Justin Bieber (3 page)

T
he day I was born, March 1, 1994, Celine Dion was solid at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “The Power of Love.” Not a bad song to start your life on. My musical director Dan Kanter, whose guilty pleasure is Celine Dion, must have been really excited that day. It was all over the radio, so I probably heard her belting it out before I got my first look at the blue sky over Stratford, Ontario. My hometown is 2,450 miles northeast of Los Angeles, 530 miles northwest of New York City, 1,312 miles due north of Disney World, and totally on the other side of the world from Tokyo. But that day, people all over the planet were listening to Celine Dion and loving it.

I am a proud Canadian and I hope that comes through in everything I do. I love hockey, maple syrup and Caramilk bars. Canada is an awesome country in general, and Stratford is an excellent place to call home. The people are nice, but not easily impressed. I go back there to visit Grandpa and Grandma and my friends, Ryan and Chaz, as often as I can, and everybody treats me the same as always.

Stratford is a small town of about 30,500 people, named after Stratford-upon-Avon in England, which is the birthplace of William Shakespeare. So it makes sense that there’s always a lot of comedy and drama going on and that our Stratford is the home of a huge Shakespeare festival – the biggest in North America. Every summer, about a million tourists come through to see the plays at the Avon Theatre, check out the local arts and crafts and poke around the town, which gets pretty quiet in the winter.

If you’re looking at a map of North America, you’ll see that Ontario is that little triangle of Canada that cuts down into the Great Lakes between New York and Michigan. Stratford is actually pretty close to the United States, halfway between Detroit and Buffalo, but, when I say I’m from Canada, some people think that means I came in from the North Pole on a dog sled or something. Sometimes it does seem like winter lasts forever, but it’s more because the kids are dying for the school year to be over. Summers are hot and muggy, but always a lot of fun. In the fall, the whole place is blazing with colors like you cannot believe. In the spring, it’s incredibly beautiful. The snowmen keel over or get kicked down, the slush piles melt away, and the grass on the baseball diamond sort of struggles to wake up. The air is clean. Everything smells like wet pine trees.

My mom and dad were in their late teens when I was born. Not that much older than I am now. (And, yeah, that kinda freaks me out, so I don’t dwell on it.) My dad, Jeremy Bieber, was basically a kid, doing his best to handle huge adult responsibilities. Lately, I’ve started to understand how hard that is. He and I have always had a great relationship, and as the story goes on you’ll see how he’s influenced not only my life but my music. I admire my mom so much for how she stepped up to meet all the challenges in her life.

My parents broke up when I was ten months old. Shortly afterwards, my dad started working on construction jobs out of town. Mom basically worked her butt off at whatever job she could get to keep a roof over our heads. We lived in public housing, and there were no luxuries at our little apartment, but it never occurred to me that we were poor. We had each other, which was everything we needed.

While Mom was working, I went to daycare, but I also spent a lot of time with my grandparents. I had a room at their house, and Grandma painted it blue and white with Toronto Maple Leafs stuff all over the walls. There was never any question about it: I was into hockey from day one, and the Maple Leafs were my favorite team.

Every summer, Grandpa and Grandma took us up to Star Lake, where they rented a cabin that belonged to the rod-and-gun club. Grandma’s brothers and sisters would come, and Grandpa and I would go fishing with Grandma’s dad. Being French Canadian,
he didn’t speak English, and Grandpa didn’t speak French, so there wasn’t much conversation going on. But that’s a cool thing I learned from fishing: sometimes you don’t need conversation. Ha ha.

I spoke both French and English from the time I was little, so I could interpret when needed.

Grandpa would say, “Ask him if he’s hungry.”

And I’d go,
Avez-vous faim?

Great-grandpa would nod enthusiastically.
Mais oui, j’ai très faim.

But, for the most part, they both knew the important words. Fish,
poisson.
Boat,
bateau.
Water,
l’eau.
Thanks,
merci.
You’re welcome,
pas de quoi.
I have to pee,
j’ai envie de faire pipi.
What else do you really need to know to get along?

“Fishing’s not something you have to talk about. It just happens,” Grandpa says, and it seems to me that a lot of things in life are that way. I mean, think how nice it is when you can hang out with someone and not have to fill up the air with small talk. I hate being on a date where both people are working too hard to come up with stuff to say. You know it’s working when you can just chill – listen to music, watch a movie or whatever – without feeling like you have to force the conversation. It should just be natural. When it’s working, there’s room in the air for both people
to say things that matter. Scooter gave me the smartest dating advice you could ever give – to a guy or a girl – just listen. And that means
really
listen to what the other person is saying instead of using that time to come up with your next clever remark.

Anyway. Yeah. Quiet mornings out on the water. There’s not much of that in my life anymore. I’m going at light speed 24/7 – and I love it. I’m grateful for all the blessings and opportunities that have come my way. But I will say that when I was little, I longed for a “normal” life with a “normal” family, and there’s no way that’s ever going to happen now. There’s a circus going on around me everywhere I go, which makes it hard on my family sometimes. I’d really love to have a nice girlfriend, but she’d have to put up with all that. You won’t hear me complain about how my life is going, but I hope someday I’ll be out on Star Lake with my own grandkid, reeling in brown trout and telling stories about how all of us would get together by the fire pit in the evening, everybody laughing and talking at once, the same way we did at Christmas dinner.

Our tradition was always to gather at Grandpa and Grandma’s house early in the afternoon. She’d have the tree up and decorated with all the usual ornaments dragged down from the attic. People would start showing up, and by dinner time there was quite a crowd gathered. And not just the usual grandparents, kids, grandkids. Our extended family is really – well, I guess “extended” is a good word.

See, my mom’s biological father died when she was a baby, so Grandpa is totally her dad, but technically he’s her stepfather, who married Grandma when Mom was two, which is how my mom actually ended up with a half-brother and a stepbrother both named Chris, because Grandpa already had kids from a previous marriage. It would suck for her stepsiblings and their kids not to be with their dad/grandpa at Christmas, so Grandpa’s ex-wife and her husband come with their kids, plus cousins on this side, and step-sibs on the other side, and after a while it’s pretty complicated trying to keep track of which cousin belongs to whose aunt, or who’s the stepson of the great-uncle, or the grandkid of the step-aunt – and you end up realizing it really doesn’t make any difference.

We’re a family.

We all have Christmas dinner, and I’m telling you, my grandma puts up an
awesome
Christmas dinner. Turkey and gravy. I wish I could have a trough of that stuff on my bus after the show. (We all work up an appetite during a performance.) It’s the best. We all eat until we’re about to roll over. Then we play this gift-exchange game with dice. Everybody shows up with a gift. If you’re a girl, bring a gift for a girl; if you’re a guy, bring a gift for a guy. That way there’s the right number of each. You take turns rolling the dice, and, if you roll doubles, you grab a gift. If you roll doubles again, you get to grab somebody else’s gift. There’s always a lot of horsing around and teasing, but nobody actually gets mad because you don’t know what’s in the package anyway, so why would you care if your gift gets stolen? You get another turn, and the game keeps going until everybody has a gift. Then we all open our gifts and end up trading anyway.

That’s how we are in my family. Every person gives what they have. If this particular gift isn’t what you need, maybe that gift over there works for you, and, meanwhile, the first gift is exactly what somebody else needs. You can’t always get what you want. But, if you’re lucky, you get what you need. And I was lucky. Along with a lot of other blessings, I got my family – just the way they are. And now my extended family extends even wider to include Scooter, Carin, Kenny, Ryan and Dan and a lot of other people I’ll tell you about a little later in this book.