Black Sheep

I am sitting with Matt at the bar around the corner. His curly hair is sticking up in every direction. His eyes wide apart and darkly likable are translucent tonight, like ale held to the light.

His new tattoo says, “All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” It’s a Dylan quote. Its sprawled across the bicep of his left arm. We’re halfway though a bottle of Jack.

My brother is a lonely planet. A strange, singular orb in a universe that can sometimes sustain itself, sometimes not.

I search his eyes for some clues. I want to run my fingers along his face, treating it like a map with some destination I can get to. Has he just come out of a sadness or is he going into one? Is he manic right now? Are his pills making him dopey? Is this Matt? Is this the illness?

He is a language that I understand but don't speak.

I am never really insane except upon occasions when my heart is touched.

...

Sometimes, late at night, I’ll start crying. I can't stop. Everything inside comes undone, gets born, learns to die. Out of nowhere, these genuine feelings will rush to the surface and I don't recognize them. I have wondered if I'm a vessel, if other people had these feelings and didn't want them.

Even if their owner's had no room left, they existed and needed to find home.

It’s not one thing. When is anything ever one thing? Sometimes, I’ll start crying about everything sad that’s ever happened to anyone in the world. I’ll think, why’d my sister’s husband have to die? Why’d Mike have such a hard childhood? Why do you always remember what you want to forget and forget what you want to remember?

Or I’ll cry about nothing at all, because I miss my sister even though I saw her last week, because my Dad’s face looks older than it used to, because time's passing too quickly.

Or everything marvelous, beautiful, glittering, ecstatic.

I’m grabbing at these unspeakable things, these concepts, these waves of thought that stretch forever and farther.

I wonder if I prefer to have a broken heart.

If I’m lucky, for one small second, I can see the order of everything. It’s like I’m standing on a building, on top of the world, taller than anything I’ve ever known. I can see my Mom, the size of a pea in Paris, dancing around the streets and I think everything that’s sent here there was meant to be. That the cruelty had purpose. I can see the invisible red string that connects us all. No matter how it’s tangled and stretched it is never broken. It’s only a second though, a flash, a glimpse, a secret. I'm jumping off docks.

So, sometimes I’ll cry.

When I stop I fall asleep quickly without noticing.

It's over as quickly as it's begun and I wake up like it never happened.

My heart has left and I'm just going in tandem.

Black Sheep

And, it's just as simple as that. I see him. I can't reach out and touch him, hold him, be against him, but I can know that he's there and I can be anchored in the strong feeling that nobody else does.

Last night, Andrew looked at me, briefly, out of the corner of his eye.

“You want me to leave.”

I didn’t nod but I didn’t shake my head either.

My boyfriend gentle man with periods of violence. Not real violence, the emotional kind. His feelings kick the shit out of him. He’s tall, standing six feet two, although he swears he was once taller. We're twins. My feelings kick the shit out of me, too.

“Dad,” I say to the ceiling, “He’s leaving, isn’t he?”

The night before their separation, my father didn’t speak to my brother or my mother, just me.

I learned young there was no point in asking why.

“Your mother’s leaving me, isn’t she?” he asked, hacking a dart outside our house as the night laid upon the sky.

“Probably not.”


“She means it this time.” He looked so confused, like, how could she mean it this time? My question was, how had she not meant it before?

“No. Probably not.”

“Your brother is not going to take this well.”

“No, probably not,” I said again.

“You’re going to have to be strong for him.”

I nodded.

“I told you don’t get married, kid.” His hands were shaking and his coffee spilt over his pants. “Shit,” he said, not like he was shocked or burnt, just disappointed.

That’s how I see my father always, drinking coffee and smoking. But how much do you manipulate your memories? Do I just place the coffee in his hand, the smoke between his fingers?

I know that it’s only because he’s gone that these things spin around me, echoing on and on.

People think I’m like my mother because we both laugh a lot and have blonde hair. Those are ridiculous and superficial similarities.

Once, when I was a girl, my mother told me, “Your father suffers from a strange condition of chosen loneliness. He has a lot of friends and no one knows him. He knows he’s smarter than everyone but feels stupid a lot. People want to be close to him but he doesn’t let anyone in.” We were watching television. I remember the deadpan expression on her face, how she was laying on her stomach with her head in her hands.

And, “Oh shit,” I thought. “That’s me.”

I have always been my father’s daughter even though I never wanted to be.

He told me that I'd know when the ending happened. That I'd feel it.

I'm not so sure that's true. I've got a problem with endings and I'm not convinced that they are preordained or organic. He told me they happen quite out of the writer's control.

No way, Jose.

The summer Andrew and I got together, we sat on a couch in my mother’s living room. She was out of town and the sun was setting. Or maybe it had become dark and I hadn't noticed. We had spent days intertwined, one person, lost in time. Back then, I didn’t notice anything except him. Back then, he was the most important thing in the world.

He took me in his arms and held me like a child.

“I need you,” I told him.

Back then, I did.

“I’m going to marry you,” he told me.

Back then, our two hearts beat like a metronome.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

Then, as Andrew turned out the lights and fell asleep next to me in the earliest hours of that morning in March, a Tuesday morning like any other, I was overcome with a queer feeling. A foreign silence impinged on the normal nightly Hollywood noises - on the keening chorus of coyotes, the dry scrape of cars moving up hills, the racing, receding wail of helicopters in the air. I didn’t know then, but no one heard that silence. Not a single soul in miles.

Just me.

Afterwards, I found myself looking back on that night, on that giant, peaceful silence. I found fantasy trying to recreate it over and over again.

If only I’d known my life was about to change.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

Men fall in love with me at first sight. Trust me, there were lots that I wanted to that didn’t, but the ones that did, fell hard, fast, bloodied. There was nothing to be done, even I couldn't warn them. I was a bomb waiting, ticking, sweating, that they could never reach in time.

I explode all over people.

There is a belief in certain circles that some are put on earth only to shake things up. Spiritual shit-kickers by birth, by definition. Having been a victim of watching my life like an outsider, I want to tell you I am one of those people.

You never get what you want, only what you un-want. Isn't that sad? Like, truly, the saddest thing about life? Men want a woman like me, but since I’ll never want the same, I'm gone before things begin. So, in getting what they wanted for awhile, they actually only got exactly what they un-wanted.

Does a part of them whisper that? Like a premonition they ignore?

I watch this play out, like scenes in a movie I can’t escape. Everything is acted with a sickening intensity. The pacing's too slow. The seconds I spend with these men thud by like boots in slush.

Every time, I convince myself for awhile that I am different. That love, in it’s pregnant hope, it’s early bliss, is actually greater than everything else. That I can beat who I am. That it will change me, that I will become something else. That everything can stay new.

But the truth is, you can never escape yourself, even when you try. Maybe it’s my knowing this that killed the romance in my heart, that ensures I’ll never have the wherewithal to really be someone’s girl.

I want to love these men, I do, but I blink and then everything's over as quickly as it began. I am yanked out of men's life with such force that I can't catch my breath.

I am some strange cosmic sacrifice. Standing five-foot-two, weighing one hundred and ten pounds, I was sent here only to fuck shit up.

It’s best just to accept that you can simply never overcome most points of your personality. I am going to end up completely and devastatingly alone.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

“Why do you think we couldn’t see it coming?”

“That’s the way life is. You don’t see things coming.”

The brain is this three-pound organ that’s the seat of everything we are—our hopes and desires and our loves. All it takes is this tiny tweak in these three pounds, this tiny change in perception, and what you see as real isn’t real to anyone else.

“What are you doing tonight?” I ask him.

“Going to see Marianne.”

I nod. “Did you tell her?”

“No.”

“Don’t. It’s not worth it. Does she know I’m here?”

No, he says again.

When we finish our drinks, I look at him and I say, so this is goodbye. And he says, unless you want to come show up on my doorstep again. Then he laughs and his face shifts, slightly, a small change behind his eyes and I realize he’s crying. And then, so am I.

“Where are you going?” he asks me, and I answer. He says nothing back and I realized he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to God now.

He holds me tight as we say goodbye.

“Someone should have told us what was coming.”

Later, in a dream, Jesus called to plead his case. He was surprisingly whiney. Eventually, I had to hang up.

"Quit bitching," I told him. "I'm busy."

I'm sorry, but what did he expect? This isn't a fucking hotline.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

How much time do we get?

Only with death, do you see time for what it is. You are re-introduced to what you had and how you spent it. You re-evaluate, recalculate, reorder. When it’s all taken away, there is lingering clarity.

Years double back and skip forward.

So, did you get weeks or centuries? Only seconds? How quickly did it go? When did it leave you?

Trust me, the world, in relationship to the time a dead man spent in it, reassembles. Sometimes, a memory gets confused. Stuck, like an ice-cube in your windpipe in its hurry to find place. Lost, now too big to fit where it should, the moment takes a different shape. Maybe it assumes a giant importance. Maybe it get thrown out all-together. My point is, when time's running out, it always re-calibrates.

Really, how long do you feel you got?

Have you seen my father’s ghost?

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

"You have to believe you’re good enough. You’re really talented. Truly talented. Everyone you go in for becomes a big fan. But you need to believe that you deserve it. You need to go into those rooms and believe that you deserve that part.”


I nod. I feel like crying and I don’t know why.

“I do believe. I do think I deserve it.”

“Probably not. Not enough. Otherwise you’d be booking.”

“Right. You’re right.”

I want to tell him that I feel like an impostor, sitting here, acting like I have a say. What I have is given and it can be taken away. I don’t own it. It owns me. Even in the good times, I knew it was fleeting.

The possibility is what hurts. I sit under it’s shadow, weighted in darkness. I will it closer, invite it back inside, ask it to take pity on me.

“Your auditions aren’t what they used to be. You’ll get it back. You just have to believe you will.”

People talk a lot about belief here, positive thinking, manifesting your destiny. I wonder if things are that simple, that my problems are of my creation. That one thought can swim into the ether and by chance or by luck, crack the universe and change things.

It just seems a little straight-forward to me.

“Maybe you should get a tan,” he tells my back as I’m walking out of his office.

Like Father Part Six

"I got out because it got too serious. Well, too serious for me."

"Did journalism change?"

"That's it right there. There were journalists and not newspapermen."

He sips his coffee. Today is special and so I share his bran loaf with him. He puts his head in his hand, leans in his chair and slumps like my nephew at the dinner table. Age spins through my father and at this moment, he looks four.

"I always believed that if you took your talent seriously, you could play with everything else. As long I never betrayed writing, then it wouldn't betray me. I took care of it. I took great joy in making everything as perfect as I could. Your talent is your life raft, it's your escape. You pay reverence to it. You don't turn your back on it. It was always the only thing I cared about. I was very serious with it. Very stupid with everything else."

Displaced Canadian actors in Los Angeles are the strangest group of immigrants in the world. No one has a job, children are friends with adults; it’s a circus of existence where everyone is three bad days from packing up and moving away. We are dreamers prone to seizures of grief that send us from room to room, place to place, city to city, in a hand-wringing daze hoping everything will work out.

But then, there's always romance in possibility.

“Do you ever want to find us, the people we were two years ago, and shake us? Do you want to jump into the memories? Tell us not to feel so safe? To wake us up, screaming, don’t be so happy, don’t trust this feeling. Something horrible is going to happen to you, and you’re not going to see it coming. Nothing make me sadder than thinking about how happy we were, because it didn't matter. How can you trust your feelings when they just disappear like that?”

Black Sheep - Novel Excerpt Four

My first memory of my father is in a grocery store. He was flipping through a magazine at the cash. Looking over his shoulder and then at me, he slid the magazine into his tartan trench-coat. He tipped his hat and whispered, “Our secret.”

I don’t know why I remember that, the inception of our league of sneakiness.

He always wore a hat. A bowler hat, a porkpie hat, a fedora, a cowboy hat. A toque that was too small in the winter months. Sometimes a balaclava for fun, to scare the neighbours. He covered his red hair like it was toxic, shameful. The only place I saw him without a hat was in bed. Once, in the middle of the night, he thought he heard a burglar. He ran upstairs, screaming that he would kill the sonofabitch. He hadn’t taken the time to put a stitch of clothing on, but he was wearing a fedora.

It was just me and a middle-school boyfriend sneaking in before dawn.

When I was a kid I liked his hats. They reminded me of Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, Indiana Jones; men with purpose.

Eventually, I realized, much to my gloom, that you can’t just dress the part.

My next few memories are all identical, my father hurling his beliefs about politics, about God, about the expiry date of coupons on some unsuspecting victim, defending himself against some imagined slight.

“Don't piss in my ear and tell me it's raining!”

I’d stand in a corner, staring at my patent-leather shoes silently waiting until he finished. Afterwards he’d ask, do you want me to tell you why I did that? I would always say no, even if I did. Then he would answer, because it’s not your job to tell people what they want to hear. Once I asked, who’s job is it, then?

Apparently, I’d misunderstood him completely.

When I was twelve, his lies became so exquisite I wept myself to sleep each night.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt Three

"Upon his death, my father left me a single inheritance; his insanity. There is enough magic in a bloodline to form an instant, irrevocable bond."



There’s the matter of your crimes; those that you’ve committed and those that have been done to you. Crimes of rage, crimes of passion, crimes of innocence. Crimes so giant they stole you and you couldn’t sleep, couldn’t forget, couldn’t think.

The damage, the danger, lies in who you choose to convict.

When I was a girl my father gave me some advice that has turned over in my mind ever since.

“Cast out the devils and the angels go, too.”

He wasn’t a practicing Catholic. Three days before his sixty-eighth birthday, Frank Oakley put on his coat and hat and walked out the front door. He never returned.

Silence is a powerful conversational gambit.

...

“Are you cold?”

I am startled by the voice. I look down at my arm and see goosebumps. My boyfriend, Andrew is sitting across the table from me. He takes my hand. He knows the look on my face. I am lost, troubled, elsewhere.

"I'm okay," I tell him.

I can feel the cold Toronto wind, even though it’s May, swinging through the front door. It’s Sunday and full of families with loud children. The walls buzz, plates and cutlery bang. These are the sounds of people belonging. With it’s yellow walls and cracked tiles, this diner is a place of worship. For me, there is no prayer. Just confession.

“Did you hear me?” he asks.

“Sort of.”

I’m lost in this moment, drowning in air. My skin moves around the bones it protects like plastic in the wind. It was a sleepless night.

I stumbled the four steps to get here, just up the street from my parents house. Well, it was my parent’s house once. It then became a house split in two; my mother on top, my father on bottom, a flight of stairs acting like an invisible barrier separating the two.

“You’re beautiful,” Andrew tells me.

I am, sometimes. A natural beauty punctuated by fierce determination, that’s what my father always said.

I have long, blonde hair and when I’ve showered it turns into curls that fall down my back like a muscle. I have thick eyebrows and dark eyes that I line, winging at the tips. I wear red lipstick which makes kissing difficult, but I like to see my mark on men when I’m done. My skin is white as a sheet of paper. I never tan, even when I try. I am like an oil painting, colours permanent.

“Did you hear me?” Andrew asks.

He just came inside me. Twenty minutes ago in my mother’s bathroom floor. Afterwards, he collapsed, kissing me, and I became hysterical. Looking at him now, I feel sad.

I’m killing us, setting fire to what we were. I could warn him, but I’m an arsonist. Being loved by me is like drinking slow-acting poison. When your lungs explode, you’re not going to know what hit you. He’ll wake up dead, surprised he’s burnt to a crisp.

He’s growing his hair longer for style because he’s a movie-star. Well, not yet. He’s an actor, a working one, and he’s too handsome to be unknown for much longer. He has dark, moist looks. Jet black hair and olive skin. People always ask him what his ethnicity is. I tell you what he is; lucky, born under a star. Women look at him on the street. Waitresses get nervous talking his order. He walks heavy through the air and it shakes the space around him.

I move closer to him like cold hands to fire. I have a naked thought and I go with it because I’m fighting. I’m fighting to remember, to go back to who I was before all this happened. He doesn’t believe it, but I am fighting. I don’t want us dead, not when had such high hopes that I was different with him.

“It’s weird that people don’t take pictures at funerals.”

“Why?”

“You take pictures at every other memorable event. Weddings, birthdays, parties.”

“Those are happy.”

“Not always. Funerals aren’t always sad.”

With the fashionable hair he looks too much like my brother, Matthew. My brother's hair was a bone of contention between he and my father. They had so many they could have constructed an army of skeletons.

Matthew looks like my father did; a tall, ginger-haired Irishman. I found that unfortunate that they looked so alike when my father hated him the moment he laid eyes on him. I get my looks from my mother. Unconsciously, even though my father grew to hate her, too, that was why he loved me best.

“You remind me of my brother,” I tell Andrew.

“Your brother’s in jail.”

“No, he’s not.”

“I was kidding. I love you.”

“He’s not in jail. He’s just a vagrant.”

“I know. I love you.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise?”

He nods.

“I feel vulnerable,” I tell him. My ability to love men is unparalleled. A woman so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.

“I blame Los Angeles.”

“We’re not in Los Angeles anymore.”

“Okay, then I blame everything else.”

...

My father was prone to apparitions, projections of his hopefully troubled conscience.

In lieu of recent events, I have to wonder if death appeared before him as a faceless man. Was he lost in a dance of circumnavigation? Death went left, so he went right? Could he speak to death? Did they shoot the shit? What do you say to your poltergiest, the man that threw him from alive to finally dead?

The joke is that I became the very thing I was most vehement against. Overnight. The moment my father died, I too became prone to apparitions. Psychic flashes. Leading feelings. 'Bullshit!’ that I never gave him the satisfaction of believing. Well, until it happened to me.

How much stock do you put in yourself?

I am my dead father’s captive. Obsessions are like ghosts; a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling. Or, with profits, obsession can be a compelling motivation. Obsessions, like ghosts, don’t die a natural death.

They linger.

But then, everything gets warped in definition.