Falling Backwards: A Memoir (6 page)

They had little vests and chaps and cowboy shirts. I
loved
playing with my John and Jane West dolls. They had bendy arms and legs so you could hang them off lamps and drawers and coat hangers and toilets, if need be. As I recall, they were very hard to melt, but I won’t get into that. John and Jane were happily married, or so Gary and I made them out to be. We would muck about with those figurines for hours. Time evaporated in our imaginary world. Eventually we’d be faced with having to go for dinner. My mother would holler my
name and that meant it was time to go home. Her voice could literally penetrate a concrete bunker. I could hear her call my name if I was sixty miles away. It was a good skill to have.

I have no idea what Gary and I ever talked about. Maybe we didn’t talk at all. Maybe we talked to each other through our John and Jane West dolls? Once in awhile we included my older brother’s G.I. Joes in our make-believe world. G.I. Joes were plastic army guys with five o’clock shadows and big guns. G.I. Joe often shot at John and Jane West, but thankfully John and Jane had their own western rifles and pistols, so they shot back.

G.I. Joe was always the first to die. I made sure of that. I don’t know why, but G.I Joe seemed like a bad guy to me. As I recall, the makers of G.I. Joe gave him a fairly big package, if you know what I mean. John West didn’t seem to have wieners or beans. He was a much more modest doll.

My brother Duray hated me playing with his stuff, and G.I. Joe was his doll, after all. I mean, he would get really, really mad and threaten to kick all the spokes out of my precious bike or something equally horrifying, like hiding all of my marbles or pulling my underpants up to my waist. I can’t tell you how much I hated having my underpants pulled up to my waist. It was a terribly uncomfortable feeling. The underpants never survived the attack, but I knew how to get back at Duray.

I threatened to tell my mother that he was stealing her maxi-pads to make G.I. Joe’s bunk beds—which he was—and that put an end to all his threats. Maxi-pads apparently made perfect little mattresses for G.I Joes. The old maxi-pads even had straps on them that you could tie to trees like little hammocks. The new ones had adhesive strips which weren’t really good for anything. (I remember the first time I used an adhesive-strip maxi-pad like it was this morning. I put in on upside down, which meant the
adhesive strip was stuck on me and not my underpants, but I digress.)

When we weren’t colouring or playing John and Jane West, Gary and I rode our tricycles around and around and around the block. (At this point we hadn’t clued in to the fact that riding bikes was exercise, and that we would one day hate every second of cardiovascular activity.) I knew where every crack was in every single inch of sidewalk. I knew where every kid lived and what their names were and what kind of swing set they had in their backyard. I knew what cars would be parked in the front driveways and when they came and went. My neighbourhood was mapped out in my heart and I never wanted anything about it to change.

I had put a pet turtle into my pocket on one of those bike trips around the block with Gary, and sadly I discovered it quite dead after a few hours of pedalling. Why I thought a turtle would survive inside my pants for hours is beyond me, but live and learn, I suppose. I cried rivers and oceans of tears over that dead turtle. I am sure Gary cried too. I hadn’t seen many dead things by that point in my life. We conducted a funeral for the turtle, said a few words to Jesus about “his only something-or-other son” and then proceeded to flush him/her down the toilet. John and Jane West also attended the funeral and were very straight-faced through the ceremony. Life, it seemed, was going to be getting harder.

After the funeral, Gary and I took our twenty-five-cent allowances and walked down to the only convenience store in town and bought a bag of salt and vinegar chips and a cream soda, respectively. That would leave us with enough money to buy five pieces of Dubble Bubble gum. If I forwent the Dubble Bubble, I could buy a box of Eddylite Easy Strike matches. It was a hard decision to make. Gum or matches? Thank God they didn’t have flammable chewing gum.

First the gum … I would chew all five pieces at the same time, almost causing my jaw to lock and my saliva to overtake my head.
The pain was unbearable but necessary. You can’t chew just one piece of Dubble Bubble—that’s nuts. You have to have at least three pieces in your mouth to make it worth your while. You have to blow out a bubble at least as big as your head to make it any fun at all. You then have to pop the bubble so the gum sticks to your hair and perhaps end up cutting off some of your bangs. I never had to cut my bangs, unless you count the time I fell asleep with the wad of gum in my mouth and woke up with my whole head stuck to my pillow. The gum was the least of my problems. My parents could deal with the odd chunk of hair being cut off of my head. But when I opted not to buy gum, I bought wooden matches.

For some reason there were a few months where all I wanted to do was burn things up. I just liked striking the matches and seeing them burn. You could strike them on anything: a zipper, your two front teeth, your Levi’s jeans back pocket, the wall, the floor, your forehead. Any surface could light an Eddylite match. Except for the side of the toilet bowl. I tried that several times and it was too smooth. One morning I crouched in my parents’ half-bathroom off their master bedroom and dropped about five hundred
lit
wooden matches down the heating vent one at a time. I didn’t think about where they were going. I thought they just dropped into nothing. I knew China was down there somewhere because my gram had told me it was. I don’t know why I did it. It just felt good to me. The fact that no one had seen me for two hours and that the pungent smell of sulphur was crawling down the hallway was a dead giveaway that something was amiss.

When he found me, my dad became absolutely out-of-his-mind mad and I do remember getting a really good spanking. We had an old worn-out sort of thick canvas-and-rubber strap that hung in one of the kitchen cupboards, and that’s what we’d get whacked with. My dad could be a very frightening man when he was angry.
His face would change and he’d look like a completely different person. He had a temper like a bull in a ring. In this particular case, though, I don’t blame him for being angry. I could have burned our house down.

I still love wooden matches. I always feel compelled to buy them when I am in Home Depot. What the cavemen wouldn’t have done for a box of wooden matches. They probably would have torched the planet and I wouldn’t be here writing this.

Me + fire = the end of the world = arse welts

You’d think I would have learned from the vent incident and the subsequent spanking that I shouldn’t be playing with fire, but oh no, not me. My arson phase was just getting under way. I proceeded to burn down a very large hedge at a house around the corner from where we lived, and almost lit their garage on fire. I remember the woman who lived there came screaming out of her back door wrestling with the garden hose and dousing the rather large flames that were now burning with great gusto. It was really scary.

All I could think of was how mad my dad was going to be and that I had better put a phone book between my dad and my bum. I don’t think I could sit down for a week after that spanking. My parents didn’t know quite what to do with me. I was officially an arsonist. I have to give it to my mom, though, because she always managed to disarm terrible situations for me. She told me that the big fat woman who came charging out of her back door wielding a water hose was horrible and mean and a lousy babysitter, and that at least it was her garage that I almost burned down and not some nice person’s. My mom made me feel vindicated somehow, though she didn’t tell me that in front of my dad …

I am sure I would not be alive to write these words had I burned
that large woman’s garage down. My father would surely have killed me or at least pulled the arms from my body so I couldn’t strike matches anymore. He’d send them to the Masai people in Africa to feed to their goats. I really don’t blame him for being mad. Burning down my own house was one thing, but burning down the large lady’s house was another thing entirely.

The whole crazy relationship with the matches didn’t last long, thankfully. I am glad I didn’t become Drew Barrymore in
Firestarter
, but I came pretty close. I have no idea what got into me those weird few weeks. I was just obsessed with watching the sulphur end burst into a little ball of fire. It was instant gratification at its best. I am now one of those people who plays with candle wax in restaurants, although I am trying to curb my enthusiasm for that. Thank God they hadn’t invented disposable Bic lighters in the sixties or the whole city of Calgary would have been long gone by 1970. Perhaps even the entire country of Canada. My dad had a Zippo lighter, but he was smart enough to keep it in a safety deposit box buried somewhere in the backyard.

My friend Gary was such a good boy that he didn’t come anywhere near me during my
Firestarter
phase. I didn’t want to incriminate him anyway. I don’t think he even knew that I had been buying matches and burning things down. He was still an angel in my parents’ eyes, and I was encouraged at every turn to colour with him. Davey, the boy who made me play in garbage cans, thereby contracting the worms that required the Scotch tape bum worm removal, was my accomplice during the Eddylite Easy Strike period of my childhood. In fact, Davey was the one who thought that the burning of the hedge would be very controllable and that we would not be caught, never, ever! Yeah, sure.

One thing I learned very early on is that boys can be dumb liars, so don’t believe a thing they tell you. Davey was quite the
character. We should have had our own reality show, if only we had known what those were back then. Our show would have been called
Jann and Davey Plus Crazy
. I might have to contact him to see if he has any interest in that concept. We could recreate the worm scene in the bathroom with my mother. We could burn things up. The Scotch tape people could sponsor us.

Davey is my age, so I am sure he’s still somewhere out there in the world. Maybe he became a fire warden or a zookeeper. I highly doubt it, though. As you know, according to my mother he had a crazy mother, so that was half of his problem. I don’t know what the other half was. Well, Davey was the other half of the problem, and I think my influence was mixed up in there somewhere too.

When I feared losing touch with my friends after we moved, mom told me that Gary could come to visit us. She didn’t mention Davey. I think where we were going had way too many trees to risk allowing Davey and me to spend any kind of quality time together there. As it turned out, Gary ended up coming out to our new house only once or twice. I learned early on that people come and go in your life—and most often they go.

I don’t know how my parents managed to buy land in the country in the first place, because they didn’t have any money to speak of. My mom said it took them a whole year to pay off their Bay card after they maxed it out buying Christmas presents for us. This went on every year for about fifteen years. They never seemed to be able to get ahead. “We would just get the credit card paid off and it would be Christmas again,” she’d say.

My mom has always been very matter of fact. I have never had the sense that she felt sorry for herself about anything. Even though her young life was very hard and often lonesome, she never complained about the hand the universe had dealt her. My mom’s dad
was a miserable drunk who verbally and physically went after his wife whenever he came home plastered after a bender. Mom would always say that her dad drank all their money away and left them with nothing. They often had to scrape together meals and they seldom, if ever, bought new clothes or treats of any kind. Mom’s dad worked in logging camps way up north, and he dragged his family with him, literally to the middle of nowhere. In fact, they were even farther away from civilization than that!

There weren’t many other kids for my mom to play with in the camps. She told me that one of her favourite games when she was little was “funeral.” She’d wrap a stick up with some old cloth and deliver sermons. That always makes me feel so sad for her. I can picture her there, mumbling humble words over a little grave for a dead stick doll. My mom was witness to a very abusive relationship between her mother and father, but she simply refuses to dwell in the past. She throws her shoulders back and always faces forward.

I am the same way. Life is life. You just get on with it. You do what you have to do to make it work. My dad always said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get,” and I believe that with all my heart. My parents are the salt (and the pepper) of the earth.

I didn’t have a clue about how much money we didn’t have. They sold the house on Louise Road for $24,900 in 1971, which was a whopping $14,900 profit. I spend more than that on feminine protection every month. (Would someone please take my uterus from me and give me a new liver? My uterus is costing me a small fortune that could be going into buying wine.) I can’t even get my head around the fact that they bought an entire house for ten thousand dollars in the sixties. It doesn’t seem possible.

My parents purchased five acres of land just a few miles west of Calgary with the few thousand dollars they’d made on the sale of the
house. Then they had to figure out how to pay for the new house they were going to be building. Interest rates were beyond out of control, and getting a mortgage from a bank was literally signing your life away. You’d be looking at a document that would basically say that you’d have your house paid off in sixty years. My parents remind themselves of just how lucky they were whenever possible.

“If we’d waited even a few more years, we would never have been able to afford to move out here,” my mother often said, as she looked out her kitchen window.

I know it was a huge leap of faith for them, moving us all out to Springbank. I know they wanted us to have fresh air and a chance to go to a smaller school. (That is an understatement—there were only forty-two kids in my high school graduating class.) I think they just wanted to invest in something that would make their lives easier forty years down the road. They knew the house and the land would someday be their nest egg, and it has turned out to be just that.