Falling Backwards: A Memoir Read online

  Like most siblings, we always fought over some stupid thing or the other, like who ate all the potato chips or where the chocolate bars were hidden or whether I had been in his room and touched his stuff. Touching his stuff was the worst possible thing you could do to an older brother. Stuff was very important and touching somebody else’s stuff could and would be severely punished. We’d chase each other through the house and punch each other’s arms until faint red marks would appear. It was all pretty harmless and average. I don’t know of any kids who didn’t fight with their siblings. Duray was much bigger than I was, but I could be mean and wild. I would kick him and scratch him and punch him and throw the odd piece of furniture his way. He never used more force than he needed to. Though I hated it when he sat on my chest and farted on my face. That was never pleasant. He, much like Snoopy, could fart at will. He could also burp the entire alphabet and whistle better than anybody. He stuck his thumb and his middle finger into his mouth and made the highest, loudest whistle you had ever heard in your life. My ears used to ring. Duray taught me how to whistle. It took him about three days, but he managed to teach me how to stick my two fingers in my mouth and blow out a perfect long, shrill note. I am still a great whistler. I can hail a cab from a block away thanks to Duray.

  He never knew how much I admired him. He could do anything under the sun; he took after my dad in that way. He could fix absolutely anything that was broken. There was nothing he couldn’t take apart and put back together. He was very mechanically minded, but he was an excellent artist as well. He could look at a picture of a truck or a helicopter or a beautiful building and draw it freehand. He was wonderful at woodworking or anything to do with metal or leather or plastics. He could do it all. That always made me jealous. He was also very musical. He loved to play guitar and sing. He made me want to do the same because he made it look effortless. He seemed to be able to listen to a song and then play it back as though he’d always known it.

  He was very nonchalant about his talents and abilities, maybe because he didn’t think that what he was doing had any worth. My brother was and is incredibly smart but I don’t know if he really understood just how intelligent he was. That always seemed sad to me. His self-esteem was so incredibly low. I don’t think people even knew what self-esteem was in the seventies, or at least they didn’t really give it much attention. A lot of young people slipped between the cracks, and he was one of them. I saw him doing all these incredible things but I didn’t really know him. He didn’t let you get to know him. I think he thought I was a pest: an annoying little sister who got into his things and got away with everything.

  I did tattle on him a lot. He was doing some pretty bad stuff, and I thought that somebody should know. Probably not the best idea in hindsight, because it just made things worse for him at home. I am sorry for telling on him. He needed me to support him, not tell on him every chance I got. Our parents, especially my dad, scrutinized and questioned every little thing he did because he lied about everything: where he’d been, who he’d been with, what he’d been doing.

  I took no pleasure in seeing him in trouble, I just didn’t think about what my actions would do to his life. I didn’t look ten minutes ahead of where I was. By the time Duray was a teenager, he’d been stealing from my dad’s liquor cabinet and smoking his cigarettes for years. He would stay out as late as he pleased, never telling anyone where he’d been. Sometimes he’d stay out all night without so much as a phone call. He was always in trouble at school, always being suspended. He was vandalizing houses and crashing motorcycles and taking off with my mother’s car. I don’t know if he was crying out for help or just trying to be the biggest loser in the world on purpose. It’s a fine line. He was starting to scare all of us.

  One day I remember being out in the yard with Leonard and Dale. By this time, we’d been hanging out less and less but on this day we were riding bikes around the driveway, hanging out, happily wasting the day away. Duray was by the garage, kind of keeping his eye on what we were up to. He had been drinking most of the afternoon and seemed agitated, taunting us and calling us names just for the sake of having something to do. I remember thinking how alone he seemed. Drinking turned him into a completely different person. I tried to steer clear of him if he’d been drinking, but that wasn’t always possible. I honestly didn’t understand his behaviour. He would usually threaten to break our arms or rip our legs off if we were to tell on him for stealing alcohol. He was a foot taller than any of us so we believed him, even though we knew he’d never actually break our arms. We sort of laughed it off and tried to look like we didn’t care when we really did. Leonard and Dale always tried to be brave for me, but this wasn’t someone they wanted to tangle with.

  Duray could be really intimidating and unpredictable. On this particular day, I watched him down three or four beers and then saunter over to our little beige car and unscrew the gas cap. He put his mouth over the hole and began to huff in and out. He kept breathing in the gas fumes and coughing between huffs. This went on for about five minutes until he flung himself back from the car and started staggering around the yard speaking nonsense. His eyes were big and wild, and he was spitting and hacking and twirling about like, well, a drunk person who’d been huffing gasoline. He laughed like he was possessed and kept yelling things that made no sense at all. After awhile he grabbed his head and moaned in incredible pain. Whatever high he’d climbed up to, he was now rapidly coming down from it.

  He repeated the process over and over again until he was exhausted and throwing up. It was hard to watch and even harder to understand. I had never seen anybody huff anything in my life. The only thing I had ever sniffed was a black Jiffy marker. I loved that smell—I still do. But gasoline? Leonard and Dale and I thought Duray was off his ever-loving rocker. For some reason, I didn’t tell my mom about those episodes. That was something I should have tattled about, but I was too scared. The huffing episodes became more and more frequent as he disappeared further and further down the rabbit hole.

  Duray didn’t seem to be all that good at staying out of my dad’s way. My dad was especially hard on him. Perhaps because he was the oldest and he was a boy and that’s what dads do. They try to groom their sons to be better men than they are. Duray knew how to push his buttons, though. It was a case of my dad saying “black” and my brother saying “white.” They were like oil and fire—one spurred on the other. They fed off each other’s discontent.

  They would argue about everything and nothing. It didn’t matter what it was, they just butted heads about it. Their yelling sounded like planes crashing right there in our kitchen and made my stomach fold in on itself. It would very often end in a shoving match or misplaced, angry punches thrown or someone crashing out the back door yelling profanities. Usually when two people yell at each other, not much is accomplished. I didn’t want to be around it and, though I’m sure Duray didn’t want to be around it either, I doubt very much he knew how to avoid it. It was almost a given that there would be confrontation if drinking was involved: you cannot reason with rum. There was no way in hell I was going to get between my dad and my brother.

  My mom spent a lot of time in her ironing room. It was not at all private, since it had two doors and was in the middle of the house, but it was her room. It was going to be a bedroom at one point, but that didn’t come to pass. It was small with a pretty decent window that looked right into the side of the garage. Not exactly a million-dollar view. She’d go in there and iron piles of clothes. She never seemed to get through that pile. I am serious when I tell you that it was five feet high at times. I had to iron a few days a week as one of my chores. (I didn’t have many.) I’d sit there and watch Star Trek and iron T-shirts and slacks and tablecloths and my dad’s hankies until I could do it with one foot tied behind my back and blindfolded. I was an excellent ironer. I’d drink Pop Shoppe pop and eat Old Dutch salt and vinegar chips. I could see why my mom liked to be in her ironing room. You could be alone and have a televisi
on all to yourself and watch whatever you wanted, and it was quiet. The quiet is what I remember the most about the ironing room. Once in awhile you’d hear the steam pour out of the top of the iron. It was such a pleasant sound, and the warmth of it felt so good. We had three channels we received clearly: channels 2, 4 and, of course, the good old CBC on channel 6. It was a huge deal when we got a fourth channel, even though it didn’t have the best programming in the world. Channel 9 was mostly news, and who in their right mind wanted to watch the news?

  In the late seventies we got a satellite dish that was the size of the moon. I was afraid to walk by it for fear of developing tumours of some kind. The thing hummed and crackled constantly. I imagined that invisible cancer beams shot out of it, like something from Star Trek. We were apparently now receiving all these illegal channels from the States and it was totally exciting. If it was from the States that meant it had to be good. I remember getting the picture a lot of the time, but no sound. That was the satellite company’s way of keeping you from stealing their signal, I suppose. We didn’t care. We were determined to watch the American movies from the dish without the sound and we all became really good lip readers because of it.

  In my dad’s book, there wasn’t anything worse than a liar. You could burn down a bowling alley, but if you admitted to doing it, you were still a good person and deserved the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know when my older brother became a pathological liar. At one time he was the pillar of truth, really. Now Duray lied about everything he did and everywhere he went. My mom would say, “Have you been drinking?” and Duray would lie and say no. She’d always want to smell his breath and check to see if his eyes were red. There wasn’t enough Visine in the world to clear up his bloodshot, stoned eyes. Duray called her Sherlock Holmes, which made me laugh. My mom could smell marijuana from five miles away and be able to ascertain whether it had been grown in Colombia or on Vancouver Island. She’d ask him where he’d been, and he would always lie about that too. After awhile I don’t think he knew where the truth was. It was gone. There was no truth left in him. He felt that a lie was always the better choice. I didn’t start lying until I turned eighteen and, according to my mother, I went bonkers. Maybe I did go bonkers. I liken it to letting the proverbial cat out of the bag. It was a really big bag and I was a late, late, late, late bloomer. (I didn’t get my period until I was thirty-seven.)

  Every time the phone rang at our house, it seemed like it was somebody calling about something that Duray had done. It was hard to believe that one kid could get up to so many bad things. My mom already had to deal with my dad and his drinking, and now she was also having to deal with Duray lighting haystacks on fire and spray-painting the hell out of the house the neighbours had been building. I don’t know how many thousands of dollars my parents spent trying to fix things my brother had ruined. You can only ground a person for so many years, and then it doesn’t work anymore. Grounding was a joke to my brother. Duray was an amazing escape artist who could get out of any room and disappear into thin air. He was like Houdini with a drug and alcohol problem.

  I don’t remember him laughing all that often. He would laugh like the devil when he huffed gasoline, but that was more of a cackle that quickly turned into a scene from The Exorcist. It made me feel so hopeless and sad to watch him come undone.

  On one of my brother’s many escapes he thought it would be a good idea to drive a tiny 75cc Honda motorcycle into Calgary to drink beer. This adventure just about cost him a foot.

  My parents had gone somewhere on a short overnight trip, so he simply decided to go on a joyride without a helmet or a licence of any kind in the fading dusk. All hell seemed to break loose with him whenever my parents went anywhere. Duray would find trouble and bring it to the front door. But it was impossible for my parents to be home all the time, and my older brother knew that. He counted on it. I think we were all secretly praying that Duray grow out of his destructive patterns. He didn’t. We thought that eventually there would be a light at the end of the tunnel instead of a train coming towards him.

  On this particular night, Duray got on the little motorcycle and headed off into town to go to the nearest bar, the Westgate. It was seven or eight miles from where we lived. He actually made it to the hotel without being spotted. He sat there for a few hours drinking, spent all his money and then proceeded to make his way back home. He had gone about a mile when two police officers spotted him buzzing along without a helmet or a licence plate. They turned on their siren, thinking he would immediately pull over, but he had no intention of giving up that easily. The chase was on!

  When they got up alongside him they told him to pull over, but he didn’t. According to my brother, the two officers in the police cruiser then starting bumping into his motorcycle with their car, trying to get him to stop. He probably got scared and thought he’d outrun them by going down sideroads and trying to head home, but it didn’t work out that way. The cruiser bumped him a few more times until it knocked him and the bike over. The police car ran over his leg, leaving him in a crumpled heap on the ground in a pool of his own blood. The way my brother tells it, the blood was spewing out of his boot like a water sprinkler. He doesn’t remember much of what happened after that because he passed out. His foot had been punctured by the little metal gear changer on the motorcycle. The pedal went through his boot and into his foot like a steel spike.

  I remember picking up the phone when the police called to say that there had been an incident. They asked if my parents were home, and I said they weren’t. They asked where they were and when they’d be home. The policeman sounded panic stricken. He wasn’t making any sense at all. He was going on and on about what had happened and that it was a “very unfortunate accident.”

  The police took him to the emergency ward via ambulance to get the mangled mess stitched up. It required hundreds of stitches. To this day my brother can hold water in the divot on the top of his foot where that pedal went in. He’s quite proud of that little oddity. If he had not been wearing his heavy leather boots, his foot would have been ripped right off his leg. The police tried to sweep it under the rug by saying they wouldn’t press charges. I can’t imagine what they were thinking, or what they ended up reporting to their bosses. They more or less got away with running over a kid on a little motorcycle. A few weeks later, he got a ticket in the mail for $30 for driving without a licence. Duray took months to heal. My parents were devastated by the whole thing.

  He said he was plastered when he drove home and that he was glad he was because otherwise “it would have hurt a whole lot more than it did.”

  My dad had begun drinking more himself since we’d moved out of town. He was under a lot more pressure at his job. His hours were longer and he was home less and less. I’m sure building our house was stressful and required a lot of money that he didn’t always have. We didn’t see him at the dinner table more than a few times a week. I had no idea why he wasn’t there; he just wasn’t. He was slowly becoming a ghost to me. My mom would caution us not to bring kids home after school because she didn’t quite know how dad would be—if he’d be sober or not. His moods were unpredictable, and he could be really cranky and short tempered. Duray bore the brunt of it, unfortunately.

  I became a bit afraid of my dad at times, to tell you truth. He was a grouchy guy, always yelling. I don’t really remember him ever talking to us. He just yelled. For about five years I thought my name was “Jesus Christ” and I thought my brother’s name was “goddammit.” We learned a whole hell of a lot of swear words from my dad. They really came in handy at school. I could shock people with my vocabulary. I could spit out words that would leave other kids with their jaws hanging half open. My dad knew some good curses. (And to think he was raised in a Mormon home.) But it honestly didn’t bother me all that much. That was my dad—that’s the way he was. For some reason I tuned out the naughty, swearing, cursing parts I didn’t want to hear. I am pretty sure I wasn’t in any kind of denial—I was just
always easygoing. I didn’t let many things bother me, and his yelling was one of those things. My mom always told me that I knew how to handle him, and I guess I did. For the most part I just retired to the basement to listen to my records.

  Making my dad mad was not a good idea, so we all tried not to. I made it a point to be out of the house if I could when he was home. It seemed like everything we did drove him crazy, like not putting his tools back where they came from or not coming home when we were supposed to or fooling around at the dinner table or using his “good wood” to build tree forts and rafts that never floated. How was I supposed to know what good wood looked like? (I must have had good taste in wood because I always used his good stuff.)

  My dad didn’t like it when you wrecked perfectly good things. He didn’t like it if you cut the bread or cheese crooked. I have to say I can’t stand that, either. He would get really mad over things like that. Everybody would scatter when he got raving about a ruined block of Velveeta cheese and a lot of goddamns were cast about. A million colourful words came shooting out of his mouth, and we made sure to stay out of their way.

  It wasn’t the big things but the little things that set him off. That’s what made it hard: we never knew exactly what was going to make him angry. I knew that when I was downstairs playing music, he wouldn’t come down there for anything. It was my safety net. Nobody went into the basement except Duray and me. Duray’s bedroom was down there and it was quite the testosterone-laden den. He had an old waterbed in his room. This was a giant one, with speakers and pot lights in it—it was the mother ship of all waterbeds. He loved that thing. I, on the other hand, have always hated waterbeds. I slept on one once and that was it for me. I dreamed about having to pee all night long, and my back felt like it had been sawed in half. (Also: never let a kitten on a waterbed, as they have very sharp little claws that can make really, really small, slow-leaking holes that you don’t notice for days or even weeks.)