Savage (21 page)

Mom appeared at my side, dishevelled, raw and tired. "They say you can leave in an hour," she said, her mouth knotted in strange creases.

"Do you want something to drink?"

"No way."

"They have some questions for you."

"Department of Administrative, um, uh...anxiety."

In what I thought was the final performance of my life, the playlist from hell had accompanied me into a pharmaceutical oblivion. The menacing songs on repeat, the pink bullets, the pharma-slugs in my stomach, I possessed a vampire's bloodlust, overplaying and pouring into my membranes; my central nervous system bankrupting into a histrionic nosedive; reddening pool of skin.

From the distance, one clean juice straw appeared on a table, just out of reach. I homed in on the wallow, inflating the agony.

This symphony ruled me, the twenty-seven pills they took from my stomach now dissolving in a sink, in a pipe, back into the water supply.

Nate, you listen to me, it's yourself talking at you: You forget about your tragic upbringing and you motor around, along, beside, inside, up and down, while your never worked a day in your life hands gently squeeze—the blood flowing through your rusty tributaries, the power and glory of it all and everything goes black and the cool mattress becomes transparent and you can see all the way to the earth's feeble cortex and as your vision goes deeper and you see further and further past anonymous shards of time, random earth debris and the molten synapses firing away, you see your Great Uncle Carl in a glossy black-and-white photo with serrated edges taken five years before your birth and he's wearing a squeaky clean business-class suit and a bib and his gimmicky bow tie, his smile is full tilt and the Japanese chefs are beside him, proud of their presentation until the photo gets snapped by a giant hot lobster claw and melts. Cut to infinite underwater bubbles. You see your sister at a cottage with friends; Elizabeth is there. You see your parents watching TV in separate rooms, the glow illuminating their eyes and nostrils and fidgeting digits. Despite this distance, you feel like your family is still booking your whole cocksucking life talking to each other like the corrupt sports agents they are, like the strangers-at-the-soup-kitchen type chatter they give you, like the let's-talk-about-the-weather-alienation-street treatment they are comfortable with, all the while getting you the cheapest and bestest suicide rate for your stupid unattended provincial funeral.

*

The next morning, I found myself recuperating on Mom's couch. I looked down at my feet, hidden under a thin blanket. "I'm going out for a while, Nate, so, just rest," she said. "I got you some ginger ale." I sat up slowly, looked around her empty apartment. When I coughed, I felt the sticky thing they used to monitor me was still on me, tangled in my chest hairs.

I walked with soft, uneven steps towards the answering machine in the hallway and pressed play.

It was last night: I heard my parents talking. Mom as usual hadn't reached the phone in time when Dad called, and the tape's brittle finesse captured my parents discussion as my body lay on Dad's stinking kitchen floor, as Mom paced on her own kitchen floor, as Dad's stomach grumbled, oozing coffee and spaghetti sauce, peering down at me, looking at my rib cage for movement.

Seeing the remaining pills lined up on the kitchen counter, the empty bottle on the floor beside me all crime scene and raw, Dad sounding residual, not certain whether I was in fact dead or poisoned.

As I listened, I wrapped the thin blue blanket around me tighter. The gargling answering machine tape played my parents' emergency exchange—as if the lines had been adlibbed by someone else with a tone of closure, exit wound and severity. There was no escape from hearing them, and understanding exactly what it was they were saying.

"Nate took some pills."

"He's supposed to take pills, David."

"Well, he took a lot. He's not moving."

"Is he breathing?"

"I don't know."

"Well, check."

"I think so."

"Call the hospital or somethi—"

The tape ended abruptly, cutting out and rewinding with a tight metallic whirl and belch. I tried to speak. I wanted to say something to disengage from the finality of the pre-millennial answering machine's cold facts that contained the secrets of the universe, but my throat hurt and my mouth felt extinct, as if words were impossible to emit. My head was full of spinning animation: little dots in heavy rotation floated past my eyes.

I slugged myself back to the couch, my out-of-work stomach turned in considerable pain, the smell of charcoal still strong and deeply tattooed in my nostrils.

PART III:

17 )
Brutal

February 1997–December 2001

I
n film, to demonstrate the passage of time, transitional montages will culminate with textured shadows across a barren landscape—glints of spastic sunshine on building sides, frost building up on window panes, bricks and mortar becoming scuffed by sleet, and wooden beams eroding and becoming brittle, while trees scuttling through seasons are plumed with rain venting down, sun drying it up, soil hardening and foliage muted with cold hints of early snow. This passage of our family's post-Glenvale colour and friction was not captured on film but was catalogued in cognitive recesses—
new and selected
. The past settled.

The memories were so big in my head that even the dulling of the drugs I was taking didn't wash them out completely. How could I gift wrap a sister, Mom, Dad, dead Great Uncle, four dead grandparents, various psychiatrists, bartenders and neighbours and Mom's strolls by bread sticks jutting out of metal troughs decorating storefronts along Mount Pleasant Avenue, south of Eglinton, several minutes by foot from Canada Square Cinemas, Eglinton subway station, Orchard View Library and the new gaudy logo noise of Yonge and Eglinton version 2...order up!

Of all the things I kept with me on my odyssey, it was my RCA CC-432 VHS Analog Camcorder that acted as a strong phantom limb, a perennial, albeit cumbersome, necessity for my ever-changing wilderness. On one of many couch-surfing exits, forgetting I had stuck my camera in the bottom, I tossed my large duffle bag down a flight of stairs, cracking the camcorder's plastic body. Luckily, for a few months at the time, I was living with someone who said he knew a guy at his work who could fix it. And so the artificial life force that mimicked observation skills was extended. What had become a lonely broad-casting tradition (the sadcore video diary entries as midnight struck and one year dissolved digitally into the next) had grown into a weekly parody of life in an adult suit. I went insane when I thought about money, employment, society; others could escape the bleakness I championed, chartered and gargled with acuity.

During a particularly low stretch of months I could be seen at the height of fashion, combining Hawaiian shirts, blazers, my father's bowler hat and a thick black overcoat worn with army boots. My hair curled over my ears in a mangy frenzy, and my facial hair was trimmed into a goatee. My eyes were a deep set of stale chocolates, glazed over with an intense look of betrayal, detached from specific focus. My stomach was usually hot-wired in coffee, pizza, pasta or a gauntlet of carbohydrates home cooked by near strangers. In December 1996, I moved to Waterloo, a city an hour and a half outside of Toronto, to live with some friends for cheap and escaped each night into a deep, pilled-out sleep.

*

Mom now lived with banana bread and white furniture cleaned with Windex, Lysol and J-Cloths, six or seven blocks from our first house at 61 Mann Avenue, across from the Dominion where I'd mispronounced the word truck often and at high decibels, and where the glass jar of mythological goose grease fell from my hands in the basement, February 5, 1976, and I fell on it, the broken glass and grease and cut my face and eye open from brow to right beside my right nostril, the pupil dangling by cords and wiring.

Dad's attempt at a stabilized career at the new funeral home was interrupted by the beer-store slip and his failure to get his funeral-director's licence, and by mid-1996, he had moved out of Toronto for good. Before disappearing into his rural pre-coffin life in Elgin, Ontario, he showed me the bottoms of his soles, how the treads had worn thin, and told me that he had never shown the shoes to his lawyer.

"They're going to settle for nineteen thousand bucks!" Dad laughed, as if he was getting away with something.

Within weeks of the settlement, he had fastened himself inside a permanent trailer, telling us later the land was cheap because it was built on a patch of degenerative swampland.

I had visited him that first Christmas, but left the next morning on a bus, unable to stomach the cigarette smoke and late-morning beer drinking.

And then a harsh laugh from Mom, oozing nervously on the phone, "Thank God we don't all live together!"

The beer store had set him free.

One weekend in February 1997, Holly took the bus and visited me during a blizzard. I made a short film of us making tea and shovelling snow. Holly did her best to cover her face from my tabloid ascents. We didn't really do anything but eat microwavable food and watch movies, and I do remember a yelling match one morning about the state of our family and Holly shouting at me about getting my shit together.

"Well it must be nice to live at home all your life with
mother margarine container
as your personal chef and laundry slave!"

"You sound so mad; why are you so angry? It's like you go to this whole other plateau of—"

"BECAUSE, HOL, JESUS! I feel trapped, cornered, a scalded dog, a dead slow-snake, a real monster, I dunno," I shouted in a booming action-film voice-over voice, "BECAUSE YOU only get three hundred opportunities to ruin your life forever!"

"Please."

"I don't hate any of you. We just seem to want nothing to do with each other at a gut level, you know, the deal is done."

Despite this glitch, things were OK, and we'd talk every few weeks after that on the phone. When Holly didn't return my calls for a month in late spring, I called Dad, who just said something disposable like Holly was working a lot and taking a night-school class.

In the summer, Holly finally visited again for the weekend. My friends wanted to go out for lunch, but Holly didn't want to spend the money, nor did I, so we wandered in the hot parking lots while my friends ate lunch.

Again, as had been the case in February, Holly moved her hands over her face whenever I tried to take a photograph or videotape her doing something like making food or reading the newspaper on the couch.

On a glossy postcard depicting Waterloo's bustling downtown core in winter on King Street between Weber and Jameson, I had scrawled the following:

Q: Nate, what was it like retiring from being a teenager?

A: YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT WALKING AWAY FROM SOMETHING YOU'RE REALLY GOOD AT, AT A VERY YOUNG AGE.

Thanks for throwing hot coffee on me as a teen pin-up boy waiting for his suicide shipments on the front porch. You scalded my self-esteem like a prince turning into a rodent covered in expired groceries...it would have made a great Miracle Whip commercial, you Nazi.

Have a great boxing day

Nancy

After inserting the tape into the fragile video-camera jaw and sliding my hand underneath the grip to hit the red REC button, I heard the gears inside the belly and moved in front of its tiny red eye. I waited patiently for the auto-focus to come to its senses. (The cassette was labeled "WATERLOO 1997.") The red light went on; the tape began chewing up real time.

The machine wheezed and gestated. I was at my kitchen table, head full of thumping pharmaceuticals as my early morning confessional began, sermon-like, an autopsy of my own living life. I turned the camera off and tidied up the evidence.

Dad, hello father, here, I am at Camp Granada! Hello Dad listen, listen up! I'm not accusing you of anything anymore. I know I did, but your appearance in my powder-keg nightmares is just syndication, nothing more, a nifty balm of worry, 100-proof vodka, a dreg of anxious breath afterbirth still raw as war, as in war in the air of my own premastered edition of myself. You are a worno, you have worn down your financial memory, down to a thin hobo shoe cud and I can revisit you pure, in un-Glenvaled Technicolor. In old library MICROFICHE, counting the years from the headlines, the grainy headlines with their chewed rat corners, rat-chewed corners before you met Mom...so here I am now, Nate in the time of Holly, post-stigmata, the Menendez home work-out videotape exploding and snapping in its own juicy gears and all we have is the segregated grocery bills and the solo consumption as if nothing EMOTIONAL ever happened. I will be your father figure put your tiny hands in mine I will be the one that loves you Davey until the end of time. Your sister Rebecca gives me a homeless man's shaving set last Christmas, so brief and cruel and glistening in a plastic cocoon of disposables—just like me, and your sister Becks saying "YOU'RE ALWAYS MOVING AROUND NATE, SO I THOUGHT IT'D BE PERFECT FOR YOU, YOU BUM!" and I'm not supposed to do anything but put down my ginger ale and ice and calmly start shaving while repeating THANK YOU AUNT BECS THANKS THANKS BECKY BABY all the while knowing she got it free with her REAL pharma purchases? Oh BECKY I'M YOUR LONG LOST DAUGHTER NANCY PROM QUEEN so be proud of me, I'm a doctor I'm a lawyer I'm doing my masters at HOOKER SCHOOL!