Dancing in the Dark (5 page)

    When he was 12, Tomaszo Garrone, Tom, The Stick, because he is tall and thin with a big sad irregular face that breaks into unexpected smiles at the drop of a hat, had a bizarre encounter. It wasn’t his first bizarre incident, but perhaps the first involving extreme heights. The incident will mark him in various ways for the next 20 years of his life. Although later on, age 27, in Texas, where he has landed, his sexy, angsty friend Whitney, genus female, species angel, will suggest that there may be some relevance to this early experience; and Tom will get indignant, red-faced even, and deny her assertion outright. Almost as if she had criticized his intelligence, or suggested that he only loved her because she kept rejecting him, or she had said that he wanted sex with his mother. Surely for an Italian boy, or an American boy, probably the worst of calamitous venial sins.

Toronto is different from the rest of Canada, something like a northern Chicago without as many steel mills. Tom is living on Grace Street with his parents in the large sprawling Italian sector of Toronto, and attending Michael Of All Angels public school on Dovercourt Road. He is fluent in English, speaking it from childhood although he was not born in Canada, he came here, at 6 months, not in his mother’s but in his father’s, Giuseppe’s, arms; Tom even speaks a little Latin, tall for his age, which seems oddly indeterminate, freckles, dark, sort of handsome for an awkward boy, with a very determined chin, a
polpaccio
, a calf, pale. But the calf loves Toronto more than Orillia, which was Stephen Leacock’s summer home; Toronto is larger, bustling, sprawling, full of new sights, smells, people, streetcars, things to look at.

(He doesn’t know the city very well yet, but is hotly, moistly interested in everything about Toronto. They, the Garrones, including Tom’s sister, Fran, and his younger brother Paolo, have moved from Orillia, where Tom’s father was employed as a day labourer in the Caterpillar factory. Tom hasn’t really settled in yet. It takes time to settle into a new school, and time is an infinite, and infinitely fine, white elastic band that stretches somehow in the upper strata of blue air between southern Calabria, where
a man will take a loaf of bread in one hand and a knife in the other and sit down to have lunch. Tom has 2 or 3 friends at school, a mixed school, some Italian, no one from his region, several Romans as a matter of fact, a beautiful angelic girl from Turin, a lot of Anglos, all indiscriminately dismissed as Anglos, some Polish kids, one Jewish boy who wears a yarmulka to school on Fridays, which is their Sabbath, apparently. There are 2 Chinese boys, brothers, the older one is George, the younger is also called Tom.)

So anyway, the encounter, which will eventually be reflected in Tom’s life after college, and in various songs he will write during that intense concentrated period at age 27 when he does pretty well almost nothing except write songs.

Tom is on his way to Saturday morning basketball practice, as per usual. It is October, Indian summer month in southern Ontario, when everything is crisp and pleasant and sunny; and it is still 1972, it will be for at least another 6 weeks. Not the year of the first dizzying dizzy dean erections, that was last year, before March, sometime before spring, when the sap began bursting in the Orillia maple and elm and evergreen trees; Nixon and America are still in Vietnam. American television and the
CBC
are still observing the landscape, usually showing rice paddies, not napalm.

Tom is on his way to Saturday morning basketball practice at a local church, big for his age but fairly innocent,
innocente
, and he runs into 2 new school acquaintances, Spud Arnetson and Billy Flaherty. They talk bicycles and fart around and jam a bit at the corner of Ossington and Bloor; and Tom winds up being talked into a quick subway visit to the much-publicized
CN
Tower south of downtown on the Lakeshore.

Spud Arnetson and Billy Flaherty, an Irish kid, take Tom up to the top level of the newly built
CN
Tower south of King Street and, as a joke, a yoick, a kibitz, harmless, nothing serious, 465’ above street level, despite the fact that he is tall for his age but also skinny and ambivalently bold and shy, they hang him out by his heels over the 5 ½’ glass-bricked – from Pilkington & Co., world famous for the best glass bricks in the world – guard rail, holding him there above the city, his huge dark grey eyes full of traffic, streets, and a confused image of the infinite blue lake, for a full
5 minutes until a redhaired young 25-year-old security kid originally from St. John’s, Nfld., where, listen you miserable fuckers in Mississippi, the most experienced serious drinkers and eschatologically good-hearted barroom brawlers in North America drift around a famous street – it is called Duck Street and has 350 licensed bars and emporia plus a fantastic view of St. John’s Harbour where nobody makes any money, except for the Lundrigans – intervened and stopped them. They would have stopped anyway. Spud and Billy weren’t crazy, probably not even retarded. Billy F eventually went through Meds. Spud Arnetson never got higher than a C-minus in his life. They were both fairly normal kids. But Tom was eternally grateful to the redhaired security guy, subconsciously, that is, for the rest of his life.

Life goes on. Tom is still friends with Billy Flaherty several years later around college, but is never friends again with Spud Arnetson. Spud becomes a goof and a car thief, other boys are big on sports, as is Tom, basketball at least, and Tom and Billy both tend to be A students. Tom fits into Michael Of All Angels with a sudden classroom flair. He performs when the priest’s back is turned. At home, he eats his mother’s pasta with great gusto. He has erections, hard-ons, boners, because of his sister Francesca, often known simply as Fran to friends later on in high school. He gets surprisingly good marks in English (Italian he speaks at home, French he finds boring, Latin seems to amuse him, as if filling him with some enormous private joke: in fact, he and Billy F will often greet each other in the corridors of Bloor Collegiate years later or in the washrooms or the gym with various select and quite complicated Latin phrases, sometimes added to or stretched with phrases in Toronto pig-latin, sometimes just by themselves,
sui generis
, pure as the driven rain, etc.).

Billy Flaherty isn’t the only close friend Tom makes as high school advances. There are other boys. Francesco, Frank, Abalone, also Italian, becomes a close associate. They are both interested in science. Abalone has a remarkably beautiful older sister, Dolores, who is lush and sardonic and precocious compared to Fran who is simply a very attractive “good girl.” Martin Kemmel becomes a close friend. He lives over by Dovercourt Road. They play baseball together at Christie Pits in the summer. Tom hasn’t
focused on basketball yet. He hasn’t come into the last 4 inches of his height. The four of them plus several other boys, several girls: Knish, because she kisses like a potato, but who is attractive and lets him feel her breasts, bare, from swell to nipple, feeling swell, nipped indeed, in the Alhambra theatre; Bonny Rattigan, who is a tomboy but terrific, and goes everywhere by bicycle. The boys love seeing her approach, of course this isn’t a winter memory, it’s what will become a summer memory, but they also love watching her disappear, blond head down, bluejeaned buttocks a work of art oscillating above the blurred
CCM
spinning spokes. Who became a surgeon out of St. Michael’s Hospital at the age of 26. Who masturbated Tom to orgasm in the tree house behind his friend Kemmel’s. Who took him in her mouth. Who collected stamps, and prized the large triangular Ukrainian stamps because her first boyfriend in high school was of Ukrainian descent, dark, and name of William.

When Tom gets in trouble with Mr. Robertson over the burning textbooks question, it is Kemmel who comes to his aid and provides a foolproof alibi for him. When he fights Jake Dentner out in the schoolyard back in Grade 11 one afternoon out at the wide back of the school, hot sunsoaked gravel looking south over Dufferin Race Track, it is Billy F and Frank who move in and push Dentner’s bulky older friends Bob Stewart and Al Kochins out of the way, saying, “Com’on, they can handle it. Mind your ass.” And Kochins and Stewart had done exactly that. Minded their big asses.

Tom likes to have fun, likes to make his moves, is not conceited, not entirely inconsiderate, but he is fun-loving to excess and is always conscious of perfection. Perfection is a rising exhilaration like the red mercury in a barometer, which is another tower image perhaps. As an image perfection is always part of a juxtaposition that involves status, a form of height, after all. In other words, he is lazy in a sense, but is also competitive. Given to daydreaming, but not always sure of what to do when he is completely on his own. So it came to be said at Bloor Collegiate after Tom left, that for Tom Garrone perfection was something that came out of free flow, free fall, perhaps out of an almost oblivious intelligence, hitting and missing and then hitting again, hopefully to score a bullseye, gold ring, or whatever, but always striking out in the blue air as if to achieve something.

Another experience that happens to prevent Tom from simply evolving as a perfectly normal, slightly tall for his age high school student, is Cesar Pavese. Cesar Pavese is the great Italian writer of the late ’30s and 1940s, a handsome, slightly weathered, slightly sardonic man with dark hair pushed back from his forehead and steel-rimmed glasses. He is a poet and a novelist. He isn’t a Marxist, but he has basic political attitudes not that far from Marxism. He is a good writer and a compelling figure. Pavese comes to Tom in the form of a vision, or, to be fashionable, a sort of brief hallucination one afternoon while Tom is reading in the Gladstone Public Library.

Tom is walking over to the geography section to pull down a book on Africa, and he suddenly has an intense graphic sense of Pavese, whom his uncle has mentioned once or twice, whom his mother had seen at a cafe when she was in Rome for some reason, and whom Tom has read a couple of stories by; Pavese is in the library, standing between Tom and the shelves, hands in pockets, slightly rumpled, casual, an attractive man with a touch of bitterness emanating from the corners of his shapely mouth. Tom stands there in the library, transfixed, for at least 5 minutes. 5 minutes is a long time. It is to become one of the important recurring measures of time in Tom’s life. 5 minutes is the length, before cutting down and arranging, of the first draft of the songs Tom will start writing at approximately age 27. It is also the maximum amount of time that he can devote to thinking about something that has nothing to do with himself.

What the Pavese incident means is that Tom suddenly decides he wants to be, eventually, when all the high school and basketball and immediate circumstances are over, a writer. Not like Pavese exactly, but a writer. Something, like Pavese.

This is a serious question because he knows even before he begins to read everything Pavese has written, including some work in Italian which he struggles through, it isn’t available in English, that Pavese has committed suicide, not like his father who dies in an “industrial accident,” and has therefore broken the Church’s most serious taboo.

The Church, although Tom wasn’t intensely religious, he was more religious, if anything, about the exact layout of the slam-dunk, could not
denounce anything more severely. This is serious, sure, but it does not dim Tom’s intense admiration for everything that Pavese has written in his short but brilliant life, or, for that matter, Tom’s interest in the women, photographs even, who had loved Pavese.