When I got home that night I was alone. I would have done anything to escape seeing my face in the mirrors around our apartment, showing me someone I couldn’t stand. Then there were the voices—not the kind a psychotic killer hears but my own inner voice, telling me to harm myself.
I crutched my way into the bathroom and opened a box of razor blades, the old-fashioned Gillette Super Blues. I stared at the shiny blades.
Would I do it? Could I do it? My brother and sister would be grief stricken, but because they knew what I had gone through, I thought they’d understand, the kind of convenient lie depressed people like to tell themselves. I also thought about my parents. Unlike the others, whom I wished I could spare, I wanted to inflict as much pain upon them as possible.
I sat down to write a short note. Instead of thinking about the things my parents had done for me and the things they’d done to me, what stood out were the times they simply weren’t there. To me their neglect meant that there was something wrong with me, some inherent evil that wouldn’t allow them to care for me—or anyone else to really love me. I wrote,
Sorry and goodbye to those I love and who love me. This act is solely the responsibility of Bernard and Jacqueline Saunders. May they burn in hell.
I can’t say my note was fair, but I can say it’s how I felt at that moment. I returned to the bathroom and ran a hot bath, the way I’d seen it done in a movie. I took off my clothes and slid into the water, a fresh blade in my hand. This would be painful, but I was already on so many painkillers for my ankle, I figured doubling the dosage would take care of that.
I rubbed the blade between my thumb and first two fingers. Then I readied it against my wrist, holding it steady. The feeling was familiar, reminding me of the hot wire hangers I used on my thighs as a teenager. I breathed in, exhaled, then sank the sharp blade into my flesh. A trickle of blood hit the water.
This is it. This is the end.
I dug the blade further into my skin but stopped short of hitting a vein. The act required more courage than I thought it would and more determination than I could muster—and that made me feel even worse. I had already failed at everything else in life, and now I was failing at ending it too.
I held my wrist up to stop the bleeding and slowly got out of the tub. I took two more painkillers and polished off a glass of whiskey. I was still wet and in need of a bath, so I climbed back into the tub, let my head rest on the back rim, and fell asleep.
I heard the phone ringing. I woke up in a tub of cold water. I got out of the bathtub and crutched my way to the phone, dripping wet.
It was Bernie. He had been driving all the way from Kalamazoo just to cheer me up and would be at our apartment in half an hour. I had to pull myself together. I wrapped my wrists in ordinary bandages and put on a long-sleeved shirt.
When Bernie arrived with a case of beer, I concluded he must have sensed my despair and wanted to kick my ass back into gear. I confessed to Bernie that I was depressed because I had no career prospects and no idea what to do next.
“John, you’re in a business most people would kill to be in,” Bernie said, referring to my nascent radio work. “Why not see how far you can take this broadcasting thing?”
It was the first time anyone, including me, had taken that idea very seriously. It was particularly powerful coming from my brother. No one knew me like he did. He often told me not to worry about the things my father said, forget the past, and take control of my life, because with my natural talent I could do whatever I wanted. His encouraging words made me feel there was hope for me yet.
As soon as Bernie left, I pulled out a tape recorder and started making copies of my radio newscasts, then set up an assembly line to mail them to every English-speaking radio station in Ontario and Quebec. I also sent letters to several hockey clubs in Europe that routinely signed North American college players. It felt good to be doing something about my future instead of just dreading it—and it certainly was an improvement over what I’d been doing an hour earlier in the bathtub. Bernie’s visit was just what I needed.
Over the next two months I received rejections from station after station and hockey team after hockey team. But one day a letter arrived from a third-tier hockey club in Belgium that was searching for a player-coach. I called them at once, and the owner told me that the job paid $11,000 for a six-month season—more than twice what my radio gig at CHOO was paying. The job was mine, he said, if I wanted it.
I was thrilled, but things got even better a few days later when I came home to see a note Delia had left on the kitchen counter, with a phone number next to the call letters, “CKNS. Ask for Mr. Hillary.”
CHAPTER 15
Chasing a New Dream
I WASTED NO TIME CALLING MR. HILLARY—WHOEVER HE was. Someone at the station picked up right away, and before I knew it I was speaking to the station owner. He explained that CKNS was a small station in Espanola, Ontario, an industrial town of about five thousand people a few miles north of Lake Huron. They needed a news director, which paid $10,000 a year, a thousand more than I was making at CHOO.
I initially thought moving to the middle of nowhere for a thousand dollars more wasn’t a very good trade, but the station owner told me the news director I would replace had just landed a job in television, and CKNS was becoming a launching pad for up-and-comers. The station would also pay for housing if I would share an apartment they owned with two of their disc jockeys. That meant Delia would have to stay behind until I could find an apartment for us, but it was something to think about.
When Delia returned later that night I shared my news. She wasn’t thrilled about the idea of me going ahead without her, but she agreed to stay in our Toronto apartment until I found a decent place for us in Espanola.
But I knew in my heart of hearts I was one step closer to being my father, always stepping out on his family. I thought, because I wouldn’t know anyone in Espanola, it’d be great if my old Western Michigan hockey buddy Neil Smith could join me. He was game, so I talked the station manager into giving Neil a job as a disc jockey. This could work out!
A week later, still unable to drive due to my broken ankle, I boarded a bus to take me to my new home. As we pulled out of Toronto I looked out the window to see the great city’s skyline shrinking behind us, and I took a deep breath. I was going to a town I’d never heard of to see if I could make a living talking into a microphone. It was strange, but I was starting over, and that felt good.
Five hours later we pulled into Espanola. What I hoped would be a breath of fresh air was filled with the heavy stink of sulfur. Yellow dust from a pulp and paper plant draped the buildings, the houses, and the cars. It was everywhere—including inside your nose the minute you stepped off the bus.
Even though I didn’t have much to fall back on, the whole idea still seemed like a lark. But just three months into the gig a TV station in Sudbury, an hour east, offered me $12,000 a year and my own apartment: a bigger town, a bigger salary, and a home. I took it.
Although Canada had generally good race relations, growing up I had never seen a black face on TV, so it never occurred to me that I could get a job talking into a TV camera. This would be a big step.
When I called Delia to tell her the news, she was thrilled, but before she quit her job she wanted to be sure I wanted her to join me. “You have not included me in your life much while you’ve been in Espanola, so I wasn’t sure if you still wanted to be with me,” she said.
I said, “Absolutely, I want you with me. I’m sorry I made you feel this way.” But the truth was that my two sides were still battling: my need to be loved and my tendency to run away.
Delia quit her job, I drove back to Toronto to help her pack, and we loaded up the U-Haul. We headed up to Sudbury and unloaded our boxes. But no sooner had we started unpacking, the phone rang. My new boss told me I’d be moving not to Sudbury, but ninety minutes farther east to their TV station in North Bay, some two hundred miles north of Toronto, to replace their
sportscaster.
We packed it all back up again and headed up the road to North Bay, where they set us up in a Howard Johnson’s for a couple of weeks. I was very nervous about my TV debut the next night. You could only prep so much with twenty-four hours’ notice, while you’re also moving to a new place. But after the show, when I got back to our motel room Delia said I was a natural, and I felt great.
After our two weeks at the Howard Johnson’s was up, all I could find was a glorified shack on Lake Nipissing, a popular fishing spot. I didn’t want Delia living in a place like that, so I told her she should go back to Ajax until I could find something better. In hindsight I’m not sure whether I was being chivalrous or chicken, but it was probably some combination of both.
Working on TV in North Bay—an attractive lakeside town of about fifty thousand people—made me look at things a little differently. With my hockey career over, the TV business was starting to look pretty good. When I took it seriously I discovered the TV game could replace the excitement of drugs and hockey. A good night in the studio could lift my mood just like a good night on the ice. On TV your mind can’t be anywhere else or else you’ll screw up. Such all-consuming focus took my mind off my problems for a few hours each day. I was getting hooked on broadcasting—my healthiest addiction to date.
About a month into my stay in North Bay I found a better place and called for Delia to come back. It didn’t take her long to get a job modeling for a dress store. She changed her look, cutting her long hair to her shoulders and dropping the bleach-blonde dye. Although her new look was lovely, it did little to dispel our lack of intimacy. Our trials had brought us closer emotionally, but we still rarely had sex.
Delia thought I was avoiding intimacy to ensure that I wouldn’t get her pregnant, but my sexual hang-ups were the real reason. I couldn’t explain this, though, because I hadn’t yet pieced it together myself.
As the months went by my confidence soared on the set. I became more popular off-screen as well, while I grew farther from Delia.
One weekend we went back to Ajax to see family and friends. When it was time to return to North Bay, Delia wasn’t feeling well so she stayed behind to see her doctor that Monday. When I called Delia later that day she told me she was in the hospital because she’d just learned she was pregnant, and it wasn’t going well. Delia desperately wanted to have the baby.
I raced back to Ajax, where Delia suffered a miscarriage the next morning. I sat beside Delia’s hospital bed, stroking her long hair. I felt like a fraud. I hated that she was in pain, but I still had no interest in being a father.
A week later, when we were both back in North Bay, I made a mistake that would doom our marriage.
“Delia, maybe it’s for the best,” I said, “because we’re not ready to have a baby.” The truth is that she might have been ready, but I certainly wasn’t. I still had no interest in becoming a father and repeating my dad’s mistakes.
Delia became hysterical. I tried to stammer an explanation and an apology, but it was becoming obvious we did not want the same things.
In my spare time I began sending my tapes to any station bigger than ours—which was just about all of them—in hopes of eventually landing a job in Toronto. For Canadians, that’s like making it in New York City.
I got a few nibbles, but nothing solid until I got a call from Dave Reynolds, the sports director of citytv in Toronto. Reynolds said he liked my work, although he didn’t think I was quite ready for Toronto. But, he asked, would I consider working at their sister station in Moncton, New Brunswick, a thousand miles east of Toronto? He said he’d pay me $16,000 a year, and after a year of learning the business I could have a shot at the big time in Toronto.
I felt like I’d hit the lottery. I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough—so fast, in fact, that I didn’t even consult Delia first.
I knew that the career I had chosen was going to be a gypsy’s life. To climb the media ladder you’ve got to move constantly, like a military officer. That wasn’t a problem for me because I’d spent my boyhood hopping from house to house, but I didn’t want to go through all that while being married.
When I left North Bay I told Delia I wanted to go it alone. Not long after I got to Moncton, a cute little town of about sixty thousand people, Delia visited me. We talked about everything. We cried, we hugged, but there was just no getting around the fact that I simply wasn’t ready to be married. We held each other in silence that night, and I took her to the airport the next day. We kissed and said goodbye.
My last season of college hockey showed me I could be just as violent as my father. The last year of my marriage showed me I was no better at commitment either.
CHAPTER 16
Making It in Moncton
THAT SPRING OF 1979 BERNIE HAD JUST FINISHED HIS career at Western Michigan in spectacular style, leading the Broncos in scoring three times, being named their MVP twice, serving as their captain his senior year, and earning all-league honors. In other words, he did everything I’d hoped to do.
When he graduated he signed a contract with the Quebec Nordiques, who had just joined the NHL, with a $5,000 signing bonus. That summer he figured he could afford to spend a couple of weeks in Moncton, and he probably sensed how badly I needed him, so he offered to drive me to Moncton in the Datsun 280Z my father had bought him with the money he’d saved for Bernie’s college, thanks to Bernie’s scholarship.
We stopped in Quebec City to see the old coliseum, Le Colisée, where the Nordiques played. It wasn’t much to look at except for the photos of players who had starred in that building, legends like Jean Béliveau, Guy LaFleur, J. C. Tremblay, Marc Tardif, and others we grew up idolizing. If Bernie got called up to the big club, this is where he’d play.
“You know,” he told me, looking at those photos, “I couldn’t have made it this far without you.”
That was a very generous assessment, but it was good to hear—good enough for me to remember the rest of my life.
Not long after we pulled out of Quebec City Bernie told me a story that would answer one of our family’s great mysteries.
The previous summer Bernie and his best friend, Gary, had worked with my father on construction sites in Cleveland, not far from Oberlin, where our father had been living most of the past fifteen years. When Bernie and Gary arrived at our father’s home he was surprised to find Dad had bought three houses next to each other and was single-handedly renovating them while we had been getting evicted from home after home back in Montreal.
Our father lived in the nicest of the three, renting out the second house and using the third for a single mother and two teenage boys, who often played basketball in their driveway with Bernie and Gary.
One weekend Bernie drove all the way to Espanola for the wedding of our old buddy, Neil Smith, who married a local girl. When Bernie returned to Oberlin Gary had a troubled expression. Gary told him that Mary, the woman who lived next door, invited Gary over for dinner with her two boys. After the boys retreated to their rooms Mary told Gary she didn’t live in the house where she’d just served him dinner but the one next door—with my father. They had been together for about eight years. Her boys called our father “Dad,” although he wasn’t their biological father. Mary knew about Dad’s children back in Canada, but my father had told her he was divorced. He’d never introduced us to her, he explained to her, because he felt that we weren’t ready to meet her and that we wouldn’t understand his relationship with her boys.
While she’s telling Gary all this, our dad showed up, unannounced, looking angry and jealous—which effectively confirmed her story. Gary wisely got out of there.
A year later, when Bernie told me this on our way to Moncton, I was in shock. My mind started running over the many nights we went to bed hungry, the evictions, and the cold mornings spent waiting for the Western Union office to open, only to discover he hadn’t wired any money. Now I knew why: he was spending his money on another family.
“But i
f you think about it,” Bernie told me, “We’re luckier than those two teenage kids. We didn’t have to put up with him all that much.” We both started laughing hysterically.
I asked Bernie if he had talked with Mary’s sons. I was secretly hoping he’d say they reviled our dad for his cutting remarks and bruising fists, just like I did. But he told me that their “dad”—our dad—spent his days teaching them football and baseball. He went to all their games and was always there for them.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Bernie, stop the car.”
He pulled over, and I stumbled out onto the shoulder of the highway, cars whipping past. Bernie led me away from the road. “That sonuvabitch!” I howled. After all these years here was proof that somewhere in that man was a loving, gentle father. We had seen those sides occasionally, but they were often eclipsed by his other sides and, more often, his absence.
The self-blaming thoughts came crowding in: If only I didn’t talk back, if only I’d worked harder, if only I was smarter or nicer or more obedient, maybe then he wouldn’t have hauled off and hit me so often. Objectively I knew this wasn’t true, but it was hard to convince myself of that when he apparently treated someone else’s kids so well.
Bernie advised me to put it away and move on, but I couldn’t do it.
“I’ll move on,” I told Bernie, “when that man is dead.”
After I got settled in Moncton I was pleased to discover a surprising number of beautiful women in town, thanks to the government offices where many of them worked. I’d already tried alcohol, drugs, self-mutilation, and work to dull my pain, which now left sex. I can’t say it made me forget my problems, but it didn’t hurt.
Bernie generously paid for our nights on the town, but after two weeks it was time for him to head back to Toronto. When he stopped by a bank on his way out of town to get some cash, the teller informed him he had only $800 remaining. He told her there must be some kind of mistake because he had just deposited his $5,000 signing bonus, and we’d burned through a couple thousand, max. No, she said, $800 was all he had left.
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