Читать книгу I Am Nobody - Greg Gilhooly - Страница 8

ONE

JUST A BOY

I AM A CHILD of the Canadian prairies, born in Winnipeg in 1964 in the middle of a very cold winter while my dad, choosing his first love over the waiting room, circled the hospital in his car, listening to the radio for hockey scores from the Innsbruck Winter Olympics.

“Winnipeg” comes from the Cree word win-nipi which, roughly translated, means “muddy water,” an apt metaphor for a story about sexual abuse. And with a population of about 750,000, it’s more of a big small city than a small big one. When I was growing up, it was Canada’s fourth-largest city, but having gone through some very tough times it has now slipped to eighth. It is solidly working class, it can sometimes seem a little unsophisticated to outsiders, and its charms can remain somewhat hidden. But if you look just a little deeper, you will quickly see that it is also a magical place with so much to offer, a place of character, one you would never leave if you could just take the time to get to know it a bit better.

Winnipeg is the quintessential Canadian city, a place known and loved by people who have lived there but misunderstood and underappreciated by those who haven’t. Winnipeg is, geographically speaking, where east meets west in Canada. It’s the kind of place that in winter it isn’t just cold but cold-cold. If you’ve moved away and then come back home to visit, you’ll think you remember how cold it can get but then realize as you take your first step out of the airport, and your lungs immediately freeze on taking your first breath, that you have forgotten how cold it really gets. Every day in the winter the newscasts give the number of seconds in which exposed flesh will freeze. Movies and stories about climbing Everest present the windy, freezing “death zone” near the top as a serious problem, but this is what Winnipeggers deal with for weeks on end every year. We Winnipeggers are tough. We walk in the freezing cold because we have what it takes to survive in Winnipeg, we prepare and we wear the proper clothing. We embrace the cold because that’s the type of people we are.

Not everybody is strong enough to handle Winnipeg. Its only hill is artificial, a park created on top of an old garbage dump that is a great place to toboggan in the winter. Winnipeg has amazing summers, but they last for only a few very short months. The freeze-thaw cycle is so intense that the roads are continually destroyed by potholes that form when the ground warms again in spring. Winnipeg’s mosquitos are so bad that even in these enlightened times most people are in favor of aggressive chemical fogging, if only to allow us to kid ourselves into believing that the problem isn’t as bad as it really is. And as for things to do in The Peg, a prominent professional football player once said that the city was a nice place to live but that he needed to be traded away because he could only take his kids to the zoo so many times after he’d run out of things to do with them.

But Winnipeg was a fantastic place to be a kid. With its long winters and outdoor natural ice to play on, it was an especially amazing place to be a young hockey player. Like all who grew up there, I am a proud Winnipegger, and we share a secret world with knowing references to the special ties that 7-11s, Slurpees, The Guess Who, BTO, socials, Neil Young, “going to the lake,” Sals, orbit, K-tel, the BDI, bumper shining, garbage mitts, and Sylvia Kuzyk all have to our city. A fatwa on any non-Pegger who may ever speak ill of my hometown.

I see a lot of myself in Winnipeg. It’s the place where I grew up, where I first went to school, where I learned who I was, where I became a young boy with big dreams, where I learned to laugh and play. It’s the place I have in my mind when I look back on my life, the place where, as Garrison Keillor says, everybody was good-looking and above-average. And I have so many good memories of Winnipeg, of my house, my school, my friends, my little corner of the world where nothing went wrong, where all of us kids rode our bikes to the park around the corner, where we went down by Sturgeon Creek back before it was dammed and played in the mud, where we played in the snow, where we set up our pick-up baseball games and the older kids taught us younger ones how to properly taunt the batter. It is that place we all have in our memories when life was perfect and we were kings, that we know we were a part of yet never really existed.

I grew up in Winnipeg and I love it so much, but I don’t live there anymore. I love it from afar now because what happened there makes it very difficult for me to return. I want to go home. I make plans time and again to go back. But I can’t just click my heels together and make it all better because the storm, well, when it blew, it blew hard, and Dorothy sure wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

MY PARENTS BOTH grew up in Saskatchewan. My mom, Patricia, came from a farm family that eventually acquired some property outside of the town of Pense. My dad, Michael, was from a family of athletes who, after leaving Ireland and landing in Montreal, made their way west to Regina, leaving behind a good portion of the clan in the jails of what is now known as Thunder Bay. After marrying in Regina, my parents set out for the relatively bright lights and big city of Winnipeg just in time to have me.

Eventually we became a normal suburban family of five. I was the eldest of three children; my sister, Dawn, was born a year after me; and my brother, Doug, was born a year after that. We lived in a modest bungalow built the year I was born in a modest baby-boomer subdivision where the streets all had alliterative names: Amarynth, Alcott, Antoine, Alguire. It was decidedly upper-lower-middle class, but back then nobody really knew how the rich lived because, unlike today, we had only a small television window into their world, and we didn’t know anybody rich, so we never thought we were doing without. My parents were entirely average, and there was absolutely nothing that would have caused anybody to give them a second look. That was just fine by them and fine by us kids as well.

My dad dropped out of high school after Grade Eight and then immediately took a job loading and unloading trucks with the Regina branch of Northern Electric Distributing. Eventually he moved up the ranks and became a salesman of electrical supplies to contractors. He stayed with Northern Electric and its distribution subsidiary Nedco until he retired. Think about that. He dropped out of school, never went to high school, took a menial job, and stayed with the company virtually forever. The thing is, I’m pretty sure that he hated every minute of his job from the day he started until just before the end, when he was finally given the chance to manage other people. He excelled at that. All his working life he had been a square peg in a round hole until it was almost too late. He was a large man with a soft smile. People liked him. He was gentle and kind-hearted, and yet he understood how to get things done and was firm when necessary. Turns out he had a great touch with people and was an amazing manager, a leader, somebody people wanted to perform for, somebody who was both liked and respected and who people didn’t want to let down.

Despite having only a Grade Eight education, he was far smarter than many people I went to school with or later worked with. And that is something I have always carried with me. It’s always a fifty-fifty chance whether the people leading the meeting are any smarter than the people who will come in hours later to clean up the offices after them. I’ve seen this firsthand over and over again during my career. But I went to school and worked with many who seemed to view themselves as better than others. No one should ever presume they are smarter or know more than anybody else. No one.

My mom was a high school graduate and thus the educated one in the family. She went on to work as a lab technician, earning a certificate but never completing a university degree. She was naturally bright and had been very attractive in her day, though the title of Miss Pense, Saskatchewan, which she earned one year at the town’s summer fair, may not have been the most hotly contested pageant. Her sense of humor showed itself every once in a while, but for the most part she carried with her a darkness that suggested she had seen a bit too much of the world to ever be truly happy. She never seemed to be present in the moment but instead always had her eye on something that could or was about to go wrong. Picnics were always on the verge of being infested by bugs, candy was just about to be choked on, rain was just about ready to fall.

Our family struggled financially. Mom and Dad hid it very well, but I would sometimes take phone messages from collection agencies and would see bills that were long overdue. We were by no means destitute and always had the basics, but I know that it must have been tough for my parents. I remember having to get up from the old beaten-up piano I loved so much so that it could be taken away and sold for money we needed to get me a new pair of skates. And, when I finally became a lawyer and applied for a credit card, I was initially refused because Amex thought I was my father, who had numerous unpaid debts.

Sports had been a way of life for the Gilhooly family for several generations. My grandfather and great-uncles played professional football and hockey. My father grew up playing hockey in the Regina Pats organization, right beside future NHL stars like Bill Hicke and Red Berenson. One of my dad’s favorite possessions was a team picture from when he was an assistant captain. He has blood all down the front of his jersey and is smiling, just behind a young Berenson, whom he protected. In short, my dad followed in the Gilhooly tradition and loved my mom, hockey, and the Saskatchewan Roughriders, although not necessarily in that order.

So it was not surprising that I started skating just before my fourth birthday and was participating in local organized hockey by the time I was five. I started my hockey life as a very large forward. I was so big for my age that I stuck out in the crowd. At the local park I was once mistaken for being a somewhat slow pre-teen when in fact I was only five or six. I was a very good skater, given my early start, and that combination of size and ability was a recipe for a disaster in the early 1970s, when kids of all ages, shapes, and sizes were still body-checking each other. And that’s where the story really begins, when I became a goalie not by choice but as a result of an incident at an outdoor rink that showed both the good and the bad in my father.

We played most of our hockey at outdoor rinks. My local community club was Heritage-Victoria, and that’s where I was first signed up to play. It’s in the west end of Winnipeg, in the center of a group of very modest suburban homes built near the end of the baby boom. Outdoor hockey in the winter meant kids played while parents huddled on snowbanks, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to keep their feet from freezing. Even back then the parents were at least as engaged as the kids playing, if not more so. The problem is that when they’re young, kids can be of wildly different sizes and abilities, and that can impact a parent’s state of mind, especially if your kid isn’t as big as or as good as somebody else’s and you’re the type who wishes otherwise.

At one of the games I inadvertently checked a boy on the other team. At least, I’m pretty sure my bodycheck wasn’t intentional, but since I was only six or seven years old I can’t in all honesty be sure. Afterward, his mother spat on me as I came off the ice.

When my dad saw it happen, he froze. He later told me that the others who saw it all froze too, as if what had just happened was beyond comprehension. There I was, a little kid all bundled up to play hockey outside in the freezing cold, coming off the ice to walk through the snow and into the clubhouse to warm up and take my skates off and get my boots on and go home, with half-frozen spit all down the front of my hockey sweater.

In the aftermath, my dad showed both the best and worst in him. The best was that he immediately de-escalated the situation. The worst was that he didn’t stand up for me but instead more passively worked toward a less confrontational resolution that was not in my best interests. He immediately grabbed my arm and walked me into the dressing room, where he took off my skates, warmed my feet, and kept telling me how well I had played. Then he took me straight to the car and we went home. I didn’t know what to think of what the woman had done to me, but I remember that my dad made me feel good. By the time we were home it felt as if nothing had happened. He did an amazing job. But at the same time he kind of didn’t.

Today there would be lawsuits, calls for suspensions, and media coverage. Back then there was nothing. And my dad’s next step prevented the situation from ever happening to me again. Maybe, he suggested, I would like to try being a goalie? Maybe I could try it out next time?

And with that suggestion—though I had no concept of this at the time—the worst in him came through, his passivity in the face of another’s wrong. Why did he think that I needed to make a change? Why wasn’t I free to play hockey without having to change positions? Did I deserve to have an adult spit on me? Had I somehow done something wrong? Are adults allowed to do things like that to kids?

But at the time, the proposition of changing positions seemed like an opportunity. As a kid, there was nothing more exciting than putting on all of that cool goalie equipment, so I didn’t exactly feel as if I was missing out on anything, and I probably thought this might actually be even more fun. The fact that I could skate well gave me an advantage in the position, and kids like to do things they are good at. So just like that, I was a goalie. And looking back on it, I guess it would have been difficult for my dad to be among the other parents while his ginormous kid on the ice was with the other kids, knocking them around, skating circles around them. Now that I know more about my dad, I believe that pulling me—and himself—out of that spotlight and not being the center of that ongoing conflict would have suited him just fine.

And he couldn’t have predicted what would happen next, when things really started to happen. Because I could skate and was large for my age at a time when the worst skater usually became goalie, I had that incredible advantage in the position. Nobody figured out until years later that given the importance of the position, the better athletes should be made goalies. I moved up a year to play with older boys and then was advanced even further to our area hockey team. As far as I was concerned, it was as if the spitting had never happened, and I couldn’t have been happier with my new place in hockey. It’s only when I look back on it that I wish my dad had stood up for me and my right to play the game in whichever position I wanted.

HOCKEY’S PLACE IN Canadian society has been well documented. My first real brush with that zeitgeist was while playing for Heritage-Victoria at age nine in a league that featured several boys who went on to become professional players. Playing in the area league championship gave us two chances to defeat our bitter rivals, Kirkfield-Westwood. I know how funny that sounds, having a bitter rival at age nine, but at the time we were living the dream and hockey was everything to us. Spring was coming and there was that certain smell in the humid air, a smell that means two things in Canada: summer is coming and playoff hockey is upon us. This was back when most hockey was still played outside, so because the ice was starting to melt during the day, our games were scheduled long after the sun had gone down at times that seemed ridiculously late in the evening given our ages. If we won the first game, it was over—we were champions. If we lost, we still had a chance the next night to win in a winner-take-all game.

All I can remember is the last part of the first game, a game we lost. Do I remember anything at all about the second game, the game we won to advance to the Winnipeg finals, the celebration, the awards, the party afterwards? No. The only thing I remember is that we lost the first game on a very controversial late goal. And the only reason I remember that is because of what the adults did.

There was a play around my net. The referee blew his whistle and then pandemonium erupted—screaming, yelling, allegations that the referee was blind, a complete idiot. The game was stopped, but then everything quieted down after the referee went to the benches and explained to the coaches what had happened. The goal was finally counted and put on the scoresheet, a face-off took place at center ice, and shortly after that the whistle was blown to end the game. We had lost and had to play another game. To everybody watching outside that cool spring night, it looked like we had been ripped off. Except there were two people who knew for sure that our bitter rivals had scored on us—me and the referee. Because I told him.

The shot had come in hard and off the ice. It looked like I had made a great save, blocking it with my glove and then smothering it. Except that when I went down to smother it in the crush of players crashing in around the net (maybe crashing the net is bit of an overstatement, since we were just little kids, but it remains epic in my mind), I nudged the puck over the line as I covered it. Even the other team didn’t know they had scored. But the referee, standing in perfect position, thought he had seen what I knew had happened. He skated over to me to get the puck and said he couldn’t see for sure and asked me if the puck had gone in. I told him it had. And with that, he signaled a goal and a face-off at center ice. And in doing so, it was if he had started a war.

Now, understand what was at stake here. We’re talking the highest level of competitive hockey for nine- and ten-year-olds, so of course that meant hockey scholarships, agents, pro hockey careers, entire futures, right? You would have thought so given how the adults acted. In the midst of the outrage, the referee skated over and told both coaches that the goalie had told him it was a goal. All the other players on the benches heard this, and all the players on the ice who had followed the referee looking for an explanation heard this. I only found this out after the game. I was not a popular person. And on the way home in the car, my dad and I had a conversation that I didn’t understand.

“Nice game. Are you tired?”

“No. Why is everybody mad at me? Why don’t they like me anymore?”

“Well, you’re at an age now and you’re playing at a level where it wasn’t up to you to do the referee’s job for him. You don’t have to tell him that the puck went in if he asks you.”

I was confused by everything I had seen that night, by how the adults had carried on at the rink, by what my dad had told me on our way home. And that’s all that I would have taken with me from that year of hockey, that would be all I would have remembered from the glorious Heritage-Victoria Olympic Nines of 1972–73, except that something else happened later that night. After I had gone to bed, and while I was lying there alone in the almost dark, looking at the shadows of my hockey posters and thinking about the game, trying but failing to fall asleep, I heard my dad’s footsteps come down the stairs toward my room. He knocked at the door, opened it a bit, and stuck his head in.

“Greg, are you still up?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“You did the right thing tonight telling the ref. I’m proud ofyou.”

“Thanks.”

“You OK?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Goodnight. Good game. Goodnight.”

He closed my bedroom door and went back upstairs. That’s the last thing I remember about that night, and the only thing I remember about that entire year of hockey.

I CONTINUED TO progress quickly in hockey. By 1975, when I was eleven, I began playing for the St. James Canadians at what today would be considered the AAA level. I eventually became one of a small group of players in the city who played at that level in every year of eligibility without ever being cut. I was usually at or near the top of our league statistically in “goals against average” while playing on a team that often finished only in the middle of the standings. As I moved through the ranks of age-group hockey, I was becoming known outside of my local area and was being scouted and recruited for both junior and college hockey teams.

But I wasn’t close to being the best athlete in my family. My brother, Doug, was blessed with a remarkable physical make-up and coordination, the kind of guy who later in life could pick up a set of golf clubs after not having played in a year or two and score in the mid-70s. And my sister, Dawn, blew us both away by becoming a nationally ranked swimmer, a national age group record holder, and later a champion triathlete.

Yet, while all three of us seemingly had a common bond through sports, something that would connect us and bring out all of the emotional support that a functioning family needs to provide its members, that wasn’t the case. I was always on my own as the eldest, while Dawn and Doug were more of a team. They were simply naturally more comfortable with each other, they were more fun to be around, and they were cooler kids at school. Unlike me, they had many friends. Me, when I was young I was always a little different, off by myself, intellectually a bit older than my peers and with different interests.

All three of us were always straight-A students, but I wasn’t just a straight-A student, I was a straight-A-virtually-perfect student. I could tell that I was ahead of the rest when my kindergarten teacher let me lead the flashcard vocabulary program. She had figured out on the first day that I could read all of the words, pronounce them correctly, and give their proper meanings.

Not only that, but I completely kicked ass at nap time.

The next year I was dragged out of my class to perform a reading test for another teacher who had heard about me. I became a bit of a circus act, and I was increasingly asked to solve puzzles or answer questions on command for others to show just how smart I was. But I also had a most amazing teacher, Ms. Belding, who always made time for me. She took me aside and set me up with my own academic program. That elementary school of mine—Arthur Oliver—is long gone, but I hope she isn’t.

Ms. Belding was the perfect teacher for me because she kept challenging me while encouraging me. She started giving me my own schoolwork during class. I loved it. I was getting from her what I wasn’t getting at home: somebody who understood me and my need for more. And while schools now rarely advance young children ahead of their natural grade because they better understand the social and psychological risks this presents to students not old enough to interact appropriately with older classmates, she and the rest of the staff at my school only ever did what everyone thought at that time was best for me.

It wasn’t long before external educators were showing up at school and I was being pulled out of class to be tested by strangers.

“Greg, today we have something special set up. Don’t worry. It will be fun. Here, come with me, we’re going down to the office to meet somebody.”

And with that, I got up and went with Ms. Belding, the class snickering behind us as she held my hand, oblivious to my immense crush on her.

I was introduced to a woman who was pleasant yet who also seemed overly serious about what we were about to do. I was tested on a set of materials, with blocks, math puzzles, timed tasks to perform, language puzzles, things like that. At one point she broke into a wide smile and thereafter was more akin to a best friend. She told me that I was the first person she had tested who had managed to solve one particular puzzle.

About a week later, the same scene played out. I asked why I had to do it all over again and was told that they wanted to make sure that my score really was what it was. All I know is that the next week I was moved up a grade. A week later, I was at the top of that grade too.

I was “academically gifted,” as they say, and if I in any way make this out to be a potential weakness I also understand how that will come across. I did well at school and was moved up a grade and probably could have been moved up a few more. I was a parent’s dream. I was, to anybody looking at me from the outside, a massive success. How could any of this in any way ever prove to be a problem?

Today, children are rarely accelerated through the school system ahead of their age group as it is better understood now that school is as much about life as it is about education. School is about learning the basics, learning how to learn, learning how to socialize, and gaining the ability and confidence to facilitate your own development. If you aren’t developing emotionally as well as academically, you’re in a very dangerous place. And with all that was going on, I was in that dangerous place, an isolating place.

When I moved ahead in hockey, at least I had my school friends. When everyone figured out I needed more in school, they reasoned I could deal with it because I was already playing sports with older kids. Except, by moving me up a year in school, they took me away from the very group of kids who were keeping me socially integrated at my emotional level. As large as I was physically when I was young, I was not an emotionally strong child. I was not ready to live in a world where my hockey and school peers were all older and more emotionally mature.

Because of my size, I wasn’t exactly a normal-looking kid. I was the one in the center of the back row in all the school pictures, the kid with his head sticking up while his neck sits next to the smiling faces on either side of him. Everywhere I went I felt as if I didn’t belong, and that was imprinted on me at a very early age. Emotionally, I was a gentle soul, very much like my dad in that regard, though fortunately I had also acquired my mom’s aggression, which gave me a drive he never had. Emotionally and socially I was a late bloomer. Although physically large, I was very late to reach puberty. And because I was already finding it difficult to fit in, the last thing I wanted was to look different, to actually be different. Yet I was different. I kept growing and growing, I started stumbling over my limbs, I started to gain weight as my body anticipated a puberty that just never seemed to kick in. It was a very difficult time for me. I was a giant with the voice of a choir boy and an athlete who was now bumbling and having to work hard just to keep up at the back of the pack while running laps or doing other training drills that I had once led.

After having started out as very athletic and extremely coordinated, I went through several years of being very tall but also chubby and somewhat uncoordinated. I struggled to keep pace with my height and lingering fat, and had a body composition I thought would never change. Yet, while I was tripping over my own legs, I was still able to fight through the extra weight and keep succeeding at hockey at the highest levels as patient coaches could see in me both my natural talent and my willingness to work at least as hard as the hardest worker on the team.

By age fourteen I was again truly becoming an athlete. I was active in football and other sports besides hockey and had no difficulty excelling at school while keeping up an extensive list of extracurricular activities.

But a disconnect between the reality of who I was and who I thought I was had been cemented. The negative image I had of myself from those difficult times stayed with me longer than it should have. Further, that image, formed by others too, probably stayed with them longer than it should have.

I had just turned fourteen and was away at a hockey tournament in Thunder Bay, Ontario. One afternoon, we had nothing to do between games and were hanging around in one of our hotel rooms. Somebody came up with the idea of having a push-up contest. There had been a time, when I was ten or eleven, when doing even just a handful of push-ups would have been difficult, if not impossible. I tried my best to get out of it, to hide, but when you’re my size (I was by then well over six feet tall) there is nowhere to hide. Eventually, near the end, I was called forward and forced to do my push-ups. To this day, I remember how shocked we all were when I finished second to Scotty Allan, a physical specimen of perfection.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, as I’d been quietly working very hard downstairs at home by myself to get my body into shape.

Less than a year later, our team was in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a tournament, and one of the billets we were staying with had a weight room set up in his basement. A couple of guys on our team who were there couldn’t believe it when I went over to the weight bench and effortlessly pressed the entire set. And the thing is, they were shocked that I even went over to the bench, let alone pushed the weights with ease.

Barry Melville, one of our hockey coaches when I was eleven and twelve, later saw me at one of my football games and didn’t realize it was me. Once he found out, all he could comment on was my changed shape. He had been so patient with me, so encouraging, so dedicated to helping me improve, and I felt proud to make him smile at the athlete I had become.

I was also lucky to have had a remarkable gym teacher, Mr. Warkentin, in Grades Seven through Nine at Ness Junior High School. He was always so kind, patient, and supportive of me as I grew into my body. There was nobody happier than he was as I went from being a kid who couldn’t hold myself up to the chinning bar to one who excelled at the flexed arm hang, a rite of passage for all Canadian kids of a certain vintage who had to complete the Canada Fitness Test.

When I look at pictures of me from back then, the change in my physical makeup through those early years was dramatic, more dramatic than I realized. But the image of that eleven- and twelve-year-old heavy, uncoordinated boy persisted with all of us, myself included, despite my new body. We saw only what we had once seen, not what was really there.

I SEEMED TO have it all. I was a star student, an athlete, and a nice, friendly kid. Athletic success came easily. When I played baseball, I was a pitcher, and I threw harder than the other kids the very first time I tried without knowing a thing about baseball. When I played football, I was voted one of the captains. I didn’t know it, but I was in the process of becoming me. Yet, I was different from my athletic peers because school was even more important to me than sports. I liked sports but I loved school, always in that order. Kids like what they are best at, and no matter how good I was at sports, I was always even better at school. I was, in effect, a teenager cast as a jock among the geeks and a geek among the jocks. But underneath it all, I was a jock who hadn’t always been physically solid, who was in many ways anything but.

And if you dug just a bit deeper into my family situation, you would also have seen something that was different from what it likely seemed to be. Families are like that, and mine was no different.

My mom, as much as she appeared to be loving and caring, and as much as she was loved by others outside our home, was incredibly cold and demanding. She was a closet alcoholic, one only we could see. She most definitely was not a happy drunk. She scowled at us, snapped insults, always had a demeaning comment about how we could be doing more or doing better than we were. I grew up thinking that white Bacardi rum was a cleaning supply because I always found bottles of it under our sink—and that’s what my mom told me it was when I was little and asked her what was in the bottle and, well, she was my mom, so I believed her.

Somewhere along the way, somebody or something had taken away her sense of life and fun. The joyful mother she appears to have been in a journal she kept after my birth quickly gave way to an overwhelmed mother of three who struggled to cope. Drunk and belligerent at dinner, or passed out on the couch after drinking to try to escape, life was just too much for her.

That made her incredibly difficult to live with. The sad thing is that every once in a while, maybe twice, three times a year, she would become the person we didn’t usually see, happy, carefree, laughing, and just really cool to be around. I remember her helping me build a crystal ball radio, just the two us, and it was as if she was a different person as we bantered back and forth until we sorted everything out. She joked that if we could figure this out then we could probably build a television and maybe we should just get rid of ours so that we would have to get right onto that next project. It was such a simple moment, yet because such moments rarely happened with her, that conversation is etched in my memory. And those few moments of joy with my mom kind of made it worse, because after seeing her so full of life, it hurt even more to see her the way she usually was around us.

At her funeral, I heard all about the person she had been before life got the better of her. It was like listening to stories about a complete stranger. I wished that the woman who others had seen had been my mom—someone warm, kind, open with her emotions, helpful, encouraging.

And I know this is awful to say, but I never believed she really loved me. I mean, of course a mother loves her child, and of course I must have memories of loving moments stored somewhere, right? But even as I write this I struggle to find memories of any loving moments. The truth is, I have none. She wasn’t wired that way. Maybe she was a product of her generation, maybe a product of her stern farm upbringing, maybe a product of her alcoholism, but whatever it was, she could not show love.

Of course, if anybody outside the family had said, or were ever to say, a bad thing about my mom, I would be livid. That’s the way it works. You keep it within the family. I did, until now. But I loved her, and I tried so hard to be as loving as I could.

Now my dad, he was a good guy. I have no idea how he survived as long as he did with my mom. They clearly loved each other at some level, and they were each other’s best friend, but after my mom started drinking, she became stubborn and cold and ruthless, and it wasn’t easy being in the house with her. My mom would be in a conversation about something, anything, and would always find a way to lash out at my dad.

“Michael, if you’re so smart, how come you have your crappy job and your crappy car and your crappy clothes? See, you’re not smart. You’re not smart. You’re crappy.” It wasn’t exactly Shakespearean iambic pentameter and it most definitely wasn’t nice. Mom did have standards though. She would not swear in front of us, so “crappy” was the go-to word.

She would withdraw into herself, cut short or dismiss any interaction by reflexively turning her back to us to hide her drinking, I guess thinking that if she couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see her. She would go silent to try to hide her slurring. And on the nights when she lost the ability to hide herself, she would just go on and on at my dad about the same thing, whatever the complaint may have been, until everybody sought refuge somewhere in our tiny bungalow, though we were never able to completely avoid what was going on. We never talked about it with each other. We just tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Yet, my dad never fought back or argued with her, he just accepted her for who she was. I always admired him for acting like a gentleman with her in the face of some of the worst things imaginable. He loved her to the end, for better or worse.

But the thing is, my dad had to take his frustrations out on somebody, and that somebody was me. I’m not talking about physical abuse or beatings or anything like that. First, that just wasn’t in my dad’s make-up. Second, he simply wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of me physically after I got to be a certain age given my size and strength—he was a big man for his generation 6' 2" and strong, but nothing compared to me in my teens. The abuse was verbal, and something our entire family had to witness.

His mantra with me was “book smart, worldly stupid.” It started when I was about nine or ten years old, when it became apparent that I was more than just academically gifted. I’d give my view on politics or current affairs. “You always have been and you always will be book smart and worldly stupid.” I’d fetch him a Robertson screwdriver when he’d asked for a Phillips. “Book smart, worldly stupid.” I’d finish mowing the lawn and not coil the electric cord properly. “Book smart, worldly stupid.” In a certain sense I guess it was sort of a cute, almost endearing way to approach me, because he was actually acknowledging that I was smart. Except it wasn’t cute, because it came with much more.

No matter how big or small the issue, my father had to go after me verbally. He couldn’t ever just leave me alone. He was always on me. Sunday dinners were the worst. My sister, Dawn, later told me that she feared them, dreaded them, for she knew that whatever I said about anything, my dad would challenge me, and not in a productive way to encourage critical thinking, but in a way that belittled me, that tried to tear me down, that was designed to make me feel inferior to him. “You’re nothing. You’re not as smart as you think you are. Oh, come on, that’s stupid, you’re stupid. You’re a loser. What, you think you’re better than me? You think you deserve more than I have? You’ll never make it! You’ll never succeed! You’re nothing!”

My sister would cry. My brother would be thankful it wasn’t him.

It hurt. It hurt so much, until eventually it didn’t anymore. And then it became a game with me to provoke him, to get him whipped up into a frenzy, for me to sit there and be belittled. I just didn’t care anymore. And my inner voice would kick in:

Go ahead. Yell at me all you want. I don’t care. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about anything anymore. You’ve told me I’m stupid, I’m a loser, I’m never going to succeed. What more could you possibly tell me?

But you think I’m a loser? I’ll show you.

Looking back on things, that all makes sense. He had never been able to achieve all that he wanted in life. He saw me, his eldest child, achieving everything that at one time had been his to obtain. He had dropped out of school after Grade Eight, but knew in his heart that he was better than that, that he was smarter than that, but that he was trapped in a situation he couldn’t escape. He was stuck having to do whatever he could to raise a family, and here I was about to get all of the benefits of his miserable hard work. But at the time I didn’t have any perspective. All I could see was his anger toward me.

I fought back. I said things I never should have said.

“I’m a loser? You’re a loser! Look at you! How could I ever be proud of you?”

At some level I knew what he was going through, what he was dealing with, but as much as I tried to focus on the good and love him, it didn’t make any difference. The tragedy of life is that you can’t see then what you can see now. I know now that he was envious of me, but I couldn’t see that back then. All I could see was the anger and his inability to show me any approval for what I was doing, not resentment, jealousy, or a fear that maybe his first born son, a son he loved and admired so much, saw him as looking small and inadequate.

And yet, unlike my reaction to my mom, a part of me always knew that he was indeed proud of me. I would, every once in a while, hear from others the things that he was saying about me to them. But he was too stubborn to ever say these things directly to me and I was too stubborn to ever force the issue with him. So, while he played the tough guy with me, I think I knew that deep down he was proud of me, even in the face of his relentless verbal assaults. Sure, there was his demeaning mantra of “book smart, worldly stupid,” his outright dismissal of anything I ever said or wanted to try to achieve, and his saying I wasn’t nearly good enough for those types of things. Still, I think he was proud of me.

In the midst of this trainwreck at home, I was now moving on to high school alone because the guys I played hockey with, as well as my best friend, Carl Torbiak, all remained in junior high in the proper grade for their age. I became increasingly isolated, a geek living in a jock’s world and a jock living in a geek’s world, now without my best friend.

Please don’t get me wrong. My life at home and at school was not even close to the worst imaginable, and I did deal with things in my own way. I had friends, just no close friends. I know that many have much worse family situations than I did. I wasn’t some lost soul nobody loved or appreciated. But I was a boy with vulnerabilities.

Being an outward success at external things didn’t fulfill my emotional needs. Already isolated within my family, seemingly unloved and unappreciated by my parents, and now displaced at school, I wanted more of a connection with the world around me. And the thing is, when you want something so badly and aren’t getting it, it makes you vulnerable to somebody who comes along and offers you understanding and an acceptance of who you are and what you want out of life.

I may have pretended otherwise, but when I was a young, awkward, giant misfit of a kid I had never wanted to be special or different. Being successful didn’t make up for being different and alone. I craved the acceptance that I wasn’t getting at home, the normalcy that I wasn’t getting at school, and the understanding that I wasn’t getting from friends outside of hockey.

Still, no matter how tough things may have been for me on the inside, I always had hockey, my safe place, the place I belonged.

That is who I was when I met Graham James.