Threads of Life

Chapter 5-1

Throughout my school years, my parents had two obsessions: tennis and me.

* * *

First, tennis. You’re probably wondering why it was so popular with three-quarters of my family. It’s difficult to explain to people who weren’t around in the seventies and eighties and, in particular, in white upper-middle class neighbourhoods. But, back then, tennis was a very big deal. Professional players were like movie stars and rarely did a weekend go by when there wasn’t a tournament on television. Courts were being constructed in every park and schoolyard (you can still see the sarcophaguses all over the city). Clubs like Long Acre were popping up everywhere, similar to the way golf courses are today. And people my parents’ age, bitten by the tennis bug, were infecting their kids, sticking them in tennis programs and tennis camps, and dragging them along on tennis vacations.

veryAnd everyone was talking about tennis. There were arguments about who was a better grass court player, Ken Rosewall or John Newcombe, about who had the best serve on clay, Manuel Orantes or Guillermo Vilas, about who would finally beat Björn Borg at Wimbledon or the French Open, about who was the best woman’s player, Chris Evert or Evonne Goolagong, about who had the best backhand, Jimmy Connors or Arthur Ashe, even about who was the best Jewish player, Brian Gottfried or Harold Solomon. Lines of separation were clearly drawn as people declared wholehearted allegiances to Borg or Connors or, a few years later, to McEnroe or Lendl, and then argued with one another from the rose-coloured perspective of their favourite player. My parents started out in the Connors camp but later defected to team McEnroe, attracted to what my mother called his tortured artistic soul. When McEnroe beat Borg at the U.S. Open in 1980, friends were congratulating my parents like they had played and won themselves.

Without any allegiance to organized religion or a synagogue, the Long Acre Tennis Club, just north of Steeles on Leslie, was the closest thing my family had to a temple. My parents and Simon played in leagues and competed in club championships in singles, doubles, mixed doubles, and junior singles and doubles. Despite all the lessons they took and the time they spent on the court, my parents could never beat the Pinskys or Szabos, and never won anything. Simon, however, was Junior Champion from 1972 to 1977 and each year had his name engraved on an enormous gold trophy.

I was also a fixture at the club, only because my parents insisted I come along. I spent most of the time in the clubhouse watching television or eating fries at the snack bar, or lying by the pool wishing I was at home sleeping. Sometimes Simon would drag me onto the court and hit balls to me, and I would send them into adjoining courts, forcing him to apologize, or over the fence or, if we were lucky, into the net. I much preferred when my parents and Simon left early in the morning and let me sleep in. I was happy to wake up in an empty house and then j******f in the den watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island (to Mary Ann, not Ginger).

Gilligan’s IslandAnd there were social gatherings and dinners and parties and events at the club. The amount of time club members spent playing tennis was equalled by the time they spent at the snack bar or at the outdoor restaurant or in the sauna analyzing their most recent matches or discussing the latest innovations in equipment, especially the racquets which always got larger. It would have been hard to believe back then that twenty years later, tennis in Canada would become as unpopular as a fat pimply kid in high school, but that’s what happened. My parents and their friends, and their bad backs and knees, abandoned the game for a stupid new hobby: golf.

* * *

Now, me. Far from passively accepting my lack of motivation and second-rate performance in school or relying on osmosis from Simon to improve my work ethic, my parents, at various times during my childhood and adolescence, and almost always following a disappointing report card, sent me for what they called “help”. Help turned out to be three psychologists, two psychiatrists, a social worker, who seemed only interested in whether or not my parents s*****d me, a holistic healer who tried to put candle wax in my ear until I kicked her and she fired me from therapy, and a naturopath who found out that my primary source of food energy was Coke and potato chips and told my parents that they were poisoning me.

The psychologists and psychiatrists were all men. The first sessions were always with my parents and me, and they always trolled my entire history, from the day I was born to what I did in school yesterday, with questions they read from clipboards. Then they met with me alone for a few sessions and administered tests where I had to build things, describe things, draw things, or answer more questions, sometimes about girls, to which I made up answers, trying to make it look like I was at least kissing them and feeling their boobs. And then they met with my parents and me again and got me to say that I would try harder in school. And then they met one last time with my parents and told them, in general terms, that there was always the possibility that my cognition could be slightly impaired by the lingering effects of my low birth weight, but that they could find no further evidence that there was something wrong with my brain beyond my poor comprehension of grade-appropriate math; in fact, I had a vivid imagination and could express myself and write surprisingly well and that if I applied myself, I should be able to achieve decent marks in high school and even in college or university, and that there was no reason, beyond my dedication to laziness, why I shouldn’t be able to make friends with boys and girls, and even get married one day.

My parents had great difficulty believing my laziness was all my doing. Because they had produced one super-motivated son, they kept seeing the same potential in me, and believed that all that was needed to turn me into the star I was always meant to be was a magic pill or tonic, or the right therapy. They explained their theory to each shrink and each shrink, including one who did a brain scan and x-rays on me, told them that there was nothing organically misfiring inside me, and that the only solution was to reward my good behaviour and punish my bad behaviour until I internalized everything and worked harder.

After defending his position for twenty minutes to my father, one exasperated doctor said, “It’s not rocket science. On weekends, don’t let him hang out with friends, talk on the phone, or shower until he does his homework.”

To which my father replied, “He won’t notice the difference.”

* * *

But then in grade twelve, I was allowed to drop math, science and French and instead take a bunch of English and social science courses, which required far less work. With about the same effort as always, I was getting Cs and even a couple Bs. In my forever comparison to Simon, I was still underachieving but, then, so was every other student at Westbury. And although I still hadn’t made a friend, it was clear to my parents that I was actually going to graduate and possibly get accepted into a university, and so there were no more appointments with psychologists or psychiatrists.

* * *

During our final year of high school, Simon received full scholarship offers from the University of Toronto, York University, Queen’s University, McGill University, and Dalhousie University. He considered applying to Ivy League schools in the States which, according to his post-secondary advisor, would have offered him the sun and the moon, but in the end something else factored into his decision regarding which university to attend as much as any scholarship: me.

In grade thirteen, I was achieving a B- average, less the result of any additional effort on my part and more the result of taking essay and not exam courses, where there was no need to read the assigned textbooks or study for tests. I applied to the University of Toronto and York University. I was accepted into York and put on a supplementary admissions list at U of T and given a number, 204, which meant that a near impossible number of students already accepted into the university would have to withdraw in order for me to receive an offer.

Simon and my parents wanted us to go to the University of Toronto, my father’s alma mater, together. The university was paying Simon’s tuition and had offered to pay all his residency costs as well, but Simon declined because my father, who sat on the board of directors at Redpark, one of the largest holders of residential properties, condominiums, and apartments in Toronto, had used his influence to secure us a two-bedroom apartment on Alexander Street, just behind Maple Leaf Gardens. Canadian universities didn’t offer athletic scholarships in the late seventies, but Simon did receive telephone calls from the basketball, tennis, and cross-country coaches, who kept track of the achievements of high school athletes mostly by reading about them in local newspapers, and who informed him of try-out dates and encouraged him to attend.

By mid-July, it was looking doubtful that I would be accepted into U of T and that I would be attending York, which was fine with me because it meant, with Simon living downtown, I would finally have my own room. My father, however, still harbouring biases against his old rival university, looked upon York as a kind of retard factory and aesthetic inferior with its square concrete buildings that looked so unlike the great Gothic cathedrals of King’s College Circle at the University of Toronto. “York looks more like a mall than a university,” he would say.

When July ended, I was certain I was going to ruin everyone’s plans but my own, when some unforeseen good luck occurred. My parents, accompanied by a Lichtenstein silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe, which had been hanging in our upstairs hall between the two unoccupied bedrooms, met with the Dean of Admissions, Martin McNamara, who, they accidentally discovered, had met Roy Lichtenstein in the sixties at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and twice after that at local shows, and had written an article about these three encounters, filled with praise for the artist, for Toronto Life magazine’s Best Art Galleries in Toronto issue—an article my mother happened to read in her dentist’s office and then told my father about.

Toronto LifeBest Art Galleries in TorontoA week after my parents met with Mr. McNamara, a letter arrived from the University of Toronto informing me that I had been accepted into the undergraduate program at New College, and my parents and Simon hugged me like I had actually earned it myself.

And that’s probably the last thought I would have had about the whole thing. But about a week later, I woke up around eleven and, after leaving my room, found my mother in the upstairs hallway hanging the Lichtenstein print back on the wall.

“I thought you gave it to that admissions guy,” I said.

My parents had told me that they never really loved the picture and that was why they offered it to Mr. McNamara, though I thought otherwise because they’d both been very excited when they purchased it and had even brought a few of their friends upstairs to look at it.

“We were. But he told us that there were problems with it and that before we gave it to him, it needed to be re-matted and re-framed.”