Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

Copyright © 2015 by G & M Vanderhaeghe Productions Inc.

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ISBN: 978-0-7710-9914-4
ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-9915-1

Cover image: © Image Source / Corbis

McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
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v3.1

IT’S THE SUMMER OF 1970
and I’ve got one lovely ambition. I want to have been born in Seattle, to be black, to be Jimi Hendrix. I want a burst of Afro ablaze in a bank of stage lights, to own a corona of genius. I ache in bed listening to “Purple Haze” over and over again on my record player; the next night it’s “All Along the Watchtower.” I’m fourteen and I want to be one of the chosen, one of the possessed. To soak a guitar in lighter fluid,
burn baby burn
, to smash it to bits to the howl of thousands. I want to be a crazy man like Jimi Hendrix.

What I didn’t know then is that before my man Jimi flamed his guitar at Monterey, he warned the cameraman to be sure to load plenty of film. This I learned much later, after he’s dead.

It’s not a good time for me. After school finishes in June my father moves us to a new city; all I have is Jimi Hendrix, Conrad, and Finty. I don’t know what I’m doing with these
last two, except that with school out for the summer I lack opportunities to widen my circle of acquaintances. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Finty I meet outside a convenience store. He introduces me to Conrad. There’s not much wrong with Finty; born into a normal family he’d have had a chance. Conrad is an entirely different story. Finty proudly informs me that Conrad’s been known to set fire to garbage cans and heave them up onto garage roofs, to prowl a car lot and do ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage in the wink of an eye. He’s a sniffer of model airplane glue, gasoline. That stuff I don’t touch. It’s impossible to imagine the great Jimi Hendrix with his snout stuffed in a plastic bag. Occasionally, I’ll pinch a little grass from my big sister Corinne’s stash in her panty drawer, have my own private Woodstock while Jimi looks down approvingly from the poster on my bedroom wall. I tell myself this is who I am. Finty and Conrad are just temporary way stations on the big journey.

Conrad scares me. His long hair isn’t a statement, just a poverty shag. His broken knuckles weep from hitting walls; he’s an accident willing itself to happen. The only person who comes close to scaring me as much is my father, a janitor who works the graveyard shift in a deadly office complex downtown, midnight to eight in the morning. A vampire who sleeps while the sun is up, sinks his teeth into my neck at the supper table, goes off to work with a satisfied, bloody grey smile on his lips. So far as he’s concerned there’s only one lesson I need to learn – don’t be dumb when it comes to life. I hear it every night, complete with examples and illustrations.

I’m not dumb. It’s my brilliant idea to entertain ourselves by annoying people because that’s less dangerous than anything Conrad is likely to suggest. The same principle as substituting methadone for heroin.

The three of us go around knocking on people’s doors. I tell whoever answers we’ve come about the Jimi Hendrix album.

“What?”

“The Jimi Hendrix album you advertised for sale in the classifieds in the newspaper.”

“I didn’t advertise nothing of any description in any newspaper.”

“Isn’t this 1102 Maitland Crescent?”

“What does it look like? What does the number on my house say?”

“Well, we must have the right place then. Maybe it was your wife. Did your wife advertise a Jimi Hendrix album?”

“Nobody advertised nothing. There is no wife anymore. I live alone.”

After my warm-up act, Finty jumps in all pathetic with misery and disappointment like I’ve coached him. “This isn’t too funny, you ask me. Changing your mind at the last minute. I promised my sister I’d buy your album for her birthday. A buck is all I got to buy her a lousy second-hand birthday present and then you go and do this. We had to transfer twice on the bus just to get here.”

“His sister has cerebral palsy, mister.” I hang my head like I can’t believe what he’s doing to the poor girl.

Conrad says to Finty, “I got fifty cents. It’s yours. Offer him a buck and a half. He’ll take a buck and a half.”

“I ain’t going to take anything because I don’t have no Jimmy Henson record. I don’t even own a record player.”

“I’ve got thirty-five cents,” I tell the man. “That makes a buck eighty-five. He
needs
the album for his sister. Music is all she has in life.”

“She can’t go out on dates or nothing,” Finty says, voice cracking. “It’s the wheelchair.”

“Look, I’m sorry about your sister, kid. But I’m swearing to you – on a stack of Bibles I’m swearing to you – I don’t have this record.”

“Maybe you’ve forgotten you have it,” I say. “Does this ring a bell? Sound familiar?” And I start cranking air guitar, doing “Purple Haze,” no way the poor wiener can stop me until I’m done screaming hard enough to make his ears bleed.

One afternoon we’re cruising the suburbs, courtesy of three bikes we helped ourselves to from a rack outside a city swimming pool. You can feel the heat coming off the asphalt into your face when you lean over the handlebars and pump the pedals. Conrad’s been sniffing and the toasty weather is steaming the glue in his skull and producing dangerous vapours. Already he’s yelled some nasty, rude remarks at a woman pushing a baby carriage; now he’s lighting matches and flicking them at a yappy Pekingese on somebody’s lawn, driving the dog out of its tiny mind. The lady of the house is watching him out her front window, and I know that when she closes those drapes, it’ll be to call the cops.

Conrad is badly in need of structure, a sense of purpose at
this particular moment, so I point to a bungalow down the street, a bungalow where every shrub in the yard has been trimmed to look like something else. For instance, a rooster. I definitely recall a rooster. It’s easy to guess what sort of a person lives in a house like that. Prime territory for the Jimi Hendrix routine.

Finty and Conrad take off with me in a flash, no explanation needed. We pull up on our bikes, leave them on the lawn. There’s a sign on the front door, red crayon on cardboard:
ENTRANCE ALARMED. PLEASE ENTER AT REAR
. The old man who comes to the door is dressed like a bank manager on his day off. White shirt, striped tie, bright yellow alpaca cardigan. He’s a very tall, spruce old guy with a glamour tan, and he’s just wet-combed his white hair. You can see the tooth marks of the comb in it.

“We have come to inquire about the album,” I say.

“Yes, yes. Come in. Come in. I’ve been expecting you,” he says, eyes fixed on something over my head. But when I turn to see what’s caught his interest, there’s nothing there.

“This way, this way,” he urges us, eyes blinking up into a cloudless sky. For a second I wonder if he might be blind, but then he begins herding us through the porch, through the kitchen, into the living room, his hands flapping down around his knees like he’s shooing chickens. Finty and Conrad are giggling and snorting. “Too rich,” I hear Conrad say.

The old man points and mutters, “Have a seat. Have a seat,” before disappearing off into the back of the bungalow. Conrad and Finty start horsing around, scuffling over ownership of a recliner, but it’s already a done deal who’s going to claim it. Like the big dog with the puppy, Conrad
lets Finty nip a bit before he shoots him the stare, little red eyes like glazed maraschino cherries left in the jar too long and starting to go bad. Finty settles for the chesterfield. Big dog flops in the recliner, pops the footrest, grins at me over the toes of his runners. “Right on,” he says.

I don’t like it when Conrad says things like “Right on.” He’s not entitled. He and Finty aren’t on the same wavelength as people like me and Jimi Hendrix. Conrad would be asking people for Elvis Presley albums if I hadn’t explained that the types whose doorbells we ring are likely to own them.

Finty is into a bowl of peanuts on the end table. He starts flicking them at Conrad. Conrad snaps at them like a dog trying to catch flies, snaps so hard you can hear his teeth clear across the room. The ones he misses rattle off the wall, skitter and spin on the hardwood floor.

I’m wondering where the old guy’s gone. My ear is cocked in case he might be on the phone to the police. I don’t appreciate the unexpected turn this has taken, the welcome mat he spread for us. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on here, but there’s this strange odour in the house that is creeping up into my nostrils and interfering with my thoughts. When I caught the first whiff of it, I thought it was the glue on Conrad’s breath, but now I’m not so sure. A strange, gloomy smell. Like somebody’s popped the door on a long-abandoned, derelict fridge, and dead oxygen and stale chemical coolant are fogging my brain.

I’m thinking all this weird stuff when Finty suddenly freezes on the chesterfield with a peanut between his thumb and middle finger, cocked to fire. His lips give a nervous,
rabbity nibble to the air. I scoot a look over my shoulder and there’s the old man blocking the entrance to the living room. With a rifle clutched across his chest.

Conrad’s heels do a little dance of joy on the footrest.

The old gentleman pops the rifle over his head like he’s fording a stream, takes a couple of long, lurching strides into the room, crisply snaps the gun back down on a diagonal across his shirt front, and announces, “My son carried a Lee-Enfield like this clear across Holland in the last war. He’s no longer with us. I thought you boys would like to see a piece of history.” He smiles and the Lee-Enfield starts moving like it has a mind of its own, the muzzle sliding slowly over to Finty on the chesterfield. One of the old guy’s eyes is puckered shut; the other stares down the barrel straight into Finty’s chest. “
JFK
,” he says. Then the barrel makes a lazy sweep over to Conrad in the recliner. “Bobby. Bobby Kennedy.”