Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt.



“It's one of the great tragedies of contemporary life, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.” Andrew told me that once.

We were lying around, watching t.v., stuck in one of those days that never begins and then never really ends. He wouldn’t look at me when he said it, he just kept staring at the television. I have moments with him where he’ll say one thing that changes my life forever.

I’m dumbstruck, silent, and he’s none the wiser.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



“Did you sing that song a lot when you were a kid?” I asked him.

I’m always asking him about his childhood. I’m a stupid, old detective trying to understand the man I love.

“All the time. My mother would always say, ‘Sweet Lord, the never ending song!’

“How did you sing?”

“Very earnestly.”

“Were you good?”


“No, I was awful.”

He is a beautiful singer now. He is beautiful at everything he touches and I am jealous of him. Maybe that is why I love him.

“I was. In Grade Two, my teacher told me I wasn’t allowed to sing at my desk anymore. Then on the last day of school, everyone got to pick one special thing they were allowed to do and I asked to sing again.”

I pictured him as that little boy, with too much energy singing his heart out for hours at his desk. Maybe he was performing, or maybe, he just liked the company of his own voice. Either way, I thought it was mean that a teacher would take that away from him.

Especially when he had a dead brother.

“Did you ever really feel like you were married?” he asked me as we fell asleep that night. My marriage was another thing we talked around but hardly ever about.

“No, not really.”

And when I was married, I never did. Things only feel real once they’re over and even when they’re over, stories never really end.

In the hazy dark of the night, I looked at Andrew.

“I hope you’re my never ending story,” I told him.

I meant it.

Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt



I picture my father in his prime as Dustin Hoffman in All The President’s Men; smoking in elevators, busting into politicians offices in corduroy bell-bottoms, coercing pretty young women into giving him leads.

Only, he was tall and handsome like Robert Redford.

Only, he believed Watergate was the end of journalism he wanted to be apart of, the end of turning a blind-eye.

He stopped working undercover with criminals, exposing sex scandals, interviewing off the record. He became editor of the sports page and travelled with the Toronto Blue Jays, almost year round. He refused to wear anything but jeans, sweatshirts and ball caps.

He told me that he just had to get out. He didn’t have the taste for the jugular he used to.

I know the truth. That was the year he quit drinking.

That was the year he lost his nerve.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Nan Nan


My grandmother lay in her bed.

"I feel too sick to sit," she told me.

My grandmother had nothing wrong with her, nothing that could be determined, anyway. She had a fragile mind and I watched it breaking as she got older.

"What'd you do today, Nan?" I sat on the chair near her bed. I should have sat on her bed with her but it scared me. It had swallowed her whole.

"Nothing, just lay here. Thinking about my life, all the people that have come in it. I have thought of every single person in my life."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Can't help but think about things, stuck here like this. I have known so many people. Even near-strangers I am thinking of. Most of them are dead now."

"It's funny how some people only come in for a short while, like they weren't meant to stay for long."

"But you never forget them. They come in and out but you never forget people."

She got up out of bed and for the first time in as long as I could remember, she didn't need my help.

Anna



"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

...

My brother quit drinking and started having nightmares. We sat, as usual, at the diner up the street. He poured what looked like a million grains of salt on his eggs, one for every star in the galaxy.

"What do you dream about?"

He sighed and moved towards me like a secret. His thoughts hurt him, always had.

"Last night I dreamt of her."

She was his best friend, a beautiful girl he had fallen under when he as fourteen. He loved her so purely, the kind that is rarely returned. Even that young, she was a ghost-girl; already dead, see-through, not meant to be here. By the time they were twenty she was gone completely, this arm to that drug, that leg to that bad man.

"Why did she give herself away?" he asked me.

He needed her.

"I dreamt that I was in her house. Dad was helping her with something and then he got pissed off and started screaming at her. He left, disappeared like a cloud of smoke. I ran up the stairs and I found her all alone. She was so skinny, and she said, 'Don't leave.' I said, 'I won't.' And then she turned and looked at me, I've never seen someone so skinny, Katie. She said, 'Will you help me?' and I said, 'Help you with what?' and she said, 'The cancer.' She had cancer, I knew it in that dream way, like I had known it all along but not a second earlier. Isn't that fucked?"

"What do you think it means?"

"That I'm being like Dad by cutting her out. That she needs my help."

I took his hand.

"You did the right thing, Mike."

"Yeah," he nodded. "It's just a lot easier to stay out than get out, you know what I mean?"

I nodded.

"I just wish I could love someone like that again," he told me as he finished his coffee as if it was the first time, as if he hadn't told me that one hundred times before.

I hated watching the world strengthen the man in him, destroy the boy in him.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Crutches - Personal Essay Excerpt



Everybody needs something.

It was fall. He and I were about to break up. I knew it and he knew it. Why neither of us did it, I don’t know. I’ve come to realize that you don’t know how wrong being out of love is until after the fact.

There are small similarities between loving and being unloved, so many in fact, that you can convince yourself everything is okay. They are the ones you call every night. They are the ones you share a bed with. They are the ones who hold your hand. In life’s more clever moments you are tricked. You think what you share is an intimacy with that person, when really, all you’re doing is marking time.

And so, while marking that time with him, I told myself it wasn’t so weird that we’d share a bed and not make love. It wasn’t weird that we never made each other laugh. It wasn’t weird that I could never be myself around him, that I felt like an alien, that he never understood me, that he thought I was stupid.

None of it was weird, none of it was heavy, nothing broke my heart.

There are those relationships that do not serve the usual intended purposes. Sometimes, there is no love given and so, no love lost. With he and I it was never about how he felt for me or what I felt for him.

I wanted someone.

As far as I can tell, so did he.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Til Death

He holds me in his big arms, drunk and I am seeing stars, this is all I think of.



"I think I'm not married because I take it too seriously. I am too committed to the idea. I think when you get married you shouldn't take his last name, you should create a whole name. A whole new tribe, together. I think your husband should be your absolute first priority. If your husband is in a car, choking, and your mother is dying by the side of the road, you help your husband first. That's really what I think. He asked me to move to New Zealand with him and I couldn't do that because I thought of all the films I had in production, all the stuff I couldn't do there. I realized, this isn't right. Some things are more important than work. Some things should be, like your husband. I should have said to him, 'Yes, baby, I'd move anywhere with you.' I should have wanted that. I didn't."

She was the type of woman I admired but never wanted to be like.

I would have pretended to want to move to New Zealand and filed it under bridges soon to be burnt, never crossed.