Regrets
The great Lamar Cleveland, running back for the Riders, used to date the older sister of my best friend, Jan Vanderhoek. It was 1968. Jan and I were in the same class at school and we lived across the street from each other on Vancouver Avenue in the south end off Bank Street, the rougher end of Alta Vista Drive near Charles H. Hulse Public School and Ridgemont High. The Vanderhoeks lived in a little white bungalow. It was tidy looking and solidly built, although the driveway needed repair and had tufts of grass and weeds sprouting between cracks in the pavement.
Lamar Cleveland drove a white Mustang. Whenever I would see him parked outside on the street with the engine running, his radio would be playing loudly, tuned to CFRA, which had General Grant as its morning anchor. We would eat breakfast to the sound of The General exhorting us to get a move on, brush those teeth, here’s some rousing martial music to spur you on. It wasn’t John Philip Sousa we’d hear coming out of that white Mustang with the red-leather interior, though; it was what we later came to dismiss as lounge-lizard music—the crooning, smoky, boozy, early Las Vegas sound of the Rat Pack.
One day, Jan started singing “Strangers in the Night” while we were in his back yard pretending to blow up his G.I. Joe. It was the same song I’d heard as I watched his sister Leda hurrying out the front door in her full-length honey-blonde fur coat, its fine hairs riffling in the cold wind.
She minced outside in black thigh-high leather boots with spike heels, her coat open to reveal a turquoise mini-skirt and white Angora wool sweater. Halfway to the car she stopped, executed a multi-step turn on the icy sidewalk, skittered back up the front steps, and disappeared into the house. Lamar pressed his car horn, which played a rendition of the first six notes of “My Way” so that “Regrets, I’ve had a few” was repeated three or four times. Mrs. Vanderhoek, a stout woman in a floral-print dress too small to be comfortable for her, came to the doorway and opened the aluminum storm door.
“She is coming right away, Lamar, in two minutes and a half or less. Would you like to come inside?”
Lamar took a long minute to lean across the front seat of his car—its paint job dulled by slushy spray to match the grey of the snow banks, the soot-embedded, crystalline, salt-rimed berms that grew and grew higher than we were tall, hardening all winter, narrowing the street and obscuring the sightlines of cars backing out of their driveways. We dug vertical holes in the banks until we hit ground or impenetrable ice. Then we would tunnel horizontally, carving out a chamber. Sometimes, if we were lucky, our shaft would be so deep that we would need a ladder to get in and out.
Lamar rolled down the passenger-side window. He filled the little car the way Mrs. Vanderhoek filled her dress. She repeated her invitation from partway down the walk. She seemed impervious to the cold, wearing no coat or sweater even, just that short-sleeved dress, a watercolour blue with delicate red roses, the cuffs of the sleeves biting into the flesh of her upper arm. She had on a pair of dainty, emerald-green, fuzzy mules with a bit of a heel, which I thought was strange because she was a large woman. Her voice was guttural and deep, the kind that rumbled quietly in the lower register, outside—let’s say, in a courtyard in Rotterdam, which is where the Vanderhoeks were from—with the other women of her apartment building as they hung their laundry and chatted. They were really exchanging information about how to get food and which of the soldiers assigned to their street were pushovers, which would look the other way when someone’s boy kicked a ball past one of the barriers and let him retrieve it without shooting him, and which were vicious and took delight in humiliating the weak.
Lamar stayed in the car. Mrs. Vanderhoek came all the way down the walk to where he was parked. She had to squeeze through the narrow passageway Jan and I had made by hacking through the snow bank one Saturday morning for a quarter apiece, which his father paid reluctantly. Jan got to use the machete that his father had been issued during the war and which he smuggled into the country in a duffel bag full of clothes. “Stand back,” Jan had ordered and I did; then with two hands grasping the leather grip of the weapon he raised the thing over his head and brought it down with the force of an executioner, so hard that he lost hold of it and the big knife went rattling into the street. We chopped and hacked into the hard-pack for hours, the mid-morning sun helping to soften the first few inches, and we cut straight walls on either side. Jan said he wished he had some lumber, nails, and two hinges with him, because then he could build a gate with a latch. I thought that was the best idea anybody had ever had. We didn’t make the passageway quite wide enough for his mother, though, and she had to turn sideways to make it through. There was no question of her getting into the car, and so she leaned her head into the open window.
From my snow foxhole across the street, I watched and listened. Lamar turned the radio down. The music had changed from Neil Diamond’s “Crackling Rose” to the Green Line, Lowell Green’s call-in show, and Lamar had no interest in listening to people call in with their opinions on the teaching of math or the government’s apparent arrogance at ramming official bilingualism down the throats of the electorate. I had to agree with the gridiron star on that point. Any time I had listened to the radio show, the host ended up insulting someone or telling someone to stop calling in, that they were becoming a nuisance, or that they were now embargoed, banned from the airwaves, or black-holed, as they say today. Give me “Norwegian Wood” or “I Am, I Said” over that “jimmer-jammer” any day of the week.
Leda Vanderhoek finally did come back out. I couldn’t see what was different about her, if her reason for dashing back inside was to change an item of clothing or fix her lipstick and makeup. Back then, I prided myself on my powers of observation because I was training to be a spy, and a spy must have, along with the patience of a stone, the ability to discern subtle changes in the expression and attire of those he is charged with observing. One of my training exercises—as outlined in the particular manual I was following, one I had on loan from the public library under special dispensation because I wasn’t yet old enough to take out adult books—was to remember as much as possible about a person: approximate height in feet and inches, hair colour, facial hair, expression, clothes, distinguishing marks and mannerisms, way of walking, objects carried, dialect spoken, voice intonation, etc. I got pretty good at it and longed for the day when I would witness a crime so that when asked to identify a perpetrator I might give the police a stunningly accurate description.
Leda Vanderhoek reappeared in her mini-skirt, fox coat, and go-go boots, her anxiety intensified, if the speed of her short strides and agitated dance of her many-ringed fingers in the air was an indication of her state of mind. Why, I wondered, were they making such a fuss over this man, who didn’t even get out of his car? A good part of my curiosity stemmed from never having seen Lamar Cleveland standing to his full height while he was out of uniform.
“Why do you think he never gets out of his car?” I said to Jan one day.
“Are you really that stupid?” he said. “Don’t you know anything? Lamar is from Detroit.”
“So?” I knew where Detroit was and that cars were built there and that Gordie Howe played for the Red Wings, making Detroit my hockey city.
“So, dumb-head, if a brother is in a white neighbourhood in Detroit he probably gets arrested or shot. Didn’t you hear about the riots?”
“A brother?”
“That’s what they call each other. Don’t you know anything?”
“Oh,” I said, wanting to add, “But we’re different here, aren’t we?”
