High School Hierarchy

This may seem a bit of a rant. It’s definitely angry. I hope that it burns of defiance.

Was I popular in high school? I’d have to say, no. If anything, I was quiet and shy, especially around the girls, especially around the girls I had a crush on. I asked Penny Deluce what the girls thought of me, back then, and that's what she told me; she said she and her friends liked me, too, maybe not in the way I wanted, but it’s nice to be remembered kindly. Was I aware of my lack of popularity? I’d have to say, yes, that I was. Did that lack of popularity hurt? Yes, sometimes. But not always. I wasn’t exactly a pariah, either. I was invited to parties when I was finally old enough to attend them, more as the years passed. I even threw a few.

My first party I attended was my sister’s. I had to be invited. It would have been quite a feat to have kept it secret from me. I did live in the same house. And I was actually invited, and not just because I lived in the same house. My sister was not at all concerned with my social status. In fact, she was my coach when it came to helping me figure out how to navigate all the obstacles thrust in my way. She taught me how to dance, and we practiced how to jive together. I guess she didn’t want her brother to be a geek. And I wasn’t, not really. At her party, I was the disk jockey. It was fun. And her friends treated me well, for a kid. I think they were especially impressed with my LP collection, since I had just about everything they wanted to listen to.

But in school, I can’t say that the “cool” kids or the jocks had much to do with me. Nor I with them. As I’ve said before, I was fairly heavily involved at the pool, first as a helper, then as a guard and instructor. I had my crowd, our weekend outings at the mall and arcades, kickin’ back time at the beach, at the pool, and in basements, routing through others’ collections to rout out my next purchase, my next favourite LP, my next favourite song, my next obsession. There was homework, there was TV, there was the cinema on Friday nights (Mark Charette worked there and snuck us in every now and again). And there were books.

But the evidence was there. Leafing through the old yearbooks, I’m astonished how little the yearbook crowd actually knew about us, if they even gave us a second thought. The pages are thick with the popular crowd, with the basketball teams, the volleyball teams, and hardly ten pages passed without the popular girls crowded together in the fame, mugging for the camera. Even the supposedly candid shots were always of them. There were a few pictures of us, one of John Lavric here, his hair quite a bit longer than in his class photo, another of Garry Martin there, a couple group shots, no more. I’m sure I saw my back in one of the photos once. To be truthful, we weren’t really a school spirit, rah, rah, rah bunch. John worked for his dad and was one of the first of our number with a car, Garry and I spent most of our time at the pool, without much spare time for school sports. There were few extracurricular activities that interested me, us. Gerry Gerrard was in hockey, not an O’Gorman staple. Mark Charette and Roger Rheault were in basketball, but few others. John and Dan Loreto began working out at a gym. Chris Cooper was in Cross-country running, but somehow didn’t grace those pages. Gerry, Mark and I were in Track and Field (Roger, too, I think), but it was held too late to make the print deadline (although it always did in the RMSS yearbooks, I’ve since learned, leafing through my wife’s).

So, were we pariahs to those “cooler” kids? Maybe.

Did we care? Yes. And no. We were the geeks and freaks of our school, in our day. And we liked that just fine. We were into our own things, sometimes that meant sports, but for whatever reason they weren’t the “right” sports. Whatever.

And as it turns out, it took years for the rest of the world to catch up to us. We were gamers. Pre-home-computer. The arcade era. And the arcades were teeming with us, not a jock or a popular girl to be seen. It seems like everyone plays them now, not that I have for more than a decade. We played Dungeons and Dragons. We read horror, science fiction, and sword and sorcery novels, watched every genera of escapist movie ever made, modern, classic, silent, red menace, anything we could see at the theatre or the video store. In the aftermath of Lord of the Rings, whole hosts of superhero movies (to be clear, I never cared for superhero flics), and decades of fantasy gaming, 100,000s of thousands of people now play roleplaying games and attend every type of escapist convention imaginable. FYI: I was never part of the costume crowd. To each his own. If you love it, go with it.

That said, I never liked being invisible to others, either. Reading what was written about my friends and I in the O’Gorman Yearbooks, what was inferred, what was obviously bullshit made up by strangers, it’s no wonder that I did not purchase my final yearbooks.

I remember that the burbs to be published about each of us being distributed throughout, beforehand. I was shocked when I read mine. It was vicious, backhanded. I went to the writer and told her in no uncertain terms what I thought of her description. I even went to the principal and complained, told her what I knew it meant. And demanded that it not be published in the yearbook. Was it? No, it wasn’t. Some shallow, banal piece replaced it. What was it? I don’t remember either, now. Thankfully, I suppose. Not having that book allows me distance to the insult, and its flaccid replacement. Am I imagining that long ago slight? Not a chance. We remember the hurt inflicted upon us far more than any other memory. Why? In hopes of never having those hurts repeated.

What did that long-ago editor think of me when she wrote that blurb? Was it indeed spiteful? And if it was, what did she think of reputedly meek little David Leonard venting his red anger in her face? His not being so expectedly compliant. Not being such a victim.

Compliant? Meek? Victims? If they only knew. I remember us well. Geeks? Sure, why not; but we were also fearless, adventuresome. We were daredevils, speed demons; bright, tech savvy and replete with curiosity, loyalty, and love.

What do those people think of us now, I wonder? Do they, at all?

Do we care?

Subtext

I learned early on to hold my cards close to my chest. Children, especially teens, are cruel, and I’ve found that there are more than a few people out there who’d use aspects of someone’s life to hurt, to ridicule. You might say that I’m imagining that, but I don’t think so; I’ve fielded my fair share of cruelty over the years. Maybe it’s our not wanting others to know our personal and family secrets, unsure how those others will react to them, fearful that we will be rejected. We all have secrets. We all hold our cards close to our chests, all those secrets bottled up and suppressed, setting the subtext to our lives.

Is that cynical? Maybe, but I’ve noticed how my own family’s history, its subtext, has painted how we view the world. I have said on many occasions that we should be kind to all the people we meet, for we are all fighting a hard battle for the full measure of our lives. That’s an old piece of wisdom. There’s debate on who actually said it first.

I’ve never learned much about my father’s family. My dad was not particularly curious about his extended family, not even that curious about his parent’s history before he was born, so what I did learn came from snippets told by my mother and my grandmother. There was Blanche’s brother, whom she had sent quite a bit of money to over the years my father was growing up, supposedly to keep him out of jail for embezzlement (see earlier memories). There was a history between her and her sisters, I gather; I always had a sense of it when they visited. As to Jules’ family, I have few details except that there was a brother, Leo-Paul, in Quebec. I’d met Leo-Paul Jr, once, but have no memory of him except that he wore a jet-black handlebar moustache. I’ve learn aspects of the narrative that flowed beneath my father and his siblings, a somewhat rocky narrative at times, replete with grudges that have festered for decades. But compared to my mother’s family, they appeared an oasis of fun, and hugs and kisses.

My mother’s parents were born eleven years apart, and I don’t know if Hilda ever loved Mec, or if she hooked up with him because her mother pushed her on him, the good catch, the pharmacist. I don’t know if she married him just to get away from her mother. I’ve heard this potential meme suggested. I also recall it inferred that they spent their marriage inflicting harm on one another, and only adopted my mother to save their marriage. That would make for a cold, unemotional household. There may have been infidelity on Hilda’s part, certainly the onset of alcoholism on Mec’s. During the ‘40s, Hilda left Mec, taking my mother with her to Toronto, to live with her sister; and Mec let her go, but he would not support her or my mother so long as they did not live in his house; he was firm on that. But he did tell Hilda that the door was always open for her return; and when she did return, he was true to his word. Nothing was ever said about her leaving again. Not that it was forgotten, either, I imagine. Not that its memory didn’t linger; not that their marriage was ever salvaged by Hilda’s return. My mother has memories of Hilda finding bootleggers serving beer to my grandfather in their house, and Hilda throwing the bootlegger out. Hilda was no angel, either, from what I gather. My mother once told me that she’d had to wait in the car while Hilda “visited” a friend for an hour or so. I suspect that was why Mec retired to his bed, as a punishment to his wife who had never cared for him, but would have to now that he’d retired. She didn’t, of course; she continued to work into her late 70s, long after Mec had passed away. Was there love in the house? Poppa loved my mother. He was devastated when we moved to Timmins. Nanny didn’t like that we moved, either, but she visited often, even more so after Poppa died. And she was always a sympathetic ear for my mother’s troubles, never judging. Don’t judge my grandparents. People are complex, at the best of times. I do know, though, that my Poppa and Nanny doted on my sister and me. I choose to see the good in them.

Long prior to these events, my mother’s grandparents were of similar mind. Susan may have stepped out across the street to dally with Alf Cheeseman, Robert’s friend and neighbor. There must have been such a row following the discovery that both Alf (41 at the time) and Robert (37) thought it preferable to brave the trenches and join the CEF in 1916. Alf was in the artillery and returned after being gassed. He eventually took up with Susan, and they married after their divorces were finalized. Bob fought the rest of the war, at Vimy, at Passchendaele, and throughout the final 100 days when casualties were at their fiercest, and presumably never suffered more than a scratch. When he returned from the Great War, he never remarried, content to spend the rest of his life with his new “landlady.”

I see the subtext of my grandparents’ relationship, running through my mother, those memories close to the surface, remembered vividly 80 years on like they were yesterday. She wanted more for her own family. Where she was an only child, she wanted her children to have siblings, so she set about having her own.

Joseph-Arthur Bradette

She had only one. Karen and I were adopted. Her son Dean was born with extreme deformities and developmental issues. My parents unable to cope, Mec stepped in and made arrangements with his friend, Joseph-Arthur Bradette, the Ontario Senator for Cochrane District, who pulled some strings to have Dean placed in a care institute. This sort of thing isn’t done anymore, but it was then, and I doubt that my parent’s marriage would have survived caring for Dean. Despite his having been sent away, Dean had left a mark, a subtext that lurked beneath the surface of my family for decades, the living ghost of the boy who no one talked about. I discovered my first evidence of Dean when I was routing through the cupboards, looking for hidden chocolate, and I found some toys, dinky cars. Being a kid, I thought they were for me, so I took them down and played with them. My mother was livid when she saw me with them. I was terrified by her reaction. She spanked me for taking what wasn’t mine. It wasn’t until much later that I pieced together the truth, that I had taken what was a gift for Dean, and that I had peeked behind the curtain of her subtext. When she did tell Karen and me about Dean, we were told to never talk about him.

I learned to never talk about other things, too. I won’t mention what those things are. They’re not my story to tell. Let me be clear, though. There was no abuse. My parents were loving, affectionate, but I also don’t remember my family being overly tactile, either. But for all their warmth and love, there has always been the chill of subtext. I’d learned that there were things that were private, family things that the world had no right to know. I was learning my lessons. Keep it to myself. Don’t talk about it. More cards to hold close to my chest. Subtext.

That subtext leaves a mark. In 1982, we saw two artists in the Timmins Square. One penned caricatures with a Sharpie black marker; the other, a large, redheaded woman named Skye, who sketched colour portraits. I was fascinated. I loved to draw and these two were producing actual portraits of people. My mother asked us if we’d like to have our portraits done. We did, so we approached Skye to see about getting them done. She was busy, it took some time to produce each portrait, and she had a backlog of potential clients, so we had to make appointments for the next day. Her male counterpart, on the other hand, was much quicker, rendering far more simplistic profiles (probably from a stencil laid underneath), and was able to take Karen and I right away. When our sittings with Skye did happen, Karen had her portrait sketched first, and me afterwards. Each took about an hour.

While I sat for mine, I noticed and covertly watched the crowd observing Skye’s work resolve. A woman commented on how good it was, how she had captured me. She also noticed how I kept her within my view while keeping still, as instructed. She said. “She’s especially got the eyes right. He has very serious eyes.”

What she saw in them was subtext.

Lifeguard Training

I spent a lot of time being certified as a lifeguard and instructor, not that it reflected well in my pay, when compared with those who worked in construction or at a grocery store. Then again, the work was far lighter than those others, as well.

They’ve renamed all the levels since then, but I began with Novice, then Beginners, Intermediate, Junior, and Senior; yellow, orange, blue, green, and white badges, respectfully, with Walter Safety stitched into the first 2, and the Red Cross into the others. Progression was different then, lessons spanned the summer, with the lessons only taught during summer (no heat, no insulation at the venerable Schumacher pool), and with the skill sets taught at each level broader than now, I imagine. Most swim students stopped there. That was sensible. One need not progress any further if one’s goal was to just learn how to swim. After that the aspects of rescue, recovery, first aid and such were the main focus of the curriculum. Bronze Cross and Bronze Medallion were the minimum requirements to be a lifeguard, where lifesaving skills were taught, ring tosses, swim pulls, defense against drowning victims, and then much later, spinal injury recovery and CPR. Then there was Instructor, and finally National Lifeguard. One also had to be at least 17 years old to be a lifeguard.

Were that all one had to do. We were always enrolled in refreshers, and had weekly charts of laps swum, to keep our stamina up, laps to be swum on our own time. That was also the reason why I was paid less than those in the other jobs; the city was apparently under no obligation to pay us minimum wage, since we’d not reached the true working age of 18…or so I gather. I’m not a lawyer; not then, not now.

Come summer, we’d train at the river. Gilles Lake was never considered, too easy, no current. So every summer there were training exercises at the Mattagami.

We’d, each in turn, drift down the river on the current, splashing about to keep in character. Then the rescuers would blow their whistles, and those not designated drowners or rescuers would exit the water. While one rescuer stayed on the beach, supervising the orderly exit of swimmers from the water, the other would run to his/her board, and race downriver to collect us. At other times, we’d have to perform the same rescue but without the board, and then tow the victim back to the beach, swimming each way, no easy task when done against the river current.

Once the rescue was complete, we’d have to perform mouth to mouth. I had to rescue Lisa Leone. Lisa was a friend of my sister’s, very pretty. I had the urge to kiss her lips...but that would have been unprofessional, and might have freaked her out, so I just performed mouth to mouth on her, instead, and promptly clacked teeth with her. It stung me. It really hurt her. So, I guess what slim chances I might have had with her died a quick death, right then.

I preformed my series of rescues with Lisa, and then I was designated the drowning victim. I let go of the buoy line, and began to drift. Lisa swam after me, and after declaring me not a danger, she closed the distance between us and took hold of me, spun me on my back, and began to tow me back to shore. So far, so good. But she wasn’t a strong swimmer against current. I glanced to the side and noted that we’d made absolutely no progress back to shore. I waited, checked again, and found we were still in the same relative position. I began to kick to help out; but she was tiring, and we were soon losing ground. All this time, she was working hard, keeping warm; I on the other hand, was just supposed to lay there and enjoy the ride. I wasn’t. The constant flow of water was carrying my body heat away. I finally told her it was no good, that I was beginning to freeze, so I pulled away, and began to swim to shore. And realized how cold and stiff I’d actually become. My limbs were really slow to respond. I struggled and after a time, I made it to shore, far behind Lisa, and once on shore, began to shiver. I took a few steps, then found I couldn’t make any more progress up the sandy beach. My limbs ached, my breath was shallow and short. The shivering grew, and my legs buckled beneath me. Before I knew it, I was buried in life guards, each more than happy to finally put all those finely-honed skills to use. Blankets were wrapped around me, limbs briskly massaged. Sensation began to return to my legs and arms. And pain. There was quite a bit of aching for the next little while.

I was actually suffering from hyperthermia. I turned blue and shivered for about an hour. I could barely talk for the first ten minutes of that hour, then only with great effort for twenty minutes after that.

There was more training to be had than just rescues. Some of even more difficult, or so it seemed. CPR was difficult. We had to perform on a dummy that spit out a printed tape of our compressions, of our mouth-to-mouth breathing, volume and timing. Too little, and the dummy died of heart failure or suffer brain damage; too hard, and we’d hear a squeal, informing us that we’d broken ribs and punctured a lung. First came the instruction, then the written test (that was easy enough), and then came the, for me anyway, endless attempts at keeping the dummy alive. A few, and I mean a very few, were lucky enough to pass the “clinical” in their first attempts, but for the bulk of us, our stress levels rose with repeated failures. Garry Martin began to make a mockery of the process after the first hour, and began calling the dummy Linda Sue. “What’s that, Linda Sue,” he’d say, shaking the shit out of the dummy. “You can’t breathe? Your heart can’t beat?” Then he’d wallop her, sometimes to see how high he could get the needle to jump, just to see if he could make that circus bell ring.

It took a long time. I was not the last to complete the test, but I was not far from it. I had to take a break, I had to go off by myself for about fifteen minutes, just to get my anger, and impending depression under control. I felt like crying. I did. Then I choked it back. And then I made another attempt, and was shocked that I was a hair within the prescribed parameters of the test. I felt weak with relief.

At the end of the training, our instructor told us that if we did break a rib while saving a person, that person could sue us for damages, and that we were under no obligation to actually help anyone, ever. When I heard that, I seriously considered performing the initial shock punch we’d just been taught to the instructor’s chest.

Dance Hall Daze

We finally took over running the dances.

Of course, there came a time when my grade became the seniors, Grade 12, and 13. Were we the role models one would expect of such mature individuals? We who cursed throughout our high school years, gambled in the halls, were nearly expelled, raced about town, spent all our money on gas, and video games and LPs? We rose to the occasion, as you’d imagine.

I recall Sean Quinn spinning a few dances. I remember Chris Cooper doing the same. Where did they get the music? Did the school have an album collection? I don’t think so. It did have its own sound system or lights, as far as I remember, but I won’t say that under oath. So where did all that music come from. From us. Chris had oodles of albums, milk cartons full of them. We all did. (Personally, I didn’t have any milk cartons, although I was always on the look-out for them, if never actually laying my hands on them; the world had gone metric, and the new ones weren’t compatible to LPs.) But not one of us had enough to run a dance with. There were too many types of music for one person to have copies of everything everyone wanted. So, we pitched in, much like, I believe, all the disk jockeys prior to us must have done. I remember Chris borrowing a number of albums from me, from Mark Charette, Garry Martin, and John Lavric, as well. And I recall the dances being as good as all the others we’d attended, but different. We spent as much time behind the table as in front of it. Well, they did. I’d hang out there with them, but I wanted to be dancing. I wanted to have my arms around a girl.

The Christmas dance was our finest hour. It was hopefully going to be the best one yet. We all helped to hang decorations, set out the chairs and such. And when all was in place, we still had hours to spare.

I went home to get myself all dolled up. Silk shirt. Parfumed. Probably Hai Karate!

Chris and John went over to Dan Loreto’s house. I suppose they may have gone home first. I suppose they must have eaten something. I do know that Mario Loreto Sr. fed them homemade wine. John, from what I gather, understood homemade hooch. Chris did not. Mr. Loreto handed them small glasses of homemade wine, strong as moonshine, light on the tongue as air. They had one, then another. John begged off a third; Chris did not. I don’t know how many glasses slipped past Chris’s lips, but there were more than a few; there must have been. Undoubtedly, more than enough. Because those glasses did not hit Chris directly. It was a brutally cold night. And Chris and John and Dan were numb with it.

Their supper finished, the wine drunk, they made their way to the school, in advance of we participants, to deliver the music and begin the night’s festivities. And that’s when the wine hit Chris. To say it hit him like a ton of bricks sounds like a cliché, but you’d have to have seen Chris, and not fail to imagine that Monty Python 16-ton weight not resting atop him.

I arrived. The music was playing, newish stuff that no one danced to yet, but familiar enough that it set the mood, got people excited, got their feet tapping and their adrenaline pumping. It was loud, spilling out into the hallway from the gym, into the hallway, out through the door and into the street. I stowed my parka in my locker, changed from boots to shoes and began to make my way to the gym.

That’s when I saw Chris, held aloft between John and Dan, headed toward me and away from the gym. Chris was polluted. No doubt about it. He was drunker than I’d ever seen him.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, like any good Catholic boy would say within the confines of a Catholic school, “what the fuck happened?”

John was calm. He also wore a grin that stretched from ear to ear. But he was calm. “Well…” he said, drawing that out with a chuckle trailing after it, “Chris dipped into the pot a few times too many.” He explained what had happened, how it happened and when it happened. And he said that Chris was okay when he left the Loreto’s, but upon leaving, he declared that he may have had a little too much wine. They bought him some coffee somewhere, but it had little effect. Chris was getting drunker by the minute, beginning to stammer, weaving on his feet. But what was to be done? The dance was about to begin. They drove to the school, Chris claiming that he would be alright the whole way, an obvious lie by all reckoning, but duty called. And Chris was never one to shirk his duty. Back out in the cold, he seemed to get a little better. Hope prevailed. Not enough, but, one can always fall back on hope when all else fails.

They thought we could cover for him. There was John, Garry, Renato, Anthony Lionello, Sean Quinn, and hell, there was even me, who could pitch in and get Chris through this nightmare. We could feed him albums, spin them for him with a little coaching. It was going to be alright, they told themselves. Hope prevails.

Of course, once they got Chris to the gym, and into his seat behind the turntables, the heat hit him anew, and it was obvious that Chris ought not to be in faculty’s view. So, they needed to get him outside, and most likely home, before all went awry.

And that’s when I came in.

“All we need to do,” said John, “is to get Chris a little air,” bustling past me.

And right into Sister Fay.

She looked Chris up and down, and inquired as to Chris’s state.

“He’s just a little under the weather, Sister,” John explained.

Sister Fay was not convinced, I imagine.

Chris looked up, took the principal in, and said, “Oh, hello, Sister.”

And promptly threw up all over Sister Fays’ shoes.

She was horrified. We were horrified. We also had to bite our cheeks to keep from bursting out laughing.

Somehow, she allowed that he had the flu, even though the smell of wine was rising from his pores in a flood.

How’d the dance turn out?

It was one for the books!

High School, Trials and Tribulations

I’m of mixed mind about O’Gorman. I loved my friends. I loved the times we had. I even loved how small the school was when compared with the others. One would never be lost in the teeming masses. That said, there weren’t that many places to hide, either. Everyone knew who you were. There was precious little wiggle room when it came to reputation, to clique membership.

For me, the worst aspect of attending O’Gorman was the never ending apparent need to canvas for money. It seems that I was always knocking on doors, begging sponsorship for this activity or that. I feel for all those kids forced to do it now, but at least they are fund raising by selling something tangible, like chocolate, cookie dough, pepperettes, something that allows the sponsor to come away with something they want. Not so us; we canvased neighborhoods, asking, begging, indifferent households to sponsor us for basketball marathons, dance marathons, whatever. And I heard the same line over and over again, “No thanks, I support the public-school system.”

Then there was the dress code. We didn’t have a uniform like the students at O’Gorman do now, but we did have restrictions on what we could wear, and that was NO jeans. Denim jackets were okay to travel to school in, but not for class. I suppose their original intent was that all students would wear wool slacks and skirts, but no one ever wore such items on a daily basis then, anymore. That left cords. Did I mind? Not particularly. Everyone else wore them, too. But as I didn’t own any khakis then, they did make for some sweaty exams, come June. So, one day I wore painter pants to an exam. They were the newest thing; they were certainly cooler. I know now that they were actually jeans, just not the denim one remembers. Butch McMillian, one of our teachers, saw me waiting to enter my exam, and took a long sideways look at me. Then he approached. And pressed the fabric between his finger and thumb. He asked me if they were jeans. I said, no, they were painter pants. He then told me, no, they were jeans. They don’t look like jeans, I said, so how was I supposed to know they were jeans. He thought on it, and in the end decided that they were unlike jeans enough to not send me home. But he did tell me not to wear them to school ever again. Good thing; there was no way I’d have been able to get home, change, and return in enough time to arrive prior to the start of the exam.

John Lavric was not so lucky, but then he was, too. John had been sent home once for God knows what dress code infraction one day. What that infraction was is lost in the fog of time, probably a punk or metal t-shirt (John had a bunch of those). What I do remember was that we were surprised to see him back in class right after lunch. He explained that just as he’d arrived home, his father came home for lunch, something that rarely ever happened. Upon seeing John at home and not in school, he asked why. John told him why. His father was livid. He ordered John into his truck, and drove John back to school. He ordered John to sit in a chair outside Sister Fay’s office, and without asking to see her, without waiting to be ushered in, he stormed into her office, interrupting whatever she may have been doing. For the next five minutes, John heard his father yell at Sister Fay. He said, in no uncertain terms, that for the money he was paying for John to attend O’Gorman, John could wear anything he damn well pleased, so long as there wasn’t a curse word or a naked woman on it, and if she had something to say about it…. When he left Sister Fay’s office, he told John to get back to class, and without looking back to see if John DID go back to class, he left to go back home, to work, to wherever he had a mind to go to. Jeff O’Reilly was not so lucky. He wore a rock and roll tee shirt to school one day, likely with the Monk’s “Bad Habit” cover on it. He did not have John’s father as an advocate. He was told to wear it inside out, or to go home and change.

But having John’s father storm into Sister Fay’s office didn’t win John many brownie points. Neither did our onsite gambling. About the same time that I was invited to the other clique’s blackjack nights, there was a rash of gambling throughout the school. How prevalent was it? I don’t really know, but I remember there were quite a few card games being played. John, Chris, Garry and I were no exception. Small stakes stuff, with matchsticks subbing in for nickels. Sister Fay caught wind of our game, and called us to the office to explain ourselves. We weren’t the rich kids; they'd been seen gambling too; in fact, they’d been playing right next to us, but a blind eye had been turned on their game, as the school would never risk their parents’ financial donations. Not so ours. And so there we were, jammed into St. Fay’s office, treated to her stern gaze. John had balls like on other, an icy calm at times. When Sister Fay asked us, “Were you gambling?” he denied the suggestion of our gambling for money without pause, and following his lead, so did we. Strength in numbers, and all that. Mob courage, too, for that matter. We denied any involvement of money. I’ve said it before; we weren’t stupid. To admit to actual gambling on school property may have invited expulsion, even if only for a short time. And had we been, there’d be more hell to pay at home than there’d ever been at school. I don’t think she believed us, but she didn’t have any proof, either. She knew we were playing cards. We’d been seen doing just that. And we admitted to doing just that, but not to any actual exchange of money. Any further supposition was just that.

Lastly, we of my grade were gipped out of a senior school trip. When we were in Grade 11, we watched the Grade 12s and 13s leave for New York City. Needless to say, I was envious. I was also terrified of the prospect of such a trip. It was New York, after all! New York was the landscape of countless crime dramas, gangster films, and the home of graphic violence on the news. But it was also the Big Apple! Broadway, Times Square, the Yankees! Who wouldn’t want to go there? We couldn’t wait to go, ourselves. But, the next year, my last in high school, there was no school trip; and not the next year, either. Then, miraculously, when we were finally out of O’Gorman’s hallowed halls, the Grade 12s and 13s were off to Europe. Was I mad? Did I feel slighted? You bet I did.

To this day I wonder, did they hate us that much? Or was it simply that there weren’t enough chaperones lined up? Teacher disinterest? No one to organize the trip? Did something especially bad happen during the last trip? Not enough money? All I know is that there was no suggestion that there would be a trip for my grade while we were there. Not a hint of one.

I’ve made up for my lack of travel experiences since then. So many places. So many adventures. Backpacks, buses, planes, trains, and automobiles. Boats, ships, catamarans, even an outrigger. Where? The Caribbean, Australia, the Philippines, South Africa, Egypt, Ecuador, France, Italy, Canada from coast to coast, the American Midwest, L.A., San Francisco, New Orleans, Alaska.

And yes, New York, too.

Natatorial Anecdotes

Yes, I used a thesaurus to find that word.

I have quite a few memories from my time at the Sportsplex, the Mattagami River, Gilles Lake. Some of them good, some of them not. As I remember it, there was quite a bit of fun, some horseplay, too, hopefully always out of the public view. But sometimes not, either. What can I say? We were teens. Controlling us was like herding cats.

The lake and river were the most sought-after posts. We spent the entire winter cooped up in the Sportsplex, no windows, always humid, as depressing as a tomb when one spent one’s whole day in its confines. We never knew what the weather was like, unless there was such a deluge that we could hear the thumbing of the downpour on the roof. We only saw the sun when we were not scheduled to guard a swim and were left with a free hour; no long enough to go anywhere, but enough time to crash out on the patch of grass out back and catch some rays. So, to spend one’s summer out in the sun? Heaven!

There could be loneliness out there, too, depending on when one’s shifts at Gilles Lake or the Mattagami River were. In July, there were so many swimmers at the lake and river that there were four of us stationed at each site. Days were full. I’d arrive at the musty old guard shack at Gilles, drop the wood panel shutters, and fill out the log. We’d man the two chairs, 15 minutes at a time, the others basking in the sun, gaining the best tans of our lives. In August, on the other hand, the temperature slipped, the rains fell, the beaches emptied, and we were reduced to one per site. Owing to my living on Hart Street, I never worked at the Mattagami River, although I did hang out there on my off days when friends were stationed there, usually Jodie Russell, Sean Light, or Jeff Chevrier. I’d arrive later, some beer stashed in my backpack, and stow them away in the water tank of the Men’s toilet, where the water was colder than ice. After 8 pm, we’d lock everything up, retrieve the beer, and while away a couple hours before heading to Top Hats. But left alone for 8 hours there in those guard shacks? Mattagami’s was a narrow cinderblock room; Gilles’, a musty old wooden shack.

At Gilles, I’d only open one of the shutters, so that the wind would not howl through, carrying the icy rains with it. I’d wrap myself in a musty old wool blanket, one of many at hand there, one stripped from the bed in the back room. Yes, there was an old cot there. Use your imagination, in that regard. And I’d curl up and read what book I was lost in at the time, waiting for my sister to bring me what supper my mother would send up, talking, on occasion, on the phone with whomever was whiling away their hours at the river.

Once, I had to rescue an idiot. It was August. I was alone. He was drunk. He staggered up to the beach, stripped down to his jeans and plunged in, swimming out to the Hydro tower in the middle of the lake. It was a rare, hot day; but there was no one to guard, as the threat of swimmer’s itch at Gilles in August was another reason for the absence of everyone but me. I watched him make early swift progress, then none at all. So, I grabbed the guard board (sort of like a big surf board), and paddled out to him. I wouldn’t normally have been able to do that, leave the beach unattended, but as I said, there was no one else to guard. I paced him, telling him he’d never make it and to climb on board. He gasped at me to fuck off. His words. But I didn’t. I wasn’t going to let him drown, foul mouthed idiot that he was, or not. He finally climbed aboard having failed to reach the tower, but he was not pleased with my leisurely progress back to shore, so he paddled hard. Then said I was a “fuckin’ shitty lifeguard,” and stormed away. Ah, the memories.

One day, I got a call. Cold, rainy, windy day. It was Jodie, spending his cold shift at the river. He said, in a wildly thrilled voice, said “We can do anything! I mean anything! And nobody will say a thing.” What? I asked. He explained. He too had not bothered to open up much of the river site, deciding to wait to see if the day improved and swimmers arrived. It didn’t. They didn’t. His girlfriend did, though, and one thing led to another. And then Tory Kullas, our supervisor, did. She just walked right in on them, catching them in their state of somewhat undress. Tory stepped back outside, and closed the door gently behind her. Jodie and girlfriend composed themselves, the girlfriend left. And when Tory re-entered the guard shack, she didn’t say a word about what had just transpired. Not one word. She left after a few minutes, and before she’d gained her car, Jodie was on the phone with me. I gaped into the phone, not sure how to process what I’d just heard. Ah, good times.

One day in August, the Timmins Press arrived to report on how the local beaches had emptied out, due to a weeklong cold snap. The reporter asked Jeff if he would submit to being photographed. Jeff was bored, there were no swimmers, so he agreed; but he was chilled to the bone in his speedo and polyester guard’s tank top, so the report suggested he put on his jeans and jean jacket to warm up. The reporter also set Jeff up with his back to the water, to show that the beach was empty. Jeff didn’t think anything of it. Not until Fred Salvador, head of Parks and Rec, saw the picture in the Press. There was one of his lifeguards, back to the water, out of uniform, while on duty. He wanted Jeff fired on the spot. Tory eventually cooled Fred down and saved Jeff’s job but we were all given a stern talking to about “professionalism.” Like that helped. Jeff told me and Sean all about it over a beer at 8 pm.

There was quite a bit of boredom, as well. Time creeps and slows to a crawl and a stop while guarding a less than popular swim, most notably, the adult noon swim. One finds one timing swimmer’s laps to pass the time, and later finds oneself watching the clock tick, second by second, realizing that one cannot escape that swim, not once, that all one’s shifts will span its eternity.

During one such swim, I was guarding the shallow end of the pool, watching the thinly spread bathers swim laps, walk laps, hang off the buoy lines in conversation. I had not reached the point of stifling yawns, but I was not far from it, either. Adults were never as quick to enter the pool as the kids were, who were eager to gain as many seconds in the water for their money as possible. Adults, on the other hand, were more orderly, more composed and leisurely minded, and may spend quite some time in the sauna before even exiting the change room, so there were still a few leaking out on deck even thirty minutes into the swim. I was on my second position of the swim, my first seated, when I watched a middle-aged Asian gentleman exit the change room and make his way to the furthest corner from me of the shallow end. He stretched and reached, spun his arms to warm them up before entering the water. He had a well-sculptured pompadour. Okay, maybe not a pompadour, as the hair flowed around his head, beginning from behind his ear, drawn up to his forehead, before sweeping up and back over the top of his head. It was an unparalleled engineering feat. He dove in, with grace, with hardly a splash in his wake, and flowed beneath the surface for half the length of the pool before surfacing opposite me. His hair flowed behind him, as long as his shoulders at the back and on the left, no longer than an inch on the right. His glistening pate shone in the lights. I watched him swim back and forth, fascinated at the transformation. When Jodie relieved me after another ten minutes, I pointed the Asian gentleman out, and said, absolutely deadpan, “If you ever see me do that, take me out back and shoot me.”

Up To No Good

I was never a bad kid, but every now and then I’d do stupid shit. I think we all did. It’s all part of growing up, testing our limits, and inching towards independence.

I’d been to a few parties, some of them tame, others not.

The first (lifeguard) staff party I attended was held on the first night my parents extended my curfew. Be home by midnight, they said. Prior to this, I had to be home by 10 pm. I get to the party and I see a draft ball being pumped, and a glass of Northern draft is pressed into my palm. I inhale the sharp salty brew and take a sip. And before I know it, another is handed to me. I doubt I drank more than four, but four was enough. I was hammered. Guy Talbut sat me aside and said, “You’re going to get yourself in trouble if you don’t know how to drink.” He laid out a few rules to follow. Don’t drink shooters, he said, they sneak up on you fast, you can’t regulate your buzz, and they’re puke in a cup. Don’t play drinking games; you get drunk too fast, and your evening is over in an hour. And don’t buy or receive rounds; someone always drinks faster than you, and you’re racing to catch up, or someone drinks for free and leaves before he buys a round. Learn to drink at your own pace. Don’t get hammered. You’ll never impress a girl if your blind drunk and spilling your drink on her. Great advice. Good rules. I think I’ve broken every one of them over the years. Starting with that night. The booze was free, this being my first ever staff party. And before I knew it, I’d looked up at the clock and realized that I’d already blown my curfew. By the time I arrived home, I could barely walk. When I did stagger up to the door, my parents were waiting. My mother was livid. She gave me no end of Hell, as I tried to remain upright in my chair. Behind her, my father was shaking his head, and finally said, “Well, so much for the curfew.”

Sean Light, Sean Quinn and I were hanging out, when they decided to get a six pack from Northern (Doran’s) Brewery. Apparently, Quinn had a fake ID. Now, I’d never bought beer before, preferring to lift a bottle from my father’s beer fridge on occasion, instead. Quinn was served and we walked to Gilles Lake, where Light and I had keys to. It was quiet, the shack locked up for the evening, no on about. As we rounded the corner to the lake, we say a middle-aged woman glaring at us through her picture window. My heart leapt to my throat, my stomach tied in knots. I felt we should move on, but both Seans said the old biddy wouldn’t do a thing. So, we unlocked the old dilapidated old guard shack, and pupped the cap of our first beers. Our last, it turned out. A cruiser pulled up, the cops strolled down the hill, and confronted us. Hey boys, what’s your names, how old are you. Scared straight, we owned up to everything. The cops wrote everything down and watched us pour our beers out into the sand, every last one of them. Now, I’d never been spoken to by a cop before. I thought I was in deep shit, that my parents would be informed, that I would have a RECORD! But we noticed that, as the cops rounded the top of the hill, that they balled up the papers with our names on them and tossed them away.

Another party, this time with Jeff Chevrier and Peter Cassidy. Jeff was drunk, crashed out on the couch. Pete approached him, inspected him, and fingered Jeff’s nose. Jeff was unmoved. So, Peter grabbed hold of Jeff by the shirt, forcibly lifted him off the couch, and yelled into his face, “SLEEPING’S FOR FAGS!”

Words to live by.

Dungeons and Dragons

Yes, I played Dungeons and Dragons. Were we geeks, those of us who did? Maybe we were, all of us were already in the freaks and geeks crowds at our respective schools, each of us having learned to play chess, each of us avid readers, movie buffs, and maybe a little introverted, in our own ways, but we certainly didn’t feel like it. We also played sports. We also started drinking at about 15, far too young for that nonsense, but we grew up in Northern Ontario, so that was almost a given.

I began to play “the game,” at the pool. Henri Guenette approached Garry Martin, Jodie Russell and I and asked us if we’d ever heard of “D&D.” We hadn’t. So, he showed us what his elder sister had bought him for his birthday, a Basic Box Set, an AD&D Player’s Guide and DM’s guide (those in the know require no explanation, anyone else can look them up). Most of us had grown up watching and reading science fiction and fantasy, Star Wars, Star Trek, Sinbad movies, Doctor Who, Arthur C. Clark, Asimov, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, and the like, so we were intrigued.

None of us knew what we were looking at, so we spent our break between swims in the relatively secluded and sunny spot out back of the pool (the same spot where we would sun tan, what we’d been doing at the time) leafing through the source material (the game books), Henri filling in what little he’d already gleaned on his own. We decided to give this new type of game a try.

We had our first session; again, out back in the quiet seclusion, and were hooked. Before we knew it, we were playing upstairs in the glassed in observation deck most evenings. The place was perfect, long folding tables, folding chairs, and it was a place we were already at. Other members of staff watched, a few declared it silly and stupid, a few asked to play.

But we didn’t have a complete set of books, and each of us wanted our own. We asked the older lifeguards, those heading down to Sudbury to check out the university, to pick us up the books at whatever store was selling them at the time, Comics North, most likely. And before long, we each had a new set. We studied them, and the largely made up rules we’d been playing by up to then fell away.

Then Tory, our boss, asked us not to play at the pool anymore. Someone had seen us and complained. She said it was inappropriate. We weren’t aware of it at the time, but this was during the Satanic Panic, back when the news was reporting that the game was stirring up Black Masses everywhere, in the schoolyards, in dark basements; that, and mass murders and suicide. Truancy, runaways, cavities!

We convened to basements, splayed out on couch and floor, our papers fanned out around us. Pop, chips, pizza, then after some time, beer. Lots of tense moments and even more laughter.

When my mother heard about it, close on the heels of watching “Mazes and Monsters,” Tom Hanks’ greatest film before beginning his acting career, she asked me about it, and told me that a friend of a friend of a friend said—you know the drill—that we were worshipping the Devil (now my mother is a fairly religious woman, so she was understandably concerned); so I showed her what books I had, showed her the tables, the stats, the dice, showed her how the basic mechanics of the game worked, and then said to her, “this is no different from any board game; it’s just played in our heads.” She never forbade me from playing.

Did playing D&D stunt my development? I don’t know. Maybe. But it also quickened my interest in mythology, history, ecology, and helped develop my understanding of statistics.

Say what you will, but it also created some of the most deeply felt friendships I have ever known, memories of which I cherish still, regardless my not having seen some of them for some 30 years.

The Pool, Part 2

Not all work days are exciting. Most days little happens. There was one such day at the Sportsplex where I had some time to kill. I threw off my staff tank top and dove in, eager to do anything to fill the time. Laps seemed just the thing. Twenty or so laps later, I was done with swimming, and all I wanted to do was laze about in the hot pool. I grabbed a flutter board, and once in, rolled and rolled, clutching the board to my chest, pure meditation, then I half climbed out to throw off some heat. Moments passed with me in a torpid state, and then I felt a finger caress my scalp. A little surprised, I spun my head round and saw Astra Senkus looking down at me. “You’re starting to lose your hair,” she said.
“What?” is about all I could think of to say. Complete shock. I wanted to rush to a mirror to check. But that would have been the height of uncool.
“Yeah,” she said. “Your hair is starting to thin out a little bit up there.”
I was 17. Too early, in my imagination, for someone to begin to thin out. I was wrong.