goodbye, blue sky
it’s not often i think about certain parts of my past. they are just too painful to acknowledge, and the fact that i survived it, more or less, is nothing short of a miracle. but i don’t/can’t/won’t celebrate it, because it’s so ugly it borders on contemptible. the fact that these things happened to me is just a fact, nothing more. i chose to bury it, like a bad movie, while occasionally tossing a reference or two into a song or a story, even fictionalizing some of the more slapstick aspects of it. they were some dark times. made even darker by the fact that i was one of the few who survived. there are more, of course, we weren’t all morons, and some of us even managed to learn a little from all the mistakes we made. but there was a certain aura over the whole thing, an unwritten agreement that it was never to be spoken of, ever again.
a big part of that darkness just passed from the world this week, and i’ve been faced with so many horrible memories - there was truly nothing good about it. even what should have been fun turned ugly in the end. i’ve been thinking about whether i should write about it or not, and after doing a little digging, i found that both this person’s parents were already gone, and no real harm could be done. so here it is.
the papers aren’t saying much about the guy who died in that colossal house explosion this week, so i feel somewhat obligated to give you some background on who he really is, in case you were wondering. all the news is saying is that there was a warrant out for his arrest, for uttering death threats and assault. from this you can assume nothing, but i can tell you - he was a violent and vengeful motherfucker who held petty grudges forever. they said it was over money - it could have easily been over five fucking dollars and nothing more. he told a story once, about how he stalked this one guy who owed him money for drugs. again, it was probably less than twenty bucks - he stalked this guy, snuck up behind him while he was walking home one night and clubbed him over the head with a lead pipe until he was unconscious. i remember at the time saying ‘he didn’t even know it was you who did it,’ and him replying that it didn’t matter, he himself knew, and that was enough. this should tell you a little bit about who he really was.
he was a drug addict and a lifetime criminal. a scrawny little fucker with complicated agendas, who could turn on a dime and wouldn’t hesitate to tell you what he’s done to others. when he told you, you’d believe it too. there was a deep nothingness in his black-as-night eyes that belied an abysmal bottomless pit of darkness. he would even recruit his mother to count his drugs for him: thousands of tiny hits of acid that he would sell at the pool hall on Danforth every weekend. take that money and parlay it into pharmaceuticals, or better yet, break into a drug store or five, and parlay that into cash for the downers and endless opiate highs for those in the inner circle. yeah, his parents knew what he was up to, and though they didn’t like it, they took the money just the same. an eastern european family sensibility, they would stick together through thick and thin, regardless of right or wrong. i once saw his father chase him down his street with a butcher knife, and this on my birthday, as he was stopping at the house for ‘party favors’ ... telling my own mother about it later, she called his mom to get the slant, but all she would say was ‘we gave him life, we have the right to take it away.’ hard working parents, his father was a fine dining chef (so that knife was probably pretty sharp), his mother a meticulous home maker who did not approve of fraternizing outside their race. not like they could tell him anything, he was the only boy of three children, all hopes pinned upon him for the succession of the name. i don’t know if he had any kids out there, but one would hope not. it would be doubly hard to lose a parent, but one with such a legacy of darkness might be difficult to mourn.
he broke my cheekbone and two ribs once, knocking me down and kicking me in the chest, kicking me in the face ... he left me for dead at the side of a railroad track, and i crawled home in shock when i came to, not recognizing myself when i looked in the mirror. it’s amazing i don’t have any visible scars from it, but i still carry the internal ones. he talked me into doing some horrible things, and when i got arrested i took a huge step away from him, from his druggy criminal world, and never looked back. this began a reign of terror, as he played the wounded friend to my mother while secretly planting drugs in her house, calling the police on a tip and nearly causing her a heart attack when they tore her house apart. i wasn’t even living there at the time, but he didn’t know it. he threatened me with death, with unspeakable violence - so much so that i have a sealed letter stating certain details he said he would deliver unto me ... the letter to be opened if something terrible were to happen ... guess i can burn it now. like i said, he held a grudge, and when i left his inner circle, it was easy to blame me for his own troubles with the law. i pretty much expected to die at his hands, one day. sounds dramatic, but if you knew him, you might understand why i would think so.
as much as i should have implicated him on any number of atrocities that had been visited upon me, i didn’t. i just wanted it behind me, forever. the list of his crimes are too numerous to mention, and he was always careful not to use any names ... but the inference was always there, that he was responsible. i do believe he’d killed before too, and that only for fun. he spoke of looking in the windows of a family home once, knowing he could kill them all and no one would be the wiser. i mean, who thinks like that? and then there were the women ... he ran hookers, which was common amongst his thuggish street friends at that time. sad, not one of them really had any respect for women at all. he sold drugs, stolen goods of all kinds, and he was always flying under the radar, which explains the black hole of information there is out there on him - probably due to the fact that his lifestyle never really changed at all, in all those years.
i remember one time, maybe fifteen years ago, when i was visiting Toronto from California. i ended up in a cafe on the Danforth in the wee hours. there, in my direct line of sight, was a guy from back in those days, one of the smaller circle of friends who ‘knew things’ about each other. he looked good! nice suit, clean cut, looking healthy and sitting with what must have been good friends or family. we locked eyes, and in that moment, there were volumes spoken without a word. he gave his head a brief shake, raising his finger to his lips for a nanosecond, as if to say ‘not a word.’ i smiled and winked. i get it. he didn’t want to go back there, either. didn’t even want to acknowledge that we knew each other. it would be too much to have to explain.
there was another time, when i was performing under the name iST, at Rancho Relaxo on College Street, and one of the old gang showed up, to my surprise. we had a talk. his name was Dino. he was always a good guy, one of these cats who was just on the fringes of the bad, never really had a stomach for it. lucky him. he told me that our mutual friend had cleaned up his act for a while, but had since gone back to his old ways. i told him never to mention to anyone that he had seen me. we were both just happy that we survived those days. we hugged and parted friends. i still remember his smile. affable, like a puppy dog. just a really good guy. about five years ago, Dino’s name came up, and come to find out he’d been attacked and beaten and was pretty much a vegetable, better off dead, in fact. somebody had attacked him from behind with a blunt object, he never saw it coming. they never caught the guy, there were no witnesses. the disturbing part of his story was that it sounded like a page out of our mutual friend’s textbook, and i didn’t think it was a coincidence. still don’t.
so let’s see, where are we at today? oh yeah. he’s been ‘blowed up’ in a spectacular explosion of what was his recently deceased father’s house, where he had lived since the mother died in 2013. they’re not ruling out the cause as being drug related, and that stands to reason, given his history. it’s quite possible. he could have had a meth lab in the basement. he could have been building a bomb for that matter. his favourite reading was ‘The Anarchist’s Cookbook,’ after all. it’s also possible that he overdosed with a lit cigarette, which ignited a gas leak. i would believe that too. inasmuch as he always declared that he would go out in a hail of bullets, this isn’t far from his ultimate fantasy, though his frequent proclamations that he would take as many down with him as he could - was thankfully not to be.
sadly, i just now heard on the news that the victims of the threats he was currently charged with were his own sisters. it was about money, and there is a good possibility that they were fighting over the disposition of the house itself - and now i’m pretty sure i know what happened. he probably blew it up on purpose, just to prove a point. it’s definitely something he would do. adding insult to injury was one of his trademarks. i wonder if he actually meant it to blow himself up as well. that remains to be seen, but really who fucking cares.
he’s caused enough misery. to his family, to the people he professed to love, i’m pretty sure it’s a relief to more than just myself. yeah, i didn’t state his name, his sisters have suffered enough. for them, my sincerest condolences. they were just regular girls, smart, serious, with hopes and dreams like the rest of us.
he can’t hurt you, or me, or anyone, anymore. it’s a blessing.
