Brantwood Beach: Battlescars and Stigmata.

by Robert Markland Smith.

I am Brantwood Beach, and I remember. I sit in Ottawa East, in the capital of Canada, and it was 1959, the year Fidel took over Cuba. There were radio reports, with static over the airwaves, and this was a new hope. I remember it well.

That spring, a bunch of boys were playing with firecrackers to celebrate the Queen’s birthday, in the month of May. There was one boy who grew up to be a doctor, and his brother, who was thirty-eight years later one of the generals involved in the Somalia scandal; another boy became a bus driver, and then there was one Robert Smith. Now, Robert was ten years old, and he had 200 firecrackers in his right hand pocket. Nobody is sure how it happened, but maybe a match touched the firecrackers, maybe it was an accident. But suddenly, as the sun watched, the firecrackers started going off, like machine gun fire, crackling and exploding, one by one, then faster and faster, as the boys watched Robert explode.

There was smoke in the air, and the smell of sulphur, and plenty of weeping and yelling, and the machine gun crepitation of firecrackers going off, as the boys pulled Robert aside and tried to pull down his pants, which were on fire, and everyone was in a panic, and then, and then, good old Jean St-Denis came up to Robert in the middle of this hubbub and hue and cry, and asked Robert, “Smitty, can I have the rest of your firecrackers?” (Now there is a poetic justice, because twenty years later, Jean was trafficking coke in fascist Spain, and got busted and did ten years in jail under Franco’s regime.)

I am Brantwood Beach, and I remember. It was the heyday of motorcycle gangs, and there were hardrocks. The cops didn’t like them, and the cops used to harass them just for wearing their hair in jelly rolls and riding motorcycles. Robert Smith and his friends used to walk through the bushes and woods down by the beach, and find hardrocks sitting around campfires with their girlfriends and a case of beer or two, and Robert liked the hardrocks; he wanted to grow up to become one of them. Because all the other grown-ups were phony, they would talk down to Robert and say, with a nasal voice, “Oh hello, little boy, what grade are you in?” And they would pat Robert on the head, whereas the hardrocks, who were seventeen or eighteen years old, would talk to Robert as an equal. They would discuss what was on their minds. It’s a bit like what Frank Zappa said, to the effect that if children knew what their parents were up to, they would rise up and kill them in their sleep. And the parents all had short, short hair, and short, short tempers, and they worked for the government plotting fascist plots, or so it seemed. The father of Robert, anyway, would argue against communism, whenever given the chance. And Robert longed for a friend to play ball with him or take him fishing, but dear old dad merely helped Robert memorize his catechism lessons every night, for two hours at a time. And if Robert came home with a report card that gave him a 90 per cent average, but saying Robert came in second of the class, Robert was in deep trouble. For the home was élitist, and the expectations were high.

And I am Brantwood Beach. I remember. I remember the time that Joseph de Bané went down to the beach one night, and left a pile of clothes on the sand and walked down into the water, only to swim a hundred feet upstream, and come back out of the water, thence to hitch-hike to Boston, whence he would phone his grieving father a month later, after the police had dragged the waters for nine days, searching for a drowned corpse. And Robert Smith watched the police dragging the waters, and he pondered all these things in his heart.

Likewise, Robert Smith was in the hospital that summer to get his leg operated on for the firecracker burns, for the scar kept pussing and never healed. It was a kiloid wound, and could have turned into cancer. And one morning, in the hospital, Robert wandered around on his wheelchair, and went to visit one of the boys there, who was about the same age, around twelve. And the boy was weeping, and
he asked Robert, “Here, touch my leg, tell me it’s still there!!” And the boy was desperate, for a train had run over his leg and his leg had been amputated the night before by the doctors, and Robert didn’t know what to say, so he answered, “Yes, it’s still there.” And there was no leg there, just crumpled bedsheets on a hospital bed.

And I am Brantwood Beach. The girls in bikinis used to come and neck with their boyfriends on the sand, and Robert Smith would lust a tiny little boy lust and then rush off to confession and tell the priest he found girls pretty. And the priests would sit behind the grate and ask, “How many times, my son?” And Robert found out as an adult that you could tell a priest in a confessional that you had slept with three hookers, robbed a bank, killed an old lady, and as long as you were repentant, the priest would give you the absolution. But if you told the priest something like, “Every time I go to mass, I think of the Spanish Inquisition,” the priest would blow a fuse and kick you out of the confessional box.

And at Brantwood Beach, the waters were polluted soon later. In 1959, there was a bit of seaweeed, but now the beach is closed down for pollution reasons. I guess if the Cold War wasn’t going to destroy the Earth, the pollution would. And Robert Smith said his prayers every night, praying we wouldn’t get nuked by the Russians during the night. And it was dark outside, and the nuns warned the students that on May 1^st, 1960 it was going to be the end of the world. And they looked pretty silly on the next day and the next day. And the Year 2000 is upon us, and Fidel is still alive and well in Havana, and Robert Smith has a scar on his right thigh. Here, look, can you feel my leg?