It was, apparently, my uncle’s first ride on his — or anyone’s — coaster. But it was also the first time he’d fallen for a girl.
By the time they were engaged, Elfie had cajoled him into riding the treacherous Port Stanley Hog’s Back and the notoriously untrustworthy Aldershot Axis Smasher. Thanks to Elfie, my uncle had outgrown vertigo like he had his Paddington Bear, which my Mom had inherited and kept on her night table into her 60s. Soon after they married, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Soon after his death, she rode the Eager Beaver to the crest of the first drop and stepped into the sky.
It was in all the papers, my Mom said. But she hadn’t saved any.
1
Dou an’ me, Gideon,” my grandmother wheezed between slurps of her gin and tonic when I asked for a subscription to TV Guide for my 13th birth-day, “we’re different than them others, eh?” Them others, I understood, were my father and mother — a pair of old-school Trotskyites with little time for capitalist eye candy. Until, that is, my Mom hitched a ride with Jimmy Swaggart on the ever-metaphorical Road to Damascus, and Dad suddenly couldn’t get enough of Canadian football.
From my bowel’s first untoward movement (a scherzo, I’m told, conducted against a heavily-scored volume of Deutcher’s The Prophet Armed), to the Sunday morning she flew away from us to live for a time with her sister in Birmingham — and particularly from the moment of my mother’s conversion from Marx (and my father) to Christ — my grandmother and I had been a Grand Alliance of non-aligned souls. Her tiny sitting room down the stairs, always stinking of potpourri and a smoking picture tube, was the one place in the house I could rest in peace. It was the free space in my Game of Life; out of bounds for parents trying to raise my consciousness about the fall of Allende, and later, the resurrection of the dead. When my parents fought, I preferred Nanny’s room to my own because it was usually the furthest removed from their state of permanent revolution, and the volume on her Zenith console was always cranked up so she’d have a shot at following her “stories.” And since she’d often fall asleep while I was visiting, I was often left in my own company. I usually watched her television.
I started seeing a lot more of her the spring that Nixon resigned, after an old classmate of my mom’s, someone with whom she’d long been out of touch, invited her to a Swaggart crusade at the CNE Coliseum. I remember the days before, the anxious lines on my father’s face. Attendance, he argued, was “anti-revolutionary,” and he offered to picket the rally with her in protest. (“What’s wrong with us?” he whined. “We don’t go to the barricades like we used to.”) My mother confessed she’d always sort of enjoyed Swaggart’s singing voice and why shouldn’t she go and what was he afraid of, anyway?
He should have had his reason, ever since Mom accepted his proposal with, allegedly, an off-handed “What the hell?” It embarrassed me, even as an adolescent, to hear them tell that story. I knew even then that considering marriage demanded a tad more gravitas.
Dad used to say Mom looked like a vanilla sundae in her wedding dress. The wedding photos are more dulled than his memories; Mom looks like two modest scoops poured into a caramel-coloured sugar cone. A tiny smile plays with the corner of her lips that could have meant I love you or I can’t believe we’re doing this. They tied their slipknot in Calgary, for the benefit of his parents and a Jasper honeymoon.
While she was out, my father found time to watch SWAT with me. He even asked my grandmother to come up and join us, which was unusual, as he typically coped with her presence downstairs by embracing her upstairs’ absence. She declined. She was happy to be left alone with her gin and imported sweets once I’d told her there was a Sanford and Son listed she hadn’t seen.
It’s one in the morning and I’m Barney Rubble. I’m walking through a scene with the Great Gazoo when Flintstone stumbles onto the set, refreshed after happy hour at the lodge, and promptly knocks me out with his lunch (Bronto ribs, naturally). When I come to, Fred’s doubled over me, blubbering his “bosom buddy, life-long pal” routine, but I’m in no mood for that. I look up, from his toes that swell like ripening grapefruit to the shiny tips of his starched black hair, and tell him I’m one pissed Cro-Magnon. “Don’t fuck with me, Flintstone!” Gazoo whispers something to Wilma that makes her laugh (What’s going on between those two, anyway?), and I wish Betty were here. I awake with a start to an argument between voices I barely recognise. Mom and Dad.
The next morning when mother shook me awake for school, she said with a tremulous smile and gooey red eyes that she had died to the world; Christ had made her a new creation. She’d been renovated, she said; “What yesterday had been an abandoned flop house has become a temple of the living God!” I didn’t have a clue what she meant, but I knew enough to be scared.
Dad was mortified. God had never been an issue for him. He’d always taken his disbelief on faith, and would have presumed the Road to Damascus to be nothing but a hoary Crosby/Hope comedy. But once his wife was born again he became a student of atheism to turn her head and trust her heart would follow. “Jesus was a good man,” he’d say. “A revolutionary, even. But to believe everything in the Bible! That the world’s 6,000 years old …” Mom would begin by smiling indulgently, quoting the latest Scripture she’d committed to memory, but often wound up screaming that he was going to Hell and she wouldn’t be held responsible for it. It was times like these that I’d decide it was time to visit Nanny
“A man forced his pig and it died,” she’d often say without elaboration, once I’d settle into her musty, lemon sofa beside a bowl of calcified fruit drops. I never knew what she was talking about. I was just glad to be there, out of the reach of old Phil Ochs LPs or a gospel “translated into the idiom of today’s youth” my folks would try to fob off with a promising, “close your eyes and hold out your hands.” Unlike my bedroom, which could only be locked from the outside (though thank Christ it never was), my grandmother’s basement suite was an inviolate demilitarised zone.
Tabula rasa and erasa; we were different than them others. Faith, secular and religious, was rolling snake eyes throughout my adolescence, as it was for my grandmother ever since she’d heard her son had fallen from Heaven. I got a boost from my grandmother’s cranky disbelief — it helped me say “Thanks, but no thanks” whenever I felt pressed to choose sides.
We didn’t talk much, even when she was awake. She might ask what they were fighting about now, or if there was anything good on. If we tuned into a rerun of Bewitched boasting “that bloody bugger,” the second Dick, she’d likely mutter some Edwardian imprecation of quaint gibberish, ask me to pour her another g&t, “there’s a good lad,” and keep watching until she fell asleep. We were more comfortable watching bad television than was good for someone of either our ages; certainly far more than my folks, what with their educating the masses and, later, my mother’s preparing the way of the Lord, and all.
Nanny left for England when I was 14, but I felt 5 that morning at Terminal One; red-eyed and clutching a bag of licorice all sorts she’d bought for me, not knowing when I’d see her again.
Less than six months later — around the time of the Mayaguez incident — my parents split up. One evening, while Dad was recounting the problems jiving the chronologies of the synoptic Gospels, she walked out and into her old classmate’s apartment. All she’d taken was her Bible and tampons; four days later she returned with her friend for the rest of her things. A month later she had a rented bungalow and I went too, because everyone expected that of me.
Left with scant sanctuary from my mothers grasping faith — not to mention my roaring antipathy towards her for the meltdown of our nuclear family — my father’s politics suddenly seemed a liberal, inviting alternative. Though weekly Mom would cajole me into joining her for Pastor Vern Filmore’s three-point, 40-minute sermons, I slowly began to cultivate a secret life of subversion that I thought would make my old man swell like the Red Flag seized by an eastern gale.
It