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Kelly and Dorothy

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Posted: November 14, 2019 at 4:57 pm

Coincidentally, Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981) went to school with Dorothy Stratten (Playmate of the Year 1980). Dorothy was murdered by her jealous husband at just 20. In my next excerpt from “Tough,” Kelly and Dorothy build their friendship:

“The walls in my school weren’t smooth; stacked cinder blocks, thickly painted white so you could still see the outlines of each brick. There were posters for the weekend dance and flyers for school clubs I would never join, stick-tacked to the walls. I walked alone in the corridor, and caught a faint wisp of smoke. We were only allowed cigarettes in the smoke pit outside, but I could tell someone was smoking in the girls’ restroom. I really, really needed a cigarette, and thought maybe I could bum one. 

Even before I pushed the heavy restroom door, the kind with an oblong steel plate instead of a doorknob, I heard the giggly chit-chatter of several girls. As I entered, three faces turned my way and all talking stopped. I knew these three: in my head I called them the Milk Bone Girls, the ringleaders of the dog-biscuit-throwing gang which included my sister. They hadn’t thrown anything at me for years, and now, in high school, the power balance had shifted. I was now known at school as wild, undisciplined with no parental supervision, kind of a badass. At 14, I had the fully developed body of a woman, and the interest of the older boys. I made the Milk Bone Girls look (and feel) like children in comparison. All three girls lowered their gaze and made a beeline toward the door, which I still held open. As the last former bully shuffled past, I lunged at her with just my head, the rest of my body immobile. She flinched, and a flush of satisfaction washed over me.

The source of the smoke sat amidst the sink pipes under the restroom counter. Dorothy Hoogstraten was a girl I knew since kindergarten. She sat under the sinks when she smoked because she didn’t want to get caught; I never understood how sitting under there would help. Dorothy wore what she wore for years, a pale blue ski jacket with white trim. I expect she wore it so long because her family was poor, her mom raising her and her siblings alone. She had long strawberry hair, and never used makeup because she didn’t need it or didn’t care. Just like me, she attracted the attention of boys, but never got asked out. I didn’t want to get asked out…I knew what sex was and I didn’t want anything to do with that.

“Hey,” said Dorothy.

“Hi. Can I have a drag?”

“Yeah.”

I crawled down beside her, not for the first time. We often shared cigarettes under there, sometimes hers, sometimes mine, whoever could scrounge them. We weren’t really friends, just cig buddies. We mostly sat together in silence, but neither of us said much in school either. Dorothy had been shy and guarded since kindergarten. I rarely talked to kids at school because my life was different; I wasn’t doing homework and watching Starsky & Hutch at night like them. I worked in night clubs until 3am. How could my classmates relate to that? 

Just two loners, sitting under the counter, passing a cigarette back and forth. Even though we weren’t close, Dorothy was never one of the bad people, never one of the bullies. She knew what the bullies had done to me for years. I was comfortable sharing a cigarette with her, comfortable sitting under the counter with her, comfortable not talking. The closest person I had to being a true friend who wasn’t a friend at all. I couldn’t imagine then how this quasi-friendship would play out in the future.”

Excerpt from “Tough”

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Posted: September 21, 2019 at 3:42 pm

In the upcoming book I’m writing with Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981), Kelly recalls some childhood trauma:

Sitting in the middle row of my Grade Two classroom, trying to be invisible. The cool kids sat in the back and the keeners in the front, and I was neither of those. For the thousandth time I stared blankly at the alphabet row above the blackboard, 26 squares, each with a capital and lower case letter, and a picture of something that started with that letter. Apple to zebra, except the ‘P’ was missing because Brian Castel stole it and drew a penis on the other side and the teacher caught him trying to sneak it back into place. School was torture for several reasons. I was the new kid, and on welfare, and the other kids never let me forget it. I had blotchy skin and stringy hair. It didn’t help that Dawne, a year behind me in school, was pretty while I was ugly,  smart while I struggled. The fact that Dawne was also new and on welfare didn’t seem to register with anyone. The kids chose me as the weaker sister and aimed all their teasing and abuse my way, progressively worse each day.

I had mixed emotions as the recess bell rang. I liked to play tetherball, depending on who played that day. The game could take a nasty turn in a flash. By the time I got to the tetherball pole at the back of the playground, I could see most of my usual tormentors, including my sister,  already assembled. I turned on my heel to escape, but too late; I’d been spotted. Uh-oh.

“Hey, Smelly Kelly, where’re you going?, said one of the girls from Grade Three. Most of the girls called me Smelly Kelly because I have a brown birthmark the size of a nickel on my ankle; the kids decided it looked like a plop of poo. “Don’t you want to play with us?”

The situation looked grim, but it would be worse to refuse. “Uh, yeah.” I shuffled up to the group and hoped they’d forget I was there.

Tetherball at my school was based on the pyramid system. There was one kid at the top, then two kids at the next level, then three at the next. No matter how many levels there were, I was predictably on the bottom. When it was my turn to play, I always had to battle the girl at the top of the pyramid, Marcie McCormack. She was two grades ahead of me, bulky and mean. Marcie bullied me the most, and tetherball afforded her another opportunity to humiliate me. She pounded that ball so it swung on its rope so fast it was impossible to hit back. All I could see was a white blur as I pathetically stabbed everywhere the ball wasn’t. Marcie was setting me up for her standard move, one I fell for every time. With her most vicious and powerful blow, she smashed the ball so it swung directly at my temple, knocking me to the ground. 

I lay with one side of my face in the dirt, pebbles pressing into my cheek. 

One of Marcie’s henchwomen bent over and poked me in the ribs to see if I was dead.

“That was a big mistake, Karen,” said a girl out of my view. “You just touched Smelly Kelly. Now you have fleas!”

“No way! Look!” Karen rolled up her sleeve and I knew what was there without looking. She had ‘SFP’ written in blue ink on her forearm, a practice that had spread thorough the school like wildfire. Super Flea Protection. With this indelible safeguard, Karen could touch me without receiving a flea infestation. 

As the girls erupted in laughter, I saw Dawne with my one available eye, pointing at where my t-shirt had risen slightly.

“I’m telling Mum, I’m telling Mum, you’re not wearing an undershirt!”, said Dawne.

“Shut your face, Dawne,” I screamed.

“An undershirt?”, said Marcie. “Only little kids, and poor people wear undershirts!” The girls howled.

“I’m telling M…” Before Dawne could finish her threat, I lunged at her, grabbed her hair, and pulled her to the dirt. We wrestled and punched and scratched, making non-human screeches like racoons. The crowd egged us on, but I rolled off of Dawne when she started crying. I rose slowly, hoping the bell would ring. Someone pushed Marcie into me but I didn’t fall.

“You pushed me, Smelly Kelly,” said Marcie.

“No I didn’t. You pushed me.” I knew that was a mistake, but either way I was doomed. Marcie said nothing, a thin smile on her lips. With one hand she grabbed my hair, and with the other, the collar of my jacket. She swung me around in a circle a couple of times like the Olympic hammer throw and let go. I flew through the air, bounced in the dirt and rolled twice. The bell rang and the girls, including Dawne, giggled as they walked past me. 

I thought my ordeal for the day was over. When I entered the school, covered in dirt and dust, Marcie jumped from behind a pillar and punched me with all her might in the shoulder. Just a regular recess.

 I watched the hands of the wall clock slowly inch ahead the rest of the afternoon while Miss Lawson droned on about times tables and division. It seemed like a waste of time since I wasn’t planning on multiplying or dividing anything when I was older; I turned my brain off so it wouldn’t get full of stuff I’d never need. I awoke from this dreamlike state when the bell rang and the floor squealed from 30 chairs sliding away from desks. Everyone talked at once, well, 29 children talked at once, chattering about their plans after school. Children  grouped in twos and threes to walk home together, to hang out at each other’s houses until dinnertime, where moms made them hot chocolate and peanut butter cookies. There weren’t any moms making hot chocolate at my house. I held my spiral binder close to my chest and walked alone, hoping the kids would forget about picking on me for the rest of the day.

On the way home, I usually stayed off the main streets as much as possible, even though this made the walk longer. I thought no one knew I used a long alley past the school, but something whizzed close past my head. Did someone just throw a rock at me? A rock ambush wouldn’t be unusual. The next missile hit my cheek and rebounded to my feet. It wasn’t a rock, but a dog biscuit. A Milk Bone dog biscuit because I was a dog. A dog with fleas, if recess was any indication. As I examined the biscuit, a volley of ten or twenty biscuits bombarded me from behind a peeling wooden fence. And another volley. Not as painful as the rocks I often endured, but those biscuits were still hard enough to sting. The real sting, however, came from the barks and muffled laughter of several girls behind the fence.  Dawne’s pink scrunchie, the one Mum bought her at Value Village but told her was new, bobbed above the fence’s top.

Prologue from “Tough”

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Posted: August 6, 2019 at 11:24 am

The following is the prologue from “Tough”, the memoir of my co-author, Playboy Playmate Kelly Tough (Miss October 1981):

For an eight year old, it was hard for me to understand why Don Kirby had his tongue down my throat, right?

I sat on the kitchen counter in my flannel nightie, bare legs hanging over the edge. Pushing the buttons on the phone while holding the receiver thingy down. I didn’t want to make a real call, because Mum would get mad. The phone was cool because it had this long, long cord so you could talk and even be in another room. I don’t know why I was playing with the phone that day. Maybe I hoped someone would call me, but I knew that wouldn’t happen because I didn’t have one friend. 

There wasn’t anyone else in the kitchen. Mum was working late and my little sister was in our room, probably looking at herself in the mirror. I always played in the kitchen, mostly to avoid my sister, but also because it looked like the kitchen from Happy Days. That’s how I always think of that kitchen, even though I now know Happy Days didn’t start until later. But it was a ’50s kitchen, with an Arborite counter and a tired, pink and grey linoleum floor. The table and chairs had shiny chrome frames. The chairs were covered with plasticky seats, the kind that stuck to your legs in the summer, and the table top was off-white with worn stars on it. Mum had covered the fridge and stove with gold-patterned Mactac; she covered everything in Mactac. Above the sink, the window was made of a lot of little windows side by side, like in a barn. Some of the window frame paint was peeling. Each little window looked like a black square because it was evening, after dinner. 

“Oh, hi Kelly.” Mum’s boyfriend Don Kirby walked in, and used that really low voice of his, smooth, like he was Tom Jones without a Welsh accent. We always called him Don Kirby, both names, in full, because my sister’s name was Dawne. Don Kirby was tall, much taller than Dad, with wavy orange hair, like flames sticking up. He wore super sharp slacks, polyester green, with a brown vest and a peach-colored shirt underneath. Don Kirby never wore jeans or sweatpants. He always looked dressed up, with his shiny shoes, thinking he was Dapper Dan. I felt a little bad inside when I saw Don Kirby, because I hated him for so long and didn’t treat him very well. But now he was a nice guy, and since I hated him for so long I felt like I owed him something, right?

“How was school today?” Don Kirby had started taking interest in what I was doing, making an effort to do more dad things with me. I lied, of course, telling him I hung out with lots of friends at recess. It felt good to talk to Don Kirby, to talk to anyone, even though I had to lie to keep the conversation going the way I wanted. While we talked, Don Kirby clenched his jaw, biting down hard like he was trying not to cry. I pretended not to notice, but his eyes were all watery, and then a couple of tears slid down his face.

“Why are you crying? Did you have another fight with Mum?”

“Well, Kelly, sometimes with your mother…” Don Kirby wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I love your mom. I love you girls. Sometimes it’s just…” He stood there, stiffly, like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. I felt really sorry for him and reached out my arms to give him an almost-daughter hug. Don Kirby stepped over, and since I was sitting on the counter we were close to the same height. He pushed my knees apart and moved in between, pressing his chest against mine and hugging me pretty tight. Something inside of me, just for a second, felt a little bit weird. But it was only a hug, so it was OK. It got really not OK real quick. Don Kirby pulled his head back and I thought he was going to kiss me on the cheek like he often did. He held my chin, put his lips on mine and suddenly his fat tongue filled my mouth. It was huge, it was all gushy, it was insistent, racing around the inside of my mouth, the whole nine yards. I kind of gagged a bit, but he just pushed in harder. I was paralyzed. When I think about it now, I assume Don Kirby had an erection, but at the time I didn’t even know what an erection was. It felt like thousands of years Don Kirby kissed me like that, but it was probably only ten minutes. 

Slam. A car door slammed and we both knew Mum was home from work. Instead of jumping back like he was doing something wrong, Don Kirby released me and sat at the kitchen table, lighting a cigarette. He didn’t say anything, didn’t tell me to keep our secret. Don Kirby didn’t look sheepish, and wasn’t crying anymore.

“You’re still sitting around doing nothing?” my mother said, banging the kitchen door behind her. Don Kirby started to answer, but Mum cut him off. “Don’t give me that shit. I’m tired of it. And what’s wrong with you? Why do you look like that?”

That last part was directed at me. How did I look? I tried to look like nothing. I was in shock, confused. I couldn’t respond. Don Kirby and I had finally established a friendship after a couple of years of me not liking him, but this was different. This wasn’t a normal friendship thing, I was sure of that. 

“You’re just going to ignore me?,” Mum said, heat rising. “Why aren’t you answering me? What’s wrong with you? GET YOUR ASS IN BED.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around what had just happened to me, but I knew I felt like a piece of garbage.

Baptismis Interruptus

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Posted: February 19, 2019 at 9:37 pm

When our daughter was an infant, Carol and I wanted to please our Catholic mothers by arranging our child’s baptism. We made an appointment to see Father Holland at our local parish (the same Catholic church in which 52 year old Pierre Trudeau married 23 year old Margaret Sinclair, but I digress). I figured it’d be a meet ’n’ greet, fill out a couple of forms, choose the baptism date, easy-peasy. Father Holland was a soft-spoken, rotund man in his 60s, with that blank expression many priests have which says they’re trying hard not to judge you, but you know it’s in their job description so they’re doing it anyway. We sat across from Father Holland at a scratched table in the Sunday School hall attached to the church offices. Crude, child-drawn pictures of Jesus with blood running from his brow and hands adorned the walls.

“It’s nice to meet you Carol and Bill. Before we get started, I’d like you to watch this short presentation about baptism.” From a cupboard, Father Holland brought a cassette recorder and an ancient slide projector, the kind with a circular carousel on top. I’d last seen this projector in elementary school, in the late ‘60s. He drew the blinds and pulled a string which unrolled a white screen from the ceiling. 

“Every time you hear a beep on the tape recorder,” said the priest, “click on this little button and the next slide will pop in.” He switch off the lights, started the tape, and shuffled out of the room.

 Father Holland left us alone to watch his baptism slide show entitled something like, “Your Child Won’t Rot in Purgatory.” The story was comically outdated, by all evidence produced in 1940. In every scene, the wife wore a dress, high heels, a frilly apron and yellow rubber gloves…because she was always washing dishes. 

Watching those slides, I was taken back in time to Ascension Catholic Elementary School. Each week in religion class, we were entertained by similar slide shows with uplifting titles such as: 

Resist Temptation

Creation: The Real Story

When Man Walked With Dinosaurs

Suppress Those Feelings

Mary’s Special Friend

Your Duty To The Priesthood (striking fear in alter boys everywhere)

We loved those slide shows in the way movie buff hipsters flock to see Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie so bad it’s great. However, what we liked most about the slide presentations is that they invariably resulted in chaos. This was because class clown Marcel Thibault could perfectly imitate the tape recorded ‘beep,’ the beep that told Sister Theophane to advance to the next slide. Marcel always sat at the back of the darkened classroom, and it was impossible to distinguish where his beep came from…he could throw his beeps, like a ventriloquist. He made untimely beeps, causing the nun to advance the slides at all the wrong times. The slides became hopelessly unsynchronized with the narrator’s voice. Sister Theophane became frustrated and confused, and general hilarity ensued. This happened every week.

Back to Father Holland, who re-entered the hall once the baptism slide show ended. He held a form secured by a clipboard, and asked for some basic information.

“…and where did you two get married?” asked the priest, pen poised.

“In Huatulco, Mexico,” said Carol.

“In which church?”

“We eloped,” I said. “A Justice of the Peace married us on the balcony of our hotel room.”

“Oh. Oh my,” said father Holland. “That will never do. You’re not married then. Okay, well, the first thing is that I will have to marry you in this church.”

“But we’re already married…”

“And before you two can get married here, you will both have to take the marriage preparation course.” Father Holland folded his hands on the desk. “Which I will teach you.”

“Let me get this straight.” I could feel my heat quickly rising. “I’ve been in a monogamous, loving relationship with my girlfriend, now wife, for 11 years. You, single, never married, and celibate, YOU are going to teach ME how to live in a committed relationship with a woman.” 

“The course is only 6 weeks. I’m confident you’ll pass if you have an open mind.”

I calmed myself, and let father Holland drone on about the marriage course he was going to teach to a couple married already a year, and who dated for 10 years before that (don’t judge me, that’s my mother’s job). I didn’t want to cause a scene, in a church, but then the meeting veered on a bizarre tangent. In the middle of nattering about Catholic education and our obligations to our child, Father Holland pronounced that the Harry Potter series was the work of the devil. He forbade any Catholic child to read the books or watch the movies. Now, I am prepared to listen to differing opinions, and suffer some lonely priest devaluing the relationship I have with my wife, but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit quietly while anyone disparages Harry Potter. There’s only so much a guy can take. Our friendly baptism education session took a dark turn at that point.

Suffice to say, we weren’t remarried, neither of our children are baptized, and except for weddings and funerals, I haven’t darkened a church door since.

Three Vignettes From France

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Posted: December 5, 2018 at 3:13 pm

Having lived in France a couple of times, and written 200 fish-out-of-water blogs, I thought I’d exhausted my quiver of quirky stories highlighting the differences between Canada and France. Not so! Upon my recent return to Aix-en-Provence with Carol, three vignettes stood out. These situations would never happen in Canada:

1.      Reflected in Carol’s sunglasses, I saw the foulard at my throat was tied in the jaunty, insouciant, Aixois fashion. We sat at a spindly, wrought iron table, charmingly crooked due to its cobblestoned base, at a crowded outdoor restaurant in downtown Aix. We sipped from a carafe of Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages, not in a hurry to be served our goat cheese and arugula pizza. I spied our waiter coming from the bowels of the restaurant, bedecked in Aix’s standard straight-guy clothing: white wife-beater t-shirt, scarf wrapped thrice around his neck, dainty pirate boots with many buckles. He held a large pizza in his left hand, another two in his right, and balanced a fourth on his forearm. Since the patio tables were tightly squeezed together, his easiest access to his customers was the middle of the narrow street, dodging pedestrians and the occasional Smart Car. I could see our lunch on the waiter’s forearm. Laden as he was, you’d think the waiter would unload his pizzas as quickly as possible. You’d think that if you didn’t know the waiter’s male friend appeared around the corner at the top of the street. Our waiter stifled a squeal and hustled toward his friend, away from the restaurant, still carrying the pizzas. By the time he caught up to his friend, our waiter was a half block away, but the kisses on each cheek were still audible from our table. The friends’ chitchat was brief, albeit loud, and our waiter quickly returned to his job (after two more kisses good-bye). Our pizza was still hot.

2.      Finishing our pizza, Carol and I tucked into our salads. At a nearby table sat three fashionable young women, one of whom held a baby. Children aren’t encouraged to attend restaurants in France – there aren’t kid menus, or placemats to colour, or jars of dull crayons. Restaurants don’t supply high chairs or booster seats. And I’ve never seen a restaurant washroom with one of those fold down baby changing tables. If you bring your kid to a restaurant, they had better sit quietly and eat a grownup meal (and they do). But seeing a baby on a mother’s lap was even more unusual. As the mother continued her lively conversation with her friends, she deftly moved her cutlery, her wine glass and her table’s flower arrangement to one side. She rooted around in an impossibly large Hermès purse and found a small fuzzy blanket, which she spread flat on the table. You’ve probably guessed what happened next…she lay her baby down and changed his nappy. In a packed restaurant. Six feet from where we were eating. 

I knew I would write this story one day; in the interest of accuracy I leaned forward in my seat to get a better look. Yes, just as I expected: numéro deux.

3.      A day before we were to board the train in Aix towards Paris, SNCF workers went on strike. SNCF is the French national railway, and its workers often strike. It wasn’t a big surprise, but was inconvenient because, (a) if we didn’t get to Paris we would miss our non-refundable flight home, (b) Aix to Paris was too far to drive in the time we had, and (c) Air France triples its prices whenever SNCF is on strike.

In a normal strike, in non-France countries, all trains are cancelled. It’s disruptive, but travellers are calm because no one can get anywhere. During SNCF strikes, one of every seven scheduled trains will run. You just don’t know if your ticket is for that one-in-seven train. You have no choice but to arrive at the station and hope you win the train lottery. I don’t know how they decided running one of every seven trains causes maximum mayhem (not 1 in 3, not 1 in 10), but I expect they have PhDs armed with algorithms and supercomputers bent to the task. Suffice to say, running one in seven scheduled trains ensures the maximum number of people in the train station with the minimum number of these people boarding a train. Any train.

Regular readers of this blog will know when faced with an intractable train problem, there is only one solution: call my friend Nickipedia. Nick has run a Parisian travel company for 30 years, and possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of SNCF and every available scheme to game the system. His advice? Go to the station and sneak onto any train bound for Paris. How could this possibly work, I wondered.

The trick, according to Nick, was to slip past the ticket-checker on the platform and go straight to the bar car. Once there, no SNCF employee will kick you off the train (as they’re not paid for confrontation). We didn’t have tickets for that train, which would’ve warranted seats, but we could stand on any train travelling to Paris, Nick advised. I was nervous when the SNCF employee came through the bar car and checked our tickets which corresponded to a cancelled train. She didn’t bat an eye – even better, she eventually found Carol a seat two cars over. I stayed happily in the bar car; if you must stand, I feel that’s the best place. I was quite content watching the countryside race by at 300 kilometres per hour, drinking several single-serve red wines from plastic bottles.

Thanks to Nick, the pièce de résistance occurred when we arrived in Paris. He said our tickets were fully refundable since our train was cancelled. Even though SNCF transported us from Aix to Paris, a distance of 700 kilometres, on the fastest train in France, we were credited $250.