6: The Golden Child

        
             Did I tell you about my brother Kim's homemade burglar alarm? There were holes in the floors from the old wood stove, so Kim connected a string to his bedroom door, and put a big plastic tarantula at the end of the string. We'd be sitting at the dinner table when a rubber Tarantula would drop down and dangle. Kim would run upstairs to confront Danny.
           When I was six I used to hang around with a bully named Roy Bird. He used to wear a wolf ring and would always sneak up on Wendy Cress to give her a kiss on the cheek. Anyhow, his friends were pretty rough, so I made up a story to keep them off my back.
          I told them that my father had gone on an excursion to Africa, and had returned with a sack of poisonous spiders. One night one got out and bit me on the back, so now you have to be careful not to touch my back. There is some truth to the story. I did have a father who had a back problem from a tow motor mishap. He always told us to keep off his back.
             In 1975 I was living in a house on Palmerston Street, the one with the blue porch light, I almost got beat up by the drug dealers who were living across the hall. I ran down the back fire escape and escaped. They didn't like my voice lessons. That was a strange place. Someone strung out on heroin was always playing sitar in the attic, and the police would come through our apartment in the middle of the night on sting operations.
             PB the photographer, my roommate in early 1975, would let cops in and forget to tell me about it, and it was weird to wake up with them traipsing by on tiptoe. One night I dreamed that PB let in a girl from my high school, Dawn Walker; and she came over to the bed where I was sleeping and tossed an old black and white photograph of me tanned and golden and holding the telescope. In the dream she said, 'This is what you threw away — The golden child.'
           My mother says that when I was young I was as 'good as gold.' I used to sit in the sand box and listen to the radio. We had an old antique upright radio, and I used to love hearing Wake Up Little Suzie on it because that was my sister’s name. I used to listen to Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Flowers in a blue armchair and would conduct an imaginary orchestra with my feet.
          Across the street where the creek wound its way though an empty lot there was an apple tree. A few neighborhood kids would sit in the tree because it was so easy to climb. I found a branch that fitted me like a perfect seat. I could sit with no hands. It was at that time that I realized what it was to be, to be in harmony with nature.
Early February 1976 I looked up from reading Another Roadside Attraction and gazed out the window of the Grey Hound Bus. I was driving past Acorn and thought about my childhood friend Bruce. I visited with Bruce and stayed the night at his parent's place. The first time I met Bruce was in grade two; at recess our scarves became reigns as we raced horses across the school ground. That was around the time they broadcast over the PA system that Alan B Sheppard had ventured into space.
             I wrote about Bruce on one of my exams in grade 2. The assignment was to write something I did after school: "After school Bruce and I play in the barn beside the railway tracks. We build tunnels in the bales of hay. It is lots of fun and soon we are tired." As members of the Young Naturalist Club we made nets to catch butterflies. Bruce would stand for hours on the edge of the pond trying to catch a dragonfly. We used to propel ourselves across the water on an old door with broken hockey sticks. Once a huge gray bird flew overhead and we thought it was a Whooping Crane.
           Bruce often ordered Chinese food from the Lido Restaurant. I'd never had Chinese Food; in fact I never ate out when I was young. My dad didn't believe in restaurants unless it was on a long trip and all the peanut butter and jam sandwiches had run out and the kids were screaming. The sandwiches were heavy on the peanut butter; my mother adhered to the theory that a quiet child is a child with a mouth full of peanut butter. Sometimes when we traveled there would just be a few jars of peanut butter and a spoon for each mouth. Sometimes Bruce would invite me to his parent's cottage at Port Severn. When we reached the Port after the long car ride, we would stop at the store for cashew nuts and Beanie and Cecil comic books. He would sit for hours on the dock fishing for sunfish. Lots of turtles could be seen sunning themselves on logs. We raced swimming, wild dog paddles.
             I was at the cottage when Bruce's adopted brother left in a huff. They were getting ready to go skiing and I was asked to pass a life preserver to the adopted son. I couldn't reach him so I passed it to Roger who threw it at him. The life preserver landed in the water precipitating a flare up. I thought it was my fault the kid ran off, because I didn't pass the life preserver.
           When Bruce was engrossed in a book it would be impossible to distract him. Sometimes Mr. Powder, our grade five teacher would stand beside him trying to get his attention in class. Mr. Powder entrusted Bruce with his pet skunk. Also Mr. Powder asked Bruce to care for Major, his Dalmatian. One Christmas his parents gave me a book called The Earth Is a Spaceship. It was the only book ever given me in my childhood. I still have it. It became the inspiration for the song: Look Out Ma, I Think This Spaceship Earth is Gonna Crash. Come to think of it the book Bruce gave me was actually called Curious Creatures, about nocturnal animals.
          On a hike to Rattlesnake Point lead by Mr. Powder, Bruce said, “Turn around,” and I made a face, knowing that Bruce would be photographing me at that instant. When Mr. Powder asked us to collect firewood, I brought back a big log and asked if this would do. Bruce captured the moment on film.

         Bruce's dad had a Peugeot dealership at the Plaza, and Bruce would point out every Peugeot he saw. Bruce and I would get paid fifty cents each to sweep the shop, and then we'd race our way through strawberry milk shakes. There was a burnt down barn beside the Plaza, the stone foundation became a castle for us.          In January 1976, I discovered that Bruce was teaching classical guitar at a music store in Kitchener, and visited. After an evening of talking and sharing songs I crashed out in the guest room and awoke to hear his parent's talking. It was as if nothing had changed since I was a child; I had a peaceful feeling when I woke up. We had not seen each other since the two of us had joined Steve Copperfield, in the summer of '66 when he smashed every window of Homes' barn. Bruce and I both admitted to throwing only one stone, but were considered 'just as guilty.' Running into me by chance at the candy counter of Kelly's gas station Mrs. Holmes told me the replacement windows would cost $9.32. I can still see her ominous reflection in the glass of the candy concession as she approached me from behind. For some reason I recall buying a box of 'Smarties.'
         Did I tell you about going to a scouting camp out by the Sitting Tree, and how I got kicked out for being on the fringe of a revolution? I got kicked out of a lot of things. I got kicked out of Sunday school for burping incessantly, and that's the only time you met the minister. I went to camp when I was in grade five, and was about to be recognized as camper of the week when I did something out of line and missed winning the prize of a big chocolate bar. I was so upset I walked seven miles home. All because I threw a handful of grass at the councilor. She was actually going out with my brother Rick at the time, and this was before I smashed the windows of her parent's barn. We were coloring in those pictures where you put black over the primary colors and scrape out a design. That's where I got the inspiration for "Like a Tiny Million Ants of Thought." I started writing about what had inspired the Ants of Thought: The first verse about the primary colors was when Dot Holmes, filled my shirt with grass after wrestling me down.
        It was sort of like the feeling I got in grade five with Mr. Powder, my teacher with the brush cut who used to go to a coffee house and would sing for us sometimes weird folksongs such as Froggie Went a Courting. Anyhow, Powder used to strap all the boys in the class except for Bruce and I. Once I was playing with a ladybug sitting in the front row, directly in front of his big oak desk. To remind me that I should be paying attention he simply placed the dirty, pink, pimpled strap on the desk. The color of the strap was twilight mauve, the same color of the carnation that I had plucked off the trellis by our veranda. I could never figure out how my parents found out I had picked one measly obsequious petal. There is another scene in my mind about the house in Scarborough when my mother was interrogating me because someone had removed the sewer cover and there was a bar of soap missing from the mailbox.
         When we lived in Scarborough I used to steal rhubarb from the backyard of our next-door neighbor by putting a rake over the picket fence and yanking it up. We used to walk around the neighborhood eating it with a small glass of sugar to dip it in. My brother Terry had a jeep with a spotlight on the back that put zebra stripes on the ceiling, and the dream with the unicorn in captivity in it, surrounded by the picket fence.


LITTLE RED BUG
I took my easel off the road
To the meadows chirping green
Hills of receding blue echoed
In the quiet watercolor stream
A drop of rain fell on a whim
It hit my work and pulled me in
Just like a bird upon a limb
That faded into the cerulean
I mixed sienna to richer rust
And thickened the road with muck
It hadn't dried to a lighter dust
When a ladybug got stuck
Ladybug on my wet paint
Took a step and sunk right in
Like my car it was quaint
But faded into oblivion I had a car
Color it carmine
A fugitive hue
It looked like a bug
I left my car when it bit the dust
On the verge of falling apart
But freed the bug from the canvas
To prove that life can transcend art
There were places I meant to go
The day I slammed that rusted door
I still recall how it startled a crow
Into a realm I've yet to explore

Stefan des Lauriers, Front row second from right.Stefan des Lauriers, Grade two, last row far left.

Stefan des Lauriers, First row third from left.

Stefan des Lauriers, Front row, second from right.

Stefan des Lauriers, Front row, second from right

Stefan des Lauriers, Last row, third from left.

Stefan des Lauriers, front and center

  Stefan des Lauriers top row second from right

February 29, 1980 Joy’s Logbook: (49 Mary Street Milton, Ontario)

        Up at noon, Kim here with Dylan about 2 pm; he’s staying the night, he played outside for an hour, it was freezing cold, coldest its been this winter, but he was wrapped up warm and didn’t want to come in, he stayed out for an hour, and when he came in his little cheeks were read, he looked very healthy, bless him, he is such a dear little boy. I love him so much, he reminds me of Rick and Stefan, as they were very good little boys too, never got into mischief, were quite content to play their own little games

[Dylan was four and a half years old at the time.]

Saturday June 221, 1980 [Dylan rides bike to Victoria Park]

        Up at 8:30 with Dylan, made porridge for him and Fern, then Dylan went out on his bike, Fern sat on the veranda, there was a do on at the park, Hospital Auxiliary Garden Party, Dylan went on his own, when he came back he asked for a dime please so he could buy candy. Fern gave him two dimes and a nickel, he was so happy, and went off on his own, we watched him up the street, he came back fifteen minutes later, he had won a plastic tow truck and two fishes from the fish pond, he was really happy about that…