I Was There the Night He Died (9 page)

“Spring can't be far off now. The goggly-eyed, two-wheeled thunder bum has made his glorious return.”

The girl from the park, in the park—I hadn't noticed. Probably because it's the first time I've seen her in the daylight. “School holiday?” I call from my porch.

“I'm taking a mental health day.”

The phone and iPod are laid out beside her on the bench, an unlit joint between her lips. “I can see that,” I say.

“You know what they say: ‘Physician, heal thyself.'”

“Right.”

Its apparent uselessness to me as a conversation starter and sustainer aside, weed is no different from any other drug, whether it's the government-taxed, over-the-counter variety or the kind you can only get from a guy named Bubba who lives in his mother's basement: booze or drugs or any combination thereof are for when the day is done, the shade of a cooling consciousness best enjoyed only after first overheating one's head in the busy glare of the day. Shade without light is invisible, isn't anything. Beware of not anything. But what the hell, I've got enough problems keeping my own train on the track. Choo choo to you, then, my teenage friend, and here's hoping you eventually make it to the station safe and on time and with the majority of your brain cells intact.

The fat man on the mini-bike chugs past us again, his knees nearly at his chin; it takes a moment for one's ears to adjust to the after-assault quiet. Once they do, “So was that your wife or something?” the girl says.

“My wife?”

“The BMW that dropped you off. Was that her driving?” The joint is out of her mouth now and in her hand, still unlit.

“No, that was”—yes, that was what, exactly?—“a friend,” I decide. Deciding even that somehow sounds salacious, “She's involved in the campaign to keep CCI open. You should be thankful that people like her are working so hard to help keep your school from closing.”

“It's not my school.”

“You go there, don't you?”

“For, like, five more months.”

“Well, without people like her there won't be many more months for anyone.”

“Whatever.” The girl picks up her phone and looks at it as if she's expecting it to ring. It doesn't. “Does your wife know about your friend? Your wife—she's back in Toronto, right?”

“My wife is dead,” I say.

The girl looks up from her phone. “Oh.”

I don't say anything else, let her smutty smear hang in the air between us like a bad smell no one wants to own up to. She puts down the phone and lights up the joint.

“I'm sorry,” she says.

Here we go again, that word, that same worthless word. “Don't be. It wasn't your car that killed her.”

“I mean I'm sorry for implying that you … you know. I mean, I saw your wedding ring, so I just … ” The girl stubs out the just-lit joint on the bench with a quick, single stab and grabs her phone and iPod. She keeps her eyes on her running shoes all the way across the park.

“My name's Sam,” I say.

The girl slows down, but doesn't stop her retreat home. By the time she gets to the street, though, the fat man is blasting past again, keeping her on the curb. She waves away a swirl of black exhaust but can't help coughing, a half-and-half mix of hacking and laughing eventually taking its place. I can't help laughing too.

“Samantha,” the girl manages, again without looking my way.

“Hello, Samantha,” I say.

“Hello, Sam.”

 

* * *

 

No one visiting room #131
is self-conscious about talking to themselves. That's one of the best things about dad sharing a room with three other residents. At first, I was opposed—nothing too good for my father, only the priciest private room will do—but once we actually got him moved into Thames View I was reminded once again how what is normal and nice is what is happening to you right now. We
all
talk to ourselves in room #131. We
all
pretend to varying degrees that our loved one is listening and is interested and is happy that we're here. Make believe is so much easier when everyone else is doing it too. Alzheimer's is lonely enough; a silent, solitary room isn't what the Alzheimer sufferer needs. Isn't what his family needs, either.

And so what if it isn't true? I didn't say it was true—I said it was nice. And everyone in room #131 can use all of the nice they can get.
I
can use all of the nice I can get. Particularly after the conversation I finally had with Uncle Donny.

“You thought that the government would pay for it.”

“I told you, just until I could win back what I lost.”

“Win back fifteen thousand dollars. Which means that you lost fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Give or take.”

“Give or take? You're a seventy-four year old retired factory worker from International Harvester on a fixed income and all of a sudden it's ‘fifteen thousand dollars, give or take.' Since when did you become the Cincinnati Kid? ”

“I don't know how it happened. I really don't. After I retired, I guess I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. And at first it wasn't that much—just Pro-Line mostly, usually no more than fifty bucks a week, a hundred at most—but then it got out of hand. I guess I got in over my head.”

“Believe me, you were in over your head before you placed your first bet.
Way
over.”

“You've got to understand, I didn't mean to get anyone else involved in this. I thought that the government would help us out until I could get back what I lost.”

“You thought that until you won back fifteen thousand dollars in gambling debts the government was going to step in and pay Dad's bills.”

“Now you're not even listening, now you're just repeating what I'm saying.”

“No, I'm just trying to understand how you could be so goddamn stupid.”

“A man works as hard as your father did his whole life, paying into the system his whole life, you'd think there might be a little something somewhere to help a guy out when he needs a helping hand.”

“There is. They're called pensions. You know: those things of his that you stole.”

“You keep calling it that doesn't make it true, you know.”

“What would you call signing his cheques and cashing them in and pissing them away on gambling debts?”

“Not just that. Not just that. I got my roof fixed too.”

“Sorry, my mistake. Gambling debts and home renovations.”

“So now you're saying I don't deserve to have a roof over my head that doesn't leak.”

“This isn't about you. That's the part of this you don't seem to understand. This is about my father.”

“He's not just your dad, you know. He's my brother.”

“Your brother that you robbed blind.”

“That's not right, that's not right for you to say that.”

“Well, don't worry, I won't be saying it again. Just like you're not going to be visiting him again.”

“It's a free country. You can't stop me from visiting my own brother.”

“It won't be free for you for very much longer if I tell the police what you managed to pull off. I don't want you even coming near Thames View. And if I find out that you have, you're going to be placing all future bets from behind bars.”

“What I've got—it's a disease, you know.”

“How is it that whenever somebody screws somebody else around it's always because they have a disease, but the entire time they were busy doing it, it was nobody else's business but their own?”

“I'm getting help with my addiction at Chatham Mental Health now. I haven't played Pro-Line or placed a bet over the phone in two days. I even got rid of my cell phone.”

“Two days. Congratulations. Maybe Dad's cheques will be safe until the end of the month.”

“Damn it, I told you, that's all over now.”

“Well, you got that part right, anyway.”

“Which part?”

“The part about it being all over.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six

 

 

 

I can walk from the nursing
home to the bar.

The bar, the Montreal House, was here when my dad was a young man; the nursing home—under its older name and function—as well. Before the developers and their bullying bulldozers ate up the farm land and shat back the shiny piles of surrounding suburbs in their place, Chatham existed for the human beings who erected it. People once-upon-a-time really did walk to the store on the corner and ran to the neighbourhood baseball field and meandered to the school just on the other side of the bridge. I walk across the ice-glazed parking lots of a carpet wholesaler, a hot-tub installer, and a lube and oil-change garage, careful not to step onto the road, a lone pedestrian just an overgrown squirrel too goddamn stupid to own a car.

Of course, if the world ran on reason—and if sane social planning was as common as greed, stupidity, and sloth—no double-digit-an-hour-paying factory would have hired my grade-nine-dropout father to help quench the country's car lust and I would probably be—at best—a second-generation custodian whose only notable life experience outside Chatham city limits would probably have been something akin to an endlessly-recalled weekend in my early-twenties spent attending Wrestlemania at the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit in the late-eighties, that long ago golden age when the name Hulk Hogan still meant something and Bon Jovi owned the airwaves. This is called irony. Employed in literature, it is quite often illuminating, if not for the characters, then at least for the reader. Unfortunately, this is freezing night-time February in Chatham, Ontario. The implication is obvious.

Inside the Montreal House there's no sign of Steady Eddie, who I'd agreed to meet here, but it's one more Friday night and everyone is drunk and intent upon getting much, much drunker, and that's all right because it's Friday night, the lie that keeps the entire working world spinning on its bone-weary axis. Give us this day our weekly whoop-up and let us forgive ourselves for wasting our lives, as we forgive those who have wasted our lives against us. And lead us not into the drunk tank tonight, but deliver us from the evil of Monday morning, forever and ever Monday morning, all men.

“Sammy!”

Steady Eddie is the only person who calls me Sammy, and then only when he's pissed. I push my way to the rear of the bar, toward where the washroom is. The Men's washroom. The Women's is located in the other room, in what was once the ladies' section of the Montreal House, at one time thoughtfully outfitted with not only its very own restroom facilities but a separate entrance as well, bygone hallmarks of a kinder, simpler, even more ignorant age. Besides the usual work-week-done revelers, tonight the place is crowded with men's rec-league hockey teams guzzling pitchers of beer and telling bad jokes, but come springtime there'll be just as many softball-playing women doing their own post-game imbibing while repeating many of these very same ha-ha's. No one ever said progress had to be pretty.

“Get your butt over here,” Eddie says, dragging a chair from a nearby table by its back legs. Once we're both settled he grabs one of the three plastic pitchers and pours a glass foamy full, pushes it in front of me.

“You know Dougie Unger and Kevin Wright and Billy Rankin, don't you?” Eddie knows everyone in Chatham—even in high-school we used to call him “The Mayor”—but the guys he works with and plays weekend hockey with aren't even names without faces for me, the days of my being friends with His Honour Steady Eddie meaning that all the world was my friend, too, long gone the same day I graduated to university, Eddie to the assembly line.

Two fresh pitchers on my credit card do what an entire evening of Toronto cocktail party chit-chat could never accomplish, propel me from stranger to brand-new-buddy status in the time it takes the first sixty ounces of soapy beer to turn into suds. I'd forgotten how easy it is to hop right on and ride the bike of Chatham barroom buffoonery.

First you laugh at someone else's tasteless joke, in this case Dougie's (or Kevin's or Billy's, it's hard to tell them apart):

“These two drunks are walking down the street when they come across this dog sitting on the curb licking his balls. After awhile one of them says, ‘I sure wish I could do that!' The other guy just looks at him and says, ‘Well, I think you better pet him first.'”

Next, you tell your own:

“Know what the difference between Michael Jackson and a grocery bag was? One was made of plastic and was dangerous for children to play with. The other one you used to carry groceries.”

Finally, someone emits an angry blast of gas—in this case, Steady Eddie, accompanied by the happy rejoinder “Speak, o' toothless one”—which elicits not only groans of delighted disapproval from everyone present except the defiantly proud blaster, but four rapidly raised glasses and the sudden panic of three empty pitchers. It's not my round, but I can use a time out. Willful imbecility is a great place to visit, you just wouldn't want to live there.

Waiting for the girl to fill the pitchers—she can't be a girl if she's slinging beer, although the blonde ponytail tied back with a blue ribbon and the gum-snapping boredom argue otherwise—I turn toward the eruption of women's laughter from the other room. I wonder if it's Rachel and a tableful of other CCI do-gooders; wonder enough that I stroll over and peek my head around the corner to discover that it's not, is just two middle-age women in Swiss Chalet uniforms, each with a bottle of Coors Light in front of her. I pay for the pitchers and am surprised I'm disappointed it's not her.

When I return with the pitchers Steady Eddie is telling a story about his brother Todd. If Todd hadn't already been the coolest person we knew simply by virtue of being twenty-years-old when Eddie and I were only eleven, his job as a Lay's Chips delivery man clearly sealed the deal. Number one, he got to ride around all day in a truck—a truck!—and number two, what was he hauling but a thirty-­foot-long cabin full of potato chips. Anytime the mood strikes you, just pull that big rig over to the side of the road, good buddy, and help yourself to whatever flavour you like. It didn't seem possible that any one person could be so lucky.

“So after conning Mum into letting him have Dad's new car so he'd be able to look for sales jobs, not a month later he ends up selling it to some other loser he knows for a thousand bucks straight up, but without the ownership and the tags—tells the guy not to worry, the car is his outright, and the guy believes him—so when the car gets repossessed, this other nitwit, he threatens to call the cops unless Todd gives him his grand back, plus an extra five hundred for all the inconvenience.” Eddie lifts his glass, but doesn't drink, is waiting until he's delivered the
coup de grace
we all know is coming. “Which of course Mum does. When hasn't she cleaned up one of Todd's messes? Which puts her out not only fifteen hundred bucks but also a two-year-old car with less than a thousand clicks on it
plus
the nearly five grand already lost on the down payment Dad made before he got sick.” Now Eddie can drink. “Todd. You know what I say to Mum? I say, ‘He's not my brother—he's your son.'”

I wonder what happened to Todd's potato chip truck. And his expensive stereo Eddie and I weren't allowed to touch, but we'd play anyway when Todd was at work. And the white Les Paul, on which Todd could play nothing but the introduction to “Smoke on the Water,” but which looked so fantastic museumed in the corner of his bedroom on its shiny silver stand. Maybe everyone only gets so much luck in their life. Maybe Todd used all of his up.

Dougie or Kevin or Billy decides that things have gotten just a little too grown-up, so one or another launches into another sure-fire knee-slapper. “This guy answers the phone and it's an Emergency Room doctor. The doctor says, ‘Your wife was in a serious car accident and I have bad news and good news. The bad news is she's lost all use of both arms and both legs and will need help eating and going to the bathroom for the rest of her life.' The guy says, ‘My God. What's the good news?' The doctor says, ‘I'm just kidding. She's actually dead.'”

Everyone howls but Eddie and me. We drink until the other three raise their own glasses. Eddie puts on a wild smile and leans over like he's about to tell me the world's lewdest limerick. “They don't know, they didn't mean anything.”

“No problem,” I say.

“You know what's what, that's all that matters.”

“It's not a problem.”

Someone says, “What's not a problem?” and Eddie answers back, “Guy walks into the doctor's office and says he's got a real memory problem, he can't remember anything at all. The doctor says, ‘How long have you had this problem?' Guy says, ‘What problem?'”

“Hilarious.”

“That's fucking hilarious.”

“That
is
hilarious.”

“That really is.”

 

* * *

 

What I want is music and warmth
, not wintertime's squall and shiver, but ten minutes after arriving home from the Montreal House, ten minutes spent on my mother's couch listening to CDs through tiny tinny earbuds sends me outdoors with a bottle of wine and a determination to track down a record player as soon as possible. I thought I'd be busy enough taking care of Dad's affairs and working on the new book that digitized music on an old Discman would suffice until I got home. It won't. Music is magic and magic needs conjuring, otherwise it's just entertainment. Music magic means I need a record player.

Besides, my phone is inside, and on it Uncle Donny's latest message, unlistened to but unlikely to be different from the previous three. Uncle Donny was the only uncle I had who never forgot to give me a birthday present—the same five dollars tucked into my shirt pocket that seemed like such a small fortune when I was ten, but which had shrunken to a deflationary family in-joke by the time I was sixteen—and could be annually counted on for an always groan-worthy “See you next year” farewell after enjoying another of my mother's Christmas turkeys, but repeated apologies and inquiries after Dad's well-being don't make up for months of systematic embezzlement. Blood isn't thicker than the misappropriation of entrusted family funds.

I'm getting used to this bench, this park. Maybe a few frozen wooden slats and a patch of partitioned dirt are all anyone needs. Or maybe I'm just drunk. Red wine was another thing Sara taught me. Not etiquette tricks like what year and vintage to purchase or what kind of cheese to eat with it, but how a full-bodied red, even if slugged right out of the bottle, is as close as alcohol can come to a conduit of cosmic consciousness, every other bottled spirit hurling you along happily with every sip toward this and that thing but never ever The Thing. William Blake didn't need booze to glimpse a world in a grain of sand, but since most of us aren't William Blake, these hard hoary stars in the sky above me and this icy air feeding my lungs and the music I can hear in my head if not in my ears are closer to what they really are because of the 2009 Hecula Monastrell stirring in my stomach. Doctors and dieticians will tell you that alcohol is only empty calories. They're wrong. Empty is just about the only thing it's not.

All I've got is the moon and a streetlight, but it looks as if the girl—Samantha—is talking to someone in her front yard.
Looks as if
, because although they're standing face to face and both busily gesturing with their hands, I can't hear a word either one of them is saying. Young lovers' quarrel, probably: fiery whispers, bursting hearts, I'll die tonight if you don't say yes or no or something else equally epochal. I'm disappointed she's capable of such an out-and-out teenage cliché. Disappointment that is, it must be admitted, odd, considering that she is, after all, a teenager.

A car comes around the corner—rude headlights on the rain-glistened street,
unta-unta-unta
thumping dance music in danger of bursting the car's windows—and slams to a stop in front of her house. The boy she's talking to drops his hands and climbs into the backseat. The car speeds off, leaving Samantha standing alone in the middle of her yard. She looks like she's considering going back inside, but crosses the street and walks past me without returning my nod and smile volley, takes her usual sulking spot on the swing.

“Boyfriend trouble?” I say.

“He's my brother,” she says, the roll of her eyes audible in her voice. “And he's fourteen.”

“Oh.” I need a quick recovery so as not to appear to be the hopelessly out of it fuddy-duddy I so obviously seem. “In that case, you might want to tell him he's going to go deaf listening to that shit his friends were playing. In addition to ruining his sense of taste.”

“It's too late. He already is.”

“Already is what?”

“Deaf.”

I lift the wine bottle. Red wine isn't just an excellent means of stripping the obfuscating veil of familiarity from everyday objects and events—it also does a swell job of helping you forget stuff. Like how easily an eighteen­-year-old girl can make you feel like an unqualified fool.

From the swing set behind me, “Speaking of shit, that shit you're drinking will end up ruining a lot more than your sense of taste.”

“You are aware, I presume, of the expression ‘The pot calling the kettle black?'”

“I don't drink alcohol. I don't. And pot isn't a drug.”

“I see. I wasn't aware of that.”

She pauses, presumably to puff. “It's an herb. It grows naturally.”

“So does Athlete's Foot. That doesn't mean you want to put it inside your body.”

An SUV rolls past. The bored faces of two small children strapped into the backseat are briefly illuminated by a flashing video screen. They're talking about making smoking inside automobiles illegal when there are children aboard. If they really cared about them, they'd make televisions against the law, and not just in cars.