Son of a Critch

by Mark Critch

  “Good God! Where did you get this?” The old man was standing in my bedroom doorway with the script for The Empty Room rolled up in his hand.

  “That?” I barely looked up from an issue of The Fantastic Four in which the team finds itself stuck in a town whose entire population has been turned evil from drinking the milk of alien shape-shifters disguised as cows—which, I felt, was far more believable than the script he was holding. “It’s some stupid play that Sister Furey wants me to do. Can you write me a note or something so I don’t have to?”

  “Absolutely not,” Dad said with a passion I hadn’t seen in his eyes since he had a beer at the VOCM Christmas party. “You have to do this play! I did this play in Goose Bay during the war. What are the chances? Good God!” I later learned that while my father had been serving on the American base toward the end of the war, he’d been tasked with directing the Christmas play. One of his lead actors was transferred at the last minute and he’d had to take on his part with just a day’s rehearsal. “What part are you playing?”

  “The stupid innkeeper,” I said, dejected. “Who wants to watch a play about a guy who turns a pregnant woman out on the street on Christmas Eve?”

  “You’re playing Hamar the innkeeper? That’s the same part I played. Good God! What are the chances?” And with that my fate was sealed.

  My dad and I had never shared a love of sports. I was too lazy and he was too old. We didn’t share a love of cars. Neither one of us drove or had any interest in driving. We didn’t go fishing. We both preferred a nice piece of overcooked steak. But this play turned out to be something we could work on together the way other fathers and sons worked on model airplanes or go-carts. Sister Furey would block the play one way during the day and the old man would block it differently during the night. I had to remember two sets of notes from two different directors. I soon knew the show backward and forward and was more than ready for opening night. Until Sister Furey presented me with my costume: a yellow robe that went down only to my knees. It was really more of a jaunty skirt with pantyhose topped off with a blue sash. I’d never hear the end of it from Fox and the boys. Still, the joy in the old man’s eyes was worth it.

  As I performed I could see him in the third row, mouthing along with every line, sitting on the edge of his seat. I guess that’s sort of what it’s like to have a hockey dad cheering you along, reliving his youth as you score a goal in overtime and secure your team’s spot in the nationals. Whatever the feeling, the joy it brought him was immense, and his belief in me made me believe in myself and in the pretend world we were creating. For a brief moment, I felt transported. I was on the edge of history, a bystander with a small part in something much bigger, not realizing quite what was happening but feeling the weight of it. I slipped into another reality, somewhere just beyond the dusty curtains and itchy tights, into a place where anything seemed possible. As I finished the year at St. Teresa’s and moved on to Holy Heart of Mary High School, I had my mind set on one thing: it would be an actor’s life for me.

  * * *

  —

  Holy Heart had always been a girls’ school, but times had changed. St. John’s in 1990 had finally caught up with rest of the world in 1960, and now we had co-ed education. The nuns who taught there were forced to confront their worst fear: boys in their school. Holy Heart was four times the size of St. Teresa’s, and it even boasted a professional twelve-hundred-seat theatre. I was desperate to take the theatre arts course.

  My mother went to a parent–teacher night to meet Kevin Lewis, who taught the class. When she got home she said, “I​Don’t​Want​You​To​Take​That​Theatre​Arts​Course. I​Met​The​Teacher​And​I’m​Pretty​Sure​He​Was​Drunk.” Lewis was an accomplished actor who’d worked in both amateur and professional circles. When my mother came into his classroom and announced that her son was interested in acting, he spun her around in his arms and proclaimed, “Madame, I will make your son a star!” I was hooked before I even met the guy.

  I was only fifteen, but after I’d met up with three other like-minded guys we decided to form a sketch comedy troupe, calling ourselves Cat Fud after a panel in a Far Side cartoon. The problem was, we had nowhere to perform. So we headed down to a little local theatre called the LSPU Hall—in its previous life it had been the Longshoremen’s Protective Union and it had kept the name. We were able to get a sixty-forty split on the door, and to my shock we got to keep the larger share. The downtown artsy crowd were no match for a kid from St. Teresa’s. I was going to get paid for doing something I’d have gladly done for free. I felt as if I’d just robbed someone, and it kind of felt good.

  This was the same theatre where my idols Greg Malone and Tommy Sexton and the Wonderful Grand Band had gotten their start. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. Soon it was all I could think of. The four of us—Chad House, Greg Rex, Stephen Guy-McGrath, and me—met every day after school to write and rehearse. As opening night grew closer, sets needed to be built and costumes needed to be sewn. I no longer had time for things like school.

  School schedules were set in stone by the morning announcements. An announcement read by the principal over the PA was like the word of God. So I devised a system. I’d walk down to the office and ask Gladys the secretary for the announcement sheet. “Mr. Lewis asked me to make an announcement for him,” I’d say with my biggest nice-guy smile. Then I’d write on the bottom of the sheet: “The rehearsal for the school play has been cancelled. And would Mark Critch please come to the office.” I’d sit in homeroom, looking as inconspicuous as possible, and wait for the signal that marked the start of announcements.

  Bing! “Good morning, students. This is Sister Georgina. I’d like to begin by congratulating the debating team on their win against Prince of Wales Collegiate this past weekend. And I would like to wish the girls’ senior volleyball team good luck at regionals this coming weekend. Go Holy Heart Hooters! Also, this is a reminder to please bring in your canned food item for the Spirit Week Food Drive. The rehearsal for the school play has been cancelled. And would Mark Critch please come to the office.” Bing!

  With that I’d make my biggest “Don’t talk to me, there’s something bad going on at home” face and walk out the front door, down over the hill past the Basilica, and into the LSPU Hall for rehearsal.

  Our sketch troupe was a success. Soon we were performing five-night sold-out runs three or four times a year. I had found my passion, and was ready to perform anywhere and for anyone. But things came to a head after an afternoon spent downtown rehearsing for our latest show. I walked in the house to find the old man in a particularly sombre mood.

  “Can you come in here for a minute?” he said, his face encircled in a cloud of smoke. I sat down across from him and noticed he was clutching a blue piece of paper. “Would you mind explaining this to me?”

  He unrolled the sheet, revealing it to be a show poster. “I pulled this off a pole downtown.” The telltale staple holes backed him up. It was a poster for Bar None, an alternative bar in an alley off Water Street. It read, “Bar None! One Night Only! Fetish Night! Sparkling Spank-O-Rama! Tickets $5 at the door, $2 if you get paddled. Comedy by Cat Fud.”

  In our eagerness to perform we’d booked ourselves, underage, into a bar. And not just any bar, but one featuring a Fetish Night. I didn’t even know what a fetish was. “You’re not doing this,” Dad said. I nodded and slunk off to my room, wishing my father “got” my art.

  But there were other shows, and as high school went on I delved deeper into comedy and acting. I saw less and less of the St. Teresa’s guys over these years. A couple of them, like Fox, dropped out of school and got jobs. I stayed in school more for the theatre arts than anything else.

  * * *

  —

  Mr. Lewis was more than a teacher. He seemed like a wizard who knew how to safely navigate the dead lands in order to complete some magical quest. He cast me in an absurd play called Waiting for the Bus. In it, I played an elderl
y man who (spoiler alert) dies waiting for (wait for it)…A BUS! This play would be the school’s entry in the provincial drama festival. I’d hit the big time! Mr. Lewis told me to watch old people, to really study them—the way they walk, the way they sit, how they eat, how they talk. Having spent my life surrounded by the elderly, I found this to be the easiest assignment of my life.

  In the mornings, I’d sit and watch Dad with exhaustive concentration as he sat eating his hard-boiled egg. “What the hell are you looking at?” he’d ask. I’d retreat to the living room to observe him from afar. People act differently when they know they’re being watched, so I’d casually peer around the corner as he tapped the shell with a spoon, absent-mindedly parroting his movements and hitting my pencil off the door jamb.

  “Are you losing your mind?” he’d say. “Eggs make old people cranky” I’d record studiously in my notebook. When Mr. Lewis suggested covering my glasses in grease to replicate cataracts, I’d go around banging into people left and right and tripping over the cat more than once. My father would watch me right back, wondering if I’d been sneaking a few beers. We’d follow each other from room to room like two birders, each thinking the other was an Asian crested ibis that had been blown off course by a tropical storm. I’d never worked as hard at anything in my entire life. I longed to impress Mr. Lewis by transforming myself so completely that I’d develop adult-onset diabetes and, if I was lucky, break a hip.

  Then my teacher started missing rehearsals. This wasn’t like him; he was as dedicated to us as I was to the play. Then he started to miss whole weeks of school. Soon he came in to tell us the news himself. His wife, Peggy, had developed pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs. The only hope was a lung transplant, and there was no donor. Her illness was terminal. They had three young sons. Real life had become far more tragic than any play we could ever hope to act in.

  He told us he still wanted us to do the play, but that he wouldn’t be able to be there for us as much as he’d like. He had a friend named Mr. Power who would fill in, and if he could get away from the hospital from time to time, he’d check in on us. I was heartbroken for him and, selfishly, for myself. I was losing my mentor, but if anything I threw myself into the role harder than before, determined to win the drama festival for Mr. Lewis and add the smallest sliver of joy to a very sad time.

  Mr. Power was just as dedicated a thespian. He had a flair for the dramatic, though that spilled over out of theatre arts and into other classes he taught. Once, in religion class, he wanted to show his students what life had been like for Christ, so he brought in a giant cross and carried it over his shoulder from class to class. The weight of it, and its unwieldy nature in the crowded hallways, made him late for all his classes and left him with a bad case of splinter neck. Another time he wanted us to understand how hard it was for blind people, so he taught the whole class blindfolded. As he lectured I watched as student after student tiptoed out of the room until it was just he and I.

  Mr. Power was also absent-minded. He’d often lose his keys, and sometimes we’d find ourselves locked out of the auditorium or even his own classroom. The nuns had told him that if he lost his keys one more time he’d lose key privileges altogether and would have to fetch one of them to let him in whenever he had to access his own room. One day I arrived for rehearsal to find Mr. Power pacing the classroom like a caged tiger.

  “Critchie,” he exclaimed, “I can’t find the things, there. Driving me nuts. I can’t find the machine.” Everything to Mr. Power was a machine. A set of keys was a machine, a pen was a machine, even a textbook was a machine. The machine in question—his keys—was right in front of him. They were on his desk, as plain as day, but he was so worried about the nuns confiscating them that he’d willed himself a case of key blindness.

  “You look in the auditorium,” I said comfortingly, “I’ll keep looking here. We’ll find them.” I thought it would be a great prank to take his keys and drive his car around to the front of the school while he was gone. He’d walk out to the parking lot at the end of the day and think his car had been stolen. Perfection.

  “Hey, Lumpy,” I said to my pal, “you can drive, right?” Lumpy had been a very heavy-set guy who’d lost so much weight over one summer that when we met up again in September I thought he was a completely different person. When I saw a kid wearing a thick white sweater that I remembered Lumpy wearing, I said, “Hey! Where did you get that sweater? Lumpy used to wear one just like that,” and the kid replied, “Mark, I AM Lumpy.”

  I grabbed the keys off Mr. Power’s desk and Lumpy and I made our way out to our teacher’s car. We hopped in, Lumpy turned the key, and the engine roared to life. I smiled. We were about to become legend.

  Just as Lumpy touched the gas, Mr. Power came running out. “Mark! Mark!” he shouted. Lumpy hit the brake and we both jutted forward. We were busted. We sat frozen, like two prisoners caught in the bright white glow of a spotlight as we attempted to climb over the wall. “Mark,” our teacher continued to bellow, smacking his fist on the passenger window. I rolled it down, expecting the worst.

  “Yes, sir?” I winced. Lumpy gazed down at his lap.

  “You found my keys!” Mr. Power said joyfully. “Excellent!” He wasn’t angry at all. He was overjoyed. “Give them to me!”

  I twisted the keys from the ignition and the car made an unhealthy crunching sound. I passed them to my teacher, who half danced his way back to the school, leaving us partially pulled out of his parking place and feeling as if we had just been T-boned.

  As the drama festival approached our small cast honed our performance, armed with Mr. Lewis’s notes and Mr. Power’s keys. Leah Lewis played my wife, future Canadian music star Damhnait Doyle played an octogenarian prostitute, and Sindhu Johnson, a sixteen-year-old South Asian girl, played a twentysomething African-American man. This was Newfoundland in the 90s. You took your diversity where you could get it.

  The festival was held at the LSPU Hall, the same theatre I’d rented just a year before. On the big night we huddled in the tiny dressing room, the air crackling with nervous energy. I followed the natural lines of my face with the greasepaint to age myself the necessary sixty-five years. I coloured my hair grey with a silver spray that looked and smelled like something they’d warn asbestos miners not to breathe in. I smudged my glasses until I couldn’t see a thing in front of me. I was ready.

  The dressing-room door opened and a familiar voice boomed, “Break a leg, guys!” It couldn’t be. I looked to see the voice’s owner, but all I could make out was a dark blur, as if I were speaking to the whistle-blower in an episode of 60 Minutes. I removed my glasses to confirm my suspicions. It was Mr. Lewis. Even though his wife was very close to the end, he’d decided to leave the hospital just long enough to watch the forty-five minutes of high school dramatics. He knew how much that would mean to us.

  Tapping his belt, he pointed out a pager. For anyone under forty, a pager was a one-way communications device. You could “text” your phone number to someone who carried a pager and then they’d call that number from a pay phone to find out why they were needed. Only medical professionals carried pagers. If someone had one they were either a doctor or a drug dealer. Mr. Lewis had it for a more personal reason.

  “If this goes off I have to leave,” he said, explaining himself. The weight of what wasn’t being said hung in the room for a moment, cooling the air enough for the crackle of nerves to dissipate.

  I put my glasses back on because I didn’t want him to see the tears forming in the corners of my eyes. Nor did I want to see if he could see them. Mr. Lewis left the room and I stumbled up the stairs. If he was willing to be there for us, I was going to be there for him. I stood behind the black curtain and listened as the audience settled in. I love listening to audiences before a show. The loud ones will be easy crowds. They’re excited to be there. They got their babysitter. The work week is over. They had a nice dinner somewhere and they might even go out for a drink later. If an a
udience member sees an old friend a few rows over and shouts out a “Tim! Tim McAuliffe! What are you doing after this?” you know you’re golden.

  But I couldn’t hear the crowd. I didn’t listen to the last-minute notes from Mr. Power. All I could do was listen for Mr. Lewis’s pager to go off. Blinded as I was, I could tell when the lights dimmed. Black. Then they slowly came up again to the familiar blue/green of our lighting scheme. I stepped out onto the stage, feeling the light on my face as I hit my mark. I could hear the lines delivered with amateur earnestness by my fellow actors. But I kept listening for that pager.

  The play ended. As the audience stood up and applauded I looked over the rims of my cloudy glasses just in time to see Mr. Lewis push his way through the fire door and back into the cold dark night. Peggy Lewis did not die that night, but she passed soon after. Two of their three sons, Kevin Jr. and Chad, have also passed from the same terrible disease. Kevin Lewis has experienced more tragedy in his life than most Shakespearian characters, but he never stopped inspiring young people to run away and join the circus. I was following the Pied Piper far from the city walls, and I was lost in his music.

  * * *

  —

  As the end of my senior year approached, the old man asked me to go for a walk in the hills behind the radio station.

  Dad always dressed a certain way. The lowest he would go was business casual. I watched him struggle behind me as he climbed the rocky hill in brown dress shoes. “So you’re serious about this acting stuff, are ya?” Oh no! This was a “talk.” My father and I had never had a talk. There’d never been a “birds and the bees” discussion or anything of that sort. Everyone in my house just blissfully ignored any kind of “real talk,” so I was shocked by this breaking of the unwritten rule.