by Mark Critch
“Yeah, I think,” I stammered uneasily. “I’d like to. For a bit, anyway.” The words sounded ridiculous to me as soon as I said them. It was almost impossible to make a living in the arts anywhere in the world, let alone a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. My father had worked hard to climb “tooth and nail” up from a life of poverty, and now I was going to be a starving artist. It seemed selfish of me to expect to be able to do what I wanted and, for the first time since starting high school, I felt the weight of reality.
“It can be a hell of a hard life,” he said, looking anywhere but at me. I was thankful not to have to face him. “It can be filled with a lot of disappointment, a lot of heartache. I don’t want that for you.”
I could feel my chest tightening around my heart. I wanted to run. I wanted to ignore him. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t understand, that I knew what I was getting myself into, but I knew that he did and that I didn’t. I walked alongside, avoiding his gaze. We were both trying not to look at each other, and in our desperation we accidentally locked eyes a couple of times.
“I have a friend. You know him. Andy Richards. I hope you don’t mind, but I had a chat with him and he said he could get you a job researching deeds. I know it doesn’t sound very exciting, but there’s room to move up. And it’s a start.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was moved that he’d been thinking about my future that much; I’d had no idea he was so concerned about me. But I couldn’t imagine a worse hell than a lifetime researching deeds. Surely that couldn’t be a real career? He may as well have said, “I can get you a job mixing beige paint.” It sounded like a life sentence, and yet I didn’t have the heart to say no.
“Oh. Cool,” I said, furious with myself for every dishonest syllable that dripped from my mouth. “That sounds really great but—uh—I, um…” We carried on without speaking for a bit, the sound of gravel under shoes filling in the spaces until one of us had the courage to say something.
“Look,” he said, slicing the silence, “I know it’s not what you want. I just wanted you to know that—well, it’s something. But you don’t have to take it. Your mother was worried and I—well, I think you’ll be fine. But she wanted me to talk to you. Okay?”
I nodded. It was okay. It was better than that. We walked on in silence, our feet crunching the stones as the sun set on the hills of VOCM valley.
* * *
—
I got a call from my brother one night. There was much excitement as the phone rang. Misty the cat jumped from the telephone table and Dad asked who was calling at this hour. It was eight p.m.
I hadn’t heard from Mike much in the past year. He’d long since moved out into an apartment on John Street, just a stone’s throw from City Hall, right around where the slums in which my father had been raised once stood. “Hey,” he said. “I need a roommate. Are you ready to move out yet?” This confused me to no end. Still, it was an incredible opportunity. I’d be within walking distance of the LSPU Hall. I could really get my feet wet, and I’d be ready to pounce on whatever opportunity presented itself. I had absolutely no way to pay the rent, but that didn’t stop me.
I hadn’t been living with Mike long when I got a phone call from Dad. “There’s something wrong with your cat, you should come and get it.” My cat? He’d won her in a card game the same week I was born. She was nineteen years old. Misty was Siamese, and was about the size of Siam—she was a very fat cat. She’d been living the good life for a long time. Her dish was always full, and when it came to eating, always was never soon enough. She was so used to eating anything she wanted that she’d undergone a couple of surgeries to remove from her stomach all the inappropriate things she’d ingested. Garland, string, an eraser: all had fallen victim to her cavernous jaws. Misty would walk to her bowl, empty it, then fall asleep in the centre of the kitchen, halfway to wherever she was going, worn out from the exertion.
I returned to the house to find that nothing had changed. Dad was still smoking in the kitchen. Mom was on the phone with Alice again, trapped in the same eternal loop of conversation. “YourEars? HowAreYourEars? YourEARS?!?”
“Your cat is in the bathroom,” Dad said. I opened the door to see Misty lying on the floor, looking like a pile of bones that had been stuffed into a big, empty, furry sack. She’d lost a lot of weight and didn’t move an inch when I walked into the room.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“She won’t eat anything. Won’t drink anything. She doesn’t come when she’s called. I don’t think she can see anything, poor thing. She’s just been lying there like that. I think it’s time.” I called a taxi and then bundled her up carefully in a pink blanket and placed her gently in a cardboard box. When the car came I told the driver to take us to the vet. As I stroked her fur I could feel her lean into me slightly as she tried her best to make a sound.
I rubbed her forehead, knowing that taking her in was an act of kindness but still feeling like a traitor. When we got to the clinic I explained to the receptionist that I had a very, very old cat that needed to be put down.
“Oh, my. What a sin,” she said. She probably said that a dozen times a day, but I still believed her. I took a seat between a man with a golden retriever and a lady with a budgie in a cage, relieved when Misty didn’t hiss or howl at either of them.
“Misty,” the receptionist called out into the waiting room. I thought this a bit weird. She was the patient, but was she going to walk in by herself? Was she going to pay the bill? I picked up the box containing my oldest friend and made my way inside. Misty lay perfectly still. Was she in a lot of pain now, and had she been that way for long? Had I not moved out, would I have noticed sooner than my parents had? Maybe I could have done something for her or brought her in before it was too late. I felt like it was all my fault. I felt like I’d let her down.
“What seems to be the problem?” the veterinarian asked as she walked into the examining room.
“Well,” I began. I wanted to say, I have a nineteen-year-old cat in a box. What do you think the problem is? “My cat is pretty sick. I need to have her put down.”
“Do you mind if I just examine her for a moment?” I placed Misty’s box on the examination table and took a seat.
“Tell me what’s wrong with Misty,” she said, her hands on Misty’s back. I started to worry that I’d made the wrong decision and that she’d be in even worse pain than before.
“She hasn’t been eating. She hasn’t been drinking. She’s been lying in the same room for days and I think she might have gone blind.”
The vet looked at me for a moment before checking Misty for a final time. She began to speak, then stopped. She looked at me quizzically, as if trying to remember something that had just been on the tip of her tongue. Finally, she said, “Well, sir, that’s because your cat is dead.”
Misty had died in the car on the way down to the vet. I’d brought a dead cat in to be put to sleep.
“Oh.” I sat in silence for a moment, trying to think of what to say. Maybe “But she was with us just a minute ago” or “My parents assured me that she’d been alive very recently”?
The vet joined me in my silence, either out of respect for the dead or embarrassment for me. We sat there staring down at Misty’s earthly remains lying peacefully in her cardboard box. I could see then that she was dead. It’s funny how in moments of great sadness you cling to any shred of hope you can. Even after nineteen years of furry, feline obesity, I still expected Misty to be there for me. I felt a little more alone in the world, a little more grown up.
“There will be no charge for that,” the vet added before fleeing the marsh of awkwardness in her examination room. I went home, and for the first time, home felt like a place other than the house I’d grown up in.
* * *
—
The biggest theatre in Newfoundland and Labrador is the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s. Built in 1967, it holds t
welve hundred red plush seats under a ceiling filled with thousands of twinkling lights. In honour of its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Rising Tide Theatre company was to remount the very first play ever presented there: Tomorrow Will Be Sunday. Based on a novel by Harold Horwood, it was the coming-of-age story of a young outport boy who experiences a sexual awakening with both a beautiful local girl who’s also having an affair with the teacher and a local preacher who’d molested him. The play scandalized audience members at the ACC’s opening. Some even walked out.
The remount, under the pen of the brilliant playwright and poet Des Walsh, promised to be even more risqué. It was to have a director from Montreal, and would feature a set by renowned Canadian visual artist Gerry Squires. After several auditions, in which I ended up kissing half of the actresses in town, I landed the lead role of young Eli Pallisher. I had a job with a professional theatre company, helmed by a respected and successful director. I was a real actor.
The director looked every inch the artist. He was a giant of a man with long hair, a scraggly beard, and a mischievous twinkle in his eye, but he took the work very seriously. The rest of the cast were all heavy hitters in the East Coast theatrical scene, so I spent most of my time in rehearsal trying to act as if I knew what I was doing. I did a lot of thoughtful nodding around the coffee pot as motivations and character choices were discussed.
I was too busy trying to choke down the murky brew to give any thought to performance. I’d never had coffee before. Rehearsal-room coffee is thick and strong, fortified by the ghosts of several decades’ worth of past productions that clung to the pot and stained the glass. It is not for the weak of heart, and my heart was already beating against my ribs like a sea cadet’s mallet on a glockenspiel during a Christmas parade.
More than anything, I wanted to please this director. He was everything my naive self wanted to be. He’d made it in the theatrical world. He was smart, talented, experienced. He’d worked all across the country, and had even directed Shakespeare in Moscow. I was desperate for him to teach me, to show me how to become an actor.
The content of the play was just as suggestive as promised. In one scene, my character lies with Brother Eli, the community’s preacher, under the same blanket on a hunting trip.
We hear the sounds of paced breathing, shifting of bodies.
Eli: Your hands…they’re cold.
Brother John: It’s okay, Eli…just close your eyes. It’s okay.
We hear the sounds of paced breathing, shifting of bodies.
Eli: Stop…
Brother John: Don’t you like how that feels?
Pause.
Eli: I don’t know.
This was not Guys and Dolls. In the play, two mentors fight for Eli’s loyalty. One, Christopher Simms, is an open-minded, poetry-loving teacher. The other, Brother John, is a fire-and-brimstone-spouting Bible thumper. Christopher steals Eli’s girlfriend, Virginia. The preacher pushes Eli into a sexual relationship. When Eli rejects him, Brother John accuses Christopher of molesting Eli, resulting in the teacher being sent to jail.
A key scene features Brother John spying on Christopher and Eli as they wrestle playfully after a swim. We were rehearsing the scene when our director leaned forward with a suggestion.
“You should be naked,” he said. The room suddenly fell quiet. I could hear the hellish coffee hissing in its pot across the room, demanding release from its glass prison.
“Oh. Right. Yeah,” I said, nodding pensively as I often did when things started going over my head. Did he mean naked as in undressed, or naked emotionally? Did he mean completely nude, penis-out naked, or swim trunks naked?
“They need to be innocent. Pure. As God made them, with nothing to hide,” he growled, chewing on an unlit cigar. No one had ever been naked onstage in Newfoundland before. Sure, there were strippers at the Eager Beaver bar downtown, but even they wore their socks.
“Of course,” the director added, leaning forward again, “you’d have to be comfortable with it. It would be for the good of the play.” The subject matter was already going to jolt my parents. I couldn’t imagine what Dad would think seeing his youngest son wrestling another man nude on the main stage at the Arts and Culture Centre. This was not Montreal. There was no way that I, or anyone else in town for that matter, was going to be comfortable with it.
“Sure,” I said, every eye in the room on me. “Absolutely. No problem. For the good of the play.”
“MyGodMark,WeAlreadyGotTheTicketsForYourShow,” my mother shelled through the receiver like Hitler during the Blitz. “TheClosestWeCouldGetWasRowM. TheMissusOnThePhoneSaidIt’sGoingToSellOutForSure.”
“It’s okay, Mom,” I whimpered. “You guys don’t need to come. I think there’s a Bob Hope special on that night.”
“Don’tBeSoFoolish,” she roared. “IHeardThePremierWasComing. MyGod. We’reSomeProud.”
Perfect. No sense in half the city seeing my penis. Best to have everyone see it at once.
I tried to put my family and friends out of my mind. This was the theatre, and theatre was meant to make people feel things. If anger and shame were some of those feelings, then so be it. I threw myself into the work, more determined than ever to give the play my all.
We were rehearsing a scene where Virginia and Eli console each other after Christopher has been wrongfully sent to jail. It was a tender encounter that, played wrong, might seem to come out of nowhere for the audience. It had to be done just right.
Eli is silent. Virginia moves closer to him. Eli says nothing as Virginia leans into him and kisses him passionately.
Virginia: We love each other…the three of us. You, me, Christopher…we’ll all be damned together.
They make love.
The director leaned forward in his chair, watching us and thinking. I lay frozen on top of Janet Edmonds, the amazingly talented actress playing Virginia, as we waited for some note, some ingenious hint as to how to make the scene better.
“What if you were both…naked?” I was beginning to see a pattern. “The lights would dim, of course, but before they go out completely, we would see you both naked on the stage. Revealing yourselves to one another.”
“Or we could just kiss? That might work too?” I suggested. Janet was strikingly beautiful, and I had no intention of her seeing me naked. Thankfully she wasn’t in the wrestling scene, and so had been spared the sight.
“No,” the director directed, “this scene needs to be powerful. You are revealing yourselves to one another. You are admitting the truth of your relationship with Christopher. You are naked emotionally. The audience needs to see that you are actually naked as well.”
“Oh,” I thought. “I guess so. I mean, what do I know? I’m only eighteen. I’m from Newfoundland. He’s an accomplished director from Montreal.” To a small-town kid like me nudity was a big thing, but to a guy from Montreal it was nothing. Quebecers pretty much do their grocery shopping in the nude, I told myself, never having been farther than Stephenville.
For me, the play’s big moment came at the end. Brother John has been exposed and cast out from the community. Virginia and Christopher have gone off together to St. John’s to get married. Eli is left behind in a community that has grown far too small for him.
Eli, out for a walk, stops for a moment where he and Christopher swam and where he last held Virginia. Then he hears it, the unmistakable cry of an eagle somewhere overhead. He hears Virginia’s voice somewhere in the sky above.
Virginia: (voiceover) Like eagles, Eli…free as eagles.
He stands with his arms outstretched.
Eli: (shouting) Here I am, Lord…your obedient servant.
Strike me down in all your righteous glory. If not, let me walk to the end of the world alone.
Curtain.
I stood in the rehearsal room with arms outstretched, spent. My chest heaved in and out as I emoted throu
gh every pore. The room was silent. The rest of the cast were lost in thought, running over their own lines or jotting down notes in the margins of their scripts. The director leaned back in his chair, tapping his lips with the butt of his cigar.
“What if,” he said, one thumb absent-mindedly tugging at his suspender strap, “what if you were naked?”
I was still standing spread-eagle with my arms over my head, looking like one of Michelangelo’s anatomical studies. I could not imagine a more vulnerable position. “To be honest,” I muttered, “I don’t think I’d be very comfortable naked.”
“Exactly,” the director said, his eyes afire with a flame of passion for Canada Council–funded theatre. “Eli is naked emotionally. He has nothing left to lose! He should be standing naked before his maker, challenging God himself!”
“Well,” I thought, “when you put it that way.”
* * *
—
As opening night approached, we moved from the rehearsal room to the main stage. The set Gerry Squires had created was incredible: a giant painted backdrop of blues, greens, and browns that perfectly evoked the Newfoundland landscape. The entire stage was one big Gerry Squires painting that changed with the lighting cues as effortlessly as the ocean changed from day to day. There was no time to feel nervous about nudity: the blocking was set in stone, exits and entrances were timed, performances were honed. It was exhausting work, but it was worth it. The play was truly special, and I was giving it my all. I was lost in it.
I’d gone so deep into my role that I completely lost sight of the world outside our little group. This play was the most important thing in my life, and I was prepared to do anything for it. I would willingly bare my soul, and my body, for my art.
The lights dimmed on opening night and the sound of a thousand people settling into their seats gave way to our soundscape.
Eli Pallisher and his father, Elias, are standing on the family wharf. Elias is preparing for a trip in his motorboat…sounds of wind and seagulls are heard, then Eli looks to the sky.