my early teens it became my job to deliver their food and bus their tables as they glowered and argued over their pints of Schooner lager and Labatt 50.
I should also describe Little Frankie himself. My dad was prone to both bursts of pride and fits of rage when it came to me, and his mood swings were about as predictable as a punch in the face. Part of the problem was that the Jugglers Arms had not been Frankie’s first, or even third, ambition. He had left Prince Edward Island at age twenty to pursue a series of unlikely opportunities: first a brief stint at academics (he fancied himself a scholar, despite having failed two grades); then a briefer stint in the Canadian military (he missed the Korean conflict by mere months); and finally a six-year career as a busy but unsuccessful featherweight in Halifax’s pro boxing scene (retiring, reluctantly, in 1960 after suffering his eighth concussion). He returned to the Island shortly thereafter and took a job slinging drinks at an eatery on the outskirts of Charlottetown. Despite his short stature and now cauliflowered ears, he managed to attract the affections of the woman who would become my mother — a tall, red-headed, bedizened beauty who worked alongside him as a waitress, and who was not above exploiting her Rubenesque cleavage for tips. They soon married and decided to launch their own bar together, downtown.
Problem was, they squabbled about what kind of establishment it should be. Little Frankie insisted on the name the Jugglers Arms, but because he didn’t know where the apostrophe was supposed to go, he left it off his signage completely (much to the consternation, years later, of his know-it-all son). I suppose he envisioned the place an upmarket pub where Kingsley Amis types would sit around drinking port and discussing important issues of the day. My mother disagreed. She said what tiny Charlottetown really needed was a strip club, and she was more than happy to be the Island’s first (and, if necessary, only) exotic dancer. This threw Little Frankie into a paroxysm of prudishness, and the two of them rowed and thwarted each other at every turn. Thus, with two equally far-fetched ideas about what the pub could be, the Jugglers Arms opened in the early sixties with a muddled identity, one it kept to closing day — that of a slightly seedy but loveable dump.
My mother grew deeply unhappy there, and made sure my father knew it. She began to doubt whether she’d even want to take her clothes off in front of the down-market bums the bar was attracting. She was constantly threatening to leave, and Frankie soon encouraged her to do so. Then, the unspeakable happened. Despite her best attempts at birth control, my mother fell pregnant with me in 1965. My existence proved to be the straw that crushed the camel, as the various bodily indignities of motherhood soon filled her with torrents of disgust. Shortly after my second birthday, she abandoned me and Little Frankie and fled to Montreal, where, rumour had it, she took work in a burlesque house. My father felt betrayed, naturally, and spoke ill of her at every opportunity. (Indeed, throughout my childhood she was known simply as “your nymphomaniac mother”; though, to be fair, “nymphomaniac” was how Frankie described any woman whose sexual appetites outpaced his own.) Still, this turn of fate presented my father with yet another ambition, one he declared with great drama to the pub’s slouching, indifferent regulars: I Shall Raise the Boy Myself. He grew giddy at the prospect of bringing me up the way he wanted, without feminine interference.
And I’ll give the guy credit. Despite our poverty — and we were poor, more or less, the pub falling victim to long winters of slow business and my father’s various get-rich-quick schemes — Frankie made sure to provide me with everything that a young, insatiable mind might need. When I showed an early voracity for reading, he bought me a leather-bound set of the Harvard Classics, which we displayed on a bookshelf near our large bay window overlooking old Charlottetown. I devoured these tomes, which included everything from Homer and Aesop’s Fables, to Cervantes, to various founding documents of the United States. When I went through a science phase, he got me a subscription to Scientific American; when I got hooked on journalism, he landed me a tour of the local CBC outlet. Frankie also educated me about music. While downstairs the pub played a nonsensical cocktail of honky-tonk songs and Top 40 hits, upstairs in our apartment he insisted we listen to real music, which for him meant classical. Being a barman, he was also particular about booze. While his regulars were happy to drink the swill on tap or the cheap spirits he kept behind the bar, upstairs Frankie insisted I learn the difference between a single malt and a blend, between a transcendental Gewürztraminer and a passable Chardonnay. Why did he go to such lengths? Well. It was clear he regretted not being better educated himself, and he loved living vicariously through this little sprezzatura-showing redhead he was raising. Every report card got displayed on the fridge; each academic commendation got bragged about to the pub’s staff.
Of course all this would come back to bite him in the arse; and it started when, at age eleven, I first began pointing out the missing apostrophe on his signage. “Did you know,” I said, which was how I often began sentences at that age, “that there is a typo in the pub’s name?”
“You don’t say,” he replied in his collared bar shirt, walking a keg of beer across the floor of the backroom. “Too bad you weren’t here when me and your nymphomaniac mother launched this joint. Here, grab the other end of this, would ya?” As I took one handle of the keg in both hands and we lifted together, I asked him, “Are you going to fix it?” but he answered me with a single dismissive snort. I asked again at age twelve, and age fourteen, and several times at age seventeen. By then I was reading Freud for fun and writing a monthly column on teen issues for the local rag, the Evening Patriot.
“Look,” I said to him during one particularly dead afternoon, “you can either put an apostrophe before the s or after, it doesn’t matter. Though if you choose the latter, you really need to add a second juggler to the logo.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” he said. “Philly, if I did that it’s not just the sign out front that would need to change. It’s every matchbook, every coaster, every bloody ashtray. I can’t afford to do that.”
“But it’s wrong,” I replied. “We look like illiterates.”
Frankie put both hands on the bar and leaned toward me. “Philly, Islanders don’t care about shit like that. The twenty-eight people in this town who know where apostrophes go would never drink in this dive anyway.” He went on to remind me that upstairs in the apartment he and I could gab at length about the intricacies of the English language, but down here in the pub it was strictly business. He said that when I was on his clock, I should spend less time jaw jacking about typos and more time keeping up with food and drink orders. And then he said something hurtful about the piss-poor job I did cleaning the bathrooms the previous night.
That was the other thing about Frankie. For all his love for me, for all his pride in my “big brain,” he had a preternatural talent for pointing out my incompetency when it came to manual labour. I chalked it up to him being a boxer: he always knew how to hit you where it hurt. The irony was, when Frankie felt I was getting a bit too “uppity” with my booksmarts, he would take me down a peg by intimating that it was my fault the pub was struggling as much as it was. (And true, I did lack a certain acumen: by age sixteen I had read and grasped the entirety of Shakespeare, but still couldn’t settle the till properly, or help the dray men park their trucks, or remember how to reassemble a bar tap after cleaning it, no matter how many times Frankie roared instructions and belittled my efforts.) He loved the sight of me reading and doing homework, but more generalized idleness incensed him. He said that a real man didn’t just loaf around. If a man wasn’t working, or thinking about work, there was something profoundly flawed about his behaviour. Indeed, Frankie was forever on the lookout for people who were getting through life more easily than we were; and for all his parental illusions, he was, in the end, just another stressed-out entrepreneur, and my self-esteem was the furthest thing from his mind.
And so who filled in the gaps? As I mentioned, much of my upbringing fell to the patria potestas of my father’s regulars. Oh God, they were awful men — beaten down by their hardscrabble lives on Prince Edward Island; by their grinding blue-collar jobs; by the dull, interminable winters; and, most specifically, by the fishwives they regretted
