One Man Against the World

“That’s fine then! I just won’t sleep in the house anymore! You’re right!”

“That’s not what I meant…” It’s really not what she meant.

“No, you said you don’t want me sleeping in the spare room anymore, so I just won’t sleep inside at all.” This was really not what she meant.

“All I said was that you shouldn’t sleep in that room if you can’t clean up after yourself. You just can’t leave half-empty food containers everywhere…That’s all.”

“Well you won’t have to worry about that anymore because I’ll just be sleeping outdoors from now on. Like a dog!”

This was an actual discussion my parents had with each other while they were both adults. I have to confess the fight was at least partially my fault. After I moved out my parents converted my old room into a combined spare room and office. Which really just meant an office with a futon in the corner that my dad would regularly pass out on after doing paperwork. The fifteen second walk across the house to his actual bedroom suddenly seemed overwhelming when there was a perfectly good bed just behind his office chair. Last summer I found myself temporarily homeless for a few days between subletting my place in Toronto and heading out West to start my job tree-planting, so I went to my parent’s house and stayed in the spare room. The first night I tried to shift the pillow over a bit on the futon and found it was stuck there. Glued somehow. I yanked on it until it finally ripped up from the bed. It turned out that a spoon with the congealed remains of what looked like chocolate pudding on it had been adhering the pillow to the futon. I don’t know how long ago my dad had left it there but it was stuck hard enough that it had nearly torn the fabric of the couch coming up.

                I tried to just wash the pillow myself but my mom noticed it and the argument above soon ensued. Naturally my dad blamed me. If I had just slept on the pudding cushion and let him deal with it later everything would have been fine. Unlike some parents my dad has never shied away from pointing out just how many of the fights he gets into with my mom are mine or my siblings’ fault. This might have been more traumatic in my childhood except that the kinds of arguments my parents regularly got into were so absurd as to border on the cartoonish.

There was, for example, the time my mom had to spend twenty minutes on the phone talking my dad down from buying a car load of what he swore were “real Armani suits” off a guy in a gas station parking lot. He called back three times. The price started off at $1500 and gradually worked down to just under $1000 when my mom finally made him stay on the phone while he got in the car and drove home. He walked in the door visibly shaking and sat down at the table with the kind of sombre expression usually reserved for funerals. “Kids” he addressed all of us, eyes downcast. “I want you to know, you could all. . . all . . . have been wearing brand new Armani suits right now. Each of you. But your mother just would not let me.” I don’t think he ever quite forgave himself for giving up on that deal and may still hold a bit of resentment towards my mother all these years later. The point is that these are actually the kinds of arguments my parents get into on a regular basis. While being adults. So the pudding incident wasn’t that out of the ordinary.

What was a little shocking was that my dad decided to actually follow through with his threat to move out. That same evening he set to work dismantling the futon (It was one of those annoying pieces of Ikea furniture) and moving it out of the house. It’s revealing of some of the intricacies of my father’s mental processes that he decided the garage did not constitute part of the house. Maybe he saw sleeping in the garage as a clever loophole that would allow him to save face without risking a raccoon attack. In his defense it does get a bit drafty in there and opposums have been known to wander in when the door isn’t properly shut, but most people would say if you’re surrounded by four walls and a roof you can’t really claim to be sleeping outside.

Whatever point he may have been trying to make grew increasingly obscure as he moved most of his worldly possessions into the garage. Setting up the futon seemed reasonable enough. Even the space heater was somewhat understandable. But if the idea was to inspire some sense of shame in my mother for forcing him outdoors at the tail end of a harsh Canadian winter he probably should have stopped shy of a full entertainment system. By the time he had set himself up he not only had his desk and futon out there, but a laptop, speakers, television, DVD player and radio alarm clock. There was only one outlet in the garage and so he’d had to plug a couple power bars into each other to get everything working. By the time night came on he was ready. He would stay out here in the garage and my mother would be made sick with regret over asking him to pick up after himself.

It took about two hours for everything to go horribly wrong. At around one in the morning all the power went out in the garage. His set-up had blown a fuse. He could have just bundled up with some more blankets and gone to bed. He could even have replaced the fuse and gotten by with just the space heater plugged in. But in that moment I like to think that, like the great Greek tragic heroes, he realised he was being punished for his hubris. He had wanted too much. Rather than test his luck with the Gods further he gave in. Or maybe the thought of staying in the garage with anything less than three forms of simultaneous entertainment just seemed unbearable. In any case, he immediately set about dismantling the futon by flashlight. I know about this whole process because my brother’s room backs onto the garage. He was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of my father swearing and throwing parts of the futon around the room. As he moved each part back into the house he carefully opened my brother’s door with as little noise as possible and walked gingerly through the room, then immediately started yelling, swearing and banging things around as soon as he got back into the garage, as though the door were some sort of soundproof barrier. Dismantling and re-assembling the futon by flashlight took over an hour. Then he had to move everything else back inside and set it up. By the end of it all he probably got a worse night’s sleep than he would have if he had actually just set himself up in a tent on the front lawn.

He never mentioned moving out again.

A Trip to Remember

“Okay, what in the fuck just happened?”

Everyone makes stupid decisions when they’re drunk.

“Don’t worry about it.”

This is in fact one of the major appeals of alcohol. Rationality is always stopping us from doing the really fun things in life.

“I was nearly just crushed to death. Why shouldn’t I worry?”

The problem with most people is that they fail to follow through on those drunken decisions when the awful, blinding light of sobriety returns.

“Oh, that. Yeah, Andrew almost missed an exit and had to make a quick lane change. Sorry. Shouldn’t happen again. I figured you were talking about the vague sense of hopelessness in the air. That’s just us passing through Oshawa.”

This was the series of messages back and forth between me and Andrew. I was in the back of the U-haul we were driving across the country, trying to figure out why him and Greg were trying to kill me. It was the winter of 2010 and Greg had just gotten a promotion requiring him to move from Toronto to Halifax. Offering a free trip to Halifax is a great way to get help moving. Originally there were to be three of us on the trip; exactly enough to fill the cab of a U-haul. Then, for Greg’s going away party, a bunch of us pitched in and bought a keg. Somewhere between tapping the keg and waking up in the bathroom the next morning, I’m told that me, Greg and Andrew decided our friend John had to come with us. I don’t remember many of the details of the conversation but I’m pretty sure there was a girl sitting in a large fish tank next to us at the time. It’s all a bit hazy. John had only been out East once, at a time when he was too young to remember, and we decided he needed to see the coast again. It would be great. Just the four of us on an old-fashioned road trip. What the Hell did it matter if there weren’t enough seats? Greg didn’t have that much furniture. There’d be plenty of extra room in the back of the truck. We could even take turns switching up so each of us would get a chance to actually see part of the country we were driving through.

                Most people would wake up the next morning to the cold touch of porcelain, and take the advice of their rotting insides and pounding heads telling them this was a terrible, terrible idea.

Most people who made it beyond that would still have turned back at the moment we lifted the rear gate of the U-haul, revealing a giant red and white sign telling us that carrying passengers in the back was illegal, voided all insurance on the vehicle and carried a serious risk of injury or death.

The few fool-hardy enough to continue on, pack the truck, and climb in would almost definitely have changed their minds after that first disastrous test run.

Because Greg’s job had him more or less constantly on the road, he still hadn’t moved out of his parents’ house at that point. His mom tends to worry far too much about things like ‘safety’ and ‘the law’, so we decided it was best not to let her know what we had planned. We told her John was just there to say goodbye and that we were gonna drop him off down the road at the bus station. So all four of us crammed into the front seat, waved goodbye, and immediately pulled into the gas station parking lot across the street where we went about re-arranging. For seating, we tied an office chair and an old armchair to the wall of the truck with some thin rope. We decided the safest way to test the arrangement before getting on the road was to do a few loops around the parking lot and then see if the guys in back were still alive. We bought some cheap walkie-talkies so that whoever was in back could quickly let the guys in front know if anything started to shift, and, well, crush them to death. The walkie talkies barely worked at all, but they had pictures of Buzz Lightyear on them and I think his presence watching over us gave us all a sense of comfort.

                I think we might have played rock paper scissors to see who had to take the role of Guinea Pig. Me and John might also have been forced into it on the grounds that we would probably be the least missed if anything happened. Again, the details are a little hazy. In any case, the two of us ended up in back for that first trial. The office chair, being on wheels, immediately started rolling back and forth as far as the rope securing it would allow, and John soon tumbled to the floor. A few loose items threatened to jump into us as the truck rumbled along. I had been prepared for things to slide. I hadn’t anticipated the violent shaking, the fact that occasionally a good portion of the trucks contents would become temporarily airborne when we hit a slight bump. I think all that flew forward was one heavy box I managed to stop just before it could crush my head against the door of the truck. Greg’s mom had helped us pack up, assuming, not unreasonably, that we weren’t going to stick two people in front of the giant pile of furniture. As such things weren’t quite as secure as they probably should have been. Really, given how reckless even that first, slow spin around the parking lot was, being thrown to the ground and nearly taking a box to the head was getting off pretty easy. In addition to that we hadn’t realised when planning the trip that the back of the truck was unheated and the thin walls provided very little insulation. It was the middle of winter and even the few minutes that first ride took were almost painfully cold. There were also no lights built into the back, and the door could only be opened from the outside. It also had to be locked with a padlock while the truck was moving or else it would fly up. This meant that if anything did happen we had no way out, and I doubt many people would have thought to look for stow-aways in back while clearing the wreckage.

                This had clearly gone beyond a fun story about following through on a drunken decision. Driving across the country like this carried a very real risk of arrest or serious injury. There were a few moments of silence in the parking lot staring at our Buzz Lightyear walkie talkies while we considered this. We knew what the responsible thing to do was. We bought more rope.

                I know you’re thinking we should have given in, but it wasn’t really an option that point. It wasn’t just a matter of stubbornness. John lived a solid twenty-five minutes in the wrong direction, so dropping him off would have meant an extra hour on the road, and traveling any farther than we absolutely had to in this reckless and dangerous manner would have been completely irresponsible. Also, the front of the truck was really uncomfortable with three people up there, and having a person riding in the back alone would have been stupid. The buddy system was the safest way to go.

                So, we tied down everything we could, doubled the rope on both chairs to keep them in place, and left a poking stick next to the office chair to push back any stray items that looked like they might be a hazard. We also had a huge pile of sweaters, sleeping bags, and blankets to keep the passengers in back warm and a smaller pile of drugs to keep them distracted from how horrible being locked in the back of a dark, cold, windowless moving truck was going to be. We were ready to go.

                I wish the rest of the story was more exciting, but from there it was actually a pretty typical road trip. We did get some odd looks in parking lots from anyone who saw pretty much any part of what we were doing. There was also that time Andrew nearly killed me and Greg by swerving violently across two lanes of traffic and off the highway when he realised he had missed an exit and was about to cross the border into America. And the time Andrew kept me and John locked in the back for five hours while he drove around a small town in Quebec trying to find his way back to the highway because he didn’t want to have to admit that he’d gotten us lost (We had agreed to switch out every three hours max because it was actually dangerous to be in back any longer with the cold). Really if you factor out Andrew’s incompetence it was all fairly routine. If anything, everyone probably drove much more cautiously than they otherwise would have. Part of this was because we didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Most of it was because we weren’t entirely sure at any given point just how many laws we were breaking, but we didn’t think any cops who opened the back of the truck would take it easy on us.

                We got Greg moved in safely and had a fun couple days seeing him off in Halifax. Even after the conditions in the truck, the two-day Greyhound trip back to Ontario still managed to be less comfortable.

Fucking Bus People.