He continues,
And then there was the time my sister and I were hiking things between our legs, like we were hiking a football, at this window. Little things like Parcheesi pieces, plastic things. “See, I can throw this at the window and it won’t break!” And then I got a C-cell battery and said, “I bet I can throw this at the window and it won’t break …” Smash! So then I had to get a spanking. Mom made Dad do it. Dad took me to my room and sat me down and said,
“Okay, I’m going to slap my thigh—like this—and every time I slap my thigh you’ve got to go, ‘Ow!’ Let’s try it, okay? On three … One, two,” slap.
“Ow.”
“No, no, say it like you really mean it, say it like it really hurt you.” Slap on knee … “Owww!”
“Okay, try one more. Slap on knee …
“Owww!!!”
He’s whispering to me, “That’s really good.” So then he slaps his knee again and I don’t say anything, so he looks up at the door and there’s my mom …
I used to watch him shine his shoes and put on his putties. Army guys had pants that go down below your knee. Then you had a little chain to hold them down, so they puff downwards.
Louise argues that John doesn’t really remember all those things—he’s actually putting images and stories to things she told him. Or, equally plausible, these recollections have subconsciously metamorphosed over the years, through family storytelling and faded black and whites, into memories. “He knows of his dad from what I’ve told him. I don’t think he remembers his dad that much, actually. I asked him once, ‘Do you remember his face or the jokes he told?’ It’s hard to tell if John remembers or he remembers what we’ve talked about.”
Lefebvre claims to remember “tons of things” from before he was three years old:
I know I do because they’re memories that have my father in them. I ask other guys and they say they don’t remember anything from that time. But really they probably do, they just don’t realize that it was from when you were three because you don’t have that kind of temporal litmus.
Anyway, my dad was a soldier. I think he was born in northern Ontario—Espanola. My grandfather Lefebvre was from there. And my grandmother Lefebvre was a Masicot. They were both French. Emily, my daughter, can speak French. My mother can struggle through. I know enough to ask which way is the No. 14 bus.
There wasn’t that much influence linguistically, because although my grandfather was ethnically French Canadian he despised people who made a point of only speaking French. He was always shooting off his face—“Those asshole Frenchmen, why can’t they join our country?” So, no, there wasn’t really a strong francophone influence.
So my dad was a soldier from Ontario, and he came out to Alberta, took my mom out to the mess on an introduction, and stole her away from all the Calgary boys.
• • •
When I mention how difficult it must have been, Louise says, “Uhmmm-hum … fortunately, I had three wild little children. You couldn’t do much mooning about.”
And neither did Louise’s friends in New Brunswick, who sprang into action. She recalls,
Those were hospitable people. They contacted me out of the blue to say they had a bridge club going, and did I play bridge, and would I like to come and meet the ladies. Of course, I was a terrible bridge player, but I said yes. Anyway, they came and they packed everything. Except for I had saved letters that I used to get from Ed when we were discovering that we wanted to get married. I had tied these up and I never got them back. I don’t know where that package went, but probably in the garbage.
The family, minus Mun’s body, flew to Calgary on a Canadair North Star, a large modern plane with four propellers that held about thirty people. Used by both the Royal Canadian Air Force and commercial airlines, instead of Douglas radial piston engines the North Star was outfitted with Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, which injected a thirty-five-mile-an-hour boost in speed, not impressive by today’s standards but useful in the fifties.
Ed died on the eighteenth of March, early Saturday morning. We flew out of Moncton, which was the closest place, on Monday. We stopped in Montreal, and friends of mine from Barrie happened to be there. They had heard about it and were there at the airport and spent about an hour and a half with us. Then we flew to Toronto and the same thing happened there—another close friend, Teesy, from Calgary. I don’t know how she found out about the route we were taking. She was with the priest who brought my husband over to my friend Nora Valentine’s house in the first place. And then we flew to Calgary.
We flew out of Moncton at four in the afternoon and got to Calgary at 11:30 a.m. the next day. John discovered that if you push the button on the seat it would snap up. I had the seat set back and I was asleep, and John pushed the button … [Louise gestures herself jerking ahead, and laughs] I had Teddy on my lap. He was a baby and they wouldn’t give him a seat.
As Louise finishes telling me of the defining event of her life, and its aftermath, the telephone rings. It’s Emily, her granddaughter and John’s only child. She’s twenty-eight years old and in a few days is to marry her longtime boyfriend, Pádraig. Emily, a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer in classics at Trinity College in Dublin, is thinking seriously of making a job shift. She and Pádraig want to move to Vancouver. If they do, the discipline required to plan and execute a wedding to her favorite Irishman—getting his family to the Rockies, organizing buses and accommodation, getting people out to her dad’s home on Salt Spring Island after the reception—may have spurred her decision to leave Ireland and the world of academia behind for a while.
“Grandma, where was Dad born?”
“He was born in Barrie, Ontario,” Louise replies. “Is that all you need to know? Now they’ll let you get married? All right, dear. Bye-bye.”
Louise continues the story of how she managed to fit the pieces of her life back together after New Brunswick: “My parents lived on Garden Crescent in Calgary and I flew home to them. The funeral wasn’t until a week later because they wouldn’t fly a body in those days—it had to come by train. That gave mother- and father-in-law ample time to get to Calgary for the funeral. They were in France, with the air force, and flew back a week later to Ottawa and then Calgary.”
Louise says many different gears start to shift when a soldier dies. First, an officer is sent to the bereaved to take care of the family. In her case, an old friend named Art Potts arrived and started to make things happen. Art made sure Louise and her children got settled in. He took care of the insurance claims. He found a realtor. They started looking for a house. Louise didn’t have to impose on her parents on Garden Street for long. It was, and is, a nice neighborhood for kids, though.
Within a couple of weeks, Art and Louise found a bungalow in the Roxboro area, at 3014 Third Street, just a few blocks from her mom and dad’s place on Garden. “It was a house I used to walk beside. I used to babysit for the Johns family, Dr. Johns. I’d walk by that house and think, ‘Oh, what a beautiful yard—who would pass that up?’”
The odd thing is, despite Art’s efficiency in nabbing a house within a couple of weeks, Louise could not bring herself to move in straight away. She says, “I kept telling Mom, ‘Well, we have to wait for the furniture.’ I stayed at Mom and Dad’s for three months, bless their hearts. I was afraid to make the move.”
Louise finally moved Anne, John, Ted, and all their stuff in, paid her mortgage on a teacher’s salary, and stayed from 1955 until 1970, when she sold the house for $35,000. The next year, the people who had bought it advertised it for $90,000. Ten years later, before a recession walloped Calgary in the early eighties, the house’s worth had reached $300,000. Now it has probably climbed to over a million. Louise admits she has never been much for wheeling and dealing: “It was just at the beginning of the Calgary boom. I’ve not always been a good businessperson.”
When Louise finally made the m
ove out of her parents’ home, a feeling of calm came over her: “I still knew a lot of army people in Calgary, plus my old friends, and we had a great housewarming. When I saw all that happen I thought this is wonderful that I have my own home again. It’s good.”
During the period 2002–03, when her son set up and ran a Neteller office in San José, Costa Rica, he would make time for frequent visits with friends and family back home. John understood and spoke Spanish badly—at best at a second-grade level—so his ears thirsted for the ubiquity of his native tongue. On one of these breaks, he said, “Hey Mom, let’s go for a walk. I want to buy you a house.” They walked over to their old Roxboro neighborhood. They started to walk all along Rideau Road, in the middle of the road.
“There may be some traffic here, John. Why are we walking here?”
“Because it’s our street, Mom. It’s our neighborhood.”
Anne, John, and Ted grew up on Rideau, and John wanted to reclaim it.
“My children really loved that neighborhood,” says Louise. “It was a lovely place to be. We had tar-topped streets. It was a bit oily, but it was there to hold the gravel down.”
John’s version of childhood is much the same, except there are some things mothers need not know. He recalls,
We lived at my grandparents’ place on Garden Crescent, and then Mom bought a house in Roxboro, which turned out to be a kind of ritzy district but wasn’t when we lived there. It was a nice place to grow up, the river and the hill. When we were six or seven we used to take girls up the hill and make them show us their parts. Up by the Chinese cemetery, see if we could make them let us smell them. “Can I smell your bum?”
“Okay, but don’t look.”
“Okay, I promise I won’t.”
Robb Lucy made me do it. I remember we were at this one place and Robb got a look at this one beautiful young lady, she was probably four years younger than us, we were probably eleven and she was seven, and Robb said, “You should let John have a look.”
She said, “I don’t want to, I feel shy.”
“Well, what if you just pretend it’s just me looking and John peeks over the barbecue, would that by okay?”
She says, “Yeah.” So Robb got another look, but I was allowed to peek over the barbecue. And then her big brother walked by in the driveway and we were completely busted. “They made me do it!” she says, and then Robb yells, “Run!” As if they didn’t know who we were or where to find us. “Run!” That was smart.
We had tons of fun. There were places where we could throw crabapples at cop cars and run, ring doorbells and run. We used to play war. I remember Debbie, she was just about our age, she turned out to be a junkie—probably because of the way we abused her. We’d play war and Debbie would be the nurse. We’d have fights about who got wounded first.
“I got wounded before you did.”
“No you didn’t, I did!”
So Debbie would nurse us, and that was lovely.
With girls I realized there was something there to be interested in, I guess. Hate to admit it, but yup. It was all Robb Lucy’s fault; it wasn’t me. Robb would go into yards at night and say, “You just wait here, I’m just going to go in and steal some carrots and I’ll be right back. It’ll be okay.” And then he goes in and rather than stealing carrots he sneaks a look into the basement where the girls are having a slumber party. And then he comes running out and says, “It’s okay!” And he just keeps running. So then I’m standing there and the dad comes and grabs me. Robb was such a smart aleck.
• • •
Louise has remained single since Mun died. She made the decision early on: “I met another fellow named Lefebvre once. He was so much fun and, yes, he wanted to get married. But I thought: I know what I have; I don’t know what I might get. And with three babies, you’re not the most popular date in town, either.”
“It’s difficult, it really is,” she continues. “I thought it would be nice to have someone to take you out to dinner and that sort of thing, but the longer I’ve been on my own …” She gestures to the condominium she’s living in now. “A lot of people live in these apartments with one big closet in each bedroom; I need both of them. I guess I was a little leery about making that kind of commitment.”
Louise worries about her son and the stress he’s being put under by the FBI: “I hope this thing ends soon and they take as much money as they want, but don’t do anything else. He says, ‘Mom, stop worrying. I’m not going to tell you anything if you keep on worrying.’ But I just noticed him this weekend with the pressure …”
As the afternoon I interview Louise happens to be during prep week for Emily’s marriage and celebration, Louise gets to watch her son fidget in his lower Mount Royal house, trying to keep it tidy for the coming onslaught of guests and relatives from Canada and Ireland. “He was up washing dishes,” she says. “Yet when he’s here, I do that and he would say, ‘Come in here and sit down. You don’t need to do that now.’”
I offer that, yes, he does seem quite agitated and preoccupied, but I assure Louise that it’s the added pressure of the wedding that has him going, not the fact that he is still waiting to be sentenced. Lefebvre pled guilty on July 10, 2007, and now here we are, mid-October 2008, and there’s still no word. Jane McMullen, who helps run the Lefebvre Foundation, a nonprofit that doles out money as it sees fit, has been lining up the funds to pay the huge forfeiture the DOJ demands. The FBI seems to want the money right now, yet is willing to let Lefebvre dangle out there, suspended in presentencing, as bait for other internet gambling targets they have: “Hey, we got Lefebvre and Lawrence down for forty and sixty mil and up to five years. Come in and talk to us. We might give you a similar deal.” Sure, that could weigh heavily, but right now it’s the wedding.
“Sure it is,” says Louise. “Pádraig’s family was invited, but they didn’t expect so many people to be part of the family. It’s turned out the family is a hundred people. They’re set for it, but …”
Lefebvre will be set for it. Uptight is anathema to him. This goes back to his insouciant teenage rebellion days. His hair grows long, his freak flag does not fly half-mast. He wants to wear what he wants to wear. Sure, he was drunk on money after the Neteller geyser exploded, buying whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted. But, eventually, jeans and T-shirts started to look good again. While everyone else places a premium on formality, Lefebvre might or might not play along. Louise knows this:
We had one dinner. We worked hard on it, with all the girls dressed to the nines. In came John with his orange shirt on his belly and the holes in the knees. There he is, being a hospitable host. His friend Hilary, she looked gorgeous. He doesn’t feel you have to all dress the same way just because you’re all together.
We were so, so conscious of the unimportant things. And John wasn’t. He was conscious of the important things. And in that I love him dearly.
Can I go and get my hair done now?
II (1965–70)
A Revved-up Teenage Head
Lefebvre spent his teenage years mostly up to no good, “running around and drinking and stealing booze.” He had accelerated to St. Mary’s a year ahead of his friends and found he had to prove himself socially. His mom said his learning ability was exceptional, yet it was tough to leave his buddies behind: “He purposefully tried to stay back when he got to St. Mary’s because the kids would call him an egghead.” Lefebvre endured the usual taunts before things turned around in high school. “For a few years there,” Louise admits, “he got cool.”
When they were sixteen, in high school, Lefebvre and his buddy Robb Lucy would steal Lucy’s mom’s car and bomb around the neighborhood. They’d slip it into neutral, silently wheel it out of the driveway, and then siphon gas from another vehicle. That way, Lucy’s mom wouldn’t wonder why the fuel indicator was low.
Lefebvre remembers another friend, Scott McGeh
ee, who in the middle of eighth grade moved to San Francisco but came back for an Easter visit. When Lefebvre saw him he was holding a bag of stuff that looked like “green shit.”
“You gotta smoke this stuff, Johnny, it’s really funny.”
That’s when Lefebvre started smoking dope. He was fourteen. He’d meet his friends at the old Palace Theatre, on Eighth Avenue between First and Second Streets SW, on the south side of the street. In those days it was still legal to smoke inside the theater. To Lefebvre, this meant he and his buddies could smoke hand-rolled cigs at the Palace and nobody would know the difference. What’s that funny smell? Don’t know. “Then Robb would say something like, ‘These crackers taste dry,’ and ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ We’d all laugh as if it was the funniest thing we’d heard all day.”
There were others, including a couple of Lefebvre’s cousins, who were into the green shit. And there was a girl from school who went to San Francisco for a visit and returned with a Jefferson Airplane seven-inch single. Lefebvre remembers thinking how unusual it was to hear this strange new hybrid of folk and rock coming out of Haight-Ashbury, flown 1,500 miles northeast across the Rockies directly to his hometown. Being a music fanatic, Lefebvre watched this shift from simple, straight pop to baroque, turned-on rock, and it fascinated him. He recalls,
It was a great time to grow up. I remember lining up at the store at Glenn’s Music in the Bay Parkade in 1964 because the new Kinks record was coming out. Or there was this new band called the Rolling Stones. I listened to Buddy Holly records at my friend’s place, but the first record I bought was “Time Is on My Side” backed with “Congratulations” by the Stones. And the other record in 1964 I really remember was “Downtown” by Petula Clark. You know how your record player would have that tall spindle? We’d stack up forty-fives and have dances and parties. Del Savery and Mike McCool would sit on the couch and say, “I’ll kiss any girl.” Then the girls would line up and kiss Del and dance to songs like the Ventures’ “Wheels.”
Life Real Loud Page 6