Blood Sports (2 page)

I respect your mom. Yeah, she’d relapsed a couple of times, but that’s the way it goes, you know? In the movies, everyone who goes straight stays straight. It’s all “Oh, I will never touch that evil stuff again” and then whatever actor is playing a junkie will look all soppy and pleased, and end credits, happily ever after. But it takes time to realize how deep the hooks go. You never believe how hard they’ve sunk in until you try pulling them out. The first time you clean up, you feel immortal, untouchable. You get cocky. You want to test it out, ride that dragon one last time. Or you realize that your life is still in the crapper anyway and cleaning up hasn’t done fuck all. You hate yourself and everyone agrees that you are worth hating.

I don’t know where your other Gran and Granpa are these days. Eugene and Chrissy Bauer, if you want to look them up. Eugene went
MIA
when I was two. Chrissy phones it in. You’re going to have to do the heavy lifting to keep a relationship with her going. I’m not trying to discourage you from meeting them, but be warned they’re big talkers. Their promises are sugar-covered shit.

I don’t want you to think I’m not around because I don’t care, Mel. Okay? Lots of things happened that had nothing to do with you. Daddy’s knee-deep in a mess and has to dig himself out. Paulie and I agreed that it would be safer if you guys went away. Wherever you are, I’m thinking of you.

Bad news on the genetic front: my side of the family has never swum in the cool gene pool. I don’t think they’ve even dipped
their toes in it. Have you ever seen that televangelist who wears silver lamé muumuus on late-night
TV
? You know, the one who believes that God is an alien who will ride a comet to earth to kick-start the Apocalypse? He’s a great-uncle of yours, sweetie, and our only claim to fame.

Your eczema is from our side of the family. Two of your aunts and a couple of your cousins have adult onset diabetes. The uncles mostly get Alzheimer’s in their late sixties. I’m the only one with epilepsy, so the doctors don’t think it’s genetic, but that’s their best guess.

It’s not that scary, though. I don’t even think about it most days. I’ll run you through it. Put your palms on your temples. Okay? Cover the tops of your ears with your thumbs and your index fingers. Cup your head with your fingers. Your temporal lobes are patches of squiggly grey matter underneath your hands. Daddy has what they used to call temporal-lobe epilepsy, but now they call my type of epilepsy partial seizures secondarily generalized. They’ll probably call it something else by the time you read this. They change the name every time they find out something new.

When Daddy freezes up, that first seizure is called an aura. Not the New-Age you-must-be-angry-because-you-have-a-lot-of-red-in-your-halo aura, but a sensory seizure. When it starts, I feel it in my stomach, like I’m seasick. Then it changes. You know that feeling you get after you’ve watched a scary movie late at night, alone, and you know no one’s in the house with you. It’s just your imagination but you can’t stop being scared anyway. That’s how that seizure feels.

The second seizure starts right after the first one, but I’m not awake for it. When you think of an epileptic attack, I’m sure you
think of people falling down and convulsing. It’s over in a few minutes, and Daddy wakes up tired, sore, and confused.

For a while, Daddy was self-medicating with pot. All those
NA
meetings rub off on you though, and Daddy realized he’d been over-medicating, and got himself down to two hoots, twice a day. Don’t go overboard when you’re trying pot, Mel. It’s right up there with watching too much
TV
: a whole whack of your life passes you by, and you don’t realize it until you stop. You get stuck in this zone not quite in the real world.

Your mom and I were always careful. Condoms and spermicide. Condoms every single time. You must have really wanted to be born, Mel. Paulie almost had a heart attack when she learned she was pregnant, and we started going to every
NA
meeting East Van had to offer. That was our life for two weeks: eat, shit,
NA
, eat, shit,
NA
, sleep. Wake up, eat, shit,
NA
. If there wasn’t a
NA
meeting open, we went to
AA
. Paulie wasn’t using when you were conceived, but she was shaky. She was at that point when she could have slipped over. And by then we both knew how easy it was to slip.

Jazz was Paulie’s sponsor. They talked long and hard. Paulie just didn’t say, fuck it, I’ll have this kid. She thought about you. Everyone on The Drive who ever went to
NA
knew about you when you were the size of a cocktail shrimp because she’d fucking talk to everyone.

When Paulie makes up her mind, then it is game over. She took out every book in the library that said anything about being a mom. She badgered her way into parenting courses with waiting lists the length of your arm. She’d corner these new parents and
quiz them until they got this glazed look, filled with the fear of God because this woman would not let go.

We were both scared shitless because we didn’t think we were good enough for you, Mel. But we wanted you. You were the biggest risk we ever took. You were the only good thing to come out of a lot of bad.

22 JUNE 1998

The waiting room of Wal-Mart’s photography studio had all the charm of a bus depot. Tom held Melody in his lap. The other parents were uniformly grubby, but their children sported starched name brands as they tore through the sticky selection of toys. Melody squirmed as she watched the children, lifting the hem of her dress to gum the lace. Tom brushed her hair to the side. Soft and white blond, it sprouted from her head like dandelion fluff.

Paulina wandered back with the promised McDonald’s fries and, alas, the dreaded paint swatches.

Mel bounced excitedly at the sight of the fries. “Uh! Uh! Uh!”

“Just one,” Paulie said, handing her a crisp, dark one, Mel’s favourite kind of fry.

Paulie sat in the orange plastic chair one over from Tom, spreading the swatches out on the chair between them. Today’s Sesame Street will be brought to you by the colour yellow, Tom thought, and every frigging shade of it imaginable. Mel slouched against him, her hair tickling his stubble. She gnawed contentedly.

“I’m leaning toward Lemon Zing,” Paulie said. “With a Washday White trim. What do you think?”

“Which one’s Lemon Zing?”

Paulie set it apart from the others. “I know it’s a little darker than,” shuffle, shuffle, “Prairie Snow, but the living room is so bright, maybe we should go with,” shuffle, shuffle, “Summer Wheat.”

“Uh! Uh! Uh!”

Paulie absently handed Mel another fry before Mel went ballistic.

“Lemon Zing reminds me of those Easter egg–shaped cookies my mom used to get half price.”

Paulie stopped playing with the swatches to eyeball him, making sure he wasn’t poking fun.

“You know,” Tom said. “The ones with the crunchy icing. You only get them at Easter.”

“Do you like the colour or don’t you?”

“I like it.”

“Hmm.” Paulie scowled. “If we go with Lemon Zing in the living room and the hallway –” And she was off. He watched her mouth moving, her lips chapped and red. She used to wear cotton-candy-pink lipstick, or, when she was feeling dangerous, dark, dark red.

Looking around the room, Tom realized they looked as time-warped as the other parents. His plaid shirt with the grey thermal underwear poking through the holes, his shaggy hair, and ragged sneakers all screamed grunge, a look that had died four years ago with Kurt Cobain. Paulie dressed like she did in high school. Biker chick. Tight black jeans tucked into knee-high shit kickers and a low-cut Metallica tank top. She hadn’t dyed her hair since
she got pregnant, so from her ears down, her hair was frazzled strawberry blond. Her roots were light brown.

“Look at Paulina’s real hair,” his mother had said before their big blow out. “Yours is just as dark. Now look at Mel’s. Tell me who she took after.”

Mute with frustration, he hadn’t said anything, hadn’t been able to drag out Paulie’s baby pictures in defence.

“And then look at her last boyfriend’s hair. You can’t tell me you’ve never wondered.”

“Tom?” Paulie said. “I’d appreciate it if you actually fucking listened to me.” When Paulie was seriously mad, her blue eyes went so dark they looked black. They narrowed, beady.

“Sorry,” Tom mumbled.

“This is important to me.”

“You’re just hot, Paulie. Sometimes I get floored looking at you. You’re so hot sometimes I can’t think.”

“You
asshole
,” Paulie said, but her eyes lightened.

“Sorry.”

Mel yawned.

Paulie gathered up the swatches and jammed them in her purse.

“Seventy-six,” the assistant called out. “Number seventy-six.”

“That’s us,” Paulie said, picking up Mel.

Tom reached beside the chair for the diaper bag. The middle-aged couple across from him grinned. The man touched the rim of his baseball cap.
Nice save
, he mouthed.

Paulie dozed on the floor, letting Mel crawl over her. The phone rang and Tom picked up, expecting Jazz to ask for Paulie for their nightly catch-up. The line hummed in silence.

“Hello?” Tom said. He waited, and then sighed and hung up. He marked the time on the calendar. His mom was averaging three calls a week. They’d traced the numbers back to pay phones in the skids.

“She’s still trying, which is more than my parents are doing,”

Paulie said. “Cut her some slack.”

“I’m detaching,” Tom said.

“Detach with love,” Paulie said.

“If she keeps this up,” Tom said. “I’m detaching with a restraining order.”

“Tom,” Paulie said.

“You know what gets me? She doesn’t say anything. She’s just waiting for me to break and pretend –” Tom shut his mouth. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the night analyzing what was probably a drunken grand gesture on his mother’s part.

Tom scooped up Mel and took a whiff of her diaper. He stood her in front of him. She reached for his hands, ready to be finger-walked around the room.

“You’re choosing to hold this grudge,” Paulie said. “And the only one it’s hurting is you.”

“Write that down,” Tom said. “I’ll read it back to you after Thanksgiving dinner at your parents’ place.”

Paulie threw her pillow at him. “You can be such a dink.”

“You are the son of a gambler and a whore,” his Aunt Faith had told him when he was almost five. She’d reached down to stroke his hair as if this was a reassurance. The Greyhound had pulled into the station.
VANCOUVER
spelled in dull white letters on the bus’s chrome forehead. His mother was inside buying their
tickets, last minute. Her love of drama precluded planning. Aunt Faith guarded him and their luggage as they waited.

His mother burst through the doors, unmistakable with her mane of big bar-hair. She ran awkwardly in her laced-up granny boots, in the tight skirt with ruffles, pastel blue with matching pantyhose overlaid with ruffled socks, a popular look in the early eighties, ZZ Top–inspired fashion.