Deni Ellis Bechard

My Favourite Crime


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Where the hell was my father? My shoulders hurt from sitting straight. The phone rang, and Mrs. Goodman got up.

      “Yes. Oh, yes. I see.” She looked at me. “Your father, he can’t make it.”

      “Can I talk to him?” I asked, but he’d already hung up.

      The evening dragged on. Eating properly was stressful and exhausting: not resting my elbows on the table, sustaining a respectable posture, limiting the rate of my consumption to that of the people around me, carefully portioning the food with fork and knife while resisting the impulse to sate my hunger by shovelling it all in.

      After dessert, Mrs. Goodman threw herself on the grenade: having heard I liked books, she asked me to read her poetry. She told me they’d had a guest from the university, a poetry professor. She’d given him hers, and he’d returned it with every line but one crossed out in each poem.

      “Do you think my poetry’s that bad?” she asked.

      Elana screamed at the living room window as headlights outside lit her up.

      A young man in a leather trench coat came in, and she jumped into his arms. The hair above his right eye was bleached. He turned and shook my hand. Then he gave me a music cassette. On the front, he and three other guys posed, arms outstretched.

      “We’re Christian a-cappella rappers,” he told me.

      Shortly afterward, I said goodbye. As I drove home, I played the cassette.

      “He was the Man,” they sang in baritone.

      Falsetto: “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

      Baritone: “Get ready to be saved!”

      In the restaurant where I met my father that same night, I told him I didn’t belong with those people.

      “But you could,” he said. “I could see you with them.”

      Weeks passed, and I left. I travelled the continent, went broke, got a job, started college, and two years later he filed for bankruptcy and took his life. I often thought back to that strange Christmas Eve dinner, uncertain as to whether he had been trying to keep me close or save me from himself by giving me to the kind of family he wished he could have provided. But now, so many years later, in my memory of our conversation that Christmas Eve, I am the adult and he is child, looking to me for my reaction, to see if I liked the family he found, and then, not receiving my approval, returning to his old self.

      My last image of him is from when he dropped me off at my car. As I stood in the parking lot, he laughed and jammed his accelerator, spraying slush and oily grit so that I had to cover my face. He made it seem as if he was the one leaving. He raced into traffic, cars braking and swerving, and was gone from sight.

      (2013)

      The film that I most remember seeing I have virtually no memory of. I was fifteen, in rural Virginia, alone in the trailer where my family lived, and I noticed that someone had rented Born on the Fourth of July. It was on the VCR, and having nothing to do, I put the cassette in, turned the TV on, and sat on the couch.

      Everything about that day was odd as I recall it, and there’s no way to explain it without going back five years, to when my parents separated, when we lived in Vancouver, B.C. One morning, instead of driving us to school, my mother dropped us off at her friend’s house. She returned several hours later, her van packed with everything we owned, and she drove us to Virginia. Those five years that I didn’t see my father, we were poor, sleeping first on couches at my aunt’s house and then in a trailer park, before my mother found me an alcoholic stepfather, who enjoyed proving that I was no match for a former soldier. I spent a lot of time in school detention, reading voraciously and dreaming of travelling the continent.

      When I eventually moved back in with my mother, she lived with my stepfather and two siblings in a trailer in the forest, next to a house that was under construction. The day after my return, the sun shone in the windows, lighting up the white walls of the narrow rooms. Everyone was gone – I didn’t know where – and I felt like an intruder, as if they should have stuck around for a day or two just to get a sense of me, to see that I wasn’t the same person they’d known. But they’d left, and I’d woken up late, and in the bright trailer I saw Born on the Fourth of July on the VCR and I put it in.

      I have vague flashes of the beginning. Tom Cruise as Ron Kovic soaked in the rain and then dancing at the prom. I didn’t care for Tom Cruise, not since Top Gun, when every girl I’d liked had been too busy fantasizing about him to notice me, so I had no great expectations. I vaguely recall war scenes, confusion, him shooting a fellow soldier and later getting shot in a field, but from there everything is blank but for a few crisp images and a sense of discomfort. Why was I watching a movie about a man in a wheelchair? When was he going to heal and stand up and go back to being a hero? Wasn’t this a war movie? Among the images I recall are a bleeding sex worker, a desert, a roadside brawl between two men in wheelchairs. There was a confession at some point.

      I was afraid someone was going to come home and find me there, and know, just from seeing me, everything I’d done. But the feeling shifted, and as I tried to make sense of the movie, I understood that everything was going to be all right. There were places to put all that I was holding – fucking my father’s teenage girlfriend, seeing his enraged face, or the face of the pregnant girl through a crack in the door, over the chain, or my crimes, their sheer stupidity that I’d known even as I was committing them, like breaking into a neighbour’s house and stealing knives and spare change. I had no words, no real knowledge that I could have shared, just a sense of space.

      It takes dozens of revelations, if not hundreds of them, for any type of awareness to begin, and I would find that same feeling in novels and films and art, over and over. Of course, I wasn’t finished doing idiotic things or hurting people, but I found forgiveness in unflinching honesty. That someone could make such a film created more space in the world. It took everything out of boxes and pulled down walls, my child’s mind looking for the fairy tale, the love story, the good soldier who will become a hero, only to become