The break, part III
January. Down we go.
Dad makes two big decisions: 1) he’s going to have the house painted before putting it on the market, and 2) dude, he wants to get high.
A friend of a friend recommends a house painter called Dynamite Bob. Dad’s pleased that Bob is such a dynamite painter, but Bob later confesses that he was thus named for his habit of putting homemade bombs into mailboxes.
Dad estimates that it will take about three weeks to complete the job but, by the fourth day, Bob has moved in and doesn’t leave for another six months. Bob spends most of the day, and all of his pay, out scoring drugs and buying expensive wine and gourmet food.
He returns late afternoon and begins to mix cocktails, peel shrimp, draw lines and marinate the salmon. At night, he parties until we’ve all gone to bed, and then he starts to paint. In the morning we find him wherever he dropped of exhaustion, sprawled snoring on a tarp in the hallway, hardened rollers and the dregs of his party around him.
In addition to being a house painter/anarchist, Bob is also a 25-year-old virgin with a disturbing habit of sharing his violent fantasies, apparently as a means of seduction. We eventually break it to him that his palaver may well account for his celibacy. His best friend’s name is Spud, and that doesn’t help either.
Meanwhile, dad’s progress as a rake is doing fine. The professional wives on the prowl are gradually replaced by a string of silly young things who titter and yowl and pee their pants when too excited. Drink umbrellas are now on the grocery list. My sister and I sit across from them, barking dark passages of Miller, Bukowski and Burgess… They clap upright-handed, and gush, ‘wow, that’s neat.’
On Valentine’s Day, dad sends out two dozen cards to Sweetie.
It’s around this point that dad remembers that the drug-crazed 60s had passed him by, and he wants to know what all the fuss was about. He asks if we can “score” some “marijuana cigarettes,” and soon becomes the kind of pothead that everyone avoided in high school.
He emerges from his studio, red-eyed and pasty-mouthed, cranks up the music and begins his munchies dance. Hips twitch and thrust, arms pump like he’s milking a cow, and he’s singing, ‘pizza, pizza, we want pizza!’ And it won’t stop until the delivery boy has sung a few bars as well.
In April, dad meets J. Twice divorced, and living high on the alimony, J spends her days painting garish pink landscapes and growing pot in her bay window. She’s a chatty, exuberant, upper middle class hippy. Always pushing to do something outlandish, peddling a creed of “stylish spontaneity.”
On the night that dad and J wrap their batik creation around the dining room chandelier, stick their heads up inside and baptise it the “control tower,” concerns are raised about the growing accumulation of oxymorons in our lives.
Dynamite Bob thinks it’s the funniest shit he ever did see.
After doobies and scotch, they’re off to the home of one of dad’s lifelong friends, trying to get them to smoke up. One night it’s the Ts. When they turn down the offer to get stoned, the most proper Ts are told to loosen, get funky, release their inner child. No thank you, they say, refilling their glasses. The debate continues until dad grabs Mrs. T and carries her over to the fireplace. Sweeping it clean of photos and knickknacks, he plunks Mrs T down on the mantelpiece, and traces the outline of her body on the wall with a large black marker. Then he hauls her off, and proceeds to fill in her portrait in caricature.
The next morning, he’s on the phone to Mrs T, obsequiously offering to pay to have their living room repainted.
Dad soon rules that all this smoking isn’t healthy. Years ago he’d gone cold turkey from 5 packs a day – though confesses to still having erotic dreams of standing alone naked on a beach, smoking a cigarette. He decides that all future drug consumption should be in the form of cakes and brownies. This has the added bonus of allowing him to slip it to his friends, and marvel at the ensuing gaiety.
Instead of the usual semi-abstract landscapes, dad’s show that year is giant dusty purple and orange canvasses, where J and her friends have rolled around nude in the paint. ‘Oh, that’s just so art school,’ says one in-house critic.
In May, mom is rushed to the hospital with kidney stones. Her boyfriend R calls to tell us, and my brother drives my sister and I down there, Grand Prix style through the streets of the city. They won’t let us in to see her yet, so we stay in the waiting room, listening to R tell us that he knows all about what we’ve done to our mother, how we broke her, how evil, how he’d like to take us out to the parking lot and beat us senseless.
Dad arrives and he and R butt antlers until we are told to shut up already. When the doctor tells us mom’s going to be fine and we can go in, R blocks her door and spews insults at us until the hospital staff ask us to leave. When we go to see her the next day, R stands in front of mom’s bed, telling us we can only talk to her through him. Two months later, R is dropped. The discovery that he was under close psychiatric supervision didn’t help. More damaging was that he’d started hitting mom up for money.
On the night my brother comes home and finds dad again in a free for all with his new lover and women we’ve known since we were kids, he snaps. He’s up the stairs crying and shouting at my sister and me what he’s seen, that he can’t take it any more, that it’s sick and twisted and… I don’t know why, except that we’re high, but the angrier he gets, and the more lurid the details, the harder we laugh. He’ll see no humour, and slams off to his room. We keep giggling like idiots long into the night.
The next morning, our brother is gone. We call his friends, but nobody’s seen him. It takes dad 10 days to notice he’s no longer there. It would probably have taken longer if our brother hadn’t called from Vancouver – having hitched his way across the country – to tell us he was never coming home. Never did.
In July, mom and I take the train to Quebec to find me an apartment. The farther we get from Toronto, the more we enjoy each other’s company. On the way back, the edge and gloom creep back in. It will be years until all is forgiven. It will be years until I realize what a bum hand we dealt her.
In August, I leave for university. My sister stays on in the house until it’s sold, two years later.
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