A Brief History of Oversharing Read online

  During the much-loathed Ontario NDP government of the early ’90s, the prime farmlands of Egypt were slated to become Toronto’s “megadump.” Protest signs decorated the lawns and fences, simply stating, “NO DUMP!” This political action was my very first venture into scrapbooking as I clipped various articles from the Georgina Advocate and the Era Banner and proudly pasted them into a book I evocatively titled “The Dump.” At the height of the anger, the surrounding hamlets banded together and a convoy of hundreds of tractors, trucks, and cars drove at a farmer’s pace down the 404 highway and circled the grounds of Queen’s Park, halting busy city life. In a burgundy Astro van inching down the Don Valley Parkway, I got my first glimpse of Toronto’s skyline, including the CN Tower … This was “The Big Smoke” that threatened our very existence. Egypt was spared Toronto’s refuse, the city repressed its garbage crisis down an abandoned mine shaft somewhere else, and our sanctity continued.

  While it’s not my intention to give a full and detailed account of the slack-jawed terrarium in which I was raised, it is important for me to establish that, like a veal calf, I was nurtured and raised for a specific fate. Like many young gay men from small towns who came into their sexualities in the shadow of the AIDS crisis and before Ellen and Will & Grace,when my Rockwellian existence soured I became an outsider, no longer part of some greater whole that can only be explained in farm-speak. There is a copacetic relationship between the farm animals and the barn that houses them. The shelter provides a safe refuge for them, and the heat and moisture created by the livestock maintains the structural integrity of the foundation. The hayloft above stores food for the animals while insulating the interior wood from harsh winters. When you remove the animals and their food from the barn, the foundation dries out, the wood rots, and the structure falls to ruin. My exodus from Egypt triggered neither plagues of frogs nor water-into-blood transformations, but I no longer contributed to the provincial mindset that reinforced Egypt’s existence and Egypt could no longer provide me shelter.

  I was raised with an intense sense of belonging and a blind sense of comfort that I’ve desperately tried to regain since I lost it. But normalcy has evaded me at every turn. So I surrendered to the margins and learned to survive in the undefined. I have done many bizarre things to push myself or to test my breaking points, to release tension the way an athlete stretches a cramped muscle. I have fallen apart more times than what I will admit to, not because I am fragile or weak, but because this is the reality of the stateless. We push to create a space for ourselves, and often to our detriment we are both the barn and the cattle. And sometimes we burn it and everything down like a nineteenth-century lunatic.

  I moved to Toronto and quickly learned that living in the Big Smoke is just like living in a small town. Both are full of gossips, bigots, boozers, sluts, addicts, criminals, and Jesus freaks, except living in a city I’m not related to any of them.

  Only with the self-flagellation of an elastic band did I erase the distinct twang (a confusing hybrid of American Midwest and Canadian East Coast) that is unique to my family. Every harsh snap of an elastic band against my wrist may have removed a “t” from the word “across” or replaced “eh” with a period, but no amount of office-supply therapy could unknot a crocheted way of thinking. It is a considered point of view that delicately weighs both horror and circumstance, life and death, action and consequence, past and present, then crassly concludes that either someone is a “fucking idiot” or something is “horse shit.”

  Once, my mother’s cousin Brad (the unofficial mayor of Egypt) rescued a distressed cow by shoving his entire arm inside the animal’s birth canal to prevent its uterus from slipping out. It’s a fatal complication for a cow having just birthed a calf, and a potential loss of income for a farmer. Arm deep in a cow’s vagina, Brad instructed Mike (his son and my cousin) to take a jackknife and some twine and stitch the cow’s vulva closed. Between each incision and sewing of the coarse thread, Brad inched his arm out while Mike vomited to the side. The cow was saved and a clearly traumatized Mike had experienced a gruesome rite of passage.

  This story was performed over beers and shots of rye in the basement of my family home, which served as Egypt’s unofficial tavern. (These were the type of gatherings where the mixture of Labatt and Crown Royal would cause grown men to order fifty baby turkeys then forget about it until boxes of freshly hatched poults were delivered to our front porch. It was drunken nights like these that resulted in us raising turkeys in our finished basement until they were old enough to be transferred to the barn.)

  The fisting story killed.

  “That’s not funny!” one cousin snorted uncontrollably; it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  “Well, if you can’t laugh at life’s shit, then go kill yourself, eh?” howled another cousin.

  In a world of common sense, where the golden rule was “don’t put your foot in the thresher,” life was rife with comedy. I was never privy to intellectual banter peppered with wit and bon mots, but to a bucket of harsh stories filled with obscenities, slopped and delivered with the cheer of a tole-painted duck wearing a lace bonnet and smoking the pipe of Jean-Paul Sartre. There is a tipping point to this type of humor, a danger that you might reveal too much. Learning to navigate this line was essential, because only by laughing at our situation were we given permission to complain, to express profound dissatisfaction, to show vulnerability, or to admit fear.

  The world of Egypt seems lives away, but I am a farmer through and through. I eat when the harvest is bountiful, fast during droughts, and laugh in the face of hardship. While there is no going back, I remain tethered to the land. Nostalgia is in my blood.

  When truth wades into darkness, I close my eyes. I am perched at the very top of a wagon piled with a hundred rectangular bales of straw. My sister and I are sitting side-by-side, laughing as the stack of interlocked bricks of compacted bedding sway dangerously to-and-fro, the coarse-but-sweet-smelling fibers sawing our bare legs red. We laugh as my grandfather looks back at us from his Massey Ferguson, making sure we haven’t toppled off, as we chug towards the gray weathered barn. We squint at the horizon as the large black tractor wheels kick up dust and the late August sun burns bright, illuminating our world, making the ordinary, the simple, the nothingness appear anything but.

  This was home.

  STIFF COMPETITION

  1994

  Mr. Guy was my bald and surly grade eight teacher who used his class time to bemoan how the local Lions Club no longer permitted minstrel shows to be performed. He was an artist (and a bigot) at heart who enjoyed being theatrically lit by the overhead projector during his performative lessons. He was the type of teacher who only got into the profession to direct the school’s “operetta” and the rest of the school year he peppered his lessons with off-color jokes and distasteful accents. Once, during his boring ramblings about Newfoundland, he reminded us to pay attention and enjoy what, for some of the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds in the classroom, would be their last year of formal education.

  As bleak as Mr. Guy’s outlook was, his predictions were shockingly accurate. Expectations for success were exceeding low for a school built in the middle of a swamp. Our mascot was Skippy, a giant papier mâché swamp rat with a hobo stick. Morning Glory Public School was a funnel for the surrounding concessions and dirt roads. Most “Swamp Rats” were from farms and small subdivisions, few were from affluent homes, some were First Nations from Georgina Island, but there was a high percentage of kids who came from abject poverty. These were the kids who lived in converted cottages, houses without siding, and trailers embedded in scrap-metal yards. For those kids, Mr. Guy kept a classroom pantry stocked with cans of Chef Boyardee and a microwave with a “no questions asked” policy.

  The school bus was the great yellow equalizer. Every day started and ended with a forty-five-minute bus ride, and it provided a needed opportunity to socialize with our p
eers. Our journeys to and from school were always loud and out of control. Our bus driver Madeline Carpenter was a stout horse farmer with a round face, curly yarn hair, and aviator shades. She had a high threshold for the unruly, but daily she’d pull the bus onto the loose shoulder (nearly rolling it into the ditch), turn off the ignition, and arm herself with the emergency axe. “The next kid who sticks their arm out the window, I’m going to come back there with this axe and chop it off!”

  The sight of a giant axe-wielding Cabbage Patch doll would make the entire bus fall dead silent. Then Madeline would return the axe to its resting place beside the stick shift, start the bus, and let the engine deafen the whimpers of traumatized kindergarteners and the stifled laughter of the grade eights in the back of the bus.

  Public school seemed like a tedious journey to claim the back of the bus; a rite of passage as every September each grade moved a seat behind until they were ultimately ejected out the emergency exit. Graduation meant moving on to the only high school in the township, an even larger funnel with even more kids, and a seat once again in the front of the bus.

  One morning during quiet study, Mr. Guy pulled me out of class using his trademark mime skills. He had marched furiously into the classroom (after being in the staff room for thirty minutes) and without saying a word he pointed at me with a courtroom accusation of guilt, made an umpire’s circling yeerrrr-outta-herrrre motion, and banished me into the hallway. This signal was reserved for the bad seeds who set things on fire or hand-painted the washrooms with feces — the kids who smelled of woodsmoke and ate the free Beefaroni. I stood in the hallway for ten minutes until Mr. Guy appeared. A thick vein throbbed on his shiny forehead as he placed his two hairy-knuckled hands squarely on my shoulders.

  I could feel my eyes beginning to twitch, my voice choke. I was always the kid who cried at the hint of authority.

  This was not going to be good.

  “Why did you drop out of the Lions Club vocal competition?” He began shaking me like he was acting in an after-school special. “Why! WHY!? WHY!!!! Every year you win!”

  This was almost correct.

  I had won the Sunderland Music Festival every year except twice: ’87’s devastating loss to Nick Harper, and ’92’s to some ringer who brought out a prop while singing the Canadian folksong “Squid Jiggin’ Ground.” (When that charlatan pulled out a handkerchief on the line “And if you get cranky without your silk hanky,” I was furious.) That year I also won a landslide victory in the fall, becoming MGPS’s first student council president to govern in a tracksuit and headgear. I cleaned up at the effective speaking competition with a loose ten-minute stump about my dirty bedroom. I beat Stacy Kaiser (the smartest and tallest girl in the school) and her snoozer about her family’s vacation to PEI, then I continued on to dominate the regional circuit by creaming the competition. Stories about a tenacious Laura Secord and the legacy of Terry Fox were no match for a rousing tale of house cleaning and stain removal. I was the lead in all the school shows. I had the trophies, the badges, the plaques, the cash prize money, but what I didn’t have was a solo in the town’s figure skating carnival.

  “I’m really focused on my figure-skating career right now, Mr. Guy. I just can’t!” I broke out in tears.

  I always had a career, never a hobby.

  “Figure skating! You disappoint me.” Mr. Guy did have admirable diction. “I’ve seen the results of your Scantron sheet. Your future is clearly as an actor, entertainer, or environmental scientist! Those were the results of your aptitude test.”

  “I know! I’m sorry!”

  “Well, you’re on thin ice with me. Now get back to your desk and think about what you’ve done.”

  As the Olympic torch relay crossed Canada, the 1988 Calgary Games had started a wave of nationwide pride that poured into our homes, filling our cupboards with Olympic gold-embossed goblets, collector’s items from the Shell gas station. We cheered the Jamaican bobsled team, whooped as Elizabeth Manley rodeoed her way into the hearts of Canadians, and I remain adamant that all children born in 1989 were conceived to David Foster’s rousing anthem “Can’t You Feel It?”

  A triple whammy of back-to-back games (Calgary, Albertville, Lillehammer) over six years introduced me to a type of male who expressed his strengths wearing sequins, pirate shirts, and form-fitting vests. I watched Brian Orser backflip his way to professional status, Kurt Browning become Canada’s Gene Kelly, and a young Elvis Stojko amp up competition with quad jumps and mixed martial arts. For me, there was no cleaner form of expression, no better way to interpret the madness of the world, than on ice.

  Doug Hall was the only other male figure skater at the Sutton Figure Skating Club; he also happened to have red hair just like me. Doug had an athletic build, attended a school program for advanced children, and was the son of a doctor. He was the purebred version of me: he was better disciplined, more muscular, and came from an entire family of gingers. He was unbeatable, and he reminded me of the uncomfortable dissonance that occurs when passion is failed by ability.

  You can’t fake it until you make it in figure skating.

  “Yeah, but he skates like he has a stick up his ass,” my mother consoled me after yet another devastating loss to Doug.

  We had just finished performing our male solo programs. There was a lot at stake: the winner would not only get his name engraved on a trophy as Best Male Figure Skater of the Year, but he would also solo in the club’s biennial carnival. Doug had nailed his tribute to 007 dressed as a James Bond, and I had flopped through The Addams Family theme song wearing purple spandex slacks and rainbow sequinned suspenders. I had hoped that the artistry of my finger snaps and suspender tugs would somehow cancel out two minutes of unintentional pratfalls.

  When the judges announced the results, I was in second place.

  In a competition of two people, second place is last place.

  Gravity was not kind to me in 1994; my body was doing the exact opposite of all the other boys. As their muscles lengthened and voices dropped, they swapped their juvenile sweatsuits for 90210 jeans, Donnie Wahlberg hair, and Will Smith earrings. I went into full hibernation as my body ambitiously tested the stretch of jersey while stockpiling enough caloric energy for an entire precision ice-dancing team. The entire force of the universe was compressing me into “Big Red”: a giant donut of flesh and orthodontics, topped with a fern of red hair.

  Much of my weight gain was due to the fundraiser organized by the skating club to raise money for the carnival. That year every child was sent home with as many large boxes of overpriced chocolate-covered almonds and caramel bars as they could carry to sell to their neighbors. But we had no neighbors. My mother proudly displayed a Block Parent sign in the front window of our living room, but the red and white insignia proved as effective as a lighthouse in a desert. For years, the plastic square leaned against the glass, baking in the southern exposure until it eventually grew brittle and crumbled. Without anyone to guilt into buying an overpriced box of saturated fats, I tried to eat my way into being the top seller, inadvertently transforming myself into the world’s first human Zamboni.

  But Doug became my true nemesis, not just my main competition, after a wedge issue was driven between our mothers, and therefore us. Rehearsals for carnival had ignited a hot-button gender issue. Janet, Doug’s mom, was furious that the grand finale to the superhero-themed event would be scored to Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman.” The Bodyguard soundtrack was at the top of the charts, and since figure skating is the purest way to reinterpret the latest cultural phenomenon, it only seemed appropriate to end the show with the rousing popular feminist anthem.

  “I will not have my son dancing to THAT song!” Mrs. Hall shouted at the gathering of skating moms at the emergency plenary session in the arena lobby. Janet stormed off, yanking Doug, still in his skates, out of the arena. “Well, at least we know where Doug gets the stick up his
ass from,” my mom snarked.

  “You don’t care about skating to that song, do you?” asked Marg Mercier, the president of the skating club (and the woman who created my colorful knit sweaters and sparkly Lycra outfits). “It would be an honor,” I said, taking off an imaginary top hat and bowing for the mothers.

  *

  The first time I heard Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” I was in the car with my mother and sister. Houston’s voice soared on the radio, the syncopated enabling lyrics asked me to dance, begged for me to dance, then told me to dance. DANCE!

  I needed to dance.

  “And that was Whitney Houston’s new single from her second studio album, Whitney,” called the radio announcer.

  I immediately committed the singer’s name to memory.

  Whitney. Whitney. Whitney. Whitney.

  We were on one of our long quarterly journeys to Newmarket to stock up on some of the seasonal fashions at Zellers. My mother despised shopping. She held a natural aversion to spending money, and her “go without” attitude meant shopping with her was like haggling with a Turkish vendor. She preferred the peaceful convenience of the Sears catalog, plus the cheap dyes and stale air of a low-end department store always triggered my violent nosebleeds. With two kids and a tight budget, every visit to Newmarket ended in a temper tantrum and bloodshed.

  As we passed the electronics section, I saw a cassette cover featuring a young black woman wearing a crisp white tank top against a gray background; her buoyant curly hair defied gravity. Centered at the top was a scratchy white cursive signature. With her thumb tucked into the fabric of her shirt, Whitney waved at me with a four-fingered hello.