Johnny Wraith Stories

How Shit Gets Handed Down

My oldest grandchild, Juliana, will be nine soon. Everyone calls her Julie. Julie still wears diapers. Technically, Julie is my step step granddaughter; she is the stepdaughter of my stepdaughter.

Elsie is my only living grandparent. Elsie is 100. She turned 100 on the day that I turned 52. Elsie does not wear diapers, or I don�t think she does. Her husband of over seventy years, my grandfather, lived to be only 94, and he was senile by the end. But her mother, my great grandmother, and her mother's two sisters, my great great aunts, all lived well over a century; and her older sister, my great aunt, even though mentally handicapped by childhood encephalitis, lived to be 106.

Julie was not supposed to make it past five. I once sent Elsie an email, telling her about Julie. I told her that she had a great great granddaughter with an extremely rare genetic disorder called 9P minus, a great great step step granddaughter actually, like I was calling out a square dance.

I have a biological granddaughter too: Jane. Jane is a year younger than Julie. Jane has not worn diapers practically since she learned to walk. She is long and thin and fragile, like me, and like Elsie. But she is a beautiful little dandelion. She has fine blond hair, a pale complexion, and round blue eyes, with dark circles under them just like her father did, my son. She is a sensitive child too, like he was, and very intelligent.

On the rare occasions that I see Jane, she always seems to have a cold or a cough. Usually I take her out to a restaurant, where she likes to order more than she can eat. Every few minutes she sneezes into her hands; clear strands of mucous stretch back to her nose like miniature suspension bridges when she pulls them away. "Kleenex," she says in her high sweet voice, looking like she might begin to cry. I think she would be more robust if her mother and her new stepfather did not smoke around her. But I am not particularly worried about her health; she will outgrow her frailty. She will overcome her environment; her father did.

Elsie met Jane once at a family reunion, back when Jane's mother, Arlene, and my son, Steve, were still together.

Jane gives Elsie an obligatory hug and Elsie makes high-pitched southern cooing noises. But they do not seem to have a lot in common. Their affection appears strained, like each is afraid of damaging the other. We take a five generational photo.

It feels strange to be a grandchild and a grandparent all at the same time. I feel as if I am in the middle of a long conveyor leading nowhere. I try to eat right. I even work out a little. But the belt keeps turning.

I first met Julie at my second wife's family's Christmas get together.

Helen, my second wife, of course is not my wife yet; we are only dating. Feeling myself too shy and unattractive for the bar scene, I have answered a personal ad that she has placed in a local newspaper. I can write a decent cover letter; my father is a writer too. Helen has been married for 23 years and divorced for less than one.

At this get together everyone seems to be a little leery of me, the new guy. The women only break from the comfort of small clutches to skitter around maintaining platters of dips and cheeses and cakes and cookies that they have brought, or to attend to the needs of their children, among whom it seems that one is always crying. The men are less standoffish. They drink beer and talk about work and snowmobiling and hockey, none of which I have much interest in or understanding of. When they ask me if I want to go in their pool, at first I think that they mean swimming. The children are aloof�not because I make them nervous, but because I am old and uninteresting, and I am not related�all the children that is, except for Julie.

I sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the fireplace. Gifts have already been distributed and there is generalized bedlam. I am trying to eavesdrop on the women over top of it. My wife�s youngest sibling, younger than her by almost twenty years, has announced that she is pregnant with grandchild number twenty. The news is accepted joyfully, but with the underlying sense that it would be no great disappointment if this were to be the last.

A scarecrow of a little girl clomps her way towards where I sit. She grabs onto furniture and people�s limbs to keep from falling down as she works her way in my direction. She has incredibly long thin fingers that wrap around stabilizing objects like vines. Metal leg braces fastened below her knees with leather and Velcro straps reach down into a pair of heavy orthopedic shoes. Occasionally she falls. But Julie refuses to crawl.

I first met Jane, my biological granddaughter, at Kitchener's Grand River Memorial Hospital.

Arlene has just given birth to her. When I go up to the receptionist to ask what room they are in, it occurs to me that I don't know Arlene's last name; I don't know my first grandchild's last name. It is embarrassing. I tell her I know my son�s name. "That is not really enough," says the receptionist. But then we figure it out.

The room smells of antiseptic cleaners, body odor and breast milk. Arlene is feeding Jane; Jane is feeding on Arlene. The birthing has gone well, very well. Arlene's first child, and she was in labor for only twenty minutes, almost dropped her in the lobby. Everyone looks very proud, very satisfied, except for Jane, Jane looks tired and annoyed, pinched and kind of pained. "Easy births run in my family," Arlene tells me. "It was the same with my mother." I begin to wonder if I will have a lot of grandchildren.

Steve, my oldest son, Jane's father, was born at Saint Mary's, another Kitchener hospital.

I am in scrubs in the delivery room�the operating room, watching. Fathers are allowed to do this. It has been a difficult labor.

The initial shot of Demerol makes Sarah too tired to do much work, but without providing much relief. Then the epidural syringe pops as it is squeezed into her spine, spritzing me from across the room. The episiotomy is done with what looks like a pair of stainless-steel tin snips. I have not had a toke in over twenty hours. The crimson flow of blood from the slice in her perineum almost makes me faint. When I invade the sterile arena by placing my hand on Sarah's abdomen to feel her new flatness, the obstetrician growls at me like a wounded bear and begins to rip the placenta out like so much chopped liver; hollow tearing sounds issue from deep inside her.

A few years later, at home, with the help of two midwives, the birth of Joel, my second son, goes much better. Sarah is experiencing some back labor; occasionally she squats in the bathtub. I massage around her tailbone, and suck her nipples to speed things along. Strangers do not neurotically keep checking her dilation. Family arrives.

Sarah screams as she bears down to deliver. I am sitting behind her with my arms around her. But I do not feel afraid or sorry for her; the sounds that she is making remind me of when we are having sex. Perhaps because I am not distracted by the grisly ritual of the hospital, this time I am able to focus on the new guy. I feel as if I have just pushed someone into a very wide fast river, a muddy river like the Mississippi. For the first time in a decade, I almost cry.

I am encouraged to cut the chord, surprised at its stickiness and warmth. Then, while Sarah helps prepare breakfast for all our guests downstairs, I smoke a bowlful of leaf in my indoor greenhouse off the bathroom. We have taped the birth on a piece-of-crap VCR that her mother has loaned us from the separate school board. We have taped over an old Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie. But, when we replay it, we have only recorded intermittently. Just after the crowning, but before the actual delivery, in front of a singing dancing chorus, Fred and Ginger plunge down a long slide into a swimming pool.

Julie walks tilted forward, looking down at her feet, groping her way along as though navigating in a pea soup fog. She has snatched a couple of shortbread cookies along the way and has fed one and part of the other into her mouth faster than she can chew and swallow; saliva and cookie crumbs pour back out. When she makes it to me, she grabs onto my ears; her diapers crinkle as she deposits herself in my lap. "Swallow Julie," says her mother by rote from across the room. Ignoring her, Julie looks up at me and hands me what remains of the cookie.

She looks like a sketch of a little girl done by a gifted child. Some detail is there: thick mucous leaks down onto her upper lip like a pair of green grubs escaping from her nostrils; she has a lot of widely spaced, pointy teeth that all look the same. But her face is flat and featureless, as though hewn by the single stroke of an ax; her eyes, nose and mouth look equally unfinished, as though they have been carved as an afterthought. Even her haircut looks hacked and homemade. Julie brings her face close to mine; her eyes are green too; I anticipate a kiss. "Swallow Julie," says an uncle. Julie ignores him; she has become inured to being told to swallow.

Unlike some, I am not grossed out by her. She does not want to kiss me; she only wants to see me better. She does not want me to eat the cookie either. She has only handed it to me so that she can explore my face with both her hands. Her fingernails are short but sharp. Her fingers are slippery and cold. I am careful of my eyes.

I hand the cookie back to her. She says something unintelligible and presses more of it than will fit into the hopper that is her maw. Then she hands it back to me again. I pretend to take a bite. It is nice to have someone to relate to; I feel less isolated.

We hand the cookie back and forth. I call her little drooly Julie. It becomes my sobriquet for her.

Never once have I told her to swallow.

Sarah, my first wife, had three brothers and two sisters of which she came fourth, third from the bottom.

Her father leaves when she is six, out of the blue, her mother just arrives home one day and he is gone; he has thrown them all over for his secretary. Twelve years later Sarah still has not forgiven herself for this. Shortly after we get married, she invites him to our apartment. He comes, but I do not remember seeing his face; I remember only seeing him from behind, a hunched balding man with a clamp of orange hair squeezing his temples. He does not stay long.

Sarah leaves me when Steve, my oldest son, is seven, and his brother, Joel, our youngest, is four. Steve seems to take it pretty much in stride, as though leaving were the natural course. Joel steals a small wooden carving from a mantel in my parent's home when we are visiting and later presents it to me as a sort of going away present.

I do not blame Sarah for leaving.

Among my fondest memories of time spent with my boys when they were small, is one of us all sitting in the living room stripping the flowers and leaves off of a large marijuana plant. "Joel is ripping the buds apart," says Steve. "He's ruining them!"

"Here," I say, handing Joel a pair of scissors. "You cut off the big leaves. Let Steve and me do the tedious stuff."

Afterwards, when we all go downtown for a treat, we smell like hash.

I remember catching Joel on his way out the door once, on his way to school. He is in kindergarten. He has with him a large cannabis fan leaf that I have ironed between two pieces of wax paper. He is taking it for show and tell.

There are also sad memories. I am in the grip of a debilitating habit. As I stretch my lungs in search of happiness and meaning, I become increasingly depressed. I spend a lot of time wishing I could die; I make no secret of this. But I do not have the nerve to kill myself. Although I have never hunted, I have a small collection of hunting rifles, including a Ruger .44 magnum semi-automatic with an internal five round clip. I fantasize that this is the one I will use. One Christmas I come home early from a family get together. I chamber a round. But then, even with the safety on, even though I have had a few, I do not have the nerve to put the barrel in my mouth. For the first time in fifteen years, I cry.

I sell my guns just as new legislation is about to force their registration. I use the proceeds to buy bigger lights for my greenhouse; I beat my swords into ploughshares.

One day I find some wet grass leaves rolled up in yellow sticky note paper. The ends of the paper are burnt. The next day I uproot all my plants, dump all my aggregate in the strip of garden beside the house, and take down my halide lights.

I grew up at Reba Place Fellowship, an urban Christian commune located in Evanston, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago.

My father is a superintendent at the Chicago State mental hospital. Outpatients from this institution regularly come to stay with the Fellowship, and sometimes become members after they get better. So the role models of my extended nuclear family are comprised of the religiously devout and the mentally ill; I have trouble telling them apart.

Steve, my oldest son, Jane�s father, leaves not long after she is born. He has left once before, before he even knows she exists; but when Arlene, who is a third year honors biology major, informs him that she has just discovered she is five months pregnant, he returns. In the end, he does not love her though. He does not want to be with Arlene any more. He explains this to me. Hearing him, reminds me of Sarah, his mother, saying to me, "I don't love you; I don't want to be married to you any more."

At first, I continue to see Jane on a regular basis. All I have to do is call Arlene at her married student's apartment and she is happy to prepare a hamper of diapers, wipes, zinc cream, spare clothes and drinking boxes so that Helen and I can take Jane to the park across the street in her stroller.

Every couple of weeks, when Steve has Jane for the weekend, he brings her over to my house on the highway in Salem. I am raising European night crawlers in the cellar. I also have on hand a few thousand Canadian night crawlers that I have captured in the cemetery down the road. I put them in little bait cups in a Styrofoam cooler on the porch. Fishermen, except for a dishonest few, leave two dollars in a special box affixed to the side of the house for each cup that they take. Jane calls me Poppa Paul, like I am the pope or something. "Can we see the worms, Poppa Paul," she asks, trying to lift the metal handle on the trapdoor in the kitchen floor.

In the cellar it is cool. The worms are in large Rubbermaid containers in strips of damp newspaper sprinkled with limestone. She makes me open each one. At first she does not want to touch the worms. But once she overcomes her squeamishness, she helps me count them into cups. The Europeans try to jump out of her hand when she picks them up, and usually they succeed. The Canadians are larger, more wriggly and exploratory. "Eeeeeeuuuuhh!" she says holding one up, pinching it between her thumb and her forefinger, just to show me that she can. "Gross!"

After Steve quits his job as a web developer and relocates to Vancouver to study philosophy at Simon Fraser, and Arlene moves back Barrie to work at Tim Horton's and be closer to her family, I see Jane less. I see her for her birthday and Christmas which, because of their proximity in her case, are amalgamated into a single visit. I tell her truthfully that I have missed her. She says that she has missed me too; I wonder if this is out of politeness.

Arlene has warned me on the phone: she has a new man in her life. His name is Bill. Helen and I meet him when we pick Jane up to take her to the Red Lobster. Bill is a roofer. He once had his own company, but it folded. Now he is working for someone. He is trying to save enough to buy a truck so he can start his own company again. Bad weather has given him the day off. He likes to talk.

"Bill drinks beer every night," says Jane in the car without prodding. "He drinks a lot of beer." She sounds impressed.

"How did he meet your mom?" I ask. I want to change the subject.

"He met her in a bar. He got her very drunk."

My wife looks at me.

"When I'm nineteen," announces Jane, "Bill says I can drink beer." It sounds like she is being careful not to call him daddy.

Sarah, my ex, once took Jane and Joel, our youngest, on vacation to some Ontario all inclusive.

All week Jane thinks Joel is her father; she thinks he is Steve. Even after he straightens her out, she continues to pretend. When he tells me this, I sense an element of pride.

For some reason all of this separating is harder on my parents than it is on me. My mother once tells me that whenever she feels like crying, all she has to do is think about Jane.

I hope Joel quits toking soon. I hate to see him suffer. But, judging from my own timeframe, he still has a few more years.

Julie's rare disorder, her 9P minus, is caused by an anomaly in the 22nd karyotype. Actually it is 9P minus 22.3 that she has inherited, a rarity among rarities. The human genome is an example of very bad coding. Emergent and therefore having no modularity, and, when not vestigial, overburdened and inflexible, such a minor glitch as this has left her impaired in every way imaginable.

I am in the backyard sorting worms by age once when Julie visits. I pretend to eat one and then dangle it out for her. She reminds me of a baby bird the way she opens her mouth to the clouds, waiting for me to drop it in.

I won't let her handle the worms even though she has no compunctions about it. She has a tendency to tear them in half or slice them on her sharp nails. Also, Julie loves to eat. She once ate an entire stick of deodorant. If you give her a bowl of ice-cream, she will continue to spoon away at it long after it has disappeared into her mouth and down her chin. Once she ate some bird shit.

We take her to the Mandarin all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant in Burlington. But we fail to stay on top of her plate. When we look up, she is standing at the nearby table of an older couple, simultaneously feeding off both of theirs. She does not ignore her hosts. She tries to engage them in polite conversation. Because of her tendency to put things into her mouth faster then she can process them, it is now a cornucopia of partially masticated rice, vegetables and chicken balls in bright orange sauce. And, although her tone is cordial, her banter is impossible to follow. A sprig of broccoli has fallen into her shirt pocket.

I sit across from Julie at Easter dinner with our extended family; not a preferred location for some. She is asking me a question, the same question, over and over. At first I do not try to understand. From her tone it sounds as if she is only looking for confirmation.

"Yes," I say. "That's right." Then I keep eating. She has a large glass of cola which she keeps taking the straw out of and trying to insert in my coffee. "No," I say. "Keep it in your own drink."

"It's not a good idea to agree with her if you don't know what she is saying," says her mother.

Julie keeps repeating her question like a looping tape. I listen more closely. "Be careful," she is saying. "Be careful? Right?" She puts the straw back in her drink, and sips from it carefully. "Have to be careful? Right Paul?"

"Right Julie," I say. "You have to be careful."

She smiles at me, and stops asking. She has a wicked smile. Sometimes I think the only way in which she is not handicapped is in her sense of humor.

The next time I look up at her she is wearing her drink, the cola is all down the front of her pretty Easter dress and the glass is empty. "Careful, right?" she says. She says this quietly. It is for my ears only. Her green eyes twinkle. She doesn't ask again.

Imagine you are watching a hardboiled protagonist being worked over by the cops as they try to beat out a false confession. A bib of blood and mucous has seeped into his nice white shirt and dried an earthy brown. Bleary from forced wakefulness, crippled from saps to the arms and legs, filthy from loss of washroom privileges, eardrums ruptured, nose flattened, eyes swollen to a squint and, whack, he swallows a few more teeth, thud, a fist is buried in his gut. Then a stinging backhand slap twists his face around, to you. He is trying to speak, but his words are muffled and hard to understand. You watch his lips; you try to listen more closely. Blood and drool leak out of his mouth which hangs open; then you notice he is smiling. Your eyes meet. "Have to be more careful," he says, "right?"

Julie is improving. She only wears diapers at night now. And she has just had an operation to help stop her from drooling, to help with her socialization.

In a six hour surgery at Toronto Sick Children's Hospital, doctors relocate her saliva ducts to the back of her throat. Her tonsils are removed because they are in the way. Julie is no stranger to oral surgeries: for example, she has had reconstructive work done on her cleft palette. Her father takes a week off from his factory job to be by her side. He stays at Ronald McDonald House.

Julie is discharged a few days early. The doctors are surprised at how quickly she is able to start eating again.

I have not seen Julie since her return. But when I do, I am sure she will tip her head way back and open as wide as she can, even though it hurts, and let me study her new scars.

Then she will smile.