Eskasoni Water

soundtrack

(dedicated to all cowboys)

“Steee-rike!”

It’s the beginning of the seventies, and I’m eight while my little sister Shirley is six. In the middle of July, the old man is playing a ball tournament in the Eskasoni Indian Reservation. The Steel City Sixpax are playing three games against a Mi’qmac team at the same provincial skill level. And even though the reservation is an isolating half-hour drive from any white suburbs, the Rotary Club calls this a community-building activity. I guess the idea is to build community by beeping your car horn whenever a white guy scores a homer against the injuns.

Baseball has always been an important part of my childhood. My earliest childhood memory is of being punished because I wouldn’t “sit still and watch my father play” when I was three and a half.

Back in those days, people used to say that male homosexuality was caused by having an invisible father and a bitch mother. Unfortunately, I had both of those things, but the stories about what caused homosexuality changed before I came out of the closet. By the time I turned 17, gays were supposed to embrace their diversity, and not question why they got such a poor upbringing or try to overcome it to start a family. The 80s were a decade of abortions and permanent bachelorhood, and having been told to “sit still while other men play” was probably my own personal abortion moment.

One of my dad’s ballplayer friends is a skinny and talkative goon type named Victor Armstrong. He’s visited our suburban bungalow a few times, and once, when I was six, he showed me how to do card tricks and some easy magic. Victor’s not the best ballplayer on the team, but the Sixpax keep him around for morale and because he organizes off-season poker tournaments.

Hard times in the Maritimes

Like many other economically-depressed small towns, Steel City has hundreds of baseball diamonds that are the result of Recreation grants that were designed to help locals get enough weeks to qualify for Employment Insurance. Most of these pogey parks don’t have drinking fountains because outdoor plumbing is too expensive. And it’s the same in Eskasoni: four diamonds, zero drinking fountains. So both teams resourcefully bring their own water coolers.

Exploring the land around Eskasoni Ballfield, Shirley and I find grassy meadows, beaches, and woodlands, and run so much that we get tired and thirsty. So we decide to get a drink of cold water from the orange water cooler on my dad’s team bench.

Shirley goes first. She carefully separates one of the conical white cups from the pile, and places it under the spout. But before she can get any water to come out, Victor Armstrong is standing over us, menacingly frowning with his forehead crunched up. “Shoo!” he yells at us, as if we were wild dogs. Shirley looks at him confused and scared, but he just repeats “Shoo! Get the hell out of here!” even more loudly, and motions violently with his hands for us to scram while flashing his shiny white shark teeth. Shirley starts to cry, so I grab her arm and we run away.

“Steee-rike Twooo!”

Shirley says between sobs that she wants to see Ma, so we find the playground where Ma’s smoking with another player’s wife, and tell her what happened. When Victor sees us chatting with a white woman, he comes over and explains: “Oh my God. I thought they were two little squaws. I didn’t know they were yours. Sorry ‘bout that, Kass.”

Ma takes a long drag from her DuMaurier King Size, and shakes her head: “That’s what youze get for getting’ so dark this summer. He’s right.” Embarrassed, she tells Victor not to worry, and then tells us to go sit in the car until the game’s over. I suddenly realize that our Acadian skin tans deeper than most of the Scottish and Irish people who play on my dad’s team, and that this is a liability.

““Steee-rike Threeee! Yuuuuu’re out!!”

My sister and I liked to think of ourselves as Malibu Barbie tanned, rather than as two little squaws. See, Steel City summer is usually two months of rain which is perfect for playing Barbies and watching TV, but this summer’s been sunny for a change. I guess that’s why we were ethnic-cleansed by Victor Armstrong. No hard feelings. We chose to tan, after all.

Talking in the car

On our way back to the car, we meet up with two Mi’qmac kids our age -a brother and sister – and ask them to come with us to talk privately in our parent’s massive Ford Gran Torino. They tell us that they saw what happened, so we sit and share personal stories about growing up. We learn a few words of Mi’kmaq, and share a few words of our remnants of French. The girl – Pamela – tells us we can drink water from the Mi’qmac cooler if we want to. But after what’s happened, we decide to just hang tight and wait until we get home.

Even though my mother agreed with him that day, Victor Armstrong never visited our house again after the ball tournament. And the Steel City Fruit will live his entire life without enjoying a card trick, a magic act, or playing in any kind of poker tournament because, well, those are ethnic-cleanser activities.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

…

Kerry McFabe

Knowing Me, Knowing You

(dedicated to all sons of bitches)

Mother’s Day makes me think of my neighbor Kerry McFabe, a skinny guy with low self esteem who lived a few hundred steps from my house. Because he was 3 years older than I was, we were never in the same class, but for a few summers, we hung out fairly regularly. He’s the guy who introduced me to Abba.

His mother didn’t know we were hanging out, and that was intentional. She didn’t like him having too many friends. Kerry was the product of marital infidelity, so his mother kept him hidden out of shame though she never told him that this was why. This caused all kind of problems, and Kerry’s father ended up leaving when Kerry was only two.

Because Kerry was socially awkward and slightly paranoid, kids used to tease him a lot. He got bullied at school, and even non-bullies often called him names like Fairy McFag. But this was nothing compared to what his own mother called him every day at home. Kerry’s mom was a skinny, nasty woman who used to talk to him in a way that many would call abusive. I once heard a teacher neighbor say that, like a lot of working class parents, Mrs. McFabe was soul-murdering her own son – that Kerry was in the process of having his self esteem and ability to feel joy sucked out of him by a stressful childhood without much parental love.

I would wait silently for him in his porch while he changed from his Sunday School clothes into play clothes. His mother never knew I was there, so I overheard a lot of what she used to say. For example, as soon as he arrived, she’d yell, “Get the Jesus shoes off!” Every time. His shoes were usually sitting on the floor beside me when she said this.

And then, if it was raining or if she had a toothache, or if he mentioned that he had already taken his shoes off, she would call him a vulgar word like “bitch” or “slut” and then go on to tell him what a loser, baby, burden, or incompetent he was.  I never understood why she attacked Kerry’s self esteem every single time. What a way to arrive home every day of his life there.

Once, I offered to defend him against his mother’s meanness, but he told me that I would just make things worse if I said anything, that his mother had a lot of problems, and that he probably deserved it anyways. Kerry often walked with his head down, and never had much optimism or warmth for other people.

Both physical and psychological abuse can have the same effects on self-esteem, but they often come from different genders. This is because men tend to be physically stronger, while psychological violence is often the weapon of choice of the fair sex – perhaps due to the primary role of the female in socializing offspring, or maybe because women aren’t as physically strong as men. Emotional violence can be used for wicked and spiteful ends just like physical violence can. Even though I’m not a psychiatrist, I would say Kerry was seriously hurt by the non-stop attacks on his integrity by his mom.

And yet somehow, with all the life and joy sucked out of him, Kerry soldiered on.

Many years after leaving his childhood home, Kerry was diagnosed with a kind of post-traumatic stress. While seeking therapy, he read that music could be used to reprogram a damaged mind because it operates on a different part of the mind than speech. Perhaps all that pop pastry from Sweden he listened to religiously was a form of medicine, and not just entertainment. Maybe the soothing female voices of Agnetha and Frida helped to reconfigure his pain-filled soul.

Kerry was the first person I knew who had bought a record album, and it was Abba’s second release. He told me that he liked to put on the headphones and disappear into a kinder, more logical world,  filled with synthesizer hooks and Swedish accents.

Last month on Facebook, Kerry sent me a list of songs he used to use as medicine to neutralize some of the more toxic words his mother deployed on him, along with the approximate number of times he was  called each name.

__________________________________________________________

“You antichrister bastard!”
(1872 times)

Kerry’s mom was a practicing, God-fearing Catholic. She was also Irish, so this word might have had less impact than it would have in my French Catholic home. To me, calling Kerry an “antichrister” on a regular basis was full-strength hate speech. Is there anything worse you could be than the killer of Jesus’ beautiful message?

Antidote: I do, I do, I do, I do, I do
(1500 – 2000 listenings)

Like the word antichrister, this song’s title makes a vague reference to organized religion. The  reason it works is because the Abba antidote confirms that there is love inside the listener’s heart, in the same way that the hate speech denies that any love is even possible there.

__________________________________________________________

“You hateful little slut!”
(4212 times)
This one had a double-edge because it introduced sexuality – a corrupting strategy as well as an abusive one – to a child who felt instantly dirty and sinful. Corrupting a child can cause damage long after the verbal abuse has ceased.

Antidote: Gonna Sing You My Love Song
(2000 – 3000 listenings)

This song’s lyrics are about curing the damage caused by an abusive or absent lover. “Still I see that she makes you blue…”  It works well for curing the damage of abusive parenting too, so this song may have actually saved Kerry’s life by reprogramming his inner voice.

__________________________________________________________

“I’m gonna wring your neck/crack your head open/etc. … you poison bastard!”
(2808 times)

His parents threw objects when they were angry and weren’t afraid to bruise, so these words carried some weight. A permanent threat of physical violence is sometimes more effective than actual violence in destroying self esteem and social confidence, so this was actually one of the most difficult hate-bombs for Kerry to diffuse.

Antidote:  S.O.S.
(4000 listenings or until self esteem reappears)

Working class males are made to feel inadequate for not being strong (like Superman or a robot), and this gives abusive parents impunity with their sons. In the meantime, this song was like a silent cry for help – muffled by giant pink headphones in a bungalow in suburbia where no one can hear you scream.

__________________________________________________________

Of course, you might wanna listen to a more recent pop band if you’re currently being psychologically tortured by a close family member. Abba may have worked for Kerry, but styles change, and so do the vocabularies of abuse and the songs that are made available to help mediate it.

And though Kerry grew up to be another Steel City Fruit, it’s likely that his daily retreat into Abba helped him cope with his less than ideal existence in a damaged household.

Let me add here that Kerry hasn’t spoken to his mother in many years. Although he says he sometimes feels bad about having abandoned her, in his situation – where the abusive attitude continues in the absence of any remorse –  this was the probably the most prudent thing to do. Here again, I have to deflect to the wisdom of Abba with this Mega-Antidote: Bang A Boomerang

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

The Girl on TV

soundtrack

(dedicated to all war heroes)

I’m almost four years old and feeling understimulated by my dumb suburban environment. My mother had three kids back-to-back so she has two babies to take care of, and with only two arms, a 300 decibel voice, and no help from her husband, she props me in front of the TV for hours and hours, and rewards me for sitting still with sugary treats. Whenever I fail to stay still, she smacks me until I cry, or throws something at me – and then locks me in her room as solitary confinement.

My brother and sister are lucky to have a father. He spent the first years of my life overseas doing mysterious but important work to get some quick money to buy a small Ford convertible. He was a chopper pilot over there, and now he sure loves driving that car. By the time he got back from his car-enabling war, he had never bonded with me, and we never got attached our entire lives.

One Tuesday while I’m watching ‘my’ late afternoon game shows, the old man comes home with his Korean War buddy Pookie MacDonald. I don’t understand a lot of what they’re saying, so I ask “What’s a war?” and they laugh at my ignorance.

My old man turns to Pookie and says, “When people who don’t know anything ask me what I did when I was over there, I just tell ‘em I was shootin’ rats in a garbage dump.” And then he and Pookie smile knowingly at one another.

Pookie’s a born-again Christian, so he adds that God himself killed all the evil people in Sodom and Gomorrah “like they was rats too!”  This gets both of them laughing. My mother grins and says she finds Pookie clever. My father’s smile disappears when she says this and he stays in the  bathroom instead of saying goodbye when Pookie leaves.

Once his too-clever guest is safely gone, my father goes to get ready for ball practice and a news program comes on TV.

The news usually bores me – and then I misbehave and get punished. But this time, there’s a picture of a child as the first story. It’s a little Vietnamese girl who’s had all her clothing burned off by chemicals dropped from choppers by the American military during the Vietnam War. The girl on TV is crying, and other kids are also walking on that same road, crying their hearts out as well. The girl on TV is one year younger than me.

When my dad emerges for two seconds from his bedroom, I look at his rat-shooting, chopper-pilot face, and then back at the girl on TV. I will soon look a lot like that little girl myself as my self-esteem will be burned off with a potent cocktail of neglect, verbal abuse, and corrosive levels of mass media consumption. Sighing as my daddy walks out the door without nodding or saying goodbye, my destiny is being sculpted in molten iron and I will soon be the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

Red Maple Tree

soundtrack

(dedicated to all parents)

When I was a teenage paper delivery boy, I only made a buck an hour because our suburb was so sprawled out. Built on top of once-productive farmland, the driveways and lawns were massive, though the homes were modest and poorly constructed. Overall, it was bleak and boring. The miniputt got burned down by stoned teens. The McDonalds had a four-fatality robbery.

Suburbia is a failed trend – and a bit of a scam – that children pay for even more than their commuter-parents who got sucked into it by fast-talking TV. In a full hour of walking across gigantic lawns guarded by bored, growling dogs, I make what an urban paperboy makes in 10 minutes with no dog terror.

But even with this tiny amount of money to play with, I manage to save $12 to buy a red maple tree from Botrop’s Tree Farm. At twelve hours of labor, it’s like buying a $280 tree with the salary I make today.

After asking permission, I carefully plant the little sapling next to the walkway of our house, taking care to water it just enough the first few weeks to give it a chance at a healthy life. The old man even came out of the house the first time I watered it to quickly nod his approval. He only appeared for a half minute, and he was actually on his way to the car to go golfing – but he still nodded, which is like gold to me. “My daddy nodded at me!” (note to future parents: remember to nod at your children. – it might be their only fond memory of you)

Fast-forward five years: While in my freshman year at the local college, my mother explains over dinner that crows are attacking her new vegetable garden, and that the red maple tree is blocking the view. For me, the lack of sound insulation in our house seems far more critical than crow surveillance. We’re all light sleepers, and it’s like living in a tent. When I mention this, it infuriates her.

Another life-quality diminishing feature of my suburban existence is getting to school. My mother and her sisters used to walk a few miles in snow to school, and now, I have to commute many times that distance – alone. She had it so good. No one in my environment wants to give me – a college type – a lift to college. A wise war-veteran neighbor even sees my sub-zero hitchhiking as a kind of life lesson: the value of a snotty education versus the value of owning a nice, comfy car. No one questions why the college is on a highway in the middle of nowhere. Maybe if they went to college, they would. (It infuriates everyone when I say this out loud instead of just thinking it)

A few days after Mom’s anti-tree hate speech, when I get home from hitchhiking from an exam, all the leaves have dried up and fallen off. I ask my mother what happened, and she slowly and guiltily explains: “Your father killed it with soapy, hot water.” When I ask her why, she shrugs and says she doesn’t know. Like he was an Apache and she was a cowboy: “It is his way.”

Funny thing is that the maple tree was still small enough to move and replant when he poisoned it. But I guess the temptation to kill things is too strong to resist in the burbs. Maybe it’s because all those proud, honor-driven suburban hunters have nothing legitimate left to kill and eat: all the wild game and wild land has already been pre-killed to make room for suburbia and the predators who mow its lawns.

My little contribution to the crass commercial warscape – the tiny red tree I bought with my paperboy money – is sacrificed to the mighty surveillance state, to a private panopticon with an above-ground pool and earwigs. A year from now, my mother will give up gardening when she realizes she doesn’t really care for it. And soon after that, I’ll move away from home.

Last I heard – that double-wide bungalow still has no sound insulation and I’m still the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

Wallpaper Sample Books

soundtrack

(dedicated to all fathers)

Dad’s store makes me think of vinyl and paper cuts. Only time I’m allowed to go there’s when I have a doctor or dentist appointment. When this happens, I have to wait for a ride home. No choice.

I’m ten and in Grade Five, and just had my first dental fillings. Boy, was I scared. It’s hard to face first-time events like this when you have no older brother or father to say he’s been there. I never know what to expect or how to react.

My old man had all his teeth pulled out in his twenties, but I never heard about why or how. I guess the words got pulled out as well.

So today is the day. Right before I left for my appointment, my mother assured me I’d be fine. Her exact words: “Stop bein’ such a jeezus sissy!” Then she growled at me like a tiger to give me cat-like encouragement.

Just before filling my teeth with hot lead, the dentist snarled at me and called me a baby because I cried in pain. Dr. Hickstein’s hands shake like an epileptic seizure and he usually tears my gums to shreds during the freezing-slash-interrogation phase of each appointment. All I remember of him is: “You’re a baby!” *slash!*

So now it’s 1 pm, and I’m injured and weak at my father’s shop, and I start to tell him about the experience. “Shut up and go sit in the front of the store,” he snarkily tells me before I can finish the story. I keep forgetting it’s still World War Two: dental secrets can sink ships.

So, I slowly get up – embarrassed to be treated like a dog in front of human strangers – and sadly limp to the front of the store with my tail between my wegs. This is the farthest part of the store from the office – an outpost, almost in the display window. It’s raining, so no one is walking by.

For the next four hours, I look at wallpaper sample books all by myself: patterns and textures and colors and shapes. I guess I’m supposed to be learning that work is boring and lonely. Only one customer walks in during the whole four hours. As a form of solitary confinement, looking at wallpaper samples for four hours is probably worse than watching TV in a bungalow for the same duration.

Every once in a while I hear my dad laughing along with others coming from the office. I wonder what they’re laughing about? I wonder what subjects the men are talking about? Will I ever know what to say to other guys?

Patterns and textures and colors and shapes.

After a few years of these treasured educational visits to the store’s wallpaper counter, I decide to become a graphic designer whenever I grow up. My father laughs at my first attempt at imagining being a grown up, saying mockingly: “When I was 15, my guidance counselor said I was gonna be a paint and wallpaper salesman.”

The burn of the sarcasm helps me understand my low place in the universe.  I will forever be the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

The Hockey Game

soundtrack

(dedicated to all fathers)

A few months before I turn nine, I find Dad home on an early Saturday afternoon. That’s weird cuz he usually has sports and stuff when he’s not working or running errands or on business trips or on his way to deliver milk.

Even weirder – he’s looking for me! He wants to take me somewhere in the house. My pulse starts to race cuz this kinda thing never happens to me. My father wants to hang out with me – spend some time. It’s like the Children’s Wish Foundation. Does this mean I have leukaemia?

He takes me down the basement into his small trophy room, past the shelves of plastic Dollarama-style trophies honoring his accomplishments in the golf, hockey, baseball and pingpong fields.

Next to his hero den, he has a hockey net and two sticks all set up. He pushes a stick in my hand while beaming a proud smile like Mother Teresa, and asks me to take a shot on him while he plays nets. I take a weakling, girly shot at him, and he lets it easily slide in for a goal.

“Nice shot. What’s your name again?”

This is bonding or something, so he lets me get a few more shots in. Feels like I’m improving. I can already control the stick a bit better than 60 seconds ago. I think this might be…

And then it’s over. The phone rings, and he’s gone like a summer hailstorm. Saved by the bell.

It turns out that my three minutes of fathering was inspired by a ten-minute speech from a guidance counselor at my school the night before. At a Parent-Teacher Night, Mr. Pendergast told my mother: “Qatzel fears guys his own age and older. He has virtually no male-bonding skills.” And that’s how I got my one hockey game in with the old man.

Looking back, I think that guidance counselor really made a difference in my dad’s life.

The next day, my sister and I played Barbies and imagined a big, happy world made up entirely of fashion designers and hairdressers. And that’s how I became the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)