Ron had pulled out a short two by four piece of wood out of the dirt and Tommy had taken it.
“This would make a good club,” he said to Ron.
“Yea, it would, “ Ron said.
“Can I try it out on your brother?” Tommy asked.
“Sure, “ Ron said.
Tommy whacked me with the piece of wood right in the head. It had a nail sticking out of it. It hurt like hell. I bled. The blood was the limit. Tommy laughed. I believe my brother was simply surprised at the force Tommy had used. I think he saw the blood first. I screamed. I screamed bloody loud. I hurt. Blood was blood.
My dad came to the screen door and shouted. “Shut up Billy. Stop all that racket.” He went back in the house. I don’t know what Mom was doing at this time.
I ran into my dad and screamed, “Tommy hit me with a nail!”
My Dad who was now back on his recliner reading the Winnipeg Free Press, turned and said, “I don’t care what Tommy did. You can’t be screaming like murder in the neighbourhood.” With that he went back to his newspaper, ignoring me, a trickle of blood dripping down my face.
I walked away, furious and mortified. I went down into my father’s workshop with a piece of paper and a pencil and I wrote furiously.
“Tommy hit me. Ronny let him. You blamed me. You are wrong.”
My mom found me there. I remember her wiping the blood off my face and head with a wet face cloth she got from somewhere. Mom’s always were producing things like that by magic.
“Let me have that, “ she said. I think she was amused by my writing that out.
I heard my parents upstairs.
My mother had given my legal brief to my father. It hadn’t gone over well. I don’t know what she was thinking. I’m suspicious today that there was a back story that I was somehow a pawn in what is often seen as the passive aggressive drama. We were all watching Perry Mason in those years. I’d study Freud and Jung many years later. To Dad it was more like the Magna Carta. Or there was another conversation going going. Either parent can use a child to hide behind or to make a point. Mom really was the go between us kids and the Old Man. She was maintained the peace. She was loved each of us. Even the dog. At this time the dog had made himself very scarce.
I next heard Dad shout.
“I don’t care what happened, I’m not going to have my authority questioned in my own house. I’m leaving.”
Dad just packed a suitcase then and left.
Now Ron and Mom were angry, very angry at me. Tommy had gone home.
Mom was crying..
“You shouldn’t have screamed so loud, Billy. See how you’ve upset your father. He’s left us.”
“Tommy didn’t hit you that hard.”
“I was bleeding.” I said.
“We didn’t know there was a nail in the board. It was just a scratch anyway. You’re such a cry baby.” My brother added.
“Stop it you two. Billy go to your room. I don’t want to see your face again this day. You’ve upset your father and now he’s left us. We’re not going to have anything to eat. We’re going to lose the house and end up on the street and it’s all your fault.’ She was sitting there on the sofa , her face in her hands. Ron sat down beside her.
“Yea, Billy, you upset Dad. You shouldn’t have upset Dad. Now Mom and Dad are upset and it’s all your fault.” He said
Mom just waved me away.
My brother was as I remember always quick to ascribe blame. Meanwhile I was a jailhouse lawyer myself. What I couldn’t understand was how I was the guy with the headache, I’d been stabbed with a nail, and somehow I was the bad guy.
I’d went to my room.
This became the a cornerstone of my twisted inner life. I’ve played this day over a thousand times, a thousand ways, over the years. In my mind and my heart it sits there beside the ships of the USSR and the ships of America meeting on the high seas in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuba let Russia install nuclear missiles secretly on it’s island, breaking the Monroe Doctrine, causing the having the greatest show down of my life.
Looking back I know that Dad leaving was to do with something going on between him and mom. This was the era of feminism, Hanoi Jane, and women burning their bras, Overnight everyone was having sex with everyone. The birth control pill was discovered in 1952. It freed women to be as promiscuous as men. They were no longer as likely to get caught with telltale pregnancies. The profitable abortion industry was just ramping up.
In my home, Mom had used my legal dossier (Perry Mason) to challenge my Dad. Dad was on his day off after a week of work ruling men and unions and trying to get a job done for his bosses way off in Eastern Canada. They sent out blue prints he said were conceived in LALA land and had no bearing on the reality of what he was faced with trying to put modern conveyor systems into a fixed building space with existing materials and tools. Dad didn’t think highly of architects.
Now the house was empty. Mom was crying. My brother was scowling at me. I was stupefied.
Dad returned that night.
He stomped back into his house with his suitcase. “I decided I’m not going to pay for a motel room when I’m already paying for my own bed here.”
That was Dad, the Scots Analyst. The judge had spoken.
No one else did for weeks. My mother was quiet as a mouse. My brother and I whispered. Dad came and went to work. The meals were served. Not a bird sang in the valley. No blossoms blossomed. The insects died. My brother did stop being friends with Tommy.
Dad worked out of town a lot. Despite huge main projects in the city he’d be gone for a week or two in the north doing a smaller project in a store up there.
Tommy had this mean streak He’d always insist he didn’t know there was a nail. It might have been true. Whatever it was about Tommy it helped make him his later success. He’d go on to be this great leader. I never turned my back on him after that. This ‘unpredictableness’ became linked in my mind from that time forward with power. Arbitrariness was linked to respect. There was a critical glance between predictability and unpredictability that a person needed.
My brother and Tommy were both respected but for different reasons. The fact is, Tommy was a great guy, smart, kind, loving, caring but there was that one time. He hit me in the head with a piece of board iwith a nail in it. He seemed not to my mind it. Kirk didn’t defend Tommy too much. Indeed Kirk in his typical diplomatic way wouldn’t talk about this at all. I complained. I whined. I complan and whine really well. Kirk didn’t say anything. Kirk doesn’t saying anything really well.
One day weeks later Mom and Dad were hugging in the hallway. My brother visibly relaxed. Laughter returned to the valley. Dad was normally lots of fun. Mom was the one who’d be serious and slap us kids if we ‘talked back’. She had the Irish temper. Dad was the jolly one. He was also the last resort. I was never afraid of my Mom but I was afraid of my father.
“It was all your fault. You made Dad leave home.” My brother would remind me.
My mother would say it too. “Billy, you can’t upset your father. You have to stop that.”
That’s the way things were after that. I remember being the ‘baby’ in the family then I was the ‘black sheep’ .I’d also learn the term ‘scape goat’. Years later in family dynamics I’d recognize the term ‘identified patient’ in systems theory. To this day I don’t know what was going on in the back stories, in the back scenes, behind the curtain, in the bedroom, in the community, in the cosmos. What mattered was Dad and Mom got back together. Ron and the dog were inside an inner circle. I was the outside. They were the family. I was the one who’d almost torn the temple down.
I don’t think others saw it my way.
That was the beginning of adolescence. Testosterone and it’s distinctive stink. Hormones could probably explain everything. Ron and Tommy were already adolescent while Kirk and I were just seeing hair appear in funny places.
Kirk would seem to overnight have the hairiest legs. He was black haired so in summer it was really noticeable. I had armpit hair. Both of us complained about not having chest hair. Chest hair was cool. Leg hair, not so and, armpit hair not cool at all.
Girls began to look different by the end of Gr. 6. That summer they started wearing bikinis. We noticed. Classmates acting weird. The girls began whispering and giggling a lot.
Two girls fighting each other in front of the school Ripping dresses off. Scratching. Everyone else in a circle until a teacher came and stopped it before one or the other caused serious damage. Hair pulling and eye gouging. Not nice.
My voice was a problem. I remember it began to be untrustworthy. I knew shame. I didn’t have to wear a fig leaf but I would suddenly squeak instead of talking normally. It was wholly disconcerting. Everything was sstrange. Kirk and my other friends weren’t doing any better. The girls seemed happy about this.
The school had a class where they showed us boys WWII STD films of endstage gonorrhea and syphilis cases. All us boys came out of that session shell shock. If transsexualism had been prominent in those days we’d have enlisted for immediate sex changes. It would be decades before I found those pictures in old infectious disease books. One picture showed a black emancipated guy wheeling his huge ball sack around with a wheelbarrow.The black and white film had been developed in the 30’s or 40’s to scare the troops going into Europe and Asia.
We were 12 year old boys. All of us were virgins. Kirk had hair on his legs. I had hair on my armpits. None of us had hair on our face or genitals. We knew because we still swam naked at the Y and changed together in the locker room. The first boy to have hair on his balls was teased relentlessly. That was Ron Brawn. He’d have hair on his chest too. We’d tease him. He didn’t care. Nobody messed with Ron. He was like a combination of Schwartzenager and Chuck Norris.
Meanwhile we were scared senseless about the danger of having a penis. It was somehow associated with girls. There were no copulating scenes to make it more explicable. Just these clinical diagrams that were like a kind of comic strip. We knew about sex as intercourse but not really. It was a foreign concept. We’d even found black and white ‘True Detective’ magazines and hid them in our fort by the river as boys. We looked at them only because they were adult and taboo. They showed pictures of old guys and old girls in their 20’s ,with the girls having shocked expressions on their faces. All in black and white. Kirk’s brother Tommy had Playboys and Kirk would steal these coloured magazines. and He’d show Garth and I pictures of these older women with hair and big breasts.
None of these pictures looked anything like our Mom’s or Kirk’s sisters or any of the girls in our school.
The lesson on STD’s was similiarly about old people.
Meanwhile the girls would come out of their “special” class smiling and floating down the hall. They had pictures of flowers and pink birds. When we asked what their class was about. They said it was about menstrual cycles and babies. We didn’t tell them we’d seen pictures of guys with their noses eaten away by syphillis or guy’s pushes their ballsacks about with wheelbarrows.
All the girls were looking forward to maturing while the guys were looking for rusty knives to cut off our balls before syphillis invaded their faces and ate away our noses. No guy touched a toilet seat for decades after seeing that film.
As boys we didn’t look forward to getting any older. Boyhood with friends was an idyllic time. We had the best times on hikes, Garth, Kirk and I , down by the River River. Very Mark Twain and Hucklebury Fin. We’d catch frogs to give to girls. We had lucky rabbit foots. We’d skip stones. We’d throw sticks for the dog. He’d fetch them then shake all the dirty water on us. We’d swing on branches and climb trees. It’s was a really good life. All that other stuff with adults and girls wasn’t so good. We had our bicycles and we’d ride everywhere. Wildwood park was a great place to ride around. We loved riding along South Drive too. Sometimes we’d ride all the way out to the University. Great wide paved roads with long stretches without traffic. We’d ride and ride.
The best was when we went in the other direction to BDI. Bridge Drive In. There was a Bridge there which I think is probably gone now. Only foot traffic was allowed on it then because it was already so old. But the ice cream and milkshake stand was the best in the world. Never knew one ever that was as good. And we’d have money as boys from our mom and we’d get triple layer ice cream cones, chocolate, vanilla and licorice and we’d just pig out on the river bank sitting with our bicycles eating ice cream. One time we ate so much ice cream we puked. And laughed. We laughed and laughed and laughed as kids.
If I’d known what adulthood would bring I’d have laughed more. Adulthood according to too many adults was deadly serious business. There’d be long stretches without laughter in adulthood. Like laughter was taboo. Giants would walk through the world shouting ‘fee fie fo fun, I smell the blood of a child.”
As kids we were beginning to move out of the world of our parents into the world where we had to make it on our own. We’d never forget BDi. It’s was a taste of heaven on earth.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment