Tunesday : I Want to Break Free

I Want to Break Free

(Deacon, J / May, B) Performed by Queen

I want to break free
I want to break free
I want to break free from your lies
You're so self satisfied I don't need you
I've got to break free
God knows, God knows I want to break free.

I've fallen in love
I've fallen in love for the first time
And this time I know it's for real
I've fallen in love, yeah
God knows, God knows I've fallen in love.

It's strange but it's true
I can't get over the way you love me like you do
But I have to be sure
When I walk out that door
Oh how I want to be free, baby
Oh how I want to be free,
Oh how I want to break free.

But life still goes on
I can't get used to, living without, living without,
Living without you by my side
I don't want to live alone, hey
God knows, got to make it on my own
So baby can't you see
I've got to break free.

I've got to break free
I want to break free, yeah
I want, I want, I want, I want to break free.

I want to take a minute and talk about Queen this week - a band that has grown in my esteem over the years. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, I pretty much thought of them as a novelty act. We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions was played at sporting events right from its release, and even if my friends and I did turn up the car radio to sing along if Bohemian Rhapsody came on, I obviously never thought of that as rock and roll, or even pop. And then when you add in the truly novelty-sounding songs - I Want to Ride My Bicycle, Fat Bottomed Girls, Radio Ga Ga - they felt easy to dismiss as non-serious. So, maybe it was because Queen was never really on my radar, but when Freddie Mercury ended up dying of AIDS and it came out publicly that he had been a gay man, I was actually surprised: having spent my life never wondering about who might be gay, I was just like, "Oh, okay, and the name 'Queen' - that must have gone right over my head. Cool." When I was looking up the lyrics for I Want to Break Free today, I noted the trivia that because the band appears in drag in this video, MTV refused to air it in the States at the time. Whaaaat? I never just sat around watching videos, so I can't be 100% sure that we were seeing this in Canada on our MuchMusic channel back then, but I'm so oblivious to what's gay and what's not gay that, even now, I don't really see the difference between Freddie Mercury wearing a dress and the guys from Monty Python having done the exact same thing. That's just standard British humour, innit? Ah, but we were so much more closeted back then, and I'll eventually get to the point of why I chose this song this week - other than it just being a great song (I said that Queen has grown on me).

Okay, so in my timeline, I left off with us buying the townhouse in Cambridge and ending our year of homelessness (Dave hates that I refer to us as having been homeless, but while we may not have actually been on the streets, we didn't have a home of our own, so...) Right from the start, Dave was willing to work long hours in order to prove himself a go-getter at Maple Leaf, and while I would have liked to have seen more of him, I was finally happy, settled into my own little center of domesticity (think Freddie Mercury running that vacuum). 

We bought that townhouse because: 1) We could afford it and liked that it was freehold with no condo fees; 2) It was not only halfway between both of our parents' homes but also had easy access to the highway and Dave's commute; and 3) It was only a year old and felt fresh and new. It was in a string of four attached townhomes (in a small area with maybe a dozen of these fourplexes, spread between a main road and a cul-de-sac; we were on the main road), and we were in the second unit from the end. Facing the four, the neighbours to our left had the best spot - with a large corner lot - and then there was us, and then set back from us, the next two units were of a Cape Cod style with a nice dormer window upstairs of each. Looking at our unit, the single garage was nearly flush with the face of the building, so when you entered our front door, the first thing you saw was a long, narrow hallway that ran beside what was the garage to your left. At the end of the hallway was a small family room (we had room for a loveseat and arm chair, a side table [but no coffee table], and a very small cabinet that held a small TV and VCR), and in the area beside that was room enough for a table and four chairs, and that led onto a tiny, but perfectly adequate, kitchen. Leading off the eating area were patio doors, and this led to a fairly useless back yard. You stepped down onto maybe four paving stones, and that was all that was level out there. The lawn around this "patio" dropped sharply to the right, where it met the neighbour's wall (as those units were offset back from us), and just a few steps beyond the pavers, the yard became a steep hill that ran up to the first unit of the cul-de-sac (this grass was never fun to mow and I daydreamed of installing terraced gardens). At first the yard wasn't even fenced, but we eventually made this into a nice space.

Returning to the house, the main floor also had a small but perfectly adequate powder room, and while the laundry room was in the basement, that large open space was a perfect place for Kennedy's toys - her Little Tykes playhouse was kept down there until the yard was fenced - and eventually, Dave would finish this space to make a larger area for watching our big TV. The upstairs had the full size bathroom, and in addition to two rather tiny bedrooms at the back, the master sat over the garage at the front - making this the biggest room in the house, which on the one hand felt like a waste of space, but on the other, made for a small bit of luxury. Before we even moved in, I painted that upstairs bathroom a deep burgundy - after a year without a home of my own, I was avid to leave my mark somewhere. (I won't get into the psychology of my mother having painted the family room in her last house the same deep burgundy.) We eventually put a chair rail and a half-wall of wallpaper along that long hallway on the main floor in order to visually break it up, but besides eventually painting the second small bedroom for Mallory before she was born (the people who owned the place before us had also had a baby girl, so Kennedy's room was already a pretty purplish blue; we  added a ladybug border in there for her), I think that's all the decorating we did in that place; everything was still new and fresh and nice as it was.

And so to the neighbours: The far right unit was owned by another young family, but in the first few months we were there, the father died suddenly and the mother used the insurance settlement to buy a house nearer to where our own next house would be (the young baby in this family would eventually be in Kennedy's class at school, and very briefly, be her boyfriend and date for grade eight grad). Two lesbians then moved in - one rather butch and one who mowed their grass in a bikini - and they served as foster parents for a string of troubled kids; I remember coming home one day and seeing a teenaged girl sitting half-in and half-out of her dormer window; smoking, glaring at me defiantly. Next to them (and us) was an old woman who lived alone for most of the time we were there - until her grown son was released from a psych ward and moved in. He was a silent, brooding presence - always doing some kind of seemingly pointless home improvement project (he spent weeks sanding and puttying their essentially new garage door before repainting it the same colour) - and it made me uncomfortable when he would glare at little Kennedy if she tried to wave or say hi to him. He would contribute to my desire to eventually move away - and as we later learned that he started threatening some of the neighbours (threatened to kill the little dog in the yard up the back hill from us), I was glad to have moved when we did. And to our left was a lovely Newfie family that we enjoyed spending time with.

The husband, Carlton, was an odd duck - a fast-talking little guy who was equally proud of being able to drink a 2-4 of beer in one day and buying his jeans in the boys' department of Sears. The wife, Karen, was a true salt-of-the-earth big-hearted chatterbox, and her presence definitely made up for an odd husband. Their older son, Stephen, was a husky hockey-player who, it seemed incongruously, was a respectful and thoughtful conversationalist; very lovely with Kennedy. The younger son, Brent, was an outgoing and friendly little boy - and just a wee bit effeminate. When they first showed us around their house, Brent said that although his bedroom was decorated in a hockey theme, he had wanted it to have posters of boys doing gymnastics (this got an eyeroll from both his parents as he told us). Brent was naturally flexible - was always doing the splits and flips around his yard - but his parents wouldn't allow him to take gymnastics; made him sign up for hockey instead. Once when a friend of theirs was visiting and Brent went into the splits on the lawn, this man said, "I told that boy once that he could prance around here all he likes, but the first time I catch him sitting down to piss, I'll knock him into next week." Carlton laughed his butt off at this - as he sat on a lawnchair in his garage, working on his 2-4 - but I couldn't imagine allowing anyone to speak about a kid of mine that way in front of me; let alone in front of him. Brent was always welcome in our house - he was sweet with Kennedy, a nice kid to be around, and there was zero judgment from us no matter what he said he was interested in; it's hard to remember that even in 1996, so many people still had this homophobic mindset and we weren't uninterested in helping someone who needed a space to break free. (And thinking about those days made me remember the image of a mustachioed Freddie Mercury in a dress - the meeting of the obscurely gay with a routine domesticity - and that led to this week's song choice.)

Carlton was a carpenter at some factory in town, and he said to us once that if we did the labour to build a fence between our yards, he'd supply the lumber from one of his contacts. I mentioned that at some point to Dad, and once when we were out - probably in London with Dave's parents - Dad and Ken came by without our knowing they were planning to, and having towed up one of Dad's tractors, they drove around the perimeter of our yard, drilling out postholes. We came home to all these holes around the yard - following their best guess as to where the property lines might be - and I think it was a long weekend, so Dave went the next day to buy the posts and the concrete to set them in. Within a week, Carlton had a load of fenceboards and two-by-fours delivered to our tiny driveway, and the next weekend, we built the fence with my brothers' help. We also built a small deck that first summer - it seemed obvious to me that we could run one off to the right of the patio stones and secure it to the brick wall of our neighbour's unit - and that fixed the unlevel uselessness of our yard. Kennedy's playhouse, castle, sandbox (can't say my mother wasn't keen to buy her things) all found a flattish area before the hill on which to sit, and once Kennedy really started walking and running around, she loved climbing it and rolling back down again. Often when we'd have people over and be sitting out on the deck, Carlton would climb onto something in his back yard in order to stand above the fenceline and join in our conversation. He always joked that we should install a shelf right there for him on our side so he'd have a place to rest his beer - and he said that enough times that he might not actually have been joking; said it enough times that Dave despaired he would never get the hint that we actually didn't want him there.

One evening, when we were sitting on the deck with Ken and Lolo, the mentally unstable son from the other side was cutting up bricks - for a cobblestone patio? - with a chop saw for a couple of hours; intruding on us with the intermittent whine of the saw and clouds of brick dust (despite him bizarrely working under a blue plastic tarp, the dust was incessant). The sky went dark with night and we figured he must be about to pack it in soon, but as the chop and whine and dust continued unabated, Dave eventually lost his patience and went over to the fence, asking if maybe it wasn't time to call it a night. The man's face twisted up with rage and he spat out, "I could stop now, but then I'd have to start again at six tomorrow morning. Is that what you want?"

 "Yes!" we all replied. So he stopped. I don't recall being disturbed by any commotion the next morning; perhaps it was but a passing mania.

That's about all I wanted to write about this week, but I did want to record that I still think of Brent sometimes. I wonder if he did grow up to be gay, and if he found the family support he should have expected. I ran into Karen and Brent at the mall some years later (when they told me about the neighbour threatening the little dog), and he was shy with me, but I noted his pierced ears and wondered if that meant he was finding enough space to express himself. We've come a long way since 1996 - lightyears since 1986 when I had a good friend come out to me - and in ways, it all feels like a different world to me now. I was so proud of that little home, so happy to be a settled family unit; yet we'd only live in that townhouse for a couple of years before I wanted more.