1982 (5 page)

I have made a short list of the lawn sprinklers that were available in Thornhill in 1982:

stationary sprinkler

rotary sprinkler

oscillating sprinkler

pulsating (impulse) sprinkler

travelling sprinkler

As you can see, there were distinct and varied types of sprinkler to be utilized in the suburbs in the early ’80s. But ultimately, the point was to watch the sprinkler as much as to water the lawn. And it was all the same, watching sprinklers, no matter the kind. The style of sprinkler seemed to neither heighten nor dampen the enthusiasm. Simply, this is what men in Thornhill did. And so you see, while the Clash were inspiring punks to resist Thatcherism in the UK and a revolution was being co-opted by mullahs in the streets of Iran, grown men in Thornhill were watching sprinklers. That was the problem with Thornhill.

I didn’t choose for us to live in Thornhill. My parents did. They picked our new locale when I was nine, a couple of years after we moved from England. It was all their decision. When you’re nine, these options are not exercised democratically. There was no negotiation. I didn’t feel I had the power to say, “Okay, I respect your decision. You guys do the Thornhill thing, and I’m going to go to Montreal and rear myself in the centre of what will become a hot music scene that will eventually spawn the indie collective Arcade Fire and a bunch of other bands that sound like the indie collective Arcade Fire.”
I didn’t have the resources to make that case at the age of nine. And I wouldn’t really have wanted to do so, anyway, because that would have meant leaving my family. And my parents had bought me a guitar and a drum kit, and I would have had to leave those things behind, too. And I was really skinny, but I got hungry a lot, and my mother is the best cook in the world when she’s making Persian food, like
ghormeh sabzi
.
Ghormeh sabzi
is a popular Iranian dish often served when family members return home after being away. It’s a herb stew with lots of greens (
sabzi
) and some kidney beans and lamb and other things that I can’t identify because I’ve never made it. It’s served over rice (
polo
) and with bottom-of-the-pot rice (
tahdig
) as well. You might think bottom-of-the-pot rice sounds like a mistake. But it’s not. Persians love it. It’s crunchy and has oil. And my mother is the best cook. So part of the deal with getting my mother’s food was living in Thornhill. But as a training ground to become Bowie, Thornhill was a disaster.

If Bowie was about edge and platform boots and spiked hair and drugs and cross-dressing and cool riffs and distortion and impenetrable-but-profound lyrics and creativity, you could easily make the case that the inverse of Bowie was the town of Thornhill. I’ve tried to picture Bowie walking down my street in 1982. In my imagination he has platform boots on and looks a bit like a sexy woman and he’s singing “Be My Wife” from his 1977 album,
Low
. But I can’t truthfully picture that. Nor can I picture him on my street as another one of his characters, Aladdin Sane. Or even as the
Let’s Dance
guy from the 1983 tour with the yellow suit and superblond hair. I can’t picture him even if he were wearing my old
North Star runners and hooded sweatshirt from Roots. Not in 1982. Thornhill wouldn’t have understood what to do with Bowie then.

Thornhill was a safe and quiet suburb where conformity was coveted. No one really rocked the boat. The dwellings all looked relatively similar on our street, and most of the houses had big lawns and nice trees. The adults on my street in Thornhill usually referred to themselves as “middle class.” I decided “middle class” must mean “the same.” Differences were expressed only in subtle ways. For example, the Jones family used silver for their house numbers next to their front door, while we and the Mullers had black.

Of course, my family stood out because we were Iranian and the rest of the street was pretty white and old-school conservative. That is, with the notable exception of the Olsons. The Olsons were a black family at the far end of the street, and they were very successful and attractive and charming. They had kids the age of my sister and me, and they created unfair expectations. All of the Olson progeny would go on to be great thinkers and business people and a supermodel. So the Olsons stood out too. But they were like a superhero family. They were in a different league. Who lives in a family where someone becomes a supermodel? And anyway, they were black and not Middle Eastern. There were some occasions where my family may have been exceptional for reasons other than our ethnicity—but the cultural difference always seemed to be unavoidable.

For our first couple of years in Thornhill, our house was set apart from others because of a little exterior twist that involved lighting. My father would put red light bulbs in the
lamps that stood on each corner of our porch. These lamps were very distinctive, especially by Thornhill standards. No one used coloured lights on their houses except at Christmastime. This was an unspoken rule. But my parents had a streak of creativity that was often at odds with their desire to have us assimilate. It was like the fact that we had Persian rugs all over our house. But it was okay to be more different behind closed doors. The red lights were on the outside. This was a problem in Thornhill.

If you drove up our Thornhill street on an evening in the late ’70s, you could identify the Ghomeshi house because of the two red lamps holding down the fort. We would turn them on after 6:30 p.m. and then turn them off in the morning. In retrospect, it was rather impressive that my mother let my father get away with the red lamps when it would clearly set us apart. But she did. And the lamps became our trademark in the early days in Thornhill. I suppose I took pride in our red lights. They looked romantic and maybe a bit edgy. Even then, I had an instinct for all things unique. But I was foolish and young.

One day, my father came home in something of a panic and started unscrewing the red lights on the porch. He seemed upset, and he ran around looking for white light bulbs to replace the red ones. He said something to my mother, and then she looked very serious and concerned as well. No one would tell me what was going on. When I finally got an answer about what was happening, my father explained that Mr. Pile from a few houses down the road had pulled him aside and told him that the red lamps were problematic in Canadian culture. My father shook his head in frustration as he recounted the little neighbourhood confrontation about the red lamps.

“He ees telling me that the red lights are meaning bad thing,” my father explained. “He ees telling me that red lights means we are running cathouse!”

I never found out if “cathouse” was my father’s word or Mr. Pile’s. And I wasn’t sure what “running cathouse” meant. But I could tell it was something bad. And it probably made us less Canadian. And this wasn’t good. And Dana Verner would probably break up with me again, and my mother would be upset that we were different, and people would talk about us. I wondered why “cathouse” was the cause for such alarm. I wondered if the problem was that our house was suspected of having an overabundance of cats. For a couple of years after this incident, I assumed that red lights must represent a form of feline insurrection within an otherwise tranquil home. And this was obviously a negative thing. But it still didn’t make sense that my father had dashed home and changed the light bulbs in such a fluster.

One day, my sister, Jila, explained to me that “cathouse” was a term that meant whorehouse. Jila was three years older than me, so she understood these things. I knew what a whorehouse was. I knew it was a place where hookers worked. It was probably a house full of sexy whores. I knew this because I had seen something similar on the Friday-night
Baby Blue Movies
on Citytv when my parents were upstairs. But no family in Thornhill would want to be known for running a whorehouse. And we never had the red lamps again.

My father was a highly regarded engineer who had done his schooling in Iran and the UK, but people didn’t always think that, because he had a heavy accent. When you have an accent you are sometimes considered dumb. At least, that was
the case in 1982. Then again, it also depended on the accent. If you had a French accent from France, you would be thought to be sexy in 1982. And if you had a strong German accent, like our neighbour Mr. Muller, you might be mistaken as gruff. English accents were considered cool, but I wasn’t really aware of that when we first came to Canada and I was eight and spoke like a Londoner. I just knew I wanted to lose my accent so I would fit in.

But maybe the worst and most misunderstood accent was the Middle Eastern one. If you had a Middle Eastern accent in 1982, you might be thought to be dumb or confused or to have a natural facility for explosives. This hasn’t completely changed over the last three decades, but people seem to have more reference points for brown people now. My mother had less of an accent than my father, and she was much whiter, but it was clear she was from somewhere far away, too. The fact that there were very few immigrants in our part of Thornhill at the time meant assumptions were made about my father and our family because we were Middle Eastern. For instance, the red lamp incident might really have been about contrasting ideas, but it got presented as my father not understanding “Canadian culture.” I didn’t know about the roots of stuff like this at the time. I just resented my family for being different and my father for his accent.