Lucky Man (7 page)

Eventually the young brothers won low-paying jobs such as hot-walking the horses. Dad, barely five feet six inches and thin as a rail in those days, was considered “potential jockey material,” my mother tells me, and his apprenticeship began in earnest. By the time he was sixteen, he was earning mounts in a few races. Giddy from this turn of events, the Fox brothers got drunk one night and set out for the tattoo parlors of Vancouver's rough waterfront district. Dad had his left bicep permanently emblazoned with the profile of a thoroughbred, a horseshoe-shaped laurel of roses draped around its neck.

The war ended, and with it Dad's short-lived dreams of a career in horse racing. Servicemen returning from overseas flooded the job market, and Dad soon found he had few options but to trade places with them. He had spent enough time around racing touts, punters, and pari-mutuel windows to know that a life in the military was his safest bet. Shortly after Dad enlisted, his kid brother Doug, his best friend, contracted spinal meningitis and died before reaching his seventeenth birthday. Bill Sr. returned from Alberta, but a year or so later Dolly drifted away for good. No one in the family ever heard from her again.

Something positive did come out of this period, however—a life-altering event that my father would credit as his salvation. As a new enlistee housed in Ladner's army barracks, he met a cute and spirited redhead at a local dance. In Phyllis Piper he found someone who made him feel needed. At the same time, she displayed a stubborn independent streak that he respected. He sensed, correctly, that if they married, settled down, and had kids, Phyllis was not someone who would ever drift away.

Christmas Eve after Christmas Eve, Dad sat there relishing the bounty of gifts spread out under the tree, thinking about how far he'd come. Certainly the presents symbolized material success, but beyond that they implied love and connection—a nuclear family, intact. For all his hardships, Bill Fox had managed to achieve something great. With my mom, he had helped to create a family, to care for and protect them, and at the end of another year they'd even managed to see to it that there was something left over. To ask for anything more would be asking for trouble. These, at least, are the thoughts I imagine going through his head those sweet evenings alone. Gaze never leaving the tree, he'd lean back in his chair, take a long pull on Santa's beer,
his beer
, and smile.

DON'T YOU WORRY ABOUT MICHAEL

Burnaby, British Columbia—1971–1972

In 1968 we were transferred once more, to Dad's shock this time, clear across the country to North Bay, Ontario. Dad had been considering retiring in 1971 when his eligibility would come up, and the seeming capriciousness behind this latest transfer sealed the deal. After three years back east, Dad retired and moved the family back to B.C. for good. It was the start of a new life for us, a
civilian
life, with all of the freedom and uncertainty that implied.

We weren't the only ones making this change. Almost all of my adult male relatives had military careers, and the early seventies set off a wave of retirements. From every corner of Canada, all the branches of the Piper family tree returned to their roots in the west. Resettled into new homes in the greater Vancouver area, all within easy driving distance of one another, the progeny of Harry and Jenny Piper initiated a series of mini-reunion celebrations that would pick up where they left off virtually every weekend.

In the case of the large social gatherings I remember as a child—birthdays, backyard barbecues, holidays, and homecomings—the term “friends and family” is redundant. My parents' closest and dearest friends were almost all family. They needed very little excuse to get together, sit back, tip a few beers, cook up a big feed, and watch their offspring, a closely knit clutch of cousins, scramble in and out of whomever's home the tribe had assembled at that weekend. “In or out, kids, in or out—and close the door,
for chrissakes
, the neighbors are complaining about the
heat
”—that was a favorite of Dad's. Presiding over the festivities, and perhaps enjoying the warmth and camaraderie more than anyone, was the family's matriarch, Nana.

In those days, Nana split her time amongst the families of the children who lived in B.C., with extended tours across Canada to see the others. Always a welcome guest, she'd pitch in and help the adults, and always came bearing gifts for the kids. She'd pull us aside as we were running out to the candy store or local movie theater and discreetly tuck a dollar bill into our pockets.

I felt a very special bond with my grandmother. I'm sure my brother and sisters and cousins would share this sentiment, but mine goes back literally to the day of my birth. When the nurses came into that Edmonton hospital room to deliver me into my mother's arms for the first time, Nana was at her bedside.

“Do you and Bill have a name yet?”

“Well,” my mom replied, pushing the blue bunting from around my pink and puckered face, “we've pretty much settled on Michael.”

Nana was not pleased. “Michael's a fine name, but you know everyone will just call him Mike.”

“Not necessarily,” countered my mother.

“Yes they will,” Nana promised. “But not me, I'm not crazy about the name ‘Mike.' Don't like it. I'll never call him anything but Michael.”

And she never did.

After Dad's retirement and our return to B.C., we settled into a three-bedroom flat in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. Situated across the street from a sprawling strip mall with an enormous parking lot perfect for endless hours of street hockey, the apartment complex also boasted a large if indifferently maintained outdoor swimming pool that was even cooler. The best feature of the neighborhood, though, was a block and a half away: the boxy, blue three-story walk-up where my Nana settled shortly after our arrival.

I'd gladly forsake slapping a hockey ball against the stucco wall of the liquor store or splashing around with my friends in the swimming pool to spend time visiting Nana in her new digs. We were an unlikely duo, a ten-year-old boy and a woman in her mid-seventies, but I liked nothing better than hanging out as she went through even the most mundane of her chores. Sitting in the kitchen, she'd tell me stories as she washed and sorted her collection of cups and saucers. Drying her hands on her housedress, Nana would fish into her gargantuan handbag for a candy bar or box of Chiclets she'd been saving for me.

“Now you tell
me
a story,” she'd demand.

The shot starts with a wide pan of the room, which is thick with a blue haze of cigarette smoke. Everybody's there but Kenny, who survived WWII but succumbed to cancer in the mid-sixties at the age of forty-two. Moving in and out of the bottom of the frame are the tousled heads of various children, but the camera is concentrating on their parents. Smoking their smokes and quaffing their beers are Uncle Stuey, who, like Kenny, was released from POW camp at war's end; my uncle Albert, who never saw combat duty; and Al's wife Marilyn, chatting with Stu's wife Flo. The pan continues and there's Mom's baby sister, Pat, standing with my parents and her husband Jake. The camera pulls back and we see that they're all grouped loosely around an overstuffed sofa upon which sits Nana, sipping from a beer mug that dwarfs her tiny hands. She lowers it, revealing a small wisp of foam painting her upper lip. She says something now, perhaps to herself, but more likely in response to a remark from off-camera.

There's no sound of course, so I have no idea what exactly the group has been laughing and gossiping about. But I do have personal knowledge of one frequent topic of conversation at many of these family gabfests: me.

Still tiny and decidedly hyper compared to the other kids in the family, I was considered something of an oddity. My parents would often share the latest twists and turns in the strange saga of their youngest son: a doctor's recommendation that I be administered growth hormone, a teacher's insistence that, as good as my grades were, my overwhelming appetite for stimulation needed to be tamped with a course of whatever the equivalent of Ritalin was in those days. (Dad nixed both suggestions.) Since the aptitude I demonstrated was for the arts, it was hard for anyone to imagine me holding a real paying job.

“You weren't going to be a laborer,” my mother explains. “You weren't going to be a union guy. That wouldn't have suited your personality, never mind your physique. You were the dreamer and the artistic type. I mean, years later I see that, but at the time, I can't honestly say that I did because it was just something that had never been in either side of our family.”

And so there was much chin-rubbing and worried conjecture about what would become of me. This is when Nana would always chime in.

“Don't you ever worry about Michael,” she'd intone with a calming certainty. “He's going to be fine. He's going to do things you can't even imagine. And he'll probably be very famous one day.”

And then with a smile, and no doubt a twinkle in her eye, she'd add, “And when he is, everyone will know him as Michael.”

In most circumstances, this would be written off as the indulgence of a doting grandmother, but you have to remember Nana's position in our family. It was accepted, after all, that Nana was something of a psychic. She'd had The Dream. She'd come down the stairs that morning in Ladner thirty years earlier and announced that Stuart was alive. So, if Nana said it, who were they to argue? I mean, if they woke up in the morning and the sun was shining and Nana said “rain,” believe me, they'd all spend the day packing umbrellas. Unlikely as it seemed to everyone else, maybe Bill and Phyl's boy Mike—
Michael
— was going to be okay after all.

SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER

Burnaby, British Columbia—1972–1979

August 22, 1972: I was in the pool when I heard the sirens. My folks were both at work; Dad as a police dispatcher in Ladner (his postretirement job) and Mom as a payroll clerk in a cold storage plant on the waterfront, so the summer day was like a blank check that I could fill in however I wanted. I might have gone to the movies,
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
for the second or third time, then headed down to the lake on my new bike with its sleek banana seat and high-rise handlebars. It was a scorcher though, so I opted for the unheated waters of the swimming pool. Maybe I'd go over to Nana's later, I thought, scrounge some lunch.

It was around noon the sirens started; I remember being unsettled by the sound. I climbed out of the pool, grabbed my towel, pushed through the gate in the chain-link fence enclosure, and climbed the stairs to our second-floor apartment.

I barely had time to dry off and dress before the phone rang. Mom said she was leaving work early. Nana had had a heart attack.

Nana was the first real person I knew to die—not an actor or an American politician, but someone whom I loved, whose voice, touch, and laughter were as familiar as my own. Of my father's father I have the merest glint of remembrance—walking along a sidewalk with a thin, pleasant older man who held my hand—but I was three when he died. I was eleven now, and Nana's death was my first experience of loss. For a period of time afterwards—days? weeks? a month?—a door would open and I'd flush with the irrational expectation that Nana might walk in, or I'd daydream of going to see her in her apartment. The worst were the times I'd believe, for an instant, I did see her, at Woolworth's, or through the window of a passing bus. I would catch myself and simply feel sad.

In time, I absorbed the loss of Nana. I finished elementary school and prepared for junior high. My parents secured an economic foothold in the civilian world and began shopping for the first home of our own. Life moved on.

Over the years to come, though, Nana continued to figure in my life. I knew, in a general sense, that she thought I was a great kid; that she loved me and understood me better than any other adult in my world. I didn't, however, grasp the extent to which she'd been my protector, my bridge to the world of other adults, including my father. And even after Nana was gone, her belief in me held sway. Her conviction that I was somehow different, that special consideration was in order, became a posthumous gift, an emotional trust fund of which my parents were the dutiful, if sometimes dubious, executors.

ONE HAND CLAPPING

Nana wasn't the only one with a rock-solid belief that I was destined for a bright future. About this she and I were in complete accord. As a child I didn't define success in monetary or material terms, but I would tell my mom and dad that one day I'd buy them each a new car and a big house for us all to live in. They'd smile and shake their heads. Sometimes this wide-eyed hubris was not so charming. When Mom would tidy my room after endless demands that I do so myself, she'd ask, “You don't think someone's going to be doing this for you for the rest of your life, do you?” “Well, actually . . . yeah . . . I mean, I'll
pay
them for doing it.” In my mind I was just being honest. So I'd be genuinely confused when she'd take her dusting rag in both hands and look as though she wanted to wrap it around my skinny neck.

How did I plan to achieve this life of leisure? Like most Canadian kids, I played hockey with religious devotion, and hockey represented our only realistic shot at fame and fortune. Being small, I regularly got my ass kicked (more than two dozen stitches in my face by the time I was a teenager and countless broken teeth). Still, I threw myself into the game. Realistically, the odds that I would be the next Bobby Orr (Wayne Gretzky was still a snot-nosed kid himself) were slim to none, but I could still dream.

Maybe my belief in myself sprang from a recognition that many things seemed to come easily to me. School was a snap, especially writing; that's what seemed to get the grown-ups (like Nana) the most excited. Even at five and six, I was writing long, multistanza, epic poems about my adventures, real and imagined, and later moved on to short stories, essays, and book reports that won praise.