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.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt Two

I walk home and think about Martha Fitz’ hands. Her tiny, shaking, withered, wrinkled hands. Her veins that threatened to burst at any moment, her thin skin like saran-wrap. Shaking her hand goodbye I was scared to tear her.

Dad was the same age. How is that possible?

I find Matt sitting on the porch. He’s wearing jeans that are too big and a sweatshirt I haven’t seen since I was fifteen. He’s smoking, of course.

“Can I bum one?”


“Since when do you smoke?” he asks.

“Since today.”

He pulls out his pack of Camels and hands me a light.

“Where’d you get the money for Camels?”

“None of your business.”

“Matt, I’ll buy you smokes. Don’t steal from Mom. She’s too easy a target right now.”

“I didn’t. Christ.”

I holds the unlit smoke in front of me. It’s a peace offering.

“You have to light it for me,” I tell him.

He does.

“So, how’d it go?” he asks.

“Do you really want to know?”

He nods.

“Dad left her for another woman six months into their marriage. Sound familiar?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.” I suck the smoke deep inside me. I cough, uncontrollably. “Jesus, fuck! This looks so much easier in the movies.”

Matt passes me some of his Coke.

“What else did you find out?”

“That he loved this other woman, even though he didn’t want to.”

“What’d she say he was like?”


“He sounded...different.”

“What do you mean?”

“He sounded cool. Hip, or something. She said he very was charming.”

“That was always true.”

“Yeah, when he wanted it to be.”
 I look towards the busy Queen Street just north of us. I want to go and be apart of those people, get lost in something else, quiet my mind and the questions and the visions and the pictures of my father.

“What’s wrong?” Matt asks.


“Nothing. Everything.”

He sits, sucking on his cigarette. Ribbons of smoke twist through the air.

“So, what was she like?”

“Old and goes to church.”

“Weird.”

There is one bible passage that has always stuck with me. I remember sitting in Church with my father, the one and only Christmas he made us go. The priest said something about the sins of the father being visited upon the son.

“Do you think that’s true, Dad?” I asked.

“Timshel,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“It means thou mayest in Jewish. It's your choice.”

Jewish wasn’t a language and he knew that, but he was always vaguely, lazily anti-Semetic. I realized in eleventh grade that he'd stolen timshel from East of Eden. I wondered, as I grew older, if he stole everything from great literature. If his whole personality came from Hemingway and Steinback and other men he was disappointed he never became.

Am I making that up? Why would a priest talk about the sins of the father on Christmas?

“I had a dream I killed Andrew last night.”

“How’d that feel?”

“Believable.”

Matt laughs and scratches at his tattoos. I watch him, and in my eyes he looks like a child, my child, and I want to hold him in my arms.

“How’d you do it?”

“I drowned him in a bathtub of my blood.”

“Jesus. Is that why you’re breaking up?”


“Probably subconsciously.” I look down at my hands. My smoke is two seconds from burning my fingers. “So, I’m going to call that lesbian.”

I throw my smoke out into the afternoon, and then suddenly miss it.

Now what are my fingers going to do?

I have a taste of my father. A taste is not enough.

"It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it."

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

Three weeks before he died I sent him an email, my first attempt at contact in two years. Women’s intuition, I guess.

'Hey Dad', I said. 'Is this still your email? Can you tell me the meaning of life yet? That’s really the only thing I’m still struggling with'.

I added a ‘Ha-ha,’ for good measure.

I have one photo of my father in my apartment in Hollywood. It’s tacked on my fridge next to a Dalai Lama magnet, which I bought because I thought it would make me seem smart. Cast in shiny Kodak paper, that photo is a beautiful and horrible memory. I know it was taken when I was small, from the period I like to remember. He’s thin, he’s wearing a flannel shirt and bluejeans. He has salt and pepper hair.

“Hair you and your brother gave me,” he always liked to say.

He’s jumping over a small wrought-iron fence, one that I recognize from my elementary school. I picture him running late for some school event. Some stupid thing Matt and I were singing Easter songs at.

My mother took it.

There’s sometime in his face. His most common expression was one of furrowed skepticism, but that’s not how he looks here. He looks surprised. His mouth is open, like he’s saying something to us. He looks happy, a part of something, one of us.

That was as good as it got.

I wondered if I should take it down. If I should throw everything out that reminded me of him, if that would make things easier.

Then I thought, what if I have a daughter one day? She’ll want to know about her grand father. What will I have to show her? This picture? Will I tell her that romantic love had nothing on what we shared? Will I tell her that I probably only loved her father because he was in some ways, a version of my own? Will she know, how all kids know things they are never told, that once my father broke my heart it never really healed?

Like a good captain, he went down with his ship. He never wrote me back.

I was positive he reply, “Easy. The meaning of life is whatever you want it to be.”

In times like these, thoughts come easy. Answers do not.

I guess everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.

Hollywood

Los Angeles is a city with no centre.

It sprawls, there’s no downtown. The city is endless and the vastness gets too much. It’s so powerful it can vibrate a room and shake walls, climb underneath a road and haunt a neighborhood. It passes through you and you catch it, no matter how much you try to protect yourself.

The giant aloneness.

You pass a woman walking her dog, she’s forty, you can tell in the sunlight. Her jeans are too tight and they probably cost three hundred dollars. Her hair is too long, like a teenagers, but it’s perfectly streaked. Her body is filled with a wiry energy. She spends too much time exercising. You can see how she looked once, that she was beautiful once, young and fresh and beautiful once.

It follows her like a shadow.

People look old trying to be young. People look ugly, trying to be beautiful.

I have thought myself out of happiness one million times, but I have never thought myself into it.