1982 (6 page)

On another occasion we had gotten squirrels caught in our attic and my father had tried various methods to shoo them out. There were lots of squirrels in Thornhill in the ’80s. It was like a squirrel epidemic at times. In the spring of 1981, when there had been a few squirrels living inside our attic for months and nothing had worked to shoo them out, my father and I
had gone to a local Home Hardware store. My father had the idea that we might find a cage or trap to catch the squirrels so he could take them and release them somewhere away from our home. The point was to try to liberate the attic without harming the squirrels. When my father asked the guy in the baseball cap behind the counter about a trap of this kind, the man wagged his finger and said he wouldn’t help us.

“We don’t eat squirrels in this country,” the guy behind the counter said.

I remember sensing my father’s disappointment when the man accused us of eating squirrels. I saw his shoulders slump a bit, and then he motioned to me for us to leave. It all happened quickly. The man in the baseball cap probably had no idea how tasty Persian food like my mother’s
ghormeh sabzi
was and that we wouldn’t be so desperate as to eat squirrels. But that didn’t matter. I was angry with my father. I was angry that he had a heavy accent and that people thought he was stupid. I wished I wasn’t Iranian, even though I’d only known Iranians—or Persians, you can use either word—to be kind and loving and generous family-oriented people. I wondered why my father had not yelled at the guy or punched him like a tough dad would. I told my father he should have said something. My father replied, “Don’t leesen to this man. There ees no point fighting with heem. He did not understand very well.” My father was usually graceful in these situations. Just like the oscillating sprinkler. But sometimes I wished he would be more like the impulse sprinkler.

I was different in all the wrong ways in Thornhill in 1982. Rather than looking and acting like Bowie—which would be impossible, because then I’d be too cool to be seen
in Thornhill—I was often distinguished from others because I was Persian. There were no other Iranians in Thornhill in the early ’80s. None. Or almost none, anyway. And this is ironic, because the place is now teeming with Persians who’ve settled there and constructed a mini “Tehranto” just minutes from where I grew up. But they weren’t there when I was young. Not when I needed them.

Beyond assumptions based on accents, the dearth of Iranians meant people didn’t understand anything about our background. After Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the tumultuous events of the early ’80s there, people were still quite confused about who and what we were. This went beyond racism. Sometimes it was just confusion.

One day, Annie McMillan from down the street asked me about our ethnic background. I wanted her to like me, because she wore tight, faded jeans and would always tan the way pretty girls did. Annie was two years older than me and she was quite tall. She saw me playing road hockey alone and crossed the street and came straight towards me. I was excited that Annie wanted to speak to me. Then, after saying hello, she asked me if my family were Arabs. She didn’t say it in a mean way. In fact, she said it in the way a pretty girl with a tan does when she’s being nice.

“Are you guys Arabs?”

There was a genuine curiosity in her tone. I thought Annie might think we were exotic, the way Freddie Mercury was exotic in his spandex and moustache when he was onstage during the “Live Killers” tour with Queen. But I wasn’t sure if she thought it would be a good or bad thing for us to be Arabs. So I decided to tell her the truth. We were not.

“No, we’re Persians. Iranians. Like, from Iran,” I said. There was an awkward pause and Annie looked a bit puzzled. I decided to continue. “It’s in the Middle East. That’s where my parents come from. But I’m not from Iran. I mean, I was born in London. Like, in the UK. But we’re Iranian.”

I tried to explain this as comprehensively as I could to cover all the bases. And I thought if I let her know I was born in England it might make me better in her eyes. She had pretty brown bangs and she could flip her hair like Kristy McNichol. And she had a very nice tan.

“Oh, okay,” she said. “So, you’re like Arabs, though?” “Well, no. Iran is a separate country and the people are actually Aryans. That’s our race. Aryans.” I didn’t know what that part about Aryans meant, but I had heard my uncle saying something similar. And I knew the point was that we were different from Arabs.

“So, are you from Arabia, then?”

“No. Iran. We’re not Arabs. Like I said. We’re not Arabs … at all.”

Annie still looked puzzled. It was clear she would not be able to get her head around this.

“But your food is like Arab food, right?”

It went on like that.

This was not Annie’s fault. She simply hadn’t met any other Iranians. And she probably didn’t know any Arabs. I always wondered what she was thinking of when she asked about “Arab food,” but she probably didn’t know either. And besides, she had tight jeans and she was very pretty. She had a nice tan. And Annie was like a lot of Thornhill: pretty straight ahead and relatively confused about what and who my family were.

Thornhill was certainly safe in 1982. It was clean and wellkept and what is often professionally called “livable.” Kids would play on our street well into the night and there was never much concern about that. We generally left our houses unlocked and trusted our neighbours. But here again was another reason Thornhill lacked credibility. There were no dark alleys where gangs roved and ran cocaine importation businesses the way they did in
Scarface
. There were no “crackwhore” streets or red-light districts (well, except for our porch before my father changed the lamps). And even when a lot of the kids did drugs or drank behind the Golden Star restaurant or near the ravine, it was all still relatively harmless. Safe suburbs are the best places for raising kids, except for the kids who think they don’t want to be safe. While Bowie was being spotted in the cesspools of underground society, Thornhill was pretty squeaky clean.

I wish I could say that this was nostalgia. I wish I could say that Thornhill has since devolved into a dangerous ’hood filled with hookers and crime-ridden back alleys. I wish I could tell you that my old stomping grounds have become bloodied and busted. That would be cred. But I can’t. While Thornhill is a much more diverse and urban place than it was three decades ago, it still has a reputation as a nice burgh for upper-middle-class families to settle in. A recent survey of crime in Canada found that the region in which Thornhill is located is still one of the safest in the nation. So the Bowie who appears in the “Ashes to Ashes” video would still likely be unwelcome.

But there were some variations in different parts of Thornhill in the ’80s. And one of the ways this played out was in the marked distinction between the two main high schools:
Thornhill SS and Thornlea SS. Our family lived in the zone that required me to go to Thornhill SS. It was generally considered a tougher school with a lower academic standard. It was more “old Thornhill.” That meant less cool. My friend Toke told me that Thornhill SS was also more of a rocker school. His brother, Mitch, had gone there, and Mitch wore a leather jacket and listened to Black Sabbath.

Thornlea SS, on the other hand, was literally on the other side of a bridge. It had first been constructed in the 1960s as an open-learning experimental liberal school with socialist principles. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I knew Thornlea was still considered cool. It was no longer experimental, but it was a more diverse place with greater breadth of courses and had a more racially integrated student body. It was known for its growing academic prowess and, most important, for its focus on fine arts. This was also cool.

My sister had successfully petitioned to transfer to Thornlea SS in 1979, because she was interested in theatre and because it seemed more glamorous than going to the “old Thornhill” school, which was closer to us geographically. With my growing affinity for theatre and music, I also petitioned to follow in my sister’s footsteps. I got accepted into Thornlea, and in 1982 I started there in Grade 9. Going to Thornlea would become the biggest decision ever to affect my future. It was at Thornlea where I first became New Wave. It was at Thornlea where I started on my path to be Bowie. And, most important, Thornlea is where I met Wendy.

2

“ARAIBAN KNIGHTS” – SIOUX SIE AND THE BANSHEES

W
endy was like Bowie. Inasmuch as a diminutive sixteenyear-old blond girl from Thornhill could be like Bowie. To those who just didn’t understand, she probably wasn’t much like Bowie. But she had shoulder pads. And she smoked. And when she smoked, she held the cigarette between her index finger and her thumb like she was holding a joint. That’s the way Bowie did it.

And Wendy had that early ’80s short haircut with the long straight bit in the front. It was totally David Sylvian. David Sylvian was the lead singer of the band Japan, and he had dyed-blond hair that was long in the front and short in the back. He was very serious. He would flip his hair back sometimes, but usually it was parted on the side and covered one of his eyes. And that’s the way Wendy had her hair, too. And David Sylvian got that from David Bowie. So, you see, Wendy was exactly like Bowie. And she was punk. Or, no, she was New Wave. Wait. No. Punk. Okay, I’m still not sure which. But she was almost seventeen. And she barely spoke to me.
In fact, she barely looked at me. Wendy was my dream girl. Female Bowie.

You probably know what I mean when I say that Wendy was cool. Or you think you do. You probably have an idea of what cool is. But there’s a subversive trick to cool. Cool can be fleeting. And what is cool in your head this minute might not be cool in a couple of years from now. It will stop being cool if it lacks substance, or if it has too much substance, or if it
is
a substance. It might also stop being cool if it becomes too popular. Pop success is often at odds with cool. But then, if you hang on, you’ll be cool again in a couple of decades. Longevity is another trick. Cool can change.

Remember vinyl? Vinyl records were cool when Zeppelin put out
In Through the Out Door
in 1979. That album was so cool it had a few different jacket sleeves that you could colour. Then vinyl became near extinct as people started collecting CDs and throwing out their ELO albums. In the mid-’80s, vinyl records were seen as antiquated and inferior. Then, fifteen years later, everyone got iPods. And after a while, some people got tired of their music only coming out of tiny plastic rectangles with a digital list of songs. These people yearned for large black discs of music that they could scratch. And so now, vinyl is cool again.

The same is true of eggs. When I was a little kid in the 1970s, my mother would make me eat lots of eggs. My mother would say that eggs were an important part of the daily diet. Then, in the ’80s and ’90s, my mother started instructing me to stay away from eggs because of cholesterol or fat or bird flu or something. She was not alone in this capricious attitude towards eggs. Eggs became so uncool that people started to eat
only the white bits. Some people went even further than that. In the ’90s, some people resorted to eating fake stand-in eggs with funny names—anything to avoid real eggs. But cool can change. And now my mother thinks I should eat eggs again. They provide protein, she says. Even Starbucks sells eggs, in elaborate Starbucks packaging. And Starbucks is cool. Or wait, no, Starbucks isn’t cool. But it was once cool. And eggs were cool and then not cool—and then cool again. Just like Joan Jett. Totally like Joan Jett.

I have made a short list (or shortlist) of things that were cool and then not cool and now are cool again:

vinyl

eggs

cigars