Chapter Five
I remembered drinking whiskey and the assurance with which it navigated a path that was becoming better worn with each day that passed. I remembered that as the traffic thickened a bit, I decided to race with anyone that was game. I remembered cursing other drivers as I sped. I remembered it all later, from where I sat, in a jail cell. While confined, I would emerge from the spell of a blackout and remember more than I wanted to.
On the highway, a little car pulled up beside me. Ha, I thought, that little thing should know better. I left him eating dust and cranked the music. The same little car pulled up beside me. This time the driver was flashing a badge.
“Ah, shit, I’m done.” I hid the bottle in my coat’s lining, pulled over, lit a cigarette, rolled down my window, stuck my head out and exhaled.
It all seemed staged but it was unfolding in front of my face; an officer of the law in plain clothes, walking resolutely towards me. All I wanted to do was to keep drinking; I was just getting started. I didn’t want to get busted. I was willing to sing soprano with a vibrato, if that’s what it would take to be allowed to carry on with my business.
I felt more doomed with each step he took in my direction. Ideas bounced around inside my head; my brain was a pinball machine gone amok, perpetual tilt, put a quarter in my mouth and I’d have spit it back in dimes and nickels.
“…yeah, she left me,” I heard myself saying, “I feel so terrible, I can’t stop crying sometimes, you know. I’ll try to get over her, at least while I’m driving.”
“That’s a good idea. Here’s another. If you’re going to kill yourself do it on someone else’s stretch of highway.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered and he was gone, stopping once to take a long look over his shoulder as if he’d changed his mind, then to shake his head and spit.
I pulled back on the freeway that could have snuffed me out in the time it takes for a quick goodbye. I shook my head and laughed.
“That was close.” I said to myself and relieved, I laughed harder.
I turned off the expressway and pulled into a church parking lot where I hoped to collect myself. I wasn’t there long when a caretaker pulled up in a little wagon with a motor attached.
“Pastor says you have to go,” he said, firmly, challenging me to be contrary. “You don’t belong to this church, not a public parking lot.” I felt compassion and put the car in reverse.
“See you, Pedro,” I said and drove away.
Guys like Pedro, who were called retarded, could always make me smile with their dead seriousness and fierce loyalties. I felt some type of awkward kinship; I almost knew how he felt. A strange foreshadowing was going on. In spite of myself, I was embarrassed. I knew that I had faulty wiring upstairs and I knew Pedro had similar problems. Was I going to end up driving a cart hooked up to a lawnmower engine? As I drove I wondered who was saying what about me.
I was soon back where I spent a lot of time growing up. The old neighbourhood, a place I had yet to outgrow. I thought I’d visit with a few friends, but I was no longer known. The few people I thought I’d been tight with seemed caught off guard and uncomfortable when I showed up at their door. I’d been far from their thoughts, if I was ever there at all. Maybe they hadn’t imagined me at their doors, drunk and disheveled. Maybe the smell of cheap whiskey made them reluctant to admit they had known me. Maybe I should try to sell him a chocolate bar, I thought, as one guy seemed to have trouble placing me.
“It’s okay,” I said and walked away. Nothing stays the same, I thought, and thinking it made me tired. I suppose I could have restrained myself, could have stopped going to strange houses and ringing the doorbells of people for whom listening to a gloomy drunk go on about the good old days was unexciting.
Later that night I came out of a blackout and found myself in my father’s car, crammed in with a gaggle of rowdy teenagers. We were searching for the downtown party that we were all going to, driving around until we found the spot. Once there, my father’s car was discarded, having served its purpose for the time being. Some guy with long, blond, over-washed hair parked it behind a building whose brick facade looked like it served as a backdrop for every graffiti artist in the district. The driving duties had been taken over by this person. He wasn’t in the state that I was. As I staggered towards the gathering I felt wounded. The car I had assumed temporary ownership of had been taken from me. Someone else was at the wheel, possessing the keys he had wrestled away from me as I had reeled and lurched and tried to convince everyone I was okay to drive. I had been crammed into the backseat and an argument had ensued over who would drive. I had a fleeting pang of guilt - what was my father going to say? I knew he’d find out what I’d been up to.
At some point during that glum evening, I fell down a flight of stairs with a wine bottle in my hand and had to be taken to a hospital. I remember being restrained and stitched up. Another part of a rotten scene; more shapes, shadows and noise I’d have to live with. After my trip to the hospital, I fell asleep in a space I cleared on the floor, amidst the drinking and drugging. Within twenty-four hours, I’d be under lock and key.
The next day was an odd one. The wheels were set in motion that would change my life. My actions during that time brought disgrace, imprisonment, and the gnarled finger of blame pointing my way. Later, while I languished alone and in jail, it seemed that I’d been deflated, emptied, never to be especially happy again.
When I first woke in my jail cell, there were jackhammers in my head. Half drunk, I wondered what it was that I’d done. I remembered getting into a race with a cop on my way to the city. Looking at the gauze wrapped around my right hand, I remembered that I had fallen the night before. Or was it the night before that? How long have I been in this cell, I wondered, and what is it that keeps me here? Eventually, one of my keepers would tell me that I was sitting in a Toronto jail facing a multitude of charges, all of them related to the destruction of my father’s car. Someone, besides me, was going to be very unhappy.
When the loose-tongued guard who would prod my memory came by my cell, I asked him what I badly wanted to know, that is, what I’d done.
“Destruction of property,” he answered, and he didn’t say anything else until he’d finished peeking into the windows of some cells that were built into the wall and had opened a few others that resembled mine to a greater degree, no walls, nothing but bars. Though there was no one there, he made a show of rattling his keys.
“Not counting a heap of other bad things. You’re lucky you didn’t kill someone, Bub.”
He clucked his tongue and left me alone. It came to me then, hazy at first and then with more clarity - the accidents that I’d been involved in, what led up to them and what happened after. What I had needed was that jolt, “You’re lucky you didn’t kill someone,” to get my memory working.
A psychologist might counsel that I hadn’t been remembering at that point in order to have time to prepare myself for the shock. However, psychologists don’t leave room for chatty jail guards in their theories. The stranger triggered thoughts I didn’t want to house, thoughts that dug in their heels and made a home. Memories flooded, dingy, black and white imagery, thoughts and emotions that refused to leave. I somehow weathered the onslaught.
That day was noteworthy. Sinister traces of it would follow me far into the future. I would recall for years thereafter, be they hallucinations or not, the shapes, shadows and noise of that time of mistakes.
“Honey, you should have seen this accident. Crazy guy speeding through the streets, broadsides this car. Seems he’s left a huge trail of destruction behind him, running into parked cars like he’s in a demolition derby. Eventually his car won’t go anymore so he gets out and runs, real shabby looking guy. Pass the potatoes. Jeez, you’re something, that roast looks great.”
So I envisioned Ordinary Joe, while, in a cell, fragments of essential well being lay around me, partly decomposed, to be swept up and deposited in the trash with a hundred thousand dust mites and then, to be nothing but a dim memory. What, I wondered, disgustedly, just what the hell is wrong with the blob the sits on top of my neck.
I gulped down fear and choked on it. I drowned in introspection, always arriving at the same conclusion – I deserved to be where I was. Those who were worried about me could breathe a little easier now. Hell, throw away the key - I was born ghastly and evil, though strangely, not without remorse. A spider walked calmly across the floor of my cell. I wondered briefly what he’d done to be there. I wished I could just go to the type of Hades where nobody was too concerned with punishing anyone. If I die tonight, I prayed, please don’t send me to the Christian hell. I began to be very afraid.
“If I die before I wake, please send me to the friendly confines of the Hades of the ancients, the humane alternative to fire and brimstone.” Not exactly how I wanted to phrase it in my head, but the sentiment was there. God, I hoped, knows a contrite heart.
The next day the policeman, who called my parent’s home while I sat and waited, anxious and disgraced, stroked one of his facial scars. He had obviously endured a problem with acne. He didn’t seem self conscious about it though. I supposed it was something he had gotten used to.
Inside me a cruel illness that had yet to be diagnosed, was busy fortifying its home. This illness exploited me using fear and delusion, but two of the distressing weapons in its arsenal. Anything it could do to me it would and then it would feast on the harvest, the by-products of a brain’s chemistry gone awry. Surely, this illness had a life force of its own. It was at a banquet table for one and holding me, its sustenance, in a submission hold that would have made the most seasoned wrestler yell Uncle. I was cooked.
Everything looked funny, in a drab, non-humorous way. It was as though my perception had shifted. I would never see life with the naiveté I once had. I became aware of the police officer and I admired his bravery, how effortlessly he dealt with his problem that, due to its physical nature must have garnered its share of attention.
“One more time and then we’ll just have to try later,” he said to no one in particular.
I began to wonder how long we’d been there. I could smell something cooking and so, figured it was about lunchtime. We’d been there since just after breakfast, with him phoning off and on, on my behalf. Where have I been this morning, I wondered, and then as a type of answer to what had to be one of the most moronic questions I’d ever asked myself, I realized I was handcuffed to my chair.
Eventually the policeman’s patience paid off. He was at long last in contact with Mr. Playford. A short conversation ensued and the phone was held to my face so I could speak. I felt that I could do so if someone would take the cotton out of my mouth, the handcuffs off my wrists and pour cool clean water down my throat for a few minutes. Otherwise, I thought, I was utterly incapable.
I was no Al “Scarface” Capone, the famous mobster who went to prison for the only crime the authorities could make stick, tax evasion. He did his time in fine style, without doubt. I had to get out of stir because I couldn’t do any time in any style. The only way to dig myself out of my predicament was to speak whether I liked it or not. I badly wanted to see the light of day and lose the crazed animal persona I already fancied I’d begun to acquire. Like a ceaselessly pacing creature in a zoo, I was well sick of the bars that held me captive.
“Hello,” I managed. My Grandfather answered and that puzzled me. Why had they called him?
“Carmen?”
“Yes.”
“I understand you’re in a spot of trouble.” I didn’t answer. It’s not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. I was sad and full of regret, dumbstruck from top to bottom.I shook my head at the copper, indicating that I couldn’t talk at that time.
“Yes, sir, we’ll try back later. Goodbye.”
I was led back to my cell where I lay face down and motionless for some time. I didn’t want to think about my personal assault on the metropolis of Toronto. I remembered a fair bit of it by then. Not wanting to rehash it only made it run around in my mind over and over.
Why had I, the day after I was stitched, beaten my father’s vehicle, metal on metal, to a mess that would no longer turn over? Not a cough or a whirr, just dead silence eventually broken by a hiss and a few clicks. Why at that point had I foolishly scurried into an apartment building and hid in the dim garbage disposal room, smelling excessively of antiseptic. I flinched at the mental image flashing in my mind, of a pair of Toronto’s finest discovering me there, on the floor, trying to look inconspicuous which, given the situation, couldn’t be done. I was really starting to remember a lot for a guy who woke up without much idea as to why he was in jail, and I wasn’t impressed.
Embarrassed, I remembered that I actually feigned innocence when I was caught, pretending, I guess, that I always hung around the garbage disposal. When I remembered sitting on my haunches and lying, claiming to have no knowledge of what the police were asking me about, my face got hot. Being told to get to my feet and staggering so they had to hold me up, one on each side, was not an image I valued. Flanking me, they led me stumbling from the building like the bum I’d become, while people laughed and cheered. I turned it off, somehow, the mental chattering went away and I fell into a fitful sleep.
Eventual calm took hold and I slept deeply enough to dream. Not surprisingly, my parents kept appearing in my dream and whenever I saw them I would run. I ran so fast and hard that I was back in the fields, running from spirits. It was there that I was accepted as a fool of the nontoxic variety. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. In my sleep I longed for those days, when I wandered with a clammy six pack in my hand, a harmless idiot but certainly not a felon. A vision of a car that was being carted to the scrap heap while its headlights, panic stricken, blinked on and off woke me and I was full of guilt. Looking at my arms I saw that the hair on them seemed to be partly at attention.
I didn’t eat supper that night. Later, the dim lights of the jail and a calming hum of unknown origin lulled me once more into another dreamlike state, but this time it was just a state - I didn’t dream. I slept through the night until 6:30 the following morning when the guard woke me and gave me something to eat.
I ate. The eggs and toast were the same, cold and soggy. The coffee was lukewarm. I was happy to eat though and gave no thought to the state the meal was in. It was food and drink – cold or lukewarm, it was essential and you had to partake. That, or perish.
I had enjoyed a restful sleep and was strangely optimistic. I was rebounding with what could probably be explained as the elasticity of youth. My life was nowhere near over and so I had yet to ruin it. I was convinced that my meagre violation of the law could be explained away, that destruction of property and endangering the lives of others wasn’t as serious as some people thought. How could the powers that be not be sympathetic and helpful?