Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada
By Bruce McCall
Random House, 249 pages, $24
It is well known that many Canadians are traumatized when, moments out of their mother’s womb, they realize they are not born Americans.
The frightful predicament pursues some to their dying day. They can choose recourse to psychiatrists, who offer service for free under the universal health-care system. Some go into outright denial, like liquor-entertainment mogul Edgar Bronfman Sr., who became a U.S. citizen in 1959 and has admitted he now visits Canada as infrequently as humanly possible. Others daringly infiltrate across the border hoping no one will notice. ABC’s Peter Jennings, for example, still plunks tell-tale Canadian “oot’s” and “eh’s” into his U.S. discourse without obvious damage to either his credibility or earning power.
Expatriate author Bruce McCall’s solution was to write a wondrous and eviscerating memoir.
Being born Canadian was no joke. Quite apart from a national requirement that Canadians must apologize forever for their existence, the condition demanded they foreswear all unseemly aggressive intent. A child’s Canadian upbringing next door to the U.S.–by comparison a gaudy extravaganza of swagger, tinsel and gushing dollars–bred unwholesome traits of envy and longing. Discussing the dilemma on Canadian radio recently, McCall impishly mused that Canadians ranked alongside Jews and the Irish as “the most oppressed people in the world.”
McCall, 63, a lapsed Manhattan ad man and now a prolific magazine artist and writer, made his escape some 34 years ago. Yet he still seems burdened by birthplace, succumbing to an unnecessary but characteristically Canadian-born disclaimer: “It’s doubtful that Jim Carrey, k.d. lang, Wayne Gretsky, or any other Canadians of the post-sixties generation who have settled in the USA would understand what the hell much of the huffing and puffing in this book is all about,” he writes. McCall’s story concerns a time “when things were very different indeed . . . (and) the sense of not quite measuring up created the world’s only national culture nourished by self-effacement.”
The lingering historical mindset of small-town Ontario where McCall grew up was intensely pro-British and ostensibly anti-American, a legacy of the Revolutionary War. No one could deny that the Canada of McCall’s youth was overwhelmed by its neighbor. But Canadians didn’t have to like it: “I grew up in a world where the average Canadian would rather be trampled by the R.C.M.P. (horse show) than be found publicly admitting anything American to be superior, or even much good.”
Yet by age 11, McCall already was falling into grievous seduction, largely thanks to the media and glitzy merchandising that splashed across the border. An American boy obviously had a lot more fun; it was seemingly part of his birthright. “American kids got whistles, rings, glittering prizes in their cereal boxes; all we got was cereal,” McCall complains. American comic books were “splashy, loud, rowdy, and manic,” while their Candian counterparts “were black-and-white, vapid, and hopelessly wholesome.”
“Canada had no Empire State Building, no Hoover Dam, no Golden Gate Bridge; Canada declined to soar in any way,” the young McCall concluded. “Everything exciting, bold, glamorous in life could be traced back to America.”
But “Canadianism seemed to require, beneath everything, contentment with the world as it was.” To be sure, his red-brick Victorian hometown of Simcoe near Lake Erie boasted the usual closet lesbians, lushes, swordsmen, suicides and women who actually wore wigs. But such interesting aberrations never were mentioned over the kitchen table. “It became obvious,” he writes with mock earnestness, “as uneventful year followed uneventful year, that I had been born into a family exempted from illness, hard times, death.”
The reality was that his father, T.C., a government apparatchik and commuting absentee for nine years, was an egomaniac and tyrant McCall came to loathe. His mother, Peg, was an alcoholic recluse in a household of six children where “home improvement amounted to making the beds.” The parents feigned worldliness and assiduously collected stacks of New Yorker magazines. They even kept a smart-set shelf of battered books on display. But they never bothered to read to their kids, and the books were simply the “reminders of halcyon days. . . . And we kids were the reminders of how and why it had all gone so miserably, so completely and forever, wrong.”
Both parents were dead before age 50. McCall’s sketch of his father and his predilection for golf, domineering dinner-table monologues and “the oleaginous strains of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians” is merciless and unforgiving. Motherly love was also a clear casualty of the family’s dysfunction. “(T)he DO NOT DISTURB and DO NOT TOUCH signs posted all around her were respected,” says McCall. “The nearest I could ever come was the ache to trespass those boundaries of hers, the longing to somehow get close.” The love McCall lavishes on his siblings, four other boys and a girl, is rich and haunting, their grim circumstances often described with hilarity. There is not a twinge of self-pity.
After the family moved to nearby Toronto, McCall retreated from parental horror to the cluttered bedroom he shared with a brother. There he voraciously read Charles Dickens and spent hours at a desk drawing cartoons from the outrageous and grisly fantasy worlds of his adolescence. “Toronto’s reputation as not so much a city as a vacuum-sealed container of perfectly preserved late-Victorian Anglican rectitude was . . . beginning to melt” by the mid-’50s, he reports, only half-convinced. When the family moved on to Windsor, the auto-making branch-plant of a town across the river from Detroit, the specter was even more deplorable. Says McCall: “Nothing memorable, even by modest Canadian standards of memorability, had ever happened there.”
In fact, however, it was in Windsor that the young man, by now a high school dropout, landed his first job touching up advertising drawings of shiny new products rolling from auto assembly lines–and made contacts that would eventually lead him to his nirvana of New York.
McCall insists he fully intends to trade in his green card and apply for U.S. citizenship. After all these years, only dreary paperwork is holding him back. “On any given day in any given week, wouldn’t you know it, something always seems to come up,” he writes. “But mark my words: Any day now. Next week is looking good, in fact. Certainly the end of the year. Absolute latest.” Oh, how Canadian.
