“You called me Philly Four-Eyes.”
“Correct. Well, that’s what you called yourself on the message machine.”
“Oh! I left a message!”
“Yes, last evening. Don’t you remember?”
“Well … no. Not exactly.”
“You asked if we could check the books, that’s what you said, check the books, and see if we could dig out any information on a Norman Kitchen.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You understand, Phil, that we don’t really keep those kinds of books.”
“No. No, I guess not.”
“I don’t even know what kind of books those might be! Might I ask what this is all about?”
“You see, Norman Kitchen and I both attended Wolf Cubs at the church, in the early sixties.”
“Indeed? Well, I really should be able to help you then.”
“Why? Were you a Cub, too?”
“I was the scoutmaster for many years.”
“You were the guy who held Akela? The guy with the really bony knees?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s me. Not too bony.”
“No, no. Not at all. I just remember they were a little bony. It’s Phil. Little Philip McQuigge. Don’t you remember me?”
“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry, Phil. There were just so many young lads over the years.”
“I wore glasses. Really, really thick ones.”
“There were several boys who wore spectacles.”
“I was stocky. Husky was the word they used back then. My mom bought all my clothes from the Boy’s Husky section at Eaton’s.”
“Mmmm … I’m so sorry.”
“I had a brother named Jay.”
“Oh, yes! I remember Jay.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes, Jay. He would play the piano in the rectory. He would come over often, to the church, and he would play the piano. Once or twice we even let him have a go at the organ, mind you, back then we couldn’t afford a real pipe organ, still can’t, although we have mounted a campaign, a drive, perhaps you might care to donate a few dollars?”
“Jay would go over to the church?”
“Yes. McQuigge, that’s right, it’s coming back to me now. A strange name. Jay McQuigge. You boys didn’t have a father.”
“Well, we were rankers. Rankers don’t really have fathers.”
“Er, ah, beg your pardon?”
“Sorry. I just meant, yes, we had no father.”
“Was your mother a divorcée?”
“No, a widow. My father died. In a car accident. He sailed a blood-red Edsel into an abutment of the Diamond Bridge. Remember the Diamond Bridge?”
“Yes indeed. How old were you when this happened?”
“Oh, I was young. Four. Nobody really knows much about it. There was no evidence of steering failure, the weather was good, and back then there was no such thing as blood-alcohol levels, so there’s no way of knowing what happened. I have to admit, Bill, that I have entertained the notion that he suicided. I entertain the notion especially late at night, especially these days.”
“Especially these days?”
“It is not insignificant to me that my father died while crossing the Don River. My father died going through the ravine.”
“Ah. The ravine can be a very dangerous place.”
“Who are you, Bill?”
“Who am I in what sense, Phil?”
“Well, you tell me you were the scoutmaster, and I remember a tall man with a tallow complexion, clutching the broomstick that held the plastic wolf’s head. I remember your knuckles would blanch, that’s how seriously you undertook that task. You were a kindly man, but you didn’t say much.”
“I see. Yes. That sounds like me, all right.”
“You showed me how to tie knots. And I was good at it, the best in the whole troop.”
“Pack.”
“Yes, the best in the whole pack. That’s probably the thing I’m best at in life, tying knots.”
“What is it you do for a living, Phil?”
“Oh … I’m in the television business. I was. Writer slash producer.”
“Anything I might know?”
“Did you ever watch Padre?”
“Yes, indeed. In fact, that show is the only reason my grandchildren find me in the least bit with it.”
“You actually cradled the phone under your chin and made those little quote marks when you said that, didn’t you?”
“Now that you mention it, I did!”
“So, what are you talking about, anyway? Why did my show alter your grandchildren’s perception of you?”
“Well, you know. Because I too am a man of the cloth.”
“Yipes!!”
“Hmm?”
“You’re a priest?”
“We don’t have priests in the United Church of Canada, Phil. You know that, don’t you?”
“And all the time you were holding that wolf’s head—Akela, dib dib dib—you were a priest?”
“A minister. Retired now, but they can’t seem to clear me out of the place. I attend to the clerical work, I answer the telephones, check the messages … so what is the deal here, Phil? You and this Kitchen boy were close friends and now you want to reconnect?”
“Something like that. We were never all that connected.”
“Google him!”
“I don’t have access to the Internet, Father. Don’t have it, don’t need it. I’m more comfortable with ancient technology, like this telephone. I prefer real human contact.”
“Are you making a joke, Phil?”
“No. I don’t think so. I guess I am.”
“If you want real human contact, come by the church sometime.”
“I’d love to. But I’m somewhat busy these days. Working on a book, kind of a memoir. Only I’m calling it a novel because my memory is so fuzzy. Right now I’m writing about my dinner with Rainie van der Glick. I really should be getting back to that.”
“Well, I’m here. Anytime you want to talk. But I wouldn’t leave it too long, Phil.”
“You mean, I should attend to matters of the spirit whilst I may. Seek my salvation before it’s too late.”
“That, and the fact that I’m eighty-seven years old.”
“Got it. Nice talking to you, Bill.”
11 | WHAT HAPPENED, INEXACTLY
TRUTH-TELLING IS EASY. AT LEAST, IT CAN BE. THAT IS THE OBSERVATION I am delivering, although you should know that it is, what, two o’clock in the morning. I am hovering over the laptop. Beside me is a bottle of wine, three-quarters full. But you know what? That’s not the bottle I’m drinking from, ha ha, fooled everybody. No, in the kitchenette there is a soldier an inch away from being dead, that’s the baby I’ve been sucking on. There are also a few beer cans retired to the recycling, enabling me to forget that I ever drank them, that they ever existed.
You wonder what I’ve been doing all these hours? When Reverend Nystrom woke me up this morning, I implied that I was going to buckle down and get to work right away. And that truly was my intention, but somehow I’ve managed to fritter the day away. I had errands to run, which is how I refer to the act of walking to the liquor store and buying booze. They’ve opened a new LCBO a few blocks away, a huge one with an extensive Vintages section, which is where they really gouge you for the plonk. Still, I tend to select from the Vintages section, hoping to give the impression I’m some sort of connoisseur. Then I take my purchase to the cash desks and select the queue I will stand in. My selection is not based on length of line, rather on which clerk is working the till, and how many days it’s been since he or she has seen me. I’ve got them on a four-day rotation. Anyway, I bought some wine, then on the way home I impulsively ducked into the public library. All right, all right, I admit it, I pulled Baxter down from its perch in the “New and Notable” shelf, I leafed through briefly and determined that it was much like Hooper’s other books, dense and impenetrable. And then I waited for a very long time for one of the computers
to free up. There were four terminals, but young Asian men occupied them all, each intent on, I don’t know, proving Fermat’s Theorem or something. They clouded the screens with symbols I couldn’t fathom, strings of numbers that seemed to stretch into infinity, squared and cubed and squared again. Finally one of them was successful at whatever he was doing and he signed off and I jumped into the wooden chair and called up the Google screen. Then I entered the name “Norman Kitchen,” and was surprised to find no fewer than forty-eight of them spread across the North American continent. Forty-eight men with elaborate hairdos and fat, blubbery lips. Forty-eight men who’d had something terrible done to them before they were able to discover that life held beauty and wonder. I lost my stomach for the search, wandered out of the library and went for a long walk, which ended when I passed through the doors of Jilly’s, a strip club. I sat there and looked at naked women and wondered if I would ever feel anything again. I wondered if I had ever felt anything. I came home, drank one of the bottles of wine—a very tasty Pinot Noir—slept it off, got up, and even though it seems like about an hour and a half’s worth of activity, it’s taken me until now… two o’clock in the morning.
So where was I, right, talking about truth-telling. What I’m getting at is that it is sometimes easy to tell the truth, as long as you are operating within a certain circle of humanity. Of humanness. Here’s my metaphor. The truth, the ugly truth, I represent as a hammertoe. Know what one is? John Hooper has one, his little toe seems to come from someone else’s body, it is tiny and lacks a nail of any significance and plays no part in the day-to-day operation of Hooper’s foot. When he removes his right shoe and sock, this little appendage waves happily, hovering almost a full inch from the floor. And sometimes, at parties, Hooper will denude his foot and demonstrate his odd toe, and everyone is vaguely repulsed for a moment, and then someone, usually a woman, will want to touch the thing, and Hooper will end up in bed with yet another beauty. I’ve mentioned that I hate the man, correct? He slept with Veronica, you know that, despite which, his novel Baxter is receiving excellent reviews. Soon they are going to announce the short list for the Giller book prize, and I’ll be surprised if Baxter isn’t there. I’ll be surprised if it isn’t there and I’ll kill myself if it is—anyway, the truth is like Hooper’s hammertoe, and it is easy enough to reveal. But me, you know, I have no little hammertoe of a deformity, instead I am like the Elephant Man, shrouded from top to bottom with filthy rags. Any small parting of the cloth and people bolt, howling with fear. I am not an animal, I shriek at their disappearing backsides, although as the sound of the footsteps fades away, I fall silent and think, Oh, who am I trying to kid?
But Rainie van der Glick was with me as I donned the rags, wasn’t she? As blemishes, boils and deformities manifested themselves, there was always a bit of time before I covered them up, a few days when they were exposed. There is no mirror for the soul, after all, one can only judge by the look of revulsion in the eyes of the citizenry. My belaboured point is, Rainie knew all about my failings. And didn’t really seem to mind, kept nodding and shovelling pasta into her mouth, pausing three times during the meal to light cigarettes, smearing the filter-ends with bright red lipstick.
“Phil, Phil, Phil,” she said, “what a mess you’ve made.” She touched my hand, not especially tenderly—she prodded it almost as though testing for life, pressing down and releasing, seeing if blood would return to the clammy flesh.
“We’re out of wine,” I pointed out.
“I have some, um …” Rainie moved her mouth to one side to aid in taking mental inventory, but she quickly released it. “I got booze.”
“Good.”
“Don’t drink too much, though,” she said, rising from the table. “Don’t forget, I am Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy Fucks.”
I bet you want to know what happened, don’t you? Not with Rainie van der Glick, although you no doubt want to know what happened on that front, too, but I bet you want to know what, precisely, my confession entailed, what I did to end up where I am today.
Seven years ago, I created a television series called Padre. You may very well have seen it, especially if you’re Canadian, because the series was on the air for a grand total of one hundred and fifty-six hours. You may also have seen the show if you live in either Germany or Japan, where it is something of a hit. It has always struck me as odd that the show is appreciated in those countries, because, as a postwar baby, I tend to view those nations as the Enemy. I have attended a fan-fest in Japan (they hold them annually) where I was confronted by an auditorium full of people, most of them men, most of them dressed in clerical garb and wearing white ten-gallon hats. If you live in the United States of America, it is not likely that you have seen the show, where it ran for a grand total of two episodes on UPN. The second episode actually made the Guinness Book of Records: lowest ratings for a network television show. And I wrote it!
The premise of Padre is simple, compelling and totally stolen from The Bullet and the Cross. I have never been called on it, because a) more people saw the second episode in the U.S. than saw The Bullet and the Cross and b) I lifted my premise from the B story, that of Father White, the virile clergyman. In Padre, Edward Milligan portrays Gabe Quinton, a pastor sent westward by the higher-ups in some church, a Christian denomination characterized largely by the apparency that their ministers have very little actual ministering to do, and therefore have lots of time left over to duke it out with blackguards and ne’er-do-wells. Father Quinton does give the occasional sermon, but they are almost always interrupted by gun-toting desperadoes. If I lived in the fictional Boone City, I wouldn’t attend one of Father Quinton’s gatherings for anything, but in the world I created the little church is always filled to the rafters with wholesome people, fresh-faced farmers and their progeny, chaste-looking women with large breasts.
The show was popular (at least in the unlikely axis of Canada, Germany and Japan) largely because of Edward Milligan. Milligan was a stupefyingly handsome man, and his perfect features were laid out in such a manner as to suggest a purity no amount of evil could sully. I point to his features because he surely lacked the acting ability to portray this innocence, which was in violent opposition to his true nature.
The last credit in the title sequence read: CREATED BY PHILIP MCQUIGGE. The card immediately preceding this one identified me as the Executive Producer. Those of you unfamiliar with the television industry may wonder what, exactly, that position entails, so by way of explanation, I will describe a typical day. Actually, if I describe a day that occurred in the last six months of the show’s production, you may get a pretty good idea of what went wrong.
I enter the production facilities at about nine-thirty in the morning; shooting doesn’t start until two-thirty, because it has been pushed an hour. Production went late the night before, and the unions are very strict about turnarounds, so although the boards announce a call-time of eight o’clock for six consecutive days, we are now starting in the afternoon. And, I’ll point out, one doesn’t get to this point without spending thousands of extra dollars on overtime, so I enter the building with a dour expression pasted firmly on my face.
I choose the door that is closest to my office, but that still forces me to walk down thirty-five yards of corridor. I have considered having a door built so that I could enter my office directly, but there is no money for anything like that; the budget barely covers production costs, and there are always overages, particularly when Jimmy Yu is directing, which is the case on this day.
So I walk the thirty-five yards, and people descend upon me. “Phil!” “Phil!”
Willy Props comes at me toting a cumbersome machine, a typewriter so antiquated that it looks almost postmodern, the keys ovular, the striking pegs thin and bent like spider’s legs. “Check it out,” commands Willy, who is perpetually drug-addled. “For 607.” I have to stop to think: we are filming 605, this is the last day of pre-production for 606, so this is for, um, right, Barker’s scrip
t, which is in pre-pre. I vaguely remember the plot twist that necessitated an ancient typewriting machine, but I thought I told him to deep-six it.
“Look,” says Willy, “this baby is a hundred and sixteen years old.”
“Where did you get it?”
Willy Props has to think about that. He remembers. “Oh, yeah. There’s a typewriter museum in, what, like, Canton, Ohio. We’re renting this baby.”
“For …?”
“Two thou. American.”
“Too steep. Send it back.”
“But—”
“See, the thing is, Willy, there is magic in television. But no one around here ever trusts the stuff. We don’t need to get an actual hundred-and-sixteen-year-old typewriter. We could shoot a dishwasher and just say it’s a hundred-and-sixteen-year-old typewriter, and everyone—everyone except Ernst Kibble—would believe us. Send it back.”
Ernst Kibble, in case you are wondering, is a man who lives in, I don’t know, a rabbit warren in Northern Ontario. He watches Padre faithfully, but has no interest in the show other than the spotting and reporting of historical inaccuracies. He’s the supreme bullet-counter. You know what I mean, right? For example, in the crowd at the Galaxy Odeon there were at least four kids who, upon commencement of any gunfight in the Old West, would start counting aloud the bullets fired. If there was ever a seventh bullet discharged from a six-shooter these little creatures would howl derisively. Bullet-counters grow up to be accountants, for the most part, although Ernst Kibble has the syndrome too profoundly to function in society. He once pointed out to us—via an email, a godsend to the insane—that the stars in the night sky were in an alignment that belied our stated time of year. “That is simply not a November vistage!”
At any rate, Willy turns around dolefully. I make a short bolt toward my office, but I am confronted by Dirk Mayhew, the production manager. “He’s insane!”
“I know he’s insane. He’s also a genius.” No, we’re not discussing Mr. Kibble, rather Jimmy Yu, the director.
“Fire him!”
“I can’t fire him,” I sigh wearily, “there’s only two days left in the shoot.”
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