In the summertime, Bunny and George used to shut the house down after supper. Bunny didn’t trust me in my own bed, so she’d make me get into bed with her on the pullout sofa in the front room. How depressing it was to lie wide awake in bed with the sun still full in the sky, listening to the “normals,” the neighbourhood families in their yards, with their puffy, red-faced boozy friends dropping over, barbecuing and snapping the tops off bottles of beer with church keys, and kids laughing and fighting, and wives getting drunk and smoking cigarettes around the cheap metal patio furniture and picnic tables, gossiping about the heathen Protestants and whether there’d be a strike at Stelco next year and about who was stepping out on who around the block and up the street at O’Hannigans’ drugstore, about the dirty details of the cashiers and the managers in the stockrooms at the Dominion store. Meanwhile, in my house the very last sounds of the day came from down the hall, where George Wilson lay alone in his own bed in his own darkness away from Bunny and me. George kept a transistor radio beside his bed. He would lean in towards the tiny speaker and tune in the news. The voice of Ray Sonin. The dim light of the radio dial. My first signs of how lonely life can be. What was it about the monotone male newsreader that made me feel like I didn’t belong, like there was so much going on that had nothing to do with me?
When I was four years old I stood in Bunny’s kitchen, three feet tall, and came right out with what was on my mind: Why did I not look anything like Bunny and George? And why were they so old? Bunny was quick to tell me I should be happy with who and where I was. I stopped asking for a while after that.
There were, however, bold, mouthy, confident kids in the Peace Memorial schoolyard and up and down East 36th Street who were happy to tell me to my face that I looked different. They talked to me like there were no mirrors in my house to see it for myself. We had mirrors, but somehow I could stand in front of the one in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and combing my hair before school, and no longer see what they saw. They’d ask me if Bunny and George were my real parents or if they were my grandparents. They asked me if I was adopted. They asked me the questions I didn’t dare ask myself, questions that more often than not ended in fist fights.
I was on my own out there. I tried to divert their attention away from me. I made up stories that Bunny and George were secret agents, working undercover looking for the Germans. I focused on George’s blindness and his war-hero status. I became the kid with the blind father instead of the kid with the giant head, and that suited me fine. I lost myself in a dreamland to avoid being seen.
I doubted myself. I didn’t have any confidence. I compensated by acting up. My report cards often read, “Tommy plays the clown to get attention from his fellow students.” I sang in class, out loud, all the time I’m told. My daydreams became one-act plays with me running around the classroom, through jungles like I was Tarzan or Sergeant Rock or the Hulk. I couldn’t control myself.
Teachers would drag Bunny into the school to report on my odd behaviour. They told her that I should be put back a grade or two or put in the slow class, which led to the opportunity class, which led to Crestwood Vocational School, then maybe even Mounthaven, where the slow kids went. I was on a downward spiral and I was just seven years old. Hell, I was just getting started.
Teachers would move my desk around the classroom to keep an eye on me. I’d start out in the general population, then get moved to the back of the class where I would be isolated. But that didn’t work, so I’d be told to move my desk right beside the teacher’s desk so that I’d never be out of her sight or reach. Eventually I’d end up with my desk out in the hallway. I’d have to listen in on the classroom through the doorway. The voices in the morning saying the Lord’s Prayer and singing “God Save the Queen” melted into the sound of chalk against the blackboard and then just the sound of pencil lead on notebook paper. My assignments were usually delivered to my desk by cute girls like Patti Wilk or Lynn Harris. I loved it, the voices and footsteps that echoed off the walls up the long hallway. I’d nap and dream and doodle the days away. If this was punishment I was all in.
I soon figured out that I could wander away from my post outside the classroom and get lost in the massive old school. I’d dodge any teachers in the halls, hit the stairs and descend into the basement under the original structure to the boiler room and the old coal chutes that led down to the furnace-room killing floor. I followed the tunnels under the new wings, into the film room and the bomb shelters that were built after the war. It was a fantasy land and a walk through history at the same time.
I’d run into Ted Wren, the janitor at the school. He’d give me a wink and let me know that I was out of bounds but that he wasn’t going to tell anyone. I knew Ted Wren as a professional wrestler. A local fall guy, no less. He would get his ass kicked during bouts of not-so-well-rehearsed choreography that always ended with Wren bleeding and pinned to the mat in the centre of the Hamilton Forum by all the ridiculous wrestling greats of that era. Haystacks Calhoun, the Love Brothers, the Sheik—not the Iron Sheik, the original Sheik, with his camel clutch and his manager Abdullah Farouk, who was always sneaking foreign objects into the ring for the Sheik to use on his opponents. There was also Gene Kiniski and the great Angelo Mosca, who both got in the ring to make a couple of extra bucks between CFL football seasons as defensive tackle for the Hamilton Tiger Cats. Yvon Robert, Mad Dog Vachon, Chief Don Eagle and Brute Bernard, to name a few more of Wren’s assailants.
One Sunday afternoon Wren left his house, got on the Upper Gage bus and headed down to the Hamilton Forum for his weekly beating. I was six years old watching the local television channel CHCH’s Maple Leaf Wrestling as Wren jumped into the ring with Yukon Eric. Before the bell, Wren lost his shit and blindsided his unsuspecting opponent, putting Yukon Eric into a headlock and trying to poke his eyes out, right there, in fuzzy black and white on my TV screen.
A mob of refs and cops jumped into the ring to pull him off Yukon, and as the cameras pulled away to a commercial, I sat there on my living room floor in shock. Wren got kicked out of professional wrestling that day and then became the janitor at my public school.
From the hallway, my desk was moved inside the principal’s office and it stayed there for the rest of the year, putting an end to my underworld adventures. But I still spent most of my time dreaming up new identities and tall tales. I shook off the obvious facts and took on the stories that most suited me. I was like an addict. I shot myself up with fantasy to make myself feel better and lose touch with everything real.
There…that’s better….