In 2009, on Ash Wednesday, I was writing about a dear friend who had died of bacterial meningitis. He was 41.
I was alone in my two-bedroom flat in north London after attending the funeral in Dundee, Scotland. I had spent the day playing acoustic guitar, ripping through a repertoire of Billy Bragg, Bob Dylan, The Clash, The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Tom Waits. I sat down at the wooden Ikea table to write in my journal, which I had entitled Evidence of Angels in 2002, inspired by the impending birth of my daughter. I always wrote in pencil.
The first paragraph of this journal reads:
‘Baby grows in a slow rising breathing swell. Upside-down but pushing outwards, stretching the milky bread belly. Float, budding water horse. Your fire-filled daddy sits on a park bench at the bottom of Primrose Hill. Airplanes scrape whispers across the sky. Dogs trot on the pathway, nails clicking and collars jangling. Darling miracle creature, I promise not to tell you anything about the crisp kiss of wind or myriad glory patches of silver light through the clouds. I will only think it and hope you are picking up the vibe. Mum is a slender swan. She began the afternoon poised in ancient yoga postures.’
I rarely committed time to this creative writing exercise. The next journal entry was 16 moons later. I count moons. My daughter was born on a full moon. Several other entries over the seven years added up to a mere 24 pages of cursive scrawl.
On February 25, 2009, I wrote: ‘Ash Wednesday, first day of Lent, and this time I do believe I shall repent. I have lost a second dear friend – Julian – and I am seeing more evidence and coincidental connections. Julian died of bacterial meningitis on February 8. He had been suffering flu-like symptoms, wicked earache. His wife found him passed out on the couch. He died in the ambulance, the antibiotics came too late to save him. Shocking and horrific. Julian had ginger hair. He was a frisbee king. He had boundless energy and exuberance – ‘
As my pencil looped the last ‘e’ on ‘exuberance’ an almighty KER-SMASH punctured the silence. Plates and bowls hit the kitchen floor and burst into shards. I yelled ‘Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!’ and crossed myself twice as I stared transfixed at the empty space, my heart pounding.
It felt like a Fuck You. I now understood what fear of God meant.
I know what you’re thinking. It’s just a coincidence. True, the screws holding the dishrack into the gyprock wall had been whimsically reinforced with a spoonful of spackling by the landlord. It was an accident waiting to happen. But why at that exact moment, with the writing of the word exuberance, in that journal? For me the message was unequivocal; the final feather on a heaping pile of mysterious ways.
I should confess that I once heard the voice of God.
It was 1995. I was lying on a park bench in the sunshine in the Pierre Elliott Trudeau rose garden in the center of the Town of Mount Royal. I was on lunch break from my job as a hack reporter for The TMR Weekly Post and feeling the pressure of grief and loneliness and fear of failed ambition. I was also hung over as usual. As I snoozed I suddenly heard a booming voice in a region of my head not normally associated with hearing.
‘YOU MUST BE BRAVE BEFORE YOU LIE BACK DOWN!’
It was a command.
And when I say voice, it was more like a thundering symphonic exhalation of brass and trumpets. There was no one around. I am not schizophrenic. I had never heard voices before.
I was willing to believe this was my own subconscious or a singular auditory hallucination driven by some kind of depression. True, I had been burning the candle at both ends: Smoking skunk and swilling Old Stock into the early hours as a wannabe rock star with my rock band Sway, and then trying to be small-town democracy’s watchdog by day.
Yet no matter how I tried to explain it away my heart knew Who it was.
Was I ever brave? Nope. Not by a long shot. Not in any way, shape or form.
Julian’s death was upsetting on many levels. One thread of immense sadness was that I thought I was protected from this kind of loss.
On October 15, 1993, my best friend from high school, my soul-brother, Eduardo, was swept through the sluice of a dam in Crabtree, Quebec. He was working as a commercial diver. A sudden rise in the water levels dragged him up by the air hose and spat him out the dry side. He fell until the air hose snapped his neck. He hung suffocating to death in his dive suit. He was 28.
As I watched my friends wrestle with the inexplicable cruelty and randomness of Julian’s death, a part of me was detached and cold. I’d suffered this before. True, I descended again into that shimmering hyper-corporeality that follows the death of a loved one, where every breath and atom seems holy and you’re grasping and grateful for every sharp detail of your precious life. I could hardly fathom my sorrow and only once worked myself up to cry in the shower. It was a six-second keening barf of rage into the palms of my hands. The thin lasers of water streamed, disinterested.
Ed’s death ripped me to shreds, but slowly.
We met in Grade 7 music class when the teacher told us to hold up our hands and spread out our fingers. Ed and I were put in a group of three altos for the flute-à-bec. We bonded over this TV movie about a talking dolphin called Fa. As we went through do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do, I quipped: ‘Fa speaks to pa-pa’ in a high-pitched voice, imitating the talking dolphin. Ed laughed hysterically and we got a detention. From then on, I think Ed laughed at every single one of my jokes. Ed was a special kind of genius. He soon mastered the recorder, playing the haunting theme song from M*A*S*H in the corridors. It was years and years later that I learned the lyrics: ‘Suicide is painless, it comes in many stages.’
Ed and I were oddballs. He was two years older, having come to Canada from Argentina at age 11. I was first-generation Canadian, born of British parents. I was a wimp and a joker with a smart aleck mouth. Ed always ran the fastest mile. I was always at the back of the pack. Ed was possessed by a restless rage. He hated all the cliques and preppies. He didn’t want a desk job or a false life. He wanted to be a soldier. He had a younger brother who was severely retarded. He wore a diaper under his pants and walked around the house squealing and yelping like a gurgling baby. One time he jumped on me and wrestled me down and bit my shoulder. But I just laughed it off.
Ed made meticulous models of war machines; fighter planes, half-tracks and tanks. The camouflage paint was battle-specific. The pilots inside the aircraft even had mustaches.
One day, when all the leaves were off the trees and everything was bleak and grey, we began a new game. We placed his models in the dirt under the deck and shot at them with his BB gun from across the yard. We spent hours setting up scenarios, like a Wellington had crashed and was under fire by a Panzer. We stuck green plastic soldiers in bunkers and rained down destruction from on high like gods. Sometimes we splashed paint thinner on the models and set them on fire, rushing back to our firing range to shoot up the scene. The miniature billows of black smoke added that extra touch of reality. We would rush back to douse the flames and examine the wreckage, the molten holes of the BBs like tank shells. Then we would set it all on fire again and rush back to shoot it up, until there was nothing left but melted plastic pancakes. To fuel our fetish, I took down the F15A, the Spitfire, the Hurricane hanging on threads from my bedroom ceiling and smuggled them out of the house. One by one, we shot them up.
I once talked to a demon through Ed.
We were on an early summer ‘Green Week’ field trip with school in Grade 8. At night, after a day of canoeing, we snuck out of our room, like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. We ran hunched over like nighthawks sticking to the shadows, swooping across the gravel and around the lake.
We got to a local honky-tonk bar. We walked in and bought some cokes and potato chips and Ed called his mother from a pay phone. We stealthily got back into the pavilion and back to our room. As the coke bottles clinked together the door whipped open and a teacher, Mr. Q, yelled: ‘What the Fuck are you doing!?’ He riffled open the bag and I think he was relieved not to find beer. He let us off with a stern dressing down and said we’d better not do it again and that he’d be waiting outside our door all night.
Ed and I shared our booty with Lars, the jock. We hooked the bottle caps on the edge of a table and bashed them with our palms to open them up. We swigged the cold carbonated sugar water from the sexy hourglass bottles and crunched on the chips. We were heroes. This was back in the days when Coca-Cola was that benevolent Norman Rockwell-painting of Santa Claus winking; not the evil exploitative global corporation pumping out millions of plastic bottles. Mission accomplished. After the caffeine wore off we stopped whispering and fell asleep.
The next night the mission was doubly dangerous. We had been warned. But Ed and I saw ourselves as young S.A.S. recruits. We opened the door a crack to see Mr. Q sitting in a chair tilted back against the wall, reading a magazine. We decided to aim for a 2 a.m. sortie, agreeing to sleep in shifts. I slept first and then Ed woke me up: ‘Your watch.’ I paced around the room, biting my fingers to stay alert until finally the lines on my digital watch flipped to 02:00. I tapped Ed on his shoulder and he hardly budged. I shook him harder with a harsh whisper: “Time to wake up!”
He sat upright like a zombie.
“Tell the men with the guns! Tell the men with the spears!”
I was spooked.
“Waddya mean, Ed! Who do you think this is?!”
And he said in a sing-song voice; “It’s Mickey Mouse!” like he was on the Mouseketeers Disney show. “M I C,” he sang, “K E Y…, M. O. U. S. E…”.
I was filled with cold dread. Mickey Mouse meant small fry. Was I small fry? Inconsequential? I saw myself as a budding Mick Jagger, to the point where my Nanny called me Mick, instead of Mike. Suddenly, Ed snapped out of it, swung his legs out of bed and said: “Let’s go.”
And off we went out of the window and down the drainpipe, jumping onto the dumpster below. This time the night was colder and quieter and darker. We ran across the field, pretending we were soldiers, grunt-humming Wagner’s, Ride of the Valkyries from Apocalypse Now! Bun, Bum, Bah, Bhum, Bomb, Bham! We rattled off lines with Robert Duvall machismo, “Charley don’t surf!”
“About a half mile out we’ll come in low with the rising sun!”
“Ark Light, B52 Strike…Charley don’t ever see ‘em or hear ‘em man.”
“Go get the roach!” “Beverley Hills! “Hey GI, Fuck You!”
We grew up in a death cult, under the shadows of war. And yet we craved the adventure, as if it were inevitable that we would one day have to fight, just like all the other generations.
My last memory of that night is that we each climbed a tree, pretending to be snipers. I went as high as I could through the scratching branches. I could just make out the hulk of Ed hugging his tree next to mine as we fell into a reverential silence. I stood on a branch just thick enough to take my weight. I hugged the trunk as the wind tipped and swayed the tree. The shushing swell was like a lullaby and I was a bug on the tip of a metronome. I became one with the tree and dissolved into the darkness.
Years later, Ed and I were punks. We rebelled against the hippy bullshit. One day, Ed took his dad’s hair clippers and gave himself a Travis Bickle mohawk.
“You lookin’ at me? I don’t see anyone else around here.”
“Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.”
Our prophets were Jello Biafra and Henry Rollins. “I’ve got a six-pack and nothin’ to do.”
We rode the 68 and 64 downtown to see all the great Montreal punk bands at The Rising Sun: No Policy, Fair Warning, Genetic Control and The Nils. One night at a punk show in a church basement on Mont Royal we slam danced and drank beer after beer.
There was a holy moment when we grabbed each other by the scruff of the neck and spun around in a chaotic embrace amid the prowling, bashing, gyrating slammers. It was like tackle football. The power chords churned and the drums thrashed. We spun faster and faster laughing our tits off; our eyes connected across past-life eons. We were a buzzing molecule until our legs slipped on the suds-slick floor and we split like separate atoms, spilling across the floor into the discarded plastic cups.
The day he died I was lying in bed with Karine at around 11 p.m. and my phone rang. It was my friend, the brother of Ed’s wife.
“Hey man, where’s the party?” I said, thinking that’s the only reason he would call me so late.
“No party. I wish that was why I’m calling. I’m at the hospital. Mike, it’s Ed.”
“What happened?’
“He fell.”
“How far?”
“50 Feet.”
“Is he Ok? Is he going to be OK?”
“He hit his head.”
“Is he alive?”
“He’s alive, but it’s more a question of what’s going on in there.”
I got to the hospital before midnight to see him on life support, propped up on a gurney. A breathing tube was shoved in his mouth and an accordion in a glass cylinder pumped and gasped. His bare chest rose and fell mechanically. Wires were stuck to his torso and his arms were chunks of meat. There were many machines with tiny blipping lights; reds, blues, yellows, greens. His eyes were slightly open and it was the same old Ed. Black hair like crumpled tar paper, pale pallor skin.
I kept vigil, grasping his hand. “C’mon Ed, hang in there…stay with us.” After a while, I fell silent. There was a tiny blue dot, a reflection from one of the machines, in his eye. I focused all of my prayers to God on the tiny blue dot, willing it to expand, like it was the seed of an ocean that would swell and bring life. My soul strained, trying to summon telepathic superpowers to meet Ed in that tiny blue dot. Ed, can you hear me? I knew the light was a reflection but imagined it as a tiny Caribbean Sea and that he would somehow rise triumphant from its depths.
The awful vigil extended all through the night and into the next day. I had been one of the first to arrive, followed by his mother and father. The look of despair and bewilderment on his mother’s face as she realized that her Catholic prayers were falling flat.
“He’s sleeping and I can’t wake him up!” she cried looking at me.
Many a time, when I had rung Ed’s doorbell, he would be napping and she would go downstairs and knock gently on his door, “Eddie…Mike’s here…Eddie…” Half the time he would not rise and she would say those exact words, leaving the task of rousing him up to me.
In the early hours, the blond-Aryan doctor gathered us loved-ones together. His wife, my friend, me, his mother. There was zero activity in his brain. He had been starved of oxygen for at least 20 minutes…The clinical conversation turned to the subject of organ donation. Ed was a fine specimen, his body in Rolls Royce condition.
Here again, I will continue with some paragraphs from my journal, written in my shed in Buckingham, Quebec, in October 2013:
“Growing up, Ed and I would often talk about life after death, and what happens, and if you should take it all with you. Back then, there remained some mystery surrounding heaven and hell and purgatory and ghosts. We were not so certain about the science of elements of creation blasted from stars to be recycled again and again. There was vague acceptance that there was a Big Bang but people were hedging their bets. But who made the Big Bang? We weren’t so developed in our ideas of us humans as mechanical with replaceable parts. So, when it came to the issue of consent to use Ed’s eyes, heart, kidneys, liver and lungs to help others, attention turned to Ed’s driver’s licence. On the back of the green paper, Ed had signed his name consenting to the use of his organs in case of death. But then he had scribbled a line through this signature. His wife and the doctor and my friend and I sat down together to discuss what we knew or believed his wishes to be. They turned to me and I said ‘But he crossed out his signature.’ The doctor pursed his lips, put both hands on his knees and then stood up and walked away, ending the discussion. To this day, I feel guilty for potentially being instrumental in preventing others from health and happiness. Perhaps even condemning them to death. But the fact of the matter was that the consent was negated by the stroke of a pen. I do hope this was Ed’s true wish.”
The plug was pulled on Ed just before sunset the next day. We were given one last chance to see him, one by one, without all the tubes and machines. The doctor warned it might be better to remember him as he was before. I opted to say one last goodbye. I sometimes wish I hadn’t.
He was laid out like a prize fighter holding his breath, except there would be no more breathing. The finality hit me cold. The body – muscles, skin, hair, face – a discarded, empty vessel. An inanimate GI Joe. His eyes stared and his mouth gaped, as if frozen mid-snore. The tiny blue light was gone. Prayers for a Lazarus miracle sucked into the vacuum. I touched his cold shoulder, said “See you on the other side my brother,” and then walked out of the room and down the hallway, past his mother and father and wife and all our friends and his cousins, and down the stairwell. I stopped between floors to look out the window to see an orangey-gold sunset. Then I just kept walking, my boots squeaking like mice with every step. I walked and walked, down the hill and into the city, thinking about where Ed would go. I ended up sitting at the bar at the Olde Dublin. I had just enough coins for a $6 pint of Harp.
A couple of nights later I could not sleep. I had been pacing all day, alone in my empty apartment on Clarke Ave. I was trying to grasp sorrow but couldn’t really feel it.
Everything seemed normal. I imagined that the frosted glass pane on the front door was some kind of thin barrier to the otherworld. I placed my hand on it and my cheek and felt the coolness of the pane. I imagined Ed on the other side.
That night sleep just would not come and I lay tangled and tortured in the bed sheets. There was no up, there was no down.
Suddenly, two things happened simultaneously. I heard Ed’s voice say “Hello”. It was exactly how he sounded through the earpiece of the heavy, spin-dial telephone when he used to call at my parent’s house. Except I was instantly aware of this voice in a region of my head I had never used before; right at the back, in a hidden attic.
I quickly said: “Hello, Ed? Are you there? Where are you?”
“Everywhere!”
“Everywhere? You mean you can go anywhere?”
“Anywhere!”
And then I woke up and it was eight hours later and I felt refreshed like I’d had the deepest sleep ever. In my mind the conversation had happened before I fell asleep. It was not a dream. I knew this, I know this in my soul. The angels taking care to lay a web of plausible deniability.
I know what you’re thinking, and what all the psychologists and psychiatrists will say. That this was a natural feedback loop of my own consciousness, self-healing, as a reaction to the emotional stress. A vivid dream. I know all of that, too. And, over the years, the further I drew away from the incident, I rationalized it like that. However, further occurrences would add to the weight of circumstantial evidence.
And then the dishrack collapsed.
Exuberance.
It’s fair to say I have a fairly fraught relationship with religion. I was raised an Anglican Protestant and attended St. Barnabas Church, a squat, spiritually uninspiring brick building on Pierrefonds Boulevard in the suburbs of Montreal. I happily sang ‘I’m not going to hide my light under a bush, I’m going to let it shine!’ with all the other boys and girls at Sunday School. My nanny bought me a silver Saint Christopher pendant, the patron Saint of all Travellers. I cherished it, until one day I lost it in the sand on the beach in Weston-Super-Mare.
On Palm Sunday, I held the thick-reed alms folded into a cross with wonder. Delicate power, like Jesus had handed it to me himself. A plaster white dove hung over the altar, below an ornate golden crown. Two wooden crucifixes stood on either side. Shards of light lit up rectangular wedges of stained glass next to the posted numbers of Hymns.
I listened attentively to the Lessons and had my own Children’s Book of Bible Stories. The drawings in this Bible were like windows to the ancient world: Moses parting the Red Sea, David fighting Goliath, Samson bringing down the temple, Jesus turning water into wine, Jesus upturning the money-lenders’ tables.
I was the kind of kid who found proof in tiny signs. Like the time I was convinced that the dark scuff on the plastic roll protecting the hallway carpet was from Santa’s boot. My mischievous parents once left ski tracks in the snow in the back garden, which my sisters and I agreed were from Santa’s sleigh.
You could say I was brainwashed, hardwired to find meaning in the smallest of coincidences; programmed with the double-think of the Virgin birth, the resurrection. I loved the comforting certainty of the seasonal rituals. My mother flipping pancakes in the kitchen on Shrove Tuesday, then giving up the tiny things, like chocolate, or cookies, for Lent. Followed by the smell of hot cross buns on Good Friday and white chocolate rabbits with pink sugar eyes at Easter.
Anyway, Saint Barnabas will soon be demolished.
Twice the water spoke to me with tickling cadence.
The first time, I was on a confirmation retreat at age 14. We woke early and fasted and prayed and then ate porridge before attending lessons. It was all about truly accepting Jesus and Christianity and then making a conscious choice to join the faith. There were no refuseniks.
During free time, I found myself standing on a small bridge above a waterfall. I peered down at the cascading wave, mesmerized by the churning cylinder of water. It spun like molten glass, spitting heavy pregnant droplets. The force was violent yet delicate. It flowed and flowed, eternal and unrelenting, like a rolling machine; a ravenous, carnivorous weapon. The weight of the molecules at once permanently suspended in the arching fist of the wave and fleeting glimpses gone in a flash, sacrifices to gravity’s embrace and the smooth river below.
I stared into the water and wondered about my future path and I was quiet in its cleansing energy.
The second time, I was at a Quebec Community Newspaper Association annual conference in my late 20s. I saw the event as a massive piss-up and a chance to maybe get laid. But I had hit the beers and the wine at dinner a bit too heavily as a succession of peers won awards. I returned to my room to have a quick nap and recharge my batteries before returning to the party. Instead, I woke up in pitch-black silence. When I went back to the hall there was just one couple slow-dancing and a waiter cleaning up as the music played feebly.
I had missed the party and it was about 4:30 a.m. and I was wide awake. I went for a walk in the mist outside and hiked up through the woods. In the grey day-break I found a thin babbling stream running down the mountain. I straddled it and squat, letting the water run between my legs, looking up at the rambling trajectory of the water as it happily slapped smoothed stones and zigged and zagged down the miniature ravine.
I opened my ears and there was only the dribbling, tinkling water. Its gurgling cherub laughter filled me with spiritual euphoria.
The thing about Julian for me is this. I remember him calling me as I walked to work, his mellow voice with its Ottawa-twang: “I’m inviting a few friends to a restaurant for a get-together, you wanna come?”
“Sure!”
“And it’s for my birthday,” he added, sheepishly.
It was a rip-roaring night in Clapham, all of us gorging on pizza and red wine. The next morning, I was in a hangover fog, taking the overland from Willesden Junction to Euston Station. This was after the long daily trek, pushing the stroller with its precious folded cargo, my daughter, my English rose, from King’s Road, up Harlesden, to finally drop off her off at the day care.
I walked out of Euston to total mayhem. Sirens wailed and every road was clogged with crawling vehicles. It was the day after London had won the bid for the 2012 Olympics and I was thinking ‘How the fuck is this city going to cope with all the extra people when it can’t even cope on a normal day?”
I got to my desk on the 4th Floor of the British Medical Association headquarters. A colleague was online, checking what all the transit problems were about.
“There’s been reports of explosions or some kind of power surge, the entire Victoria line is down…And the Piccadilly line…”
I worried about my wife, who was seven months pregnant with my son, being stuck on the sweltering tube on her way to Vauxhall.
Then, 10 minutes later, at 9:47, as I was in mid-rant about the 1976 Montreal Olympic Stadium’s billion-dollar price tag and corruption and why I was less-than-thrilled about London winning the Olympic bid – BOOM!! An explosion punched my stomach and the windows rattled and the building shook. There was a frozen slice of suspended silence as we all looked at each other, speechless.
Then, I said feebly: “That’s King’s Cross…” Thinking that was where the explosion must have come from. But it had been over my left shoulder, behind me, in the wrong direction. And then the fire alarms sounded and we all traipsed obediently, as we had many times during drills, down the rear stairwell. As we entered the courtyard, streams of people were coming through the main entrance, past the central fountain with its four statues. I came face-to-face with a woman with black curly hair and she was covered head-to-foot in splatter. I think I said something like, “Are you OK?” She looked at me, stunned. I said, “Let me try and find you a doctor.” I looked around in the crowds for someone and I was trying to lead her to a quiet spot to sit on some steps but then I lost sight of her.
I overheard a colleague say he saw an open-top tourist bus blow up outside of his window. I edged over and said: “You saw it? A bus blew up?” And he said he heard the boom and saw a rising cloud of red mist.
Another colleague let me borrow her cellular phone and I called my wife. She was safely at work and hadn’t heard of any explosions. I said: “I’m safe but a bomb went off right outside BMA House. Soon it’s going to be all over the news.”
The next several hours were a numb blur. We loitered at the rear of BMA House but then were gradually moved away from the building. A troop of a dozen bobbies paraded past, quick march, their faces ashen-grey. A man in a ragged suit, his face blackened with soot, walked down the road with his briefcase. We got scraps of news in dribs and drabs. Bombs at Aldgate and Edgeware Road and Russell Square. Then the bus blown up, forming a bloody cross over the heart of London. We crowded into a nearby pub to see Tony Blair address the nation.
By the mid-afternoon, there was nothing left to do except begin the long walk home. I looped around the wide police cordon by Tavistock Square to see the red double-decker bus. Its roof was peeled off, hanging like tangled tin foil.
Then I joined the mass exodus along Euston Road. I walked through Regent’s Park and along the outer ring, past the zoo. I got to Primrose Hill and it started to rain and I got soaked as I walked up the hill and stopped to look over the city.
I later risked the overland train from Finchley Road & Frognal back to Willesden Junction, picking up my daughter. She toddled along in her daisy sandals, oblivious to the day’s events. So perfect and precious, cascading blond hair and blue eyes, a cherub angel holding the handle of the stroller amid the urban jungle. And I counted my blessings with every step.
I had walked right past that number 30 bus, 10 minutes before it blew up.
Total random luck. Amid all the news stories of the 56 dead from July 7, 2005 – children left without fathers and mothers, fathers and mothers losing sons and daughters, brothers losing sisters, sisters losing sisters – I thanked my precious stars.
And now, years later, and every year, I equate that anniversary with a birthday that my friend will never get to celebrate. And I whisper, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.”
And what of my sin?
I drink. Guzzle, guzzle, filling the empty hole.
It’s fair to say, I have drunk a swimming pool of beer in my time. So much muddy fog. So much violence and abuse of my sacred heart. Beer is my love, my fuel.
Gluttony, lust, pride, sloth. Anyone wanna throw a stone?
In the late 1990s, I was living in a sprawling Montreal walk-up with 10-and-a-half rooms all by myself on Jeanne-Mance, between St. Viateur and Bernard Avenue. The place was like an art gallery. I was a Gentile in a sea of Hasidim. It was their country, circa 1880. Men in heavy black overcoats and hats with long beards. Women in calico dresses and white shirts and hats with the uniform bobbed-wig, always surrounded by armies of children. From my rear balcony on Friday nights I could hear families singing ancient prayers from the desert.
One night, I was playing a primal rhythm of power chords in my storage room, which I had set up as a makeshift studio. I pounded out the chords and out came these words over and over in a rolling meditative mantra: ‘Psalm 112; Please let me explain, about the pressure valve.’
Later that night I received a phone call from my mum, telling me that her brother, Uncle Peter, had died of a heart attack. He was 65. I later looked up Psalm 112 in the prayer book that my parents had given me on the day of my confirmation in November 1980:
‘Blessed is the man that feareth the Lord, that hath great delight in his commandments. His seed shall be mighty upon earth; the generation of the faithful shall be blessed.’ Then later, the final line 10: ‘The ungodly shall see it and it shall grieve him; he shall gnash with his teeth and consume away; the desire of the ungodly shall perish.’
That was me, the ungodly, gnashing his teeth. I had a weakness for potato chips and peanuts. A thirst for salt. When I was a child, I refused to eat unless I could dip everything in a tiny pyramid of salt on my plate. The doctor thought I might have Addison’s Disease. Among my vices was a desire to munch through entire family-sized bags of chips in one night, watching TV. Between that and the beer, my waistline was pushing 39 inches and my weight pressing beyond 185 pounds – too much. With the Lent of 2009, I ended the sloth. I gave up all booze and salted snacks.
Part of it was spiritual. There I had been writing about penance only to be met with an angry manifestation, the violent smash of the dishes. Was it Ed? Angry that I had pissed away my time? Was it Julian, jealous that I was living in my body?
And why this involuntary exclamation of me calling out Jesus’s name twice and crossing my heart twice? For protection? I thought I was a humanist-existentialist-atheist, well-versed in Nietzsche. The words were ripped from my soul.
I took it as an angel’s warning: ‘At this point, mate, you ain’t getting in to Heaven you fucking hypocrite.’
The other part was physical. I’d better start taking care of my body and throw away my crutches. Or I’ll end up dead, too.
And so that first year, I did give up all those things that had such a deep hold on me. And I read from the prayer book on Lenten days and Sundays. I felt purified and clear. I couldn’t believe I had managed to live without booze for 45 days.
Since then, only once have I slipped from my yearly Lenten vows. It was in 2010, during the Gold Medal Men’s Winter Olympics hockey game between Canada and the USA. I was with my holy brother, Marwick, a rabid Canuck if ever there was one, in a packed bar just off Piccadilly Circus. It seemed churlish not to partake in pitchers of beer, although I did hem and haw for some time before capitulating. I quote from my journal:
“The USA tied it up with around 40 seconds left on the clock and I rushed to the urinals for a pre-emptive emptying of the liquified bowling ball in my bladder. Standing there as flecks of shimmering piss-mist shattered off the stainless-steel trough, a distraught fellow Canadian stepped next to me, muttering Fucks and lamenting before the makeshift wailing wall. ‘We’ve got to win, we’ve just got to win…’ he whined. To which I responded with full faith: ‘We will win because we’re better than them.’ When Sid the Kid slipped the puck in the net and dropped his gloves and tore off his helmet in one fluid singular gesture that lasted .8 seconds, I knew that I had been forgiven for my boozy transgressions.”
And then, on October 2, 2011, my father collapsed in front of Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter’s Square.
My parents were on their second day of a dream trip to Italy. It was a hot day and they were jet-lagged after the flight from Toronto but still took the bus through Rome to Vatican City. My dad keeled over and attendants rushed out with a wooden cart and spirited him quickly to the Ospedale di Santo Sprito, the Hospital of the Holy Spirit. I was in London when I got an email at work from my sister.
‘Have you heard from mum and dad?’
‘No, why?’
Mum had emailed asking for their health insurance details. Dad had collapsed. It was his heart. This was worrying because he had had a triple bypass in 2006. I decided the best thing to do was to get back to my flat as we waited for more information about his condition.
I rode the groaning, lumbering Metropolitan line, choking up. Could he be dead? I imagined making arrangements to fly him in a coffin from Italy to Canada. Did I know him, this stranger? My master; the authority, the ruler of manners and behaviour, the thundering voice. Elbows off the table! Stop fidgeting! And yet there was love; throwing me rough house in the water, coaching my football team, driving us to Disney World.
Was I ready for his death? What was left unsaid? I had lost two young friends but he was flesh and blood. I fell into numb resignation amid the normalcy of the rush hour commute.
At home on the tinny-shit plastic telephone, I pressed a complicated sequence of numbers to get through to his hospital room. He was OK, feeling better, but the doctors said he might need a pacemaker. I imagined his open chest with a robotic, mechanical heart inserted. “Will your insurance cover it? What’s it going to cost?” I feared they would be bankrupted. “Well if we have to sell the house, we’ll sell the house,” dad said.
I agonized about whether to fly out to Rome. We were not poor but with two young children every extra expense put us in the red. I was wracked with guilt by the fact that I had not been able to be in Canada when he had a triple bypass in 2006. I flew out to Rome the next day.
When my mother and I walked into the hospital room my dad emerged from the bathroom looking frail in a thin smock. He looked at me with sheepish guilt with tears in his eyes. He couldn’t believe I had made the journey. It was the most emotion, apart from anger, I had ever seen in his face. An involuntary sweep, like a rushing train. Relief and love. I hugged his shoulders gently through the gown. He was surprisingly solid. He was sharing the room with a burly Italian, Giovanni, who lay in the bed next to his. The room was sparse with concrete walls painted white and the window overlooked the Tiber. Dad said he and Giovanni shared a Papillon-prison kind of camaraderie.
There was a lot of waiting and confusion. The hospital staff didn’t speak much English. My mother and I sat in the small room, watching two men grapple with their mortality.
Giovanni needed a stent to widen an artery. My dad’s heart rate was skipping like a ragtime beat. The doctors decided he needed a pacemaker. This was not as scary as it had sounded at first. The device lays tiny electronic hands on the heart to soothe it into a steadfast rhythm. Pretty routine for those expert doctors but, nevertheless, they had to open him up. The operation was delayed a couple of times. Our frustration mounted but we were grateful for the care. Finally, the day came and it went well. Except afterwards there were air bubbles in the lining of his lungs due to a slight tear.
“There’s been a fuck-up,” dad said, as he collapsed despondently into a chair. After nearly a week cooped up in that hospital now he had to stay days and days longer, staring at the walls in that flimsy gown. Meanwhile, we were getting zero information about the cost of this. I had to return to London, where I began to frantically research the incidence of lung tears in pacemaker surgery. Should we sue? Was there negligence? Finally, I received news that my dad was released from the hospital but could not fly until the air bubbles were gone; at least a month. My parents holed up at the Hotel Roma as my dad recovered.
We never did have to spend a cent for all of that expert medical treatment, thanks to Christian generosity and a centuries-old tradition of providing care for pilgrims. Where else in the world would this happen? Bad luck that my dad collapsed. But good luck that it happened in St. Peter’s Square, right by the obelisk.
This is why I tiptoe carefully and honour my blessings. It is 2020. It feels like God has left us. The world gets shittier every day. Massacres continue. The rich get richer. Biodiversity is crashing. Tornadoes and floods hit my neighbourhood. Forests burn in the Amazon and in Australia. Antarctica is melting. Everything is choked in plastic. On the Ash Wednesday that I began writing this, 13 teenagers were shot dead at the Parkland High School. Still no gun control. Pro-lifer, fascist hypocrites in America ban abortion. Holier-than-thou evangelicals support a whore-mongering, adulterous, draft-dodging, tax-cheating conman. In this Lent, we are all sequestered in isolation as the COVID-19 coronavirus rips across the world. Gaia has sent us to our rooms to think about the horrors we have done. She loves us. The birds chatter riotous in the garden.
Despair is a sin.
Here, now in this small Quebec town, from my living room window, I can see the cross on top of the St Grégorie-de-Nazianze church steeple. The bells ring at 6 p.m.
I have counted the beer cans piled up in my cellar and returned them in wave after wave to the depanneur. There were 643 at 20 cents, 317 at 5 cents. I kept track of the $18.65 I had collected from empties over this time. I write out a cheque for $163.10. The number is how much I weigh.
Tomorrow I will walk to the church, past the stone statue of Jesus with out-stretched palms, above the inscription ‘Help Us’, and donate the cheque to the fund to restore the steeple.
- Spike LeBloke
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