Introduction

Neve Campbell and I were students together for five years at Vista Heights Public School. We were enrolled in a French Immersion program in Mississauga Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, Canada. The following is the story of my life as it relates to her.

"I just wanted to be normal. I didn't have friends. I wanted some. I wanted a locker! You know those ones you see in high-school movies? We didn't have them."

Neve Campbell, February 2006 - The Independent

Awakening

Most people remember the first time they were attracted to someone of the opposite sex. For me it happened in kindergarten class.

I started school at Vista Heights Public School. The year was 1978. We had this gigantic kindergarten class. The class was divided into two groups in one room, with roughly the same number of kids in each group. The school was introducing a French Immersion program that year beginning with our class. The kids learning English were on the one side of the class, while the kids taking French Immersion were on the other side. I was in the French Immersion program.

The following year the school added grade 1 French Immersion, then the next year they added grade 2. They kept adding grade levels as our class progressed, so that we had roughly the same group of students year after year.

Each student did not have a desk of their own in kindergarten. We sat cross legged on a section of the class with carpeting when the teacher wanted to teach us things or read us stories.

In the middle of the room were two sets of desks that formed the boundary between the French side and the English side. Instead of chairs, there were bar stools at those desks we would sit on whenever we wanted to paint.

Painting meant we had to wear smocks so we wouldn’t get paint on our clothes. The smocks we had were a lot like hospital gowns made with plastic. They had sleeves in the front and tie-up strings in the back.

I remember there was this girl in my kindergarten class that was so cute. She had big cheeks that you just wanted to pinch. One day we had tied each other up in those smocks and we were painting together. She was sitting on my left. I had trouble tying things at that age and her smock kept coming undone.

As we were painting together she wanted to change colors so she needed a new paint brush. The paint brushes were in a tin can that had the lid cut off in a way that left no sharp edges. The can was sitting in the middle of the table.

Instead of reaching out, picking up the can and pulling it in close so she could pick out a brush, this little vixen had stood up out of her bar stool and was leaning over the table. She had this incredibly serious look on her face as she picked through the can of paint brushes. She was determined to find exactly the right one.

As she stood there, the ties at the back of her smock came undone, so that only the tie around the back of her neck was holding it on. I just sat on my stool watching. I was all out staring at her.

That serious look on her face really got my attention. What got my attention even more was just how straight her back was. If you had taken two ends of a ruler, put one on the small of her back, the other on the back of her shoulder, they would have lined up perfectly.

I sat there trembling, because I had this urge to reach out with my left hand and start rubbing her back. She picked through that can of paint brushes for a very long time. I kept hoping she would sit down before I acted on impulse. She just kept leaning over the table with that serious look.

When she finally did take a brush and sit down, I was relieved. She started to fumble with her smock so I got up off my stool and retied it for her. I often wondered after that what she would have done if I had started to rub her back.

After that thing with the paint brushes, all I ever wanted to do was find that girl and play house. On our side of the room there was a play area. The play area had these wooden blocks and some oversized cardboard bricks with a red interlocking brick design painted on them. The two of us would make a square outline on the floor with those blocks and those bricks and we would sit in the middle and play house.

Eventually the teacher would come and say, “Okay class, it’s time to learn the alphabet.”

I would just sit there on the floor pouting. “Alphabet? I don’t wanna learn alphabet. I want to pay house!”

I never wanted to learn anything in school. I just wanted to find that girl and play house.

Back Row from Left to Right: 1. Phil Barrett, 2. not sure, 3. Robert Dykeman, 4. Richard Caddoo, 5. myself, 6. Steven Pearson, 7. Jason Ashton, 8. Remi Kaiserman, 9. Chris Cummins, 10. Larry
Front Row from Left to Right: 1. Chris Stopa, 2. Chris Geisler, 3. Holly Presley, 4. Neve Campbell, 5. Amanda Knaggs, 6. Mary Heisler, 7. Suzy Merk, 8. Sammy Maltby, 9. Jillian Scudamore, 10. Cassandra Raponant, 11. David Miller

The Spooks and the Merk

My next door neighbor was also in my class all those years I went to Vista Heights. His name was Jason Ashton. Ashton had two younger sisters named Jodi, and Jenny. Jenny was the youngest.

Ashton and I lived side-by-side in town houses on Windwood Drive. Our bedrooms were separated by the adjoining wall. That wall was thin enough that we could hear each other knocking if we knocked loud enough. We had our own set of secret knocks. One for ‘good morning’ another for ‘goodnight’, yet another for ‘go to the window so we can talk’.

We waited at the same bus stop each morning and we would bring each other homework assignments on the days we were sick from school. I had asthma growing up so I was sick a lot and missed a lot of school. I liked playing sports, but Ashton was not very athletic so we didn’t always play together at school. Having your next door neighbor in your class did have its perks though.

One day Ashton told me about a movie he had seen. It was a James Bond film. He loved James Bond. He thought Roger Moore was the best James Bond and he wanted to play spies at recess. I would have preferred football or British Bulldog, but I agreed to play spies anyway. We needed someone to spy on, so we decided to spy on Suzy Merk. This was in grade 1.

Merk was skipping rope with some of the other girls in our class. They were on the tarmac near the western most side of the school. Ashton and I hid behind trees, bushes, and various other hiding spots. We ran around spying on Merk as she skipped rope.

In the end, we were not very good spies. The girls noticed us and Eugenie Fitzgerald walked away from the group. I saw her when she walked away, but I didn’t pay much thought as to where she was going. After all, we were spying on Merk.

A few minutes later Ashton and I were standing behind a post.

“What are you guys doing?”

We spun around just then and there was Fitzgerald standing right behind us. I froze not knowing what to say.

Ashton cracked on the spot and said, “We’re playing spies.”

“Who are you two spying on?”

“Suzy Merk”

“Why are you guys doing that?”

“I don’t know. It was M’s idea.”

I broke my silence at that point and yelled, “Ashton!”

Fitzgerald laughed and said, “I’m telling.” Then she ran back to the girls that were skipping rope.

I watched that conversation unfold in slow motion. I wanted to reach out and strangle Ashton as he kept talking. I was livid.

“What the hell did you say that for? This was your idea!”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”

“Well you don’t say that!”

I have no idea what Jason Ashton does for a living these days, but I sure as hell hope he isn’t working for CSIS.

When we finally did go back to class, Merk walked right up to me.

“So I hear you were spying on me.”

We were caught red handed. There was no point trying to make excuses. I felt like an idiot as it was and I did not want that girl to hate me. I figured if I was honest and apologized she would forgive me, but rather than forgive me she asked me another question.

“Whose idea was it?”

“It was Ashton’s idea.”

At that point she looked at me and said, “You’re a liar. Ashton told me it was your idea and I believe him. I’m never talking to you again.”

The fact that she was wrong about that was a small consolation. My conscience still bothered me for spying on her in the first place. When she said she would never talk to me again, I figured she would be mad for a while, but I thought she would get over it eventually.

Whenever I said hi to her after that she would walk right past me. When I said bye at the end of the day, she would just walk away. If the teacher put us in a group together, she would go up to the teacher and demand to be in a different group. That girl despised me.

As days and weeks went by, I realized Merk was going to hold that grudge for a long time. She had already forgiven Ashton, whose idea it was to play spies in the first place. That bothered me. Then I figured that if she was willing to forgive Ashton, maybe she would forgive me if I sucked up to her.

At the end of the school day the teacher would ask us to put our chairs on our desks so that the custodian could sweep and mop underneath. The next morning our chairs would be on our desks and we would have to take them down again. For one week I put Merk’s chair up at the end of the day and I took it down the next morning. She wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence.

After a week of kissing her butt, I decided to give up. She was determined to hold that grudge.

To My Teddy Bear

Kids in love can be cute sometimes, but this story is just pathetic.

It happened in either grade 1 or 2. I was at home around Christmas. I had a Ferrero Rocher. These are little chocolate truffles wrapped in gold foil. They are usually sold in packages of three with a single piece of cardboard along the bottom much like the way Reece peanut butter cups are packaged.

I had eaten two of them and I decided I wanted to give the last one to Neve as a present. I pushed it to the middle of the package. Then I folded the cardboard ends up and tucked them in so that looking at it from the side it had a trapezoid shape. Then I wrapped the whole thing over with Christmas paper, which there was plenty of around the house at the time.

Along the top I wrote, “To my teddy bear Neve,” and I drew two teddy bears, one on each side. Given my level of artistic skill at that age the teddy bears looked more like aardvarks, but that didn’t mater. I was just excited about giving this present to her at school the next day.

I usually took the Mississauga transit to school. This particular morning, however, my dad decided to give me a ride. He worked as a courier and drove a silver Datsun at the time. They don’t even make Datsun anymore, they are called Nissan now.

I had the present in my hand on the ride to school. When my dad dropped me off, I grabbed my lunch box and my bag and headed to class. When I got to class and saw her I opened up my bag to get the present, but it wasn’t there. I searched that bag completely, but nothing. Then I checked my lunch box thinking maybe I put it in there, but it wasn’t. Then I checked my coat pockets, still nothing. Then I went through and checked my bag, my lunch box and my coat pockets a second time thinking maybe I was losing my mind. I could not find that present, it was gone.

I knew for a fact I had it when I was in the car, so as soon as class let out for recess I retraced my steps. I walked from class, back toward Vista Boulevard. I searched along the path on both sides. When I got to the road I looked all over including the street itself. I searched around that area, but it wasn’t anywhere to be found.

I stood there dejected. I could not believe I would go to all that trouble to wrap a present only to lose it. I was almost certain that I had that present when I got out of the car, but I thought maybe there was a chance it dropped in the car when I was getting out.

That night when I got home I searched my dad’s car. I checked the seats, beside the seats, under the seats, in the glove compartment. I tore that car up looking for that present, but it wasn’t there. Finally, I gave up.

Some time after that, maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months, I went somewhere with my dad. He got out of the car to do something, maybe to use a bank machine, who knows. I was sitting in the car by myself. I opened up the compartment between the front seats and when I looked inside, there was that present!

I pulled it out, looked at it and read the writing on the top, “To my Teddy Bear Neve.”

I was so happy it was found. I’m not sure if I told her about that present or not, but at least now I had it again. Now I could finally give it to her!

When my dad got back to the car I was really happy. I asked my dad, “Hey dad, where did you find this?”

He said, “Oh I remember that. That’s the present you gave me one day. You left it in the car. I was having such a bad day when you did that it really cheered me up. I really appreciated you doing that. Thanks son.”

The smile was now gone from my face.

“You’re welcome.”

Growing up I knew my father was both violent and unstable. One minute he could be super happy and the next he would go ape shit. Sometimes you would say something with good intentions not even realizing he would take offence and instantly he would come down on you like a ton of bricks. Other times you wouldn’t even have to say anything at all, the car in front of you would lane change with no turn signal and then all hell would break lose. This was one of those rare occasions when, even at that young age, I could foresee the sheer hell I would bring upon myself if I dared burst his bubble.

If he wanted to think that gift was for him, he could have it.

Still, it bothered my conscience knowing that he believed something that was not true. Then I read it again, “To my Teddy Bear Neve.”

I read that inscription over and over. How in the hell could he possibly think it was for him? Her name was right on it. Then I thought maybe the confusion would be cleared up if he took the time to read what it said. I handed the gift to him as he drove down the road.

“Did you read what it says?”

He took the gift and read aloud, “To my Teddy Bear. That’s really sweet son.”

Ugh! I just couldn’t let it go. I was toying with my life by pushing the subject, but it really bothered me that he thought that gift was for him.

“Is that all it says?”

“Well I couldn’t read the last part. I think maybe you spelled something wrong.”

Good Grief. My dumb ass dad thought I spelled something wrong. He didn’t realize that Neve was the name of a girl in my class. At that point he asked me, “What was that supposed to say?”

The temptation to tell him the truth was there, but I knew my father. I could envision my lifeless corpse being dragged by a rope behind a beat to shit silver Datsun at 120 km/h down the 401.

After a long pause I said, “I don’t remember.”

Then instead of putting that present back in the compartment between the front seats where it would be out of sight and out of mind, he tossed it in one of the open slots under the dashboard where it was easily visible. He never opened that gift. He never took it out of his car. That present stayed in that slot for years like some cheesy picture pinned to the refrigerator with a magnet.

Every time we went anywhere in that car, I would look at that present and cringe. That Datsun did not have air conditioning and in the summer I could imagine that chocolate melting away inside the foil wrapper and rotting. It really bothered me that my dad thought it was for him.

What a dumb ass.

House of Hammonds

One year our teacher wanted us to work on a project in groups of three. Although I may have been fun to play with on the playground, nobody wanted to group with me on this project, because I was so lazy with school work. Larry and Brian tried to get away with doing the project as a couple….umm….I mean a pair.

The teacher was adamant about having us work in groups of three so she stuck me with those two. Or she stuck those two with me, either way, we were now a threesome. It did work out well in one respect. The three of us lived close to each other so we could easily get together after school to work on that project.

One night after school the three of us were at Larry’s house. We were in his living room for the first little while. We watched the beginning of Star Wars with this crazy VCR he had. It was the first VCR I had ever seen. It had this slot that you would feed these big square plastic disks into. The machine would take a while to load the contents of the disk into memory and then you could eject the disk and watch the movie. This was before VHS and Beta.

I’ve tried to find a machine like that on the History of the VCR website, but I can’t find anything that looks like the one I remember him having. I’m curious to know what that was.

We eventually turned the movie off and went upstairs to his bedroom to work on our project. Brain and Larry wanted this to be their show. Those two didn’t want me grouping with them and they basically told me to sit there and not get in the way. They promised me some easy bit part, which was okay with me.

Their grand plan for this project was to reenact a scene from the John Travolta musical Greece.

Gay

Larry and Brian both sat cross legged facing each other. Larry had his back to the bedpost at the foot of his bed and he was facing the door of his room. Brian was facing toward Larry’s bed. I was lying on the floor off to the side, facing more in Larry’s direction. These two were reading from this Greece lyrics book. They were looking into each other’s eyes and singing to each other. I’m biting my lip as these two are having a moment.

That’s when Larry’s sister Karen walked into the room. Karen was Larry's younger sister and she went to Vista Heights with us. When Karen walked in, she started to be a pest the way all little sisters can be when they want attention.

“What are you guys doing? Can I play? Can I watch? I want to watch. Can I?”

Larry and Brian just ignored the poor girl, which I thought was rude. Karen was always nice to me. She said hi. I said hi back. We talked for a bit. I sure wasn’t into those two guys and their John Travolta love affair.

It wasn’t long though before Karen wanted to get her big brother’s attention again. She began to pester and when she wasn’t getting his attention she began flashing us. At first she just lifted her top, which is nothing for a girl her age. When that didn’t work she started to show off her bottom. She had my attention. Larry and Brain still wouldn’t even look.

Next she started flashing the other side. I’m all out gawking. Those two just kept singing to each other and reading from this lyrics book. Finally Karen stripped completely naked, got up on Larry’s bed and started jumping up and down like it was a trampoline.

I can understand Larry not being interested. This was his sister after all. To a point I could understand Brian not watching, because he was trying to be polite. But these two were so lost in each other’s eyes they seemed oblivious to what she was doing. I had to pinch myself to keep it together.

Then Larry said he needed to get another book and he would be right back. He stood up, walked out of his room and went downstairs.

Finally! With brother gone I thought Brian and I could be guys for a minute. Karen is still jumping up and down on Larry’s bed stark naked, but Brian wouldn’t take his eyes off that John Travolta book!

That’s when I reached out with my hand and started to knock on Brian’s head like it was a door.

“Are you home?”

He pushed my hand away and said, “Stop that! Yes, I can see!”

“But you’re not looking”

That’s when Brian gave me a tongue lashing. He said something about how I was only encouraging her by watching.

“Oh, I see. So what you’re saying is that if I keep watching her, she’ll keep doing this. But, if I close my eyes for a second, or look away, she’ll get dressed and leave.”

“Yes!”

“I see.”

[Long Pause]

“So just to clarify, what you’re saying is that I should not be giving her my full undivided attention. Is that right?”

That’s when Brian said, “M. You’re such an ass!”

That may have been true of me at times, but I had never seen a stripper before. Considering I was only 6 or 7, I was rather entertained.

Then Larry came back into his room.

I could understand Larry pretending that his sister wasn’t naked and jumping on his bed when he was sitting down, because he had his back to his bed and couldn’t really see. You would think the sound of bed springs breaking right beside his ear may have tipped him off that something going on. His sister’s clothes lay on the floor beside him.

But now Larry was walking back into his room. He could not avoid seeing her. She was right in front of him. I thought he would say something to her, but he didn’t. He walked over to his spot. He turned around. He sat down cross legged facing Brain and opened this new book like nothing was happening.

Then Brian made some comment to Larry about how I was gawking at his sister.

Larry turned to me and made some comment about how I was only encouraging her by watching. So I said to Larry, “If your sister is doing this and it bothers you, why don’t you ask her to stop?”

That’s when Larry told me it didn’t bother him. Then he began to lecture me. He explained that in their household it was a perfectly natural thing for their family members, mother, father, sister and brother to walk around the house naked in full view of each other when it pleased them to do so. He was very serious about that. He then explained that I was not behaving properly by looking.

I thought I was in the twilight zone!

I grew up in a very strict, very Conservative, very prudish household. My view of the world was about as narrow as a strip of dental floss. The concept of alternative lifestyles was foreign to me. For me to be holed up in a bedroom with two gay guys, a nymphomaniac sister bouncing on a bed, in the household of a clothing optional family, was too much. Then to be told that I am the one that’s misbehaving by simply being there and bearing witness to this?

I was like a fish out of water. My poor brain was fried.

It was not as though I could talk about stuff like this with my parents either. I had no relationship with them growing up. If I had mentioned this to my parents my mom would have called in an exorcist and my dad would have tried to beat the memory from my mind. The only people I could count on for guidance was my friends from school.

The next day I took the early bus to school. I was there long before anyone else arrived. Right after I got there, Sammy Maltby showed up. When I saw him I asked why I didn’t see him on the bus. He and I usually took the same bus to school. He mentioned that sometimes his mother would give him a ride to school on the way to work, if he was up early enough.

For Maltby to have arrived early to school that day was perfect! Of all the people I would have wanted to talk to about this, it was him, because if it had to do with sex, or girls, or sex with girls, you had his attention. Any other subject and you would have to worry about him zoning out.

Maltby had this eccentricity where, if you were talking to him about a subject that was boring, he would zone out. One minute you would be talking to him. Then his eyes would drift off to the right side of your head. He would stare off into the distance. His head would cock ever so slightly. His mouth would be slightly agape, and he would be gone into his happy place.

Nothing would bring him back either.

When he zoned out you could run around him in circles, do jumping jacks, snap your fingers inches from his face, but you would get no response. You just had to wait. Two or three minutes later he would shake his head with a blink and look at you. Then he would say, “Did I do it again?”

It was funny when he did that.

As I told him the story of the night before he laughed hysterically. He didn’t zone out this time. He laughed from beginning to end. When I was done explaining I asked him, “Am I the crazy one?”

He couldn’t even answer he was laughing so hard. I had a feeling he was imagining himself in the same situation, his brain frying the same way.

Oh, how I wish Maltby was there instead of Brian that night. I wouldn’t have had to listen to Larry lecture me, because he would have been bound, gagged and locked in a closet. We could have watched Karen put on a show in peace and quiet. I bet we would have had popcorn too.

A little while later Robert Dykeman showed up at school and we filled him in on what happened. He got a good laugh as well. I’m not sure who else heard that story, but eventually we went to class.

About an hour or two into class, the teacher was up at the blackboard teaching a lesson. She was writing on the chalkboard when out of nowhere a burst of laughter came from the back of the room. It was Maltby. He was sitting at the back of the room by himself laughing. He had zoned out and he was thinking about something funny.

He laughed so hard he fell onto the floor on the left side of his chair. There were a few giggles as the kids in the class looked to the back of the room. Our classmates looked on wondering what had gotten into him. Dykeman and I shot each other a look. We knew what he was laughing at.

The teacher at the blackboard stopped writing as she waited for him to stop. He couldn’t stop. He was in his happy place. He just rolled around on the ground laughing. At one point the teacher looked at her watch, wondering when it would end. He was still rolling around laughing. There were big smiles all around. Then Maltby, still laughing, started to feel around for his chair. He couldn’t even see he was laughing so hard. He finally felt his chair and started to pull himself up on it. Then he grabbed a hold of his desk.

As he was pulling himself up, the teacher asked, “Y a-t-il quelque chose de drôle, monsieur Maltby?”

Just then he took a firm grip of his desk. With all his strength he pulled himself up so that all you could see from the front of the room was his head come up over his desk like some kind of hilarious giggling whack-a-mole. Still laughing with tears in his eyes he nodded his head and said, “Oui, Madame.” Then he fell backwards on the floor again.

At this point the class erupted into laughter. The teacher realized she lost control and went to sit at her desk. That was so funny. He laughed so hard that day he pulled a muscle in his stomach that was sore for a long time after. If ever there was an inside joke, to be on the inside of, that was the one.

I still laugh when I think of that.

The Birthday Party

The only time I remember going to a girl’s birthday party as a kid, was when I was a student at Vista Heights. I can’t remember what year it was, but I’ll never forget the party itself. It was an unforgettable experience to say the least.

One of the girls in my class gave me an invitation card. She was someone in my class I liked a lot and I wanted to go. I remember asking her what she wanted for a birthday present and she told me, “any kind of jewelry.” I got a good laugh at that. I didn’t think I could pull that off, but I promised I would do my best.

I remember my parents giving me a ride to her house. I was sitting in the middle seat in the back of the car. I have no idea where that girl lived, but it seemed like we drove forever to get to her house. It was nowhere near Vista Heights. Nor was it in Meadowvale.

On the ride there I was holding her present in my lap. I didn’t have a VISA card back then so I was at my parent’s mercy for a present. They had gone out and bought her gift and wrapped it before I could even see it. I remember the gift was square, like the shape of a book, but it was bendable.

I knew this girl well enough to know that you could have given her one pink sock in a brown paper bag and she would have hugged you and said she loved it, but I had a crush on her and I wanted her to get something nice. I agonized over what that present was the whole way to her house. I kept holding it up to the light, hoping to figure it out.

I asked my parents to tell me what that present was, but they wouldn’t say. They just told me, “You’ll see when she opens it.”

“Well by then it’s kind of too late isn’t it?”

They didn’t respond and I was getting worried.

“Can we stop by the jewelry store on the way? I know what she wants for her birthday. She told me.”

I’m not sure why my parents laughed at that. I wasn’t kidding.

On the birthday invitation it said that we were encouraged to bring Halloween costumes if we had them. I remember thinking that was very odd. I didn’t even have a Halloween costume, because Halloween was still a month away. I decided to improvise and I brought a cowboy hat and a scary mask that I had left over from my Halloween costume the year before.

When I knocked on the door I was wearing the mask and the cowboy hat. Someone let me in and I could see that most of the people from the party were already there. And much to my surprise….none of them were wearing Halloween costumes!

I remember slowly taking off this mask and this cowboy hat, putting them together, tossing them to my left as I walked in the door, and trying my very best to pretend that embarrassing moment never happened. All I could think at that point was how lucky it was that I wasn’t wearing a full body costume that I had to take off. That would have been completely humiliating.

When the birthday girl saw me, she came and greeted me at the door.

“Come, I want you to meet somebody.”

She took me into her kitchen and a man was standing at the counter cutting something with a knife. He had his back turned to us. She tugged on his pant leg and said, “Daddy, daddy.” As he turned around she said, “Look daddy. It’s my boyfriend M.”

I was maybe 6 or 7? I was thunderstruck!

Don’t get me wrong, I liked this girl a lot. But, I had a brother who was ten and a half years older than me. He was already dating and he told me many horror stories about the fathers of his girlfriends. I imagined them all to be ill tempered nut cases, like my own father. Those stories were very fresh in my mind when the birthday girl introduced me like that. Panic set in.

I remember she had a big smile on her face when she said that. Her dad seemed to be projecting a pleasant appearance for the benefit of his daughter, but I got the feeling he was not altogether pleased to hear that.

“Oh, this is the boy you’ve been telling me about,” he said with a giant knife in his hand.

Telling me about? What? Considering all I ever did in school was get into trouble, I couldn’t imagine what she could have told him that was good. I was scared out of my wits. At that point he leaned over and shook my hand. He was talking all nice, but the look in that man’s eyes and the firmness of his handshake had me convinced I was going to die that day!

From that point on I have only patchy memories of things that happened during the party. I remember the birthday girl opening her presents, but I can’t remember what my present to her was. I remember us lying down on our stomachs together in her living room, she was lying on my right side and we were coloring together in a coloring book. I also remember some guy at the party brought my mask and cowboy hat downstairs and suggested I put it on and hide in the closet to try and scare her. It didn’t scare her at all and she just pulled me out of the closet and asked me not to go in there anymore.

One thing I remember more vividly than anything else was this one birthday game we played. Her dad had taken this sheet of clear plastic and laid it out on the floor in their basement. On that sheet of plastic he had made something of a hopscotch course with chicken’s eggs. On one step there would be an egg on the left, then the next step there would be one the right. Then the egg would be on the left for the next two steps, then on the right for the next two, and it was all mixed up as you went along this course.

The point of this game was that you would get a minute or two to memorize the placement of the eggs, and then they would lead you away to a room, blindfold you, bring you back, and make you walk this course in your socks.

Yeah, this is a fantastic game to play with kids at a birthday party.

I remember standing there staring at this sheet of plastic with all those eggs. On the one hand I was trying to memorize the placement, but on the other hand I was thinking, “Surely to God they’re not really going to make us go through with this.”

Her dad was standing beside me while we stood there memorizing the pattern of eggs. I asked him, “Sir, aren’t you worried you may get egg yolk on your carpet?”

Underneath that sheet of clear plastic, he had wall-to-wall carpeting.

He told me, “Don’t worry son, you won’t get egg yolk on my carpet.”

“Are you sure? These eggs are awfully close to the edge of the plastic. I’m thinking you may get egg yolk on your carpet.”

Again he told me, “Don’t worry son, you won’t get egg yolk on my carpet.”

At this point I was getting kind of testy and I said, “How can you not? If someone steps on an egg, the yolk is going to squirt out and it’s definitely going to get on your carpet.”

He said, “Son. If you get egg yolk on my carpet I can always get a steam cleaner and wash it out. But don’t worry. You won’t get egg yolk on my carpet.”

I couldn’t help but wonder why he kept saying I wouldn’t get egg yolk on his carpet. Did he have faith in my ability to remember the placement of the eggs? Was he planning to blindfold me, kill me, and bury me in the backyard, because his daughter introduced me as her boyfriend? Why did he keep saying that?

I just didn’t want to go through with this. As if I wasn’t self conscious enough being at the birthday party of a girl I liked. Now I was imagining myself stepping in egg yolk. Then I would have to go to the bathroom to take my dripping socks off to wash my feet. Then I would spend the rest of the day walking around her house barefoot. It was a humiliating thought. And that was assuming those were fresh eggs on the ground and not eggs that had been sitting in a cupboard for a few months!

Finally they led us away to this other room. (More like a holding cell) They brought kids out one by one like little lambs to the slaughter. Each time they would bring someone out, the rest of us would put our ears to the door to listen in. We could hear the crunching of egg shells. We could hear kids whimpering. We could hear other kids laughing from the sidelines. It was like standing outside of a torture chamber, you can hear the screams of the person being tortured on the inside, while you wait patiently for your turn to be tortured next. It was a train wreck.

Then they finally bring me out blindfolded. Lucky me, I was one of the last to go, so now all the kids from the party are on the sidelines getting ready to laugh. I remember holding a lady’s arm. You can’t see anything, so you need to hold onto something for balance and direction as you walk along this course.

What you don’t realize though as you walk along this sheet of plastic, is that after they take everyone into the other room, they removed all the chicken’s eggs and replaced them with these little piles of dry granola. So when you step on it, it sounds like the crunching of egg shells, but in reality you can just brush the crumbs off your socks and there’s no harm done. The other thing they had done was, starting at about the forth or fifth step, they had reversed the placement in two or three places. So if you went according to memory, you were guaranteed to step in it, with both feet, at least once.

As I go along, everything is fine for the first few steps. After all, Sir said I wouldn’t get egg yolk on his carpet. I gain a little confidence and start stepping with a little more authority, and then crunch!

I stop, and think, “Hey that’s not supposed to be there!” Then I take another step and crunch! “Hey that’s not supposed to be there either!”

At that point I freeze and think, “Oh, I know what they’ve done. They’ve just reversed the placement for the rest of the course.” So then I step on the spot I think the egg is and crunch! Now I’m thinking, “What did they do? Have they placed eggs on both sides for the rest of the course?”

Meanwhile this lady whose arm I’m holding on to is whispering in my ear, “Oh you’re doing fine, just keep going.”

I start whimpering, “Oh, okay.”

Crunch, crunch…

At this point I’m in full blown panic mode, so I drop this lady’s arm. I run to the end, whip off my blindfold and look at my socks……then I look back at the course. All the kids are laughing. That’s when you realize you’ve been had.

Like I said….It was an unforgettable party.

She Loathes Me, She Loathes Me Not

The grudge Suzy Merk held against me for spying on her lasted all through grade 1. Every day she pretended I did not exist.

When we came back to school in grade 2 the same class was together again. I figured Merk had a whole summer to get over it, so when we arrived back in school I walked up to her and said hello. She completely ignored me. I tried talking to her. She simply walked away.

I was in disbelief.

She really was determined never to talk to me again. It bothered me. I thought Suzy was a nice girl. She had good reason to be mad at me for spying. I did feel bad for what I had done, but I wanted it to end.

I didn’t just want her to forgive me. I wanted to earn her forgiveness. That first month back, I did the same thing as the year before. I put her chair up so the custodian could sweep and mop. I brought her chair back down again the next morning. After a week of doing that she still acted like I didn’t exist. I gave up again.

When the same class reunited at the beginning of grade 3, she walked right past me. Trying to say hi to her seemed pointless, so I didn’t bother. I did, however, take part in the ritual with the chair again that year. At the end of school I put up her chair and the next morning I brought it back down.

One day when I put her chair up after school, she turned to me and said, “Thank you.”

I was flabbergasted.

“Oh my God, you said thank you. You talked to me. Hey guys did you hear that? She said thank you! To me! I think we’re making progress here!”

My classmates had been watching our feud from the sidelines for years and when that happened they started laughing.

Then Merk called me a jerk and went home.

I put her chair up two more times after that, but when she ignored me both times, I gave up again.

The Pyramid Game

My favorite subject in school was math. Most of that subject was memorization, and the ability to remember things was my gift.

Our grade 3 teacher had decided to play a game to help us learn the times tables. She drew a pyramid on the blackboard and sectioned it off so that at the top of the pyramid was one slot. The next tier down would have two slots. The next tier would have four and so on. All the slots were filled in with the initials of each student.

Then the teacher would start at the bottom of the pyramid. She would offer each student the chance to challenge someone else from a higher tier. Those two students would square off and do a best of nine lightning round with flashcards. The teacher would hold up a card, say 9 x 3, and then she would lay it on the desk in front of the student who would be the first to answer ‘vingt-sept’. Naturally, each student would pick on the person they thought they had the best chance of beating.

It worked out that we had two students in our class with the same initials, but the teacher never felt the need to differentiate between the two. Poor Sammy Maltby, who could only count with his fingers, was always sucking wind on the bottom row. Suzy Merk was always on the second tier right below the top slot. Right above her in that top slot was her nemesis. Me.

It didn’t matter how much school I missed for health reasons. It didn’t matter how many times I was told to stand in the hall or go to the principle’s office. It didn’t matter that I never did homework, or assignments. My ability to recall things from memory was my gift. Back then I could spit out an answer as quickly as the teacher could flash the card. Merk never had a chance. I would humiliate her in that game every time and she hated it.

Since nobody could knock me out of that top slot, the teacher finally decided to reset the board. The class sat quietly as she erased all the slots and wrote all the initials back on in a different order. She wrote my initials on last. When she placed me on the bottom row, the class cheered.

As I worked my way back up to the top that week, an opportunity came for me to challenge my good friend Maltby. It was not a fair contest. He could not count unless he used his fingers. The teacher could put up an easy card like 6 x 2 and he would have to count un, deux, trois all the way to douze with his fingers. It was hopeless.

When we squared off, the first card the teacher pulled from the box was 9 x 12. A groan went through the class. The teacher had never thrown up a card with a number in the double digits before. Maltby went to work counting with his fingers. The teacher could see the answer on the back of the card and when she heard the class grown she looked at the front. She thought for a second and then decided that one was too hard, but in the few seconds it took her to hesitate before putting the card back in the box, I spit out the answer.

“Cent huit”

Another groan went through the class when I got it. Even the teacher seemed surprised. Maltby was still counting it out on his fingers. He zoned out.

The teacher threw up the next card and then the next. I kept rattling off answers. On my left Maltby was audible.

“Quarante-deux, quarante-trois, quarante-quatre…”

On my right I’m watching the cards come up, on my left I’m watching Maltby work on 9 x 12. His fingers were flying. He was in his happy place.

“Soixante-sept, soixante- huit, soixante-neuf…”

When the round ended, there were nine cards lying on the desk in front of me. The teacher gathered them up. There was no need to tally them. Maltby was still going on the first card. You could see he was getting excited.

“Soixante-dix-neuf, quatre-vingts, quatre-vingt-un…”

The teacher was being very quiet as not to disturb him. I turned around to look at my classmates behind me. Everyone in the room was all smiles trying to contain themselves. A few giggles went out from people that couldn’t hold it in. Maltby was really getting excited.

“Quatre-vingt-quinze, quatre-vingt-seize, quatre-vingt-dix-sept…”

His eyes were as wide as saucers as he counted the last few numbers. He looked like he was on the verge of an orgasm. He whispered the last few numbers as if he wanted to keep them a secret, so as not to give the final answer away. When he finally reached his climax he jumped out of his chair and hollered, “Cent huit!”

The class erupted into laughter.

At that point his smile disappeared and he got all serious.

“Quoi? C’est cent huit. N’est-ce pas?”

Then he turned to the teacher. “Madame?”

Someone from the class told him, “Yes Sammy, the answer was 108. A year ago.”

Getting to First Base

One day at lunch we were sitting around and talking about having a kissing contest. That sounded interesting, so I asked what we should make for the rules. Someone explained the rules to me. Then I asked how we should decide who kisses who. Then someone explained that it was already decided who was kissing who.

As I sat there listening, I came to the realization that we were not in a planning phase. Everything about this contest had already been decided. The rules were already in place and who would be kissing who was established.

“When did all this get planned?”

“Just now in class”

I sat there at lunch retracing my steps. I was not standing in the hall or visiting the principle that morning. I was in class the whole time. Now I was bothered. Usually when things went down in that class I was at the forefront of planning it or at very least I was in the loop. For the first time I felt like I was on the outside looking in.

Then to my amazement I heard Larry bemoaning the fact that he had to kiss Neve, as though someone had forced him with a double dare to do it! I would have gladly jumped in to bail him out except that Neve was whining that she wanted to kiss Maltby. WTF!

My heart was pounding in my chest. Where the hell was I when this was being planned?

I knew why Larry didn’t want to kiss her. The look on Brian’s face said it all. Brian was trying to be brave, but behind that poker face he was just as jealous as I was.

This was when I realized for the first time that while Neve and I were very good friends, that is all we were. She had a thing for Maltby. I was also good friends with Maltby and I knew where his heart lay. It was not with her. There were hurt feelings all around.

If I had any balls at that point I would have set Neve straight and told her exactly how I felt, but listening to her moan about how she wanted to kiss Maltby was like a slap in the face.

Then someone suggested I should trade sandwiches with Larry. I had peanut butter and Jam for lunch every day. I really wouldn’t eat anything else. I can’t remember if Maltby suggested it, because he wanted to win, or if Brian did to ease his pain. It could have been Larry himself not wanting to kiss Neve that made the suggestion, but whoever it was I did it gladly. I figured maybe I could stop this from happening or at least make it end quickly.

Larry passed me his sandwich and I took a bite. It was two kinds of deli meat, with mustard on white bread. If his goal in trading sandwiches with me was to gross out Neve, he really should have eaten his own sandwich. It was so disgusting I ended up throwing it out. Fortunately, I had no appetite anyway.

Out on the playground the teams squared off. I don’t remember much about the contest itself. I remember where on the school grounds we had it. I remember where I was standing in relation to everyone else. I did not take part. Merk was there and she also did not take part. I remember walking up to her before the contest. I planned to say something to her, but I don’t remember if I did. She would not have answered me anyway.

The contest itself was over pretty quick.

It did bother me that Neve kissed Larry that day. If there was one thing I could take solace in, it was the fact that Neve kissed a guy from our class that was

Gay

That kissing contest was not Maltby’s only invention to help break the ice between the guys and girls in that class. His most brilliant scheme involved a game he devised over at the baseball diamond.

The rules were simple. The girls would run around the diamond. They would have to stay on the area that marked the infield. They could not go out of bounds. Then we would chase them around the diamond, catch them and drag them back to the benches in the dugout kicking and screaming, where we would steal kisses from them and do other things…….

Yeah

It was brilliant.

But of course Maltby was not a complete womanizer. He was a humanist and an equal opportunity molester as well. We would give the girls a chance to chase us around the diamond and then we would let them have their way with us when we got caught.

That was even more fun, because we could easily keep our distance on the girls. What a crazy coincidence too. Every time one of the pretty girls in our class got close we would fake an ankle sprain and limp over to the dugout pretending to be in pain. The exception to the rule of course was Jason Ashton. He was not athletic at all. Doctors had inserted tubes in his ears to treat repeated ear infections that affected his balance and coordination. That poor kid got ravaged by every duck in our class.

The only girl in our class that could catch us unassisted was Eugenie Fitzgerald. She was tall and had long legs. She could run almost as fast as any guy. She was also as cute as a Royal Doulton china doll, with a sexy mouth and pouting lips. We didn't have to fake any ankle sprains with her.

I only remember bumping into Maltby a few times after I stopped going to Vista Heights. One time I ran into him was when I was in my teens. It was at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto of all places. We got to talking about the good old days when we used to chase the girls around the baseball diamond. That brought back a lot of happy memories for him.

“I remember that! Remember that time when…..” and he went on to tell me a story that was so X rated I recoiled in horror.

“No, I certainly do not remember that.”

“No, weren’t you there?”

He had forgotten that I stopped going to that school at the end of grade 4. When I reminded him of that, he said, “Oh N! You missed the good stuff.”

Apparently I did. By the sounds of it, there wasn’t a virgin left in that French Immersion class by the end of grade 6. The parents of those grade school kids would have screamed bloody murder if they knew what was going on at that baseball diamond.

Robert Dykeman

One of my two closest guy friends at Vista Heights was Robert Dykeman. It was a kid’s thing to do that whenever we played hockey, we would pretend we were some player from the NHL. The player he always chose to be was Mike Bossy of the New York Islanders. He preferred Mike Bossy, over Gretzky, because the great one was a wuss.

He also had a big brother that went to that school. His brother would have been in grade 6 when we were in grade 1 or 2. One time we were playing British Bulldog and he ran past me not thinking I would even try for him. I kicked his leg out as he went by. He stumbled about 10 feet before landing on his chest. When I tagged him he got up laughing all the way. He was a good sport about it and shook my hand. What an ego boost. His brother was a very big boy.

For lunch sometimes Dykeman and I would go to the hill. There was a hill in a field just outside of the school grounds on the side of the school where the water tower used to be. That field has since been developed with houses and it appears from the satellite image that the water tower is now gone.

Sometimes we would go to his house for lunch or meet up there before school in the morning. He was one of the first to have an Atari 2600. That was an uber rig back in the day and we would play Asteroids or Missile Command.

One tradition we had in the first month or two of school was to have chestnut fights. There were a few trees in the town of Streetsville that would drop chestnuts. Everyone would get a dozen or so, and bore holes in the middle. We would run a shoe lace through the hole and take turns whacking each other’s chestnuts until they broke off the string. One year it seemed like there were no nuts dropping from any of the trees in town so we couldn’t play. Then one day for show and tell, Dykeman brought a rope a mile long with chestnuts stretching one end to the other. That’s when we figured out where all the chestnuts went that year.

One year Dykeman got it in his head that he wanted to assert his position as class tough guy so he picked a wrestling match with me, then Remi Kaiserman, and then Gerard Real. There was really no need to do that, the issue was not in dispute. Dykeman was the class tough guy hands down. Doing that to Gerard Real was not nice either. Gerard was big, but he was too nice to ever fight anyone.

It's Pronounced Neve

"The first time I ever screamed at someone was in a scene, and I'd never screamed at someone in my life." - Neve Campbell

Neve and I were good friends in school. She was the type that was always concerned for others and wanted to be on good terms with everyone. We never fought. We never argued.

The closest we ever came to arguing was the year we learned each other’s middle names. She made the point that her middle name was easy to remember on account of the movie Rocky which had been out for a few years. In it, Sylvester Stallone calls out to his wife, “Adrian? Adrian?” It made remembering her middle name really easy.

After that we took to scolding each other for everything. She would shoot me a dirty look and I would scowl at her and say,

“Neve Adrianne Campbell, don’t you look at me like that!”

She would return fire, “MSN, don’t you talk to me that way!”

It would go back and forth, but it was all in good fun.

There was only ever one time when she lashed out at me. I believe it was in grade 4. One day she arrived in class and I greeted her.

“Good Morning, Nevie.”

She walked right past me to her desk, turned her back to me, crouched down and started looking through her bag.

There was a long silence. I was pretty sure I spoke loud enough for her to hear me, but on the off chance I didn’t, I repeated myself.

“Good Morning, Nevie.”

She just kept looking through her bag and ignoring me.

The last time I talked to her before that was after class the day before. I said goodbye to her when her dad picked her up. She was in a good mood then. Nothing could have happened in the meantime that would give her reason to be upset with me. If something was wrong, it would be nice to know, so I could make amends.

Finally I asked her, “Are you ignoring me?”

At that point she stopped looking through her bag. She stood up. She spun around and she screamed at me, “My name’s Neve! It’s pronounced Neve! It’s not Nevie! It’s not Nevster! It’s Neve. I hate it when people call me Nevie!”

Then she stormed out of the room.

I just stood there stunned and feeling like crap. My classmates were looking at me and we were all wondering the same thing. “What the hell was that all about?”

For her to do that was peculiar for two reasons.

First, she had never yelled at anyone before. This girl was so sweet and shy. She worried constantly about how people viewed her. For her to throw a tirade like that was completely out of character for her.

Secondly, we had been calling her Nevie since kindergarten. It wasn’t just a few students either. It was everyone, teachers and students alike. Since when was her name pronounced Neve? That’s when someone suggested that maybe she got married the night before and had her given name changed. We all laughed about that.

When she returned to class, it was everything I could do to apologize. She was too important of a friend to let her be upset with me. After apologizing, I asked, “If your name was pronounced Neve, why didn’t you say anything all these years? We’ve been calling you that since kindergarten.”

Then she replied, “Well you all know Sammy hates being called Samuel, but you call him that anyway. I figured if I said something sooner, everyone would just keep calling me Nevie to bug me.”

She did have a point there.

Sammy Maltby’s legal name on his birth certificate and on all the school records was Samuel. When his mother signed him up for school she made the point of telling our teachers that he would start crying if anyone called him that, so she asked our teachers to call him either Sammy or Sam instead. When Sam introduced himself to us in kindergarten, he introduced himself as Sammy.

A year or two later we were in class and we had a substitute teacher. She was doing roll call and when she got to Sammy’s name she called out Samuel. Nobody answered.

“Samuel!”

“Samuel?”

When nobody answered, the kids in our class were all looking at each other and wondering who Samuel was. There was nobody in our class by that name. There was a Sammy, but….

That’s when we looked back at Sammy. His eyes were big and wide. His face was beet red, but he refused to answer. He figured if he didn’t reply he could still keep this a secret from us.

After roll call we started talking among ourselves.

“The teacher never called Maltby did she?”

“Nope”

“Who is Samuel?”

“No idea.”

Just then, Maltby got up out of his chair and went to talk to the teacher. Then he went back to his seat. We knew something was going on.

When the teacher left the classroom for something, a few of us went up to her desk to look at that attendance sheet. There it was. Samuel Maltby. We held up the attendance sheet and looked at him. He just sat there looking back at us.

“Oh guys! I didn’t want anyone to know that. Please don’t call me that.”

He was so embarrassed.

What made matters worse, was that Sammy Maltby was the class prankster. If anyone from that class were to bring a whoopee cushion to school or pull your chair away as you sat down, it was him. He terrorized us with his pranks. Now we had found his akiles heel and nothing bothered him more than being called Samuel.

While it is true that we called him Samuel at every opportunity in the days that followed, eventually the thrill of calling him that wore off and we went back to calling him Maltby, since we always referred to each other by our last names in that class. We did, however, keep it like a trump card in our back pockets in case his pranks started up. It was something we would use to keep him in his place.

Not only that, but Maltby was completely affable. We could bug him and he could take it. Not only could he take it, but he dished it out very well too. Nobody was ever cruel to him, nor did he go overboard with his pranks. It was all in good fun.

Neve, on the other hand, was fragile. She never insulted anyone, not even in fun and she never played pranks. She was always serious about everything. It was like walking on granola when you talked to her, because you knew it would take very little to hurt her.

I told Neve, “Yeah, but that’s Sammy. We like bugging him. We would never have called you that if we had known.”

Her reply, “Well you know now, so let’s see if that theory holds true.”

From that point on it became a point of honor that her name was pronounced Neve. Whenever anyone called her Nevie the class would go silent. The people standing closest to that person would start to tip toe away quietly as not to be standing to close when the lightning came from the sky and struck them down.

Whenever we had a substitute, someone would make a point of telling the teacher how to pronounce her name before roll call.

“See this girl? Yeah, her name is pronounced Neve, you have to say it Neve or she’ll ki…she’s gonna ki…...”

“You’ll die.”

“And then you’ll be dead.”

Ironically, the one person in the class who had the most trouble getting her name straight after that was our class scatterbrain, Maltby.

One day he went up to her and said, “Hey Nevie? I mean Neve. I mean……wait. Which one is it?”

Neve just stared at him and said, “Careful Sammy. We all know what you don’t like being called.”

Then Sammy replied, “Oh, I know……but I can’t remember…….oh!”

Then he ran away.

S & M

One of my two closest guy friends in grade school was Sammy Maltby. He was a happy-go-lucky prankster. You could tease him until the cows came home and he would never get mad. Everything bounced off of him.

He lived at home with his mother and step father. One year his step dad had bought him a single drum with the promise that if he practiced and got good, he would get a full drum set. Considering his fondness for young girls, drummer in a rock band would have been a perfect career choice for him. He was the horniest little grade school student I ever knew.

His favorite joke back in the day was one that his uncle had told him. It would begin with Maltby taking your hand and squeezing it until you cried out in pain. Then he would ask, “Do you feel the pain?” Next he would tell you to put your hand on the window and then he would ask again, “Do you feel the pane?”

When he first told me that joke I didn’t get it. He had to explain to me that a piece of glass is also called a windowpane. By the time he finished explaining it really wasn’t funny. He still laughed though. He loved that joke.

It’s not surprising that his favorite joke back then involved an element of pain either. His initials were after all S and M. It was a fact he took great pleasure in emphasizing by making a cracking of the whip sound. Whaaaapshhhhh.

Sammy Maltby on the Right

One sad memory I have of him came one time after school. All the kids from our class that lived in Meadowvale were taking the transit bus home. Maltby’s bus stop was at the corner of Windwood Drive and Glen Erin Drive. That intersection had only stop signs back then for the east and westbound traffic on Windwood. It was an omission that led to a lot of car accidents and eventually those stop signs were replaced with a full set of traffic lights.

Everyone opened the windows on the bus and called out to him as the bus started to drive away.

“Goodbye Samuel! See you tomorrow Samuel!”

He got a big smile on his face and held his fist up in the air. Then he started to chase after the bus. He was running full tilt, but he got tunnel vision and didn’t see that the stop sign was right in front of him. He turned his head at the very last second before running into it face first. Then he dropped to the ground like a Raggedy Ann doll. Luckily an adult also got off at that stop and was able to help him.

It was the last time I ever remember calling him Samuel.

In Trouble Again

I remember the first time I ever got Neve into trouble at school. I'm not sure what I did. Our afternoon recess got cancelled and we both got detention. Our teacher also made us write 50 lines of whatever it was.

I know Madame Mocrie was our teacher at the time, because Madame Fisher would never have given Neve a detention. She could have set off a bomb at school and Madame Fisher would have yelled at me, “M, detention!” Giving me a detention was fair game, but giving Neve a detention was against the rules. For this we nick named our teacher Macreep.

The teacher left the room and we sat alone writing lines. We had finished about five to ten of them. Then Neve turned to me and said, “Hey M, I have an idea of how we can write these faster.”

I was all for anything that made punishment go by faster.

“How?”

“Well instead of writing full sentences across the page we can just write the same word down the page.”

I was impressed when she said that. I could not believe that for all the times I got detention and for all the times I had to write lines, it never occurred to me to do them that way.

“That’s brilliant, Neve! This is going to make my life so much easier. I’m so glad I got you into trouble so that you could be here in detention with me.”

She beamed when I said that.

From that point on, we finished our lines by writing the same words in columns down the page. The problem with that of course, is that our handwriting was already bad enough at that age. When we wrote words in columns down the page they started to bend and shape. There would be big gaps between some words on some lines. The last few words of some sentences would have to be crammed in at the end. It was awkward, but we finished our lines before the end of recess.

When the teacher came back to the room, we went up to her desk and turned them in. She looked at them. Then she looked at us.

“Did you two write these out properly, or did you write the words in columns down the page?”

We both just stood there staring at the teacher. Neither one of us would answer.

After a long pause the teacher held the pages up in front of our faces so that we could look at them. It was so painfully obvious what we had done. The first five to ten lines were perfect. The rest of the page was a catastrophe. Neither one of us wanted to answer her, so we just stood there.

After another long pause the teacher took our pages and ripped them up right in front of us. Then she took some more foolscap off her desk.

She past us the paper and said, “Now then. You two are going to rewrite them. You are going to write them out properly this time. And instead of writing them 50 times, you’re going to write them 100 times.”

Then the teacher looked at the clock and said, “And recess is almost finished so there’s no time left to work on them. You two will have to take them home and do them as a homework assignment. Now take your seats.”

When we went to our desks, I sat in my chair. I folded my hands as if to pray. Then I looked heaven bound and said, “Dear God. I’m such a good little boy. I’m so well behaved. This girl is such a bad influence on me. Why do I hang around with her? Amen.”

The problem with me doing that of course is that Neve Campbell often failed to see the humor in things. She thought I was being serious when I did that. Not long after that she came up to me practically in tears. She kept apologizing.

“M, I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

“I got our punishment doubled and I feel terrible and I’m so sorry I suggested that.”

She was literally begging me to forgive her. I could not believe she was serious, but she obviously was.

“Neve! We would not have even had to do lines in the first place if it had not been for me getting you into trouble. If anyone should be apologizing here it’s me.”

“I know, but I should never have suggested we do that and now I’ve just made matters worse and I feel just terrible. I’m so sorry.”

It was classic of Neve. She was always so concerned for others. She always wanted to be on good terms with people. She just melted your heart.

When I went home that night I stashed my foolscap in a good hiding place. Another thing I was always getting in trouble for was not doing homework. I could not take the chance of getting caught doing lines at home. Fire and brimstone would have rained down on me if my dad heard that I got in trouble at school.

The next morning I wrote some lines before heading to school. There was never anyone at home when I woke up in the morning. I wrote more lines at the bus stop. I wrote a few more as I bounced along on the transit bus on the way to school. By the time I got to school I had most of them done.

When I got to class Neve came and asked, “Did you finish your lines?”

“No not yet, but I’m almost done. How about you?”

“Yes, I finished them.”

Of course she did. She was a good little girl.

That’s when our conversation turned weird.

She asked me, “So, what did your dad say?”

I looked at her confused.

“What did my dad say? What did he say about what?”

“About the trouble we got into.”

“Well I didn’t tell him! I can’t tell my dad anything. He’d take out his belt and start thrashing me.”

Then she said, “Oh” and looked at me completely surprised.

I looked at her and I was completely surprised that she would even ask such a thing. Then I got curious.

“Did you tell your dad?”

“Yes”

At that point I was completely floored. I don’t remember what it is we did. I’m sure it wasn’t that bad, but it was definitely bad enough that it terrified me to hear that her dad knew about it.

“I can’t believe you would tell him. Why would you do that?”

“I tell my dad everything.”

I was blown away. It was one thing to get into trouble at school, but I was very concerned that I was getting her into trouble at home too. I also had another reason to worry. I was scared Mr. Campbell was going to tell his daughter that I was a bad influence on her and that he didn’t want her hanging around with me anymore.

“What did he say when you told him?”

“He said it was a bad thing to do and that we shouldn’t do again.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah”

I was in complete disbelief hearing that. The Campbell household sounded like an oasis of sanity. Obviously our fathers were not reading from the same child rearing textbooks. I envied the relationship she had with her dad. It was one of the many times in my life when I can remember thinking, “I’m not getting the same upbringing as everyone else.”

I pondered that for a while, but I had to ask what was really on my mind. “Did your father tell you we couldn’t hang out anymore?”

She laughed when I said that. “NO! He would never do that. My dad loves you.”

Mr. Campbell loves me? I was embarrassed to hear her say that. It was pretty strong language considering I only ever saw him when I would wait for her to get picked up after school.

To be fair though, I did like her dad. Any time I saw him after school picking up his daughter, he would call me Oor Wullie. Whatever she was telling him about me at the dinner table must have been really good stuff.

Oor Wullie

Merk’s Olive Branch

By the beginning of grade 4, I was fed up trying to get Merk to forgive me. It was a stupid grudge for a stupid thing that had gone on way too long. I decided I wasn’t even going to try and be nice to her anymore. There would be no ritual of the chairs this year. I had only apathy for her. Besides, I already had a girlfriend and it was Neve.

As the school year began we started learning long multiplication in Math class. That involves multiplying two numbers with multiple digits, for example 935 x 25. You do that by multiplying each digit from one number against each digit from the other number. Then you add the products of each to get a result.

All of a sudden I could not breeze by in math class, because it was no longer a question of memorization. Now you had to think. That was a lot more difficult.

After our teacher taught us how it was done, she wrote five sample problems on the blackboard for us to work on. She told us that when we had our answers we could come up to her desk and she would check them for us. I sat there struggling to figure them out. The kids around me seemed just as confused.

While I was still on the second problem, Merk got up and walked to the teacher’s desk. I was laughing under my breath. If I was struggling, she would have to be completely stumped. As I sat there watching with a smile, the teacher announced, “Class! Suzy a obtenu tous les cinq corrects! Suzy bien faite.”

A groan went through the class. She not only finished them, she got them all right. She walked past me on the way back to her desk. She shot me one of those 'in your face' looks, but said nothing.

In the days that followed, the teacher would again explain how to do long multiplication for those of us that were having trouble. She wrote more sample problems on the board. They were harder ones this time. Each time Merk was always first to the teacher’s desk with the answers and she always had them right.

Math was always my subject. Now it was personal.

I really wanted to find out how Merk was getting this so easily, so I asked Neve if she would find out for me. She didn’t want to go ask, but Holly Presley was willing to do it. Holly reported back that Merk had either taken summer school or spent the summer with a tutor, I can’t remember which.

That explained her advantage, but it still bothered me that Merk was besting me in math.

Then one day a crazy thing happened. Merk talked to me. I have no idea how this conversation started, but she actually talked to me. It was the first time we had talked since grade 1.

“Do you know why I hate you?”

“Yeah, cause I spied on you in the first grade. I remember.”

“No. That’s not it. I hate you, because you’re a goof off. Everything is a big game to you. You don’t even try in class. You skip school all the time….”

“You think I play hookey? I miss school all the time, because I’m sick.”

“That doesn’t matter. When you are here you do nothing. You never do homework. You make paper airplanes. You’re lazy. You cause trouble.” She continued, “I do try. I do go home and study. I do my homework, and every year I end up in the same class with you. It pisses me off that you get by so easily without trying. Imagine where you would be if you did try?”

The irony of being lectured by Merk that day was not lost on me. I had heard that speech a million times from my parents, my brother, my sister, teachers, the principle, hospital tutors, you name it.

When my report cards came out I would take them from the teachers hand and pass them to a classmate without even looking. Then I would say, “I bet you my report card says, ‘M doesn’t apply himself. He is not living up to his potential.’”

Then they would open up my report card and start reading. A few seconds later they would burst out laughing. I would ask them where it says that. They would show me my report card and point.

Merk may have been giving me the silent treatment for three long years, but that girl had been observing. In a way she was paying me a compliment as she talked down to me. I could really understand it from her point of view too. She did work hard in school and she never seemed to get rewarded for it. I felt bad for her.

I was quick to point out that I was not some kind of genius though. This new math we were learning was tripping me up. She seemed to be catching on quicker than anyone, even if I did know why. Then Merk did something that really floored me. She offered to help me.

Three years of treating me like I don’t exist and now she wants to tutor me? I could see right through what she was doing. All those years she felt like I was smarter than her and she resented it. Now she feels like she can negotiate a truce from her new found position of strength. That bothered me.

I may have been lucky enough to breeze through grade school without any effort, but it wasn’t like I was the top student in the class, except in math. I never looked down on anyone. I certainly never looked down on her. I tried everything to be her friend. Now after all these years she is acting like she wants to be mine, because she has an edge?

“No thanks. I’ll get it eventually. And I want you to know that while you were spending all summer learning math, I was outside everyday playing baseball. Maybe you should get a life.”

Then I walked away.

Whatever opportunity there was for us to bury the hatchet that day, I completely pissed it to the wind. To this day that is one of my life’s biggest regrets.

Frère Jacques

It was grade 3 or 4 when I did this. I was playing ice hockey the year it happened. Our teacher told us to bring our skates to school, because she was going to take us skating at Vic Johnston Arena. The morning of the skate I was getting dressed. I have no idea what possessed me to do this, but as I was putting my clothes on I put on a piece of hockey equipment. Then I slipped my pants on over top.

I was checking myself out in the mirror and it looked pretty good. It didn’t look noticeable and I figured I would get away with nobody at school knowing. Then again, I’m sure every girl that has ever stuffed their bra thought the same thing.

I went to school and all morning nobody noticed. That afternoon we went skating. We walked over to the arena. Still nobody was the wiser. When we got to the arena we started to put on our skates. Whereas most girls in our class wore a pair of white figure skates, Neve had brought a pair of hand-me-down hockey skates that belonged to her brother.

We were in the corridor by the canteen, on the other side of the glass from the rink itself, and I was lacing up her skates. The way you tie someone’s skates, if you’ve never done it, is you have them put their skate on your thighs, while the blade of the skate slides between your legs. Then you just pull the laces up, thread the top few eyes and tie it at the top.

After I laced up her first skate I opened my legs and her foot dropped to the floor. When she brought up her second skate for me to tie, she accidentally kicked me between the legs.

“I’m sorry.”

“No problem,” I said. Then I faked a little pain. I tried to downplay it as not to make too big of a deal in the hope that the subject would change quickly.

The problem, however, is that hockey skates have a steel toe to them, to protect against slap shots. When her skate made contact, it made this loud ‘konk’ sound like the sound of metal on plastic. It was so loud it seemed to echo off the walls. I tried my best to lace up her second skate and pretend it never happened.

“What was that sound?”

“What sound?”

When I looked at Neve she got this smile on her face that told me she knew, that I knew, that she knew, that I was hiding something. At that point she tried to gently kick me again with the toe of her skate as I was lacing it up. I grabbed her skate with both hands and held on for dear life as I looked up at her.

“What was that sound?”

“I didn’t hear anything”

We were both smiling at each other. It was obvious I was lying.

“Why is your face turning red?”

“My face is not turning red.”

“Yes it is. What is that?” Then she pointed.

I knew she would never let it go unless I told her. Nobody else from our class was nearby so I reluctantly filled her in. She got a very good laugh at my expense.

“Please promise me you won’t tell anyone.”

“M. You have my word I won’t tell a soul.”

“Thank you Neve.”

Not even two seconds later…

“Can I just tell one person?”

“No”

“Please, just one person.”

“No”

“Come on. I just want to tell Holly.”

“I would rather you take out a full page add in the Toronto Star than tell Holly.”

“Please she won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

“No, Holly won’t tell anyone. She’ll tell everyone. Please don’t.”

A little while later, Neve told Holly. Now I was sweating it.

I am convinced God put Holly Presley on the Earth for the same reason there are mosquitoes in Winnipeg, to get under people’s skin and annoy the hell out of them. That girl lived to push my buttons. When she got something on you she wouldn’t let it go until something new came along that she could bug you about instead. She was never cruel, but she was relentless. She got a rise out of making you squirm.

For the rest of that skate I squirmed.

At the very end of the skate Robert Dykeman found out. Dykeman also played hockey when we were students together. He played for a tiered team called the Terriers. He was a goaltender and he wore goalie skates which were not easy to skate on because they are sharpened a different way.

On the walk back to school he started singing Frère Jacques, which is a French bedtime song. Holly and Neve burst out laughing every time he sang it. Sammy Maltby however, was in the dark.

The arena was about a 45 minute walk from our school. We were halfway back. Dykeman had sung Frère Jacques about a dozen times. Holly and Neve had burst into laughter about a dozen times and Maltby was finally getting curious.

“Why does he keep singing Frère Jacques?”

Dykeman just said, “Oh no reason.”

Then he started singing again, “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous, Dormez-vous. Sonnez les matines, Sonnez les matines, Ding Dang Dong, Ding Dang Dong.”

Neve and Holly kept laughing.

The closer we got to school, the more curious Maltby was getting.

“What’s so funny about that?”

Dykeman for his part kept getting more and more obvious. He kept emphasizing Jacques. Then he started pointing when he said it. Maltby was getting worried the girls were laughing at him. When Dykeman said Jacques and pointed, Maltby checked his zipper to make sure it was done up. That caused more laughter. I was just dying to get back to school and slip out of this thing.

When we finally reached the school grounds Maltby still hadn’t figured it out. Dykeman finally just blurted it out. “For crying out loud, N’s wearing a jock!”

At that point I ran into the school straight to the washroom and slipped it off. I got quite a ribbing over that for some time after.

Picture Day

Each year at Vista Heights we had picture day. We would get individual photos taken and there would be a class picture with all of us together. One year our teacher handed our pictures out near the end of class. I was never a big fan of picture day. I just checked my set of photos to make sure my hair wasn’t sticking up and I didn’t have red eye. Then I put them back in the envelope and tossed them in my bag.

Sammy Maltby came up to me with a worried look just then. He approached me with caution as though he thought I would be very upset about something. It was no secret that Neve and I were good friends. He was concerned.

He asked me, “Did you see the pictures?”

“Yeah, I saw them, why?”

“Did you notice?”

“Notice what?”

“Look again.”

I took the class photo out and looked at it. I was standing on the back row a little to the right, and pretty close to the middle. I took a close look at the guys standing on either side of me. Nothing seemed out of place.

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

That’s when Maltby said, “Look at Neve.”

When my eyes scanned down to the girls sitting on the front row, there was Neve. I noticed instantly. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me.

Maltby read the expression on my face and said, “I know. What are we going to do?”

I shot a look to the back of the class. Neve was sitting there and putting on a brave face, but it was obvious she already knew. I could see a few guys in the class pointing and giggling, they seemed aware. Maltby and I sat down facing each other. Dykeman sat down on Maltby’s left, facing me as well. He already knew.

The three of us sat at the table thinking without saying a word. The dour look on our faces said it all. Neve really was an angel in that class. She was always so sweet and polite and shy. You never wanted to see her get hurt, but you knew this would hurt her. The silence between the three of us seemed to go on forever. Then Maltby finally broke the silence.

“Still……That is really hot!”

At that point Dykeman and I burst into laughter. Dykeman grabbed Maltby’s hand and started to shake it.

“Thank you Sammy.”

I also nodded and said thank you. In the deepest, darkest chamber at the back of our minds, you knew we were thinking that, but we were too ashamed to say it. Maltby had a way of always cutting through the bull and saying what was on our minds.

For all those years we always saw Neve in the most innocent light. But that day we saw her the way most people view her today. She was sexy beyond belief.

Dykeman made the point, “If she looks like that now, imagine when she turns 18?”

Maltby commented, “This girl could be in Playboy.”

I want to say at this point that Playboy comment really bothered me. I thought the idea of nude pictures of Neve available for purchase at the local corner store was disturbing. I was jealous enough knowing that one picture was in the hands of my classmates. I kept my feelings to myself though. I know Maltby was only making the broader point that Neve was a beautiful girl.

As we sat there spouting locker room language, an ear splitting cry went up from the back of the class. Neve’s head slammed down on her desk and she wrapped her arms around her head as if to hide herself from the world. Maltby and Dykeman had to turn around to witness that. I saw it unfold right in front of me.

When Maltby and Dykeman turned back in my direction the smiles were wiped clean from all our faces. There was no need to say it. We were ashamed for even thinking what we were thinking. At that point we were back to square one. What do we do?

That's when I walked over to Neve and sat down beside her. I sat with her more to keep her company than anything else. I wanted to console her, but how do you console someone after something like that? I loved that girl. It was heartbreaking to watch.

One of the girls in our class finally walked up to the teacher as Neve sat there crying. The girl held up the class photo to the teacher and started pointing and talking. I couldn’t hear what that girl was saying, but it was obvious what they were talking about.

I remember reading the expression on the teachers face. She sat down like she was in shock. She looked in our direction, but Neve still had her head on the desk crying. The teacher sat at her desk thinking for a short time. The school bell was about to ring. Then the teacher ran to the door and closed it so nobody could leave.

“Class, I need your attention. There is a problem with the pictures and I need to ask everyone to turn them in right now.”

That was a good call. We all went up to the teacher’s desk and turned in our pictures. The school bell rang and kids started leaving. I went back and sat with Neve. She always got picked up after school and often she didn’t get picked up until quite a while after school ended. I waited with her until someone came to get her. When she finally did get picked up she was still crying.

I missed the first transit bus, so I took a later one. I rode that one home alone. It was a long somber bus ride. You just knew that experience was going to become a scar that would affect her for the rest of her life.

The next morning I went to school early.

Not only did Neve get picked up from school long after the school bell rang, but her dad usually dropped her off at school well before school started in the morning. Since she got there before anyone else arrived, she would usually wait in class rather than wait outside in the school yard all by herself. I went to the class to see her, but she wasn’t there yet, so I went back outside.

When Maltby arrived we talked about what we could do to cheer her up. We pondered that one for a while. Then Maltby came up with the idea that we should go around the school yard and pick flowers. All the guys from the class should pick some. Then when we went to class, since she would already be there, we would form a line single file at her desk and all give her flowers one by one. That idea was brilliant.

That’s what we did. There weren’t many places to pick flowers from at the school though. There were a lot of white buttercups in the yard a few places with lavender. We knew there were some really good flowers in front of a house on the other side of Vista Boulevard. Some of us snuck off the school grounds and grabbed a few of those. We told the other guys in our class what we were doing as they arrived. We picked extra flowers for the guys that might be arriving late. We had all these flowers when the school bell rang.

What happened when we arrived in class is something I think nobody from that class will ever forget.

As we walked in the door we noticed Neve still wasn’t in class yet. That was strange, because she almost always arrived before anyone else. It was possible she was running late, so we took our seats. As I was taking my seat, the teacher asked one of the four boys in our class named Chris to sit up at the front. I thought that was strange, but I was wondering more about where Neve was.

As time ran out on the clock, the second bell rang. We sang Oh Canada and listened to announcements on the PA. Her desk still sat empty. We sat there with our flowers knowing full well she wasn’t coming. I could picture her sitting at home depressed out of her mind.

There was an eerie silence as we sat down after Oh Canada. Usually the teacher started every day by going to the front of the class and teaching a lesson. Instead, the teacher sat at her desk writing in a book and ignoring us. The silence went on for a long time. We were sitting with our flowers. Neve wasn’t there. The teacher was ignoring us. Nobody wanted to break the silence. It was all very, very uncomfortable.

After what seemed like an eternity, the teacher finally put down her pen and walked over to the classroom door. She said something like this,

“Class yesterday I told everyone that there was a problem with the pictures and I asked everyone to return them to me. When I went home and counted the pictures I noticed that one set was missing. Would someone like to talk about that?”

Now when the teacher gave the first explanation I thought that what she meant was that everyone in the class had turned in their pictures like they were asked to, but someone went into the teacher’s desk after the fact and stole a set. I remember thinking that if that happened, it would be impossible to figure out who it was unless someone confessed.

That also worried me. Whenever something bad happened in that class I was usually the prime suspect, and often I was even the guilty party. But I would never do anything like this. Neve was my closest friend in that class and I would never have done anything like that to her. At that point I felt rage building inside me as I prepared to blast our teacher if she even dared to suspect me.

This unsettling silence went on for a very long time as the teacher waited for someone to own up. I sat there gritting my teeth waiting for her to mention my name. After this long drawn out silence, nobody spoke up. At that point the teacher turned around, put her hand on the classroom door, and with every ounce of her strength she slammed that door shut. It sounded like an explosion when the door hit the frame. The door hit so hard that the latch didn’t catch and the door bounced out, so the teacher had to kick the door a second time with her foot to get it to stay closed.

Every kid in our class was now freaking out. Even the ones that had nothing to fear were quaking. No one had ever seen the teacher this mad before.

At that point the teacher spoke again and said,

“Surely this person must know that in addition to the class photo there were individual photos. It’s very easy for me to go through the pictures and figure out who has them.”

From that second explanation I realized that I had it all wrong. It was not that everyone turned in their pictures and one kid stole a set and ran out the door. Someone in our class never turned in their pictures in the first place. When she said that I realized that the teacher already knew which kid had it. So the teacher knew it wasn’t me. I was relieved that I would not be accused, but that begged the question. Who had the pictures?

All the kids started looking at each other at that point. There were a lot of poker faces in that class as we started looking at each other. We knew someone was scared out of their wits, even if they weren’t talking. The teacher let the silence go on and on. Someone had to be ready to crack. Still, nobody would talk.

Then after the longest time, the teacher walked away from the door to the chalkboard. She leaned over a bit and grabbed the leg of the desk that Chris was leaning on at the front of the room. Then she ripped the desk out from under him and slammed the desk up against the wall. The teacher then sat on the desk, stared him in the eye and said, “Would you like to talk about it Chris?”

Our teacher set that kid up for a public humiliation. Chris was now the object of scorn. It was the perfect thing for that teacher to do too. He was getting a small taste of the same humiliation Neve was feeling at home.

When Chris finally spoke, he defended himself by saying, “Well I took those photos home and gave them to my parents and they said they liked them and wanted to keep them. There’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my hands. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Gasps and snickers went up front my classmates when he said that. It was obvious he was lying. Unless, his parents were outright pedophiles there was no way in hell that was true. The teacher asked him then if she should call his parents.

“Yep, you can call them right now if you like. They’ll tell you. It’s not my fault. It’s out of my hands, there nothing I can do. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.”

The teacher took him at his word and started walking toward the door.

“Okay class I have to make a phone call, so I’ll be back. By the way Chris, will your parents be at home when I call or at work?”

“Well neither actually, they had something they needed to do today.”

The class laughed when he said that. It was like watching a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. The teacher just said she would try the numbers she had and be right back.

Looking back, it was lucky the teacher was never charged with criminal negligence causing death for leaving Chris alone with us that day. I doubt I was the only one thinking about killing him.

When the teacher got back to the classroom, she slammed the door shut again. The class fell silent.

“Well Chris, that story doesn’t check out, would you care to try another?”

At that point Chris changed his story.

“Well the truth is I took the pictures home and I lost them. I don’t know where they are. I’m very sorry, but they’re gone and I can’t find them and there’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my hands. I wish I could change that, but it’s out of my hands. I’m very sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

We all started snickering again. It was so obvious he was lying. We all knew damn well those pictures were at home on his nightstand, right beside his box of Kleenex. However, he wouldn’t back down from this new story. The teacher tried to reason with him. She tried to make him feel sympathy for a girl who was probably sitting at home in tears that very moment. He wouldn’t back down.

Eventually the teacher realized she had a class to teach and the subject dropped.

The class went on and we started talking amongst ourselves.

As for the flowers we picked, some landed on the teacher’s desk. The rest of them got tossed out the window at the back of the class or in the garbage. I felt bad for stealing flowers out of someone’s yard only to throw them in the trash.

I wanted to beat the crap out of Chris. I decided against it though. I had this bad feeling that if I beat him up he would think he had some kind of moral right to keep those pictures as compensation. I figured fear was the best way to get him to turn those pictures in. If everyone in the class would unite to bring Neve flowers, maybe they would unite to put the fear of God into him too.

I pitched Maltby on the idea of swarming him at lunch and threatening him with a beating if he didn’t cough up the pictures. Maltby was on board. Jason Ashton, Gerard Real, and Chris Stopa were on board too.

I pitched Dykeman on the plan and to my surprise he wouldn’t go for it. I was shocked. Of all the kids in the class we needed him the most. He was the undisputed tough guy in our class. Nobody could stand up to him in a fight. He insisted that he didn’t need anyone’s help to beat up Chris, he could do it himself.

“Dykeman! I don’t need your help to beat up Chris. I could take him by myself. Stopa has a limp and he can take him. Even Ashton could take him. Chris is a gimp. The goal is not to beat him up. We just need to scare him so he’ll bring those pictures back.”

It took a few tries to get through to him. He was adamant that he could do it himself. Eventually we convinced him that we needed to do this together as a class, but he made it clear that if he took part it would have to be his show. He would do the talking. We would not talk when he was talking. We had no problem agreeing to that, so he finally agreed to take part.

Once we had Dykeman and a few other guys we had all we needed. Anything else was overkill, but I wanted to get everyone from the class if I could.

I remember talking to Brian and Larry about my plan. I knew they didn’t like me, because I made fun of their relationship. This was for Neve though, so I figured they would be in. They were both open minded enough to hear me out. When I pitched them on the idea, Larry said absolutely not.

When I asked him why not, he started spewing all this liberal crap about how violence doesn’t solve anything and two wrongs don’t make a right. I explained again that we were not really going to beat him up. We just wanted to scare him into bringing the pictures back. Larry shot back by saying intimidation and threats are not an acceptable means of resolving conflict. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I knew those two had contempt for me, but this was Neve we were talking about. I asked them what their solution would be and they didn’t have one. They told me they didn’t care. Then they walked away.

To this day, whenever I listen to anti-war pacifists and leftist kooks on the news, guys like Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton, I think back to when Larry and Brian would not help me get those pictures back. Every ounce of contempt I have for liberal pacifists can be traced back to that one moment in my life.

I know liberals pride themselves on their big hearts every time they oppose military conflict. But they always seem oblivious to the suffering of people that necessitates the credible threat of force. Larry and Brian may have thought they were taking the moral high ground when they wouldn’t take part, but their pacifism did absolutely nothing to relieve the suffering of a girl that we all knew was at home crying. I learned back then what works in life and what doesn’t! They really pissed me off.

In the end, it didn’t matter though. We had Dykeman and virtually everyone else from the class. When lunch came we all got together. It was agreed that Dykeman was our speaker and we were simply there as a show of force. When we caught up with Chris on the school yard we surrounded him.

Dykeman walked up to Chris, and pushed him toward the wall of the school. He folded his arms across his chest and put his elbows up against the wall so that his forearms were around Chris’ throat. Then he got right in Chris’ face and politely explained his only option.

He gave Chris the obligatory 24 hours to bring those pictures back and turn them in. Then he explained what was going to happen if he didn’t.

“Starting tomorrow at lunch if you don’t bring those pictures back, we are going to lay a beating into you. And we are going to beat on you every day, day after day, until you bring those pictures back.”

Considering Chris was surrounded with Dykeman in his face, it was amazing that he still wouldn’t back down.

“There’s no point in waiting until tomorrow. I lost those pictures and I can’t find them. There’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my hands. You may as well beat me up right now, I can’t find them. Really, there’s nothing I can do.”

Chris just kept repeating that over and over. Dykeman just shook his head.

“No Chris. We’re not going to beat you up now. We are going to leave you alone so that you can think about the beating we’re going to give you tomorrow. And every day after, until you bring those pictures back.”

Then Dykeman walked away. He was absolutely brilliant. We all stood there staring at Chris for a few extra seconds not saying a word. Then we all walked away. I remember Maltby was still standing there as we were walking away. He was scowling at Chris and shaking his fist. I tugged on his shirt sleeve to get him to come. He was such a ham.

The next morning Chris came to class. It was a miracle! Apparently he was cleaning out his closet the night before and he found the pictures in there somewhere. We were all very relieved for him. He spared himself a hell of a beating.

Neve still wasn’t back to class two days later though. If I remember right she didn’t come back until the middle of the following week.

Chess with Raponant

The only other girl I really liked in our French Immersion class besides Neve was Cassandra Raponant. She was by far the shyest girl in the class.

Often the teacher would ask the class a question and people would put their hands up to give the answer. The same few kids in the class would always have their hands up and the teacher would eventually want to pick on other people and put them on the spot. Cassandra was one of the ones that never put her hand up. She was just too shy.

When the teacher would put a question to her in class, she would just shrug her shoulders or shake her head no. She was a smart girl and often we knew she had the answer, but she was too shy to speak.

One time the teacher asked a question that was so simple it would have been an embarrassment not to give the answer. Then the teacher called on her. Cassandra knew the question was ridiculously easy so she felt compelled to answer even though she didn’t want to. The smile on her face gave that away. When she spoke, she got about 3 or 4 words out and then her voice cracked. From that point on she could only whisper like someone with laryngitis.

The class burst into laughter. That girl was a whole other dimension of shy.

One year the school started up a chess club. I already knew how to play chess by then, so I signed up. To my amazement, Cassandra also knew how to play. I learned from our first few games that she didn’t know how to defend against being beaten in four moves, but after that I decided to play defensively to drag the game out.

As we played, we talked. I have no idea what we talked about, but I remember thinking how amazing it was to just talk to her. This girl was so shy most people didn’t even know what her voice sounded like. Yet, here she was talking like normal over a chess game. It was exciting to see her come out of her shell.

I always liked that girl, even if I only retained those two memories of her in five years we were classmates.

Random Memories

Here are some random memories of my five years at Vista Heights.

I remember the first time Neve told me her parents were divorced. I don’t remember what grade it was, but we were very young. I felt bad for her, so I asked how she was coping. Her answer verbatim was, “It doesn’t really bother me, because both my parents love me very much.” I was always impressed by that answer. She grew up a lot more level headed than most of the kids in our class.

I remember one time Robert Dykeman brought a centerfold pull-out from a porno magazine to school. It was a picture of a girl, her legs were spread open and with two fingers she was opening up. He showed that picture to Jason Ashton and Ashton was disgusted. He said, “Ewwwwwww.” Sammy Maltby looked at him and replied, “Eww? That’s not eww. That’s Ahhhhhhhh.”

My favorite game in gym class was la cour de roi, which in English is King’s Court. It is a variation of murder ball. One time we were playing that and I fired a ball at Eugenie Fitzgerald. She tried to jump over the ball, but the ball it her legs on the way up. She kart wheeled in mid air and came down upside down. She shrugged it off like a champ, but that had to have hurt. Sorry Eugenie.

I remember one time recess got rained out, so we just sat in class and talked. Neve and Holly Presley sat opposite from me at a desk. Neve and I were talking mushy and Holly started feeling uncomfortable, so she sang that M and Neve sitting in a tree song. She sang it from start to finish, complete with me in the baby carriage, sucking my thumb, doing the dance. When she finished she asked me, "Are you getting mad yet!?" Neve was by far the prettiest girl in our class. I said no, and asked her to sing louder so everyone could hear. Holly tried everything to get under my skin.

We did a lot of field trips in that class. We went to the Royal Ontario Museum more than once. The ROM had this silver ball back in the day that you put your hands on and then static electricity ran through your body that made your hair stand up. Given all the talk these days about cell phones and brain tumors I can only wonder what that silver ball was doing to a bunch of grade school kids. I can just imagine Maltby at a fertility clinic right now, “Help me Doc. I’ve bedded half the girls in this city. I can’t figure out why they won’t get pregnant.” Doctor, “Oh here’s your problem. Seems you have a lower sperm count than Rosie O’Donnell. Let me guess, you’re one of those French Immersion kids that always made field trips to the ROM. Static in your hair isn’t so funny now is it?”

I remember Jason Ashton, Eugenie Fitzgerald, Brian and I used to wait at the same bus stop. Fitzgerald would be at that bus stop in the dead of winter wearing a skirt with bare legs like it was nothing, and we guys would be shivering in our snow pants. Larry and his kid sister Karen waited one bus stop further down the road, but sometimes they would leave the house early and come wait at our stop. One time I tried bugging Larry and Brian about their relationship, but to no avail. Larry looked at me in complete seriousness and said, “M, we are very comfortable with who we are.” Larry and Brian were not really gay and teasing them about it was often pointless.

In grade 4, I had been called up to play hockey with Streetville’s AA rep team. Our team represented the town of Streetsville against other teams outside the Greater Toronto area including: Brampton, Flamborough, Georgetown, Orangeville and others. Our team uniforms had the same color scheme as the Philidelphia Flyers, Orange and Black on White (Home), Black and White on Orange (away). Vic Johnson's arena was our home ice and also home to the Streetsville Derby's. We were expected to show up for games in proper dress that included dress shoes, slacks, shirt and tie and our Streetsville team jackets. Our team jackets were made of black corduroy with a zip-out liner and had felt orange crests, with another crest on our sleeve embroidered with our names and player numbers. At school, Neve wore my jacket more than I did. She looked absolutely gorgeous in that black corduroy sports coat.

Vic Johnston's Arena

One time one of our grade school teachers was teaching us how to count with an abacus. There were only a few of them for all the students in the class to share. I mentioned to the teacher that I had a ton of poker chips at home that I used to play blackjack with. I offered to bring them to school. I had enough for everyone in the class. It would have been a lot easier than having all the students share 3-4 abaci. She was not too thrilled with the idea. Oh, what my teachers must have thought of me.

One time at school a bunch of us guys were showing off our most gruesome scars and injuries. The best I could muster was a scar that ran the width of my thumb, which I still have today. I got it when I cut myself trying to lift the lid off a tin can, on a day I was home sick from school. Kaiserman bested us all with a rectangular shaped burn mark he had on the inside of his thigh. He got that when he accidentally knocked a scalding hot cup of tea on his leg. Eventually, Chris Stopa put us all to shame when he showed us the scars he got after having major surgery on his hip. The procedure left him with a permanent limp which made it impossible for him to run afterward. It was a shame too. He was an excellent baseball player. Stopa and I played t-ball on a team sponsored by Robin Hood Multifoods and coached by his dad. Our team cleaned house that year, winning every single game from exhibition to the finals. I ran into Stopa and his dad at Memorial Park one time after I left Vista. Although he couldn’t run he could still bat with pinch runners. He was a pitcher and learned how to throw curveballs at an obscenely young age. I sat with his dad and watched as batter after batter would leap out of the batter’s box on every pitch to avoid being hit, only to have the ball curve right across the plate for a strike.

I have many memories of waiting with Neve after school for her dad to pick her up. One time she was getting feisty and looking for a play fight. I opted to just tickle her instead. Her older brother was standing right beside us and I didn't want him to be upset with me if I touched her the wrong way. That girl is way too ticklish. The best spots on her I found were the ribs, or on her shoulder close to her neck. If she’s sitting down, she has French knees.

Back Row from Left to Right: 1. Michael Reid, 2. Larry, 3. Chris Cummins, 4. Remi Kaiserman, 5. myself, 6. Gerard Real, 7. Brian, 8. Mark Page, 9. Jason Ashton, 10. David Miller
Front Row from Left to Right: 1. Mary Heisler, 2. Suzy Merk, 3. Eugenie Fitzgerald, 4. Laura Bolton, 5. Cassandra Raponant, 6. Neve Campbell, 7. Holly Presley.

The Ballet Ultimatum

In the last few weeks of grade 4, Neve came up to me at recess.

“Come, I have something I need to tell you.”

She took me by the hand and led me to a quiet corner in a way that really had me worried. She had this look of terror on her face like she was about to give me some very bad news. From the look on her face, I thought one of her family members had died.

I remembered her telling me that her younger brother had been diagnosed with asthma. We were sitting in class at the time and she began asking me all these questions about what it was like for me growing up with asthma. As she led me away I had this bad feeling she was going to tell me this brother of hers had died.

When she finally spoke, she told me that she had made arrangements to go to a private school the following year and she wouldn’t be coming back for grade 5. This was bad news, but it wasn’t the kind of ‘end of days’ news that warranted this degree of seriousness.

“That’s what you wanted to tell me? My God! From that look on your face, I thought you were going to tell me your bother had died.”

Obviously things were going to change. Right away I started thinking of a workaround. We could still write to each other. We could talk on the phone. When I turned 16 and got a driver’s license, we could hang out again. I didn’t see this as the end world.

Much to my surprise, she had already thought of her own workaround.

She explained that this school she would be going to was a full-time ballet school. She was getting paid to go and the money she was getting was more than enough to cover the tuition for one person. In fact, she said it was almost enough to cover the tuition for two people. Then she explained that she had talked it over with her dad and Mr. Campbell had agreed that, if she could convince me to go, he would pay the difference so that we could attend this school together.

I could not help but be touched. It was incredibly sweet of her and her dad to go to all that trouble, but um…..

BALLET SCHOOL??? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?

Ballet is a humiliation for a ten-year-old boy!

I grew up playing sports. I was a fighter, not a lover, and I certainly was not a dancer.

This story would be a lot funnier if it were not for that fact that Neve was always so deadly serious. And, she was being deadly serious now.

She was neither dumb, nor naïve. She came to that conversation armed with every convincing argument for why I should join ballet school.

She told me, “Lots of boys take ballet. There is nothing wrong with that!”

And, “I think you would look really good in a ballet uniform.”

And, “If you don’t go, I may never see you again.”

It is truly amazing what passes for a compliment in the mind of a nine-year-old girl. I know in her heart she thought she was buttering me up with that comment about me looking good in a ballet uniform. However, male ballet dancers do not wear uniforms. Airline Pilots wear uniforms. Male ballet dancers wear long underwear and bedroom slippers that are way too damn tight. There was just no way this was going to happen.

But like I said, the fact that she had talked her dad into paying my way made saying no very hard. I could see she really wanted this. And to be fair, I loved her enough not to want to disappoint her. She was very mature and understanding throughout the whole conversation. She never made me feel uncomfortable. She didn’t push the ultimatum. She simply explained how much it would mean to her if I would do this. Then she ended the conversation by saying,

“If you do decide to do this, it will be a serious commitment. You won’t be able to horse around the way you have here at Vista. You will have to take it seriously, but you don’t have to make up your mind right now. There is still time until the end of the school year for you to decide. Just think it over and we’ll talk more in the days ahead.”

Then she went to work on me.

If ever there was a girl who could have convinced me to do something as flamboyant as that, it was her. She did all these little things that tugged at my heart strings.

One day at recess we walked around the school yard and she just took me down memory lane.

“Remember the time we did this? Remember the time we did that? Remember the time we tried to feed the squirrel?”

She spent the whole time drawing out my every happy memory. When you spend eight hours a day, five days a week, for five straight years with someone, there are bound to be a few happy memories and she hit on every one of them. More than once I had that sick feeling in my stomach that made me wish nothing would change.

On another day she had brought a coloring book and a box of crayons to school. Our grade 4 teacher was in the habit of giving us open study periods since it was almost the end of the school year. It was an opportunity for us to study for tests or to work on assignments that were coming due. Or if we chose, we could just goof off and do whatever we liked provided we did it quietly and didn’t disturb our classmates.

When she gave us one of these study periods I went and sat down beside Neve and she pulled out this coloring book and these crayons.

“Want to color?”

I thought that was kind of silly, but sure why not. We were practically adults at that age, but a little regression isn’t so bad. When she pulled the coloring book out of her bag she was sitting on my left. For some reason she asked me to switch seats, which we did and she ended up sitting on my right. We spent the period coloring and talking. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it was not about ballet. I kept thinking she would push that subject again, but she didn’t.

It was very sweet sitting there in class and coloring. It kind of reminded me of kindergarten when we were painting together and she was trying to find a paint brush that she liked. She was every bit as cute as she was back then.

As the study period neared its end, she did something that got my attention. She stopped and looked at me. Then she wrote her initials in the bottom right hand of the page and she looked at me again. I took that as a queue that I should do the same, which I did. Then she began flipping through the pages of this book.

She opened the coloring book up to two pages that had already been colored, albeit poorly. And, when I looked at the bottom corner of the pages I saw the initials MN in the bottom left and NC in the bottom right. I laughed when I saw that. It was funny, if not impossible. We never colored with crayons in class before, nor do I remember her ever bringing that coloring book to school. I sat there pondering the meaning of that. I could picture Neve sitting at home the night before doing a rough job of coloring in that book to try and make it look like we had colored those pictures at a younger age before writing our……

It was like being punched in the gut when I figured it out. That was not fair!

The third thing I remember her doing as part of this campaign involved a clear plastic zip lock bag she brought to school filled with notes and Valentines Day cards, and basically everything on paper I had ever written her. She had kept it all and now she was pulling it out and reading me these notes. I don’t remember any of them off hand, but I do remember feeling a little upset.

I used to keep all of Neve’s notes and Valentines Day cards as well. I kept them in a drawer of my dresser. Unfortunately, one of my mother’s insanity quirks was that she would periodically pitch out my personal belongings. She was like the opposite of a pack rat. Every so often she would get this compulsion to grab a giant garbage bag and go through my room filling it up with all my stuff. Hockey card collections, comic book collections, you name it. I remember I got a delivery route delivering flyers at one point and I’d spend the money on collectibles only to have them end up in landfill.

I was not the only one affected by this insane little quirk of my mother. I remember my brother lost his cool one day when I was very young. All his stuff got pitched.

I was talking on the phone to my sister the day my mom had come through my room and pitched out all of Neve’s notes. Some of them were ones she wrote me and sent home with my neighbor Jason Ashton when I was in hospital. There were many days growing up with a violent father and an insane mother when those notes were all I had to remind me that someone in the world cared. But, my mother found them and wiped them out in one shot.

“It’s nothing but a lot of junk! You don’t need that, so I pitched it out!”

It would have been impossible to explain sentimental value to a sociopath, so I never bothered. But I was so mad when she did that I called my sister. I remember talking to her about that and she said bluntly, “Why do you think I moved out?”

“You just need a better hiding place,” she suggested.

Where? No square inch of that house was safe from her. Even if you thought you knew a nook or cranny in that house, you would hide something only to find it gone. And she was such a hypocrite about it too. She would think nothing about throwing our stuff out, but you knew in the drawers of her dresser were things that had meaning to her. It was tempting to want to grab a garbage bag and get even by emptying her drawers of all our school pictures and other items. Of course, I never did.

While I was still talking to my sister on the subject, something occurred to me. I know the perfect hiding spot! My mother kept all my childhood pictures in the bottom drawer of a four drawer chest cabinet in her bedroom. She never looked at them, they were simply there. From that point on, I decided to hide everything in that drawer. I had to start from scratch, but by the end of grade 4 I had a few notes and one big heart cut from a piece of pink construction paper.

“To M, Love Neve”

From that point on, whenever I needed a pick me up, I would just sneak into my parent’s room and rifle through that bottom drawer. They were always there.

It was a little distracting thinking about all that as Neve read to me from notes she pulled from this zip lock bag. It was still very sweet watching her go through my notes and read them all. This was the only occasion where she engaged in her campaign of convincing me to take ballet where I wasn’t even close to crying. The resentment of my mother kept my emotions perfectly in check.

There may be other things she did to convince me to join this ballet school that I don’t remember, but the last thing I do remember had to do with a photo album.

During one of our end of year study periods, Neve came and sat down beside me. She had brought this photo album to school with some of her childhood photos. When she sat down beside me, she placed this photo album on the desk in front of me. She put her elbow on her desk and then she put her head in her hand. She opened this photo album up and she just smiled at me as she turned the pages. She never said a single word.

My eyes bounced back and forth between that photo album and the smile of this pretty little girl and I was getting choked up. I had already endured the trip down memory lane. I survived the shock treatment of the coloring book. I’d listened to myself saying the sappiest things in note after note that she pulled from a zip lock bag. Now I’m looking through a photo album while she gives me the silent treatment for dramatic effect.

Don’t get me wrong. Neve was a very smart girl even at that young age. She could yank my emotional chain on the best of days. But I was pretty smart too. It was blatantly obvious that one of her parents was coaching her on the most efficient way to rip the heart out of my chest. What I experienced in the dying days of grade 4 was a whole other level of manipulation that I’ve never experienced in my life until this very day. Also obvious was which parent was behind it.

So I asked, “Your mother is coaching you on how to do all this stuff, isn’t she?”

When I asked that, Neve got this big smile on her face. Then she shrugged her shoulders as if to say, ‘maybe’. But she wouldn’t answer my question. She didn’t say a word. She just sat there smiling and turning pages.

It’s worth pointing out, at this point, one thing I remember very well about the Campbell kids. This was true of Neve and this was also true of her brother Christian anytime you would ask him a question about Neve. Those two cannot tell a lie. It’s not possible. I don’t know if it is something about their DNA or what, but they can’t lie.

If you ask them a question that they don’t want to give an honest answer to they may smile. They may laugh a little. They might try to change the subject in an obvious way, or they may answer your question with another question. Those two seem to have this entire Campbell family playbook of things they can do to get out of giving an honest answer, but they cannot tell a lie.

Not even little white lies. Try it sometime. Next time you see one of them, mess your hair up really bad and then walk up and say, “Be honest. Am I having a bad hair day?”

They’ll laugh. They’ll say, “Why do you ask?” But they will never look you in the eye with a straight face and say, “Not at all. I think your hair looks fantastic like that.”

I point this out, because when I asked Neve if her mother was behind her elaborate campaign, it was obvious to me someone was coaching her. I suppose it’s possible that she simply smiled because she took it as a compliment that I thought a parent was behind what she was doing. She never did answer my question. But when I asked if her mother was the guilty party and she got that smile on her face, I took it as a tacit admission. To this day I’m convinced that if I had dusted that photo album for fingerprints, I would have had no trouble tracing them back to Marnie Neve.

It was not fair.

You take the sweetest, prettiest little girl in the world and team her up with a psychologist mother and you’ve got enough dynamite to blow up a little boy’s heart for life. I’m 35-years-old as I write this and I still remember that. It was completely unfair.

As she turned the pages of that photo album I could feel the tears coming. I glanced quickly around the room at the guys in my class and I knew I would never hear the end of it if I started crying. I turned to Neve and I said,

“This is interesting and I do want to see more, but I need to go to the washroom real quick, I’ll be right back.”

When I told her that, she got this disappointed look on her face that told me she didn’t think I was interested at all and was simply looking for an out. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to convince her otherwise I needed to get out of that room.

I remember I just made it out the door of our class as I burst into tears. Luckily the boy’s washroom was right across the hall from our classroom. I ran into the washroom, locked myself in a bathroom stall, sat on a toilet seat and balled. She was killing me!

It was really upsetting too, because she didn’t have to do any of those things. I loved her. I loved her right from kindergarten. I would have done anything for her. I would have fought any guy for her. But for crying out loud……

THIS WAS BALLET SCHOOL!

Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place! This was like being told, “You can jump off a bridge or you can get hit by a train. You get to pick.”

I was dead either way. There is no way I could have survived the humiliation of being a male ballet dancer, but I sure as hell didn’t want to say goodbye to my favorite childhood friend of five years.

So there I sat, by myself, in a bathroom stall, balling like a baby. Every time I heard someone come into the washroom I had to find a way to stop crying and hold my breath. As soon as I heard them leave I’d start up again. Eventually I worried that I had been gone so long a teacher might come looking for me, so sucked it up as best I could and dried my eyes before heading back to class.

When I walked back into class, Neve was waiting for me and genuinely concerned.

“Are you alright? You were gone a long time.”

“Yeah, I’m fine. No problem.”

“Why are your eyes all bloodshot?”

“Oh, just my allergies are really bothering me today.”

In addition to asthma, I also had allergies so it was a believable story even if I was lying through my teeth. What was I going to say? “Well Neve, I was in the washroom crying for the last hour, because I love you and you’re killing me.”

I’m sure most ten-year-old boys are very honest about their emotions, but there was no way I was going to be honest about mine.

That night I went home and I sat alone in my room. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed and thinking it through. At one point I started laughing to myself like a crazy person. On my dresser was a picture of me and my hockey team. My closet door was open and on the wall in my closet was a picture of me and my baseball team. On the shelf in my closet were trophies and medals and crests and ribbons from every sport I ever played. Hockey, baseball, soccer, you name it.

As I sat there in my room alone, laughing to myself, I thought I must be crazy! I can’t believe I’m going to do it. I can’t believe I’m going to take ballet. But I had made up my mind that Neve was just too important a part of my life to lose. I had even gone so far as to convince myself that learning ballet may actually help me be a better hockey player. I was probably reaching with that one, but I was going to do it.

That night I stayed up late into the night. I couldn’t sleep. The next morning I rode the transit bus to school. It was the picture perfect day. The sun was beating through the windows that ran across the back of our classroom. I couldn’t stop staring at the clock, I was anxious for that first recess to come. I was looking forward to how happy it would make her to hear that I’ll do it.

When recess finally came we got together. What happened at recess is so vividly etched into my brain I will never forget it.

Just as I was about to say I will go to ballet school with her, I had this image pop into my head. I pictured myself in ballet tights, wearing ballet slippers and dancing on my tip toes. I was mortified!

It was like walking into a bedroom, a naked man lying in bed, holding a teddy bear and smiling at me. There was just no way I was going to live this down. And this wasn’t going to be some casual ballet lessons in the evening, with a class on the weekend, where if you start to feel uncomfortable you can just walk away. She had made it clear to me that this was going to be a serious commitment.

I was ten! When she said serious commitment, I was imagining this maximum security ballet prison, with little sugarplum fairy guards flying around with assault rifles, gunning little boys down as they tried to escape over a wall. I was imagining a nightmare. I just knew there was no way I would be able to do this, so at the very last second I changed my mind.

I told her, “Neve, I’ve thought it through. I’ve made up my mind. And I’m sorry, but I’m not going to do it.”

If I live to be a million, I will never forget the look in her face when I said that. She was stunned. I really think she thought she would convince me in the end, and to be fair she had me at one point. But as the realization came that I wasn’t going, she had this unforgettable look in her face.

I could see this little tear starting in the corner of her left eye. But behind that tear, was a look of shear fucking resentment. It was as if her heart stopped beating and her lungs stopped breathing. Her body never moved, her head never moved. She was not scowling. She just stared at me with a look of pure hatred. You could feel the heat of burning anger radiating off her body. I’m certain that if she had a handgun she would have put the barrel to my head, dropped me with a bullet and not even blinked.

When she finally did speak, her exact words to me were, “Even if it means you’ll never see me again?”

I pleaded with her not to make it an all or nothing ultimatum. I said there’s no reason we can’t still write to each other, talk on the phone, when I get older and get a driver’s license…..

She cut me off mid-sentence and said, “M no! I told you. This is going to be a serious commitment for me. I’ll be too busy on evenings and weekends practicing and training for ballet to have any time for you. If you’re not going to do this I will never see you again.”

When she said that, I got genuinely scared for the first time. Up until then she had only hinted that I may not see her again. Now she had dug in her heals for the first time. Like I said before, those Campbell kids cannot lie. If they say something will happen, it will happen. And even though I knew that ‘never see you again’ is not what she really wanted, I was certain that would be the result, because to do otherwise would mean she lied.

I begged her not to cut me out of her life completely, but she was hurt. She was angry. She had gone to all the trouble of convincing her dad to pay for me. She had spent a week or two bending over backwards and forwards to convince me how much it would mean to her for me to go. And she was not about to show me any mercy whatsoever. To a nine-year-old girl it must have seemed like there was only one valid reason not to go and that is that I didn’t really care about her.

Neve, I want you to know that you could not have been more wrong. Your decision to cut me out of your life back then destroyed me.

All I could do was apologize, and then she broke down and started to cry. Classic me, I didn’t want her to see me cry so I simply walked away. I think I got about 5 steps before I started balling.

From that point on everywhere I walked, everywhere I went, everything reminded me of her. We had already spent a day walking around the school yard recounting five years worth of memories. As I walked away, I tried to avoid groups of people not wanting anyone to see me cry. I turned the corner at the end of the school where the library was, which is also where I used to wait with her after school for her dad to pick her up.

Finally I just walked inside the school even though it was recess and everyone was supposed to be outside. The first two doors on the left side of the hall both led to our kindergarten class. The library was on the right. I stood in the second doorway looking into our kindergarten class which was now empty. In a corner of that room was the play area. The same wooden blocks and cardboard bricks were still there.

Looking into that classroom brought home to me just how much I hated going to school. I just stood in that doorway by myself crying. I never wanted to learn. All I ever wanted to do was find Neve and play house.

I made so much noise crying in the hallway that eventually the librarian came out of the library. She snuck up on me from behind and asked me what was wrong. I tried to answer her, but I couldn’t even speak. After trying unsuccessfully to get me to talk she asked if I wanted her to walk me to the office. I nodded, yes.

As we walked to the office, I remember a girl from our class came inside the door that was across from our grade 4 class. I don’t remember which girl it was, but I do remember her asking me if I was okay. I tried to reply to her too, but I couldn’t speak. I ended up walking right past her without answering and I felt bad about doing that.

When we got to the office, the office secretary tried getting out of me what was wrong. I still couldn’t talk. I was just crying too hard. The librarian and the office secretary talked about what may have happened to me. I had no cuts or scrapes. My clothing wasn’t ripped. It was obvious to both of them that I was not physically injured, but I was badly messed up. Finally the office secretary asked me if she should call home. I nodded, yes again.

Not long after that I remember my mother picking me up from school. The office secretary couldn’t say what was wrong with me. She didn’t know. But she did make the point that I was not physically injured, so it must be an emotional pain. On the car ride home my mom started asking me what was wrong. I finally had my voice back and all I could say was, “I don’t want to go back to that school next year.”

She kept prodding me to find out why, but I just kept repeating, “I don’t want to go back to that school next year.”

As we drove down Erin Mills Parkway, approaching the forest on the right at Britannia, she asked if someone touched me. That really, really, really pissed me off. Here’s my mother now thinking I’ve been molested. I went off on her, screaming like I never have before.

“No, it’s nothing like that! I just don’t want to go back to that school anymore!”

Both my parents spent much of that summer thinking I had been molested, and they wouldn’t let the subject drop. I don’t believe I ever told them what really happened, but they really did not want me to drop French immersion. They thought it would be good for my future.

I also suspect they didn’t want to have to invest the time and effort to transfer me out of that school, fill out forms, and get school records transferred over, especially if it would be less effort for them to talk me out of my decision. It was only the fact that I spent much of that summer crying, from the time I woke up until the time I went to bed, that they finally relented and transferred me out.

The next day in class Neve wouldn’t even talk to me. She ignored me like I didn’t exist. My best friend for years and now she was treating me like Suzy Merk.

I was devastated.

Then the school year ended.

Rumor has it that Neve went back to Vista the following September to visit the class, but if she was looking for me, I wasn't there.

The next year I started grade 5 at Settlers Green.

Needle in a Haystack

The summer after grade 4 was definitely the most miserable summer of my life. I couldn’t get Neve out of my mind. I missed her so much all I could think of was calling her to try and talk her out of her decision to cut me from her life completely.

I cracked open the Mississauga white pages and flipped through to Campbell. What I saw was unbelievable. There were pages of Campbells with literally hundreds of listings. I never would have thought there were that many Campbells in the world, much less one little city like Mississauga. I closed the phone book knowing full well I would never find her in that mess.

Next I tried knocking on the doors of all my classmates that lived in my area of Meadowvale. Jason Ashton was my next door neighbor. Eugenie Fitzgerald and Brian lived behind my house on Starfield Crescent. Remy Kaiserman lived at 2755 Windwood Drive. Across from Lake Wabukayne on Inlake Court lived Sammy Maltby. Larry who I had virtually no relationship with by then, lived on Bucklepost Cresent. Talking to Larry would have been pointless, but his kid sister Karen was in the same dance school as Neve, so I thought she more than anyone might know how I could reach her. I knocked on all their doors and talked to each in person.

I also knew where Robert Dykeman lived on Bonham Boulevard, but I elected to call him by phone. His house was just a bit too far of a walk from mine. I also talked to Cassandra Raponant on the phone. I looked up Holly Presley in the phone book (Holly was Neve's closest girlfriend by then), but her number seemed to be unlisted. I may have called other kids from our class, but I only remember talking to Dykeman and Raponant.

I asked each one of them the same questions. Do you know where Neve lived? Do you know her phone number? Do you know any sports she may have played, or how I can get a hold of her? They all gave me essentially the same answer. You knew her better than anyone. If you don’t know we certainly don’t.

As time went on I got pretty desperate. I knew the phone book was all I had. Eventually I decided I didn’t care if I had to call every Campbell in the city, I was going to find her. I started at the first listing and worked my way through. After I had called maybe 20-30 listings, something occurred to me. Her dad was a school teacher and he was sure to have an unlisted number, because if he didn’t his students would prank call him.

I remember that, because one of our teachers at Vista Heights, Madame Fisher, had a listed number and one year she started getting prank calls. She was certain it was someone from our class doing it and she pleaded for whoever it was to stop. When it didn’t stop she informed the class that she had her number changed and unlisted.

Exasperated I closed the phone book. I did everything a ten-year-old could think of and I was out of ideas.

Then I had a thought. I opened the phone book to my name this time. There were exactly five listing for my last name that year. Out of those five listings, one was my place where I lived at home with my parents. One was my brother’s apartment and one was my sister’s apartment. That’s when I realized that if Neve really wanted to talk to me and she called only one of those listings, her odds of getting me or someone else in my family were 60%. I was again at her mercy. Not a happy place to be.

As time ticked by I started to give up hope. It hurt, but I could understand why she wouldn’t call. Sure I grew up with a violent father, an insane mother and a brother and sister that were both ten plus years older than me that I had virtually no relationship with.

But Neve had a mother that loved her, a father that loved her and a relationship with her brother that frankly, I was jealous of. Not only that, but now she was getting paid to go to ballet school, which was something she loved. I thought back to the time when the guys in our class picked flowers out of sympathy for her. I remember the easy time I had rallying almost every person in that class to swarm a guy on her behalf. That girl was adored. She was beautiful. I knew she would be forgetting about me pretty quick.

My Teenage Years

It took a long time to get over Neve, about two or three years, but eventually I did.

The summer before grade 8 my parents divorced and my father moved out. It was a big relief when he left. He was one of those nasty pricks that goes through life with a chip on their shoulder, looking for any and every excuse to argue or fight. I went from living in absolute fear, to living in absolute freedom overnight.

I put my new found liberty to good use in grade 8. I had two best friends in junior high, Shawn and Ivan.

I also had the sweetest girlfriend of my life that year. She was born Stephanie Lee Woods, on February 8th, 1976. She was originally from Danville, Quebec before she moved to Meadowvale. She was everything. I loved that girl.

Stephanie

Ivan lived with his father and older sister. His mother had past away. Ivan’s father was something of a workaholic and was seldom home. His father owned three businesses and one of those businesses was a bar. Just before the beer taxes went up in Ontario on January 1st, 1987, his father went out and bought an outrageous quantity of beer. Most of the beer was put in storage, but a truckload had to be brought to their home and stored there. Ivan’s basement was wall-to-wall cases of beer.

Since Ivan was the eldest son still living at home (his older brother Vlad had moved out), his father made him the man of the house and put him in charge of the beer. Ivan, Shawn and I drank virtually every day in grade 8. Ivan would bring three bottles of beer to school and Shawn and I would bring rolls of BreathSavers. We would go to the forest for lunch and crack them open.

One time a guy in our class named John Bradshaw got caught with a Mickey of vodka in his locker and got suspended. I still remember the day that the three of us were at the forest drinking Amstel at lunch and laughing ourselves silly that Bradshaw got caught with alcohol in his locker. Ivan was a straight ‘A’ student and nobody would have suspected he was bringing beer to school.

That was the happiest year of my life.

The summer after grade 8, things began to fall apart. Grade 8 was the last year of junior high and Shawn was headed for a different high school than we were.

Stephanie and her parents moved to a small town outside Barrie, Ontario. We tried to keep a long distance relationship going, but it slowly faded away.

An interesting thing happened around the time that Stephanie moved away. A girl on my street named Laura Hammond needed a dance partner. Her mother was a dance instructor and Laura’s competition dance partner was Larry, the same Larry that kissed Neve and went to school with us at Vista Heights. Larry and Laura were cousins.

For some reason Larry couldn’t team with Laura so she hoped I would take his place. I was in Laura’s kitchen talking to her mother. Laura went upstairs. Laura’s mom put me through all these tests, to check my rhythm and so on. I felt really uncomfortable, but I humored her at first. Then she wanted me to try some dance moves and she crossed my comfort level.

I told her flat out, there was no way she was going to turn me into a dancer. I apologized, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was determined. The memories of Neve trying to get me to join her ballet school came back that day. Then I wondered, “What is it about girls that they have this desire to turn me into a dancer?”

By the time I entered high school my mother was growing more insane by the day. She developed some kind of crazy variation of the Oedipus complex where she figured that with my dad gone I was her new boyfriend. I was big enough by then that she didn’t push it too far. I spent most of my time avoiding her like the plague. I was seldom home. I stayed with friends whenever I could, but I really needed to come up with a permanent way to get away from her.

I had other girlfriends after Stephanie moved including a French fox named Andrea Steen. Andrea lived in Meadowvale, but she moved to Brampton around age 15. It was while she was living in Brampton that we dated.

Dating Andrea was not fun. On one hand she was so incredibly hot it was exalting to be with her. The downside was that she knew just how hot she was and she flaunted it. We would go somewhere and she would be wearing a short skirt and a tube top. Every other car would be honking, guys would be shouting out of the windows as they drove by. She would wave back with me standing right there. It was not fun.

What made matters worse, was that I kept hearing about her ex-boyfriend. What I kept hearing had me thinking that relationship wasn’t completely over. I’m not sure if I was the guy she was cheating on him with, or if he was the guy she was cheating on me with. Either way, there was way too much background noise.

I heard all the horror stories about her ex-boyfriend. I was told he was a jealous freak. I heard about his violent temper, he was a bad guy, he didn’t treat her right. I heard that he got so jealous one time he took a baseball bat and destroyed his own car. I could picture that happening. This girl seemed to have no respect whatsoever for your feelings. She kept telling me she was done with him, but I didn’t want to be involved with someone that was committed to someone else, no matter how zany he may have been. It wasn’t my place to interfere. I ended things with Andrea.

Apparently she patched things up with her ex the next day.

At the end of grade 10, I decided to drop out of high school for a year and work, with the goal of getting out on my own before going back and finishing high school. My timetable got moved up shortly after I turned 16 when my mother asked me to move out. That’s when I moved in with my sister.

I was relieved to be living away from my mother. She really belonged in an institution for the criminally insane.

The Dream

Around the time of my 17th birthday, there was only one girl on my mind. It was Stephanie. She and I still wrote to each other infrequently. I had been out to visit her a few months before. She was really all I could think about at the time, which is why this dream I had was so very strange.

I’m not sure on the exact date, but Friday, February 2, 1990 is my best guess. I was home alone and drinking from a case of Budweiser. I was not drunk, but I was not in the right frame of mind either. That night I had a crazy dream.

I dreamt that a guy called and introduced himself on the phone as Neve’s brother.

“Do you remember Neve?”

Well of course I remembered her, but I said, “I don’t remember Neve ever having a brother.”

He told me that he used to go to school with us back at Vista Heights and that when he got picked on at school I used to stick up for him.

I’ve always prided myself on my ability to remember things and I remembered Neve well. But I didn’t remember her ever having a brother at that school, much less one that I stuck up for when he got picked on.

I did recount the story of Steven Pearson though. Steven was a red haired kid who was in our class. One day his parents had packed an onion with his lunch the way anyone else would get an apple or orange. Steven peeled the skin off that onion like it was an orange and bit into it like it was an apple. He ate that whole onion right in front of everyone and it grossed the guys in our class out.

Naturally Steven got teased for that. Steven was a pretty big boy though, so when he got teased he pushed back. Eventually things escalated to the point where he was getting bullied and it started getting ugly. I heard that some of the guys in our class were planning to gang up on him one day after lunch, so I had planned to make a stand for him.

I remember going to Steven’s house for lunch the day he was supposed to get lynched and we had lunch with his mother. Steven lived literally a stone’s throw away from Vista at the corner of either Sora Dr. and DeJong Dr. or Sora Dr. and Wareham Dr.

His mother was really worried about his tribulations at school. I felt bad for both of them. I grew up always feeling sorry for the hard luck cases in school, the outsiders, and the ones that didn’t fit in. I guess all those days I spent by myself lying in a bed at Mississauga General brought out my compassionate side.

When we walked back to school a little ganking squad was waiting for him. Someone called out to me not to get involved, but I had already made up my mind I would. I decided to take on Remi Kaiserman and the two of us got into a shoving match. Whatever friendship I had with Kaiserman evaporated that day. He wouldn’t have anything to do with me after that.

As much as I tried to stick up for Steven, it eventually became too much for him and his parents to handle. His parents transferred him to another school. It was sad to see him leave. It all happened because he ate an onion.

I wanted to believe this guy I was now talking to on the phone. I simply didn’t remember Neve having a brother, much less one that got picked on.

Then he told me that wasn’t important and changed the subject. The reason he was calling was that she was in the hospital. Now I was concerned.

“What happened? Did she get into a car accident?”

He said, "No. It's nothing like that. She’s depressed."

Depressed? At this point I knew I was dreaming. People don’t go to the hospital when they’re depressed. They go to the hospital when they have real problems. The person on the phone argued back that depression was real, but I just couldn’t buy that. Here I was home alone. I had dropped out of high school. I was kicked out of the house and living with my sister. I’m sitting by myself drinking beer around the time of my 17th birthday. What the hell, I was depressed. I would never think to go to the hospital.

At this point my memory of the conversation gets a little fuzzy. He mentions something about Neve slipping in and out of consciousness and calling out my name. How does being depressed make you go unconscious? Not only that, but I couldn’t believe that this girl was still thinking about me. I had not seen her or talked to her in almost 7 years.

I made the point, “If she’s been thinking about me all these years, why didn’t she call? I loved that girl. I spent years hoping she would call!”

Then he shot back and asked, “Why if you loved her didn’t you ever call her?”

That really made me upset, because I did try to call her. There were a zillion Campbells in the phone book. I couldn’t find her. There were only 5 listings for my name that year. I said, “You found it pretty easy to get a hold of me!”

As he kept talking I was starting to tune him out. The memories of Neve were coming back. I remembered the ballet ultimatum. I remembered that death stare she gave me when I said I wouldn’t go. I remember begging her not to cut me from her life. I remembered leaving Vista Heights on account of all that. I remembered all I tried to do to get a hold of her. It was all coming back and now someone is trying to talk me into visiting her in the hospital.

Anger and bitterness was rising to the surface, but at the same time, I did love her. I was leaning toward going, but that’s when he dropped a bomb on me.

He said, “By the way, I think I should warn you. She has a boyfriend now. He doesn’t treat her very well and my dad and I don’t care for this guy. We liked it much better when you two were friends.”

I got the sense from him telling me that, that he was trying to pay me a compliment. But I sure as hell didn’t take it as a compliment.

“She has a boyfriend?”

Considering I hadn’t seen Neve in almost seven years and I really hadn’t thought of her much in the previous three, I’m surprised how jealous that made me. I still had deep feelings for her. But I had just finished going through that crap with Andrea and I was in no mood to go through it again. I know he was only asking me to go visit her in the hospital. He was not asking me to sweep her off her feet, but still. I did not feel it was my place to interfere.

At that point in the conversation I had pieced together enough information to vent my thoughts. That’s when I went off on a rant that went something like this:

“So let me get this straight. You’re asking me to sober up, screw my head on straight and go visit some girl in the hospital that cut me out of her life for not taking ballet. I loved that girl. I begged her not to cut me out of her life and she showed me no mercy. I had nobody to console me when she did that, not even a pet goldfish. Yet here’s a girl with a mother that loves her, a father that loves her and a brother that loves her enough to call up some guy she hasn’t even talked to in 7 years. And to top it all off, she has a boyfriend now? What am I supposed to do, rush off to the hospital to console this girl so she can get all better again, so she can cut me out of her life again, so she can go running into the arms of another guy and leave me to pick up the pieces of my life again? Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do here?”

“I do know the history and I am very sorry for the way things turned out. But she really needs you now.”

I felt strongly that the guy on the phone was genuinely sympathetic to my position. I could tell he felt bad for me. But at the same time, he obviously loved his sister and if he thought he could do something to help her get better he would do anything for her.

At that point I said, “I’m sorry, but I think she needs to suffer through this one on her own. She just can’t blow people out of her life and expect them to come running back when she needs them.”

That’s when the guy told me, “I understand. Again, I’m sorry for what happened. I want you to know that I’ll always be grateful for you sticking up for me at school.”

“Again, I don’t remember Neve ever having a brother, much less one that I ever stuck up for at school.”

Then he finished by saying, “Well, it must be a shock for you to get a phone call like this out of the blue after all these years. Would you mind if I called you back in a day or two just to see if you would be willing to change your mind?”

When I thought back to how polite this guy had been during the entire conversation I thought that was completely reasonable. I closed by saying, “Sure. If you want to try back in a day or two, you’re welcome to. But I really don’t think I’ll change my mind.”

He said, “That’s all I can ask for.” We hung up the phone on a pleasant note.

The Morning After

The next morning I woke up with a sober mind. What a crazy dream! I was sick to my stomach, but this was no hangover. This was regret. I have never felt regret like that in my entire life. It was as if a little girl was drowning in a swimming pool and I could have easily saved her. Instead, I walked up to the edge of the water, spit on her and walked away. I was in tears. What had I done?

And this wasn’t just any little girl. This was the first girl that ever stole my heart. I remembered all the times that girl was there for me. I thought of all the times I was holed up in a hospital bed with asthma. There were the times I was in I.C.U. in oxygen tents. I had IVs sticking out of my arms. I got chicken pox when I was a student at Vista Heights.

Every time I was sick that girl was there for me. She would send notes home with my next door neighbor Jason Ashton. When I got back to school she was always there to welcome me back and ask me how I was. She was the one girl that made me feel loved when nobody else did. And the one time she needed me, I’m sitting at home drinking Budweiser and feeling sorry for myself when her brother calls.

All I could think was, “Of course I’ll go visit her in the hospital!”

What made matters worse, was this strange feeling I had that it was no dream.

I’ve had vivid dreams before, but never anything like that. And usually when I have a dream it’s visual. Sometimes there is a line or two of dialogue in a dream, but I don’t remember ever dreaming a telephone conversation before. As time ticked by that morning I felt more and more like that really happened.

Then like Mr. Scrooge waking up on Christmas Day I started thinking, “Maybe it’s not too late.” If that did happen, he said he would call back. Maybe I can still redeem myself. The next two days I never left the house. I grabbed the phone and put it on the coffee table in front of me. I sat on that couch 2 full days not going anywhere.

The phone never rang.

Then I thought about calling her family. It may be a bit of a shock for them to get a call from some guy after 7 years asking if she’s okay, but I have to know. I grabbed the phone book and opened it up to Campbell. When I saw all those listings I remembered. “Oh yeah, I tried this before and I couldn’t find her.”

As the days went by, the phone still never rang. I again thought it must have been a dream. Yet, the feeling it really happened kept gnawing at me.

I took a piece of paper and made a list. On one side I wrote a list of reasons why I thought it was a dream and on the other I wrote why I thought it really happened. Here’s what I wrote:

Why I think it happened:

1. I have not thought about Neve in years, why would I dream about her?
2. My dreams are always visual, not telephone conversations
3. It was too vivid to be just a dream

Why I thought it was a dream:

1. Neve never had a brother
2. She never had a brother, much less one I stuck up for at school
3. People don’t go to the hospital when they’re depressed
4. Neve was a girl that was adored, beautiful, and happy, with a family that loved her, being paid to take ballet. She had everything going for her. What could she possibly have to be depressed about?

For months I carried that piece of paper around in my pocket. On bus rides to work I would pull it out and start thinking. That dream gnawed at me a very long time.

I am certain of this date, Friday, February 9, 1990. I will remember that date forever. I was at a staff party at some hotel. I got drunk that day and blacked out. I woke up the next morning, face down on a hardwood floor. I wasn’t hung over, but my mouth was very dry. Other than that, I felt fine. That dream from the week before was the first thing that popped into my mind when I woke up. I was still sick with regret over that dream. It was the last time I ever drank alcohol.

Neve Did Have a Brother

I thought about Neve Campbell from sun-up to sun-down in the days that followed. Then I remembered. Neve did have a brother. I couldn’t remember his name, but I specifically remember the day she came up to me in class.

She said, “Oh M, I’m so happy!”

“Really? Why’s that Neve?”

“My brother is going to be coming to this school right away!” She went on to explain that her dad had made arrangements to transfer him in during the school year.

“Really, that’s terrific,” I said. Then I tried to pretend like I was sharing in her joy, but I really wasn’t.

That’s when she asked me, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Why do you ask?”

“M, I know when something is wrong. What’s wrong?”

“Well obviously. I know you love your brother. You talk about him all the time. I have this bad feeling if he starts coming here, you and I won’t be hanging out anymore.”

She could see I was jealous and she was very sweet about it. She said, “No. I’m sure my brother will have his own friends, we can still hang out. It will just be nice to have my big brother here at this school with me when I need him.”

It was reassuring to hear that, but I still had this bad feeling.

I don’t remember what year it was that Christian transferred into Vista Heights. I think it happened when Neve and I were in Grade 3, but we may have been in grade 4. One thing I am 100% certain of is that the year he transferred in, the school year had already started. When this memory came back I had to cross number one off my list of reasons I thought it was a dream. I rewrote it in the column of why I thought it was real.

The Soccer Wars

As I spent more time thinking in the weeks after my 17th birthday, other memories came back. I always remembered this soccer war that started up at school, but I could never remember what started it. Now it was coming back to me.

One day I was playing foot hockey with four guys in my class. Foot hockey is like soccer with a tennis ball. We used our coats for goal posts spaced about as far apart as a hockey net, with the wall of the school being one post and a coat being the other. We were on the tarmac near the side of the school where the library was. Neve came running up to me in a panic, “M, I need your help. My brother is getting picked on.”

I followed her to the other side of the school. The guys I was playing foot hockey with overheard, grabbed their coats and came too. When we got to the other side of the school, three guys were pushing her brother around. I grabbed the guy that seemed like he was doing the most damage, threw him to the ground, pinned him on his back and started punching him.

As I was hitting him he starting whining, “Oh you’re such a tough guy. Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

The fact that I had size on this guy didn’t make me feel sympathetic. He was ganging up with two of his buddies on Neve’s brother. But when he said that, I heard this girl behind me say, “Umm. I hope you know you’re getting beat up by a grade 3.” (It may have been grade 4, but I’m pretty sure I was in grade 3 at the time)

When she said that, it didn’t register right away. I had adrenaline going through me. As I thought about what she said I realized she was referring to me. I stopped hitting this kid just then and I turned and asked. “What grade is this guy in?”

“Grade 5”

At this point it’s a school yard fight, so we were surrounded in a ring of people. When everyone heard that answer they burst out laughing. I was looking down at this kid thinking that’s impossible! He might have been in grade 2, but there was no way he was in grade 5.

As this kid kept whining for me to get off him, I decided just to embarrass him in front of everyone. I started patting him on the cheeks and pinching his nose and otherwise making a fool out of him. That’s when one of his two friends said something that made me furious.

“5 against 3, that’s not exactly fair! Why don’t you let us go get another 2 guys and come back? Then we’ll finish this.” He was referring to the four guys I was playing foot hockey with that were there with me.

More than anything, hearing that drove me nuts.

“5 against 3 is not fair, but 3 against 1 is fair? How does that work? And anyway, it’s not 5 against 3. It’s 1 against 1. It’s me and this punk!”

That’s when all my anger boiled over and I just began pounding this kid in the head. That’s also when the teacher just happened along. When the teacher showed up I was the only one throwing punches, so naturally I was the only one that got dragged to the office.

It was classic of the way things happened for me at school. I could be walking along minding my own business and a group of guys would be burning the school to the ground. One guy would ask me to hold his matches while he and his friends went to the washroom.

“Don’t go anywhere, we’ll be right back”

“Oh okay”

Then I’d be standing there with matches in my hand while the school burned to ashes and a teacher happened along. I’d be dragged to the office, trying to explain myself the whole way.

“These guys just asked me to hold their matches. They said they’d be right back. Honest!”

Now here I am on the way to the principle’s office again.

“Three guys were beating up one guy and I tried to help him. Honest!”

There was no need for introductions when I landed in the principle’s office. I spent more time with Mr. Brian than I did with my own father growing up. He was pissed.

Sure I got into trouble a lot in school, but my transgressions were minor. I didn’t pay attention in class. I cracked jokes. I made paper airplanes and picked the most inappropriate times to test them out. I spent many a recess in detention and I wore out a lot of pencils writing lines.

I was a handful for our teachers to deal with, but I was not like the kids of today. I never dealt drugs or brought guns to school to shoot up school kids. I was simply the class clown that got pleasure from cracking jokes and making my classmates laugh. For that Mr. Brian and I spent a lot of time together.

This time I was in his office for fighting. I had upped the ante. He was very angry. He screamed at me louder that day than any other. He chewed me out for quite a while, but I stood there listening to him in perfect calm. For once I knew I had done the right thing. It didn’t bother me in the least to hear him yell at me.

When he finished tearing a strip off me, he paused. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

I simply told him the story. The brother of a girl in my class was being picked on. I saw three guys ganging up on him, so I jumped in to help.

My explanation only made Mr. Brian more furious.

“You are so full of crap! You really expect me to believe you’re some martyr, jumping in to save someone from overwhelming odds?” He kept yelling at me, outright calling me a liar to my face. He told me the teacher saw what happened and I was the only one throwing punches.

To be fair, I could picture what the teacher saw having only showed up at the end, so I could imagine how it looked from her point of view. But, I was still perfectly calm, because I knew what happened. I knew I did the right thing.

When Mr. Brian paused again I was still very relaxed. I simply said, “If you don’t believe me, go talk to Neve.”

That’s when Mr. Brian leapt out of his chair and got right in my face screaming.

“I am going to look into your story! And you better hope it checks out or so help me God,” and he dished out a multitude of threats on what would happen if it didn’t.

Before he left his office he did something that scared me. He said, “I want you to sit down and I don’t want you to go ANYWHERE until I get back!” Then he started to walk out the door of his office.

One thing about being in Mr. Brian’s office was that it was a point of honor that you were never allowed to sit in one of his chairs. That would be too comfortable. You always had to stand at attention when he berated you. So when he told me to sit down, I figured he would scold me for taking a chair. I decided instead to sit on the floor. I thought that’s what he wanted, because that would be more uncomfortable.

He saw me out of the corner of his eye sitting down as he was walking out the door and he stopped. He spun around in the doorway of his office and unloaded on me.

“Why the hell are you sitting down? Who the hell do you think you are? Who told you that you could sit?”

That scared me. This man had been yelling at me so loud and for so long, he had lost his mind.

I said, “You did.”

When I said that his voice jumped an octave and he really unleashed a torrent. He called me a liar again and then he asked, “When did I tell you that you could do that?”

I said, “Just now.”

That answer just took his outrage to another new level. At that point he took a step back from the office doorway, so that now he was completely outside the office and I couldn’t see him because he was on the other side of a wall. I could however see the office secretary who was sitting at her desk.

That’s when he turned to the secretary and yelled, “Did I tell him he could sit down!?”

The secretary seemed startled that he would yell a question at her. She yelled back at him with a little anger of her own and answered, “Yes! You did!”

At that point there was complete silence. A few seconds later I heard the sound of Mr. Brian’s footsteps as he left the office.

I’m not sure at that point who he talked to when he left the office. I assume that he talked to Neve and/or Christian. He was gone for a while.

When he came back to his office he was a changed man.

He told me I could stand up and take a seat in one of his chairs! All of a sudden I felt like a dignitary. Nobody ever got to sit in Mr. Brian’s chairs. He told me that he looked into my story and it turns out that it did happen exactly as I said. He apologized for calling me a liar.

I don’t think he apologized for the sitting down thing. In fact, I don’t think he mentioned that at all. But you could tell he had his tail between his legs over that, because he embarrassed himself.

This moment marked the TSN turning point in my relationship with Mr. Brian. It was the first time he talked to me as a person without yelling. It was the first time he reasoned with me. After all the times I had been in his office, it was the first time I felt he actually had respect for me. From that day on, whenever I landed in his office, he was always very reasonable.

He explained that he could not tolerate fighting on the school grounds and he had to lay down the law to ensure that didn’t happen anymore. Then he did something that blew me away. He let me go back to class without being punished! Considering I beat on that kid pretty good, I was amazed to be getting off scot-free.

When I got back to class, Neve was concerned that she had gotten me into trouble. I was happy to tell her that I got into no trouble at all. The bigger concern now was what to do about her brother. I knew a little something about the minds of bullies. When someone’s sister runs for help, it’s like an invitation for more of the same. I knew those guys would want to get her brother back.

A group of us were in class talking about what we could do. I’m not sure who came up with this idea, but I think it was Remi Kaiserman. The idea was to challenge those three guys, plus whoever they could get from their class, to a game of soccer. Sure there would be a soccer ball on the field. And yeah, I supposed we would be kicking it around and trying to score. In reality though, it was just an excuse to fight those three guys. When any of those three guys went for the ball, we planned to take the body. I think it was Kaiserman’s idea, because he was the one who brought the ball.

They went for the idea and the soccer wars began.

On the first day we played, some scuffles broke out. Whenever any of those three guys went for the ball, we lined them up and threw body checks. We had some big guys in our class too. There was Robert Dykeman, Remi Kaiserman, Gerard Real, and myself. This was war. It didn’t take long before the guys on the other team realized the soccer ball was only a distraction. The teachers broke it all up that first day.

The second day, those three guys were eager to play again. They found a few friends that had a little more size and we went at it once more. The shoving started and it wasn’t long before the teachers broke it up again.

The afternoon after the second day of the soccer war, I had an idea. This soccer war couldn’t go on forever, so I had manipulative scheme for how to end it. The idea was that the next time we played and fights started to break out, Neve’s brother would jump in on behalf of those guys that were giving him grief and stick up for them. I figured if he did that, these guys might have some sympathy for him and leave him alone. We all agreed to try that the next time we played soccer.

On the third day, Kaiserman rolled out the soccer ball and the fun began. I saw one of those three kids go for the ball and I lined him up. It was that little punk I had pinned to the ground and beat on earlier in the week. Considering we all knew this was war and not soccer, I’m surprised that kid had his head down as he went for the ball. He didn’t see me at all. I lined him up from a mile away and at full tilt I drove him on his ass.

When I did that, Neve’s brother came running over to defend him.

“Hey M, let him go. There’s no need for that. Come on.”

But it was not to be. The kid looked up and said “Shut up. I don’t need your help.”

Then the little punk got up and came at me. I was sick to my stomach for a few reasons. He obviously saw through that chivalry crap and I worried that I was only making matters worse for Neve’s brother. Worse still, now I have this punk, about half my size thinking he has some kind of moral authority to fight me back because I picked a fight with him.

Growing up I never started fights. Often I stuck up for people that were picked on. Often people misjudged me and thought I was wimpier than I looked and picked fights with me, but I never started fights. Especially with gimps half my size. Now I had done both and I didn’t feel good about that.

That little punk came at me like a moth to the flame. Instantly I had the upper hand and was beating on him. One of the guys from his team tried to jump in and save him, but Kaiserman grabbed that guy and made short work of him. The teachers broke up the fighting again and this being the third time, the teachers had enough. Four of us ended up at the principle’s office. Kaiserman and I stood outside in the hall while the two kids from the other team talked to the principle first.

When those two kids left the office, Kaiserman and I went in. Mr. Brian was very calm and reasonable as we entered.

“M, are you here again? That’s interesting. It seems you were just in here a few days ago. Why was it that you were here? Oh, I remember. It was for fighting. I think we had a talk about that and I told you I would not tolerate fighting. So what brings you by today?”

“Fighting”

Thank God I went to grade school in the 70s. If I was a grade school student in this day and age I would have been diagnosed with ADHD and pumped full of pills. I would be so drugged up in class I’d spend my days slobbering all over myself.

In spite of it all, Mr. Brian kept his cool. He politely explained that Kaiserman and I were getting one week of detention. In addition, Kaiserman was told he was not allowed to bring his soccer ball to school anymore. The principle went over the PA system and announced that playing soccer on the school grounds was banned permanently. And he topped that off by giving me the most dreaded punishment of all.

He phoned home.

The belt was waiting for me when I got home.

Even though it hurt to sit for many days after, much good came of that experience. It was gratifying to see all the guys in our class band together around a girl we all adored. Even Kaiserman and I, who were at odds because of the Steven Pearson thing, buried the hatchet for a time. For me personally, I was glad Mr. Brian was no longer screaming at me when I was sent to his office. There was always respect between us from that point on.

Another thing this experience did was make me remember. And even though I didn’t remember it the night Christian called me, I remember it now. Neve did have a brother. I did stick up for him at school. I pulled the list out of my pocket and moved that one into the column of why I think it was not a dream. I really felt like crap.

On the Run

It is true what they say. You really don’t know someone until you live with them. This saying best sums up my sentiment toward my sister.

My sister is 10 years older than me. She moved away from home when I was about five or six. I don’t have many memories of her living at home. After she moved out I would visit her sometimes, but we were never very close.

At 16 when I moved away from my mother I went to live with her. It worked out well in one respect. She worked as a flight attendant and would often be out of the country for days or weeks at a time.

My opinion of my sister can be best summed up by describing her favorite comment and her favorite pastime.

My sister would often make the comment, “No, I’m not racist. I feel everybody should own one.” The meaning of that being, everybody should own a black slave.

Her favorite pastime on weekends would be to make breakfast and then watch television. There were a lot of famines in Africa in 1989 and 1990. The famine that was getting the most attention in 1990 was going on in Ethiopia. Relief agencies had many pledge drives to raise money for food to send over there. They would air the most disturbing video of starving children, looking like concentration camp victims. These kids would be just skin and bones, with hollow looks in their eyes and flies buzzing around their heads. My sister would eat cereal, watch that and laugh hysterically.

This was not so much a revelation for me as it was a confirmation. Growing up I always knew my family was not as wholesome as the Cleavers. And although I wanted to believe I was the sane one growing up in their midst, I could no longer deny that they were rubbing off on me.

I stewed over that dream for eight months in 1990, between February and September, before I finally cracked. Eating cereal and laughing while children die of starvation may sound cruel. But not visiting a girl in the hospital when asked was for me, just as bad.

On September 29, 1990, I got together with my best friend at the time, Mark Gregory, and he gave me a ride to the Greyhound Bus Terminal. I was 17-years-old. I said goodbye to him and never looked back. I have not been back to Mississauga. I have been estranged from my family ever since.

Welcome to Winnipeg

I arrived in Winnipeg on October 2, 1990. It was a Tuesday. I had the clothes I was wearing and a few hundred dollars. Within a few weeks I got a job. It was part-time working in a hotel.

I also found a place to live. It was a room in a rooming house. A rooming house has shared kitchen and bathrooms, and very cheap rent. Having a job and a place to live gave me the perfect opportunity to finish high school. I enrolled at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute and started there in January of 1991.

The rooming house I moved into had some real characters living there. Most of them were on welfare, but there were a few with jobs as well. Many of my roommates had mental illnesses. Ronald Bruce Clay had schizophrenia. Tim Anthony had dysthymia, which is a mild form of chronic depression. Mark Proznik had manic depression and there were a few others with depression.

As if that weren’t enough, the place I moved into was right across the street from the Health Sciences Center, which is Winnipeg’s largest General Hospital. The house itself was one block over from the Adult Mental Health building, which as I learned, is where people who are depressed go for treatment.

I was no longer carrying that piece of paper in my pocket, the one that listed the reasons for why I thought my dream was real or not. However, I still remembered reason number 3 of why I thought it was just a dream.

Whatever ignorance I had about mental illness and depression was completely wiped clean living in that house. It was as if God himself took me by the scruff of the neck and immersed me in it. Exactly one year later I learned that people really do go to the hospital when they are depressed.

As shocked as I was to learn that, my stubbornness remained. I thought about Neve a lot back then. I still remembered her being a very happy girl when we played together as kids. She was getting paid to take ballet, which she loved. She had everything going for her. I desperately wanted to believe that she could not possibly have any reason to be depressed.

A Day at the Beach

In the spring semester of high school, something interesting happened. I don’t know where I heard this, maybe it was on the radio, but somewhere I heard that there was an actor named Neve Campbell. This was in either the spring of 1992 or the spring of 1993.

Hearing that name got my attention. Right away I started wondering if that was the same girl I knew in grade school. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it had to be. Campbell is a common last name, but Neve? Neve is just way too unique. It had to be the same girl.

I thought about her a lot that week. This was only two years after I quit drinking and the memory of why I quit was still fresh in my mind.

I started to wonder if this would become a reoccurring nightmare that I would have to relive for the rest of my life. I relived the memories of her for years after grade 4. I relived them again after my 17th birthday. I relived them again a year later when I had my ignorance of depression and mental illness wiped clean. Now another year has gone by and I learn there is an actor by the same name. When will it end?

The same week I heard that, I was in geography class. Our geography teacher’s name was Mr. Shryer. He was up at the front of the class teaching a lesson.

I had a friend named Adam that sat on my left in that class. We were not close friends, I only knew him that one semester, but we did hang out together outside of school the odd time. He was one of the few people in high school I could relate to. Adam had a girlfriend in that class. Her name was Danielle.

I never felt very connected to the people I went to school with at Daniel McIntyre. Here I was a teenage runaway. I moved to Winnipeg from Mississauga, so that I had no family or friends when I arrived. I transferred into that school not knowing anyone. I’m living on my own. I’ve got a job to pay the bills. I’m just trying to graduate so that I can make something of my life. I didn’t complain or take things too seriously, but I was cognizant of what was going on in the real world outside of school.

My friend Adam was in a similar situation. He was living on his own. Both his parents had died. He moved to Winnipeg from rural Manitoba and transferred into that school not knowing anyone either. He was always positive and outgoing. You would never know he had all this adversity in his life unless he told you. He never complained about his problems either. He was just determined to make something of his life.

In fact, I took some comfort knowing that my situation wasn’t all that bad given that I made the choice to walk away from my family and his parents were taken from him. In a lot of ways he had it worse.

When Mr. Shryer finished teaching his lesson he gave us a homework assignment to work on and then he sat down.

As soon as the teacher sat down, Adam said, “finally.” Then he put his head down on his desk and started to go to sleep. I thought that was funny.

I’m sure we’ve all heard either a parent or a teacher give that, “Oh you’re such a bad student. What are you going to do with your life” speech.

When Adam did that, I jokingly said to him, “Oh Adam, you’re such a bad student. What are you going to do with your life?”

When I said that, he sat up in his chair. He turned to me. He looked me dead in the eyes and he said, “I’m going to be a big Hollywood movie star.”

I cracked up laughing when he said that. I thought he was just trying to be funny. But he just smiled at me with all the confidence in the world and put his head back down on his desk and went back to sleep.

Still laughing, I turned and looked at Danielle. She just smiled at me and looked away. At that point I stopped laughing and I felt really uncomfortable. I felt like I had somehow insulted him by not sharing in his optimism.

The next morning Danielle stopped by my house and we walked to school together. She lived on Bannatyne Avenue, just off Tecumseh St., which was one block over from my place on McDermot. As we were walking to school that morning I asked her, “What was all that stuff yesterday about Adam becoming a Hollywood movie star?”

I didn’t realize this, because I was living on my own and I didn’t own a television, but she told me that Adam had been on an episode of North of 60. North of 60 is a CBC show about life on a reserve. She went on to explain that he had been told by his agents, or someone, to go back to high school and graduate. They said it didn’t have to be pretty. He could just skim by with 50s if he had to, but they told him if he got his grade 12, they would guarantee him a future in acting.

All of a sudden it made sense. I went from thinking that he was just being funny to thinking that he had some kind of naïve optimism. Now I’m realizing that he already knows his career path is mapped out in advance. It made sense now why he was so serious when he said that.

When we got back to class I mentioned to Adam that Danielle had been filling me in on his career choice. I was quick to apologize for laughing in his face. He already knew the story about how I moved to Winnipeg from Ontario. I explained that I didn’t have a television and I didn’t watch movies so I had no idea what was going on in the world of entertainment. I just thought he was trying to be funny.

After we got that out of the way I said, “It’s an interesting coincidence that I should hear about you becoming an actor. I heard just this week that there is an actor named Neve Campbell. I’m pretty sure I went to school with her.”

He said, “Really? Where did you go to school with her?”

“Well, Toronto, where I’m from. Mississauga to be exact.”

At that point he looked at me and laughed. He said, “You’re full of shit. You couldn’t possibly know her. Neve Campbell is an American actor.”

“Are you sure?”

At that point Adam broke into this big song and dance about how he was this expert on all things Hollywood. He said he watches all the movies. He told me he reads all the magazines. He assured me that he was a foremost authority on the subject of Hollywood movies and actors and he was certain that Neve Campbell was an American actor.

I was inclined to believe him, but I was still skeptical.

“I don’t know. I mean sure, Campbell is a common last name. It’s right up there with Jones and Smith, but Neve? How many girls do you know named Neve? I’ve known one and it was this girl.”

But Adam was adamant. He said, “Put it out of your mind. It’s not the same girl.”

If anyone else on God’s green Earth had told me that Neve Campbell was an American actor and I couldn’t possibly know her, I never would have believed them. Neve is just too unique of a name for it not to have been the same girl.

But because it was Adam. And because I had so much respect for the guy. And because he seemed like he would be in a position to know. And because I didn’t own a television. And because I didn’t watch movies. And because there really was no internet back then for me to Google it and figure it out for myself, I believed him.

I was convinced Neve Campbell was an American actor. I couldn’t possibly know her.

The 1990s

Despite the belief Neve Campbell was an American Actor I still thought about my childhood friend during the 1990s.

In 1994, the rock band ‘Our Lady Peace’ released a song called Naveed. To this day, every time I hear that song it reminds me of her. Mostly because Naveed sounds like Nevie, which is what we used to call her before she bit my head off in class that day.



There he's on his knees again

Trying hard to understand

Why Nevie would let a young man, die

Convinced that he might break, he reaches for that phone

And then another day, has gone

OUR LADY PEACE - NAVEED (1994 - Sony Records)

There was also one memory of Neve that stayed with me even when all the other ones faded. It was my happiest memory of that girl. It came about that one day our teacher made arrangements for a guest speaker to come to our class and give a lecture. I remember he was some David Suzuki, environmentalist type guy from Africa.

When the teacher knew he was coming, she asked if anyone would volunteer to give a thank you speech on behalf of our class. Of course we were just kids. Nobody was going to volunteer for that and nobody did. So our teacher decided to have a draw and whoever’s name got picked from the hat would deliver this speech.

There were many times when I did not give the teacher my full undivided attention and this was one of those times. But, I did notice that the kids in our class were ripping squares of paper out of their ‘cahiers’ and writing their names down. So, I turned to the guy beside me and asked him if the teacher was having a draw.

“Oui,” he told me.

Then I asked him what the teacher was drawing for and he replied, “Une plaque de chocolat.”

(I’m pretty sure that kid was Brian and I still want to get him back for that!!)

Well anyway. Excited at the prospect of winning a chocolate bar I ripped half a page out of my cahier and wrote my name down in full using big block capital letters. Then I noticed as the teacher went around the room with her hat that all the other kids had written their initials on tiny scraps of paper and they were rolling them up into spit balls before dropping them in.

“Mon Dieu. Il y a beaucoup d'étudiants dans cette classe avec des allergies de chocolat,” I thought to myself.

I really felt sorry for them. It must be a terrible thing to go through life allergic to chocolate. I loved chocolate!

(Side Note: I found out after the draw that some of my classmates had even written other kid’s names, rather than their own, to get out of that speech)

So our teacher asked one of the students to pull a name and wouldn’t you know…she held up my half page at the front of the class. My name was written so big it was legible to the kids sitting at the back of the room.

I was excited. I was now wondering what I had won. Three musketeers bar? Snickers bar?

“Fantastique,” I said, “Qu'ai-je gagné?”

At this point the class erupted into laughter. They knew what I had won and all our poor teacher could do was shake her head and roll her eyes.

“De nouveau, pour ceux de nous dans la classe qui ne prêtions pas attention la première fois,” our teacher said, “J'expliquerai de nouveau pourquoi arrive-t-il que nous avions cela dessine.”

And then our teacher went on to explain that, because I won the draw, it would now be my responsibility to write and deliver a thank you speech to a guest speaker that would be giving a lecture to our class later on that week.

Now, I may have liked the attention of being class clown. It made me happy to crack jokes in class and bring laughter and smiles to my classmates. However, I was a very shy and nervous kid growing up. The idea of being the center of attention or standing up in front of the class and giving speeches was terrifying for me. I tried to convey this to our teacher as best I could at the time.

Unfortunately, our poor teacher who was at her wits end with me most days was not too sympathetic of my problem. And, with emphasis on the definitive she said, “Trop mauvais M, mais vous donnera ce discours de merci!”

So, I spent the rest of that class thinking about how I was going to get out of that speech. I ran the scenarios through my head: Fake an injury; call in sick from school. I was looking for an out.

When the school bell rang, Neve came up to me after class. She told me she had been thinking about that speech. Then she said, “M, I know you don’t want to give that speech, and to be honest, it wouldn’t be fair to the guest speaker for you to give a thank you speech if your heart’s not in it. So if you want, we can go to the teacher and we’ll tell her that I’ll do that speech for you.”

I was so grateful when she told me that.

“You would do that for me?” I asked.

“Of course I would,” she told me.

So I thanked her. Then we told the teacher and the teacher agreed that I was off the hook for that speech. (Note: It’s quite possible that our teacher was more relieved than I was that I would not be giving that speech)

I never forgot this, because this story said it all for who she was.

Here I am growing up in a world were everyone is looking out for themselves. Kids are willing to lie and trick others to get out of a speech. Kids are writing the names of their classmates on scraps of paper to get out of a speech. A school teacher is willing to provoke a train wreck to teach a lesson to a student that doesn’t pay attention. And I was just as selfish as any of them in the lengths I would have gone to in avoiding that responsibility.

Yet, here was a girl who, at that young age was so completely selfless that in the last few minutes of a class, she had already considered the feelings of everyone. She knew I was a shy and nervous kid that was terrified of speeches. She knew nobody in the class wanted to do it and saw what they were doing to get out of it. She recognized that the teacher was courting disaster by making the class clown responsible for a thank you speech. And she even considered the feelings of a guest speaker, who she had never met, didn’t know from a hole in the ground and would likely never see again in her life. But, she felt that this guest deserved to be properly thanked, for coming to our school and volunteering his time with our class. She took it upon herself to defuse an uncomfortable situation for all of us.

I was always grateful to her for that. And, not only for bailing me out of a speech that I would have been far too nervous as a kid to give. But, also for making me realize for the first time in my life that there are good people in the world.

Hollywood Ending

One day I was at home on my computer.

This was in 2002 or 2003. I was at the Apple Quick Time Movie Trailers website. I really don’t watch movies often, but I was bored. I figured I would check to see if there was anything interesting I might like to rent at the video store one day.

I came across a trailer that looked promising. It was a war movie and those are usually pretty good. The movie was Windtalkers, starring Nicolas Cage. When I watched the trailer I recognized his costar instantly. It was Adam from high school. The same guy I laughed at when he told me he was going to be a big Hollywood movie star.

It was inspiring to see that. Winnipeg can be a pretty depressing city at times. It is the murder capital of Canada. It is the car theft capital of Canada. The poorest federal riding in the Country is Winnipeg Center, which is where we lived and went to high school.

For every Adam that makes it big here, there are many more that throw up their hands and don’t even try. All you have to do is walk down Main St. from City hall, head north past Higgins Avenue, continue past the underpass, keep going past the Bell hotel and The Northern and look. This city is full of people who think their salvation can only come from the welfare office, or a social worker or a lottery ticket. Too many people here find their comfort from a rag soaked in paint thinner, tucked up under their sleeve. And any one of those people could have been him.

In the end it was not a handout or a social program that bred his success story. It was the old cliché, hard work and perseverance, exploiting the opportunities that present themselves.

It was nice to see that Adam got the last laugh.

Not only that, but he must have known what he was talking about when he told me Neve Campbell was an American actor and I could not possibly know her.

I Thought it was Spelled Nev

November 2007.

I do not remember the exact day, but that is when it happened. I was at home on the computer. I was checking my e-mail. Microsoft had changed the format of hotmail so that instead of getting your e-mail by default, you get entertainment news by default. I never figured out how to change that, so I just left it.

When I signed in, I saw an article about an actor. I don’t remember what the article was about, but the name in the title got my attention. It read: Neve Campbell.

I am not sure if it is because Adam told me this or if I assumed this on my own. It is likely that I just assumed this on my own. Somehow I got it into my head that because Neve Campbell was an American actor, she must spell her name NEV. I would have thought nothing about it since I knew she was an American, but what I saw on my monitor that day was spelled NEVE.

I knew for a fact that the girl I went to grade school with spelled her name NEVE, because we used to exchange notes. That and I could picture it spelled out on that one pink heart Valentine’s Day card that I kept hidden in the bottom drawer of my parents room after my mom had pitched out all my other notes from her.

Seeing that on my monitor sent a chill up my spine.

When I clicked on the link, the first four words of the article read, “Canadian Actor Neve Campbell.”

At that point my heart was beating pretty fast. It was two months before my 35th birthday. I had not seen this girl since I was 10. Not wanting to panic, I thought maybe it’s still possible that it is a different girl. There are 32 million people in Canada after all.

I typed Neve Campbell Mississauga into the Google search engine. The first hit that came up read, “Canadian Actor Neve Campbell, whose father was a high school teacher in Lorne Park, Mississauga…” I always remembered Mr. Campbell was a school teacher, but I did not remember him being a high school teacher. Now I was all but certain it was her. A picture would confirm it.

Next I looked for a photo gallery. When I found one I was blown away. The fact that I had not seen that girl in 25 years made absolutely no difference. She has not changed a bit. I recognized her instantly. She looks every bit the same now as I remembered her back in grade school.

It was like waking up from a coma. Sure, I haven’t owned a television since I was 16. Sure, I haven’t seen anything in theater since Jerry Maguire in 1997. But how could I not figure that out after all these years?

It was nice to see her for sure and if I was smart I would have left it at that. But like a curious cat, I just had to dig. I turned to YouTube to see what clips there were of her and I was shocked by what I saw. Seeing her on different interviews really brought back memories. Good memories came back at first. Then all the bad ones followed close behind.

I’ve thought about that girl a lot in the last 5 months. Virtually all of what I can remember has come back now. Most of these memories are the same ones that have been popping up over and over during the course of my life.

It has been over 18 years now since I quit drinking. I’ve been told that my memory is astounding. While that is a nice compliment, I think my memory is more of a curse. There are many things I wish I could forget.

Somewhere along the line, I read something about her teenage years. It talked about her being bullied in high school. It painted a pretty bleak picture. Here I am at the age of 35, just now realizing that she did in fact have reasons to be depressed around the time of my 17th birthday. I am all but convinced now that my dream was no dream at all. The final nail has been hammered into my coffin.

I know at the time I had all the right excuses for not going to visit her in the hospital. She had a boyfriend. She cut me out of her life. I thought it was a dream.

Those are all just excuses though, and I know it. Christian dealt me the perfect opportunity to rewrite that sad ending and just like I did with Suzy Merk, I pissed it to the wind.

The truth is, you hurt me Neve and I wanted to hurt you back. It was spite. I screwed up and when I realized it the next day, there was no way to contact you and take it back.

I am so very sorry.

My Three Reasons for Creating this Blog

There are three reasons I decided to post this, first and foremost, regret.

There are many things I have come to regret over my life.

I regret spying on Merk in the first grade and I regret not accepting Merk’s forgiveness the day she finally offered it. I regret my fashion statement on skating day. I regret joining in a chorus of Samuel on the day Maltby hit the stop sign. I regret that there was no internet back in the day and no Facebook so that I could contact Neve and deal with things before all this time had past. I also regret Maltby was not there with me at Larry’s house the day we worked on that project. That scene really would have been better with popcorn.

Those regrets are minor, though, compared to the regrets I have concerning Neve Campbell.

I truly regret that at the same time a nine-year-old girl spent the dying days of grade 4 pouring her soul out to me in an effort to show me how much I meant to her, I put just as much effort into running away and hiding from her the fact that she was killing me inside. It may not have changed anything, but Neve I feel you deserved to know just how much I cared about you back then.

However, there is nothing I regret more in this life than not visiting a friend in the hospital when I was asked to. I have regretted that since the day after it happened and it is something that I will never forget either.

Every time I meet up with friends at the bar, or go to a barbeque or go anywhere that people are drinking someone always takes notice and asks the same question, “Why don’t you drink?” Every time someone asks, I give the same answer, “Personal choice.” But in the back of my mind I relive what I did and I seem destined to relive that one for the rest of my life.

It would have been nice to bump into her one day, so I could get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness on account of that. Now that I know what a charmed life she is living, I can put the hope of that ever happening out of my mind.

I am so very sorry.

In spite of all my regrets, let me say this. If I live to the ripe old age of a billion and a half, I will never regret my decision not to join her ballet school. Every interview I’ve seen her in where she talks about her many injuries and the back stabbing culture that exists in the world of dance, it only reinforces the fact that I made the right choice. I do, however, wish I had a crystal ball back then so I could have shown her the future that lay ahead. I loved that girl, and although she hurt me, I would never have wanted her to endure the pain she brought upon herself.

Anger

My second reason for posting this is anger.

When I finally joined the world of the living and clued into the fact that Neve is still alive and doing well, the temptation was to contact her. Then I noticed she is married. Her celebrity status already makes her a target for every nut in the world and I did not want to contribute to her frustrations. Besides, the memories that came back were painful ones. There is no point in us both reliving them, so why drudge them up?

If she is happy with her life, I prefer to remain forgotten.

Then in February 2008, I noticed an account on Facebook of a woman that knows her well. I figured the polite thing to do would be to contact this woman instead. Surely she would remember me, and then I could just hand my contact information to her. I figured this woman would exercise discretion and do her due diligence before ever mentioning me to Neve. After all, Neve has her own account on Facebook, there was no need to go through her.

I have no idea what compelled this woman to be so rude and insulting before blowing me off like garbage. All I asked her for was some advice on what would be appropriate under the circumstances. She fired back a reply that said ‘my memory may be fantasy or it may be real. It matters not.’

Considering how much effort I put into showing courtesy that was very insulting. My memory is a fantasy is it?

I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. I’ve never experimented with drugs, not even a single puff of marijuana. I quit drinking in February of 1990, and haven’t touched alcohol in over 18 years. Not even those chocolate liquors they have around Christmas. I have not owned a television since I was 16 and I really don’t watch movies very often, so my memory is not influenced by daytime soap operas or Hollywood storylines.

And even if you strip all my memories away, the facts of my life remain. I quit Vista Heights the same year Neve did. Why did that happen? It was not because I got a scholarship to attend private school. I transferred from one public school to another, Vista Heights Public School to Settlers Green Public School. I didn’t switch because I moved. I lived in the same house on Windwood Drive from age 4 to age 16. It was not because my parents wanted me to switch, in fact I had to beg them to transfer out, and they didn’t want to do it. It was not because I got picked on at school like Steven Pearson. There were only two kids in our class that could stand up to me in a fight and only one could take me for sure, Robert Dykeman, and he was one of my two closest guy friends in that class.

What I remember, I remember well. My memory is no fantasy.

A fantasy would be….

One night I was laying in bed wearing my sexiest pair of Scooby Doo jammy-jams, a licorice pipe was suavely dangling between my lips. I heard a noise so I went to investigate. When I pushed the curtains out of the way, there was Neve smiling at me through my bedroom window. She was wearing only the bottom half of her Wonder Woman underoos.

I opened the window and she threw her arms around my neck. I carried her to bed and we snuggled up under a blanket. We fell sound asleep.

The next morning my alarm didn’t go off. We were running late so we decided to shower together quickly to save time, before jumping on the transit bus to grade school. Then we ….

That is a fantasy!

My best friend from childhood cut me out of her life, because I wouldn’t join her ballet school is not a fantasy. That is my most painful childhood memory relived.

Assuming that woman is right though. Assuming my memory is just a fantasy, and it really does matter not, then I guess no harm can possibly come from me posting said memories to the web for all to read.

Setting the Record Straight

My third reason for writing this is to set the record straight.

I have done some reading on the subject of Neve growing up. Most of what I have read was gleaned from the web. There are two unauthorized biographies out there. I’ve read only the first chapter of the one by Elina Furman and I have not seen the other one.

These biographies, being unauthorized, are written by authors that probably don’t know her from a hole in the ground. The individual facts may have been taken from things she said in interviews, so I assume they are true. I do not remember any of our teachers selling cookies on Valentine’s Day though. Maybe I was sick from school that day, or maybe I just don’t remember, but I have a hard time believing I missed Neve on a Valentine’s Day.

What troubles me most is reading all this ‘woe is me’ bullshit. Everything out there seems to portray this girl as someone nobody loved, nobody cared about, and she was an ugly duckling. Neve Campbell was an ugly duckling is about as true as Hillary Clinton dodging sniper fire in Bosnia.

I still remember the day our teacher made a big deal in front of the class about Neve being in a production of the Nutcracker. I never saw that, but I assume she was not on stage with a bag over her head. Ugly girls on a stage are not good for ticket sales even in a country as polite as Canada.

I cannot understand why there seems to be this vested interest in describing her childhood as completely miserable. Listening to this girl’s early years portrayed as some absolutely perfect childhood tragedy is not just upsetting, it is personally insulting. And when I combine that with the fact that this woman I e-mailed in February 2008 said, ‘Neve doesn’t remember any of it’ I cannot help but think, “Why am I not surprised?”

Because if Neve did remember me she would have to admit that someone did love her, that someone did care about her, that someone did go to bat for her when bad things happened in school and no she was never an ugly duckling. That girl was beautiful, with a pretty face and the perfect body of a ballerina.

I was not the only one noticing either. I vividly remember Dykeman commenting that if she looks like this now, imagine when she turns 18. I vividly remember Maltby commenting that she was playboy material. There was a guy in our class that was almost prepared to die a horrible death rather than let go of a picture of our class vixen. All of that happened as the result of the fiasco on picture day.

And Neve was not the only one getting her little heart broken. She was breaking hearts just as bad. How many ten-year-old boys have been so heart broken over a girl they dropped French Immersion and transferred out of grade school? Not many I bet.

And Neve was not the only one on the outside looking in, wishing she could hang with the cool kids. There were also people who were a part of Neve’s life that wanted to remain a part of her life, but she hauled off and blew them out of her world no mercy. She was the one throwing up barriers and driving people away.

She was relentless when she did it too. She drove people out until there was nobody left, until she was in a hospital alone and depressed. Her brother is calling people on her behalf to come visit her and they wouldn’t even come. If she had some sad times in her teenage years, she can’t blame the world.

I loved you Neve. I wanted to be there!

The Content is Entered

I finished entering all the content today. I’ll be editing the content over the next few weeks and maybe adding some hyperlinks.

This blog

On Wednesday, March 26, 2008, I began writing out my lifetime of memories as they relate to an old school friend. She and I were classmates from kindergarten to grade 4. We were enrolled in a French Immersion program at Vista Heights Public School in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, between 1978 and 1983.

We were good friends back in the day. I remember her vividly. Her fingerprints are all over my life in ways both good and bad.

I’ve thought about her a lot over the years and although there were times in my life when I wanted to contact her, finding someone with such a common last name seemed impossible. Only recently, November 2007, I realized that my childhood friend has not exactly been hiding. It turns out she is something of a celebrity.

Originally I thought this project might take months. It has been 9 days now and already I am about half finished.

On Thursday, May 1st, 2008, I plan to post the full story.