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| The monster on his 62nd birthday: Bruce at the ROM, 24/08/19 |
For today's blog, I thought I would share this fragment of a sketch I wrote 20 years ago about a character named Peter:
Peter grew up in the 60's and 70's in the Leaside neighbourhood of Toronto with his parents, Ian and Agnes, and his two brothers, Gerry and Stephen.
Peter's oldest brother Gerry was a clone of their father, slight, fair-skinned and foul-tempered. Gerry, like his Irish dad, had a singing voice that could make you cry, though his temper more often did. Peter spent his early years fleeing the terrible wrath of his eldest brother and his father.
Stephen, Peter's other brother, was more like their mother, Agnes, who came from Jamaica. She was one part African, two parts Spanish, one part Chinese, one part Tamil and the rest who knows. She smoked a pipe and worked as a plumber.
Stephen was spindly thin, with long arms and big feet, and almost six feet tall by the time he was fifteen. Of the three boys, Stephen took most after his mother; he was the family poet. His experiments with sexual behaviour in early adolescence made him think he might be gay. Stephen confirmed his suspicions in his eighteenth year, during his first summer away from home planting trees for the Ministry of Natural Resources with one of work crew, a kid from Halifax.
Stephen kept his sexuality secret from his family. They never knew, until Stephen died from AIDS in 1987, at the age of 28. Stephen's father was ashamed, and did not go to the funeral. Agnes went, and had her two remaining sons help to hold her up, because of her grief, yes, and because she was too drunk to stand.
Peter's parents forged their soul bond with alcohol. They met drinking in a bowling alley in New York City. She was on a visitor's visa. He was staying with his brother who had come over from Ireland six years before, and who told him that it was easier to get into Canada than the United States. He said, "the weather's worse, Ian. It gets cold like you'd never expect to live through it, but, they'll pay your health care there, and your kid's university. Think of that. A college education for each of your kids, just for putting up with six months of freezing hell."
Ian thought about it, but looked around for work in New York, too. His brother's friend ran a dry cleaners, and took Ian in under the table. Ian forgot to take the boat back to Ireland when it embarked.
That was because Ian had met Agnes. He'd seen one glimpse of her and fallen hopelessly. They sat at the snack bar counter at the bowling alley drinking whiskey glass for glass and never bowled even one ball down the lane.
When Ian and Agnes crossed the border into Ontario, she was six months pregnant. They'd been told about immigrant amnesty. They forged their own documents (with help from some friends in Toronto) to prove that they had been illegally in Canada for two years.
Ian had a little money saved, Agnes a lot, and they put a down payment on their split level in Leaside, a then-young suburb with tiny trees and small houses that they lived in until after their son died of AIDS and they finally paid off their mortgage.
Stephen's death sparked a rage between Agnes and Ian. But their marriage had never been peaceful. Alcohol had long incited their fights, contaminated their children and unfocused the best parts of their life together. Shortly after his middle son died, Ian suffered a fatal heart attack. Agnes buried her husband in the plot next to Stephen's, and died herself of cirrhosis of the liver a few months later.
After Stephen died, Gerry, the oldest son, fled to Africa to work with the Irish organization Concern. Caring for emaciated, vomiting, bleeding, crying children, Gerry feared body fluids more than anything. He did not want to die like his brother.
Had he had the chance, Gerry might have felt relieved it was a rebel bullet that took his life, zipping in through his left eye, exiting by way of his spinal column just below the seventh vertebrae, laying him dead in the dust, but not from AIDS.
And that's how it happened that Peter lost his whole family in less than two years, and left him the beneficiary of four estates. By the beginning of the nineties, thanks to spiralling real estate values, Ian and Agnes' house in Leaside sold for more than half a million dollars. Thanks to a burgeoning interest in gay literature and a script Stephen had sold, Stephen's estate was worth almost as much as his parents' house. Gerry had left all his worldly wealth behind him when he fled to Africa.
Peter, after all the wills were probated, was a millionaire.
The combination of extreme bad luck and good fortune had less impact on Peter than his conviction that his mother was the cause of all the bad things that had ever happened to him and the chief reason he would never know happiness in his adult life.
Thanks for reading!
Have a great long weekend!
Karen
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| Peeking through the trees: the high-rises at Jarvis and Dundas |
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