One Native Life (7 page)
AT THE CENTRE
of our being, as at the centre of our Mother Earth, is fire. It burns within our cells, and because of that we are entranced by fire, drawn to it relentlessly. As we gaze into it, something eternal in its flicker and dance calls to us. In the Ojibway world, great stories and teachings were shared around a fire. The men and women we grew up to be were shaped by the tribal fires that burned in our villages. The embers of them reside within us today, patiently waiting to be fanned into flame. On this journey, I have sat by many fires, but it is only now, in retrospect, that I see how much I learned there, in those fires burning bright.
. . .
IT WAS FEBRUARY
25, 1964, deep winter in northern Ontario. At that time of year the nights descended like judgements, dark and deliberate. I shared a room with my foster brother, Bill Tacknyk, and my bed was the lower of the two bunks. When bedtime came I always fell asleep to the sound of his radio playing softly in the darkness.
That night he was listening to a boxing match. Cassius Clay was fighting Sonny Liston in a place called Miami. You could hear the crowd behind the announcer’s voice. It was like a sea, roaring, then murmuring, then crashing into silence. The announcer was excited, and his words came out of the darkness like the jabs and combinations of the fight itself.
Clay was lightning quick as he pounded the lumbering Liston. He opened a cut over Liston’s eye and the announcer yelled that there was blood everywhere. The crowd noise was enormous. It filled the corners of our dark room, and when Bill’s legs draped over the edge of his bunk, I sat up too. We were galvanized by the details of that fight.
I swear I could smell the sweat of it. I could feel the thud of blows landing, and in my mind’s eye I could see the younger, faster Clay wheeling around the ring taunting Liston, hitting him at will. I began to cheer for him when Clay was blinded by something and Liston started to win.
Clay recovered, and as I rocked in my bunk, arms wrapped around my knees, I clenched my fists and willed him on. In the end, a battered Liston refused to come out and fight again. The crowd cheered and booed and raged, and Bill and I celebrated the new heavyweight champion of the world. My foster mother had to come in and tell us to get to sleep.
Cassius Clay changed his name about the same time I did. In my new adopted home I got to see some of his fights on television. He was beautiful. He was outrageous. He was a warrior poet, and when he crashed over refusal to fight in Vietnam I hurt for him. In my mind he was a giant.
But my adopted home was a fiasco from day one. No one had told my new family about the history of abuse I came from. No one had told them about the terror I’d faced as a kid and the horrific physical abuse I’d suffered. No one knew then that post-traumatic stress disorder wasn’t just a soldier’s pain; it could happen to a kid, too.
Physical punishment was the rule in that home, and it was the last thing I needed. When I was strapped and beaten, it only exacerbated the trauma in me. When I was banished to my room, it only embedded the isolation I felt. I found it difficult to fit in and become the kid they wanted me to be, and there were always clashes.
I ran away a few times and then, when I was fifteen, I emptied my bank account of paper-route money and found my way to Miami Beach. It was February and I wanted to be somewhere warm. More than anything I just wanted to be away.
I got a job in a cafeteria as a busboy and moved in with a pair of old hippies I met. We smoked weed and hung out on the beach, hitting up tourists and swiping drinks from tables. But when I couldn’t produce a social security number, the cafeteria let me go. I wandered Miami Beach lost and hurt and hopeless.
One day I went into a lunch counter at Fifth Street and Washington Avenue. They served lemon meringue pie, and I ordered a piece in hopes that a childhood favourite might make me feel better. It was marvellous. When a man came and sat beside me, I bent my head out of shyness. He ordered a piece of pie like mine, and the waitress asked him if he was allowed to have it. He laughed and said he could eat whatever he wanted; he was the Champ, after all. I looked up and saw Muhammad Ali beside me. His training gym was right above that lunch counter, it turned out, and he came in often.
He bought me a piece of pie when he ordered another, along with a chocolate shake. We ate together and he smiled at me and rubbed my head like a brother. When he was leaving, I asked him for an autograph and he signed my napkin. Muhammad Ali. A giant. A warrior poet. I was honoured. Watching him walk away I felt healed, like I could bear up. When the police found me eventually and shipped me back to my adopted home, I held onto the sight of him.
I left for good soon after, and my life became the road. Thirty-seven years later, I still remember the feel of his big hand on my head and the taste of that lemon pie. Finding Ali saved me, gave me the strength to carry on. I guess that’s what heroes do—imbue us with the gold dust of their courage. Ali made me a fighter, and I’ve come out for every round since then.
. . .
MOUNTAIN RAIN
is healing. Walking in it in the slate grey of morning you get the sense of what my people say—that rain is the tears of Mother Earth crying down a blessing. There’s a freshness to things then, a radiance, a sweeping rush of energy that means Great Spirit when you allow it to touch you. You feel the places you inhabit when you open yourself to them. They cease to become places then, existing in you as a vibration, a tone I’ve come to call belonging.
I went to the street when I was sixteen. My home life was a shambles, and it hurt too much to be there. So I left one day. I had a Grade Nine education and no sense of who I was. I was filled with anger, resentment and fear. I had no plan except to get out. There weren’t many opportunities for a high school dropout with no skills. The street was the only place I could go.
I worked when I could, but for the most part my life became the usual welfare dance of living cheque to cheque, trying to fill the gaping holes in my days. The places I found to live in were low-income rentals, small rooms in dingy buildings, alongside people much the same as me. There wasn’t a lot of hope in those dim hallways, just a keen sense of desperation.
Drugs and alcohol eased the hurts, and the loose company that came with them made it all feel less lonely. But the bottle always came up empty, the high always became a bitter low. The fast friends were always off to somewhere else where the supply was better. There is no loyalty in that life. Everyone is living for escape, and leaving is easier since you never truly arrived in the first place.
Sometimes there was no money for a room, and I lived as best I could with the concrete of the city for shelter. I slept in doorways, behind dumpsters, in parks and abandoned buildings and deserted automobiles. I woke cold, shivering hard, wet sometimes, the rain or snow slick on my face. I’d stamp my feet to regain a measure of warmth. And I was never alone. There were hundreds of us. We were Indians—Crees, Ojibways, Micmacs—and we were black—Jamaicans, Africans, West Indians. We were Romanians, Germans, Finns, Australians and Brits. Everyone, it seemed, was susceptible to slipping between the cracks.
You’re not lonely for people when you live like that. Neither are you lonely for a physical place. Instead, you’re haunted by a feeling, a relentless feeling you’re stumped to identify because you haven’t experienced it in a long time, if ever. It lives in you like a bruise. The stories you bring to the street are the baggage of a life, and you open that baggage alone, in private moments when there is no one to see your shame, your tears, your desolation. You don’t look down when you walk because of the shame. You look down to avoid the shining light of life, of possibility, of belonging in the eyes of the people you pass.
In the netherworld of homelessness and poverty, the commonality is a total lack of colour. There are no pastel tones to your world, only the immutable greys and umbers and purples of longing, hurt, hunger and lack. Colour taunts you always. It lurks on every street corner and in every neighbourhood. Colour. The look of possibility.
You become invisible when you’re homeless. You walk the crowded sidewalks, dodging busy passersby, and you understand what it is to exist as a phantom, a shadow, as irrelevant as the discarded newspapers that flap at your feet. Every chink of change you beg for contains the properties that haunt you. Every mission meal served on a plastic tray carries within it the fleeting recollection of another meal in another place, at a table in a room farther away than years. Every shard of laughter on the street pierces you. You find yourself hanging around parks and playgrounds as though you could soak up the innocence of childhood by osmosis.
The feeling that haunted me lived in the lights of the houses I passed on long aimless walks at night. It was the feeling of being expected, of knowing someone was waiting on the other side of a door for the sound of my footsteps. It was the feeling of welcome, of belonging. The feeling of being known. I craved that feeling, and I slowly began to work myself up from the pavement and into a life.
Belonging. It’s what we’re all after. The tendril of emotion that ties us to people and places and things, entwining us in the particulars of that blessing. Walking beside this mountain lake, the rain against my face is healing, like tears. But they’re tears of gratitude now.
. . .
THERE’S AN OLD-STYLE TV
antenna on the roof of our cabin. One of these days I need to climb up there and haul it down. When I was a boy those antennas were everywhere. In the North you got as accustomed to snow on your
TV
screen as you did to snow on the roof. We have satellite
TV
now, and though we don’t watch it much the reception is clear when we do. But that antenna reminds me of something special I learned from an old
TV
.
After I’d left home at sixteen, I lived in drab rooms in buildings that begged for a coat of paint and a good cleaning. Waking up in those places, it was a struggle to stay hopeful or positive. But I remember one place fondly.
The place itself wasn’t much, just one of those one-room mansions you can find in the heart of any city. It came with a dresser, a hot plate, a small refrigerator, a creaky old bed and a table and chair. Twelve of us shared a bathroom, and the smell of stale cigarette smoke and grease from someone’s cooking was always in the air. There was a park across the street where I could sit and watch the regular folk play with their dogs and children, but in my room itself there was nothing to occupy me.
Then one day I saw a portable television in a pawnshop window. It was a small red
RCA
, and I picked it up for ten dollars. The screen was only about ten inches wide, but for me that
TV
held the promise of distraction and a connection to the regular world.
Once I got home, I extended the
TV
’s long aluminum aerial and twisted it to see what I could bring in. The reception was bad in my room. At first, I often turned the
TV
off in frustration because the picture was so horrible. There’s nothing worse than trying to watch a hockey game when the skaters are double-imaged and the puck is invisible through the dots of heavy snow on the screen. It drove me crazy. After a while, I discovered that if I stayed close to the television my body acted like an extra antenna. I could watch whatever I wanted as long as I stayed within two feet of the screen. But as soon as I moved to get something from the refrigerator, the screen filled with snow and the picture disappeared.
I tried all kinds of things. One of the old-timers across the hall told me to wrap tin foil around the end of the aerial. Someone else said to keep it by the window. I moved that
TV
all around trying to find a spot where the reception would stay clear. Then one day I set it on the table in the middle of my little room. The picture was perfect. I moved three feet away, and the picture stayed strong. I moved six feet away, nine feet, right over to the door, and the picture was still perfect. And so all the time I lived there I kept that little
TV
smack in the middle of my room. It never failed me.
When I think about those days I smile. The times seem so strange, with their outdated technology, and I was a different person. I’m older now than I ever thought I would be, and I live in a regular home. I have not only satellite television but cable, too, along with a computer, a
DVD
player and an
MP
3. But that little red
RCA
taught me something I’ve never forgotten.
You see, that little television was like anything that connects you to the world. It could be spirituality, it could be culture, it could be a philosophy or the traditions of your people. Whatever gives you your idea of the world and your place in it, whatever anchors you, that’s what that little television was like. It doesn’t work so hot if you stick it in the corner. You miss the message then; the image is scrambled and the audio crackles. But if you keep that vital thing right smack in the middle of your life, you can move anywhere and you’ll always get the signal you desire, bright and strong and true.
. . .
THE CIRCUS CAME
to town when I was seventeen, and I ran away to join it. It was a carnival, actually, one of those mom-and-pop road shows that played weekend dates along the secondary highways and in mall parking lots.
This one was called Wood Family Shows. The owners, Peter Wood and his wife, Gerta, were carrying on the tradition of the old-time carnies that Pete had been raised with in England. Wood Family Shows had a funhouse, a Ferris wheel, a trailer-mounted roller coaster and half a dozen game joints. Each May they hit the road with a handful of other carnie folk.