Imperfections (3 page)

Four days later, bundled in an odourless blue blanket and cradled in my father's arms, we stepped out into the bright sun and crossed the parking lot to a shiny new green AMC Pacer. My father wore a green cardigan and sported a thick, but well-groomed, brown beard. The glass shimmered in the sun as Father handed me off to Mother and opened the door for her.

“Blitzkrieg Bop” by the Ramones screamed through the speakers as the engine roared to life. “What is this?” my father said and poked at the radio pre-sets. “Where did ABBA go? They used to be on all the time and now there's this nonsense.” He fumbled around on the seat between us and found an 8-track cartridge. Without taking his eyes from the windshield, he scoured the dashboard with it before inserting it in the player.

“There we go,” Father said with audible relief. So began my first experience with ABBA, something that everyone does, or at least should, remember. Unfortunately, the kids nowadays hear “Dancing Queen” on a drunken night at some retro-dance party. They fail to see the depth of ABBA, the depth that my father saw, their first ABBA experience ruined by some DJ-of-the-moment's “Dancing Queen” remix. Just out of the hospital, swaddled and warm, there was something in the air that forever tied me to those Swedes.

The engine roared and the Pacer turned out of the hospital parking lot onto the main street. Father lit a cigarette and the smell of it filled the car. That's the smell I remember of my father and, in the future, that's a smell I would always associate with the man. It would remind me of the first words I heard from his voice and of playing catch in the backyard. It would remind me of the feel of his green cardigan, scratchy and warm, and how his beard looked when I gazed up as he carried me out of the hospital.

Mother rolled down her window a bit. Smoke slid out of the crack like a waterfall.
 

We were going home. We were a family.

I don't remember much of my early days at home except the general things. There was a lot of sunshine coming through clean windows into large rooms with vaulted ceilings. There was the smell of freshly mown grass coming through open windows and the sound of kids shouting in the distance, over the rows of fences, in someone else's backyard. I remember the air being fresh and sweet. It was a morning feeling, one where there was the clink of dishes and cutlery from another, faraway room and the sound of the vacuum cleaner running downstairs.

Then there was the barbecue where I got to meet more of my family. A warm breeze blew across my face where I lay in a bassinet, in the backyard in the shade under an orange tree. “He's gorgeous.” My aunt's face beamed down.
 

I was wearing a blue cotton unitard with attached booties. There was a button-up hatch in the back. I also wore a fuzzy bonnet. I remember always wearing a hat when I was a kid.

“A little darling,” Mother agreed. I could not see her but I knew she was close by the sound of her voice.

“Have you settled on a name?”

“Jack wanted to name him Jack Jr.,” Mother said.

My aunt frowned and rolled her eyes.

“But I think I've convinced him of Richard,” Mother continued.

I giggled and my aunt's face melted into a smile.

“Richard Trench.” She contemplated before turning a wiggling finger to my chin. “Hello, little Richard,” she said. “I am your Auntie Maggie.”

“He likes you, Margaret,” my mother said.

“Tony,” Auntie Maggie called over her shoulder. “Come say hi to your nephew.”

“What's that?” came a voice from somewhere.

“Come here, damn it,” Maggie said. “Say hi to your nephew.”

A man's face appeared in my vision, beside Auntie Maggie's face. He had a heavy brow and a square jawline that was covered in silvery stubble. The man smelled of grilled meat and barbecue sauce. He held a bottle of beer at belly level. His head was quite a bit bigger than Auntie Maggie's, his eyes were a little wide-set. The bridge of his nose was flat and the rest of it was rather bulbous, giving him the look of a syphilitic boxer. This man, my Uncle Tony, revealed two rows of crooked teeth as he smiled.

“Leonard, come here and meet your cousin Richard,” Tony boomed over his shoulder. “Now, damn it.” Pause. “Hold my beer, Mags,” he said, handing Auntie Maggie the beer, raising a camera in front of his face, fiddling with the focus and then clicking a picture.

Uncle Tony slung the camera around his neck and bent out of my vision for a moment. When he reappeared, he held up a small child with a round face and a runny nose.

Leonard.
 

Uncle Tony presented him like a gift, holding him out so he could touch my arm. Leonard, who would become my best friend in childhood and through my adult years. Leonard, who would always have a scheme and would share so many moments and memories with me. Leonard, who, being two years older than me, would protect me from bullies, break ground and map areas for me such as girls, driving, alcohol and so many other wonders of the world.
 

Leonard pinched me hard.
 

I cried out in pain.

“Leonard,” Auntie Maggie's voice was stern. “Use your nice hands now.”

She patted the backs of Leonard's hands in a vague and noncommittal form of discipline.

Mother mistook my surprised yowl as an order from the bar and lifted me from my bassinet.
 

From this new vantage, I took in the backyard. It seemed to go on forever. My father stood at the end of the deck, poking at the barbeque with a confused look on his face and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The grey-blue smoke from the end of the cigarette blended with the grey-blue smoke drifting into the air from the grill. Uncle Tony put Leonard down and tapped him on the butt, sending him scooting across the dark green grass, away from the orange tree. The colours of the flower garden were vivid and alive. Roses stood thick and majestic near the deck. Clematis climbed the trellis near the fence where a bright yellow bird sat and sang. Leonard made his way to the clematis and hit the trellis, causing the bird to trill and flap away. He laughed and tumbled backwards onto the grass. Auntie Maggie wandered away from us, toward Father. Her gauzy dress, swirling blue and green, patterned like an ocean wave, rippled in the breeze.
 

And then my face was plunged into my mother's breast.

When I was pulled away again it was from under a blanket. I was in a grocery store. Fluorescent lights, far overhead, stung my eyes. The air smelled like a mix of vegetables and cardboard. The floors were polished to the point of being blinding, if a tan shade of brown could ever be blinding.

“Jack,” Mother said, calling to Father.
 

“Wha'?”

“Go get me some of that udder balm Maggie was talking about.” She was hissing now, her eyes darting to see if anyone was close enough to hear. When she deemed it safe, she continued. “My tits are chewed raw.” Father wandered off, nodding and breathing through his mouth which, combined, came across as a look either of retarded wonder or cerebral palsy.

We were sitting on a stack of pallets full of Campbell's Soup across from a row of glossy magazines at the end of an aisle. Opposite us was a freezer full of Swanson's Hungry Man turkey dinners. “Mean” Joe Greene glared at us with the threatening claim that spending ninety-eight cents and half an hour with an oven would result in a succulent Thanksgiving dinner.
 

A heavy-set woman wandered up to the freezer and, with a finger attached to her chin, contemplated the meals. She took two and then spotted us. Her face softened to a smile and she pushed her cart with a wobbly wheel over to us.

“Oh my God, you are so cute in your little ball cap. What's your name?” she asked.

“This is Richard,” Mother replied for me.

“How old are you, Richard?” the woman clucked, reached out and rubbed her finger up and down my cheek.

“He is just turning eight weeks,” Mother replied.

“Aren't you adorable?” the woman cooed and made a clicking noise with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. She took a step back in admiration before waving bye and pushing her Hungry Man dinners over to the magazines.

Mother sighed and looked up the aisle for Father. My eyes followed the woman across the aisle to a rack of magazines. She selected a fashion magazine and started flipping through it. Several heavy bond paper inserts slid from the pages and skidded across the aisle. The woman huffed and scrabbled around collecting the inserts.
 

I would see those magazines later in life but then they would be faded and dog-eared, the covers creased and coffee-stained. On the covers there were skinny models with turquoise blue neck scarves and big, bug-eye sunglasses. In the background there were beefy, hairy chested brutes with facial hair, moustachioed or bearded, and with ill-defined but undeniable musculature.

“Is this the stuff?” It was my father jolting my thoughts and holding forth a yellow- and green-coloured tin with a smiling cartoon cow face framed by gaudy daises.

“I think so,” Mother said and adjusted me so she could open the container. She poked two fingers in and scooped out a gob of white paste. She thrust the wad of goo under her shirt and rubbed.

I hiccupped and puked up a little bit. Mother took this as a request and my face was plunged under the blanket and into her breast. The balm had left the distinct, sanitized smell of the hospital.

When I was pulled away we were in a parking lot, sitting in the Pacer, which was parked beside the sickly yellow light of an overhead lamp. In the light, I could make out slivers reflected off of the glass and steel of the surrounding cars. I could also see the slivers reflected off the tears on my mother's cheeks. The images outside the car were blurred by a light condensation gathering on the windshield. I couldn't tell whether it was on the inside or the outside. The window was open a crack; the glass was foggy.

I smelled Father before I saw him. I smelled his cigarette even before he opened the driver's-side door and before I felt the suspension sink under his weight as he plopped down. The car keys jingled in his hand.

“Well,” he grunted, smoke puffing out of his nose like a pissed-off cartoon bull. “What the fuck was that?”

The car was silent for a moment.

“Today, at the grocery store, a woman talked to Richard.” Mother gasped and whimpered. “I wasn't even there.”

Father looked at her dumbly. The cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth, dumbly as well.

Mother continued. “She didn't talk to me or even look at me. She talked to Richard. I wasn't even there. And now, I just wanted a fancy dinner with some friends and Richard starts acting up and they asked me to leave. I went. I couldn't do anything else.”

“Oh, I missed that,” Father mumbled. “All's I know is, I went off to take a piss and you were gone when I came back.” The cigarette bobbed up and down in the corner of his mouth, the ember at the end drawing circles in the dark as he talked.

“You didn't think to come looking for me? I've been here almost an hour,” Mother said.

“Well, I had to finish my dinner… It was steak,” Father said, “and lobster. I thought you were in the can changing him or something.”

“Take him for a minute.”

My world jostled and shifted. Then, I was looking up past the steering wheel to my father's face. Mother rummaged through the purse resting at her feet. She found an orange bottle and rattled the pills inside before taking one.

“Shit, honey. When did you start the Librium again?” Father's beard frowned.

A bit of ash fell off the end of his cigarette and landed in a soft, sooty pile on my cheek, right below my eye. Nobody noticed but me.

“It's not the Librium. This is Valium. It's better,” she said. “I'll be fine. If I have to dine in the food court at the mall with all the other moms for the next eighteen years, I'll be fine.”

Silence followed the sound of Mother putting the rattling bottle back into her purse. A pudding-brained instinct made me giggle, kick my feet and reach for the rattling noise. This bothersome reaction would persist for a while before evolving through several stages including the instinctive giggle-kick-reach that comics and ice cream would bring out, and later, tree forts, homemade bike jumps, and drum kits, and later still BMX bikes and covert porno-magazine glances in the alley on the way home from school, and finally the boobs and butts of the real thing.
 

It's all instinct.

It happens.

Can't fight it.

CHAPTER 3

Bagged—Champion Sports Rhino Skin® Style

Leonard laughed.
 

The veins in his neck sticking out told me it was a real hard laugh, one of those grab-your-knees-and-squat-a-bit-because-you-may-just-piss-yourself-you're-laughing-so-hard kind of laughs. Then he squeaked, a long high-pitched siren noise. It was one of those squeaks that came from laughing so hard he couldn't control the flow of oxygen because he was busy trying to breathe and not throw up at the same time.