Tunesday : Crazy Train

Crazy Train

(Osbourne, O/ Daisley, R/ Rhodes, R) Performed by Ozzy Osbourne

All aboard! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay

Crazy, but that's how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it's not too late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate

Mental wounds not healing
Life's a bitter shame

I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

Let's go!
I've listened to preachers
I've listened to fools
I've watched all the dropouts
Who make their own rules
One person conditioned to rule and control
The media sells it and you live the role

Mental wounds still screaming
Driving me insane

I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

I know that things are going wrong for me
You gotta listen to my words
Yeah

Heirs of a cold war
That's what we've become
Inheriting troubles I'm mentally numb
Crazy, I just cannot bear
I'm living with something' that just isn't fair

Mental wounds not healing
Who and what's to blame

I'm going off the rails on a crazy train
I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

Any outside observer (and I suppose I'm speaking directly to my girls this week) would think that my brother Ken is my best friend: he moved his family to the city where I live to be close to me -- eventually buying the house across the street -- and we spend all holidays and most Friday nights together. Ken might even make that statement himself, "My sister is my best friend", but what I hope to accomplish this week is to demonstrate what a strange relationship we've always had; one in which I'm pretty sure he doesn't realise we haven't always been friends at all. But to be clear, I chose that opening meme up there deliberately: in the chaos of our early childhood, we rode the crazy train together.

Some of my first memories involve cowering behind a built-in bar in the basement of our house in St. John with my brothers as my Dad stomped and raged at our mother up in the kitchen. This was pure terror -- we never knew if Dad would come storming down the stairs to find us and start yelling at the three of us, too -- and always, Ken served as a shield for me and Kyler; physically putting himself between us and the small opening to where we hid. Ken did get the worst of Dad's rages -- at five or six, he was expected to already know how to behave himself, how to be a man and keep me and Kyler out of trouble -- and it was also at five or six that Ken first packed up his hockey bag and regretfully informed me and Kyler that he just couldn't live in that house anymore; he was running away; the first of many times.

We moved to Ontario when Ken was ten, and within a few years, he was a hardcore delinquent. I've written about it some here and here and I don't want to rehash all that, but suffice it to say that for a long time, Ken was pushing me and Kyler around, stealing my money, breaking my stuff, and acting like no one I would willingly spend time with. It was also around this time that he started listening to heavy metal -- like Iron Maiden, AC/DC, and Black Sabbath -- and that stuff scared me. By the time Ozzy was biting the head off a bat, I had no idea who Ken was and why he thought that would be so cool; by now, he was on that crazy train alone.

As I've said before, Ken rarely went to his classes in grade nine at the public high school, so the next year, he was sent to the Catholic one with me. We had to take a school bus and Ken would sit at the rear with the other stoners because the hippy bus driver would let them smoke back there. After school one day, I was sitting with Cora on the bus, gabbing and giggling about whatever, and Ken walked down the aisle towards the back and his friends, and just before he sat down, he said very loudly, "I sure hope my little sister isn't pregnant. I haven't been seeing a lot of tampons around lately." I was fourteen and this was so bizarrely combative and humiliating and disrespectful that I wasn't even mad as the losers at the back (led by Ken) all did their best Beavis and Butthead impersonation: I simply hated him. He caused so much trouble -- now when Dad was raging at Mum it was about Ken -- and that seemed to make him smugly satisfied. One thing for sure: Ken was no longer on our side; me and Kyler were a wary team against all the dangers in our home, including Ken himself.

The following year -- partly because of Dad's ambition and partly to give Ken a new start -- we moved out to Alberta and things did get a little better: there was certainly less raging and Ken's presence didn't really affect me one way or another throughout grade ten. The next year, however, he started cutting school again and acting like a punk. I remember coming home one day to see Mum begging Ken to turn his life around: they were standing in the small foyer (blocking me from escaping up to my room; me feeling too awkward to just turn around and leave again), and as she collapsed on the stairs in sobs and wails, Ken crossed his arms and watched her dispassionately for a while before calmly walking out. Not long after this, Ken moved out -- and even today I don't know where he went (I think he moved in with his girlfriend in her mother's basement, but having grown up with the mantra If it was any of your goddamn business someone would have told you by now, I didn't ask then and I wouldn't ask now). 

I've listened to preachers

I've listened to fools

I've watched all the dropouts

Who make their own rules

Some time after this -- and I'm sure I've told this story before but can't find it -- Mum and Dad were out of town and Kyler and I had a bit of a party: actually, Kyler was having a loud and boozy party in the basement while Kasia and I were hanging out with our boyfriends; Kasia and Miles in my bed (where I'm pretty sure they were having sex), me and Bill in my parents' room, where we were definitely not. All of a sudden, Ken showed up and was banging on my parents' locked bedroom door, roaring that he had come for "his" furniture and demanding the keys to Dad's truck in order to move it all. I opened the door before he broke it down to tell him no way -- I didn't have permission to give him Dad's truck or the furniture -- but he pushed past me, sneered at Bill, and snatched the keys off Dad's dresser (where they were always left, as Ken would have known). He and a buddy then took his childhood twin bed and dresser out of the basement, drove it off wherever with the truck, and returned the vehicle without mishap. I had to tell Mum and Dad what happened after they got home -- leaving in how Ken rough-handled me to get the keys, leaving out the bit about the party and the boyfriends -- and, surprisingly, they were so weary from their relationship with my brother that even Dad simply shrugged and said, "Fine". 

The next time I saw Ken was some months later. Lethbridge was known for bush parties -- with bonfires and underage drinking down at the river bottom -- but I only ever went to one. As me and my friends were drinking and gabbing and giggling about whatever, a couple of shadows lurched out of the bushes, and as they got nearer to the light of the flames, I could see it was Ken and a friend as they stumbled and looked around, Ken saying, "Hey, hey, what have we here?" Not everyone at the party knew this was my brother, and there was a leery vibe as the guys I knew tried to figure out if these stoners were potentially dangerous. Ken was totally wasted, and when he saw me there, he grinned and slurred out, "Anyone who pops my little sister's cherry tonight has got me to answer to." This was just like being back on the school bus again: I was filled with more hatred than embarrassment and I threw my drink at him in disgust. Ken stomped back into the bushes: we had neither drugs nor easy chicks with us and he had a real party to find.

Not long after this, I heard that Ken was in some kind of trouble with the law (yes, yes: if it was any of my goddamn business someone would have told me about it, but I still overheard things and this had something to do with a stolen Snap-On Tools truck that Ken insisted was a misunderstanding). Not long after this, I heard that Ken had moved down to PEI; having the nerve to show up at our grandparents' house as though they would be excited to take him in. (To this day, I think he believes that they were excited; to this day, my mother's siblings resent her for allowing her teenaged son to become a burden on their aging parents.) Again, no one ever told me or Kyler directly what Ken was up to, and we didn't ask; for the next few years, it was like Ken didn't exist; had never been a member of our family.

Ken moved back to Lethbridge, and back into the house, not long after I turned twenty, and that's when I learned that he had been apprenticing as a sous-chef in Charlotteown at some big CN hotel and then got into bar management. It didn't take him long to get a job managing Who's on Third (a bar I never went to with my friends; we liked dance music and Ken's bar was all live rock bands and wet T-shirt contests), and as I went to university during the days and he worked late at nights, we hardly ever crossed paths. He was a pain to Kyler though: this was when Ken famously took a pair of Kyler's favourite sweat pants (that he would have had to buy for himself) and cut them jaggedly into shorts, unembarrassedly modelling them and bragging, "Look what I made for us". This was also the period during which Kyler rigged a stereo speaker outside Ken's window in order to wake him up early (after a late shift) with the smooth tones of Burl Ives singing A Little Bitty Tear. Within a few months, Mum and Dad announced that they were being transferred back to Ontario and Ken was livid: here he was, finally trying to get his life together, and our parents were abandoning him (in his fevered opinion). Before they moved, Ken had already moved out, going to Pincher Creek to manage the bar in a hotel where his good friend was the General Manager. I also decided not to make the move to Ontario (I was nearly 21 and had been looking for my own escape hatch for the longest time) and I went up to Edmonton to start my own adult life. I'm sure that after this, Kyler felt totally abandoned; like an only child.

I met Dave not long after moving to Edmonton, and before long, Ken had to come up to take some course on food safety (he briefly worked at a dairy) and he stayed with me. Ken asked me about this guy Dave and I remember part of what I said was something about how wonderfully close Dave's family was; that I wanted that kind of closeness to be a part of my life in the future. Ken was totally taken aback and told me that I had had that kind of closeness with my own family for my whole life; no siblings were closer than me and him. Um. Just no. Remember the harassment? The hatred? The years that he didn't live with us and I didn't even know where he was? Not looking to clear the air (then or ever again), I could only shrug noncommittally.

Crazy, but that's how it goes

Millions of people living as foes

Maybe it's not too late

To learn how to love

And forget how to hate

Ken and his girlfriend Mickaila moved to Edson (a couple hours away from me) where Ken was managing a bar again, and over the next couple of years, I think Dave and I went out to visit them twice; Ken came into Edmonton once? They did fly out to Ontario to come to our wedding, and when Mickaila left him, Ken stopped by our house as he made the trip to our parents' house, his tail between his legs, ready to take whatever advice Dad would be willing to give him on how to live like a man.

I next saw Ken when he was getting married himself -- when Kennedy was just a month old -- and within a few months, Dave and I decided it was time to move to Ontario and be near our families. For a few months, me and my brothers were all living at my parents' house -- which was very surreal after all the years apart -- but one-by-one, we all got our living arrangements sorted out and separated to three different, but nearby, cities. For a couple of years, we would get together at Mum and Dad's most weekends, but eventually, our parents decided to retire down in Nova Scotia.

By this time, Ken was a stationary engineer (as per Dad's advice), and when he got the opportunity to move to Nova Scotia himself, he jumped at it: suddenly, there was nothing more important to Ken than making up time with our parents. Even when Mum would act nutty and start stomping around and raging (a reversal of roles that my parents accepted as a strange sort of fairness, your turn Brenda), Ken said that his intent was to never oppose her: the image of Mum crumpled on the stairs crying had haunted Ken for years and he vowed to never be the cause of that again. The job in Nova Scotia didn't work out, so Ken and his wife moved to PEI, where Conor was eventually born. This was a four or five hour drive to our parents' house, and Ken and Laura made the trip often to show off their son. As my family also made the annual pilgrimage to Nova Scotia with our girls, we would stop in PEI along the way so we could all do the final push together.

Eventually, the PEI job didn't work out, and Ken moved his family to Moncton, where Ella was born. Still, it was a doable drive for Ken to visit Mum and Dad (better, really, without the ferry or toll bridge fees), and he visited often, and always at the same time as our own summer trips down. As must be obvious, the job market down East is lousy, and even though Ken and Laura both have education and professional designations, these were lean years for them. Laura would be on maternity leave while Ken worked; Ken laid off while Laura worked; Laura off; Ken off: soon, Ken started to worry about who he was going to get to look after his kids once they were both back at work (if he was lucky enough to find a full time job), and for the umpteenth time, I told Ken that if he found a way to move up near me, I'd watch his kids and that's one worry he'd never have again. They did find a way to move up (Ken getting a job at the hospital in Toronto, Laura at a Maple Leaf company in Guelph), and for the first time in 17 years (not counting the few months we were all camped in Mum and Dad's house at the same time), Ken and I lived in the same city. Something like seven years later, they moved in right across the street. Even though Conor and Ella are too old to need me to watch them anymore, I love that I'm right here if they want a ride to school or need to borrow some milk: this is the closeness that I always assumed other families had and that I always wanted.

So are we all friends now? Of course we are: childish squabbles are long behind us. But yet...I can totally get my back up if Ken wants to make generalisations about those years, about "our" unhappy childhood: he caused so much of the stress -- for our parents and for me and Kyler -- and then he was gone. Poof. It is no exaggeration to say that for years Ken didn't exist for me; that's probably why it's so easy for Kyler to now live as though none of us exist for him: he only engages with the rest of us when he feels like it, and that doesn't even make me mad; I get it, brother. There is a happy ending though: it is possible to go off the rails on a crazy train and walk your way back to normal. Whatever normal is.

I'm going off the rails on a crazy train

I'm going off the rails on a crazy train