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As we stepped through the front door of my parents’ vault, the waft of sizzling bacon and eggs permeated the air. Saturday is breakfast for lunch, I remembered. The sound of bagpipes shook the glassware in the china cabinet. Auld Reekie Scottish Dance Band. I’d been raised on that music.
We had stopped at Opie’s Bakery on Concession Street to pick up some Scottish baps. The boy inside me needed to come here and feel a piece of home.
“How are you doing, Mum?” I called from the hallway. We slipped off our shoes. Mum’s tired voice came from the kitchen. “No’ good.”
Allison and I looked at each other in consternation. My folks were at the age where their health was precarious, at best.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, walking up the three steps from the hallway and into the kitchen. Mum stood leaning on a walker next to the stove, a pan of sizzling bacon in one hand. “Mum, what are you doing out of bed? It’s too hard on your knees, let Dad cook the lunch.”
She scowled and shook her head. “Ach, he’s at it again.”
“What?” asked Allison, innocently.
I put my hand on Mum’s shoulder and passed a quick look of warning to Allison. “I’ll go down and see him, OK, Mum?” I skillfully distracted my mother from her worries about Dad. “Allison, why don’t you put your feet up? You need to rest, honey. Mum, do you have a glass of milk for Allison?”
My mother sprang into action. She would certainly never let her pregnant daughter-in-law want for anything while under her roof. As I headed into the basement, I heard Mum quizzing Allison about the crazies outside our house. Allison was careful to mention nothing about our recent separation and reunion.
The old teenager feelings of shame and anger flooded back, as I headed down the steps towards Dad’s secret lair, coined “the Inner Sanctum” by Mum, a room under the stairs. Ducking down because of the five-foot ceiling, I could see the top of Dad’s head behind the layers of criss-crossing strings where he’d clothes-pinned lottery tickets. Thick blue cigarette smoke and an old beige carpet full of cigarette burns. The dilapidated old oak desk stacked with hundreds of old lottery tickets that Dad had labelled with strange, secretive markings, dating as far back as the Seventies.
“Dad? How’s the Breaking of the Code going?” I hesitantly asked.
He sat up from his desk, and pulled down a string of tickets so he could see me over it. He humphed and then let go of the string, the tickets bobbing up and down. His face was mostly hidden again.
I decided to try again. “Dad, how about leaving this for now? It’s unhealthy as hell down here—all this smoke and darkness. Come on upstairs and we’ll have a cuppa on the deck. Okay?” Typically, there was no response. That sort of thing had frustrated me all of my life.
Dad had a big head. He wore the same thick-lensed glasses that he had in the Sixties. He’d been follically-challenged from Day One, but there were still some tufts of fading red hair above his ears. A filterless Export A cigarette stuck to his lip like an appendage, darting in and out of his mouth as he spoke. On the floor around him, empty McEwans beer cans littered the floor. A 1972 calendar from back hame in Scotland was still pinned to a wall stud.
“So, are you getting close, Dad?”
“Blether, blether, you’re still a windbag, son. And I know why you’re down here.” He continued to tinker away, not even bothering to look up.
“Dad, you’ve been at this for years, but you’ve never won the jackpot. What makes you still think you’re going to crack the Code?”
Dad’s jaw went up in defiance. “What makes you think I won’t? Eh? I’m getting closer every year. I have predicted six wins over the years.” Dad didn’t go on to mention that he had blown his own system by forgetting to buy the tickets on those six occasions. It was too bitter a memory.
“Dad, it’s all random. There’s no skill in it.” Oops. In our house, this sort of talk was considered heresy.
“Weesht, man! You’re brainwashed, Donny. There’s fixes in all things, including sports. Why, there’s the trots, the slots, and lottery tickets. You know as well as I do, the casinos program their slot machines to pay out every so many pulls of the lever.”
He pushed past me and went over to the old Sears stereo console, searching the collection of LPs and pulling out a record. “Sergio Mendes—brilliant! Why don’t you write about him in your column, Donny? That man was an underrated genius.”
“Or write about the crazy old Scot trying to crack the lottery code,” I said, under my breath.
“I heard that, Sonny Jim! Bite your tongue, or I’ll bash out your teeth.” That was the sort of affectionate talk that I had grown up with. Charming. I made a mental note to myself never to threaten to bash out my child’s teeth.
“Anyway, you’re one to talk. That rubbish column of yours! Pah! What the hell did that lazy bastard Steven McCartney ever offer the world? He was no good in the day when you were chummin’ wi’ him. Another one of your Eddie Hascal buddies, all nice as pie on the outside but phoney inside. Should’ve given them all a Glasgow kiss when I had the chance.”
Since Dad was in a mean mood, I decided to jolly him up. I put on the Sergio Mendes album.
In an instant mood change (one of the things that always astounded me about him), he danced and shimmied, snapping his fingers. My fondest memories of childhood were the dance parties on New Year’s Eve, hosted by my folks in our basement.
I looked around the old wood-panelled basement, and at the black marks on the door where I used to drill pucks. The dart board, ping-pong table, the old stereo. Everything was still there. But my folks hadn’t had a party down here in ten years. Water stains marked some of the ceiling tiles. On the window sill, spiders had strung webs between the bowling trophies. Everything seemed so small to me now. I’d turned these memories over in my mind one too many times, and doing that had sucked the magic out of them. Now, standing here, the basement seemed a dead place.
Sighing deeply, I noticed that the window and door were wired. Attached to the wires was a huge megaphone.
“I like your new security device,” I said, trying to sound positive.
“Aye, I’m ready for the intruders now,” Dad said. He started to puff a little bit from the exertion of his dancing. “Ach, I don’t have the wind I used to, lad. Age doesn’t come by itself.” He turned to me. “I never said this, son, but I’m glad you don’t smoke. It’s a killer.”
I nodded. I’d tried in the past to get him to quit, but he’d just go inward and not say a peep. When Mum would berate him for it, he’d slip out to his garage-cave to get away from her and smoke his brains out. Smoking was not only a physical addiction for Dad, but a highly emotional one, as well. I imagined that it kept his demons at bay. The demon thing seemed to run in the family.
He slung his arm around me, still panting. “I don’t like to tell you how to run your life, son, but maybe you’re not meant to be a columnist. When you were a lad, you were a great organizer, you know. You could whip together a hockey game on a dime, and you were a Sixer in Scouts. Not only that, but you were Captain of your house league hockey team. I always imagined you in a management-type job, Donny. When you’re ready to come down from the clouds, you can settle down and find yourself a real job. Crack the whip, Donny.” He shook a fist in the air. “Aye, here comes Donny Love! Get crackin’, everyone!” He laughed and wheezed.
Ah, it was the same old message of disapproval of my choices in life. The only thing that I’d ever done that my parents approved of wholeheartedly was to marry Allison. I had long since given up trying to defend myself in these moments. “We’ll see, Dad.”
“Care for a beer?”
I grimaced. “It’s a little early, Dad.”
“Enough with the faces, son—it’s Scottish beer. You can drink that any time of day.”
Jesus, you’re so hardcore.
With great stealth, Dad placed two cans of McEwans on the tiki bar. As he always did when he wanted to keep his basement shenanigans to himself, he covered up his beer cracking sounds by singing The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond. Mum knew his old trick, and if you were upstairs and he started singing, she would shake her head, scowl, and make her trademark gasping sound.
“I heard that Archie!” Mum called down sharply.
“Right, get to it, son, before the auld lady pulls the plug on our party.”
“Right, it’s out!” Mum called from the top of the stairs, the bacon and eggs aroma reaching us.
“Coming, Mother, coming!” Dad said. “Ach, cut short again,” he muttered. He tipped the beer to his mouth and drank the contents in three gorging swallows.
Always impatient, Mum called down again. “Hurry up before it gets cold!”
“We heard you the first time, woman!” Dad cried, his face turning red. “Now, wheesht!” He turned to me with a wink. “It’s a good thing I’m not a violent man.” And up we went, as ordered.
