by Rae Spoon
I listened to Nirvana before Kurt Cobain was found dead in his garage, but it was only then that he became an obsession for me. My parents subscribed to Time magazine, and when the issue with him on the cover was delivered to our house that week I squirrelled it away in my room, cutting out the pictures and taping them to my wall, which eventually became covered with his photos. I managed to sneak all five of Nirvana’s albums past my parents into my room through several covert missions to the mall. Kurt Cobain’s music was full of unapologetic pain and anger. I discovered my own pain and anger by listening to it. While my church and family encouraged us to rejoice even when absurdly tragic things happened, grunge allowed me to express the unfairness of life. To me, Kurt Cobain was the personification of the rage I felt. I wanted to be him.
My grandma gave me an old green cardigan that had been hanging in her closet when I was visiting one day. I wore it all the time, with ripped jeans and flannel shirts, except on Sundays when I would have to sit in church in a dress, my hair hanging in my face and the ear buds of a Discman hidden from view. Grunge music made church more bearable.
I spent hours every night writing songs and practicing guitar, and I also took it to school and played it during lunch hour. Music became everything to me. When my father grounded me for months for defying him, he let me keep my guitar; hiding in my room, I felt like it was all I needed to survive. I remember writing a song once while he banged on my door threatening to take me to the hospital; I could barely hear him. Later on when he stopped living with us, I used music to hide from my memories. Nothing could touch me when I was writing or singing a song.
As I started my haphazard escape from the church, my music was right there with me. My faith would ebb and flow as I tried to realign my perspective. At first I saw rock music as the devil tempting me, but in time church became the thing I needed to escape. It was drummed into my head that without the church, I would have no spiritual protection. I imagined this as being the same as a spaceship alone in the void, pelted by debris. At youth group they would get us to close our eyes and then describe hell to us: “Imagine the most painful thing you’ve ever felt; now multiply that by a million and you would still not be in as much pain as hell. Hell is so horrible that if you saw even a glimpse of it, you would die from shock.” And hell is where they thought people who liked grunge music belonged.
In senior high, I escaped the solitude of my junior years by playing songs in the hallway to make friends. It worked the same way it did at church, except that now I was singing about being angry instead of rejoicing over Jesus. There were plenty of others around who could identify with that. When my parents divorced, I took over the basement of our new duplex to make recordings on my four-track tape recorder. I borrowed instruments and made tapes that I would take to school and sell just like at church, for five dollars apiece. One day I heard that a famous singer from Calgary was coming to talk to my sister’s singing class, so I went to see her. She was very funny and talked about golfing with another Canadian singer that my family always listened to at Christmas. After it was over, I went to the front of the class and nervously handed a tape to her, mumbling that I had made it myself. I was star-struck. I had seen the Juno Awards she had won on display in a downtown store that she co-owned. The tape I made for her was called “Androgynous Fool.” I had added a zero to the number of available copies on the side, so it would look like I had made fifty instead of just five. The songs were about wanting to escape and not being able to come out as gay. After school that day, I went to work at the gas station. When I came home, my mother and sister were running around the house excited, saying over and over, “She called you! She called you!”
My sister had talked to her. She said she liked my tape and that she would call back to talk to me. After all of the chaos it took to get my father out of our lives, this was one of the first really good things that had happened to my family. I waited for two days for her to call back. When I answered the phone, she asked me some questions. I told her I was seventeen and that yes, I did write all of my own songs. She told me that she really liked my tape and that I should keep writing. Then she said something that took me by surprise: “You know, you should come out to your mom.”
I paused, wondering if I should deny her assumption and say that I had made up the gay stuff. I wanted to tell her how homophobic and religious my mother was, that she would rather lose her children than change her views. I wanted to tell her that I was terrified that someone would tell my girlfriend’s parents that we were queer and that I would lose her forever, and how scary it was to walk around at night in my neighbourhood, but I choked it all back. “Yes, I should do that someday,” I replied shakily, tears welling in my eyes.
A few teachers at school had expressed mild concern when they found out that some students were terrorizing the queer ones; they treated our identities as a mere misfortune. But this singer was the first adult who ever told me to stand up for myself and to be proud of who I was. She provided some necessary fuel to get me through the difficult years that followed by making me feel special. Now when I play the tape I gave her fifteen years ago I cringe at how young I sounded, but I can also hear the terrified teenager that she heard. I can see what made her pick up the phone.
Change Your Name
WHEN OUR MOTHER WAS pregnant with our brother Craig, she used to play a game with my sister and me. Every morning as soon we woke up, we would run to the kitchen and get some saltine crackers and apple juice. The night before, our mother would make sure the box of crackers was at the edge of the counter where we could reach them. Then we would sit next to her bed on the floor and have a picnic breakfast while she ate them still lying on her side. I broke the crackers into tiny pieces and chewed on them while my sister would suck on them until they were soggy. Then we would wash them back with the apple juice from plastic cups. My mother couldn’t stomach anything else. “It’s what the baby wants to eat,” she would say.
I don’t remember our mother leaving the house to give birth to Craig, but I do remember her being gone. While she was in the hospital, our father cooked our meals; one day, he burned the scrambled eggs, but made my sister and me eat them anyway, and yelled at us when we cried about it. Later, though, he felt bad and took us out for pizza right before we went to the hospital. He told us not to tell anyone. We licked the tomato sauce off our faces under the hospital lights and never told our mother about the burnt eggs.
Our new brother Craig was named after our father because he was the first boy to be born in the family. When we brought him home from the hospital, I realized that I was going to be the oldest of three. My sister and I were too close in age for me to think of her as a baby, but Craig was tiny and bald except for a very thin layer of hair. He would lie in his crib throwing up on himself or crying when he wasn’t sleeping. I had started kindergarten two months earlier and was the smallest in my class. After my days at school feeling terrified of everyone around me, it was nice to come home and tower over Craig. Later, as he learned to speak and walk, he became a better sidekick for me than my sister. He was willing to do pretty much anything I wanted, and he believed anything I said.
One early December when Craig was five, he still had leftover Halloween candy because he was allowed only one piece a day. Being older, I had been left to manage my own supply, and it had been gone for weeks. I crawled under his bed one night right before his bedtime, laying there undetected as I listened to our mother tuck him in and say his prayers with him. I heard the door close and waited for a few minutes until I thought Craig must be half asleep. Then I whispered in a ghostly voice:
“Craig …”
I heard him shift above me, so I did it a couple more times.
“Craig … Craig.”
“Yes,” he finally responded.
“This is your conscience.” I waited to see if he was buying it.
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s really important …” I paused for effect. “… that yo
u give all your Halloween candy to Rae.” I instantly knew I had taken it too far.
He leaned his tiny face over the side of his bed and saw me. “Rae!”
I rolled out from under his bed and ran giggling out of his room. He ended up giving me some candy anyway. Even when I was picking on him, he liked the attention.
I grew impatient with Craig while he was trying to learn how to ride a bike. The day my parents took the training wheels off, I decided that if he could go faster he would be able to stay upright.
“Craig, come with me!” I pushed his bike up the hill by our house and he followed.
“Get on,” I instructed.
“Okay,” he said, too trusting to protest.
“Just keep the handle bars straight and your feet on the brakes,” I said, motioning to the pedals, which had back-brakes on them. I tapped him on the helmet, steered him in the right direction, and then let go. He sped down the hill, seeming to stay upright.
“Yay, Craig!” I called out. But my yelling must have thrown him off because the bike started to shake. He took a hard right and careened full speed into one of our neighbour’s rose bushes. I ran down the hill and pulled him out. His arms and face were all scratched up, but he was smiling.
“You did it!” I said. He never told on me.
Throughout our childhood, I couldn’t understand why Craig got to wear suits to church with his hair slicked down with a comb while I had to wear dresses. Hadn’t my parents noticed that I was better at being a boy than he was? I was way more talented at building forts and climbing trees. My father would often refer to him as the man of the house, but Craig was never quick to take on that role. He was quiet, gentle, and loved animals, and didn’t seem the least bit interested in becoming the kind of man that my father was. He would nervously crack his knuckles whenever it seemed like it was time for him to show his strength or skills as a boy.
When my father was put on a strong dose of anti-psychotics and spent most of his time sleeping, I took on the job of distracting my brother. It was best for us to stay outside and away from our father’s sleeping form on the couch. Craig and I would play road hockey with the boys from our neighbourhood while my sister was inside playing with John the baby. We made Craig the goalie because he wasn’t into fighting for the ball. He would stand in front of the goal wearing his foam road-hockey pads, sometimes wringing his hands when the game moved away from him to the other end. I was the oldest and bigger than all the boys. I would run up and down the street body-checking them and taking illegal slap shots above my waist. I had something to prove. Whenever I scored, I would drop my stick and cheer.
When I moved to my grandmother’s to escape my father, it meant leaving the rest of my family behind. I couldn’t afford to think about what it was like for my brothers and sister when I left; all I could think about was my own survival. Thinking about my siblings living across town in a house with my father made me feel sick to my stomach, and then … nothing at all.
When Craig and the family visited me at Grandma’s, I wanted to let him in on my secrets even though I was beginning to think of myself as an adult. Once when he was hanging out with me in my room, I got him to smell some green stuff in a bag. “What is it?” He asked.
“Tea,” I lied.
“It smells like a skunk,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
When I was sixteen, after our father was out of the house for good, we packed all of his stuff in the van so he could drive it to wherever he was headed. It sat in our garage for a month. Our father was slow about leaving and fought the divorce at every step. He knew our mother didn’t have any money and he wanted to weaken her by forcing her to spend it on legal bills. He fought for full custody of the boys and lost because the therapist he had originally forced me to go to advised against us having too much contact with him. It didn’t take long for his name to become forbidden in our house.
When I moved back to our mother’s house, I was able to spend a lot of time around Craig again. One afternoon while we packed to move into the duplex that was a quarter of the size of the house we had lived in before, Craig and I were out front taking a break. Somehow we got on the topic of our father. “I hate him,” I seethed. “I’m glad he’s gone. I don’t care if we have to move into a tiny house. Anywhere is better without him.”
I looked at Craig. He looked sad.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It’s just that I hate him too … but I have the same name as him,” he whispered.
“I know. That sucks,” I said. “You know you could change it, right?”
“Really?” he said, his eyes lighting up.
“You have two middle names. Why don’t you pick one of those?” I said. “Let me try them out on you … Hello, Robert!”
He shook his head. I tried the other one. “Hello, Phil!” I said, grabbing and shaking his hand. He smiled.
“Okay. We’ll call you Phil, then. Let’s go inside and tell everyone.”
The look on his face melted my heart. Of course he wanted to change his name. None of us called him by our father’s name again. That was the beginning of us all starting over. It was the first little sliver of our father that we pulled out and threw away. There were many more left, but getting started meant we were walking away from him instead of being pulled toward him. And that made all the difference in the world.
Second Coming
I WAS SITTING IN GRADE twelve chemistry class writing a test. The whole room was quiet except for the scratching of No. 2 pencils on paper. The test was multiple choice; I scanned the list of questions so I could answer the easiest ones first. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, so there weren’t many that seemed clear. The questions kept blurring in front of me.
Because I couldn’t sleep, I’d spent the night creeping around our house. I went from room to room checking to see if my family members were in their beds, panicking when I couldn’t make out their forms in the dark and moving onto the next room when I did. I became more agitated each time I repeated the pattern. After all, I’d been raised to believe that according to the Book of Revelation, Jesus could come back any day in the Rapture and that when He did, all Christians would disappear from the face of the earth, abandoning those who would be “left behind.” When I left the church at the age of sixteen, I had crossed the divide to the ones left behind. I wasn’t sure if I believed in God during the day, but in the middle of the night, it was clear that something was haunting me.
I couldn’t shake the worry that I was going to be left behind in the Rapture. I was eight years old when I read the Book of Revelation for the first time; I read it from beginning to end, with its four horsemen of the apocalypse, the breaking of the seven seals, and the sign of the beast. It said that all of the water on earth would turn into blood and that it would also rain down from the sky.
My parents often made reference to the second coming of Christ when we talked about death. They would cite the part of Revelations that said that the faithful dead would rise to praise the Lord and would join Him in the sky. I pictured my grandfather and my brother flying out of their graves. It was comforting to them and terrifying to me.
At the beginning of the end of the world, there was supposed to be the sound of a trumpet in the sky, heralding the arrival of Jesus. I listened for that trumpet everywhere I went. It could have been a car driving past our house at night, or a plane flying overhead. Every sound I couldn’t place was a trumpet. So one day when the classroom heater made a sound in the middle of my chemistry test, I again heard a trumpet. I started looking at everyone else in the room, worried that if I blinked they would all vanish. What if my parents were right? What if I was a sinner? I thought I was going to start screaming, but I knew an outburst would draw attention to my out-of-control thoughts. Whenever I grew close to asking for help, I pictured the hospital where I had visited my father when I was eleven. There was not a lot of help for anyone there. It was better to keep my fears to myself.
So I stood up and walked out of the class, down the empty hall and past the rows of lockers. I headed to the only place in the school where I felt safe, an empty stairwell. I used to sit there and quietly sing and play guitar when I had a spare period between classes. The door was the backstage entrance to the school theatre. Sometimes when I was singing, drama students would poke their heads out to see where the sound was coming from. This time I was too worked up to think of getting my guitar. I sat alone, pressed up against the wall, trying to slow down my thoughts. I knew there was no God, so why was I still afraid?
It began the moment my father was out of the picture. I was at my grandma’s house lying on the couch and suddenly my whole body went numb. I was convinced that I was dying. But there was always a layer of reality in which I knew my thoughts were illogical. It didn’t make sense to me that freedom from my father would contain so many panic attacks. I thought I was going to have a new life where I didn’t have to fight with him everyday, but now I fought eternal damnation within myself.
When I got home after the test that day, I went to my room and lay down on my bed. I’ve got to stop this, I thought. The plywood wall of my basement bedroom was covered in a collage of pictures that I’d cut out of magazines. Everything looked two-dimensional and hazy. Go away! I yelled at Jesus. Be real! I yelled at my room. Nothing seemed present to me anymore. Everything was coated in a thick layer of foreboding.