Like Father Part Eight

Sometimes, you need music to write to.

"I was sitting with your brother having breakfast and he says, 'Dad, why are you wearing that ratty jean vest?' and I said, 'What gave you the impression I give a fuck what you think?'"

I admire my father.

"Am I a bad daughter, Dad?"

"Are you crazy?" he asks.

Maybe.

I drink a soy latte and he eats a pumpkin muffin. We go to Starbucks because the old Scottish woman who usually guards the patio is gone tonight. My father stopped speaking to her when she started scolding him for being married four times.

"Listen, who you fall in love with, who you love, who you like, who you like a lot, that's a deeply personal choice," he tells me.

"I know I'm right. I know my instincts are special."

"It's your ass up the flag pole. The higher up you get on that flag pole, the bigger the target is. It's your life."

I laugh.

"Don't laugh. Listen. You have to assume that you are the sane one. That's the only way life is livable."

"I am sane, right?"

He looks at me like I'm crazy.

"It's your movie, baby."

"Yeah, until you have kids."

"No. It's my movie still, baby."

He laughs.

The flat finality of that spectacular confession led me up a staircase of thoughts and from their peak I couldn't find my way down.

Sympathy For The Devil

I met him three years ago at a Christmas party. We bumped into each other on the patio, smoking, me in a t-shirt and him in a leather jacket. He looked like James Dean. We were both freezing.

I was incredibly drunk so I don’t remember what we said to each other. I only remember his first questions to me.

“What do you do?” he asked.

“I’m an actress,” I said.

“Are you a good actress?”

“I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”

I bummed a cigarette from him and left.

It’s always funny, the first picture you minds eye takes, of someone who will mean something to you. For years we’d float in and out of each other’s life, sometimes happily, sometimes not. I wasn’t ready for him when we first met. To deal with how he made me feel, I’d get drunk and be reckless with his heart.

On a date where I ended up so drunk that I couldn’t see I asked him what his birthday was.

“Valentines day.”

“No!”

“What?”

“That’s mine! I’ve never met anyone with the same birthday!”

He thought it was special, too.

“Do you think we’d get along if we weren’t actors?” I asked him years later.

“I kind of think we’d be married. We have the same birthday.”

Then he shrugged.

...

On our third first date that night at a bar across the street from where he lives, he spoke about religion, life and death in sweeping ideas and I felt like I could drown in him.

When he kissed me, I thought of Leonard Cohen as every breath we drew was hallelujah.
“I really like you,” I told him.

I wasn’t lying. There was an intoxicating seriousness to him, a seriousness that would soon permeate us, one that I couldn’t ignore. He shook me to my shadow.

As we fell asleep, we watched his “Life On Mars” DVD, the original, better British version. In the pilot, the main character finds himself magically transported into 1973 after his girlfriend’s kidnap and murder. He spends the whole episode running around the 70s thinking everyone’s tricking him, asking how this could happen, wondering how his life took this turn, utterly fucked in bellbottoms.

In his arms, I could relate.

The truth is, I knew I loved him. The more time I spent with him the more I felt things changing in me.

...

Since we’ve started seeing each other I don’t eat much and I can’t sleep solidly.

One night, we were walking to one his concerts, not speaking. Early on, I wanted our silences to be comfortable, but they were not, not for me.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

“That I can’t see. I only have one contact in.”

“I have extra contacts in my purse.”

“What’s your prescription?”

“-1.75 in my left eye and -3.50 in my right.”

“No way.”

“Why?”

“That’s mine.”

I took that to mean we see things the same way.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

My next few memories are all identical, my father hurling his beliefs about politics; about God; about the price of shoes; on unsuspecting victims, defending himself against some imagined slight.

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

In every situation, I’d stare at my patent-leathers, waiting until he finished. Sometimes he’d ask, do you want me to tell you why I did that? I would say no, even if I did. Then he would answer, because it’s not your job to tell people what they want to hear. I asked, who’s job is it, then?

Apparently, I’d misunderstood him completely.

One time, we were eating lunch near a fountain in a park.

“Turn your head,” he told me. I did. I heard him unzip his jeans and the sound of a strong stream of urine landing against the marble fountain.

“Sir, what are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing?”

“You’re going to have to come with me.”


I turned and watched my father give the policeman this speech.

“Is it part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the world? This city is famous for it’s gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, Anarchists, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by the graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problem with you, but don’t make the mistake of bothering me.”

His dick was still in his hand.

“You can’t piss on public property.”

He zipped up, took my hand and said, quite proudly, “Showed him.”

I laughed until I cried all the way home.

One day, I realized he’d stole that whole speech from Confederacy of Dunces. I don’t remember when I began recognize the breadth of his lies, the scope of his indiscretions. Nothing he did came from him. You got the feeling everything, even how he loved you, was stolen from somewhere.

Last night, I awoke to him tap-dancing on my ceiling.

“Dad?”

“Just doing my cardio.”


Then he winked and I turned around, pissed, trying to show him I was sleeping. Of course, my father has interpreted death not as a great sleep, but the final awakening.

Yeah, I won’t lie. Things aren’t great.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

“So, what do we do today?” he asks.

“You tell me.”

Asking him that feels like an admission, an acknowledgment of a lie.

I want to ask my Dad what to do. He can hear us. He does not sleep. He is not dead. I angle my face away from Matt’s. “I want to talk to those women who said they were married to him. Is that stupid?”

He waits until I look at him again.

“Marla, you know the answer to that.”

“Why do you think Dad hid everything from us?”

Eventually, the shepherd must slaughter his sheep.

“I don’t know. Because he was ashamed of himself? Because he was an asshole?”

Looking at my brother, I feel my blood being squeezed out, drop by drop.

Now, the people I love are like celebrities to me, surrounded by rumor and fanfare. Parts of my past come forth like scenes. Nostalgia obliterates reality but this dialogue feels realer than real. My mother lives on a movielot. I want my father’s autograph. I want my brother’s picture.

“I have a lot of questions about his family. Do you think this woman would be a good start?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to tell with people that knew you when you were a younger you.”


“What does that mean?” I tear my nail almost down to the quick.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

A year after they separated, Patty came to Frank’s house in Montreal. She stood on his doorstep, weeping.

“Take it easy,” Frank said in his doorframe.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She walked past him and lay on the couch they shared as man and wife. She was wearing a wind-breaker, a nightgown and sneakers. She'd lost weight since she moved out. He had wanted to see her, but not like this. He thought of what his father always said, "Y'know, son, one doesn't like to be deceived, but one likes less to be undeceived."

“Are you drunk?” Frank asked.

“Well, you’d know wouldn’t you?”

He had been five years sober earlier that week.

She stumbled and then pushed her head against the leather cushions and lay like a child on her stomach. “I did love you, you know.”

He sat in the space next to her and put his hand on her back.

“I feel sorry for you,” he told her, moving his palm down her spine.

She smelt like liquor. When had she started drinking liquor?

“Don’t be hateful. Please. This is hard enough.”

He moved closer to her again, pushing them against the leather arm of the couch. He felt his sturdy weight against her and wondered if he could crush her into dust.

“I’m being truthful. I feel sorry for you.”


“Why? I left you.”

“It’s not an easy life.”

She cried louder, moving her body against his. He held her like a baby.

“You know, Una blames me for making you a dyke,” he said.
 He hoped she'd appreciate that. She always liked brutality more than honesty.

“Frank, it’s not your fault. You were a good husband.”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t say anything. He was going to say that deceiving others was what the world called romance, but he'd used that on her before. She knew it was Oscar Wilde's, not his, and footnotes were for fags. He searched the room for Sean. He felt his dead friend but he could not see him, and in this moment all he wanted was to see his face, to know he wasn’t alone, but he only captured the feeling in his chest.

"I wasn't a good husband. I fooled around."

As time passed, he couldn’t understand why a year after the fact, he had wanted so desperately to clear his guilty conscience.

“I didn’t like myself while I was doing it.”

“I don’t like myself either,” she told him.

But then, Frank had always believed his life was a miracle of bad luck.

"I guess we both had secrets," she said as she was leaving into the kind night.

The next time he saw her was her funeral.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

The truth is, my father’s life was a deeply touching failure.

Despite being declared the greatest journalist of his generation time and time again, he could never keep a job. He holds the simultaneous Canadian record for numbers of newspapers worked at, number of newspapers fired from. At first impression he made a lasting impression. He wrote two best selling novels on baseball players. Almost every reviewer said he chose the wrong protagonist.

He should have lived on those pages.

My father was a star. He was a liar and a cheat. Tell me, how could a four year old be dancing on the ceiling while you’re still eating your potatoes?

Like most sad people, he remembered his childhood best. He idolized his dead family, his brick house at 742 Woodbine Avenue, the 1950‘s. The present was always completely fabricated. I grew up being told to believe everything he said was a lie.

But now, years double back and skip forward.

Snippets of My Day

I sit at my computer, which rests on a collapsing table. We used it for dinner when I was a child. It was folded up and pushed against a wall as we grew older, as my mom worked more and didn't need the money from renting out the downstairs, where the bigger, better dining table lived.

We use it since my parents separated, now that we live upstairs again.

The table is my father's family heirloom. I remember when he refinished it one summer, how he sweat under the sun, the stains on his peach t-shirt.

I stare at my reflection in the mirror across from the table and I decide what's wrong with my face. Mirror-gazing is my favourite pass time because time does not weigh upon me. I remember when my hair was longer, how I was prettier then, softer, younger.

Why do women always change their hair when things go to shit?

I decide I should shower before speaking to my editor. A piece of stray hair falls past my face, and I watch it from the corner of my eye, sure it's a bat.

The cyclical nature of life seems unfair.


...

I call a divorce lawyer with my mother's last name who has an office in the Scarborough Town Center. My father used her to divorce his third wife after my brother was born. They had been separated for ten years, but seeing my mother's last name on the lawyer's store front, he took it as a sign to severe ties.

This was, to him, a romantic gesture.

"Can I come in tomorrow?"

"10:30?" said the woman on the phone.

"Any later?"

I hang up and I have a craving to call my father, but I promised myself I wouldn't until all was said and done.

...

I am sitting in a park with two new friends. They are bohemian and beautiful and I feel strangely at ease in their company. They suggest we do a play reading and I oblige when normally, I hate doing things in front of people.

There is one speech that my friend reads about a exposing herself to a man she loves and I think about it all afternoon.

She talks about the philosophy that only we are real, that everything else is a dream. That the man she loved was a dream. That she made him up. That she fell in love with the wall. That he was the one person she exposed everything to. She trusted him with her deepest, darkest secrets, but that she could only do that because he wasn't really there. That she chose him for that reason. That she fell in love with him because he was fake.

But don't we all fall in love with dreams?

...

At a diner with my brother, I turn to him while eating poached eggs. "I'm just disappointed that he wasn't who I thought he was."

He drinks his coffee, thoughtfully. It's 4 pm and he's just woken up. He takes the DROPOUT cap that he had made off his head. My brother stands on shaky, hopeful ground so it's fitting that he would take what he hates most about himself and stitch it across his forehead.

His curls are so matted. How did they get so matted?

"The thing is, he was. Everyone always is who you thought they were while also being who they became to you. They're both. He is, and was, sometimes, who you thought he was."

"That's deep, Mike," I say.

He shrugs. "Yeah, I'm in an everything is true phase."

"Be careful."

"Why?"

"It's really confusing."

"No."

"Trust me. You're new to it."

If everything is true, who do you blame?
...

I do a photo shoot for my friend. She was my book buddy in grade one and it took me awhile to realize I knew her when we met again. She recently travelled the world and as I an putting on a ball gown, she tells me about Cambodia. She has heart problems and ever since her diagnosis, it is like seven hearts beat in her and she can't live enough.

"There was this little girl, she couldn't have been more than fourteen. She would follow you through the streets and could beg in every language. Fluently. She must have spoken eight different languages."

"No."

"Yes. English. Spanish. German. You name it, she spoke it. My friend from Ireland went to Cambodia shortly after me and I told him, 'Be careful, just speak to them in Gaelic and they'll leave you alone.' I swear to you, it was the same girl that he met. He started speaking to her in Gaelic and they had a full conversation."

"In Gaelic?"

"Yes."

"No one speaks Gaelic."

"I couldn't believe it. How did she learn those things?"

"It's so sad."

"I know. The resiliency of the human spirit is unbelievable."

Looking at her, feeling her seven heartbeats, I agree. I think of how smart that little girl must be, how I could never learn French even when I tried.

Maybe I just didn't have to. Maybe we can always do what we have to.

...

I lie with him in his bed. He just bought us new sheets from the dollar store. On my skin, they feel like silk.

He holds me from behind and with his arm near my breast, I have never felt more committed.