Sunday, August 28, 2011

Like Father Part Seven



In front of other people, I see no separation between my father and I.

"Dad, do you still have recurring dreams?"

"Yes."

"The flying one?"

"I have one where I'm driving from the back seat of a car. Naked."

"I wonder what that means," I laughed.

He looked at me like any explanation would have been bullshit, like nothing motivated thoughts sewn together by the night.

"The one I have most often," he said, "is where I am walking, slowly, looking at my feet, and then I begin to fly. That's nice."

I felt God right there.

"Are they lucid?"

"What?" He didn't hear me.

"Do you know you're dreaming?" I said louder.

"My dreams are very logical. No strange characters. Just ordinary. I have the most ordinary dreams."

I wondered if he lived his waking hours in such distorted reality that once he fell asleep his imagination collapsed all together.

"Me, too," I lied.

Sunday, August 21, 2011



I haven't got a lot to say.

Or there's a lot to say but it won't come out. Sometimes, not being in control is the most beautiful thing in the world. Sometimes, it's the most excruciating.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



I end up on Mike’s doorstep.

“Why is your scarf around your face?” he asks.

“Oh,” I move it away. “My cheeks were cold, or something.”

He’s not wearing a shirt.

“Why are you shirtless?”

He’s embarrassed and covers his chest. “Did you text me to tell me you were coming over?” Why is he hiding himself? Why is he acting like its wrong for me to see him in a vulnerable state?

“No. I just missed you,” I say to bring him closer. I start laughing. My smile is not catching and his face won’t move. A feeling passes between us, I am not alone. He is not happy to see me.

“You have to leave,” he tells me with no change in his voice.

“Oh, come on, Mike.”

“Go home and be with your boyfriend.”

“What the fuck?”

“Don't come here anymore.”

"My Dad just died and we’ve been in each other lives for six years and you’re kicking me out of your apartment? Are you fucking --”

“Don’t,” he yells. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“I love you.” I have never seen him so angry at me. I didn't think it was possible for him to be this angry with me.

“Mike --”

“Leave him. Leave him and be with me,” he is looking at me with such a scorching kindness, a searching hopefulness. The anger has left and this is the one moment of truth I'll see all night.

I shake my head, “Mike,” I plead. I know what he wants me to say and I can’t do it.

“I'm not going to fuck you in secret.”

“Can we talk about this?” Everything is falling down my face. I sit on his steps. I am sweating and I move my scarf down to my neck. I can’t lose him, not him, too.

“How many times have you broken up with me?”

“Are you going to tell him?”
 I know quickly that I have said something very wrong. “Don’t look at me like that. My Dad just died and I’m so fucked up and I’m not the bad guy here. You wanted to sleep with me. The two of us are doing this to each other, it’s not just me --”

“You’ve got a lot to say for the one who walked away.”


Then he turns around and a door slams in my face.

“I know you’re right,” I scream.

I want to keep holding on but the rope burns my hands.

He doesn't come back.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



When he as five, Frank lay on his bed, bothered by time and how it insisted on passing. It was pretty mean especially when he was playing baseball, when he was watching a John Wayne movie, when his brother Owen was being nice to him.

“If you find me, hide me. I don’t know where I’ve been,” he told Owen last night in the middle of Cowboys and Indians.

“You stupid ginger,” said Owen and then it was all over.

“What does that mean?”

Kids had been calling him that at school. That, and dirty Dogan, but he knew what that mean. The Prods would find him when he walked home from school and beat him with sticks. It was a bum deal because they were seven and there were three of them so, he just lay on the ground until it was over. He knew when he was licked.

“It means you have ugly red hair.”

“Oh.”

That night, he wore his cowboy hat to bed.

“Stop crying, you girl,” Owen said when their mother made him check on Frank before bed.

I’m going to fly, he thought to himself. If I can fly, they’ll leave me be.

By morning, he had already made his first attempt. He was still wearing the cowboy hat and nothing else. “There he stands on the edge of his feather, expecting to fly,” his mother said when he jumped off his bed and bloodied his lip.

It was hot in his room. He was boiling. The summer day beat through the window, and it hurt him that he had been sent there for bad behaviour.

“Why are you so stupid you to throw yourself off your bed?” his mother asked.

He held ice to his lip. The house was so quiet he could hear the heat rise.

Forget them, he told himself. I am going to fly.

He put his ice on the bed-stand. He closed his eyes.

Fly. Fly, fly like a bird.

He first felt it in his feet. His head felt so light he couldn’t be sure it still existed. He saw his bed beneath him. He saw the floor moving farther and farther away.

He was lying flat in the air.

It only lasted a few seconds and then he collapsed back into his bed, disappointed and exhilarated.

I flew.

He spent the day drifting in and out of naked sleep, thinking when I have a family, we’ll be different.

...

Frank stood with Duffy. It was the middle of the night, the middle of February, the middle of Toronto. They drank hot whiskey and hid in the dark shelter of Withrow Park, but the snot froze in their nose.

They were sixteen.

“I’m a failure, Duff.”

“Like shit you are.”

“I’m the failure. My brother’s the king.”

“You’re just upset because Honor turned your down.”

“She said her mother wouldn’t let her see me. She said I didn’t have any future.”

“Forget her. She’s a stuck up bitch.”

He chucked the empty bottle across the park.

“Maybe I should just stop looking back.”

“That’s the ticket.”

Frank’s lip started to quiver.

“I just can’t do anything right.” He felt blue and pieces of green.

It was so hard to do when time knew no bounds. How do you look forward, trace the genealogy of feeling, when you don’t know where anything begins or ends?

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



Although I promised myself after I left his office that I would research my father’s columns, I couldn’t.

I told myself I’d come back. I told myself that one day I would be strong enough. I told myself that I would sit in that fire soon, but I can't yet. It is too visceral to be so close to his voice, his purest self. His talent was the part of him he left to God, and I don’t know that I can be near that yet. I don’t have the luxury of falling in love with him again.

I can’t be coaxed into forgiving him.

I take the streetcar home. As I watch the bright summer day happen to Queen Street, sweat and steam and sunglasses, I think that when he touched people's lives and they were never the same again, after he moved his hands away. The strength of his spirit, its hurting and howling ways, for better or for worse, moved people. He singlehandedly changed things. He mattered.

Maybe that’s all I could ever hope for, to keep mattering.

He left spaces in peoples lives that could never be filled and maybe that makes him a hero.

Then I wonder if he was unknowingly creating a place for his soul to go, if we all do that. I see him because he’s still here, living in these painful sores, cracked feelings, taking comfort in his permanence, the space he created.

He left the legacy of poignancy and maybe that’s okay. Everyone has to leave something behind.

Who wants to just fade away?