Tuesday, May 17, 2011

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.

Monday, May 16, 2011

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.

Friday, May 6, 2011



“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?”

Thursday, May 5, 2011

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.

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

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.