Mister Roger and Me Page 3

  “Because! Get a move on!”

  “But he has a gun.”

  “Go get him! Jeanne, bring me the telephone, please.”

  “What’s he gonna do here?”

  “We don’t say ‘gonna,’ we say ‘going to.’ NOW GO GET HIM!”

  I took the stairs four at a time. As usual, Mister Roger was sitting on his fake-leather throne, watching the world go by and muttering curses as it passed.

  “Well, if it isn’t Sweetie.”

  “Never mind the Sweetie. You’ve got to come to our house, my sister drank a whole bottle of Javex.”

  “Holy Christ! And people think I’m crazy! Run back to your zoo and tell your mother I’m on my way.”

  “Okay.”

  “And tell her not to make her throw up! It’ll rip the guts right out of ’er.”

  My mother looked on with anxious yet trusting eyes, and after a little water, to wash down chunks of bread with the crusts cut off, and a plethora of really foul curses, Margot was back to her usual cheeky self in no time, as witnessed by a return to her impassioned nasal excavations. During the whole operation I noted that our foul-mouthed saviour never aimed the slightest reproach at my mother.

  As prompt as his intervention had been that day, my mother’s relief became almost permanent when she realized that Mister Roger was an inexhaustible source of old-wives’ remedies.

  When a small colony of plantar warts invaded the bottom of my foot, she said, “Go see Mister Roger.”

  I would venture into the whirlwind of his tiny two-and-a-half-room grotto knowing that I would have to go all the way back to the far end, where the kitchen was. The walls reeked of hamburger cooked in an ocean of butter. I could yell my lungs out from the door, but he wouldn’t hear me. He liked playing the deaf doorpost because it forced me to wade through his Stygian digs. I’d hold my breath and plunge in, bravely risking death by asphyxiation.

  “Huh! I’ve got warts.”

  “Come over here, you little fart-in-a-bottle. What’ve you been stickin’ yer feet into, eh? Jesus Christ on a bicycle! These things’ll eat off your leg, don’t you know that?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Well, you should!”

  “No, it’s not true. You’re saying that on purpose, but I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Take it easy, there, Jezebel. No need to get personal.”

  “What am I supposed to do, then?”

  He turned around and rummaged through the drawer of a tottering old cupboard that blocked the back entrance to his apartment. I always thought it was strange, him barricading himself in like that. It made it look as though he was afraid of something getting into his apartment, even though he never tired of telling us how much he was looking forward to dying.

  “Draw a circle around that mess on yer foot, there, with a lead pencil, then put . . . wait a sec . . . here . . . put one of these plasters on it. Come back and see me when it turns white.”

  “When what turns white?”

  “The skin, what do you think? The skin under the plaster. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  “Okay, bean-face.”

  And the warts would melt away like butter in a frying pan.

  Some nights I’d be wracked with horrible charley horses in my calves and it wouldn’t be possible for Roger to come. There were a thousand reasons why, all of them less convincing than the one that was enough for my mother to hold back the person whose turn it was to go fetch him: no one wanted to know what that ogre would look or smell like if he had to get out of bed in the middle of the night, dressed in old-fashioned nightclothes — or worse, not dressed at all — coated in a thick layer of rancid sweat after a day of drinking beer. On those nights, when my heroine shell cracked open like the hull of a submarine and sank down into the abyssal depths of the ocean, there was my mother.

  I knew there was nothing she could do, but I could tolerate the pain if she lay down beside me. She would lie there patiently, arms crossed, not even trying to struggle against that strange, old-woman’s mask that lack of sleep puts on a face, and because I didn’t want to bother her for too long, I would concentrate as hard as I could on making whatever it was go away as quickly as possible. I imagined myself on a battlefield, my leg wrapped in bandages, ants chewing away at my blood as I lay on my stretcher, making me feel as though my skin were burning off. Mustn’t groan or cry out in pain, no, endure the agony in silence for the sake of the company. Keep your eyes as dry as an overheated room in winter. Swallow the pain, it’ll make you stronger. Above all, being courageous was the best way to keep her there with me. Suffering was tolerable only when she was lying beside me, watching me sweat it out. Otherwise, it would be useless pain. It’s like when you’re the only person looking at something beautiful — a full moon above a rooftop, for example — and you sense that the beauty of it is wasted; there’s at least enough for two.

  In any case, I always ended up asking Roger what I should have done.

  “Always keep a piece of fresh steak handy, and when the charley horse comes, run and get it and put it on your foot.”

  “Ew! That’s disgusting!”

  “What d’you mean, disgusting?”

  “Steak can give you varicose veins, which Mom says are contagious. I have to keep my socks on all the time, even when I’m sleeping.”

  “What the hell, you aren’t going to eat the goddamned thing.”

  “But we aren’t supposed to play with our food.”

  “You aren’t playing with it, you’re healing yourself with it. It’s a kind of medicine.”

  “. . .”

  “You wrap it back up, put it back in the fridge, and take it out when you need it again. It’ll last for a week. After that, it’s going to stink like hell and you’ll have to throw the damned thing out.”

  Mister Roger’s remedies — comprised of mustard plasters, heated gin, garlic, cabbage-leaf compresses, boiled milk — were mostly made from cooking ingredients and apparently could treat any malady. News of his gifts as a shaman spread quickly throughout the neigbourhood, and pretty soon everyone was finding an excuse to come down to our street for an instant consultation. I learned that they repaid him by dropping off a few of his necessities — beer, tobacco, an Expos baseball cap for when it rained, and so on.

  As far as steaks were concerned, I never had a chance to try them. I went to the butcher’s, determined to buy a nice piece of meat with my hard-earned money, but the butcher took pity on me and changed my mind.

  “You want a steak?”

  “Hm-hm.”

  “What cut? How thick?”

  “Thick enough.”

  “Okay.”

  “About as long as my foot.”

  “As long as your foot?”

  “I wear a size seven. Adult.”

  “What are you going to do with this steak, if I might ask?”

  “It’s for my charley horses.”

  “What charley horses?”

  “In my legs, in the back.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “In your calves?”

  “Um . . . something like that.”

  “And you’ve got to eat a foot-long steak for that?”

  “No, I don’t eat it. It’s medicine. I have to put the steak on it.”

  “What do you mean, on it?”

  “On my foot.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I only sell steaks for eating.”

  “I’ve got enough money. I have a big route.”

  “It’s not about money. It’s about disrespecting my meat.”

  I let it go. I wasn’t about to heal my leg with a slice of this man’s ego. I’d rather put up with the cramps, this violence my muscles used to for
ce me to get down on my knees.

  And so Roger became an integral part of our daily routine, chanting his swear words, which got louder and louder under the knife-edge gaze of my mother, about the vagaries of life, calling out “Hello, Sweetie” every time I left or returned to the house, loud enough to be heard by anyone within shouting distance. He was like a historical monument erected in front of a miserable palace, it was as though his body had taken root in our neighbours’ parking space. His face and his hands, perpetually exposed to sunlight, turned as red as maple leaves in autumn.

  The end of the day was the loudest. Mister Roger’s voice rose in direct proportion to the number of beers that had made their way from his feet to his throat, his ammunition in the interminable battle against boredom. It was in these alcohol-induced moments that he would stagger over to our place with all the grace of a routed army and come in without knocking. He wanted to borrow “ten bucks until payday,” or he needed a piece of wood to shore up his throne, or he had just thought of something he needed to tell us right away. In short, he needed to talk to someone, and he talked only at the top of his voice.

  “Not so loud, the children are sleeping.”

  “That’s right, I’m a goddamned idiot!”

  “No, I’m not asleep.”

  “What are you doing still up! Go to sleep this instant!”

  “Yes, but —”

  “No yes-buts, young lady. Into bed with you, and that’s that.”

  After the blessed hour when my parents could legitimately forget that we existed — our bedtime — I would slip into the little hallway near the front door and spy on them. I’d stand there barely breathing so as not to miss their hushed whispers. They’d spend hours discussing a million totally banal little things, but the tone with which they broached those daily nothings gave me something to believe in.

  I never thought of it as love. Love couldn’t be expressed so mundanely. Superlative imaginative beings like myself could never, not even at eight years old, conceive of love as appearing in anything but an elegant evening gown and a big car, accompanied by champagne, flowers, a night at the opera, and a heavenly hotel room. By the time I was eight, television had already stuffed my head with certain notions about Life, and no dose of reality, however tenacious, could come close to mitigating the lies those images conveyed. The drudgery I witnessed daily did nothing to change my mind; I needed to believe that a fresh stick of menthol chewing gum really did guarantee white teeth, passionate kisses, and cascading laughter. I wanted to believe that, every evening after work, adults got together in après-theatre restaurants, the women arriving in rivers of diamonds and the men driving up in two-door sports coupes. And I did believe it, even though what I saw at the end of every day were two familiar faces completely drained of expression, their darkened, narrowed eyes peering through smoke from the cigarettes they lit one after the other in front of the loose warp of the boob tube. Two blimps washed up on a second-hand sofa, bundled in their threadbare housecoats, never going anywhere in their white, rusty, leaky, old Malibu. But from up close — and this is why I had to sneak up on them — when I really examined the pattern of their days, I could see that they were in fact holding the fort, that the incessant boredom that attacked them was beaten back, if only for a moment, by the tranquility of a happiness that had nothing to do with the mediocrity of their surroundings. Slowly, reality made itself appear beautiful.

  I especially liked hockey nights, when my father got excited, drank joyfully, rubbed his feet on the floor frenetically in imitation of the skaters scurrying around on the ice, and pounded loudly on the table when his team scored. He’d give out huge, exotic roars in the style of Speedy Gonzales — Ariba, ariba, ariba! — and leap so high in the air that he must have registered several points on the Richter scale in that little papier-mâché building of ours. One night his enthusiasm was so overwhelming — the Canadiens were vainly trying to stay ahead of the Nordiques — that it brought out the cavalry. The downstairs neighbours, who didn’t have the benefit of a television to tell them that the shouting and stomping were in fact necessary parts of a harmless diversion, thought that a madman had been set loose in our house — a man locked up with five women could easily go crazy, it was well known. The police figured it out as soon as they entered the apartment, and accepted my father’s invitation to grab a cold beer and join him on the living-room couch to watch the end of the game. And so they joined the solitary madman, and it was transformed into a boys’ night that was even noisier. Crouched in the corner by the door, I watched them until the final horn: I never saw the screen, sequestered as I was some distance away and at a bad angle, but I was too happy observing their euphoria to worry about seeing the television. I could hear the roar of the crowd, it sounded like a waterfall, and above it their beautiful, sweet voices rising at a cleared puck, a broken play, the scramble in front of the net, and then the ecstatic crescendo that swept everything in its wake: “They scorrrred!” It was a reassuring noise that lessened my father’s habitual anguish, sometimes even erased it altogether. I loved hockey.

  On nights when Mister Roger burst into the room, he didn’t actually disturb this divine order of things, but it did mean I could stay up without having to hide behind the door; his explosive voice blew away any inclination I might have had to sleep, and my mother didn’t bother telling me to go back to bed. She waved me over from the gap that was serving as my foxhole, and I would enter the room, blinking through their cloud of tar-filled smoke like I was walking into a movie scene that called for dry ice. They would even let me have a few sips of their beer. No cigarettes, though, I might choke. The three of them would laugh when I said, “It’s good! I like that,” with the affected air of a grown-up little woman even though my nostrils were clearly quivering with distaste. I would take whatever was on offer and slink back onto a small wooden chair, making myself as tiny as I could, as if by being uncomfortable I was buying my right to stay up longer, my only goal to make myself perfectly forgotten.

  It was during one of these moments while I was trying to make myself invisible that I found out where Mister Roger had learned his arsenal of folk medicines. I’d been aware for some time that all was not well with my father — he couldn’t cook an egg or dry a dish, he didn’t know which hand to hold a hammer with. Mister Roger made his own food, even his ketchup, and knew how to take things apart, put them back together again, and he even invented things.

  “My wife died when the kids were still little buggers. Brigitte was still in diapers. . . .”

  A subtle nod in my direction from my mother. I could evaporate into invisible atoms, reduce myself to the size of an amoeba, and she wouldn’t forget that I was in the room. Roger would let up on the swearing but talk more loudly, loud enough to shake the walls.

  “They were pretty goddamned small. Too small . . .”

  “What did she die of?”

  “She got sick, for Christ’s sake! Some goddamn thing wrong with her blood. You never know where it’s going to get you.”

  “Did it take long?”

  “I don’t remember anymore. I guess that should tell you.”

  “And you never remarried?”

  “Are you crazy? No goddamn way! I was already tripping over three kids. No way I was going to get hitched up again, no way.”

  “How come we never see them, these children of yours? Don’t they live around here?”

  “You know how it is, for Chrissake. . . . Kids grow up . . . turn into fucking ingrates, the whole lot of ’em. You give ’em everything you got, and when they don’t need nothin’ from you no more, they fuck off. Far as they’re concerned you’re just another pain in the ass. But just watch ’em come runnin’ back with their tails between their legs when the shit hits the fan, eh? Like last year, when my son wanted to get a divorce. His wife wasn’t even dead yet and he couldn’t wait to get rid of her!”

  “They have the
ir own lives, that’s the way it is.”

  “Goddamn right. They’re comin’ to pay me a little visit at my place, Jesus wept! I hafta see ’em sometime, I guess.”

  “Roger . . .”

  “What? I can’t even say ‘Jesus wept’?”

  Not a day went by when he didn’t harp at us about his imminent death. I knew exactly why he wanted to die: he was bored, his children had all left him, and he’d become too old and too poor to hope for anything more than being able to tolerate his daily miseries by drinking cheap warm beer in front of a dilapidated house from which bipedal behemoths rained abuse down on his head. I understood him because I was at an age when death held no dominion over me. At that age, you accept without question that old people have to die and that it’s part of the natural order of things. Later, time passes and things get complicated because we begin to think about what death is. That’s when we turn to disturbing philosophical concepts like existentialism, or comforting human-like abstractions with wide backs, which is what most gods have.

  But to Roger, God was someone who wouldn’t release the creatures trapped in his wife’s body, which was still so useful. That didn’t stop him from praying fervently all day long, letting God know he was ready for the next world, whatever it turned out to be.

  “Okay, I’ll stop boring the shit out of you now . . .”

  “You don’t bore us.”

  “Sure I do. I shout too loud, and the poor little bugger can’t sleep . . .”

  “That’s true. You could stop that. She’s not a sound sleeper.”

  He stood up, holding his stomach to prevent himself from toppling over like a top that has stopped spinning and is wobbling toward the ground.

  “Yeah, well, I’m out of beer anyway.”

  “We don’t have any.”

  “Just as well. One more and I’d start farting like an old workhorse. I usually don’t fart until morning.”

  “We don’t really need to know that.”

  “Stop getting your arse out of joint by my harmless little phrases, for the love of Chr—”

  “Go to bed! Good night!”