was the Man,” they sang in baritone.
Falsetto: “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”
Baritone: “Get ready to be saved!”
In the restaurant where I met my father that same night, I told him I didn’t belong with those people.
“But you could,” he said. “I could see you with them.”
Eventually, he gave up and boisterously told crime stories. This was how his entire life seemed, as if he tried to get it right but failed, and then let out his wildness, showing everyone that he was happy the way he was.
Weeks passed, and I left. I travelled the continent, went broke, got a job, started college, and two years later he filed for bankruptcy and took his life. I often thought back to that strange Christmas Eve dinner, uncertain as to whether he had been trying to keep me close or save me from himself by giving me to the kind of family he wished he could have provided. But now, so many years later, in my memory of our conversation that Christmas Eve, I am the adult and he is child, looking to me for my reaction, to see if I liked the family he found, and then, not receiving my approval, returning to his old self.
My last image of him is from when he dropped me off at my car. As I stood in the parking lot, he laughed and jammed his accelerator, spraying slush and oily grit so that I had to cover my face. He made it seem as if he was the one leaving. He raced into traffic, cars braking and swerving, and was gone from sight.
Born on the Fourth of July
(2013)
The film that I most remember seeing I have virtually no memory of. I was fifteen, in rural Virginia, alone in the trailer where my family lived, and I noticed that someone had rented Born on the Fourth of July. It was on the VCR, and having nothing to do, I put the cassette in, turned the TV on, and sat on the couch.
Everything about that day was odd as I recall it, and there’s no way to explain it without going back five years, to when my parents separated, when we lived in Vancouver, B.C. One morning, instead of driving us to school, my mother dropped us off at her friend’s house. She returned several hours later, her van packed with everything we owned, and she drove us to Virginia. Those five years that I didn’t see my father, we were poor, sleeping first on couches at my aunt’s house and then in a trailer park, before my mother found me an alcoholic stepfather, who enjoyed proving that I was no match for a former soldier. I spent a lot of time in school detention, reading voraciously and dreaming of travelling the continent.
The father I found again when I was fifteen wanted me to respect him for the business he’d built, but I let him know how pathetic I thought selling fish was and insisted he tell me about his crimes. He told stories of heists and fights he won with his fists or a baseball bat or by breaking a man’s leg. He’d been stabbed himself, had had all of his limbs broken, had been in the penitentiary with rapists, with men who had killed women or bitten their nipples off. His job in prison had been to serve food, and he told me that when the rapists were let out of their cages to eat, he spit on them and their food. He said was different, that bank robbers were respected. And yet if bank robbers were respectable, his new seafood business wasn’t, I quickly learned. He bought salmon illegally from Indigenous people and had me do a pick up from them on a back road at night, a thousand dollars in my jeans pocket. When I thought I was a badass, he gave me a baseball bat and sent me to collect money, just to prove I couldn’t. A girl hardly older than I was and hugely pregnant answered the door, and I couldn’t go through with it. Though he was fifty-one, he had a thing for teenage girls and left me alone to live with one of them for a month on the property where he had one of his businesses. She and I became confidants and lovers, and when he found out, he threatened to kill me. He then told me that he was taking her to her family. He drove her into the country with everything she owned in a black garbage bag.
When I eventually moved back in with my mother, she lived with my stepfather and two siblings in a trailer in the forest, next to a house that was under construction. The day after my return, the sun shone in the windows, lighting up the white walls of the narrow rooms. Everyone was gone – I didn’t know where – and I felt like an intruder, as if they should have stuck around for a day or two just to get a sense of me, to see that I wasn’t the same person they’d known. But they’d left, and I’d woken up late, and in the bright trailer I saw Born on the Fourth of July on the VCR and I put it in.
I have vague flashes of the beginning. Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic soaked in the rain and then dancing at the prom. I didn’t care for Tom Cruise, not since Top Gun, when every girl I’d liked had been too busy fantasizing about him to notice me, so I had no great expectations. I vaguely recall war scenes, confusion, him shooting a fellow soldier and later getting shot in a field, but from there everything is blank but for a few crisp images and a sense of discomfort. Why was I watching a movie about a man in a wheelchair? When was he going to heal and stand up and go back to being a hero? Wasn’t this a war movie? Among the images I recall are a bleeding sex worker, a desert, a roadside brawl between two men in wheelchairs. There was a confession at some point.
Now, twenty-three years later, I don’t know what I remember and what I’m making up. I have to close my eyes and work outward from an image, each one anchored by strong feelings of unease. The movie did nothing that a movie was supposed to. I didn’t feel triumphant but disgusted. Then, when it was over and the TV was off, I sat on the couch, the room obscenely bright, no curtains in the windows.
I was afraid someone was going to come home and find me there, and know, just from seeing me, everything I’d done. But the feeling shifted, and as I tried to make sense of the movie, I understood that everything was going to be all right. There were places to put all that I was holding – fucking my father’s teenage girlfriend, seeing his enraged face, or the face of the pregnant girl through a crack in the door, over the chain, or my crimes, their sheer stupidity that I’d known even as I was committing them, like breaking into a neighbour’s house and stealing knives and spare change. I had no words, no real knowledge that I could have shared, just a sense of space.
It takes dozens of revelations, if not hundreds of them, for any type of awareness to begin, and I would find that same feeling in novels and films and art, over and over. Of course, I wasn’t finished doing idiotic things or hurting people, but I found forgiveness in unflinching honesty. That someone could make such a film created more space in the world. It took everything out of boxes and pulled down walls, my child’s mind looking for the fairy tale, the love story, the good soldier who will become a hero, only to become an entirely different kind from any I could then recognize. I’d wanted the movie to tell me that everything was going to be okay in the usual ways, but it told me just that in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
I have never watched it again, or read the book, maybe not wanting to lose the clarity of what I felt. I have only read Ron Kovic’s Wikipedia page, learning that he wrote the book manically in the fall of 1974, around the time I was born. I can’t analyze the film in any technical way or judge its merits. But it did what I’m not sure art could ever do for me again, at a moment when only art could.
Disobedient Ancestors
(2009)
My father was born in 1938 in Rivière-au-Tonnerre, Québec, a town on the north coast of the St. Lawrence and an eleven-hour drive northeast from Montréal on modern highways. There the river joins the gulf and is over 112 kilometres wide. In the early twentieth century, ferries plied the seaway during the few clement months before ice choked it and small airplanes were needed to carry men across to timber camps. Blizzards closed the coastal roads and the mail made it through in a truck with caterpillar treads,
