Falling Backwards: A Memoir (12 page)

In the late seventies we got a satellite dish that was the size of the moon. I was afraid to walk by it for fear of developing tumours of some kind. The thing hummed and crackled constantly. I imagined that invisible cancer beams shot out of it, like something from
Star Trek
. We were apparently now receiving all these illegal channels from the States and it was totally exciting. If it was from the States that meant it had to be good. I remember getting the picture a lot of the time, but no sound. That was the satellite company’s way of keeping you from stealing their signal, I suppose. We didn’t care. We were determined to watch the American movies from the dish without the sound and we all became really good lip readers because of it.

In my dad’s book, there wasn’t anything worse than a liar. You could burn down a bowling alley, but if you admitted to doing it, you were still a good person and deserved the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know when my older brother became a pathological liar. At one time he was the pillar of truth, really. Now Duray lied about everything he did and everywhere he went. My mom would say, “Have you been drinking?” and Duray would lie and say no. She’d always want to smell his breath and check to see if his eyes were red. There wasn’t enough Visine in the world to clear up his bloodshot, stoned eyes. Duray called her Sherlock Holmes, which made me laugh. My mom could smell marijuana from five miles away and be able to ascertain whether it had been grown in Colombia or on Vancouver Island. She’d ask him where he’d been, and he would always lie about that too. After awhile I don’t think he knew where the truth was. It was gone. There was no truth left in him. He felt that a lie was always the better choice. I didn’t start lying until I turned eighteen and, according to my mother, I went bonkers. Maybe I did go bonkers. I liken it to letting the proverbial cat out of the bag. It was
a really big bag and I was a late, late, late, late bloomer. (I didn’t get my period until I was thirty-seven.)

Every time the phone rang at our house, it seemed like it was somebody calling about something that Duray had done. It was hard to believe that one kid could get up to so many bad things. My mom already had to deal with my dad and his drinking, and now she was also having to deal with Duray lighting haystacks on fire and spray-painting the hell out of the house the neighbours had been building. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars my parents spent trying to fix things my brother had ruined. You can only ground a person for so many years, and then it doesn’t work anymore. Grounding was a joke to my brother. Duray was an amazing escape artist who could get out of any room and disappear into thin air. He was like Houdini with a drug and alcohol problem.

I don’t remember him laughing all that often. He would laugh like the devil when he huffed gasoline, but that was more of a cackle that quickly turned into a scene from
The Exorcist
. It made me feel so hopeless and sad to watch him come undone.

On one of my brother’s many escapes he thought it would be a good idea to drive a tiny 75cc Honda motorcycle into Calgary to drink beer. This adventure just about cost him a foot.

My parents had gone somewhere on a short overnight trip, so he simply decided to go on a joyride without a helmet or a licence of any kind in the fading dusk. All hell seemed to break loose with him whenever my parents went anywhere. Duray would find trouble and bring it to the front door. But it was impossible for my parents to be home all the time, and my older brother knew that. He counted on it. I think we were all secretly praying that Duray grow out of his destructive patterns. He didn’t. We thought that eventually there would be a light at the end of the tunnel instead of a train coming towards him.

On this particular night, Duray got on the little motorcycle and headed off into town to go to the nearest bar, the Westgate. It was seven or eight miles from where we lived. He actually made it to the hotel without being spotted. He sat there for a few hours drinking, spent all his money and then proceeded to make his way back home. He had gone about a mile when two police officers spotted him buzzing along without a helmet or a licence plate. They turned on their siren, thinking he would immediately pull over, but he had no intention of giving up that easily. The chase was on!

When they got up alongside him they told him to pull over, but he didn’t. According to my brother, the two officers in the police cruiser then starting bumping into his motorcycle with their car, trying to get him to stop. He probably got scared and thought he’d outrun them by going down sideroads and trying to head home, but it didn’t work out that way. The cruiser bumped him a few more times until it knocked him and the bike over. The police car ran over his leg, leaving him in a crumpled heap on the ground in a pool of his own blood. The way my brother tells it, the blood was spewing out of his boot like a water sprinkler. He doesn’t remember much of what happened after that because he passed out. His foot had been punctured by the little metal gear changer on the motorcycle. The pedal went through his boot and into his foot like a steel spike.

I remember picking up the phone when the police called to say that there had been an incident. They asked if my parents were home, and I said they weren’t. They asked where they were and when they’d be home. The policeman sounded panic stricken. He wasn’t making any sense at all. He was going on and on about what had happened and that it was a “very unfortunate accident.”

The police took him to the emergency ward via ambulance to get the mangled mess stitched up. It required hundreds of stitches. To this day my brother can hold water in the divot on the top of his
foot where that pedal went in. He’s quite proud of that little oddity. If he had not been wearing his heavy leather boots, his foot would have been ripped right off his leg. The police tried to sweep it under the rug by saying they wouldn’t press charges. I can’t imagine what they were thinking, or what they ended up reporting to their bosses. They more or less got away with running over a kid on a little motorcycle. A few weeks later, he got a ticket in the mail for $30 for driving without a licence. Duray took months to heal. My parents were devastated by the whole thing.

He said he was plastered when he drove home and that he was glad he was because otherwise “it would have hurt a whole lot more than it did.”

My dad had begun drinking more himself since we’d moved out of town. He was under a lot more pressure at his job. His hours were longer and he was home less and less. I’m sure building our house was stressful and required a lot of money that he didn’t always have. We didn’t see him at the dinner table more than a few times a week. I had no idea why he wasn’t there; he just wasn’t. He was slowly becoming a ghost to me. My mom would caution us not to bring kids home after school because she didn’t quite know how dad would be—if he’d be sober or not. His moods were unpredictable, and he could be really cranky and short tempered. Duray bore the brunt of it, unfortunately.

I became a bit afraid of my dad at times, to tell you truth. He was a grouchy guy, always yelling. I don’t really remember him ever talking to us. He just yelled. For about five years I thought my name was “Jesus Christ” and I thought my brother’s name was “goddammit.” We learned a whole hell of a lot of swear words from my dad. They really came in handy at school. I could shock people with my vocabulary. I could spit out words that would leave other kids with their
jaws hanging half open. My dad knew some good curses. (And to think he was raised in a Mormon home.) But it honestly didn’t bother me all that much. That was my dad—that’s the way he was. For some reason I tuned out the naughty, swearing, cursing parts I didn’t want to hear. I am pretty sure I wasn’t in any kind of denial—I was just always easygoing. I didn’t let many things bother me, and his yelling was one of those things. My mom always told me that I knew how to handle him, and I guess I did. For the most part I just retired to the basement to listen to my records.

Making my dad mad was not a good idea, so we all tried not to. I made it a point to be out of the house if I could when he was home. It seemed like everything we did drove him crazy, like not putting his tools back where they came from or not coming home when we were supposed to or fooling around at the dinner table or using his “good wood” to build tree forts and rafts that never floated. How was I supposed to know what good wood looked like? (I must have had good taste in wood because I always used his good stuff.)

My dad didn’t like it when you wrecked perfectly good things. He didn’t like it if you cut the bread or cheese crooked. I have to say I can’t stand that, either. He would get really mad over things like that. Everybody would scatter when he got raving about a ruined block of Velveeta cheese and a lot of goddamns were cast about. A million colourful words came shooting out of his mouth, and we made sure to stay out of their way.

It wasn’t the big things but the little things that set him off. That’s what made it hard: we never knew exactly what was going to make him angry. I knew that when I was downstairs playing music, he wouldn’t come down there for anything. It was my safety net. Nobody went into the basement except Duray and me. Duray’s bedroom was down there and it was quite the testosterone-laden den. He had an old waterbed in his room. This was a giant one, with speakers and pot
lights in it—it was the mother ship of all waterbeds. He loved that thing. I, on the other hand, have always hated waterbeds. I slept on one once and that was it for me. I dreamed about having to pee all night long, and my back felt like it had been sawed in half. (Also: never let a kitten on a waterbed, as they have very sharp little claws that can make really, really small, slow-leaking holes that you don’t notice for days or even weeks.)

He had Nazareth and KISS posters plastered everywhere. He had a black light and black-light posters too, which I thought were amazing. I remember how weird our teeth looked when we had that black light on. (God forbid I should
ever
touch the black light, even if I was absolutely sure Duray was in another country.) My brother was a
very
tidy person. No one had to tell him to clean his room. I, on the other hand, was pretty messy. Making my bed or putting my clothes away cut into my snowmobiling and my tree climbing and my killing of gophers and magpies. Why make a bed when you were just going to get right back into it?

I don’t think my dad noticed that I wasn’t around much when he was. He was in his own world and I had no idea where that was. I wasn’t old enough to understand that he was a person with his own issues and concerns and worries. I somehow managed to be under his radar. I guess it helped that I was short and quick and could get around him pretty well. I would grab a Wagon Wheel out of the cupboard and fly out the back door. (A Wagon Wheel is a godawful chocolate-covered cookie thing filled with marshmallow. We ate them by the millions even though they taste like used sport socks.) I would be outside playing until the sun went down and I literally could not see my hand in front of my face.

By then I had a new dog—Aquarius. My parents had gotten him for us a few years after we’d moved out to Springbank. They’d found him in an ad in the local paper. We drove out to a little town
west of us called Priddis and picked him out of a litter of pups. He was the smallest of the bunch. We think he was a German shepherd–husky cross, but the farmer wasn’t exactly sure who the father was. I couldn’t quite figure out how he couldn’t know that. That seemed important to me. My mother tried to explain that you didn’t always know who the father was when it came to dogs. I took her word for it. My mother was the one who named him Aquarius. She apparently loved the song as sung by the 5th Dimension: “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius …” Whatever the heck that meant.

My dad had put up an old school-bell from the turn of the century that my mom would ring when playtime was up. I knew that I needed to get home as quickly as my short, bruised legs would take me. No fooling around. You could hear that bell from miles away and, ironically, it was as clear as a bell. Go figure. My dog’s ears would perk up and he’d start running for home, and there was no question that he’d be taking me with him. He would always pull at me by my shirt sleeves. Aquarius knew there would be a big bowl of food waiting for him when we got home.

Both my parents worked so hard on the house and in the yard. We had five acres, and they spent months if not years fixing up every square inch of that land: clearing brush and planting trees and mowing and gardening. My dad used to have us haul buckets to water the spruce trees they’d planted. My dad would say, “Go out and water those goddamn trees!” (It wasn’t just a tree, it was a goddamn tree.) I would cringe. I would rather have been ironing, because at least then I could watch TV. Picking rocks out of the garden wasn’t high on my list.

“Go and pick those goddamn rocks out of that goddamn garden, goddammit!” How did those rocks get there in the first place, I always wondered, and why would a girl need to pick rocks
out of a garden anyway? What exactly did the rocks do that was so detrimental to growing things? I never understood the rock-picking at all. It was one of my least favourite chores. I just hated picking rocks. I am quite sure that it served no purpose at all. It was just something my dad made us do when we were in trouble or when he didn’t want us in the house. I think he may have been the one who planted the rocks in the garden in the first place, although I will never be able to prove that. He will undoubtedly take that secret to his grave. His last words will be like that final scene in
Citizen Kane
. He will utter the word “rocks,” and slip into the vapour of the unknown. Yes, I am dramatic.

My dad liked to pick a fight and win it. It’s like that old saying: Do you want to have peace, or do you want to be right? My dad wanted to be right. He always thought he was right and the hard part was that, more often than not, he
was
. He seemed to know everything about everything, and that made it hard to win an argument. My dad was very, very stubborn, and I know that drove my mother crazy. My mom wanted peace. We all wanted peace. Who doesn’t want peace, for crying out Christmas?