Growing Up Next to the Mental Read online

  Nor did he make any effort to conceal his new possession, which would’ve been strange for anyone other than a mental patient.

  “He must’ve come in after we got home last night and grabbed the first thing he saw,” elder sis surmised.

  “He shoulda tried on a few first!” eldest brother quipped, inciting a group laugh that briefly fogged up the window we were all trying to look through.

  My parents would’ve laughed, too, had they not been beating themselves up for doubting me, and for leaving the basement door unlocked—again.

  Not that they didn’t have reasonable cause to be upset with me in the first place. I wasn’t exactly an angel, and odds were good I had lost the damn coat, which we never did see again.

  In the end we called it even, and I escaped with a refresher tutorial on the “cry wolf” fable, understanding that too many false denials could destroy one’s credibility when it was needed most.

  Oh, and I never forgot to thank the Lord for divinely intervening after all.

  4

  “Mom! Can we measure?”

  I had already assumed the position, kicking off my sneakers while backing up against the door frame at the entrance to the kitchen.

  “All right,” she said, shaking her head. “But we just did this last week, so I doubt there’s much change.”

  Actually, we did this every week, such was my trepidation that I would never grow beyond the four and a half feet I’d under-attained in my equally short twelve years. Perpetually the shortest kid in class, any change would be fine by me, as long as I hadn’t shrunk.

  “Can that even happen?” I asked, quizzically squinting up sideways at my mother.

  “No. Now would you please stay still, Aloysius?”

  She’d seemed to have lost her train of thought for a moment as she adjusted my head with both hands like the random barber you got for a haircut at the mall. Turns out she was also seizing the opportunity to sift through my scalp for signs of head lice, as per the school letter sent home to all parents.

  “Wait. Can what happen?” she suddenly asked.

  “Shrunk. Can someone shrunk?” I asked, intentionally messing up the tense to get a rise out of Mom.

  “Shrink, darling. You meant to say can someone shrink.”

  She paused, put her index finger under my chin, and tilted my head up until our eyes met.

  The pace of her words slowed considerably. “You do know the difference—right?”

  I stopped to consider the implications of my answer. A “yes” would confirm I had said shrunk on purpose and just for badness, whereas a “no” had the potential to keep me back a grade.

  There was also the past Christmas coat caper and the lesson I was supposed to have learned from the “cry wolf” moral, and the importance of always being honest, which was why no one believed me when I said I hadn’t lost it, and blah, blah blah, blah blah.

  I still hadn’t answered when Mom suddenly continued.

  “I suppose a person could shrink. I think there’s a medical term for that. But no, not until I . . . or you get older. Hopefully a lot older. Not at my age, of course. Your father and I are what you’d call middle-aged. But that’s what happens: you start from nothing and just waste away to nothing. Ashes to ashes . . .”

  Wow. Where did that piece of positivity come from?

  I felt the length of the hard pencil press against the crown of my skull as another short horizontal line was etched into the beige paint of the door frame.

  I spun around to see.

  Mom was right—there wasn’t much change at all. Probably none, really. But the sight of a new mark, even if just a hair above all the others, lifted my spirits enough to deflect the pipsqueak barbs for another day.

  We were led to believe that sticks and stones would hurt you more than any silly name-calling. That was just the logical, short-term mindset of any kid, especially one considered fresh meat by the bully set—like me: still under five feet tall, seventy pounds soaking wet, and I wore glasses.

  But ya know what? They could call me four-eyes, shrimp, or anything else all they wanted if it eliminated the threat of a knuckle sandwich, wedgie burns, or a punch to the beak of my nose. The last one was the worst, exacerbated by the immediate and frightening flood and taste of blood.

  And if that wasn’t enough, I was also claustrophobic. If finding buddy in the Waterford River was my top trauma moment—and it still was—a close second occurred regularly on the ice at the former Brother O’Hehir Arena.

  You see, unlike the poor, coerced saps, I wanted to play goal. And I had three childhood heroes to back it up: the Habs’ Ken Dryden, the Leafs’ Mike Palmateer, and the Flyers’ Bernie Parent. It was the mid- to late 1970s, after all.

  Oddly enough, it wasn’t the physicality and puck-peppering during the game that I feared. Rather, it was the aftermath. You see, the sixteen other players on my peewee team had this annoying—okay, terrifying—ritual of piling on the goalie in victory celebration.

  Or put another way: burying me alive.

  The more the merrier and the higher the better was their mantra.

  Did I mention I was claustrophobic?

  I had to be the only hockey player on earth who dreaded winning for any reason let alone that one. I mean, I could see if it was the championship game or something, but this was every game.

  The only caveat was we had to have won.

  As tempting as it was to let in a late one to secure a tie and avoid the inevitable post-game onslaught, I never did. Not on purpose, anyway. I was having nightmares, for Christ’s sake . . . of being trapped beneath this immovable mountain of players, and in a complete state of panic for fear I couldn’t get another breath.

  In the end there really was only one solution: run. Or should I say, skate like hell. It was said the goalie should be the best skater on the team. Now I knew why.

  What ensued was a comically bizarre, Benny Hill–like routine that saw me chased around our end by a pack of exuberant teammates until they just gave up or ran out of gas.

  Which brings me back to the door frame of our kitchen and my limited stature.

  Buddy in the river will never leave me, and I still can’t go for a skate without flashbacks of near-suffocation. But neither of those experiences could ever match the degradation I was subjected to at school swimming one day, compliments of my very own personal bully—“PB” for short.

  Oh, I had lots of random, one-off bullies, but Rodney Carter was my PB. And he played and looked the part to a T—he being a tad taller, louder, and thicker than all the other grade sevens. Even at the ripe ol’ age of twelve he had a receding hairline, and the peach fuzz on his upper lip implied premature onset of a moustache.

  He seemed to relish his role and appearance. Other accessories included the light-blue school dress shirt and beltless baggy grey cords that invariably exposed the top of his butt crack. Cap’n Mike’s phlegm couldn’t hold a candle to that blinding image on the gross chart.

  PB was also the only one authorized to threaten me with the standard “Yer gettin’ it after school,” accompanied by the raised fist from the back of the class, of course.

  But while he was a natural at bullying, he was an even better hockey player, his advanced skills always turning heads on the rare occasions he made it to a game. As gronky as he was, he could smoothly skate and stickhandle his way around most of our peewee team, although I can honestly say I didn’t miss his no-shows since he was often the initiator of the pile-on protocol.

  Rodney delighted in my embarrassing post-game ice-capades and chose to exploit my fear a few days later by barricading me in a change room locker at the old Wedgwood pool.

  As traumatizing as it was to be pushed half-naked into that small, dark echo chamber, it could never equal the humiliation I felt upon my tear
-filled exit in front of my lifelong classmates, most of whom reacted with muted pity over laughter, which was even sadder.

  As one might expect, I had big problems changing in front of anyone at swimming after that. Unfortunately, the only other options for privacy were the single bathroom stall, which was always out of order, or, God forbid, a locker.

  The following week I threw phobia and caution to the wind and covertly slipped inside, pulling the little metal door to as much as I could without jamming my fingers. Then it hit me: I’d left my clothes on the bench. Not that it would’ve mattered, since the space was so confined that I couldn’t bend or extend anyway.

  Thus, rather than risk a repeat of the horrid PB affair, I stayed put till I was sure everyone had left.

  Wouldn’t ya know, the janitor would walk in just as I was stepping out.

  There was an awkward pause and look of puzzlement on his face.

  “Ah, I think your bus is leaving, or it might already have left,” he said, turning and quickly walking out again.

  I was shivering too much to say anything, my trunks still stuck to me. To make matters worse, my swim bag had been knocked off the bench, spilling my clothes and towel onto the slick and muddy tile floor.

  By the time I emerged, the bus was indeed gone, but one of the Christian Brothers, I was told, would be back for me.

  Great.

  I slumped into a corner chair and waited—bundled up but still damp and frozen, boots dangling a foot off the floor.

  “Is that your teeth?” asked the gum-chewing, hair-twirling, twenty-something lifeguard filling in at the reception desk.

  My God—it was my teeth, actually chattering loud enough for her to hear. I thought that only happened in Saturday morning cartoons.

  I cursed the Brothers for dragging us off to swimming in the dead of winter. And speak of the devil, the main door flew open with a blast of frigid air, and in trudged one I’d never seen before.

  He stamped his way straight to the front desk and was directed to the corner where I was sitting.

  “Aloysius Mooney?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Gonna take you on home, now. Do you have everything?”

  Home? It wasn’t even lunchtime.

  He said only one more thing en route to Cowan Avenue.

  “The principal has been speaking with your parents. We’ll get to the bottom of all this.”

  The bottom was right where my heart went. Yes, I had dilly-dallied and missed the bus, but there was no need to get the bosses involved, was there?

  Apparently there was.

  Context provided by initially reluctant classmates, along with intel from the janitor, gave the school and my parents more than an inkling of what I’d been subjected to in the change room, and by whom.

  Suddenly, potential punishment of me was replaced with potential pummelling at the hands of PB. The fact that I hadn’t actually ratted him out wouldn’t matter.

  It was a Friday, but that didn’t mean I was safe until Monday. Not with Rodney Carter living just three backyards away from me.

  You see, Rodney wasn’t just my schoolyard bully. He’d played the part in our neighbourhood, too, for as long as I could remember.

  I hardly stepped outside that weekend for fear of a run-in—impromptu or otherwise.

  Stressed out at twelve. It couldn’t bode well for my well-being.

  But it was all needless worry, it turned out, at least in the short term.

  I was expecting Friday’s events to be what everyone was whispering about in class on Monday morning, but there was nothing of the sort. Nor was there any Rodney.

  It was almost a letdown, but mostly relief following a stressful and sleepless weekend of imagining how he’d get me, and what he’d do when he did.

  “Word on the street,” as he would always say, was he was suspended for a week; word that came from a boastful Rodney himself, out on the street. Apparently there had been an accumulation of indiscretions on his part, and the change room stunt was the last straw.

  And that was just at school. He had a knack for nasty around the Mental Field, too, although some of his claims seemed a little far-fetched even for our messed-up minds. He told stories of helping patients escape from basement cells or taking others on Metrobus rides downtown and just leaving them there.

  But everything was back to normal the following week upon his return—normal in the sense that he was back, anyway. I just recall him being very different in a very short period of time. Seemingly, the rambunctious, reckless punk who was gonna get me after school had been replaced by a big, fidgety galoot who mostly kept to himself.

  The pre-morning bell chatter was dominated by less-than-subtle desk-to-desk hypotheses that might explain PB’s sudden change in behaviour.

  “The Brothers must’ve really put the fear of God in ’im,” said one.

  “Yeah, they put somethin’ in ’im!” said another, followed by prolonged laughter, with Rodney right there.

  “I think he’s on somethin’,” said a third, summing up what we were all really thinking.

  “I am,” Rodney said suddenly, getting up and walking to the open classroom door. He stopped and turned to look at all the faces of the friends he’d known since kindergarten. He dug down into the front right pocket of his grey cords and produced a small pill bottle.

  “They’re Valium. Supposed to calm me down, right? ’Cause I can be a real shit disturber, hey Mooney?”

  There was a smattering of nervous laughter from everyone except me.

  “We might be moving, too. I dunno. Anyways, I gotta go take one of these. Smell ya later.”

  And that was it. He never came back to class or school after that. He also stopped playing hockey, failing to show up for any games with an all-star team he’d easily made up the shore. He’d wanted to, just didn’t always have a parent to take him.

  In short, it was no secret that Rodney’s home life wasn’t helping with his alleged behavioural issues. In fact, around our tight-knit neighbourhood it was widely considered the root of it all.

  He never did move. But his dad did, leaving just Rodney and his mother at the Holbrook bungalow he grew up in.

  As weeks passed I rarely saw him, and even less of his mom.

  And, dare I say, I missed PB, such had been the regularity of his presence—albeit menacing—in my life to date.

  5

  “The opinions expressed on the following program are not necessarily those of this station.”

  The Open Line disclaimer wafted up to my bedroom from the downstairs bathroom radio and into my half-conscious head.

  This could only mean one of two things: I was still home and late for school, or somehow I was already on the Metrobus, eavesdropping on the driver’s little transistor he had tucked down between his seat and the big sliding window to his left.

  I rolled to my other side and was drifting off again when two sharp-knuckled raps on my door and a scream of “Snow day!” brought me fully around.

  Okay, it could mean one of three things.

  One of my two older brothers made the pronouncement as he practically flew down the stairs, touching maybe three of the fifteen treads along the way while grasping the old wooden railing on the right. I couldn’t believe he still did that after one particularly gruesome incident in which he drove a three-inch splinter straight through the tip of his middle finger to his knuckle.

  The pain made him sweat, turn white, and nearly faint. It wasn’t until the nurses at Janeway emerg mercifully deadened his entire right hand that he quit squealing and settled down. Ten minutes later they had it out; the splinter, funnily enough, was replaced by a splint.

  And it was funny, the way the implement was positioned and clamped over his erect middle digit, giving him licence to “fli
p the bird” 24-7 for a couple of weeks without consequence.

  My three sisters, meanwhile, remained in their rooms, indifferent as cats. I can only laugh now at my assumption then that all felines were girls and canines were boys. But then I also believed a wake was where you actually woke the person up to say your goodbyes.

  And speaking of waking, why was someone waking me up if the schools were closed?

  There was movement throughout the house, but I was thankfully left to doze and absorb the verbal gymnastics of Open Line, faint as it was, coming up through the vent in my floor.

  Verbal something, anyway.

  “. . . and if ya ask me, the lot of ’em should be thrown out on their you-know-whats.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Host. “Well, I didn’t ask you, Winifred, but since you brought it up—on their whats? Their arses? You can say that on the air, ya know. And who exactly are ‘the lot of ’em’? Ya can’t just blanketly accuse a whole group of people of something. Gimme some names, Winifred. I want names!”

  Host theatrically pounded his fist on his studio desk, but she seemed oblivious to the sarcasm.

  “Oooh, my God, I can’t do dat. It’s just the ’ole council out ’ere. Dey’re h’all h’at it.”

  Host must’ve been weighing the risk versus reward of asking where exactly “out ’ere” was, when a little voice in his ear provided an out.

  “Okay, well it sounds like you’ve got quite the can of worms you want to open there this morning, Winifred. But unfortunately my producer tells me we gotta pause now before we go face and eyes into the growing list of cancellations coming into our storm centre.”

  Host motioned for his producer behind the glass to fade Winifred out before she could begin a new sentence.

  “So we’ll have to say goodbye now, but please call again so we can give you the chance to make your points. Thanks now. Bye bye.”

  Host drew a deep breath, followed by an exhale of exasperation.