Thursday, September 29, 2011

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.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

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.

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?