Chapter 10: Tornado - Asbestos

Tuesday, August 27, 1991

For a few seasons now I’ve been swimming seriously, meaning furiously. I joined the school club, the Solstice Swimmers. The pool is a place where I can smother myself, achieve obliteration through exertion. But this physical expenditure is secondary; what counts most to me is the discipline of technique. My stroke is an inspired front crawl. Elbow pointed up as I pull my arm out of the water, fingertips brushing the surface as I stretch my forearm in front of my head. Tracing extended S-curves under my body for better pull. My feet are propellers, kicking up a moderate but vigorous churn. I alternate my breathing between right and left on every fifth stroke, ignoring the pointed instructions of both coaches. My times are decent, so they mostly let me do it my way.

When I’m underwater, songs come to me and I hum them as I breathe out. The other swimmers in the club complain – Who’s singing underwater? Like the beeping of their watches, it hits you from all sides, conducted through 330,000 gallons of water. The way it annoys them makes me keep at it, so discreetly no one ever knows that I’m the culprit any more than they can guess what I’m singing. I’m a master of concealment.

The Starmania tape Poulie made for me long ago, which like all my music I listen to exclusively on headphones, holds a permanent place in one tray of the double tape deck in my room. But its case stays in hiding. Song titles like ‘Un garçon pas comme les autres’ and ‘Travesti’ would be playing with my father’s fire, while ‘Les adieux d’un sex symbol’ would make my mother blush. The tape is my last written record of Charlélie. One song from this rock opera tells the story of a mob of glamorous wild boys from the housing projects outside town descending on the city centre. The singer says:

When all the good people are sleeping in peace,

The glitter punks gather and descend on downtown.

Who’s raping the girls in car parks at night?

If you’re wondering who’s setting buildings alight,

The glitter punks wreck shop when we come to town.

Five bars at four beats per bar equals twenty; five sets of five bars equals one hundred: one complete phase. Safe and sound under a watery cloak, my body pulses to the tempo of the song. A perfect flip turn at the end of my lane, and I push off in the opposite direction. S-curves, flutter kicks, breathe out, breathe in, pulse.

When we roll down the sidewalk, people cross the street.

We may not look manly, but we’re scary to meet.

People titter at guys in glitter and makeup,

But when they spot the blood on our razor blades,

It’s like lightning in the fog.

Sixty-five lengths at twenty-five yards per length in twenty-five minutes: fifteen sets of five lengths equals one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five yards, or five phases of three hundred and seventy-five yards. Now it’s easy to tally the phases in my mind: five phases make a pyramid. After five training sessions, five pyramids make a park. I train on Sunday morning, Tuesday at lunch, and Thursday evening, then the following Sunday and Wednesday at lunch: one park. After each park, I have to light a bonfire in my head, to clear the count and start over again.

Life-saving class is on Saturday mornings. In five weeks and five days, I’ll be a Bronze Cross lifeguard.

The walls are almost entirely glass. Sunlight streams in, streaking the mirrored surface of the water with fire, plunging amber hands down to the bottom of the pool. This orangey projection both calms and excites me. My gaze is trained straight ahead and does not waver; my lines are just as ruthlessly straight, and my technique wastes not one iota of energy. My entire being is consumed; I am boiling.

The change room is the Mephistophelean antechamber of this Atlantis. The boys shower together in a room without stalls, laughing like grunting hogs at their jokes about the girls. The roar of hair dryers and echoes of the girls’ giggling reaches us from the other side of the shower wall. So the boys’ laughter must reach them too, even more clearly. Sandy this, Sandra that. You can see through Katie Quirion’s white swimsuit. Fannie has hair down there. Karine gives head, Annick doesn’t. Vachon, the club’s champion swimmer, claims he fingered both twins, Edith and Esther Bizier: he waves two lecherous index fingers in Dany Morasse’s face.

This change room is an ordeal – but not so with the Bronze Cross group. With them a calm intimacy prevails, cultivated through aquatic contact and carefully practiced first-aid procedures. Our Saturday sessions are spent simulating artificial respiration, cardiac massages, and Heimlich manoeuvres in a pleasurable unisex closeness.

But with the swim club the change room fills me with a violent contempt. They give me nicknames: Sissy, Lispy, Faggot. People suspect I’m the one singing underwater. Like lightning in the fog.

I think back to the lyrics: How can that be my song? A gang of guys: bad start. Raping girls: horrible.

I wish I could have long hair, dye it orange. I wish I had something to shave, so I could nick my skin and leave flashes of scarlet lightning on my face. I wish no one knew what I have between my thin, firm thighs. I wish I could wear long black stockings, long black gloves; leather and chains, lace and pearls. A bad-boy diamond in the rough. By day we lie low, blend into the masses / After dusk we shed our skin, strike where we can. I wish I could be part of some sophisticated gang of ungovernable glitter boys, a scourge on the city, worse than any cancer.

When I leave the building, in front of the empty school bus parking lot and the elementary schoolyard, facing nothing, at high noon, my imagined coiffure vanishes into thin air. The weather is everything at once: sun, hot wind, steam. The sky is writhing.

* * *

A few months earlier A Sunday afternoon: Winter 1991

My allowance was five dollars a week. My chores were emptying the dishwasher, shovelling the driveway, mowing the lawn, and cleaning the windows, and I did them all without complaint. For Christmas, I got a Sony Mega Bass mini system with CD and double cassette. The promised bass was experienced only on those rare occasions when the house was empty; the rest of the time, an extension cable ran from the stereo to my Walkman headphones on my bed, where I listened and pored over my tiny collection, my eyes and hands and breathing and mind at rest. One allowance: a five-pack of ninety-minute blank tapes. Five allowances: a new CD from Columbia House, the huge mail-order catalogue. Though my chosen genre was metal, I also taped copies of whatever I could get my hands on: Daniel’s classic rock, Péloquin’s boring French stuff (Cabrel, Renaud), the punk masterpiece Nada by Bérurier Noir that Ouellet had turned up somewhere, and the metal CDs Binette would lend me for a single night. I owned around fifteen CDs and played them in heavy rotation. On that day, my latest Columbia House purchase was spinning in the tray, galvanizing my belligerence.

It took me a few seconds to realize that my headphones had slipped out of the jack. Dave Mustaine was now singing through the speakers, causing panic that was compounded by the shock of seeing my father looming nearby. He held the headphone cord in hand. I stood up straight, like a soldier caught out of line.

I was wondering what you were listening to.

He grabbed the CD booklet, which showed the leaders of five world powers gathered in a hangar behind the Megadeth mascot, Vic Rattlehead. Vic was brandishing a fluorescent green rock that suddenly brought to mind the image of Rascar Capac about to smash the crystal ball. In front of Vic, an alien lies trapped in a space capsule. I hoped my father wouldn’t damage it. Like everything I owned, I kept my booklets in mint condition. You could never tell I’d read them all a hundred times.

The way my father pronounced the band name, ‘mega debt,’ was criminal. It was meant to be funny. But I’d rather be deaf than endure my dad’s jokes.

They haven’t taught you about radioactivity at school, hey.

A little, in physics.

It doesn’t seem like you’re learning much.

I should probably just have been saddened by my father’s inability to find a way to communicate with me, to connect with my interests and my life. Before the holidays, we’d studied Quebec’s mineral resources in geography and spent two whole lessons learning about asbestos mining. Wouldn’t it have been nice, or even just normal, for me to be able to talk about it at the dinner table with my dad, my dad who drove an actual truck full of actual asbestos at the actual mine. Wouldn’t that have showed him that we were learning a thing or two at school, and that I was sometimes, in fact very often, interested in what we learned? My guileless attempt to bring it up – Did you know that the asbestos region is also called the Serpentine Belt? – lasted about as long as his reply.

Leave me alone with your belt, I just took mine off.

Little wink at my mom, who blushed.

I don’t feel like talking about work after work. Is that too much to ask?

It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t violent. It was meant as a joke – but it wasn’t meant for me, and it didn’t fulfill my need to connect with my father. It was meant as a joke but was cold and disheartening. Then the atmosphere turned icy, and it was implicitly my fault, since of course he’d launched back into his monologue about the latest signs that the mine closure was imminent. My dad wasn’t cruel, he was angry. I got that. My dad didn’t hate me, he just didn’t especially like me. I got that too. And there was one more thing I understood: I did hate him. And I was scared of him.

Given my father’s volatility, I felt an urgent need to stop the tape – ‘Tornado of Souls,’ off Rust in Peace – or at the very least turn down the volume. I was sitting upright on my bed, toes on a hardwood floor of red-hot coals. I’d recently noticed that whenever I got nervous, it made me squint a little, and my irises would point down toward my nose. Gradually, in secret, as an unvoiced but still alarming shame took hold, I’d comfort myself by repeatedly crossing my eyes, counting to five. A few times I’d completed multiple sets, but only ever up to twenty-five eye-crossings in total. I’d made a strict rule against going beyond twenty-five. Annihilate the fire.

But just then with my father, I focused on blinking, at regular if somewhat rapid intervals. Of course I refrained from sharing my interpretation of the album cover, which suggested the Cold War was a minor concern compared to some fantastical extraterrestrial threat.

And above all I feared – against all logic and for no good reason, beyond a vague feeling of being deemed abnormal, hence guilty – that my dad would see my disaster scrapbook lying open on my desk. In the last five years I hadn’t added many clippings, not even Poulie’s obituary, which I’d missed in the Courrier Frontenac. This absence in my scrapbook and the lack of any casket at the funeral – just a mother-of-pearl urn – left me with the distinct impression that my perfect friend had never existed at all, that he’d forever represent an original loss, irrecoverable and formless.

My memories of the days following Poulie’s death were hazy, but one scene kept replaying in my mind: my new teacher Diane taking me aside and asking me if Charlélie had been my best friend – Yes – and then her silent sigh and furtively tucked lips, and her advice conveying in a single breath both her kindness and the gravity of the situation.

It’s going to be important to make new friends this year, Steve. There are always new friends waiting for you.

On the top page of the disaster scrapbook compiled by the late Charlélie Poulin and yours truly, the glue was drying on an article from the Journal de Québec I’d found the day before, in my locker at the pool: ‘George Bush and the United Nations Launch Operation Desert Storm in Iraq.’ I didn’t know what it was about this article in particular that sent me back to my collection of paper tragedies.

My father regularly came into my room to do his ‘rounds’: inspect my bed, make sure my window was closed, and scrutinize the posters on my walls, frowning or muttering under his breath at my collection of shirtless, tattooed rockers in tight leather pants – Axl Rose, Sebastian Bach, Tommy Lee … It wasn’t as if I’d put up the most suggestive posters from the magazines I bought – one allowance.

True to habit, my father had just come by to do his rounds, to lay a firm hand on my shoulder and let me know that he thought I wasn’t doing much with my life, with this reading and music-listening. That he couldn’t wait for me to become ‘more independent’ (read: ‘a real man’) like Daniel. At my age, my brother was already working weekends, my father reminded me, as the crushing pressure of his large hand pressed me down, determined to keep me in place, a child powerless to respond.

I mentioned that I was one class away from becoming a lifeguard. Mistake. Watching people swim isn’t a real job. After five years washing cars, Daniel was still making minimum wage – I’d earn more than him – but he works hard. I could feel my querulous answer bursting the dam of my father’s unstanchable rage. Any moment now my room would be engulfed by a black lake.

Always thinking you’re better than everyone else. Fourteen years old and strutting around like some kind of doctor. Believe me, you’re not gonna make a living staring at people in bathing suits.

My double-edged silence might either quell my father’s anger or further fan its flames. I was now struggling to breathe.

And I’m sick of looking at that shit on your walls. Take it all down!

I would never have imagined that it would be this affront that unlocked my courage, some reflex spurring me to stand up to my father. Cut to the quick, I shouted in a voice that betrayed the full strength of my confused panic.

They’re my magazines! I was so worked up I feared I might burst into tears.

His anger jumped a notch to rage. Yelling now.

Who do you think pays for your goddamn magazines? Who do you think pays for this house? These walls are mine and I’ll decide what goes on them. So take your little faggot pictures off my walls!

The unyielding refusal in my head, my furious breathing through my nostrils, and the constriction of my jaw flipped a switch, and my father passed from orders to execution. Megadeth raged on, catalyzing my father’s own rage and driving him to further humiliation and violation. With the flat of his callused hand he coldly ripped each poster free, one at a time, leaving them to slide down the wall under their own weight with a terrifying and sadistic economy of movement. ‘Polaris’ was playing now, Mustaine crowing about cowering in fear. I sobbed with rage at the sight of the corners of certain posters left stuck to the wall in a cruel mockery.

That’s when the unthinkable slipped out from my clenched teeth.

Fucking asshole.

My dad pounced. What did you say? He grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked so hard I thought he’d dislocate my neck. How dare you talk to me like that! he said as he eclipsed my face with his stare, locking me into a moment of fear so acute that it triggered the dreaded stress response in my eyes, my tears, a pitiful appeal that only fed his furious scorn.

Little shit! He raised his other hand while the first was twisting the hair on my scalp. Little shit! I’m gonna whack you on your little faggot face, and then you’ll get up and walk straight –

PIERRE!

This rare summons from my mother was final and without appeal. My head was immediately released with a gesture of almost theatrical disgust.

The CD was over. I was snivelling in between long, heaving sobs. Pins and needles in my uncontrollably shaking hands as my parents had it out in the hallway.

He makes me lose it, that kid. I can’t stand that snotty attitude.

I closed the door, picked my posters up off the ground, and slid them into my disaster scrapbook, hiding it all away.

A few days later, at the sight of my crushed expression, my mom asked me to try not to pick fights with my father. He’s on edge. It was meant to be nice.

* * *

Tuesday, August 27, 1991

Daniel bursts into the house. Hi, Mom, I was just passing by on my way to pick up Nat. On the radio they said there was a tornado in Pierreville. Wasn’t that where Dad was going to – lowering his voice – Wasn’t that where he was going today? Some people got injured.

Where’s Pierreville?

My brother looked at me for a second before answering, cautiously, with a quick glance at my mother.

Near Trois-Rivières.

I don’t know, hon. He said he’d be home for dinner.

I didn’t ask what Dad was doing out there, but Daniel told me anyway. He’d gone to get a new fishing boat. I couldn’t have cared less. I just wanted to know whether he’d be there at dinner.