9
There was one afternoon in the spring of 2017 when I was able to study Blake’s face for a long time without his noticing. I was peeling carrots. He was home from the hospital for a while and he was sitting at the back of the house, looking out the window. He was micro-dosing LSD at the time, which I didn’t know. It was our daughter who provided this detail a few months later. She knew exactly what afternoon I was talking about when I mentioned how intent Blake seemed to be on the view that day.
I paid attention to Blake’s voice when he was sick. When he was calling from the hospital, or when he was on his couch in his apartment in our basement watching Star Trek, or The Twilight Zone, or Paths of Glory, or Reservoir Dogs and I came to his door with tacos from Kensington Market or Banh Mi Boys sandwiches from Queen Street, I’d listen. If I heard confidence in his voice I felt better. Even if I thought he’d put it there for my benefit, I felt better.
However, when it came to assessing how he was really feeling, Blake’s voice was a less reliable gauge than his face, and the only reason I didn’t search his features more closely (looking for optimism, looking for health) was because he always caught me. “Stop doing that,” he’d say. He hated people looking concerned.
But on this occasion, I stood at the kitchen counter, peeling carrots and looking at my son without interruption. Blake was intent on whatever he was looking at through those large back windows. It was a grey day, but the light’s good back there. This had not always been the case.
The rears of the houses McBean built were evidence of his careful attention to cost. They were solidly utilitarian in aspect. The backsides of McBean homes are not among the triumphs of Victorian residential architecture.
They were plain brick walls, a few begrudged windows, and (over time, increasingly insecure) a wooden shed. In relation to the main body of the house, McBean’s mudrooms were often more leaning-against than attached-to. Ours certainly was. I wasn’t sure what held it up. There were a few holes in the floor you had to watch for.
It stayed this way for quite a while after we moved in. In fact, the mudroom stayed that way for years. But eventually (around the time Caroline was entering grade nine) it became apparent that the back shed was going to collapse if we didn’t do something.
One thing led to another. As things do with old houses. Now large windows look over the postage-stamp garden.
Blake often sat there when he was home from the hospital. Sometimes he read. Sometimes he played guitar. And sometimes he just looked out those windows.
The view could hardly be more prosaic: the insulbrick siding of the house across the alley, the garage-roof shingles, the old fences, the fire escapes. But I figured Blake was looking intently at what he couldn’t look at when he was stuck in a hospital room. He was looking at the light.
Our new windows meant that the light came from the east, the south, and the west, angled by northern latitude, fretted by branches, filtered by cloud. It was a luxury, that light. Sometimes when I was driving Blake home from the hospital he stuck his head out of the car window (just like Withnail, actually) as if the air was something he wanted to gobble up.
Blake was a handsome young man—and you don’t have to take my word for it. Once, the four of us were on our way to some event at a downtown hotel. It was a wedding or a graduation or something—one of those important semi-formal functions that occupy a family during its middle history. Blake, I remember, was looking particularly flash—in a skinny, vintage-store black suit. His dark curls completed the young Bob Dylan look he had going when he was twenty or so. He had a coolness that I actually envied—envied in the retroactive sense of wishing I’d had such an asset when I was his age. Because I noticed (from the vantage of invisibility) that the young women we passed on the sidewalk as we approached that downtown hotel gave him a look.
We kidded him about looking cool even when he was sick. And it was true. Illness sculpted his features—never more so than on the afternoon when he learned that the stem cell transplant had failed. (The bone marrow aspirate and biopsy indicating relapse of the MPAL with 30 percent blasts on the bone marrow biopsy sample.) I’d come in the back door of our house a few moments after he’d got the phone call from the hospital. He’d collapsed in the front hallway. His mother had caught him, and they’d crumpled to the floor together. He was lying across her lap as pale as Christ in Mary’s arms.
He had a sharply defined face. His shoulders were square. I remember standing at the kitchen counter peeling carrots that afternoon, and thinking how handsome my son looked. And I thought: I’ll always remember this. It sounds sentimental, I know, but it was actually more an observation than anything. I’ll remember how beautiful everything was. The light was too clear to forget.
10
Slightly to the left of my head in the painting there is a swath of black as wide and thick as a knife-full of peanut butter. If you look at it on its own—if you focus on the heavy dash sufficiently to separate it from the neighbourhood in which I grew up—it’s inexplicable.
Literalists would say there was no such object. There was no long glob of iron oxide (crested with phthalo turquoise) on Aberdeen Avenue, in the city of Hamilton, in the province of Ontario, in the country of Canada. But there it is, more or less level with my right eye—about the speed-blurred shape of a comic-book bullet on its way to my head. And the strange thing is, I said to Blake, it looks like it belongs.
Hartman’s painting is textured with this kind of thing: colours that seem too bright, shapes too undefined, knife-fulls of chroma too thick to exist in the natural world. But there they are. These explosions contrast with the more common greens and browns of a mixed deciduous background. These colours stand out the way angels stand out in medieval triptychs.
But listen, I said. Here’s what’s odd.
One morning, while sitting in our living room, while drinking a coffee, while looking at Hartman’s painting, I remembered that there really was something black at the corner of Queen and Aberdeen. It could be charred ivory crested with turquoise. I’d almost forgotten. It used to give me bad dreams.
Now and then it was my father. More usually it was my mother who had to come hurrying down the hall in the middle of the night.
The house at the bottom of Spruceside, across Aberdeen near Queen, was an address to be avoided. Shortcuts through the property were not advised. The house (shadowy, outlined with verdigris) was set back, in the middle of an overgrown and tangled lot. It was occupied by a lady who was very old. Maybe dead.
We were sure that the old lady’s stubborn invisibility was evidence of supernatural power. Or madness. Or both. And our conviction had entirely to do with her house. It was exactly the architecture of a good many of the houses in the horror movies we were allowed to watch on Friday nights.
This was a weekly ritual, instituted when I was nine years old. There were usually four or five of us—neighbourhood friends, approximately the same age, boys. Operating on the theory, I suppose, that at least they knew where we were and what we were doing, our parents agreed that we could take turns meeting in one another’s houses for Fright Night.
It was always a double-header. So there was a certain amount of walking home along Mapleside, or Spruceside, or Hillcrest, or Glenfern at 2:30 in the morning. After seeing Psycho and Night of the Living Dead.
For a while I had a morning paper route. This presented other opportunities to scare myself. If I saw the bundles of newspapers on the park bench at the bottom of Spruceside when I was on my way home after House on Haunted Hill and The Pit and the Pendulum, I’d do my papers a couple of hours before the first signs of dawn. There was never anyone around.
The TV listings were consulted every week to see what horror movies we had in store. The listings were published on Tuesdays, and they had their own little spark of interest, especially when read on a dark street while delivering the papers they came in. They were
written in a matter-of-fact present tense: “An eccentric millionaire dares his invited guests to spend a weekend in an old house”; “Newlyweds discover that a curse still haunts a family estate”; “A mysterious Count purchases the property next to a girls’ boarding school.”
I was a boy. One of millions in North America at that time. I was, therefore, exactly the demographic at which most horror movies were aimed. I was a pinpoint of marketing. Candelabras, cobblestone, horse-drawn carriages and girls in nightgowns were components of this vernacular.
We looked down our noses at movies with modern settings. These were usually the second feature of a Friday Fright Night. Suburbs like suburbs we knew. Neighbourhoods like ours. They were the horror movies that Blake would come to consider classics. The invasion of a pleasantly affluent middle class by zombies, by aliens, by body-snatchers, by some mutating force of malevolent science was a recurrent theme. These movies were almost always about monsters that lurked beyond the tidy streets and well-kept neighbourhoods of nice, ordinary people like us. The horror movies I liked were more picturesque.
The house at the bottom of Spruceside near Queen and Aberdeen was well back from the sidewalk. It was surrounded by a high and (as per the traditional requirements of a haunted house) not entirely upright iron fence. It could have been a long glob of iron oxide crested with phthalo turquoise.
I called it the Spooky Place when I was very young, and for a few years the name stuck. Even my parents called it that, as if they were pronouncing the name of an estate owned by a well-known local family with an unfortunate last name. It was torn down in the 1960s—veranda, chimney, gables, widow’s walk, iron gates all gone, replaced by a row of perfectly pleasant, perfectly tidy two-storey townhouses.
Urban geography is not difficult to erase. Here, in Toronto, when a new building goes up, as they do all the time, I often find I can’t remember the brick and cornice and stone lintel that were there before. During the autumn of 2017, when we drove back and forth, and walked back and forth, and rode bikes back and forth to the Princess Margaret Hospital, sometimes dropping Blake off, sometimes picking him up, sometimes delivering meals and smoothies and requested hard drives or memory sticks or DVDs or books, there was a four-storey brick building at the corner of College and Huron Streets that we watched disappear over the course of a few weeks. It wasn’t anything so special, I suppose. But it was handsome and solid, and the stonework was good. The windows were nicely proportioned. And it was part of the city we used to have. It was just a building on the way to the art gallery that the four of us walked by now and then.
It’s the same with paint: a rag and a little linseed oil are usually sufficient to get rid of something. If the paint has dried, fine sandpaper works.
The perfectly pleasant townhouses at the corner of Queen and Aberdeen in Hamilton are the least surprising buildings imaginable. And that’s why they always surprised me when we drove in to visit my parents. They are directly across the street from the park bench where I used to pick up my bundle of newspapers. They were never what I was expecting to see when we turned up Spruceside Avenue to Glenfern.
“Now and then” would be a pretty good description of how regular our visits to my parents were, although, when our daughter and our son were young, the frequency of trips increased with the temperature. “You’re bad pennies, that’s what you are,” my mother said when she took their hands and marched—she always said marched—them straight up to the pool before they perished in the heat. That’s also what she always said. “Those children will perish in this heat.” But even when it really was hot and we were visiting Hamilton frequently, I couldn’t get used to those townhouses.
In those days, when we arrived in Hamilton it was always the same. I can picture it exactly. As if the light is still there.
My mother stands up from her weeding. She has the agility of a much younger woman, despite having never to my knowledge attended an exercise class in her life. That will be the frosty Friday were her precise words.
She disdains the aquafit classes many of her friends attend. And not because we have our own pool. She hardly ever swims. I cannot remember when I last saw her in the water.
She smooths her summer dress. She takes her grandson’s left hand in her right hand, her granddaughter’s right in her left, and together they walk (“the three heroes,” my mother turns and says to us as they march upward) through the luminous halo of the summer of, oh I don’t know, 1992.
There were three stone steps. Right there. I can point them out in the painting. And there’s the old gate to the pool. And even though the turquoise water isn’t visible from the bottom of the garden, there’s a brightness in the air that makes it clear the pool is there. I don’t imagine that has changed.
11
Blake’s view from where he sat in the back room of our house in Toronto was eastward through the upper branches of the trees that pop up among the parking spaces toward the backs of the buildings on Spadina Circle. And if you sit there (as I sometimes do now; looking at exactly the view he had) you’ll see that the lower portion of what Blake could see was cut off by the foreground of garage roof and wooden fence.
At the ground level there are garbage bins and gates and rusted bicycles and bits of trash and abandoned shopping carts and patched asphalt. But this part of the view is out of sight. And if you knew nothing about Toronto, you could imagine that you are looking out over a park. And because it’s a park you can’t actually see, it could be an improbably beautiful park in which everything moves in slow motion. Why not?
Perhaps there are ponds and fountains and footpaths obscured by the fences and carport roofs. Perhaps the trees and the sky you can see are the upper reaches of a graceful commons. Maybe cellophane flowers of yellow and green are hidden by our neighbour’s sway-backed garage. Perhaps newspaper taxis. I picture the park that isn’t really there as a peaceful, vaguely psychedelic scene.
Blake’s musical passions were drawn from a canon I knew little about: hip-hop, dub, house, electro-beat. The records in his collection were mostly indie bands and DJs and remixes: Broken Social Scene, Animal Collective, Flying Lotus, Panda Bear, MF Doom, Wu-Tang Clan, Death Grips, Arthur Russell, Actress, Mount Kimbie. He saw Sun Araw in Montreal and said it was one of the most magical concerts he’d ever attended.
But there were other important figures for Blake who were also names I recognized. He was a big fan of the Band, particularly Levon Helm’s drumming. He used to kid me about how much I like the Beatles, but he liked them, too. So, like me, he may well have had “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” in mind when he looked out our back window. He was on LSD, after all.
Other than overhead wires, of which there are many, the only evidence that what you can see from the rear of our house might not be a Peter Max panorama is the University of Toronto’s utility chimney to the east. It’s about the height of Godzilla.
But on that afternoon, when I was peeling those carrots and our son was sitting at the back of the house, I was able to look at him for a long time—longer, probably, than any time since the occasions when I’d watch him sleep in a crib. Long enough, anyway, to notice for the first time that his eyes had the same expression as the eyes in the portrait in our living room. The colours—umber, Payne’s grey, cobalt, zinc, aquamarine, dioxazine violet, and sienna—combine to more grey than blue. They aren’t sad eyes so much as eyes surprised by sadness.
The back of the house couldn’t have been a highlight of the tour that McBean gave any of his prospective customers. It was too perfunctory. “And this is the back” is about the most that could be said of the old back of our house. Any benefit that southern exposure might have bestowed on the inhabitants (light, for example) was avoided in McBean’s tightly budgeted design. For more than a hundred years the back of the house wasn’t anywhere you went unless you had a chore or a bowel movement to attend to. But from the day our new windows were installed, th
e back of the ground floor became the favourite place to sit.
This left the living room even more at sea than it already was.
12
For the first ten years of the band’s existence we practised at a house on the east side of Toronto. It belonged to the writer Alison Gordon. We had to set up around her ex-husband’s snooker table. This was a small price to pay. Alison’s basement was pretty much perfect for us. As was Alison.
From the jacket blurb of her mystery novel The Dead Pull Hitter, published in 1988: “Alison Gordon is a sportswriter and columnist for the print media, radio, and television. She spent five years covering the Toronto Blue Jays for The Toronto Star, the first woman to cover the American League beat.” We practised once a week.
There was a television down there, and Alison sometimes turned it on (with the sound off) during our practices. She watched baseball while playing tambourine. She got to be quite good.
Alison was a writer who had stopped writing. This was a deliberate decision, one she didn’t talk about, but she hadn’t published anything in a magazine or newspaper for a few years. If this troubled her she took care not to show it. She carried on being Alison Gordon.
Every week, we sat with Alison at her kitchen table. Wine, usually. And during these pre-music conversations we sometimes caught a glimpse of how spectacularly her life was populated. She had something of which she was very proud. She had (and the two words that follow these parentheses have to be pronounced as Alison would have pronounced them: with the hint of emphasis that conveys very deliberate understatement) interesting friends.
Alison protested the Vietnam War at Queen’s University. She campaigned for Pierre Trudeau at his leadership convention. She worked for CBC Radio in the 1970s. She was a good writer, and could be a very funny one. She wrote droll magazine articles—some for National Lampoon. She’d had her share of adventures and love affairs. She could tell you stories. Mostly, chose not to.
Likeness Page 12