I Was There the Night He Died Page 17

  But Samantha needs these stories. In lieu of getting her to actually tell me why she cuts herself, I went on-line last week to try to understand why people in general do it. Everybody’s bad news has its own inimitable tang, but apparently there are some things that are across-the-board bona fide for people suffering from her disorder. Like that cutting is basically a coping mechanism for stress, of which Samantha—with no mum, with a drunk for a dad, with a new school and town to adjust to, with university looming—clearly has. Like that the endorphins that the body releases when cut or injured feel good, and that people can actually become addicted to them when they’re otherwise feeling emotionally bad. That some people cut themselves for an entirely different reason, to feel pain in order to feel more alive when they’re prone to ordinarily feeling numb. That marijuana is a common form of self-medication since it tends to blunt the desire to self-mutilate.

  Samantha needs these stories. I need to write them—would have written them anyway—but she needs to hear them. I need to write them now so I’ll know what to say when I see her. She needs to know who died tonight. Who and how and what for.

  I realize, of course, that this all sounds incredibly vain. Not that that’s any surprise. I do, after all, tell stories for a living.

  * * *

  Even though I’m not going anywhere for awhile, I still need to finish packing up my parents’ stuff, so I’m at No Frills to get more boxes for the things I’m keeping and garbage bags for what I’m either throwing out or donating to the Salvation Army. While I’m here, I decide to pick up a few non-packing-related items, but get stalled in the bakery section, the kamut bread that Sara insisted we eat and that I’d ordinarily buy from the health food store down the street not a Chatham grocery store staple. My flesh started to fill out around the same time that hers started to fall, and every aging step of the way Sara would add or subtract whatever was necessary for our continued good and happy health. We used to joke how at least we weren’t going to have to endure the encroaching Hospital Years alone, and that if I could put up with her going completely grey, she was willing to accept me wearing my pants chest-high.

  Once I settle on a loaf of rye bread whose primary ingredient isn’t rye but wheat, I head for the dairy aisle, where I spot Rachel standing in front of a refrigerated wall of egg cartons. I watch her select one, open it up, and inspect it. She’s obviously just finished work, still has her teaching clothes on—matching blue blouse and skirt, simple silver necklace, sensible heels—but looks … weary more than simply tired. The dozen eggs in her hand make the grade and get placed in her shopping cart.

  I duck back into the pop and chips aisle and ditch the bread on a half empty pretzel shelf and magnet toward the store’s exit. Once I’m outside, I can’t understand why I’m there. Walking home, all I can come up with is that it felt like I saw something I shouldn’t have.

  * * *

  I feel it before I think it, always an encouraging sign when the feeling is a good one. This one is a good one. My only concern is that the nurse who must have turned on the TV to the hockey game for my dad might have put it on a little too loud for some of the other, more sentient patients who might become agitated by it, I can hear it halfway down the hallway. I remember it’s Saturday night, Hockey Night in Canada, hockey still hockey even if it’s Maple Leafs hockey. Maybe they’re getting thumped.

  He sees me before I see him, springs up from the chair beside Dad’s bed as soon as he spots me coming through the door. His arms are hanging at his sides like a long distance runner ready to race. Uncle Donny might be unforgivably selfish, but he’s not stupid. At least not when it comes to his own self-preservation. He’s probably expecting me to shout, so I don’t.

  “Where’s the smart money tonight?” I say. “Whoever’s playing the Leafs is probably your best bet.”

  “I haven’t made a wager in over a month. I go to Gamblers’ Anonymous meetings twice every week.”

  Uncle Donny viewed with suspicion any group or gathering larger or more organized than Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner with my parents and me, even tended to distrust his own union, used to complain how the big shots upstairs in the suits used to be decent guys when they were down on the line like everybody else, and that they had to be watched every minute now that they had their fingers on the purse strings. I have great difficulty imagining him standing up in some church basement full of strangers and announcing, “My name is Donny Samson and I’m a compulsive gambler.”

  “And I never bet against the Leafs.” He says it like I’m supposed to be impressed.

  “Well, that helps explain why you lost so much money, anyway.”

  “I never once bet against my own team.”

  “Congratulations. If you couldn’t be loyal to your brother, at least you were a rock when it came to supporting the league’s sorriest franchise.”

  I look at Dad for the first time since I came in the room. If you didn’t know what was wrong with him, you might think he was just another guy killing just another Saturday night watching the game, pleasantly bored while waiting for a goal or a fight or something to liven up his night, his life. Uncle Donny sees what I’m looking at.

  “He knows when it’s hockey, you know,” he says.

  “Don’t make me any more upset than I already am.”

  He contemplates keeping his mouth shut; looks at the TV, then back at me. He licks his lips. “I don’t care what you say—or what any doctor says either—I know he’s the happiest he is when the two of us are watching the game.”

  “The two of you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but do you mind enlightening me how you happen to know this to be true?”

  Uncle Donny studies Dad’s face for a moment. “I don’t know. I just know it is. I just know it’s true.”

  Not only is he now an enthusiastic exponent of group therapy, he’s also a mystical seer of others’ ineffable states. This from the same man whose favourite game with me when I was a kid was to get me to follow his “one skin” with my own “two skin” succeeded by his “three skin” before concluding with the inevitable “four skin.”

  “Yeah, well … ” I say and pick up the remote from the side table and click off the television to prove my point.

  There aren’t any visitors tonight except for Uncle Donny and me. The only sound now that the game is off is Mr. Goldsworthy in the bed across the room making a low, repetitive, monotone noise with his mouth closed that to someone who didn’t know any better might sound like humming.

  I look at the clock on the far wall. “The game was almost over anyway,” I say.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t,” Uncle Donny says.

  * * *

  The sun, the still industrious sun, has done its daily thing, come and gone and given way to a black sky stuffed full of bright white stars. The ratio is right. One living life-giver is worth a billion dead suns, no matter how brightly they once shone upon a time. But some things are easier to do or say in the dark, so we need nighttime too. I’d waited for this evening’s appearance while revising what I’d written over the last week, a chapter of Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) double dutying as a life lesson for Samantha. Art can’t be didactic, but its manufacturers sure can.

  I don’t have to wait long on the park bench before I see her leave her house and cross the road and walk past me to the swing set. I give her time to take out her stash and light up and ask me who died. Instead, “Do you want some of this?” she asks.

  I lift my bottle of wine without turning around on the bench.

  “You know,” she says, “in certain cultures, it’s considered insulting to turn down the offer of a communal toke.”

  “What cultures?”

  I hear her inhale, hard. “It’s a big world. There’ve got to be some.”

  I lift my bottle to my lips
without swallowing, not wanting to appear a party pooper, but also not wanting to turn tonight into a party where I’m too pooped to say what I want Samantha to hear. I’d primed the oratorical pump with a few glasses of red wine before I left home, and I’ve got to be careful not to flood the engine.

  “Whatever,” she says. “If you want to be an alky, it’s your life.”

  I want to answer back that I’m not an alky—at least not an alky like her father is, the one who’s clearly scared her clear of alcohol—but I also want her to remain unawares and stay open to what I’ve written, so I take the seat next to her on the swing set and offer a peace sign that she completes by slipping the joint between my two fingers.

  “Don’t do it for me,” she says.

  “I’m not. It’s something you should know about me. I pride myself on my cultural sensitivity.”

  I puff and pass it back and hope I’ve got enough brain cells to spare so that my head can handle being pleasantly muddled when I also need it to be serious and sharp.

  “Gram Parsons,” she says. “Didn’t he die tonight?”

  In spite of being impressed, or at least surprised, that she knows who he is, “I don’t do cover versions,” I say.

  “It’s a request.”

  “I don’t do requests.”

  “You wrote a novel about him, though, didn’t you?”

  Now I really am both impressed and surprised. “Something like that. Did you read it?”

  She takes another hit, passes me the joint. “I read about it. On your website.”

  “Gee, I’m flattered. The whole website, or just selected parts?”

  “Didn’t you know that my generation has a tragically short attention span because of all the video games we play and the music videos we watch?”

  “And my generation believed that if you didn’t eat beef and drink two glasses of homogenized milk with every meal you risked getting sick, and that asbestos was the insulation of the future. That didn’t stop us from reading a book without pictures now and then.”

  “I believe they’re called graphic novels, Grandpa.”

  “We read comics too. We just felt guilty about it if we were still reading them when we were old enough to vote.”

  And then I don’t feel so smart anymore; feel a-okay with it, too, which is even worse, like if I just sit here gently rocking in this icy nighttime breeze long enough everything will take care of itself in time, quintessential stoner satori. This is the price of the happiness that pot begets. I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s microwave a frozen pizza.

  “Do you ever see birds?”

  I think that’s what she says. “Did you just say, ‘Do you ever see birds?’”

  “Yeah, I mean … I mean, I know there are birds, obviously, but … Do you ever see them? I don’t think I ever remember seeing any. Not lately, I mean.”

  I’ve got to act fast before I lose her.

  “Janis Joplin died tonight,” I say.

  “But I didn’t ask you who died.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m telling you. Janis Joplin died tonight.”

  “But it doesn’t work that way.”

  “It does tonight. Tonight, I’m telling you, Janis Joplin died.”

  Before she can again object to my willful disregard of our unspoken tête-à-tête etiquette, I proceed to tell Samantha all about Janis Joplin. About how she was an overweight, acne-scarred high-school outcast from Port Arthur, Texas in the late 1950s—where and when being a high-school outcast was the real geeking deal—and how, just like the song says, her life was saved by rock and roll, except it wasn’t rock and roll, but Bessie Smith and Leadbelly and Odetta and Big Mama Thorton records. How like thousands of other kids, she eventually migrated to San Francisco in the hope of fewer hometown hassles and more funky freedoms and how she found what she was looking for in a five-man blues-rock band that she stood in front of and which took their orders and inspiration from her because she was the actual reason everyone came out to listen—real rock and roll feminism. I tell Samantha how she screwed who she wanted to screw—men and women both, it didn’t matter which, just as long as they were either attractive or interesting or, ideally, both. How she sang how she wanted to sing—ear-drum-bursting, heartache-healing, soul-stirring screams and whispers and sighing supplications. I tell Samantha how she might have worn feathers in her hair and kaleidoscope-coloured bell-bottoms, but she was still that same pimply plump high-school freak from Port Arthur, Texas, the one who forced the world to shut its big mouth and listen to what she had to say because, clearly, it didn’t have the balls necessary to speak for itself. I tell Samantha how—and this is the part I’ve been building toward, this is what tonight is all about—everyone at one time or another drinks or smokes or sniffs or loves too much, but here’s the thing, here’s the thing to never forget: heroin is no win, and Janis knew it and did it again and again anyway, and she lost. She knew she had a problem, she knew she had a reason to live, and yet she died on a hotel room floor with the change for the cigarette machine still clenched in her right hand, she’d barely even tied-off before she hit the carpet.

  “Asshole.”

  “That’s not how to look at it,” I say. “The way to look at it is she needed help—more help than she was getting. That’s the point.”

  “Not her, you asshole,” Samantha says, standing up from the swing. “What an asshole you.”

  I stand up as well; point at myself just to make sure there’s no further confusion as to who she’s referring to. “Me?”

  “Is this what you wanted to see?” she says, ripping off her coat and slamming it over her shoulder to the ground like an overmatched wrestling opponent.

  I pat down the air with open palms. “Let’s try to keep it down, okay?”

  Next to go is her perennial blue hoodie, but this time not south, but at me, the zipper catching me in the right eye. Both of my eyes shut tight of their own volition, and the right one begins to water.

  “Look at me.”

  “Jesus Christ, I can’t look at you, you’ve fucking blinded me.”

  “I said look at me. This is what you wanted to see, so look at me.”

  The injured eye won’t cooperate—is too busy sending salty water down the right side of my face—but the left one is game. What it sees is Samantha in her white sports bra with both arms extended in front of me for inspection, old flesh-coloured scars alternating with fresh red welts up and down each forearm. Lucky there are so many stars out tonight or I wouldn’t be able to see them so well. Lucky.

  “I just wanted to help,” I say, trying not to stare at the mess of her flesh. “I do want to help.”

  “With your bullshit stories with their stupid moral lessons? You really think a story is going to make me stop cutting myself? My God, you are so vain. You come across like you’re so laid back and above all the bullshit, but you’re just as full of yourself as everyone else. Is that what you’ve been doing every time you told me about someone who died? God, I can’t believe I sat there like some kind of little groupie and listened to you.”

  “No, no, that wasn’t what happened at all. Before, it was just us talking, I swear. Because I liked talking to you. I do like talking to you. Tonight was the first time I … Look, I was little drunk, maybe I came across a little … pedagogical, but the point is still … ”

  Samantha gathers up her clothes from the frozen ground and walks away without bothering to put them back on. Her naked shoulder blades look like amputated wings. You’d think she would hurry home—me still standing there, the cold air, someone who might see her—but if you did, you would be wrong.

  Chapter Twelve

  I’m eighteen again, and time travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  It’s almost midnight on Friday night and Steady Eddie is behind the wheel and the radio is on and we’ve each got a can of b
eer between our thighs and there’s nowhere we have to be, we’re just driving around, but it’s a single Coors Light Tall Boy each because drinking and driving drunk is a grown-up no-no and the radio is one long commercial only occasionally interrupted by songs we’ve heard a million and twelve times before and never need to hear again and we’re not in Eddie’s dad’s 1980 Chrysler Le Baron coupe but in the Steady One’s brand new GMC Sierra HD with a 360 horsepower Vortec Six Litre V8, six-speed automatic transmission, and towing and payload capacity far superior to his last truck, features and luxuries he neither needs nor can afford. But he just got the good news that he’s staying on at the factory, at least through the spring and the summer, so what better way to celebrate being able to scrape by for a few more months than by adding a truck payment to his already fat stack of monthly bills? Money is for spending, after all, life is for living, you know, you only go around once, don’t forget.

  “Remember the Capitol Theatre?” Eddie says, hand on the wheel, pointing with his pinkie.

  “Sure.” Someone’s parents would drop you off, someone else’s would pick everyone up out front, two dollars to get in and a dollar for popcorn or a chocolate bar and a pop and teenage ushers with flashlights and “O Canada” before the movie. I’m sure I wasn’t the only Chatham adolescent to see his first pair of female breasts after bluffing his way into Porky’s at the Capitol.

  “The city bought it and are turning it into a real theatre—you know, for plays and stuff.” Both the Capitol and the Centre closed down in the early nineties, near-century-­old monuments to Chatham’s downtown, boarded up and forgotten in favour of a conveniently located cement box that can show eight Tinsel Town chimeras at once.