Dancing in the Dark (6 page)

Fools that they were.

So what did the bizarre incident described here with Spud and Billy Flaherty have to do with various other parts of Tom’s developing life?

Girls, for example, food, surely it didn’t change his appetite, or cars which he later collected, potency, planes, trains, ambition, his idea of history and incident, perhaps, or his enormous surge of feeling for that moment in Mahler’s 1st when the horns begin to brood with sexual joy, like swans?

Girls were not Tom’s problem in life. “Women,” his uncle Giacomo once said to him “are like the flowers of the field.” Tom thought this was pretentious. Giacomo smoked his cigar on the front porch at 246 Grace Street, although older Italian men don’t usually smoke cigars. Giacomo was in business. Tom thought his uncle’s view of women sounded like an older man who wants to look at a lot of girls on the street and admire their legs or their backs or their dresses. The girls Tom knew, and he thought largely in terms of the girls he actually knew, as well as the women he read about in books or magazines, were not very much like the flowers of the field. What field? What he knew was school. They were wild, shy, irascible, horny, hornier even than Tom at times, committed, uncommitted, vengeful, vivacious, exuberant, self-determined, but always attractive. They were challenging, some of them even talked about feminism. Sure, he thought sometimes, more jobs for women. How about for women like my aunt?

But they were not achievers in the sense that Tom, with his big
DC
10 (forget the
DC
10, if it’s a Delta, it’s a problem), with his big 727 Al Italia ego, was an achiever.

When he jumped for the basket and got the slam-dunk to break a tie in the middle of a game between Bloor and Riverdale, arch rivals, arch maniacs, for example, or when he got 99 in Geography which was a subject that fascinated him as literature, in its literary form, but bored him to tears as
a classroom subject – then he was at the centre of a sort of blue sky where the sun seemed to be perpetually shining. The Spud Arnetsons of the world, or whoever it was at the back of his head, could not touch him. He lashed out with one large Nike-shod foot and Arnetson plummeted.

Tom loved Wendy Taylor, Bonny Armstrong, Helen Hrtanak, Joanna Murphy, Grace Solipstano, and Maria Gevalado. Loved them at various times wildly, into a confusion of sheets which slowly became an intense, almost white world of night and day combined.

Tom’s view of himself as an athletic but fundamentally literary type will change, although naturally he can’t foresee this as yet, probably after he meets the Desperados for the first time in a little bar down on the lower East Side in New York the Bad; but his interest in achievement and his inability to deal with it will continue. His desire to write great stories, about Life, his life in Toronto, the Italian community, Frank Alberfetti’s vegetable store, Paolo Strematti cheating on his wife. That will change, that’ll change.

But his confusion about women will probably remain the same. There will always be two of them. One fairly traditional, the other more postmodern than Gucci. Tom will romanticize both because they are women, because they were not at the Tower on the day of his mishap, but they were, in a sense, at home at 246 Grace Street when he arrived that day. So. He will romanticize both of them, and will often lie awake at night, his long body stretched out like an awkward swimmer, kicking the cool sheets into a world of white confusion.

But at home, at school where his friendships rapidly expand to include scores of boys his own age and older, sports-interested types and in a few cases, another poet or whatever such as he is himself, with girls, at the local
ymca
on Dovercourt at College, Tom is a model guy. As he also is if they go out to the country southwest of the city to his cousin’s farm, milking the occasional cow, fairly occasional, Tom is an easygoing guy, restless, smart, but with all this tension, or so it would appear, bottled up inside him somewhere, like a small green bottle, filled with helium perhaps, floating somewhere in the open space at the back of his head, like a small green bottle tossed from a ship in space by a careless astronaut.

He is a bit antsy about some things, occasionally strained by ambition, but the sort of kid who looks as if he may become successful and then fool everybody by suddenly deciding to give it all up. He is like that in school sometimes. He tackles a particular project with incredible deep silent concentration and then, when it is finished and successful he suddenly shows no more interest in the subject, although it is possible that he may think about it as a reference. Basketball is different. Basketball is a continual challenge. There is no limit to how good you can be at basketball.

Albertini Garrone, Tom’s ample traditional mother, occasionally suggests that she can see Tom becoming extremely successful in business, she wants him to be a lawyer; for example she is convinced by the time Tom is in Grade 13 at Bloor Collegiate and thriving like a healthy plant that he should have a great career as a leading lawyer, a senator, even, maybe a member of government. She also sees him, for some obscure reason, as going into the steel business, perhaps in Hamilton. Mrs. Garrone has strange pictures of him in some of the different southern Ontario regions, and doing extremely well, making millions perhaps. Canada needs steel. There are opportunities. Most of the Anglo Canadians don’t know fettuccine or carpaccio about how to make good steel. Simple. Because they don’t have any traditions. This was, of course, because her brother, Hamilcar, had been in the steel business back in Italy, in Turin, as a matter of fact.

But Tom, romping through high school and considering college, finally chooses Harvard, which is impressed with his range of extra-curricular activities, writing, ab-ex painting, well, he did a painting once, not a lot, music, he plays mouth organ but lies and says piano and violin, the violin having of course been his father’s (his father’s passion, almost vocation, and eventual destruction – not of the man, per se, but of his stomach, his sense of frustration, the great Latin word
frustrere
, the sense of sadness turning black and bopping Giuseppe often on the side of the head like an angry mother as he left for work on cold Toronto winter white snow-swept mornings in the great frozen northern metropolis with his black lunchpail and his great thick chunky Italian rye and mortadella – which means death of woman – and tomato and cheese sandwiches); what else? Tom includes farming, nature walks, and soil analysis, also claims to be interested in
becoming an ecological or more precisely pollenological expert on the history of the Scarborough Bluffs, that range of crumbling and rugged cliffs, bluffs, which slopes down from Scarborough at the east end of Toronto into the blue nothingness of Lake Ontario, where Tom sometimes sails with a friend, the son of a family whose father owns a construction equipment company but is rumoured to be
cosa nostra
. “Who isn’t?” says Tom’s friend bitterly, one afternoon as they eat their hamburgers out in the middle of blue Lake Ontario. “Who isn’t?”

Giuseppe gives Tom 2 main gifts in life, besides love, of course, and besides his death, which hasn’t happened yet, and which, when it does happen, will become a dark spot on Tom’s computer screen in 4th year Harvard.

The first of these 2 gifts is Giuseppe Amadeus’s dislike of music, his feeling that music betrayed him, the way some men are about women, perhaps; music had let him down like a faithless woman, a
Strega
, in a red dress skittering off along the cobbles leading north from the sunlit piazza cafes of the San Borasino in Rome; as a city, his father’s great love, the city itself, its greatness, its prestige, its history, its why not say it out loud here this afternoon in the bright sunlight, it’s absolute like a Papal decree immortality. And so the father, Giuseppe Amadeus Garrone, had given up music, although he was not that bad a violinist, he just couldn’t find very much in the way of gainful employment, being something of a village boy who had come to Rome from Tuscany in pursuit of love, amor, greatness, and perhaps even money, and had finally taken up the trade of a simple brick layer instead.

The second of these two primary gifts that his father passes on to Thomas Eduardo Garrone, otherwise known as The Stick, because he was so thin, tall, and slim some said; but his mother Mama Garrone said, Like a stick, he’s so tall and thin. The second of these two primary gifts was his father’s passionate belief, especially after they had come to America, well, no, not exactly America, but as his father was fond of saying, “Christopher Columbus, who was ours and who will always be ours, and Italian, so, therefore he’s ours, he’s not George Washington’s, George Washington made the Revolution, but Christopher discovered America, he’s not
Thomas Jefferson’s, after whom Tom is named, he’s ours, an Italian, like us, a wop, a dago, a good dago, a great el woppo with a big nose,” Tom’s father had an enormous nose, a real schnauzzo; but, as his father was also fond of saying, “Columbus didn’t really discover what we now call America anyway,” and therefore, as he would point out, holding up the big blue and white with fine yellow and red lines map of North America, “what difference does it make if we’re here, in Toronto, where the majority of the good restaurants and tailor shops and small building companies are Italian anyway, or, for example,” he would beat the table with the big baguette of crusty Calabrese bread they cut slices from on the breadboard in the middle of the table, “if we’re down here in New York, where your cousin Sal and his wife live and those
battaschardi
they’ve got for children; or, for example,” he would move his big square-bottomed wine glass around the table like a Columbian compass, “if we live over here where the boy’s (the boy was Tom of course) uncle Giambattista lives in New Jersey with that huge fat ugly woman from Lombardy who tricked him into marrying her just because she was 6 months in the family way and her father owns a hardware business and wanted very much, especially when his daughter couldn’t do the family dishes any more because she was as I’ve said 6 months, not 6 weeks, but 6 months,
apregnento
. Ah. What difference, eh, this is all America.”

And his father, all 6’2” of him with flat sloping chest, the big long arms and that wide sloping but outwards belly sitting there in the kitchen with its bright yellow lights on Grace Street and Tom had been God, Jesus, how old at that time, he must have been 4 or 5 at the most and his father would sigh with pleasure with relief with relaxation at the good spaghetti and vitello that his mother had prepared and fold up the map and put it away and consider the object lesson taught and the matter in general more or less closed and committed to passionate belief.

So Tom had this considerable sense of family, Italian past, close-knit neighbourhood, leafy maple & ash trees background, much more so than he had a very clear concept of anything Canadian.

Of course a lot of different things affected Tom’s development and therefore could be called the “groundwork” of the kaleidoscope of events that
happened to him as late as 1978. School, reading Jean-Paul Sartre without wearing tinted glasses, a little trouble at customs one year to do with some hash brownies. Nothing serious.

But probably the biggest thing underlying Tom’s sense of ascent and fear of descent, his vestige of volatility from being at the top of the
CN
Tower, was his affection for his family and their life, and the enormous influence of his grandfather, Albertini’s father, who can’t be discussed here for various reasons, who spoke to Giuseppe Amadeus the
III
, and implored him to give his first son a new name, which is why Giuseppe had called Tom “Tomaszo,” just to make a difference in the Garrone family lineage.

Light-hearted and sombre by turns, high school leads to college, and Tom’s first change of city (since Orillia) is going to be Boston. Boston means Cambridge, Mass., where he has been accepted by Harvard.

Previously, going down to the Canadian East Coast for summer holidays or out to B.C., he has always taken trains. Canadian trains. Those 1940s pale imitations of the first great trains of the Canadian north. No longer kept up. No longer a big investment of government or private industry. He has always taken trains. Written a couple of stories about trains as a matter of fact, unpublished, he remembers, in Grade 12 or maybe 11. Sometime back then. When his uncle suggested Tom come back to Italy with him for June and July one year, Tom was nonplussed. No trains. It seemed to be his one weakness, apart from trig and calculus.

College makes him fly, or something does and it’s easy. As easy as drinking a different kind of orange juice. The bucolic pleasures of high school are over. Tom makes the move to the telephone one afternoon, before going to Harvard for registration, picks it up almost casually, reserves an economy flight one-way to Boston. And that’s that. Tom’s ready for travel. It was simple. After registration and settling in, Tom will get on the basketball team (although he isn’t
really
more serious about basketball than he is about literature, he just likes to say he is), as 2nd string right forward: the basketball team flies to some of their engagements. There is nothing to it. He suddenly seems to take it all for granted.

The last link or thread to that dark pool of subconsciously compartmentalized terror is neatly broken and tossed away, almost casually, like a used Kleenex.

Tom flies to Boston and flies home at holiday periods, unless he is invited somewhere else. He flies to New York for weekends sometimes, although he usually takes a train for the sake of economy. Mastering trig was, despite his high voltage
IQ
, fairly difficult for the calf. Abstractions aren’t his piano forte. But flying, flying is even easier than making coffee. He doesn’t have much money at college, not like some of the rich blond boys who buy their boxer shorts at Saks, or whose mothers buy their boxer shorts at Saks, whichever. But he will have money later, as it turns out. Some years later. After he begins writing songs.