"I have no roots"
Moravagine, by Blaise Cendrars
My father and mother were both children of the depression and the dust bowl years in the badlands of Alberta. He was a soldier at 18, a hero at 23. His life philosophy was simple and similar to that of other Scots Canadians - bite the bullet. I resembled him to a tee, and that brought me nothing but the reproach of those who knew him, as our resemblance ends at the physical. By the time I was an adolescent, the family I was born into had expanded into a clan which reached just about everywhere through Canadian society.
Just like families, clans are organic entities living in accordance with a set of immutable laws which survive long past individual interests. A man can revolutionize the world, but the same man is powerless to alter the most banal realities of the organic trap from which he emerges. The logic of a clan is to push out tentacles, each of which is an extension of the original body. When the tentacle doesn't exercise its designated function properly - i.e. either to gather food or to defend the host body - the remedy is excision. Childhood is the temporary illusion that this genetic cage is actually meant to protect you. So it went with me for twelve years. Things changed in ten minutes one day, when a band of feral youths savagely beat me within an inch of my death while I walked home from school. There was no warning of this, no motive, no familiarity with the attackers, whom I never saw again. Looking back, it seems to me that everything stems from that one day, and the arrival home, and the first understanding that noone intended on doing anything about it. The man whom the world universally regarded as a hero had left me to my own devices. During the days which followed, while I lay in a hospital bed with my eyes tumefied and several broken bones, I only knew that whatever I'd been told up until that moment was of no use to me, and I vowed to find out where I had gone wrong, and to change everything.
My formative years were spent serving a five year sentence under the Christian brothers from Ireland. During the day, it was a war zone. The brothers in their black, swirling skirts, rosaries hanging at the belt, giving full vent to their raging, unbridled tempers, swinging the strap, smashing heads against bulletin boards or against other heads. Whereas the early days were terrifying, a paradoxical reversal of psychology occurred as we sized up the measure of our enemies. The threat of violence creates a climate of fear, but the execution of it punctures the illusion and deflates authority. When a skirted brother crossed the Rubicon into the zone of turbulence and released the beast within, it acted like a curse. The perpetrator became vile and tainted, and marked for revenge. My classmates - a motley crew of scavengers, vagabonds, orphans and delinquents - were seasoned veterans of revolt, and we marked the brothers early on as an enemy to be sabotaged at every turn. They were no match for us, because they still feared exposure, whereas we had lost everything.
When the school bell rang, we drifted down to the train yards on the docks of the Fraser River and hopped trains to the south side of the river, trespassing onto farmlands, gathering up magic mushrooms. We had found our first bootlegger, an ill-shaven animal out of the Cariboo-Chilcotin district, who had an eye for young boys. Getting him to purchase beer and whisky was easy enough. We spent our afternoons wandering the river banks, looking for an outboard motorboat to steal, and if successful, would drift down towards the Delta, hallucinating on psylocybin, as the tugboats and river sturgeon and log booms and barges moved past. Once into the river Delta, a whole new form of life became visible - rebels, bums and outlaws inhabiting ramshackle bric a brac constructions, balancing on makeshift cedar pylons planted into the shifting silt of the river bed. These men sat on their porches, drinking beer, doing nothing, indifferent to the relentless buzz of stevedores, of sawmill workers pouring into the mills and the river dredgers, passively observing, drinking and smoking. It struck me that these supposedly worthless and shunned river dwellers didn't look all that unhappy. Within the haze of my beer and mushroom-induced fantasies, they struck me as guardians of a sort, and the mere sight of them, as the river took on shapes of the sidereal Eiffel tower, or a Gaudi cathedral, a dream took hold of me - of the day I would escape my drab existence.
On the home front, it looked like the judge was slowly coming to terms with the idea that his son wasn't made of the same fibre as he.
Adversity is meant to build character, but in my case, it simply confirmed a growing suspicion that the world did not correspond to the users manual I'd been handed. I'd spent my formative years devising various strategies to keep myself and my handicapped brother from being slaughtered by local thugs, or when on school premises, from being set upon by a clique made up of psychotically violent tyrants, or pederasts or both. We put a few of them out of the school, and drove some of them right out of the profession.
On my sixteenth birthday, Benson, a close friend and fellow scavenger, dropped by for a visit.
"I'm leaving tomorrow. For Europe."
"Sounds good. Can I come?"
"Have you got a passport?"
"No."
For the next year, I climbed the walls, living for the arrival of Benson's sporadic, but lengthy air mail letters which recounted the bohemian life. He lived with a Chelsea stripper, and made regular side trips to the cathouses of Hamburg, or the coffee shops of Amsterdam. To me, he sounded like a man alive in a way which I had never been. In one of those missives, Benson had included two pages torn out of a book titled Bourlinguer, containing two passages written in French, marked up by Benson's pen, as he tried to decipher the meaning. I placed the two passages inside a day journal I was keeping, giving no further thought to their contents. They possessed talismanic, not literary value for me, and the proof that I would keep my vow to escape the prison of family.
As I had a plan, overnight my marks improved, and both teachers and my father, while at a loss to explain it, decided I was finally finding my way after a brief period of rebellion and lacklustre performance. I could have just fled, but I feared the risk of returning penniless and defeated. I wanted to bury this beast in one coup, and at one of the formal Sunday dinners over which my father presided, I announced that I was leaving the country for Europe the following day to read history at the Universiteit Katholiek van Leuven, the great mediaeval institute and alma mater of Erasmus. I laid out the confirmation of registration from the university - following the judge's advice to the letter - my paper work was in perfect order.
The shock was too sudden, and the time too short for them to react. I shall never forget stepping into the taxi waiting for me in front of the family home, and the lot of them standing on the driveway, raising their hands limply in farewell, like a Rockwell painting. Pathos. On the way to the airport, I was seized by a terrible guilt - at having escaped prison camp and leaving others behind to their fate - and the power of it nearly convinced me to turn back. But I held firm, and once on the plane, there was no turning back. I knew, from the first minutes when I saw their faces recede and then disappear, that I'd never turn back.