On the way to the hospital my father’s popping the passenger door ashtray open, closed, open again. The booze fumes coming off him are positively kinetic.
“Remember taking me to the LCBO on my thirteenth birthday?” I say, because he’s in a selfpitying mood and that’s when I prefer to needle him.
“I never. Your birthday? Never, Nick.”
“Dragged me in on the way to mini-putt. They were out of your brand of gin. Whersh the damn Tankeraaaay…”
“Uh-huh, in that stupid lush voice. As if I’ve ever spoken that way. Ever.”
“Were you drinking before that procedure?”
He avoids the question.
“You know, bail may be set at a million. I’d put the house up. Think your mother’d put hers up, too?” “Why the hell would she?”
“For old times’ sake.”
“What about trial costs?”
“That’s me off to Brazil. Non-extradition policy.” “Skip bail and Mom loses her house.”
“I wasn’t serious.”
We cut across the parkway. Over the guardrail stands the brickwork of textile mills turned into low-rent apartments. A ladder of red pinpricks where tenants smoke on fire escapes.
“I took your mom to a cocktail party once. She didn’t know anyone and held it against me. I went off to find a drink. She’s chatting up some guy. Guy says, ‘Your husband, what’s he do?’ and your mother says, ‘Oh, he’s a sonofabitch,’ and the guy says, ‘Whatever pays the bills.’ Ha!”
We get to the hospital. The elevator rises to a white-walled ward sharing the floor with the neonatal clinic and the Norris wing. Fletcher Burger sits on a chair in the hall. At first I think he’s drunk. But it must be shock. The man’s groggy with it.
“At the gym,” he tells us. “The weight bar fell on her… her throat.”
Abigail’s on a hospital bed in a paper hospital gown. Veins snake down her arms and trail under plaster casts. A throat incision barbed with catgut.
“Warmup lift.” Fletcher rubs his thumbs over his fingertips. “I don’t know how but her arm broke.”
“Tracheal stent,” Dad says. “How long before they opened her airway?”
“Brain scan showed black spots, is all I know. Her eyes. Frank, they turned red.”
Outside the hospital wind shears across Lake Ontario around every angle this town was built upon. Wires of dread twist through me. My oldest friend. My prom date. Guess I thought we’d marry. Even when I was married — and loved my wife, truly — I felt I could have as easily been with Abby. But my son never would’ve been born in that scenario. A son, maybe, but not Dylan: the exact genetic prerequisites wouldn’t have been present. Plus I’d end up with Fletcher Burger as a father-inlaw. One self-obsessed man rampaging through my life was enough.
I leave my father with Fletcher and walk along to the Queenston Motel. A smorgasbord of ravaged faces and sclerotic livers. The lonesome thoughts of the patrons pinball round the dank air, glancing, rebounding, horrified at themselves. An old man eats a submarine sandwich the way you do a cob of corn: he looks like an iguana with a dragonfly clamped in its jaws. Another guy wears a leather vest with nothing on underneath. So insanely over-tanned his skin is purple. This leathery turnip of a head. The woman between them wears a hot pink tube top. Twin C-section scars grace her midriff, inverted ‘T’s overlapping like photographic negatives aligned offkilter.
I order a greyhound. My wife’s drink. The bartender gives me something that tastes like liquefied Band Aids. “Summer of ’69” starts up on the Rockola jukebox. Pink Tube Top gets up on the sad postage-stamp of a dance floor. Breaks out that old Molly-Ringwald-circaSixteen-Candles, shouldersforward-shoulders-back-slow-motion-running-inplace move. “Yeeow!” goes The Dragonfly. “Yip-yipyee!” goes Leatherhead and he slither-slides up there with her. Now they’re doing some spastic’s version of the Macarena. Now I recall why I don’t drink: it curdles my benevolent worldview.
The Hot Nuts machine is empty. There are no fucking hot nuts in the Hot Nuts machine. The red heat lamp is beating on a glass cube.
“Turn off the fucking Hot Nuts machine,” I tell the bartender. “Some dumb bastard’s liable to burn himself on the glass.”
The barkeep lays a hand on the bartop. Large, scarred, knuckles crushed flat. A mean-ass scar descends from his ear to the dead centre of his chin: a chinstrap welded to his flesh. Am I going to scrap over a Hot Nuts machine? I’ve fought for less. Fortyodd times in gyms and clubs, a greyhound racetrack, the parking lot of a Chuck E. Cheese’s. All to show for it a periodic openmouthed vacancy in my memory. My father said I fought with absolutely no regard for my welfare. A man who had made peace with his forever-after. But you have to acquaint yourself with the notion, before even scuffing your ring boots in the rosin, that not only will you be hurt — there’s no honest way you came out of any fight unhurt— but that you’ll be hurt badly and repeatedly by an opponent who, in the hothouse of that ring, hates you. You cannot batter another human being into unconsciousness unless you harbour some hatred. The second hardest part of boxing is accepting your need to suffer. The hardest part is welcoming that necessary hatred into your heart. I’d stepped between the ropes never believing I could have a wife, a boy, people upon whom I was depended. I can’t fight knowing how any punch — even one thrown by a spud-fisted bartender — could be the one to bust that all apart.
The cab drops me off a block from home. I’m so dehydrated that I steal up to the side of a house, twist the spigot on the garden hose and suck at stale plastic-y water like a poisoned dog. At home I’m nearly drunk enough to call my wife, ex, but it’s late and Dylan is there. I don’t want to be that father.
I’m absentmindedly rooting through my pockets when I turn up that leaflet with Danny Mulligan’s number on the back. I turn it over. On the front is a naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars over her nipples. A larger pink star over her crotch.
What the fuck? What the fuck.
“Sixty-Nine Cent Phone Fantasies,” the operator greets me. “Our titillation experts are sweet and sexy, dom, sub, Black, Asian, naughty nurses, hirsute, leather lovelies, Daddy’s little girls, fat-n-sassy, whips and chains, kinky, mincing, slutty secretaries, southern dandies—”
“Fine,” I say. “That one.”
… click… buzz…
“How y’all doing this faahn evenin’?”
“I’m… Jesus, are you a guy?”
“That’s not what you asked for?”
“I didn’t think I’d need to specify.”
“I talk to whoever switchboard patches through, man.”
“Well. Everyone’s got to make a living.”
“All with little mouths to feed.”
“You got mouths to feed?”
“My own. And my dog, who I’m fixing to get back. So, you horny?”
“Not really. Anymore.”
“We could give it a whirl. What’re you wearing?”
“A parka and earmuffs. Hey, listen — you ever go through a stage where everything comes apart at once?”
“Pal, you’re talking to a middle-aged male phonesex provider.”
“I just got back from the hospital. A friend I’ve known forever, she’s been hurt. Her father… my dad. Dads. Close with yours?”
“He’s dead now.”
“I’m sorry. My own boy says he hates me. What made him hate me? But I think, well, I hate my own dad sometimes. More than some. You got kids?”
“Me? No. Crimped urethral tube. Childhood soccer mishap. My wife left me over it.”
“Over a crimped urethra?”