend.

  Toke’s older brother, Mitch, was a keen follower of rock music like AC/DC and Ozzy. In contrast to Toke’s more cherubic features, Mitchell Toker looked like John Travolta with shorter hair like he had in Saturday Night Fever. Mitch clearly made regular trips to the gym. Mitch had a brown leather jacket, but he would often walk around the Toker family’s townhouse topless. He would do this to show off his muscles while he blasted rock music. Early in 1982, Ozzy Osbourne had infamously bitten the head off a real bat onstage. Mitch recounted this story to us with demonic zeal, his arms waving in the air and his fists flying. I felt a bit afraid when Mitch got like this. I would never say anything to Toke or anyone else about my fear, but it was there. It might seem strange to be afraid of your best friend’s brother, but Mitch could be an intimidating presence.

  Mitch Toker carried a knife and had a reputation for being “wild.” I had secretly hoped that Mitch would hook up with my older sister, Jila, when I was in Grade 7. That way, he would have to like me so my sister wouldn’t break up with him. I tried to get them together on at least three occasions. But one day, when Jila came to meet me at Toke’s house on our way to the mall, Mitch made the wrong move. Seems that as Jila was waiting outside, Mitch called down to her while hanging out of one of the upper windows with no clothing on. Jila did not witness his whole naked body, but she could certainly see his bare chest.