by Alex Caine
Even if we weren’t hurting for money, I still kept my “ear to the tier” as they say in prison, my eyes open for almost any interesting opportunity. It was in my blood and the instinct had served me well, from getting by on the streets of Hull to pretending to be a Bandidos businessman.
For instance, one day I was watching TV and a guy knocked at the door. “Your stuff’s here,” he announced, pointing at an eighteen-wheeler parked in front.
“Okaaaaay . . ” I said, not knowing what he was talking about.
All my things from Blaine and Vancouver had been shipped out to me by the DEA, taking me entirely by surprise. I had simply written that stuff off, left it behind like a shed skin. Now I suddenly owned four TVs and three VCRs, not to mention far too much furniture (including the leather set stolen from the immigration officer’s house). It made for one big yard sale.
It also allowed me to make $15,000 from the RCMP. The DEA had included in the shipment the candy-apple red Harley FXRT that it had bought for me for $5,500 from Jersey Jerry. I had no need or desire for it. In fact, I didn’t even want to look at it—those kinds of bikes tend to attract trouble. A couple of months later, Scott phoned me up saying the RCMP were launching an undercover biker probe out west and needed a convincing Harley. Did I know where they might get one? I sure did. Since they didn’t have funding yet for a full investigation, I agreed to sell it to them on a conditional installment plan: $5,000 down, $10,000 more after thirty days if the project took off. If it didn’t, the bike would come back to me. The Mounties paid up and I never saw the bike again. I have no idea whether it led to a successful investigation or not.
Other money-making schemes were more straightforwardly entrepreneurial. Thanks to the guy who shot Phil, we’d spent the Christmas of 1984 in Florida, and I’d been shocked by the ridiculous prices down there for real Christmas trees. So, almost two years later, I decided to get in on the racket myself. I borrowed a good-sized trailer from my landlord, attached it to my pickup and drove up to northern New Brunswick, where I bought about 250 tightly bundled trees for two dollars each. Then I hightailed it down the 1-95 to Homestead, where Frank and I set up a stand outside the store of a gun dealer he knew. A few weeks later I was back in Saint John in time for Christmas with more than ten thousand dollars in pure profit.
In the eighteen months we’d been in Saint John, we’d become reasonably good friends with our landlord, Mahmoud, and his family. It would have been hard not to, they were such hospitable people. Even though we were just their tenants, they had invited us to the wedding of their eldest daughter, Natalie, and Bashir a couple of months after our arrival. And we occasionally got together on Sundays, after Liz and the kids had been to the United church and Mahmoud’s family had gone to the small Lebanese Maronite church.
Our friendship wasn’t without its dramas. While I was selling the trees in Florida, Mahmoud had had a blowout with his second daughter, April, and had hit her. She fled the house but, being in her teens, had no money or vehicle and nowhere to go. So she came to our place. We’d moved to the downstairs unit of the duplex by this time and, sure enough, shortly after April arrived seeking refuge, her father, his eldest son, another male relative and a couple of Lebanese friends were at the door. They angrily demanded that Liz surrender April, but Liz stood her ground, helped out by Thumper the Rottweiler, no longer a puppy.
The family mob eventually backed off and April didn’t leave our house for a week, several days after I’d returned from Homestead and gone straight over to my landlord’s house to set things straight.
“This is how we deal with things in our culture,” was the gist of Mahmoud’s explanation.
“Good for you,” I said. “But next time you lay a finger on your daughter, I’ll call the cops.”
Still, Mahmoud was a decent guy and didn’t hold my intrusion into his family affairs against me for long. A good thing, since in due course I was to become part of that family.
Liz received her religious studies diploma from St. Thomas University in the spring of 1988. Her next goal—and the last major hurdle before she became a United Church minister—was a Master of Sacred Theology degree. For that, she would have to attend McGill University in Montreal for three years.
We were clearly on completely different tracks. Largely alone with the kids for the first six years of our marriage, she had had her fill of domesticity and was eager to go beyond the family, into the world, and into a meaningful career. Studying in a big, vibrant city like Montreal can only have fueled that urge. Not that she was living a wild coed existence—she was studying for the ministry, after all, and the living situation we arranged wasn’t exactly conducive to late nights and partying. In return for room and board, she moved into the Verdun home of an elderly woman, kept her company and kept an eye on her wellbeing. Still, what Liz was aspiring to was very different from what I was interested in at that point. I had been adventuring in the world since I was a child; now I was intent on playing an important role in a very different, much more tightly focused adventure, one I’d never really had—a family.
So even if the phone kept ringing, and even if Liz and I had an agreement that allowed me to take short infiltration jobs now and again, I’d lost the desire. In some ways, I guess I was burned out. And anyway, once Liz was studying in Montreal, I was tied to the house and Saint John, at least during her school terms.
The DEA money had stopped coming, but even so, we were getting by. I made a bit of cash teaching martial arts, but it was really just a hobby. Much more lucrative was a gig I had for three years or so starting in 1987 or 1988 selling disability insurance for Canada Life. I did well enough at it that we moved from our apartment to a spacious house we rented outside of downtown. After a year or so there, we took the plunge and became homeowners ourselves, buying a brand new house a block or two away that was built on the grounds of an old drive-in movie theater. For me, coming from the cramped quarters of my childhood in Hull, it was a dream house: big front and back yards, all sorts of room in the basement, bay windows, two-car garage—almost too much room. My daughter loved it just as much. It was the first place we’d lived in with a second story, and she’d always dreamed of having her bedroom on an upper floor.
By then Liz was in her final year of studies at McGill, and in fact not at McGill much at all. Most of the last year was a practicum, spent working out of a church that needed the help—usually a church with a small or poor (or both) congregation. The church Liz was assigned to was in the blink-and-you’ve-missed-it town of Massey in northern Ontario. If Montreal was far from Saint John, Massey was at least twice the distance. So no surprise that we saw even less of each other, especially given that two of the major holidays for me and the kids—Christmas and Easter—were the busiest times of the year for a minister.
That certainly didn’t help our marriage. Nor did the fact that Liz was clearly beginning to believe in all the God stuff. It became a running argument between us—or at least a point of contention, since we never had knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out arguments, which may have been a problem itself. I would tell her, “I don’t mind you becoming a minister, I just don’t want to live with someone who believes that shit.” Needless to say, she didn’t appreciate my emphatic atheism.
Finally, in February 1990, when Liz was on a visit home from Massey, we sat down and had a long-overdue talk, one we’d been planning for a while. It wasn’t loud and ugly—just the opposite. But the upshot was the same. She couldn’t live anymore with my incapacity for emotional intimacy (which I’ve never really got over) and certainly didn’t see me as an appropriate spouse for the minister she was soon to be. I couldn’t handle me and the kids playing second fiddle to God and her new religious career. So we decided to split.
Over the next few weeks, we figured out the fine points. It was easily done. My demands were simple: I wanted the two kids, the cat and the dog, and the station wagon to take us wherever we would go, because I certainly wasn’t going to stick aro
und in Saint John. She could have everything else—the house, the furniture, the bank accounts, the retirement savings.
By April, I’d herded the kids and the animals into the packed wagon and headed back to the only place I could think of: Hull.
Aunt Cécile had lined up an apartment for us in the north end. I would have liked to return to the old neighborhood, but it didn’t really exist anymore, thanks to all the office towers and autoroutes. I got the kids into an English school and set up a home as best I could. But I didn’t look for work—there was no time for that, and I wasn’t planning on sticking around anyway. This time I didn’t see Hull as anything but a place to regroup before heading out into the world again.
Liz was ordained in two different ceremonies not long afterward. The first took place in Montreal, the second in Sackville, New Brunswick. I drove the kids to both so they could attend. I stayed in the car. However smooth our split had been, our veneer of civility, politeness and consideration covered a certain amount of hostility and recrimination, which, not surprisingly, welled up often in the months following the separation, especially because I didn’t have a lot else occupying my mind.
Soon enough, however, a major distraction came along. One of the few people I stayed in touched with from Saint John was my landlord’s youngest son, Andrew, who was in his late teens at the time. When we’d arrived in town, he’d been having a lot of trouble with bullies at school. I taught him a few tricks to defend himself and he subsequently became my most diligent martial arts student. Like the rest of his siblings, he was caught between his traditional parents and contemporary Canadian culture, and saw me as a sounding board for his problems.
I’d given Andrew my number in Hull and he’d phoned a couple of times to chat. Then one day he called with a pressing problem: he wanted to rescue his sister Natalie from her violent and unpredictable husband, and he needed somewhere for her to hole up. It wasn’t news to me that her relationship with Bashir had turned seriously ugly. I think he abused her physically, psychologically and verbally from shortly after their wedding. And it wasn’t the first time that Andrew had asked me to intervene.
The summer before, Natalie had decided enough was enough. She’d told Bashir, who had been a judo competitor in the super-heavyweight category—which meant he was very big, about 240 pounds—that she was leaving him. He didn’t say anything; he just left the house they lived in on a large wooded lot about fifteen miles outside of Saint John. When he came back an hour or two later, she repeated her intentions. This time Bashir grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out the back door and over to a freshly dug pit at the edge of the woods, a stone’s throw from the house. There, he stuck a gun to her head and said, “You ever try to leave me, I’m going to shoot you and throw you in this hole.”
Natalie had called up Andrew, to whom she was very close, and he had contacted me. It wasn’t culturally acceptable, it seemed, for the men in her family to get involved, but it was tearing Andrew up and he wanted something done. The next day I went over to Natalie’s house when I knew Bashir would be home alone.
“Get out here—I want to talk to you,” I ordered when he came to the side door.
He did as I instructed—it helped that he had always been wary of me, despite my being half his size—but we, needless to say, didn’t do much talking. When he came at me, I did what had worked for me in other fights with big guys: I dropped into what’s called “number one horse stance” to make myself even lower and get under him. As he tried to get hold of me, I moved toward him, grabbed him by the crotch and shirt, and let his own momentum flip him over. At that point, he was effectively done for.
“If you ever do what you did to Natalie again, I’ll fucking come back here and bury you myself,” I told him before leaving.
Apparently, things improved for a while after that, but now, almost a year later, here was Andrew phoning me again, planning Natalie’s escape.
Because of the size, influence and ruthlessness of Bashir’s family in New Brunswick, Andrew wanted to get Natalie and her four kids out of the province immediately. I contacted a women’s shelter in Ottawa and they soon had a place waiting for the five of them. They arrived by the end of that week. I was the only person Natalie knew in the area and she needed someone to talk to, so naturally we almost immediately began seeing a lot of each other. Since I knew her family and the situation she was running from, I was able to be more than just a simple shoulder to cry on.
About a week after her arrival, I accompanied her and the kids to a meeting with her parents at a hotel in Montreal. They knew Bashir was dirt and they hated him and his family, but they tried to convince her to go back anyway. In their world a woman was her husband’s property; also, his family were the biggest wheels in New Brunswick’s Lebanese community and it was important not to be in their bad books.
Natalie refused, and after her parents returned to Saint John they got an intimidating visit from the men of Bashir’s family. Eventually, Mahmoud told Bashir where Natalie and the kids were, right down to the address of the shelter. (At the meeting in Montreal she had made the mistake of telling them where she was living.) Within a couple of weeks his family had a court order giving Bashir exclusive custody of his kids—because Natalie had fled the province—forcing her to hand over the four children, the youngest of whom was under two, the eldest not more than six.
Obviously, Natalie was devastated. She was also soon homeless—the shelter was for women and their children, and she didn’t fit the criteria anymore. I invited her to move in with us in Hull. We had room because of an emptiness that had opened up in my life. In the middle of all the drama with Natalie’s escape, my son, Brian, had told me he wanted to go and live with Liz. He was eight at the time and seemed to have thought it over. As much as it hurt, I decided to respect his choice; when I had been his age, not only was I not given any say in such matters, I wasn’t even told a decision had to be made, or what it was. So I phoned Liz and she came and got Brian right away. Handing him over to her was about the toughest thing I’ve ever had to do.
There was nothing romantic between Natalie and me at the time; we were just two hurting units helping each other get by. We were both shell-shocked by recent events and stumbled through our lives for a few months. Neither of us was under any illusion that Ottawa or Hull was a place we wanted to stick around. Still, it took until early December and the start of winter for us to make our move. And where else would we run away to but Vancouver? I wasn’t too worried about the city being unsafe. Vancouver was a big place, five years had gone by since my former brother-in-law had been shot in my yard. I’d keep my head down.
I traded in the old station wagon for a much smaller Pontiac and somehow managed to cram Natalie, Charlotte, the cat and dog, me and a few possessions into it. On our way across the country we stopped in Massey to see Brian. By then he had decided he wanted to come back to live with me and his sister, but we had made a deal before he left: he would have to stay a full year with Liz and give it a real chance to work. Otherwise, I would have happily made room for him in the Pontiac.
My sisters Louise and Pauline had moved to Vancouver some years previously, but they didn’t have room for us all. So I tried Liz’s sister Sue. She had split up with Phil—he of the bullet in his leg—and was living out in suburban Burnaby with their three kids while Phil had spiraled into the life of a junkie on Vancouver’s Lower East Side. Sue had the room in her house and the generosity of spirit and welcomed us in a heartbeat.
We stayed there through the holidays and into January, when we found our own place in Burnaby. By then Natalie and I were a couple. That month I also rented a studio space above a store on Commercial Drive in East Vancouver and started teaching kung fu. Every other time I’d opened a club or given lessons, I’d done it just to keep in shape and as a hobby. Now I was going to do it as a business. Some of my first students were Liz’s two other sisters—one of whom was overweight, the other anorexic (it sounds like the beginning to a
bad joke, but it was true). One of them brought along a black friend who was already a black belt in tae kwon do and worked in security. He in turn brought in a bunch of friends, most of whom were also black. Then a stripper who was a regular brought in a gay friend, who loved the fact that his sexuality was of no concern to me or anyone else at the club. And he recruited a bunch of friends of his. We soon had a crazy quilt of clients, and the club was all the more vibrant for it. Before four months was up, we had run out of space and were moving the club to larger premises at the corner of Hastings and Slocan.
Natalie helped out in the running of the club, doing the books and paperwork and, after a while, giving more fitness-oriented martial arts classes to women clients. She also developed classes and other activities for children, which became an important part of the business. These included a day camp during school holidays and an informal child care program for emergencies. We even lent out the club for birthday parties on occasion. Some of these things we charged for, others not. One way or another, the variety of events brought people circulating through the club, integrated it into the community and made joining up an easier decision for many people.
The club could have consumed every waking minute we had, and frequently did. It paid off in terms of revenue and client base. But I had other demands on my attention, in particular my brother Pete, who had fallen on hard times and came to live with us after spending two weeks in a drug-induced coma. Initially, he was incapable of making any decision—even something as simple as one egg or two—let alone of continuing to make a living playing music or taking care of himself. But gradually he recovered his wits enough that he was semi-functional, and I had his old guitar sent to us.