“You have to ask me about my life. There’s stuff needs to be purged. Promise you’ll ask me.”
“I promise,” I said, carefully adjusting my body. Men get spooked like horses or cats. But how will I know what to ask?”
This is what I learned: Garth’s mother is Pentecostal. He was slapped around and chain whipped, I saw the raised lightning scar from boiling water poured on his thigh, traced the tip of my index finger on its raised worn smoothness in our early days when I sucked on his frostbitten toes, his mother having turned him howling into the Ontario winter small-town cold. He ate chewed food from garbage cans, sisters spitting leftovers on the floor, mother shrieking holy roller, eat or I’m going to whup you, metal chain five feet long tearing into his young back thighs shoulders buttocks.
Sometimes we wrestle. “You think you got me,” I say and give him the Rock’s people’s elbow. I giggle when we wrestle, which doesn’t mean I’m enjoying it. But I know about Mankind and that he was really smart before he got all messed up from jumping off twelve foot scaffolds and China when she paraded her massive muscles in black leather before she had her face redone, including having her jaw broken and wired to reshape her square steroid jaw and the two Hart Brothers before one jumped to his death. I can’t say it was my scene. “But it’s all fake,” I’d say until Garth relayed their stories, how hard they trained, and the chances they took. Once on a wooden platform in the park near our house on Gossamer, Garth and his five-year old son lay on top of me, Garth holding my hands down so all I could do was move my head from side to side.
“Get off me, you creeps,” I yelled.
“Say 'Uncle.'” Garth said while Talon hooted.
“No fucking way,” I said. “Same here,” Garth said and tightened his grip on my wrist.
“I can’t breathe,” I said, “Really, it’s enough.”
“Say ‘Uncle,’” he said. So I spit in his face. His face shifted—the features rearranging themselves—the sky was summer blue one minute and the next, covered with a thick threatening wash, possibly Payne’s grey dark. He let go. “Come, Talon,” he said and they walked off.
“You’re lucky you’re alive,” he said later. In Guelph a gang of boys tied him to a willow tree; there weren’t many black families in Guelph back then. Maybe they threw stones at him or hit him with switches while he was there with the rope holding him. It took him two years to hunt those guys down. “You make sure there are no witnesses,” he told me, “know where they’re going to be and when, and you be there waiting in the shadows.” There were six or seven of them and he pummelled them into oblivion.
I can still hear the knocking—like a log being rammed against the door of a medieval hut. I opened the door. Would it have been any different if I hadn’t? If I had barricaded us in? I opened the door and a black boot wedged itself in—“Sheriff.” I was alone with Caroline. Lisa was at the Toronto French School. We had a car then—an Isuzu, that would later get towed when Caroline was in 9-south at Mt. Sinai and Abie, in another one of his flamboyant moods, parked it in a tow-away zone.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” the landlord, a tanned leather man, said.
“But I didn’t know . . .”
“That you’re six months behind in the rent? You didn’t know?”
“But he said there were jewels, he was going to give you jewels from Africa.”
“Jewels, my ass! He showed me glass. Glass!”
Caroline stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“Can I phone him? I’ve just got to phone him, we’re all alone you see, and my daughter isn’t well.”
“Let her phone him,” the sheriff said.
“Can I use your phone? Please.”
“Let her use your phone,” the sheriff instructed when I said we didn’t have one and I had to go out to the pay phone even in the coldest day of winter to speak to André who was coaching me at Ron’s gym—he was living in a friend’s office gratis and we’d save pennies for the bus fare—I didn’t say that, about how I’d stand in the snow outside No Frills and gab and laugh on the phone with André and how talking to him made the seasons change.
“I have to give my daughter her medicine,” I said.
“What do you think we are—a god dammed pharmacy?”
“I have to take my meds,” Caroline said, “otherwise I’ll go into episode. You want me to phone Dr. Flak?”
Of all of us, Caroline is the best in emergencies.
“Come on, Mom,” she said already on her way upstairs. “We have to get some clothes.”
She got hangers. She went to Lisa’s closet and took out the one-of-a kind dress we had somehow managed to buy in Kensington Market for Lisa’s graduation. I think I got some of my clothes, some of Abie’s too. I forgot my jewelry box that held my grandfather’s watch.
I cannot write this without drinking one wine glass of French Rabbit Cabernet Sauvignon. I add President’s Choice orange juice into the pottery wine goblet I bought for fifty cents at the Cowan Street fair which is where Sabina, my best and long-legged German friend lives.
When Abie and I went back to get our things from the garage—for over a decade I could not use green plastic bags or abide by knocking and phones ringing—David Sheer said, “If you want the rest of your things, you’ll have to shovel your dogs’ shit.” You see, he also took the dogs. The sheriff and the dog pound at the door. Josie’s Pyrenees, Sara, and Zack, our Bull Mastiff. We were a Disney flick—the wretched family, the triumphant landlord, and the dog catcher. I stood on the sidewalk, watching Abie shovelling shit in the front yard. “Stop,” I called and then softer, “Stop. He’s not going to give us Bobi’s furniture. Nothing. You can shovel the back and front yard. Stop. I won’t let you. Come,” I said and led him to our car loaded with plastic bags, all my writing, my books, my art on D’Arches Rives cold-pressed 200, and the photograph of Bobi and Zadi at their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the glass and frame still intact.
“I know people,” Abie said. “who’ll break his legs—asshole will live out his life in a wheel chair. It’s illegal what he’s doing. Paul will take him to court and the cops—”
Garth was seven when he hunted down his pursuers. “How’d you know how to fight?” I asked him, sliding my voice up and down the scale so I’d sound spontaneous. He thinks I interview him for my writing. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just knew.” I loved him for that.
