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“ ...On my way, honey,” I said into the cell phone. Today was our first birthing class—Allison hated to be late for anything, so she’d called to make sure I was on the way. Me, well, I’d be late for my own funeral: fact.
Driving up the escarpment in our battered 1992 Ford Tempo, I turned the radio to Hamilton’s oldies station, CKOC. Marvin Gaye was singing about sexual healing. I loved AM radio; hearing the songs from the Sixties transplanted me into the past, and all the streets and buildings came alive with good memories. Now I found myself remembering when Marie Hamson and I used to neck in her parents’ basement. The memory tugged uncomfortably at my heart. I happened to check my rearview mirror.
Close on my tail was a black Ford sedan. The late afternoon sun glistened in the car’s grill, reminding me of sharks’ teeth. My pulse raced a little. An undercover cop car? I checked the speedometer to see if I was speeding. No, forty-five clicks, no problem there. The car pulled up beside me as if to pass, but it hesitated and slowed down, then it pulled in behind me again. Then, for no apparent reason, it dropped back out of sight behind the thickening traffic. I just wanted to get to Tim Hortons without getting a ticket.
Today’s column had been a fat pile of shit. But I felt as if I’d taken my first hit of crack cocaine and couldn’t stop—I was hooked, instantly. Every well-crafted lie had spurred me on to write the next one. It was wrong. I hadn’t been raised to lie, but I didn’t care; in fact, I couldn’t help myself. I’d expected to see flames shooting out of my typing fingers.
Of course, I’d done it all for Steven. I was risking my life to save his. Just once, he deserved the sweet taste of fame. At least one of us dreamers deserved to become famous. I know he would have wanted it that way. Even as I told myself this, I felt an uncomfortable twinge of conscience. Unwilling to examine my motives any more closely, I cranked up the radio.
I’d written the column wearing my old Discman, sometimes listening to a CD of the Beatles’ number one hits. When I was twenty-five and first trying to be a writer, I wrote listening to Simple Minds and Kajagoogoo, or the Thompson Twins, or Madonna. In my thirties, I’d listened to Soundgarden and Junkhouse, or even Gordon Lightfoot, if I was trying to get some of his magic Canadiana to rub off on my writing. Nowadays, I listened to softer stuff. Sometimes, if I were tired, I’d pound back the coffee and eat chocolate while listening to Green Day’s Dookie, just to pump my adrenaline a little, so I could muster the energy to write. But after a while, the caffeine and sugar would wear off, and I couldn’t relate to the message in the songs, so I’d go back to the age-appropriate music.
What was happening to that other guy I used to be? My confidence had started to wane in middle age.
I’d just turned off the Jolly Cut onto Concession Street, travelling eastbound along the Hamilton Mountain. I passed the park on my left, the leaves beginning to turn on the oak and elm trees. The clouds hung low in the sky like freighters that had floated off their moorings in the Hamilton Bay. When my cell phone rang, I almost jumped out of my skin. My nerves were fried. I didn’t feel like answering it.
Truth was, I wasn’t ready for our first birthing class at Henderson Hospital. What could I possibly do to help my wife give birth? In our dads’ day, they smoked cigars in the waiting room while their wives screamed their heads off, surrounded by a bunch of strangers and nurses. Men today were expected to be different than their dads, and I loved my wife and this was the new millennium and I didn’t want to be an asshole about all of this: so, let’s do it, Allison, breathe, honey, one ... two. Allison, that’s it, keep breathing ... great, you’re doing great.
Someone once said that giving birth was like passing a bowling ball through your anus. That’s why you’re helping your wife, Love. She’s going to go through hell. Get over yourself.
The cell phone continued its ringing. Maybe it’s Bob, I thought. Shit, better pick up.
I took a deep breath. “Hello?”
“Love, is that you?” The voice was vaguely familiar.
Yeah. Who is this?”
“Tony Valentini, your old buddy. Remember me, asshole?”
I held my breath for a moment. “Tony, oh my God, long time, no speak! What’s up?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
What’s up? I read your column, buddy, that’s what’s up. Have you lost your freakin’ mind?”
And there it was—the fatal flaw in my Steven columns: people read them. People who knew Steven read them. I had masterfully deluded myself. I decided that truthfulness was now called for.
“Yeah, if you want the truth, yes, I have lost my mind.”
“Get your ass over to Tim Hortons. Now!”
“What? Now? Tony, I can’t, Tony I—”
“Got no choice, buddy. Now.” He hung up abruptly.
Pissed off, I threw the cell onto the passenger seat. I shook my head. No, I don’t think so, Tony. You’re a ghost pretending to be Tony Valentini. But you’re not him anymore because the old Tony is dead and the new Tony is someone I don’t know. And you talk to me that way again and I’ll kick your ass.
You know how it is—sometimes your interior voice is a bit more macho than you could actually deliver.
Of course, everyone I’d once known in Hamilton was a ghost—I’d left this town seventeen years ago, and, to be honest, I never would have believed that I would move back here with my wife, six months ago on April first, of all days, and, no, the irony wasn’t lost on me.
I’d moved at the age of twenty-three to escape—a heartbreaking first-love, ex-friends, and friends I could no longer appreciate. Down East, I had earned a journalism degree from Dalhousie University. Music had been my first love, then writing, then comedy. Instead of trying to land a full-time job at a newspaper, I’d tried my hand at writing fiction, playing in bands, and doing stand-up at Yuk Yuk’s comedy club. There were tons of those across Canada, so you could go to almost any major city centre and get up on the stage for amateur night. When I started writing, I’d gone mostly freelance, selling my entertainment pieces to The Toronto Star, The Peterborough Herald, and The Globe and Mail. I’d met Allison at a dance club, the Grimy Pauper, in Toronto.
Allison was not my first love, but she became my great love. She was, I suppose, average-looking. Not a knock-out, but definitely not homely. Definitely not. In fact, when she smiled at me with that adoration radiating from her, well, I was in heaven. When we met, Allison was a virgin, and she had intended to stay that way until marriage, but she and I were naked and all over each other by the third date. It took me a couple of years to realize that I wanted to marry Allison, but she told me that she knew that I was the one after the second date. Women always seem to get these things faster than we guys do.
Allison was like ballast for me — she smoothed out the bumps in the road and settled me a bit, without being controlling or naggy. In fact, Allison was always my biggest supporter, in whatever I wanted to do. I had found my angel.
Three years ago, after more than a decade of dragging Allison from place to place, we’d married and moved into a small apartment across from the University of Toronto. I’d never felt comfortable in Toronto, but Allison didn’t want to move to Hamilton, not at first, anyway. She had a good job at University Library. Months ago, with my parents aging and wrestling with various health problems, I was able to talk her into moving back to Hamilton; pregnant, she’d finally agreed.
Ever since we’d moved back here, I’d had a fear of running into people from my past.
But everyone has ghosts, Love, I thought. You dumped friends, and they dumped you. Old band mates dumped you and you dumped them. Get over it. Even aging, sick parents are ghosts. Nothing stays the same.
But if any one person had stayed the same, or almost the same, it might be Tony Valentini. Something in his voice had sounded as it had years ago.
Maybe Tony was the only old friend, other than Steven, that I might not mind getting to know again. Like everyone else from high school, we’d drifted apart. Tony had started adulthood at age twenty, when he and Angela had had a baby boy. I’d been the best man at his wedding, but then they had their second baby and he stopped calling me and I got pissed off at that, so I stopped calling him, figuring I wasn’t important to him anymore, and then two years later I thought about calling him, but too much time had passed and I figured it would be really awkward. End of Story.
Had we grown too far apart? Would he think I was that same mangiacake who’d moved away to prove himself better than everyone else? That I’d forgotten my roots? He used to say these things to me, smirking, of course: “...too good for us, eh, Love? Gonna make something of yourself, eh? Send us a frickin’ postcard, buddy. You wait and see, man. One day you’ll come back.” I bristled, thinking about that. On the phone Tony had sounded as pissed as he had back in the day, when he’d been defending the Canadian Football League against the American Football League in our beer-soaked debate.
I was more than a little nervous going to meet Tony. If he gave me a hard time, I’d tell him off and get the hell out in one piece. There was always the possibility of using the birthing class as an excuse to leave—he was a dad, he’d have to understand.
I’d thought about ringing him up months ago, but last June I’d run into an old high school friend, Brent Carlton, at the Price Chopper Food Mart, and I’d wanted to shoot myself in the head, it was so damn uncomfortable. Whatever bond there’d been between us had only existed in Grade Eleven Machine Shop class. His personality seemed shrunken. Had he always been that dull and lifeless, I’d wondered. How had I not noticed? Run for your life, Donny. Run. And I had. First, a bogus lie that I had to pick up mother for a doctor’s appointment, then I quickly ducked into the next aisle, picking up momentum once I was out of sight, speed-walking until I was practically running to my car.
You can’t go back, a voice had said inside my head. I felt sick inside, like a loser for trying to hook up with old friends because no one else had wanted him a lifetime later. Should any of us ever be that desperate? So, after that, calling Tony had been out of the question. After my incident with Brett, I wouldn’t have picked up the phone for anybody, even if my life had depended on it.
