I Must Say (6 page)

It's wonderful to be here representing the world of the tins and the pans and the sulfur flash pots going off here and there.

      
At my age, the only time I don't have to pee is when I'm peeing.

      
I just poy-chased a Maserati. I know it's ridiculous, but I'm going through a little mid-death crisis.

      
You know, I have written over twenty-eight thousand songs—two thousand since lunch. Such classics as “Honey Do the Hula,” “Wigwam Serenade,” and who can ever forget the Al Jolson classic, “Sam, You Made the Truss Too Short”? And I feel another one coming on right now—either that, or the Metamucil is kicking in. Gimme a C! A bouncy C!

Listen, even
I
was confused as a child about whether I was or wasn't a son of Abraham. For reasons too convoluted to get into here, I was not baptized until I was seven years old, at my family's regular church, Christ the King Cathedral. Which means that, unlike the babies who were routinely baptized there, I was fully cognizant of what was going on—physically, if not sacramentally. After the priest had done his business of ladling holy water on my head, I looked at him and asked, in all seriousness, “Am I Jewish now?”

He just barely managed to stifle his laughter into a snort, which
resonated gloriously, along with my father's laugh, through the majestic cathedral.

M
y inadvertently interfaith upbringing notwithstanding, I was never particularly stirred by the spirit of the Lord as He or She is presented in organized religion. Nor have I ever put much stock in the paranormal, the occult, or anything smacking of clairvoyance. With one notable exception.

In the summer of 1962, I was twelve years old, and my brother David was twenty-six. The age difference made him a little mysterious to me, living a life a world apart from mine. In our family photos he's kind of off to the side, handsome and brooding in his shades, like Stu Sutcliffe in those early photos of the Beatles as a five-piece. But in reality David was total sunshine, a funny and loose charmer. As a small child, I'd creep into his bedroom on Saturday mornings around seven a.m. (he'd probably only gotten in at five thirty) and play this game we invented called “Giant.” Basically, it was David, groggily aware of my presence, good-naturedly pretending to be a sleeping giant while I tried to steal the “magic pillow” from under his head without waking him. He always tolerated my mischief and had a special nickname for me, “Muggers-All,” though none of us in the family can remember its etymology. I just worshipped him.

At the age of twenty-six, David was justly excited about his life. He was living and thriving in Montreal, following in Dad's footsteps, working as a salesman for Samuel, Son & Co., another Canadian steel company. More important, David was engaged to be married in the fall, to a beautiful girl named Margaret Spracklin. His adulthood was taking off with a vengeance.

On July 2, 1962, Dave composed a cheerful letter to me while I was away at a YMCA camp three hours north of Hamilton.

      Dear Muggers-All:

      Comment ca va ma bien frere, I am spending this weekend in Hamilton and I am gouging the family as usual. I was very proud to see all the diplomas you won and that you graduated with first class honours.

      I am going back to Montreal today and will be back August first. You can tell me all about your adventures at camp. You must arrange with mum and dad to spend one week in Montreal with me and we will have some fun.

      Love dave xxxx oooooo

On the morning of July 18, 1962, near the end of my allotted three weeks at Camp Wanakita, I awoke in an unfamiliar, befogged state: oddly depressed, lethargic, weighted down, burdened by a sense that the whole universe was out of sync. My unease was conspicuous enough, and sufficiently out of character, for one of my cabin-mates to take notice and ask, “Are you okay? Are you sick?” I didn't know how to respond. “I'm fine,” I said. “Something's just weird.”

Twenty minutes later I was called down to the head counselor's cabin. After an awkward greeting, with him unable to look me in the eyes, the counselor blurted, “There's been an accident. Your brother David's been in an accident, and it killed him.” What an odd way to put it.

That strange, unsettled moment of waking, just minutes before
the counselor's horrible announcement, is the only extrasensory experience I can ever claim to have had. And I still can't make sense of it: why or how I knew—or my body did, or my subconscious, whatever—that something terrible had happened. Why did my twelve-year-old psyche, which otherwise seemed to exist in a perpetual state of bouncy, wired joy, feel, for the first time, a true sense of despair?

In the moment, I was simply stunned to the point of confusion. A minute later, I asked the counselor, “But is he okay?”

Up to that point in my childhood, I'd had it easy. Now, suddenly, life was a blur of sadness and confusion. My dad's good friend, Bob Lord, materialized at Camp Wanakita to collect me and deliver me back to Hamilton. The long, conversation-free drive in Mr. Lord's gunboat-size Mercury Park Lane was made more awkward still by a news bulletin that came crackling through the static of his car radio on CHML, the local Hamilton station: “David Short, the son of Stelco executive C. P. Short, has been killed in a car crash.” I wouldn't learn the details until later: David had spent a late night pacing in a hospital corridor with a buddy whose wife was in labor with their first baby. At around four thirty a.m., in the Montreal suburb of Dorval, David must have fallen asleep while driving home. His car hit the back of a parked truck and flipped over, hurling him to an instant death.

Our house on Whitton Road was in a high state of angst. Dad had just flown home from Montreal, where he'd been to collect David's body. Mom was beyond bereft, upset that the casket needed to be closed rather than open, given the extent of David's injuries. “Do you want it opened? We can have it opened,” said my father, heartbroken, trying to solve it all. “No, no,” my mother sobbed, “it's just the idea that it can't be open.”

Nora, my sister, was flying in from Los Angeles, where she
was working as a nurse. This, to me, was strangely a source of excitement—I missed my big sister and was thrilled that she was coming home. Since the airport was an hour away, I petitioned Mr. Lord, who was heroically filling in as the family driver, to let me come with him to get Nora. It was night, so he said, “Better bring a pillow.” I ran into the house to get a pillow, and Mom told me in no uncertain terms that I was
not
leaving the house that night. When Nora did come home, she looked different, more grown-up, with elaborate early 1960s eye makeup and long hair—the peculiar details you fixate on in moments of crisis.

The following morning, I caught sight, from my bedroom window, of my mother talking with our next-door neighbor, Mrs. James, whose front yard was separated from ours only by a driveway. Mrs. James had lost her son five years earlier; he'd drowned in Lake Ontario. Then I saw Mom, never one to lose her temper or betray signs of aggravation, storm across the driveway and back into the house. I ran downstairs to ask her what happened. She said, “Marjorie James told me that I will get over this. I will
never
get over this.”

A few days later, in the middle of the night, Mom found herself unable to sleep, so furiously were words and thoughts racing around in her head. She knew she would get no rest until she wrote them down. So she did, as a poem.

      
—T
O
D
AVID
—

Where is the laughing face?

The eyes so grey and tender

Looking down into my own.

The arms outstretched in greeting.

To clasp me to his side

In a bearlike hug?

Can this be all there was for him?

The few short years?

What useful purpose served?

What noble cause fulfilled?

Or was it I who was to blame?

Wrapped in my own security—

Of love and family and the joy of music.

Serenely living, until the jealous Gods

Struck with ironclad fist

To sickness and despair!

But no, if there is only one omnipotent God
,

He could not surely choose—

—“You I will slay, and you protect.”

In petty favoritism.

'Twas but an accident of fate.

A single moment out of time.

A tired and nodding head perhaps
,

That hurled him to his death

Upon a lonely road.

      O
LIVE
G. S
HORT

      (xxooxx)

This poem, and the events surrounding it, had a profound influence upon my views about organized religion. Mom's words made complete spiritual sense. Why did David die? For some noble cause? At some perverse whim of God? No, she concluded, it was just a matter of a tired head on the road. Oh, and by the
way: that letter that Dave wrote to me on July 2? I didn't receive it until after his death, after the camp forwarded it to our house in Hamilton. Its chipper tone, promising fun with me in the future, did not suggest that there was some cosmic plan afoot for my brother to be called to heaven. Yet in the days and weeks after David died, well-meaning family friends and members of the clergy constantly advised me that “God works in mysterious ways, and you can't understand the will of the Lord.”

This sentence not only failed to reassure me, it angered me.
Yeah, well, God also created my mind, which is questioning everything, including His will, so your theory doesn't hold.

I had been the kind of kid who ritually said his prayers before bedtime: “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild / Look upon a little child,” that sort of thing. But no more. I didn't stop praying or believing, but I had no further interest in church doctrine and unquestioning faith. My prayers changed, too. No longer did I pray over trivial matters: “Please let me pass my history exam.” I went bigger-picture. I prayed, simply, for strength, for the inspiration to go on.

A
s for Mrs. James, our neighbor, she was clearly just trying to comfort my mother. But “getting over this”—what did that mean? How was it done? It was a new concept to me. And then, the night after the funeral, something instructive happened, pertaining to this very subject. Like my mother, I too had been traumatized by the fact that David's coffin was closed. I would never see him again. My brain struggled to process the thought.

This trauma was fresh in my head as I went to bed that night. And then I fell asleep, and had a dream unlike any I've had before or since. For one thing, it was in bright Technicolor worthy of
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
. I was outside a log cabin in the woods, sitting by a scenic little stream—artificially scenic, like an MGM-backlot version of the old frontier. And while I was sitting there, David walked up and took a seat beside me. He looked handsome and strong, not remotely in need of a closed casket. He wore a vivid orange jersey that matched the scenery. And he said to me, in the most reassuring tone, “Everything's fine. It won't be long before we see each other again. I'll see you in a fleeting moment.”

“A fleeting moment”—funny words for a twelve-year-old to dream.

When I woke up, I felt great, as if the veil of sadness had lifted. A spiritualist would say that I had experienced a visitation. A psychologist would say that my subconscious had manufactured this dream scenario to fulfill an emotional need for closure. In any case, I learned what would turn out to be a valuable lesson: that something terrible can happen to you, and yet, the day after this something terrible, the sun still rises, and life goes on. And therefore, so must you. I don't mean to sound facile, or to imply that David's death doesn't still pain me to this day. But I was glad of this lesson, because it would not be long before I was forced to heed it again.

Irving Cohen was invented for
SCTV
, born of necessity when two of the show's writers, Paul Flaherty and Dick Blasucci, asked me to create an old Jewish songwriter character for a sketch they were writing. Paul is the brother of my friend and
SCTV
castmate Joe Flaherty. One of Joe's recurring
SCTV
bits was “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” in which he played the titular star of a cheesy, clubby talk show. In this new sketch, Sammy's Ed McMahon–like sidekick, William B. Williams (John Candy), had left Sammy's show to launch his own,
The William B. Show
. My character was meant to be the kind of depressing third-tier guest to which lesser talk shows, such as William B.'s, must resort to fill their airtime.

A lot of people think that Irving Cohen is based on the prolific Tin Pan Alley great Irving Berlin, because both Irvings were/are notoriously prolific. But this is wrong on two counts: (1) Irving Berlin actually wrote
good
songs; and (2) Irving Cohen was largely inspired by Sophie Tucker, a veteran singer and former vaudeville entertainer who made frequent appearances on
The Ed Sullivan Show
when I was a kid in the early 1960s. She had a deep, mannish voice and seemed ancient (she was actually in her seventies), and whenever she came on, she'd start in with a declaration along the lines of “You know, Ed, in the old days, they had a little ting they called
vaud-dih-ville
!”