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: Punk History Canada Articles : : The Story : : Culture : : Arts and Literature : Excerpt from Destroy Canada :: Spunky Punkette Seeks Romance & Adventure :: By Stewart Black
Destroy Canada is a double "A" side book, with Stewart Black on one side, and Chris Walter on the other. Destroy Canada is scheduled to be released March 19, 2005.
Spunky Punkette Seeks Romance & Adventure
I hate it when people are always asking me why I left home when I was sixteen. I usually just say there's no law against it, but because people are so nosy they go on asking me what the real reason was, and if I don't think they'll take it back to some social worker or my mother, I tell them it's because I hated it at home. My mother is still going around telling all her friends and the people she works with at the glass factory, and everybody else that’ll listen to her story, that she doesn't understand why I left. I bet she does it with a shrug. She’ll tell them that she did her best to make it a happy home and act like she's the victim because she was, oh, such a good mother. But when you look at it, it was only a happy home for her.
I hated her food. There was lots of boiled cabbage and cheap beef or pork chops every night, and it was boring and made me feel heavy. Every time I got up from the table, I felt nailed down under that load of greasy food. And as for the vegetables... Yeah, I had the choice about whether or not I wanted to butter the cabbage, but that wasn't the point. I know I've got to eat vegetables or get sick, but I couldn’t stand the cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, five or six times a week or maybe those over-cooked peas, carrots and cauliflower boiled twenty-five minutes. Can you believe that? Twenty-five minutes! That's murdering the vitamins. So it's like food, but it's not food––it’s what’s left of food when the nutritious part has been boiled out, food that's been turned to shit even before the stomach and intestines had a chance to turn it to shit. That shit was on my plate every night, and there was no talk at the table but her nagging me to eat that shit.
I’d say, “Mom, I’m sick of eating these same things every night. Can I skip dinner just this once? Please?”
And she’d sigh and look up at the ceiling in disgust and roll her eyes around and then look back at me and say, “Valerie shut up and eat your cabbage and pork chops before you let them go cold.”
But the food wasn't shit to her because she liked it. Brad liked it too. He's her live in boyfriend. I would have preferred carrot sticks or celery sticks with a bit of mayonnaise to dip it in on the side, but there was no mayo, and one night when I asked for it, she said, “Valerie, we're not having bar food in this house."
I said, “How the hell am I supposed to know what's bar food and what's not? I'm only fourteen. I'm not the one who comes home half plastered every couple of weeks, am I?”
Then she got real mad and we had a fight because I said the word ‘hell’, and I said, “It doesn't matter because you say it often enough yourself.”
Then she looked at the ceiling again and muttered, “Heaven help me! Heaven help me!”
I ate the pork chops that night, just to shut her up, even though I hated them. Then I went to the toilet and stuck my finger down my throat and threw them up because they were making me feel so heavy and gross. Later when I was coming in from the porch, I overheard her saying to Brad that she wished she had the money to send me to a shrink because she heard me puke and was sure I was going bulimic. She thought I didn't hear, and I wanted to scream in her face, “I'm not crazy. It's just that your food is shit!”
But I didn’t, of course. I was so mad that I had to lock myself in my room and I couldn't think of anything else all night. I couldn't even sleep.
And how about the furniture in that house? I hated that too. All those blow torched end tables and bookends that look like antiques but aren't antiques? Fuck, I hate fake things. Fake things are for fake people. Every tabletop, counter or otherwise useful space was covered with those ugly wooden beavers. I think that Canadian patriotism is fine, but there are limits. My mother covered the kitchen with beaver wallpaper too. Not just pictures of beavers, but wouldn’t you know it, wooden beavers! My mother found wallpaper with a wooden beaver pattern!
The day after I threw up the pork chops, she and Brad came back from the mall with the new rolls of wallpaper and she said, “Valerie, we're going to wallpaper the kitchen. Do you think you could help?”
I said, “Yeah,” because it was something to do, and she never usually asked me to help with anything.
Brad was looking pretty smug with his new painters cap and carrying the rolls of paper and the paste. He didn't say much as usual because he never says much in front of her, except maybe, “Yes, dear.”
I thought that wallpapering over the old pattern and getting rid of the fuckin’ beavers was a great idea. If I had to eat cabbage, at least I wouldn't have to feel sick looking at wooden beavers on the wall, but when we unrolled the first roll, it was another pattern of wooden beavers! Only these were worse because they were bigger and had smiles on them and big eyes that bugged out as if they were looking at you.
I said, “There's no way I'm putting more beavers up. I'm sick of beavers. They're all over the house.”
And she said, “Now Valerie, you'll get used to them,” in a voice like she was teasing me. But she wasn't teasing, she was tormenting. I could tell by her sadistic tone.
“I hate the beavers,” I said. “Put the wallpaper up yourself,” and walked off.
But she said, “Valerie, you get back here this minute. Who do you think you are to talk to me in that tone of voice?”
I came back to the kitchen and said, “What do you mean? You were the one being sarcastic 'cause you know I hate beavers.”
“You're paranoid.”
“There you go talking as if I'm crazy again. Just like you did last night when you told Brad I should see a shrink because you think I'm going bulimic.”
She said, “How dare you snoop in on my conversations!”
I said, “Snoop? I heard it loud and clear when I came in the house from the porch. I’m not a snoop like you. I can't even have a normal phone life because if anybody calls me from school, you're listening in on the other line. You're the snoop, mother. I don't know what you're checking up on when you listen in on those phone calls. I don't have a boyfriend, I’m not pregnant, and I'm not crazy! I just hate pork chops. They make me feel heavy and sick! I told you that before and you didn't listen. You never listen!”
All this time Brad was at the sink, stirring the paste with an old bit of hockey stick and acting like this conversation wasn’t going on, and I hated him. Then he said, “Dear, forget her. Let's just get the wallpaper up.”
Mom didn’t listen to Brad, but went on to yell, “You little ingrate, you don't appreciate the price of a pork chop. Wait till you start working. Then you’ll know how much these things cost. And there's nothing wrong with the beavers. They make the house look pretty. Further, I’m not a snoop, and I'll tell you another thing Valerie. When you leave home you can decorate your house however you please, but don't tell me how to decorate mine!”
I yelled, “That's all right with me because you won’t be invited, and besides, I’m going to leave home when I’m sixteen and there is no law against it!” Then I added, “And I won’t ever buy a pork chop because I hate them! That’s all. I’m not saying they aren’t expensive!”
She laughed at me and said, “You’re not leaving home till you’re at least twenty, Valerie. So stop giving me this crap and get used to living with the beavers ‘cause that’s the way it’s going to be.”
Then I walked out of the room. She screamed, “Get the hell back in here. I haven’t finished talking to you!”
I came back even though I didn’t want to. She yelled some more about something that I can’t remember now and then she slapped me. I just ran out crying and I could hear Brad trying to calm her down by calling her ‘dear’ and trying to get her to focus on the wallpaper again.
Well that fight was bad enough, but it got worse. Much worse. She and Brad had a couple of rolls left over, so they did half a wall in the bathroom. I couldn't even sit on the crapper without those stupid wooden beavers staring back at me with their weird, lecherous smiles unless I closed my eyes and imagined that I was somewhere else.
And there was another thing that was bugging me. It was the sex. Not like I was getting any, I wasn't even fifteen, but it bugged me that she kept on joking by saying things like, “Valerie, you be in the house by nine, or else. Brad and I don't want you getting pregnant or something.”
I said nothing and tried hard not to make a face so she wouldn't see how fuckin’ humiliated I felt.
Shit, it wasn't like I had a boyfriend or anything. I just didn't want her joking about my sexuality. The teachers in sex education tell you at school that you shouldn't let anybody belittle you. That means that if you're a teenage girl, and a strange woman comes up to you on the street and says you’re a little slut for the clothes you wear, or a pervert says something, just give the asshole a piece of your mind and get the hell out of there. Why did I take this harassment from my family? Why do some people think the rules stop at home? Meanwhile she and Brad fucked in the back bedroom any time they felt like it, futon frame creaking in time to Elvis’s Love Me Tender blaring on the cassette deck.
Other things bugged me too. It wasn’t just cabbage, sex, beavers and bitching. Sometimes on the weekend when Brad was chilling out from his job working on the roads all day, he’d sit back in the living room chair with his can of beer in his hand listening to some shit like Elvis or the Beatles on the oldies radio station and say, “It ain't perfect, but sometimes on a quiet afternoon like this, this house is our own little bit of heaven.”
I wanted to scream! Yeah, it's perfect, perfect for who? The two of them had the food they liked, the decor they liked, the music they liked and their own little sex nest. And quiet? With Elvis blaring? Please, I like punk rock: the Pistols, Clash, and Ramones, because punk is the only music intelligent enough to come right out and say that there’s something fuckin’ wrong with this world!
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