one time I brought a girlfriend home to meet Gord. Not that I wanted her to meet Gord, but I was trying very hard with this girl and I wanted her to see the coast where I grew up. Neither of us had a lot of money at the time, however, and Gord was still living in my childhood home, a two-storey farmhouse just far enough outside of town to be inconvenient, which he’d bought to house Sylvie and their anticipated throngs of children. He’d kept it after her death and my departure and lived in it by himself, as if expecting one or both of us to return at any time.
I told myself there was no reason this visit shouldn’t work out. I remember I was still trying to be normal at that point — trying to force a sense of decency onto my life. I didn’t want to be the type of guy who was estranged from his father. I was trying not to be a lot of types of guy back then.
Kirsten was a girl from my church and the church had me convinced that if you said to yourself — I mean to God — Okay, God, I’m giving up my life to you now, it’s all yours — and then just started acting like the kind of guy you wanted to be, the rest of your life would reorganize itself around that resolution. I was a wholesome, decent young man, I’d decided, freshly washed in the blood of the lamb. Therefore I had a wholesome, decent relationship with my father, who, when next we met, would somehow detect the godly aura rippling around my cleansed being and be instantly humbled and inspired to godliness and decency himself.
I can’t blame the church for this delusion. It was my delusion, the church just lent it institutional support. On some level I knew that’s what this particular church was all about — nurturing mass and individual delusions — and that’s probably the whole reason I joined. But no doubt you’ll recall how even in the old days I would radically clean up my act every once in a while, leaving all you guys at the house gobsmacked at my sudden puritanism. I wouldn’t drink, I would go to classes, I’d make sure I was at the library on the days I knew Wade would be coming back from Goldfinger’s with his stash. Sometimes I could go two, three weeks like that. But not much more. After that I’d get angry about something and need to arrest my thought process somehow. It’s a pattern I’ve maintained my whole life.
So there I was — wholesome, decent, delusional — mentally pulling open the screen door of my childhood home for the first time in maybe ten years and thinking — I actually told myself this — It’ll be great! My girlfriend and I will drive down the coast. We will stay with my father, and Kirsten will meet my father, and the two of them will get along. Gord always had a bit of a courtly side with the ladies. He’ll take one look at her, I thought, and he’ll be all “me dear” this and “me love” that — playing up the salty old Gael stuff because if goddess Sylvie found it irresistible surely all central Canadian women must — and it won’t be grotesque or off-putting at all. Perhaps he’ll take down my baby book for the two of them to titter over, seated side by side on the couch. Looka the size a the little bastard! I said to them nuns, I said . . . Perhaps we will barbecue in the evenings, drink beer, boil a lobster, reminisce about the days of Sylvie. It won’t be painful. It will be healing, if anything (I was very interested in the idea of “healing” at this time). And perhaps, when the time is right, my girlfriend and I will even talk to my father about Christ.
Or perhaps Gord will talk endlessly about all the bastards and assholes who have betrayed and conspired against him, always casting an accusatory eye at yours truly, and perhaps yours truly will grit his teeth until he has to make a dentist’s appointment and be fitted with a mouth guard to wear at night, and his stomach acid will churn until he can digest nothing but mushroom soup from a can and he will want, very badly, to get drunk and give nary a