Growing Up Next to the Mental Read online

  “Let’s take a quick break now, and be right back.”

  Thank God. I was bustin’ to pee and didn’t want to miss one detail for fear of losing the context of the next thrust and parry. That mindset would serve me well covering court decades later.

  As the flush of the upstairs toilet faded behind me, I knew I hadn’t missed anything, other than confirmation of what I already knew:

  “All schools under the Roman Catholic diocese of eastern Newfoundland are closed for the day . . .”

  The big comfy blanket on my bed never felt cozier as I scampered back underneath, leaving only my left ear exposed and aimed at the floor as I lay on my stomach.

  “Welcome back to Open Line, and boy, I tell ya—it is brutal outside. You know the drill: if you don’t have to go out, don’t. Let the council crowd do their jobs clearing the roads, because God forbid something should happen and we gotta get help somewhere fast.

  “Now let’s move on to line number three, while we still have power, and say a good, good morning to Loretta. Loretta, you are on the air!”

  The grand buildup was followed by dreaded dead air—generally not a good thing in radio. It triggers that shared deer-in-the-headlights reaction between Host and producer.

  “Loretta, are you there? Loretta, going once, going twice . . .”

  “I think she may be there,” the producer interjected on air. “It may be her radio that’s the problem?”

  You knew he was right when his words repeated themselves about seven seconds later somewhere in the background. Once referred to as the “profanity delay,” it was first introduced twenty years prior in the mid-1950s to catch and expunge bad or libellous words before they made it to air.

  Cursed technology. Took all of the fun and lawsuits out of it.

  So she was there. Somewhere. She’d just fallen victim to the old radio-left-on-in-the-background faux pas.

  “Loretta, if you can hear me, could you please turn your radio down?”

  This would normally be excusable for first-time callers like her.

  Still, Host was beside himself.

  “Oh, for the love of . . .”

  Hair-pulling for him, but live radio at its comic best for long-time listeners like me, not that I had a choice. It was on all the time in our house, so I chalked up my addiction to prolonged exposure and the process of osmosis. I often employed the same excuse in reference to the Waterford Hospital when trying to explain why I said or did anything off the wall.

  “. . . but I grew up next to the Mental, so that kind of explains everything.”

  Host’s words continued to echo off in the distance whilst the search for Loretta continued.

  “All righty, so Loretta must’ve stepped away to attend to something more important than me, I guess. Let’s move on to . . .”

  His words were cut off by an ear-splitting shrill of feedback as Loretta finally returned to her receiver and tried to speak.

  “Jesus H!” barked Host. “Someone turn her down, please?!”

  They should bleep Host, I thought.

  “Loretta! Are ya there now?”

  “Yes, sorry . . . I’m here,” the elderly caller replied, oblivious to the technical difficulties her radio was causing. “I was watchin’ something from my window. Is you there?”

  Wary that the conversation might morph into an Abbott and Costello routine, Host paused and composed himself.

  “Loretta, my darling, I need you to turn down your radio. Could you do that for me?”

  “Oh, yes, just give me a second now.”

  It was borderline patronizing, but it did the trick.

  She dropped the receiver on something hard, and off she went again. This time Host held his tongue as Loretta’s slippers scuffed off to wherever her radio was, then scuffed back.

  “How’s that now, my ducky?”

  “Just grand. Now what’s on your mind today other than this lovely weather we’re having?”

  “Don’t be talkin’. Look here, I just wanted to call in and say I ain’t seen one truck or plow on the roads all day, and now we got a problem like what you were talkin’ about. There’s an ambulance stuck halfway down our road. It’s absolutely ridiculous. What are we payin’ taxes for?”

  Host’s ears perked up, and his flip tone turned serious.

  “Wait now. You say there’s an ambulance stuck on your street? Is it trying to get somewhere with the lights and sirens and all that?”

  “That’s right. And I can see some men down there now trying to shovel out from under where she bottomed out sideways, by the looks of it. And there’s police here now, too, but they can’t get down either.”

  The dramatic, first-hand account from a random caller was vintage Open Line and instantly put Loretta in the running for news tip of the year.

  Meanwhile, her voice was also sounding more and more familiar.

  “Where ya calling from, Loretta?” Host asked.

  “Sin John’s.”

  “No, no. I mean what part of town?”

  “I’m here on Holbrook . . . Avenue. There’s Holbrook Place, too, but I’m on the avenue,” she said, confirming my suspicion that it was indeed Mrs. Pumphrey, the longest-winded and second-best tipper on my paper route, after the Brookfield firefighters.

  (I didn’t deserve gratuity from the latter, not after the fire stunt the previous summer. But I decided I could still live with that—for now.)

  I whipped back the covers and scurried over to my window with realistically low expectations of seeing anything of consequence, given the constant whiteouts and snow-covered trees in the way.

  Still, I was hoping to catch a flash of red light or anything dramatic that would confirm Loretta’s report.

  The visibility was even less than I expected, with snow and ice stuck to the exterior of my window, which was further obscured by rivers of condensation trailing down the interior.

  Enough of this.

  Unlike my daredevil brother, I took the stairs two at a time, reaching the landing just as my father was exiting the bathroom, clean-shaven with a hand towel slung over a shoulder and his radio blaring in concert with the ceiling fan.

  “Yes, I heard, Wish,” he said before I could open my mouth. “I’m going over for a look. You can come, but you have to get your snow gear on.”

  Our oil furnace was on bust most of the morning, but it shut off just as I entered the outside basement, as it always seemed to do when someone went in there, as if it had been caught in some act of wrongdoing.

  The sudden absence of the motor’s loud hum permitted other storm-associated sounds to be heard, like snow blowers, city plows, and metal shovels scraping against pavement, all amplified by the heavy, condensed air outside.

  Now, about my snow pants and coat.

  There was brief panic until I spotted a dark-blue sleeve partially hidden under two large overcoats on a single hook. Someone’s idea of a joke, I assumed, given my past history with stuff lost and found.

  Then there was a different kind of motor gradually overtaking all the others. One that seemed very out of place, for the city, anyway. Sounded like Ski-Doos. Certainly one, maybe even two, somewhere close by instead of up in the country, where they belonged.

  Well, if they were going to be driving around the roads illegally, this would certainly be the day for it. I mean, who and how would anyone stop them?

  My father was on the kitchen phone as I came back upstairs, snow pants and jacket held high in triumph. I’d hoped for even the slightest praise for finding the stuff, but it was not to be.

  “Boots, too, please,” was all I got from him.

  It was eerily reminiscent of those new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints commercials that stressed the importance of acknowledging and appreciating a child
’s honest efforts to please their parents.

  For example:

  Son: “Dad, Dad, I finished mowing the lawn like you asked!”

  Father: “Just don’t forget to sweep off the walk.”

  Nice.

  Or this gem:

  Son: “Mom, I got two A’s on my report card!”

  Mother: “How many times have I told you not to slam the screen door?”

  My sad reflections were interrupted by Mom holding up my mukluks, which she’d retrieved from the front vestibule.

  “Your father’s just busy with the office, Wish,” said Mom, offering to measure my height in consolation.

  The moment Dad hung up, I filled him in on the likelihood of Ski-Doos tearing around our neighbourhood, something he had apparently been apprised of on the phone.

  “It’s snowmobiles, not Ski-Doos, Wish.”

  He was right about the word usage, of course. And I would’ve known the difference had I studied the Canadian Press style guide like I was supposed to, so I could land that summer job proofreading at the paper.

  (For the record, “Ski-Doo” is considered a brand name and proper noun and thus can only be used when referring to that particular brand of snowmobile.)

  “Where are they—on the road?” I asked.

  My father turned to look at my mother.

  “No. Not on the road. They’re down in the field.”

  “Huh. I didn’t think they were allowed,” I said, the hypocrite in me intentionally overlooking the fact that we weren’t allowed either but still went every day.

  “Well, this is a bit of an emergency. The police had to borrow them from the Waterford because they couldn’t get down through Holbrook.”

  Loretta had been bang on after all.

  Snow pants half on, I shuffled and swished over to the kitchen window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the machines. It was impossible to say what brand they were, but you could tell they were coming—and fast. Two spots of light that were easy to see under the dark-grey morning sky—bounding up, down, and sideways like a set of goo-goo-googly eyes.

  I was transfixed by their dramatic, cavalry-like approach until my father trudged through my line of sight and through our backyard toward Holbrook, his fur cossack hat fading from sight with each blast of drifting snow.

  I was poised to protest his departure without me when a gale much stronger and louder than previous ones ripped a branch from our dogberry tree, narrowly missing Dad’s head.

  He was fine, but I decided I could wait inside for now.

  6

  “Three things you’re guaranteed every night on the NTV News,” Dad would say with comic disdain. “Close calls, tense moments, and dramatic testimony.”

  They’d have no problem burning off the first two of those overused clichés tonight, but the third might have to wait a day since the storm had shut down everything, including the courts.

  By now it was just after four and already pitch black. We still had power, but my sisters had commandeered the living room couch and TV for a marathon session of various soap operas, compliments of our new cable channel out of Bangor, Maine.

  All of a sudden, that channel between 6 and 8 had shows, too. Cooler shows like The Mickey Mouse Club, featuring the most beautiful Mouseketeer in the history of Mouseketeering: “Allison.”

  I further relished our new American friends for my introduction to other culturally essential New England programming, such as The Great Money Movie (“Did you see the secret word?!”) and Stacey’s Country Jamboree. But best of all, almost every Boston Red Sox game live from storied Fenway Park. The likes of Fisk, and Yaz, and Jimmy Rice, and Freddie Lynn, and I could go on.

  Cap’n Mike wasn’t so thrilled.

  In any event, with cable off the table, the three boys were forced to investigate other things to do, keeping in mind that neither homework nor piano practice were realistic options.

  Thank God for Atari and the small black-and-white non-cable set we had in the basement rec room. Pong, of course, didn’t require colour. And while dull and monotonous by today’s standard, it was mesmerizing in the day and easily kept the three of us occupied till Dad returned about an hour later.

  The incident across the way had somehow left my mind, until I heard the basement door slam shut on the third try. That’s how many it took on average in the winter, since the edges and frame would be caked with hardened layers of snow and ice that had to be chipped and scraped away with a small putty knife before she’d close tight.

  Oddly, there had been no further mention of the earlier drama on the news all day, despite the large and unconventional emergency response.

  I was about to discover why.

  You see, the commotion on Holbrook and in the Mental Field wasn’t the kind of thing that would just make the news; most days it would lead, hands down, just for the sheer originality of it, let alone the drama.

  I mean, come on. Rescuers prevented from reaching someone in distress because they were stuck on an unplowed side street. Newfoundland Constabulary officers called into action, speeding to the scene through the Mental Field on snowmobiles borrowed from hospital security?

  This should’ve been big news.

  So when it wasn’t the first, second, or even third item on NTV or CBC, everyone knew the question was coming.

  I was waiting for a commercial so I could speak, which was the rule when the news was on, when Mom got up and manually turned the volume knob to zero, then sat back down and stared at my father.

  Dad cleared his throat with one hard rev and spoke softly yet matter-of-factly.

  “Wish, Rodney Carter is in the hospital, and there’s a chance he might not make it.”

  Wait. What?

  My first instinct was to measure my visible reaction, ever so mindful of my analytical parents and how they might interpret whatever emotion I displayed. But then it actually registered, and I really didn’t know what to do, or how to react.

  The closest I’d come to the whole mortality thing was my grandmother’s passing a year earlier, which, once the initial shock wore off and we’d accepted the loss, had became one big send-off and celebration of her very full ninety-four years.

  It was also my first “wake,” where I was crushed to learn we wouldn’t be waking Nan up after all.

  Monsignor O’Keefe, who knew my mom’s mom as long as anyone, had been the perfect master of eulogy, hitting just the right notes and tone to match her personality.

  “Wow,” he began, shaking his head in disbelief. “Ninety-four years old. You just never know, do ya?”

  Until that day I had never heard laughter inside a church, let alone the applause that followed. It was bizarre.

  The monsignor continued with funny and poignant first-hand anecdotes that perfectly encapsulated who and what Amy Marie Ryan was all about.

  The good mother. The chain-smoking socialite/club owner. The world traveller who chose another very different island—Hawaii—as her second home.

  I’ll never forget that funeral for all those reasons. And because it was the first and only time I ever saw my mom cry—a memory that will forever trigger the same emotion in me.

  The entire experience also left me wondering why so many subsequent funerals didn’t follow the same crucial rule: namely, ensuring that the person chosen to speak about the deceased actually knew the person. Lest they commit the ultimate insult: getting the name wrong, or calling them by a version that no one did—Daniel instead of Dan or Danny, Alphonsus rather than Phonse, Patrick for Paddy.

  It happens.

  I made a mental note to ensure I’d be Wish, not Aloysius, when my time came. And what about Rodney? What would they call him? I had a few monikers in mind, but none that would be church-appropriate. Maybe I could get an embargoed copy of the script a
nd slip in one or two references to “PB”?

  All very cold, insensitive, and premature thoughts, really. Dad had said Rodney “might not” make it, and I already had him dead and buried. If I wasn’t already going to hell, that should fast-track the process.

  In fairness, it was hard to feel sympathy for the guy who introduced me to stress at far too young an age and had consumed too much of my time and lunch money. I also have no doubt he stunted my overall confidence and growth as a person by God knows how many years.

  He was also fond of shoving me into the bushes along the bee- and wasp-infested mini-bike path that linked the Mental with the recently shuttered sanatorium just up the hill—tuberculosis having been declared under control in the province by the mid-1970s.

  Good times, good times.

  PB was also the only other person who had first-hand knowledge of the Seadog affair, he being the instigator and me being the triggerman.

  But maybe it shouldn’t be all about me. PB could actually die. Sure, I may have wished that a few times, but that was his fault for being, well, such a bully. And just an all-’round dickhead.

  “Wish? You okay?”

  My mother interrupted my over-analysis, a bad habit I was developing too early in life.

  I proffered the obvious.

  “What happened? How come there’s nothing on the news about it?”

  It was somewhat rhetorical, but I still asked, since I had nothing else.

  I’d soaked up a lot from hanging out at Dad’s office, including protocol for dealing with sudden and near-sudden deaths.

  I knew, for example, that as a rule, the media doesn’t report on suicides, or attempts, for that matter. They’re considered immensely private and personal tragedies that have no news value since they are presumed to affect few beyond the victim, family, and close friends.

  Ultimately, a story’s newsworthiness depends on the number of people who would potentially want or need to know: a drug overdose in someone’s bedroom versus a swan dive off Atlantic Place onto Water Street at high noon.

  The latter is more likely to make the news, if for no other reason than to explain why no one could get in or out of downtown for three hours during the lunch period, not to mention the fact that a lot of people would have seen or known about it. Inquiring minds, as they say, would want and expect to hear something about it on the news.