Growing Up Next to the Mental Read online

  Julie waited till we’d detached before introducing herself.

  “He’s still got some stuff in his mouth there, so he’s finding it a little hard to speak yet. But he seemed to really enjoy the ride around,” she explained.

  “I think he even saw a friend.”

  My mother shot me a look of pleasant curiosity.

  “Someone from school?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  I wanted to just blurt out “Rodney,” but the letter “R,” I discovered, must be the hardest sound to pronounce with one’s mouth full. And I wasn’t much for charades at the moment, or any time, really.

  With that, the white coat who’d relieved me of my bad teeth, and the pain, arrived back on the scene.

  “How’s our feisty little patient doing?” he asked with a smirk, referring to my earlier hellraising.

  Why, I wondered, do dentists always ask questions when they know patients can’t answer? I’ll give Kent one thing: he had a knack for deciphering all the gibberish that came out of my mouth, which usually just consisted of screams, anyway.

  I gave a simple thumbs-up as we moved into a small examination room for a final once-over.

  “Looks to be clotting up nicely, young man. I think we can take some of this yucky stuff out now so you can communicate. But just a little, okay? Don’t overdo it just yet, ’cause it might start bleeding again.”

  I was still pretty groggy as I was wheeled to the main entrance.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” said Julie, digging down into the side pockets of her uniform. “Which one would you like?”

  The choice between a Mickey Mouse or Richie Rich toothbrush wasn’t exactly what I’d been hoping for, but the message was received loud and clear on the off chance my hospital ordeal hadn’t provided enough incentive to get busy with one or the other.

  Julie pushed me to the curb where Mom had pulled up in the station wagon, helping me out of one seat and into the other. One last wave and flash of her braces and we were on our way.

  “Some chicken noodle soup with crackers, and maybe some ice cream later?”

  I nodded.

  “I know this was all very painful and upsetting, but I hope you learned a lesson. Why don’t we stop at Callanan’s for a new game or something?”

  I almost blurted “Love you, Mom” again, but the words just didn’t come. It just seemed weird, for some reason. I mean, there was no question we were a big, close, loving family. We just never said it to each other very much, if at all, unless it was over a long-distance call or something.

  We lucked into a late-afternoon parking spot near Callanan’s hardware store on Water Street, one of my favourites to explore. It had all the sights and smells of a hardware store, but games, too.

  I wasn’t going in today, though, given my state. Instead, Mom had me wait in the warm, running car while she popped inside to purchase my pity/sooky/bravery treat of choice: the “new and improved” Archie Bunker Card Game.

  It offered more mixed metaphors than a single morning of Open Line. And funny for the whole family, it promised, in an extremely politically incorrect way that we could all relate to—each card offering up jokes and risqué terms that often applied to the Mental.

  I couldn’t help but scan the field for signs of life, maybe even a Union Jack, as we made the turn into our partially cleared driveway. Both brothers were at it but moved aside to let us through.

  “Grab a shovel, Wish!” one of them shouted, only half joking, as we exited the wagon alongside the basement door.

  “Aloysius won’t be doing anything for a while yet,” Mom declared.

  One thing’s for sure: if Marie Mooney wasn’t my mother’s name, it would’ve been Florence Nightingale. From the moment we entered the house and made it right up to my bed, she never left my side or let go of my arm or elbow.

  “Right under the covers now, and I’ll be back up with soup and a children’s Aspirin,” she said with pleasing emphasis.

  The neatness and tidiness of my room rendered it almost unrecognizable. It was a chore just getting under the sheets, tightly spread and tucked as they were under the mattress.

  To the side was one of our snap-together tray tables from the den, replete with placemat, soup spoon, and a single orange Flintstones chewable vitamin sitting on its own little side plate.

  “You should just suck on the vitamin and let it dissolve,” she reminded me as she whisked her way back downstairs to fetch the main course.

  That’s when I noticed the pièce de résistance, or as Archie Bunker would say, “peace of resistance,” of the entire setting: the black-and-white TV from our rec room, sitting atop my tall brown dresser.

  This was the life, I thought, the great reward for the torture I’d endured.

  I was catching up on the plot of The Young and the Restless—which hadn’t changed at all since I’d last been exposed a couple of weeks earlier—when Mom returned with a steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup and a side of Premium Plus crackers, with salted tops to boot!

  At the same time the phone starting ringing, but she never flinched. Shockingly, neither of my sisters ran for it, either.

  “They’ll call back if it’s important,” she always said. “Now this is still pretty hot, so make sure you blow on every spoonful, okay?”

  She leaned in with a peck on my forehead and was gone again.

  The right time would come, I thought, when I’d have the gumption to say “I love you, Mom.” Or at least the less formal “Love you!” on the way out the door or something.

  The important thing, my conscience told me, was that I felt it—which meant she must know it.

  I got halfway through the soup before the trials and tribulations of the day caught up with me and I drifted off to the world of bizarre and nonsensical dreams.

  My childhood was marred by several recurring nightmares—my Halloween experience being the least traumatic of them.

  The most disturbing was the one I had—and still have—about airplanes: specifically, about them crashing.

  The dream sequence is always the same: I’m milling about amongst a crowd of people, yet seemingly I’m the only person that notices some large aircraft suddenly bank left or right, and careen to the ground, taking dozens of souls down with it. I watch in disbelief as the aircraft hits nose first and buckles into nothing, disintegrating into a black and red fireball that I run toward but never reach.

  Other variations on the theme place me in the cockpit of a small Cessna that always ends up flying into a myriad of power lines on takeoff or landing. Thank God I always woke up before crashing because, rumour had it, if you died in your dreams, you died in your sleep.

  There was great relief when I discovered later on that it wasn’t the events in the dream that could kill you, but rather the extreme fear and resulting heart attack that such a traumatic event might induce. Made sense to me, given the hard-pumping palpitations that often shocked me awake in the middle of the night.

  I can only conclude that those tragic aeronautic scenarios were the result of the many late-night drives with Dad—usually after a school dance—to the old Torbay airport, where we’d sit and listen to classical music on eight-track as 727 after 737 swooped down over our station wagon and in for a loud landing just a few dozen yards away.

  It was, in a word, spectacular to watch as the beaming lights and screaming jet engines came right at us, sometimes low enough to see the faces of passengers in the windows of the illuminated fuselage, as the third frantic movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata blared inside the car.

  Some nightmares became so familiar and repetitive that I could sometimes stop myself mid-dream and question whether this time it was really happening. I would even think to pinch myself, not that it ever worked.

  Such was my current unconscious
conundrum. It put me right back at the Janeway, or at least a reasonable facsimile of same. It had all the smells and sterilized features of a hospital, except every room I entered was a classroom.

  School and hospital combined. This was a nightmare, all right.

  I was about to enter another room that resembled the cafeteria at St. Bon’s when a pay phone on the wall began ringing, and ringing, and ringing . . . incessantly enough to bug me awake.

  I opened my eyes, but my room was still very dark: that moment of disorientation where you can’t tell if it’s seven in the morning or seven at night.

  A sliver of light widened on the opposite wall as my door eased open in concert with my mother’s whisper.

  “Aloysius? Are you awake?”

  “Uh huh. What time is it?”

  “Just after seven thirty.”

  “At night?”

  “Yes,” she said, switching on my soft-glow bedside lamp in favour of the cold dome in the ceiling.

  “Had an interesting call just now from a friend of yours . . . well, from his mother.”

  I lifted myself upright as Mom adjusted the pillows for support behind me.

  “Who?”

  “Rodney Carter’s mom. She said you two saw each other at the Janeway. You didn’t tell me that.”

  It was no great secret that he and I had what one might describe as an on-again, off-again relationship. But I still wasn’t sure we fell into the category of friends.

  “No. I just saw him. That’s all. And he saw me. We just waved and stuff.”

  “Well, his mother was wondering if you’d like to go for a visit.”

  Come again?

  I tried pinching myself, but to no avail. This was really happening.

  “He’s going to be at the hospital for a little while longer, and he hasn’t had many friends or visitors, apparently. It’s okay if you don’t want to, but I think it might be a good idea, and just a nice thing to do.”

  Yes, a nice thing to do. Like all the nice things he’d done for me over the years. Shag that.

  That’s what I wish I’d said.

  “Did he ask or did his mom ask?”

  “Well, he told his mom he saw you and . . .”

  “Do I have to?”

  “I’m not going to force you, Aloysius. But as I said, I think it’s something you should do. I know he’s been rough on you in the past, but you’ll just have to trust me—you’ll understand later that it is the right thing to do.

  “Sometimes you just have to turn . . .”

  “. . . the other cheek, I know,” I said, completing Mom’s predictable biblical reference that preached loving, not hating your enemies, despite the shit they put you through.

  “I know, I know. But I’m running out of cheeks to turn.”

  Mom stifled a laugh.

  “Well, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about any of that at the hospital. Sounds like he just wants someone to talk to. Someone he knows.”

  Made sense, I guess. And I was pretty curious as to what was going on with him. It might even mean more time off school!

  “Okay. Well, can we go tomorrow? In the morning?”

  “Nice try,” said Mom, who knew me better than anyone did or ever would. “You know you have school tomorrow, and you’ve already missed a couple of days this week because of your teeth. So I told Mrs. Carter that Saturday might be best.”

  “But I have hockey on Saturday.”

  “That’s at seven in the morning, Aloysius. I told her around eleven, maybe.”

  “All right,” I said with a sigh of disgruntlement as Mom left with my dirty dishes.

  I stared off at the reflection of my lamplight in the blank TV scene, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

  Why me? I wondered. What could we possibly have to talk about? Our encounters mostly consisted of one-way threatening hand gestures and shit-knockings.

  But at least I would just be a visitor this time. No doctors, dentists, or manhandling orderlies could touch me or my teeth!

  And ya know, I might even get to see the lovely Julie again.

  11

  My Saturday morning regimen was as choreo-

  graphed as the Bolshoi and likely would’ve resulted in an OCD diagnosis by today’s standard.

  5:00 a.m.—Wakeup by Mickey Mouse alarm clock.

  5:15 a.m.—Lug goalie gear up from basement to den.

  5:25 a.m.—Prepare toast and tea.

  5:30 a.m.—Don said goalie gear while watching

  The Hilarious House of Frightenstein starring Vincent

  Price on NTV.

  6:00 a.m.—Wake Dad and slump on couch for next thirty

  minutes watching The Flintstones.

  6:40 a.m.—Depart for St. Bon’s Forum.

  7:00 a.m.—Peewee game.

  7:58 a.m.—Dash from teammates to avoid post-game

  victory celebration (see Chapter 4).

  8:20 a.m.—Depart forum for McDonald’s breakfast (drive-

  thru), to be consumed during a brief layover

  at Dad’s office.

  The rest of the morning would depend on how long we stayed downtown at the Daily News. It usually didn’t matter, since I could walk in on Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner anywhere and never be lost.

  Routines are a great thing until they’re disrupted.

  I’d hardly forgotten about my appointment with PB, but it was still unsettling when Mom called down to the basement, where I was methodically drying my goalie skates and airing out the rest of my equipment.

  “C’mon up, Wish. We have to be at the Janeway for eleven, and you still have to get cleaned up. Can’t go to a hospital smelling like that rancid hockey gear.”

  Maybe not, but it was still—ironically—the easiest place for a healthy person to pick up an infection.

  An hour later we were back at the scene of the crime, where seven teeth had been brutally ripped from their owner and still no charges laid. Not that I was complaining now.

  What an ugly building, I thought—no offence to the sagacious Dr. Charles A. Janeway and all. Let’s be honest. The renovated army building had all the warmth and architectural beauty of, well, army barracks—or an outhouse.

  I once heard they chose this spot for the hospital as a cruel joke against shut-ins on Regatta Day. I mean, seriously—could they have made it any less inviting for children?

  Whitewashed paint had faded yellow from neglect, as evidenced by the rust stains that trailed from the various levels of roofing down into the foundations hidden under dirty snowbanks.

  It was no prettier in the summer.

  I was missing Bugs, Sylvester, Tweety Bird, and the gang for this?

  The reception area was filled with families waiting their turn to see a sick son, daughter, sibling, relative, or friend, Saturday being the most popular visiting day by far.

  “You don’t know how good you got it till you spend some time there,” Mom would often say. (Like I needed reminding—the taste of blood returning every time I poked the leaky holes in my gums.)

  I felt a sudden pang of fear as Mom spoke again.

  “Rodney Carter’s room, please?” she said through a small round hole in the glass window that separated us from the information booth.

  No turning back now.

  The woman behind the partition pushed a couple of buttons, lifted a receiver, and relayed the message.

  “They’ll be right down. You can have a seat.” Her instruction was so routine that she never even looked up to notice that there were no seats to be had.

  There was, however, the gift shop, which, unlike a few days ago, was open!

  “Can we?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Wish. The lady
said they’d be down in a few minutes.”

  “I could go in and you could watch for them,” I proposed, applying instant, infallible logic that never seemed to strike me in school.

  “All right,” Mom relented, unable to find any immediate flaw in the request.

  I scooted inside, heading straight for the magazine rack chock full of comics and word-find puzzles.

  “Back for more, are we?”

  There was no mistaking the sweet voice that did the same funny things to my belly as a few days prior.

  I turned, fully expecting to see the red-and-white striped vision of Julie the candystriper.

  She sensed my hesitation and confusion at seeing her in a ball cap, sweater, jeans, and sneakers.

  “I guess you didn’t recognize me without my uniform. I don’t have to wear it when I’m volunteering in here or the cafeteria.”

  Wow. I made the difficult decision then and there to break up with Allison from The Mickey Mouse Club.

  “I’m here to visit my friend,” I announced, proud and mature-like.

  “That is so sweet. The friend you saw the other day?”

  “Yeah. He’s going through a rough time, and I thought it would be nice to stop by and make him feel better.” I shamelessly plagiarized Mom’s words and advice, but I’d heard love made people do crazy things.

  “Well then, I believe I owe you an ice cream,” she said, leading me over to the white miniature deep-freeze in the corner of the cramped shop.

  All I could hear were the various paper-covered products knocking and scraping against the ice-encrusted walls of the freezer as she rummaged around.

  “Ta-dah,” she exclaimed, extracting an orange, cone-shaped item that could only be . . .

  I let out a muted scream as she held up a Buried Treasure like the Statue of Liberty held her torch.

  An older woman glared over as she impatiently waited for Julie to return to her post behind the counter. We both giggled.

  “Nice to see you can communicate again. Must be getting better in there.”

  “Yeah—a lot better.”

  We headed to the counter just as Mom poked her head half inside the little shop.