Savage (23 page)
I had time to put in a few hours towards my ongoing nuclear family feud:
"Look, Family-maniacs, it's unfortunate your parental coping skills are limited to one offspring, and it has always been this way, that is, the backing-away part in which you prolifically are akin to. Anyway, I'll be fine, I always am, it's unfortunate that I'm not allowed the same rights as my idiot sister whom I am better than. It's not like I killed people. At times of great struggle, I feel that things would be easier, you know, getting a job in Toronto, if I had a phone in Toronto, or a bed there right now or could actually fucking live there. I make shit money in Montreal and I can either concentrate on school or working just so I can live here. I just have it in my head that everyone on earth I know has been able to, at some point, move back home for a period of time, but I'm not allowed. I'm on this sick treadmill on and on and on like a wet Energizer Bunny no one wants to let inside. If Holly was in my shoes, you'd be driving hundreds of miles to save her and you know it! It's no fault of yours, just somewhere along the way you've all deemed me unworthy of ultimate concern, and it's become Biblical, the degree to which Holly is a priority; it's like the accepted standards and practices of this family. From that day forward Nate shall be as replaceable as the lamps he broke on season three of This Shitty Life sayeth the Lord. Do you know of any temp work or places that handle that in Toronto?"
Mom responded, and since I didn't have call waiting, she left a voice message:
"Hi Nate, got your phone message today and wondered what kind of temp work you were looking for? I really don't have any link to personnel agencies since I've always gone through the paper. And it's for the summer in Toronto? That's a few months off. I guess the Toronto Star want ads are the best. Just look every day and see if they offer some information. I'm so glad that you've found some relief for your frustration of making the move to Toronto. Perhaps you can continue to do some work using contacts. I've talked to Uncle Carl, but when I phoned on the weekend he was resting, so I said that I'd call again. If you want to phone him, and I know he would like to hear from you, try after 7:00 p.m. He likes to talk about current-events things in the news, so plan some things you can talk about so that you don't have to be talking about yourself all the time. Work continues in its own tedious way. Maybe we can take in a movie sometime or meet for coffee, so keep in touch."
Friday, March 15th, 2002
"Hello, Nate! My blood is boiling with you today. I hope you mean the romance you give, because I'm not lying around like a plate of French fries; I think about you rubbing your nose into me, burying your teeth and shifting the balance of weight against gravity in your body. You remind me, hot and sweaty, of a horse I used to ride. You take memories of my father and fuck me with themâ"
"Hello?"
"Oh, you're home!"
"Just got home from class."
"When you get here, I can take you running outdoors in the park; it's fun and I'll kill you, then I'll make you do kung fu and yoga, which my ex-boyfriend George and I used to do. We were always working out together; it was the one thing, aside from cooking and pot-smoking we had in common."
"I'm just packing up and leaving in five minutes for the bus station," I said.
"Also, I got your tape in the mail late last night when I got back from trailer-trash bingo, which my friends Trixie and Beaver run. At one point, this cute Asian girl took her top off and stuck her fingers in her pants and smelt them. I thought of you ⦠OK, I will see you soon."
Eight hours later, wearing maroon jogging pants, jogging shoes and a yellow windbreaker, Tabitha met me at Yonge and Bloor, standing next to her bike, just after one in the afternoon. Her light-brown hair was pulled back into two small, braided pig tails just below her ears. If God were to look back, she may argue that at times over that weekend I appeared rigid and anxious, but never dour or bleak. I was always eager.
At times, however, I felt completely overwhelmed in Tabitha's world of vegan soups, almond milk, vintage
Playboy
pin-ups and girl-sweat overalls.
Now, thrown into what she called "physical reality," Tabitha and I were weekend concubines of groceries and candles and her big queen-sized bed after a meal consisting of vegan sushi and fresh juice.
"Drink this," she said, her mouth already rimmed in juicy foam. "It's rigorous juice."
I carried the giant television into her room so we could watch
Ghostbusters
, while Tabitha went through a series of wardrobe changes. After the movie ended, we got under the blankets for real, finally collapsing into each other with long, eye-clenched kisses. She undulated on top of, beneath and in front of me, our bodies reacting to this new unleashed erotic situation we had created. On Sunday evening, I had to attend
Wrestlemania X8
at SkyDome.
"I have to go to the thing. I should be back by 11:30." When I returned for the final night of our sleepover, her roommates told me off for supporting a tourist capitalist venture like the WWF. I tried to explain how they had a food drive that day at SkyDome, but it was no use.
On Monday morning, I stood in Tabitha's cold apartment. The toothpaste was like fresh mortar slapping along my gums, inviting a wall, suffocation, the end. Before my bus ride back to Montreal, I had an appointment with my general practitioner, who was standing in as my mental council as I was between psychiatrists. At the appointment, my doctor asked,
What triggered this? This need for you to feel like this is the end
.
And I was passionate about my ending, the white-light, end-of-the-tunnel clichéânot the journey. The journey never mattered. I told my GP, "I just feel like I'll run out of desire to live, like a fish out of water, and just throw myself at the mercy of whatever object is on a collision course to destruct." I would mutate into death; I'd make it happen.
Mom was semi-supportive, long distance and accessible. She was her own call centre now for my continued bouts of frenetic Unabomber-style payphone rants. My patronage to outdoor phone facilities spanned provinces. She phoned me when I arrived back in Montreal. "...Just think positively. Remember that I will always love you, but sometimes I back away because that's what seems to be the best thing at the time. I've also noticed how much you've improved in your problem-solving skillsâthat is, you find a way out of the dark side. Just remember: you will succeed if you keep in control and try not to see yourself as a victim, but as a person with a destiny..."
JulyâAugust 2002
The summer was a record-breaking, heated affair that included a papal visit from John Paul II in Toronto, prompting Tabitha and her friends to threaten to ride down his parade route naked on bikes. When we weren't visiting each other in Toronto or Montreal, I tried to beat the heat with Jimmy by rubbing ice cubes on his head and belly and covering up the windows with blankets. Some nights I would get a call from one of the waiters at Na Brasa, a Portuguese restaurant two blocks away, who would ask if I ever fed my cat.
"He is always begging for food out back," they said on the phone.
"Yes, I feed him. Do you feed him?" For the next few weeks, I would joke with Jimmy, asking him if he was eating at home or going out for supper.
Tabitha and I managed to get away: a two-week train-and-car trip to PEI with Tabitha's middle sister, Laura. We took the lengthy train ride from Montreal, and Tabitha's refusal to buy cough drops of any kind proved to be a trip tone-setting move. She coughed for the fifteen-hour train ride, my only solace being the occasional dirty comment she made about the scantly dressed teens at the end of the car. Laura picked us up at the train station, and we car-camped for two days, which included the best seafood I've ever had, nude-sister swimming and roadside sex while Laura tented solo. The funniest beach memory was the two naked Kane sisters about thirty feet out in the ocean examining each other's bodies for some reason while two boys on land checked them out with binoculars.
I went deep-sea fishing on our last day in PEI en route to Tabitha's parent's giant country house in New Brunswick. When we arrived, I rested the bag containing the barely dead fish in it on their new deck, causing a big oily mark. Thankfully, they were about to have it stained, so I avoided scorn early. Tabitha's father was a short stout British man with a red face, as if he continuously held his breath in, ready to explode on cue.
At dinner that first night, Laura updated their mother on a close friend who was always having trouble meeting or keeping a boyfriend. Before this segment began, the meal unstitched into several pockets of discussion: our PEI trip, the train ride and the pope. Laura began her story, and her mother appeared poised at first but then overwhelmed by a visible display of curiosity. "So Maggie met this guy at a picnic we'd put together," Laura began. "Yes," their mother said, touching Laura's free hand. She took a bite of forked salad. "They agreed to meet the next day at the same park we were at." Laura delivered the backstory details of Maggie's make-up as a person with brevity and equanimity, creating a sort of mysterious intrigue. "So she went to the park the next day to meet himâ"
"Where she was raped by ten bikers," their father chimed in, total deadpan and sourced from some reserve that Tabitha later told me was a typical type of parlance.
We spent the next ten days attempting to but not succeeding to go whale watching, taking the family dog on a terrible beach walk where he fell from a rock at a height of about ten feet and needed to be carried for a mile back to the house and taken to the vet. Tabitha thought this was an omen, as I carried the senile animal down the beach.
November 2002
My stability in school had evaporated once more, another unglorious reign ousted. Tabitha had spent the fall in Toronto fighting accusations of child neglect from her roommate in court over a misunderstanding concerning Emily's son and Tabitha's jogging. I tried to talk to Tabitha as often as she'd allow.
"You think I'm guilty!" she shouted over the phone, imperial in tone. Tabitha was asked to watch Emily's seven-year-old son, but when they went to the park together, he grew bored and wanted to go home. Tabitha wanted to finish her planned jog and asked if he could go home by himself, some two kilometers west along St. Clair West. The police found him walking alone and drove him home, where Emily was unpacking some groceries.
This infraction began to sting Emily, and soon the household was filled with a palpable tension and hostility. When Tabitha and I returned from a two-week trip to the East Coast, Emily was still raging, and kicked Tabitha out and pressed charges against her. The fumes from this ordeal were just now thinning out into resolve. Christmas would be a much-needed rest.
"She went ape-shit on me!" Tabitha continued, "And then you tell me to go to the police to see what I should do, and they arrested me!" For most of October and November, Tabitha lived with her ex-boyfriend in Toronto, and we exchanged communications as best we could.
*
"Hi Mom, thanks for taking me to your doctor. And offering me a pretzel-and-cracker toasted sandwich after. Doctor Brian did nothing to interpret these feelings and totally failed us. What we need is a team of doctors and trainers. I still say, you have far too much food, and I'm not criticizing, but you'd lose weight and save money if you ate what you had, or at least ate more raw food, and stopped drinking coffee twelve times a day. Your heart is like a Tim Hortons highway truck full of caffeinated fuel. Constantly eating that sort of food is bad for your stomach and for the environment. You have nine things of bread for one and a half people. That is beyond the pretzels and cereals. That is way too much food. We never had that much bread in the house. You should ration your food, and cut down on so much extravagant spending. Like crackers and garbage bags. Just throw the food out the window like they do in France. Also those fruit cups; those can't be healthy. That is food for people with no teeth or hope. They must rot your teeth; it's on the commercial. They are syrupy fruit, totally full of chemicals, and it's fake fruit, fruit made by children in Florida. That will upset your stomach. Tabitha says you need natural fats like butter and salt and that low-calorie food just makes you hungrier."
I called Mom again, and she finally picked up. Jimmy was asleep beside me on his back. I used to stretch him out that way to teach him how to sleep like a human.
"I'm really sorry about last night. I was really excited about how you seemed to have things organized about your courses, working etc., so I phoned your Dad, only to find out that he was drunk. I tried to get off the phone by saying, âI think we should talk another time,' but he refused and called me back to say he had talked to you. Anyway, I think he wants to know your marks from January through April because he's not been informed or has forgotten. As for the past term, I think he feels like he has wasted his money and it will take longer for you to finish your degreeâbut I'm sure you feel guilty about it as well. I hope that this term will show what a gifted person you really are and that the marks will reflect the confidence you need to move on."
She began telling me how upset she got by speaking to Dad. "I had forgotten that part of my life with him and how we all suffered, but now we are free. I really think Holly has a lot of courage to go up there and face it all the time."
*
"Mom, it's your son, Norman Bates. Just for the record: I dropped two courses this semester because Jimmy was hit by a car, and I missed two weeks of classes because I had to work to pay his gigantic bill. I have been finding it hard to live with my new all-male roommate situation. Why I tell you this is because HOLLY DIDN'T HAVE TO DEAL WITH COCAINE ADDICTS OR ALCOHOLICS WHILST STUDYING FOR SCHOOL. SHE BASICALLY LIVED IN A FUNERAL HOME OF SILENCE WITH YOU! My roommates were COCAINE addicts and YES my eyes do hinder me from reading from time to time. My eyes are fucked and I can only read FROM ONE of them and it's not something you should hold against me and for the record I had job offers in late 2001 in Toronto but had nowhere to live in Toronto and was still in Waterloo and you knew this. You even bought me a T-shirt with TORONTO on it as some sort of unfit joke that you could get the Order of Canada for. I expressed this clearly to you. Things are really hard for me now. I think you just don't want to think about how progressively unfair this is for me. And that Holly will have to deal with Tabitha and I at your place because we are coming on the 19th for a ten-hour blood-thirsting roast-beast cliché feast! WE'LL SEE YOU SOON AND HOLLY WILL OPEN HER SERPENT GIFT AND SAY THANK YOU BROTHER YOU ARE THE TRUE ICON AND I'M SORRY THAT I WORKED AT BUSINESS DEPOT AND WON THE GOLD MEDAL FOR SELLING REAMS OF PAPER LEADING ME TO BUSINESS SCHOOL DIPLOMA AFTER BUSINESS SCHOOL DIPLOMA. I'M SORRY THAT I HAVE HAD A STABLE LIFE FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS, HOME COOKED MEALS AND A PHONE WITH A 416 AREA CODE, CALL ANSWER, A CAR WHEN I NEED IT AND I'M SORRY THAT YOU HAVE HAD TO MAKE IT ON YOUR OWN FOR SO LONG AND HAVE NOT GOTTEN VERY FAR AND I'M SORRY THAT I HAVE AN EDUCATION AND YOU DON'T AND I HAVE A GOOD JOB. I'M SORRY. MERRY CHRISTMAS, NATE, I LOVE YOU AND I'M SO GLAD MOM SUGGESTED WE SPEND THIS TIME TOGETHER AFTER 65 YEARS OF NOT SPEAKING TO ONE ANOTHER! AFTER ALL, WHO AM I TO OWN CHRISTMAS? RIGHT? THIS CHRISTMAS, THE STUFFING, THE TOOTHPASTE..."