Never Sleep Three in a Bed

by Max Braithwaite

  But it wasn’t the end of it for me. I had dipped into the font of vicarious, erotic delight, and I was ready for the complete plunge. From the pastoral eroticism of “Venus and Adonis” I went on to “The Rape of Lucrece”, with all its dark, foul, lust and evil-doing. What an epic of tragedy that was, written to arouse erotic feelings in the youthful Earl of Southampton.

  Full of robust lines like:

  By reprobate desire thus madly led,

  The Roman lord marcheth to Lucrece’ bed.

  and–

  His hand, as proud of such a dignity,

  Smoking with pride, march’d on to make his stand

  On her bare breast, the heart of all her land.

  and–

  For with the nightly linen that she wears

  He pens her piteous clamours in her head.

  Now I want to tell you that’s gutsy stuff. Rough, ragged, randy rape, it was. And she having lost “a dearer thing than life”, after fourteen stanzas of doleful lament summons her husband home, tells him all, and kills herself.

  We are told that Shakespeare wrote these two poems in 1593 and 1594, while the Plague was ravishing London and there was little doing for actors, to establish himself as a literary man–a thing he could never accomplish by writing plays for the vulgar multitude. And we are also told that the poems were immensely popular, ran into numerous editions, and were greedily read by the young bloods of the day.

  I got the big brown book out the other day, re-read both poems, and was struck by the difference that forty-four years can make. Now, a thirteen-year old can go into any bookstore and buy a copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, Fanny Hill, Candy or Cocksure, or any one of a dozen sex-thrillers, and read all about the most intimate details of sexual intercourse. He doesn’t have to wade through verses of high-blown poetry to get to the good parts. It’s all there, spelled out in good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon four-letter words.

  But is it any more erotic? Is the exact description of sex any more stirring that the poetical hinting at it? Is the bikini more stirring than a glimpse of an ankle? I remember when Clara Bow appeared in a bathing suit she was pretty well covered from neck to knees. And she drove me to madness. But was she really more sexy than Bridget Bardot dressed in nothing? Or was I just more excitable in those days?

  Perhaps I have dwelt too long on this puberty thing, but it’s one of the most vivid impressions that remains from my first year in high school in Nutana. Another unforgettable memory is the first Field Day, and how our dog Pal and I disgraced ourselves, the family, and the school.

  13 The One-Hundred-Yard Schlemozzle

  Of all the dogs that have gone squirming, tail-wagging, and yapping through my boyhood, Pal was the most memorable. He was the nuttiest, most affectionate, stubbornest, fightingest, most intelligent dog I ever knew. And my brother Denny and I loved him completely.

  He was really Denny’s dog. He’d got him the way we always got dogs, that is by having the dog adopt us, rather than by us making any overt move to acquire it. Pal belonged to an acquaintance of ours, and when they went on their summer holidays in 1926 they paid Denny a fee to look after him. So he came to live with us, much to the disgust of my sister, “then-they-say-keep-a-dog Doris”, and my mother who was having a hard enough time to feed us, let alone a fussy dog.

  Pal was a small, whitish dog whose long fur was constantly smirched and filled with burrs. In general conformation, he resembled a collie. That is he had a long nose, long hair, a long tail and was rather lean. We used to describe him as “a pure-bred white Scotch collie who has been stunted by distemper.” And I guess that’s a good way to leave it.

  As to characteristics. He liked to fight, to chase cars, to dig in people’s gardens (the better the garden, the better he liked it), and to eat Mother’s baking-powder biscuits. He didn’t like to swim, to do what anyone told him, or to be separated from us under any circumstances.

  As a result, he followed either Denny or me or both of us everywhere we went. And since the guiding passion of his life was to get into fights, his presence was a constant embarrassment. He’d follow us into the Daylight Theatre down on Second Avenue, for instance, and hide under the seat. That was fine, unless the picture had a dog in it and that dog should begin to bark. This was the era of Rin Tin Tin, a dog whom we considered to have all the admirable characteristics Pal lacked, and whose films we never missed. But when Rinty got after a crook and began to bark, Pal would begin to bark and growl under our seat. Whereupon an indignant usher would come poking about with a flashlight and say, “Where’s that dog?” and we’d say, “What dog?” Finally the usher would locate him, drag him screaming up the aisle and pitch him out onto Second Avenue. But in no time Pal was back under our seats, ready for the next encounter.

  He followed Denny to school and when the principal tried to put him out Pal bit him. Mother never could forgive this. “Imagine,” she would say, “a dog who bites the principal of the school! Has he no respect for anything?” Mother never did like Pal much. Maybe it was because he just about doubled her housework. His long hair was always full of mud and assorted other foreign bodies, which he would leave in little piles around the house, wherever he happened to sit or lie. Often this was on a couch or a bed. He was also covered with fleas, which he generously distributed. Sometimes, when Mother would see Pal lying in the middle of the living room rug, vigorously chewing at fleas, shaking his long, floppy ears and wagging his burr-filled tail, she would sit down and weep.

  We rarely gave him a bath because he hated water so. I’ve never known a dog to hate water as Pal did. Even taking a drink he would gingerly approach the dish, stretch his neck out as far as he could, then stretch his tongue out to its fullest extent, after which he would cautiously slurp the stuff.

  Pal’s hatred of water disappointed us more than anything else about him. We had always wanted a dog who would chase sticks into the river, swim out and get them, then turn around and swim back, puffing and blowing as any decent dog should. We knew kids with dogs that would fetch anything–stones, sticks, great branches off trees, rubber tires, anything. And God, how we envied them! But mostly we envied the kids whose dogs would swim in the river.

  We spent hours trying to train Pal to go into the water. This at first consisted of pitching things into the water and shouting, “Fetch, Pal, fetch! Good boy, go and get it!” Pal would sit on his backside and look at us as though we were crazy, his long tail gently brushing the river-bank clay. Finally we gave up on the “persuasive” method and went in for coercion. “Go get it, you stupid mutt!” we’d shout, pretending to hit him with our fist. He’d cringe back and look at us with his big brown eyes, but he still wouldn’t budge. Finally we picked him up by the paws, me at the front, Denny at the rear, swung him back and forth and pitched him as far out into the muddy water as we could.

  But that, too, was a complete failure. He just sat there on the bottom with the current swirling about him and stared at us. Then, looking like a gopher that’s been drowned out of its hole, he’d creep out of the water, white hair plastered to his skinny body, stand in front of us and shake water all over us. Then he’d be overcome with an abundance of exuberance and go dashing back and forth among the willows of the river bank like a colt let out of the barn in the spring. Yapping and jumping he’d go and we’d say, “See, he really likes it. We did him a favour.”

  But if he did really like it, he had the strangest way of showing his enthusiasm. Because after a while he wouldn’t come within fifty feet of the river’s edge. Instead, he would stay up in the bushes while we fished or played on the bank, and join us gleefully when we left.

  We began to wonder if Pal could swim. All dogs, we’d heard, swim naturally, and we assumed that Pal could, too, but we’d never actually seen him do it. Try as we would, we couldn’t toss him out over his depth. This knotty problem was settled one fall day when we were playing up near the University and came upon an abandoned basement. The cement had been poured, but the hou
se had never been built on top of it. There was about five feet of wall showing, and about three feet of water in the hole, certainly enough to make Pal swim. So, before he realized what was up, we grabbed him and pitched him in. Well, he swam all right, like a drowning rat, but when he came to the concrete wall he naturally couldn’t get up. Without a sound he pawed away at the concrete, but there was no way that he could climb up. We reached down and tried to catch him by the scruff of the neck, but couldn’t quite make it. We urged him towards the other side where there was a door frame, but he wouldn’t go. Finally, there was nothing for it but for me to jump in and heave him out. We never threw Pal into the water again.

  Pal’s greatest nuisance value, however, was the way he loved to fight. He couldn’t fight worth a hoot, being small and light and not too sharp of tooth, but as soon as he saw another dog he would fly at it, teeth bared, and try to devour it. None of your walking about stiff-legged with hackles raised the way most dogs do, and then backing off gracefully, muttering threats and imprecations. No, Pal got right into it, secure in the knowledge that we’d come to his rescue.

  He had regular enemies, too. Dogs that he encountered on the routes he took when he was supposedly following us. If we went along Tenth Street, for instance, from MacPherson Avenue, where we lived during his stay with us, towards Broadway, Pal went through all the backyards, chasing cats, ravishing flower-beds, and fighting with dogs. We could always hear him–and the hissing, squalling, barking, and swearing that he left in his wake – but rarely did we ever see him.

  That is, we didn’t see him until we met the bread-man. I don’t know what company this bread-man drove for, or anything else about him except that he had a big white horse pulling his wagon and underneath it, skulking along, were his two dogs, a Chesapeake and an Airedale.

  These two breeds were very common in Saskatoon in the Twenties, although I haven’t seen one in years. The Chesapeake is big and short-haired, brown in colour, built something like a Labrador retriever, only stockier. The Airedale is leaner, with short bristly hair and a square muzzle. He looks like a big version of the wire-haired terrier. Both breeds are heavy, muscular and fierce.

  It’s difficult to believe, when I think back on it, that Pal would attack both of these dogs at once. But he did. Every time he met them. He hated those two brutes as no dog has ever hated anything. He could tell, blocks away, when they were approaching, and would instantly begin to run around in circles, his hackles rising If we didn’t catch him then and hang onto him, it would be too late. He’d be into it with both of them, and we’d be trying to save his hide.

  Sometimes we’d grab the dogs by the tails and drag them away from him (not easy with an Airedale), sometimes we’d pelt them with gravel from the road. Always we’d shout and wave our arms and threaten and try to get hold of Pal. And frequently, when we finally got them separated and were leaving the scene, he’d break away, double back and go at it again. Every walk to Broadway was a nightmare.

  It wasn’t, however, anything like the nightmare at the high school field day in the fall of 1926.

  Nutana Collegiate Institute, a majestic high school on the corner of Victoria Avenue and Eleventh Street, at the top of the “short hill”, was already an institution with tradition when I entered it that autumn. It was a huge brick building overlooking the river, with an enormous, flat campus, six tennis courts, and a football field. I liked the tennis best. You could play it whenever you liked, so long as you could find one other person to play with. Since I had gone to work for the Saskatoon Star Phoenix as a paperboy that same fall, I didn’t have an opportunity to play games after school. So I played tennis early in the mornings.

  We newcomers had just got comfortably settled into our seats, and were trying to get used to Algebra and French and Latin, when one day the drill and hygiene teacher announced that in a couple of weeks the school would hold its annual track meet. He gave us a pep talk. “It doesn’t matter whether you win or not, it’s trying that counts. You Grade Nines don’t know what you can do best. You’ve got to try to find out. So get behind this thing and enter.”

  He was painfully sincere, with a square jaw and piercing eyes. So inspired was I that I went around to his office and entered my name in every junior event. Everything: high jump, pole vault, dashes, long runs, broad jumps of all kinds. The works. The fact that I couldn’t do any of these things made no difference. Hadn’t he said that it was the trying that counted?

  The morning of the track and field meet I was out there bright and early in my baggy gym trunks, prancing about, limbering up with the best of them. I had no notion of what I was doing. Because of my paper route I hadn’t trained myself for one single event. Furthermore, there was absolutely no indication from anything I’d ever done in the past that I could even beat an arthritic octogenarian. But still, there I was, brash and self-confident as the keenest-honed athlete, ready, aye, ready for the fray.

  The junior events were run off in the morning, to make way for the more dramatic senior programme in the afternoon. The first event was the hundred-yard dash, for which the grounds people had marked off the course in lanes, made by cords strung on little wire stakes. I lined up with the others. Went into a starting crouch as I saw my neighbour do. Quivered with expectation, waiting for the starting gun to go off. And when it did, sprawled flat on my face.

  This saved me from being last (it was, in fact, the only race in which I didn’t occupy that position). The two-twenty-yard dash was next, I remember, and this time I got under way all right without falling down. I actually managed to get all the way around the track. I wasn’t lapped by the front runners, either, but that may have been because the race was only once around the track. And neither was I actually last. There was one other runner behind me. My dog.

  Pal had followed me to school this morning, and was taking a real interest in the proceedings. There were no other dogs around to fight with, so he contented himself with trotting languorously across the track in front of the crouching runners, just before the starter pulled the trigger. “Who owns that white dog?” I kept hearing the drill teacher yell, but I was not about to admit that he belonged to me.

  It was to soon become painfully obvious, however. Pal decided that if ever a feller needed a friend it was me in those races. And so he trotted around behind me in the four-forty and the half-mile and the mile, in each of which I would have been last except for him. He stayed well back, loping along in his usual hang-tail manner, and after the winners had been applauded and some people politely stayed to watch the last runner come in, there was always a ripple of laughter as he followed me to the finish line.

  My sister Phyllis, who was three years ahead of me in high school and thus had a position to maintain, was furious. “Mother!” she complained bitterly at lunch time, “tell Max not to go in any more of those races. He’s just making a fool of himself. And that stupid dog, ambling along behind him! I’m ashamed to admit he’s my brother.”

  “Then why do it?” I yelled, my pride seriously bruised.

  “I can’t help it. Some of them already know you are my brother. Tell him to stop, Mother.”

  Mother mildly suggested that, since I had about three miles to walk after school delivering papers, it might be a good idea if I saved some of my energies for that.

  But I was adamant. I’d entered in all the events and I was no quitter. I ate hardly any lunch, not wanting to add to my weight before the high jump, which came next.

  For this event some of the school reprobates–the kind who smoked and swore and even went out with girls, and had no sense of duty when it came to representing their home room–had taken up positions beside one of the standards. They’d equipped themselves with a certain kind of heavy cloth. When torn quickly, it made a loud ripping noise like a pair of pants giving way. Just as I lifted my front leg to clear the bar, they ripped about a yard of this stuff and I was sure my flimsy gym pants had parted. It’s very difficult to clear a bar and land in a pit while k
eeping your legs close together.

  The pole vault, the running broad jump, and the running hop-skip-and-jump were equally disastrous. I finished that long, hot day without a single success.

  It was a most humiliating day for me, but a most important one because, in one fell swoop, I learned some fundamental things about myself. I was forced to realize my very definite limitations when it came to track and field. I couldn’t run faster than anyone, jump higher or further than anyone, or throw anything further than anyone. So I was now able to write those things off completely. No sweating around race tracks in the early dawn, watching my diet, getting plenty of sleep to keep in training. Instead, I could henceforth concentrate on the things that I could do –like acting in skits, for instance, or writing pieces for the school paper, or debating. And I could eat and smoke and drink as much as I felt like. It was a great feeling of release I had at the end of that field day. I was free.

  However, although I didn’t distinguish myself on that occasion, Pal certainly did. His great success came right at the climax of the day. The competition between the five forms had been keen and, as we came to the conclusion of the events, C School and E School were tied for points. The deciding event was to be the final heat of the one-hundred-yard dash. I don’t know why this particular event was chosen for the honour, perhaps because it was Mr. Manerlie’s favourite. (He believed that this short, dramatic sprint really tested the mettle of a boy. He was a great one for testing mettle.)

  I can see the scene as clearly in my mind as though it were happening now. That long, straight course, running along the Eastlake Avenue side of the field. The straight lanes, marked off with their strings. And all the student body, their families and friends lined up on either side of the course, bathed in the rays of the warm September sun.