I Was There the Night He Died

by Ray Robertson

  Before I have a chance to answer, a photograph is whipped from his wallet to my hand. Before I have time to do more than register that it’s a picture of a baby, “Check it out, man. What do you think?”

  It’s a baby all right: bald, pasty, bored-looking. The same as every other baby I’ve ever seen. But it must be Eddie’s latest—he’s the same age as me, forty-four, and a father four (or is it five?) times over already—so I reel off the expected bromides: Wow. Good looking kid. It looks like you. Congratulations.

  Steady Eddie takes back the picture, shakes his head while returning it to his wallet. “Gavin says him and Cheryl might get back together someday. Jimmy—that’s the kid’s name—wasn’t six months old when she told Gavin she didn’t want to be tied down anymore, she needed some space. Space, shit. She just wants to party every night like she did before they started shacking up.” He’s still shaking his head while getting a couple bottles of Labatt Blue from the beer fridge in the garage where we’re standing. “I just feel bad for the baby, that’s all. Gavin’s a good kid, don’t get me wrong, but useless as tits on a nun. Kid couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the c and the t.” He cracks open our beers with an opener attached to the symphony of keys and mini-screwdrivers and pocket knives clanking from his belt.

  I take my beer. “That’s rough for Gavin,” I say, “but what does his love life have to do with your new son?”

  Steady Eddie giggles, tips his bottle, giggles some more. “Jimmy’s not my son, man, he’s Gavin’s. Jimmy’s my grandson.”

  I do the math because it’s impossible—impossible that I went to school with someone who’s a grandfather—but the numbers, unfortunately, add up. Gavin was born the day before our high-school band, The Tyrants, was supposed to play the Christmas assembly, and I was sure we’d have to cancel because our drummer, Steady Eddie, would be an all-of-a-sudden eighteen-year-old father. When I’d called his house, though, the Steady One himself had answered. “No sweat, man, Pam won’t be going home with the baby until Saturday. I’ll see you tomorrow. I gotta go. Tammy’s here.” Tammy was Eddie’s newest girlfriend, the one who hadn’t just borne him a son.

  I do what’s expected of me, raise my bottle and toast Eddie’s good news. He clinks me back and it’s official, we’re both old farts.

  “How’s your dad doing?” he says.

  I haven’t seen or even talked to Eddie since my mother’s funeral—Eddie was steady with the 4/4 backbeat, not so much with cracking the books, so after I left for university and Eddie stayed behind to work the assembly line and make more babies, ours became a Chatham friendship, alive when I’m here, dead when I’m in T.O.

  “He’s all right,” I say. “Considering.”

  Eddie nods, drinks his beer. He knows about my dad’s disease just like I know about his dad dying of colon cancer. People from Chatham may not subscribe to Harper’s or listen to BBC World News, but they know what’s important, like who’s sick, dead, or dying in Chatham. Or at least have an uncle who’s sure to keep them up to date.

  “Hey, check this out,” Eddie says, going to the wall to admire the most recent addition to the posters and pictures covering the inside of his garage. Eddie’s garage is equipped just like my dad’s: an old fridge for beer, a mounted television set for sports, a museum of hockey player memorabilia covering whatever wall space isn’t taken up with hanging rakes, shovels, and other yard maintenance equipment. And when the weather is nice, and with the car parked in the driveway and the garage door opened wide, several lawn chairs for watching both the Blue Jays game on TV and the much less interesting, non-televised world play its own games out on the sidewalk and in the street.

  “I got it at Joe Louis last month when I took Billy with me to see the Wings and Stars. Don’t even ask me how much it cost.”

  It’s what I guess you’d call a painting—sort of the sporting equivalent of an orange tiger leaping across a black velvet canvas—a sight-impaired oil painter’s impression of every Red Wings captain of the last seventy-five years holding aloft the Stanley Cup, whether they actually did so or not. Steady Eddie giggles, points out the artist’s version of Dennis Polonich, which more closely resembles Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter than the diminutive late-’70s Red Wing dynamo. “Old Polo, eh?” Eddie says. “What a little prick he could be, couldn’t he?”

  “Nasty with his stick, that’s for sure.”

  “Oh, yeah, cut your heart out with that thing.”

  “Could play some, too, though.”

  “Oh, don’t kid yourself, you know he could.”

  We both drink and pay silent homage to Polo, one of the few battling bright spots for a string of perpetually lousy Red Wings teams during the 1970s, when the team still played out of the ratty old Olympia. Whenever my dad would take me to a game we’d park in Windsor and take the tunnel bus over to dangerous downtown Detroit. As soon as we were off the bus and walking the few hundred feet to the arena, my dad would take my hand. I would have been too embarrassed to let him do it at home, but I always held on tight until we were safe inside the rink. Then, when everything would be all right—the sound of program hawkers, the smell of hot dogs, the view of the zamboni circling the ice—I’d drop his hand and be the big boy again that I was at home.

  Steady Eddie sits down on a riding lawnmower; I lean against the wall, between an action shot of Steve Yzerman and a gas-powered leaf blower. The lawn chairs are months away from being broken out. Eddie must have been out somewhere just before I dropped by; the car engine periodically pings above the whir of the winter wind outside.

  “You still at … ?” I say, hoping Eddie will finish my sentence for me. In the ’80s, when I left for U of T and Eddie went to work at Fram, the big factories in town—International Harvester, Rockwell, Fram—were still pumping out trucks and car parts and paying out a good wage to just about anyone who was willing to work the line. Over the last twenty-five years, though, most of the larger companies having permanently emigrated south, everyone in town has been pawing over the same handful of decent-paying positions, mostly at parts operations run as small branch plants by companies outside Canada. Every time I talk to Eddie it seems as if he’s working somewhere different.

  “Campton’s?” he says. “In Dresden?”

  That sounds about right. “Yeah, Campton’s.”

  “Shit, no, they shut that place down last year. I’m over where your dad used to be, at Sieman’s, in Tilbury.”

  Where my dad retired from after fourteen years. After twenty-one years at Ontario Steel, five years at Chrysler, and three years at Navistar. At least in that his timing was good: four well-paying factory jobs in forty-three years is a pretty impressive run. Not too many grade nine dropouts today can hope to end up paying off their mortgage by the time they’re fifty while still having steadily saved up enough Friday paycheques to help put their kid through university. My dad did.

  “Does it look good?” I say. Not Does the work look good? or Are the people you work with good people? or even Is the pay good? But does it look good that they’ll keep you on so that you can continue buying shitty art for your garage walls and sinfully overpriced blue jeans for your ungrateful children and, more than likely, diapers and baby food and rattles for the spurious spawn of your mouth-breathing eldest son. Creative fulfillment and a positive, nurturing work environment aren’t Chatham workplace priorities. Paying your bills and feeding and clothing your children are.

  Eddie shrugs; I nod into my beer.

  “Hey, how’s the old—” Eddie says, making a scribbling motion with his non-beer-holding hand “—going?”

  “It’s all right.”

  “You got a new one coming out?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Good stuff. I told you, I’m saving up all your books for my retirement. Gonna get me a hammock and read ‘em all in a row swinging with a brew beside me in the backyard.
That’s the way to do it, right?”

  I smile, sip. Eddie will never read any of my books and that’s just fine. Eddie buys my books—one of the few people in Chatham I know who does—and always gets me to inscribe them whenever I next see him. I appreciate the online sale of one novel dutifully purchased every two years or so, but more than that, I appreciate that Eddie is genuinely happy that I’m happy, am pleased that he’s authentically pleased that someone he actually knows ended up doing what they wanted to do with their life. If he couldn’t play defence in the National Hockey League, at least I get to sit on my ass all day making stuff up. Artsy-fartsy deflected glory is still deflected glory.

  “Hey, that reminds me,” he says. “I got the new one inside. Let me go in and get it so you can put your ol’ John Hancock on it.”

  “Sure.”

  Before I have time to tour in its entirety even a single wall of Eddie’ tacked-up museum—Detroit players mostly, but the occasionally deserving non-Red Wing as well (mostly long-retired opposition tough guys who could also put the puck in the net, like Terry O’Reilly and Clark Gillies and Cam Neely), Eddie is back in the garage with a pen and a copy of my latest novel still encased in its shipping box. Using a pen knife from his key chain to cut it free, “I figured I’d just keep it in here until you were back in town. That way it wouldn’t get dirty or anything.”

  “Makes sense,” I say, taking the liberated book and the pen.

  Eddie watches me while I stand there trying to think of something profound or funny or at least not utterly banal to write on the title page. It’s always easier to sign a book for a stranger than for a friend. A guy who says he came to your reading from Hamilton immediately gets To Fred from the Hammer, Best, Sam Samson, but someone who watched you get beat up in the parking lot of McDonald’s after the Sadie Hawkins dance when you were seventeen and who encouraged you afterward to super-size your meal because you fucking deserve it, man, you never stopped throwing those fucking haymakers even when you were bleeding like a stuck fucking pig, is harder to be so cocky casual with.

  To Steady Eddie, I finally write.

  Health and Happiness.

  Sam.

  Eddie takes back his book, immediately reads what’s there. And giggles. If a 235-pound giggling man doesn’t make you smile, maybe it’s time to consider changing your medication. Closing the book and setting it on top of the fridge, “Where are you off to?” he says. “You got time for one more?”

  Uncle Donny is picking me up at home in an hour to take me to Thames View so that we can pretend that Dad is glad we’ve come to visit.

  “Why not?” I say.

  “To health and happiness,” Eddie says.

  We clink our bottles, and Eddie’s car joins in with a ping.

  * * *

  “You sure it’s plugged in?” Uncle Donny says.

  “Of course it’s plugged in.”

  “You’d be surprised how many times I thought my lawn mower was busted and all the time it was just out of gas.”

  Believe me, no, I wouldn’t. I keep pushing buttons on the remote until eventually the television speaks its first words. I turn down the volume—that was Thames View’s only condition of our bringing in a small portable television for Dad to stare at in the evenings: that we keep the volume low, not so much in consideration of the other equally oblivious patients as of their assembled visitors.

  The TV was my idea. Dad without a hockey game on in the background doesn’t seem like Dad. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, though, and the evening’s first faceoff is four hours away, so I flip. The tiny television set is resting on a metal tray attached to the far end of the bed, Uncle Donny and I sitting on chairs on either side of Dad. Neither of us says a word as one blah-blah-blah channel replaces the next. I stop at a black and white war documentary, Korean War variety, it looks like. “How about this?” I say.

  Uncle Donny shrugs. “I don’t know. If it’s not about Nazis, I just don’t find history shows very interesting.” Just so there’s no confusion about where he stands on the issue of the National Socialist Party of Germany, however, “Those guys were bad news, you know,” he adds.

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “Bad, bad news, believe you me.”

  There’s a soccer game on TSN, but as disparate a lot as we are, the Samson men are united at least in their unspoken but no less firmly held belief that any activity in which men wear shorts but are not permitted to body check one another is not a real sport. Uncle Donny insists I leave it on the match, however, until all of tonight’s hockey games and their times are finished scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

  I recommence clicking. There’s a combination nature/science program on one of the educational stations, and this time I don’t ask, just leave it. Uncle Donny announces he’s got to make a phone call, and before I can ask him who he has to suddenly speak to, he’s gone. The concept of Uncle Donny having a girlfriend crosses my mind and lingers there like a bad smell in the refrigerator that no amount of disinfectant can get rid of. Dad’s eyes, if not his attention, are on the TV screen, and I join him.

  Apparently there’s a parrot that’s been taught a vocabulary of over a hundred words, inspiring several scientists with thick glasses and thinning hair to speculate on the giddy possibility of a bird capable of authentic human conversation. Just what we need: another nattering species to bore us with what they think, with what they’re feeling, with who they really, really are deep down inside.

  I turn off the TV. Dad stares at the dead screen with as much interest as when it was alive. Maybe not parrots, but people, certainly, are supposed to talk. Most of the time you wish they wouldn’t, most of the time they haven’t got a single thing to say, but that’s what they’re supposed to do. Sometimes, when he could still remember my phone number, Dad would call me in Toronto and ask me who he was. The first time he did it, I thought he was joking, said, That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? When the line went quiet, Dad, I said. Are you still there?

  You’ve got the wrong number, he answered, and hung up.

  * * *

  Two hours of Uncle Donny talking interspersed with two hours of Dad not talking followed by three hours of Mountain Dew-abetted writing—I need this. Before I put match to joint, though, I decide to take my toking outside, the fresh air on my face probably as good for cooling down my over-busy brain as the warm smoke in my lungs. I peel off the heating blanket and put on my coat and hope that the parkette is empty. It’s 11:30 on a Thursday night in January in Chatham. Of course it’ll be empty.

  And it is, for as long as it takes me to light up and cough right back out what I just breathed in.

  From behind me, “It’s probably best if we don’t wake the grown-ups.”

  I turn around on the bench but don’t need to, immediately recognize the voice from last time. “How do you know I’m not a grown-up?”

  The girl inhales, holds it, emits a perfect stream of smoke. “Just a hunch,” she says.

  Since she doesn’t appear to be going anywhere and it seems silly to turn around and pretend she’s not there, I get up from the bench and pretend to admire the night sky. I casually take another toke; not so casually hack my way to a raw windpipe and two watery eyes.

  “Not much danger of you becoming a pothead, is there?” the girl says.

  Still coughing, “I”—right forefinger raised, just a moment, please, while I—“don’t usually”—bent over, hands on both knees now, tears clogging both eyes—“smoke”—

  “Marijuana. Yeah, I can see that.” She gives me a moment to stand upright and wipe my eyes dry. My joint has gone dead. On the plus side, no one has turned on their porch light or set their Rottweiler on us. Not yet, anyway. “Why bother, then?”

  I attempt to relight the joint while considering her question, but the wind is always one stifling step ahead. I give u
p and stand there in the cold blowy night with the extinguished joint in one hand and the useless lighter in the other. “Self-improvement,” I say.

  The girl makes a perfect pucker, sucks in another lungful of dopey smoke. “I’ve never heard of anyone taking up pot smoking to better themself.”

  “There are a lot worse things to do to yourself, believe me.”

  “Now that’s the kind of thing I like to hear from an adult. You should talk to my shrink.”

  Shrink? The girl’s—what? Seventeen? Eighteen? Besides, people in Chatham don’t go to psychiatrists. When I was her age, psychiatrists were who actors in Woody Allen movies visited, or maybe characters in Robertson Davies novels set in Toronto.

  “He doesn’t approve?”

  “She says I have an unhealthy propensity to self-medicate.”

  “Tell her she should be proud of you. Tell her self-medication shows initiative.”

  The girl laughs. “Do you want me to show you?” she says.

  Hold on a minute—show me what, exactly? Nice smile or not, unusually precocious or not, if Steady Eddie can be a grandfather, I could be this girl’s father.

  “I should head inside,” I say, thumbing in the direction of the house, just to make sure it’s absolutely clear I’ve got somewhere I should be—and, by extension, so does she.

  “I wasn’t offering to fuck you,” she says.

  “No, no, I know. No. God, no.” Out comes the thumb again. “I just—”

  “Show you how to get high,” she says. “Do you want me to show you how to get high.”

  “Right. Of course. Right.”

  “So?”

  “So … yeah, sure. Thanks.”

  The girl pats the empty swing beside her. Not like a brazen temptress, more like a patient owner with a willing but witless puppy. “Watch,” she says, returning the joint to her mouth. “Breathe in the smoke like this.” Which she does—like a flight attendant patiently instructing her passengers how to fasten their seatbelts—before calmly pausing and then gently inhaling what’s left. “And then you swallow it as best as you can, just like I did, and that’s that.” She hands me her joint. “Now you try.”