Savage (27 page)

Mom was a mirage of cotton in the early evening glow; she stood in the hallway looking into her bedroom, perhaps at the pile of clothing and a plethora of itemized self-memorabilia. Her expression was dazed; a glaze of uncertainty. Yet still, she remained determined. This was all really happening.

I ejected my former VHS likeness. I pushed myself through the living room into the boiled waters of reality.

20 )
Thieves Like Us

Summer 2010

T
he office was hot. In my dress clothes and the too-tight black pants and sitting down all day long cooking, I couldn't stop refilling my water glass. Ice cubes were ready as I had made a point to both clean out the little ice-cube tray and make a fresh batch for the day.

The little office with its deficiencies in supplies (sparse elastics, folders, labels, coffee pots and wrestling magazines piled a mile high) was a form of assurance, that I did, in fact, belong somewhere on the planet, that all my studying had, in fact, paid off.

Kamala (
born James Harris, May 28, 1950
) had been on my mind all morning. It was my goal to have pilfered sound bites from Brutus Beefcake, Danny Davis, Jimmy Jack Funk all the way to Kamala this week, ready for mass consumption by ex-pimple-poppers worldwide, and, by default, to systematically frame my life in a steady work ethic, a sense of dutiful routine, one that would help harbour that particular crescent smile I would find myself wearing during commercials and grocery-store trench strolls, wearing it unforced, the muscles forming with intestinal fortitude, overcoming that disastrous emotional glacier known as my face. I had been working here now for a year and a half.

Mom's photographs came in an email attached with electronic TIFF hooks and portrayed her version of the American dream: newfound familial bounty, daring wardrobe choices (lots of sand-coloured silk blouses, white cotton pants and a large-brimmed straw hat) and multi-teethed dinner-table portraits overloaded my screen.
Now she was laughing and riding on the back of a red motorcycle. Now she was standing in front of a mountain squinting. Now she was eating at a restaurant with a group of grey-haired friends
. All these digital images clung to a JPEG netherworld in archived permanence.

I stared deeply into Mom's foreign smile. Her spinoff life was working, and a new cast had finally been assembled after our own nuclear family's epic meltdown had cooled off for good.

Our chat on Skype beaded with a sitcom's morbid routine; our back and forth was, of course, all in fun.

"I just want to see the will," I said jokingly.

"I changed it," Mom beamed. "I'm giving it all to Zsa Zsa Gabor!"

"Whatever. You and Dad will outlive me by twenty years. Holly and Sadie will get everything."

"You're funny."

"I book the prop skull all over the world and get a percentage of the total gate," I said. "I'm a Hamlet skull-prop secretary. I make millions of dollars."

Mom never offered more than terms like "sweltering" and "dry" and spicy." I'd often read the
Dallas Star
online to figure out what was really happening to the city that now consumed her and provided her with rich sunlight and dry winds from the north and west, with air pollution that petered out from a hazardous-materials incineration plant in Midlothian. I looked up grocery stores and museums and zoos. I wanted to imagine her world beyond the war-room censors.

"Haven't heard from you in a while."

"Isn't that our family motto?" I said. "Seriously, though, not to get all
Origin of Species
on you, but do you remember the skipping-rope thing? They stole it? The reason I ask, is, I have these mythologies about everyone, myself included, and I remember the skipping rope and then for some reason, when I was at day camp and they stole my chocolate drink, you yelled at the kids, and I always thought you were taking revenge on your rope thieves that day at my camp. Like those ‘3M: A Part of Our Heritage' commercials when Canada invented the wheel, pyramid, Superman, basketball..."

"I was under five, I'm sure, and living with Granny."

"Granny?"

"Your Grampy's mom," Mom said.

"Didn't know we were calling her that."

"
Anyway
, I was in an apartment and playing with some kids, and told them I had to go in for supper when I was called to come inside. Then later, I couldn't find it, and when my Granny asked where it was, I told her I left it outside and then when I went to get it, of course, someone had taken it. My Granny went around and found the person who took it, but when I did it again, she told me it was my own fault. Dad had been back from the war for about six years, so it was probably 1950."

"OK. Holly just emailed me and said Uncle Carl's guitar is from the early '80s and that he bought it at the Twelve Fret on Danforth. There goes my eBay gem! So another thing: there are photostats of your birth certificate, and it says you were born in Montreal. Is that true? How come you don't speak French or ever do anything French? I mean, we had that orange French dressing—"

"Yes, I was born in Montreal, and then when I was two, we moved to Toronto, but my Dad was overseas in the army. He came back when I was three, according to my mother, sometime near Christmas of 1945."

"Right. That's when you saw him for the first time."

"I certainly don't remember the time, but my mom told me that all the families were down at the CNE and they gave out presents for the kids because it was near Christmas and I got a teddy bear and what I said was ‘I got a new Tubby,' Tubby being my old teddy bear."

"Is that why you like teddy bears so much? You have twenty."

"I never really thought of that. I guess so."

"You should put up a profile photo on your Skype thing, Mom."

"Oh, I found your Macho Man jacket mixed in with my things when I unpacked. Do you want me to give it to Goodwill or do you want to keep it?"

"What for? A job interview?"

"That's funny," Mom said. "So you're going to see your dad for Christmas?"

"That appears to be the plan."

I stared at Mom's pots and pans that I had arranged on a wall in my kitchen. Sparse photos, paperwork and winter coats were strewn across my apartment, as if a crate of props had softly exploded.

After completing my sound-bite purging project, I tackled an abject "wrestlers who got fired" list. Then I compiled a moribund list of wrestlers who had overdosed or committed suicide, which was going to be sent over to the graphics department for some depressing design job.

Eddie Gilbert — 33

The Renegade — 33

Chris Candido — 33

Test — 33

Gary Albright — 34

Bobby Duncum Jr. — 34

Big Dick Dudley — 34

Brian Pillman — 35

Marianna Komlos — 35

Umaga — 36

Eddie Guerrero — 38

John Kronus — 38

Davey Boy Smith — 39

Johnny Grunge — 39

Chris Kanyon — 40

Billy Joe Travis — 40

Chris Benoit — 40

Rick Rude — 41

*

I mailed a postcard to my old house on Glenvale, and a reply came from a man (the homeowner, also named David, like my Dad) via email, as I had provided them with contact information should they require it. He, his wife and child had been there since early 1995. In his email was a brief greeting, and he expressed a curiosity as to why exactly I had sent a postcard to his house. I said it was part of a historical project. He was cordial, and also informed me that when cleaning the downstairs bathroom door for eventual renovations and repainting, his wife had discovered the words LET'S KILL DAD written on the top of the door. Clearly this was by me, of course, but to whom? I think I was cribbing the title from the film
Let's Kill Uncle
, which I've never seen. The new owners work in computer electronics.

I'm glad the mail was not seen as entirely insane, and my postcard was a non-hostile gesture. I wanted to contact the house, in its most current form. Also, I'm a ghost. Below is the basic trajectory of our four emails back and forth:

Our home in Leaside (161 Glenvale Blvd) just received a postcard in the mail yesterday. One side is your new book. The other side says "Leaside! Novel! The historical house! 161! Best, John." Any idea what this is all about?

I used to live there! In the 1980s. Just a one-time postcard mailout to places of significance, celebrating the book's completion. It's with my agent now. Just felt it was fitting to send the "home" a card. Nothing more. Hope you are well, and I apologize if you were in any way disturbed by the mail. Not my intention.

Thanks for the info. No, I was not disturbed. Just intrigued. By the way, we purchased the home in 1995, so I guess we purchased it from your parents. One thing that did surprise us about the home is that two years after we moved in, my wife was painting the main-floor bathroom door. When she got to the top of the door, there was printing saying, "Let's murder Dad." I hope that was just a teenager getting frustrated. Good luck with your book. David.

Yes probably just teenage frustration. I can't honestly recall which one of us wrote those words. And our father is alive. Yes, we lived there 81–94.

*

One Sunday at Holly's house, she pulled out what she believed at the time to be our mom's cookbook—with what she perceived to be Mom's notes in the back. She read aloud from it while we started prepping for homemade pizza, her kitchen table now a talcum forest of flour and oil and tiny cans of dough and olives. Only after I consulted these ancient texts on my own did I realize it was, in fact, Grammy's handwriting and not Mom's. I recognized Grammy's elegant hand, which to a degree, Mom possessed; however, Grammy's handwriting was a tighter, more italicized cursive. I guess you could say her handwriting looked as though it wanted to take flight off the page, while Mom's was insistent on remaining there in cold true blue. In my preteen years, Grammy would write me letters with clippings from the trashy tabloid magazines she liked to read, sending me everything from "news" on Stevie Wonder's blindness (November 1985) to an article on wrestlers' salaries (July 1986). Grammy had noted that David enjoyed orange-flavoured cake icing in June of 1977. This made sense to me because I did recall a series of cakes that had an orange rind afterlife. The cookbook was around 500 pages, resembled a book you'd see in a church pew, and was dated by Grammy in 1947, when Mom was four.

Unlike most of our family newswire topics, Mom's relocation to Dallas was front and centre, emblematic and summer-fresh. By late June, Mom had unpacked the last of her winter coats, slacks (as she called them), blouses, sweaters, four teddy bears, thirty heavy books and other assorted memorabilia in Susan's guest room. Now 2,310.8 kilometers from Toronto, where she had lived since she was two years old, Mom's Skype talks were otherworldly.

"Oh, so, did you hear? Mom's working part-time for a football team!" Holly said, with vibrant animation.

"The Cowboys?"

"No, some college team, as a receptionist. Her friend Sue works there, too, like at the college, and got her a job. She charters their buses, handles any home-game matters. That's what she calls it: home-game matters."

"So she's like a part-time travelling secretary?"

"I don't think she travels with the team."

"Strange."

"She wants me to bring Sarah down for the holidays on July 4th and Thanksgiving."

Campy desert-themed cutaways suddenly bristled towards me in crisp, lightning-real flashes: the rocking chair, tumbleweed blowing by, the harsh, jagged additions to the classic southern meals in a sunny breakfast room Mom would perhaps insist on, or bringing out her hyper-coloured fruit salad with cottage cheese onto the banquet-sized tables—the way she would cut the vegetables in choking shapes as if trying to fit the pieces into specific dimensions: that quaint tunnel of space known as the throat, placed like a seal over the windpipe. Her use of watery broths and, according to Holly, temperamental treatment of meat, always somehow undercooked, underwhelmed, as if distracted by a higher purpose during culinary segments.

"On Glenvale, the oven used to cook things one hundred degrees too hot, so Mom got used to lowering the oven's temperature by a hundred degrees, and when we moved to Corinth Gardens, despite the fact it was a completely different oven, she kept cooking things on a lowered setting!"

Holly turned up the radio; a show on pigeons' mating habits blurted out in surround sound.

"This is nonsense. How do they prove any of this stuff?" I said.

"Science?"

"It's so fake and impossible to prove any of that is real. Pigeons think this and can count and can see the colour blue. Nonsense."

"You're just like Jesus Christ Kirk Cameron, your buddy from
Growing Pains
. You can go and read the book together on
Larry King
."

"Right," I said softly, noticing Holly had Uncle Carl's guitar in her living room.

"Do you know, I heard, if you strum it just right, the ghost of Uncle Carl comes out and tells you ‘That sounds fine,' and turns down another slice of banana bread or to stay for dinner."

After an hour of pizza prep and clean up, we picked up Sarah from her friend's house and went to the park.

"I'm watching every move you make, Sarah," Holly said, adjusting her position on the driveway to observe a grandmother with two kids walk by, heads lowered, focused on the sidewalk squares, not noticing the silky soda drying on the lid of a discarded 7-Eleven cup along the grey desert of terrain.

"I'm a fairy!" Sarah said, her hands gesturing in twinkly moves.

"Oh, I don't know why people lie," I said.

"I was in the waiting room with her the other day and read this article saying kids born later in the year, like November and December, are given unnecessary medication more often than kids born earlier in the calendar year. Sounds like they couldn't sell ad space and just had this random drug piece put in instead of an ad for a Jeep," Holly said.