Heather O’Neill – on a family outing.

Montreal, Quebec
October 24, 2000

Dear Golda,

Yesterday I decided to take my daughter to the amusement park. My dad was waiting for me to invite him along. At first I didn’t want to because he’s subject to yelling at me in public. He’ll tell me I’m anorexic while we’re waiting in line at the grocery store. He’ll accuse me of being on heroin when I’m on my way to work. I told him if he wanted to come, to be downstairs in ten minutes.

My dad is seventy-two and works as the janitor in the three-building apartment complex I live in. He started having terrible back pains a few years ago. He’d fall off the bed reaching for his pills in the middle of the night and have to lie on the floor until morning. I moved into the complex with my six-year-old daughter, Arizona, to be near him. Except for squats, it’s the most dilapidated building in the city. Pieces of stone and bricks fall off the outside walls and the pipes leak. In the morning there’s always a puddle of water on the bathroom floor. The windows are impossible to open or wash. My dad says if he ever won the lottery, he would buy the building and burn it down.

When we got down to the courtyard he was waiting for us in a pin-striped suit jacket, his long white hair sticking up in all directions.

As we drove to the amusement park, Arizona waved at a man and a woman on a motorcycle.

“Everyone has to know what a free spirit you are?” my dad asked.

Halfway there, my dad made us stop at a garbage heap on the sidewalk. He shoved a kitchen table into the back seat. The rusted leg kept hitting me in the back of the head.

“It’s a perfect table for you,” he said.

“I already have a table.”

“Are you deliberately trying to starve yourself to death? At least think of your daughter.”

My dad was working in Virginia tearing down a railway line when he first met my mom, who was a hippie, twenty-five years younger than him. When she left him, my dad brought me and my two sisters back to Montreal with these southern accents. Things weren’t what we expected. The apartment was tiny and the kids in the neighborhood were mean. When we were living on the hippie commune in Virginia you could show up to school barefoot in your Halloween costume and nobody would think anything of it. In Montreal I showed up the first day of school with a red knit hat and overalls and it was all over for me. When we got home from school my dad showed us all the stuff he’d scored from garbage-picking. I got a blue stool with a seat as high as the kitchen table. I sang along to Abba on the radio as spaghetti sauce dripped onto my knees. That’s how he’s been furnishing his apartment ever since.

I had called the amusement park and the recording had said that senior citizens over sixty-four were allowed in for free. When we arrived and got in line at the ticket booth, my dad was nervous the whole time that I had heard wrong and that he was going to have to pay. Once the ticket-taker assured him he didn’t have to, he fell back into suave mode. He showed his ID and told her not to go looking up his name in the phone book to ask him out.

We walked by the rube tables. Every time any of the workers addressed him, my dad raised his middle finger to them. He treated them like drug dealers. He stood behind a man who was trying to throw balls into a tilted basket.

“That sucker’s hooked,” he said shaking his head.

My dad went up to a teenage vendor selling french fries to see if he could heat up the spring rolls he had brought along. The kid looked shell-shocked.

“What, your father own the amusement park?”

My dad’s good moods have always smacked of absurdity. For special occasions he used to buy a bottle of tonic water with left-over change. My sisters and I would sit with him on a park bench. We were each allowed to take one sip and then we had to pass the bottle on. If he thought we were taking too much, he would whack us on the back of the head. He used to leave us at the movie theatre and make us watch the film two times in a row so that he could have some time to himself. For Christmas we all received unsigned cheques for one hundred dollars.

Then once in a blue moon he would force us to do something cultural. One time he took us out and made us draw portraits of people and buildings. He would scream at us that we weren’t trying hard enough and to get more details down.

As we were walking around looking for new rides, my dad kept yelling at us to stop disappearing. When we went to the bathroom, he started yelling in to see if we were still there. He was all panicky that we were going to forget about him.

When we came out he was speaking to a Chinese punk kid. The kid’s spikes of hair were stuck up with what looked like toothpaste. He had a red ski vest and no shirt underneath. The kid had the largest cup of coke I had ever seen. He kept nodding, listening intently to my dad. My dad has always treated oddballs with a strange lack of prejudice. The tenants in our building sort of rely on my dad emotionally because of that quality. One guy came to my dad upset because he had done such a terrible job of cutting his own hair, and my dad had to shave his head with our dog clippers. Another tenant was running around the basement with an axe. The other tenants called my dad saying that they couldn’t do their laundry, so my father went down and chased the guy out with a drill. He refuses to have anyone evicted unless they don’t pay the rent.

“I’m not a social worker,” he says.

My dad used to walk around the apartment in his underwear and undershirt smoking skinny cherry cigars. Every time I coughed he told me I had tuberculosis. He never let me wear sunglasses because he said they make you go blind. He would pull up the blinds and blow a bugle to wake me and my sisters up. We had oatmeal and instant coffee every morning for breakfast. If we ate too slow, he would punish us by making us wear these wide bell bottoms to school. He once practically beat a guy unconscious for blowing smoke in my face at the bus stop. He threw a total of three televisions out the window during his fits of aggravation. But somehow he was always the good guy.

My daughter asked my dad if he wanted to go on a ride with her.

“Are you crazy?” he answered. “I’ll end up paralyzed. It’s just good to get away from the house. I could just drive a hundred miles away from it. I don’t care where to.”

My daughter and I took this ride that takes you way up into the sky on the wings of a very wobbly red butterfly. We asked the attendant three times if we were fastened in all right.

My father stood down below shouting instructions at us.

“Raise your arms! Yell, for God’s sake!”

“Why did we decide to commit suicide today?” my daughter asked.

When I was a kid, I had to do my homework on the fire escape because my dad would play the radio so loud that I couldn’t concentrate. He felt bad and built a little desk for me to sit on out there. The mathematical equations on the page were like seagulls.

On holidays we would go down to the canal and put cans on the ends of fishing lines. We never went very far for our vacations. My dad always had odd jobs until he slowed down and took the job managing this building right next to the train tracks. It was supposed to be jinxed because there had been a wedding party on the roof and someone had fallen off during the festivities.

That’s the building we live in now.

I’ve been thinking that amusement parks are like cities where you can jump off the roof, where kitchen chairs can turn upside down, where the subways fly off the tracks finally and everybody screams and laughs.

Love,

Heather